“Where does it go?” she asks. “Nowhere. It doesn’t exist.”
“But nowhere is somewhere.”
“This isn’t where versus somewhere else. This is being versus nonbeing.”
He strips down and gets into bed, cuddling up behind her. Once she is asleep, he waits for something to happen. He’s not sure what. Claire’s dream marriage makes a certain kind of awful sense: a theoretical husband for the woman who spends her days in a theoretical haze. Her advisor was never the threat; it was always Alan. He watches her sleep as if the drama is unfolding just behind those eyelids. Maybe she will say something in her sleep. It would be like eavesdropping on a conversation taking place in a universe that Walker cannot reach, one where Walker does not even exist. He tries to imagine not existing. He imagines darkness, the absence of thought, but then his thoughts invade, and he exists again. Claire, he wants to call out. Claire.
“Claire.” She doesn’t budge. He places his palm flat between her shoulder blades, her skin warm through the T-shirt. He shakes her gently and feels her body tense.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“Where were you?”
“What?”
“Were you with him?”
“You’ve got to be kidding. Go back to sleep.”
“If you ever stopped dreaming about him, for whatever reason, would you be upset?”
She rolls over to face him. Her loose state championship volleyball T-shirt twists tight under her stomach.
“I’m beginning to regret I ever told you about Alan.”
And why did she? Guilt, he assumes, or as a provocation. A part of Walker fears this is her way of pushing him away. She turns back over to sleep. Walker climbs out of bed and goes downstairs. He digs some D batteries out of a cluttered drawer and plops down on the sofa with the tape deck. The old batteries are corroded, crusty and white. He inserts the new ones, rewinds the tape to the beginning, and presses Record.
“You are . . . very sleepy.”
He presses Stop, Rewind, and then Record again, his lips within kissing distance of the microphone. “You will not dream about Alan Gass. You will not dream about Alan Gass. Alan Gass does not exist. Alan Gass is not a man. Alan Gass is not made of daisies. He is made of nothing.”
He rewinds the tape and presses Record again. A new and less sinister idea: he could make a tape for himself.
“You will dream about Alan Gass. You will tell him to stay away. You will dream about Alan Gass. You will dream about Alan Gass.”
He presses Stop. This is going to take too long. He needs to think out a strategy. Is there a button that makes the recording loop?
“What are you doing?” Claire is at the top of the stairs.
“Nothing,” he says, and goes to the hall closet. He shoves the tape deck up on the high shelf and joins her in bed. That night he doesn’t dream about Alan. His dreams are uninteresting and unhelpful, a slurry mess of anxieties and fears from his waking life. He is lost and swimming in a giant ocean with small gray waves. In the distance metal transformer towers jut up into the sky crackling with electricity, and far away a boat crests each wave, a boat that he cannot reach no matter how much he swims.
In the morning he wakes up to steam slipping under the bathroom door in misty curling puffs. He can hear Claire humming in the shower. In her dreams she is able to visit an alternative universe. It’s hard not to feel a little jealous.
• • •
Everywhere he goes he sees a Lexus. Lexi. They are a species, classifiable but indistinct. He sees one in the fire lane in front of the liquor store, then another in the parking lot at the gym. The cars are empty. He feels ridiculous each time he glares into a car. The tinted windows reflect only his own face, grim and warped.
Before Claire, he once dragged a date to a five-year high school reunion and made the mistake of telling her that he’d slept with one of the girls in the room. The date wouldn’t let it go. She had to know which girl. She wanted him to point her out. She said she wouldn’t be comfortable until she knew. But why? Walker asked her. “So I can avoid her,” the date said. “Or maybe introduce myself. I don’t know. Something.” At the time, Walker found it amusing. God, he even made her guess the girl.
He makes a full tape of his Alan Gass mantras and tells Claire it’s music for the play. When he wakes up, his ears are hot and sweaty from the foam headphones and, even more frustratingly, he remembers almost nothing of where he’s been for the last seven hours, an amnesiac tourist whose film rolls have come back from the lab damaged and half developed—ocean waves, broken escalators, his mother’s scowling face, a pack of vicious blue-eyed dogs. It’s all meaningless dribble.
