Ivyland (14 page)

 

Little Bob Squeazy

Got his VV

Then he went to bed

But he woke up dead

 

Big Dad Squeazy

Sued the doctor E-Z

Won a ton of bread

Then it went to his head

 

Sad Mom Squeazy

Wanted baby Squeazy

Couldn't bring him back

So she killed herself instead

 

Knock at the door—no. Me bumping the cabinet shut. The bathtub may be melting, but it's also filthy. Dirt oozes down the drain … spirals, fractal waves that surge upward helplessly … in the bathroom with me now is a person, a girl, kissing my burning cheek. It's Holly, and she mutters sentences full of blanks: “You'd never believe … I'm gonna …,” volume varying as she moves up and down my neck. In the mirror, I'm staring out of this embrace, trying to find blue in my eyes, doubting it was ever there. Studying the cartoony floral wallpaper to calm things down, counting each petal and then each line within each petal where they do this jumping, things so criminally patterned. My skin tugs upward with each kiss. I look down at Holly, but now she's Phoebe, or always was. Water drips from the faucet in heavy balls,
dyooop dyooop
, submarine sonar pings. “Phoebe?” She's not listening, but guides my hand up her shirt. She's not wearing a bra. My hand is torn between ecstasy and panicked claustrophobia, but I force it to stay, make it follow those full shapes and caress them in what I direly hope is expert fashion. I stagger backward, sit on the sink, accidentally turning the faucet on. The sudden gush is deafening after minutes of only muffled whispers and sighs, and I jerk forward.

“Let me …” I say, maybe talking about the faucet. Phoebe grabs my belt and feverishly tries to undo it.
Wait wait wait wait.
My legs are jelly, and they crumple. “I want to …” Phoebe says, or I imagine. When she moves her head it leaves a trail. The lurch of blood in my ears, prickle of every surface—each piece of air bouncing off. I have a hand under Phoebe's shirt again, on her back, and she's sweating.

Now the blood-red thing dawns on me, saying
Cal was here,
defiled all. I shouldn't care. I swallow the truth with difficulty, drown it in saliva.

“You're high,” I protest for some reason. My other hand is sunk in a bathmat and can't stop groping its ropy mildewed fibers, which seem to make a squeaky sound. “You hear that?” I ask, meaning the squeaking.

“No,” Phoebe says, silencing me with a messy kiss.

“This bathmat is squeaky,” I announce through the side of my mouth. “Stop.” This time, I push her off. “I just need … wow … okay. Fuck!”

“What's wrong?”

I stop short of crying and crawl to the door. A towering white four-sectioned monolith. Still lying down, I reach the push-lock and snap it open. Through the sliver of space at the bottom I see the amoebas swimming and two shoes. I recuperate for a second and reach again, pushing the door, push—push to close—pull it open. And there sits Henri, somehow abandoned to listen to teenagers sloppily fondling each other. His face can't be understood. Seeing me, and past me to Phoebe, woozily recumbent against the bathtub, he stands.

“Aidan.”

“You aren't mad, are … are you mad?”

“I respect you,” he says, taking the time to get his line right. “I respect you, and you're like a brother, but I can only respect so much.” The amoebas are magnetically attracted to his feet, I can see now, and they swim into fuzz circles that rotate softly, clockwise and counter, little combination locks. I pet one.

Henri's gone.

I leap to my feet with a frazzled energy I didn't think I had, running out through the bedroom in pursuit. Behind me, Phoebe too is clattering out of semi-consciousness into action. In the hallway, Henri is moving as fast as his legs will carry him, toward the deck and the ocean. I struggle over a rug that slides on polished wood, scrabbling at the walls. Henri throws open a glass sliding door, luckily for me—I would have plowed right through. The din of a raging, oblivious party and
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
in the other room (
You took too much,
I hear) slams me for a second as I remember where we are and briefly recall my dad showing me this photo, saying,
Here's me and my friends with Hunter S. Thompson at a talk he gave. He never did figure out what to do next, except for in the end with a shotgun.
Situation surges back, injecting fresh adrenaline into rubberized muscles. A nearby A/C rattles psychotically, no, honestly, as if it really does belong in some grimy asylum, and surely at least not here in a painfully standard beach house where on the salt-blasted deck I clip my hip on a bin full of rancid garbage whose funk is so pulverizing that I sort of pass  .  .  . out but keep running.

