‘Oh, yes, she’s become a valued member of the congregation.’ She pats me on my shoulder and smiles. ‘You should be proud.’
The encouragement means either she knows I’m not, or she doesn’t know enough and thinks I could be.
‘Was she here last week?’ I ask.
She cocks her head and considers the ceiling. ‘No, no, I don’t remember her being here. But she hasn’t lingered to chat the last few times I’ve seen her. She seemed anxious to be home. Honestly . . . well, maybe I shouldn’t say. But, I thought she might have a boyfriend. Which, really . . . it’s time, don’t you think?’
‘Her happiness is all that matters,’ I say, not, If you had any idea what manner of man she used to call ‘boyfriend’, you wouldn’t wish that for her, or, Can’t we all stop saying, ‘it’s time’?
‘So, how does it feel to be back home?’ Mrs Mason asks.
‘I guess it’s time I found out,’ I say, corralling the frown that accompanies the thought, No, I guess we can’t. ‘I stayed at the Comfort Palace last night. I . . . wasn’t ready.’ I feel exposed; I don’t know why I confided that.
To my surprise, Mrs Mason isn’t nonplussed, but responds equally frankly. ‘Your mother broke through,’ she says, ‘sometime last year. Cast off her shackles, as it were. She never told me what it was that finally changed in her or in her life.’
I remembered how I quit smoking. ‘In my experience, the only real motivator for personal change is disgust.’
She smiles softly and chides me, ‘Perhaps that is what it takes to get to that moment of decision. But one hopes she turned to God in that moment, and it was He who lifted her up and transformed her. I can tell you this: She did mention to me once. . . . You shouldn’t feel guilty.’
‘I don’t.’ Ah, at least that automatic defence has not been compromised.
‘Of course. Good.’ She nods, and then touches my arm again. ‘She said that one of the things that . . . held her back for so long was how she, she blamed herself . . . for you. For how she raised you!’ she adds hurriedly. ‘For how she didn’t care for you correctly.’ She sighs exasperatedly and removes her glasses to polish them on a silk scarf. ‘I’m sorry; I’m not saying this right.’
‘No, I understand,’ I assure her. ‘Recrimination is a cycle. I know it well.’
So mother cast off her guilt? Well, hallelujah and pass me a virgin daiquiri. How neat for her. How positively white.
I excuse myself, after promising Mrs Mason once more that I understand perfectly what she meant. I definitely do not want her to stammer through explaining she didn’t mean to say mother blamed herself for my sexuality. I think we’re both uncomfortable enough already.
On my way to my car I call Duenger to tell him to meet me at the house in an hour if he still wants in.
Oh, yes, oh, yes.
I stop at a chain family joint and pick a spot at the ‘bar’. The smell of warm maple-flavoured corn syrup suffuses the air. Who am I to deny its flirtation? French toast and coffee. There is lipstick on my coffee cup and I wonder glumly if it’s meant to be a comment or just the random spoil of inattentiveness. There’s no telling; the waitress would call her executioner ‘Honey’.
‘Whenever you’re ready,’ she says when she slips me the bill.
Unlike every other structure in town, the house does not look smaller. Two storeys and a cellar, side and back yards. It was always more than we two needed; it had been meant for a family, after all. I had a younger brother, Chuck. The inevitable divorce split my family in the middle. It was as though my parents went to Solomon and took him at his word. Either my dad thought two kids would be too hard on him, or maybe just too hard to win, because of course my mother fought him for custody out of spite. Maybe Dad misinterpreted the mutual contempt my mother and I shared for closeness; I remember him as fairly clueless. Either way, I’m sure it was easier to ‘cut bait’ on the longer line. He and Chuck called twice during the year after they left. They died together seven years later with the rest of his new family from carbon monoxide poisoning. Sleep tight. Mother flared for a month; I couldn’t have left her for the funerals even if I’d wanted to.
I pull into the driveway behind an unmarked white van with diagonal grating spanning its back windows. I find them on the porch. Duenger paces anxiously. The lummox orderly, smoking a cigarette, shares the creaking porch swing with the shifting limpness that is my mother, who is dressed but otherwise the same as I’d left her. I assume she just said something hilarious. She doesn’t see me.
