by Owen Thomas
And who had she told? No one. Greta. She had told Greta, because Greta was made of iron and was as loyal as iron. But no one else. No one? Not even her mother? Could he be sure? No, he could not be sure. But only because that kind of loyalty required an abiding love of which suddenly, in the grip of Katie Finn’s vengeful gaze, he knew he was not worthy and was not his to claim. The self-loathing buried so long ago had now begun to percolate back up through the soil of his consciousness like something putrid and unnaturally toxic.
The road was long and unchanging and his head hurt. He slowed the pattern of his blinking so that he might incrementally rest his eyes, which felt like wads of cotton for being open too long in the desert air. He searched his mind, trying to find any of the familiar pictures of himself that he carried around in his head – Hollis the Good, Hollis the Enlightened, Hollis the Provider, Hollis the Successful, Hollis the Avuncular Raconteur, Hollis the Epistemic Marvel, Hollis the Preternaturally Virile, and even Hollis the Chronically Underappreciated. But none of those pictures, those portraits of the artist, seemed to exist any more. All he could find in the tenebrous crenellations of his brain was the single picture of himself that his daughter carried around in her brain.
He opened his eyes after too long, realizing that he was straddling lanes. He corrected abruptly, shook his head and opened a window. Fortunately, the road around him was relatively clear. But at just over five continuous hours of driving and no sleep he was not taking any chances. He turned on the radio and searched the preset frequencies for something symphonic. Now several hundred miles out of Phoenix, none of the presets offered any signal at all. He aimed for the Scan button, selecting Band instead.
… if they think dat by making a big scene in Crawford or in any of these other cities this weekend, and calling the President all sorts of names and so on, if they think that they are speaking for America with that nonsense, with that tripe, then they are sorely mistaken. The majority, the vast, vast majority of Americans support our troops in this war. And when all of those thankless, hypocritical, blame-laying, hippie-wannabe protesters grab a bull horn or a microphone and start their little chants and songs, and wave their signs and lie down in the street, the rest of us see them for what they are: misguided, simplistic, pinheads who think that Al Qeada and Osama Bin Ladin will just go away if we just start acting nice and maybe if we apologize for being so worked up about 9-11. I mean come on, people. Come on. That’s just silly. Sil-til. Til. Tilly. You wanna know why it’s Tilly? It’s Tilly because we know better. We’ve seen things. All of us … Holofus… Hollus have seen things. We’ve watched… we’ve… she’ve watched us brought to her knees of laundry but there is no quandary, no second guessing because this is about justice. Should holofus want to apologize. Is pain. Move to France down to his ankles. America not apologize. Guilty of anything. Greatest country on earth. Promises, promish, promisfish. She saw everything. You shut her out. Protesters need to wake up. Ahhhhhhhhhhhnnnnnnn! Wake up. Wake up. Ahhhhhhhhhhhnnnnnnn!
Hollis’ eyes snapped open as his right front tire was leaving the highway. A semi behind him was laying on the horn and flashing his hi-beams into the rearview mirror. Blindly reacting, Hollis over-corrected with a violent counterclockwise jerk of the wheel, shooting the Civic sharply left, across the adjoining lane. The left front tire dropped over the edge of pavement and Hollis made a sharp re-correction back to the right, shooting the car back into the path of the semi. A five-foot tower of engine grill suddenly filled the passenger window and the demon truck bellowed its horrible scream. Hollis cranked the wheel back again and slammed the gas pedal to the floor, nicking the brake with the side of his shoe. The car faltered for a fraction of a second but then jolted forward into the left lane as the semi cut its speed. As the truck continued to slow, the Civic continued to accelerate, Hollis suddenly so shot through with adrenaline that his mind was well out in front of the car and his body, trapped in a cage of glass and steel, was racing to catch up.
The engine whined at eighty-five miles an hour for a good three miles. Hollis gripped the wheel in a kind of frozen terror, oblivious to speed, passing slower traffic like it was standing still, no longer hearing the sharp torrent of words from the radio.
As his heart stepped down its rhythm, his muscles began to relax. His mind was free to appreciate that his shirt was soaked with sweat and that his hands hurt from gripping the wheel like the tail flap of an airplane. He cut his speed to sixty, which made him feel like he was crawling. He checked the mirror continually, fearing in near equal measure law enforcement and an angry trucker. The pursuing headlights on the rear horizon all looked the same, but they also all held their speed.
On the western side of the Sawtooth Mountains, he passed the signs touting the gas, food and lodging of Quartzite, the last Arizona outpost before crossing the border into California. He kept driving, but he knew that he would not make the rest of the trip alive unless he stopped and slept. Incredibly, the almost-road-kill adrenal rush was short-lived, already fading into the shadows. His lids were again taking on fresh weight. Quartzite now behind him, he told himself that he would pull over at the first opportunity.
