Another Broken Wizard

by Dodds, Colin

  The CVS had just opened when I arrived. Exhaustion and a fundamental reluctance showed on the face of the pharmacist when I showed him the prescriptions, Dad’s insurance card and my driver’s license. He hesitated and went to the back. The place was big. I strolled the aisles and picked up magazines and snacks for Dad. The pharmacist had the pills ready when I got back to the counter.

  Back at the apartment, I looked at Joyce’s long, coldly polite letter and decided the rest of the stuff on her list could wait a day. I dressed in the same clothes I’d worn the day before and flipped through the TV’s many bad choices until I heard Joyce’s keys in the door. She was in jeans and a green fleece with a hospital logo on it. She looked raw, freckly and stippled, as if she’d applied the opposite of makeup to come over. She was unpleasantly surprised to see me. Apartments always become smaller as the winter goes on, but Dad’s would always be too small for three adults. I told her Dad was sleeping and that I’d gotten his pills from the pharmacy. She reminded me that I had failed to go grocery shopping. I said I had to go to a funeral. She asked what Dad was going to eat. I slapped a twenty on the kitchen counter and said to get delivery. She said I couldn’t keep doing that. I said I’d be at a funeral all day and walked out, dramatically, without my coat. I hurried across the frozen puddles and crunching scree of the parking lot to Dad’s SUV.

  The sky over Route 9 was clear but not bright. The sun was still low behind me. I past the Econo Lodge and the sports bar, always under new management, perched at the intersection of Route 20. It was too early for the funeral. But a sense—that something was almost over—propelled me. I was nearing the end of this first, blistering and unhinging portion of grief. I pressed the gas pedal.

  I malingered in the late rush-hour traffic on Shrewsbury Street, pausing at the traffic light by the Wonder Bar. I thought of how Joe laughed at the predicament he’d put himself in. I could still hear his loud, machine-gun laugh and thought of his peculiar, intense optimism. The optimism was for small things—that the night ahead wouldn’t be boring, that he could find some excitement and satisfaction in what seemed to everyone else to be just passing the time.

  Something was coming loose. Joe’s laugh was doing it. And he had laughed in every dour face, every shabby fate that wagged at him from the steel desks, the fake-velvet seats of Oldsmobiles, the bolted down Dunkin Donuts’ tables and the dirty plastic cash registers. I limped to the next red light, by the Boulevard Diner. I stared it down as if it could be intimidated. I stared until my eyes became blurry with tears and a Toyota behind me honked. Driving under I-290 and around the rotary by the train station, something did come loose. The staccato bellow of Joe’s peculiar and belligerent joy rang in my ears and I had to pull over. That laugh. It was Joe winning his momentary victories over boredom, and then over the embarrassing and dangerous means at his disposal to fight boredom.

  Circling past the refurbished train station, I found a place to stop. It was the parking lot of a vacuum cleaner repair shop that had been gutted and refurbished to sell wine and gourmet foods. In low, subdued spasms, I puked up a prominent piece of the cinderblock. Leaning over the steering wheel, with the traffic jostling past me, I remembered meeting Joe in the fifth grade. We were paler and hairless, our fingers always sweaty. We had both discerned that the world, though huge and mysterious, was largely unfriendly, and wanted us mainly to go where it sent us, and to be quiet about it. I remember by the lockers, Joe sold me a truly awful Atari game, called Haunted House. Later that week, I told him it was a crappy game and I wanted my money back. He said I just wasn’t playing it right. That was the beginning of it. We got older and figured out more of the little mysteries. The world got smaller and sometimes seemed, in fits of hubris, to be downright small. But we shared the same basic suspicion of it, and made our very separate peaces. Well, cease-fires only last so long. And now Joe was dead.

  Wiping the spit from my mouth and the tears off my cheeks with the back of my hand, I took some deep breaths. The wave receded. I made it to the funeral home in time to join the procession to the church on June Street. We drove slowly, with our headlights on, across the city. The funeral was across town, in a modern Catholic church, a triangle done in that yellow-brown institutional brick, with a simple cross on top. The parking lot was mostly full when we arrived. I shook hands, hugged, and shared my head-shaking, clueless grief with the people crowded in front of the church. The sense—that something was nearly over—made me a loiterer on the cold church steps. Joe’s family made their way past in a protective formation around Justine, who was wearing sunglasses. I nodded to her but she didn’t notice. Then Emily and Jeff showed up. Jeff was wearing a black trench coat with a black sweatshirt and black jeans. His eyes were wide and jumpy. Emily was wearing a dark-gray pantsuit.

