The River in Winter

by Matt Dean

  Tory said, "I can't disagree with that. However reprehensible his ex-gay ministry might be, I can't fault him for telling you that."

  "I suppose in theory it all sounds lovely. A big bearded father figure in the sky, taking care of everything. On the other hand, it's kind of ridiculous, isn't it? A big bearded father figure in the sky, taking care of everything? Ridiculous. Obviously, no one's taking care of anything, or there wouldn't be war, or famine, or genocide." I lifted my coffee cup. The coffee was strong indeed; the very smell nauseated me. I put the cup down again. "Or alcohol poisoning."

  "Men make war, not God. And God gives men free will. We're all free to throw away our lives and our souls, if that's what we want to do."

  In the hedges alongside the house, a cardinal bathed itself in the deepening snow. It might have been the same bird I had seen from the bedroom, but I couldn't be sure. White fluff clung to its back and wings. It shook and snapped its tiny body, casting off the snow, and in the same motion it took to the sky.

  "I don't really want to debate theology," I told Tory. "I'm sure you know more about it. You know more-." I was about to say that he knew more than I did about everything, but I could hear the bitterness creeping into my voice. I took a breath. "You know more about it than I do, I'm sure. I haven't given the subject much thought in a very long time."

  Tory sipped his coffee. He stared out the window. Or, rather, he had turned his face in the direction of the window; his eyes seemed unfocused, the eyes of a blind man. "I don't know that much about theology, actually," he said. He took another sip of coffee. With a grimace he set down his cup. "Cold." He looked at me now, no longer blind. "What I think you're saying, really, is that you want some kind of proof, some evidence that God is there, listening, watching, ready to help. That's not how it works. Proof and faith are two different things. In a sense, they're opposites."

  "That's convenient."

  "Faith is illogical. By definition, it's illogical. It makes no sense. It's not meant to. Why should it?"

  "It's not like I need a burning bush. It just seems like there's nothing. I'd feel stupid praying to nothing."

  "Silence isn't the same thing as absence. Maybe if God is silent, it's because he wants us to work harder to find him." He cocked his head. The stereo had gone quiet again. "Speaking of silence, time to turn that record."

  While he was gone, I flipped through the pages of his poetry. One of the poems was called "fuck."

  fuck hospitals

  fuck IV drips

  fuck the ER

  fuck ICU

  I felt a knot in my throat. I read on. The poem ran on and on without punctuation, almost entirely in lower case, cursing oxygen, plastic tubing, syringes.

  fuck all of this

  fuck life fuck death

  fuck doctors and

  fuck nurses and

  fuck God who won't

  listen when all

  I want is one

  more fucking day

  One more fucking day. In my mind's ear I heard the poem as a song. Or not as a song, perhaps, but rather as a kind of countertenor shriek, accompanied by crashing chords on piano and dissonant triple-stopped squeals on violin.

  One more fucking day. One more fucking day.

  If I set this poem to music, I would string out those last few syllables until the singer's voice wearied under the strain and the tuneless tune rankled the audience to the point of distraction. I would turn this poem into the Great Fugue-the goblin march-of art songs.

  I stared at the poem's final stanza.

  fuck God who won't

  listen when all

  I want is one

  more fucking day

  The typescript blurred before my eyes. Tears came at last. Tory returned from the living room. He stood over me, stroking my hair. Tears came and came. He squatted, his hand between my shoulder blades, stroking, softly stroking.

  "That one gets to me, too," he said, softly. "The sheer rage. It's a kind of wall you have to climb over. The anger blocks the sorrow. After the sorrow, there's the acceptance, and eventually-. Well, it takes a long time, but eventually there's gratitude."

  He stood, dragged his chair around the table. He sat. I wiped away tears. I looked at him.

  "It's okay," he said. "It's okay to be angry. It's okay to be sad. It's okay to feel."

  Something in my heart snapped. It was a physical sensation, as if a rib had cracked. The fearsome thing, the hideous thing, I'd thought to stave off at last happened.

  After the salt came the sweet. My heart grew still. I heard no small voice, I felt no unearthly presence. But in my ears there rushed a blood song; just as I grew still, I also surged. The fear was gone, the wall breached, and on the other side, calm. Was this conversion?

