In the Land of the Living (26 page)

They drove north through the purple hills of the Idaho panhandle, back up to Highway 2 and then east into Montana, where they went to the forest and followed the cairns of the Kootenai. Even though it was too cold, they ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and potato chips and played chess by the windy waves of Lake Koocanusa.

Leo said chess made him sad. Once you move a pawn forward it can never go back, he said. That was sad. And a king, he said, once caged by a rook or a queen, can never go back again. A pawn can go back, Mack said, it can get promoted. To any piece except one, Leo said: king. And did you ever think how the king is never taken from the board at checkmate? Leo said. Like it’s too painful to see him die.

“All right, let’s play,” Mack said. “You need some distraction.”

“I’m sorry I’ve been so down,” Leo said, and tears spilled out then where they weren’t supposed to, right out into the Lake Koocanusa sun and wind. “And I want you to know, Mack, that I think I get it. The thing with Mom or other people worrying about me. I understand that’s complicated for you. I want you to know I feel for you, too, and how cruel life was to you, too, and I feel terrible I hit you, Mack, I was weak. It’s just sometimes I need you so much. Because I need Daddy, I still do, I guess, and it rankles in my heart. But I love you, brother.” And the tears just ran like the Kootenai and he let them run and didn’t even wipe them off his face, even when some hikers came hiking healthfully by and said healthfully hi without appearing to notice that his heart was broken.

Mack clapped his hand on Leo’s shoulder and said, “That means a lot to me that you say that, Leo. I love you, too. And even though we experienced different things, I’m beginning to feel more and more like we’ve been in it together.”

Now Leo did wipe up his tears with his sleeve. Leo said that if you look at an endgame position without knowing all the moves that came before, that position implies a certain history of conflicts on the chess board, of decisions and mistakes, but you don’t know exactly what happened, how it got that way, and a person is like an endgame position with certain pieces on the board, certain strengths and weaknesses and a certain direction and tendency and style of behavior because of what came before, but nobody really knows all the moves that came before, not even the person himself.

Then he wanted to tell Mack about
Zugzwang,
what the Germans called it when your opponent had no good option but had to move somewhere and you just waited, and Leo wanted to say that was a good philosophy of life in many ways. But Mack wanted to play on, and they did, and Mack kicked Leo’s ass again without any
Zugzwang
ever coming into the game at all.

They drove into a minefield of bugs in the air between Montana lakes, bugs snapping like flying pebbles against the windshield and blowing up on the glass in explosions of white and yellow hemolymph. They listened to Julian Lennon’s song, “Too Late for Goodbyes,” and they stopped for the night at the Sandman Motel in a town called Libby. Leo had had a friend named Libby once, hadn’t he? A good friend, a friend from the preschool years of his life who remained in his mind like a good genie. They took the only available room, a smokers’ double, and there Leo had a dream.

Just before waking up in the morning, he dreamed that the Blackfoot Indian at the Grand Coulee information desk was working as an elevator inspector, and agreed to take Leo down to the sub-subbasement of an apartment building on the Upper West Side of New York where he was considering renting (except in the dream the Upper West Side looked like Carnegie Avenue in Cleveland). The Indian said he spoke to the dead. He said he’d spoken to Leo’s father and that his father was an elk now. And Leo said, Can I speak to him? And the Indian said that wouldn’t be a good idea, but he didn’t say why. Then he didn’t take him to the sub-subbasement, but instead just opened the doors to the elevator and they were still in the lobby. The elevator hadn’t gone anywhere, and Leo waited to go down to the sub-subbasement, and that made the Indian very irritated, as though Leo was not understanding something he was supposed to understand, and the clear implication was that Leo was that overprivileged, overeducated type that might have a graduate degree but doesn’t know how to dance or to say hello and good-bye or to look a person in the eye when you drink and say
Salud!
And he thought to himself in the dream that this was just so typical of dreams, so ridiculous, and he woke himself up by laughing even though it wasn’t funny, it was infuriating. Mack woke up too.

“That was like sleeping in an ashtray,” Mack said, and grabbed at his lower back and winced.

When they went to check out, Leo saw that outside the office of the Sandman Motel there was a large cigar store Indian with cracks running down his forehead into his nose from many days of rain and sun. Leo looked him in the eye and said,
“Salud!”

