Backward-Facing Man

by Don Silver

  When Chuck woke on game day, he tried to piece together his actions the night before. After getting high, he stood by the exit ramp of Memorial Drive and caught a cab, forgetting Frederick’s advice to scrub himself. If someone had been following him, they’d have seen a short, nervous-looking kid stagger into the bus terminal and rush toward a young man, who was so happy to see Chuck, he hugged him. From there, he walked thirteen blocks to a bar in Kenmore Square, where he spent several hours trying to convince a couple of locals to attend the Democratic National Convention, as if he, Chuck, and not Frederick, was a bigwig in the radical movement. Once home, as evidenced by the loose foil and the pipe paraphernalia on his bed stand, he’d smoked some of his best black hash before falling into a deep sleep. He swallowed a throat lozenge and lit a cigarette, setting the ashtray on his chest and looking at the clock. It was ten thirty A.M.

  By now, Frederick would have buried the powder and the rubber. In a half hour, Lonnie would pick up the banner from Lorraine and head over to Fenway. Chuck’s ticket was on a plastic milk crate. The hack was in motion. There was no stopping it. No turning back. What would happen next was out of his control.

  Along Commonwealth Avenue, window air conditioners were grinding against the humidity. Heat seemed to sink into the asphalt and then radiate in waves, warping Chuck’s view of cars and the apartment houses he passed. Chuck’s throat was sore, and he felt put upon once again being Frederick’s lackey, having to participate in this radical action so that Frederick could exaggerate his accomplishments as a revolutionary. Most of all, Chuck resented being Lorraine’s unofficial lover, her backdoor man.

  When he got there, she was standing on the porch holding the painted white sheet like a game-show girl modeling a breakfront. She had on a red cotton shirt and a pair of shorts with the letters BC stenciled on the thigh. At the base of the steps, Lonnie was sitting on his bike, smiling. When Frederick commissioned her to create a banner for demonstrations leading up to Chicago, Lorraine and her friend Toby had sewn two sheets together and then painted a huge mountain packed with dirt and dotted with trees, using whatever arts-and-crafts supplies they could find. About two-thirds up, a thin line of cirrus clouds crossed the vista, and, still higher, there was a dark crust that resembled an asshole. At the apex, neon lava spilled out of the crater down the sides in red Day-Glo rivulets. Above that, in black spray-paint smoke, with silver glitter around it, she’d written in block letters the words PEACE ERUPTS NOW! A cluster of neighbors stood admiring it, until she and Toby folded it like a flag and then handed it to Lonnie.

  After Lonnie left, Chuck and Lorraine walked down to Harvard Avenue, where they bought an assortment of Popsicles, slushy drinks, mixed nuts, and a quart of orange juice. Because Lorraine knew nothing of the hack, Chuck decided to blow off attending the game. How important was a written account of something the entire country would be watching? On their way back, Chuck stopped at a package store and bought a bottle of tequila. At home, Lorraine set up a fan so it blew on the couch, and Chuck turned on the game.

  It was midday and already it was sweltering hot. Lorraine disappeared into the kitchen to get some ice. When she came back, she’d pulled her hair back and slipped off her shorts. Chuck took aluminum foil with a chunk of hash and a few clumps of weed from a bag in his pocket and broke it into pieces on a newspaper. Lorraine spiked their drinks pretty hard, and they got comfortable on the couch. After the announcers called out the Red Sox lineup, a troop of Brownies from Lowell sang the National Anthem. Lorraine reminisced about her time as a Girl Scout, then started in about the people she’d met and the policies she’d written that week. The Red Sox took the field.

  “If you could have lived in any time in history,” Chuck asked, eager to change the subject, “when would it be?” It was the kind of thing Lorraine liked talking about.

  “The Middle Ages,” she said without hesitation, “when Frederick and I first met.”

  He sipped his drink.

  “Somewhere in northern Europe,” she said next, dead serious. “We had different physical embodiments, of course. I was thin and frail, and he was tall and Nordic-looking. He had the same laugh,” she said, as if she were remembering, “and a long red beard.” Chuck shifted his attention between Lorraine and the game, quite buzzed now.

  “How’d you meet?”