  "Have you gone and made me Lutheran now?" I asked him. My breath rattled in my throat.

  "There are worse things, my friend. There are worse things."

  * * *

  Part Two

  13 - Nothing

  The sun sank behind a hill. Engines whining, the plane banked over the blackening bay and leveledw on approach. The landing was bumpy and swift. As the plane came to a shuddering stop at the gate, I grew jittery, restless, hectic in anticipation: Barbara was just on the other end of the Jetway.

  And so it was. She stood at the front of the waiting crowd, her hands folded primly across her belly. When she saw me, she raced toward me, squealing, and wrapped herself around me. Sunglasses sat atop her frosted bob; our hug knocked them off. As I bent to retrieve them, I noticed that she wore a long, reed-slender black skirt, the hem a kind of hobble around her ankles.

  "What on earth is going on with this skirt?" I said.

  "Nowadays all the young ladies wear them this long."

  "The young ladies? What does that have to do with you?"

  "Mind your manners." She slapped my shoulder. "If this skirt were any more chic it would speak French. Did they feed you on the plane?"

  "They tried to, but I was too smart for them. Have you noticed how they always store those little carts right next to the biffy? I find that kind of creepy."

  "Do you have luggage?" she said.

  I carried only my leather jacket and a canvas tote bag big enough for The Seventeen Quartets and a notebook containing blank staff paper and Tory's poems. I lifted the bag. "You didn't raise me to travel this light," I said.

  Arm in arm we strolled away from the gate. She peered at me sidelong.

  "Are you growing a beard?" she asked me. "I've never seen you with a beard."

  I stroked my cheek. By now the whiskers there were long and stiff. Whether the growth amounted to a beard, I couldn't say; I couldn't remember the last time I'd looked in a mirror for more than a couple of seconds. I shrugged. "I've just been kind of lazy lately."

  Lazy wasn't exactly the word for it. After my apparent catharsis at Tory's, after my initial euphoria, I'd felt mostly numb. Each night I'd slept long and dreamless hours. Each morning the alarm clock had buzzed me awake. Each day I'd gotten myself to the office. I had somehow plodded through my duties, had somehow finished Onslaught, had somehow put together a coherent book report for Martin. Some of the refinements-cleaning, laundry, shaving, eating-had gradually come to seem irrelevant.

  "Do you disapprove?" I asked her.

  Too quickly, she said, "No, no, no, not at all. Just surprised, is all. I've never seen you with so much as a stray whisker."

  A knot of people had stacked up behind a pair of stooped old ladies who shambled along in the very center of the concourse. We slowed, hanging back until the crowd cleared. As we passed the old women, I noticed first that they were dressed just alike, and then that they were just alike. Twins.

  We passed the beeping white sally ports and humming black conveyors of the security checkpoint. In the blue cavern of the ticketing level we passed a skycap, a hunched and rounded little man, his uniform all askew, the backs of his shoes folded down under his white-stockinged heels.
Arms crossed, cap tilted over one eye, he leaned against the back of a motorized cart. Barbara stopped cold. She lifted her chin and set her shoulders in a way that usually meant trouble. I hung back while she strode over to the skycap. As she spoke to him, her face broke open in a grin, the toothy quintessence of breezy politeness, but the clipped syllables of the only words I could make out-"centenarians" and "hobbling" and "do your damn job"-were sharp and hectoring. Her gesture, too, a wave of the hand in the direction of the concourse, was abrupt, with an austere snap of the wrist.

  On the other side of the security checkpoint, the concourse slanted downward. I had to squat slightly to see beyond the slope. The hunchback twins shuffled along the concourse, inexorable and slow, like zombies in a B movie, if zombies wore pink macram? shawls and carried rectangular rattan handbags.

  Suddenly Barbara was at my elbow. She said, "I've discovered this new Vietnamese place-."

  The skycap's cart whirred as he spun it in a wide arc and pointed it toward the concourse and the zombie twins.

  Barbara said, "Well. It's not new, precisely. It's been there for twenty years, I'm told, but it's new to me, though ironically it's been seven blocks from my house all along."

  The skycap helped the twins into the cart. Barbara grasped my elbow and pulled me toward her.

