CHAPTER EIGHTEEN August
August begins with an unpleasant portent: I wake one morning, after a rather restive night, to discover that I have wet my bed. I quickly jot down my dream—a salmon-like struggle toward a urinal against a surging throng of faceless obstacles in dark gray suits—and strip the sheets, breathless and cursing my hands, my bladder. In the shower I inhale steam and feel a bit lightheaded; I spend the rest of the day trying to determine whether I feel normal again or not. My hands hurt, my head hurts. I try to work out an idea about the stigmata, about the stigma of old age, about the crucifixion as an allegory for the ailments and indignities of old age, but it starts to seem as if I am taking my self-pity to a dangerous new level, and anyway I can’t manage to make all the pieces fit. I abandon this theory and struggle with a vague feeling of guilt for some time after. These superstitions of your youth. You think you’ve vanquished them, and then they return to you in your dotage when you are once again too weak to resist them. This is a month of drought, of lawns baked a golden brown, of unrelenting arid heat and lethargy. The children shun the sidewalks and the street; their playthings lie bleached and neglected where they were last dropped. My neighbor attempts to revive her wilting gardenias in defiance of a county ordinance restricting the frivolous use of water. Her secret is safe with me.
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I limit my own frivolous usage to refilling the birdbath each evening. Who would begrudge a bashful old man a full birdbath, a birdbath full of bashful birds? No one, I’d like to think. No outings this month. We play Canasta at the table, the two of us, the three of us. Jerm and I stumble upon a soap opera and spend a solid week-and-a-half religiously tuning in to ridicule it until we find ourselves becoming emotionally invested and immediately stop. It takes a few days for me to stop wondering what happened to so-and-so, whether so-and-so will ever get to have that lanternjawed lad she was pining for, the one who promised to impregnate her as soon as he saw his blackmail scheme through to the end. Flies buzzing everywhere, plainly suicidal, begging to be destroyed. I think of my father, who once told me that the meaning of life, the chief task of each human being, was simply to keep the flies off of us for as long as possible. It was a task at which you were bound to fail eventually, he said, but even a rigged game can have its amusements. I think of that day long ago when he took me to work for some reason I’ve forgotten, and I sat on the floor in the corner of his office (full of ferns and milky light), flipping through bland pictures of bears in a coloring book he’d brought along for me, unable to color their pale gray fur since he’d forgotten to bring along the crayons. One evening Delia yawns, says she has to work early in the morning. Jerm and I drag two chairs out front and sit together, surveying the sleeping neighborhood, watching it dream. It dreams a young man who passes us by, whistling and twirling a small bag of excrement, led by a winsome pooch who gives us a wink from the end of his leash. A minute later a pickup truck sits rumbling before us, and I recognize it as a newly resurrected
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revenant, as the property of Franklin and Yates Landry, both of whom I can make out in the cab. Franklin leans out the window, his leering face baleful beneath his thick gray beard in the streetlight. He gestures across the street. “That your yard?” “It is,” I say. He retracts his head and I hear what sounds like a stage whisper, someone saying, Oh shit. Then some hissing laughter as the truck lurches off. “You boys have a nice night,” Franklin calls back to us, and I wonder what they could be doing out at this hour with no dog to walk, and my arms grow heavy as Franklin asks, in that way he has, why do I reckon they would ask about the yard instead of the house. He takes a long swig from his bottle and I watch the neighborhood’s dream of a delirious moth swooning in the yellow light as I try to knead life into my numb fingers. This heat will break soon, Jerm promises.
CHAPTER NINETEEN Flood
Like August, September starts off with a deluge, a sudden rush of water both needed and unwelcome. One dark morning the sky cracks open on Wilder Street, with rainfall so prodigious that I am convinced for an instant that I am suffering a stroke, that my soul has been slapped from my body, knocked into oblivion by some wrathful hand. The rain falls for just under a week, at varying intensities, coaxing mushrooms from inundated lawns, barring traffic, holding us all hostage. I don’t dare venture out to try and cross the street; I picture myself trying and failing, falling, another tumbling stick sucked down a storm drain. So instead I sit tight, take stock of my supplies, and determine to wait this thing out. The constant thrum on the roof becomes my companion. Day is again indistinguishable from night, this time due to a simple absence of sunlight. The second day in, I locate the root of my growing unease. It is not the rain, not a concern for my well-being or for that of my friends. It is that my house feels reversed, changed around: I keep turning toward the kitchen when I wish to enter the bedroom, turning to a blank wall when I want to look out my window and watch the water flowing by. I pace circles in the living room for exercise. I choke down two meals a day. I search through my clothes, my papers, my books, my memories; I cannot manage, for some reason, to make contact with myself.
