by Hugh Sheehy
“It’s Marcus,” he said when she answered, her voice tired and rough and curious.
“Where are you? Where is this number?”
“Some phone,” he said. “I’m north of the city. Not far.”
“I’m still at work,” she said. “Another twenty minutes. Today has been a real bitch.”
“Will it be too late to grab a bite somewhere?”
A long silence on her end, the hesitation that was a willingness to be convinced. “I don’t know,” she said. “What did you have in mind?”
“Not sure. I’m starving. Let’s talk about it. I’ll meet you at the station near there.”
MNEMOSYNE AND THE PLAYWRIGHT
In Paphos there was a playwright who had been married off young and was terribly unhappy. His wife too was discontent. When she took a lover, the playwright, seeing no blame in either of them, prayed to Mnemosyne to make him forget himself and be thus freed from his misery. Because he had so faithfully mimicked human strife on the stage, Mnemosyne heard his prayer and appealed to Zeus, but the cloudsplitter remonstrated that it would not be sufficient for the playwright to forget himself while the memories of so many others held him in place. So the mother of the muses convinced the dream god Morpheus to kidnap the playwright and replace him with a double.
Many years passed and the playwright’s family and friends had died or gone away. His double lived on, old and wild haired, wandering the street, harassing strangers and conversing with phantoms. The period when others found his antics amusing had long passed. The double was thought to be truly mad, and his wife now lived in the household of another man. It was only when he slept that the playwright woke in his replacement’s dreams, never remembering what had come before.
Once more Mnemosyne went to Zeus and pleaded the playwright’s case. The father of the gods looked down on the double, cavorting in the street in filthy rags, and took pity on the playwright. He decreed that not only should the playwright be restored to his rightful place, but that his youth would be returned to him, as a reward for his faithful sacrifice.
When the people saw that the soiled beggar had been transformed into a young man in full possession of his wits, they took a goat to the temple and slaughtered it in honor of the gods.
This is why in the city Paphos, when they see an old person dancing, they say, “It is unhappy memory, not time, that makes one grow old.”
A DIFFICULT AGE
The man is the corrupt dream of the child, and since
there is only decay, and no time, what we call days
and evenings are the false angels of our existence.
— EDWARD DAHLBERG, Because I Was Flesh
Look at it this way. Fourteen years old and I stand six feet two inches high, a lummox with charm like the muttering lord of the dead. Last summer most of my mom’s breasts were removed, which is no excuse, though it is a reason I began to hate everyone. She shed her hair; I grew mine to my shoulders and dyed it black. Once partners in sarcasm, observers of amphibians in our Black Swamp surroundings, the parent-child duo that chatted past the zero hour, we have become strangers, willing to hurt with words. To ease life I roam the downstairs, now that she’s as bald as Lionel, the boy on our front porch, listening after the doorbell’s echo, his pipe-thin arms short and flared.
Lionel’s baldness is self-imposed, and to ensure that no one mistakes this, he wears a heavy chain-link necklace and a black Megadeth T-shirt that portrays an emaciated man sweating bullets out of his forehead and chest onto a wooden table. Lionel is my age, has hounded blue eyes and crooked teeth, and lives in a slab house on the south side of this large park of Black Swamp forest, in a neighborhood of slab houses, a neighborhood with snarling dogs and no government, alongside the railroad tracks. He is my best friend, and for a long time was my only friend, until Brooke became pregnant, around the time the surgeons cut the tumors out of my mom. Until Brooke began driving him over in her old blue Stingray, the rumbling and rusted wonder of our minds, Lionel was forced to ride the dirt trails on his secondhand mountain bike to reach my house through the riparian forest.
I open the door. He waits, immune to the October cold, on the flagstones. Up high the clouds lie back over the stick trees. Brooke waits in the running car, her little eyes crinkled as she smokes a Kool.
“Don’t ask,” says Lionel. “Don’t even bring it up. She got really really pissed off about five minutes ago, and before she got pissed off she was already crazy. All right there, big guy?” He claps my shoulder, laughs nervously. Being so much smaller, he enjoys the idea of pushing me around. I hardly notice this. He slips past me and opens the front door. “Hi, Mrs. Wheeler, bye, Mrs. Wheeler!”
