B008J4PNHE EBOK

by Owen King

  “Other questions?” his father asked.

  “Ah . . . Booth,” said the woman on the couch with the locked hands. “I think Irving has passed.”

  The only sounds were of raspy breathing and the ticking drips of life-supporting fluids.

  Irving, the man in the gray housecoat, sagged against the armrest. Behind the chunky lenses of his glasses, his wide-open eyes were unblinking. His pale lips, his white face, his small hands cupped at the knot of his housecoat had a desiccated appearance, like papier-mâché.

  Sam felt a twinge of sadness, more for the moment than for the man. It had been a nice thing, to show a movie, and now this had happened. And Booth was doing so well, too.

  “Should I go get someone?” Sam asked.

  The crooked-backed man took a quavering sigh. “I don’t suppose there’ll be a picture now.”

  “Irving.” Booth extended his cane and prodded Irving’s slipper. Irving didn’t move. Sam’s father leaned forward slightly, peering close at the man’s face.

  Sam recalled how, at the funeral home, his father had stood coffinside in that exact position. Booth had appeared less sorrowful at his ex-wife’s death than perplexed. The coffin and the body were in the room when everyone left, but later, someone rolled Allie away to the bowels of the funeral home, to the furnace, where they placed her on a steel table and pushed her into a fire. Meanwhile, Sam returned to his sophomore year of college. Booth went wherever Booth went.

  Maybe what was really bewildering was not the abruptness of a death but the swift resumption of life. You came out from the dark, and the sun was so hideously bright, you feared you might go blind.

  “Irving O’Dell,” said Booth, for the corpse in the gray robe belonged to none other than that prominent member of the New Roman Empire ensemble, originator of the role of Mr. Jones.

  The whistle of the cane through the air was followed by the twang of wood against aluminum as he dealt a wicked blow to the frame of the couch. “Irving! Wake up!”

  His voice—the Voice—caromed around the room. Several patients in wheelchairs bucked, and someone’s pole of bags and tubes crashed to the ground. There was a screech: “Oh-oh-oh!”

  Irving blinked, yawned. He levered himself upright and clawed at his crusty jaw. He noticed Booth standing in front of him.

  “What is it?” Irving asked. “Oh, criminy! Don’t tell me I slept through the movie?”

  ■ ■ ■

  Once the film was rolling, Sam and Booth remained just long enough to see the medicine wagon come creaking over a rise, then left.

  6.

  At Tom’s house, father and son separated. In addition to his other duties, the old man was teaching a Film Appreciation class at the community college, and because there was a session that night, he needed to spend some time looking over his teaching materials. He also intended to have a quiet word with Mina.

  “When the hell did you get so industrious, Booth? You know this is all kind of weird, right?” Sam asked. “I want you to tell me about this Awakening.”

  “Yes . . .” Booth shook his head and turned to open the car door. “Some other time. You’re welcome to sit in on my class if you like.”

  “What’s the topic?”

  “E.T. I find the central characterizations, the parallels, very interesting. The sad little boy from the shattered home. The sad little person from beyond the stars who has been stranded. They’re really in the same situation—brokenhearted in the same way. I want to highlight the way Spielberg captures their bond. The magic, the flying bicycles and all of that, is simply an expression of the comfort they take from each other. Their friendship even brings E.T. back to life. It’s about friendship. On top of that very elegant metaphorical content, there’s a lot of excitement and adventure and cuteness, and that’s exceptional, too.” Booth threw his legs around and out of the passenger seat, hauled himself up. “And I’m sure, as usual, that I’ll weep copiously when E.T. dies.”

  Sam scratched his head. He thought, This whole thing is literally making me scratch my head. He thought, I can’t believe how good Booth makes that ridiculous sci-fi-fantasy piece of shit sound.

  Booth leaned down and poked his head through the open door. “There’s a rusted short sword on your floor.”

  Sam said he knew, and his father said, “All right,” and shut the door. A second or two after that, the old man reopened the door. “Remember: Quel Beau Parleur! You’re going to like it.” He shut the door again.

  The old man lumbered toward the house, slowly picking his way across the drive and the wet lawn, cane swinging and plunging.

  The habit of mentally filming the odd moment never left Sam. His interior camera was a crisp 35 mm, smack in the middle range, very flat, very “real.” He started close on the big man’s shoulder. Gradually, Booth’s figure expanded, head and back, arms and legs, ballooning into view before gaining shape. As soon as his whole form was visible, the camera began to withdraw. Booth diminished, sinking away off-center, as the walls and angles of the yard and the house rose around him. To the right, his father’s reflection wavered across the surface of the picture window. The natural light was fine, sharper than it had been that morning but filtered and lending a dull shine to the wet surfaces. Sam pulled farther and farther back until Booth was a remote figure at the door. Then Booth passed inside, and all that remained was a nicely composed shot of the front section of the looming house.

  A couple of times Sam rewound and watched it and liked it, but he couldn’t figure out what sort of weddingography it could fit into—unless he wanted to build a new template, a Bergman Wedding, maybe.

