by Chris Lynch
Except, what idleness do we mean?
You know what they mean.
“Fair enough,” you say out loud. “Fair enough. I won’t be idle. Not anymore.”
So you go, or anyway, you attempt to go. Marching straight across the room, not stopping at your station, not cleaning up your wood shavings or shelving your important carving implements. You head for the door. You make the door. An achievement right there. You are through the door. You stand there, numbly. Now what? Now what, Will? What was the plan? What is the plan? On what impulse did you propel yourself through that room and out the other side, out into—what? Into nothing and nowhere? Do you think the people inside noticed your demonstration, of strength, clearheaded determination, and be-not-idleness?
Do you suppose you are missed?
Do you care?
You stand for a good full three minutes before turning and staring at the door you so proudly came out from. And you edge it open. Looking inside, looking at all the busy, not-so-busy, and idle beavers in the woody wood center, you notice.
You notice—that nobody notices.
You go back in.
“Come on,” you say to Angela.
“Come on, what?”
“Come on with me. Bug out.”
“It’s a little late for that. You’re already bugged out.”
“Come on, take a day off with me.”
“You are confused. I, unlike you, am here because I want to be here, remember? I have no reason to go.”
You wait on that. How many times does she have to remind you that you are confused?
“I’m asking you to go. That’s a reason.”
Angela stops gluing two bits of a spice rack together to look up at you. “You remain confused,” she says. Then she goes back to work. “Why don’t you just go back to work?”
How do you feel, Will? Go on now. You feel something. This is . . . your friend, right?
Right?
Or are you confused? Maybe we should pause. Have you got a friend here, Will? Or anywhere?
Why isn’t she up on her feet and traveling with you to a better place? Why isn’t she being not idle with you, rather than remaining locked in this mine chipping away at nothing, like everybody else? She knows better. Don’t you think she knows better? Isn’t that why you picked her out? Or did she pick you? Even more so then, if she picked you, she knows. She is different. What do you feel, Will? What do you feel?
Anything?
If it’s not friendship . . .
She told you, Will. Why don’t you listen? You should listen.
She’s a ghoul. Likes deadness. And you are dripping in it.
So maybe then, if you are causing death, attracting death, being death, you are of interest. And if you are a common confused young man who just can’t make his way . . . then don’t be wasting people’s time.
You listening for once? When are you going to listen?
“Okay,” you say softly. “Okay, I’ll just go by myself. See ya.”
“See ya,” she answers, just as airily.
Once again you are out there, out in the nowhere corridor with no one. Well, you are there, aren’t you, so you are not quite with no one. Never alone if you are with yourself, isn’t that right? And in the end,
and the beginning,
and all the days in between,
isn’t that really what it is anyway? That you are with yourself, alone. People are nearby, in front of your face or working shoulder to shoulder or whatever it is, but they are never really with you, are they? Nearby, that’s the best they can ever be. Not their fault. Nobody’s fault. Just the impossibility of it, is all.
But still you stand there, outside that door, and nobody else does. There are a good many bodies inside the room, but none where you are. No matter. You wouldn’t even be talking to any of them, but for the odd obligatory, are-you-using-that-planer-right-now type of shop exchange. They would just be bodies, near your body.
You stare ahead, away from the shop, toward the entire rest of the world beyond the shop. Where and what? Will? Where and what and why?
And then, you are back, through the door, to your station, on your stool. You have a block of soft pine in one hand. Turning it, turning it, before picking up a carving tool once you can see in there the shape of a blade of a whirligig.
• • •
There is, of course, another large and teary and entirely well-meaning demonstration of love and support for teenage casualty number two. There are flowers. There are teddy bears. There are balloons and notes and teenagers with, for a change, authentic reasons for stumbling across the brown river bridge looking dazed and confused.
And there is your monument to the meaning of it all.
Which is?
Will?
“Will?” Gran asks through the closed door of your room. She is very good, Gran, about respecting your privacy, your space as she so earnestly calls it. She respects your space in much the same way most people do these days, which is about the same way people respect the space of an electrified fence.
“Are you all right?” she asks in the warm and woolly tone between fondness and fear.
“I am, Gran, thanks.”
You give her as much reassurance as you can by raising the pitch of your voice without raising your head from the pillow and without offering the extra sentence or two that might actually relieve her concern. You know the scene, Will. You know the signs and the tip-offs as well as she does and you know why she is hovering and you could just as easily defuse the thing as let it burn on. You know these things now, just as everybody seems to know them now, just as nobody seemed to know them back before when the information might have done some good. You could make it better, if only a little better, but still you don’t. Why not? Why don’t you want it better?
“Do you want something to eat? I could fix you something to eat.”
“No, thank you, Gran. I’m fine.”
Like there. You could just let her do the fixing, as you know well how happy she is in the kitchen especially working on remedial nutrition for a bone rack like you. Busy hands. Being not idle, don’t you know. Or did you think that applied only to you? Did you think that, Will? That the whole show is a show? All the people around you, the grandparents and teachers and helping professionals and wood shop flotsam all set up for the purpose of sustaining the almost-life that is you? Did you ever consider that being not idle might apply to people who aren’t even you? Doesn’t mean you would have to actually eat the food.