They went farther east and got food and drink in Kalispell and then took the Going-to-the-Sun Road (as the Blackfeet Indians called it) into Glacier National Park. They stopped and ate their Kalispell peaches, white bread, and Gouda at a picnic table at a drive-up campground. A laminated card stapled to the table warned against feeding bears, but they didn’t see any bears. Instead they saw Mennonites who rolled up in a giant white van and climbed out of it in their last-century cape dresses and pleated caps and gray jackets like they were climbing out of a very low-budget time machine. They didn’t speak or laugh or smile, but two of the boys, with tragically monkish haircuts, ran straight to the brook, which was about one inch deep, and dropped in their fishing lines. Silent men pulled a cooler and a Coleman stove out of the back of the van, and women set up cans of some kind of Spammy-looking meat, bread, mustard, mayonnaise. The girls in their head coverings with the long white ties on them looked over at Mack and Leo with fear and Leo felt rough and terrible in their eyes. They made Leo sad.

“Will you stop with the sad,” Mack said. “They’re not sad, they’re just Mennonites.”

Leo and Mack hiked up into the mountains on a path dug into steep rocks and wildflowers, with long grass and purple flower petals growing out into the air above and below them, hanging out over the chasm, a huge volume of nothing and nobody before snowy Heavens Peak nine thousand feet up. Here and there rivulets of melted snow crossed the path from up above. Mack and Leo climbed up over purple-and-green mountain shale. Heavens Peak did indeed look close and faraway at the same time because in the clear air and bright sun you could see every detail of its faces.

As they hiked up toward the place called the chalet, the immensity of the mountains and the empty volume of sky below gave Mack an attack of agoraphobia. Leo continued on alone, hoping to reach the chalet, onward in blazing light, and had to stop to catch his breath and he stood and let his eyes absorb the storm of mute and glittering energy ringing through the sky of the Northern Rockies. The shale was often wet with trickling streams but he was parched and almost out of water. A descending hiker said he had more than an hour to get to the chalet, too long to leave Mack sitting there. The chalet was lost.

Back in the car, they listened to the soundtrack of Oliver Stone’s
Born on the Fourth of July
and “American Pie” came on just as they were crossing the Continental Divide. At the Logan’s Pass visitors’ center Leo saw his red red face in the mirror and rinsed the salty dried sweat from his forehead and temples in glacier water. Skiers glided down the mountain above. Snow. Mack took a picture of Leo on a wall with his arms outstretched and the broad daylight of the mountains reprinted in his sunglasses so that it would look like Leo was flying. And in an instant, on the other side of the mountains, it was later in the day because the mountain wall behind them reached up nearly to the sun.

They sang as much as they could remember of “America the Beautiful.” They looked with their own eyes at “purple mountains’ majesties” and “amber waves of grain,” the blowing undulating grass of the buffalo plains of eastern Montana.

“It’s like
The Muppet Movie
but in reverse,” Leo said.

“And real,” Mack said.

“Goddamn, this is a great country!” Leo said. “What those Founding Fathers dreamed up, it was a Newtonian, Lockean ideal, they went for it, they went all-in, and just look at it. Not only did it come to pass, it’s more than they ever could have imagined. All this and we’re free, too, to go wherever we want and do and be whatever we want. There’s no place like it on earth. It’s a dream.”

“It’s like a dream,”
Mack said, which was a quote from the movie
The World According to Garp,
the scene where Garp crashes his car and gets his penis bitten off.

“Should I stop talking about America?” Leo said.

“No, no, you’re inspiring me.”

They tried to sing “This Land Is Your Land” but they couldn’t remember the words. “Something something that ribbon of highway and up above me a something skyway… uh…uh…this land was made for you and me!”

When they stopped, Leo wrote it all down in a journal of Venetian leather that Mack called the Grail Diary. He remembered the line in Woody Guthrie’s song about the sign that said No Trespassin’ and on the other side, it didn’t say nothin’ and he felt the need to explicate for Mack: “I love that because you can only see the back of a No Trespassing sign by disobeying it.”

Mack said, “I didn’t think of that.”

And Leo sang, “Now, that side was made for you and me.”

Altogether they sighted three dead deer in Montana, one scavenged upon until it was only a fly-ridden head. A bird took off from the grassy median while Mack was driving, a forward-looking bird ascending, aiming at the cerulean prospect of the late-afternoon horizon and feeling the sky, the future, the grass, with his unknowable bird’s sense of things, only to be stricken—
thunk!
a sound like a glass cylinder vanishing in a pneumatic tube—at eighty miles per hour by their hurtling green Saturn. They drove on for several more hours and at the Comfort Inn outside of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, they found the bird stuck between the grille of the car and the hood. Mack was so repulsed he could hardly hold up the hood of the car for Leo to clean it off (the beater Saturn had no hood stand).

