by Brad Watson
I declined and told him I just wanted to say goodbye.
“Suit yourself,” Mr. Bishop said. “But you be good, be a good student, now. If I come back through here in a couple of years and you’re not being a good student, I’m going to beat the crap out of you!” And he laughed. I all but ran away from his place.
So I had worried that Mr. Bishop was just an affable, unfortunate drunk.
I said to him now, standing there somehow in my front yard at our house in the country, some nine years later, “What are you doing here, Mr. Bishop?”
He smiled up at me in a curious and almost sad kind of way for a long moment before replying.
“I’ve come to tell you that now you have to go back to where you came from,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll know when you get there,” he said. “We just want you to know that we appreciate your cooperation.”
After a moment, I said, “With what?”
Olivia stepped out onto the porch beside me then. She smiled and nodded to Mr. Bishop. She was holding Leo against her hip, and he was clinging to her as if something had upset him, inside.
“Is everything okay?” she said to me.
I was gazing at them, my beautiful little family, and so in love I thought I might be drawn into their eyes and entirely absorbed, and disappear from the world, and be nothing but some barely traceable element in their very cells.
And then the light began to fade from the sky as if the arrival of evening had accelerated, the turning of the earth somehow sped up, and the image of Mr. Bishop before us darkened along with the rest of the world and was gone.
OLIVIA WAS STILL PREGNANT, of course. We’d been out for only a couple of days. Our parents stood next to our hospital beds. Our mothers were tearful, holding our hands. Our fathers seemed stunned, hands in their pockets, standing behind our mothers, rocked back on the heels of their shoes. The nurse disappeared and a few moments later came back in with a doctor.
“Well, well, what have we here?” the doctor said. He checked Olivia’s pulse, looked at her pupils, then did the same with me. He turned to our stunned parents and said, in a bright manner, “May we have a few minutes alone with these two?”
Our parents, like confused tourists in a foreign country, stared at him for a moment and then nodded and shuffled out of the room, bumping into each other trying to let one another out of the door before them.
The nurse stepped forward to stand beside the doctor. They stood there looking at us, smiling in an odd kind of way, I thought.
“Hello,” the doctor said then. Olivia and I looked at each other from across the little space between our beds.
“How’ve you been?” the nurse said then.
They looked nothing like the couple from the asylum, except there was something in their manner that was exactly that way.
Olivia watched them, a kind of vacant look on her face.
“I’ve been fine,” I said then, carefully.
“How did you like your experience?” the nurse said.
The doctor raised his eyebrows, waiting for one of us to reply. He tapped at his clipboard but didn’t necessarily seem impatient.
“What do you mean?” Olivia said.
The doctor laughed softly to himself, and scratched at an ear.
“Very different,” the nurse said, looking from the one of us to the other. “You’ll have to discuss that, soon enough.”
“What are you talking about?” Olivia said. “What are they talking about?” she said to me.
“You should have told her about us, I suppose,” the doctor said to me.
“Told me what?” Olivia said.
The strangest thing was, I was pretty sure I’d seen this doctor, off duty of course, around the old country club. He had a rather stolid expression, but also a head of neatly clipped, boyish blond hair. I’d never seen the nurse before. She was older than the doctor, with an old-fashioned perm, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose, but with red lipstick and bright red nails, and a querulous expression.
“We just woke up,” I said.
“It’s not important,” the nurse said to the doctor.
“I will attempt to be more patient with the patient,” the doctor said. “How’d you like the lion?” he said to me then.
After a moment, I said, “It was amazing,” and then I felt something like a deep sadness well up in me.
“Very creative,” the doctor said. “Impressive.”
“And the fish,” the nurse said.
“And the frequent, vigorous intercourse,” the doctor said, raising his eyebrows again and smiling.
That made me a little bit angry, that.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” he said. “We’re scientists. I was only joking.”
“I’m not embarrassed,” I said.
He seemed amused.
“The house in the country, though, and the various elements of sentimental perfection,” he said. “Something of a disappointment, there.”
“They’re very young,” the nurse said to him. “It’s a long shot, to expect much better.”
“Interesting, isn’t it,” he said to me, “how curiously time moves when it’s decoupled from physicality.”
“Yeah,” I said vaguely.
“What in the world are y’all talking about?” Olivia said. She looked frightened.
“The sixth-grade teacher, though,” he said. “That was a nice touch.”
“Touching, actually,” she said.
The doctor laughed his quiet laugh again.
“You did that,” I said.
“Not exactly,” he said.
“It was all certainly more substantial than hers,” she said. “How did you like your experience, sweetheart?”
Olivia’s expression went flat again, but with something like irritation behind it.
“What experience?” she said.
The nurse had taken on an inscrutable smile.
“The mansion, the yacht, the handsome wealthy Greek husband.” She accompanied her words with a little swaying motion, a casual parody of romantic reverie.
“How do you know about my dream?” Olivia said in a small, quiet voice.
My heart got even heavier inside of me.
“Much more than a dream, dear,” the nurse said with a wry twist of her lips.
