“I
know,” I said. It was time for us to leave. “But in her own way, she’s trying
to understand, Rodney. We’ve got to give her credit for that much.” Then I
knelt and cranked shut the toolbox’s strong steel clasps.
24
“WE’VE
UNLEASHED STRANGE forces in the world tonight,” Rodney said. “That’s what
confuses her. In fact, that’s what women in general don’t seem to understand.
Not that these forces exist. But that we can use them. They aren’t just ideas. They
accomplish things.
They go
places.”
We
were laboring down the ill-lit rubbishy streets off Van Nuys Boulevard, Rodney
carrying the toolbox and I the cords of rope, electrical extension cords and a
few random saws and hammers. The night air was thick with smog, palpable and
rough. Like the smog itself, the darkness did not radiate so much as settle
over everything.
“That’s
the illusion women prefer. That everything can be reduced to talk and words.
I’m warning you, Phillip, I got this one figured. Women are great and
everything. I’m not saying otherwise. But they’ve got their own sort of truth
and it has a way of confusing things sometimes. Men do things. They get things
done. That’s what men do. Women, on the other hand, talk about things. Why they
weren’t done quite right. How you might want to go about doing it better
next
time. Which things to do first, and
which things last, and which things after that. Talk talk talk. I mean, like
Beatrice and all her Communist bullshit. She wants to feed the world, right? But
I don’t see her feeding anybody. I mean, when’s the last time you saw Beatrice
feeding anybody? I’m talking even a sandwich or something. Never, that’s the
last time. But when’s the last time you heard her
talking
about feeding everybody? She’s got a million ideas as far
as talk’s concerned. If talk was wheat, Beatrice and her Communist sympathizers
could feed the whole world. But talk ain’t wheat. It’s nothing like it.” Rodney’s
pace and expression were gripped by sudden purpose, as if he and I were
hurrying to impart some crucial theorem to Rodney’s bemused colleagues back at
the lab.
“These
forces we’ve unleashed tonight aren’t new things, Phillip,” Rodney explained
earnestly, shifting the toolbox into his left hand, swinging the entire weight
and balance of his body along with it. “These forces have been around forever
and ever, since the beginning of time, in fact. They’ve been around since
before mankind, even since before the dinosaurs. They were roaming around the
universe before the Earth was anything more than a bunch of cosmic debris. They
knew what they wanted the world to be, and so they made it that way. They
didn’t talk about it; they
did
something. They got things done.
Needless
to say I was elated, higher than a kite, breezing through the muggy breezeless
night. In the wide sun-bleached and pitted streets we walked past dilapidated
automobiles, fading lawns and houses, thinning and recalcitrant trees and
foliage. Mimosa, jacaranda, fig, palm, eucalyptus, dry and spotty bamboo. The
air was pungent with gasoline, smog, and the fishy smells of cooking, along
with brief bursts of salsa music and Julio Iglesias, filtered from the
expressionless facades of Latin households. Inside those houses people glanced
out fitfully from behind cracked venetian blinds. Timid small children with big
eyes hid behind their parents’ legs, waiting for their mothers to drive them to
the laundromat, supermarket and home again in broken automobiles. At supper they
ate with vaguely surreptitious expressions, their ears alert for any sound in
the street, awaiting that penultimate knock on their door. These were families
who were always waiting to be sent away, and as a result you never saw them. These
were the citizens of my secret community I most cherished and admired. They,
like me, lived their secret lives in public places.
I
was going home and taking Rodney with me this time, and that made a difference.
My dreams weren’t secret anymore, but rather part of a common purpose, a scheme
of shared knowledge. Rodney and I were going home together to see my dad.
Rodney
was right–we had unleashed strange forces tonight. Severe black things
that had moved up from the caverns of the dead. Every once in a while I felt
them bustling invisibly past me in the street, obloid and featureless, like
faintly disembodied laundry hampers. You could hear tires careening on
Sepulveda Boulevard almost a mile away. Everything in the world seemed to be
aligning itself with these invisible forces, assembling like military units or
pieces in an intricate, vast puzzle.
“I
don’t think evil’s such a bad thing, really,” Rodney said. “It’s just something
we’ve got to get used to. It’s certainly been around a lot longer than we have.
