Vine: An Urban Legend

by Michael Williams

  Jack Rausch was a surprise, though. The children of moneyed church people tended toward entitlement, but Jack sat only when invited, regarded Koenig with a level, friendly gaze, and nodded at the right times when the clergyman spoke. Koenig suspected performance, of course, and watched the boy’s face for tells, for giveaways, but it was a mask that looked back at him.

  Koenig explained why it might be unwise to spend time with more theatrical people. He hoped that he didn’t sound too much like Roy Rausch as he explained. Theatre people, he said, tended to magnify things. Expand them until you didn’t recognize the emotion, or you lost its meaning. He had dated a local actress for a while, he confided to Jack, back before seminary. He had learned his lesson, because you know how girls turn things upside down.

  Man to man, he tried, because of course Roy Rausch was most afraid that the boy’s sexuality wasn’t right, because after all, look at him.

  And now, Peter Koenig was looking, and he noticed nothing that would mark Jack Rausch as inverted. No mannerism, no reedy and feminine tone to the voice, though Koenig knew that these things were not always present where the problem lay, and sometimes, they were present without the problem, as they were in Antioch’s happily married music minister, Tarquin LaForce.

  But Roy Rausch’s uneasiness was soon replaced by Koenig’s own, as it dawned on him that Jack had no interest in ministerial advice.

  It wasn’t that he frowned, or looked away, or gave any sign of dissent. But impassive as a kouros, one of those archaic Greek statues of a young man—no particular young man, but any young man, or better yet, the embodiment of male beauty, his musculature not incised, not defined, but a kind of geometric shaping that inclined toward the abstract…

  As Koenig caught himself in mid-speculation, his eyes locked on the boy’s dark gaze, and he could tell Jack looked through him or beyond him, toward whatever vanishing point lay in or behind the painting above them, to where the reproduced brush-strokes of the Rubens copy lost themselves in the halo of Christ.

  Are you listening? he asked, and why, yes sir, the boy replied. But these people, you see, are musical friends, and gaming friends…

  Koenig frowned, and Jack must have recalled what Antioch thought of role-playing games, because his description shifted ground to a conversation about playing bass with Vincent De Chevre…

  Then away from music as well. Elusive, as though he recognized that there wasn’t much he was doing with his new friends that would meet the approval of Peter Koenig.

  Who dismissed him with kind but cautionary words, and after the boy left the office, pivoted his chair toward the image of Jesus emergent from a grove of palm fronds and hands.

  Jack Rausch seemed other than the things he did. There was something behind the music and theatre and gaming that Peter Koenig could not decipher, a kind of disinterest that jarred the eye. Disinterest, he reminded himself. Not lack of interest.

  For the boy’s eyes were intent, though focused elsewhere. And the ever-so-slight, impatient drumming of his fingers across the pastoral desk as he stood to leave was a sign that he had finished something, that he had weathered some trial and, in his disinterest, judged himself to have passed some kind of audition.

  And audition that the minister feared he had failed. For when Jack left the room to Maraleese Koenig’s sweet goodbyes, Peter Koenig felt a grip loosen on his chest. Not of danger or of ill will, but of sheer and indifferent power, that washed over and through him like a current he swam against. And something told him he should be afraid for Jack Rausch, while something stronger intimated that Jack was not the one in peril.

  For only the second time in twenty years, Peter was tempted to call Dolores Starr. Theatre people were her people, and surely she would know something about the boy. He remembered her old number, but guessed she would have a new one by now.

  She had a son, too.

  He stared straight into the heart of the painting. Again did sums on his fingers, and sat back reassured once again.

  Briefly his small bark steadied in the flow of an ineluctable current, and the Reverend Peter Koenig told himself assuring things.

  33 Episode: Dolores Dines Alone

  The grill marks on the steak ran in one direction only.

  Because these days she turned the meat immediately, and only once.

