Bedlam and Other Stories (21 page)

“You could still jump up right now, you could jump up and get us both.” I touched her thigh, but she wouldn't stop. “But you can't be
bothered
. You can't make up your
mind
.”

The way Erin pulled together her robe—with one neat hand to her throat, a womanly gesture—was so at odds with the shakes that got into every syllable she spoke.

“I'm
sick
of worrying about you. I
know
you can't ever hurt us.”

No time to calm down. No choice except to see again about Robbie. But there, God, the shock of my relief. Robbie looked finished for the day. He lounged, with knees crookedly splayed, against one edge of the fallen table. In those speckled pyjamas he might have been a caterpillar drowned in the rains (plus possibly even then I was responding in part to some hint of the change in him, some newly calm line in his forehead or in the drooping oval of his chin). But Robbie also was holding another piece of mirror. Smaller than his last, yes, and that one detail alone couldn't change his battered general appearance. Nonetheless, however, he was frowning into the glass. His knuckles were trembling around it. And Erin, worst of all…to hear my wife's exasperation changed my thinking finally…Erin,
you kept going after him
. When you stamped your foot I could feel it right up my spine. That familiar stubborn rant cleared out whole seconds in the otherwise bumper-to-bumper cram of my fright. But Erin, no. No, there's nothing there. I admit I'd been the one to let him in—I mean I can see what you had in mind exactly. Because why else would I leave the bedroom door open? I too couldn't live any longer with these blind household cycles, sex and damages and do-it-again. I too couldn't stand it. And Erin—I'd mixed it up with you before—your promise of last things had proved no good. We'd merely gone limping from one blind alley to another. Therefore earlier this morning I'd arrived at the same conclusion you had now, namely, that Robbie and no one else could strip away our life's elastic wraps of pain. The bone in my heel knocking flatly against the base of the bedroom door had been the gavel banging down on my decision. But look where it had got me. Instead of breaking any syndromes, I'd been laid out, useless as the rubber mat beneath my shower-stall tears. I'd practically gone blinking up into Robbie's sick mouth. Now at least the poor wrecked child sat away from me—Erin, away from you and me both—we had him away from us at least, at last.

I reached again for my wife.

“Erin,” I said, “we're wrong about him. Please—”

“Erin,” Robbie said then, “please. Please don't be so hard on me. If you just go down and start breakfast, I promise I'll be there in a couple minutes. I just have to clear away some of this mess here.”

Recovery
is a word I distrust. A word like a feather, like ragweed, it blows in unreliable patterns over too much ground. Because the sanity Robbie has come to enjoy lately must be understood as taking place within strict limits. He's sane enough to live in a guest house on his father's property, with a maid next door and a doctor in town. Though these days the songs he sings come from off the radio, on the other hand that's not such an accomplishment, bringing a thirty-year-old man to the point of singing hit tunes as he noodles around in his darkroom or shovels snow outside. Robbie is a trusty, nothing more. He's the inmate you can rely on for a job like shoveling snow. And if Robbie does shave most mornings, if generally his hips are lined up under his belt as he walks, if he can now process most of his own shots and use an enlarger correctly, nonetheless I have yet to see him buy any of those razors or clothes or chemicals for himself. He can't so much as go into town without someone else doing the driving. He visits that doctor four times a week. In fact, the softness of his awareness, the shrugging innocence with which he gives up on harder questions, sometimes can only be understood as his new form of violence. Robbie uses helplessness now the way he used destructiveness then, as a means of stealing our attention from whatever's upsetting him without at the same time revealing the full ugliness of his case. He hits us with his pillow in part so we'll play with him, and in part so we won't see the jissum staining the other side. Thus
recovery
, no.
Recovery
will never convey the full sense of what's gone on during Christmastime this year. For my wife and myself, the better word is
remorse
.

