Ghost Lights (22 page)

“Not really,” said Hal. “I know someone who knows him, a guy at the embassy. I don’t really like either of them. Just between you and me. But he told me you’re gay.”

The vegan laughed easily.

“Guilty,” he said. “Though I doubt he put it that way. Cleve’s got issues.”

“They let gay guys fly fighter planes?”

“Don’t ask, don’t tell. Hey, it’s not like we’re color-blind. Or women.”

“Ha,” said Hal. He had finished the whole bottle of water. He felt almost sober. “My daughter always wanted to fly,” he said.

“She should take lessons,” said the vegan, and set his plate down on the table.

“Paralyzed,” said Hal.

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

He was far soberer, yes, but the food was making him drowsy, the food on top of the alcohol.

“I need to lie down, I think,” he said to the vegan.

“There’s a hammock,” said the vegan. “I’ll show you.”

They walked down the stairs, past the pool, past the crowds and onto the beach, where there was a small stand of palm trees. A string hammock swung there. Someone had just vacated it. There was a breeze off the ocean.

“Perfect,” said Hal, grateful.

Cluster-bomber or not, the vegan had been good to him.

After he settled down in the hammock the vegan patted him on the shoulder.

“Good talking to you,” said the vegan, and moved off.

“You too,” said Hal.

When he woke up he would tell Brady: You were wrong. The kindergarten teacher was right.

They cluster-bombed and cluster-bombed and told the diplomats nothing.

• • • • •

W
hat woke him up was not the flying dinosaurs but their calls. The calls of the pterodactyls were the same as the hoarse, throaty cries of young men.

He heard them and shifted in the hammock, registering the way the strings were cutting into his back. He was sore along the lines the strings had etched. White light made him cover his eyes.

Struggling awake he saw it was morning—no, midday; the sun was high in the sky—and the monsters were in the sky too but shockingly close to him, red and green dinosaurs with spread wings. He was back with them. Prehistoric. He could smell the salt of the sea and the freshness of morning air. Dinosaurs had been birds, many of them, and birds were their descendants . . . they skimmed along the ocean, over the waves. It must be high tide, because the water was not far away. It lapped at the sand just a few feet downhill. He was between palm trees, so the dinosaurs were only partly visible.

One landed. It had feet rather than claws. It was running.

It was actually a young man holding onto a glider thing. Was it parasailing? No . . . kitesurfers, that was it. He’d seen them before, on Venice Beach. The man hit the sand running, calling out again hoarsely, a cry of triumph. The others were behind him, still over the water. The young man let his red wings go, his red apparatus on its metal struts, or maybe they were fiberglass. It tumbled behind him. How had he taken off? How did they do it?

Another one alit on the water.

Hal struggled out of the hammock as the fliers landed, rubbing his eyes, bleary: the party would have ended long ago. The party had continued without him, leaving him behind. When he was a young man, in high school and college, he had been almost frightened to miss a party, at least any party his friends were attending. He had thought that everything would happen there, at that precise moment, that on that one occasion all friendships, all bonds would be cemented without him. In his absence, he had feared, the best times would be had and he would have missed them.

He did not have that feeling now. Sleep was a good way to leave a party.

His neck was stiff, though.

He patted his pockets. Wallet, check. Something in his breast pocket; he extracted it. It was a mass of tangled pipe-cleaner. Formerly a toucan. He pulled at it, trying to get it back into shape, but no dice. He must have lain on it.

He left the shouting men behind him, the ones landing with hoarse cries of victory. There were more of them coming, more red and green shapes over the horizon. Best to leave before the full-scale invasion. Recover in the hotel room; possibly sleep more there. But first he needed to rinse his mouth.

He walked over the sand to the water, where waves were curling. The wind was up. Behind him the first man landed was grappling with his sail apparatus; ahead, beyond the break, another man was surfing. Hal bent and scooped water into his mouth, jumped back from the edge, gargled and spat. He did it again until his mouth felt salty but clean.

Around him the red gliders were landing. They made him nervous, as though they might land on him. Were they members of a club? They all bore the same pattern, like a squadron of fighter planes. Panels of red, green, orange. The men who held them were euphoric. Their muscles and the wind alone had carried them. Hal felt envious. Yes: when he got home he would enroll in a class, learn to do this. Or windsurfing. To be one of the blown ones, carried.

Today was the day; this very afternoon he would liberate T. He would hustle him onto a plane and take him back to Susan like a trophy.