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I dream, stretched out on the couch one afternoon while the TV blathers at a low volume, of being a boy again, of running through the woods where I grew up, near some friend’s house, some friend who may or may not have actually existed. I trip—or I am tripped—and my momentum launches me forward, drops me face-down in a clearing carpeted with lady slippers, a favorite flower of my mother’s. There is a woman there, in the center of the clearing, sitting cross-legged, reading a book. I know her. We worked together, taught together years ago. I liked her, yes I did; I liked her very much, and I wonder what became of her. I try to remember when we parted ways, and why. As I jot this dream down—its gist, anyway—I note an increase in the intensity of the rain pounding outside. I give in to the very human inclination to imagine that it is somehow intended directly for me, that something is being communicated to me. Too much time alone and you will begin to think these things. A great deal too much more time, and you will stop rolling your eyes at yourself as you think them. I turn off the TV and sit up late with the lights off. I need to remove every distraction if I am going to decipher whatever message is besieging my shingles. I hold the bayonet out before me like a lightning rod. All I can think of is my own weakness. That my weakness, now that I have grown old, is worn on the outside for all to see. That the rain is telling me that I am weak, that I cannot even cross the street in a storm, I cannot even make it out of my yard. The rain invites me outside to see what will happen: Step outside, it says, step outside and see. I think of trying to do something courageous—I don’t consider it, mind you, I just try to imagine it—and it seems impossible. Say someone was being harmed for example, and I happened
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to witness it. What could I do? How could I possibly come to anyone’s defense in this state? How could I help anyone? The only help I could give would have to be given after the fact, and would that be enough? There is only one benefit to this whole ordeal, to the ordeal of age, and this is that no one will ever take you seriously. Why should they? You are a thing, not a threat; you are the fleshless pit of a devoured fruit, discarded, disregarded. And this puts you in a position to observe, which puts you in a position to judge. And if you are a judge, then it is your prerogative to pass sentences, to see them carried out. So when you are old, your weakness is your strength, and that which removes you from the world gives you power over it; old age, like religion, hides many mischiefs from suspicion. This is what I think at night, on the couch, clutching a counterfeit blade in the dark as the rain hammers my home. And then, having thought this, I can no longer sit still. Just before dawn I stare out the window, down the street, through the rain, and I make a decision. “That’s my ruling,” I whisper to the glass, and something akin to righteousness enters into me. I fly about the house the whole day, knocking into the window, brushing against the ceiling, dusting the corners with the swinging sleeves of my robe. When night arrives a lovely fatigue has taken hold of my limbs, a warm weariness, and I bed down to roost on a pile of blankets by the front door to minimize the number of walls between myself and my friends. For the first time in a very long time I allow myself to long for a drink. In the morning the rain has ceased and the air outside is clammy and cool, the heat having finally broken. I have made
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up my mind at this point, and I know that at no point past this point will I ever be at anything less than complete peace with my decision.
CHAPTER TWENTY Clearing the Debris
When the water stops rushing down the street everyone in the neighborhood emerges and begins to clear the debris, all the flotsam and jetsam that the storm has washed up to our doorways. Floods have a way of revealing things to us, I realize, of revealing what is worthy of restoration and what should be scrapped without delay. When the way has been cleared, I cross the street. The sunshine feels eerie; badges of shade waver on the sidewalks beneath the trees. A first intimation of autumn, a harbinger. We agree that a visit to Earl is in order, and on the way we take in the full extent of the damage that the storm has wrought. Jerm says it’s a miracle that the power never went out, and I realize that it never occurred to me that it might. “Faith is a funny thing,” I say, but he does not respond. Gray curls litter the floor, miniature depleted rainbows. Earl will sweep them up when I leave and drop them into a bin; they will be removed from the premises at the end of the day and removed from the dumpster outside the premises the following morning. Life, essentially, is a process of moving things from one place to another, over and over again. This is, really, all we do. We transport items hither and thither, over and over, until one day we drop to the floor and become another item in need of transport, something for someone to shift into the appropriate receptacle.
