Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  “Then why did you pick up that boy?” She waited. When he didn’t say anything, she said, “I can’t think of anything more dangerous to do.”

  “It was the building,” Harry said.

  “What building?”

  “I showed Lucia the building. On the paper. This paper.” He took it out of his pocket and handed it to his therapist. By now the paper was becoming soft and wrinkled. While she studied the picture, Harry watched the second hand of the wall clock turn.

  “You found this?” she asked. “You didn’t draw this.”

  “Yes, I found it.” He waited. “I found it in a parking lot six blocks from here.”

  “All right. You showed Lucia this picture. And perhaps she called you harmless. Why did you think it so disturbing to be called harmless?”

  “Because,” Harry said, “in this country, if you’re harmless, you get killed and eaten. That’s the way things are going these days. That’s the current trend. I thought you had noticed. Perhaps not.”

  “And why do you say that people get killed and eaten? That’s an extravagant metaphor. It’s a kind of hysterical irony.”

  “No, it isn’t. I work in a bank and I see it happen every day. I mop up the blood.”

  “I don’t see what this has to do with picking up young men and taking them to motels,” she said. “That’s back in the country of acting out. And what I’m wondering is, what does this mean about your relationship with Lucia? You’re endangering her, you know.” As if to emphasize the point, she said, “It’s wrong, what you did. And very, very dangerous. With all your thinking, did you think about that?”

  Harry didn’t answer. Then he said, “It’s funny. Everybody has a theory about what that building is. You haven’t said anything about it. What’s your theory?”

  “This building?” Harry’s therapist examined the paper through her movie-victim glasses. “Oh, it’s the Field Museum, in Chicago. And that’s not a theory. It is the Field Museum.”

  On Wednesday, at three a.m., Harry fixed his gaze on the bedroom ceiling. There, as if on a screen, shaped by the light through the curtains luffing in the window, was a public building with front pillars and curved arched windows and perhaps a clock. On the ceiling the projected sun of Harry’s mind rose wonderfully, brilliantly gold, one or two mind-wisp cumulus clouds passing from right to left across it, but not so obscured that its light could not penetrate the great public building into which men, women, and children—children in strollers, children hand in hand with their parents—now filed, shadows on the ceiling, lighted shadows, and for a moment Harry saw an explosive flash.

  Harry Edmonds lay in his bed without sleeping. Next to him was his girlfriend, whom he had planned to marry, once he ironed out a few items of business in his personal life and got them settled. He had made love to her, to this woman, this Lucia, a few hours earlier, with earnest caresses, but now he seemed to be awake again. He rose from bed and went down to the kitchen. In the harsh fluorescence he ate a cookie and on an impulse turned on the radio. The radio blistered with the economy of call-in hatred and religion revealed to rabid-mouthed men who now gasped and screamed into all available microphones. He adjusted the dial to a call-in station. Speaking from Delaware, a man said, “There’s a few places I’d do some trouble to, believe me, starting with the Supreme Court and moving on to a clinic or two.” Harry snapped off the radio.

  Now he sits in the light of the kitchen. He feels as dazed as it is possible for a sane man to feel at three thirty in the morning. I am not silly, nor am I trivial, Harry says to himself, as he reaches for a pad of paper and a no. 2 pencil. At the top of the pad, Harry writes, “The next place I plan to bomb,” and then very slowly, and with great care, begins to draw his own face, its smooth cleanshaven contours, its courteous half smile. When he perceives his eyes beginning to water, he rips off the top sheet with his picture on it and throws it in the wastebasket. The refrigerator seems to be humming some tune to him, some tune without a melody, and he flicks off the overhead light before he recognizes that tune.