It’ll certainly be here long after we’re gone. During our séance tonight I heard
it speaking to me, Phillip. It said, Get on with it. Live your life. Make
things happen. If you listen to Beatrice you’ll never go anywhere, you’ll never
do anything. For some reason, when I heard that voice, I wasn’t really excited
or anything. I felt sort of bored, really, like everything had already been
figured out. It wasn’t something I enjoyed, just something I had to get over
with. Frankly, that’s what it was like the first time I went to bed with
Beatrice. It was like I just had to get this over with. I couldn’t get into it
that much, once we’d started and I was getting the hang of it. It was like
mowing the lawn or putting away groceries. I guess it’s because I’m evil,
Phillip. Ethel told me that once when she was really angry. Even a teacher
once–even a teacher told me once I was evil. That I’m no good, a bad
seed, a black sheep. Evil is just mechanical activity, Phillip. That’s what I
think, anyway. There’s no thought behind it. It just goes on and on and on. They
say the universe started from a tiny ball of matter, no bigger than this
toolbox. I always thought the universe would be a lot more various than that,
but now I see it’s just the same stuff, stretched out all over space and
eternity, filling everything.”
We
had arrived outside my house. I felt the rushing formless shapes hurrying
faster around me in every direction. There was no wind, no sound. In the living
room window, the light was on. The colorless heat of the television glowed
steadily.
“You
can probably tell I’ve never been that big a fan of women’s lib,” Rodney said. “I
say let women stay at home and talk all they want. Men are the ones that get
things done.” He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the toolbox, which he
rested against his knee. The ropes and cords were wrapped around my neck like
the bandoliers of some South American revolutionary. Rodney was right. I felt
bored, inanimate, sleepy. Quietly I opened the garage door, and we carried our
materials up the basement staircase. Mom would be asleep by now. If we hurried,
we could be finished by morning.
25
DAD
HARDLY STIRRED on the sofa when Rodney and I entered the living room. I closed
the back door and turned the dead bolt. Both the radio and television were on. On
the radio Rosemary Clooney was singing:
So kiss me once, then kiss me twice
Then
kiss me once again,
It’s
been a long long time…
Dad
lay contentedly asleep, one arm across his chest, his head tilted to one side. The
bottles of Maalox stood empty on the coffee table. Dad seemed posed and
forlorn, like an expired romantic youth in some pre-Raphaelite painting. On the
television Tom Snyder was discussing the secret lives of “sexual deviants” with
a transvestite. “Though of course if you look at it from their perspective, I
guess,” Tom said, “it’s probably the rest of us presumably
normal
people who seem like
deviants
.
I mean, we all do our own thing, right, and when somebody doesn’t like us they call
us deviant. But for want of a better term, and since such people are often
linked in our minds with the term deviant, I guess I’ll rudely refer to our
next guest as just that, and hope they can understand and bear with be for a
little while…” Tom Snyder chain-smoked and gestured vigorously at the camera
with both hands. The close up of Tom’s head framed by his easy chair made it
appear as if he were in the living room with us. The transvestite’s back was to
the camera, and his voice was being distorted by the sound engineer. “It’s like
waking up every day knowing somebody will find out,” the transvestite said.
“Somebody close to you. Somebody who loves you and believes she knows you, and
yet she doesn’t really know you at all.”
You’ll
never know how many dreams
I
dreamed about you
Or
just how empty they all seemed
without
you
So
kiss me once, then kiss me twice
Then
kiss me once again,
It’s
been a long, long time…
Should
we wake him?” Rodney asked.
Dad’s
laptop, his briefcase, his stacks of printout and papers were on the dining
room table. Some coffee in a mug splotched with scummy cream. A moldering and
half-eaten French-style donut on a sheet of corrugated paper towel.
“It’s
up to you,” Rodney said. “He’s under a spell I cast back at my house. I call it
the Spell of the Sleeping Man. When men sleep, their souls travel around the
world, trying to reshape themselves into other things. I’ve had your dad’s
spirit held incommunicado. He won’t wake up again until I let him.”
I
switched off the radio. “I want to check in on my mom,” I said, and led Rodney
down the hall. Mom’s bedroom door was open, and Mom was sitting up in bed. Her
face was brilliant with bright cosmetics and white, grainy talcum. Her hair was
bundled up in a black net cap. The light from the television flickered across
her face, like radar scanning the moon. She looked like Bette Davis in
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
.
My
hand rested on the cold doorknob. I wanted to pull it shut before Rodney saw
her. But Rodney was already standing beside me. It was important to me not to
appear ashamed. Now that Rodney saw her, I wanted him to take his time.
“Jesus,”
Rodney said after a minute. I was starting to tremble, awaiting Rodney’s
judgment concerning the truest, most secret part of me. “For some reason I
thought your mom was good-looking.”
