The Facades: A Novel (10 page)

The Oracle shook his head.

“They used to be
very
specific,” McCready said. “He dreamed that the First Bank of Trude was going to be robbed, and we were waiting there the
next day when the prophesied getaway car arrived. He saw the make and the model and everything. In any case.
Clinic does not resemble usual medical clinic. Has two owls along front staircase, as at Central Library
. Hmm. That’s interesting. A symbol of wisdom, of course.
M. Norberg is put under and carried upstairs on a gurney for her operation
. Very strange.
Meanwhile I sit in waiting room with thirteen women. They all wear glasses. They are all reading books in ancient languages
of which I have no comprehension
. Hmm. Pretty weird, my friend.”

The Oracle let his blond head fall back against the cushions. He looked weak, as if this retelling of his dream was draining
him further.

“Coming to the end here,” McCready said, flipping a page. He seemed to be editing out certain details he felt unimportant
or inappropriate for my ears. “Ah, here we are.
After several hours, a doctor descends the stairs and tells me that M. Norberg’s operation is complete. He asks me to come
with him. He is very young and for some reason I do not believe he is a doctor. Nevertheless, I follow him up the stairs.
The thirteen women look up from their books and watch us climb the stairs
.
We reach the landing and
… Here the dream ends abruptly.”

McCready snapped the Oracle’s dream journal shut. He leaned forward and slurped up the remainder of his cooling coffee. “Well,
there you are, I guess. The Oracle’s dreams should be contemplated for some time. He doesn’t always immediately appreciate
the full significance of them himself. I’ll have a transcript sent your way.”

While McCready excused himself to the restroom, the Oracle lifted himself off the couch. Ignoring me, he walked over to
the stairwell and gazed up very intently, as if comparing these stairs with the ones he’d dreamed about. He started up, examining
the series of paintings along the wall.

“Who is the painter?” he whispered.

“I don’t know,” I said. “An admirer of my wife’s, I think.”

“Interesting,” he croaked. “The shadowy figure with the gray tie.”

“Yeah—I could never figure out what he represented.”

The Oracle turned and, leaning a hand on the banister, spoke almost inaudibly. “Perhaps it’s you?” he asked.

T
HE OPHTHALMOLOGIST, WHEN
I
SAW HIM AT LAST, PRE
-scribed strong contact lenses. “I don’t know how you even function with vision like that,” he said, fingering his pristine
white coat. I thanked him and told him I was hoping to read the chalkboard, because I was going back to high school that night
for Kyle’s parent-teacher conferences. It was one of the official duties I could no longer avoid, formalities that hadn’t
simply disappeared with Molly. Her way of groaning through these events had always made them more bearable. Humboldt High
was a squat, square brick building with long vertical slit windows that made it look like a bunker or a top-secret government
agency. It was a good example of the paranoid architecture that had thrived in Trude circa 1963. I parked the car in the huge
lot and joined the herd of parents.

The protocol at Humboldt, for its semiannual conferences, was to run the parents through a miniature version of the child’s
school day. Upon my arrival a buttoned functionary handed me a class schedule and a couple of Humboldt pencils,
then guided me down the hall toward Kyle’s first-period classroom. The other parents seemed enthusiastic. Actually, now that
I looked closer, there was something incongruous about their dress—so many leather jackets, hooded sweatshirts, and baseball
caps. Had I missed something in the invitation? Pudgy middle managers adopted a foot-dragging lope. Stout suburban moms wore
torn jeans. Everybody had pulled out their old sneakers and combat boots. Dressed in a button-down shirt and khakis, my Boggs
office wear, I moved among them awkwardly as ever.