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This view of things pleases me, and I have to suppress a smile as I am shaved to avoid being cut. I size up the gentleman in the mirror when the job is done. “Handsome fellow,” I remark as Earl shakes out the smock like a matador’s cape and nods in agreement. We shake hands before I leave, and I tell him I feel transformed. He says, “Well, that’s what I was going for,” and calls up his next customer. On the way home I tell Jerm what I believe has happened and what I feel must be done if I am correct, and I find that our impressions roughly align. “You know what the hard part’s going to be,” he says, and I do. “I’ll talk to her,” I say, and I gaze out the window at a world under construction yet again, a world being put together according to a memory of what it was like before it was wiped out, which was itself an attempt at replicating a memory, and so on. I wonder what the original was like. I don’t tell her everything, not quite. I tell her what we suspect, and that we’d like to confirm it. I hint at what we plan to do if it’s confirmed, and I say nothing about what I know will have to come after, assuming we’re successful. For a while she says nothing, but then she begins to ask questions. She asks about the cold morning when I emerged and walked out onto my lawn; she asks about the night when Jerm and I sat out in the heat and watched the truck roll by. I answer every question; Jerm interjects where and when he sees fit. When we have answered her questions, she looks back and forth, from her father’s face to mine and back again. “How exactly do you plan on finding out for sure?” she asks, and Jerm sighs, rubs the back of his neck red, pours himself a drink.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE A Night on the Town
On a Saturday night in September I pull on my finest shirt and brush the coat of dust from a pair of patent leather shoes; I splash a liberal dose of cologne into my palms and slap at the drooping flesh of my neck. When I arrive at his house, Jerm insists that I wash it off immediately. “I can’t sit in the car with you reeking like a goddamn douche,” he says. “I like it. I think he smells nice,” Delia says, but she holds her nose and giggles as I pass her on my way to the bathroom. Despite her misgivings, despite her anxiety, she is in a surprisingly good humor; she seems to get a kick out of the outdated paisley pattern of Jerm’s shirt, the faint outline of his undershirt just visible beneath it, the strange stuttering gait my warped footwear forces me to adopt. She insists on taking pictures. Jerm glowers, I beam. Why not? “This is really ridiculous,” she says. And she is right, of course, but this is the best idea we could come up with. Having done this, we may move forward. “Let us go,” I say, bowing. “Your fly’s open,” says Jerm. As we drive into town, I try to cheer Jerm up. I tell him that, yes, being an adult means putting away childish things, but it also means taking them out again from time to time to play with them again. How else can we measure how much we’ve grown? But he remains silent, hunched over the wheel, squinting out at the narrow illuminated patch of the world before him.
