“Are you okay, Joe?”
He nodded and then realized she couldn’t hear him. “Yeah. I’m going to go take a bath.”
He heard his mother smile. “I thought you’d be using our shower.”
“I thought you didn’t listen to me about the sucky,” Joe said.
“No, we listened, but we decided it was better if we didn’t make a big deal about things. It’s funny because the sucky was one of the few things we agreed about. Anyway, I’m glad you’re over it.”
“Me too. Bye, Mom.”
“Bye, Joe.”
When he hung up the phone, he didn’t let himself think about what he was doing, and he walked, zombie-like to the roar in the hall bathroom. The wallpaper was gone, and the walls looked threadbare underneath, as if the sucky was pulling layers of skin off it until there was nothing left but brittle bone. The toilet seat was up, straining against its bolts to come off; Joe actually heard the groaning of the screws. And as he stepped into the room, he felt himself stumbling forward, as if he’d entered a wind tunnel. He fought it long enough to strip off his clothes (they never hit the floor as he dropped them article by article; instead, they levitated over the rim of the tub before disappearing into the gaping black hole like diving birds); being naked made no rational sense. In the desert/belly he’d want clothes, but this was something he thought about later. At that moment, he acted instinctually, as he had thousands of times before. A bath meant being naked. That’s all this was, Joe thought, a bath.
Now naked, he stopped fighting and let himself be pulled into the tub. An instant later the world was a slick darkness, and he fell.
Down, down, down into a darkness like no other, Joe fell. There was sludge and stink and something oppressive like the air just before a great storm. Joe didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know why he couldn’t stop, or why his eyes were blanketed with a heavy, nearly total darkness.
When he stopped at last, it was only for an instant, a brief respite, before he heard the lungs kick into gear and he felt himself being jerked along a muddy path. Looking around, he saw the spillway from his dream, or something like it. In the dream there had been concrete and water and a certain manmade aspect to the setting that was missing here. Here mud reigned and junk surrounded him. Old bicycles, clocks, clothing, trash, pieces of automobiles, and mangled paperback novels moved alongside him as if on a conveyor belt made of mud.
Above him, however, hung a dazzling blue-black sea. Looking up was like looking into an aquarium without the glass. The water itself formed a dome made of silky blue where schools of fish and other underwater things floated past. Despite the extreme unlikelihood of the sea being suspended above him, Joe did not doubt his eyes. It made sense. He’d gone underneath the world, to the very bottom, and when he was spit out at last into the dull, colourless desert that cannot be filled, he will have found hell.
Swimming with long strokes, Danny made his way out to sea. Occasionally, he stopped and floated on his back, staring at the moon. It looked bigger out here in the middle of all the water and space. He felt small, unimportant in the waves. Danny let himself sink into the water.
There was a pulse here. If you remained still, you could hear it thumping around you, transfiguring you until you become part of the current, part of the mystery. Danny was still. He waited, blanking his mind of Celebrity and Samantha and, most of all, Joe. He forgot about breathing for a while. He let the ocean push him like a marionette, here and there, there and here until he forgot even himself and there was no discernible difference between his body and a ripple in the current.
Like this, he made the decision to sink some more. He could be reborn after he was dead. This all came to him in a slow stream, like a current steadily pulling away the earth. He could not deny it. He was hypnotized by the rocking pulse. He didn’t need his own anymore. So he let it go.
Last thought before darkness, not a good one: Joe, alone. Joe, facing the entire world and everything it squeezed you with. Joe, facing this by himself.
The desert with his eyes closed was a pleasant place. There was no heat. No cold. A dryness on his skin made him shiver and shake.
When he opened his eyes, he saw bruises everywhere. Bruises on the sky, bruises on his naked skin, bruises on the sand. In front of him there was nothing until the sky touched the ground, but even that disintegrated into ash and Joe couldn’t tell sky from ground, up from down.
He turned and saw a body at his feet. For a long time, Joe looked at it without moving. For a long time, he was unsure who it was. In the desert/belly there weren’t really fathers. Here there were only remnants, half-realized things, so hard to grasp they practically made themselves invisible. But part of him remembered Dad. Dad, who was supposed to come back home.
Joe dropped to the ground beside him and touched his heart. A slight pulse. A tiny, micro pulse, more of an echo than a reality.
Joe learned how to do CPR in health class two weeks ago. A fireman came in for a week and taught all the seventh graders how to save somebody’s life. When he was done, the fireman handed out little badges that said, I’m a Camden County Certified Lifesaver!
He began to breathe into his father’s mouth. At first softly, but then with more urgency. He tried to mimic what the fireman had done when he demonstrated on the dummy, but, most of all, he just tried to breathe hard. He did this for a very long time while the desert/belly waited.
When his father woke up, the sky changed. The horizon came back, an inky dark slash in the distance. Dad sat up, salt water spilling from his mouth.
Joe stood behind his father and watched as he got up, shaking the sand off his naked body. The sun burned the ocean and bright streamers of light stretched almost to the beach. The sky dissolved into an intense blue.
