Glimpses

by Lewis Shiner

  “And I just snapped. This horrible, hateful, yelling and screaming anger came over me and I called him a son of a bitch and I said, ‘You want to know why? Let me tell you about something really horrible.’ And I told him. And I said, ‘How could you have been so blind that you never saw the change in me, never saw that I had no childhood? Why did I have to watch those drunken battles, why didn’t you just take me away?’

  And he just flipped. I don’t think he heard anything I said against him. He started threatening to kill Momma. I stayed up with him all night, trying to calm him down, but something had snapped in him too. He went back to Murfreesboro and like the next month he served papers on her and moved out.”

  “Jesus.”

  “So you see what I’m talking about? Grandpa, my parents’ screwed-up marriage, the rape, my mother’s drinking, it’s all my fault. I’ve never had a relationship with anybody where I didn’t push it over the edge. You see the hurt in me but you don’t see the anger. You ask about me and Tom, can’t you see I belong with him? How I punish him as much as he punishes me? For not being what I want, for not being the way out from my miserable existence? He and I deserve each other, at least we’re not hurting anybody else. I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t want to fuck up your life.”

  “What about your life? Isn’t that worth anything? I mean, you’re in physical danger here.”

  “You don’t get it. You just don’t understand. That’s what being a woman means. It means you’re a little bit scared all the time. With Tom at least I know where it’s coming from.”

  “And of course, you deserve it, right?”

  “Maybe. If somebody treated me like I was the heroine of one of these romance novels, I wouldn’t know how to handle it. Because that’s not me. I’m trouble, and I destroy everything I touch. Look at you. We spend one wonderful afternoon at the beach and a day and a half later you nearly kill yourself.”

  I grabbed her by the shoulders. “Stop it. That’s a lot of melodramatic crap. I’m at least three-quarters in love with you already. You’re the most beautiful, fascinating creature I’ve ever seen.”

  The toughness melted away before my eyes. The person underneath seemed terribly young and curiously innocent and I knew it would be very easy to hurt her. It was the woman I’d seen lurking inside Lori from the first time she took her dark glasses off. “Really?” she said.

  “Really.” I kissed her and for a few seconds she clung to me, kissing me back passionately. Then she pulled away, touching my forehead with the top of her head.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just on this roller coaster. I feel all these things for you, and then, wham, there’s all these images from my past again. Can you understand that at all?”

  “Of course.”

  “I mean, with what I’ve been through in my life, I shouldn’t even let a man near me. But…it gets lonely. Everybody needs to be touched.” She ran her hands down my arms. “You’re very sweet, Ray. But it’s time for you to fly back to Texas and breathe a huge sigh of relief as you leave this crazy woman far behind you.”

  I pulled her close and ran my fingers through her hair. “That’s not till Sunday. I understand that this is not the time or the place for us to make love. I don’t care about that right now. I want to spend the night with you. Just talking, and kissing, and holding you. Can we do that?”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice very soft.

  We stayed up until five, kissing and gently touching each other and not going any further. We were both scared and the limits made it easier. I hadn’t done anything like it since high school.

  We talked a lot too. About our parents, about books and music, about each other. She couldn’t believe I’d seen through her tough-guy act and I couldn’t believe she expected me not to.

  I left her outside the dive shop. It was still dark and it was the quietest I remember the island ever being—no birds or insects, even the ocean calmed to a whisper.

  “Are you diving today?” she said.

  I shook my head. “I’m going to see Walker.”

  “And Moonflower?” I heard an edge of jealousy still there. “She’ll give you what I didn’t.”

  “Just Walker. And maybe go to the drumming thing. Will you come?”

  She softened again. “I’ll try. You know how Tom is.”

  “Tonight’s the night, you mean.”

  “Yeah. But maybe it’s time to change that.”

  I slept for a few hours, then walked down the road and called a cab to take me to the commune. I was starved, but Walker had said no food. I felt weightless. It was Lori’s gravity that held me, not the gravity of the world.

  Inside the commune I asked for Walker and the French girl pointed me to a room on the second floor. Concrete steps led up to a sagging walkway. I knocked on a weathered door and Walker’s voice told me to come in.

  There was a woman in the narrow bed with him, her face to the wall, a long expanse of pale naked back and dark hair turned toward me. She snored softly. Walker was cross-legged, the sheet over his lap, smoking dope in a pipe that reminded me of Brian’s. “You’re early,” he said. I started to apologize and he said, “No, it’s cool.” He got up, casually naked, and pulled on a pair of drawstring cotton pants. “You ready to raise the dead?”

  “I don’t know. Is that what I’m here for?”

  He picked up a dark green knapsack by the straps and we walked outside. “Well, I guess you got to tell me. You look ready for something.”

  I followed him to the kitchen and watched him fry up something that involved tofu, onions, mushrooms, and three or four different kinds of peppers. My stomach growled at the sight of it.

  “You eaten anything today?”

  I shook my head.

  “What now?” I asked.