‘What the hell is she doing here?’ I yell.
‘Ah! Mr Wince. Let’s get right to it, shall we?’
‘Did you hear me?’ I challenge.
Duenger furrows his brow, confused—no, he didn’t hear me. Then it processes. ‘Oh, yes—I thought it best to bring your mother to the origination point of her . . .’ he twirls a hand. It strikes me odd that a psychiatrist can’t conjure a euphemism for ‘mental collapse’. ‘Episode’, for God’s sake. ‘I thought it would be enlightening to see if anything set her off.’
Still hot, I say, ‘I don’t see how that would be therapeutic. Besides, you said you suspected an environmental factor.’
‘Indeed, I did,’ he says, ‘and “environment” is what we call our physical and psychical surroundings.’
I’ve never heard that definition before.
He goes on, ‘So the . . . contaminant might be chemical or biological, or even allegorical. Just as memory is tied to scent, or a sad picture makes us sad. You see?’
‘No,’ I answer. I most certainly do not.
‘If we went inside, perhaps everything will reveal itself,’ Duenger encourages.
Perhaps because I’m not getting the explanation I want from the doctor, I look at the orderly. He shrugs disinterestedly. That should be all I expect, but I stare at him anyway. He chuckles and flicks the spent butt into a barberry bush. ‘If you want my professional opinion as an orderly,’ he says, ‘I think your mom is batshit loco.’ He stands and pulls my mother to her feet effortlessly. He mocks me, ‘I do hope this helps you on your path to understanding and acceptance.’
The doc frets, ‘I really don’t see what the problem is.’
I frown, spin and lurch for the handle. ‘It’s unlocked,’ I announce. I regard the doctor suspiciously. ‘You could’ve gone right in without me.’
‘Legally, I couldn’t enter,’ he assures me, as though the law prohibitively affects physics. ‘Besides, we need to go in there as a unit.’
I don’t understand the distinction. I’m too annoyed to care.
‘Hey, I’m hourly,’ laughs the orderly. ‘Long as I’m done by five, you can do what the hell you want.’
Why am I fighting the inevitable? I open the door. I regret it.
‘Damn!’ the orderly recoils with his free arm to his nose. ‘And I hose down folks that shit themselves!’
The scent is noxious, but it’s not shit. And the fumes don’t burn my soft palate like so many chemical smells do. It’s not sweet like rot, either, or reeking like fish, or rotten like phosphorous. I can’t classify it. It’s aggressively damp, somehow, and foetid, as if the burning fur of a sick dog was dowsed with vinegar.
Duenger marches past me into the house. ‘Let’s see inside, then. Come on, everyone in!’ He sees our dubious faces and scrunched noses. ‘It’s not so bad inside,’ he assures us, ‘after the initial shock is processed. You’ll see.’ But even mother has changed her tune—unpleasantly. She is groaning.
‘You don’t think that is what drove her nuts?’ I demand.
He says coolly, ‘It couldn’t have been. You’ll remember, nothing was mentioned about any smell when her sponsor discovered her, or when the EMTs arrived to assist. Something must have spoiled, that’s all.’
The reasoning is sound, but I don’t like it.
The orderly swings my mother over the threshold. ‘Let’s get this the hell over with,’ he barks.
I follow him in. I hit
the switch just inside the door; the bulb overhead only slightly un-dims the interior from the grey day. My breath catches. The dimensions are so familiar, the floor plan set in my memory, but everything else is different. Why wouldn’t it be? I haven’t been in this house for a decade. The walls are a different colour, the furniture is new, the giant tube TV and its pedestal are absent; the flat screen on the wall seems out of place. But the real difference is the condition of things—clean. No, not clean, in the standard housekeeping sense, as it is obvious that any concerns about cleanliness vacated with mom’s wits, but at least kept up, modern-ish—the decrepitude on display appears recent and not resulting from year-on-year neglectful attrition, the décor of the burnout I remember from my youth. This is my impression of one room—the glazed sliding doors that lead to the dining room are closed.
So enraptured am I by trivialities no one else could care about that it is the orderly’s exertions that finally draw my attention, not my mother’s violent shaking.
‘Come on, now!’ he says, his massive arms around her.