  It is midday in downtown Five Oaks, Michigan, the time for lunch and rest and conversation, and for a remnant, a lucky few, it may be a time for love, but here before us is Harry Edmonds, an officer in the trust department at Southeastern Michigan Bank and Trust, standing on a street corner in a strong spring wind. The wind pulls at his tie and musses his hair. Nearby, a recycling container appears to have overturned, and sheets of paper, hundreds of them, papers covered with drawings and illustrations and words, have scattered. Like a flock of birds, they have achieved flight. All around Harry Edmonds they are gripped in this whirlwind and flap and snap in circles. Some stick to him. There are glossy papers with perfumed inserts, and there are yellowing papers with four-color superheroes, and there are the papers with attractive unclothed airbrushed bodies, and there are the papers with bills and announcements and loans. Here are the personals, swirling past, and there a flyer for a home theater big-screen TV. Harry Edmonds, a man uncertain of the value of his own life, who at this moment does not know whether his life has, in fact, any importance at all, or any future, lifts his head in the wind, increasing in volume and intensity, and for a moment he imagines himself being blown away. From across the street, the way he raises his head might appear, to an observer, as a posture of prayer. God, it is said, resides in the whirlwind, and certainly Harry Edmonds’s eyes are closed and now his head is bowed. He does not move forward or backward, and it is unclear from the expression on his face whether he is making any sort of wish. He remains stationary, on this street corner, while all about him the papers fly first toward him, and then away.

  A moment later he is gone from the spot where he stood. No doubt he has returned to his job at the bank, and that is where we must leave him.

  Flood Show

  IN LATE MARCH, at its low flood stage, the Chaska River rises up to the benches and the picnic areas in the Eurekaville city park. No one pays much attention to it anymore. Three years ago, Conor and Janet organized a flood lunch for themselves and their three kids. They started their meal perched cross-legged on an oilcloth they had draped over the picnic table. The two adults sat at the ends, and the kids sat in the middle, crowding the food. They had had to walk through water to get there. The water was flowing across the grass directly under the table, past the charcoal grills and the bandstand. It had soaked the swing seats. It had reached the second rung of the ladder on the slide.

  After a few minutes, they all took off their shoes, which were wet anyway, and they sat down on the benches. The waters slurred over their feet pleasantly, while the deviled eggs and mustard-ham sandwiches stayed safe in their waxed paper and Tupperware. It was a sunny day, and the flood had a peaceable aspect. The twins yelled and threw some of their food into the water and smiled when it floated off downriver. The picnic tables, bolted into cement, served as anchors and observation platforms. Jeremy, who was thirteen that spring, drew a picture, a pencil sketch, the water suggested by curlicues and subtle smearings of spit.

  Every three years or so, Eurekaville gets floods like this. It’s the sort of town where floods are welcome. They spill over the top banks, submerge the baseball diamond and the soccer field, soak a basement or two along Island Drive, and then recede. Usually the waters pass by lethargically. On the weekends, people wade out into them and play flood-volleyball and flood-softball. This year the Eurekaville High School junior class has brought bleachers down from the gym and set them up on the paved driveway of the park’s northwest slope, close to the river itself, where you can get a good view of the waterlogged trash floating by. Jeremy, who is Conor’s son from his first marriage and who is now sixteen, has been selling popcorn and candy bars to the spectators who want to sit there and chat while they watch the flotsam. He’s been joined in this effort by a couple of his classmates. All profits, he claims, will go into the fund for the fall class trip to Washington, D.C.

  By late Friday afternoon, with the sun not quite visibl
e, thirty people had turned out to watch the flood—a social event, a way to end the day, a break from domestic chores, especially on a cloudy spring evening. One of Jeremy’s friends had brought down a boom box and played Jesus Jones and Biohazard. There was dancing in the bleachers, slowish and tidal, against the music’s frantic rhythms.

  Conor’s dreams these days have been invaded by water. He wakes on Saturday morning and makes quiet closed-door love to his wife. When he holds her, or when they kiss, and his eyes close, he thinks of the river. He thinks of the rivers inside both of them, rivers of blood and water. Lymphatic pools. All the fluids, the carriers of their desires. Odors of sweat, odors of salt. Touching Janet, he almost says, We’re mostly water. Of course everyone knows that, the body’s content of liquid matter. But he can’t help it: that’s what he thinks.