“No children, we noticed,” the doctor said in a pensive voice. He was looking down at the chart in his hand as if studying something there instead of talking to us.
“A little overload on the substitutions, maybe,” the nurse said. “Those strange house servants.”
“What do you mean?” Olivia said.
“That was actually pretty good,” the doctor said.
“Just a theory I have,” the nurse said.
“I was really upset,” Olivia said. She looked like she was about to cry.
“It’s all right,” I said to her.
“Nothing to be overly concerned about,” the doctor said.
“You simply have to approach these things with a measure of intelligence,” the nurse said. “Remove the emotional veil, so to speak.”
“That’s good,” the doctor said to her.
“I’ll make a note,” she replied. “Now we really must go.”
“The doctor and the nurse have many rounds to make,” he said.
“Would you like any drugs?” she said. “The doctor can prescribe.”
“Maybe some Valium,” I said. “For both of us.”
“Done,” the doctor said, writing something on the clipboard.
“Take care,” the nurse said.
Giving us those little sideways waves, they backed in shuffling backwards steps out the door.
IN THE MOMENT AFTER the couple from the asylum had left us that previous night, when I had begun to construct our little paradise in my mind, Olivia had awakened, dressed quietly, crept from the house, down the steps from the rickety deck, and walked away.
As s
he walked, and as dawn seeped into the cooled August air, the landscape began to change until she knew she was no longer in our little hometown. It was as if she didn’t know where she was, or where she wanted to be, and the landscape continually reshaped itself with the beautiful, disorienting whorl of a kaleidoscope turned by an invisible hand.
She put her own hand to her belly as she walked. It was flat and soft. Well, that was gone. That had ceased to exist. That was not a problem anymore.
She walked on. There was a vista now, improbably so. The trees had thinned out. There was a horizon, seemingly with nothing beyond the rise.
She heard a distant, quiet, susurrant sound, which grew louder the closer she got to the rise. And before she reached the rise she saw water, and when she stepped to the edge of the bluff she now stood on she could see it was the ocean, vast and blue-gray, with gulls sailing in the sky above it, and white breakers on the narrow beach below, and just beyond them in the water there was a very large yacht. There seemed to be no one on the yacht, which was at anchor in the swells. It was new, its hull made of polished, coffee-colored wood. And then there was someone on the yacht. She could see that a man dressed in a white jacket stood on the broad rear deck, facing her, a neat, sky-blue towel draped over his arm, which he held crooked in front of him in the manner of an old-fashioned waiter. Which he apparently was.
There was a stepped path down the face of the bluff and she took it, counting her steps as if she were a child with no more on her mind than the descent itself. One hundred and twenty-seven. She walked across the beach, the warm sand pushing up between her bare toes. She no longer had any need of shoes. She waded into the surf and swam through the breakers to the yacht, pulled herself onto the ladder hanging down from its gunnel, and climbed up onto the deck.
The waiter nodded to her. He was an older man, a soft and large and comforting man, dark-complexioned, and his expression was as somber as the expression on a tilefish. She wondered for a moment how she knew that, and then she remembered being amused by the photo of a somber tilefish in the margin of a page in her dictionary, when she was a little girl. And she had said to her father at dinner that night, when he seemed troubled by something and would not speak, You look just like an old tilefish! And after everyone had gotten over their astonishment at where this expression may have come from, they all laughed.
The waiter nodded toward a deck chair and said something to her in a language she didn’t understand. She sat in the chair and fell asleep and when she woke up her summer dress was dry and the waiter had placed a cold drink on the little table beside her. It was delicious and tasted like crushed watermelon on ice. The waiter was nowhere to be seen but there was another man across the deck from her, in another chair, watching her.
He was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. More beautiful than any man she’d ever seen in a movie. Or in a magazine photograph. Or on a billboard or the cover of a record album. He was impossibly beautiful and impossible to describe. She blushed and could not say any more to me about how beautiful this man was, and I didn’t ask her to try.
She said, We went away on the yacht to another country.
The country was something like she imagined Greece to be, or possibly southern Italy. It was very sunny, the warm air brimming with golden light, and there were mountains in the distance you could see from the villa on a hill above the shore. Below the villa there were steep rocky cliffs and a wide blue sea. The villa had a broad terrace that overlooked a white swimming pool. There were large, slow ceiling fans turning in all the rooms. There was a constant cool breeze that blew in from the sea. There were servants as beautiful and slender and brown and silent as some kind of near-human, intelligent animal. Their eyes clear and limpid with an animallike devotion in their gaze. They transformed into other, similar creatures when they moved from one room to another.
There were dogs the size of small slender horses that roamed the grounds and guarded them against intruders, and killed rabbits and could be seen loping across clearings with these rabbits in their jaws.
There were great outsized housecats that lay draped over balustrades and the arms of stuffed sofas and chairs and they didn’t seem to acknowledge the existence of other creatures, not even the dogs.
The birds in the trees in their gardens watched her as she walked beneath them and they spoke to her in a silent language about things she could not translate to normal speech or even thought, and so these things remained entirely between her and the birds.
