Wichita (9781609458904) (22 page)

“Listen to him!” she says, letting go of Seth to run forward and tickle Bishop in the ribs. They embrace without taking their eyes off the twister and do a giddy little two-step in the wind-bent grass. “You led us
right to it
!” she tells him. “My hero! My hunter!”

“And all those conformist Doppler fools
missed
it!” Bishop crows. The outdraft is blowing his thin white hair around like cord grass. “Don't you
love
that?”

“Is it getting bigger?” Drew asks now. He looks up from his viewfinder and then back.

“I
needed
to have my laptop broken!” Bishop tells Abby. “That was
necessary
!”

“Absolutely!” she agrees.

“It's gotten bigger,” Drew says conclusively.

It has, Lewis sees. It's also turning the color of the field as it sucks the earth up into itself. Just how far off is it? He holds up a hand to shield the light and squints. It's hard to gauge. The tornado itself seems safely behind glass, sealed off by the idea of it, the concept “tornado.”

Suddenly there are two huge lightning blasts in the dark, widening base, like strobic bombs detonating.

“Yeah, OK, people!” Bishop says, looking sobered up, even frightened. He's walking backwards toward the car but can't seem to take his gaze from the twister.

“Just gorgeous!” Abby says, her blouse fluttering madly, the tip of the crepe scarf flickering like the tongue of a prophetess.

Lewis thought for no good reason that the twister would stay put or head off to one side or recede, rejoin the storm. But it's broken away from the matrix of the dark clouds and is headed if not right at them then in their direction.

He moves over and shouts at Bishop. “What's happening?”

“We need to
go
is what's happening!” Bishop says. Halfway across the field, what looks like a sheet of plywood sails upward and vanishes skyward in a dusty sun-struck haze.

“Now, right now!” Bishop calls. There's dirt in the air; Lewis tastes it on his tongue, squints to see through it.

No one moves for one last look, held in place by the golden-brown beauty of the twister, which is lit gold now by the light of the setting sun.

As if aware of the rapt audience, it wobbles on its axis then lunges sideways with an alarming, savage quickness, like a boxer feinting. Then it holds still. Then it jumps halfway across the field toward them, looming upward like a skyscraper thrust up through the crust of the earth.

“Seth!” Abby is shouting. Seth has opened the rear hatch of the Escalade, which is jouncing madly in the wind, and has the moped on the ground. He hops on the seat. “We're leaving
right now
!”

“Seth!” Abby shouts. “Get in the car—we're going! Seth!”

He's started the thing up, the snarl of the motor just audible in the growing shriek of the twister. Looking neither left nor right, he rides down the road in the direction the Doppler caravan went. He's panicking, Lewis thinks, he can't wait for them.

But Seth turns out onto the field and drives straight at the tornado. Objects are flashing past, clumps of grass, a branch, a section of fence. Lewis's clothes and skin are rippling in the howling wind. He can barely see through dust in the air. He shouts at Seth to stop but Seth is leaning forward over the handlebars, the white bandage on his head glowing in the gray-green light.

“Seth!” Abby shouts and breaks into a run, flashing past Lewis, who chases her down and wraps his arms around her.

“No!” he shouts. Something strikes his leg. There's a blinding flash and they're sitting on the ground ten feet apart. There's dirt in his mouth, in his teeth. He crawls to her.

“We can't leave him!” Abby sobs. She's quaking, clawing at him.

Curtains of dirt fill the air. Seth has disappeared. Bishop helps Lewis half drag, half carry Abby to the car.

Lewis can barely get the door open then he leans backwards with all his weight to hold it as Bishop and Drew push Abby into the back seat, climb in after her.

The roar is enormous, pitiless,
chug-chug
. Lewis finds himself crawling along the ground. He gropes up into the driver's seat but can't shut the door, can't see out. The car is rocked side to side then back and forth, then both at the same time. His ears pop as the air pressure plunges and he hits his head on the dash and blacks out, coming to as an enormous star appears on the windshield.