She twists, struggling to get free. ‘No!” she screams. “No! It’s bad. I threw up in the tub and it got everywhere!’
‘Jesus! Get her out of here!’ I instruct the orderly.
‘No!’ countermands Duenger. ‘Let her go. Release her!’
‘What? She’ll bolt!’ I yell.
‘You must do as I say. Do it! Let her go!’
The orderly doesn’t release her so much as he just drops his arms slack. Even his head dips sideways and his mouth opens. His eyelids flit rapidly. I wonder if he is having an attack. Mother, however, free from his grasp and contrary to my expectation, sighs and rocks forward and back, as though once more in the throes of her gentle euphoria. A shudder runs through the orderly as though waking from a nap. He looks embarrassed at first, and then he smiles like a child.
Only then do I notice that Duenger has slid wide the glazed doors.
The smell is worse, ten times worse, but its foul bloom is so effervescent in my sinuses that it feels like gas fills my head and lifts me and I wonder if I am standing or floating.
The dining room writhes. Some sort of opaque, gelatinous substance foams over every surface. The layer is thin farthest from the staircase, such that the hard angles of a cupboard are discernible to my left, and I can even see portions of the wooden frame around the door to the kitchen. But towards the staircase the mass grows halfway to the ceiling. It piles upon itself to form clumsily wavering stalagmites, a giant anemone prodding mindlessly at the air, its tentacles failing, slopping and consumed again in the roiling lower body, the hopeless toil repeating. It is white and green and brown and blue and every colour, but none pure, all soiled, a retch of pointillism.
I threw up in the tub and it got everywhere.
The floor quavers as the orderly suddenly drops to his knees, his arms at his sides, palms open to the front. Tears stream down his cheeks as he laughs like a cold engine trying to start, ‘Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh!’
I wonder what he sees. I look again at the alien mound in the dining room and I discern shapes forming in the stuff. I cannot tell yet what they might become, but they are distinct from the reaching spires.
Yes, that’s a face there.
It’s gone.
Two rough faces now, twin sides to the same head, as Janus—my father and brother? They separate, become a woman’s breasts. One raises, arcs and looms over the other one, which flattens, to form something like the lopsided oval trough in a wave, and then both sides resolve into an image of much greater complexity. Adam reclines and stretches lazily while God reaches towards him from the clouds. And Adam has my face. But in place of Michelangelo’s limp sprout a segmented erection grows dollop by dollop, and as the creator melts back to formlessness, his arm droops such that he looks as though he reaches for it.
Then everything ripples from the middle; a bubble emerges and then flattens forward. The images shift to fine focus as every pustule in the gangrenous mass becomes a precise tile in a mottled mosaic, a blot of ink on a filthy Bayeux Tapestry. Scenes blend, melt and congeal: My brother falling from the cigar tree, too disgusted by the ants filing up between his small hands to hold on; the looming mustachioed face of a disposable stud pushing a reefer on me, holding back the laughter my mother in the background cannot; flashes of television memories as the South Tower falls and Buffy kisses Spike; my Night of the Pills freshman year in college that I botched so badly that no one even knew until I told Joseph; and finally Joseph in person, volunteered by a bevy of clueless pensioners at the Luau to join the Hula while I laughed until I cried; and the scene swallows itself into the frame of an asylum window behind which my mother waves loosely.
The good doctor is disrobing my mother with clear intent. I’m angry for only a second before the tug of conscience vanishes. I am fascinated by the sudden vacancy. Duenger catches my eye.
‘The first horizon has wilted!’ he declares. ‘Mark well to cut the rattle from the baby’s hand!’ And I read that same desperation in his eyes that I’d seen in my mother’s, the hidden aspect in the cloud of disingenuous, salacious joy, that thing that is the only thing that should be there: terror.
Anger rouses me. I understand the set-up now and I accuse him: You’ve been here before! You’re infected, just like my mother, and you brought me here to infect me, too!
Only what I say is, ‘Rondeau! A crooked man walks a straight path, a pocketful of tadpoles to the circus!’
I understand the terror now. The nonsense is upon us. We can’t communicate. My neck spasms at the base of my skull and snaps my head back. I blink repeatedly. I try again: You won’t make me like you!
