Lacking Character

by Curtis White

  I said, “Let’s just step backstage behind our fabled boulder. The great boulder from behind which you came and to which you must, as all mortal things must, return.”

  I knew she didn’t want to go, but then I also knew she knew she didn’t have a choice.

  “No,” she said, and I drew her on.

  “No, Grandpa.”

  “I’m not your grandpa.”

  Fucking sunshine in shards that had broken the sky!

  “Your face! Cartoons! It’s horrible!”

  And that, as they say, went too far—I stood all I could stands and I can’t stands no more.

  Later, a bowl of rum punch was placed in the middle of our circle. The ash borer had in fact made a little hole in Rory’s head, relieving some unwanted pressure, thanks be to God. He was a different man after that.

  We drank till we fell down.

  47.

  “Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat!”

  —POE, “THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO”

  That night, I decided that we needed a little Rory-vacation, and so I got Jake to help me put him in a gunny sack and place him in what is oft called a shallow grave. After receiving assurances from us that we’d retrieve him in the morning, he got into the bag without a struggle (the bug lobotomy probably helped to make him pliant and un-Rory-like).

  Relieved of Rory’s chattering presence, Jake and I were free to share the little tent and a very heart-to-heart talk. I told Jake that, frankly, I thought he was his own worst enemy, and he replied, cogently, that whether he was or not there were a number of things I needed to account for, beginning with the whereabouts (he wanted to use the word “fate” but I wouldn’t let him) of his newly minted love, the specular—but oh how lovely!—Suzanne.

  I beat around the bushy questions regarding the girl and pressed home questions about his mental state, until at an early hour—stupid crickets chirping morosely from every direction, cicadas like something out of Stockhausen—we began to feel drowsy.

  Just before falling asleep, Jake in fact inquired about the crickets and why they seemed to be “after him.” I replied that they were probably looking for me but that, in the end, they are after all of us. He asked if I could tell which way they were moving and I lied in saying that they were moving away, while in fact any moron could hear that they were practically chewing on our tent’s canvas. Then, poor dear, he fell asleep leaving me alone to confront the beasts.

  The next morning I dragged myself stiffly from the pup tent and was astonished to see that we had been joined overnight by many large tents. It looked either like an army encampment or a scene from a circus movie. I swear that I hadn’t slept all night, so I don’t know how they had set up without my hearing them, but that only tells you just how loud those crickets were!

  This was the last straw. I had to act quickly before our little camp was absorbed by this army or circus and we found ourselves either running through barbed wire and dodging machine-gun fire or prancing with little dogs in dresses and hats.

  “Jake! Get up! We’re getting out of here!”

  “What?”

  “We’re moving. Forget the tent, just get up and let’s get started.”

  “What about Rory?”

  “What about Rory?”

  “We promised to dig him up.”

  “Don’t be a stickler.”

  “So should I suppose that something like this has happened to Suzanne as well?”

  “Imagine whatever you like.”

  He looked at me as if for the first time. He really put me under scrutiny.

  “There’s something about you.”

  “Like what?”

  “Your face. It’s a cartoon, isn’t it? Look how you change it. Right now it’s like old Prince Valiant, all innocent, handsome, and virtuous, but you don’t fool me. You are an evil man, and you have done something very wrong to the woman I love. If you understand the meaning of that word.”

  “Which word?”

  “Love.”

  “Of course I know that word.”

  “At any rate, I’m not going.”

  “Oh, you’re going.”

  A half-hour later we were seated at a Denny’s at a truck stop on I-39, and Jake was eating a Grand Slam breakfast while syrup sobbed off his pancakes. To appease him I’d had the cook make a Mickey Mouse pancake, with ears, etc.—he even put a little chocolate smile on it. Nevertheless, I doubt that he was really at peace with what had happened to him. I knew that he was just waiting for an opportunity to act out.

  I began to wish I’d buried him too.

  48.

