Freebird

by John Raymond

  The silence of his grandfather’s house was usually very simple in its tedium. Aaron was well accustomed to the long minutes of no talking, the hours of dull nothingness. But on this day, after driving home on I-5 empty-handed and humiliated, crushed on either side by the expanses of the central Valley, the silence seemed somehow shameful, an unbroken note of remorse and self-reproach.

  “Should I turn off the heat?” Aaron asked.

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Still hungry?”

  “I’m fine, sweetheart. Don’t worry.”

  In the last days of their Oakland trip, exactly nothing worthwhile had happened. The police hadn’t returned their calls, and the newspaper had carried a single item, a novelty paragraph in the crime pages, not as though anyone read the newspaper, anyway. As the hours in the hotel had crawled along, they’d almost been able to feel the gold dispersing out into the world, getting pawned for video-game consoles or zirconium necklaces, exchanged for stereos and guitar amps, transformed into meth and Molly, never to return.

  Aaron had made one more trip to the Bagel Café, hoping to trade a few words with the employees in private. He’d cornered one of the Mexican dishwashers, a hulking man with a hair net over his face like a funeral veil, but the language barrier had been too steep. The guy had no idea what Aaron wanted, and, sadly, neither exactly did Aaron. He’d talked to the other waitresses, but they were generally cold, protecting their friend. If they knew anything, they’d pledged to keep quiet about it. He’d even talked to Kari herself, the culprit, invading her space as long as he could bear and trying to wheedle any kind of information out of her, whether indicting or exonerating, he didn’t care.

  “Look, someone stole his gold,” he said. “I’m not saying it was you. But if you have any ideas, I just want to know what they might be . . .”

  Kari walked the tables before opening, collecting half-empty ketchup bottles and carrying them to the counter for refilling. “Get out of here,” she said. “If I knew anything, I would’ve told the cops, all right?”

  “Maybe there’s something you’re forgetting,” Aaron said. He watched her closely for any signs of deceit, not that he was sure what those signs would be. Shifty eyes? Nervous tics? The sudden dampening of her armpits? “If you could just talk it through with me, maybe you’d remember. Where were you when it happened? What did you see?”

  “I didn’t see shit.”

  He left in disgust. If she was too ignorant, or uncaring, or worse, to comprehend his family’s tragic story, he couldn’t get through to her. He and his grandpa had spent another day watching TV, fielding worried calls and texts from his mom, before giving up and driving home. And now here they were, puttering in the same, silent, miserable, defeated house. He’d never thought he’d miss the old, merely uncomfortable silence, but he’d trade it for this grievous silence, swimming with anger and regrets, any day.

  “I just can’t fucking believe it, you know?” Aaron said without any prompting, while his grandpa went through the junk mail. “What the fuck is wrong with people, Grandpa? Shit.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” his grandpa said. “Truly, it doesn’t.”

  “It does matter, though,” Aaron said. “It matters. A lot.”

  “It’s only money, sweetheart. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

  “It’s a lot more than that.”

  His grandfather didn’t reply. He was beyond caring, as he had been almost from the start. After the first night he’d given up and stayed in Dublin only because of Aaron’s wishful thinking. He just sat in his chair and looked through the envelopes, settling back into his familiar home life. But Aaron didn’t want to leave the subject of their trip undiscussed. He wanted his grandfather to know how deeply he was in this with him. He wanted him to understand that all the shame and disappointment he might be feeling was also Aaron’s shame and disappointment. But it wasn’t easy to express anything like that in words.

  “I know it’s only money,” Aaron said. “But that’s really fucked, too, don’t you think? Why do people need the money that badly? Why is that how everything is organized? Money. And some people don’t have it. I don’t even blame the people who took it, exactly. Whoever took it, I don’t know, maybe they needed it. I blame everything. Life is just fucked.”

