Bright Shards of Someplace Else (19 page)

She hasn't thought about Gwen in a long time. The flower's appearance on the canvas again suggested a keyhole to another place, and she remembers that Gwen used to say that she was an indigo child, possessed of a heightened vision and aura. No one else said that about her, so when Gwen got sick and Marti was moved to a new home, she tried to forget it. Auras and visions would not have played well in her second home, that was for sure.

She puts a hand on the painting and a hand on Snippet's sleeping forehead. She shuts her eyes. A tingle runs through her like a thread; it felt irritatingly minute, like a hair in your mouth. Gwen always talked
about the inner eye, how it opened, blinked, and fluttered in response to the vibrations of emotions. Hers had snapped open. Snippet wants to go, she thinks. He wants to slip into the opening he made and enter the new place. She would call Dr. Jim, make herself hold the rope for once, and see.

To live in a horse's body is to experience a perpetual loop of sensation, as if each nerve ending were being plucked in a pattern. Sometimes the patterns change or stutter: this is thought. Normally you feel the hair at the base of your tail twice, then the inside of your esophagus; now the order is switched, and that has meaning. Then, of course, there are the eyes, set on the side of the head. It is like being at a themed ride at an amusement park: everything to the side is thrilling and bright, but the area right in front of the car is black. Your world is peripheral. The blind spot in the center of your vision is your center, dark and certain, a void you can retreat to whenever you want. Sometimes the people and buildings and grass and pasture fold over you and push you into that center, like a stone held secret in a fist. At these times, your sovereignty becomes a question, a source of suspicion, a mystery. People holler at you and peer in your eyes with a bright light, trying to see if you are still there.

My son, the drug addict, is about to tell a story. I can tell because he's closed his eyes and lifted his chin. I can tell because he's laid his hands, palms down, on the table, like a shaman feeling the energy of the tree-spirit still in the wood. I can tell because he's drawing a shuddering breath, as if what he has to say will take all he's got. He's putting on the full show because he has a new audience—he'd streamline the theatrics if it were only me. We're having dinner in Levi Lambright's recording compound, Chautauqua, in remote Appalachian Tennessee. I'm a songwriter—a lyricist—and I'm here to work on a new album with Levi, our first in fifteen years. Dee was not invited. The only other person who should be here is Lucinda, Levi's cook. But Dee just showed up, the way drug-addicted sons sometimes do.

Right as he's about to speak, I reach for the wine bottle and refill my glass, placing the bottle back down in front of me, providing a bit of a visual shield between us. He's sitting across from me, next to Levi. The kid looks good, I'll give him that. He's clean shaven, and his dun-colored hair appears professionally cut. His eyes, where the cresting chaos can most often be seen, are clear and still. They still don't track exactly right, though. Like his mother, he looks at you out of one eye at a time, like a quizzical parrot. If you look at him straight on, his thin face seems to wobble and shake like a coin on end before it flips back into profile, his mother's aquiline nose and sharp chin etched in the center of his round boy's head. On his forearm, his old self-mutilation scars have been scribbled over, I see, with a new homemade tattoo:
Trust
. I don't see myself in him at all.

“Okay? Are you sure you want to hear this? It's kind of a long story.” Dee asks, though he doesn't pause before going on.

“This happened last week. I was downtown, on some crazy uppers. I think I took some
MDMA
that night. Maybe just amphetamines. I don't remember. All I know is I was high, really high, and I'd been dancing and couldn't find who I came with. So I decide I should go home. But when I leave the club, I can't figure out where I am. I mean, I only live a block from there. I'm walking down the street and I feel like I'm in a foreign country or something. Nothing is familiar. Somehow I ended up three miles away, in the worst part of town …”

I try not to listen. I've heard all this before, and I'm pretty sure it will end with him confronting the godhead. I've gotten enough midnight calls about his drug-fueled encounters with an encyclopedic list of spiritual figures: Jesus, Buddha, Allah, The Spirit in the Sky, and Mother Nature herself, who held out long arms made of saplings and drew him to her leafy bosom while nibbling a Morse code of secret truth on his earlobe. As much as I knew the source of these visions, it was hard not to be swept along by his telling. Because Dee got one thing from me: my ability to spin a story.