  He sat at the kitchen table and I took a chair across from him. “Okay,” he said. “First we have to focus you. I want you to remember a picture of your father and describe it to me.”

  I had to think. “There’s a picture that sits on my wife’s dresser. My mother gave it to her because I’m in it. It’s at my grandmother’s house in Laredo. I’m on a kind of a park bench between my mom and dad, maybe four or five years old. I can remember the shirt I’m wearing, it’s this green seersucker Hawaiian shirt, all crinkled and scratchy.

  “So here’s my father with his wife and kid, legs crossed, left arm up on the back of the bench, lit cigarette in his right hand. He’s all grown up, see, he’s a man, a family man. Only this guy in the picture is younger than I am now.”

  “Tell me about his face.”

  “He’s got short dark hair, combed back. His face is tanned, pretty dark, lots of squint lines from the sun.”

  “Is he smiling?”

  I thought about it. “It’s a grudging smile. A let’s-get-this-over-with smile.”

  “Clothes?”

  I closed my eyes. “Long sleeved white shirt and clip-on bow tie. My mother’s in a brown-and-gray checked cotton dress. She’s self-conscious, can’t relax. And nobody’s actually touching anybody else. We’re as close as we can get without touching.”

  After a few seconds Walker said, “What’s your father thinking?”

  I could see his eyes. They were narrow and unrelenting. It would have been my grandmother who took the picture, his mother, the one he’d run away from as a kid.

  “Come on,” Walker said, “throw something out.”

  “‘Why me?’”

  “Go on.”

  “‘Why do I have to sit here for this photograph? How did I end up on this park bench with this woman and this child? Is this the person I thought I would be? What am I doing here? Why me?’”

  Walker finished the last of his breakfast and poured a cup of coffee. “Tell me about this man. Who was he?”

  “His parents got divorced when he was like seven or eight. He felt like his mother didn’t love him, so he ran away and went to live with his father. He spent a lot of time out in the country, hu
nting rocks and arrowheads, camping out, that kind of stuff. His family tried to make him a civil engineer and sent him off to Texas A&M, which he didn’t handle too well. He wanted to fly. So he took private lessons and then he joined the Air Force for World War II. That was where he met my mother, who was working for Boeing in Wichita. After the war he put himself through school and got a Ph.D. in anthropology. We spent the next ten or fifteen years moving all over the country.”

  “That doesn’t tell me who he was.”

  I went with the first thing that popped into my head. “In high school, every time I brought a friend over to the house, he would get into an argument with them. Politics, music, anything to get a reaction. He would keep at it until he got under their skin. Then he’d get disgusted, and pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV. It got to where I didn’t want to bring anybody home.

  “He was so critical of everybody. I remember he told me about this party once where one of the guests was from China. He was very proud of the fact that he went up to her and corrected her pronunciation of Chinese. This based on his being in China for a couple of years in World War Two. He couldn’t even pronounce ‘Taoism,’ you know?

  “So this one time he was working down south of Austin, and he came through and gave me a ride up to Dallas. He said something snotty about some supposed friend of his, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. I said, ‘You don’t like anybody, do you?’ I don’t think he said two words on the rest of the trip. And a few weeks later my mother asked me how I could say such a horrible thing to him, how I could tell him he was a bitter, lonely old man without a friend in the world, that nobody gave a damn for him. So despite their telling me all my life how important honesty is, I ended up apologizing to him for something I never said.”

  “It was true, though, wasn’t it?”

  “That nobody liked him? No, lots of people liked him. Loved him even. But none of them were good enough for him.”

  “Of course not. None of them was his mother.”

  I shook my head, the thread of the conversation lost. Walker drank the last of his coffee and said, “This is going to be interesting.”

  On the way out he stuffed a section of newspaper into the knapsack from a pile by the gate. “It’s a five mile walk to the beach,” he said. “You up for it?”

  I shrugged.

  We followed the road for the first mile or two, finding the rhythm of walking together. After a while we talked about music. He was enough younger than me that he had his emotional roots in the seventies: Parliament/Funkadelic, Earth, Wind & Fire, the Ohio Players.

  As we got close to the beach, we gathered up whatever dead wood we saw. We carried it to a place they’d obviously used for a while. The sand had been trampled down hard and the rocks had been cleared away, except for a circle of them in the middle, a tiny Stonehenge full of charred wood and ashes. Walker built a fire there with the newspaper from his pack.

  “Let me give you a little theory,” he said. “You know about astral bodies, right? Everybody’s got one. It’s like a balloon that’s the same size and shape as your body, only it’s not physical. So it pretty much goes wherever your body goes. Only sometimes it comes unstuck. Like when the body is in a coma or you have an out-of-body experience. Great sex sometimes does it.

  “Most of this stuff goes back to the Egyptians. They split the person into nine different ‘vehicles’—body, mind, soul, spirit, shadow, heart, so forth and so on. Some of the distinctions are pretty fine. What we care about is the astral body, which is the ka, and the ba, which is the soul. The ba can live in either the physical body, the khat, or the ka. Am I going too fast?”