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Fancy Sam’s is smaller than I imagined, inasmuch as I imagined it at all, and could easily be mistaken for some other sort of establishment were it not for the music blaring through the door as it opens and closes, as well as the short line of people waiting to file inside. We leave the car in a parking garage close by and walk over to fall in place at the end of the line. This, I will admit, is a bit humiliating. The line, though short, moves agonizingly slowly, and more people soon arrive behind us. Naturally we become, in short order, a source of merriment, and remarks on our age and our horrific costumes begin to fly rather freely. Jerm stares stoically ahead; I take to smiling nervously as furtive photos are taken, clever comments whispered into blushing ears on every side. “That’s a very nice belt,” someone says, and in the burst of semi-stifled laughter that follows I feel like I am back in the classroom again, trying to pretend that I am in control; then a girl slaps my posterior as she walks by and her friend shrieks, “Oh my God!” and I pass at once out of the classroom and into some obscure, obscene inner sanctum of hell. The bouncer is a heavyset fellow with a shaved head—what you imagine when you hear the word “bouncer,” basically—and he sits on a stool by the entrance, arms crossed over a black shirt on which the name of the place is emblazoned. Everyone he allows inside seems to stop before entering to carry on a casual conversation with him, which is why the row of people between us and the door seems so slow in shortening. Jerm’s scalp flushes beneath his cropped silver hair and I can sense the steam building up inside him, puffing up his paisley shirt from the inside with potential energy, potential violence. A voice from behind me says, “You come here a lot? Hey, you guys come here a lot? You like it here? You guys like it here?” He’s
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a young fellow, reedy, a permanent sneer on his face. You know the type. Hair already thinner than mine, an archipelago of pimples arrayed across his forehead. He keeps talking when I turn around, he keeps repeating himself because it gets funnier to him every time, and it gets funnier still when his girlfriend, between sucks on her cigarette, begs him in a bored voice to shut up. But he won’t shut up, not until Jeremiah Graves grabs him by the big billowing shirt he’s tucked into his jeans for his night out, yanks him closer and then, following the boy’s juddering Adam’s apple with his eyes, says, sounding almost friendly, “Hey, bud, you don’t stop pestering my friend right this second, I’m gonna snatch off your balls in front of all these people and teach this young lady how to juggle.” Then he releases him, smiles at the girlfriend and turns, returning his attention to the door. When we arrive at the front of the line Jerm steps forward to speak to the fellow at the door, shaking his hand and speaking into his ear. The man nods his head and waves me forward. One last gulp of the night air and we walk through the door, our heads held high. Unfortunately, it is just how I thought it would be: a crush of convulsing bodies pressing toward the center of the building like swarming antibodies on the attack; stroboscopic light rendering the scene in terrifying, retina-scorching Boschian fragments; rhythmic percussions that land like bombs, rattling the pelvis; plastic cups of alcohol and ice in every hand. Jerm finds some stairs leading to an upper level; he unhooks the velvet rope that blocks us, leaves it lying on the floor like a slain snake and gestures for me to follow. Halfway up I tap him on the back and holler my concerns; he responds over his shoulder with something I cannot hear over the noise but which I understand to be, essentially, “Pshaw.”
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Upstairs we find a few tables pushed up against a railing to afford a bird’s-eye view of the pulsating maelstrom below, and a few gawkers pointing our way as we take a seat at one. Jerm looks over his surroundings with amusement, his earlier anger having dissipated. I focus on catching my breath. After a while I ask him about his conversation with the man at the door. “Well, first I asked if our boy was working tonight,” he says, his voice raised over the thumping of the music, “and then I thanked him.” “Thanked him for what?” “He’s not here tonight. Which is good,” he says. “What? For what? Why did you thank him?” “What? Oh. For keeping my no-good grandson out of here.” “What?” “I told him I have a grandson tried to get in here a few weeks back with a fake ID, but he turned him away at the door. I told him we heard about it and he fit the description of the guy that turned him away. I figured it probably happens a lot, and even if it doesn’t, he’d still go ahead and take credit for it.” “Oh. I see. What now?” “I told him to stop by when he has a minute so I can buy him a beer. I’m gonna ask him a few questions, just to be sure. We’ve got to be sure, then we can go ahead. Like Davy Crockett.” “What?” “Davy Crockett.” “Oh.” Then he seems to settle into waiting, so I attempt to follow suit. Eventually the music, such as it is, stops feeling like an assault and starts to feel instead like a kind of sonic slap on the back, an over-rough kind of encouragement from a poltergeist, an invisible
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instigator. I hunch over and let it pound away, hoping my ribs hold out and my kidneys don’t burst, thinking of what a fine mess that would be. I glance up at some point to see a gentleman striding toward us, thin-lipped, inexorable. I reach for Jerm’s arm just as a young lady at one of the other tables reaches for the gentleman’s, halting his progress. They confer momentarily, each in turn pointing toward us, and something is hanging in the balance, only I can’t determine exactly what. Finally he nods, waves his hand dismissively toward us, and she is hugging him and smiling before he strides away, back toward the stairs. In his stead, she comes sashaying toward us, her friends in tow. We are a pair of curios, of course, and in short order our table is crowded with revelers, the occupants of all the other tables in this reserved area having converged on ours. Drinks are downed, drinks are ordered; some redhead in a denim skirt takes up residence in Jerm’s lap and he is telling one of his dirty jokes, but I can’t hear which for the music and the laughter and the swoosh of blood in my ears. The table is covered with jostling cups and hands and the synthetic bonhomie that such situations tend to generate; I cannot free myself from the feeling that I am a sideshow here, a geek, and that Jerm, having escaped his classification through a combination of luck and charm and a large volume of bawdy anecdotes, is now a barker, bringing more and more gawkers into our orbit, kidding with the rubes. I hear him shouting, “That’s not a Twinkie, you son of a bitch!” The table erupts, and I put my head down to try to reconstruct the rest of the story, which I know I’ve heard but can’t quite recall. Something shakes me, nudges my arm, and when I look up there is a woman next to me, smiling down at a small white pill on the table in front of me. For your head, she mouths, pointing to her own. I reward her with a wan smile and reach for my untouched glass of water.