There was something strange about being at school at night. Moonlight brightened the edges of the goalposts on the football
field. It was all ultra-crisp, almost too clear, through the new lenses. Kyle’s teachers presented compressed synopses of
their classes for our benefit. His Algebra II teacher turned out to be a bubble-gummy blonde, barely twenty-five, big silver
hoop earrings and a provocative gray skirt. Her lip gloss glinting in the halo of the overhead projector, she parsed an equation
under the wily gazes of aging dads. I kept to the corners, away from the pockets of gossip where rumors of my absent wife
traveled from cupped hand to cupped hand. These were the same women who had approached Molly breathlessly in the hallways
in past years, the same men who had winked at me from a respectful distance, as if to say “well done.” This year silence and
avoidance seemed to be the rule. It had been long enough that no one wanted to mention her above a whisper, all those whisperings
creating a static around me, like the hiss of a record.

I arrived on time to Kyle’s fifth-period class, Wood Shop, but I was one of the few. The instructor, a rough-hewn, sociopathic-looking
fellow with hair growing out of his ears and undershirt, didn’t help his own cause by scolding the latecomers and barking
for quiet. The parents, forced to endure this so-called class for a full fifteen minutes, began to rebel. Small silver flasks
traveled sub rosa and some of the parents were pretty soused, openly jeering the wood teacher’s ruminations on logical construction
and precise measurement. Somebody fired a spitball, high and off the mark. It caromed off a framed portrait of the wood teacher’s
two sons. It was a sobering moment, but it didn’t last. Secrets were being shared in the ambient light of the slideshow. Marriages
renewed themselves behind the lathes.

The teachers’ presentations were followed by brief free-form periods, which gave the parents time to go out to their cars
for a smoke or to refill their flasks. I asked a couple of the loitering teachers about Kyle. The algebra instructor’s eyes
glazed over—she resorted to negatives, noting that he had never disrupted her class, and that there were no major problems
with his proofs. His health teacher, a wary-looking man with hollow eyes, mentioned that Kyle had “some very strong opinions
about abstinence.” I chuckled, shifting my weight inside my pants. After biology, in which the teacher felt compelled for
some reason to defend Darwin’s theories at length, looking directly at me, I slipped into an obscure bathroom for a cigarette.
The tile pattern was an unlikely combination of burnt orange, turquoise, and charcoal gray. Behind one of the stall doors,
also burnt orange, were a pair of black slipper shoes and sniffling and crinkling sounds. I got only two or three quiet drags
in before my fellow fathers descended, demanding cigarettes. I fanned out the pack with a sigh. Most of them hadn’t smoked
in years. They coughed and fumbled with my lighter. Making conversation, I said that this parent-teacher conference seemed
a lot different than the ones I’d attended in previous years.

“Well, yeah,” said the man to my right, hairline receding, shirt artfully torn at the shoulder. “Didn’t you read the letter?”
He recited a few lines from memory. “Come as you were, before the kids, before the bills, before it all got real …”

“Exactly!” someone cried from the stall.

I had almost escaped when a throng of mothers entered the men’s room, laughing dangerously. Soon I was bumming smokes to flirtatious
matrons who wore their cardigans around their waists and puffed with flair. I decided to skip gym. My eyes had almost accustomed
themselves to the absurd burnt-orange-turquoise-charcoal color scheme, and I wondered if this had been intentional on the
part of the architect, a misguided sixties idealist summoning de Stijl. Had he considered that his wacky color scheme, after
such a long exposure to it, would begin to seem bland and predictable?

I was on my way out again when a firm hand stopped my progress. “Hey, you’re Sven Norberg,” the woman said. “Honey, this is
Sven Norberg,” she said to a co-smoker across the room.

I couldn’t deny it—it was on my nametag. The woman’s nametag read
PRISCILLA
. There was a luminous darkness in her eyes, which she’d accentuated with eye shadow to match the inky streaks of dye in her
hair. She had the golden chemical skin of a frequent tanner. The nails that gripped my shoulder were the glittery purple of
Sparkles, Cuz! The man she called on was dressed in all black. He had silky silver shoulder-length hair that hung in his eyes.
His chubby arm was draped around another mom when Priscilla called to him. He made a gesture of marital resignation and wobbled
over to us. His nametag stated
PHILIP
.