  “He was a soldier, and I was a wet nurse tending one of our lord’s daughters.” She closed her eyes and breathed in, as if recalling the smell. “Thieves threatened our lord’s livestock. We were young, maybe fourteen or fifteen, already betrothed to others.” Betrothed, Chuck marveled. Who uses a word like that? The Detroit Tigers went three up, three down, into the bottom of the first inning. Once, stranded at the reservoir in a thunderstorm, Lorraine told Chuck that death was merely a transmutation of matter, not the crisis of consciousness people made it out to be. Several times that summer, Lorraine swore she’d lived before, perhaps many times. Chuck imagined Lorraine wrapped in animal pelts, hair unwashed, her face blackened, wearing an expression of wonder.

  He wanted to ask her what caused déjà vu, precognitive awareness, memories of things that may not have actually happened, but he knew what she’d say: “Not everything is explainable by science.” Besides, it’s one thing when someone you love tells you they’re in love with somebody else. You might still hold out a sliver of hope that someday something might change. But this cosmic connection asserted in one lifetime and born in the next, what do you do with that? Chuck wanted to tell her that Frederick was no revolutionary, just an ordinary sod, hooked on speed and expelled from college for truancy. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the Red Sox leave the field, vaguely aware that a hack he was at least peripherally involved in might soon rock Fenway Park.

  Someone in one of the bedrooms was playing music, and there was the smell of something cooking in the kitchen. The oscillating fan sliced the air in a slow annoying scrape. On television, an announcer in a blazer faced the camera while little figures in brown uniforms pushed wheelbarrows and dragged rakes along the top of the screen. The station cut to commercials again. A feeling of sadness came over Chuck. That afternoon—the last the two of them would spend together—he had a precognition of his own: No matter what he said or did, no matter how many times they fucked or hung out, Lorraine would always see herself connected to a man she had known for more than seven centuries. In the heat of the early afternoon, perhaps to console himself, he reached over and touched her hand.

  She let her head fall in his lap, causing the newspaper and its contents to spill onto the floor. They came together slowly, clumsily—her hands moving to unbuckle his belt, him lifting her T-shirt and, as he did, sliding out of his shorts. Their lovemaking that day was urgent and confused—a tangle of limbs, torsos inverted and intertwined. Lorraine’s sexuality—her appetite for pleasure, her interest in the moist and murky intersections of the human body—was such that she was able to focus on a tiny sensation for what seemed like hours. She took him in her mouth and then stopped, blew on his skin, and then took him in again. She let him probe her with his fingers until they were both wet. Chuck’s desire spiraled until he felt the entire focus of his being shift from his head to his loins and back again. At the same time, his craving to disappear inside her was so strong it flooded him. With the television droning, Lorraine sitting on the couch, her legs open, Chuck pressed his arms against the sofa cushions and buried his face in her hair while, outside, a motorcycle engine cut out and footsteps sounded on the steps and Frederick Keane, Lorraine’s knight in contemporary garb, threw open the screen door and stood, mouth agape, before bursting in.

  In a masterstroke of bad timing, Frederick grabbed Chuck’s shoulder at the exact moment he climaxed, causing him to freeze with his shoulders hunched, holding his breath. For a few seconds Chuck was unable to locate himself in space or time. When he came to, Lorraine had grabbed her T-shirt and panties and was scrambling toward her bedroom. Frederick tried to lift Chuck so he could knock
him down again, but his rage was too much. With his foe cowering, Frederick looked around the room, grabbed the TV, lifted it, and smashed it against the floor. He picked up the coffee table, sending the drinks flying. Roaring, he moved around the walls, punching the photographs Lonnie had put up, leaving a red swirl of blood.

  Chuck crawled into a corner of the living room, cutting his hand on a sliver of glass. He covered himself with a pillow while Frederick screamed insults that both paralyzed and astonished the naked man. “You’re a coward! An asshole, an idiotic, wannabe radical, following me around all summer hoping something I say will plant itself in your head and wipe that blank expression from your face!” It was as long and personal an attack as Chuck had experienced, except by his father, who used to tear into Artie like this when they were kids. “You’re her lapdog, man, wagging your tail every time she walks in the room.” Chuck felt tiny and deflated in the same way he imagined his brother had felt all his life.

