by Owen Thomas
Mom…”
“…cooking and, you know. Showing up.”
“Mom.”
“Yes?”
“Nothing.”
“There’s no reason to be upset, David, I just need to know about dinner.”
“I’m not upset, Mom. What is it you want me to do about dinner? I’m not going to cook anything and you won’t let me pick anything up, so…”
“It’s not a matter of not letting you, David. You don’t have to say it like that. It’s just not that kind of a party. I’ll think of something. It’s up to me anyway. If I ask your father for help he’ll tell me that this is all my deal. That’s his favorite saying these days; It’s all your deal Susan.”
“Ask him to grill something. He likes grilling.”
“No. I’m not going down that road any more. Your father and that grill and a glass of wine, or two or three, are a bad, B-A-D, combination. I mean, B-A….”
“I can spell ‘bad’, mom.”
“He is getting so…so…”
“What.”
“Remote. He’s just very cold. He walks around in his own little world like I don’t exist. I made him breakfast this morning and he just turned and walked out of the kitchen. I threw it all out. I’m very sweet. I’m very loving. I say Good Morning, Hollis. How did you sleep Hollis? Are you feeling okay today, Hollis? I greet him with a smile and a pat on the arm and he looks at me like I don’t exist and he just smiles and walks out – just like that, not a goodbye or a smile or anything – and he’s off for the day.”
“Off where?”
“I don’t know. Shirt and tie. He gave me some story. Going somewhere to help a friend interview for something. I don’t know. I’m not sure I believe him, frankly – if you want to know the absolute truth of the matter. I don’t know where he was going. I don’t really care. I just can’t take being so excluded. Being left. Left behind. You know?”
“Yeah, I…”
“It’s very cold in this house, David. I don’t know if you really understand that because you are never here, but it’s very cold. Very distant. I feel like I’m suffocating. Indifference is suffocating. When I say suffocating, do you know what I’m getting at?”
A loud knocking thuds down the hall to my rescue.
“Yeah. Look, Mom, there’s someone at the door. I gotta go. What time do you want me over there on Saturday?”
“Oh, well, six-thirty. No running, Ben. Thank you.”
“Okay, and you’ve got the dinner thing under control.”
“Well, let’s think about it. Let’s play it by ear. Bye, David.”
“I thought you were going to take care of it.”
“What?”
“I thought you were going to take care of dinner and that I’m not bringing...”
“Well I am but let’s just think about it. Bye.”
“Mom… what the hell does that mean? What... Mom? Mom?”
I clench my jaw and can feel my pulse beating in my temples. I am magically back to feeling angry at the world. At the fucking world. Not at my mother; no, no. At The World, in general. Because my mother is never deserving of anger or irritation, only sympathy. That is as low as my feelings can legitimately reach. I cannot tell if I am angry that she is hurting, or angry that I am helpless to help her, or angry that she sees nothing of her own role in her own misery, or angry that she says these things about my father, or angry that those things are true, or angry that she thinks nothing of my peace of mind, or angry that I have abandoned Ben to the misery of that house, or angry that I do not have Tilly’s strength to tell my parents off and that I so easily resort to wheedling appeasements, or angry that I am not a better son in her time of need; or ever.
I want to do violent things to my telephone. The off beep is supremely unsatisfying. I slam the cordless receiver down on the kitchen counter just as there is another barrage of knocks that rattle the photos in the hallway. I wish I had a large caliber weapon, like a surface-to-air missile, that I could fire down the hallway, through the door and directly into the chest of the person on the other side.
“Mr. Johns.” It’s him again. He’s wearing his glasses.
“Oh. Yes? Did you forget something?”
“Will you come with me, please?”
I follow him to the driveway, where he stands between his car and mine. Apparently he has never left. He points to the passenger side of my Civic. The letters are large and sloppy and bright red, like fresh animal blood dripping towards the driveway.
Rapist.
I am speechless and can only stare.
“When did this happen?”
“I…I don’t know…I had no idea…I mean, I’ve been driving around…I had no idea. It’s the passenger side, so…I…I…shit. My car.”
“Any idea who might have done this, Mr. Johns?”
“No.”
“Any idea why someone sprayed the word ‘rapist’ on your car?”
“No.”
“A little odd, don’t you think?”
I kneel down and pull my thumb across the “t”. Very dry.
“Do you think it might be friends of Brittany Kline that think you had something to do with her disappearance? People who knew you had a relationship.”
“I did not have a relationship with Brittany Kline.”
“Do you think it could have been Brittany herself who wrote this?”
“I have no idea.”
“Would Brittany have any reason to write something like that?”
“No.”
“Mr. Johns, can you tell me what that is?” He is pointing his substantial finger, the one that identified my rainbow fish a long time ago, back when I was Dave, directly into the window of the passenger door, which I now notice is not completely closed.
“What?”
“That.” The finger stiffens. It is pointing to a red make-up bag poking out from beneath the passenger seat. It is in the very place I had stuffed it just before kidnapping my brother and secreting him off to Fantasia. I do not answer the question.
“Will you open the car door, Mr. Johns?”
We are here again, at the intersection of my life and the U.S. Constitution.
