Ivyland (9 page)

To recognize the God-sent Cyrus? They say he'll ride a milk-white horse.

“Much better,” she purrs when at last my hands explore her maps.

“Do not tell others our special ways,” a would-be messiah begged his girls.

“Your skin,” I whisper, thinking:
who can hear topologies?

Outlanders rose against his prophecy, unaware they fulfilled its word.

“Are you cross?” she asks imploringly.

The Babylon beyond will judge.

“I am never cross with you,” I say.

As sinful men will always do.

*

Choppers, mutant toys, jackhammer overhead. Not for me—they drop fist-sized silver irradiation (or whatever, I'm no scientist) orbs to kill the bugs. They fall like so many New Year's novelties, too slow to believe, settling easily on the boughs of Norway Spruces. In the deafening thrum of mass murder, I collide with Aidan, a preening milquetoast of a student who's worked up the courage to say he can't wait for the annual open house tonight. Whose? Mine and my wife's, of course. Hosting duties, honestly, are a casualty I'll never mourn.

“Might there be a more appropriate event?” I ask, panting, massaging my ribs. “With grain alcohol punch and ritual humiliation of the sub—er—unconscious?”

“I'd rather continue our debate on fragmentary analysis,” he admits. “It's more … personal.”

“Aidan!” I chide. “Young man, theory is anything
but
personal.”

As he tries to digest this witless comment, I take off running once again.

*

My wife and I once took a cruise, just us. Borrowed a colleague's yacht that neither of us could manage. Were all but capsized in a storm off Cape Cod and decided that was that and started screwing the hell out each other up against the enormous steering wheel, which dug into your back reassuringly.

“I love you,” I said.

“I want to come when we start to drown,” she answered.

But the very idea went rocketing through my blood so ferociously that all I could do was come right then and ruin the final lovemaking of my life, which it wasn't. Some sea nymph stopped us from listing as I withdrew, and I said as much with a facile grin.

“Of all the times to mention another woman,” she mumbled, truly hurt.

When we finished all the food but couldn't find land for days after, we had a starving contest.

*

I stop in fitful shade, the churn of departing helicopters a failing breath, and crunch the odds. I move again, steps bent toward Jerry Godforth's office in O'Hare Hall, its clock spire ever ready to inject the heavens with time.

Azura, naturally, has beaten me here and barricaded herself in Jerry's office. I wait as she drags the furniture away from its ignominious pile on the door's opposite side. Soon as I squeeze into the disheveled room, Azura turns back to the window, cradling the WWII-era Sturmgewehr 44 assault rifle I bought her last anniversary.

“You know that was for your private enjoyment,” I say, when really I meant to say nothing at all.

She turns her head, smooth wave of hair a deliberate dig, expression cool and careless. She signals with her eyes to Jerry, who is struggling and making what noise he can. I take the spitty gag out. He licks his teeth.

“And Azura, how would you respond to that?” he asks.

“
Exactement
,” she tells the glass, “No gift
sans
conditions.”

“Tell him,” Jerry reminds her.

“If you wish to give me a gift, it must be a true gift, to enjoy on my own terms.
Mondieu
.”

“When did your terms stop being formalist—or don't you remember that raving manifesto you sent me from Prague?” Jerry twitches his nose at this.

“What did we say about trying to ground our thoughts in a less theoretical place?”

“
We
didn't say much on that matter.
You
did. And Prague is very real.”

“Don't hide behind the joke.”

“What I want to say, Azura, is that I buy you these gifts because I know your attractions … but I can't stand by while innocents suffer.”

“Better,” says Jerry, who squirms in his ropes, slightly rocking the chair in search of relative comfort.

“And I certainly don't see why you have to treat our mutual friend and peer, who has been kind enough to counsel us though he no longer practices, like a common hostage.”

“
Quelle surprise
,” says Azura with alluring sting, “trying to make an ally.”

“Azura's right,” Jerry concedes, “don't make me a talking point.”

