“Nick?” Cage answered.
“Yep.”
“I knew it was you. I just tried to call. Had the stereo up?”
“Yep.”
“Heard from her yet?”
“Nope.”
“I kinda admire her coldness. She decided it wasn’t going to work and the best thing was a clean break and she followed through. It’s better for you, too. You’ve just got to get over her and move on. There’s plenty of fish in the sea. You never had any problem landing a looker.”
“I don’ wan’ anyone else,” Nick slurred. “She’s purfec’.”
“Perfect? Two weeks ago you were complaining that she had never heard of Dostoyevsky.”
“She’s beautiful.”
“She’s hot. No doubt about that. But, man, there’re a million girls out there that look like her.”
“I’ll never find someone like her.”
“Come on, Nick. We go through this night after night. She wasn’t perfect. She was hard-hearted.” Cage just blurted it out: “And she was unfaithful.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Cage was silent. He hadn’t really meant to tell him and wondered if it was meanness from an impulse to kick him while he was down or if truth had its own momentum. Since Monica left, Cage hadn’t been able to decide whether to finally fess up. If Nick knew that Monica had seduced him, which didn’t take much effort on her part, he had to admit, then maybe the anger would help Nick move on. Or Nick might hate him for a long time. Cage could lie, say that Monica had confided in him about someone else, but the truth would out when she got back from Hawaii.
“Who’d she fuck?” Nick sounded a little less drunk.
“Brother, I’ve felt horrible about this since I was out over spring break. Remember that night when you stayed late studying and Monica and I ended up shooting tequila?” Cage heard the sound of glass shattering from the other end of the line. “We started playing truth or dare and she dared me to kiss her and I did and . . . We were both drunker than Cooter Brown.” In the quiet that followed Cage waited, picturing the outrage and hurt on his brother’s face.
“Was it good?” Nick whispered coldly.
Fantastic, Cage thought. “It didn’t really work. I don’t remember.”
“You brotherfucker! You’ll pay for this,” Nick yelled, and hung up.
Cage called him back and let the phone ring twenty times. He got no answer every ten minutes for the next hour and then called Chris and asked him to go around and check on Nick. Around eleven when Chris walked through the open front door into a wall of sound, the Police playing “Bring On the Night” on Monica’s Bose system, Nick was at his desk. In a diary entry titled
Heard It through the Phoneline
, he had written only,
I should beat Cage with a baseball bat. He should have told me when it happened
. He stood up and left the pen between the pages with the top off. His face was dry and he did not appear to be obviously drunk. He told Chris, “Next time I see Cage I’m going to kill him.” Then he laughed and asked, “Isn’t
Homo sapiens
absurd?”
On Saturday morning at ten, a few minutes after a dean at Berkeley, who the day before had called his parents numerous times unsuccessfully, calls the number on his Decks Unlimited business card which was in Nick’s wallet, Cage will go to the Nashville airport without calling anyone in the family. Chris will meet him at the San Francisco airport that evening. They will have a few drinks at the bar where Chris took Nick, will even run into some of the same girls. For several hours before falling asleep Cage will read Nick’s diary. The phone will wake him on Sunday morning. It will be Monica calling from the Pacific. When they hang up, he will call Memphis before remembering that his parents are still on a spiritual retreat, then he and Chris will drive out on the bridge to look for the skid marks and glass. When Cage sees what he guesses is the site, a bumper sticker from Louisiana about a bug squashed on the windshield of life will come to mind. They will go home in silence and start packing up Nick’s little house. That night he will call Memphis again and his father will answer. Monday morning he will go with Chris to the morgue and identify the body by a scar on the shin where Nick had once walked into a horseshoe stake in the dark and will arrange for the mangled corpse to be cremated and then spend the afternoon by himself locating the wreck of Pilar in a junkyard and an hour sitting in the backseat of the crumpled cabin. Tuesday he will spend most of the day trying to find the patrolman writing the accident report, with no luck. Dreading Monica’s arrival, knowing that seeing her would be painful and weird and the extreme emotions of the situation might even lead to an obscene animal consolation, Cage will leave Nick’s place on Wednesday morning after the UPS and Salvation Army vans come for the boxes, riding with Chris by the funeral home to pick up Nick’s ashes and then to the airport. On the plane ride back he will begin to reconstruct the last five days of Nick’s life, and through a long talk on the phone with Monica the next day he will fill in some gaps. A few weeks later he will receive the police and coroner’s reports. Down through the years he will ponder what passed through Nick’s head in his last moments of consciousness. He will never believe that Nick could have had time to see his life flash by even at the speed of light.