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“Down the hatch,” I say, trying to appear cheerful, and I pop the pill into my mouth. The water is still cold; the shrunken chunks of ice chase the medicine down my throat, and I cannot stop gulping down the water. I have never been so thirsty. When I place the glass on the table it is empty, and I am gasping for air. Jerm is staring at me across the table, his mouth open in horror, shaking his head. The redhead is on the floor next to him, having fallen from his lap. “What did you do?” he says, and I can only respond, apologetically, “It’s already down the hatch.” When I look back at the woman next to me, she has pulled her hair back into a ponytail and aged approximately twenty years. Her elbows are on the table, her bracelets sliding down freckled forearms. Her crow’s feet deepen at the corners of her eyes, which watch me closely as I start to laugh. From this point on, I warn you, my report can no longer be trusted. But here it is anyway. At some point the thud of the music begins to recede, becomes muted, like music playing on a record in a separate room. I am filled with warmth and good feeling. I turn back to the woman next to me to say, “Do you remember records?” but it comes out You mem recars? and her place is empty. On the other side of the table another woman, who may be the same woman, squeals into her phone, slams it down on the table, howls, “I’m a grandma!” and splashes tequila from a shot glass onto her breast. The man next to her buries his face in her bosom, slurps at the fluid with loud sucking sounds as they both fall to the floor. I try to waggle my eyebrows at Jerm but he is turned away, puffing on a cigar. So instead I waggle my eyebrows lasciviously at a passing stranger who asks me if I’d care to dance, in so many words. Indeed I would, and so I lift my hand from the table to take her hand,
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but my hand remains on the table even after I have lifted it—my hand, I say, has disengaged itself from itself, and the hand with which I take her hand consists only of bones, of metacarpals and wriggling phalanges, while the flesh remains on the table, wrapped around a fresh glass of water. I feel something gripping me, impeding my descent to the dance floor, and I shake myself free; when I look back, I see myself still seated at the table. But I am free from me now; I am a skeleton rattling across the floor, a rattling skeleton bowing to the ladies and offering them imaginary posies, shimmying and grinning and grinding and dancing the Hucklebuck while every bone vibrates like a tuning fork to the beat of the best music I have ever heard. I catch sight of Jerm up by the railing, his silver flat-top sparking with flashing light, swilling beer and arm-wrestling the bald bouncer from the stool outside. But he is not here either; like me he has stepped outside himself. He is somewhere else in the building, behind everything, playing the music, working the lights, pressing the buttons. When I can no longer stand, I drop to my knees and crawl across the floor, hands pawing at me as I pass, hands applauding my progress. My kneecaps scrape the floor in time to the music Jerm plays, and somewhere in the building, behind a curtain, I can feel him nodding in time with the music, even as he signals to me from the railing upstairs. And then I am suffocating behind a curtain, behind dusty purple curtains, and there is a young lady in a bathing suit sliding about on my femurs, looking for a lump in my lap on which to perch. I keep trying to push her off, to push the curtains aside, and finally I do, I finally manage to do it, and she is standing there staring down at me, laughing. We are laughing together. I try to speak but my tongue is glued to the roof of my mouth and she will not let go of my hands, my bony hands freed from their purple skins, so that I can peel my tongue from the roof of my mouth and say, “Aren’t you Lily Langtry?” So I say nothing, which is for the best because
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she is gone and I am very, very thirsty. This is the moment I will live inside forever, I think; I have discovered how to do it, how to dwell in a moment like an infant marsupial in its mother’s pouch, like Pinocchio in the whale, but then the moment is over and I am doing some strange jig on the stairs. There are hands on my shoulders trying to push me down into my body, so I resist. There are hands trying to push me into a ditch, into a grave; I can only resist so long, and finally I give up, I wake up at the table, back inside myself, almost weeping with gratitude. And now the lights are flickering flames and those people down there, downstairs in the pit, are poor lost souls spinning forever in the abyss. I cannot recall