I got up from the table, took the bowl to the sink and rinsed it in cold water.
“You’re right, Phillip. You’re right. I shouldn’t doubt him. You’re right, Phillip. Oh, you’re so, so right.” Her eyes were filling with tears and admiration for me, even longing. Our conversations always ended this way, with her palpable desire for me filling her eyes with tears. She wanted to keep me here, I could tell. She wanted to keep me here forever, her adoring and adored second child. She wanted to lift me up and hold me in her arms as tightly as any lover. I couldn’t stand it–I finally understood how Rodney felt. I had to get away from her. I had to get far, far away. I had to get as far away as I possibly could from Ethel’s oppressive arms.
LIFE
___
23
AFTER our little meals Ethel would grant me a few of her Ziploc sandwich bags and I would go upstairs where Rodney was listening to Judas Priest or vintage Alice Cooper on his ghettoblaster. Removing his chemistry set from the closet I would check my pocket notebook and mix new, untried combinations which I then wrapped in the plastic bags and hid in my inside jacket pocket. Then Rodney and I would smoke a little marijuana or a fragment of hash, just to put ourselves in the mood. If we were feeling particularly uneasy or discomposed, Rodney would get the airplane glue out from under his bed. By this time Beatrice had arrived, presenting us with baleful forecasts of our adult years when we would certainly turn out to be just like our fathers, oppressing women with our corporations and pocket calculators, adding to the world’s heartless mountains of wealth, credit-wealth, consumer goods and other mere things and numbers. “You’re all the same,” Beatrice complained, reluctantly taking our hands at the dilapidated card table, which was chipped, water-stained, and tracked in places by globular wax. “You just want to be the center of attention all the time. Me me me. That’s all you care about.” I was already feeling tremulous and thin from the grass and the glue. My eyes felt sore and fuzzy. But I felt lucid as well, lucid inside my own mind, where hard crystal shapes emerged, and spirits gathered firmness, gravity and substance. These were real things here inside my head, not just ideas or shadows. When I closed my eyes everything suddenly made more sense. Then Rodney would begin to hum.
On a Wednesday, separately and silently in Rodney’s dark room, we all experienced our first real encounter with the world of pure spirit.
I was feeling particularly heady and diffuse with marijuana and glue, sitting on my seat like a swami floating on a carpet. Lights, candle, smoky incense, cabala, grimoires, totem and taboo. “I think we’ve been patient long enough,” Rodney said. His entire tone and demeanor had changed. He was wearing a Nazi insignia framed by a pentagram on a leather thong around his neck. The knuckles of his right hand displayed his new tattoo, a bright caduceus with rippling scaly skin. His hair was shaved in a mohawk and dyed an almost fluorescent orange. “We’re not looking for handouts, you know. It’s not like we’re asking for favors. We just thought, like, we’re young, and we’re going to be around on this earth for a while, and we’re willing to do literally anything you want, and all you’ve got to do is just speak to us for about five seconds and let us know you’re interested. But do you guys have the time? I mean, do you guys even make the measliest little effort? I don’t think you appreciate all the time and energy my friends and I have been wasting here.”
Beatrice took her hand from mine momentarily and yawned, holding her tiny hand to her smudged moist mouth, her eyes closed while she stretched. She looked like a small white kitten when she yawned. Whenever Beatrice yawned it reminded me of how much I once loved her.
“So anyway,” Rodney concluded, “let’s get this relationship going, and stop beating around the bush. We’re here, you’re there, and it’s about time somebody made the first move. You guys are more experienced in all this than we are–we’re looking for a little mature guidance in the matter. So let’s go. Give us a sign, for chrissakes. We’re starting to look pretty stupid, if you want to know the truth. Holding hands and waiting for you to take your sweet time and all. Look, you want sacrifices, blood rituals? You want our souls, for chrissakes? I’m not doing anything with mine–it’s yours. You hear me? Come and take all our souls–all except Beatrice’s, of course, because she’s such a perfect angel, as everybody knows in the entire universe by now since she’s probably told them herself personally. Phillip and I, on the other hand, don’t give a fuck. We’re already yours. But if there’s something you want us to do, then you’ve got to tell us. OK? Are we getting through to you guys? Now, we’re going to be quiet again for a while, but that doesn’t mean we’re like suckers or something. That doesn’t mean we’re going to sit here forever. I’m sorry to be sounding so impatient and all, but I’m starting to feel a little bit used, if you want to know the goddamn truth. So look, whenever you’re ready, you let us know, OK? We’ll sit here nice and quiet, and you take your time and think about it. Then, if you want, you contact us, OK?”
