Outside Looking In
Page 38
He hadn’t been there five minutes when there was a knock at the door. “Go away,” he called, but Fanchon’s voice came back at him, muted by the slab of the door, but sharp-edged and insistent all the same. “It is the telephone. For you.”
He said nothing.
“Fitz?”
“Tell them I’m dead. Tell them the funeral’s on Wednesday.”
She knocked again, more emphatically this time, and he got up from the bed with a curse, not even bothering to hide the bottle of brandy he’d wrapped his hand around at some point and couldn’t seem to let go of now. He crossed the room to the door and jerked it open, trying all the while to fight down something in his chest that felt perilously close to panic.
Fanchon took a step back, as if he’d startled her—he had startled her, but before he could sort out his feelings on that score (what was he doing? what was wrong with him?), she locked her eyes on his, announced, “It is Joanie,” turned and walked away.
He went down to the kitchen, where the yellow wall phone with the extra-long cord was, and found it lying facedown on the counter. Alice was there, along with Paulette and Diana, the three of them sitting around the kitchen table with tall glasses of iced tea, playing cards. Alice’s hair was bushed out, a mass of sun-bleached streaks and split ends that were testimony to a summer on the lake, a summer that seemed to have gone on from the beginning of time and was destined to go on till time ended and the universe became formless all over again. Her hair. Alice’s hair. All of a sudden it was exploding in his face—Pow!—a supernova immolating itself right there in the kitchen. All three of them looked up at him, but he didn’t have anything to give them, not gossip, explanation or apology, not even a greeting. Joanie was on the phone. Joanie. It didn’t seem possible.
He picked up the receiver and eased himself through the door and out into the hallway, the cord trailing behind him. “Hello?” he said. “Joanie?”
“Hi,” she said, and her voice didn’t sound like hers at all so that when she asked, “How’re you doing?” he thought it was some sort of trick, some stranger playing a gag on him—one of the kids, even, from the upstairs extension.
“Fine,” he said, and everything seemed to fall back in place. Joanie. It was Joanie on the other end of the line.
“Fine? It’s been weeks—weeks now, Fitz—and all you can say is fine?”
“Well, it’s, I don’t know—what do you want me to say?”
“I want you to say you miss me, miss your son. Couldn’t you even call? Or what, write a letter? You don’t have time for a letter?”
“I did call.”
“Once.”
“Okay, I told you, right, that we’re not allowed to use the phone for long-distance? Because of the financial situation here?”
Her voice came right back at him and there was no feeling in it, no feeling at all. “You couldn’t go to a pay phone? What happened, did somebody come in the dead of night and steal all the pay phones in town? What about the one on the wall in the back hallway of the bar—what about that one?”
This wasn’t the conversation he wanted to have. Actually, he didn’t want to have any conversation at all right now because everything kept shifting on him, the whole room, the whole house, all these objects that couldn’t manage to keep still. He wasn’t having a flashback, he wasn’t tripping, and if he was drunk he hadn’t been drunk long enough or in a determined-enough way to give himself the D.T.’s—so what was this? Life? Life without the sacrament, without Joanie, without Corey.
She said something he didn’t catch and then she said, “You there?”
He listened to the breath of the phone. After a minute—a pause—he said, “So what do you want?”
“What do I want? Are you kidding me? Are you drunk? Are you tripping? Don’t tell me you’re tripping, don’t tell me that.”
“I’m not tripping.”
He heard her take in a deep breath, as if she were armoring herself, putting up the defenses so she could troop out into the field and give battle. “You told me you’d be here two weeks after the Fourth. That was over a month ago.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I know.”
“And you ask me what I want? I want you home, with me and Corey, your son—remember him?”
“I am home.”
“Don’t give me that shit. Tell me, how’s your little slut? Has she fried her brains yet?”
He didn’t respond to this. The phone receiver—what was it, plastic?—felt as ungainly as a redwood tree, two thousand years old and hairy with bark, pressed flat to the side of his head.
“What about Ken?” he said. “Don’t you want to hear about Ken?”