Slightly dinged, admittedly. Luster dimmed, in her eyes. But still a trophy.

On his return, he would see Susan in a softer light. He owed it to her. And he would be with Casey again.

Climbing the steps to the pool, he looked across its breeze-rippled surface to the aftermath of the party—glasses still on tables, white tablecloths with edges flying up in the wind, flapping across leftover, greasy dishes. No one was around, not even cleaning staff. It was deserted.

Maybe, he thought, he could salvage a replacement toucan from the ruins. He wove through the tables, scouting. Toucan, toucan! He would score one for Casey. He swore to get one for her. It was his duty. Yet there were no toucans.

Still, as he rounded the last dirty table, where a bowl of floating flowers had been used as an ashtray, he saw what seemed to be a green pipe-cleaner turtle sticking out of a margarita glass. They swam thousands of miles to build nests in the sand a few miles south of here, the divemaster had told him, but after they laid their eggs had to return to the water, and poachers tore up their nests and stole the eggs. They had lived 200 million years, maybe more. Maybe even 400. They had outlived the dinosaurs. But now a few beachfront resorts, a few hungry poachers and they were on their way out.

He would accept the turtle, though it lacked the kitsch value of the toucan.

He snatched it out of its empty glass.

10

I
t was time. At the holding facility T. would be waiting for him. Turned out the place was an easy ten-minute walk from the hotel: the receptionist drew a crude street map on the back of a piece of stationery.

The humid air of the streets was heavy with a gray smog; cars here still ran on leaded gasoline. Simply because no one had yet passed a law to prevent it. As a result children breathed in the toxic fumes every day and gradually lost brain function.

It came to Hal—a curious thought, because he was not given to theories of the supernatural—that their ghosts must linger here, the ghosts of those children before they were impaired. Even as the living children went on, growing into adults of limited intelligence, so must the ghosts linger beside them, pale images of what they might have become.

How wrong Tom Paine had been. Not overall, but in the sound bites. “That government is best which governs least.” If only.

Ahead of him a thin boy stepped out of the darkened doorway of a building. Hal felt an impulse to apologize to this boy in case he was one of the retarded ones. Not that Hal himself was personally responsible for the lead in the gasoline of this foreign country, but in the sense that they all were, that individuals were culpable, especially individuals like him, secure and comfortable and well-educated, for all of the rest of them . . . but now the boy must be confused, because he was not moving out of the way. Hal would have to step around him, down over the curb, onto the street and up again.

He moved to step into the street, smiling apologetically in case—since after all he was the interloper here, not the boy—it had been rude on his part not to do so in the first place. He noticed, in the boy’s rising hand, something thin and gray. Then the boy stepped up to him, and the boy’s hand was on his pocket; at the same time he felt a pain in his side, and was already on his way down to the dirty sidewalk before he could say anything. Falling into sharpness, or the sharpness was crumpling him. It happened so smoothly that as the boy ran away, a small bundle in his hand—a wallet?—Hal was still feeling beholden, as though he owed him an apology.

He was a child, after all. You wanted to protect them despite the bad behavior, knowing that all hurt animals had to flail . . . it was bad, it was surprisingly bad, but the sharpness faded, actually washed itself out a bit. It softened and covered him as he lay, doubtful, stricken by confusion. Was he supposed to be doing something? Was there something he could do about his situation? He was part of the world’s momentum, part of its on-and-on functioning, its inertia that was neverending. The pilot had said it, and it was true, finally. He himself was responsible for the boy, and by extension for this, for the sharpness and the spreading bewilderment. He had played by the rules—he had always played by the rules, even when, for a second, he considered breaking them and then decided not to. His life had been bracketed by rules, enclosed by their tidy parentheses; he had gone along in the forward motion, he had done nothing to stop it.

Warmth flowed over the sidewalk—his own, he felt in a wave of dismay. Had he disgraced himself? But it was thick—blood, not urine.

The sidewalk heated under his side and his arm but he himself grew colder despite the weather, his legs and stomach icy. He had thought it was so cloying in this place, so humid. Just a minute ago . . . how quickly it all flickered. Time was not in step with humans, in the end. It went too fast and too slow: and yet people expected it to guide them and shelter them.

And the boy was gone. Hal was alone and he almost missed him: come back, he thought. Boy? Anyone?

He tried calling out, but lacked the force or the breath. His voice dwindled.