Practically a footgasm from my toes sinking into the cool dry fluid of the sand and movement becomes a joke. Henri has slowed down, too, I can tell, but as I sense the gap closing a weight hits my back, locking my knees and planting me face-first in the sand. I flip over, say something immediately disqualified as language. Phoebe is straddling my chest, a lurid grin plastered on her face. Even in spare light the fiery parts of her eyes move, contort, scary/sexy. She glows star-colored, lit from within. I give in for another moment till she comes too close and runs a perfumed hand through my gritty hair, another keeping me pinned. I clench my teeth when she kisses my earlobe, too, too intense and one-of-my-legs-can't-tell-which jiggers insanely, thumping like an overexcited dog's. Air exits my mouth in a delirious hiss till my tongue pushes against the back of my teeth to stop the sound. Weight lifts. Phoebe is missing. I'm paralyzed, back arched, tendons taut. The galaxy overhead moves in streams, flowing calmly, the moon absent, and I instantly weep full ancient sobs, tears glazing the sky, rolling out of my eyes only when enough water has collected to pour sideways over quaking skin and into tiny divots where the sand claims their moisture. I count to three, shut my eyes and quell a tremor that insists I'll never get home. A star river even on the back of my eyelids, searing greens and purples.

Henri is sitting there, I realize, looking skyward.

“Do you see that?” he asks, choking on the question. I sit up with ease and touch his shoulder. This suffices for the moment, before I remember to say I'm sorry. I wish I were blind, deaf. I bite my fingers raw.

“I don't know where we are,” says Henri, answering the question I hadn't yet asked. Phoebe lies a few feet away, a surface of vomit or a beached jellyfish gleaming by her head, mouth bent in a wan, sleepy smile. She could be alive or she could be dead. Hendrix died thus. Dad went to Woodstock, but for all my investigation, his story ends there: How old were you?

Real young.

How the hell did you get out there?

My mom's friend drove us and dropped us off. It sounds ridiculous in retrospect.

And it was cool?

Of course, it was Woodstock.

“1969.”

“69?”

“Childish.”

We cannot nix the dread that some malfunctioning mass of neurons won't flip the switch from CHILD to ADULT. And if we have nothing of value to offer. Then. Am I meant to apologize for my time? Enjoy and not reverse the end? It's true we can't spend our lives in trances, with perfect TV-related recall. But who's to judge. Schedule me. I am highly trained and helpless. I assumed there was a plan.

“She's breathing,” one of us says, paroxysms in lungs: the X of paroxysm floats before me, stretching until it's X'd out everything. I crawl over and stick a trembling finger under her nostrils, pretty curls of heated, even breath. I sniffle, feel sand in my nose, petting her and now hear this, it's like one sad album played on repeat, guitar reverb soaking up moonlight of foreign song cycles, familiar melody ringing when Cal held my hand that day and took me home (though I'll not get back), took me from a deathscape of blood on ice, an ice transparent but not fully so, played with my blood, took me back. The moon that ice. Uncharted territory, says Henri, and I've found the moon again, the night is not without one, though it is bloodless—it is clear and cratered and a steady shiver and here we sit in love with immobility. Cal was homesick no matter where. In hearts. In the game of Hearts you shoot the moon, do everything wrong to be saved at the end. Henri picks up a stick that's hollow at both ends, holds it like a telescope. “Why can't I see through this?” he asks.

Zeros spinning in the sky. Wheels, gears, interlocking in pairs and pairs of pairs, scrolling mosaics, transparent geometries brushing vision. Veins bulge and snake as if charmed. Henri speaks and he gestures in rainbows and does not inhale once so far as I see with
you could have her without trying, and I'd charm all night and never, never like she wants you, not just that way, I'm saying, but wants you and to be with you, God this is fucked up, I want it to end, I mean not like my life, don't get that idea, but with Phoebe
—the name lingering even as he continues—night making his orange tux gray, little amoebas breathing on the tie he borrowed from his dad: they've seen your parents how you never will. What do these people refuse to say? They lived through worse, and it made them stronger? Or they were simply born with something, let's call it virtue, or
arête
, if Henri is to have his way with classical vocab:
arête
is a
hexis
, habit. A
hexis
. Virtue is a hex on us, and onus too. Might so much deserve my rage that I can't begin to rise in anger, frozen, my hundred wills all grown this cold? Henri stammering on,
it's like, like, like she's ahh she's a home, a home with good thoughts
. He's tracing his hand, thumb, finger, finger, finger, finger, and back again, pinky, ring, middle, index, thumb in that kindergarten Thanksgiving turkey way, just so in the chilly sands that boil with scars of violent holidays. There's been nothing in my life that could … I was born knowing this.

“I'm sick,” Henri says.

“You're fine.”

“I'm sick and I'm going to die,” he insists.

“You're not going to die. Don't tell me that.”

Thing being, we're not far from the house after all: I see faces moving at windows. Drunk and happy, collapsing into the reckless headlong narrative of dream while the mind paces alone and calculates its disaffection. A home you can't get back to. First Circle of Inferno for us uncaring pagans, more Purgatory Forever than Hell. When the last comes and things break, you don't repair them, you squeeze what's left out of the shards. Trying to fix things, you ask:
What was this supposed to look like?

