In the Land of the Living (23 page)

And Mack said, “It seems like you want me to be happy for you about it.”

And Leo said, “Well, maybe I do. What’s wrong with that?” And the temperature inside the Saturn seemed to drop by several degrees and the air inside the Saturn became unbreathable as it had been between them for years, the same kind of deadly cold cavern air for which the trip had been intended as anodyne. Leo wanted to say he was mad about Alcatraz, but he knew much better than to open the door to another ice age.

They listened to the Beatles, and Mack said that people were unfair to Paul, and that Paul was the genius.

“Who’s unfair to Paul?” Leo said.

“Everyone,” Mack said. “It’s always all about John.”

“Well, John was a genius too,” Leo said. “And he’s dead. People always revere the dead. He was also the leader, wasn’t he? He started the band. He was the oldest. He spoke for them. He set the tone.”

“See, that’s what I mean,” Mack said, and he was mad. “You know who wrote ‘Sergeant Pepper’?”

“I think they’re both awesome. They’re both the poets of lost love. They both lost their mothers. Then they lost each other.”

Mack looked straight ahead furiously. “No, they didn’t. John left Paul. You know why Paul wrote ‘Hey Jude’? He wrote it for Julian Lennon because he was more of a father to Julian than John was.”

“I know,” Leo said. “I saw a thing where Julian Lennon said his father told him he came out of a whiskey bottle on a Saturday night.”

“Told that to his own son,” Mack said. “John raised Sean but not Julian, and everybody knows what it did to Julian. What a great man. What a great father. He ruined his own son.”

“Aha. Well, his own father wasn’t really around for him, I think,” Leo said, and wondered if his brother was really so blind that he couldn’t see what they were really talking about. “Lennon’s father was a sailor. You know, the yellow submarine. And then his mother, Julia, died in a car crash—left
him
. Isn’t that the story?”

Mack had begun to rein himself in but still looked like he had a worm in his boot.

“You’re totally nuts on this subject,” Leo said. “You always have been. Same with Mafia movies.”

“Why am I nuts? The entire world is nuts for liking Mafia movies. I’m the only one who’s sane.”

“It’s just never about what it’s about with you. You think it’s about Mafia movies or John Lennon. Come on.”

“Well, what’s it all about, then? Since you know everything.” Mack couldn’t look Leo in the eye, and the fear was a measure of the rage, and the rage would turn the trip into something like the
Eiswelt
at the top of the Alps.

“Okay, Mack. Let’s go back. I didn’t mean to get you upset or to be a jerk about it. You’re my bro.”

Mack was quiet. He still had the worm in there.

“There’s a lot of history between us, Mack. And a lot of attitude to that history that’s quite complicated.”

“What? You mean what happened to us?”

And Leo felt he was standing on the edge of a cliff, and if he said the right thing, things would go a certain way, and if he said the wrong thing, they would go another way. But the question made him feel something, a very awful, very deep, powerful feeling, like a malady of the pancreas, and he was still steaming about Alcatraz and he said, “Us?
What
happened to us?”

“How we lost Daddy.”

“I have sympathy for you, Mack,” Leo said cautiously. “But you didn’t lose him, because you didn’t ever know him to begin with.” It was a thing that should not have been said, at least not in that way, but his pancreas made him say it. It seemed to him that it utterly had to be said, because his pitiless brother could for once in his life have some imagination and feel some kind of compassion for him about this. And he did not say,
If you had a clue what life is about, how much death and trouble there is in this world, you’d know we ought to stick close together, but you don’t have a clue
.

He didn’t say it in part because of the look on Mack’s face. The worm was gone. The boots were gone. It was nuclear fission, something that didn’t need to come to pass, but once it had, it could not be turned off.

And Mack said, “Well, the thing with Mom’s face…” and he trailed off. And Mack wilted like a plant.

And they didn’t care about beauty anymore and they took Interstate 5 because it headed straight for the middle of Oregon. And they didn’t talk until lunch at McDonald’s in Redding off Interstate 5, where they played chess with their grandfather’s pieces. Mack won in twenty-three moves, and while they put the wooden pieces with their mostly scratched-off gold filigree back into the cigar box, Leo told Mack what idiot mistakes he himself had made and Mack on the other hand reviewed what nifty pins and discovered attacks he’d made and how they had each one been fully intentional and planned. They folded the banged-up Milton Bradley checkerboard and went on.