His face against the sidewalk, then turning to lie on his back while the snake twisted in him—he saw the pain that way, an image vaguely inherited somewhere: a black and white snake with a diamond pattern—or no, the diamonds were not white but a sickly yellow. The image flicked past him, a snake slithering through his own blood. He felt a lick of panic, but then he was calm. It wasn’t real, after all.

He would have to wait till someone came to help him. That was what happened, with these incidents. People came to help you. All life was based on this, the social compact. It would not let him down, would it? He himself had held up his end. Not that he was a saint. But he was not a bad guy. It was fair to say that, more or less, he had held up his end.

Sometimes you had to wait first. That was all. T. would be fine without him; there was no bail, so all he had to do was walk out. Possibly, even, he would walk out and find Hal. Rescue him, in a role reversal. At this point he was only a few blocks away.

But the flow—he was soaking. Could he stop the flow while he was waiting?

He felt around with his hand, felt his side where the heat was coming from. He tried to block it, pressing his hand against the wet slick, but his arm was so weak.

The boy might even
be
retarded. One way or another damage had been done to him, that was certain. If it was the wallet he’d wanted all he had to do was ask. No show of force was needed. It was Hal’s official policy to give up money quickly whenever mugged. He had never had to invoke the policy, however.

If only the boy had asked . . . he felt a twinge of self-pity. Casey would poke at him with affection, needling. He had it all: he had legs. What right did he have to pity?

Above him a streetlamp winked on. He could not tell if the moon was out. When the moon was full you could not see the stars. Once he had seen the Milky Way. When was that? Long ago, he thought, before he got old . . . there was paradise in the Milky Way, in its seeming infinity.

When they came to move him, loading him onto a stretcher, he would make sure he got a look at the sky beyond the buildings. The stars would be even better, but in a city there was too much ambient light to see the stars clearly.

He heard sniffing. There was a dog next to him, nuzzling his face. The way it tossed its head slightly, nudging with the long wet nose, was endearing. He had to squeeze his eyes closed against the tongue and at the same time he tried to reach out to pet it, but his arm was shaking too much . . . a black dog, a mutt in the Labrador family. Now it had moved down from his face and was lapping at something. He was afraid—yes. Lapping up his blood. He did not blame it for this, though it was a strange sensation: the dog bore him no ill will. We lick what we can, was the motto of dogs. Was it any different from when they licked the salt off your hands or your face?

He recalled T.’s dog, dog on three legs. This one was here, the other was back at home waiting. Dogs all over the world.

It was a comfort. He might be gone, he himself might be gone, but everywhere were the dogs, with their faithful dispositions. It seemed you could rely on them. The dogs were a kind of love, given freely to men. Their existence meant you did not have to be alone. For if, in the end, you found yourself alone, completely alone, and it was chilling, you could look for a dog. And there, in the dog, would be love. You did not have to deserve a dog. Rather a dog was a gift, a gift and a representative. What a dog was was simple: the ambient love of the world.

The dog moved off after a while—or rather, at a certain point it was not there anymore. Hal thought he might have fainted and missed it leaving.

If he still could, he decided, he would get his own dog. When he got home he would go out and get a dog of his own. A dog from a shelter, a dog that needed someone.

He could hear people laughing, possibly in a nearby bar or restaurant. He had always liked going to bars and restaurants; he should go to more of them. Take Susan along with him. Although he might be dying. If so, he couldn’t take her to any more restaurants. But he was sorry for his behavior, so trivial and selfish. Whatever made her happy . . . have some paralegals. There, there. Have yourself a paralegal or two.

Really, I mean it, he told her. He would pass out the paralegals like cigars at a birth.

He was so sorry now that he had left her alone, left her alone years ago and never looked back, when all he thought of was Casey, worrying. He had never intended to leave anyone, it was the last thing he would ever have intended, but it turned out he was the abandoner.

This was shocking. It was just like the wound. It was a wound in himself, like the hole from stabbing. Only now did he look down and notice it: he himself did the abandoning.

Of course poor Susan needed company. She should never have been abandoned.

He hoped the laughing people were in a restaurant, celebrating something with lanterns strung up and deep warm colors that were welcoming. He was almost—almost—at the table himself. There were reflections of lanterns on his own glass, which he would raise to the crowd. If they could see him.