My mom’s up in her room, watching the TV shows we once watched, in the days she had breasts and long messy hair and did more than eat frozen dinners in bed. Skeletal, loose-skinned, and bald like an old man, she sits under blankets and pink wool cap next to the much-hated wig of bouncy brown-blonde hair on the nightstand, the lesser world of Cheers going on inside the television, her gun in a drawer and her ranger’s uniform hanging in the closet, the park service radio burbling on the dresser. At the sound of Lionel’s shout she savors a blend of fondness and anger. She won’t call back, though she smirks, and not because teasing Sam has once again irked Diane into a sexy shouting match. She is getting slowly better, putting all of her power pills into a pile. Her strength is returning, having once left her stoned and waxy in a hospital bed — that night I sat in the waiting area I half-expected to see her ghost wander past the nurse’s station, as if in search of a restroom. Instead we came back here, where she glides through the kitchen in a pink gown. She sniffs the rot in the room and tells me to sweep the sparrows out of the fireplace, to repair the screen at the top of the chimney. She watches, silent, vigilant only until the job is finished, then departs without a word. The commercial break echoes from her bedroom, and the quiet fills with her steady breathing until her door shuts.
When I think of her coming out of there, I shiver a little.
In the sound of ticking clock-and-quiet house and disconnected surf of radio static, I ask Lionel if he was able to get the item that he promised to bring today.
“Patience is divine, Wheeler,” he tells me, tilting his knobby head. His maverick wink says yes, he has brought the highly experimental drug that he promised he would bring, but that he is also going to proudly be a pain in the neck about it. I follow him to the car and sit in the backseat, among crumpled fast food sacks, and give the brooding, unspeaking Brooke directions on the mazey park roads to the pond where the rangers never stop. In the front seat Lionel fast-forwards through the new Fishbone cassette, looking for a part of a song that he feels is currently the best expression of young black anger.
We are only young and angry, I point out. Not black.
“Two out of three ain’t bad,” Lionel mocks, in a dull voice. He knows his theories precisely, like inventions left lying around his personal laboratory. “That kind of thinking isn’t going to bring people together, Wheeler.”
Though everything’s changed since Brooke drove him to my house two months ago, I’ve come to feel that it always goes this way, me in the backseat staring out the window, while Brooke drives and Lionel sits shotgun, pontificating in his small cutting voice. It’s hard to keep in mind all that’s changed, except that two months ago I wouldn’t have considered smoking crystal-form cocaine. The word “crack” belonged to undead grown-ups that herded in unnamed ghettoes and to the straight-up cops who hunted them.
Lionel sometimes remarks, How quickly and cruelly the outer world relates to you. At times I have replied, How quickly, Lionel? How cruelly? and at others, Lionel, could you relate that to Shut the fuck up. More and more lately, I’ve been saying, Yes, yes, how quickly indeed. When we left my dad behind and came to the park, my mom tried to convince me of our safety here. “Things are going to get a lot easier,” she used to say. “You’re not going to believe it.” She was looking out into
the woods, reading about the school system. All along the cancer was inside her.
It’s not saying I’m bitter, like kids they make TV movies about, just that I’m feeling open to a new way of living, a new way of thinking, once Brooke parks the Stingray on the broken-up blacktop beside a long-unrented cottage of decaying logs, once we are climbing from two open doors into the sweet pungent autumn with instantly cold throats. Beyond our clouds of breath, a single fisherman sits in a lawn chair down on the dock with his line out in the dark pond, a bobber among the reflections and moss and leaves. It’s Fritz, the harmless, muttering old German who catches and releases the sunfish and bluegill that otherwise have the run of this body of water. He wears a thermal flannel shirt and a hunter’s cap and smokes a corncob pipe.
Brooke fears rangers, jails, courtrooms, and parents. Before the pregnancy she dated the quarterback of the football team. She sold brownies at the bake sale and wore glitter lipstick. She shivers and hugs herself in her thin suede jacket, and I stand beside her to murmur that all will be fine. This forest is my area of expertise. Lionel strides on ahead of us, stubby arms swinging, no jacket for him, into the opening in the trees that we have gone into many times before to drink Old Milwaukee and smoke the occasional joint. This is a special occasion, however — momentous is the word, really — and my fear is gone now that I know for sure that Brooke, being with child, will say no to smoking crystal-form cocaine. If my mom had smoked crystal-form cocaine while she carried me, I don’t know what I’d tell people.
