Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  For the next two months they lived hour to hour. Every day became an epic of endurance, in which Harriet sat in chairs. Harriet’s mother called every few days, offering excruciating maternal comfort. There were photographs, snapshots and studio portraits that neither of them could stand to remove. Nature became Harriet’s enemy. She grew to hate the sun and its long, lengthening arcs. When living trees broke open into pink and white blossoms in the spring, Harriet wanted to fling herself against them. She couldn’t remember what it was about life that had ever interested her. The world began a vast and buzzing commentary to keep her in cramps, preoccupied with Ellen, who had now irresistibly become Purl. The grass no longer grew up from the ground but instead stood as a witless metaphor of continuing life. Dishes and silverware upset her, unaccountably. She couldn’t remember who her friends were and did not recognize them on the street. Every night the sky fell conclusively.

  Jeremy had his job, but every evening, after seeing about Harriet, he went straight down to the basement where the television set was. He played his clarinet, drank beer, and watched the local news until it was time for dinner. He opened the twist-top beer bottles and drank the beer mechanically, as if acting on orders. After overhearing the music he played, Harriet began to call it “jazz from Mars,” and Jeremy said, yes, that was probably where it came from. He paid attention to things at work; his music could afford to be inattentive.

  He came upstairs when dinner was ready. This meal consisted of whatever food Harriet could think of buying and preparing. They didn’t like to go out. They often ate hot dogs and potato salad, or hamburger, or pizza. Jeremy sometimes fell asleep at the dinner table, his head tilted back at the top of the chair, and his mouth open, sucking in breaths. Harriet would drape one of his arms around her neck and lower him to the floor, so he wouldn’t fall off the chair while asleep. They had talked about getting chairs with arms to prevent accidents of this kind; they both assumed they would spend the rest of their lives falling asleep at the table after dinner.

  They started seeing Benson, the therapist, because of what happened with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In mid-May, the doorbell rang just after dinner. Jeremy, who this time was still awake, rose from the table to see who it was. Outside the screen door stood a red-haired man and a small red-haired boy, eight or nine years old, dressed in nearly identical gray coats and bow ties. The father was carrying a copy of Awake! and The Watchtower. The boy held a Bible, a children’s edition with a crude painting of Jesus on the cover. Leaving the screen door shut, Jeremy asked them what they wanted.

  “My son would like to read to you,” the man said, glancing down at the boy. “Do you have time to listen for a minute?”

  Jeremy said nothing.

  Taking this as a sign of agreement, the man nodded at the boy, who pushed his glasses back, opened the Bible, and said, “Psalm forty-three.” He swallowed, looked up at his father, who smiled, then pulled at the red silk bookmark he had inserted at the beginning of the psalm. He cleared his throat. “Give sentence with me, O God,” he read, his finger trailing horizontally along the line of type, his voice quavering, “and defend my cause against the ungodly people; O deliver me from the deceitful and wicked man.” He stumbled over “deceitful.” The boy paused and looked through the screen at Jeremy. Jeremy was watching the boy with the same emptied expression he used when watching television. The boy’s father touched his son on the shoulder and told him to continue. A bird was singing nearby. Jeremy looked up. It was a cardinal on a telephone wire.

  “For thou art the God of my strength,” the boy read. “Why hast thou put me from thee? and why go I so heavily, while the enemy oppresseth me?”

  For the first time, Jeremy said something. He said, “I don’t believe it. You can’t be doing this.” The father and the boy, however, didn’t hear him. The boy continued.

  “O send out thy light and thy truth, that they may lead me, and bring me unto thy holy hill, and to thy dwelling.”

  Jeremy said, “Who sent you here?” The father heard what he said, but his only reaction was to squint through the screen to see Jeremy better. He gave off a smell of cheap aftershave.

  “And that I may go unto the altar of God,” the boy read, “even unto the God of my joy and gladness; and upon the harp will I give thanks unto thee, O God, my God.”

  “You’re contemptible,” Jeremy said, “to use children. That’s a low trick.”

  This time both the boy and his father stared in at him. Harriet had appeared and was standing behind Jeremy, pulling at his shirt and whispering instructions to him to thank them and send them on their merry way. The father, however, recovered himself, smiled, pointed at the Bible, and then touched his son on the head, as if pressing a button.

