In the Land of the Living (24 page)

“There’s nothing for me to eat here besides salad.”

“Okay,” Melody said calmly, sweetly, “we can find another place.”

Todd said he thought he knew of a sandwich place to try that wasn’t far away, though it was takeout only.

“Let’s do that,” Melody said.

Leo wondered, what do Vegans eat besides salad out there on their distant star, Vega?

It seemed odd that Melody was single, since she was sexy with dark hair and a clear gentile face and had such a nice-smelling bathroom. And people who were friends with Todd and Jen had a certain cachet in Leo’s mind, they had a certain social facility, and Leo believed that such people didn’t have his problems, and must all be paired off and happy. But then Melody had this very intense relationship with her droopy-face springer spaniel, Deedee, who slobbered and sporadically barked without cause—as if responding to internal stimuli, as they used to say in the ER of psychotic or delirious patients. Despite being a female, Deedee would try to mount any visitor she deemed a threat to her owner and though Melody was continually embarrassed by her dog and called her spoiled, it was also clear that she evaluated men according to how they got along with her dog. The dog mounted Leo immediately and continued to mount him at any opportunity.

Melody was very motherly in a certain way. The next day she set the table formally for lunch and served cookies (no butter or eggs or milk or other animal products, they tasted like shit) and fussed over them and asked if there was anything she could get for them. She started unloading the silverware from the dishwasher and then stopped. “Is this too noisy?” she said. “Is he asleep?” “He,” like Mack’s students would have said.

“Is he asleep?” Leo repeated. It was 2
P.M.
No, Mack was no longer asleep and in fact was sitting right over there playing the guitar.

It was hard to believe she wasn’t a Republican with a nose like that and so many pictures of bears and golfers and such nice etiquette, but she took Echinacea every day and had, according to Todd and Jen, hot-tubbed naked with them and ten other friends, and had, according to her, gone to many strip clubs, both male and female, and she had voted for Ross Perot.

“Oh, fudge!” Melody said. She had dropped a plate.

Leo went to help her clean it up and while he was squatting with the dustpan, he kept imagining her without her pants on, but he couldn’t think of anything to say that might bring that about, and said nothing.
Zugzwang
worked for Todd, but it would obviously get Leo nowhere.

She asked him what he was doing in New York. He explained about the monkeys and the lab and how they had wanted him to do surgery on monkey brains.

“Oh no!” she said. “They should go to jail for that.”

“Yeah. It seemed like a possible waste of monkeys,” he said.

She looked at him as though a beetle had just climbed out of his mouth. He realized too late that he was surrounded by fervid antivivisectionists. Melody’s girlfriend the vegan came into the room with a look on her face that brought to mind a vinegar-dressed salad and said, “
What
did they do?”

“I didn’t take the job! I didn’t take the job!” Leo said. And Deedee came and mounted him.

Love that knows no bounds can never be requited. This even Deedee the droopy-eyed springer spaniel seemed to know, with all her mounting and barking.

While Todd’s friend with the Boris Becker eyebrows played the blues, Mack again studied the finger positions and tried to catch up. He made a racket and ruined the music, though Todd’s friend didn’t seem to mind.

Leo went back into the living room.

“Hey,” Leo said, “you guys going to see fireworks?”

“Oh, is the Fourth of July a big deal on the East Coast?” Melody said.

“Uh…” Leo said.

He watched the Boston Pops play John Philip Sousa on TV and watched fireworks shoot off into the green darkness over Boston Harbor. The big TV under the landscape painting seemed puny and cheap in its total failure to reproduce any of the sights and sounds of fireworks. He remembered a Fourth of July he’d spent on the Mall in Washington, DC, and the Lincoln Monument. He’d always liked that place.

Leo didn’t know why he was so depressed and further sinking, but he certainly was.

At night they played Taboo and drank beer in the stink of the dog’s farts. They laughed, and the mood lightened. But he also asked himself:
Am I a fool? Will I be alone forever?

And he went to bed and hid from the guitars under a pillow, but even after the guitar music had stopped he couldn’t sleep. He got up. Mack was not in his bed.