  “‘Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there.’

  ‘Where we going, man?’

  ‘I don’t know but we gotta go.’”

  —JACK KEROUAC

  Lacking any other means of conveyance, we began our final trip home by hitchhiking. Which was fine, I wasn’t above it, done plenty of it in my speckled past. I was a little worried, though, that I’d picked up some new readers who were trying to turn this into some sort of beatnik buddy film. In the early afternoon, barely ten miles into our journey, we found ourselves on a remote country road on which no car passed us in either direction for several hours. I was angry (as I always am when the objective world refuses to be a direct expression of my will, which means that I am—like my tragic friend back on Islay—always angry to some degree). Jake, though, had found some mindless satisfaction creating mosaics in the dirt with tiny pebbles (pea gravel) left over from the last chip-and-seal job by the county road crew. Quickly, one after the next, he arranged the little rounded rocks to look like his great love, Suzanne. And I don’t think a photographer could have done a more lifelike job. His portrait of her was amazingly detailed, black-and-white photorealism done with little worthless pebbles, a real work of art.

  Just before I scattered his pebbles with my foot, I said, “That’s quite good, Jake. You have a real knack for whatever you’d call what you’re doing.” Swoosh, rackety-rock and clatter-away. He didn’t even bother to look up at me, wouldn’t give me the satisfaction. He just started re-creating the mosaic of his beloved.

  So there we sat. At last I saw, in the distance, a large automobile approaching slowly from the north. It couldn’t have been doing much more than a few miles an hour, barely crawling, as if its purpose were to annoy me. At last it stopped before us, like some hulking ghost ship without a crew. It was a ’63 Buick LeSabre convertible in good, if dirty, condition. I looked inside, and there, sure enough, was Rory.

  He lowered the passenger-side window and peered at me. “Need a ride?”

  “Well, of course I need a ride. But I thought I left you back at camp buried in a shallow grave.”

  He frowned. “Yes, you did, but only once, and I’m trying not to hold it against you.”

  “Look, Rory, I’m sorry about that, but it was merely personal. I mean, I didn’t bury you out of principle, and I wasn’t doing my job, and I wasn’t following orders. I was simply trying to get rid of you because I don’t like you. I’m sorry to have to put it that way.”

  “I appreciate your honesty.”

  “So, how did you get here, on this particular highway, in this car, of all cars?”

  He reached across and opened the passenger door.

  “Get in.”

  “Is it safe? You really know how to drive? And you promise you’re not angry?”

  “Does it matter?”

  He had me there. So I stepped back and pulled Jake up from the dirt. (Frankly, if we’d just left him there, I don’t think he’d have cared. He seemed happy enough with the pebbles and his artistic pursuits.) I put him in the backseat, where he sat stupefied, although even that probably gives him too much credit. At any rate, he was in the backseat. Unless his hair catches fire, ignore him.

  I got in beside Rory and slammed the massive Buick door shut.

 
“Now,” I said, “you were going to tell me how you happened to be here.”

  Rory stared at me for a moment, as if he were trying to put my face together, as if it had a bad case of Brownian motion. He was trying to “fix” me, like a drunk trying to get his wife’s face to stop spinning.

  “I’ve never noticed this before, but you have a cartoon face.”

  “Not this nonsense again! Rocky? Bullwinkle?”

  “I think it’s Archie, but it keeps changing.”

  “Good grief. At least it’s not Veronica, or Bizzaro!”

  Then, looking forward, Rory put the car in gear and started off, again at something well under the speed limit, unless it was yet another example of time dilation and we merely seemed to be going slowly from some perspective outside the car, if that’s how that bit of science is supposed to work.

  “Are you going to tell me?”

  Nothing.

  “Is this as fast as this thing goes?”

  Nothing.

  I felt like I was prodding a pulpy bug that was lethargic with the approach of winter.

  A few minutes passed before he said, “What?”

  “Are you going to tell me why you’re here?”

