Freebird

by John Raymond

  He hiked past a giant pile of broken limestone, an alien stretch of eggshell brittleness, and the border of a pristine salt flat, barely noticing the wonders of color and light that surrounded him. All he could think about was dinner. Why had he ever said he’d go? It was a terrible idea. What he really needed to do was stay put. He needed to remain exactly where he was, keeping exactly the same quiet schedule. He needed to wake up with the pale moon and spend the afternoon observing the sprawling ants and make conversation with the occasional tarantula and horned lizard, if he felt so moved. What he didn’t need was to go into the city for dinner. Not when he’d been loving his family so perfectly from afar.

  At a boulder with a mashed face, he descended into a canyon’s balm of shadow, emerging onto a patch of powdered earth where his RV waited. He’d chosen the spot for practical reasons—easily defensible, a safe five hundred meters from the main road, well beyond the accuracy range of an M16 or M4 carbine—but he’d come to appreciate it for the ancient walls and clean, sandstone smell. With a blast of sun-heated water from the plastic bladder on the roof, he rinsed the dust and sunscreen off his body, and then he stood still, allowing the air to swarm him gently from all sides. He saw no way out. His family would never forgive him if he failed to show. It was so ironic, then, he thought, that the very desert silence that had nursed him back to health was already pushing him back into the cruel static of the grid. The silence had been too strong, too healing. And so it was with a forlorn sense of duty that he stepped into his trailer and slid on his slacks and cross-trainers, suiting up for dinner with all the grim discipline and conservation of motion of going into battle.

  Half an hour on the road, and the billboards were back, blaring their news of fast food, Indian casinos, and top-forty radio stations, their endless, unabashed promises leading always to exactly the same horseshit. Mile by mile, the grid took him in. After a life of blindness, he saw the grid in all its accreting history now. The grid of power. The grid of entertainment. The grid of mindless consumption. “The grid” was no longer even the right phrase, was it? It had evolved into something not so gridlike at all. An organic creature, curvaceous and multidimensional. A bulging, Day-Glo, genetically engineered octopus with wet tentacles snaking everywhere, sucking the world of its nutrients. Although maybe that wasn’t right, either, he thought. “Octopus” made the grid sound too sentient, too conscious. The grid was a zombie, a frictionless fractal of sound and color, as dead as a kaleidoscope.

  He curled down the San Bernardino Freeway, cresting the San Gabriels into the grid’s very belly, the diamond fields of Los Angeles herself, her lights just shivering to life beneath the scurf of orange-brown sunset. Speeding along 101, he scanned the eight million lights for Anne’s light. One of the lights was hers and one of them was his dad’s and one of them was his old friend Bill Wren’s. It was strange to think how every point of light out there marked the home of a sister or a daughter, a grandfather or a girlfriend, that singly each dot of light housed the promise of love. And yet, collected together, draining energy from faraway dams, hollowing out the very guts of the world, the lights became something decidedly other than love. The lights became a pox on the land. How? How did the singular points of decency add up to this collective evil? Where did the toxin enter the system? One person, one light—that was fine. Two people were fine. Maybe three was the number of avarice and destruction. That was occult, kabbalistic thinking, he knew, but he couldn’t get the thought out of his head. Three was the tipping point. Three was the warp in the math. One plus one plus one added up to society, and society was a disease, without mind or morality.

  As he entered Echo Park, the traffic gathered on every side, and suddenly the racing electrons of L.A. jumped in amplitude. He’d tried to prepare himself, but the onslaught still took him by surprise. Drifting along with the traffic, he wished only that he could turn back and take refuge in the silent desert again, already pierced by the knowledge that the desert had allowed him to forget—namely, that he’d left L.A. to avoid committing some terrible act.

  He made his way to Anne’s street and beached his car at the curb. Mercifully, her neighborhood was quiet and still. Anne’s house was a modest Spanish bungalow, a little white cake of stucco fronted by a lima-bean lawn, bowered by eucalyptus and figs. The neighbor’s rock wall made a tidy border. Here was a modest American life with some dignity and grace.

