Beatrice sat on the edge of Rodney’s bed, her legs primly crossed and unfamiliar. I reached for one of Rodney’s cigarette’s from the card table. “I can’t really say yet.”
“You’ll see,” Rodney said. “We’ll do it tomorrow. We’ll keep doing it until we get it right.” Rodney went and sat on the bed next to Beatrice. He put one arm around her. “How you doing, baby?”
I placed my hands in the pockets of my Levi’s jacket. Concealed there were the chemicals I had wrapped in baggy sandwich bags. I couldn’t even remember what they were anymore.
Just chemicals, I thought.
I asked Beatrice if she wanted me to walk her home.
“That’s OK, Phillip.” She didn’t take her eyes off the turning pages in her magazine. “I think I’ll stay here with Rodney a little longer.”
Rodney didn’t look at me either. His arm remained awkwardly draped around Beatrice’s neck. Rodney and Beatrice posed there like lovers grown bored of both themselves and friendly cameras. They had moved out of the world of motion where I once adored to watch them kiss and pet. They had entered the realm of family photographs now, but it was not my family. It wasn’t even really my camera.
I let myself out the front door without encountering Ethel. The light was still on in her room, however, yellow and bright, and I could see it from across the street, where I stood for almost an hour, wondering how cold she was in there and whether she was listening, as I always suspected, for every movement Rodney made, for every sound and every breath her cautious silence might elicit. The light in Ethel’s room was hard, like space, not air at all. I stood on the street corner near a flickering, buzzing lamppost. The light was already out in Rodney’s room, and I figured they must know I was out here. It seemed to me implicit in our relationship that I would be standing on a street corner watching the dark window of Rodney’s room while Ethel’s light burned cold and useless alongside it.
After a while, Ethel’s light went out too, and, abandoned even by the abstract movement of contrasts, I returned again to my real home.
DAD WAS LYING on the living room sofa with the television on. Johnny Carson was saying, “I don’t know about you, Doc, but I’ll be damned if I’ll spend the night with Ed in a urinal, mirrored ceilings or not!” Dad chuckled feebly. One hand was propped behind his head, the other pressed against his stomach. An open blue glass bottle of Maalox stood beside Dad on the mahogany coffee table. As I stepped slowly into the room, my reflection crossed the Panasonic’s dusty screen. Dad cocked his head to see me. Then he looked back at the television. “Hi, son. I didn’t hear you come in.” Dad took a swig from his Maalox and replaced it on the coffee table, which showed a few faint white rings where Dad had placed the bottle before. “I think I’ll sleep in here again tonight,” Dad said. “I’ve been restless lately. I don’t want to wake your mom or the baby.”
“Do you want a blanket?”
“Sure, maybe before you go to bed. How were your friends?”
“OK, I guess.”
“You should bring them by sometime. I’d like to meet them.”
I was staring at the television. “I’m sure they’d like to meet you too,” I said emptily, without any enthusiasm. Johnny was talking about Ed’s drinking. Johnny didn’t want to say Ed drank a lot but. Johnny’d been out with Ed a few times and wow-a-wow-a-wowa.
“How’s your stomach?” I asked Dad.
“I don’t know. I think it may be getting a little better.”
I fixed Dad strong black coffee laced with tannic acid, brought him a blanket and a pillow from our well-stocked linen closet (stocked, incidentally, by an invisible maid who always arrived and departed before I was out of bed in the morning). Then I went down the hall to Mom’s room, where Mom was watching Johnny Carson too.
Mom was radiant, propped up by the brown corduroy backrest. On a handsome tray beside her bed was an ice chest, bottles of Perrier, orange juice and a small untouched bell glass of rosy port.
“Hi, Mom,” I said.
I could see the flickering television reflected in Mom’s eyes. Mom’s protuberant stomach underneath the taut, tucked blanket was filled with movement, just like Dad’s. Mom’s movement, though, was the movement of life. Molecules assembled, deploying minerals, proteins and enzymes. Routine circulatory, digestive and pulmonary processes were beating inside the still gelid mass of it. You could already see the tiny red eyes. You could already hear the tiny mind learning to click, click.
“Dad’s sleeping on the couch tonight,” I said, crawling onto the bed beside her, touching her blanketed stomach. “So he won’t wake you or the baby.”