So we sat in the darkness, and Rodney hummed, and Beatrice fell asleep, snoring slightly. It seemed a night like all the others, chemicals in my pocket, this strange house of Rodney’s around me, Ethel downstairs with her doubts and unsteady aluminum cane, while back at home Dad was being steadily dissolved by the universe of rushing darkness and Mom watched color TV. Again I descended through the earth’s dark layers into a subterranean world where strange prehistoric skeletons etched the dense basalt walls; broken human bones and teeth lay strewn about like discarded toys in a cannibals’ kindergarten. I was expecting to find the dead down here, spirits with scores to settle, or vast shapeless things without thoughts, things that shifted and turned. Perhaps it wasn’t the afterlife at all. Perhaps it was the pre-life. Or perhaps it was just nothing and nowhere, where abstract beings lay around waiting for things that never happened. Non-life, anti-life. Proto-death, death in life. I was moving through a convoluted passage which seemed only dimly familiar. Death. I’d never encountered it before, not even in my imagination. Death was in these passages I had until now blithely elided in both my texts and my dreams. Death was permanent. Death didn’t move or change. I felt an ominous presence in the darkness around me. Dead. Voiceless. Pitiless. Lucid. Hard. Death was matter, death was pure mass. Death might even be better, I was beginning to suspect. Death was real, while life by contrast seemed little more than a presumption, something broken which rattled and would not last. I was moving into the lightless heart of something I had never seen. It was filled with shapes and presences, but you could not see or touch them. Instead they elicited a buried radar from my skull and sinuses and teeth. The world of death was simple. There was no more thinking or being thought down here. There was no more fear or suffering or hate. Ever since I could remember I had been trying to discover my own Way in life, that journey I would make in the world alone. Perhaps I had been looking in the wrong place all along. Perhaps this was my true path down here. Something cold passed by me. Everything was growing misty and damp as I waded into the mud that grew deeper and marshier. It grasped my ankles, calves, thighs. It made sucking sounds against my skin. I realized I wasn’t wearing any clothes. I felt very cold all of a sudden, as if all the cold shapes passing me in the cavern were now gathering around, pressing closer against me, untextured and weightless and dull.
“It’s the same slow dream,” Mom’s voice said, loud and real in this underworld like the voice of the Mom who, I understood now, was dead forever. “You, me, Dad, our home back in Bel Air. It’s a beautiful big house that’s waiting for us, baby. It has a big pool and a big yard.”
“This is the history of motion,” I said. “You and me, Mom. The history of motion.”
“There’s nothing for you down here, Phillip.”
“I want to stay.”
“You wouldn’t like it. You’d catch cold. I wouldn’t always be around, and you’d be frightened. You’d wonder where I was. After a while, you’d start to resent me.”
“I resent you now.”
“You’ve spent too much of your life alone, baby. That’s my fault. I never helped you become properly acclimated to the world. There’s a real world in which we all have to live together. That means we have to make concessions for the benefit of other people. That means we simply can’t have everything exactly the way we want it all the time. This life you’re living inside yourself is just a dream. A dream of you, me, and your father which doesn’t work. Or maybe it works too well.”
“I’ve decided I’m going to do it.” I could not disguise the lift of triumph in my voice. “Rodney’s going to help. Rodney and I are going to do it together.”
“Then do it, baby. At least you’ll be functioning. At least you’ll be making some impression out there, instead of just down here inside your own mind. Live in the world, baby. That’s all I ever meant for you to learn, and you never did. It’s my fault. I can’t blame you. It’s my fault entirely.”