• • •
Walker’s Alan Gass calls with what he can only describe as amazing news—news that he won’t share over the phone. Walker agrees to meet him at a pizza buffet called Slice of Heaven.
They sit across from each other in a red vinyl booth that squelches under their butts. Aside from two dumpy women at a table on the other side of the restaurant, they are alone. Walker has already eaten lunch and doesn’t plan to stay long.
Alan is distracted. He wants pizza. A certain kind of pizza. He’s waiting for the waitress to bring it out on a tin tray. When she does, at last, dropping it on the buffet at the center of the room, Alan is up in a hurry. His body pressed hard to the sneeze guard, he loads his plate with one slice after another. He comes back to the table and takes a large bite. The pizza is yellowish and drizzled with a translucent pink sauce.
“What is that?” Walker asks.
“Strawberry cheesecake. Try a piece.” He slides the plate across the table, still sticky from the waitress’s rag. Walker declines and asks about the news that couldn’t be shared over the phone.
“Be patient. You’ll find out in”—he checks his wristwatch, digital with an orange Velcro strap—“about ten minutes.”
Walker takes the tape recorder out of his bag, slides it across the table to Alan.
“Did it work?” Alan asks.
“I’m letting it go. Like you said, some dumb fantasy.”
Alan smacks on pizza and dabs the strawberry sauce from the corners of his thin pink lips. Though a wiry man, he has the look of physical inactivity. He has a curved back, flaccid arms, and probably a poor heart. Something about this pizza buffet—the quality of the light or the greasy floor tiles, perhaps—makes Walker feel exhausted.
“Until you came to see me,” Alan says, “I’d never really thought about there being other Alan Gasses in the world. But that got me thinking. Somewhere out there is the best possible Alan Gass.”
“And somewhere else is the worst.” Walker motions to the waitress.
“I’d like to think I’m somewhere in the middle. Most Alans are. Statistically speaking.”
The waitress waddles to the table, her stockings tan as crust, her eyes green as bell peppers. Walker asks for a coffee.
“Over the last few days I’ve been digging around online and making some phone calls,” Alan says. “To other Alans.”
“And?”
“There’s an Alan Gass in Utah who runs a ranch. There’s an Alan Gass in New York who travels the country selling baseball cards.”
The waitress brings over a mug and a hot pot of coffee, its steam thick with the smell of burnt peanuts. Walker dumps three creamers into the cup, turning the liquid a cardboard brown.
“Oh, good, you’re here,” Alan says to someone behind Walker.
Walker turns. A heavy man in a blue polo shirt with eyebrows so dark and thick they look like two black holes in his flat face smiles at them. His short hair is parted neatly down the middle.
“Walker,” Alan says, “I’d like to introduce you to Doctor Alan Gass.”
The man shakes Walker’s hand firmly. His knuckles are hairy. Alan makes room for the other Alan on
his side of the booth and explains that the second Alan lives only an hour north of here and when he discovered he was a doctor, well, he thought Walker might be interested in that.
“Doctor of what?” Walker says.
“Of religion,” the man says, and grabs the menu from behind the napkin holder. “Mainly Eastern philosophy.”
“You gotta try a piece of this,” the first Alan says. The second Alan says no, thanks, he doesn’t have a sweet tooth. He’s going to have a calzone.
“There’s another Alan Gass two hours from here,” the first Alan Gass says. “He’s invited me to see his collection of North American beetles. He studies them. Amazing, right?”
“I wonder how many of us there are in the world?” Dr. Gass asks.
“At least a thousand,” says the first one. “We should organize a party. Wouldn’t that be something?”
Walker imagines an army of Alan Gasses. They are the building blocks of something larger and more monumental. He sips on coffee, listening to the two men compare their lives, both of them amazed that two people with the same name can have had such different experiences and opinions of the world. How did Walker end up here, in this booth, with these men? He drops a few dollars on the table and says he must be going. Both Alans reach out to shake his hand.