  Ben sat in his car, trying to catch his breath. His sister would see through him in this racked state, he knew. She would see everything, just as she always had. His dad would also see through him, see what he’d become. Maybe it wasn’t too late to call in sick, he thought. He could tell her he had food poisoning or strep throat. Maybe he could drive away and ram the car into a wall, call from the hospital. That seemed a bit extreme. Why couldn’t he just open the door and walk up the path?

  He was still trying to send signals of strength into his arm, telling it to go ahead and pry open the door’s latch, when Anne materialized on the front steps. Her slim shadow was unmistakable in the golden light, that cocked hip and bowed leg. At the sight of his sister’s telltale posture, he was reinvigorated. His days-long torment magically lifted. What had he been thinking? It was her! His sister. His dear sister, his precious older sister, his person, his puzzle. The one who’d shared the woolen blanket on Saturday mornings at the heater vent near the wooden stairs. The one who’d fought for the tapioca in the fluted cups in the yellow refrigerator. The person he loved more than life itself.

  He pushed himself out of the car and strode up the walk, and before he knew it he was taking Anne in his arms, feeling the delicate bones in her back, so light they almost seemed hollow, breathing in her smell of cornmeal and a hint of cilantro. He could have stood there hugging her for a year and a half, crushing her gently into his chest, but eventually he had to step back and face her, beaming. He stared into her hazel eyes, feeling her hands on his forearms, relishing the last moments before the pure, natural, unblemished love between them would have to be tested.

  “About fucking time,” she said.

  “Missed you, too, sis.”

  “Drive okay?”

  “Pretty much. I got here anyway.”

  “Feel those muscles. You are such a specimen.”

  More hugging and laughter ensued. Hugging of his nephew, utterly transformed in five years, and hugging of his dad, undeniably old, and then a tumble inside the house, into Anne’s bastion of superliberalism. In a blur, Ben caught sight of rice-paper lamp shades, hanging Paraguayan rugs, the framed woodblock print of the organizer Joe Hill. Even the beer was leftist, a thick brown bottle decorated with hand-tooled vines, emitting a perfume of molasses and gardenias, so unlike the piss water favored by the studs of the military.

  “So how long are you around, anyway?” she asked. “I guess you’re on leave or something? Between assignments?”

  “More like retired,” he said, pulling on the welcome beer. “I’ve been out for a few months already. Just taking it easy for a while. Figuring things out.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s big news. Where’ve you been?”

  “Around.”

  “You could have called.”

  “Well . . . you know . . .”

  “You’d have to kill me if you told me what you were doing? Top secret? Is that it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well. But I hope we get to see a little more of you. That’d be really nice.”

  The task of establishing the night’s chemistry fell to the siblings, which only made sense. Aaron was practically a stranger to Ben, whereas Ben’s dad was like a mute rock, giving nothing except the simple fact of himself, which—if you were willing to understand it as the deepest, most unconditional stolidity and love, merely expressed on a frequency far below any human sensory perception—was generally enough. There would never be any surprises or tests from his dad. They would always pick up in the same wordless place they’d left off. He didn’t even
need to go home to know that.

  So for the benefit of the generations on either side, Ben and Anne performed their rapport. Anne started by asking him about work and former classmates, and he asked her about work and real estate. They talked about the weather. And soon enough, unsurprisingly, questions of politics were finding their way into the conversation. It was a topic they’d been debating for many years, across many administrations and many wars, with rare moments of accord, and, although he didn’t want to get into it now, to quit at this point would almost be strange.

  “How go the wars?” Anne asked him, jauntily. “How are all those hearts and minds in Afghanistan doing, little brother?”

  “They seem all right,” he said, mumbling into his beer. “Like you read in the papers. You know.”