  Barbara said, "It's a hole in the wall. One of those places. You know, nothing to look at, but the food is marvelous."

  We rode an escalator to the crepuscular cave of baggage claim. The Northwest Airlines carousel loomed in a distant corner.

  "Is it me," I said, "or does the light seem dim? I feel as if I'm in a casino."

  Barbara made a show of looking around. "Perhaps the odds of your bag arriving are posted somewhere." She giggled. At just that moment, the carousel creaked to life. Metal blades rasped and scraped. A hard-sided orange suitcase rolled up a black conveyer belt and clattered onto the carousel. "Imagine that," Barbara said. "My melodious laughter charms even inanimate objects. Don't roll your eyes at me, young man. Bow before my grace and power."

  "What if I just stand here quietly and wait for my luggage instead?"

  * * *

  Barbara had parked her BMW convertible on the roof of the parking ramp. It sat a long way from the elevator, perpendicular to the yellow lines, taking up three spaces. Its black paint shone like the surface of a polished mirror. While Barbara folded the top down, I stowed my jacket and luggage in the narrow trunk.

  After the rimy weather of Minnesota, the California air felt silken, balmy. As she drove up the 101 through South San Francisco, though, the air streamed damp and chill through the loose knit of my sweater. I huddled into it. All week I had been wearing it. The collar smelled musky.

  Traffic in our direction was sluggish. Far off to my right, in a marina, dozens of boats, their masts as silver-white as winter birches, bobbed in the dark water. Across the bay, the lights of Oakland twinkled like earthbound stars, their reflections drowning in the rippling bay.

  Nothing moved in the southbound lanes. On the far side of the highway, a broad basin or reservoir-some brackish-looking backwater of the bay-lay still and shining. Around it a commuter train-a long silver thread-chugged along in a cloud of black diesel smoke.

  "Isn't this horrible?" Barbara said. She tapped her horn and dashed across three lanes. "It's getting to be as bad here as in Los Angeles."

  "How do you live here?"

  Stung, she looked at me. I thought she might cry. "How can you not? Everything you could want is right here. Including other gay people." She said, "I've been thinking, with everything that's happened, maybe it would do you good to have a change of scene. Get out there. You know, meet some new people."

  I thought of Spike's dance music, the shimmy shake, the sweaty electric slide Jose and I had enacted on the living room carpet. I sank deeper into the beige leather of my seat. I plucked at the wiry hairs around my mouth. I couldn't remember if I'd packed a razor.

  Above Candlestick Point, square-shouldered hills rose on either side of the highway. Beyond that, square houses in pink, lime, and pumpkin climbed sloping streets dotted with amber light.

  "How's Christa?"

  "She's been sick," I said. "Food poisoning, I guess. She's a freak about doctors, so she won't go and find out what it is."

  Traffic came to a halt. Barbara coasted to a stop behind a panel truck, her front bumper inches from its chrome trailer hitch. "How long has she been sick?"

  "A couple of weeks."

  The truck edged forward. A purple minivan drifted into our lane. Patting the horn twice, Barbara swerved. The minivan's driver watched us go by. She was, unthinkably, one of the zombie twins. She watched us pass, her wrinkled face impassive, her eyes hooded. There was no sign of the other twin.

  "No good deed goes unpunished," Barbara said.

  "This can only mean one thing. Somewhere on this highway there is an identical purple minivan being driven by her sister."

  Taillights shone red-orange all around us. Barbara braked. Crossing her arms over her chest, she said, "She's pregnant, you know."

  Stately as a Spanish galleon, the purple minivan sailed rightward, into the side of a Cadillac. Immediately, all around us, horns squawked. I turned my head to watch the van recede as Barbara veered around the wreck. The zombie twin stared numbly at her steering wheel. "She's probably too old, don't you think?"

  "Not her," Barbara said. "Christa. She's pregnant. No one has food poisoning for two weeks. It's morning sickness."

  "Morning sickness," I said. I felt suddenly dull-witted, thick-tongued, club-footed. Slack-jawed, I stared at the dashboard. "What makes you say that?"

  Barbara tramped the gas pedal and swerved into the now-empty middle lane. "Just a hunch, I suppose," she said.