Sometimes Dee's language was so striking during these soliloquies that I would find myself jotting down phrases without thinking.
I can't believe you mined your drugged son for a good turn of phrase
, I'd think, looking down at the pad the next morning. Then, a preposterous jealously:
Why can't I think of phrases like that?
I'd want to use the words in my work, but that seemed somehow wrong, given what they sprang from. But to let that language, no matter how destructive its origin, simply be forgotten seemed wrong, too. So I simply recorded it on little sheets of notepaper that I stored in a shoebox under my bed. I guess I figured I'd decide what to do with it all someday. I suppose it's a bit like the newspaper clippings proud parents keep of their kids' accomplishments, for they were, in their perverse way, Dee's accomplishments.

“Man, have I been there!” Levi is staring at my son, a smile playing
about his lips as though he knows he's going to hear something great. He looks at me and gestures with his fork, flinging bits of food into his drink. “Danny, remember when the tour bus got lost on the way to Santa Fe? And how we hopped out and started looking for street signs and ended up at that crazy pueblo with those cult people? The ones with all the chickens wearing stuff?”

I nod. I remember the chickens and their colorful neck warmers, scratching around in the sand while a few children sat in the sun with looms on their knees. They'd looked at the group of us—back then Levi was a bona fide rock star—with a somnolent disinterest, as if we were deeply beside the point. There's more to the story, but I don't want to tell it with Dee here. It's a funny story, and telling a funny story is an act of generosity and welcome that I certainly don't feel.

“So you were stoned and lost. And …?”

Dee fixes his left eye on me and then flips his hands upward in an emphatic gesture. There's a faint purplish streak coming off his tear duct and down his cheek, like a magic marker he's tried to wash off. His inner elbow is blotchy with thick pancake makeup, but track marks peek through like the bubbles of crabs submerged in wet sand. He leans over the table, as close to me as he can get.

“I brought a man back to
life
. That's what happened.”

Only one of my two sons Dale is a druggie. That's right: I have two sons by the same name—the absurd result of a tanking romance. That's why this Dale goes by Dee. He's the younger one—just twenty-four—the son of my second ex-wife, whose love for me primarily manifested itself in an intense jealously of my first wife, Gina. Vicki had the notion that she was simply a placeholder for that old passion. This was hardly the case—far from being a woman I pined for, Gina had morphed, for me, into the kind of pleasant asexuality that one associates with kin of the fun-cousin variety. I tried to make that clear, but simply hearing Gina's name on my tongue was all it took to send
Vicki off the edge. “Listen to the way you make love to the very syllables!” It came to a head when she was pregnant with our son. “I want to name him Dale,” she told me over dinner, a wine glass half-filled with grape juice shaking in her hand. “But Vicki, I already have a ten-year-old son by that name,” I said slowly, as if to a child. “Gina's son,” was all she said in reply. I gave in, figuring that naming my second son the same name as my first was such an extreme testimony to my love for her that it would cure her jealousy for good. But within a few years I had not only another Dale, but another ex-wife.

After the divorce, Vicki and Dee moved to Dearborn, where she immediately married a gruff, possessive pharmaceutical salesman who picked up the phone whenever I called her to discuss our son. So all the calls—even the later ones where we grimly discussed Dee's drug problems—were set to her husband's breathing, as if the call were coming through a conch shell. Weekend handoffs were tense, and I always felt I was smuggling the boy away as I hustled him to the car while Vicki and the husband stared through the bay window, blowing Dee kisses and making theatrical frown-faces. Once Dee and I were safely on the highway, I'd look over at him—slumped in the passenger side, his bag on his lap, his watery blue eyes turning in their sockets with a reptilian jerkiness—and feel as awkward and duty-bound as a cop entertaining a lost kid while the mother was rounded up.