  “Papers lie,” she said. “Come on, Ben. Give us the real shit.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m out of it.”

  “Oh, come on, give us something. You were there a long time. We want to be educated.”

  He shrugged and drank. She was trying to be light, he knew, expressing interest in what she thought of as his area of expertise, but the undercurrent of judgment was impossible to miss. She just couldn’t help herself. She had to jockey for the ultimate angle, almost without knowing she was jockeying. She was a bottomless geology of love and judgment, layer upon layer, the bedrock, after all these years, still yet to be touched.

  “Don’t disappoint Aaron,” she pushed. She was on the couch with her feet tucked under her legs, the very picture of domestic comfort and leisure. “I told him you were a master of the game. I told him there’s probably nobody better at it in the whole world.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “Yes, you do! You practically invented the game!”

  “I don’t know what game you mean.”

  “You know. The Most Dangerous Game.”

  At these words Ben inwardly moaned with dismay. Now he understood what she was talking about. She was casting back thirty years, to that fateful night in the family van, on the way home from her volleyball practice, the heat of a Round Table pizza box seeping into his knees, the night he’d made the joke about someday wanting to hunt human beings. It was a joke that had never been forgotten. It had just been a stupid, passing, teenage thing to say, with no significance other than mild shock value. They’d read the story in English class that week, and everyone was making the same crack. And yet Anne had filed it away as ironclad evidence of his essential blood thirst. Ever since, she’d held him to that stupid, insignificant moment. “How’s the people hunting?” “Bag any humans in Baghdad this year?” He wondered how much of his life had been a response to her withering, unfair judgment. How many sacrifices had he made just to prove her wrong?

  “Your mom thinks she’s really hilarious,” he told Aaron.

  “No kidding,” Aaron said.

  “Does she get up your ass all the time, too?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Oh please,” Anne said. “Don’t be such pussies. I thought my guys were supposed to be tough.”

  Mercifully, the buzzer on the oven went off, and the theater of conversation shifted to the kitchen, where Anne and Aaron began chopping onions and peppers and kindly shouldered the conversational yoke for a while. In the lair of hanging copper skillets and dangling garlic ropes, they rambled over topics of easy familiarity like Aaron’s teachers and his friends’ drug use and sexual proclivities, keeping everything nice and breezy, if extremely local in reference, and Ben gladly took the chance to drift into his own private lagoon of reflection.

  Aaron was handy with a chopping knife, he noted, as an only child of a single mom should be. He also noted that Aaron’s child’s body had molted since the last visit, evolving into the body of a tall, thin young man. His face didn’t look much like Anne’s, Ben thought, the Polish and Hungarian Jew features a fleeting shadow from certain angles, at best, but his dad’s face, as he recalled it, was deeply imprinted. The face of the blond, bum surfer, the uprooted Okie fried by the western sun. It looked as if Aaron would end up with his father’s perfect Aryan proportions when he filled out, too, probably also his dad’s haplessness and sloth. What a burn, he thought, that that loser had somehow asserted genetic dominance in the pool.

  And his own dad: he was so old. Off in the corner he sat in pathetic isolation. He’d never been a big talker, but he’d at least been a vigorous, healthy presence in a room. In the past years his skin had turned papery and sallow. His eyes were puffy and muddled. His body, once a solid boulder of muscle, was more like a sandbag, with much extra heft sagging around the midsection. Even his clothes—stained Old Navy sweats and a wash-worn T-shirt—were a downgrade from the old days of perma-pressed pants and flammable leisure shirts. Ben wanted to pull Anne aside and ask her about his health, his memory, his general state of mind, but he didn’t see how.