how I got back up here, back to the table, but when I turn to the side there is Jerm, his hand on my shoulder, his hair full of lambent light, and I beg him to take me out of this place. Then he is behind me, a pair of thick strong hands under my bony arms, lifting me up. As Jerm pulls the car out of the garage I keep saying, “Careful, careful.” He pats my knee and tells me I’ll be okay, that I am okay. At some point, I swear to you, a flock of fluorescent geese lifts off in front of us and flies away, honking, their long white wings rising and falling, rising and falling. We just miss them. They are gone for a long while before I realize I can still hear the terrified honking; Jerm is next to me, laughing, punching the wheel repeatedly, growing younger by the minute. And then I am staring down into another abyss, from which steam rises up to me, bathing my eyes, scalding them. I am bent over a large cup of coffee at a long bright bar and Jerm is next to me, patting my back. A quarter flips over the knuckles of his free hand; a glass of whiskey waits patiently for employment before him.
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“You really cut a rug out there, you old turkey buzzard.” “Everything hurts,” I croak, and then, having said it, I realize that it is true, that there is no way I will be able to rise from this stool by myself when the time comes. Further down the bar a rumpled gentleman sits with his mouth hanging open, making slight beckoning motions as if he is trying to waft his next words into his head. He reminds me of a baleen whale chasing plankton through the deep, its maw broad and black. He has the dazed look of a man who, like everyone he’s ever met along the way, is unsure of whatever became of him. He is trying to start a conversation with the bartender, a patient young lady who smiles down at him, absently wiping at her fingers with a bright white towel. Jerm gives me one final thump on the back and I occupy myself for the next minute by coughing into my coffee while he looks on, chortling and snorting. When my fit has passed, I look at him through tears and he shakes his head dolefully, muttering, “Jesus.” “What did he say?” I ask, trying to sound firm and coherent. “How do you know I spoke to him?” “I saw you.” “Saw me speaking to him?” “Saw you arm-wrestling him. I’m assuming you didn’t get so carried away that you neglected to carry out the plan.” Again he shakes his head, this time with the trace of a smile. “You didn’t see a damn thing except that poor girl that you dragged out on that floor. Arm-wrestling? Good grief.” “Yes, yes, yes, well, what did he say?” Jerm sighs, downs his drink, thinks for a second. “Well, he doesn’t like him. Said they used to work together at a Meineke over on Sherman, till he left to work at that dump.” “Who did? Who left? “The guy I was talking to, knucklehead. Anyway, Yates turns up one day, asks him to help him get a job there too. So he does,
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no questions asked. Said he found out later he’d been fired from the Meineke for knocking some poor bastard upside the head for complaining about how long his oil change was taking.” “So. Violent.” “Well, yeah, but we knew that already.” “Yes, yes, I suppose we did. But you said he doesn’t like him?” Here Jerm’s eyes begin to glow, and I see what’s coming, the future starting to take shape. “That’s right. Doesn’t like him at all. Said he wishes he never got him that job. And the reason is, Yates hung around after his shift ended one night, started drinking, trying to get some poor girl who works in the kitchen to go home with him. Can you imagine bringing a girl home to that place, to his daddy, and expecting something from her? Good Christ.” “The story, Jerm.” “Right. So eventually he gets the message the girl’s not interested—guy said she didn’t come back to work again afterward, she was so creeped out—and keeps on drinking. Eventually he starts running his mouth about all the shit he gets up to at home.” “What? What does he get up to?” “Well, I mean, we’ve seen some of it. Fighting, drinking, all that crap. Some drugs, whatever. But he also starts talking about him and his daddy riding all over the neighborhood at night, looking for . . . troublemakers, he calls ’em. Undesirables.” “So that’s what . . .” “That’s right. That’s what. Vigilante shit, he called it. Anyway, the guy said he came into work the next day like it was nothing. Might’ve forgotten he even said it. Too drunk, too stupid. Both.” We sit there for a minute without speaking and I try to allow this information to take root, to fully accept this affirmation. It is harder than you imagine it will be, especially when you are in excruciating pain and can barely draw breath. “This could all be poppycock,” I say cautiously, and at the sound of the word Jerm looks as if I’ve just spit on his paisley shirt. His