Cruising in Pilar through the last hour of night, Nick was heading south on the 101 in Marin after a pointless surveillance run past the Carsons’ house in Ross just to make sure there was nobody home. He had planned to drive up Mount Tam to watch the sun rise but the sugar levels in his bloodstream were low, the alcohol edging into the legal zone, and he was suddenly hungry and very tired. The highway ran through a tunnel, then curved around the mountainside, and the Golden Gate rose out of the dark cloud that cloaked the city across the Bay. The lamps of the bridge cast diffuse yellow light through the fog. Outside, the bright mist rushed past like the interior of a comet and visibility stretched a hundred yards. Inside, green light glowed from the dash. Nick switched off the R.E.M. tape and listened to the wind through the windows. “It will hurt for a while but I’m over the worst part,” he repeated aloud what he’d told Chris several times in the bar. Acclerating up to seventy or eighty, Nick passed a Coca-Cola truck, moving from the middle lane into the lane bordered against the oncoming traffic by reflecting plastic wands which were set for the morning rush hour, dividing three lanes into the city and two coming out. When Nick was about a hundred feet beyond the cola truck, an ’86 Corolla driven by Reginald T. Johnson, forty-three, a car salesman on amphetamine whose blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit, veered across the barrier of plastic wands. The impact could have killed Nick instantly, from a brain injury against the roof of the car or by ripping out his aorta from the heart, which floats free in the chest. Or perhaps Nick glimpsed Johnson, his murderer, who was likely already dead strapped in his seat belt, as he flew through the windshield. He may have been conscious flying through the spray of glass over the Toyota and fifty feet farther through the air, a sensation akin to free-falling off a rock face that he had grown not to fear.
A
ll the leaves are gone. The weak reds and washed oranges that the trees managed after the long, dry summer came and went in a couple of weeks. When I’m bored with making money for Hong Kong Pacific, when the adrenaline is dry and the shouts of Dooner and the traders grate my ears like the cries of loud drunks in a sports bar, when I wish I was in a kayak or on a ski slope, anywhere but our new office on Madison Avenue, even with the view of Central Park, I play with my latest toy, a Canon digital camera with an array of 35mm lenses, and record the progress of autumn in the middle of Manhattan. As soon as I hit the shutter an image appears on my computer. Framing the screen in a chronological sequence, the rich green trees first pale and yellow, then blush briefly and finally brown.
The light by my second line, which receives calls kicked from my home, blinks. I brace myself for Caitlin and start thinking of excuses—Sorry, some clients came in from Bangkok and my cell went dead—trying to repress an image of dancing naked with a big-breasted coat-check girl whose name I can’t recall.
I pick up the phone. “Howdy.”
“Is this Harper?” asks a strange girl’s voice.
“Yeah.” Who is she? Someone I’ve forgotten? I get a creepy feeling from a dream I had last night. A girl I did not know who insisted that I’d slept with her called to tell me that the state health authorities were requiring her to call everyone whom she might have infected with HIV.
“Hey, um, my name’s Emma.”
“Emma?” Christ, my dream’s coming true.
“You’re Cage’s brother?”
“Yeah,” I say with a rush of relief, thinking she’s another girl whom Cage owes money coming out of the woodwork.
“Is he okay?”
“He’s having a hard time. Where did you know him?”
“San Francisco. Santa Cruz. I egged him into stealing a sailboat.”
“So you really exist.” I remember her name now. “You were on the boat. You sort of broke his heart. Just disappeared.”
“Yeah. It was hella uncool. I capped him, totally. I was really fucked up. I’m back in school in Santa Cruz now.” She has a sad, weary laugh. “I think about him whenever I look out at the bay.”
“He dropped you on the beach so you wouldn’t get busted.”
“Cage was stand-up. I saw the cops driving him away. I should have visited him or called you. I should have done something. I was worried they’d catch me, too . . .” She’s quiet for a moment. “He’s a really nice guy. I’m sorry. Did he have to go to jail?”