  ■ ■ ■

  If he were going on a one-way trip, never to return—rocketing into another galaxy, say, on a mission to discover other humanoids—and he could bring only one whatever along with him, what would he choose?

  Allie had asked her son this question some afternoon not too long before the end of the century, when everything seemed basically okay. The towers were standing. Kenneth Novey was alive. Sam was eighteen, and it was the summer before he left for college. The subject arose somehow in connection with his imminent departure for Russell College, where, though it was only an hour north, he’d be on his own.

  “I’d take my piano,” said Allie. “It came down to either you, the piano, and I decided that I wasn’t comfortable letting you blast off into the galaxy. Too risky.” (With the help of Tom’s pickup truck, she had rescued the neglected piano from the side of the road that day. Retuned, it had been living with them ever since.) “Also, you have free will. I didn’t know whether you’d want to explore the Final Frontier with your mom.”

  “Sexbot,” said Sam. He was sprawled on the living room couch. There was nothing to do. The movies at the theater—the closest one, across from FDR’s estate in Hyde Park—were all stupid, and he had seen them anyway. “The latest model of sexbot. Slut 9000.”

  Allie told him not to be an imbecile.

  “The graveyard, then. I like the graveyard.”

  “You can’t take landmasses to outer space.”

  “Too late. You should have said that in the first place. I’m packed. They’re coming with me: the bones of the Huguenots, their gravestones, the moss, all the little trees and stumps and everything. Space is stressful. I’ll need someplace to relax.”

  Allie, who was seated on the floor, drew her legs up to her chest and hugged them. She peered at her son over her knees. “Can I ask you something, kiddo?”

  “Fine.”

  “Does it have to be so serious?”

  “Does what have to be so serious?”

  “Oh, art and everything. You have a very serious outlook.”

  “I don’t know,” said Sam, but really, he thought that it did. There was the fake, and there was the genuine; the former was abhorrent, and the latter was everything.

  “I don’t want you to be disappointed, doll. People are erratic,” said Allie. “Who’s that Swede you’re so crazy about? The o
ne who made the movie about the kids and the theater people and the dink priest, and there was all the icy scenery and everything? And the freaky puppets? Remember, it went on so long it was dark when we started and dark when we finished, and I had to pee six times?”

  “Ingmar Bergman. Fanny and Alexander. Eight hours is not a lot to give to an immortal cinematic masterpiece. You didn’t have to watch it if you didn’t want to.” For such a smart person, his mother could be irritatingly obtuse, and he had to work to keep from getting angry with her.

  “That’s not what I saying. Christ, Sam. Give me a chance. I’m glad I saw it. It was beautiful and romantic, and every time I see snow at night, falling past a streetlamp or a lit window, I think about it again. Every snowy night, I think about it. At the same time, I wouldn’t want to live there, you know? I need a little more levity day to day. It can’t all be snow in the night.”

  “Okay, then,” he replied, feeling hurt and superior. He was almost old enough to vote. “What movie would you like to live in? Hard Mommies?”

  Her response was a burst of near-hysterical laughter that made Sam flinch. “You know what? There have been more than a few times when I’d have been very happy to live in Hard Mommies.”

  Amusement was Allie’s fallback position from the beginning to the end. Sam had envied her coolness and mistrusted her acceptance and, to this day, couldn’t quite fathom that she was dead. It was so easy to picture her lying on the red heap of a settee that used to be in their living room, head propped on fist, smiling slightly, and listening to something on the record player, maybe a Scott Joplin rag, or maybe just the fuzzy skip at the end of a side. While the specific question of how she could reject Bergman in favor of a gleefully soft-core seventies artifact like Hard Mommies (in which a group of PTA mothers open a sexy car wash to fight back against an encroaching mafia kingpin—played, naturally, by Booth Dolan in a piggish nose, a ponytail wig, and an oceanic pair of red-checkered pants) was no longer relevant, his mother’s resolute satisfaction with her lot remained an enduring mystery. Allie had never graduated from college and never had a real career. Her marriage had failed. The modestly successful business that she had built from the floor up was abruptly shuttered following the divorce. In the aftermath, she patched together a living from substitute teaching and giving piano lessons to children. She volunteered for Family of Hasbrouck, stuffing bags of necessities. Save for her ex-husband and her ex-husband’s friend Tom Ritts, Allie had no close friends. Then she was dead. Her body was slid into a furnace on a steel tray. No one objected to Tom’s plan to till her ashes into a flower bed.

  Sam had seen his mother weep once or twice, and she was surely depressed a few times, but if she ever said “I wish—” or “If only—” or in any way indicated a deep and lasting regret, it had not been in the range of her son’s hearing. His only possible conclusion was that Allie had been content.

  7.

  The leaden morning clouds had partly evaporated, and the off-again, on-again rain was off again. Sunlight poked through here and there, and the wind was mild. Sam decided to go for a walk. Whether it was from everything that had happened, or from being in the car so much, he felt slightly feverish and wanted air.

  Somewhere to his left, against the right side of Tom’s house, around the corner from the big picture window, was where Allie’s ashes were interred. Yellow and purple echinacea grew from the bed, tough and bright and spindly—the absolute right flower for Allie—but they had been cut to the ground. Sam passed by the bed and continued across the side yard in the direction of the woods.

