Ivyland (12 page)

“You are angry,” the old man intones.

“I know.”

A dry click, and the power comes back on, every light in the house firing up.

“So many grow up with God in their life only to shun Him.”

“I don't shun God. And I'm far from the worst in the family.” I flop onto the sofa that they've both ignored, blowing out the nearest candle and kicking off my ratty black dress shoes. Really need new laces.

“Saw your brother's name recently, is how I remember,” the monsignor explains. “You really do resemble him.”

“Why are you still here?”

“Have you been following his mission? He will walk on the moon, it said.”

“I read this also,” Anastasio chimes in. A stifling gravitas settles over the room. It never dissipates.

“Yeah, the Vesta 1 thing? Got bumped from a backup team, I think.”

“You have not seen it on the TV?”

“TV?” Anastasio echoes. Both of them place the accent on
V
.

“It takes one of real spiritual fortitude. I understand they are having some communication issues,” says the monsignor. “But NASA is still promising success.”

“Then I'm sure they'll have it. Listen, sorry about Henri, but he's incommunicado recently. I'm honestly surprised he would invite you people to camp out here.”

“Religion can be the last refuge of the desperate,” the monsignor says, and it doesn't read as an accusation, but the fact that it could've bothers me. The wick of my torso is ratcheted, half-crazed. Upstairs, Henri sounds to be stomping or grappling with an invisible wrestling partner, which—let's not even ponder such scenarios.

“Go ahead, talk some good religion into him.”

“I wonder,” the monsignor says, finally and carefully positioning himself on the easy chair, whole room ripe with his smoky scent, “why you shut yourself off like you do.” A creaky hum builds from the basement.

“Here it comes.”

The power drops back out.

Yes, I have doubts. More than that, I don't have beliefs. Don't see how they could help. This life so far, I've looked at competing options and zoned out. It's a step short of even indecision: nothing presses me to pick a side. Why can't such a thing's pure shittiness stop me from embracing it? The monsignor nods from within his yellow aura, understands, but that's all. Raw comprehension. Unseen walls protect him from the dismal conclusions that shoot up around me like weeds. I'm just a member of that delicate new caste, the generation least prepared for a nation's backslide and nonetheless assigned to halt it. The one that wrings small pleasures out of each day, feeling bad about some abstract contribution to the state of anxiety at large.

“I've enjoyed talking with you,” the monsignor yawns much later, subsonic vibrations of power lines still not buzzing in bones and our candles long spent. Anastasio says he'd love to continue this dialogue. I remind him that lying is a sin.

“Maybe we will talk again, and Henri, too,” the monsignor says with a smile that takes grace to muster.

*

The room he was working in is a mess, cardboard boxes and blue plastic tubing spread out on the floor. Up another flight of stairs, in the pre-dawn weirdness, he's locked in.

“Henri? You all right?” Then, “the monsignor seems to think you're desperate.” “What does he know?” Henri's voice surprises, chuffing across the bolted slab of wood.

“Don't make fun of me, but I'm actually worried about you. What are you making downstairs?”

“Why would I make fun of you?”

“I don't know, for being … I have no clue. You wouldn't, I guess, is what you're saying.”

It was something the monsignor mentioned about Henri being distressed, “afraid to be alone.” Alone, with a capital
A
. The phrase tunneled in, tied organs together, and tightened. Henri coughs and speaks again.

“Some days I slip up, Aidan. Small things, little tricks my mind plays. Thinking I heard or saw things that weren't. Smear of color or movement. And I know right then that I'll go crazy. I'll snap.”

“Come on,” I say. He'd never talked like this before. Henri's problems were always less than real; now I sensed their crushing grip, the way each phrase struggled to the surface. Yet I find myself ill-equipped to explore the shifted terrain, or unwilling. “No history in your family, is there.”

“I'm not just weird,” Henri says. “Another aspect. I can't guess what.”

“Sleep on it,” I tell him weakly, the dumb advice chilled and catching in my chest as I start, off-balance, down the stairs. With any luck I can forget I said it. But when my eye is level with the plane of his floor, the power comes back, blaring mutely. Light spills out from under his door, and he's standing just behind it, the shadows of his feet two dark yawning bars on pooled white wattage.