  When Frederick finished with Chuck, he moved to Lorraine’s bedroom door. Wood around the hinges splintered. Inside the room, Chuck heard her pushing something, maybe a chest of drawers, across the floor. When it became apparent that Frederick was going to break down the door, Chuck heard the chest move again and the sound of hardware—a lock unlatching. “Pack your things!” Frederick screamed at her. “Now!” The floorboards shook. From her room, there was the sound of a mirror or the glass in a picture frame shattering. As Chuck scrambled into his shorts, Frederick was carrying a half-closed suitcase and dragging Lorraine toward the door.

  After having the palm of his hand stitched, Chuck retreated to his apartment, listening to music, siphoning smoky medication from his bong, eating old pizza from the box, and pacing. In one fell swoop, however fraudulent Frederick claimed they’d been, Chuck had lost his lover and his only friend. His days were a blur. A couple times, he wandered up to the house in Brighton. The couch in the living room had been hauled outside and replaced with the one from the porch, and Lorraine’s room, including the bed and dresser, had been sublet to a young man. Nobody had seen or heard from Frederick or Lorraine. The last time, on his way home, Chuck nearly collided with Lonnie Clark. “I’m heading back to San Francisco,” the photographer said.

  “You wanna get a beer?” Chuck said, at once anxious and eager for details of the hack.

  “Sure,” Lonnie said. It’d been a strange couple days for him, too, and he felt like talking. “The night of the drop, I took the knapsack with the film canisters to that commune in Cambridge. I only saw him for a minute. There must have been a dozen of them laying around, hippies, some of them naked.” Lonnie smiled and shook his head. “Frederick was wired, man. We went upstairs, and Frederick filled the rubber with water. The fucking thing turned purple. It looked like a big bruised dick.”

  Lonnie spent the night before the game in the Back Bay. “After I saw you at Lorraine’s, I took the Green Line to Fenway and met Frederick inside the park. He’d gotten us each a ticket, four seats apart, in the first row of the center-field bleachers. He was nervous, man,” Lonnie said, grinding out his cigarette. “Like a guy at his wedding.”

  Lonnie described the infield. “Even though it was hot and hazy that day, the field was crisp—sharp lines, burnt orange and white bases, puffy like pieces of cereal.” A man read announcements into a microphone, his words cascading over one another in center field. Frederick held a pair of binoculars in front of his glasses, alternating staring at a patch of infield and scanning the stands behind third. “He dug a trench a few feet off away from second, using his wheelbarrow as a sight block. The whole thing took less than a minute.” When they first met up, Frederick told Lonnie he was worried that chemicals had leached off in the film cans or that he’d covered the rubber with too much dirt. “Until the game started, he kept looking for you in his binoculars,” Lonnie said. At one thirty-five P.M., about the time that Lorraine and Chuck were drinking tequila sunrises, the umpire yelled “Play ball.”

  Lonnie switched to the voice of a baseball announcer. “The Tigers and the Red Sox went three up, three down, in the first inning. In the top of the second, there was a single and a walk, but nobody got to second base. The Tigers walked the lead-off man and then retired the sides. In the third inning, it was the Red Sox—three up, three down. Between innings, you could see a little trail of smoke rising from near second base. It might have been Yastrzemski from left field or Petrocelli on his way in; or the rubber swelling from the heat; or maybe a pebble that punctured it. It looked like a campfire somebody’d pissed on.”

  Lonnie smiled. “A couple of curious Detroit players wandered over to see what had happened. The second-base ump waved to the guy behind the plate, who called over the head groundskeeper. The guys in the outfield tossed a ball around, the pitcher put his jacket on, and the guy in the on-deck circle went back to the dugout.” He shook his head. “That was it, man. The crew brought out rakes and hoses, and they smoothed it out with the big brushes. There was no emergency, no announcement, no reaction from the crowd. I don’t know what they did on TV, but a radio behind us kept playing commercials. I was waiting for Frederick to drop the banner, but he just held real still, with the binoculars in front of his face.”