“The court put him in a rehab program for a few months and he got out and was working as a carpenter—”
“Cage is in Santa Cruz?” Emma sounds excited.
“Well.” I always hate explaining this. “Did you know he’s bi-polar?”
“Yeah. He made a big deal about carrying around a bottle of lithium but he would only take it when he felt really good.”
“That’s logical.” I laugh. “When you met him, he was manic, tons of fun, high as a satellite.”
“No shit. He wouldn’t sleep for days at a time.”
“Right.” I watch the clouds moving across the sky over Harlem, wonder if she’s as pretty as Cage said. “What goes up must come down. About a month ago he hurt his back and he couldn’t work. That’s what triggered it. Lying on his bed all day . . . imagine . . . staring up at the ceiling, thinking how he’s almost forty years old and his life’s been a long series of fuckups, how all his peers have families and houses and new SUVs and vacations, and he’s out there trying to start over, but he can’t ’cause his back hurts, so thoughts keep swirling around and around his head until they carry him down the drain into a black hole of depression.”
“That’s hella sad.” Her voice sounds bummed, then rises. “Where is he? I’ll go visit him.”
“He’s two thousand miles from you.” Talking about Cage makes me tired. “Got to where he was afraid to leave his room. He’s at my grandmother’s. Holed up. Paranoid. Terrified of the world.”
“Back in the spring he wasn’t afraid of anything,” she says with disbelief. “Nothing. Nobody. He was fucking fearless and he had so much energy, so much”—she sucks in air through her teeth, finding the words—“life force.”
“Gone for now,” I whisper, then try to sound cheerful. “He’ll bounce back.”
“I wish there was something I could do,” she says softly.
“I wish there was something to do.”
“Cage really helped me, you know,” she says earnestly and with a bit of awe. “He got me to stop shooting up.”
“That’s a major accomplishment.” I didn’t mean to sound sarcastic.
“You don’t know.”
“Hey, I—”
“Your brother is a great listener. He’s got a deep soul. He cares about people. And he loves you. He talked about you a lot. He really respects you.”
“Harper, you’re holding us up!” Dooner shouts from across the room. “Quit talking to your bitches!” On the screen the black box is asking permission to buy ten thousand shares of Lamar Advertising. I glance over at Dooner, who yells, “Don’t look at me, ju-nior, it’s in your basket!”
“Sorry, uh”—I can’t remember her name for a second—“Emma. I gotta go. Give Cage a call. It would mean a lot for him to hear from you. You got a pen?” Giving her Grandmother’s number in Thebes, I call up the LAMR curve on the screen, watch the line starting to climb. “You’re welcome, Emma. Take care of yourself.” I hang up, make the trade, and think how so much of my life takes place on telephones—dumping women I’d just as soon never see again, getting dumped by women who never want to see me again, talking to old college friends whom I’ll probably never see again. The last words I ever heard from Nick were over the telephone. He said, Try not to upset Mama. The odds are, the last words I hear from my Nanny, Mom, Dad, Cage, my cousins, everybody, will be over the telephone.
N
o insect noise, no birdsong, no sound of traffic from the road or the lake. On my hands and knees I advance along a row of damp, chocolate-colored soil, freshly turned, pushing corn seeds an inch deep with one finger, then brushing dirt to fill the holes. Even my own movements are silent. Maybe a side effect of this antipsychotic is temporary deafness. Ink-black clouds race across the sky over the lake toward Cage’s Bend on a mute wind. Midway along the row, my finger touches something hard and cold. I sweep the dirt away and find a wedge of dark stone. Looking at the chipped edges, I realize that it’s a tomahawk blade. I slip it in my pocket and continue down the row. Reaching the edge of the plowed field, I rise, then look back thirty yards along the row. At the far end something is sticking out of the first hole, wiggling. I squint, straining to see. Hole by hole, thin black shoots sprout out of the ground, coming closer. I want to move but my legs are frozen. Between my feet, where I planted the last seed, black shoots push up through the brown earth. The sprouts look like human hair. I raise my head slowly, looking along the row to the end, where the shoots have grown into cabbages of hair flapping in the wind. Scalps.