“I don’t have to do that,” I say, not looking at him. A black and white squad car pulls into my driveway.
“No, you don’t,” says Detective North. “But I can have a warrant here in about twenty minutes.” He takes off his stupid shades and slips them into his pocket. He is my friend again. “Look, Dave, things are going to go a lot easier for you if you cooperate. You understand what I’m telling you?”
“I’m not talking to you any more without a lawyer.”
“Fine. Consent to a search and we can talk later when you have a lawyer.”
I know it is useless to resist the search. It will only make me look worse. Fucking Shepp. Fucking Brittany Kline. I let out an exasperated sigh and gesture in mock magnanimity in the direction of my despoiled Civic. North dons a pair of white latex gloves and I remove myself in disgust to the top of the driveway.
The cop in the uniform, a lanky, blonde beanpole of a thing, quickly positions himself between me and my front door. He does not want me to barricade myself in my home, or search for a weapon or take hostages or kill myself, all of which now strike me as tragically missed opportunities. But, then, I am new to the role of felony suspect.
North has the bag in his hand. He is poking inside with two of his white latex fingers. When he is done, he looks at me with a face I cannot read. He gives a nod and Officer Beanpole moves in, pulling my hands behind me, ratcheting down the metal cuffs, patting my pockets and ankles, reciting to me from Miranda v. Arizona.
It is as they are folding me carefully into the back of the squad car, guarding my head like the soft skull of an infant, protecting the city of Columbus from concussion liability and trumped up brutality charges, that I wonder if she was right after all; if things really do gotta’ get better sometime.
CHAPTER 17 – Hol
lis
Hollis Johns listened. He stood in the doorframe of his study motionless, except perhaps, for a gentle and warm sloshing between his ears.
He listened to his house. Closed his eyes. Listened.
It breathed, he thought. Like a person. Respiration. And that was not all. There was also circulation, through a tangle of pipes that surrounded him, buried within the walls. And an electrically based nervous system. All within an aging skeleton, wrapped in an increasingly weathered epidermis.
It listened. It spoke. It knew things. It had memory.
We are alone now, the house told him. And that suited Hollis just fine.
He opened his eyes and glanced over his shoulder, back into the dark study, at the digital clock on the corner of the desk. The red figures glowed back at him like thin, sloppily arranged embers that ebbed and waved in the distance.
Three numbers. The first was bony and straight and emaciated. Obviously a one. The other two numbers were a blurry mystery. A three? A five? He squinted at them for a moment and then tried to look at them through his wine glass, as though its empty curvature might bend the light, focusing the world through a film of Chablis like a lens.
But this did not help. That he was wearing a watch never occurred to him.
No matter. It was one-something. Late. Everyone was in bed.
Hollis pushed off from the doorframe and wandered up the hall towards the stairs. He noticed light spilling from the laundry room and continued past the stairs to the end of the hall. Freshly washed shirts, his shirts mostly, were hanging from the dowel. He raked his fingers along the empty sleeves. They were dry and had already been ironed. Briefs and towels and socks had been neatly folded and arranged in decorous stacks on the dryer. The basket was gone, which meant that Susan had taken a load up before bed.
A good woman, Susan; bless her heart. A lot to love there. A lot to love.
With his left hand, Hollis clutched at the large stack of underwear. He used two fingers of his right hand to collect a bouquet of socks, carefully arranging them to encase the stem of his wine glass until it looked as though he had plucked from some darkened corner of the basement an exotic polyester mushroom with an inverted crystal head.
Hands full, he employed his elbow to turn out the light. When three attempts failed to actually connect elbow with anything but wall and doorframe, he repeatedly mashed the light switch with underwear until the room went dark.
Hollis started back towards the stairwell, his way much darker now. He was again deterred, this time by the door to the storage room, kitty corner from the laundry, which had been left slightly ajar. He thought this a bit odd since the room was almost never used. He pushed the door open and mashed the light switch with his underwear. The light was old and yellow and the boiler hissed and clicked at him from its concrete pedestal in the corner, as if in greeting.
The junk room the kids called it; a telling misnomer, indicative of a generational decay in values. It was not a junk room. It was a …what…it was a vault. It was a place of storage, for things worth storing.
The younger set – his children’s generation – consumed the world like ravenous beasts, oblivious to value, disgorging everything almost instantly into piles of trash. It was their micro attention span. And their technological pre-occupation. Their defenselessness to advertising and hucksterism. And their overactive sense of entitlement to the latest and greatest. Consume, consume, consume. Excrete, excrete, excrete.
It was worse than simply an automatic preference for the new over the old; which in itself was bad enough. Nowadays, anything not still sealed in its original wrapper was utterly without value; junk. Artificial obsolescence had settled in as the new organizing principle of the predominant culture. The world had been handed to generations with a compulsion for mindless reinvention, an addiction to upgrading, and a pathological aversion to investment. Investment of anything, in anything. If it requires patience to develop, if it takes time to fully appreciate, if it has so much value as to withstand the moment, then nobody wants anything to do with it. It is, in a word, junk.