In the narrow hallways of a school like ours, a person learns fast enough about cruelty. The smirks at the table where you aren't hip enough to sit, the lies told so evenly it's as if the heart itself was wrapped up in a winter coat. A person learns fast enough, and we spent all the years we remember best learning. Then why is it Erin and I could never recognize how cruel we were to this boy? Entire landscapes of viciousness, we'd traveled, but why only after the fact could we comprehend the rough proof of the snaps and slides? Late in December hardly a meal went by when there didn't come to mind, say, some time I'd yanked Robbie to his knees and then laughed at him. Or some freaky valentine we'd ignored, some furniture or silverware in the shape of his own splintered nerves. Or a cold afternoon when, nothing to it, he'd looked our way and we'd turned our backs. Yes, Erin and I couldn't analyze, couldn't classify. None of our experience around the quad had prepared us for the raw simplicity of shame. Though of course we've tried to rationalize. When we couldn't manage to forgive ourselves, of course we could smart-talk someone else into doing it for us. “You two must have seemed like the blessed angels to the boy,” the maid told us, or we got the maid to tell us. “Like the blessed angels of the Lord, after the hardship he'd known.”

Ration out the reassurance. Any idiot can get that degree. It's useless paper before the agony, useless agony after the fact. Every forgiveness lately seems no more to Erin and me than the creaky and overworked string of sanity itself. With each new claim that we helped Robbie, we hear the fastenings shriek that much worse against the rusty cleat of the truth about what we did, and in the glasses of the crowd below us the reflected glare seems that much more dizzying. We understand now that, for the madman, there must also be some numb commitment to the air itself. There must also be the decision to drop. Yet by the New Year, Erin and I had to wonder if our whole life hereafter wouldn't be this same pinch-footed balance, this softening rope over deeps of remorse, two teenage hoods tottering along forever on boots that have just enough padding for us to pass as cool.

Then during the last week of January, Mr. Challait asked Erin and me to stay on indefinitely.

He asked, and this surprised us both, with Robbie there to hear. The two men sat side by side on the sofa. Robbie sat back, fingers nervously playing over his tie-clip, while his father leaned forward with elbows on knees and thrust that attractive Headmaster's face at us. Radiators clonged soggily in other rooms. As always since the new windows have been put in, the house felt stuffy. Mr. Challait began by mentioning the possibility of relapses or other secondary disorders. He explained next that, beginning February first, he would become semi-retired. His older son, he said, had taken over most of the traveling since Thanksgiving anyway. Finally the man leaned still closer. He made his offer.

“I can't pretend I understand the chemistry,” he finished. I'll never understand, with any precision, that is, how you three worked this out. But frankly—” and his voice broke, his head dropped.

We'd seen Mr. Challait crying before, these past weeks. When he and Robbie fixed the broken rocker, the tears had started to show the first time the son demonstrated he knew where the glue went. Erin and I had learned to go on as if the high emotions weren't happening.

It was Robbie who spoke next.

“It's so hard,” he said. “For years and years, for the longest time, all I could think about was my own problem.” His voice was timid, and as he spoke he looked down at himself in his tie-clip, but there was obvious thought behind the words. “That took all my energy. The decision that anyone else matters—” suddenly he looked up—“it's just so
hard
.”

Remorse. Remorse seems our only recovery.

“So.” Mr. Challait was folding his handkerchief. “So, ah, everything here would go on the same. But don't, ah, don't get me wrong. I'd allow you kids full privileges. Nights off, weekends away, whatever.”

Pretending to think it over, I looked at Erin. Though I could tell already she agreed with me. Yes, sadness may slip my attention way off the mark—I might be distracted by the briefest hint of a remembered bad time—but I can catch my Erin's sly indicators out of the corner of one eye alone. The way she causes the shadows to change shape in that hair the color of a yellow crayon. The shifting dangle of her blouse's fold between the peak of her shoulder and the tip of her breast. And she has wonderful hips, my wife, muscular and full of surprises. Especially after she's set you up with those strict lines in her face.

“Frankly—” Mr. Challait began.

“No thank you,” I said, a little louder than necessary. “No. You can't expect so much.”

