You see, Juan-George, people tend to be impressed with complex ideas, but the basic questions are the hardest part, the basic questions are the most difficult challenge to any serious thinker. Answers get all of the glamour and attention, answers are what everyone seems to be after, but the real value is in basic questions. This is because once you have an answer you stop, you’re done, but life doesn’t stop, you become a plaster statue, life begins to pass you by, only by asking questions can you keep moving, and only by asking the right questions can you keep moving in the right direction. Or to put it simply, to put it in clear and concise terms, you have a choice, you can either feel smart or be smart.
The next day I sleepwalked through work, nobody noticed. Then Aunt Liz dropped me at the Lighthouse Fellowship for a scheduled Bible group. The discussion topic was Letting Go, Letting God, and it was about how God has a plan for every one of us, and how we can try to fight it but in the end we must all submit to his will. I hadn’t expected to engage in the conversation, I had planned to sit in the circle of uncomfortable chairs and nod from time to time while my mind wandered elsewhere. I was only counting down the hours before I could get back up in the ceiling again and help Paul advance thinking for the sake of mankind. But some of the talking made its way into my ears, and all the references to God’s plan reminded me of a boy I knew in Madera when I was younger. He and I had been friends, I mean I was friends with everyone, this was before I became a shield, this was when we were very young, our lives were just getting started. He had a baby sister, they were playing at a winery with some other kids, and I don’t know exactly what happened but the baby sister stepped into a puddle, which turned out to be deeper than anyone thought, and she drowned, she was two years old, it was terrible. I don’t need to tell you every tragedy I’ve heard of, turn on the news, they keep coming, I don’t mean to add to your burden, I mention Natalie’s death only because if God indeed has a plan for everyone, then what kind of plan is living for two years before drowning in a muddy puddle? Since it was already in my head, I mentioned this story to the Bible group. Jan’s face turned red and she started to pick at her Band-Aids. Mark, who was leading the group, who was what JB would have called the facilitator, responded to the story of Natalie’s death in the strangest way, everyone else looked sad, nobody likes to hear about that sort of thing, everybody looked sad and made faces of sympathy, they made faces that told me it would be okay if I got emotional, they made faces of support, but Mark’s face was something different altogether. Mark’s wiglike hair migrated farther back on his head, his eyebrows raised, and he looked like I’d just offered him a cookie or a hundred dollars. I had brought up, he said, something he had been wanting to talk about, I had brought to the table the exact question he wanted to address, and I had done it better than he ever could have, he had been planning to talk about an earthquake in Portugal, I had made it personal. If indeed we are living according to God’s plan for us, Mark said, then why is there suffering in the world? A seeming paradox, Mark said, he had a thing for paradoxes, and yet the answer was simple, Mark said, so simple many people missed it completely, the answer was best phrased in the form of a question, Mark said, or two questions, which were, Who are you to question God’s plan? Is your wisdom infinite like God’s wisdom? Everyone around the table agreed that Mark had made a good point, that there must be some reason for suffering, known only to God, something we couldn’t see from where we were standing, so to speak. Now I don’t claim to know everything, Juan-George, in fact, I claim to know very little, my areas of expertise are limited and very small, but it seems to me much more reasonable to say that there is no plan, that the reason Natalie drowned had nothing to do with God’s will, it was an accident, it happened because she didn’t know how deep the puddle was and didn’t know how to swim and her big brother was distracted pulling apart a pomegranate. Why am I here in this hospital bed, dying of my injuries, shortly before you are scheduled to arrive? Is it so important to God that we do not meet? I am interested, I have always been interested in trying to make sense of the world, your grandfather was always interested in it, too, and even more so in trying to make the world fair, to make it a fair place, but life is unfair, usually, and sometimes an accident is just an accident. Mark talked about Natalie, who he had never met, and about earthquakes, I can’t count how many times he used the phrase needless suffering. He smiled when anyone in their right mind would have kept their face serious, he talked about things that were horrible, he talked about things that anyone with any room in their head would recoil from, amputation, combat, poisoning, starvation, and he said that these too were gifts from God, the significance of which would not be revealed until after death. He mentioned Job, everyone perked up, he had ventured into the Old Testament, he seemed pleased with himself, he mentioned Job and misquoted a passage, I did not correct him. There’s an expression, seeing something in a new light, it was like that. I could see the cracks, and I could see the dust in the cracks. The Lighthouse Fellowship was a beehive of perversity, the lighthouse was a perverse symbol, all of these things were in my head. They overlay everything I saw and heard. I don’t blame the people at the Lighthouse Fellowship, Juan-George, I don’t begrudge them their beliefs, everyone is different. I just want you to keep in mind that what we see, what we think we see, I should say, is always changed by the words in our heads, which means that even when we’re all looking at the same thing we each see something different.