  “I’m okay so far.”

  “When the khat dies, the ba hightails it to the ka. So now you’ve got the consciousness—the accumulated awareness of the person—stuck in the astral body.”

  “Like a ghost.”

  “Yeah. Sometimes the astral body hangs around for a long time after the physical body is dead. Haunting people, if you want to use that word.”

  “I don’t believe in any of this stuff, you know. If that makes a difference. Neither did my father. He didn’t believe in God, or ghosts, or anything but himself.”

  “That’s cool. Belief isn’t strictly necessary here. Think of it as a metaphor.”

  “For what?”

  “Ghosts are just memories, right? It’s the shit we can’t manage to forget that haunts us.”

  “And it’s what we feel that makes them real.”

  “You got it. The point is we are not raising your old man for his sake. It’s for yours. All right? It’s for whatever you need.”

  I’d just swum off a cliff and given my heart away to somebody I might never see again. I no longer knew what I needed.

  By that time the fire was roaring. The heat was a pressure on my skin. I could smell my own sweat. It occurred to me to move away. I didn’t. Walker took a handful of some kind of leaves and reached into the fire and dropped them into the center. They turned instantly to smoke. I couldn’t believe that his arm hadn’t burst into flames.

  “What are you doing?” The sweet smell of the leaves gave me an instant and powerful image. I was in my father’s lab, holding a skull in my hand, hundreds of years old. It should have been treated to preserve it, and it hadn’t, and now it was starting to decay from the inside. The smell was sweet, almost sexual, cloying. The hollow eyes stared up at me.

  Walker said, “Just a little something to open you up.”

  “You’re not setting me up for some two-bit hallucination here, are you?”

  “No psychedelics here. I got nothing against them, they’re fine for what they are, but we’re after something different. We want to get you connected again.” The sweat was pouring off him now too. “Everything’s connected, see. That’s what makes magic work. A rock that looks like a duck can stand in for a duck. The blood of an animal can stand in for the blood of a person. Your clothes are imprinted with your personality. If the king is getting laid, there’ll be a big harvest.

  “Look at the planet. The planet’s being poisoned the same way we poison ourselves. It’s like there really is this death wish inside everybody.” I felt myself go cold, even with the fire roaring through me. “Some people go after it with booze or smack or cigarettes, some people go over the edge, like your old man. That’s what demons are supposed to be, you know. Just a physical manifestation of that urge to self-destruction. They call you to it.”

  “I’ve been drunk for years,” I said. “Maybe I was killing myself. Maybe I was medicating myself to keep from killing myself. Maybe both. Medicating myself so I can live with the idea that I’m pissing my life away. That I should be fucking all those beautiful women on MTV and not my wife, that I should ditch my two-bit job and go after the big bucks, that I need a new car and a swimming pool.”

  “Sure, man, we got to have all that material shit. We got to gratify those short-term desires. Take that next drink, have another McDonald’s hamburger. Snort some more coke, drive around in that big car. And pretty soon your liver’s turned into a piece of rock and there’s oil all over your beach. Making all that shit turns the world into an ugly, dying place and owning all that shit makes us into ugly, dying people. We got no connections left to the natural world. And no magic left, because that’s where the magic is, in those connections.”

  I was dizzy, disoriented. My eyes wouldn’t focus anymore. I had no idea what time it was, when I’d last eaten. I didn’t know that I could stand up until Walker pulled me to my feet.

  “Let’s dance,” he said.

  He draped my arm over his shoulders. “The grapevine,” he said. “You ever do this?”

  I shook my head.

  He showed me. We moved sideways across the sand, one foot behind the other, to the left, kick, back to the right, slowly getting faster. Walker hummed wordlessly. I saw an ancient flatbed truck pull up at the edge of the road, full of people from the commune. They began to unload congas and timbales and shakers an
d bongos, hollow logs and tambourines. They started to play them as they carried them across the sand toward us, picking up our rhythm.

  Walker slipped out from under my arm and his movements got more complicated. He turned and slapped the side of one foot as he kicked, then stamped his heels in the sand. “Don’t stop,” he said to me, but I had.

  Debra was suddenly there. She hugged me quickly and then began to dance around me. “Like this,” she said.

  Everyone was either dancing or drumming. There was no one to point and stare. I let my head roll around on my neck and then I let myself move again. My thoughts of Lori took over. The passion and frustration and fear spun me around, faster and faster until I fell down. Even then I couldn’t hold still. The drums had ceased to be a sound and had become a physical force that was impossible to resist. I don’t remember getting up but somehow I was on my feet and dancing again.

  My mind moved faster than my body. Maybe it was my astral body about to come loose. I had a sensation of flying low over water at dazzling speed. There were images of Lori, and then of the drop-off, and then of my father, first floating face down in the blue-green water, then a hundred others, him hitting me, him shaking my hand, him in a suit, him in a T-shirt and bathing trunks, him on that park bench next to me, smoking a cigarette.