  His grandfather continued looking through the envelopes that had stacked up in his absence. There were coupons, fund-raising pleas from Greenpeace and B’nai B’rith, and mostly yellow and green and white envelopes from credit card companies and insurance conglomerates, fishing for the octogenarian suckers of the world. Grandpa Sam piled his envelopes into a neat stack on the end table, refusing to throw them in the garbage, where they belonged, and as he shuffled for the bathroom, he mumbled something in Aaron’s general direction. Aaron asked him to say it again, and he spoke up a little louder.

  “Life is good,” he said. “That’s all I know, honey. Life is good. It’s good to remember.”

  For once, Aaron was the one who said nothing. How did one respond to a platitude like that? The words just hung there, inert. “Life is good.” He’d seen the movie with that Italian actor, Benigni. Or “Life is sweet”? “Beautiful”? Whatever.

  He watched his grandpa hobble unsteadily to the bathroom, carefully setting his envelopes on his bureau for later review. Grandpa Sam didn’t know much, Aaron thought. He was pretty ignorant of the whole modern society that surrounded him, technologically illiterate. He told terrible jokes to waitresses in diners, and he was politically out of whack, a one-issue Zionist. But on this topic, maybe he possessed an unassailable authority. On this one, gigantic, all-encompassing topic, he might be irrefutably wise. If he said life was good, then it was true, life was good. Aaron was willing to take it as the only undeniably true thing his grandfather had ever told him.

  He drove home and found his mom sitting in the living room, staring at her computer screen. She closed the shell as he stepped inside and got up to hug him, smothering him with her smiling, grateful, unconditional attention.

  “You’re home!” she said. “How was it? Tell me everything! I want to hear all about the trip.”

  “It was okay,” Aaron said, enduring her hug with his backpack still strapped to his shoulder. He’d been hoping to avoid a lengthy debriefing. The familiar smell and temperature of his house was already causing him itchiness to leave.

  “What happened?” she asked, sitting on the couch with an expectant look in her eyes. “You guys have been gone for days. I’m so curious.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Aaron said. “We just, like, you know, drove up there and came back.” He didn’t even know where to start.

  “Did you get a flat tire or something? Is that what you said? Something must’ve happened.”

  “Yeah, I guess. I mean, not really.”

  “Did you see his old house?”

  “No. We mostly just sat in the hotel. Watched TV.”

  “Did you . . . talk?”

  “A little.”

  “Well, that’s good, I guess. Hey, what happened to your lips?”

  “Nothing!”

  She looked hurt by his anger, but he didn’t know what to do about that. It wasn’t his job to satisfy her every emotional need. He stalked to the kitchen and made himself a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich that he carried directly to his room, and he shut the door.

  Lying on his bed, he wondered why the mere idea of sharing his thoughts with his mother seemed so repellent to him. He wasn’t afraid of her judgment. He didn’t think that she’d punish him or think less of him for anything he might say. If anything, it was exactly the opposite of that. He was afraid she’d love everything he told her so much, she’d never let him stop. She would drink it up so thirstily, he’d be stuck feeding her the rest of his life.

  So instead of saying anything, he listened to the Velvet Underground, cranking his speakers so that the room filled with the throbbing drone. He lay there on the bed, communing with the guitars, the arrogant, inc
antatory vocals, and lost himself in the glittering dust motes near his head.

  He stayed home only a few hours before going out again, this time to meet Joel at a diner in Chinatown. At last, given the chance to recount the whole adventure to an interested third party, he blossomed into a storyteller, and he was pleased by the loyal amazement his friend displayed in return. Joel seemed intuitively to understand all the sickening ironies of the Oakland experience, all the depths of evidence about how fucked up the world truly was. He was an expert in the nuances of the absurd.

  “It is unreal, dude,” Joel said, grinning. “Out of control! Gold.”

  “No shit, right?” Aaron said. His Budweiser was almost gone, and he wasn’t sure whether to try his luck ordering another. He didn’t want to push it with his flimsy fake ID. He’d already told Joel everything, from the factory farm to the fight in Kari’s front yard, leaving out no detail except for the part about jacking off in the bathroom at that crucial moment. That passage had been revised into a very long shit on his part.