We trudge in place through the edge of that world and back into our own. Phoebe stirs. Trees near the street decked with leaves or dangling metal mobiles that move and catch scant warmth of distant suns. An ambulance streaking by is unusually profound, a wailing vault encrusted with glittering jewels. One that came for Henri years ago … When it happened, I was sure of the worst, never shook that certainty. He needs to stay. I need to stay … we stay awaiting zodiac rays. A car squeals past, following the ambulance. “Where's that guy think he's going?” I mutter, making Henri actually laugh, the sound so alien in this place. The brush along the road rustles knowingly, its serenity throwing me for a minute as our surroundings conspire to a higher purpose. But the glass nothings pass, impurities colliding with space again. Fraught voices pierce us from the house, and a bird chirps, not waiting for dawn.

DH /// SPECTRE, GEORGIA /// LAST SUMMER

Belltruvin float, now airborne. The cop hesitates, smelling the potent Adderade cocktail we got in Baltimore. Once he's asleep I'm going to dig some ice out of the cooler and rub the back of my neck with it. Weird to think about masturbating the old way. Can't believe people still do.

“Are you an organ donor?” Lev asks over a clipboard.

No. A bunch of hours longer ago: I'm speeding when we leave North Carolina and going faster when we hit Georgia and a total grease streak after we show up to Lev's dad's abandoned house.

“He can't hide,” says Lev.

“Seems like he can,” I say, and slam on the gas.

The cop pulls us over a bit later. I haven't gotten to drive since.

“Fast truck you have here,” the cop says, chewing his moustache. “In a rush?”

“Yes.”

“Why's that?”

I look at Lev, who shrugs.

“Humanitarians,” says the cop, admiring the poster we stole from a harvesting clinic and plastered on one side of the truck. JERRY GODFORTH WAS A PIONEERING PSYCHOLOGIST, BUT IT IS HIS KIDNEYS THAT BEST SUPPORTED A PATIENT: GIVE TOMORROW'S GIFT OF DIGESTIVE FILTRATION TODAY. With a picture of the creepily smiling guy himself. Where the poster's scratched through you can see some of the old ice cream pictures.

“Who sent you boys on the mission?” he asks.

“One of Endless's new mobile VV units for Rural Protection,” Lev says, adding, “also licensed to do coz.”

Turns out the cop knows where Lev's old man lives, this same county but down toward the coast, a plantation-style place that never was one. He also wants penile implants, which Lev assures him he can do, despite my silently panicking eyes.

“Suppose these celebrities want some quiet,” the cop says. “Didn't know he had a son, Brutus.”

When we get around to Lev's first attempt at genital enhancement, the cop's eyes are not focusing. His words drip from the corners of a chemically wet mouth.

“Let's see,” says Lev. “Hand me my etherscope.”

“He knows what he's doing?” swims the cop's mouth.

“He knows everything,” I laugh, forcing his unhinged eyes closed with a gentle palm. “The hell's an etherscope?” I whisper.

“Not real,” Lev admits.

A crackling voice turns out to be the cop's walkie-talkie, which asks: why aren't you patrolling, you're one of only two cars in this whole stupid backwater, and here I am staring at this halted tracking blip on my screen that represents your very stationary ass, and if you don't cover your ground I'll come down on you like a fucking bridge. I hit the off switch. Lev pulls down the cop's pants to reveal an already oversized member.

“I'm ethically bound not to operate,” he sighs in relief.

We take what we want off the guy and dump him back in his squad car with a sorry-note I scrawled—saying too much of a good thing is no good to anybody—and Lev and I motor off to his father's house by the beach, which turns out is something from a slasher flick, weeping willows and Spanish moss hiding a white rotting portico, like the whole place is trying to grow back into the earth. It's nicer than the first house, though. We walk on in.

Inside erupts the stench of mildew, and I start sneezing when we come to a dark wooden study. A hard object strikes me in the head and I open my eyes to find on the oriental carpet a small bottle of allergy meds that I used to get stoned on as a kid. Brutus Van Vetchen is sitting at the far end of the cavernous room, behind an enormous dusty desk in a pool of dirty sun that pours in from floor-to-ceiling windows, wearing a three-piece wool suit in soul-incinerating heat, cutting something tiny apart with a butter knife.

“Don't bother introducing your friend,” Brutus says, and it doesn't sound like a joke. “Can't visit your father without a bodyguard?”

“
Et tu
, Daddy? Didn't even tell me you moved.”

“Earthy, yes? A present from Endless for my life-saving efforts. The appearance of life-saving efforts.”

“Sure you saved people, Daddy.”

Brutus is slicing open pills, tasting the powder. He looks way too young, the lines in his cheeks too sharp, as if he's only ever made one face besides the current. Also, what do
I
look like these days?