Joe followed his father down the beach. They’d come out of the belly somehow, perhaps spit back up because something between them disagreed with it. Dad walked until he found a bundle of clothes half buried in the sand. He dug out a shirt and then a pair of pants. He did not put them on. Instead, he went through the pockets until he found his wallet. Then he emptied the wallet on the beach, shaking out bills, coins, photographs, credit cards. He went through them one by one, until he found what he wanted. Joe slipped up behind his father, so close, he smelled the seaweed in his hair. His father held a photograph in his hands. An old photo, Joe barely recognized the smiling little boy holding the scrawled illustration up to the camera. He’d been happy then.
He needed to be happy again. His father placed the photo up on dry sand and then took the rest of his belongs and tossed them as far as he could into the ocean. Just as Joe began to feel the fading (he couldn’t tell if he was fading or the place was fading, but everything turned to grayscale, and the bright sun became a watermark in the sky, and then it was gone completely), he saw his father go pick up the photo, look at it once more and then evaporate like ocean spray.
After trashing his clothes and wallet in the ocean, Danny made a mad dash for his hotel room. He banged on the door until Ralph opened it.
“Jesus Christ, Dan. You’re naked.”
“And cold. Let me in.”
Ralph moved aside. He had a beer open and porn on the television. “Why are you naked?” he asked.
“I need a shower,” Danny said.
In the shower, Danny tried to remember what happened. He couldn’t, and that was okay. He did remember the photo, finding it where it was supposed to be. Knowing he had to start over, get rid of everything that didn’t matter, but at all costs hold on to his boy. He didn’t feel so bad anymore. He knew he was going to let his boy down, but he also knew his boy would survive. Because that’s what people did when they didn’t die.
As he stepped out of the shower, one image flashed through his mind, fleeting, yet clear: Joe’s face looming over his.
Danny held onto this one, tried to burn it into his synapses, thought a crazy thought: Joe had saved him so he could, in turn, save Joe. He did not know how, b
ut it was true.
Danny smiled, liking the way it felt to believe something with his heart even when his mind said it wasn’t possible.
Joe made it back home, eventually. The tub never so much as gurgled again. That doesn’t mean everything was great for Joe from that point on. In fact, Joe’s parents got divorced and stayed that way. Samantha met an ex-minor league baseball star who believed in drowning a day’s problems in a fifth of Jack Daniels. Joe didn’t like him at all, but even when he got drunk and threatened to kick Joe’s ass, Joe never heard a peep from the sucky.
His father found a girl without a face and married her. Joe doesn’t see him half as much as he’d like to. He never sees her.
There’s part of Joe that is always coming back from the desert. During his trip down the sucky, he picked up a lot of dirt and grime and bathwater. In his mind, he is forever walking, shedding drop by drop all the nasty stuff. Bathing doesn’t help. Only walking. And even that only helps a little. Some of the stuff, he knows, will stick to him forever.
Thirteen Scenes from Your Twenty-Fourth Year
Scene 9
A phone rings in the middle of the night waking you from dreams you will never remember.
“It’s your brother,” says William.
Alfred turns in his sleep. Outside the motel room, the city seems to do the same. You take the phone.
“John.” A rough voice. Coarse. Your brother, Reg.
“Yeah?”
“Mom’s in the hospital. She had a stroke.”
William and Alfred are both up now, dark shapes across the room, breathing silently. They are your best friends in the world, yet in the darkness they recede like shadows.
“When?” You have never been able to say anything to your brother.
“Today.”
“Is it bad?”
“I think so.”
“Okay.”
William and Alfred move as one, straightening up, readying themselves to speak words they do not know.
Scene 1
There is no soundtrack when you move home. It’s late fall and the tree branches lay bare, cold-kissed by the wind until they are thin tendrils, icelike and brittle. The nights are cold and the air burns your lungs.
You leave friends, a job, school. And driving home, you feel like everything has been put on hold. When you turn into your old neighbourhood, you feel as if your heart might burst.
Mom is in her chair, wearing a sweat suit, still beautiful, still serene, long and tall and blonde—though her dark roots are finally showing past the hair dye. Her face is lined, her brow furrowed as if she has been concentrating fiercely.
You put a hand on her shoulder.
She says welcome home.
Scene 2
There are no friends here. Your father stays in his room, sitting in his chair, his half face glowing in the light from the television set. He emerges only for waffles and to empty his colostomy bag.
The house reeks.
Mom tries to be positive.
It’s hard.
She’s in the kitchen one day, running the faucet, knife in hand, peeling a peach. She’s losing hair from the chemo. It never dawns on you how bad it is not only to have cancer, but to know you earned it from the stress of dealing with your husband who also has cancer and who hides in his room, never bothering to check on his wife who’s caught cancer from him like the goddamned flu.
Anyway, she’s in the kitchen, peeling that peach, and you want to talk, to share with her how you’re feeling.
“If it’s so bad, just go back to Birmingham. No one said you had to move home,” she says, and her voice is cold and foreign. Not the Mom who kissed your tears away or held you close after your first dog got hit by a car.
There are words you want to say, aching words that fill you up like a helium balloon and make you come off the floor. You choke on them and something inside you snaps because she doesn’t know how much you’ve given up for her.