Although…and here he thought of her again…there were exceptions, weren’t there? There were counter-examples; individuals under thirty who recognized value when they saw it. Individuals whose instincts were to gather wisdom and to deepen themselves at every opportunity. Individuals who soaked up life and learned through a kind of osmosis.
Hollis scanned the overburdened shelving from left to right, high to low, as though he were reading a very large book. The shelving itself changed rather dramatically two thirds down the wall from old warped and knotted pine, splintering along some of the edges, to a darker, glossy oak that he had installed after ripping out a surreptitiously leaky sink and rotting cabinetry fifteen years earlier.
That moldering furniture had gone down in marital history as one of Susan’s indisputable victories, marking one of his rare concessions, that there really had been a smell coming from somewhere in the house, that it really had not been her imagination, that she really was not making something out of nothing, that he really should not have been so dismissive of her concern. He may not have actually apologized, but he had clearly conceded the point, which, after all, was just as good.
Just to give Susan her due, he had ripped out the lime green cabinets, removed the plumbing, repaired the wall and flooring, and installed the shelving all himself. Each hour of the renovation – the project had taken a week and a half of toiling after work, after dinner, down in the basement with a bottle of wine and a crow bar – had been a reminder that Susan had been right all along. Fair is fair.
And, the truth was, there really was more storage now; no question about it. She had been right. Hollis missed the old room and the lime green cabinets just the same.
Inexplicably, recalling the old room conjured thoughts of Tilly. She momentarily dampened the buzzing in his head and the fuzzy pleasantness of the past two days.
It was not uncommon for thoughts of Tilly to have a disquieting effect on Hollis and, for this reason, he generally tried not to think of her. Of course, those were almost always thoughts of his adult daughter, the one with her condescension and disdain and her combative alliance with Susan; the daughter who had found a calling in highly public licentiousness. But his thought at this moment, which he felt as much in his stomach as his head, was of Tilly as a young child, before the teenager-from-Hell, before she had run off to join the Hollywood circus.
And that was odd.
Because thoughts of little Tilly were generally good and happy, immune from the corruption of adolescence. His little girl. His princess. His sweet pea with the giggly laugh. This was the Tilly of read me a story, daddy and I love you extraspecially, daddy, and can I have a fish, please, can I have a fish, please, daddy, please? Those were good thoughts. Little Tilly was a labyrinth of memory that he had stored away; preserved against the corrosion of time and circumstance.
And yet, now, suddenly, without reason, even the thought of little Tilly trod through his brain dragging an old disquiet and agitation that he could not explain; like she was dragging an over-sized stuffed rabbit that she had pulled out of a dumpster or sewage pit and was slinging around by the ears.
Hollis shook his head sharply, more of an involuntary twitch or tremor, and the thought was gone. Momentarily, his blissful flush returned and he continued to read the shelves, making mental notes of the various projects he remembered and now wanted to complete. The photo albums. The darkroom; he should reassemble the darkroom. The guitar – he should really get back into the guitar. And the brewing kit. Now that he was retired, he would have time for these things. Spare time had always been the problem before, when he was working and raising children. Never enough time.
A yellow wooden stepladder was leaning against the wall just inside the door. This is not where it belonged. He realized that Susan must have needed it to reach the supply of washer soap in the top of the laundry room cabinet. That explained the open door. Satisfie
d, he mashed his handful of underwear against the light switch until the room collapsed into darkness around the red blinking light on the tank of the boiler.
He closed the door, resealing the past from the present.
Upstairs, Hollis took an impulsive detour through the living room, pulled in by the still darkness pressing in against the windows, strangely reluctant to go to bed.
He sat on the couch and tipped the black poly-crystal mushroom to his lips, hoping the wine had miraculously regenerated. But there was still nothing. He leaned back and closed his eyes again, gripping his undergarments and listening to the faint sound of breathing from the back bedrooms. First Susan … then Ben. Susan. Ben. Susan. Ben. His mind wobbled and spun as the house around him swelled and deflated.
It had been another remarkably pleasant day. Up early. Meditation for a full thirty minutes. Out the door and on the road this time before Susan was even out of the shower. He made record time to the Westin. The car felt lighter, faster, and the tires felt wider and fatter. He knew this was silly. But still.
Bethany had been back out on the rock wall waiting for him, her body reclined, her legs outstretched, her face tilted upwards, collecting the sun in her flawless features. Having replayed that moment at least a dozen times in the past twelve hours, Hollis was no longer the least bit hesitant to admit that the very sight of her had made his heart race.
Hollis opened his eyes, jolted for an instant back into the present. He looked around the living room, at his reflection in the empty black lens of the television, and then, like a leaf finding the lawn, resettled back into reverie.
They had taken a booth in the back of another truck-stop waffle house and had eaten more food than he would have guessed possible only three days earlier. They had spoken at length of Buddhism and of Hollis’ prodigious respect for Akahito Takada. She was full of questions; full of fresh interest in his life and his sense of the world.
But it was not their conversation that now stood out in his mind so much as the enduring quality of Bethany’s physical presence. Everything about her was so … so vital; so immediate. She had left an impression, a mark, that was every bit as physical as if her likeness had been embossed on the face of a penny and then pressed firmly into the skin of his forehead for hours at a time.