HECUBA /// IVYLAND, NEW JERSEY ///
TWO YEARS AGO

One hangover-blasted Wednesday, Hecuba dreamt she was asleep at the wheel, lead-foot subconscious running her route. Eventually she admitted to herself this was no dream and hooked an instinctual right to avoid entering at 60 mph a drive-through ATM tube that would've shaved the top off her jitney. Squealing onto Maple Ave., a treeless one-way street, she bore down on an SUV headed in the opposite direction, swerved, popped her last hubcap off into spinning shine on the air as a pothole's grace note flickered underneath, and sneezed.

It was a bus of the undead she piloted, seniors being the only passengers with a life expectancy not drastically shortened by her driving, and she circled the urban prairie of Ivyland four times daily, like a clump of hair that flirts with the shower drain. Courseless though she seemed, Hecuba did have a navigational approach: she drove toward the colorful, trying to outpace unsaturated hues that pervaded Jersey's suburbscape to the point of conspiracy, this dumbly guillotine-blade sky. Her cargo didn't care, content simply to stay in motion.

“Pardon me, miss, but the rec center is in the other direction,” one zombie had the gall to pipe up. “Worked there, actually. Thirty-two years. There when they put in the new wing, supervised it. My grandkid—little angel—she's got a piano recital, and since it's the next stop, and normally you never stop there, not that I'm criticizing—”

“Shut up now, please,” Hecuba said when she could take no more. She puked discreetly enough out her window, tried to blame Tequila Tuesday. Lenny Marx, who owned Viking Putt MiniGolf on Route 22 and kicked his dog as though he needed a creature to pity, never failed to goad her into it. Tequila Tuesday at Sipwell's was his Sabbath, his booth a shrine. Afterwards, they'd usually screw. But Hecuba hadn't held out hope on that front a few Tuesdays back when Lenny'd won two hundo on a scratch ticket and vowed to drink it. He'd fade into brainless neon fuzz, reemerging with a smile and twin shot glasses of amber venom. At last call he'd rushed the bar while Hecuba coasted on a perfect fog.

The glitchy jukebox played some albums too loud, and Lenny had memorized which, so when a Celine Dion single suddenly cut the din, Hecuba's suspect list was one name long. Lenny, across the room, held a handsome leer up to frail light.

“What faggot put this on?” this grease stain missing an eyebrow roared. Lenny jabbed a thumb at the backs of two planetoids disguised as Collars.
You were my voice when I couldn't speak
, Celine oozed.

“You,” eyebrow yelled at the neckless duo, who turned away from a South Jerz girl they'd been feeding umbrella drinks. One pointed at both his platinum blonde sideburns, like:
me?

“Yeah, you. Are a fucking. Faggot.”

Flesh hit flesh, toppled tables broke glass. Lenny settled next to Hecuba as the carnage erupted, scratching her shoulder with his stubble.

The jukebox yowled,
I'm everything I am.

“Not that you needed a reason,” she began.

“Jumped me in line. Manners are all we've got.” He drowned his grin in beer as a guy who'd been tossed once already that night sprayed the brawlers with a fire extinguisher, filling the bar with a nasty white smog. Hecuba threw back her head and laughed so hard that a Sipwell's lifer dozing in the next booth, eyes still closed, asked if she was gonna be okay.

Recalling the bloody tooth that splashed in Lenny's mug shortly after, she laughed again, meaning to suffocate on arrival the uninvited image: opened pink-and-white box. On her toilet, days after the fact. Leering the pretty way Lenny did.

Ivyland was smug as she blew through its crowded vacancies, past gutted beauty parlors; the offices of injury lawyers Oppenheimer & Glove, which used to be a car dealership run by local ad loony Unami “Uzi” Cloudfoot, and with its dorsal-finned red roof seemed an overturned sailboat; strip malls offering party favors in bulk and used vacuums, while brass-knuckled guys sold powerful Adderade cocktails in forever damp back lots. The scenery singing
you got a little too used to this
. Remembering to take a shortcut, she cursed—did adapting to a swamp mean you were unfit to leave? She knew the wonky light on Fairfield stayed red for six and a half suicidal minutes, that the dead-ending maze of McMansions up past Floods Hill was so like those assholes' sense of humor, and that JFK Junior High let out at exactly 3:13, would-be gangstas and goths, seeds that might never break the surface, tumbling out in knee-length white T-shirts and clip-on nose rings and re-stitched backpacks. Kids she used to bus to school, who threw crap at her jitney when she slowed down to see if any might recognize her.