  Lonnie reached into his camera bag and handed Chuck a series of eight-by-tens, beginning with an out-of-focus shot of people in the stands and ending with a groundskeeper dragging a broom across the reddish dirt. “By the time the game started again, Frederick had split. The Sox lost, the hack flopped, and somebody ripped off my bike. On top of that,” he said sheepishly, “I left the fucking banner in the stadium.” It was a bad day for the Fenway Park Revolutionary Council. What was supposed to have been a brilliant piece of revolutionary theater that would have catapulted Frederick to legendary status in the countercultural revolution was a dud, a nonevent. The hack went slack.

  “Have you heard from him?” Chuck asked.

  “They’re at the Democratic Convention in Chicago,” Lonnie said, rolling his eyes. “Me, I’m getting out of here. Back to California.” They stepped out into the cool night air and shook hands. “I’ll send you a postcard.”

  Chicago was a disaster. It was all over the news. Twelve thousand cops, five thousand guardsmen, and six thousand army troops with tear-gas grenades, nightsticks, and firearms beat and arrested a couple hundred unarmed longhairs, including Frederick and Lorraine. The Democratic Party rejected the peace platform and nominated Hubert Humphrey, a flap-jawed Minnesotan hand-picked by LBJ.

  Maybe it was the cumulative effect of the assassinations—John and Robert Kennedy’s, Martin Luther King’s, Chaney’s, Goodman’s, and Schwerner’s—the civil rights workers, and black leaders like Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. Maybe it was the bystanders who were beaten or lynched or shot to death for being the wrong color or in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe it was the lies and the made-up progress of our military in Southeast Asia. But it was at that moment the political ground of the sixties began a seismic shift. Men who’d secured deferments by staying in graduate school decided to get married. Drifters looked for jobs. Renters bought houses, taking out thirty-year mortgages. Slackers, those who’d been intentionally unemployed—living off the land, turning on, making music, and loving each other freely—quietly started careers or enrolled in graduate schools. Flower children became gardeners and advertising managers; Hell’s Angels became felons; pacifists became introverts; and angry young women turned into radical feminists.

  People like Frederick moved to communes, became bomb-wielding revolutionaries, or put on suits and ties and became professors or journalists. Few people realized it at the time, but the fall of 1968 pretty much marked the end of the sixties as an ideological era. Before it, people seemed hopeful, radiant, and energized. That summer, everything changed. In place of hope, children of the sixties began feeling dread. It was like the sun disappeared behind a wall of clouds. The Age of Aquarius—the days of free love and flower power that had started with fast food and the
handsome president, sleek cars and color television, cures for crippling diseases and the exploration of outer space—morphed into something much darker.

  Back in Philly, after an extraordinarily good year in the security guard business, Charlie Puckman Sr. surprised everyone who knew him by hiring his oldest son, Arthur. Just before Labor Day, Chuck reenrolled and settled into a dorm room at MIT—a plain-looking four-story building with mostly seniors. A few nights after he’d settled in, Chuck heard someone tapping on his door in the middle of the night.

  Much to his surprise, it was Frederick Keane, looking like a half-tone version of himself. “It’s bigger than we are,” Frederick said, pushing his way in. “It’s bigger than Fenway, bigger than Chicago.” He paced the tiny room like a caged animal, walking to the window and back, licking his lips, wiping his nose on a shirt that smelled as if he’d been wearing it for days. The muscles of his jaw moved under his sideburns. “This Sunday’s an open house over at the lab.” He sounded out of breath. “Here’s what I need.” He rattled off the same chemicals Chuck had procured before. “Lorraine will come pick them up tomorrow night.” He made no mention of what had happened two weeks earlier.

  “Lorraine?” Chuck said, his heart racing. “Here?” There would be contact again. Discussion. Rapprochement. They would have a few hours together. Frederick stuck his right hand out, angled up for the freak handshake. It was ice cold.

  The next day, Chuck washed the sheets on his twin bed, stuffed the rest of his laundry in a bag, and replaced the harsh white bulb in his study lamp with a red one. Then, just as Frederick had asked, he followed a group of students into the lab and set himself up at a station. When everyone had either gone or gotten involved in experiments, he went over to the supply closet and quickly withdrew the same three containers. Fifty grams my ass, he thought, dropping them in his pack. I’ll give him the fucking jars.