  “Hey guys. Thanks for coming.”

  Emily pursed her lips as though I’d said something absurd.

  “No problem, man” Jeff said, lowering his head and looking solemnly at me.

  “Hey, are you going to the cemetery after?”

  “I didn’t know if we should or not,” Emily said.

  “I’d like it if you did. You can ride with me if you want.”

  “Okay, sure,” Emily said, looking at Jeff, who was nodding in a rhythm that had escaped the cadence of the conversation.

  “Oh, I got you a present, do you want it now?” Jeff asked, jumping into the conversation from left field.

  “Maybe after the Mass.”

  “Okay.”

  “What are you guys doing afterwards?” I asked, surprised by the high pitch of my voice.

  Marissa passed me with Kyle, Fin, her enormous Italian boyfriend and Mike. She said she’d hold me a seat close to the front as she passed. I made plans with Emily and Jeff to go to the cemetery and then to get something to eat. Marissa waved to me from the fourth row when I entered the church. I kneeled and crossed myself, then walked down the aisle. In front of me was Joe’s extended family, distant uncles and aunts, adopted and natural cousins, along with family friends who felt they were entitled or needed enough to sit up close. I wasn’t the only one who wanted to be at the white hot center of the pain. A strange competition was afoot.

  The church filled up. Except for his sworn enemies, almost everyone who knew Joe loved him. His ashes sat on a cart on the crimson high-traffic carpet at the head of the aisle, in front of the marble stairs that led to the altar. His urn was green marble, just larger than a shoebox. I imagined Joe—all six foot two of him, condensed to be buried. I thought of who he was—now condensed into anecdotes, to be buried in memory. It was all happening too fast. The priest began to say the Mass. Marissa periodically clutched my hand and I clutched back. I looked around at all the people, crying or staring dumbly into the front of the room. The Crucifix above the altar was one of those sterile, modern jobs—all pale wood and clean lines. The face of Christ was drawn and tranquil.

  The priest obviously didn’t know Joe and repeated what he’d heard from the family with full attribution. Claire gave a eulogy that praised Joe the precocious child, and condemned Joe the alcoholic. After Communion, I prayed without aim, mouthing the words Oh God over and over, with no other praise or pleas for Him. The Mass resumed with the Ave Maria, whose opening notes rose like the sun cracking the line of the horizon. A massive sob rose with it and seized my chest and throat. When it passed, I realized the Mass was nearing its end. For the first time in my life, I wished that a Mass would be longer. Even in remembering, I find myself reaching out for some remembered detail to slow down the narrative. But I mostly remember looking down at my hands, my lap and my shoes.

  Too soon, too fast, the priest told us to go in peace.

  Emily and Jeff and I got into Dad’s SUV and followed in the procession out the west side of Worcester, up Airport Hill, and out of town, into the woods, into Paxton, whose town common was anchored by an obelisk to its war dead. We didn’t talk much on the drive over there. The Veterans cemetery was where they were
going to bury Joe. It was a humble place. Its large monuments commemorated the wars and the branches of the armed forces. The men and women and their families received small brass plaques in the lawn. Whoever ran the place had cleared the snow off the ground around the grave and dug a hole. A backhoe was parked behind a massive granite star that honored the men and women who served in the Navy during World War Two, including Joe’s grandfather. We packed into the semicircle carved into the snow. Sobs erupted around the circle.

  The priest, a gentle if ineffectual old Irish man, said the words In the midst of life we are in death. It sounded so baffling that I almost had to believe it. It was a shard of mystery thrown into the cooling tumult of my guts.

  After his words, most fled the cold. I lingered, along with some others for no good reason. I spotted an old friend, John Bedill, who had been a friend of Joe’s and an all-around good guy—until he robbed a sporting-goods store with a shotgun and, if memory serves, received a fairly stern sentence for it. I was surprised to see him out and about. We saw each other and embraced, released each other, nodded and went our separate ways, probably forever.