“That’s nice, dear.”
“I want you to know I’m taking full responsibility for everything that happens from now on.” I took Mom’s fair freckled hand between my hands. The skin was soft and faintly translucent, knitted with fine blue veins. “I’m not going to go drifting off again when things get too confusing or complicated. I know I went pretty far into myself for a while there, but I’ve come out the other side now. I’ve grown up, Mom. That means I can be a lot more help to you from now on.”
Mom transferred the glass of icy Perrier to her right hand. Her left hand touched my wrist. For the first time since Dad’s arrival, Mom was wearing her expensive wedding ring and engagement band that used to lie neglected in the bottom of her big black purse among crumpled gum wrappers and Kleenex. “I’m sure you will be, baby. I’m sure you’ll be a lot of help to me and your father. You always meant well. I never thought for one minute that you didn’t mean well.”
I fell asleep that night in Mom’s bed, with the warmth of her hand on my wrist. This was the vital current. Beatrice’s hand, mine, and now Mom’s. It was like genealogy, race, intertribal culture, migrating birds, evolution. The warmth traveled from one person to another; it changed people and people changed it. It grew warmer, it grew colder. Sometimes it grew warmer again. Soon Dad would be a part of it too, I thought, pulling the smoky dreams into my body and face. Soon Dad would be the warmth I shared with other people and there was nothing, really, nothing he could do about it.
22
“THE OCCULT IS that relative half-world into which we journey to make our own world more real,” Beatrice said, while Rodney and I squirted Hansen’s airplane glue into our Kleenex. I kept my eye on Rodney. “I don’t think the occult dimension is necessarily any more invalid than our own, or more valid either. It’s just that big black gap of things we don’t know. I think we should learn to accept the things we don’t know on their own terms, without wondering things like, you know. Whether we’re really talking to our departed great-grandmother or not. Or whether it’s really the devil out there, or demons, or goblins. We have to accept life’s gaps and lapses as well as its hard promises. I think that’s your problem, Phillip. You need answers to everything. Something’s not real to you unless you can use it exactly the way you want.”
Rodney pinched shut his left nostril and applied the wadded Kleenex to his right. Then he inhaled a long whistling rough breath and the Kleenex popped. I followed his example, though perhaps with less ardor.
“I mean, if you guys could just see yourselves,” Beatrice said, overturning her book on her knee. The book was Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals. “Shoving that crap up your nose so you can feel less real. Trying to move into the half-lit world of the doped, the dreaming and the insane. Now, if you guys were just trying to experience it, I might have a bit more sympathy for you. If you were just charting maps, trying to move to the edges of the experiential precipice, so to speak, then I’d say you were kids stretching your wings. It would just be another part of growing up–and a good part, so far as I’m concerned. But you guys don’t think that way. You want to move into the unreal so you can turn it into property. You want to build houses there, motels and swimming pools, convenience stores and parking lots. You want to find escape, pleasure, pain, spirits, things. Things you can use, just like you use those chemicals, Phillip. You
don’t care about chemistry. You don’t care about abstract knowledge–no matter what you say. You’re just using those chemicals to kill your dad. And that’s what this whole occult thing is all about too. So you and Rodney can take control of everything, because that’s how you see life. Use or be used. That’s so goddamn male, Phillip. That’s so goddamn hopelessly… oh, I don’t know. So goddamn penile of you. It makes me want to throw up. You notice I’m talking to you, Phillip, and not to Rodney. That’s because I always expected more from you. It’s not like Rodney’s ever listened to a word of sense in his entire life–certainly not if it would do him one bit of good. But I always expected more from you, Phillip. I thought you and I shared a certain unexpressed sympathy for the unknown world. I thought you loved it as much as I did. But you’re no better than Custer. You’re no better than the goddamn Mormons. You just want to make the unknown profitable. I guess I’ve been disappointed in you lately, Phillip. I’ve been disappointed in you ever since your dad came.”
A hot burning sensation lifted high into my skull. It was not unpleasant, and quickly diminished to a soft convincing whisper. I rested the wadded Kleenex on my knee. I felt very good and relaxed. It was not as if I was under the influence of anything at all. It was a sensation like breathing or drinking cool water. A thin fog entered Rodney’s room. I heard Rodney taking another long sniff, and when I looked at him again he was withdrawing the Kleenex from his nose. Fragments of pink tissues were attached to the rim of each nostril like stray confetti at the Mardi Gras.