She had two children of her own—adults, technically—the elder a daughter who'd eloped with a geneticist given to dressing like Elvis. He actually dreamed of cloning the man, wore a ring set with his synthetically duplicated DNA, was once sued by the licensing company that owned The King's image, had been rebuked at Graceland countless times for you-don't-want-to-know what kind of reconnaissance, and hoped to snag the bio-copyrights to some less untouchable celebrities, probably a comedian. Hecuba identified parts of the obsession both pathetic and charming.

The son, DH, had been living under her roof for twenty-eight consecutive years, discounting a short window of foster care and various weeklong benders that stranded him in Atlantic City jails, the Filthydelphia sprawl, and once even the Pine Barrens (sand from the Jersey Dunes collected in the corner of each eye), rarely with an inkling of how he'd arrived. Hecuba pictured him sleepwalking up and down the Turnpike for days at a stretch. Lenny casually sparked these episodes with a game of crass allusion to the long-disappeared father, who'd worked a job in South Woodbane's septic quarter apparently too humiliating to describe. Lenny was given to claiming that anyone with a son like this would be a fool
not
to ditch, whether they came home smelling like shit or no. Then a wink at Hecuba. DH, by contrast, was committed to a fantasy he'd perfected out after seeing a special report in sixth grade: poisoning by tainted spinach. A senseless tragedy. No one's fault.

DH's boggling and childish insistence on this point unnerved Lenny, who occasionally feared karmic payback for the hazing, and what would be more poetic than death by toxic vegetable? Any gut-ache was cause for alarm, and as he woke on Wednesday, one pale shade of consciousness dissolving into the next, gut was where the first ache bloomed. He recognized the mangy green of Viking Putt's sixteenth hole, the mead-toting valkyrie statue, both of which reinforced the worry. What'd he eaten? That suspicious gyro. What'd he drunk?

Lenny rolled onto his back and stared at the underside of Nidhogg, an apocalyptic beast set free from the Underworld, jagged head raised in a mute roar of celebration. Or maybe pain: a child-size golf club dangled from the dragon's eye, jammed in a hole where it'd been used to whack through the brittle plastic. Thing wasn't worth fixing, Lenny concluded. Neither was the Viking Putt itself, with its garbage-filled water hazards and defaced mythology factoid signs, sandwiched between Fong Friday's—always on the health inspector's shit list, never shut down—and a guitar store where kids loitered inside wishing they could buy something while Sal lurked in his dusty back office wishing the same.

Lenny blamed kids; he always did. Blackout as he'd been, there was no way he'd scaled Nidhogg's spine, hadn't done so since the Wall Street riots a few years back, when he'd sat on the dragon's head with Hecuba, sipping Beam, and with ancient binoculars watched the cracked ash-globe of downtown Manhattan smoldering across the river. Above gray wake, the atmosphere pulsed blue and clean and indifferently bright. Easier than ever to believe the skyline was a mural. Someone had put a thumb to wet paint, pulling detail into a monstrously beautiful smear.

Seamless segue from ambient dread to ambient disaster. You didn't want the dust settle and prove the wound. He recalled DH that night when he'd gone to check on Hecuba again, complaining how school wasn't even dismissed early and that their geometry teacher made them turn off the news, plowing ahead with a lesson on vectors. Mainly the way kids dealt with it, Lenny guessed, was pretending they always knew it would happen.

*

For Hecuba it boiled down to this dirty truth: Lenny made her laugh. He was one of those dangerous, high-wattage crazies you get close to so they'll train their evil humor on someone else, nobodies you wanted to hate anyhow. And in case they spill a drop of way-fucked genius. His shit with DH was a joke gone too far, she knew, one that set off her own pangs about Kurt, the stoically meek man she'd married, who had had the strange dignity to wear one of his three bright seersucker suits to work every day in spite of what lowly, unmentionable and foul-smelling task awaited.

But if she could withstand it, Hecuba reasoned, then her son could too. It was a small price to pay for a decent lay or guffaw now and then.

