The Sky Below (7 page)

I concentrated as hard as I could on keeping my arm steady. At last there was the tiny pressure of a bird's foot, a few quick pecks. Then gone. The memory of the unbearable brightness. My empty hand. Caroline opened her eyes and smiled at me, and in a rush, as if a bell had rung, all the birds rose and flew off, a few with strands of Caroline's wavy black hair trailing from their beaks. Caroline exhaled loudly, wiped her hands on her jeans, and pulled her hair off her forehead into a rough knot on top of her head.

It was over. She was her usual weird self again. I realized that we were both covered in swamp dirt and tree junk and whatever that sticky homemade crap was, that we were sweaty and filthy and bitten to shit by mosquitoes that had feasted on us along with the birds. When I scratched my arm, I scratched up skin and mud together, indistinguishable. There was bird shit on one of Caroline's thick eyebrows.

“See?” she said. She was so happy.

I nodded. I did see. And it was already gone. Leaving just a bright spot, like a mirror, in me, waiting for the reflection to return, like the sun sliding into view across the mirror's face. I knew it might be a very long time, with all the trouble I was in. Fucking fat Jenny. My fucking bad luck. But the bright spot: I could live there until they came back for me.

“Okay. Look out climbing down. That's when I always slip.”

I clambered down ahead of her as fast as I could, swinging from branch to branch, monkeyish, letting go of the second-to-last one too soon and slamming heavily into the swamp dirt.

“Goddamnit, Gabe,” said Caroline, making her way down carefully, back to being the peculiar nerd she was. “I told you.”

I just laughed, lying on my back in the swamp. My knees and my spine were banging with pain by the time we made it back out in the dark, but I was calm.

The motel was quiet when we got home. My mother had locked me out of my room, but I didn't care. I let myself into an empty motel room and slept on top of the scratchy covers. I dreamed that my light was sliding in and out of a large darkness. The next morning, Caroline and I didn't talk about where we'd been. Our mother didn't ask. When she let me back into my room, it had been swept clean. Nothing under the bed at all.

And then the way it worked was this: since Jenny was the one going to the dealer, and since she was older (which I didn't
know until then, that they'd held her back more than once, she was actually almost eighteen, her real name was Genevieve, who was she?), if I testified against her she'd be under more pressure to turn in the Fort Lauderdale guys. Which I did. And which she did. The court sent her to juvenile detention. It sent me to a different high school, where I had to talk to an ugly counselor every day for a month.

I was a man in exile.

I didn't go to the bus station anymore. I wondered if they missed me, my kneeling men. Who did they kneel for now? Who had they knelt for before?

The cops took everything that was in the shoeboxes. I'd still like to know what they did with it all, how they spent my money. I could feel the cold hollow, the invisible ruins, where the shoeboxes had once been, under me as I slept. It gave me bad dreams. To ward them off, I slipped into my mother's room one day when she had gone to one of her endless bridge afternoons. Her room was extraordinarily neat, like she had joined the army. The white sheets, the two modest pillows, were crisp as salutes on the high, single bed. The venetian blinds shone like clean blades. She had an antique mahogany dresser with curly feet that she'd refinished with great determination; on the dresser was a small, square mirror in an oak frame. The floor was no-color linoleum, just like everywhere else in the Sunburst, though hers was scrubbed until it was almost a not unpleasant beige, with maroon stars. When had she become so selective? No more paisley. Velvet banished. Though we lived in Florida, she had never saved a single shell.

I looked at my face in her small square of mirror:
Gabriel, Brewster, midafternoon.
The funny thing was that I couldn't see G anymore. G had vanished entirely. I wasn't sure if I even missed him. I was Gabe now. Gabe the fuck-up, the skinny red-headed kid who lived at the Sunburst Motel and got expelled from Brewster High for dealing drugs.