The ice came with them like comet dust up to Sunriver, outside of Bend, Oregon, where they met up with their cousin Todd and Todd’s girlfriend of ten years, Jen. The first thing they did was to play basketball and Leo knew that when Mack was depressed he played his best basketball. He wanted Mack to play his best basketball because he thought it might serve as antifreeze, and because he felt he’d said the wrong thing, and because it feels so good to beat the living shit out of other males at anything at all anytime at all, and because he loved Mack so much he would lie down in front of a train for Mack. That was something he couldn’t make Mack understand, and maybe Mack didn’t care. Maybe Mack didn’t need such love because he didn’t know what it was to have it taken away. But Leo would do it even in the middle of one of Mack’s Arctic winters. He would walk straight into that ice-wind for his brother, or into a flood or a fire. It was just him and Mack against the whole world.

Mack had not permitted Leo to score a single basket in a game of one-on-one for more than five years. He could jump so high, he would just block every shot Leo put up, and he would shoot right over him and he never missed. And while Mack sometimes froze when he played pickup, he never froze up when he was depressed.

Mack brought the ball up and one of the strangers on the other side called out, “Let him shoot! Let him shoot! He can’t do nothing!”

And Mack spotted up and nailed a three-pointer and then backpedaled and he had that old Mack-like sorrow on his face, the quiet, still, unbroken sorrow of an old pond without any birds. He looked like a kid at a fair where they were giving away puppies and everybody got one but him and somehow he had known that would happen.

On the next play, Leo set a pick for Mack and cut to the hole and Mack passed it to him and Leo fumbled it and the other team got it and ran it up the court, but Todd slapped the ball away and then threw a baseball pass all the way back to Mack and Mack jumped up and slam-dunked with two hands. He had a very nonviolent, somewhat slow way of dunking, a very elegant way of playing basketball altogether, very soft hands, and he could see over everybody because he jumped so high and knew how to float, and he could see through everybody because he had X-ray vision when he was depressed. Even the dunk didn’t make him smile. He just kept watching the ball with the same expression of exhausted excellence and concentration that Galahad presumably had when he knocked his father off his horse.

After the game, Leo put his arm around Mack, but Mack only looked at the gleaming sweat of the arm with evident disgust.

Leo wanted to say, “I would take a bullet for you, Mack, but you would watch me drown.” And it was possible he had said such things before, because he couldn’t count on Mack, but whether or not he could count on Mack, he knew better by now than to say all those things about bullets and drowning and counting on.

When they had showered, Mack got out his guitar and Leo knew it would be hours of command performance and betrayal with Todd’s friend, who could play the blues.
Mack, you would let me drown.

Long ago, when they’d visited his soon-to-be grandparents’ house at the top of a hill on North Park, where some of the wealthiest families in Shaker Heights lived, Leo’s mother fell. A servant had opened the door to the Zajacs’ house, a massive door with decorative hasps like you’d see on a very old book, and a brass handle that was fashioned to look like an enormous key in an enormous lock. They had gone into the front hall and saw there a tree arising miraculously out of a little indoor pool filled with stones. And his mom had reached out with one foot as if to touch the water, and had seemed all of a sudden to be dragged down into it. She had fallen into the pool and soaked her dress. “I thought it was glass,” his mother had said, as if that explained, and Leo had watched the mobile sculpture hanging by the tree, the silver glyphs slowly turning on invisible strings, and hoped that the Zajacs would still accept them into the family even though they were klutzes. The spring after Laura changed from Laura Auberon to Laura Zajac, when Leo was six and Mack was three, Mack had fallen into the swimming pool at the same house and his mother had had to jump in fully dressed to save him from drowning!

The Zajacs didn’t fall into pools. Their name, which meant “rabbit” in Polish, had a strong cachet among Cleveland Jews, and even throughout the gentile whole of the city. The Zajacs were builders. They owned Cleveland’s main landmark, the Terminal Tower. Their family business, a real estate company, was traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Philip flew on business every single week and so did his brothers.