  The steak sat on her plate now, a mottled brown-gray pooled with pink juices, streaked across with four unbroken lines atop two split by a mottled vein of fat.

  Dolores stifled a giggle, drained her glass of wine.

  It was like one of Stephen’s hexagrams. His silly rituals of rock star Buddhism and New Age greenness. She never understood it back then, and least no more than she understood a man twice her age.

  All she had figured was that it was a matter of counting. A kind of Taoist jugglery with the yarrow stalks. Counting off by fours the numbers of stalks in your hand, moving back and forth from hand to hand, apportioning little bundles that looked mysterious, as though the wind could pass through them and create unheard melodies.

  Though how an unheard melody would sound, she could not imagine at sixteen. She had watched Stephen in the process of consulting the I Ching, and at first it had been one of his appeals. It gave him youth and a kind of exotic turn, even if he was only her high-school drama teacher, inclining toward the weight he would carry thirty years later, and helpless before his mother’s transgression and acid.

  Now, in her own middle age, Dolores forgave those shortcomings, understood and lived them all. The prophecies of the I Ching, though, had returned to her in a fascinating circle: when she saw the yarrow stalks scattered on Stephen’s table those evenings they all discussed the play, she wondered why he had kept at it all these years, and yet she was not inclined to ask, feeling that she might give him the wrong ideas.

  She bent over the steak. Carved the first bite and examined the gelid red between the papery brown layers. Just enough to tell herself she cooked it.

  She poured a second glass of Merlot.

  Early on, trying to explain the oracle, Stephen had told her about the changing lines. Old yin and old yang. She could not follow the mathematics, his talk of probabilities and remainders, of multiple coins, of dice and beads. She suspected that he knew as little about them as she did, that he was all talk when it came to this, like he often was. But what she did understand was that the old lines were unstable, the young ones steady. That in the process of aging, the lines transformed, until they had become their opposite—old yang to young yin, old yin to young yang, forming a new hexagram, a new insight as they changed.

  Now she understood the comfort of her teaching job, the daily expectations, the new things taking place in familiar structures. She was onto the second wave of students—kids whose mothers or fathers she had taught. Consoled herself that generations passed quickly in the city, that she was no older because teenagers dropped out of high school to breed. It was good to pretend to be surprised by their insights, to see them grow like their mothers had, especially when the growth was old ground to her and vastly new and wonderful to them, a kind of best of both worlds.

  Stephen had told her once that when you used the yarrow stalks to consult the I Ching, it moved the lines differently. The coins were binary, he said, heads or tails. So yin and yang were equally likely. But the stalks showed a stable yin, an active yang moving slowly, over months and years and centuries, toward its stationary and passive counterpart. Dolores was all right with that, with movement that was a kind of banking of energies, that suggested how eventually we settle into something more thoroughly ourselves.

  But what worked for her worked less well for the men she knew. Stephen had become what she had come to suspect he would after several years around him—a pot-smoking refugee from America’s silliest decade, an indulged Boomer who had yet to learn the lesson his generation still worked through, that they were not so special, not really.

  And her time with Peter Koenig a mystery when she saw him now.
Called in by Jack Rausch’s father to consult on the boy’s well-being, the minister was still a presence, but changed as well, jowls and staid demeanor covering the passion of the young seminarian she had dated briefly until they both discovered, almost by mutual consent, that the distance between their worlds could not be spanned by anything but the most ardent affections, which at that time he had devoted to Jesus and she to the theatre, both of them sure that their truths would make them whole and authentic. Now he trooped the high school halls (and she expected, his offices at the church, and since he had dropped in to the school to invite her to a meeting, she would find out for herself soon) with a kind of respectability you wore like a costume, gestures of cultural and Biblical confidence, and she reckoned the strong lines of his search had led to an established peace, though how it would be peace she could not figure.

  She washed down the last morsel of the meat with the last swallow of wine. At least the last from this glass.