  I paced and stared at the green marble box until it became clear that I wasn’t going to out-linger the other lingerers without a coat. I walked down the snowy, trampled grass back to Dad’s SUV.

  63.

  Jeff turned off the radio when I got in the SUV.

  “The radio’s fine. You can turn it back on.”

  Jeff didn’t turn it back on, so I did, but quieter, so the Aerosmith song coming through the speakers was a tinny hiss. We pulled away from the grave and then stopped by the cemetery office so Jeff could use the bathroom.

  “So are you okay?” Emily asked, climbing into Jeff’s seat up front.

  “You probably know better than me. I mean, I’m talking and walking and I want to get a sandwich or something. So I guess that I am okay. I’m not feeling the urge to drink my own weight or drive a hundred miles an hour. I guess that’s what okay is, right?”

  “I guess it’s the best you can hope for.”

  “I just wish there was something to do. To name a street after Joe, or pass a law, or to make it so that cop goes to jail. I wish there was some clear lesson in all this, besides don’t taunt a man with a gun. Or I wish it had changed something in me, that I could take all of this and use it to become a saint or a millionaire. And there’s none of that, no lesson, no meaning, no purpose. I mean, is he just another guy who threw away his life because he couldn’t figure out what he was so mad at?”

  “You have to give it time.”

  “It’s like, your whole life you try to think positive, to make the best of bad situations, to fix problems and so on. But there’s no way to fix this, no way to deal with it, no good to be gleaned from it. He’s just dead. There’s nothing to do and practically nothing to say.”

  “I don’t think there is anything to do. Things will change in their own time.”

  Jeff came out of the bathroom, walking with a stumble back to the car. Circling out of the graveyard, we saw the funeral directors, along with a guy in coveralls, converging on Joe’s grave. Through the woods, we found Worcester again. There was a reception in the church basement, but I skipped it. We drove around aimlessly, finally stopping for some sandwiches at Elsa’s Bushel and Peck, then crossed the tail end of Lake Quinsigamond, passed St. John’s and climbed into Shrewsbury.

  “Can I have my sandwich?” Jeff asked.

  “One minute,” I said. “We’re almost there.”

  There’s a park connected to the lab in Shrewsbury where they invented the birth control pill. On a service road between the lab and the park is a gap cut about two hundred feet deep into the trees and brush to give it a view of Worcester. It’s a lovers’ lane that no lovers ever seemed to visit. Driving the SUV right into the snow bank, I parked there. It wasn’t late, but the sun was already lowering itself onto Worcester.

  “You know, you shouldn’t miss Joe too much. You’re going to see him again, in another life,” Jeff said after a half sandwich had passed.

  “Thanks man,” I said.

  “Seriously. My dad told me this story about reincarnation. One of the gods, Indra, was building himself a huge palace to celebrate this war he won. He kept making the palace bigger and bigger, until the builder finally went to Brahma and said like, hey, get this guy off my back.”

  “I thought your parents were Catholic,” Emily said.

  “That’s mostly my mom. My dad is into all kinds of stuff, religion-wise. My mom is just the pushy one. I think she tried to convert him when I was a kid, but …”

  “Okay, so Brahma decides to help out the contractor.”

  “Yeah, so he goes to see Indra in the form of a little boy and he starts telling Indra all kinds of things that he never knew about his ancestors. And then the boy sees a trail of ants in the corner of Indra’s huge mansion and starts laughing. Indra asks why he’s laughing, and the boy says that each of the ants has been Indra an infinite amount of times before,” Jeff said, nodding.

  “So what happened with the mansion?” Emily asked.

  “Oh, I think Indra decided to forget about it and seek wisdom, or something.”

  “I wish my thesis advisor was so easy to placate,” Emily said in her low punch-line voice.

  All of Route 9 glowed as it climbed up from Lake Quinsigamond, anticipating the dusk. It grew bright with orange streetlights, white parking lot lights and a dim rainbow of back-lit plastic signs. Beyond it was a glimpse of the few tall buildings of downtown Worcester.