“
Merci
.”

“Is it fair to suggest she treat others with a dose more compassion?” I ask. A beam of giddy romance slices through Azura's face.

“May I show him?”

“I think you should,” Jerry nods. “I think that could be very cathartic with respect to the conflicting feelings we were discussing.”

“Come,” says my wife, gesturing with the Sturmgewehr, and we leave the office.

Jerry grants me a wink as I pass.

“Where are we going?”

But Azura says nothing, leads me up the hundred stairs to the top of the clock tower. To a pair of bells made from molten Civil War swords on orders of Ivyland's pacifist mayor—two weeks before Appomattox. We look out over the South Quad. She points with her rifle at the grass.

“There.”

It's Sylvia we see, alive, a stretched, overpale thing on patchwork blanket, body flinching now and then as she flicks away invisible pests. A face-flushed and ridiculous odalisque.

“I would have. But look. Just look.”

She's standing now, a stupid white stalk in the blaze of perfect green, an awning of fingers above her eyes as she scans the clock face. For the time, not us. And now I know Azura's point. This creature is no threat to her.

“But, the detective—he said.”

“No,” she says, watching Sylvia. “More important women to destroy. A certain Lady Liberté? Ever watch the news?” Erupting with a quaking glee adults are supposedly drained of at thirty.

Sylvia cocks her head, bewildered, as police cars surround our tower, sirens scribbling out the afternoon. Corpses curled like commas rain from trees. The bells chime four, bringing students out of classes, into soft hail and extinction. Through silver oases of silent demise, littered like dew drops, sunbeams boomeranging off.

But Azura. Azura. Criteria of goddess-ship, work of Fauvists to the last: bodies hum. Perspective a myth. Her halo spins one hundred miles an hour.

“Tahiti would be nice,” I say, and she kisses me.

She shows me the only caterpillar poem so far, a joke, scrawled on a napkin and untitled, as megaphoned demands beat silence raw.

 

I can put aside their feel

Milky clasps of muted hair

The way you rear on blades of grass

Cast your heads about and there

Look for what you cannot name

Yearning just to greet and bow

When you find the one selfsame

Mismatched friend to show you how

Neither needs to play the game

And not one will wear the crown

 

But I have to say, it's so unfair—to make them human, make me care. Give them eschatology, and revelation they can spare. Hell is a Paradise you can't share.

The Lambs are ready: let them dare.

“Are you cross?” she asks in stained-glass glare.

*

What I like to do before “Gauguin in Tahiti” is study his last Continental paintings, from just before he abandoned his family, and contemplate the savagery to come.

“The Yellow Christ” is our museum's best. Crucifixion scene set in thick cloissanist lines, a harvest countryside. Breton women weep for jaundiced Jesus. His beard in that pointed French style Gauguin himself wore. An unnamed man steals into autumn hills—logically he's Gauguin too.

Hang my yellow coward's corpse with nails, leave it out for carrion birds. I will still get away. There's no need to go, to skulk offstage. These bells will ring as long as we want. Wherever, whenever our cells slow past thresholds for life, we'll pluck the fruit of true solipsism. Our world shades over into private apocalypse. Yours soldiers miserably on.

CAL /// NEW YORK, NEW YORK ///
SIXTEEN YEARS AGO

We went to the Thanksgiving parade. I'd seen it on TV, of course, but the promised remaking of rhythms and colors in a city's throbbing heart, no medium to pale the joy  .  .  . was tempting enough that I demanded it, and my parents were happy to comply.

Years of elbow warfare as we pushed toward the train. Glances exchanged with smaller children being dragged through the forest of adults. On board, every seat was taken; people shoved from car to packed car in denial. It was a third-world train, lightless and dank. People clogged the aisle, gripping luggage racks overhead. Babies' voices curdled. A crazy man dressed in garbage bags bit the air and foamed. Maybe H12.