“Jesus, Maxwell,” Leo said. “I’m the one who’s cleaning it up.” He’d said “Maxwell” to make it a joke but couldn’t eradicate all the malice from his voice, the malice of old wounds, the malice of Nazis and Zionists and Muslims and all the grudge-masters of the earth.

“Okay, sorry,” Mack said. But then he clutched at his face and said, “Uch! Oh my God! That is so disgusting, I can’t even stand here!”

Leo tried to keep silent but said, “You’re being a complete girl about this.”

Leo saw Mack’s soul begin to close on that remark like a Venus flytrap, and saw Mack fall righteously silent, and that made Leo even madder at this moment of heavy mortuary duty, shouldered, as ever, by himself and himself alone.

“Why don’t you jam your hood open with one of your wire hangers? That would redeem their presence, grabbing on to my duffel bag like a gremlin that lives in the trunk every time I get my bag out.”

“Will you shut up about the hangers already! Asshole!” Mack said.

A thunderclap of fear struck them both and they stood shaking like men on earthquake ground, waiting for an aftershock.

“Sorry,” Leo said. “It’s the bird.”

“It’s okay.”

Leo recited: Mack is your truest friend, Mack is your truest friend and he invited you to do this once-in-a-lifetime thing with him! He invited you, fool!

Leo rolled the bird into a newspaper, sang the
Sh’ma,
and dumped the dead bird in a trash can outside Arby’s. The next day there were still spots of black blood under the hood and a few yellow-and-brown feathers.

The carnage they left behind: nameless flying bugs, one butterfly, another big winged insect (Mack said a moth) caught under the wiper blade, then released by activating the wipers, almost a Montana deer and with it two human brothers from Cleveland in a crap-green Saturn tin can, and last one yellow-bellied leap-without-looking bird—
thunk!
into the pneumatic tube of death. A meat truck slowly receded next to their car on the highway. It had a goofy cartoon of a bull on the side, proclaiming its prey with no compassion at all, like Americans killing Indians and claiming their ground and naming baseball teams after them and putting caricatures of them on the baseball jerseys.
What an abattoir life is,
Leo thought,
everything fragile and constantly getting slaughtered under the carriage wheels of life and destroyed in its prehistoric jaws.

To eat,
Leo thought,
to drive, is to kill. To live is to kill.
And they went on down the road eastward in their terrible glory; alive; killers; lords of the earth. All the way through the Badlands, where Leo got a migraine with a double aura, which had never happened before, all the way to the great metropolis of the plains where his soul mate dwelled, Chicago.

APPROACHING CHICAGO FROM
the west on a summer’s afternoon, the shadows point toward the city. As its towers rise in the distance, so you loom up on pillar legs on the burning pavement of the Kennedy. And since the long shadows are the forgotten trails of the traveling sun, you feel that you’re going someplace you’ve already been. You see plane after plane screaming into O’Hare through a cloudless lavender sky and you see the sun flashing on every plate of airborne steel and every countersunk screw. And you do see freight trains and you see Polish churches. And you have traveled over the whole of the Great Plains and the city is the first vertical thing you’ve seen for fifteen hundred miles and is therefore lord and sovereign over those fifteen hundred miles and the Sears Tower is the sovereign skyscraper of the world.

You feel love for the lone giant of the Plains, standing on hardy pillar legs before Lake Michigan in cloudless summer and casting stalwart shadows like the legs of your mother and your father used to. You feel an old and reverent love when you come to Chicago and a trust that the rugged, perseverant human race will figure it all out and propagate on and on into the far future, past the dying of the sun, on generation ships bound for new planets where people will still eat kielbasas and drink Budweiser on their roof decks and the Cubs will still lose.

He’d heard Michelle was living there now, but he hadn’t talked to her in years. Had it been love back then? Or just the foolishness of youth and the first time? It had not been, in the end, the love of the pre-op man and the woman with the white lace-fringed pillow off their marriage bed.
Wonder what happened to them. Something. Wonder what happened to Michelle.

As he approached the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, where Berry was doing her residency, he instructed himself firmly, firmly not to have overly high expectations, not to bring to the library his fantasy Berry, next to which poor real Berry would be destined to fail.

