Above The Thunder

by Renee Manfredi

  “Fags know early on the importance of good gifts,” Jack said. “You never know how long the riches will hold out. Don’t you agree?” Jack said, to no one in particular. “Today an investments broker, tomorrow a viewer of daytime television and wearer of watch alarms. We’re all just this side of selling Amway.”

  Judy Garland muscled over the huge gift—what could only be a picture or painting of some sort. Anna looked down at his feet, turned inward in the red heels. “Ready for the Mona Lisa?”

  “What the hell is this?” Jack asked, tearing at the wrapping paper. “Oh,” he said, and Anna saw an expression on his face—a recent addition to his repertoire—which she had begun to love, love to an aching degree for its authenticity. It was a look of great intensity that suggested transparency, as though he saw right to the beating heart of things. His eyes widened and crossed just the tiniest bit before dropping down and looking away. There was usually a smile that went with it. “Oh,” he said again. Finally, he turned the photograph around. It was a black and white of Jack himself dressed in nothing more than a chef’s hat. In his hand was a pair of barbecue tongs clenching a hamburger bun in a strategic location. He was standing at a grill, gazing full into the camera with a cheese-ball grin, surrounded by men and women with blank looks, as though there was nothing unusual going on. They were looking at the grill with open buns in their hands. Jack was breathtaking; Anna had no idea. It was clearly a staged photo meant to be comedy, Anna guessed, but people were studying it now with the solemnity that seemed more fitting for the Edward Weston print. She didn’t understand the silence at first—surely a group like this wasn’t offended—until Anna felt Violet come up beside her. “Huh. That’s some body. Who’s he?”

  Anna glanced at her, then at the group around Jack who were avoiding looking at one another or the photograph.

  Jack himself broke the silence. “Do you remember this, Stuart?” Jack asked. “The redneck handbook Curtis put together.”

  Stuart smiled, nodded. How could he forget? That was just before everything changed. He looked down at the photo of Jack, then at Jack in the flesh. It didn’t look like the same man, though for his money he loved Jack’s face better as it was now. Jack was tiring, Stuart saw, a certain tightness around his mouth, tension in the tilt of his head.

  Stuart was nervous despite the three martinis he’d hoped would take the edge off his panic. “I have something for you,” he said, getting down from the barstool. He took off the coat and laid it flat on the ottoman in front of Jack. “Ever since I’ve known you, you were the most exciting thing ever, like this great whirl of energy that I never wanted to be outside of. I couldn’t imagine not being surrounded by you. This was the next best thing.” He opened the coat, explained about the numbers from Jack’s running jerseys—more for the benefit of others than for Jack—the flowers they picked together or their first date, feathers from the mourning doves that nested outside their bedroom window in California, but after a few minutes he felt people’s attention beginning to wane. Stuart watched Jack’s face in earnest, watched the memories come alive in his face as he touched the emblems of them. “Anyway, I give this to you with love and good wishes.”

  Jack looked up at him, and then away. “I am overcome. I am overwhelmed by this.”

  “It’s just a token of our time together. A scrapbook.”

  “It’s a work of art.” He wrapped it around his shoulders. “I’ll cherish this forever.”

  Stuart smiled. Jack kissed him, then kissed him in a way that made the other half of the room stare. Stuart pulled away, but Jack folded him close again, kissed him on the forehead, the mouth, left cheek, then right. “That is my genuflection,” Jack whispered in his ear, “I worship you.”

  By the time Marvin showed up at about ten-thirty, Anna realized she hadn’t seen Flynn for hours. She greeted Marvin at the door. A young woman—young young woman, nineteen maybe—stood beside him holding a giant box.

  “You’re way late,” she said, irritation rushing in where worry had been. More than any other person in her life, past or present, Marvin had a way of knocking her off an even keel; just when their relationship seemed to be steady and workable, he pulled a stunt like this, showing up three hours late with a woman young enough to be his daughter.

  “Good to see you,” he said, leaning in to kiss her on the cheek. He smelled of the cold air and tobacco. “This is JoBeth.” The woman peeked over the top of the box.