Mom and I were somehow split from Dad and Aidan. We glimpsed a three-seater that looked empty, save one well-dressed man staring out the window. Shoving closer, we discovered a woman in a black silk dress lying across the bench, her head resting in the man's lap. Even I could tell she wasn't sick, that this was some fixed possessive posture, a sculpted warning. His finger made circles in her hair. Mom pointed and said: “Here.”

I wouldn't sit. I wouldn't say why, and I didn't know how. These people soaked into me like acid. I said, “Let's Go,” and Mom said: “Don't Be Ridiculous, Cal.”

“Is this seat taken?” Mom asked like she didn't know. I came undone, looked down, trying to muzzle this panic.

“Sorry?”

The man's finger froze mid-circle. Jutting bones in his cheeks that dreamed of escape. Dirty smear of passing smokestacks and bald trees on the other side of glass.

“Can my son sit here?” Mom asked.

The man glanced down at the woman, who sat up. She wore dangling icicle earrings that swung with indignation. She flattened straight brown hair against her skull, slid over and mauled us with her eyes.

My eyes bored into the empty seat. How a child's private shame evolves. Standing there, near tears, convinced my precious agony could kill. Mom sensed hesitation like only mom could. She said, “Sit here, I'll stand next to you.” With a hand on my shoulder I obeyed.

I moved my body against the aisle armrest, away from the couple. The metal on my skin was cold.  .  . yes, that would work: take stock of the million discomforts. The train smelled like wet garbage. Floor was sticky. Babies kept crying. But these two invaded even my litany. They spoke in stage whispers. I caught what the woman said, sotto voce.

“Can't believe that bitch.”

She said it to the man but threw burning glares at us, and said it again, “That bitch.” Mom stared straight ahead at nothing. My hands got clammy and tight. The woman kept saying it every so often, muttering “That bitch, that bitch.” I wanted to sink, slip down between the seams. “That bitch,” she said, “that bitch,” and always waited till I'd almost put it out of my mind before saying it again, a bit louder each time.

Mom would later claim she confronted the woman, shut her up. “If you have a problem, we can get the conductor,” that was the line. Really, she shuffled her feet. I examined and reexamined my shoelaces. We tried to lose ourselves, to make our deafness plausible.

*

I'd been to one other parade, as an only child. In misting rain on Saint Patrick's Day, my birthday, we stood on Fifth
Avenue and watched a river of people stomp by. A parade expressly for me: it was simpler to say that, my parents reasoned, than explain sainthood. I'd waved, sitting on Dad's shoulders, to drunken redheads and bagpipers, thanking them for celebrating with me. They knew that green, with its numberless natural shades, was my favorite color. I cheered at banner-waving policemen and towering floats and shamrocked ancient immigrants. It wasn't strange, their generosity. I was lucky that way.

An odd icon's death day. Banisher of snakes. I never discovered the lie because it never took root. Hearing the story, memory stalled. The sole impression: sitting high, squinting at pins of water. The crow's nest. Dad's hair. It silvers in my hands.

*

I stayed off Dad's shoulders this time—too old, I decided. Aidan enjoyed the view instead. I heard snare drums, boots slapping pavement. Sounds dulled by walls of flesh. Wind clawed at the streets. A nor'easter's wind without the storm. Parades aren't something to cry at. Even so, there thousands stood, weeping at the sight. Bladed air extracting tears. Below its wrath, my eyes were dry.

This was when the balloons rebelled. The weather proved too much for their handlers, who yanked desperately at ropes meant to control the sagging characters. Spider-Man swiped the face of a silver office tower with extended fingers, then turned to kiss it. Bits of a window washer's scaffold popped loose and fell to the street like a handful of toothpicks. Woody Woodpecker could hardly stay afloat—he folded as a knifing gust put his beak to the street. The Cat in the Hat, piloting a fanciful Seussian vehicle, tipped a street lamp that flattened some woman, we heard. The papers, already bankrupt at that point, followed her coma for a week. Garfield swooped low, collapsing on a pocket of disbelieving spectators before teetering unsteadily on. Ambulance sirens boiled out of the distance. Santa Claus concluded the carnage. Blood, I thought, could be happily lost in his red velvet stuff.