  Gazing at his dad’s down-turned face, feeling the realness of his physical presence, Ben sensed the ghosts returning again, more of them than he’d ever seen in one place. It was a whole crowd of shadow-gutted faces this time. Eyeless, voiceless faces, wavering in the air, shooting razors of pain straight into his skull. The pain was probing and fantastic. Webs of pain winding through his brain’s nerves. Ben knew he was the only one in touch with the ghosts, but it was difficult to keep acting normal. The ghosts clustered around his dad’s body, offering up their premonitions or memories or warnings or curses—Ben had no clue. He tried to listen to the words flowing between his sister and his nephew, but nothing could really penetrate the sizzling in his head. Who were they? Ben wondered. He could barely see them through his watering eyes. The pain tolled in his head like a bell. They wouldn’t stop coming around. And now they had some kind of designs on his family.

  It was the tacos that finally brought him back into the moment. Gusts of beef brisket were wafting through, and after a month of protein shakes, jerky, and convenience-store bananas, the smell held an even stronger power than ghosts. Shakily, Ben managed to dig a chip into Anne’s homemade salsa, tasting chipotle and jalapeño, and forced the ghosts back into the walls. To keep things going in the right direction, he tried joining the conversation, thinking this might be a good time to establish some avuncular connection with his nephew.

  “So hey, Aaron,” he said, wiping his eyes, “you have a girlfriend these days or something?”

  “Uh, no,” Aaron said.

  “No? How come?” He wasn’t asking in a pointed way, but only out of curiosity. He realized the interrogation was probably no fun for Aaron, but he had no other great moves. What was an uncle supposed to do?

  “I don’t know,” Aaron said.

  “I mean, you’re a good-looking kid.”

  “Eh.”

  “Shit, I wouldn’t worry about it,” Ben said. He dipped two chips at once and scarfed them down. “I never had a lot of girlfriends at your age, either. Girls scared the shit out of me back then, to be honest. I mean, they didn’t scare me”—he checked himself, wanting to be precise for his nephew’s ravening teenage mind—“they just bored me. I guess that was it. It wasn’t their fault. They just didn’t share my interests.”

  “Ha! I’ll say,” Anne cut in. “Judo and staff fighting? Not a lot of teenage girls in those dojos of yours. What about you, though, Ben? Any romance in your life these days? What’s going on in that department for you?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “No?”

  “Uh-uh. It never really seemed like a good idea, what with the career and all.”

  “Oh, come on . . .”

  “No, it’s true. I see all the guys in the forces getting married, and it’s always so much crap. They don’t give a shit about their women. They like the idea of a little lady back home, but the truth is, actually sitting there on a lawn with their kids and their neighbors is like death to them. Worse than war. They don’t have the guts to deal with the boredom of family life, you know? No inner resources
. Anyway, I never wanted to treat a woman like that. Better just to get whores.”

  “Uh . . .”

  Anne and Aaron were staring at each other, and Ben understood he’d gone too far. “Anyway,” he said. “You playing any sports, Aaron?”

  “No.”

  “Any plans after graduation?”

  “Not really.”

  Ben loaded another chip and gave up. Better to let his nephew return to mincing peppers into atom-sized bits. He could tell from Anne’s scrupulously blasé chopping that he’d hit on a household nerve with the postgraduation question, and he was tempted to keep exploring the sore spot but figured for Aaron’s sake he should probably back off. Instead he fetched his fourth beer, brewed, he found, near the Russian River in Mendocino County by grateful, anticonglomerate artisans who enjoyed hang gliding and rock climbing on days off. Beer was proving a good antidote to ghosts.

  Anne’s tacos turned out to be much more elaborate than their mom’s had been. They’d eaten her tacos as a twice-weekly staple, but there was no crumbled Safeway hamburger or canned refried beans here. Instead it was organic beef, heirloom beans, handmade tortillas, and guacamole with many minuscule flecks of seasoning. And yet, still, the sight of the old family meal made Ben’s nerves tingle hotly in his nose and eyes, bringing on a shot of consciousness around the tragic endurance of his motherless family, how inconsolably they all still missed her. “The tacos look amazing,” he said, and Anne patted him on the shoulders, understanding, or not, the rich depths of the compliment.