You lose control. The balloon is airborne, no ceiling to hold it near the earth. It flies toward the hateful sun. And you close your eyes and let it take you.
What can make you hurt this much?
Mom and Dad.
You can’t see anything except your anger.
When you come to your senses, you are on the floor in the hallway. Your hands and arms hurt from pounding on the carpet with your fists.
Your mother looks at you as if she doesn’t recognize you anymore.
It gets worse before it gets better.
Scene 3
The moon is out tonight, full and bright and it sees you sitting in the car at the park, drinking your slushy.
You and William. Planning the trip.
“Memphis,” William says. “That’s the first stop.”
“Beale Street,” you say. “You ever been there?”
“No. Arkansas after that. Little Rock. You think Alfred’s going to come?”
“He’d better.”
“What if he backs out?”
“Then we’ll go without his sorry ass. His loss, missing the trip of a lifetime.”
William nods and tosses his half-consumed slushy out the window. You watch the moon, never wondering what will come after the trip. Perhaps you assume it will never end, or there will be other trips to equal it or maybe it is like a salve, and once rubbed, it will cool all of your scrapes and cuts and make them recede so not even the scars remain.
“Lubbock,” William is saying. “We’ll see the Hidey-Ho where Buddy Holly played his first show. Then we’ll hit New Mexico . . .”
You decide to remember this night forever.
Scene 4
At work, there’s a woman over by soundtracks who needs help. You help. She talks to you for a long time about Bette Midler. You don’t bother to listen. Instead you think about the Grand Canyon, and the summer. You think about moving back to Birmingham. You think about your friends. You don’t think about your mother.
The lady buys six CDs. Leartis, the shift manager, checks her out and tells you to vacuum. “We’re closing early tonight,” he says. “I got a gig.”
You vacuum.
And think about the Grand Canyon. When Leartis goes to the back, you put on the Jayhawks. Tomorrow the Green Grass. It’s kind of become like your theme song. Except it’s the whole album. Listening to it makes you sad and happy at the same time. As long as there’s happy, you think, as the opening chords of “Blue” ring out across the store, you can deal with sad.
Leartis comes back out and locks the door. It’s fifteen minutes until ten. He doesn’t care.
You don’t either. You vacuum. And think about the Grand Canyon.
You’ve been home almost five months.
Scene 5
Mom is better. The cancer is gone. Radiation, chemo, surgery. It all worked. Three months cancer free.
Mom is better.
After the trip, you’ll move back to Birmingham for good.
Mom is better.
Tomorrow the green grass.
Scene 6
Memphis, The Ozarks in the rain, and now Red Rock Canyon State Park in Oklahoma. You grill hamburgers and hike. You go to sleep in a tent before eight o’clock, listening to the sounds of freedom and the rest of your life rolling out in front of you like a galaxy of stars, unending and bright with promise and mystery.
If you think of Mom, it is only a brief, half-formed thought, and it gets lost in the steady summer thrum of cicadas and bullfrogs.
And anyway, she’s better now.
Scene 7
You buy a postcard at a gas station on the side of the road somewhere west of Monument Valley. The picture on front shows a stark view of Monument Valley at sunset. Plateaus are shrouded in shadow, as the sun burns like a photograph flash beneath heavy gray clouds. You write
Mom,
Yes, the views here are really this beautiful. We are having a blast. So far the highlight was Red Rock Canyon in Oklahoma. Being here makes me so thankful you have your l
ife back. One day, when you get stronger, I am going to bring you out here. I promise.
Love,
John
Scene 8
You hike down three miles. Your legs are strong, your canteen full. Life may work out after all.
“Should we be thinking of heading back?” Alfred says. He’s the smart one. Valedictorian. Med school.
“We’ll be all right,” William says. He’s like you: tall, dark haired. More interested in sports than grades.
You agree. “Further,” you say, though your legs are finally beginning to ache, and your back hurts beneath the weight of your pack.
Maybe you sense the half-way point looming near. The ninth day on a seventeen day trip. Middle of the day. Middle of the hike. When you turn around, you’ll be moving away from the Grand Canyon, moving into the rest of your life. It scares the shit out of you.
You keep walking.
Finally, William gets winded and you turn around, start the journey back to the top, back to your life.
Now, it gets tough, and though you had been warned again and again, hiking down was the easy part and how it would be wise to turn back before you start feeling tired, you’re still surprised when the uphill grind kicks in, and your legs go dead and you begin to doubt yourself.
Alfred sits down to rest, sweat pouring down the sides of his face. He grimaces and unstraps his pack.
“I can’t carry it anymore,” he says. “I got to rest.”
William paces. He’s always got such energy.
“I’ll carry it,” you say and pick up Alfred’s pack.
Ten minutes later, when the sun tops out overhead and your legs have turned to jelly around your bones, you wonder why you are always trying to carry so much.
Scene 10
You are thankful for the dark when you hang up the phone. William and Alfred do not see the tears that streak your face. Silently, you pull your shoes and shorts on. You leave the motel room without speaking.
The Shoebox Trainwreck Page 21