Todd Zajac was Leo’s age. When they were eight, Todd’s father had given him a Swiss Army knife, and Todd had brought it on the Zajac family canoe trip and had used it to whittle a stick. Leo had asked if he could try whittling.

“No,” Todd had said. “You’ll cut yourself.”

“But you’re using it,” Leo said, “and you’re my age.”

“I know how to use it,” Todd had said.

“I won’t cut myself,” Leo said.

Todd gave over the knife. Leo admired the blade and the other tools inside it. There were a screwdriver, a scissors, and even a magnifying glass. He used the knife to try to strip some bark off the stick.

“See? I told you,” Leo said to his cousin.

Then when he tried to close the knife, he closed it on his thumb and he bled and bled.

Leo had always known that Todd was cool but at the charity event on the Sunriver green, Leo finally understood what “cool” meant. It was not a social construct like the bullshit vendors in his literary theory class said. It referred to a real character trait, a real phenomenon. It meant the emotions were cool; Todd did not get mad or nervous. And that was socially pleasing, as it caused everyone to forget about frailty and death.

Families picnicked on the green and cheered on the firemen in suspenders and bunker pants, who dueled with spraying fire hoses to push a red ball along a wire. Everyone, everywhere, was thoroughly white and all the land seemed to have been put just where it was on purpose, by a bulldozer, and then covered with a pelt of transplanted grass. Cries of joy. Leo ran grimly after the Frisbee, berating himself for dropping the Frisbee on so many one-handed catch attempts, and thought seriously of suicide. Todd never dropped the Frisbee. Death was nowhere to be seen. No death and no black people. Todd’s friend was so blond you couldn’t see his eyebrows. He flicked the Frisbee back to Todd behind his back while coasting away on a skateboard, deadpan, hidden behind sunglasses. Leo wanted to dig a hole and bury himself under the green pelt of the grass. He didn’t know why he felt suicidal again. He hadn’t felt it since his surgery rotation. The sun baked him red.

Then they went back to Todd and Jen’s friend Melody’s house—or rather it was Melody’s parents’ house where they were all to stay that night. Todd and Jen said they wanted to set him up with Melody. (After four years of medical school in Baltimore, four years of flaying onanism, Leo had made his needs loud and clear.)

Over the huge TV set in Melody’s parents’ living room, there was a landscape painting in a black-and-gilt frame, the sort you see dragged onto
Antiques Roadshow
from someone’s attic and want to avert your eyes but you can’t—like a car accident, except much more boring. Cast-iron statuettes of a golfer and a grizzly bear stood on either side of the mantel. There was a statuette of Santa Claus, too, wearing real clothes, actual red-and-white fabric. Everywhere there were pictures of golfers and bears.

“So is Santa nude underneath?” Leo whispered to Mack.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean is he nude or does he have iron clothes under his fabric clothes?”

“Why?”

“Never mind,” Leo said. “I just thought it was weird either way.”

When they had dropped off their bags and washed up a bit, they went to dinner in Sunriver: Leo and Mack, Todd and Jen, Melody, and a couple of other friends of Todd and Jen. It took forever to find a place to seat them all that could also accommodate all their dietary restrictions.

Melody was a full-time animal rights activist and, like Todd and Jen, a vegetarian but not a vegan. One of the other girls was a vegan. When they finally did find a suitable place, the busboys had to drag two tables together to fit them all, and Leo blushed. The others had all known each other for years; he and Mack had pushed the head count to unmanageable numbers. But he was light-headed from sun and from dehydration and too little food. He had detected on the menu a turkey club with steak fries and had his mind on a Coke as well, and was literally swallowing back gobs of automatic drool when the vegan girl tossed the menu down and said: “I can’t eat anything here.”

Leo watched Todd to see how a cool person would handle this sort of insurrection by a vegan. Leo himself had zero ideas. He wanted to slit the girl’s throat with a laminated menu and carnivorously drink her blood. Leo swallowed his drool and watched Todd. Todd merely waited; in chess that was called Z
ugzwang
—when you waited for your opponent to break the status quo and let victory happen by his action, not yours.

“Why can’t you eat here?” Leo said impetuously. (He was always too impetuous for chess.)