She and her Greek or Italian lover never spoke to one another, and yet they grew older, without appearing to. They only became more beautiful.
I became more beautiful, she said, until I wasn’t at all the person I had been before. I was entirely changed.
And that was good? I said.
She nodded, her attention distracted in the memory of her dream.
Yes, it was.
OUR PARENTS, HAVING BEEN terrified back to their senses, wasted no time seeking an annulment of our marriage. We’d lied about our ages, had no parental consent. Seeing us unconscious and possibly dying (as far as they knew or feared), they were sure we were being punished by God for being so young and so foolish, for thinking we could bring a child into the world when we were nothing but children ourselves. We were going to serve as a ghoulish example to other young people, the young couple who eloped and went to sleep and never woke up. Their child delivered by the doctors although the couple themselves would never know. Would never see that child, who would never see his or her parents, either—not awake and in the world, in any case.
Within days of our awakening, we were no longer married, no longer legal tenants of our apartment. Olivia was taken away to live with relatives in another state, I was never certain if it was Louisiana or Texas. I suppose it could have been a state even farther away, with a relative she’d never happened to mention in our brief time together. I don’t really think she put up much if any resistance.
I heard from someone a year or so later that she—we, I guess, but it no longer felt like that—had delivered a little boy, after all.
Then someone else told me they’d heard it was a girl.
In any case, I presume it went straight to adoption.
On the other hand, I once heard she never even had the child. She either miscarried or had what people called a phantom or false pregnancy.
I never spoke with Olivia again, so I never knew for sure.
Once, a few months after she’d been taken away, I saw her downtown, on the sidewalk, walking along as if nothing like what happened to us had ever happened to her, as if she were just another one of the people walking along, window-shopping, another person with no history at all.
It was winter, January. She wore a long, heavy coat and some kind of colorful hat, from which her dark hair just peeked at the bottom, even shorter than before. She wasn’t pushing a stroller or anything like that. Just by herself.
I looked different. I’d gained a lot of weight and some of my hair had fallen out, ridiculously, just from stress. I was depressed, I guess, what a joke of a word. And I was just driving by in a car, not our old VW bus. She wouldn’t have recognized me, anyway.
I tried not to worry or feel guilty about the child. He would always have someone looking after or over him. She would most likely have some very interesting fairy godparents, for lack of a better term.
LOOKING BACK NOW, of course, it’s obvious we got off pretty easy. There was always some young mindless dying in that town, those days. Cars flinging themselves into groves and against large stalwart roadside trees, the residents in their myopic ranch-style houses hardly bothering to venture out to the carnage.
During the year all this took place, one boy I knew was flung from a friend’s truck and crushed between the truck and a tree. A girl I knew and liked a lot died when an addled motorist drove the wrong way on the interstate. Another night, a guy who’d been on my Little League baseball team heckled a drunk stumbling into a pizza parlor a
nd the drunk walked over and shot him in the heart. He’d been bored, the boy had, hanging out with a bunch of other bored boys in the parking lot, and too easily amused by potentially violent drunks hungry for pizza. Not long after all this, my own brother Curtis died in a head-on collision with a car driven by another young man his age. They’d gone to high school together, had known each other most of their lives.
I knew a boy who shot himself in the head, in front of his mother, in their front yard, because he was so sick and goddamn tired of her drunken bitching cruel ways.
The funerals of these young people were awful affairs, with parents wailing, suffering, siblings slouching about in angry grief, not a little frightened over their own suddenly looming mortality, friends fairly creeping around as if to avoid the contamination of bad luck.
Then of course there were the teen couples who ran off to get married, so alluring the delusion of greater freedom. They were so phenomenally bored with being nothing, and high school seemed little better than a minimal-security prison. They were almost literally mad to chain themselves to lives of eight-to-five jobs, punch-clock paychecks, puttering home to the little postwar starter bungalow, and having a couple of beers, cooking burgers on the grill, being grown-ups.
I was kind of mad to find something of significance, anywhere, though I was into the delinquency, too. It was the most obviously interesting thing going. There was plenty of good, cheap marijuana, the kind that made you laugh a lot. Quaaludes. Mescaline. Plenty of acid. A few people blossomed into full-blown junkies. It even went that way for my little brother, Mike. But, instead of smashing up my car and friends, or overdosing on one concoction or another, I fell in love with Olivia Coltrane.
IT’S NOT LIKE THAT anymore in that town. There’s more to do, inside the house, inside the magnificent motherboards of the new machines. Young people don’t just drive around, bored, drinking beer and crashing into trees and other vehicles, slashing and flailing away at one another in parking lots and vacant lots out of rage or boredom. If they get pregnant, they get a quick and easy abortion at the local clinic, the boy waiting outside for the girl who doesn’t want him to come in, and then she staggers slightly back to the car, a stunned look on her face, something in herself suddenly evaporated, beyond her ken. No one seems to get all excited over the drugs, even though there are more of them to choose from. They’re just not the big deal they were. I suppose there’s the usual brittle coterie of meth-heads, if you look.