“I’ve got news for you,” she said, her tone shifting till it was brisk and mechanical, just the facts, “—I’m not going back there. Ever. It’s wrong, Fitz, it’s a disaster. Look what’s it done to us. To me, Fitz, to me.”
“Don’t say that,” he said.
“I swear to you, I’m not going back.”
“Come on, don’t say that.”
He was going to say I love you, but it wouldn’t have meant anything, not right then, because he was irritated and confused and so far between the salient points in his life he couldn’t begin to imagine how he was ever going to navigate his way back. Corey! he thought then, Joanie! And even before she hung up and the line went dead he was thinking how very, very much he was going to miss them both.
Later—no, he wasn’t hungry and no, he wasn’t about to sit down to dinner and have to face everybody in the house, Tim especially—he took the back staircase down to Lori’s room and checked for what must have been the twentieth time to be sure her backpack was still in the closet. It was. He flipped open the nylon flap and inspected the contents, but as far as he could see nothing had been removed—or added—which told him something he didn’t really want to know. For a long while he sat there on her bed while the sun backed away from him inch by inch across the carpet till it hung suspended in the window and finally dropped out of sight. He was putting off what he most needed to do, which was go to Tim and explain himself, apologize, and at the same time see about the one thing that could begin to make this right, this whole day, this scene, as Charlie would put it, this terrible winnowing scene. Tim was the gander and he was the gosling. And though he’d been drinking brandy steadily off and on throughout the day, he couldn’t feel it on any level beyond the physical, and what was the use of that? The sacrament, that was what he needed, revelation, the shining path. If ever he was ready, it was now.
There was music coming from the main room, a murmur of voices, the usual current of people plugged in and operating on the same wavelength. He avoided them and tiptoed up the stairs, hoping he’d find Tim alone in his room, which wasn’t all that unlikely. Tim was up there most evenings now, at least while he was home and not out on the lecture circuit spreading the word and making the cash registers ring—it was as if he was withdrawing himself strategically, preparing them all for the break that was coming at the end of the year when he would fly off to India with his Nordic princess and leave them behind. Fitz listened at the door a moment, unsure of himself—he didn’t want to intrude or interrupt anything, especially after what Ken had said about Tim being furious with him, though he couldn’t really imagine Tim being furious with anybody for long.
At first he heard nothing, and then a sound came to him that froze him inside, a voice, a girl’s voice, nasal and echoing, and wasn’t that Lori? Wasn’t that Lori’s voice? Before he could think he gave the door a sharp declamatory thump with the heel of his fist and shoved his way in, ready for anything—only to find . . . Tim, dressed all in white in his long trailing sherwani and flowing trousers, sitting at his desk, alone. “Oh,” he murmured, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—can I come in?”
Tim had been writing in his notebook and he looked up now, the pen arrested over the page, and gave him a puzzled look that morphed almost immediately into his trademark grin. “Fitz,” he
called, “where’s the fire?”
The room was warm. It had been a hot day, muggy, and the evening hadn’t cooled things off at all. There was the sound of insects shrieking in the darkness beyond the windows and the periodic buzz of moths at the window screens. Fitz stood there, just inside the door, trying to smile back. “I just wanted to apologize,” he said.
Tim frowned. “Yes, well, I understand, Fitz, I do. We all go through these things, but the point is we have to be on our very best behavior in a little burg like this, you know? We’re members of the community now, but never forget it’s a community of hicks and yahoos, conservatives, Catholics, and we don’t need to be giving them any extra ammunition when we’re in their crosshairs to begin with.” He paused, set down his pen, interlocked the fingers of both hands and stretched his arms out before him. There was a bottle of scotch on the desk, a glass half full beside it. Moths flapped. The screens rattled. “Apology accepted,” he said.
“Don’t go,” Fitz said suddenly, and he didn’t know why he’d said it except that everything seemed to be closing in on him.
“Go? Go where?”
“India. Tibet.” A pleading tone had come into his voice, a tone he didn’t like, gosling and gander, but he couldn’t help himself. “We’re only getting started here, this experiment, I mean. We’re, we’re—we have breakthroughs coming.”