 

L
ewis gets out of bed, steps over a tray of food, goes to the window. He listens for a moment then lifts the blinds. A man is digging a hole in the backyard. He lays down the shovel and walks out of view. In the bush outside the window, sunlight traces a filament of spiderweb strung between two leaves. A breeze lifts the web, sunlight flashes along its length then vanishes as the web falls back.

The man comes back carrying a young birch. He kneels on the ground and with a blade cuts away the twine and burlap wrapping. He brushes his hands over the root ball, loosening the soil, then lowers the tree into the hole and shovels in dirt. He goes away again.

A sparrow lights in the bush and passes its beak back and forth across a branch, one-two. Then it flicks its tail feathers and drops from sight.

The man comes back with a hose and stands watering the ground around the tree, the sound of water spattering on the earth fills the air.

 

***

 

The leaves of the bush nod in the breeze, yes, yes, yes, all the leaves he can see confirm: it happened, it happened, it happened.

 

***

 

Lewis swings his legs out of bed and sits for a long time on the edge then gets up and washes his face, brushes his teeth. He finds a pair of scissors in the drawer of his desk and cuts off his beard, clumps of rust-colored hair falling onto the porcelain and his hands, coarse, foreign. He peers at himself in the mirror and considers cutting off all the hair on his head too. He raises the scissors then lets them fall.

On the bedside table, V.'s condolence letter, the grain of the paper visible in the angled sunlight coming in through the venetian blinds. He picks it up, his eyes passing over the handwriting, cramped yet clear, like brushing the features of her face with his fingertips. “Love,” it's signed. She must have weighed that. It would have been too cold without it and so it gets used because there's no middle ground, it's either life or death.

Abby is coming out of her own room with an air of trying to remember something. Her smile when she notices him there in the hallway is wan.

“Very nice,” she says of his clean-shaven face. From the living room and dining room comes a hushed bustle. People are rearranging furniture, laying out food. The rich, faintly nauseating fragrance of a cake baking reaches them.

The bruise on her cheek is yellow in the center shading out to mottled green and blue and purple. Beneath the house robe, her body feels warm and boneless. He intuits her as an old woman, slow-moving, replete with incorporated days. She reaches up to but does not touch the bandage on his brow. He asks whether someone planted a tree in the yard.

“A birch,” she says, nodding.

“I thought I might've dreamed it.”

She produces another wan smile, shakes her head: no, he didn't dream it. “It's for a ceremony Louise is going to perform.”

“A tree ceremony?” he says.

‘It's done to settle spirits who have had—” she pauses as if she's momentarily forgotten the phrase, “—violent passings.”

In Mongolia it's done, Lewis thinks, and in Siberia. But he works to keep this disenchanted thought from appearing in his face. Over Abby's shoulder he sees Stacy and her parents come in from the kitchen, the father, wearing a bolo tie, guiding the wheelchair. Stacy's expression is strangely washed-out and disoriented, as if she's been given a powerful sedative. Her father is the designated driver.

Bishop takes Lewis by the elbow and steers him through the house. Summer light flickers at all the windows. They pause to speak to Stacy and her parents and Lewis finds that he understands what Stacy says before it's translated.

There are women from the Birthday Party evening at Gar, Astrid among them, others he hasn't seen in years. They stop what they're doing to touch or embrace him. He listens, watching words form on their lips, but doesn't quite hear what they're saying. Or he hears but he doesn't follow it.

In the kitchen Bishop pours two glasses of whisky. Lewis finds a legal pad and a pen in the cabinet underneath the phone. They take the whiskies out through the sliding glass doors of the breakfast nook and sit on the stoop.

The leaves of the young birch sift the hot air. The smell of the new black soil spread around the trunk is sharp. Succulent-looking green weeds have sprung up everywhere in the wide swath Lewis cleared with the machete.

Bishop holds out his closed hand for Lewis to take something—two capsules, white powder on a slant inside them.

“Ex,” Bishop informs him quietly. “I'm going to do mine before the ceremony.”

Lewis thanks him and looks down at the pills in his hand with half a mind to pop them right now. He puts them in his pocket instead. “Is it yours?”