  “Why art thou so heavy, O my soul?” the boy read, stuttering slightly. “And why art thou so disquieted within me?”

  “Stop it!” Jeremy shouted. “Please stop it! Stop it!” He opened the screen door and walked out to the front stoop so that he was just to the right of the father and his boy. Harriet crossed her arms but otherwise could not or did not move. Jeremy reached up and held on to the man’s lapel. He didn’t grab it but simply put it between his thumb and forefinger. He aimed his words directly into the center of the father’s face. “Who sent you here?” he asked, his words thrown out like stones. “This was no accident. Don’t tell me this was an accident, because I’d hate to think you were lying to me. Someone sent you here. Right? Who? How’d they ever think of using kids?” The bird was still singing, and when Jeremy stopped he heard it again, but hearing it only intensified his anger. “You want to sell me The Watchtower?” he asked, sinking toward inarticulateness. Then he recovered. “You want my money?” He let go of the man’s lapel, reached into his pocket, and threw a handful of nickels and dimes to the ground. “Now go away and leave me alone.”

  The stranger was looking at Jeremy, and his mouth was opening. The boy was clutching his father’s coat. One of the dimes was balanced on his left shoe.

  “Go home,” Jeremy said, “and never say another word about anything and don’t ever again knock on my door.” Jeremy was a lawyer. When speeches came to him, they came naturally. His face in its rage was as white as paper. He stopped, looked down, and hurriedly kissed the boy on the top of the head. As he straightened up, he said softly, “Don’t mind me.” Then, mobilized, Harriet rushed out onto the stoop and grabbed Jeremy’s hand. She tried smiling.

  “You see that my husband’s upset,” she said, pulling at him. “I think you should go now.”

  “Yes, all right,” the father mumbled, blinking, taking the Bible from his son and closing it. The air thickened with the smell of his aftershave.

  “We’ve had an accident recently,” she explained. “We weren’t prepared.”

  The man had his arm around his son’s shoulders. They were starting down the walk to the driveway. “The Bible is a great comfort,” the man said over his shoulder. “A help ever sure.” He stopped to look back. “Trust in God,” he said.

  Jeremy made a roaring sound, somewhere between a shout and a bark, as Harriet hauled him back inside.

  Benson’s office was lodged on the twentieth floor of a steel-and-glass professional building called the Kelmer Tower. After passing through Benson’s reception area, a space not much larger than a closet, the patient stepped into the main office, where the sessions were actually conducted. It was decorated in therapeutic pastels, mostly off-whites and pale blues. Benson had set up bookshelves, several chairs, and a couch, and had positioned a rubber plant near the window. In front of the chairs was a coffee table on which was placed, not very originally, a small statue of a Minotaur. Benson’s trimmed mustache and otherworldly air made him look like a wine steward. He had been recommended to them by their family doctor, who described Benson as a “very able man.”

  Harriet thought Benson was supposed to look interested; instead, he seemed bored to the point of stupefaction. He gave the appearance of thinking of some
thing else: baseball, perhaps, or his golf game. Several times, when Jeremy was struggling to talk, Benson turned his face away and stared out the window. Harriet was afraid that he was going to start humming Irving Berlin songs. Instead, when Jeremy was finished, Benson looked at him and asked, “So. What are you going to do?”

  “Do? Do about what?”

  “Those feelings you’ve just described.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything you’re supposed to do. It’s a choice. If you want me to recommend something, I can recommend several things, among them that you keep a journal, a sort of record. But you don’t have to.”

  “That’s good.” Jeremy looked down at the floor, where the slats of sunlight through the venetian blinds made a picket fence across his feet.

  “If you don’t want my help,” Benson said, “you don’t have to have it.”

  “At these prices,” Jeremy said, “I want something.”

  “Writing in a journal can help,” Benson continued, “because it makes us aware of our minds in a concrete way.” Harriet cringed over Benson’s use of the paternal first-person plural. She looked over at Jeremy. He was gritting his teeth. His jaw muscles were visible in his cheek. “Crying helps,” Benson told them. “And,” Benson said slowly, “it helps to get a change of scene. Once you’re ready and have the strength and resources to do it, you might try going on a trip.”