“Is Pedro down here?” I asked. I had felt another cold shape approach me. I was filled with either fear or hatred. Something burned in me, some impalpable fuel. “Is that Pedro with you?”
“Of course not, baby. Pedro’s upstairs with you. Pedro’s out there in the real world with you.”
“Pedro?” Tears were forming in my eyes, cold, freezing, emerging from some secret part of me. “Pedro? Is that you? Pedro? Are you out there? This is me. This is Phillip.”
“If you’re going to do it,” Mom’s voice said, “then you better do it now. Stop beating around the bush, baby. If you’re going to kill your father, then kill him tonight. Kill him tonight and get on with your life.”
It was Pedro out there, but Mom was hiding him from me. It was Pedro. His multitudinous arms came up around me, icy and damp and formless and thick. It was Pedro. Pedro was dead and waiting for me. For me. Pedro as waiting for me.
“WHY DON’T YOU go kill everybody while you’re at it? But start with the men. Kill all the men, you guys, and then kill each other. Then get back to me in a few thousand years. We might have something going then. We might be on our way towards some practical, permanent solution to things.”
“If you’re not going to help, Beatrice, just put a lid on it, OK?” Rodney was selecting a cord of rope from a cabinet drawer. We were standing in Rodney’s basement in the cold fluid light of a naked overhead bulb. I was on my knees going through my steel toolbox. The lid of the case was open, displaying cold gleaming tools in red steel compartments.
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll help.” Beatrice was sitting atop Ethel’s Maytag dryer. She held a lit cigarette, and was gesturing it with dramatic disregard just like Greta Garbo. “We’ll buy us some machine guns, some Uzis, and some army issue bazookas. Then we’ll go down to the shopping mall and start blowing everybody’s goddamn head off. OK? That’ll teach them all a good lesson or two, won’t it? I can hardly wait. I really can’t wait another minute.”
“Do we need these?”
Rodney showed me a rusty pair of gardening clippers.
I thought for a moment. “Sure,” I said. “Why not.”
“Look, we’ll get us some hand grenades. We’ll start lobbing these big hand grenades into B. Dalton’s and the May Co. We’ll blow the fuckers to kingdom come–that’s what we’ll do. We’ll be just like Dirty Harry. We’ll be just like John Wayne. Sure, some innocent lives will be lost, but there’s nothing we can do about that. If you’re going to fight evil, ma’am, then sometimes you just gotta be a little evil yourself. We’ll detonate the goddamn mall, that’s what we’ll do. Save ourselves the trouble of going in there. Then we can move on to the Ford dealership. Cost Plus. The Warehouse. City Hall. We’ll teach all those liberal phonies what real suffering’s all about, won’t we, guys? Sure, they can all talk about peace and love and brotherhood, but when it comes right down to getting things done, well, that’s where we’ll move in. Whistling our national anthem and spraying bloody death wherever we go, because we’re realists. We want peace too, but we don’t have any liberal bullshit illusions about how it’s gotta be achieved. War’s hell, but sometimes it’s just goddamn necessary if peace is to be preserved. I’ll meet you guys in the car. I’m going to go take a long piss in the alley.” Beatrice flicked her cigarette and it arced across the dim garage, crashing against Ethel’s Toyota Corolla in a shower of sparks. “Bring beer. Afterwards we’ll go down to the whorehouse and get ourselves properly laid.” Beatrice stared at my toolbox with a weird inanition.
Rodney stacked a long extension cord beside the toolbox, in case the rope was not enough. We stood there for a moment looking at the gray steel box.
“Next stop, the Middle East,” Beatrice said. Her voice was clipped and mechanical. Peace through strength. Wealth through poverty. Love through death. Once we’ve taught those Palestinians a lesson they’ll never forget, we’ll build this humongous Kmart. Then we’ll move on to take care of those fucking Chinese. We won’t even try to set up any provisional government or anything. We’ll just kill all the fucking Chinese. God, how I hate them. God how I hate those goddamn Chinese.”