*

We trudged back across the blood-drained island. Featureless skies began to spit—water flung off a fish gasping for life. I said nothing to my family; they tried to pretend this misery had been worthwhile. Mom asked if we loved this or that and wasn't it neat to see so-and-so. We passed a nest of shivering hobos.

“I always feel worse for the homeless this day,” Dad said.

Near Penn Station, we came upon a group thrusting pamphlets and petitions at passersby who sped along. They had a wall of posters displaying Asian people—some badly hurt, some dead. People on the sidewalk were imitating the pictures, pretending to torture or be tortured. I asked. Mom explained. “They're protesting these people being cruel to other people in China because of their religion. They're asking us to notice.”

A woman lunged out to hand me a flyer. My left eye rumbled in its bed. I snatched the paper, dropping the crumpled result in the gutter, and walked on. I saw a man sitting cross-legged on a mat some yards away, eyes closed, meditating. Untouched by surrounding noise and grime, the picture of serenity.

Maybe, I've told myself since, I wanted to remind him what trouble lay all around, and that is what tilted my reason askew, scraped my insides, hollowed me out. But consider all the dropping you'll do in your days. See if that stops it. Take the worst thing you've done, and the best. These are two people with nothing in common.

Accelerating toward him, hanging wetness sprinkled me urgently. A vanishing crack as fist met nose, sincerely fusing. Cells in my knuckles and his startled expression interlocked, dragging each other out of place, bits of us both suspended in rain. I struck him again, trying to break the face. I couldn't. He clutched at my arms, refusing to fight back—maddeningly—and rolled onto his side. Hands over his slick red features. His bloody hair stuck to the mat. My parents tried to pull me from him, this grown fetus, but my feet lashed out and found his spine.

*

I didn't speak anymore that day, as much as Mom stormed and swore. This was the first time I heard her say “fuck,” and I saw Aidan's ear twitch at the curse. He sensed how different this was and wanted to get out of the way, seized the first chance to run upstairs. “What if he'd pressed charges?” Mom asked. “Where do you get this from?”

Dad: “And do you have anything to say for yourself?” As if I could talk the logic of hate into them.

I didn't come down for Thanksgiving dinner, and Mom gave up calling me after two tries.

*

By the next day, I'd resolved to stay in my room. The needs to eat and eliminate did not seem obstacles, mysteriously. I woke early out of habit, sat up and stared at the wall. In an hour, Mom came in without knocking, puffy-eyed, same as she had when Grandma died. I was lying awake then too, and waiting. Now I tasted the menace again.

“Cal,” Mom said. “I don't know why you did what you did. And I don't think you'll say. You are a determined young man, is all. That's why you'll go far.” She was crying. I didn't try to stop her. “I know that you want what you want when you want it,” she continued. I knew the blanked guilt of missing desire. Exactly what wish had left me? “You've always known exactly what you wanted. I remember once, when you were little—you know
Duck Soup
, that Marx Brothers movie you loved? ‘Hail, Freedonia?' “ I gave the slightest nod, saw its slow and certain shadow on my blanket. “Once, I know you didn't mean it, but … I thought of this when you … One day, they didn't have the video to rent. Someone else had taken it out. I'm sure you don't remember, but when I told you we couldn't get the movie, you hit me. Just hit me in the face. And that's what I thought of yesterday, because you … it felt like a slap in the face again … “I listened to her sad sounds and swallowed dryly. “You didn't mean it then, and you didn't mean it yesterday. Cal: You're so good and smart and wonderful and you know we're so proud of you, but maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to see someone who—”

I was atomized. I would never own these deeds. A thousand clashing points of dark, dead but reassembled well. Mom's eyes searched and with a blink confessed. Her love could not disguise me. No love could make me good again.