See You in Paradise (24 page)

Even the wildlife looked scraggly and sick. Mangy elk could often be found mornings, standing around in the parking lot looking confused. You would have to honk at them to leave, if you were lucky enough to own a car. We once found a dead bighorn sheep lying on our front stoop, and another time we had to cancel a dinner date because a scrawny, insane-looking moutain lion was standing outside our door, growling.

By “we” I don’t mean John Weber and me; I mean Ruperta and me. Ruperta was my girlfriend. She left me because we had sex problems—specifically, the not having of it. It was my fault. I didn’t want to do it anymore. All I wanted to do was read and reread from my library of books about trains. It was my interest in trains that caused me to rent this place, with Ruperta, five years before; if you hiked to the south end of the mountain you got a great view of the tracks down below. But a few months after we moved in, the only freight company that used the tracks went out of business, and they fell into disrepair.

Honestly, I don’t know what was wrong with me. I felt like I was slowing down. I had moved to this town to go to graduate school in environmental and land use law, and I suppose I lost enthusiasm. To be sure, the subject was not very interesting to me. I read a lot of thick, boring books, and went on field trips to see how various ranches diverted creek water. Then, one day, while inspecting a barbed-wire fence as part of a summer internship, I fell into a ravine and broke my arm. When I got out of the hospital, I had lost all desire to return to school, and I started begging off when Ruperta wanted to get it on. She put up with that for a very long time, and this reasonableness caused me to lose all respect for her, respect I regained the moment she left. I missed her terribly.

Since quitting school, I had worked for eight dollars an hour editing the newsletter of a hunting and conservation outfit. The work took about three hours each week, so I spent the rest of the time pretending to do it and posting on internet messageboards under a variety of names. I chatted all day long about knitting, veganism, soccer, scrapbooking, and dog grooming, none of which I knew anything about, nor cared to learn. I was thoroughly debased, and at thirty-two felt like I’d been an old man for a long time. I saw no way of escaping the life I’d made for myself, save for the mountain falling down and crushing me.

Weber was also probably around thirty, but his girlfriend, Sandy, looked closer to forty. Forty-two, if I had to make a precise guess. She came twice a week to spend the night in Weber’s room, where some kind of new age harp CD was cued up and left to repeat all night long. I asked Weber if he could turn the music off after midnight, and he laughed. “Of course not!” he said.

“Why not? It’s hard to sleep.”

“Well, Sandy can’t sleep without it.”

“But Sandy doesn’t live here. I live here.”

“Sandy is a guest.” He shook his head. “I’m disappointed in you. You don’t know how to treat a guest, do you. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

I actually got to spend a fair amount of time alone with Sandy, since Weber liked to sleep in on the mornings after her visits—he was actually still in school, studying I don’t know what—and she, like me, was an early riser. We sat across from one another at the table, me with the paper, she with nothing, drinking from gigantic mugs of coffee. She made cryptic little pronouncements in a withered, weary voice.

“John doesn’t like coffee.”

“There’s a nuclear missile near here, I bet you didn’t know that.”

“John used to race bicycles competitively.”

“It’s possible to get certain diseases from fish, you know.”

One morning in late autumn she said, incredibly, “John is a genius, you know.”

I could not resist. “He is?”

Beneath her haylike skirt of hair, her chin seemed to nod very slightly.

“What’s he a genius of?”

“Art,” she replied.

“Art?”

“Sculpture. He’s a sculpturist.”

“I would never have guessed.”

It was hard to see what her eyes were up to under there, but I had the feeling they were glaring at me. We drank our coffees for several minutes.

“Don’t be an asshole,” Sandy said.

It was another week before I found out exactly what type of sculpturism Weber was getting up to in his room. He had invited me in there more than once, usually so that I could hear one or another horrible song that he was grooving on:

“Hey, come listen to this!”

“I can hear it from out here,” I would reply from the living room.

“No, you can’t. You need to get the full audio spectrum.”

“John, I can hear enough out here to know I don’t want to come in there and hear it better.”

A moment of silence that suggested deep puzzlement, and then he would emerge wearing a pained expression. “You mean you don’t like it?”

“No.”

“How can you not like this?” Gesturing back toward the room.

“By hearing it, and then considering my feelings about it, and then deciding I don’t like it.”

“You know,” he said on one of these occasions, “it really hurts my feelings when you won’t listen to my music.”

At which point I set down
Small-Gauge Railways of the American Northeast
, carefully marking the page with a magazine subscription card, and said, “One, it isn’t your music, John. You didn’t compose it or perform it. It’s somebody else’s music that you happen to like. And two, we don’t have to like the same things. Do I keep asking you to look at pictures of trains?”

“No, and maybe you should.” He crossed his freckled arms over his scrawny chest. “Trains are cool. I like trains. Why don’t you show me your stuff more often?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Right! There’s the problem! Sometimes I think we should see a counselor or something.”

“A roommate counselor?”

“A relationship counselor.”

“We’re not in a relationship.”

“We’re in a roommate relationship.”

And so on. Thus, I had managed to avoid being lured into the dark heart of Weber’s personal space, which in my opinion had, in the form of his incessant demand for attention and approval, encroached upon the rest of the apartment enough already. But then, apparently dissatisfied by my resistance to his overtures, he began to borrow my books. I came home from work one night, ate (I had managed to get him to stop serving me meals, though not to stop him demanding grocery money for the meals he would continue to offer to make me), showered, put on my pajamas, and went to bed with a good heavy train book. Then John Weber walked in.