  “I can’t believe it,” Joel said. “The widow . . .”

  “I know.”

  “And, most of all, I can’t believe your grandpa wanted to listen to Steppenwolf.”

  “That was very possibly the most terrifying part.”

  They talked it all through again, the fight with Scott, the red wave of rage that had crashed over him. And, as usual with Joel, the talk eventually turned to Mexico and their coming trip. How incredibly pathetic was it, he wanted to know, that no one besides them seemed to have even the slightest desire to go down there and see the true country for themselves? He wasn’t talking about Cancún or TJ, but the real pueblos of the nation’s heartland. Considering how utterly dependent Americans were on the people and culture of Mexico—not just on the guys who came up looking for jobs, but on the whole families and extended families and communities they left behind—everyone in America should be mandated to drive around down there and pay homage. Joel topped off his revolution talk by revealing he’d found another van for sale. They should go look at it soon, before someone else beat them to the punch.

  Aaron said okay in his usual tone of near commitment, still unsure what he wanted to do. He definitely didn’t want to mention that he had a plan with Karl in a few weeks to see a sun dance on a mesa in Indio. It was going to be a very special performance, Karl claimed, a true urban tribal sun dance ritual, complete with a guy impaling his nipples with hooks and attaching himself to a tree and dancing his way outward until the rings broke through his flesh. The invitation had arrived through Karl’s friend Monica, and the gathered crowd would be among the royalty of L.A.’s underground, the very community of fascinating personages that would swirl around the sunporch on a nightly basis. Karl was working on scoring them peyote for the soiree.

  Aaron parted with Joel and drove back home, still not ready to go inside the house. Instead, he walked around the neighborhood, peering in windows, thinking. Nothing about the future had gotten any clearer since Oakland. He was still the same mealy, indecisive, superficial person he’d been a week ago.

  A part of him wished his dad were still at home. He wished he could walk into the living room and find Barry lying there on the couch with his rum and Coke on his stomach, ready to lay down his abstract wisdom. Not that he couldn’t predict what Barry would say in this particular situation—i.e., nothing helpful whatsoever. “This is the kind of decision a guy has to figure out for himself, right? You don’t really want anyone else making your big decisions for you, do you?” Then he’d flip sides on his Captain Beefheart record and pour himself another drink. But still, it would have been nice to hear it from his dad in person.

  When he reached the 7-Eleven, he figured he’d turn around and start back to his darkened house. He wandered past the empty park again, the sleeping fire station, these streets he’d walked almost every day of his life, and wondered if they all led to the same place in the end. To a land of enchantment or a land of righteousness, or some incredible combination thereof. To a land of bitterness and desperation. They might lead to some country he’d never heard of before, some island he could never chart. They all led toward something called manhood, whatever that meant. He could feel it out there, just around the bend, and fuck if he knew what kind of man he wanted to be.

  22

  Mark gave great PowerPoint. He was a master of the technology, in complete command of the moving boxes, darting arrows, cascading bullet points, and subdividing frames within frames, at all times ready with a steady patter of anecdotes and jokes sprung from the graphical interface. He delivered his rap on the glories of cavitation with great ease and transparent organization. But at the same time, he was not too slick or too practiced in his talking, not full of obvious bullshit. He didn’t use the empty jargon of the faker.

  His audience, admiring his skill, rewarded him with its rapt attention. They laughed at all the appropriate moments, scribbled notes during the information-rich passages. It wasn’t an easy crowd, either. Seated around the conference table in this plush, flickering cave in the upper aeries of city hall were Charlie Arnold, commissioner of Sanitation, Randy Lowell, senior city councilman, and the mayor’s chief of staff, Bill Bailey, whose authority in the mayor’s office was unquestioned. Each was a king of his own fiefdom, and each was ensconced in his own executive throne, equipped with a perfect-bound book filled with four-color infographics as a take-away prize—the Document. Simply getting these men in the same room at the same time had been a superhuman feat of scheduling, and the idea of pleasing them all en masse was a feat of nearly impossible charisma. A labor for a modern-day Hercules. But here was Mark, modern Hercules, pleasing them all.