• • •
The experiments in Europe—with the black sphere and the K-matter—have failed horribly. Claire comes home so excited she almost tackles Walker. The failure doesn’t exactly prove Daisy Theory, but the theory does emerge relatively unscathed. Particles, for the time being, can still half exist. Walker joins when her advisor takes the entire team out for celebratory drinks. In a suit jacket, jeans, and sneakers, his boyish face glowing, her advisor steadies himself on an assistant’s shoulder and steps up on a booth, raising his dark whiskey glass high. Claire lets out a whoop.
The music in the bar is disco music: Donna Summer, maybe, but with a newer backbeat. Claire’s advisor lures a research assistant onto the dance floor. Claire lures Walker too. They dance in the middle of the group. She spins under the flashing lights. She moves away from him. The dance floor is crowded. Bodies merge and move like extensions of the same creature. Claire orbits around Walker, but when he turns she’s disappeared. He stops dancing, the only stationary body in that sea, until she reappears again, moving away from the group and toward Walker with hands raised. She’s looking right at him. Their waists meet first.
“I want to take you home tonight,” he says.
“What?”
She can’t hear him over the music. He kisses her. Kisses are a kind of vocabulary, he thinks. This one, both lips parted, tongues touching with the most delicate of flicks, has a particular message. The message is, Let’s be happy, and that feels like the wise decision, a conscious decision to be happy.
They have to leave their car at the bar that night and take a taxi home.
“Fun time?” he asks, but she’s already passed out against his shoulder. The last round put her over the edge.
The taxi pulls up in front of the house, and Walker, too tired to do the math, tosses the driver a twenty before going around to the other side and helping Claire stand. He throws her arm over his neck, and they cross the dew-wet lawn together. She mumbles into his shoulder as he fumbles with the door key. Upstairs she crawls across the bed and then collapses, hair flowering out in all directions across the pillows. He unzips and tugs off her boots and lays a blanket across her back. He’s sitting on his side of the bed, untying his own shoes, when Claire says she loves him.
“You too,” he says, and shimmies out of his pants. He slides across the bed to her. Her eyes are closed, her face long and relaxed against the pillow. She may already be asleep—or on the verge of it. He considers testing her, giving her shoulder a light shake, but she looks so tired and content. Waking her wouldn’t be right.
Grasshopper Kings
The boy scrapes the stick across the grass a few times and flings it behind the hedge before Flynn can even get his car into the driveway. Flynn is home late from work, and driving up he saw it in the darkness, the small flame eating the end of the stick. The boy is alone on the front lawn in a red T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He stands very still, pale arms crossed behind his back. The smoke hovers around his head like an apparition. “Ryan,” Flynn says, rising from the car with a huff, “I thought we’d put this fire business behind us.”
His son’s eyes are like his wife’s eyes, which are like an owl’s eyes, hardly blinking and gigantic. Nothing else about his wife is very owl-like. She is skinny as a ferret and not at all nocturnal. She’s in bed by eight, or seven-thirty if Jeopardy!’s a repeat.
“Whatever you used, give it here,” Flynn says, and Ryan forfeits a small yellow matchbook. Flynn shoves the matches deep into his pocket and grabs the stick out of the hedge. The dark ash smears his hand, and with his index finger he smudges his son’s nose. When he opens the front door, the boy darts under his arm and runs ahead down the carpeted hall to his room.
By the time Flynn gets there Ryan is already under the covers with the stuffed blue bear, Mookie. His wife used to call her older sister Mookie, but that was years ago, before cancer killed Mookie at the nearly young age of fifty-one. His wife doesn’t like to talk about her sister’s death. “Why Mookie?” his wife is always asking. Meaning, why, of all names in the world for a bear, why that one? Ryan and Mookie (the bear) share many common interests: kites, Erector Sets, matches, magnifying glasses, flaming sticks, aerosol sprays. Ryan and Mookie (the aunt) never met unless you count the birth, and Flynn doesn’t, as his son was not then a real, thinking human animal.