  “This is my mother-in-law, Anna.” He stepped in and dropped his luggage, took the gift from the girl. “Oh, I need to tell you. Greta called as I was leaving. Her daughter is sick, so she won’t be coming in tonight. She said maybe tomorrow. She’ll call you later.” Disappointment and panic—she didn’t know why exactly—sank through her. Something was wrong. Something felt really wrong. She would call Greta at the first possible moment.

  Anna left Marvin at the door and escorted JoBeth into the living room where the party was louder, drunker, and more surreal than ever: Judy Garland, with Violet’s red skirt on his head, held the giant photo of Jack overhead and had a conga line forming behind him. The line snaked around the living room to the music of Donna Summer. Jack and Stuart were still in their mushy moment, everything but the cartoon hearts above their heads. She was suddenly feeling ungenerous and tired. “There’s still a lot of food left if you’re hungry, and drinks, of course.” To Anna’s left Albert Cyr was holding Y2K doomsday court with Violet, whose visible skirt—the red one still being used as a head dress—was now a librarian brown plaid. Asa was still at his station in the corner. His hands were moving beneath the pizza box in his lap. Tripp, the druggist, who had been inspecting Jack’s gifts, turned and swatted Asa on the shoulder. He was Tripp’s nephew, Anna remembered. “Get your hands off your imagination, boy,” Tripp said. “On top of the pizza box, where I can see them.”

  “I’m a palindrome,” Asa said, when JoBeth swept by. Anna watched as the girl turned and bent toward him, puzzled.

  Anna waited for Marvin to sidle up beside her. “I have to tell you, I’m a little irritated. You might have called to tell me you were running late, and that you were bringing a date, which by the way is disrespectful.”

  “Why? To whom?”

  “To me. To your daughter, the reason you’re supposedly here. The reason you were supposed to be here this morning, as you promised.”

  Anna watched Marvin’s date make her way to the bar. She was exquisite, really, and she had Poppy’s coloring and build, though the girl had boobs—augments, Anna decided—and wasn’t quite as tall. “And what happened to the lovely Christine?”

  Marvin sighed. “What happened. What always happens? Lovers are like pantyhose. Sooner or later they all run.” He put his arm around Anna’s shoulders. “Come on, Anna.”

  She didn’t dare look at him. “Anna,” he said again, in a tone that was patient and cajoling at the same time. Her body had always been traitorous in the presence of Marvin. She could be trembling with rage, but the minute he stood near or touched her, it was like brandy in the back of her throat, a warm and smoky fire. “Take your hand off me,” she said finally.

  He exhaled dramatically. “Where is my daughter?”

  “She’s probably hiding out somewhere. She’s not much into crowds these days. I’ll go find her.”

  “No. Wait a little while. Don’t force her into this group. I’ll see her after the party ends. I want you to see what I made Jack. It’s something I’ve had high offers for. A buyer offered me a thousand for it, but I decided to give it to Jack.” Anna watched as Marvin reached around JoBeth to get the oversized box, encircled her waist for an instant. He walked over to Jack, who was glowing. Stuart, too, had transformed into something wonderful-looking. Anna had never thought much of Stuart’s looks—he looked to her like an old-egg baby, the short limbs, long trunk, and flat forehead women sometimes produced when they bore children in mature maternity—but now she realized that he was a handsome man. Or maybe it was the
attractiveness that comes from being in love. The dancers were moving to the corners now, Petula Clarke singing “Downtown.” Jack lifted a bust of clay and bronze out of the box. The side facing her was Clinton whose features Marvin distorted to look like a goat’s. Half the face was bronzed, the other ordinary clay. She didn’t need to see the other side to know it was a serial killer. She’d imagined he would have moved past this by now.

  Anna turned away, toward the back door somebody had left open. The air streaming in smelled of the sea and of the damp cedar fencing her garden. Something else, too. Figs. The musky intimate smell of figs, though she was surely imagining that. She walked outside. It was getting very cold. Tomorrow she and Flynn would drive north, stop at a chowder place for lunch, shop for warm school clothes—Flynn was growing so quickly—and walk the beaches in the afternoon. She walked to the porch at the front of the house. Flynn wasn’t here, but had been; she’d made herself a little nest on the chaise: rumpled quilt, a scattering of record albums printed with Poppy’s name in her childish handwriting, a nearly full glass of Kool-Aid, and—in the path of the porch light—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s book about dying.