A moment ago I asked why I was here dying in this hospital bed, only a month before you are scheduled to arrive, and when I said it I realized I haven’t told you the story. I’m going to interrupt my walking out of the Bible group, I’ll get right back to it, because first I want to tell you, because it’s more important, I want to tell you how I ended up in this hospital. I haven’t told you yet about leaving Panorama City and returning to Madera, about finding your mother again, about setting up housekeeping, as they say, in the old house, I hope I have time, but if the terminus takes me first, your mother was there, she can tell you all about it. What happened was that a few days ago I was riding my blue-flake three-speed Schwinn, as I used to do before your grandfather died, I was riding into Madera. Your mother was home napping, you make her tired sometimes, and so I was riding into town for some groceries. It had been a long time, Juan-George, since I’d been able to enjoy that simplest of pleasures, listening to the burring sound of tires on asphalt, feeling the breeze on my face. And then, as if summoned somehow by my presence, a familiar vehicle appeared on the horizon. The Alvarez brothers’ pickup truck, coming my way, drifting across the yellow line toward me. Then there is a blank spot in my memory, I don’t know what happened next, my next memory is of waking up here in the Madera Community Hospital.
I excused myself from the Bible group as if I was going to the restroom, which was at the back of the Lighthouse Fellowship coffee shop. I thought I would have to sneak past Scott Valdez’s door, it was open, but he wasn’t at his desk, his office was empty. I went out the back door, the sunlight was blinding white, everything was bleached. I followed the alley to the end of the mini-mall and came back around to the front. I wasn’t planning to see Maria, I was just trying to get away from the perversities, to get fresh air, but as soon as I saw the neon pyramid in the window I knew I was going in. Your mother is snoring at the moment, I can say Maria’s name, I don’t dare utter it when your mother is in that shifting-around half sleep. I am a jealous god, she likes to say, which is from the Bible, she’ll tell you she doesn’t remember any of it from school, but that’s a direct quotation. I’ve mentioned before that while I was down in Panorama City your mother had many suitors, I am not jealous of any of them, I am not the jealous type. Your mother says it’s because her suitors never so much as nicked her heart. Maria, on the other hand, says your mother, stole my heart, Maria threatens our bond, no matter how far away she is, in distance and time, no matter how I might claim to have no feelings about her now. Your mother says that what’s
written on the heart stays on the heart, true feelings can never be erased, only written over, they lurk beneath, circling like sharks. That is her philosophy, I’ll let her share it with you, later. For my part I can only say that my feelings for Maria and my feelings for your mother reside in two different parts of my heart, and that except for putting my life down on tape, except for telling you my experiences, I haven’t done much visiting of the part with my feelings for Maria in it, I haven’t seen any reason to, she is gone, long gone, I wouldn’t even know where to find her, and besides, I am happy in the part that belongs to your mother.
I went into Maria’s storefront, I went into her psychic adviser shop, I pushed through the bead curtain into the waiting room. Empty and quiet. Usually she was there right away, or I could hear her talking with another client and I would wait my turn. I listened for her voice, I heard nothing. I sat on the couch and waited, there was a magazine about boats. I flipped through it and looked at pictures of yachts. I wondered, when I was finished with the magazine and still had not seen Maria, I wondered whether she had heard my psychic appeal to her several nights before, whether she had heard it but had not responded, whether she was avoiding me. But then I heard something, it sounded like someone had knocked over a glass, an empty glass. It clanged but did not break, then rolled across the floor. I walked through a second bead curtain into the room where Maria did her readings, with the round table, and the crystal ball, and the chandelier that had cast strange patterns of light on her face. Empty. Then more sounds, something else knocked over, furniture, from farther back, there was a solid door, I had never been through it. Something told me to go in, whatever was going on didn’t sound right. I thought Maria might be in trouble, I was in the part of my heart that belonged to her, I acted without thinking. I nudged open the door, I must admit I thought of myself as coming to her rescue, I thought about how grateful she would be that I’d interceded.