  She poured the third and thought of Aron. Her own son had passed through sullen country on his way from yang to yin. Or he was passing through it. And though it annoyed her that Aron had not arrived in a place that was good for him, that he still moped through activities, was secretive and putting on pounds, she told herself it was part of the process, his changing lines.

  But she expected more of him.

  His father’s genes, she told herself with uncertainty. Some things hold you back.

  The fourth glass went down smoothly. She hoped she had another bottle.

  Nevertheless, Dolores told herself, Aron should have shown signs of his election by now. He should have displayed the gifts she was certain he would have when she knew it was a boy she carried, and later when that boy moved the first time in her belly. He was already bound somewhere, she knew, and sometimes on nights like this, made speculative by wine, she stood above his bed and watched this hulking, teen-aged enigma, thrashing under his blanket and drooling onto the sheets. Then she would take up in hand his pillow, imagine stillness, silence, the long prospect of solitude, and again she would wonder how she had come to this, how she had changed.

  34 Stasimon: Strophe: T. Tommy and the Brischords

  T. Tommy: Up there. Top of the slope. It was Hamlet’s stage last year. Where he took on his mother, after the play. Not after Hamlet, but after the play in Hamlet, the trap in the middle of it, where the theatre sprung and opened its maw for the old king, like the jaws of a bear trap or a python. Hamlet held the mirror up to her then.

  He told her,

  Sit you down; you shall not budge;

  You go not till I set you up a glass

  Where you may see the inmost part of you.

  And what was it she told him? What mother’s words back to the son?

  O Hamlet, speak no more:

  Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul;

  And there I see such black and grained spots

  As will not leave their tinct.

  Into her soul. What she said, children.

  Because it was never that the boy could not make up his mind. He right well done so when he did not act. Your Hamlet turned his eyes inward, and he understood.

  Because he could not change the tide of things, and he knew it.

  No John-a-Dreams, no Laurence Olivier, no George Castille. It’s not the mirror’s reflection that kills us, on account of we ain’t that kind of glass, children. We are not a mirror, but a diver’s mask—a lens through which we look on inconsolable currents. Once we seen that, none of us wants to move. Nothing consoles us, and our longing drifts through the world, beyond it…even beyond the gods we imagine.

  You are shredded by circumstance. Or you see everywhere the horror or absurdity of being. You drown like the crazy girl, or you understand:

  Best never to be born. Next best, to die young.

  Brischords: There is shredding and there is shredding. A term vague around the edges, rending asunder or the metal playing V-1 rocket dive on the whammy bar.

  Falcon: The boy Vincent is bound for both. You seen his powers to charm and transform by shredding. Hella pretty, fingers cascading over the frets, the guitar between his legs like a ginormous strung pecker, pivoting, the neck high and standing as he slows into a walking “Voodoo Chile.”

  Daddy Chrome: All of this on the stage in the park, because early on that other one showed him the outlets, there for the lights and sound equipment. The stage gives Vincent freedom: electrified, he can wail and embrace the volume, try music that shakes too many things at home, dream retro dreams of Eddie Van and Stevie Ray. And yes, the shredding stirred nerves up on the Court, but the LMPD lets it slide, too busy fighting their losing battle against Fourth and Fellini. Because they can’t change the tide of things, and they know it.

  DJ Mel: I come down from 4th and F the night that boy played, drawn by the groove. I told him I was a personal friend of Bootsy Collins, and I aks him if he knew who that was, and he says he made his funk the P-Funk, so I lingered a while, then went home to the bus stop and wig shop and C.V.S., but I swore I’d return the next time.

  T. Tommy: We all was there the next time, Mel. Sat before the stage, in the orchestra rather than the seats. Give the boy a hand when he finished up that slow, serpentine blues improv and took it up to a flurry of quick, bending notes. It scared him at first, then, he bowed, but by then I was certain he would not forthcome with money.