  “The water wars are not a question of if, but when,” he said, images of postapocalyptic armies limping through desert landscapes flashing behind him. Road Warrior, with Mel Gibson wreathed in smoke from oil fires on the horizon; Waterworld, with Kevin Costner drinking his own urine on his catamaran; Dune, with Kyle MacLachlan riding the sandworm.

  “I like that guy,” Mark said, and paused to point out a screaming, flailing figure deep in the background of a Soylent Green still. He seemed to be doing the splits. “James Brown, seventies apocalypse version.”

  He paused for an appreciative burble of laughter from the paladins and continued, asserting that humanity was on the cusp of a global war over the one truly precious substance on earth, the substance of life itself, and that it was a war that would make the wars over the other stuff—gold, land, and oil—look quaint in comparison. He alluded to a few of the crazy water-hoarding schemes of the past, like shipping blocks of ice from the Arctic to the Arabian Peninsula, or damming giant rivers until their flows were reversed, to illustrate the postulate that the winners of the water wars would be those states and municipalities that had started planning for the crisis thirty years ago, while those communities that were just figuring out the stakes were basically already fucked.

  The homework had been well done, if Anne did say so herself. The audience didn’t seem to notice the scarf work, the sleight of hand. They had no idea the boxes flashing on the screen were in fact empty boxes, the diagrams mere fiction. Around the conference table they stared at Mark and his screen, grinning like idiots.

  “Hydrodynamic cavitation probably sounds like another crazy scheme, I’m sure. What is cavitation? Cavitation refers to the formation and immediate implosion of small cavities in a liquid. These liquid-free pockets are also known, more commonly, as bubbles. So cavitation refers to the making and collapsing of bubbles to create shock waves of energy that can be harnessed in any number of ways. There are applications for wastewater purification and also for alternative energy production. We’ve been making some enormous leaps lately. Quantum leaps.”

  Now Mark was entering the most treacherous passage, exiting the soft, irrefutable social-theorizing section and traveling into the unforgiving plains of hard science. He moved lightly through the minefield, talking briefly about orif
ices and venturi, inertial and noninertial reference frames, and disambiguation, delivering pithy, impressionistic explanations of the tangled equations that materialized and disintegrated on the screen. And then, soon enough, he was out of the desert and back onto gentler terrain, talking abstractly again, if not poetically, about the promise of the future, the challenge of sloughing off humankind’s historical aversion to reused water, the imperative of evolving into the next golden chapter of civilization.

  The pale light of the screen shifted on the dark walls. The men’s faces were unreadable. Anne’s skin prickled with heat. The lie was fully in blossom now, unfurling its dark petals. And Mark muscled through toward the end, subliminally pitching his talk in the direction of the city councilman, Randy. He knew Charlie had already been bought. He was getting his sustainability czar. He knew the mayor would accept his subordinate’s judgment. He loved the secrecy as much as the promise. The one who needed convincing was the bulldog, Randy Lowell.

  “This is next-level technology,” Mark said. “Not only will the hydrodynamic cavitation reactor create an incredible new surplus of usable water for the city; it will also create hundreds, if not thousands, of family-wage jobs. The implementation of BHC’s project, when it comes—and it will come soon; it’s only a matter of some final confirming experiments—will place the City of Los Angeles at the forefront of a new wave of green technology.”

  His next bullet point materialized on screen, a dollar sign.

  “The revenue we predict the program will generate is somewhere in the region of five hundred million dollars a year. The city shares in that revenue at a level commensurate with its investment. This amounts to a lot of discretionary funding for schools, roads, whatever the city leadership chooses.

  “And this is the killer thing,” he said, summoning his final bullet point and staring directly at Randy Lowell’s shadowy chair. “This city won’t ever need to worry about federal clean-water standards again.”