  “Where?” Harriet asked.

  “Where?” Benson looked puzzled. “Why, anywhere. Anywhere that doesn’t look like this. Try going to someplace where the scenery is different. Nassau. Florida. Colorado.”

  “How about the Himalayas?” Jeremy asked.

  “Yes,” Benson said, not bothering to act annoyed. “That would do.”

  They both agreed that they might be able to handle it if it weren’t for the dreams. Ellen appeared in them and insisted on talking. In Jeremy’s dreams, she talked about picnics and hot dogs, how she liked the catsup on the opposite side of the wiener from the mustard, and how she insisted on having someone toast the bun. The one sentence Jeremy remembered with total clarity when he woke up was: “Don’t like soggy hot dogs.” He wouldn’t have remembered it if it hadn’t sounded like her.

  She was wearing a flannel shirt and jeans in Jeremy’s dream; in Harriet’s she had on a pink jumper that Harriet had bought for her second birthday. Harriet saw that she was outgrowing it. With a corkscrew feeling she saw that Ellen was wearing a small ivory cameo with her own—Harriet’s—profile on it. She was also wearing a rain hat that Harriet couldn’t remember from anywhere, and she was carrying a Polaroid photograph of her parents. Harriet wondered vaguely how dead children get their hands on such pictures. In this dream Harriet was standing on a street corner in a depopulated European city where the shutters were all closed tight over the windows. Near her, overhead in the intersection, the traffic light hanging from a thick cable turned from green to amber to red, red to green, green to amber to red. However, no cars charged through the intersection, and no cars were parked on the street. A rhythmic thud echoed in the streets. Leaves moldered in the gutters. Harriet knew that it was a bad city for tourists. In this place Ellen scampered toward her down the sidewalk, wearing the pink jumper and the rain hat, the photograph in her hand, the cameo pinned near her collar. She smiled. Harriet stumbled toward her, but Ellen held out her hand and said, “Can’t hug.” Harriet asked her about the hat, and Ellen said, “Going to rain.” She looked up at the bleary sky, and, following her lead, so did Harriet. Flocks of birds flew from left to right across it in no special pattern, wing streaks of indecision. Clouds. Harriet gazed down at Ellen. “Are you okay?” Harriet asked. “Who’s taking care of you?” Ellen was picking her nose. “Lots of people,” she said, wiping her finger on her pant leg. “They’re nice.” “Are you all right?” Harriet asked again. Ellen lifted her right shoulder. “Yeah,” she said. She looked up. “Miss you, Mommy,” she said, and, against directions, Harriet bent down to kiss her, wanting the touch of her skin against her lips, but when she reached Ellen’s face, Ellen giggled, looked around quickly as if she were being watched from behind the shuttered windows, reached both hands up to cover her mouth, and disappeared, leaving behind a faint odor of flowers.

  “Such dreams are common,” Benson said. “Very very common.”

  “Tell me something else,” Harriet said.

  “What do you want me to tell you?”

  “Something worth all the money we’re paying you.”

  “You sound like Jeremy. What would be worth all the money you’re paying me?”

  “I have the feeling,” Harriet said, “that you’re playing a very elaborate game with us. And you have more practice at it than we do.”

  “If it’s a game,” Benson said, “then I do have more practice. But if it’s not a game, I don’t.” He waited. Harriet stared at the giant leaves of the rubber plant, standing in the early-summer light, torpid and happy. Jeremy hadn’t come with her this time. The Minotaur on the coffee table looked inquisitive. “What is the dream telling you about Ellen, do you think?”

  “That she’s all right?”

  “Yes.” Benson breathed out. “And what do you have to worry about?”

  “Not Ellen.”

  “No, not Ellen. The dream doesn’t say to worry about her. So what do you have to worry about?”

  “Jeremy. I don’t see him. And I have to worry about getting out of that city.”

  “Why should you worry about Jeremy?”

  “I don’t know,” Harriet said. “He’s hiding somewhere. I want to get us both out of that city. It gives me the creeps.”

  “Yes. And how are you going to get out of that city?”