I'd like to say that it was just Dee's addictions that had cooled me on him over the years, that had frayed the precious father-son thread. But there were things in Dee that had bothered me long before he started using. Even as a little boy, he was always selling himself too fervidly, selling whatever he cared about. When he was fifteen, it was Stanley Kubrick's body of work, and I spent many an afternoon watching him pause
A Clockwork Orange
frame by frame while he explained the brilliance of the shot—the shifting chiaroscuro that played against the elegant curve of a kicking foot. By the time Dee was eighteen, Kubrick was forgotten, and all Dee spoke about was music. He listened nonstop to what sounded to me like the drippings of a
leaky pipe in an echoing room mixed with a duck call. Dee claimed that the absence of voices and recognizable instruments represented a higher form of music, untainted by human expression. “These sounds are incidental, you know, found sounds,” he explained. “Then they're spliced and looped. That's all that's been done to them. Isn't it beautiful?”

I liked that Dee was passionate, even artistic. Unlike my other son Dale—a bakery franchiser whose imagination stretches no further than how to rebrand the cupcake—Dee seemed more like me, a thinker, someone interested in ideas and art. Yet it was hard to really engage with him. His typical response to anything I said was a wave of a hand and a wincing squint, the same gesture one would use when walking into a smoky room. Still, I loved him. I imagined that when he grew up a bit—got out of Vicki's control a bit more, saw more of the world—that he and I would have a fresh shot. The good times we had (racing down the dunes in northern Michigan and splashing into the lake, paging through catalogs of specialized recording equipment, waxing philosophical about the state of pop music) seemed to contain within them the seed of something better, something more solid. I can wait. That's what I told myself.

But Dee's habit ruined whatever fragile relationship we'd been building. He stole from me, screamed at me, punched me, came onto my then-girlfriend's mentally disabled daughter when she was staying with me (a disaster that was only averted because I walked back into the living room in time), and even accused me, during an acid fugue, of abusing him as a child. Of course that was laughably untrue—I'd hardly touched him at all, much less hit him. I'd been raised by a cold, withholding father who demanded dark and silence whenever he got home from work. When I would fix him his drink, I'd place it into his hands with the gentleness of a small spider, its legs no more than filament. I treated Dee with the same delicacy, only touching him lightly, if at all, and when I hugged him I did not even press away the air under his baggy shirt.

Vicki and I did our best for him. We sent him to the top rehab facilities in the state, even an experiential sailing adventure where the organizers likened ducking to avoid the boom to avoiding drugs, and gathering up the lines to organizing one's life and getting a job. I tried everything I could think of or read about—too much to even recall. And Dee would have good days, of course. They always do. He'd show up at my door and apologize. He'd talk in a low, exaggeratedly modulated voice, as if luxuriating in his ability to speak in something other than an accusatory shriek or a paranoid mumble. We'd go somewhere to eat and he'd stare at his plate in wonder, as if his reentry into the world had given even his limp house salad a kind of sheen. Being with him as he reentered regular life, watching him acquaint himself with all of life's serene pleasures, was bracing and thrilling. It made the world feel new to me. All he'd said and done shed off me like it was nothing. And then—relapse.

Before Tonya, my ex-girlfriend, decided she'd had enough of me, she told me that my willingness to ride the rollercoaster of Dee's deceit, lies, and false recovery so many times was an addiction in itself. “What do you do all day? Read books about recovery. Call his phone constantly. Drive around town looking for him. All for a kid who pretends to be clean once a week, like clockwork, usually to get some money out of you. This kid will get better, or he won't. It can't be on you forever.”

She was right. I'd been living off dwindling royalties from my career with Levi, refusing new songwriting work, even from artists I once desperately courted. There was no time for friends. I never bothered to see my other son, even though he lives only a few hours away. And the rooftop community garden, where I had once so enthusiastically volunteered, had taken me off its work schedule since I'd been a no-show too many times, times when I drove right by the garden to hunt down Dee, parking my car by a dark overpass or barren lot, leaping out with a flashlight and calling out his name, raking the light over the faces of those bums and strays he ran with. Each face was lit
with a chemically restored naïveté, so even the roughest slow-grinned like toddlers caught in the act of scrawling on the nursery walls. I'd grabbed one I'd seen before—a man who always wore brass-buckled pilgrim shoes and drank from a horn flask—and demanded to know where Dee was. He cocked his head and called out “dee
dee
dee,” a sound that rose, echoed, and converged with the faraway car alarms, bird calls, and every other ambient long
e
in the city. Dee was lost and unavoidable. I'd find him dead one day, I thought, or get killed looking for him. There's no other way it could end.