Leo went out for a glass of water, and there was Mack in the kitchen leaning forward in a slightly awkward way with his hands on Melody’s arms and they were licking their tongues together.

They went back to Portland with Todd and Jen. On their kitchen refrigerator was a picture of a cat and a pig and the words: “One you pet, one you eat. WHY?”

“Because,” Leo said, “cats don’t taste like bacon.” Nobody laughed.

Todd and Jen had seaweed shampoo in their bathroom and a compost barrel behind the backyard patio. There were many stacks of CDs, bands and albums that Leo had never heard of. There were Nike sport-hiking shoes and many cats with honey fur and swaying, fat, low bellies. The Russian Blue was too scared to emerge from under the bed for more than a few minutes at a time. A serious backpack hung from the door, as if a hike were imminent at any time.

They went to the Rose Garden and Leo made a point of having ham at lunch. There were hundreds of breeds of roses, pink and orange roses so bright and stark against the dark-green grass it was not like a natural sight but rather like the shining spectra before a migraine. Mount Hood loomed over the rose-lined terraces, and Mount Saint Helens with its top blown off, snowy peaks at silent unreal distances like that of the moon—visible but too far to ever get there and following you wherever you go.

And right there in the Rose Garden in front of everyone, Leo said, “You don’t care. I would die for you, and you don’t care. I could be drowning and you wouldn’t even notice unless somebody pointed it out to you. And then you would let me drown.”

“Yeah, that’s right. I would let you drown. What’s wrong with you?”

“I was drowning two years ago and you didn’t even know. How could you know? You’d drop everything and fly to China for one of your friends but I could be on fire and you wouldn’t even notice, much less do anything about it, unless I said, ‘Hey, I’m on fire, could you help extinguish me, perhaps by using a bucket of water?’ and even then you’d just say you couldn’t make it and wouldn’t tell me why and the reason would be you were going to your friend’s nephew’s birthday party, something really important like that.”

And Mack said, “
I
don’t care about
you?
You say you care, but all you care about is yourself,
asshole!
”

“
I’m
an asshole? You didn’t come to my graduations. You didn’t come to my birthday. You’re never there at all. When I broke my arm and called for you, you just left me lying there. When our canoe flooded, you remember that? You just swam ashore and left me in the river by myself to hold the canoe against the current alone and rescue all the gear by myself! And that tells it all! You’re a
motherfucker!
”

And Leo couldn’t stop it and he did what he had never done, he hit Mack in the face with a closed fist right there in the garden, right there among the roses bright as a migraine headache.

Leo jumped on top of his brother and punched him a second time while he lay on the ground. “What’s wrong with you?” Leo shouted. “Why don’t you fight back?”

But all Mack did was crawl back onto his feet and touch his fingertips to his bleeding nose and, as he had always done, let Leo’s guilt do all the punching for him. And then Leo realized that Mack had stripped the watch off his wrist, the Raymond Weil inscribed to him for his twenty-first birthday by his aunt and uncle. He found most of it lying in the grass and held the broken watch out to Mack in his unsteady palm as if he were showing Mack his broken heart.

“They’re brothers, they’re brothers,” Todd said. A policeman had come into the garden.

In the morning the Russian Blue came out from under the sofa and killed a spider and ate it. Separately, but within hearing of each other, Leo and Mack apologized to Todd and Jen about the scene in the garden because they both were really very grateful for being hosted and for the sleeping bags and backpacks and they felt taken care of. But they didn’t apologize to each other. They said good-bye and drove to Olympia, Washington. They took Route 101 North along the misty Hood Canal with the Olympic Mountains on their left, on up past Dabob Bay, and followed the highway around to the west. In Sequim they bought stuff to take with them into the hills: smoked turkey, Muenster cheese, sourdough bread, some apples and bananas and baked nacho tortilla chips, and Leo also bought a Timex digital watch. They drove on between the mountains and the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the road ducked around to the south into a sad country of tree stumps. Leo swore to himself he would never apologize to Mack again. Every tree stump in the clear-cut forest was a one-sided apology Leo had made sometime somewhere for losing his temper.

“I’m sorry I hit you,” Leo said, “I truly am.”

“It’s okay,” Mack said, with eyes irreproachably calm but also blue and sad like that unvisited pond mirroring the sky.