  So I warn him to keep an eye, and you all heard me and were in agreement. Keep an eye, I told him, on account of outdoor wiring—especially this wiring—is decrepit, capable of electrifying those who are not mindful.

  He allowed he was fine, but thank you nonetheless.

  Falcon: Brought up right and taught not to patronize.

  DJ Mel: Safe enough to be polite, though, Falcon. Because he knowed he would never dress in worn lamé and sleep in a Goodwill box.

  T. Tommy: Hey now, Mel. Keep an eye. My warning was genuine, and not for his donation. I emphasized the leaky stage structure, how everything it offered lay open to the elements, even those parts that should have been covered, and the boy thanked me again. Then I tell him it had happened to before, on Halloween night in ’68.

  And he passed from amusement to interest, clean through alarm and out the other side of boredom.

  Daddy Chrome: He expected otherwise. He had heard of the Lizard King, and when the story turned to you and the storm in the tower, he stopped believing, then stopped caring, then finally stopped listening, packed his guitar and took the amp downhill to the van…

  Falcon: Which he parked right here, by the bench, by this rock-shattered streetlamp.

  T. Tommy: Rock-shredded, children. Shredded with music and cast stones.

  He did not hear the thing backstage. Because he wasn’t listening, or it wasn’t ready to be heard. But the three of you did, and if you didn’t, I heard enough for you. That is why I told the story to all of you, to the stone lions and the empty stage and the blonde boy and the Brischords.

  And I will tell it all again when the god arrives.

  35 Stasimon: Antistrophe: Polymnia and the Muses

  Polymnia: It may be the most popular of your plays. More than the harder ones about shredded families, unbalanced southern women, witch hunts, and dying salesmen. And still, not everyone gets out of Our Town alive. But death approaches dressed in homespun poetry, so it doesn’t seem as much like death, but like a play about death.

  Thalia: No sex either. No language that rankles the reverent. That is why Antioch likes Our Town.

  Melpomene: Except the ghost. They do not like the ghost for religious reasons.

  Thalia: Yes, that. Hamlet or A Christmas Carol or even Casper scents their nostrils with brimstone.

  Polymnia: Peter Koenig rather likes Our Town in spite of everything. Especially the third act, which they rehearse tonight. Tell me how it goes, sisters.

  Melpomene: It takes place twelve years after the first act. Begins in an abstract cemetery, set upon a hill overlooking Grover�
��s Corners. About a dozen people sit in several rows of chairs, which are supposed to represent graves…

  Thalia: Which solves all kinds of prop and staging problems. Stripped and minimal and high-school-drama artsy. Saves money on tombstones. The Stage Manager has been talking to the audience all along. Breaking the frame—artsy touch…

  Oh those of you who listen here, who watch this drama from a silent place, we will not break the frame on you. We will speak in your imagined absence. But the Stage Manager, you were saying…

  Melpomene: the Stage Manager tells us that these seated actors are the dead citizens of the town. A funeral procession approaches. The dead narrate the new arrival: Emily Webb, the play’s romantic heroine, if you can call her that. She died, it seems while giving birth to her second child.

  Her ghost walks away from the living and joins the dead, sitting next to Mrs. Gibbs, her mother-in-law.

  Emily goes on and on about the world of the living, but she knows that world is behind her. That the dead are waiting for something.

  Thalia: For over two millennia, I have adorned sarcophagi. I have looked back over processions in marble and stone and watched you erode as you follow. I could tell these dead how little they wait for, but I am only audience and dare not break the frame. But the dead are onto something when they detach from the troubles of the living.

  Polymnia: Perhaps the last thing they are onto. I do not know.

  Melpomene: Mrs. Gibbs tells Emily to wait, that it is best to be quiet and patient, but she is not having any of it. She decides that you can return to the world of the living, revisit the past.

  Thalia: Our artsy, folksy Stage Manager offers to help, for after all, he’s not just a stage manager, he’s a damned narrative device!