  “I don’t remember saying that I was going to tell you why I’m here. Besides, you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “How about if I give you the simple version?”

  “We can start there.”

  “I’m here because this is the world in which you can ask me why I’m here.”

  “That’s the simple version?”

  “I warned you.”

  “Can you explain what you mean?”

  “It will hurt.”

  “More than this?”

  “Okay, then. While I’m here now with you, in this time and this place, every other possibility is playing itself out. You’re on a different road, every possible road. The car is a different car, every possible car—a Dodge Sierra station wagon, a Rambler, a Ford Pinto on fire, or your mother’s old Plymouth. And we are every possible version of ourselves. (Plus or minus a three-percent allowance for sampling error.) Those are just the big variables. Now multiply them out. There is an equation, if you think that might help.”

  “I hate equations, but your sentences are not much help either.”

  “Okay, so,

  or something close to that.”

  “Oh, come on, that can’t be right. That is a basic principle of classical mechanics where S is the action, the integral of the Lagrangian multiplier determining the local maxima and minima of a function subject to equality constraints.”

  Rory looked like I’d hurt his feelings.

  “I paid a lot of money for that equation. It’s very high-end,” he said.

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Okay, let me try again. I’ll make it simple so you’ll understand. Take R, where R is reality, and ∞, which is, as always, our old friend infinity.”

  “He’s no friend of mine.”

  “Now the equation.

  “R = roads/∞ x car/∞ x you/∞ x me/∞ x ∞/∞ and all that divided by C2. I hope it doesn’t disappoint you that it’s just another inverse square equation. But that’s important because without it there wouldn’t be anything to hold it all together. In other words, the equation requires an acknowledgment of gravity.”

  “I notice that it didn’t include an acknowledgment of Jake.”

  He looked back.

  “Would you acknowledge Jake?”

  “Agreed. Agreed.”

  “Actually, it just happens that in this world Jake is in a coma-like state in the backseat—in this case this backseat, in other cases other backseats. Are you starting to get it? In others he’s in his “steady state,” and every other possible state of Jakeness, including one that I’m particularly fond of in which a Roy Orbison–like Jake sings ‘Blue Bayou.’”

  “That song always makes me cry. Feel so bad I’ve got a worried mind.”

  “There is one other possibility that I ought to alert you to. It is possible that he is not in a coma-like state at all. It could be that he himself is the cosmological constant.”

  “???”

  “In short, Jake could be the very thing that Einstein sought: the cosmological principle that makes the universe eternal rather than doomed to infinite expansion into the inky depths of space.”

  “We’re trusting Jake with this?”

  “If I’m right, Jake’s hair should catch fire shortly.”

  Then a thought struck me.

  “Doesn’t…,” I asked, “Doesn’t…”

  He completed my thought, “Doesn’t that mean that our campground this morning was the functional equivalent of the Big Bang?”

  I sighed in relief. “Yes!”

  “True, but I wouldn’t take that homely fact too seriously. Campgrounds are exploding at this very moment in every corner of our universe. Billions and billions of them.”

  I’m dazzled by this vision.

  “You mean, campground supernovas exploding in tents and sleeping bags and freeze-dried turkey tetrazzini and marshmallows and Coleman lanterns and more marshmallows and martinis and first-grade report cards and whoosh! a covered wagon and Indians to chase it and there goes the first girl you ever kissed, her lips still puckered, and now the corn crib you kissed her behind, then ceramic elephants, croquet bats, and badminton nets with baseball gloves signed by Orlando Cepeda entwined, and Labrador retrievers, televisions, pachucos with their hair greased back, a copy of The Last of the Mohicans, guinea pigs in pockets, a pack of Lucky Strikes, a bale of dog money, and everything you have, every what have you, all flowing out of the campground and out across the universe. This is marvelous! Science is not only true, it’s charming!”

  Rory looked at me sternly.