And Leo wanted to hit him again and to hit the men who cut the trees down and to hit the stumps for being dead and to hit himself for using dead trees to write on and eating pigs he didn’t have the courage to kill himself and for hitting his brother like a savage and he wished they would just terraform Mars already so everyone could just start over.

They drove south along the Elwha River and by the time they got to Lake Mills it was past four and wind was blowing false waves across the lake. They were going to drive another five or six miles up the Elwha River Road to the trailhead and then hike another two miles to a campground that Todd had shown them on the map.

“The road’s washed out,” the ranger said, and looked at the green Saturn where they sat with their asses one and a half inches from the road. “You could try it, but you won’t get far in that thing.” If they wanted to hike all the way, it would be seven and a half miles.

The sky blew dark and gray. If they made the hike in three hours, they’d only have an hour or so of light to pitch the tent, collect firewood, build the fire, and eat dinner, and that was assuming it didn’t rain.

“Shee-ut,” Leo said. They had been listening to Jon Krakauer read
Into Thin Air
on tape, so they were well aware of the mortal peril that faced them. “We face mortal peril,” Leo said.

“Fuck it, let’s do it,” Mack said.

“Skin-ut,” Leo said. He didn’t know how to use movie quotes the way Mack did. Mack didn’t skin it.

They each loaded up the borrowed backpacks and Leo slung his frayed old MEI school backpack on his front as well and they set off up the road into the unspoiled world of the Olympic wilderness.

Once or twice they passed another couple of hikers. Sometimes they saw distant mountains that stood tall and blind with their peaks in the clouds. Sometimes they saw hills dark with lonely pines, which stood erect and waited for rain in that mute and homeless way of trees far up in secret hills. They sweated plenty into their T-shirts, and knew they would sleep in their sweat.

“My head is encased in three inches of ice,” Leo said in his best Jon Krakauer.

“My brain screams for oxygen,” Mack said.

“We’re doing it, Mack. We’re looking at the Western Cwm ice valley from the top of the world with our own eyes, Mack. It’s just too bad I’ll have to leave my left leg here in Tibet.”

They hiked some more and Leo worried over the silence.

“What if I was X and you were Y?” he said in a harried, worried way. They called each other X and Y sometimes, some old reference that was by now partly forgotten. He thought it was something that happened on a family trip to Italy. They were playing at something and Leo had said he’d be Ixion and Mack should be Tantalus. Leo thought of that because it seemed that he hung himself on a wheel of fire and Mack held himself out of reach of love. But Mack didn’t want to be Tantalus and they’d changed it to X and Y, something neutral and without meaning but that had somehow become funny to them in a now-forgotten way.

Mack didn’t laugh about X and Y, and Leo thought he’d pressed too hard for an old shared memory. But then Mack said, “I’d say, ‘You don’t have any legs, X.’”

“I don’t?” Leo said, surprised.

“You never did.”

“Are you implying I’m an egg?”

“If the chromosome fits.”

“If the chromosome fits you must acquit,” Leo said. “Got the man out of jail with a rhyme.”

“Don’t put him in jail,
mmmf
this Pringle is stale!”

“Johnnie Cochran, standing before the judge, surprises himself by stuffing a bunch of Pringles into his own mouth!
Mmmf!
”

“We almost there?”

“No.”

“You ambulate well for an egg.”

“How did we get in Tibet?”

“We walked.”

In the pitched ferns and moss on the forest floor they saw a grouse with two chicks. They saw many wildflowers, but didn’t have time to get out the Audubon field guide to identify them. And when they got to the Boulder Creek campground up in the mountains, near the hot springs that the Elwha Indians said were the frustrated tears of two dragons who had fought to stalemate, there was nobody there. Nobody but a big buck elk wandering unafraid in the unhuman, lonely place, and it was so unafraid that it watched them come and they had time to count the points of its horns.

“I get twenty-nine,” Leo said, and he didn’t even notice the significance of that number. “Check me on that, Mack,” Leo said, because he was bad at counting. He was better at calculus than he was at arithmetic, but Mack could do any kind of math without even understanding it, like an idiot savant.