We linger, she short and delicate in a way that makes me hide my hands in the kangaroo pouch of my hooded sweatshirt.
“What if he sees us?” she hisses.
“Don’t worry. He’s just this old guy.” My whisper does not convince her, and she only follows so as not to be left alone with the half-blind old man sitting with his back to her, once I’ve almost disappeared from her sight down the trail into the leafless dogwoods — she catches up at a stumbling, paranoid jog. It’s embarrassing to see an older girl unnerved, so I don’t mention to her that when I look back Fritz has turned in his chair to watch her through his thick bifocal glasses, chewing the pipe with his old teeth. I look a second longer to make sure he doesn’t feel ignored by me, until he jerks a nod. Maybe a long time ago in the Black Forest or wherever, kids would meet in the woods to get it on. I go after Brooke, a step behind her, into the den of leafless branches, with my head down.
Our spot is a flat dry bank between an isolated chunk of granite and a bald cypress. Lionel crouches on the boulder. He hops down as we squeeze through the branches of young basswoods. He pulls a small pipe from one pocket, from the other a small bag of dope and a little smoked glass vial that I recognize as having contained pure caffeine at one time in a cabinet in our General Science classroom. The day Mr. Clayborn got that stuff out so we could estimate its melting point, boys from our class stole them to flash such vials in the corridor and joke that they contained what Lionel’s actually does. Explaining that he’s already broken up the crystal, he twists off the lid and shakes frosty nuggets onto the swirl of twiggy pot in his bowl. Observing ritual, he balances the pipe on the toe of an Airwalk and searches out his cigarettes in the vast pockets of his jeans. “Wheeler?” He offers one, totally solemn, and I take it, light it, and pull out the bottle of apple-flavored wine I have stolen, smuggled, and hidden in my shirt as a surprise for my friends on this occasion.
“Thank God,” says Brooke. She uncaps the bottle and drinks from it, watching Lionel and me smoke our Camels. “You guys are fucking crazy,” she tells us between slugs, eyeing the pipe balanced like a hacky sack on Lionel’s shoe. “That stuff can make your heart explode. What if you get addicted?”
“Then we get addicted.” Lionel glares at her like she’s his little sister, whom he had no choice but to bring along this one time. I happen to know that he loves her and wants to adopt the baby when she has it. He tells me all his secrets and thoughts. He imagines putting the baby into a car seat once he’s got his license. He says he sees them moving into a slab house in his neighborhood together. He’ll be a construction worker, come home to her in the evenings. Then I’ll stop by, and we’ll drink beer in the living room. Lionel believes his love is all the more legit because Brooke annoys him — this time because he has conducted actual research on this particular chemical under the reading lamps at the downtown library, and he is confident that the first-timer-hooked story is falderal meant to deter us from passing into an alternate world that could lead to a higher reality. This higher reality stuff isn’t very clear to me.
“That’s the problem,” he says. “The way the system is set up. So you won’t see that every second is another chance to shoot into another dimension.”
Lionel winks at Brooke, then takes the first hit, mouth puckered hard around the piece, holds it and blushes, and quilts my face with pot smoke. With a hurry-up motion he hands me the pipe, and then, with an audible heartbeat and damp armpits, I’m doing it myself, staring directly into the disapproval of too-thin, pretty if slightly buck-toothed Brooke.
A ball of tension in my chest releases into a greater tightness that makes me understand for the first time that my mind is a part of my physical body. There I am, standing on taut legs, laughing with Lionel, as Brooke freaks out and drinks green wine from the bottle, the three of us on the mud bank of a still pond under a spry autumn cloud.
This is all that happens.
As far as I know.
That makes me laugh like I’ve never laughed before, so hard I think I’ll break my chest, and Lionel walks up with a cackle in his throat and punches me in the cheek. I bop him in the middle of his bald head and he goes down, laughing, on the hard bank. We sit together, painless, sharing a pipe, and drum our legs on the bank. Brooke calls us idiots, but more importantly, the autumn is its naked self, bold and inelegant, and hard like a new tooth driven through a baby’s gums. We laugh hard and cry and get scared and laugh hard, and Brooke stares at the pond and shakes her head, drinking wine and being pregnant.