  After his bagel and orange juice, Conor leaves Janet upstairs with the twins, Annah and Joe, who conspire together to dress as slowly as they possibly can, and he bicycles down to the river to take a look. Conor is a large, bearish man with thick brown hair covered by a beret that does not benefit his appearance. He knows the beret makes him a bit strange-looking, and this pleases him. Whenever he bikes anywhere there is something violent in his body motions. Pedaling along, he looks like a trained circus bear. Despite his size, however, Conor is mild and kind-hearted—the sort of man who believes that love and caresses are probably the answer for everything—but you wouldn’t know that about him unless you saw his eyes, which are placidly sensual, curious—a photographer’s eyes, just this side of sentimental, belonging to someone who quite possibly thinks too much about love for his own good.

  The business district of Eurekaville has its habitual sleepy aura, its morning shroud of mist and fog. One still-burning streetlight has its orange pall of settled vaporish dampness around its glass globe. Conor is used to these morning effects; he likes them, in fact. In this town you get accustomed to the hazy glow around everything, and the sleepiness, or you leave.

  He stops his bicycle to get a breath. He’s in front of the hardware store, and he leans against a parking meter. Looking down a side street, he watches several workmen moving a huge wide-load steel platform truck under a house that has been loosened from its foundation and placed on bricks. Apparently they’re going to truck the entire house off somewhere. The thought of moving a house on a truck impresses Conor, technology somehow outsmarting domesticity.

  He sees a wren in an elm tree and a grosbeak fluttering overhead.

  An hour later, after conversation and coffee in his favorite café, where the waitress tells him that she believes she’s seen Merilyn, Conor’s ex-wife, around town, and Conor has pretended indifference to this news, he takes up a position down at the park, close to the bleachers. He watches a rattan chair stuck inside some gnarly tree branches swirl slowly past, legs pointing up, followed by a brown broom, swirling, sweeping the water.

  Because the Chaska River hasn’t flooded badly—destructively—for years, Eurekaville has developed what Conor’s son Jeremy describes as a goof attitude about rising waters. According to Jeremy’s angle on it, this flooding used to be a disaster thing. The townspeople sandbagged and worried themselves sick. Now it’s a spectator thing. The big difference, according to Jeremy, is sales. “It’s … it’s like, well, not a drowning occasion, you know? If it ever was. It’s like one of those Prozac disasters, where nothing happens, except publicity? It’s cool and stuff, so you can watch it. And eat popcorn? And then you sort of daydream. You’re into the river, right? But not?”

  As early as it is, Jeremy’s already down here, watching the flood and selling popcorn, which at this time of morning no one wants to buy. Actually, he is standing near a card table, flirting with a girl Conor doesn’t quite recognize. She’s very pretty. It’s probably why he’s really here. They’re laughing. At this hour, not quite midmorning, the boom box on the table is playing old favorites by Led Zeppelin. The music, which sounded sexy and feverish to Conor years ago, now sounds charming and quaint, like a football marching band. Jeremy keeps brushing the girl’s arms, bumping against her, and then she bumps against Jeremy and stabilizes herself by reaching for his hip. A morning dance. Jeremy’s on the basketball team, and something about this girl makes Conor think of a cheerleader. Her smile goes beyond infectiousness into aggression.

  Merilyn is nowhere in sight.

  The flood has made everybody feel companionable. Conor waves to his son, who barely acknowledges him with a quick hand flick. Then Conor gets back on his bicycle and heads down to his photography studio, checking the sidewalks and the stores to see if he can spot Merilyn. It’s been so long, he’s not sure he’d recognize her.

  Because it’s Saturday, he doesn’t have many appointments, just somebody’s daughter, and an older couple, who have recently celebrated their fiftieth anniversary and who want a studio photo to commemorate it. The daughter will come first. She’s scheduled for nine thirty.

  When she and her mother arrive at the appointed time, Conor is wearing his battery-operated lighted derby and has prepared the spring-loaded rabbit on the table behind the tripod. When the rabbit flips up, at the touch of a button, the kids smile, and Conor usually gets the shot.

  The girl’s mother, who says her name is Romola, has an errand to run. Can she leave her daughter here for ten minutes? She looks harried and beautiful and professionally religious, somehow, with a pendant cross, and Conor says sure.