  “Oh man, here’s your present. I got it just for you,” Jeff said, taking a brown paper bag from inside his coat pocket.

  Inside the bag was a clay wizard with a conical cap and star-spotted cloak. The wizard held a marble for a crystal ball in one hand. The wizard had a long, white beard and his mouth was wide with joy. It was exactly the kind of gift you’d expect your mentally ill friend to give you in a time of bereavement.

  “Thanks man. I like it, a lot.”

  Jeff leaned between the front seats to touch the wizard.

  “His open hand is for incense. I just figured that, with everything going on, it might help you relax.”

  “Thanks. It’s a great gift. I really appreciate it,” I said and put the wizard on top of the dashboard.

  We finished our sandwiches while the sun pressed itself into the hills. I was all cried out and all talked out. My eyes were as hollow as my cheeks. I drove Jeff and Emily to the church parking lot and said good-bye. Jeff nodded again and again with his eyes wide as we said good-bye. Emily seemed more wary.

  “Call me anytime you need to—night or day. But I guess you already do that,” she said.

  There were still cars in the church parking lot, and I considered going inside. But by then, communal mourning had gone from being a high imperative to a poisonous form of self-abuse. I drove around Worcester as the roads filled again with rush hour traffic. Meandering in Dad’s SUV, I wondered at what Jeff had said about an infinite universe, where you play every part again and again. It seemed fair, but dizzying. And it made my present anguish seem foolish.

  Despite everything, I prefer the Catholic scale of things. In it, everything matters. Everything is real to everyone. Even Christ loses his patience on the cross and demands that God explain why He has forsaken His only son. Even for Christ, pain is as real as God, and even more real, for a moment. And though reality may have a happy ending in heaven, there’s a lot of suffering between here and there. For the first time, the agony and struggle of Catholicism made real sense. I decided to buy some beer.

  After making a hundred lefts and rights just to stay within twenty minutes of the red hot center of the pain, I pulled into the big liquor supermarket on Park Avenue. Abstracted with thoughts of suffering and God, I parked too hard into the parking lot’s huge snow bank. The clay wizard rattled against the windshield and then fell down by the gas and brake pedals. In my suit, I walked fast against the cold t
o the liquor store. But the doors were locked. Checking the sign on the door and my cell phone, twice, I saw that it had closed three minutes ago. I knocked, but only drew the attention of a surly Puerto Rican clerk, who pointed at the sign. I held out my hands in supplication to the scratched plastic doors of the liquor store as he walked away.

  Back through the orange sodium light of the parking lot, I cursed. I opened the door to Dad’s SUV and hopped inside. But my feet didn’t hit the mat evenly. I leaned down to see what I’d stepped on, my stubbly neck pressing against the fake wood steering wheel. I retrieved the wizard Jeff had given me, now in two pieces, the wizard, and the arm that held his crystal ball. I held up Jeff’s gift, with a piece in each hand. The crystal ball caught the headlight of a car making a u-turn on Park Avenue.

  “Another broken wizard,” I said to no one, and wept. I went to punch the car radio, but remembered it was Dad’s, and pulled back.

  Eventually, I put the pieces of the wizard-shaped incense holder in the passenger seat and put the car in reverse. I took Chandler Street downtown, passing the old Worcester Market with the gorgeous terra cotta bull’s head at its roof peak. I worked through the rotaries and one-way streets back to Route 9, where the snow banks had already turned their final dirty color, somewhere between gray and brown. It was the color of the long-haul portion of the winter that sends the old-timers and the short-tempered running for Florida. I drove past the Price Chopper, Papa Gino’s and Newbury Comics in Shrewsbury, past the West Side Grill, which waited in the cold to go out of business again, then past the Fountainhead.

  Route 9 was a profoundly unconscious stretch of the human enterprise, like so many places. The stores, the empty patches by woods and lakes, the apartment complexes, the uneven peppering of red lights—they all seemed immune to remark. I worked the gas and the brake. It was the best I could do. The night spread out forever. The earth vanished as Route 9 rushed me and my fellow travelers to the dream scenarios of parking lots, private homes, shopping centers, junkyards, interstate highways, airports and oblivion.