Watching his son sleep—or rather, pretend to sleep—he swishes a toothpick back and forth across his lower lip. The toothpick is a sorry substitute for a cigarette. He rations out his pack across the week as a means of quitting, and he smoked the last of the day’s allowance at work.
Flynn is the activity director at an upscale drug and alcohol treatment center in the mountains, and as such, he arranges outings and adventures for patients—nature walks, movie screenings, theater performances, and so on. Today he drove a van full of recovering addicts to a chain bookstore, which would have been a pleasant excursion if not for the fact that one of the patients hadn’t shown up at the appointed time. The missing man—Small Paul with the needle marks between his toes, “Small” because you really could just about fold him into a shoebox—had checked himself in to the center voluntarily, but Flynn had still feared the worst. Along with a nurse he’d spent the rest of the afternoon going from store to store before finding Paul in a Sharper Image at the mall, testing out back massagers. “Already time to go back?” he asked when he saw them.
Flynn sits down on the end of the bed, and the boy’s eyes flicker open, then close again. His brown hair is wild and messy, the small snub nose just above the covers. He’s short for his age, just over four feet, but then again so was Flynn at nine.
“I don’t need to tell you I’m disappointed,” Flynn says. “Because you already know that.”
The closet door is decorated with Ryan’s old school paintings, and on the other side of that door, Flynn knows, there’s a black ring burned into the beige carpet, hidden by a doormat. Ryan is not a pyromaniac, or not yet, anyway. The doctor calls him a “fire-starter.” He’s more curious than compulsive.
“I’m sorry,” the boy says.
He wonders if it is because of his smoking. If the boy has seen him light too many matches. Does Flynn work too much? Does he not pay the boy enough attention? Should they be playing more catch? Does the boy need hobbies? Flynn’s father used to take him fishing and made him gut the fish in the sink behind the house, and at the time he’d hated it but looking back on it makes Flynn smile. Should he take Ryan fishing? Would he like to learn how to weight the line and wipe the gummy knife across his shirt? Is the boy bored? Is it a feeling of boredom? Is i
t a feeling of not belonging? When he looks inside his heart, does he see clouds or sunshine? Isn’t that how the doctor put it?
“This isn’t over,” Flynn says, giving his son’s foot a gentle squeeze, before going next door, to his wife’s room. The boxy television on the edge of her dresser flickers blue across her bedroom. They sleep separately because of the snoring. His snoring, not hers. She is asleep, or was, nestled in her mechanized queen bed with the hospital controls. She isn’t sick but kept the bed after Mookie died because, supposedly, it helps her back. He flips on her bedroom light, and she moans. She gives him a look like, Please, not tonight.
“He’s doing it again,” he says. “I don’t think he ever stopped. I think he’s been hiding it from us.”
She rummages for the control, and the bed vibrates into a sitting position. “We should call the doctor first thing,” she says.
“What, so he can squeeze another three hundred dollars from us?”
“The doctor said to call him.”
“He can’t fix the problem.”
“And the problem is—what?”
“The problem is a feeling. A feeling of not belonging.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means the boy needs friends. He needs to be included. You know, to really belong to something.”
Her bed vibrates backward into a reclining position.
“I’m going to sign us up,” he says. “For the Grasshoppers.”
“To be continued,” she says.
• • •
Grasshoppers aren’t allowed at the father-son Grasshopper Camp until they’ve been in the program for a full year and earned enough beads. Flynn learns this in one of their brochures. Unfortunately, he’s never even taken Ryan to a Grasshoppers meeting.
Flynn goes to see Bill Tierney, a malpractice attorney in town with an ad on the back of the phone book. Tierney’s son, Grayson, is older than Ryan, president of the student body at the elementary school—and a Grasshopper. Tierney is the Head Guide.
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