“Gran?” you say.
“Yes?”
Do you hear that, Will? Do you hear the hope in her voice? Do you hear the power of the word, of your word, as she waits and wants and wishes to somehow be able to deliver? Go ahead, if you still won’t believe, run it again. Go on and roll a second time, ask, and listen to hear if Gran’s lips brush the door panel because she is listening so hard into you.
“Gran?”
“Yes?”
Yes.
“Do you think I could bring the small TV up here into my room?”
And you can hear that too, can’t you? You can hear quite clearly as that little bit of something whooshes out of her, like a puff of steam, when you ask for that next extra bit of isolation.
She wants to say no. You know she wants to say no. No would be good, helpful, right. See how it can all hinge on the smallest thing? You could have said, Sure, Gran, I’d love a sandwich, and who knows? She could, should now say, No, it would be unhealthy for you to lock yourself away with the television up here. You’d almost like her to say that, wouldn’t you?
Wouldn’t it be nice to hear no, at the right time?
“I suppose,” she says wearily. “I suppose, for a while anyway.”
Why? Why can’t we do what we know we need to do?
How do you suppose things would be different, if we could change one small thing in the sequence?
But the sequence continues, unchallenged, eh, Will? Can you not change i
t? Can we change sequences?
Do not look away this time, boy. Not this time.
“Thanks, Gran.”
• • •
Can you take somebody with you, do you think? When you go down there where you go, where you are now going. Do you have that kind of power, that your descent can pull someone else along?
Conspicuous in his silence since you have taken to your bed—isn’t that quaint, the way you can make that sound, taken to your bed—is Pops. Pops isn’t here. He’s there. Here and there may mean only the physical distance of the twenty-foot length of hallway between the two bedrooms, but here and there can be entire worlds apart, can’t they?
You have barely been aware of his presence through this, though Gran makes her infrequent kind fumbling attempts to coax you out into the light. You hear him, leaving the bathroom as you are about to use it yourself. You hurry, you make deliberate noise, he speeds up, and closes his bedroom door just as you open yours. You hover outside his door, to hear what you can hear. He could very well be holding his breath.
He will not be coming into your world, if this is what you choose to make of it. Know this. He won’t come near. He cannot. He is afraid, and will allow you to go there rather than risk reaching out and being pulled all the way under.
• • •
The bed is comfortable, the food robotically delivered by your grandmother is life-sustaining, even if you only consume the merest niblets of each dish of pasta alla olia with white beans or bowl of Tuscany tomato soup. You do not move around very much and therefore don’t sweat and therefore don’t need to shower as regularly as usual.
And anyway why would you need to go to the world when the world comes to you out of the box. Game shows and talk shows and soaps and game shows and talk shows. But that is all filler, in between news broadcasts. Broadcasts which cannot seem to avoid presenting the airbrushing of two otherwise unremarkable young folks as if it mattered.
Still investigating, the beautiful-haired television man says, the connection between the two deaths. What is not in question, however, is the magnificence of the tribute. Even tamped down into that small pixilated TV picture, that bridge scene is one breathtaking monument to young life that will stay young.
“Will?” It is your Gran. “Will?” she calls again. “You have company.” It is an effort for Gran not to sound giddy at this announcement, and she only partly manages it.
“No I don’t,” you say because the thought is simply too ludicrous to contemplate.
“Well . . . yes, I believe you do,” she says.
“No, I don’t think—”
“Hope you’re decent,” Angela says, “because I’m coming in there.”
Panic. Why? Didn’t you want to be missed? Weren’t you hoping that somebody would miss you if you removed yourself? Isn’t that, in fact, what people like you are up to?
That’s right, people like you. Don’t dare think there are none.
“So can I come in?”
“Can she? Can she come in, Will?” Gran adds with such unbridled hope in her voice that she somehow manages to make you appear even more pathetic than you are.
“Yes,” you sigh. You prop up in bed, rigid as a corpse at an old Irish wake. You make a dismal attempt at presentability, buttoning the top button of your N.Y. Yankees pajamas and smoothing your hair, which by now has become as moldable as Play-Doh.
All wasted effort anyway. Angela sweeps into the room and your Gran sweeps away from it just as conspicuously. Before you have even had the chance to apologize for the state of the place and the self, she is seated on the side of the bed, practically in contact with your blanketed hip, as casually as if you were working in shop. She doesn’t care a lick what you look like. Which is a good thing.
“So,” she says. “Having a little vacation, are you?”
“I guess,” you say. “Why are you here?”
“Jacks asked me to.”
“You? He did?”
Angela shrugs. “I’m the only person ever witnessed talking to you, so I suppose I was a natural choice.”