“Honey, this is Sven Norberg,” Priscilla said.

“Yes, I see,” replied Philip. “Thanks for the smoke.”

“This is
Kyle’s
father.”

“Oh,” he said, looking at me as if I were a sudden obscenity in a children’s book.

“We’re Plea’s parents,” Priscilla said.

“Oh!” I cried, too avidly. I immediately reached for another smoke, offering them the pack again, which they refused with
disgust, even though they’d both just finished smoking. “Plea is a lovely girl,” I said.

“Yes.” There seemed to be a threatening edge to Philip’s words, though it was blunted under all the soft hair. “We think so.
Your son doesn’t seem to agree, however.”

“Cut her off like that,” Priscilla said. “Without even a word.”

“She’s been too upset to even go to school.”

The words wrenched me. I had picked up the phone countless times and let my finger hover over the screen, but had been frozen
mid-dial by the mental image of these very people (or their more aristocratic equivalents in my imagination).

“Kyle has been going through a weird phase,” I said.

“Sounds more like a conversion to me,” Priscilla said.

“No, I wouldn’t go that far, wouldn’t say ‘conversion,’ no.”

“Not a very Christian way to act toward our daughter, in any case,” Philip said, puffing up inside his turtleneck sweater.

“I agree,” I said. “I completely agree. Of course we’ve been …”

“Right! Your wife,” Philip said. The other parents had stopped chatting now, and there was an eerie silence in the now hot-boxed
burnt orange, aqua, and charcoal bathroom. “What did they say happened to her, honey? They were saying she was kidnapped for
a while.”

“Or maybe even murdered,” said Priscilla. “I’m pretty sure the word ‘murder’ came up.”

“I am really
drunk
,” one of the mothers said.

“Of course there are other possibilities,” Philip said with an airy toss of his silver hair. “More obvious possibilities,
closer to home.”

“I’m late for class,” I said through gritted teeth, snuffed my cigarette underfoot, and lunged for my escape. On my way out
I couldn’t resist a parting shot: “Hope you enjoyed the swingers’ conference!” I said.

“We prefer the term
polyamorous
—” Philip’s words broke on the tiles.

If I hurried, I could still make it to Art. Along the way I saw a couple of parents making out against a locker and a guy
on the floor who was giggling wildly and looked like he had peed in his pants. A scornful custodian in a blue District 99
work shirt observed the scene, scribbling in a pocket notepad. When I asked him what he thought of this parent-teacher conference
night, he said he was writing an epic satirical poem about it. Then he dipped his mop in a trough of suds and more or less
shook it in my face.

O
N
T
HANKSGIVING MORNING,
I
SHAVED MY BEARD.
I
T HAD
been a while. I hadn’t yet smoked my first cigarette of the day and was exulting in the temporary delusion of health this
gave me. By the time I went to work with the electric razor, I already regretted what I had done. My face is one of those
faces that alarms when unsheathed. All the boyish insecurity of my features, the rodent-like need and juvenile worry, becomes
instantly legible. There are certain faces that should be hidden by beards, and mine is one of them, I thought. Large clumps
of hair wafted in the sink like tumbleweeds and lined the porcelain in wispy script. Examining myself in the mirror—pointy
little Nordic chin, clear cheeks and bare jowls, Adam’s apple—remorse overwhelmed me. I quickly fashioned a substitute beard
out of shaving cream and hurried for my cigarettes.

There was a stiff dress shirt on a hanger and just mildly wrinkled pants by the bed. A hard, diagnostic sun shone through
the window. Kyle was calling from downstairs. I avoided the full-length mirror, where Molly had so often mooned—I’d actually
been
annoyed
at her for those momentary disappearances. My son waited on the landing, cradling a basket of crescent rolls and a bottle
of wine. When he saw me, he chuckled, mouthing “Dad” as he pulled at his clean chin. I touched my face and came away with
a handful of foam from my ghost beard. I brushed it off, and when we stepped outside, the cold wind stung my bare cheeks.