The opportunity came soon enough at the town of Blythe, just across the Colorado River into the Palo Verde Valley where the Sonoran Desert began to make its apologies and loosen its grip on the land. He tried two motels only a stone’s throw from the freeway, with no vacancies. Venturing further into the town, his third and final effort was successful. He followed directions through empty streets to a tall fountain in front of a façade of sand-colored stuccowork. The words Blythe Landing were written in cursive on the flat wall above the door, as if written in wet sand with a finger.
He could tell almost instantly that this place would cost at least three times as much as any of the others. He didn’t care. A fountain burbled in the center of the ovular drive. He didn’t care. It featured a trio of stone ducks, webbed feet outstretched, seeming to glide into a pond that was perpetually disturbed by a small geyser. He still didn’t care.
Zombie-like, Hollis pulled his carry-on into the lobby and all but threw his credit card at the clerk behind the desk. She was entirely too pleasant and alert for five o’clock in the morning. They had one room. He asked no questions.
He did not sleep as the dead. He slept as the quick and dying sleep, unable to let go of the world for fear it will keep turning; for fear that it will keep rolling into the future, leaving him behind on the road of history. He clung to consciousness for fear that time was too short now to change anybody’s mind and that what people knew and believed they would always know and believe. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. It seemed that sleep could only come in fifteen-minute increments, as though sleep was now a kind of travel-toiletry-sized convenience or a cheap somnifacient mini-sausage, made of low-grade ingredients stuffed into bite-sized, quarter-hour casings.
He woke repeatedly in heart-pounding fits and starts that wrenched him from agonizing dreams. In one of the dreams he was drowning in a tank of exotic fish. In another he was trapped inside his living room television, pressing his fingers up against the glass looking in terror at Tilly and Susan on the outside aiming their pistols and taking turns trying to change the channel with bullets. Gayle, the tattooed lesbian home-wrecker, reclined on the couch getting stoned and fellating Heinrich Van Susteran. In a third dream, Charles Compson had moved into his home. Elena was with him, wearing her black triangle swimsuit, playing both Charles’ concubine and daughter. They mashed on each other and ate feces and laughed maniacally. Charles liked to rub the top of his head along the walls and over the sheets and on Susan’s hair, leaving splotches of blood. In a fourth, he and Bethany Koan were on foot, trying to outrun a semi that belched fire and that had a flat-screen television for a grill. Katie Finn stared out along the road, bugs flattening against her face. Bill Clinton – the Great Scourge – was driving.
By the time consciousness had returned to stay, it was almost two o’clock in the afternoon
. The sun was making a ferocious display, clawing at the pulled drapes and illuminating the entire room with its breath.
Hollis sat up in bed feeling hot and damp with sweat. He sat for fifteen minutes, blinking and breathing and listening to the blood pound in his temples as the previous day replayed itself and as he suffered the hangover of revelation. Eventually he pulled off the covers and stood and shuffled over to a round table with an arrangement of desert lupine and orange California poppies. A cardboard placard welcomed him to Blythe Landing.
The shuffling trip over from the bed having exhausted him, Hollis sat down heavily and naked in the chair at the table and allowed coherence another chance to catch up. He leaned back and crooked a finger around a panel of drapery, pulling it back just enough to see outside into a courtyard. The sun roared in through the crack, lashing at his face. The pressure in his temples flared. He let the drapes go.
It was nearly three o’clock by the time he had showered and dressed. He made a point of shaving his face and brushing his teeth and clipping his nails and trimming the hair in his nose, all in an effort to maintain some semblance of discipline and continuity in his life; a flimsy procedural bulwark against the knowledge that as he had laid in a Phoenix hotel room, and as Lynnette Moss, aka Bethany Koan, had liberated a fifty dollar bill from his wallet under the pretense of finding a prophylactic, everything in his life, everything about his self-concept, had changed in an instant.
But there was no aspect of the personal hygiene ritual that made him feel any better or that lent any comfort of normalcy.
He sat back down at the table and tried to focus on what to do next. He was starving. His breakfast for dinner with Bethany was now a distant memory. And yet, as hungry as he was, he could not think to concern himself with food. All he could think about was seeing Tilly. All he wanted was to feel the full brunt of her rage; to accept it and to own it; to take it from her and carry it for the rest of his days so that she, at last, could stop carrying it; to show her that he knew that she had always known.
For the first time, it occurred to him that he did not really know how to find her. California, he knew. “Hollywood,” as a concept, he knew. But he did not know where she actually lived. He did not know her telephone number. This was information that had been about as useful to him as knowing what his daughter chose to eat for lunch or the name of her favorite shampoo. Communicating with Tilly was Susan’s domain.
He stood up and went to his carry-on bag and extracted his cell phone. He made several fruitless efforts to see if Los Angeles or any of its satellite municipalities had a listing for Tilly Johns. Next he called home, hoping that David would be able to consult Susan’s address book on the kitchen counter beneath the phone. But no one answered. Hollis left an awkward and frustrated message asking David to return the call, but not revealing why or expressing any interest in how he and Ben were faring.
Susan, of course, would know Tilly’s number by heart. She would know the city in which she lived if not her exact address. He could call Susan.
He looked at his phone for long, quiet minutes as if waiting for it to ring.