“Natural enough, I suppose.” You don’t like it, do you, Will? The clinical sound of it. You almost expect her to produce some Department of Social Services paperwork for you to sign, attesting to your still-alivability, so she can be on her way. So. What did you expect then? You make yourself a non-person flyspeck of a creature of no consequence, and then what? Long to be of consequence? You wanted maybe for her to come in on bended knee, begging you to rejoin the race? You wanted her to bring flowers from the class and balloons from Jacks and a teddy bear from the headmaster and a great big gigantic card signed by everyone you don’t know wishing you a speedy recovery and return? Well, unfortunately, you are a victim of your own success. You don’t hardly exist.
“Okay, it wasn’t only that Jacks asked me to do it. I also, maybe, felt a little responsible. Like, you know, the last time I saw you you were asking me to bag out of school with you and I said no. So I thought maybe you were, I don’t know, killing yourself over that.”
That may have been a joke. You have no idea.
“And you wouldn’t want to miss that,” you say flatly.
You look at her and she looks back. Refusing to respond. Refusing to acknowledge. Or to deny.
Fair enough.
You look at the TV, in that way that tells a person, without pointing or speaking, that you want them to look at what you are looking at. She does not need to be told twice.
“Ya, and there’s that,” she says sadly.
Then you both just watch. It lasts about a minute. Long by local news standards. This is big news in a small town.
“Sculpture looks nice, though,” she says. “Everybody says so.”
Everybody says so. Everybody is saying.
You look and look until the image goes away and an infomercial for revolutionary cookware replaces it.
You start nodding, nodding, agreeing with something, long before you begin speaking. She is watching you getting more sure of the agreement, nodding harder and quicker.
“You want me to go?” Angela asks.
You continue nodding.
“My dad drove off the road,” you say.
This is the first time you have yet caught Angela at all off guard. “Oh,” she says. She starts to say more, but says the same again. “Oh.”
“Into the water. With my stepmother.” You continue to nod, as if you are not telling the story but are instead listening to it, and agreeing with it.
“Oh. I’m, you know, sorry. Was this . . . do you mean, like, recently?”
You nod. “ ’Bout a year ago. He adored Sinatra. Sinatra died right after. The truth is I think my dad was some kind of carrier pigeon of death. The real surprise is that people around him actually lived, not that they died. Or maybe not surprise, maybe accident is a better word. Or mistake, even, is a better word.”
Angela looks sad. You had not achieved that before. How does that feel? Did you want that? Careless. It is easy to be careless, no?
“But he did love Sinatra, though. Loved him nuts.”
He certainly did.
“I’m sorry to hear.”
“You don’t like Sinatra?”
“No . . . sorry to hear, about the accident.”
“Wasn’t any accident.”
You do not know that. That is not knowable.
“ ’Scuse?”
“There was no good reason for them to have gone off the road. They could find no good reason for the crash. He just killed them both. They were only married a year, just like he was with my real mother before she died. Maybe there was, like, a time limit . . .” You shrug. Your great lying cowardly shrug.
What would they know, investigators, about good reasons? What would they know? What would you know?
“He thought he could fly, was the thing. He used to say that. That he could fly, was the thing. He used to say that. That he could fly, but he just didn’t know how. He was trying, I figure. He
wasn’t trying to hurt anybody. He was just trying to fly. I figure.”
He did say that, didn’t he? You remember that. You remember?
“Oh,” Angela says. Could be worse. She could be tripping over herself and saying “sorry” all over the place the way people do. Oh is okay. At least it doesn’t sound like pity, does it? Listen close, Will, because it matters. Does it sound like pity, coming out of this one?
“So that’s why you’re crazy then?” she says casually.
Not pity. Isn’t that a relief?
“Yes,” you allow. “I suppose that is why.”
She nods. “You’re one up on most of us. Least you know your reason.”
She looks all around your room. Even you are aware of the stagnant quality of the air and the weird way everything regardless of its actual hue seems to look yellow. What is she thinking? Can you imagine?
“So, you really want to stay in here?” she asks.
You shake your head.
Before she proceeds any further, she gets a bit of a worry flickering across her face. “Listen,” Angela says, and wouldn’t you swear if you closed your eyes that she was speaking to more than one person? “Don’t go misunderstanding. I don’t want you thinking that we’re going to wind up going to proms together and shit, because that’s not going to happen. Right?”
“Right.”
“I just figure a soul that’s destitute enough to attend track practices is a soul that could use a hand up. Right?”
“Right.”
This is reasonable enough. Angela is quite clear on the subject of not having much use for people. You are quite clearly not much of a person. Match made in heaven.
You get up, look about the room for clothes.
“Um,” she says politely, “you will be showering, I assume.”
You look down at yourself, as if that will tell you anything.
“I wasn’t planning to.”
She shakes her head. “Whatever. Just don’t be getting too close to me. You’re kind of ripe.”
You wander the room, collecting bits of clothing from various surfaces, gathering them up in your arms in an aromatic lump that even you have to admit bears a strong resemblance to the laundry pile. You stop, stare.