“Pretty heavy, huh?” Rodney’s voice was nasal and rough. He leaned back on his bed, adjusting pillows, then crossed his arms and looked at me, grinning remotely like a forgotten relative at some tedious family get-together. “Do you dig this stuff, dude, or what?”
Beatrice was wrong. I did not feel more distant from the world so much as more firmly rooted in it. I was caught among its tangled whispering earth and dense folds like a sparrow in a blanket. Small animals hypnotize themselves when trapped by a predator. It’s not so painful then, life’s last moment.
“Just keep pouring more fuel on the fire,” Beatrice said, as if she were reading my mind, or I were reading hers. “Keep acquiring more property. Keep buying more nice pretty things and stuffing your bodies with more burgers and cheesecakes and candy bars and bonbons. And don’t stop just because you don’t want any more, or even because you don’t need any more. Because you always want more. You always need more.”
I sniffed. Rodney sat across the table from me. His expression was remote and diffuse. He sniffed.
“She never shuts up, does she?” he said. “All day and all night. Yap yap yap. Even in bed when you’re doing it to her, she talks right through it. She doesn’t shut up for one minute.” Rodney sniffed, and ran the back of his hand across his nose. His eyes were red and bleary. “It can get pretty frustrating sometimes.”
We joined hands around the table, Beatrice with her armed and petulant silence, more ominous even than her most dire predictions. Rodney and I shared our gazes with the flickering candle flame.
“Now, I’ve been reading up a little bit more on this stuff,” Rodney said.
I sniffed (or was it Rodney who sniffed?)
“Now what I should’ve done first is gone off and purified myself by drinking pure water and meditating,” Rodney said. “But since we didn’t do it last time, I figured we might as well skip it this time too.”
“You’ll both end up in reform school,” Beatrice said. “You think you’re a couple of real rebels or something. But when I look at you all I see are a couple of little kids.”
Rodney sniffed noisily. After a moment, I sniffed too, but more succinctly, as if to dissociate myself from Rodney.
“Now,” Rodney said, switching off the light and taking our hands, “let’s get down to business.”
OVER SUCCEEDING DAYS and weeks the three of us settled into our new routine with a sort of grateful complacency. It was like the days of our burglaries, only more patient and informal. I would spend the day at home watching TV with Mom on the big bed, while Dad was either at work or sleeping fitfully on the living room sofa. If Dad was home, I would hear him go into the bathroom every twenty minutes or so, then the flush of the toilet. Mom and I watched the game shows and soap operas together, and sometimes I tried to explain the rationale of these programs to Mom’s baby.
“The woman’s voice you’re hearing now,” I said, “is the voice of Victoria Morgan, the youngest and very spoiled daughter of Joshua Saner Morgan, the richest man in Creek Valley. Victoria is used to getting her way, and she’ll get it no matter who tries to oppose her. She’s not really the mother figure in this. She’s sort of the evil-twin type, though she doesn’t look at all like her sister, Felicia Morgan, who’s actually a nice person. Felicia’s daughter, Jeremy, is the illegitimate daughter of the police inspector, David Rampart. I think of her as the sort of heroine of the show, because she’s really pretty–almost as pretty as Mom–and she’s always trying to help her friends get out of trouble, like when they tried to frame Tad Stevens for murder that time. When you get out, we’ll probably watch “Heartbeat County General” every afternoon, so eventually you’ll catch on to all the names and faces, though you don’t really need to know all the characters and plots that well to enjoy the show. Also, I better warn you. People are always extra serious about how they feel on this show. They’re either really happy, or really sad, or really having a good time. It can get on your nerves after a while. But it’s something you’ll get used to, I guess.”
Late in the afternoon I would tuck Mom into bed after she had fallen into one of her dozes, then slip down the back stairs to avoid Dad on the living room sofa, and arrive at Rodney’s around four o’clock. Ethel would present me a small snack. We would exchange light banter about weather and current events. If I waited long enough, she would try to engage me in conversation about Rodney.