“She
used to be,” I said. “She used to be really good-looking. She’s been letting
herself go lately. I think it’s because Dad came back. Or maybe because of the
baby.”
Outside
Mom’s bedroom window a searchlight flashed through the alley. Out of the city’s
general white noise emerged the hard beating sound of a helicopter in the air. The
searchlight flashed again.
“Does
she just watch TV all day?”
“No.”
I shrugged. “She talks to me sometimes. Sometimes she talks to Dad.”
“What
sort of programs does she watch?”
“Old
movies, usually. Game shows and soaps. That sort of thing.”
“It
doesn’t like give you the creeps to have her sitting there all the time with
that look on her face? I think it would me. I think it would really give me the
creeps.”
“Long
ago Mom and I came to a sort of understanding,” I said, and realized suddenly
it was not the sort of understanding one could easily explain to a third party.
On
the television the transvestite was saying, “It was nice just to meet people
who understood how I felt, and didn’t make me feel like some sort of weirdo or
something. It was nice to know I wasn’t alone, and that what I was doing was
perfectly normal to a lot of perfectly normal people like myself. Many of these
people had prominent careers in business, advertising and even television
broadcasting.”
Rodney
struck a match and took a long hit off a joint. He took two more quick hits, just
to get the ember flaring. Then he handed it to me, speaking deep in his chest
while he held his breath.
“She’s
knocked up, isn’t she?”
I
looked at the bright ember. A hard green seed blackened and spilled onto the
rug. I stepped on it.
“I
know,” I said. “She’s really knocked up.”
Then
I pulled shut Mom’s bedroom door.
WE
BOUND DAD on the sofa with the clothesline and electrical extension cords and
gagged him with a pair of his white monogrammed handkerchiefs. Dad didn’t move
or make a sound or open his eyes. His face was flushed and pouting, like the
face of a small child who has just awakened in the lap of its parents at some
endless holiday party. There was something very warm and innocent about Dad
now–if I still believed in innocence, that is. Occasionally, when his
head lolled to one side, he momentarily snored or kicked. Dad was definitely
very far away. Perhaps Rodney really had managed to arrange his spiritual
kidnap. I had a pretty good idea what we had to do now.
I
was high on the marijuana and my first few sips of a Budweiser I had found in
the refrigerator. Rodney was drinking Jack Daniel’s on ice, crushed glittering
rattly ice from the freezer’s automatic icemaker. “It’s not what we do that
matters,” Rodney said, opening the toolbox on the floor. “It’s our frame of
mind when we do it. This isn’t another person, Phillip. The person inside your
dad’s already dead. This is just a body filled with energy. This is a body
filled with energy that we can join ourselves with and use to make ourselves
stronger. We can shape, funnel and redirect it. We can use it to our own
purposes.” Rodney handed me one of the sharper tools. “All right, Phillip? Do
you understand? How do you feel? You ready to go?”
The
tool felt firm, like the edge of a desk, or the fender of an automobile. The weight
was reassuring, in a way. But there was something in its dull edges that
disturbed me for reasons I couldn’t articulate. “I don’t know,” I said. I
waited for a moment. Already I felt his presence in the room, as if a large
window had opened to admit a soft cold wind. He deserved to be here, I thought.
It was perfectly fair. I turned and looked over Rodney’s shoulder. Pedro was
sitting at the dining room table beside a stack of Dad’s business papers. “Do
it,” he said. “Do it, do it, do it.”
I
looked at Rodney again just as Rodney turned to look over his shoulder at me. He
didn’t look like he trusted me.
“I
feel good,” I said quickly. I didn’t want him to see Pedro for the same reason
I didn’t want him to see Mom. It seemed a sort of violation. “I think we feel
all right.”
I
leaned over Dad with the sharp tool in my hand.
“This
has nothing to do with your dad,” Pedro said loudly. “I don’t have a single bad
word to say about him.
It’s your
mom we’re thinking about now, Phillip. It’s time you stopped worrying so much
about your own damn self and started paying more attention to
her
feelings. You shouldn’t have done
what you did to me, Phillip. I was good for your mom and you knew it. You only
loved your dad because you knew he wasn’t any good for her. Your dad didn’t
threaten you. Maybe he could destroy your mom, but he couldn’t destroy your
mom’s love for you. That was all you cared about, Phillip. Your mom’s love. You
don’t care what happens to other people. You just care about maintaining those
private temperatures inside yourself.”