However uproarious his cruelty was, it made her unlikely to attempt
any
serious conversation, forget the one they were headed for. She found herself pulling into Viking Putt's parking lot with a pre-defeated sigh. He could be negotiated, maybe. A few seniors got up when the bus stopped, but Hecuba shouted them back into their seats. A small plastic frog was glued to the dash; she chucked it under the chin. Taped beside it was an index card that read:

NORTH AMERICAN CRYING FROG

Amphibia Lacrymosa Americana

Lenny called her that when she cried—minus the Latin, which he added for show.

“Cheer up,” she told it.

Lenny, in the pungent office that doubled as his living quarters, was watching a sassy TV courtroom judge berate a couple with haircuts ten years off-style. His mutt walked in and blocked the screen, prompting Lenny to pitch a shoe at his head.

“Fuckwad,
move
!” he yelled, and the mongrel, strangely enough, obeyed. Lenny's sneaker hit the TV and flipped the channel, bringing
Jeopardy!
to the screen. Hecuba entered with minimal resolve.

“Len.”

“Hec.”

“Problem.” Lenny hacked a cough and wiped the result on his dog.

“Who is Manute Bol. DH?”

“No. It concerns you.”

“What is Elba. Should have to say, ‘Where is Elba,' really.” He glanced up at Hecuba, who for an instant thought she might will his head to explode and was relieved to remember she couldn't. Lenny shifted in his foul bed, revealing a familiar stain. “This … I just so hate how the money isn't real. It's abstract. I hate that.”

“You
hate
that?” Hecuba asked.

“On principle,” he said.

“I'm pregnant,” she said.

“You're not being abstract?”

She fought a snorting laugh and shook her head with the gravity that confirms, yes, I'm un-abstractly pregnant.

“Pill,” he said, slumping back and smacking his head on the usual part of the windowsill. “What is a Möbius strip,” he recovered, unwilling to admit it hurt.

“Too late.”

“Late? Who are ‘The Mamas and the Papas.' Do you say ‘are' or ‘is' for bands?”

“Way late.”

“What is—how long ago was—unhgod
dam
mit … he chewed through this wire.” Lenny held up a mutilated power cord. “Should that kill you? Shithead?”

“I can't tell if you're talking to me or the dog. You know, most people have a dog voice, or like an animal voice, and you can tell the difference.”

“Not changing my voice for the fucking dog.”

*

Back on the bus, Hecuba didn't notice she was missing a few seniors, because she tried to never look at them. Roaring into traffic, she thought of her children again, wondering what remote locale she'd soon fetch DH from—a chore less hateful than his absence. She loathed being without him, ever since she'd made the Mistake that her mind revisited each day without permission.

Hecuba, when a newly single mother, had taken her squabbling kids out to their dinky front lawn, tied them to the kitchen chairs, and hosed them till purple crept into their lips, hoping to impart some morsel of wisdom since forgotten. A neighbor outright threatened to call social services; Hecuba retorted that it was only child abuse if you used hot water, and doused the nosy bastard before aiming the icy stream back at DH, who squealed and opened his mouth, trying to drink it.

And when they came to pluck him from Hecuba's arms, he bawled something fierce, still shivering, not understanding in the slightest why it had to be so.

*

Lenny was prepared to find DH himself when he detected young voices in the vicinity, assuming the boy had once more suggested Viking Putt as an oasis where he and his entourage could sprawl out in their popper haze. Instead, he found unfamiliar kids piling out of a skunky station wagon and told them to scram. We were going to play, they whined.

“Were,” said Lenny, unlit cigarette dangling expertly.

The mutt stared in through the screen door as he yanked out each desk drawer. Tequila escaped his body as sweat, more poisonous than ever. Finally he found two bottles of lighter fluid under a stack of unopened credit card statements. He patted his thigh and felt a book of matches, doubtless from Sipwell's.

Strolling around the rigged-to-be-unsinkable eighteenth, past the peeling Odin statue, Lenny whistled. Here was the Ragnarök sign. Gods do battle, most die, fabric of existence is torn a new one. It'd make a good Saturday morning cartoon. He struck a match and held it to the sickly green turf, which wouldn't burn. Struck another and held it to a plant, but it blackened and curled and didn't do much else, so he doused the area with lighter fluid. How much did an abortion cost, anyway?

Two old harpies and an ancient man in a porkpie hat appeared, asking when the next bus would come through. Lenny had to laugh. His dog stalked over, ropy drool stretching for the ground, and sniffed the seniors apprehensively. Upon analysis, it fled.