Bishop is pleased that Lewis thought to ask. “It's a special batch,” he says, nodding. “I was in the zone.”

Bishop would like to give a more detailed account, Lewis can tell, and he turns slightly away and looks down at the legal pad to discourage it. He should have begun this earlier. He remembers a line from Rilke he came across online: “You are not surprised at the force of the storm—you have seen it growing.”

He jots it down, thinks about it, crosses it out. The reference to storm is too fraught. They saw it coming, all right. And Lewis
is
surprised by the nameless heaviness bearing him down.

Cars have been parking along the street, the muffled clamor of doors closing. Now friends of Seth's drift outside through the open sliding glass doors to smoke and speak quietly in small clusters: a homeless-looking man with a thin scar like a helmet strap under his jaw; someone with a mohawk; someone else wearing a gray wool cap in the heat of summer; an undersized young woman, who seems to have some sort of congenital condition. A few wave tentatively at Lewis, nod. They know he's the brother, bits of his story.

“People think synthetic drugs are lacking the spirit of organics like peyote and whatnot,” Bishop says. Lewis looks at him. What's he talking about?

“But if I'm in the zone, I can
feel a spirit
enter my synthetics,” Bishop says, flittering the fingers of one hand trippily in the air. “It happens toward the end, like a soul entering a fetus.”

Lewis nods. “That's nice, Bishop,” he says. “But I need to write something for my little whatever-we're-calling it.” Eulogy?

“Oh, of course!” Bishop says, rising.

Tori and Kaylee, wearing short tight black dresses, find him on the back stoop and embrace him tearfully for so long, one on each side of him, that he's growing inappropriately turned on.

Abby comes out onto the stoop and beckons everyone inside. The air-conditioning has broken down and all the windows are open. The house is crowded and ripe-smelling with so many bodies. A sort of altar has been arranged on the marble mantle above the fireplace, lined with objects significant to Seth, guitar, skateboard. Above these, a blown-up photo of him with arms crossed. He gazes into the distance with an expression of self-mocking grandeur.

When he finds Abby, she says, “This just came in.” She holds up her cell phone. There's a text message: our condolences

“I had to check the caller ID,” Abby says. “It's from Gerty.” Lewis stands there shaking his head. “Can you believe it?” She turns to a group of her friends and shows them. “From Seth's grandmother in Cambridge.”

“You are
joking
.”

There's a stir at the door. Virgil has arrived, larger and more formal in attire than the others in his immediate vicinity. He's wearing a dark-blue linen suit Sylvie bought for him in Paris. From across the room, Lewis watches him introduce himself to Astrid, who was the one to open the door. His mouth is compressed in a stoic smile that brings out a dimple in one cheek, a somber version of the public, formal face Lewis has seen him wear for post-lecture wine and cheese receptions.

Now Abby goes to him and they embrace for a long moment then stand speaking, gripping each other's forearms. They are the parents of the dead child, Lewis thinks. Together they created the boy and now he has died and they are meeting again for the occasion of his memorial service. That two such different people were married and produced offspring is so odd and unlikely as to be either mistaken and obscene or transpersonal and destined.

They embrace once more and Abby turns away and Lewis makes his way through the sweaty crush and shakes his father's hand. Virgil looks relieved and grateful to see him, as if he expected Lewis to shun him, to leave him squirming in social isolation here in terra incognita. He asks about the people around them and listens distractedly as Lewis tells him what he knows, as if the purpose of the questions is to free Virgil of the obligation to speak himself. Abby reappears with a glass of red wine for Virgil.

Lewis's cell thrums. It's Eli calling to offer his condolences again. He's in France. He asks to speak to Abby then to Virgil then gets back on with Lewis. He's feeling guilty for not flying out for the memorial. It's because of Hermione, Eli says again, and the trip to the South of France she's had planned for them for over a year. Otherwise, Eli would be there for Lewis, without question.