At first I couldn't find what I was looking for. I looked on the bedside table, in its one drawer—an old
New Yorker,
a stick of lip balm, and a calculator. I looked under the bed: nothing but scrubbed linoleum. I was sure it was here somewhere, and I knew it wasn't downstairs in our little tilted motel living room, where we almost never opened the curtains, since we were on the ground floor. The dresser scowled at me, warning me off. With a certain amount of trepidation, I opened her closet door. Inside, set precisely heel to heel, toe to toe, were her work shoes: black, laced, no heel, thick sole. White insoles that bore the faint impression of her feet. A slight bump on the left shoe that marked her bunion. In the back, a cheap pair of heels with silver buckles, a few pairs of sneakers splattered with paint and stain, the soft gray slippers Caroline and I had given her for Christmas that she never wore. They still looked new. A belted coat, a blue dress, a poncho the color of an Appaloosa pony that I remembered from the Bishop days, all on hangers.

I was tall enough now to reach the high closet shelf. I felt around. I was sure that, secretly, she had kept it. She couldn't have thrown that overboard. No matter the sharp-cornered white sheets, the square of mirror barely big enough to see your face: she was inside somewhere, like a spirit in a rock. I felt carefully past boxes, a phone book, a flashlight, then there it was, its crumbling spine in my hands. I was almost crying as I took it down, so gingerly, from the high shelf. I stood by the window and let it fall open, as if magically: there was the fleeing girl, Daphne, her arms twining and leafing, her untied sandal; Phaethon tumbling headfirst from his chariot with the sun and moon and stars all whirling chaotically above him; a bull (Zeus, in disguise) with a vast span of lethally sharp horns swimming in the swirling, thick lines that were the sea. Last, most thrilling, the savage Tereus becoming a bird—crest of his head, beak of his nose, sword in one hand, feathers sprouting almost obscenely from the other. The feathers were etched,
cartoonish, aggressive. I turned the pages with my dirty, nicotine-stained hands, entranced.

I picked up a few stray navy-blue scraps of spine that had fallen to the floor. I wouldn't leave any traces. Although my mother wasn't home—no one was home except the spacy, pregnant girl who worked the desk on weekdays—I tucked the big, old book against my chest, under my shirt, and spirited it away to my room, where I covered it in plastic wrap and slid it between the mattress and the box spring. I didn't have any cheap porn under there; my life, as far as I could tell,
was
cheap porn. Instead, I had the book from before, the most important one, the one that told all about how the gods took pity on those who were inconsolable in their grief, turning them into animals and trees and stars. I wished the gods would take pity on me and turn me into something, into anything.

But I never did go back to that swamp, that certain tree, the one the gods clearly knew about. I told myself I didn't know where the tree was, I didn't know how to make that stuff that summoned them, which was true, but it was more like I was saving it for some other time, in a better future somewhere else. Keeping it a secret, even from myself. Instead, now, between me and the cold ruins where the shoeboxes used to be, I had this middle earth of incredible stories, this metamorphosing populace. I felt them all furling and unfurling underneath me at night, bumping into me with their horns and fins and branches, murmuring and clucking and lowing. They comforted me almost as much as masturbating did, and when I had my cock in my hand I felt them draw close, closer, closer still, drawn by the scent. In this way, for a little while every night, the gods did take pity on me. Stiffening, I was a beast in that magic bestiary, an animal, all the animals, and all the trees, and all the rivers. But in the morning I was back to being the same guy.

On my second day at the new school, I got a girlfriend with
ratty blond hair and screwed her all the time. I failed as much as you could fail and still graduate, just for the hell of it. I used the diploma for rolling papers. Jenny wrote me some terrible, mean letters from juvenile detention. I couldn't have been all the things she said I was, but I suspected that maybe I was a few of them. I wore dirty jeans and felt as if I were an old plastic bathtub toy in a condemned building, a dolphin flecked with rotting spots. Felicia called, but I didn't have much to say. My new ratty girlfriend loved to hear about the shoeboxes and the whole affair. I left out the bus station bathroom part. “I can't believe you did that, G,” she'd say admiringly, and pinch one of my nipples. She thought I was some kind of sexy, foreign criminal, a hard case who left girls crying in doorways in their underwear.

I went from ropy to skinny, no longer a sly fox but a mangy dog. The ratty girl couldn't wait for me to get up enough energy to break her heart. I blew smoke rings into her brittle yellow hair like I was sending a message to someone, somewhere. Find me. Inside, I stood on the bright spot, waiting to be beamed up.
Gabriel in exile: Florida, Earth.

But I knew we'd never get back to Bishop.

I knew the City was gone forever.