On our last night together my dad stands in the red bathroom with my mom’s hair in his fist. He uses his knuckles to point her eyes directly into the toilet. He shouts in a voice torn down to a squeak, that she has to take the fucking cabbage out of the fucking toilet. This during the period we believe that alcohol does this to him. The toilet is empty. Nonetheless my mom, wide-eyed in pain and by now done talking to him, lowers both hands in, hoping, I guess, to catch my dad’s hallucination in both her palms as she lifts them out. She tries not to get the floor too wet.
After he passes out I climb out from under their bed, from under his flung out arms and the broad shining slope of his belly. My mom has been preparing for this, and the duffel bags are out of the closet. She composes her clothes and hair enough to go outside, composes her head enough to drive the car. She kneels beside me, and we look at the snoring, slobbering disaster that is my dad. She breathes hard and I breathe hard and we both smell like the kind of tears that don’t mean anything, the useless tears that continue to fall after the reasons for the pain are isolated and as uninteresting as childhood toys.
We drive to the house of a friendly ranger my mom knows. We stay in his stone cottage less than two miles away, but I don’t see my dad again until we go to the courthouse. He wears a suit, his face sickly white-and-yellow, his guido hair combed back. Except for the tattoo of a five-pointed star on his right ear, he does not resemble the oaf who raged in our house throwing unbreakable plastic dinnerware and glassless photographs and tackling heavy wooden chairs, searching for nonexistent friends and sometimes naked when he’d fabricated a coyly hiding lover. In the court he is frightened and sick, as the clerk reads from my mother’s testimony about some things he’s done, which I remember well, which he says he does not remember. He scares me most like this, braced in agony, without his usual, unkind happiness.
A psychiatrist questions him for a week and takes pictures of his brain that are blown up and
colored for the benefit of the judge and lawyers. He is diagnosed as schizophrenic, and when they tell him this in the courtroom he weeps. He has not had alcohol to drink for almost a month by now. Lighter and sweaty and shivering, he stutters when he tries to talk after the judge asks if he has anything to say.
He looks at us at our little table, me in my suit and tie, and says, “I-I-’m s-s-s-sorr-ry,” as if he has eaten a speech therapy student, who is speaking from inside his stomach.
My mom maintains an upright posture in her gray suit, her face smart and ready. She is nearly free, and looking past the present, she hardly knows he is there.
They move my dad into an institution in the farmlands north of Lima, Ohio, but he doesn’t know where it is. He doesn’t know that we move east along the lake, not because he’s vindictive and murderous but because he takes Thorazine. He can’t keep drool in his mouth.
I don’t miss him. In six years I’ll take an unannounced trip to Lima over Christmas break, in an ’89 Accord, and be informed by a doctor there of my dad’s release after three years due to cuts in hospital funding. My mom will apologize for not telling me. She will be forty-one and still bald, and it will be easy to forgive her. When I drop out of college that spring I’ll drive to Panama City, where he’s thought to have gone in search of a climate conducive to heavy drinking and homeless living. After a week of talking to volunteers in missions around the city, I’ll be directed to a block near Buccaneer stadium, and he’ll be the old man in mesh shorts sitting in the shade of a viaduct. The star on his grimy ear will look like a tattoo of used chewing gum. I won’t know if he knows me, but like I think we’re bros, I’ll buy two forties and sit with him. After saying a few planned things, I give him my goddamn beer and leave him there.
This is what happens in Mr. Clayborn’s General Science for Freshmen, a boring required course in which I fail to foresee an oncoming disaster. In this class students sit in pairs at green Formica lab tables, and since Lionel and I are lab partners and contemptuous of our childish peers, we sit together and sneer at our surroundings. Our table is in the back corner beside a cabinet in which a pig fetus, a pine rattlesnake, a mudpuppy, and a cow’s heart float in jars of formaldehyde. In the larger cabinet behind us are stored seriously unstable compounds and elements, all of them in smoked glass jars. Several times per class period, Lionel and I wish they would explode. Lionel is one of three Advanced Chemistry students in the freshmen class, and as far as we know he is the only one who’s noticed this powder keg in the classroom. Today we feel especially superior, fourteen-year-olds who have smoked crystal-form cocaine and survived without becoming addicted to it. Every few minutes I write into Lionel’s notebook: You a fiend yet?