We were going to the Lillys’ for Thanksgiving dinner. There, I said it: the Lillys. That deceptively gentle name is still
a knot of pain to me. To my son, then, it was a song, a one-word weapon. “The
Lillys
invited me to Thanksgiving,” Kyle said. “Pastor Lilly invited you too.” It was as if a silent, powerful machine had kicked
into motion behind my back, starting with the flier in our mailbox. We arrived at their home, somewhere in a surreal enclave
of identical houses on a sculpted hillside; there were no trees. We drove from Sherwood Court to Sherwood Trail to Sherwood
Street to Sherwood Lane. The gray van was parked in the driveway. I was welcomed in by a prim blonde named Cordelia, who handed
me a business card with the name of their youth ministry and two black, eerily disembodied hands printed on it. As I made
my doomed efforts to insert myself into my son’s new life in the weeks to come, it was as if these two hands were pushing
me; I felt their dark pressure on my back.

To her credit, Cordelia Lilly did not ask me about my wife. She only asked how I was and I managed to tell her, after a breath,
that I was okay. Molly had become an awkward pause, a missed beat in conversation.

I’d had too much coffee that morning, so I asked for the restroom. With an accommodating smile, which suggested that this
was a slightly grotesque request on my part, Cordelia led me
down the hall, past framed pictures of the Lillys, standing among impoverished children in far-flung locales. The Bob Lilly
of the photographs was a bearish, bearded man, his face weirdly out of focus. He looked steady and solid against the austere
backdrops of Mumbai slums and wintry Balkan squares. The bathroom had salmon-colored wallpaper and a wide assortment of wipes
and salves. There was a high window through which, after climbing onto the toilet seat, I could see Bob Lilly cutting wood
out in the yard. He wore a farmer’s flannel and the familiar chauffeur’s cap. His axe swings were nonchalant, neatly splitting
the logs. Isolated out there, he looked like some solitary woodsman from a Brueghel, negligible in the vast expanse of snow.
I tried to imagine the deep pleasure the work was giving him, the clean sting of the cold. I climbed down from the toilet.
The Lillys’ bathroom smelled of cloves. With a burst of needling pain, I peed. As my urine splashed the bowl, golden and polluted,
the reports of Lilly’s axe echoed through Sherwood Forest.

W
E GATHERED AROUND
a smorgasbord of steaming, multicolored foods. Kyle took my hand, and Cordelia’s, and began to pray. No one had asked him
to do it and the ease with which he invoked the fictional Father disturbed me. The bright abundance was making me dizzy, and
given how long I’d been living on junk and fumes, I wondered if I would be able to hold it down.

Toward the end of his prayer, Kyle said, “I pray that my dad can see the truth, even if it is too big for him to see right
now.”

“Pretty eloquent,” said Bob Lilly, sawdust still on his shirt sleeves. “You may have a preacher on your hands.”

“He has gravitas,” Cordelia added.

“It runs in the family,” I muttered. Gravitas, like some genetic curse. I released Kyle’s hand a moment late. Forcing a spoon
of sweet potato into my mouth, I told myself that I was grateful for all that I hadn’t yet lost.

A
FTER DINNER, UNDER
the guise of “getting a breath of fresh air,” I went out to the yard for a smoke. I told Cordelia that after all, I was out
here in the purer suburban elements and it would be a shame to waste them. She frowned. She was the kind of woman to whom
it was difficult to lie, I thought, lighting up as soon as I was clear of the house’s sightline. My steps made a series of
craters in the snow. The smoke, combined with the shock of cold air in my lungs, was sublime.

“Got another one of those, bucko?”

I turned around, somehow expecting to see my father, though it was inconceivable that my father would ask for a cigarette.
Lilly was loping through the snow, kicking up powder in his haste.

“Really?”