  Anna sat. Something wasn’t right. She pressed the blanket to her face, inhaled her granddaughter’s scent. It smelled a little sweaty, sour with illness or fear. An animal moved at the corner of her vision. She turned, but saw it was just the wind, not a living creature, moving the leaves and shrubbery. There was something else. A presence, a feeling of being observed. Anna walked to the edge of the porch, squinted into the darkness. An insect brushed against her cheek. She smelled roses and lime shaving cream. Anna rarely thought of sex, even more rarely wanted it, but there was something about the night, with its wintry air and the emotions swimming around in her—nostalgia, anger, and, inexplicably, fear—that made her want it now. With no one in particular, without any special tenderness, or, God forbid, false expressions of love, just a healthy strong man who could reawaken her body’s responses. Once again, she heard something rustling in the bushes beside the house. “Marvin?” she called, but there was no one there.

  *

  Flynn sat on the railroad tracks waiting for the midnight train. She felt like she was still stuck in a dream, only half aware of what she was about to do. This was best, she knew, because she had seen the future last night in her dreams and it wasn’t something she wanted to be a part of: Jack would die soon, so would her grandmother. Last night and early into this morning, she saw the rest of her life. She would marry and live in France, but it would be an unhappy marriage. She would be an artist creating things in blue glass, but even this would not make her happy. She would have a son, but not a daughter, and, most terrifying of all, she would develop a disease in her forties that would slowly paralyze her and confine her to a wheelchair long before she would actually die. She would be completely alone, her son turned against her by her ex-husband, under the care of a nurse who didn’t treat her very well because she didn’t have to; Flynn couldn’t speak but even if she could, no one was there to listen. There were wonderful things before this happened, but not so many to compel her to stay. She knew what would happen after she did it: they would be angry with her, just as in the dream last night her mother was angry when she saw Flynn and said, what are you doing here, you’re not supposed to be here, and they would put her with the angels for a while, make her sit among them but not be able to experience the joy they had, the place where every living thing had a voice. Her mother was dead, Flynn was sure of this. She’d been dreaming it for weeks.

  The angels had come to her last night and showed her things, warned her that time was no better healer of wounds than mercy. They told her in the world of spirits time was measured only by completion, interruption, and violence. She would be sent back, and her next life would be harder but more rewarding. The punishment for what she was about to do was that she had to be in her father’s group again, as his mother, which was far worse than being his daughter. He was moving in the wrong direction, toward the dark and not the light, and he had many more lifetimes to learn his lessons. His had been a soul greatly admired: he’d lived twice as a beggar, which was greatly esteemed because it taught people charity and compassion. Before that, when he was new, he was one of the extremely rare beings formed from two separate places: the realm of the angelic and the realm of the human-divine. Sometimes, though, the angels got jealous—they were imperfect, too—and they did bad things. In her dream last night, she saw and understood everything.

  Before bodies, souls had colors. Her father had the blue of the angels swirling through the yellow-white of the human-divine. The angelic part of him sang along with the blue flowers, the bluebells and violets, a silvery wet sound in the key of C. Perfect C was what the angels were pitched to. An important task of angels was to escort all souls to the birth tunnel, one on each side, their bodies acting like skin to protect the new being from the dirt and darkness of the human world. There was a small space, a gap, where they had to be extra careful, and that was the border between these two places. This was the place of nowhere. The time of nothing. The place where no heavenly bodies could rule, and no bodies that were human could stay. Underground creatures dwelled here and were hateful.