  We were closing fast on the car in front of us. I clutched the armrest until my knuckles whitened. I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth.

  I must have dozed. Barbara nudged me awake in time to see the skyline come into view. Against a blackening, cloudless sky, the windows of office buildings glowed with yellow light. Fairy lights outlined the cables of the Bay Bridge.

  "What is it about a skyline?" I said. "It's just concrete and steel and granite, and somewhere a power plant belching coal smoke to keep it all running. But there's something magical about a skyline at night."

  Barbara stared at me, frowning.

  "What?" I said.

  "A power plant belching coal smoke? I don't recall you being so cynical."

  I patted my belly. "I'm always cynical when I'm hungry."

  * * *

  By some miracle, Barbara found a parking spot half a block from the restaurant, in front of a movie theater, the Lumiere. Rapt, she stood on the sidewalk, perusing the poster for a movie called Tous les matins du monde. Two men stood before a pair of trees. A gap between the trees revealed the sandy-beige facade of a manor house. The men wore elaborate period costumes; one held his arms outstretched and tipped his face to heaven, as if appealing to the gods for a role in a better movie.

  The marquee's yellow light bathed Barbara's upturned face; her pale skin and frosted hair glowed. She wore the beatific smile of a haloed saint or votary in a Baroque painting.

  I cleared my throat. Barbara shook herself out of her reverie. With a smile she led me down the hill to the restaurant.

  Just as she'd said, it was a hole in the wall, a narrow, deep storefront. At the front, there was a galley kitchen and a long counter. At the back, a single cramped four-top table sat on a platform. A tall structure of bead board half-concealed the sunken entrance to the restroom. To the right of that, a closed door oozed steam.

  "Strange," Barbara said. "I've never seen this place empty before."

  We sat at the table. Barbara sat with her back to the bead board wall. She set her mammoth leather handbag on the chair next to her.

  The cook, a tall curly-haired Asian woman, handed us each a single sheet of laminated paper. Barbara fitted horn-rimmed
half-glasses to her face and pored over her menu, as if it were something elaborate, as if it did not comprise a handful of items-imperial rolls, five-spice chicken, grilled pork, noodles-in various combinations. Everything came with "meat sauce and rice."

  I leaned across the table. "What is this meat sauce?" I whispered.

  "The most delicious thing on earth. Just don't ask what's in it."

  Another Asian woman, also curly-haired, appeared from the back. Smiling, she set two glasses of ice water between us. Smiling, she disappeared.

  "Now I'm kind of wishing I'd tried to talk you into Thai food," I said.

  The front door opened with a creak, and a man stepped into the restaurant. He wore a baggy, rumpled raincoat. He could not have been much older than thirty, but his hair was salt and pepper, mostly salt. His eyebrows were thick and black. He sidled past us. In his heavy black boots he clumped down the stairs to the restroom.

  Without looking up from her menu, Barbara said, "I swear I raised you for higher purposes than you've yet put yourself to. Open your mind. It's a big world."

  That sounded familiar. I rolled my eyes. "When you said Vietnamese, I was picturing hot and spicy chicken, ginger beef, spring rolls. Like at Vina. You know, that place in Highland Park-."

  "I remember, I remember. Vina is bogus. This is the real deal."

  I laid aside my menu. "How's the pork? I don't want chicken. It'll either be bone-dry or crawling with salmonella."

  "You seem snappish of a sudden. I suppose I shouldn't have said anything about Christa." She folded her glasses and tucked them into a gold lam? case and dropped the case into her purse. "Never mind," she said. She sipped her water. "What shall we do tomorrow? The entire city is our playground. Do you have any interest in the wine country? We could drive up in the morning, have lunch in Napa, hit a few wineries. Or maybe the Santa Cruz Mountains. More wine, fewer tourists."

  The gray-haired man returned from the restroom. As he passed our table he winked at me. I heard him say, in a mellifluous baritone, "I'll have the usual."

  "I don't drink wine," I said to Barbara.

  "That's not really the point, is it?"

  "Won't you be sleeping all day?"

  With a grin she poked my shoulder. "You're only here once or twice a year. Who needs sleep?"