Tim held up a palm to forestall him. “It’s okay, Fitz, don’t worry. You’ll be in good hands with Dick. And Michael—Michael’s going to stay on. And I’ll be back before you know it, I promise.” He swiveled around and gestured to the easy chair beside the bed. “Look, have a seat, why don’t you. You want a drink?”
“Yes,” he said, easing himself down. “Or no”—and he was the one grinning now—“drink is what got me in trouble. With our friend Officer Salter. What I was thinking is maybe a little taste of the heavenly blue? Will you do it with me?”
Tim gave him a long look. He controlled the sacrament, though he was more than liberal about it—if people wanted to trip, that was their right, the right to internal freedom—but he was the impresario, the ringleader, the dealer, and he held that power over everybody in the house. All you had to do was ask, but still, it was all in the asking, wasn’t it? “It’s kind of late,” he said finally. “I was planning on finishing this,” he said, gesturing to the notebook. He glanced across the room, as if there were an audience waiting in the wings. He gave it a beat, then one more. “But all things in time, right?”
“I don’t know,” Fitz said, “I just—I think I’m getting close. The last time, or no, two times ago, I saw the white light, the First Light, I mean—just at the end. It was like all the color went out of the world and there were no dimensions to anything, just light.”
Tim was nodding. Sipping his drink and nodding. “I hear you. People who’ve died and been brought back to life report seeing that same light—in every case, absolutely. Though of course you’ve got your neuroscientists and their lab rats telling you it’s no different than a light bulb flaring at the moment the power goes out.”
“But they’re wrong, aren’t they?”
Tim shrugged. “I don’t know, Fitz.”
“I want to see the Second Light, I want to see God—or whatever passes for God when your mind peels back all the layers and there’s nothing between you and the universe. You’ve been there, I know you have—”
Tim had the pill bottle out now, right there in his hand, the Delysid, LSD-25, with its preposterous warning label—POISON—when in fact the substance inside it was the only known antidote for the poison of the world, of consciousness, of non-God and non-knowledge and the pitiable grasp of humankind on the drawstrings of nature and the dead black reaches of space that swallowed everything like an insatiable mouth.
“Tell me you have. Tell me you’ve been there. Tell me you’ve seen God.”
Tim uncapped the bottle, shook six pills out into the palm of his hand, three each, a supernal dose, a dose worthy of all the gods there ever were. He winked. Grinned. Leaned forward over the cradle of his knees and stretched out his hand.
“Fuck God,” he said, “let’s get high.”
About the Author
T.C. BOYLE is an American novelist and short-story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published sixteen novels and twelve short-story collections. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1988 for his third novel, World’s End, and the Prix Médicis étranger (France) for The Tortilla Curtain in 1995. In 2014, Boyle won the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times. He is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Southern California, and he lives in Santa Barbara.
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Also by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Novels
Water Music (1982)
Budding Prospects (1984)
World’s End (1987)
East Is East (1990)
The Road to Wellville (1993)
The Tortilla Curtain (1995)
Riven Rock (1998)
A Friend of the Earth (2000)
Drop City (2003)
The Inner Circle (2004)
Talk Talk (2006)
The Women (2009)
When the Killing’s Done (2011)
San Miguel (2012)
The Harder They Come (2015)
The Terranauts (2016)
Short Stories
Descent of Man (1979)
Greasy Lake & Other Stories (1985)
If the River Was Whiskey (1989)
Without a Hero (1994)
T.C. Boyle Stories (1998)
After the Plague (2001)
Tooth and Claw (2005)
The Human Fly (2005)
Wild Child & Other Stories (2010)
T.C. Boyle Stories II (2013)
The Relive Box (2017)
Anthologies
DoubleTakes (2004), coedited with K. Kvashay-Boyle
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
OUTSIDE LOOKING IN. Copyright © 2019 by T. Coraghessan Boyle. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Jim Tierney
Cover photograph © Superstock/Getty Images (man) and Colormos/Getty Images (colored splotch)
FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition APRIL 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-288300-1
Version 02262019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-288298-1
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