  “Run?” Harriet looked at Benson. “Can I run out of it?”

  “If you want to.” Benson thought for a moment. “If you want to, you will run out of it.” He smoothed his tie. “But you can’t run and pull Jeremy at the same time.”

  After Jeremy’s dream, she no longer served hot dogs for dinner. That night she was serving pork chops, and when Jeremy came in, still in his vest but with his coat over his shoulder, she was seated at the table, looking through a set of brochures she had picked up at a travel agency down the block from Benson’s office. After Jeremy had showered and changed his clothes, he was about to take a six-pack out of the refrigerator when he looked over at Harriet studying a glossy photograph of tourists riding mules on Molokai. “It says here,” Harriet announced, “in this brochure, that Molokai is the flattest of all the islands and the one with the most agricultural activity.”

  “Are you going on a quiz show? Is that it?”

  She stood up, walked around the dining-room table, then sat down on the other side. She had a fountain pen in her hand. “Now this,” she said, pointing with the pen to another brochure, “this one is about New Mexico. I’ve never been to New Mexico. You haven’t, either, right?”

  “No,” Jeremy said. “Honey, what’s this all about?”

  “This,” she said, “is all about what we’re going to do during your two weeks off. I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit here. Want to go to Santa Fe?”

  Jeremy seemed itchy, as if he needed to go downstairs and play a few measures of jazz from Mars. “Sure, sure,” he said. He rubbed his eyes suddenly. “Isn’t it sort of hot that time of year?”

  She shook her head. “It says here that the elevation’s too high. You can stay in the mountains, and it’s cool at night.”

  “Oh.” Then, as an afterthought, he said, “Good.”

  She looked up at him. She stood and put her hand on his face, rubbing her thumb against his cheek. “How’s the black box?” she asked. She had recently started to wear glasses and took them off now.

  “How’s the sky?” he asked. He turned around. “The black box is just fine. I move around it, but it’s always there, right in front of me. It’s hard to move with that damn thing in your head. I could write a book about it
: how to live with a box and be a zombie.” He reached for a beer and carried it to the basement. She could hear the television set being clicked on and the exhalation of the beer bottle when he opened it.

  2

  The flight to Albuquerque took four hours. Lunch was served halfway through: chicken in sauce. The flight attendants seemed proud of the meal and handed out the plastic trays with smug smiles. Jeremy had a copy of BusinessWeek in his lap, which he dropped to the floor when the food arrived. For much of the four hours he sat back and dozed. Harriet was closer to the window and dutifully looked out whenever the captain announced that they were flying over a landmark.

  In Albuquerque they rented a car and drove north toward Taos, the destination Harriet had decided upon, following the advice of the travel agent. They stopped at a motel in Santa Fe for dinner. Appalled by the congestion and traffic, they set out after breakfast the next morning. As they approached the mountains, Jeremy, who was driving, said, “So this is the broom that sweeps the cobwebs away.” He said it softly and with enough irony to make Harriet wince and pull at her eyebrow, a recent nervous tic. The trip, it was now understood, had been her idea. She was responsible. She offered him a stick of gum and turned on the radio. They listened to country-western until the mountains began to interfere with the reception.

  In Taos they drove through the city until they found the Best Western motel, pale yellow and built in quasi-adobe style. They took showers and then strolled toward the center of town, holding hands. The light was brilliant and the air seemingly without the humidity and torpor of the Midwest, but this atmosphere also had a kind of emptiness that Jeremy said he wasn’t used to. In the vertical sun they could both feel their hair heating up. Harriet said she wanted a hat, and Jeremy nodded. He sniffed the air. They passed the Kit Carson museum, and Jeremy laughed to himself. “What is it?” Harriet asked, but he only shook his head. At the central square, the streets narrowed and the traffic backed up with motoring tourists. “Lots of art stores here,” Harriet said, in a tone that suggested that Jeremy ought to be interested. She was gazing into a display window at a painting of what appeared to be a stick-figure man with a skull face dancing in a metallic, vulcanized landscape. She saw Jeremy’s reflection in the window. He was peering at the stones on the sidewalk. Then she looked at herself: she was standing halfway in front of Jeremy, partially blocking his view.