He could call Susan.
He dialed her cell phone number, but could not bring himself to actually send those numbers skittering out into space in search of his wife. Sending the numbers was not possible without imagining what she was doing and what he would be interrupting, which was most likely nothing, but the actual odds were beside the point. Possibility, however remote, was what mattered. Susan would certainly think that his sudden and inexplicable interest in contacting Tilly was a thin excuse to vent his marital insecurities and to check up on her. She would interpret the call as a concession of weakness. Defeat.
And maybe she should, because maybe it was. Maybe it was a concession. Maybe what he really wanted was to call his wife of thirty-five years and tell her he was sorry and to cry like a baby into the phone. Maybe he did want to interrupt her; to tell her to stop whatever she was doing and whatever she was thinking; to tell her that she was everything and that he had taken her for granted and that he was sorry. Maybe he wanted to hear her scold him for leaving his chromosomally-enhanced child to go chasing after Bethany Koan. Maybe he had all of that coming and maybe it would feel good to hear her care again about the things he did and to tell her that she was goddamned right about all of it. Maybe he wanted to tell her how smart she was and how beautiful she had become in her old age with the crow’s feet deepening and sinking in to the softness around her eyes, and her lips not quite as full as they were when he had first kissed them, but all to the better; all to the better for letting the inside – the truer beauty – come out for some attention. Not some attention; his attention. It was his attention to give and he had not been giving it and maybe it was time for him to tell her that. And who the hell cared if she heard all of it as a concession, a surrender, because it was a goddamned concession. It was a surrender. An unconditional penitent surrender unto that higher authority for all things bearing on his worth as a husband. Susan.
The more he thought about it, the more the idea was like a salve. Susan. He had the power to call his wife. Still with him after all of these years. Barely, perhaps, but still with him. Without allowing another thought, he sent the numbers skittering, loosing them to the hunt like digital bloodhounds.
“Hi…”
“Susan?”
“…this is Susan Johns. I’m not available. Please leave a message at the tone.”
Hollis cursed under his breath and hung up without leaving a message.
He called David’s cell phone. The call went straight to message. He waited in mounting frustration.
“David. This is Dad. Call me on my cell. I need your sister’s address. I… I need to send her something. I tried the house. You and Ben must be out someplace. I’ll call you at your place; maybe you’re there. Thanks.”
He cursed and dialed the number for David’s condo. When he heard no ring at all he examined his phone. It was suddenly lifeless. After repeated efforts to resuscitate it – as though battery-life was merely a function user will – he gave up in disgust, throwing the dark, useless instrument onto the unmade bed.
He grabbed his wallet and his car key and the room key and with a violence calculated to satisfy his frustration, ripped open the door, stepping outside into the blistering light.
The temperature was fine; pleasant even. It was the light. It was the savage solar scrutiny. He physically recoiled; a vampire with no sense of time. The blood in his temples raced to his defense. His entire head was a tocsin.
He realized then that it was not just the sudden light. He needed food.
He inquired at the front desk and ultimately found his way to an empty café. He took a seat at a table by the bank of windows looking out over the same sun-scorched courtyard he had seen from his room. Small desert birds flitted about the lip of a fountain. The water came unevenly in surges and sputters from the mouth of a stone bass.
Along the far wall of the café was a full bar, posted with a dozen empty stools. Behind the bar was the usual over-staged assemblage of libation, glassware, and a large flat-screen television – sound off – on which the Saints were losing miserably to the Lions. New Orleans was lining up for a long-shot field goal.
It was several minutes before he saw anyone who looked to have official responsibilities relating to the café. He was a thin man, early-forties, with precise movements and an efficient way about him. He stepped behind the bar and began stacking glasses.
“Excuse me.”
The bar tender looked up and around and, seeing Hollis across the café, smiled genially. An old scar cut across his lips, running from nostril to chin like a dry riverbed in the shape of a sickle or a claw.
“We’re closed, sir.” He looked at his watch. “We don’t really open ‘til four.”
Hollis looked at his own watch and slumped in defeat against the back of his chair. He looked out at the fountain and rubbed the back of his neck, thinking
that he would need to go out and find food. He must have looked as pathetic as he felt.
“Well, let me check what’s going on in the kitchen,” the man said. “Maybe we can do something.” He disappeared for two minutes and was back standing next to the table. “We can grill something for you if you want. Cheeseburger. Something like that. Soup’s not ready yet. No specials yet.”
“A cheeseburger would be just fine,” said Hollis, relieved. “The works.”
“The works,” said the bar tender, smiling, his thin sandy hair lending an extra lightness to an already epicene look. The man glanced back towards the door to the kitchen as if hoping to catch sight of the cook. A mottled purplish port-wine stain unfurled from behind the wisps of bleached hair along his left ear, trickling down his neck and out of sight into his collar. “He’s got to heat up the grill so bear with us.”
“Thanks. I’ll wait.”
“I’m Eric.”
“Hollis.”
“Pleasure, man. Bring you something to drink while you wait? Iced tea? Wine?”