“They have orangutans mixing doses now. My old partner Reginald agrees. How is school going, Leviticus? Anatomy still holding you back?”

“Not at all. Got a tutor, it's going great,” Lev answers, head tilting at me. “Anyway, Daddy, you want to have maybe a sweet tea, whatever it is they drink down here, talk a minute.”

“We're talking now.”

“I need the gas.”

Without looking up, Brutus pries himself away from the pill project and walks to a cabinet in the corner. He takes out a glass, a capless bottle of Scotch, and a recognizable sleek silver tank, but no familiar symbol. Inside that, the perfect ratios. He pours himself a few fingers of Scotch, drops the tank on his desk with a bang that makes me almost laugh. It leaves a mark on the wood.

“Even with all their legal products,” he begins.

“This is legal.”

“Not for what you want it for.” Brutus sips his warm drink. The whole place is preserved, marinated in some peaty scotch like that. Creeping vines growing in through busted windows and boggy air. Moss on the unused bookshelves even, creeping up around a lone picture frame laid facedown. I flip it up to find a photo of hard-hatted young Brutus standing with a forced smirk before the skeleton of a construction site. Closer to the foundation, on the far right, is a person cut off by the shot: a seersucker-sleeved arm and a sliver of face that could just as well be mine.

“Had the anger long?” Brutus asks stonily.

“Anger, sir?” I ask.

“It speaks. Anger, yes, the withdrawal?” Here he pulls the tank's plastic mask to his face and turns the knob, inhales deeply. “Getting worse every second, isn't it—have to chew a ton of Belltruvin to stay remotely happy. Is it worse when I do this?” he takes another lungful, his eyes rolling back like a shark's.

“Stop it, Daddy.”

“A medical tool,” Brutus goes on, spittle stretching down the length of his tie. He gets syruped from doing two hits in a row, but fights it, drinking more, then sucking more. “I can see why you're seduced, Leviticus. Everything reassembled.”

“It's for the hospital where I'm doing my residency in Ivyland,” Lev lies. “Services immigrants, mandatory VV upon entering the country, and if they don't have the money, they get deported. I want to make it free.” True, except for Lev doing his residency there.

“What kind of person believes you?” Brutus asks, slumping back in his chair.

“Please, Daddy,” Lev trying to weep. “There's a little boy named Carlos who I'd kill myself if he died of H12.”

“Nobody dies of H12,” Brutus says. He licks a palm and massages his face with the spit. “Just moved along.”

“Because of you, Daddy.”

“Because nobody.” Brutus paints his spit-sticky features with pill powder. “Indian war paint. The medicine man,” he laughs. “They cured some things.”

“Daddy.”

“Go to the basement.”

“We're going to negotiate.”

“Useful things in the basement.”

“I'm not a kid,” Lev says.

“A basement is where I bet Kurt is right now.”

“What did you just say?” I ask, knowing it couldn't be what I heard.

Brutus stands up like he barely knows how, shuffles to the window, swings it open and climbs out into rippling high grass.

“I guess let's try the basement,” Lev sighs.

We head downstairs and crack open a rotting door to get in. There's a fireplace, fat screwholes within Φ-shaped dust outlines above. Scratches and dents on the walls. I step on something that crunches. It's a fingernail with dried blood around the edges.

“There,” says Lev, pointing to a hairline crack in the wall below where the Φ-shaped thing used to be. “Come on, stockpile.” He crosses his fingers. We kick in the flimsy panel together.

On the other side, squatting like a nestful of dinosaur eggs, are tens upon hundreds of silver tanks, shelves bursting with pills. A bunker to wait out the firestorm. But the fire found them.

“We can't take it all,” I say breathlessly.

“We can take a lot,” Lev says, grabbing bottles of something called Pyramil, the pattern-finding stuff we both came to love more than gas. But the gas is good, too.

“How come the tank your dad was hitting had no logo?” I ask as we start picking over the lot. “Can't imagine Endless would ever allow such a thing.”

“That was the first one, the free sample they gave him. I'll start loading this shit, just go make sure daddy's not spasming.”

So I trudge reluctantly back up to the study to find Brutus carving what look like hexes and crop circles in the carpet.

“You all right, sir?” No reply. “Thanks for …”

“Place'll be less haunted now. And with these.”

He gestures hopefully at a set of concentric circles.

“Haunted?” I ask.

“Endless man used to own the house, family man. Kids.”

“Sounds like a family.”

“At what age did you get VV'd?”

“I. Well. Never.”

“Now, with a few years hindsight.”

“Mr. Van Vetchen, I'm not sure I know what you mean.”

Brutus begins to weep softly.

“Killed himself with a favorite shotgun in this room.”

“The family man?”

“The family man.”

“And his family?”