Shelter in Place (5 page)

“Good for her,” Tess says. “No one fucks with Joey.”

I stand in the shower after she calls the motel and this is the memory that comes. My mother and her wild hair and those terrified brothers and the man leaning across the passenger seat to call her a crazy bitch.

It is the last in what I have come to believe was a series of premonitions. A series that began with the bird in February, and on to the restaurant in Los Angeles and all the others. Instantaneous recollections, momentary hallucinations, or that other thing: pure detached sensation. On the beach, or in the bar basement changing a keg, or on the highway, or in the shower. A radiating feeling of familiarity, a kind of haunting, which carried with it neither sound nor image. Only a vague vibrating. A chill. Cold mist along my spine. Something like what some music does to me. Something like that.

Or perhaps these premonitions were all imagined. My imagined imaginings. A warping of two levels of experience. My faithless memory of memory. As sharp and shining as the edges of this table.

My mother sings me to sleep in her softest voice, “If wishes were horses, Joey, beggars would ride. If turnips were watches, my sweet boy, I'd wear one by my side.”

M
y father taught me to feel the air for the suggestion of coming seasons. On short dark days we flew our hands out the window of his Wagoneer and felt for a balmy current flowing through the cold. A game I have always loved. Feel the air for a future season. Fall in summer, spring in winter. Warnings. Promises.

In Cannon Beach, in those last weeks of August I found fall everywhere. The light had begun to lengthen. The wind was more often cut with that sharp winter edge. The nights became colder. We stayed up later and later and tried to take the last of it. There were great bonfires on the beach. Ending parties. Everyone was preparing to leave. Tess and I were making plans. September we'd drive up to Seattle to see my parents. Spend a few days and then fly to London. We had plenty of money. Until then we'd work and walk the beach and watch the summer die away.

I became tense and irritable.

Tess watched me from her chair, over the top of her book, from bed.

“Joseph,” she said. “Sad Joseph.”

She smiled at me with tender sympathy, still charmed and intrigued by my ever-changing mind.

My fading summer joy was like the dilution of some wonderful and potent liquid. Drops of water dripping into the vial, weakening the solution bit by bit.

“It's everything all at once,” I told Tess. “The end of summer, my mother's phone call, leaving.”

“That's all it is?”

“Yes,” I said.

On a night off, waiting for her to finish work, I sat at the bar watching a Mariners game. She was keeping an eye on me. The bartender was a friend of ours, a short guy with red hair.

I was okay. I liked being in that little corner. Things were all right, but then in the middle of the rush, I looked from the TV to see a group of guys watching Tess walk away. They were making a show of it and watching was what mattered to them. The display. It was nothing new and nothing she couldn't have handled herself. She was tougher than I was by a long, long way. But there was something about them, and then something about one of them. The way he sat slunk down in his chair. His leer. The way he collected his friends' grins.

Waited for them. Little gold coins. The sad prick.

I felt that twinge in my gut. Sharp irritation turned to rage.

They were nothing. They were the usual. They were the same old shit. The same thing Tess endured every hour of every shift.

Still.

The timing was wrong. The night was poisoned. Winter was coming. Too much bourbon. The night was rotten. I'm not sure. Something though. It was something.

The Mariners lost. Then it was the news on mute, so instead of looking at the television, I looked at the guy.

I wasn't that kind of person. I have never been that kind of person. Except for sometimes, right?

That's a funny thing. A funny idea. This kind of a person or that. I wasn't though. I wasn't until I was, until he snatched at her. Until he grabbed at her wrist.

When he did that I hit him and broke my hand.

W
hen it was over, Tess and I sat on the floor of the motel room with our backs against the dresser. We were both looking at the small cast resting on my knee.

“Listen to me, Joe,” she said. “Listen, I don't need you to defend my fucking honor. I'll do it myself. Do you understand me?”

She was shaking.

I couldn't look at her.