  “You may have noticed that God is nowhere to be found in this.”

  “I did, you scoundrel.”

  “I think this bears on the behavior of some people we know, not naming any names.”

  He meant the Marquis, I believe. Just a hunch.

  “Note this well: it is easy to act as if God does not exist,” he looked at me intently, and pointed at me, fixing my attention, “but it is much worse in this case, with the person in question, because it would appear that he is sincere! And that is unforgivable.”

  “And until this unnamed man, by whom we of course mean your former employer, until he came along with his dirty ermine sleeves and his blasted sincerity, we had all been kidding about there being no God?”

  “Exactly.”

  Just then, Rory reached into the glove compartment and pulled out the Smith and Wesson .38, as mysteriously returned to this adventure as Rory himself.

  49.

  “Nobody ever gets anything right. That is the human condition, and there is no value in fretting over it.”

  —MORSE PECKHAM

  Even at 20 miles per hour in a ’63 Buick LeSabre, you eventually get to where you’re going. As we approached the Marquis’s château, I couldn’t help feeling a little nostalgic tug at my heart.

  The memories!

  Pulling into the circular drive, I noticed that the grounds had not been tended in many weeks. The grass was long and brown; dandelions and chickweed flourished. Nearer the house Afghan Love and Hempstar diesel, a particularly vigorous cultivar with sky-high THC content, climbed the walls, their bright-green and serrated leaves lush and thick.

  I looked round to the backseat to see if Jake was still with us. I was amazed at what I saw. Not only was Jake there, vividly there, but he had a protective arm around the hunched shoulders of Suzanne! She was shivering beneath a wool blanket, army surplus, the kind of stuff that Allied ski troops froze beneath in the Apennines during the last months of World War II. Her hair was wet and hung in ropy braids slick and stiff with mud. She looked like Millais’s Ophelia dragged from her mossy pond. Jake shot me a resentful tough-if-you-don’t-like-it look. I think he cordially hat
ed my guts at that moment.

  Believe it or not, I was okay with this. I thought, “Well, I’ll be damned! The two youngsters really care for each other.” Besides, I had other problems just then.

  “My God,” said Rory, looking toward the weed-choked château, “I hope His Excellence is okay.”

  Don’t misunderstand this sentiment. He was only worried that he wouldn’t be able to shoot him.

  “He’s having the time of his life,” I said, “just look at the porch.”

  On the wide porch, three burly security men sat in rocking chairs, assault rifles across their laps, and fat spliffs hanging from their lips.

  “Looks like he’s moved on from the craft brews,” said Rory, opining. “Impressive. I wonder where he found the Navy SEALs.”

  I yelled out to them, “Hi! We come in peace. Would like to talk to your leader.”

  Nothing. They didn’t even move. But then out of nowhere a voice: “Hands where we can see semen!”

  Slowly, we got out of the Buick and walked toward the house, our hands up and open.

  “Hands where we can semen…!”

  I turned to my confreres, “Did that Ranger just say ‘semen’?”

  Jake dropped his hands and said, “Dummies.”

  “What?”

  “Dummies.”

  Just then the Marquis stuck his head out from behind the front door.

  “Jake!” he cried.

  “Grandpa!”

  Rory ran toward the Marquis.

  “Sir, it’s so wonderful to see you, so wonderful to be home!”

  Rory had fallen quickly from his Masters of the Universe know-it-all state back to his default condition of servile and witless toady. The Marquis rebuffed him deftly with a dowdy ermine swish of his tatty purple sleeve.

  Frowning, he said to us, “Our bursar informed me last month that I was a squatter. In my own boyhood home! Squatting! An ugly word with unpleasant connotations. They say I’ll be evicted, but my public defender has resisted. He says that the term ‘squatting’ is not acceptable to the defense, but if they can come up with a different word I’ll leave voluntarily. Apparently they’re still working on it, thank God. Apparently, they don’t have a thesaurus.”