  With Marvin, one of the jealous angels moved just a fraction of an inch, and darkness rushed in. That angel had received the worst possible punishment: it was torn from the angelic realm and forced to become a human spirit. And, even worse, Flynn learned in her dream, the spirit wouldn’t be blessed with forgetfulness, it would always remember in a vague yearning way the blue and white happiness of the angels’ special place. That’s how bad it was to do something unkind and unloving to another being, Flynn was told by a man in her dream. Angels feared one thing and that was becoming human: the worst possible situation for them was to be encased in small spaces like human bodies that demanded to be fed and satisfied. The angel had been Anna, and now she, too, was bound to Marvin. The three of them, Flynn saw in her dream, would be back in the same group, with Marvin and Anna as husband and wife, and Flynn as Marvin’s mother. Poppy would be a mentally ill mail carrier who poisoned all the neighborhood dogs. She, a he, in the next lifetime, would go to jail for doing terrible things to children where he—she—would be murdered after ten years. A terrible war was coming and Flynn was to be a soldier in charge of a settlement camp after the fighting ended. Her life would be lonely and she would be blamed and hated for a food shortage and for enforcing laws—who could bear children, and who couldn’t; executing people who committed hate crimes—that were designed for the continuation and improvement of the species. In the world to come, only kindness mattered. She would be shot to death eventually, but Flynn would do good in that future lifetime, fulfill her purpose.

  In the distance Flynn heard the faraway whistle of the train. It was time, and now she was really frightened, not of dying, but of getting it wrong about being forgiven. Hell was where the unforgiven went. Flynn hadn’t seen hell, but she knew there was such a place. This, where she lived now, might be hell. She walked down to the track and lay down. Two Native American men lay beside her. One of them showed her how to make herself small so it wouldn’t hurt at all. But something or someone wouldn’t let her do this. When the train was close enough so that she could feel the vibrations in the track, she half sat up, about to change her mind. She was so afraid! No one in her dream had told her how afraid she would be; the angels told her there was nothing to fear. She wished she didn’t know the things that she did, wished she couldn’t see so far or so clearly. What if she was wrong about everything? What if she was just a psycho mental freak like kids at school said?

  Lining the track now were all sorts of people—not anybody she recognized—who were staring at her. She didn’t know why they would be interested in her or appear glad to see her. Watch my eyes, an old man said. Flynn looked at him, and realized he was her grandfather. At least, he looked like the photograph her grandma had on her night table. She kept her eyes on his,
felt the Native American men push in closer to her, their soft leather shirts like another person between her skin and theirs. This is wrong, she thought. I don’t want to do this. But now she couldn’t move and the train was so loud she heard it through every bone in her body. She didn’t feel anything, and just at the last minute, when the train was above her she saw a terrifying creature with red eyes hanging on to the underside, a creature from the place of nowhere, the time of nothing. It was like a badger only with a human face and very very angry—the Indian men squeezed against her so hard with such firm pressure that she popped right off the tracks. Now she would have to go home. Now she would have to finish out her life unhappy and crippled and lonely. She began to cry, because she was stuck in this dark dream, this thick darkness and clumsy body of a twelve-year-old girl when she’d been so close to being free of it all. She turned her head to the left and saw the lights from her grandmother’s house. She heard singing from somewhere, voices talking with echoes in them. There was a vibration in her chest, a rattling in her and she knew she probably broke some bones because there was a rattling and a vibration, now moving up to the top of her head and causing a terrible pressure, a pain worse than anything she imagined possible.

  Slip out, a woman said. Flynn looked down, saw a pair of red shoes and a lawn with croquet wickets. Slip out, a woman’s voice said again, just like your body is a sweater you’re taking off, and follow me.

  Flynn didn’t have any idea how to do this. She couldn’t move anything but her eyes. She felt the waiting presence of this woman, her grandfather and the others. She had to learn it before they could help her. She watched as the woman walked toward the wickets. They grew tall as she neared them, high enough that they cleared her head, then shrank back down when she passed through. Flynn watched as the woman’s red shoes got farther and farther away. She was moving in the direction of the sun, walked until the white light surrounded her and made her a shadow against it. Flynn again felt the humming in her head, now worse as she looked at the light, which she thought might be some kind of food, because in her body were thousands of buzzing mosquitoes frantic to get at it, so many of them that they pushed her head out to twice, three, four times its size until it exploded with a large pop like a gunshot. After that she felt better, could take a deep breath again. She was going to be okay. She stood up, turned toward her grandma’s house. Turned the other way. Turned back again. There was nothing there. She looked in every direction: nothing. The croquet wickets popped up one by one, becoming arches of light. A red soccer ball rolled toward her. She kicked it, then followed its rolling path; it stopped at a field of bright green grass where very tall women were wearing shoes the color of cherries and playing soccer.