“I know,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“Joseph,” she said. “What's happened to you?”

“I don't know.”

“But you have to tell me.”

“But I don't know.”

“You have to tell me anyway. You have to tell me anyway. Otherwise I'm going to leave. Do you understand? That I'm going to leave. It's enough, Joe.”

“Enough?”

I could feel the slow creep.

“It can't go on like this. It can't continue.”

I didn't know what she meant by that, by
continue,
but when I turned to look at her and I saw her eyes, I didn't argue. It wasn't what I had done that frightened me. It was the word.

I said, “What do you mean
continue
?”

“Joe, you've been like this for weeks.”

“Like
this
,” I said. “Like what? Punching people? What are you talking about?”

I could feel the sweat on my forehead.

“Dark,” she said. “Cold and remote. Like you were tonight. What do you think? Tonight was the first time?”

She was so angry. I watched her mouth. I thought of the last weeks, but I could not remember myself within them.

“Days and days go by, Joe. You're unreachable. You don't speak.”

I looked at her and tried to remember, but I could not find a single image. There were only the generic symbols of our life—the beach, the house, the motel, the bars. I saw no instances of unhappiness, of tension, of my apparent darkness. Seeing her anger and frustration, it shook me. She was so insistent, so certain, and yet I could not see the person she was describing. As if I'd been thrashing and screaming in my sleep and now, in the morning, she was telling me how I'd kicked her, the phrases I'd called into the night.

“When?” I asked.

She must have seen it—my fear, my bewilderment. Her look turned from anger to worry, or worse, to pity.

“When I found you sitting alone out on the beach the other night? You don't remember?”

“I do.”

“You were gone for hours. We were supposed to have dinner.”

“I lost track of time.”

“When I finally found you, Joe. You wouldn't look at me. You barely responded. It was like you were drugged. You don't remember that?”

“I remember us sitting together.”

And that was all I could recall.

“I had to shake you, Joe. Just to have you look at me.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I wanted her to stop talking.

“Okay?”

“I'll stop.”

“Look, I can't tell you what to do. I don't want to. You have to decide. But something, Joe. You've got to do something.”

“Sure,” I said. “I understand.”

But I didn't understand. Punching that guy, yes. But the other, the
continuing
. Not at all. I didn't know what couldn't go on any longer. I knew that I'd hit the guy hard. That now there was a piercing pain cutting from my elbow to my knuckles, a pain beating in rhythm with my heart.

“It can't go on, Joe, and either you tell me what's happening with you, or that's it. You see? Because I don't want that kind of thing.”

She stood and walked out of the room leaving the door open. I listened to her moving through the hallway.

It was circling.

I felt it alight.

The pointed pressure. The constricting of my heart. The spreading weight.

Did it also take my memory? Did it black out time?

Had she gone for good?

Has she gone for good?

I wanted her never to come back. Part of me did. The coward. If she were gone, the investigation would end and I would wait with it in peace.

It was a kind of peace.

It is. You want nothing. Not food. Not language. Not sex. Not even to move. And if it blinds you to yourself, if it makes time vanish, then I'm sure you understand there's a frail peace in that too.

I sat slumped against the dresser until Tess returned with a bucket of ice. She poured us drinks and faced me. Legs crossed, elbows on her knees.

“Joey,” she said, bringing her forehead against mine and forcing me to meet her eyes, “speak.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “sometimes I imagine a bird. I imagine it circling. And there are times when it lands. When it lands right in the center of my body and I can feel its talons digging in. They're very sharp and very strong.”

I was humiliated. She was listening to me.

“And then it changes. It's no longer a bird. It's something else. Tar. Tar that moves through me and pins me down and holds me there.”

She never broke. Never looked frightened. Never looked much of anything. Just those lips parted, those eyes on me.

“I imagine tar. It could be anything, but I imagine tar. It's moving. It's in my veins, covering my heart, filling my lungs. Sometimes it feels like it's pulling my eyes, as if it's in my brain and wants to pull my eyes back through my head.”