My
hands were shaking as I handed the tool back to Rodney and he handed me
another, like a surgeon and his faithful, highly qualified nurse in a long
intricate operating theater while young students observed from a high balcony. I
felt Rodney’s hand on my shoulder.
“You
all right?”
“I’m
all right.” I took the next few tools without examining them. I felt hot and
dizzy. Magnified and eccentric, the motes swirled around me in the dim light of
the television. The television volume was turned down low, and someone was
whispering about Islamic fundamentalism. I applied the tools, one at a time, to
Dad’s flushed, warm skin. Gently, at first. My skull throbbed with a low dull
ache that intensified with every move I made. It was a sharp, shooting pain at
times, into my sinuses and eyeballs.
“You
know what you did, Phillip,” Pedro was saying, without bitterness and without
remorse. “You did it, and now you have to know you did it. You have to know you
did it, Phillip. Otherwise it doesn’t mean anything. Otherwise it’s like it
never happened. Then I’d hate you, Phillip. Then I’d never forgive you.”
My
knees buckled slightly as the blood rushed to my feverish head. Pain expanded
in my skull like the skin of a balloon. I handed the tool back to Rodney. I
touched Dad’s hot flushed skin with my trembling fingers. There was a large
blue vein under his neck.
“He’s
still breathing,” I said. “He’s still got a pulse.”
“Of
course he does. You haven’t
done
anything to him yet.”
“I
haven’t?” The room was turning slowly around me. “I haven’t done
anything
?”
I
heard the tool clatter into the steel box. Then Rodney said disgustedly, “I
thought you knew how to do this.”
“He
does,” Pedro said.
“I
do,” I said, stepping away from the ambient warmth of Dad’s trussed body. “I
do, I really do.” I was gesturing with both hands, trying to make the room stop
moving. I heard something kick. Weight was pouring from the mouth of the
Budweiser can into the thick pile carpet at my feet. “I just need a drink,
that’s all. I think I’m coming down with something.” I brushed my forehead with
the back of my hand. “I may be coming down with a fever. Maybe a cold or
something.” Tears were forming in my eyes, and I wiped them against my
shoulder. I was backing out of the living room. I didn’t look at Pedro as I
passed him. Suddenly I was in the bright latex kitchen. All the lights were on.
One of us had left the refrigerator door open, and the engine was humming,
generating an icy mist. One of the eggs in the egg rack was cracked and exuded
a yellow, inflating gel.
“Hey,
Phillip! We gonna get this over with or what?”
I
wanted Rodney to go away, but I knew he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t go away. I
grasped the open door of the refrigerator and braced myself against it. The
cold air rushed over me, like water in a bath. I needed this. I reached for a
liter bottle of 7UP and took it to the beige-tiled kitchen counter. As I was
reaching a glass down from the cupboards, I saw Dad’s note on the counter
beside the matching flour, rice and sugar bins. An empty pharmaceutical vial
rested atop Dad’s letter like a paperweight. The letter was printed on Dad’s
Epson printer, like junk mail advertising some new MasterCard Card Bonus Club
Service. The empty vial said, “Phenobarbitone 50 mg. Take one every evening for
sleep.” Inside the vial was a thin white powder, like the powder you find at
the bottom of an extinguished loaf of Wonderbread. I picked up Dad’s letter.
Dear son
, it said,
I hope this is something you’ll
understand better than your mother, who has a lot of other things on her mind
right now. I just think that perhaps things will be much better for both of you
when I’m gone. Please do not feel guilty about this even a little bit, since it
is a decision I have made without you knowing it or having anything to do with
it. I think this is the only way to provide a quick resolution for everybody, since
I am certain I am suffering from some irreversible stomach cancer or maybe even
something worse, since I can’t sleep and my stomach feels terrible all the time
and there are worse symptoms I won’t really go into right now. Just remember
that whatever happens wherever in your life, that your parents really did the
very best they could to make you happy, it’s just sometimes they couldn’t stop
themselves from being selfish, stupid or confused. All parents fail their
children and we all have to get used to that, I guess. You’ll have children of
your own someday and maybe then you’ll understand. I’m counting on you to take
care of your mother after I’m gone. I know you can do it since you did very
well without me before I came to make both your lives so miserable. Everything
is in good shape with my lawyer, whose business card you will find attached,
and whom I have carefully informed as to your mother’s condition so he will
keep a good eye on her from now on. There is $5,000 cash in my wallet.