‘All’s Hell that ends!’
My compromised protestations are ignored. The doctor is rolling my mother over in the slop. He seems almost bewildered about how to penetrate her. I want to run but instead I begin weaving on my feet counterclockwise. The orderly bends forward, smearing a putrid kaleidoscope over the floor, ooh-ing and ah-ing.
What is this stuff—this psychic mould, this cancerous ectoplasm, this froth of decadence? What foul wonder is this that has ruined my mother and compelled the mad doctor to evangelise? I know it. I know it. I know it. It is corpses in our heads. It is the compost of souls. When spirit breaks down, where does it go? It is in all of us; it is ten millennia of rotted thought from whence new ideas spring; it carries in spoiled spores on the waves between us.
Yes. Yes. And occasionally it gets caught in the deeper pits of the emptier husks. It materialises and festers in our guts, germinating in a caul of bile and anxiety, accreting mass as a bezoar, corrupting and killing only to die along with us, unless . . . unless a person frees herself.
My mother decided to let go of the pain she suffered for her failure. For her benefit alone, she absolved herself and left the mess in the tub. Because I wasn’t there to tell her she had no right to take on my suffering in the first place.
So I yell—no words, no meaning, just anger. No one else gives a damn, but I roar. And there is a crumpling inside me and sparks move my limbs. I am outside before I know how I’ve gotten free.
I don’t know what to do. I know I need to get away. Primal thought saved me, primal thought moves me. I want to go to ground. But home is not an option. The church? Services are over—and what should I say? I go to the motel. I have to call Joseph. My strength.
I feel terrible. I can barely fit the key. The room spins and I collapse on the bed. I’m nauseous. Maybe . . . I feel it’s very important to say something reasonable. I have to make my words work. I try . . . I try with the one clear thought that remains.
‘How . . . how dare she?’ I ask.
I am still sick. My insides twist. But my scalp tingles and a feeling of minty lightness brushes my skin. And so I begin to smile, because I know it is so stupid. It is so absolutely stupid.
I chuckle. ‘Don’t you remember that you don’t care?’
My stomach roils. Fluid
pushes upwards. I scramble for the toilet. I puke violently, repeatedly, French toast and coffee and so, so much more.
I collapse back against the wall of the bathroom. My chest is heaving, my heart fluttering. I am weak but I feel better. As bad as it smells, it takes me a few minutes to gather the reserves to flush the toilet. I lean forward. Perverse curiosity grips me. The experience was so brutal, the purge so cathartic; I have to look at what came out of me.
Oh.
Oh, Joseph must see this.
ON BALANCE
Peak season ends with Labour Day, but thriftier tourists continue to rent the beach houses through September. Hurricane season is in full swing by October, and if it is difficult to find lodging then, it is only because some houses are shut for the season and some others are occupied by their actual owners, anxious to enjoy the last of the warm weather as the winds allow.
I preferred this time of year to take my vacation. I did not fish or frolic in the surf, and swam but rarely. I was content to stroll aimlessly, my slacks rolled to my knees. When I became tired, or found a particularly quiet or attractive spot, I sat in the sand and watched the surf.
On one such occasion, I noticed a man with a metal detector sweeping along the base of the dunes a hundred feet from my repose. Dispel any romantic notions you have of his endeavour —such beach-combers have little expectation of discovering sunken doubloons swept ashore; they troll for lost tourist jewellery. This character struck me as a semi-ambulatory melted waxwork: from his drooping head down through the slack of his faded clothes. As I watched him shake the machine roughly and then flip the bottom plate to his face with some unknowable inquiry, I felt instinctively his last day on earth would involve the routine cleaning of a firearm. Several times the man stopped to pick something up. Loose change was pocketed; rejected objects were tossed carelessly into the rushes. Just as I lost interest and looked away I heard a particularly loud squeal emanate from his machine. I watched as he set the metal detector aside and used both hands to dig into the sand. He straightened, holding some object I could not see. He peered closely at it and turned it over several times. Then he looked off towards the surf as though weighing a decision of some import. He repeated the process twice more. I was surprised to see him shrug and toss the thing aside indifferently before resuming his hunt.
The Hidden Back Room Page 7