I looked up at her. I'd heard what I'd said. I could still hear it.

“I'm not crazy.”

“No,” she said.

“I'm just telling you what I imagine. How it feels. I know it's not tar. I know it's not a bird.”

“I understand.”

“I'm not crazy, Tess. I don't know why it comes. And I don't know why I can't remember.”

She didn't answer. I'd told her what I could and for a while that seemed to be enough. We climbed into bed. I lay next to her, curled up with my head on her breast. She stroked my hair.

“It's recent,” I said. “It's new.”

“Like me,” she said.

My broken hand was on her belly. I could hear her heart. Feel her breathing. Soon we were asleep.

I
gave up my job. I couldn't do it one-handed. And anyway, I didn't much want to work anymore. I went into Bill's a few times after that night. They said, “What's new, Tyson.” They called me Holyfield, but I could tell they were unsettled. I didn't know what they'd seen me do exactly. I was famous in a way I didn't like.

The bartender, the redhead, was older and he didn't look at me with admiration or with fear. I was grateful for that. He had a bat beneath the bar and kept an eye on the door, but I didn't think they'd be back. They weren't those kind of guys.

I sat there those last few nights and drank my free bourbon and watched the Mariners. Those were the days of Ken Griffey, Junior. The last days when he played alongside Griffey, Senior.

My father and I always loved those two. We loved their whole story.

Tess and I walked for hours on the beach with the bartender's chocolate lab.

Tess in her big black turtleneck sweater and her hair blowing all over the place, throwing a chunk of driftwood for the dog. She had a dangerous, terrible arm. You had to keep your distance.

The dog had a ridiculous human name. Paul, I think. She loved that. “Paul, would you mind passing me the stick. Paul, can I trouble you to fetch the tennis ball for me.”

I tried to get out from under it. She kept an eye on me, forced me to speak. We were all right. Things were better. The weight slipped away as it always did. I ran and ran while the dog chased me, barking into the wind while Tess sprinted barefoot across the wet sand.

And beneath it all, beneath the images of Tess, the sunsets, and my throbbing hand in its dirty cast, was a premonitory sense of disaster.

What else?

Once, Tess threw the stick so badly that it hit poor Paul in the head.

Once, for an afternoon, the full warmth of summer came back to the air.

I told Tess that I believed I shared the bird with my mother. That it bound us together.

I was better, but increasingly I felt as if I were living without a layer of skin. That I could no longer filter the physical world. Nothing was processed, all the light and sound rolled through me and nothing was dulled, nothing was quiet or kept out.

I saw images in the air. I heard phrases in the wind.

These I did not mention.

Not less a layer of skin. That's wrong. It was more than that. As if there were no skin at all. The world was becoming sharper and sharper. I could not stop it.

The buzzing motel fridge woke me at night.

The sky in the early afternoon took on the texture of wool.

The wind on the beach made me hard.

Tess and I in a sheltered cove beneath the sun and sky, the swirling air tempered by the rocks and she is drawing her shirt up and off.

Her breasts in the sunlight.

The pleasure of it, of that warmth, of her body, of the sun, the wonderful privacy of that cove, the roughness of the dizzying blue sky, the way she moves on me, the heat of her, squeezing me in pulses that somehow seem coordinated with the gusting wind and her lips against my cheek, against my neck.

We're crying, the two of us afterwards holding on hard, staying as still as we can for as long as we can, because below the sand there is the doom, below is the chaos coming slow and sure and close. And I know it then. I am certain. I felt it there beating in my lungs, in the air, in the shortening days.

M
y father called on the motel phone. Tess was at work.

“Joey,” he said and already I could hear it in his voice. “Joey, you there?”

I cannot separate what he told me then from what I discovered later, so I'll tell you what I came to know—that evening, the next day, in the weeks to come. The truth by all accounts.