Rodney’s hands rested on his hips. His expression seemed momentarily to approve of our preparations. Then, as if approval in any form was for Rodney a sort of lapse, he scowled bitterly. He reached to his shirt pocket for his cigarettes, offered me one, and shrugged in Beatrice’s general direction.”
“She thinks this is all some sort of game,” he said. “She thinks this is all just some big har-de-har laugh or something.”
“I know,” I said. It was time for us to leave. “But in her own way, she’s trying to understand, Rodney. We’ve got to give her credit for that much.” Then I knelt and cranked shut the toolbox’s strong steel clasps.
24
“WE’VE UNLEASHED STRANGE forces in the world tonight,” Rodney said. “That’s what confuses her. In fact, that’s what women in general don’t seem to understand. Not that these forces exist. But that we can use them. They aren’t just ideas. They accomplish things. They go places.”
We were laboring down the ill-lit rubbishy streets off Van Nuys Boulevard, Rodney carrying the toolbox and I the cords of rope, electrical extension cords and a few random saws and hammers. The night air was thick with smog, palpable and rough. Like the smog itself, the darkness did not radiate so much as settle over everything.
“That’s the illusion women prefer. That everything can be reduced to talk and words. I’m warning you, Phillip, I got this one figured. Women are great and everything. I’m not saying otherwise. But they’ve got their own sort of truth and it has a way of confusing things sometimes. Men do things. They get things done. That’s what men do. Women, on the other hand, talk about things. Why they weren’t done quite right. How you might want to go about doing it better next time. Which things to do first, and which things last, and which things after that. Talk talk talk. I mean, like Beatrice and all her Communist bullshit. She wants to feed the world, right? But I don’t see her feeding anybody. I mean, when’s the last time you saw Beatrice feeding anybody? I’m talking even a sandwich or something. Never, that’s the last time. But when’s the last time you heard her talking about feeding everybody? She’s got a million ideas as far as talk’s concerned. If talk was wheat, Beatrice and her Communist sympathizers could feed the whole world. But talk ain’t wheat. It’s nothing like it.” Rodney’s pace and expression were gripped by sudden purpose, as if he and I were hurrying to impart some crucial theorem to Rodney’s bemused colleagues back at the lab.
“These forces we’ve unleashed tonight aren’t new things, Phillip,” Rodney explained earnestly, shifting the toolbox into his left hand, swinging the entire weight and balance of his body along with it. “These forces have been around forever and ever, since the beginning of time, in fact. They’ve been around since before mankind, even since before the dinosaurs. They were roaming around the universe before the Earth was anything more than a bunch of cosmic debris. They knew what they wanted the world to be, and so they made it that way. They didn�
�t talk about it; they did something. They got things done.
Needless to say I was elated, higher than a kite, breezing through the muggy breezeless night. In the wide sun-bleached and pitted streets we walked past dilapidated automobiles, fading lawns and houses, thinning and recalcitrant trees and foliage. Mimosa, jacaranda, fig, palm, eucalyptus, dry and spotty bamboo. The air was pungent with gasoline, smog, and the fishy smells of cooking, along with brief bursts of salsa music and Julio Iglesias, filtered from the expressionless facades of Latin households. Inside those houses people glanced out fitfully from behind cracked venetian blinds. Timid small children with big eyes hid behind their parents’ legs, waiting for their mothers to drive them to the laundromat, supermarket and home again in broken automobiles. At supper they ate with vaguely surreptitious expressions, their ears alert for any sound in the street, awaiting that penultimate knock on their door. These were families who were always waiting to be sent away, and as a result you never saw them. These were the citizens of my secret community I most cherished and admired. They, like me, lived their secret lives in public places.
I was going home and taking Rodney with me this time, and that made a difference. My dreams weren’t secret anymore, but rather part of a common purpose, a scheme of shared knowledge. Rodney and I were going home together to see my dad.
The History of Luminous Motion Page 15