If there’s one thing I can’t recommend, it’s thinking of yourself in an outside way when the situation requires you only to be yourself. I poked my head into the room, ready to save the day, and I found an empty business office, or a business office I thought was empty. I looked down and saw, on the floor, Maria, blocked partially, or mainly I should say, by broad shoulders, short arms, a fleshy neck, and a head that even from behind looked like a pineapple. Maria’s eyes were closed, and her mind must have been somewhere else, because, being psychic, she should have known I was standing there, even nonpsychics know when someone is looking at them, but she was distracted, her mind was elsewhere, I lingered there only long enough to verify, only long enough to understand what was happening, which was obvious at first glance, which was that they were doing what men and women do, only long enough to verify and certify that what was happening was happening mutually, I mean, that it wasn’t a violation, that she wasn’t being attacked. I lingered only to make sure, to be sure she didn’t need to be rescued. I might have lingered there a moment longer than necessary, I wanted Maria to open her eyes, I wanted her to see me standing there and stop everything, but she did not, she was lost in pleasure.
I did not go back to the Bible group. I went to the Laundromat. I watched clothes tumble around inside a dryer. Words echoed in my head, something Scott Valdez had said, the first time I met Maria, when Maria had asked me for a jump start, Scott had said, his words, The battle between good and evil played itself out everywhere, and our mini-mall was no exception. I watched a skinny man pull out items from a rolling wire laundry basket and fold them on a high counter. Maria and Scott, Scott and Maria, it made no sense, they hated each other, I had seen it, I had heard it, seething hatred. Maria had heaped scorn on the Lighthouse Fellowship, which was Scott’s organization, which was Scott’s mission in life, his calling, and Scott had even more viciously and publicly attacked everything that went on behind Maria’s bead curtains. Yet my eyes had not deceived me, as they say. I couldn’t watch the skinny man calmly folding his clothes anymore, I turned my eyes to the dryer again, it better suited my thinking, which was tumbling in circles, or which tumbled a half circle before free-falling through space.
Eventually, Aunt Liz pulled up at the Lighthouse Fellowship and went inside to look for me. I stepped out of the Laundromat and sat on the hood of her car. She emerged from the Lighthouse looking panicked, she thought I’d run off again. I told her I’d been waiting outside and that she must have missed me. Scott Valdez came out then, he came out of the Lighthouse, he had come through the back, he came out and told Aunt Liz that he knew I hadn’t wandered off, he told her that I was a real asset to the Lighthouse, he told her I always kept the Bible group on their toes. I looked into his eyes, his too-close-together eyes, and I saw only sincerity, and I knew then that Scott, too, was a double agent of sorts, a better double agent than I could ever be. Scott gave me a big grin, his cheeks looked flushed, he patted my upper arm. There was no fear in his eyes, not the slightest trace, I knew that he had not seen me, that he and Maria had had no idea I’d seen them. I knew, too, because I’ve always studied people, since elementary school I’ve studied people, I knew that this wasn’t the first time for Scott and Maria, this had been going on a long while, what I had witnessed in the office was not the exception but the rule. Which meant that the jumper-cable incident had had nothing to do with a battle between good and evil. It had been a lovers’ quarrel.