I never had enough money anyway, and now it was gone. My father had put us into a debt that could never be repaid.

Caroline was gone, too. She graduated from high school and went to Morocco for what she said was a year. I knew she would never come home again. She'd gone
AWOL
from the Braid Brigade; she'd flown off with the strangely tall guy and ferocious short girl; they were a flock of weirdos. My mother cut all her hair off, and permed what was left. Many of her curls were gray; the rest were a dull near-brown. With a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, her skin seamed by the sun, she looked like she was made of bark, like a leafless, lightning-struck tree.

We didn't talk much. In the evenings, she determinedly did her laps in the small, warm pool and then, with her short, permed, gray hair—it looked like poodle fur—still wet, she did the motel's accounts, making neat marks in the oblong book with the thick yellow grids inside. One of her
FIRST CLASS
missives finally came back with a message scrawled on it in pencil:
not here—moved to mexico sorry.
She tucked the envelope into the back of the oblong book and closed it, her face empty of expression. I couldn't wait to leave her. I didn't care where I went as long as it was far away from the Sunburst Motel. She had become its gargoyle, and I didn't love her anymore.

The pregnant girl had her baby, so after school most afternoons, I worked the desk. I fixed the wheels on the maid's cart. On the weekends, I went on beer runs in vans with guys at school. They thought beer was a big, questing adventure. I told them things about the ratty girl that weren't true, and when I was in a really bad mood I told them things about her that were true. I looked exactly like a guy from Brewster: sunburned, skinny, horny, and dull. Flip-flops and stretched-out T-shirts with stupid slogans on them. No one knew anything about me. I was a cur, slouched in the back of the van with my nose in a comic book. I was the best belcher, the master of the fastest, most disdainful wank that never missed its aim. God knows I had practice.

I made up a boy in my mind, a tall, smart boy a little older than me with shaggy black hair, and I thought about him while the ratty girl was blowing me. As the ratty girl worked away, I had extended conversations in my head with the made-up boy in which I explained what happened, how it wasn't my fault, none of it was my fault, and he was very understanding, he understood it all, he'd nod, and together we'd begin cutting things out of construction paper: trees, lions, swans. Then, usually on the floor of the ratty girl's family's rec room, near the pinball machine that didn't work, I came.

“Yum,” the ratty girl would say. The smart boy with black hair vanished.

In that brief, pulsing instant, I always felt more alone than ever. The indoor-outdoor carpet in the rec room grated on my scalp.

At night, I lay in my bed, stroking, and became other things, making my way around my own personal zodiac. First I was a small brown swan, gliding down a deep blue stream behind a larger snow-white swan, my feet cold in the water. Then I was a twin astride a flying pink pony. Then I was a fox leaping out a window and slinking into the shadows of an afternoon. Then I was a nymph, bathed in rays of gold, worshiped by a ring of hunters. Then I was a mouse, like Stuart Little, carried by a blackbird. Then I was a great eagle with huge, strong wings. Then I was a dolphin. Then I was a dog, rutting and snapping. The black-haired boy breathed into my mouth. I was the sun. Then I wasn't.

I'd start over again at the swan, trying to figure it out, make it all come out differently this time. Twin. Fox. Nymph. The ice machine in the hall clattered. A woman laughed. Mouse. Eagle. Dolphin. Dog. Swan.

Swish
went the traffic on the road outside.
Swish
went the wind where the City used to be.

2

It can be so difficult, looking from tree to tree, to understand where the sound is coming from or what it means. You think you know, but the shape, the light, are different from what you've seen before. You drop an arrow, then another.

 

I got into exactly one college, a tiny place in Arizona called Arroyo D'Orado College. My roommate was brain-damaged—that's not a joke. Brian was actually brain-damaged, I think from a car accident. There had been a large settlement, so he had the best of everything: the latest chunky Mac, a clock that talked, special orthotics in all his special shoes. Everything was difficult for him—language, what time it was, where his body was in space—so he labored with monkish concentration just to get through the day. He was a broad-shouldered, handsome guy, and he was universally adored at Arroyo D'Orado. Students were constantly in our room, helping him study and secretly wondering if the damage had affected him below the waist as well, and what the ethics were of boning a brain
damaged guy. He probably got more pussy than anyone in the state of Arizona.