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hand comes down on the bar with a sound like a body striking the pavement after a fall from a sixth-story window, drawing glances from the bartender and her chum. “What more do you want?” he says. “This guy brought it up by himself, unprompted. I didn’t have to hold his hand or pay him off.” “We could follow them one night, just to see. Just to be sure.” “Sure,” he says, tossing a bill disgustedly on the bar. “I’m sure. I don’t need to go lurking around behind bushes to be sure. You’re sure too, you just don’t want to be. I’ll do it on my own, if I have to.” And he heads for the door, leaving me to follow. I have just enough time, before he remembers that I can’t stand up and returns, cursing, to assist me, to notice the song playing softly somewhere nearby, an old song I have not thought of in years. I can only recall the chorus, and when it arrives I sing along as best I can: Remember me, when the candle-lights are gleaming. Remember me, at the close of a long, long day. It would be so sweet when all alone I’m dreaming, just to know you still remember me. Sometime before sunrise I make my way to the bathroom like a man on stilts for the first time, and I fall to my knees—my poor patellae grinding again against the floor—and vomit gallons of black coffee into the toilet, hacking and choking, my eyes watering in the rising steam.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Convalescence
This pain I cannot communicate to you; to say that I writhe in torment on the couch, that couch straddling the boundary between the fear of death and the hope for it, will have to suffice. Delia pours hydrogen peroxide on my sizzling knees and I shriek and call out for my mother, sense the twitching of her finger inside her coffin, lodged deep in the loam of my memory. Bags of frozen vegetables on my arms and legs, a damp cloth on my forehead, I lie there and cry like an abandoned baby while she hums sweet, sinuous melodies over me and clears away the cups and bowls, the single precious plate. Jerm looks away, embarrassed by my weakness, tries to busy himself by straightening picture frames and rummaging through the kitchen drawers. Three times I wake from the same dream, drenched in sweat, to write MWMWMWMWMWMWMW on a scrap of paper. Three times I try and fail to forget. After a week or so I am ambulatory again, but I do not make much use of this capability. I work out a triangular circuit and travel it faithfully, wearing a path in the carpet from the center cushion (where I sit watching Westerns) to a chair by the back door (where I sit watching bathing birds) to the front window (where I stand staring at a spot on the lawn), thence back to the cushion for another course of blood and dust and justice.
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When there is time to heal, there is time to think—I would posit, in fact, that the two processes work together, that each act assists the other. I sip my soup and reflect on the song I heard in the bar, that old song: Remember me, it says, and it occurs to me that behind almost every human act is the same request, that this phrase sums up the single strongest human longing, superseding the longing for sex and shelter, for money and power—what is power, after all, that holds no sway over memory, that disappears with the ultimate exhalation? A pair of trunkless legs, is all. A rumor in the desert. This is nothing novel, of course, this concept. But it is one of those eternal ideas that will never stop bearing repeating. I can recall the quiet in the classroom—I sometimes allowed myself to fancy it was rapt attention, but probably it was boredom—when I spoke of Hamlet’s father, of his parting words to his son: Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me. Three sorrowful iambs, prolonging the moment, and then, of course, the final plea. The demands come before, the strict instructions, and then the parting plea. “What other message could any spirit hope to convey more than that?” I asked these children, year after year. But they were always children, and they could not understand. “You are a ghost,” I would tell them. “You may return to earth to speak to whomever you please, for five seconds, no more. Your message may not exceed two words. What do you say?” And half of them would gaze at me, wide-eyed, and the other half would begin to laugh into their books, and I always knew what they were thinking, and I would always blush and move on, stuttering. Such disappointment. Must I remember? At one of the three points of my circuit—I suspect it’s at the front window, looking out at the lawn—I decide not to dither or delay any further. I will not lie, I vow, a craven coward in my grave.