“Sure, of course. But no telling Cordelia, bucko. If she smells it, just say I was out here, talking to you amid your fumes.”

“Okay.” I handed him one. “I’d like to nip this ‘bucko’ thing in the bud, if possible.”

“Ohh.”

I lit his smoke for him, careful not to singe his enviable beard with the lighter.

“Neat kid you’ve got.” Lilly smiled. “Very serious, intense kid. But neat.”

We blew out two contrails of smoke that faded instantly. The new houses on the hill looked massive and vacant.

“It’s been a tough year,” I said. “He’s very vulnerable right now.”

“He’s in great shape, compared to me at that age,” Lilly said. “Fifteen years old, I ran away, moved to an abandoned grain
mill downtown. I was dropping acid at least twice a week. Used to go out to the mall, right when it opened, wander around
in that labyrinth all day, stoned out of my mind. The first time I found Jesus it was when I woke up in the mall Dumpster,
where my friends had left me for dead.”

“That was good timing,” I said.

He didn’t pick up the tone—or, generously, he chose to ignore it. “It was, bucko, it was. But I lost him again later. Anyway,
what was I saying? I’m lucky to be around at all. And to have Cordelia, who puts up with a lot. A lot more than you know.”
He dropped his half-smoked cigarette and kicked some snow over it. “It’s no picnic, what you’ve been going through. Don’t
hesitate to call on us if we can help in any way, bucko.”

“It’s kind of you. I’m really doing fine, though.”

“Sure you are. Sure you are. Come over here, I want to show you something.”

Lilly took long, decisive strides over the bare slope. The snow had melted there and the grass had the look of a dry wound.
I trailed behind huffing, Kyle’s prayer ringing in my ears. Lilly pointed past the edge of the development to the faint rainbow-like
glow of the highway’s neon lights. “It’s kind of beautiful, don’t you think?”

“In a way,” I said.

“Every night, before I pray,” Lilly said, “I look out at those
lights. And it just reminds me of all the world’s junk. The sheer junkiness of it. Our church is off that highway too, but
you wouldn’t know. All you see are the hotels and chicken wings and showgirls. I’m getting to the point in my life where I’m
thinking about my legacy. I want to leave something tangible behind. And one night when I was looking out, I just saw it.
Three crosses soaring over I-99, leading the way to our church. It just came to me in a kind of vision.”

“This wasn’t a drug-induced vision?”

“Very funny, bucko.” Lilly pointed an inspired finger into the distance, where the highway snaked off and diminished. “They’re
going to be three hundred feet high. You’ll be able to see them from downtown, and from way out in New Arcadia. It’s been
a ton of work raising the money, but we’re almost there. It’s going to be beautiful.”

He walked up the hill and gazed out. Behind him, the shadows of the saplings fell like dark hands in the plush, white snow.

T
HE GROUNDBREAKING CEREMONY
for the new crosses was held two weeks later. To my surprise, Kyle asked me to come, so I didn’t need to invoke the weather
to justify my continued supervision. Conditions were, in fact, bad. I-99 was a smear of neon lights, the snowbanks black from
exhaust. Small quantities of gray slush splashed up through the rusted frame of Molly’s car. The only radio station that wasn’t
playing Christmas music was playing an absurdly laid-back jazz trio, its mellow bleats and xylophone taps inadequate against
the night. I reduced it to a murmur. We were like two conscripts on a submarine, I thought,
sharing the same cramped vulnerable silence. I turned off at the exit to
FIRST CHURCH OF THE DIVINE PURPOSE
. The slick exit ramp was steeper than I expected, and for a few unnerving seconds the car’s tires lost traction. I rode it
out, and after recovering control wondered if Kyle had noticed my mishap. I decided to say nothing and glanced over at him.
My son regarded me doubtfully.