“Is there anything bothering Rodney that you know about?” she might ask, while I munched my carrot sticks, or contemplated my hot black coffee. “Is there anything Rodney’s not telling me?”
I tried to remain as noncommittal as possible, but confronted by Ethel’s strained and withering sadness I could not help but offer her at least a few tiny gifts.
“It think it’s just school,” I might reply. “He’s having trouble adjusting.” Or: “I think it’s just his age, Ethel. You know he’s practically a teenager and all. Everybody starts acting a little weird when they go through puberty, or so I’ve heard.”
“I don’t know where he goes at night,” Ethel said. “People call on the phone for him. Sometimes they’re grown men. I don’t trust their voices. They want Roddy to meet them places. Some nights, Roddy doesn’t come back at all from these meetings. Sometimes he’s gone for days at a time, and won’t tell me a word about where he’s been. He won’t even call to tell me when he’ll be back.”
“He’s just practicing a little independence, Ethel, that’s all. It’s perfectly normal for kids his age. Especially for young men.”
“When he’s in his room alone at night I can hear him talking to himself, saying the strangest things.”
“He’s just exercising his imagination. Rodney,” I assured Ethel, “has a very active imagination, as you well know.”
“Sometimes I get very worried, Phillip. I can’t sleep at night. I start thinking, well… I start thinking terrible things about Rodney. I’m embarrassed to admit it. But I start thinking maybe he’s not turning into a very nice person. I can’t help myself. I know it’s a horrible thing to say…” Ethel turned and looked away. Tears formed in her eyes. Her voice grew rough and swollen. “I just don’t know sometimes.” One tear ran down her cheek.
“It’s OK, Ethel. I understand.” I reached across the table and took her hand. “I really do understand, Ethel. Don’t cry. Sometimes we hate the people we love. Freud said that. It’s perfectly normal. Whatever you think, for God’s sake don’t think there’s anythi
ng wrong. There really isn’t.”
“I don’t mean hate.” Ethel took her hand away. She abruptly stopped crying. Her voice had returned to normal. She gazed off at chrome fixtures on the stove, her hands nestled together in her lap like lovers. “I mean I start having these terrible thoughts. Roddy’s a good boy, and I know that. I really do. But sometimes I think, well, he may have gotten in with the wrong crowd. I don’t mean you, Phillip, or Beatrice. I mean the sort of crowd he hangs around with when you’re not around. Like the boys at the bowling alley, or the boys who hang around at Shakey’s Pizza. Then there’s those strange boys I always see outside on the street at night. There’s usually just one of them. I can see him from my bedroom window. Sometimes he’s staring up at me, like he knows I’m watching. They frighten me, Phillip. I’m so worried about Roddy I can’t sleep or go to the bathroom sometimes I’m so worried. I think it’s happened. You know, Phillip, I think Roddy may be doing it. He may be experimenting, you know. With drugs, marijuana. Or maybe even worse.”
“Ethel, look at me.” My voice was very firm and direct. I leaned earnestly across the table, pushing aside a depleted wooden bowl of corn chip fragments. “Ethel, look me in the eye.” Her hands began to fidget as her eyes rested on mine. The hearts of her eyes were fractured and simian. Her hands began pinching at one another, like quarrelsome crabs. “Rodney has a cigarette every once in a while. Maybe a beer or a drink. But he’s not crazy, Ethel. He’s got his feet planted firmly on the ground, and you know that. I’m Rodney’s best friend and I know that. OK, so he likes to wear some offbeat clothes–but that’s Rodney. He’s a trendsetter, he’s his own man. I’m telling you–all the kids at school look up to Rodney. They’re always imitating him. If Rodney’s going to keep one step ahead of the pack, he’s got to go for the more courageous sorts of styles, you know? But, Ethel, now listen to me carefully. Don’t ever, ever think that about him again. It’s just plain wrong, that’s what it is. It doesn’t do you any good. It doesn’t do Rodney any good. Just trust him, and trust me. Rodney’s a good kid, Ethel, and you know that. He’s good inside–he’s good inside here”–I thumped my chest affirmatively with my fist–“in here where it matters. He’s going to turn into the sort of man you’ll be very proud of one day, Ethel. I promise.”
The History of Luminous Motion Page 14