“Eli, it's fine,” Lewis tells him again. He didn't expect anyone other than family to make the journey. But the more he speaks to Eli and listens to him bemoaning being unable “to be there for” Lewis, the more Lewis detects Eli's relief at not having to deal with the emotional mess of the situation, and the more Lewis resents being let down by his friend, who has in fact chosen Hermione and the South of France over Lewis at a moment when Lewis should have been given priority.

When he gets off with Eli, Abby touches him on the arm and says, “Let's begin.”

The house falls silent as Abby makes her way to the mantle. People sit on the floor and squeezed together on the couch, stand along the walls. More than a few must be from the Inter-Faith Homeless Shelter, administrators but the homeless or semi-homeless too, including Butch, looking dazed and shrunken. Lewis is impressed at the turnout but faintly disgusted by the pong and funk in the hot house. He's having trouble catching his breath. He fans his face with a program Abby had made up for the memorial: the photo of Seth from the mantle, lyrics from one of his songs.

She closes her eyes for a moment then opens them and, looking serenely from face to face, smiles sadly, bravely. “Well, he really outdid himself,” she says and the room erupts in laughter, quietly rueful then gradually more raucous and joyful. She has nothing written down but she is a more natural public speaker than any of the professionals on the Chopik side of the family and it all emerges in effortlessly rounded paragraphs. It is wise, a wisdom born specifically of her time with Seth; there is foreknowledge and even a kind of joy in her words, but if Lewis grasps their meaning they also pour over him like music and he retains little, as if the purpose were to forget.

Now it's Virgil's turn but Virgil shakes his head, sending Lewis forward with a pat on the shoulder: you speak for both of us. Lewis wends his way through the crush to the mantle and looks out over the people sitting shoulder to shoulder on the floor, on the couch, in chairs, peering in from the dining room, craning to see in the doorway behind Virgil. In their upturned, expectant faces he seeks out Seth or signs of Seth but sees only eyes set in faces altogether their own. He's the educated, sane brother. They expect him to say something noble and touching and pitch-perfect but nothing of the sort is occurring to him and he simply stares back over them, his attention drawn to the man with the helmet-strap scar, who is weeping into his puffy wind-burnt hands. And when Lewis finally opens his mouth to speak it's as if he's being ventriloquized by this man. All that comes out is a sob.

He struggles to get control of himself but can't do it and now someone has laced an arm around him—Bishop, smelling of Dr. Bronner's and high-grade weed and whisky. Lewis allows himself to be led away from the mantle. Passing through the crowd, he is touched by many hands—consoling, congratulatory. As if by failing so completely, he's achieved something, which angers him obscurely, like a consolation prize.

He pours another glass of whisky in the kitchen and drinks it off standing alone at the counter. He can hear someone else speaking at the mantle but the words are unclear. He thinks of taking the Ex Bishop gave him but lacks the energy or belief to fish the pills out of his pocket.

He goes back to the living room and stands beside Virgil as someone plays guitar, someone reads a poem, someone sings a song Seth wrote, all of it taking place, for Lewis, in a kind of silent, obliterative roar.

 

It's twilight, midsummer twilight in which the light is a veil-like substance. Having declined Abby's invitation to take part in the tree ceremony, Virgil sits looking overlarge and uncomfortable in his small rental car, knees riding up and the fabric of the suit trousers pulled taut. Lewis has walked out with him to say goodbye but now Virgil pats the passenger seat. “Sit for a second,” he says.

Climbing reluctantly into the car, Lewis notices the cardboard container holding half the ashes lying on its side in the back seat. Virgil plans to have a memorial service in New York for the Chopiks.

Staring through or at the dust-streaked windshield, Virgil says, “I regret sending him to the clinic that summer.”

“Abby feels bad for not sending him to
more
clinics,” Lewis says.

Turning toward Lewis at the unexpected remark, Virgil gives off a whiff of cologne, something Sylvie forbade because he tends to use too much. But Sylvie is not around to intervene in Virgil's personal style. Virgil is free to wear fedoras and trench coats again, sleuth his way through the stacks. “Really?” he asks.

Lewis nods. It's not true of course but Virgil seems so miserable.