  Her daughter appears to be about ten years old. She has an odd resemblance to Merilyn, who is of course lurking in town somewhere, hiding out. They both have a way of pinching their eyes halfway shut to convey distaste. Seated on a stool in front of the backdrop, the girl asks how long this’ll take. Conor’s adjusting the lights. He says, “Oh, fifteen minutes. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes. You could practice your smile for the picture.”

  She looks at him carefully. “I don’t like you,” she says triumphantly.

  “You don’t know me,” Conor points out. He checks his camera’s film, the f-stop, refocuses, and says, “Seen the flood yet?”

  “We’re too busy. We go to church,” the girl says. Her name is Sarah, he remembers. “It’s a nothing flood anyway. In the old days the floods drowned sinners. You’ve got a beard. I don’t like beards. Anyway, we go to church and I go to church school. I’m in fourth grade. The rest of the week is chores.”

  Conor turns on the little blinking lights in his derby hat, and the girl smiles. Conor tells her to look at the tinfoil star on the wall, and he gets his first group of shots. “Good for you,” Conor says. To make conversation, he says, “What do you learn there? At Bible school?”

  “We learned that when he was up on the cross Jesus didn’t pull at the nails. We learned that last week.” She smiles. She doesn’t seem accustomed to smiling. Conor gets five more good shots. “Do you think he pulled at the nails?”

  “I don’t know,” Conor says. “I have no opinion.” He’s working to get the right expression on the girl’s face. She’s wearing a green dress, the color of shelled peas, that won’t photograph well.

  “I think maybe he did. I think he pulled at the nails.”

  “How come?” Conor asks.

  “I just do,” the girl says. “And I think they came out, because he was God, but not in time.” Conor touches the button, the rabbit pops up, and the girl laughs. In five minutes her mother returns, and the session ends; but Conor’s mood has soured, and he wouldn’t mind having a drink.

  The next day, Sunday, Conor stands in the doorway of Jeremy’s bedroom. Jeremy is dressing to see Merilyn. “Just keep it light with her,” he says, as Jeremy struggles into a sweatshirt at least one size too large for him. “Nothing too serious.” The boy’s head, with its ponytail and earrings, pokes out into the air with a controlled thrashing motion. His big hands never do emerge fully from the sleeves. Only Jeremy’s calloused fingertips are visible. They will come out fully when they are needed. Hands three-quarters hidden: Y
outhful fashion-irony, Conor thinks.

  After putting his glasses back on, Jeremy gives himself a quick appraisal in the mirror. Sweatshirt, exploding-purple Bermuda shorts, sneakers, ponytail, earrings. Conor believes that his son looks weird and athletic, just the right sixteen-year-old pose: menacing, handsome, still under construction. As if to belie his appearance, Jeremy does a pivot and a layup near the doorframe. It’s hard for him to pass through the doors in this house without jumping up and tapping the lintels, even in the living room, where he jumps and touches the nail hole—used for mistletoe in December—in the hallway.

  Satisfied with himself, Jeremy nods, one of those private gestures of self-approval that Conor isn’t supposed to notice but does. “Nothing too earnest, okay?”

  “Daad,” Jeremy says, giving the word a sitcom delivery. Most of the time he treats his father as if he were a sitcom dad: good-natured, bumbling, basically a fool. Jeremy’s right eyebrow is pierced, but out of deference to the occasion he’s left the ring out of it. He shakes his head as if he had a sudden neck pain. “Merilyn’s just another mom. It’s not a big puzzle or anything, being with her. You just take her places. You just talk to her. Remember?”

  “Remember what?”

  “Well, you were married to her, right? Once? You must’ve talked and taken her places. That’s what you did. Except you guys were young. So that’s what I’ll do. I’m young. We’ll just talk. Stuff will happen. It’s cool.”

  “Right,” Conor says. “So where will you take her?”

  “I don’t know. The flood, maybe. I bet she hasn’t seen a flood. This guy I know, he said a cow floated down the river yesterday.”