“Hey dude.”

“What do you want, John.”

He came and sat on the edge of my futon, which lay on the floor in the corner as it had ever since Ruperta took our bed. I scootched my legs over and pulled up the covers to my chest.

“I wanted to return your book,” he said and handed me
New Innovations in Rail Travel 1982–1992.

“Where did you get this?”

“I borrowed it.”

“From where?” I demanded.

“Right there, man.” He pointed to one of the enormous sagging homemade bookshelves that lined the walls of my room.

“You came in here and took my book?”

“Not took. Borrowed. There’s a difference.”

I wanted very badly to debate the precise difference between taking and borrowing and establish definitively which of the two he had done. But I also wanted him to leave immediately. For a moment, I was suspended between these contradictory channels of annoyance, and in that weightlessness felt the presence of a terrifying possibility: that John Weber’s obliviousness and intensity were, in some twisted way, actually profound. That there was substance to him, a substance that I would forever lack. My heart spasmed and I capitulated. “Thank you,” I said and stared daggers at him until he left.

But the next night, when he was at Sandy’s place, I couldn’t find a particular hobo oral history I was looking for, and I became convinced that Weber had taken it away to his inner sanctum. And so I threw open his door and plunged in, expertly flipping the oddly-placed switch—it was two feet from the doorjamb and about nine inches too high—that I remembered clearly from the days when Ruperta used the room as an office. At which time I saw that Weber was not, in fact, at Sandy’s—he was right here in his room. Except he was a uniform medium-gray color, and his body was missing below the neck.

Of course I screamed. You, too, would have screamed. I want to scream today, remembering it. Weber’s head. It sat on top of—appeared, in fact, to be growing out of—a miniature chest of drawers in the corner of his room. It was made of modeling clay. John Weber, sculpturist. The head was life-size; it rested upon a sturdy neck, which thickened into what should have been shouders, but in fact was merely a broad smearing of clay that covered the top of the bureau and extended partway down the sides. This head was extraordinarily, horrifyingly realistic. The flared nostrils, the slightly uneven ears, the chinless chin—they were all perfect. The head was so fabulously accomplished that it brought out details I didn’t notice that I’d noticed on the real John Weber—the lines around the eyes, the pockmarks on the forehead, the crookedness of the teeth. He even had the smile down right—that awful half smirk, simultaneously innocent and calculating, relaxed and desperate, brilliant and moronic.

How was it possible that John Weber could see himself so clearly? He was the most obstinately unobservant person I had ever met. Of course, there was his epic, heroic narcissism; that probably explained it. To one side of the head, attached to the wall, was a foot-square mirror where, no doubt, he studied his face as he worked. This, I surmised, must have been the real reason he invited me into his room. The music was a ruse. He wanted me to see—to admire—the head.

When he came home late the next morning, I watched him more closely than usual, hoping to learn how I had missed this hidden talent. He seemed to appreciate the extra attention and became voluble.

“Have a good night?” he asked me.

It gave me a bit of a shock. Did he know, somehow, that I had gone into his room? I was feeling bad about it, as I had later found the hobo book hidden underneath a corner of my futon. “Fine,” I said cautiously. “And you?”

“Oh,” he said, with a smarmy touch of wistfulness. “I guess so.”

“Is something wrong?”

He exhaled loudly, pretended to consider before speaking. “Let me ask you something.”

“Okay …”

“What do you think of Sandy?”

“Ahh … she seems … very nice.”

“Well, of course she’s nice. She’s very nice. What I mean is … I’m afraid maybe we’re a bad match.”

“How so?”

I’d been alone on the couch, and now Weber flopped down next to me and swung one leg over the other. He wore a thick fleece zippered sweatshirt and, like Sandy, an unseasonable pair of many-pocketed khaki hiking shorts.

“Well, there’s the age difference, for one thing.”

I shrugged. “She’s not that much older.”

“You mean younger. I’m not that much older, you mean. That’s it though, I kind of am. I mean, I think she thinks of me as being like a mentor or something. You know? I’m so much more talented and mature than her, it’s like I’m like her father. Or actually I’m nothing like her father, I’m like another father.”

“How old is she, exactly?”

“She’s nineteen.”

I could only blankly stare.

“I know, I know, robbing the cradle, right?” He stood up now and began to pace. “Her parents totally hate me. They think I’m corrupting her or something. Which is totally crazy since I don’t even believe in sex before marriage.”

“You don’t?” I said.

John Weber laughed. “No, of course not, are you nuts? That’s a recipe for disaster. And don’t tell her I told you because this is totally private and secret but Sandy is not a virgin
at all
, and her parents don’t know obviously, and that’s what’s crazy, I’m keeping her on the straight and narrow, not corrupting her!”

“Wow.”

“And I am very cool with that. With her having sex, like, in her past. I mean, I still respect her and all. But I dunno, I mean, she wants to have sex and kiss and all that, because she’s used to it I guess, but at this point if I did that stuff it would be like doing it to my daughter or something, on account of this being-like-her-father thing. Not like her father,” he self-corrected, “like a second father.”