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My convalescence more or less complete, I inch through the cool air across the street, still a bit tender, still a bit raw.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Reassurance, Reconnaissance
It is just after noon, and we sit at the table together eating turkey sandwiches, drinking ginger ale and talking about every single thing except for what’s to be done. Jerm keeps trying to tell me how terrible I look; Delia keeps saying, “So?” and tapping the rim of her glass with her fingernail; I keep hemming and hawing and chewing without tasting. Finally, he stands up to leave us alone, placing a hand on my shoulder as he passes. The TV turns on in the next room; a voice says, “Take him Charlie! Pull the trigger, it’s gotta be now!” A pause, and then: “Alright, if you won’t do it, then I will!” Then a shot, a scream reverberating through a canyon. She says, “This is so stupid. I can call right now and report it, you don’t have to do anything.” I say, “It won’t work. It can’t work that way. It has to be me, one way or another.” “Explain to me why that is.” I tell her I cannot. “That is so stupid.” “There are certain unwritten laws,” I say, faltering. “There are certain immutable laws . . . ” “Stop. Just stop. Tell me what happens afterward. Assuming.” She is asking me to name the punishment for the crime I am going to commit, the crime that will punish them for the crime they’ve committed. That I cannot do: How can you pass down a sentence until you’ve seen the damage that’s been done?
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“How long?” she asks. “How long this time?” “I cannot tell you that, because I do not know,” I say, and she shakes her head and rises from the table, taking her glass, her plate. “At least this time I’ll know why,” she says. I stand up to visit the bathroom, take ten or twelve steps before I realize I am heading in the wrong direction. She has to go to work, and she leaves without saying goodbye. In the living room I sit down on the couch and without looking my way he asks, “How’d she take it?” “You know,” I say. “You were sitting right here.” “Ah, well,” he says, changing the channel. “She’ll be okay. What ends well’s always well.” Then he looks at me. “Close,” I say. “Very close.” Sometime after sundown I awaken with a jolt, swatting at myself. The TV is off; the remote has just landed in my lap. Jerm looks down at me, grinning, suddenly full of life. “Get your ass up, boy,” he says, rubbing his hands together excitedly. “Let’s go prowling.” He parks the car one street over, the supplies in the trunk, and we stroll along the sidewalk, two old codgers taking the night air together, swapping stories or comparing ailments. Something like that. When we arrive at the point he has chosen he pushes me off the path, and then we are trespassing, and I think how strange it is that it’s just that simple to step off the sidewalk, into the dark. Momentum: that is what he gave me. You must understand the importance of momentum; you must never underestimate it. We walk along the side of the house behind theirs, through the back yard, past winking garden gnomes and a sagging trampoline.
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We cross the boundary between back yards and stand there looking at what appears to be a kitchen window, a lozenge of light burning in the center of the universe. Without seeing, I see Jerm point at the sliding glass door to the right of that light, whispering, “There it is. That’s the way.” “How do you know? What if it’s locked?” “They’d never lock it,” he says. “It’d never occur to them that they needed to.” He tells me to get low, grabs hold of my arm and pulls me toward some small structure in the corner of the yard. My rickety joints won’t allow me to crouch, but I try, and I arrive panting at what I now see is a tiny shed with a busted motorbike leaning against its side. “We’ll leave it behind here,” he says. “No one’s gonna notice it. It’ll be right here waiting.” Fifteen minutes later we are back in the living room, back on Wilder Street, and Delia’s keys are jingling on the other side of the door. And then she is there, seated on the other end of the couch, tapping her knee with her fingernail and waiting for us to speak with a look that says, So?