Behind a line of cautious, blinking vehicles we rolled onto the premises that had captivated him. The parking lot was a well-lit
void in the winter dark. We parked far away from the church itself, a massive concrete dome that had been designed by Bernhard’s
professional and sexual rival, von Hartsig. Upon its completion Bernhard had written: “I congratulate von Hartsig on his enormous
mushroom.” On the other side of the lot was a one-room brick chapel, which announced itself as the F.C.O.D.P.’s original house
of worship. A group of dour figures had gathered on the steps, dressed in worn, faded gray suits and dresses, each of them
cradling an open, empty suitcase. Their eyes were intransigent and steely as the sky.

“Who are those people?” I asked Kyle.

“The Dissenters,” he replied. “They worship there, in the old church.”

I did not understand the source of the disagreement, exactly. We walked past them, toward the carnival tent and the movie
premiere lights. Young girls in peacoats handed us candles and hot cider in paper cups.

It was an ordeal to keep my candle lit. The flame was small and feeble. I had to reignite it twice with my cigarette lighter.
The tent was not providing much shelter, trembling over celebrants who stamped their feet and blew into their hands. Across
the tent, I saw Cordelia Lilly waving and smiling. She managed to look elegant in earmuffs somehow. I waved back, but she
had already turned away. In response to the snub, I lit a cigarette with my candle. When I turned to Kyle to see if I could
get some idea of when the ceremony would begin, he had drifted to another part of the crowd.

The mayor of Sherwood Forest came up to give a brief speech. Swaddled in a red coat, she grappled with the microphone and
her glasses kept fogging up. She clearly did not want to be here any more than I did. She delivered a few minutes of tepid
oratory, then raised a huge key to the city. When she said Lilly’s name there was a roar. The applause was shocking from such
a small crowd—everyone must have been screaming at the top of their lungs. Lilly accepted the giant key and shook the mayor’s
hand. He was wearing a leather jacket over a big wool sweater that looked hand-knit. His corduroy pants billowed around his
trunk-like legs. The applause held on, growing and feeding on itself. Near the front, Kyle was pumping his fist in the air
along with a group of kids in big down coats.

Lilly stepped up to the microphone and cleared his throat. With his hair slicked back and his beard trimmed, he looked like
a sepia-toned pioneer. In the candlelight his figure was richly shadowed. Two fluted speakers projected his words from the
edges of the stage. As I moved to avoid a direct hit of his voice, I checked to see if I was blocking anyone’s view, and I
saw behind me, far beyond the tent, in the outlying darkness, the small group of Dissenters still standing on the steps of
the old chapel with their open suitcases.

“Friends,” Lilly said. “Tonight is the culmination of a long struggle. That struggle began one hundred and fifty years ago,
when my great-great grandfather, Georg Lula, ended his pilgrimage in Trude.” He paused and raised his right arm, extending
the fingers of his hand; the shadow appeared as an engorged black spider on the ceiling of the tent. “He and the others stopped
here because they saw a hand in the sky. They recognized the image at once, of course. In the medieval period it was called
the Powerful Hand. The fingers stood for each of the apostles, and the thumb was our Savior. They understood the message,
although this was also a simple sign. The same sign a policeman makes when directing traffic at an intersection. They saw
this hand on the same hill where we stand now, at the edge of the city. The cloud blew apart but they stayed on.

“Now my great-great-grandfather, he believed, and I believe as well, that the Second Coming is imminent. That is what we have
always believed and we long for this joyful event. The question has been, how do we prepare ourselves for this transformation?
Do we make inroads into the city around us, adopting others into our cause, or do we focus solely on the purification of our
own hearts?”

His voice swelled, and wherever I moved I could not avoid its direct beam. The voice entered my body through every orifice
and infiltrated my corrupt veins and channels. In the back of the tent I thought I saw Plea cowering, her hands cupping a
candle, her vast sunken eyes holding a glimmer of orange light, but when she turned her head, she was a stranger. Lilly’s
next words were directed to the Dissenters, pale and ghastly as ancestors, on the chapel steps beyond the tent.