And yet she was named Berry. That was at once so evocative of fruit, ovaries, female sex organs, beauty, flowers, dessert, summer—at once all that and so unique. And her parents must have been unique to name her that, and her father was a doctor, but literate, he loved D. H. Lawrence, Bailey had said, and her mother was someone of importance, he recalled, so she was bred of good people, strong people, magnanimous and benevolent people. And Berry had suggested they meet in a library; perhaps she’d spent a good deal of her childhood in the library of some wonderful old summer home, reading her father’s books, and had been bookish but had discovered sex in D. H. Lawrence and rubbed one out now and then to scenes from
Women in Love
(which Leo had never read but presumed to be full of sex). And he had Bailey’s account of her friend in his mind. The girl was clearly smart, given where she’d gone to college and where she was doing her pediatrics residency, and she was good in her soul, a doctor. She cared for children. It had to be. And the ivy grew lush on the neo-Gothic stone of the campus, and people walked their bicycles in front of quiet archways with oak doors, thinking, presumably, as he did about genes, energy, force, time, stained glass, Pericles, induction, deduction, Francis Bacon, anatomy, the Renaissance,
Hamlet,
Virginia Woolf, Rome, medicine, and John Stuart Mill. There were quiet low little houses behind whose arrow-slit windows sat deans and masters, leather armchairs and secret Persian rugs, young men and women preparing to rule the world, and silver flagons with a century of names inscribed upon them, just as it had been at Yale—though the buildings here were slightly more spare, with a wind-ripped Midwestern honesty about them.

Despite all self-instruction, he had a feeling of destiny.

The floor plan of the Regenstein building had the shape of the continental United States, with an entrance somewhere around Louisiana. The building looked like the modernist dorms at Yale, Morse and Stiles, buildings of morbid, water-stained concrete.

He didn’t see her at first there in the student union, because she was not the dreamed-of Berry, but a different one, the real one, sitting at a table with her coffee in a paper cup.

She was indeed soft and very sweet-looking, thin, with eyes that were slightly red, the right more than the left, red from fatigue and from her contact lenses, which he judged she had worn for his benefit. And around her eyes there was a weariness that seemed to run very deep, a weariness of the spirit, as if she had been crying for a long time or had had all her blood taken out and put back in, and she had a kind of mauled, haunted gaze that looked out as if through a long periscope from the bottom of a deep well of overmastered pain. Her eyes were smitten by pain, he thought. Leo thought you could see clearly on her face that she had loved fiercely and lost; he thought of the poem where Catullus called his love a crushed meadow flower “ungently beneath the plowshare stricken” and you could see too that she was postcall. He’d said he could come see her another time but she said it was okay, she’d said you’re only in town for a day, right? Maybe it wasn’t the depths of grief there on her face, but just that drowned, waterboarded look of hospital house staff.

“Am I late?” he said. “I broke my watch.” He had left the replacement Timex in his room since the band already smelled like feet.

“Not too much,” she said, and stood up. They awkwardly shook hands. She said she liked to get coffee there at the Reg, to be on a campus, around books.

“I love this campus,” he said. “The library is a bit modern for my tastes, though.”

“I think they call the style Brutalism,” she said.

“Brutalism,” he said. “That’s fitting.”

“I just heard something about it on NPR.”

“You’re sure you’re not too tired?”

“No, no,” she said. “I have my coffee. What happened to your face?”

“Oh, this?” Leo said, touching the scabs where the Nazi woman had scratched him. “I ran afoul of some Chicago Bulls fans.”

“Seriously?”

“No. You’re not from Chicago, are you? Can I speak freely? This town doesn’t know shit about sports suffering, man.”

“What about the Cubs?”

“I know, I know, what about the Cubs.”

He said Bailey had thought of their meeting because of his dead father. And the mention of death seemed to make her brain contract like a sea anemone contracting at the touch and the inwardness of her eyes plunged fathoms deeper than before. And he suddenly saw the irony: that they were the very two people on the face of the earth least suited for each other—a woman mourning a dead man and in search of a man to rouse her from mourning; and a man in eternal mourning, looking for any woman but one who was mourning a dead man. No, he would not ever compete with that, never, knew better by now than to try to compete with a dead man. A dead man would bludgeon him. Dead men don’t play fair. They drown you in your own love for them until you can’t compete with them or anyone else and you just knobble around on your knees for the whole of your life with your hands tied behind your back. No fucking way. He would crack and blow up like plutonium with her past dead love peering out of picture frames at him for the rest of his life.