Later that day Erin and I sat at the kitchen table. This was after dinner actually, and we put together our
vita
sheet line by line. We'd done a lot of writing at this table recently anyway. We'd answered all those letters from friends, the ones about how tough their first semester at college had been. And we may try some of that university life ourselves. I mean a job in a college town doesn't seem too unlikely at least, since Mr. Challait promised us a “glittering” reference. So we wrote. Robbie bustled in and out, taking our photograph, humming tunes we recognized. The kitchen's heat too had its familiar light touches, the odors of bourbon and oregano. And after listing what foreign languages she spoke, Erin told me a secret.

“What I always loved about you,” she said, “was that you never took for granted anything the teachers told you. You never took for granted
anything
they told you. I remember one day Old Witch Winslow told us not to put our hands up behind the radiators in class because there were spiderwebs there. The very next day you had to sit next to the radiator and find out. You were so cool about it, but I saw you. I saw you at your desk with a handful of spiderwebs.”

I realized then that, remorse or otherwise, these nine months at Mr. Challait's had left me at that moment very calm. Erin of course was laughing, her face full of buttery wrinkles, and I understood also by now that whatever we'd learned in this job wasn't going to be of much practical use in the next. But I sat feeling calm nonetheless. Calm like when my mother and father used to dance in the kitchen, humming uncertain tunes of their own, calm as, for example, the resume on the table between my wife and myself. In fact, reaching across it to touch Erin, I was overcome by calmness, except my heart, which was down there somewhere going insane.

We live on dead worlds. I can recall my first meeting with Ul ‘Lyu, when I began to realize what that meant. And this was only our first meeting. This was before I came to see the carnival lights inside her, before I started to needle her with my pet rhyme on her name, “you
jewel
-you,
Ul
‘Lyu.” This was before I fell in love. Our very first meeting, and she turned my afterlife into a hell. Ul ‘Lyu asked me, at that time:

“On your world, what's the principle for recycling souls?”

“A moral principle,” I said. “We operate on a moral principle.”

I'd had to give my answer a long moment's thought. Here I'd just for the first time laid eyes on this creature, and she was coming after me with the hardest question I could think of. Indeed, the setting for this conversation alone still took some getting used to. Ul ‘Lyu's eternity had rammed into mine, a terrific collision of afterlife environments. The souls in my world were knocked flat. Now that I have traveled—now that Ul ‘Lyu has compelled me to travel, past farther orbits, past the solar winds—I can picture how it must have looked, that initial accident. Ul ‘Lyu's world must have smashed into mine like a plaster birdbath dropping from its pillar edgewise onto an old compost heap that had hardened to clay. The lip of her world had sunk a short distance into the tough ooze of mine and there got stuck.

So: one moment I was marking time, living somehow through the excruciating boredom after death, and the next I was flat on my back. Above me the smoky ceiling of my world trembled unnaturally. And then after picking myself up I'd run towards the crash. At the blurred overlap of the two worlds, the astral floor had buckled from the impact, so that finally I had to stop running and pick my way from buckle to buckle, as if hopping stones across a river. There I found her, there at the borderline, floating off the ground. She was an indistinct Other, a kind of jellied ball, floating off the ground. And at first glance, unmistakably, she was female. My heart rose like a flipped coin. Yet no sooner was I standing before her, on one of the higher buckles in the astral floor, than with the very first words out of her mouth this visitor had come after me. This visitor, this intruder, had challenged my entire life and death. My principle, she'd asked? My
principle
? I'd had to give my answer some thought.

“A moral principle?” she asked next, that first meeting.

“Yes.” And I frowned. It was time to demonstrate I also could come out swinging, I also could play hard. “You know?” I asked with exaggerated politeness. “You know, right and wrong?”

Ul ‘Lyu's jelly surface quivered. For a few seconds she withdrew, floating away from me and into her own world. But she had the strength to back up her curiosity.

“A moral principle?” she repeated more firmly, coming again into full view. “Impossible. The complications, ooo. Just imagine…it's impossible.”