PART FIVE
TAPE 8, SIDES A & B;
TAPE 9, SIDE A
FALLOUT
As these things usually are, Paul Renfro’s words. Look at the Trojan War. I wasn’t interested in the Trojan War, I wanted to know why and how Scott and Maria had ended up together. On that point, Paul had no answer other than to say love is blind, truly blind, not blindfolded, when you’re dealing with love you don’t get a choice, even when you think you do, there’s no blindfold to remove, you just have to accept it. Scott and Maria could seethe all they wanted, they could talk about good and evil until they lost their voices, but they were in the grip of future generations asserting a right to exist, Paul’s words. We were in the ceiling, I had gotten in the habit of climbing up there after Aunt Liz had taken her sleeping pills and gone to sleep professionally, to let the balm of sincere friendship do its work. Night after night, Paul and I discussed every subject imaginable. If I had been wiser I would have recorded our discussions, they would have proven more valuable to you than this thin slice of my experience. Every other thing out of Paul’s mouth was something I did not understand, my head filled with his words. The only thing we didn’t talk about was what he’d scrawled on the notes hanging from the walls and joists, he would say only that he’d finally had the time and space to successfully reabsorb all of the thoughts and ideas he’d written on all of those scraps and sheets of paper, he’d for the first time in years managed to turn himself into a duplicate of his former self, so that he could push forward, through the development of several basic questions, push forward his thinking. He described his thinking as a large rock, the size of a small mountain, that had to be kept rolling, that if it came to a stop might never roll again, due to the differences between the coefficients of static friction and kinetic friction, Paul’s words, which I remember but still do not fully understand, as opposed to most other people’s thinking, presuming they thought at all, presuming they hadn’t given over their thinking responsibilities to so-called common sense, which was, other people’s thinking was, more like a tumbleweed, meaning it was not as dense as his thinking, and therefore not as difficult to move forward, but also much more sensitive to the whimsy of shifting winds.
He said to me, this was a few days into his stay in the ceiling, he said that the one thing he needed that the ceiling hadn’t given him, the one last obstacle to his thinking, was freedom of movement, everything else was ideal, but his blood wasn’t circulating freely, it might have been exacerbated, Paul’s word, by the fast-food place food, which thickened his blood, or the warm air, the warm dry air of Panorama City, but freedom of
movement, or the lack thereof, had become an obstacle, the last in a long line of obstacles. I asked him if he needed to come down, if he needed to walk around the block, I had taken walks around Aunt Liz’s block many times, it had been most salutary, though I probably didn’t use that word, Paul probably taught me that word while I was telling him about the walks, I offered to help Paul down from the ceiling to let him roam the streets of Panorama City at night. I explained to him that at certain hours the streets were completely empty, we could imagine we had Panorama City all to ourselves, thinkers only. But for Paul coming down from the ceiling was out of the question, even in the middle of the night he couldn’t risk interacting with the terrestrial-minded masses. His thinking, his cloud, had become like a soap bubble, contact with coarser elements would destroy it. How, then, to achieve movement? We devised the solution together, I can’t deny that I was part of the thinking process that lay behind the ingenious but ultimately doomed solution, doomed but also not doomed, resulting as it would in your eventual arrival, I can’t trace all of the unintended consequences here, it’s not my job to do so, I can only tell you what we did and what came after. There was a network of crawl spaces and openings up there, Paul had explored them on his first day, I mentioned that he’d found a way to observe the front door. Near my room, not far from my room, above the area we would later realize was the kitchen, the roof above peaked in a continuous line toward the living room. The living room had high ceilings but the kitchen did not, meaning that there was an area above the kitchen where the roof was peaked but the ceiling was low, it wasn’t a big area, it covered maybe half the floor plan of the kitchen, but providing he stayed on the beams it was big enough to allow Paul Renfro to pace back and forth while developing his thinking, it was big enough to allow the kind of unfettered movement Paul was in desperate need of. The space was unlit, but some light crept in from three separate sources, which were a dim glow from Paul’s Christmas lights, shafts of daylight coming through a ventilation grate, and, occasionally, if I left them on, overspill from the ceiling-mounted kitchen lights. The only problem, which was a problem we solved together, was figuring out how Paul could do his pacing without making too much noise. What happened, what ended up happening, was that I went down into my dresser and pulled out four pairs of socks, these socks were too big for Paul’s feet, we had to stuff them with newspaper so they would fit, we stuffed the socks and put Paul’s feet into them, and then put three more pairs of socks over that, and it was like, his words, it was like walking on air, he didn’t make a sound.
Panorama City Page 16