He was sorry for the boy, the stabbing boy, but then the boy, he recognized, was also his daughter. Not that Casey had ever stabbed him. He corrected himself, as though someone was listening. It was his feeling he meant, his feeling . . . as soon as they were past, perceptions took on a transparency. There was an impulse, it fled, and then he saw what the impulse meant. He saw through the obfuscations of his own mind, through the dodges of his remorse and his wishful thinking, and behind it all was a vision of his daughter.

It was Casey he wanted to apologize to, not the boy, and it always would be. When you were born, he could say to her, I was born too.

This appeared to him in the light of a new idea, though it was not. I was born then because it was true, as soon as you existed, that I only existed to care about you. From then on I myself was nothing.

And you know what, sweet girl?

I was happy that way.

“It was you who made me necessary,” he said.

It came out as a mumble. He wished he could hold her close in perpetuity, as he had wished so often when she was small. He was astonished, when he thought about it, that every man was not a criminal before he was graced with a child, astonished that any man was good at all before that. Many of them were not, actually. Statistics told the story: most vicious criminals, the warriors and ax murderers and gangbangers, were young men. Except for the rare among them who were born nice, they needed a child to civilize them.

And yet, of course, they should not be granted the privilege.

He would tell her: It was you who gave me the reason for my life. Before you I was proud—proud and empty. I had no idea what it was like to beg the world for mercy and not be heard, never be heard at all. But still to go on begging, unheard. I knew nothing.

And then I failed you.

He would say this clearly, making sure she understood how fully, fully acquainted he was with his failure. He had failed to protect her, failed in his one genuine calling, being her father. He did not accept this, in the sense that he repudiated it, but he knew it all the same. You could know something and at the same time reject it, no contradiction there. I failed, he would say to her, I failed at the moment when you were hit and after that moment I would never stop failing.

And it was you who suffered for my failings.

That was the problem of the religion he’d been born into. Christians, he thought: his parents had been two of them, but he could never bring himself. He had lived and now was dying an un-Christian, quite pleasantly godless . . . for the problem with the story of Jesus was simply this: it was a reversal, it was a perfectly backward version of the story of humankind, a mirror image of the world. For in reality itself, as opposed to the holy script, it was not one man who suffered and the rest of the world that was saved. It was the whole world that suffered for the sake of one man.

He could make the stipulation now, he could indulge in bombast now that he was, so unexpectedly, becoming dead. The whole world suffered and bled for all eternity, through all of human history, so that a minuscule, paltry few could have leisure and joy and the liberty of wealth for as long as they each should live. There is no doubt, the poor are the sacrifice, he thought, and he remembered this knowledge like a sight he had seen—all the poor and the untended and powerless. Together they are Jesus on the cross, bleeding so openly, bleeding for all to see, and thin like Jesus too, their arms and veins opened.

And yet the rich, especially the very, grotesquely rich, that fraction of a percent that make up the one man that is saved, blithely deny the truth of this, though it is perfectly obvious and as transparently clear as glass. The rich may worship God or they may pretend to but they are kicking Jesus to the floor daily, kicking him viciously and stepping on his face.

Because the poor are Jesus, in their billions. Plain as the nose on his face . . . and he himself, neither Jesus nor Judas but someone in between, was dying.

But maybe it would be all right in the end, or in the end beyond the end. Maybe somehow a second chance would come for him. And next time he would make sure she was not injured at all. He would take her away to a safe place and there she would be kept separate from accidents . . . there had to be a shelter like that for her, even for both of them. As simple as that bar at the end of the street, beaming its warmth. Was it so much to ask? A safe place for his little girl. If bargains were possible he would give himself up a thousand times before he would let them hurt her. Let them accept him, let them accept his pathetic, meaningless sacrifice. It was paltry. He knew that, for chrissake. But what else did he have, what else could he bargain with?

And this was melodrama, he knew that too, so sue him, who cared, he was dying. And anyway the melodrama did not make it less true . . . all he wanted was to hear the word
yes
. Yes: we will accept it. We will accept what you offer, be it ever so puny. In exchange we will give life back to your girl.

So she will always be young. And she will always be beautiful.

Whatever he did or could never do, in the end it was she who had formed whatever he was that was worth being. It is the child who makes the parent on this earth, he would say to her if she was here to listen, not the other way round. The child was more than father to the man; children were father and mother to the soul, whatever that might be. He did not pretend to know much about souls, or the idea of them. He never had. But once or twice he had thought he could hear a sound, a faint music. The spirit moves around us, falls past us invisible like air through air . . . all we are sure we have, all that we know, is the suspicion of its presence.