  At the back of the house, below the redwood deck that extended out on pilings, the ground fell away steeply before flattening out into forest. Most of the trees were green, though a few canopies showed a spattering of yellow and orange. At the foot of the hill, one towering sugar maple, leaves already showing a dozen shades of heat, stood out from the rest, a forerunner of change. Sam gave the big maple a knock on the trunk as he walked past and forged into the woods.

  The same rail trail that backed up against the Huguenot graveyard ran along the eastern margin of Tom’s property. After about a quarter mile of wading through deadfall, Sam reached the railroad embankment and climbed it easily.

  The gravel-bedded trail tunneled beyond sight. The branches of the neighboring trees did not quite cover the path; a zipper of pale sky hung directly over the center of the lane. Sam’s sneakers crunched softly. Probably due to the uncertain weather, he saw no one else.

  It had been nearly an hour since Tess’s last call. Perversely, this made him worry. Although he couldn’t have expected her to keep calling him indefinitely, he had begun to anyway.

  Sam fished out his cell phone, thumbed up the recent calls, and pondered the long accusatory column of her name—

  Tess Auerbach 212-555-6161

  Tess Auerbach 212-555-6161

  Tess Auerbach 212-555-6161

  —and found he didn’t have the gall. He hoped maybe he’d have it in another few minutes—or better, maybe in the meantime, she would call again and he wouldn’t have to do anything.

  It crossed his mind then that, really, when it came to telling Mina what to do about relationships, he was standing on a hell of a wobbly leg. On one hand, he was carrying on an affair with another man’s wife, and on the other, he preferred a person he might be interested in to keep calling him but not to, you know, speak with her. All Mina wanted to do was date a nice gay guy whose parents’ apartment had a view of the park. What was so objectionable about that?

  The thought of his sister led Sam to Wesley. It was well past time to ascertain if his roommate had been killed by the avalanche of boxes.

  Wesley answered on the first ring. “Hey.” Sam was taken aback. It was uncommon enough for Wesley to bother to answer the phone under any circumstances. It was unheard of for him to pick up on the first ring.

  “Are you okay?” Sam asked.

  “Mentally or physically?”

  “Wesley. Just tell me if you’re okay.”

  “I’m a mess. But what else is new? I’m bruised, but I’m alive. Forget about me. How’s your old man?”

  Without getting too involved, Sam explained that his father was not dying, that Mina had scammed him, that he had spent the morning and early afternoon with Booth, and that during their few hours together, Booth had healed the sick, fed the poor, and raised the dead. “Anyway,” he said, “I guess I’ll probably drive home tomorrow.”

  “I’m relieved that Booth’s not dying.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t sound so happy, Sam. We’re just talking about the man who jizzed you into existence. No one important.”

  “I would give anything to unhear what you just said.”

  “Someone needed to say it.”

  Based on their shared enthusiasm for eating, watching television, and doing both while taking up a whole couch, it was no surprise that Booth and Wesley got along famously. Both were also big fans of The Prisoner, the 1960s ITV television series about a spy held captive in a nefariously quaint hamlet where all of the inhabitants are referred to by number (the Prisoner’s handle is Number Six) and anyone who tries to escape is attacked by large gelatinous bubbles. During their junior year at Russell, Booth had dropped by the boys’ suite and ended up camping out for the better part of a weekend to watch the entire run. Several loaded pizzas and dozens of beers were consumed, and late into the night, amid a haze of farts, the two men collaborated on a deranged theory wherein the Prisoner was behind the entire scheme, that his desperate attempts at escape were put-ons, and he was the true mastermind of the Village (i.e., Number One). It was an existential Möbius strip; the actual “prisoner” was the viewer.

  “But what’s the point?” Sam had asked, drunk, incredulous, suffocating. “Why would he want to mindfuck us through our television like that?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” With a smug smile, Booth turned to Wesley to answer the question, as if they maintained a telepathic l
ink.

  “Because he can,” Wesley said.

  “Wesley, that is exactly right: because he can. On the nose!” Booth cackled abrasively, and they toasted each other with cans of Bud Ice.

  The black dot of a jogger appeared a few hundred yards down the trail.

  “I’m sorry my sister tried to kill you,” said Sam to Wesley. He added by way of consolation, “She beat up a bum, too.”

  “It wasn’t the coolest thing that ever happened, I’ll be honest.”

  “I’m sorry. For what it’s worth, the bum got the worst of it.”

  “It did give me a chance to reassess things.”

  “It did, did it?” Sam smiled. Wesley was heroically full of shit.

  “After Mina whipped my ass, I’m lying at the bottom of this pile, you know, shrouded in utter darkness, and I have this flash: I get all this free stuff, I have a job I love and that I excel at, I make my own hours. My mother still does my laundry. You clean the bathroom. All the cuisines of the world are delivered to my door. It’s the perfect life—but I have no one to share it with.”

  The jogger, a heavyset bald man in a pink T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, huffed by on Sam’s left, his footfalls like fists hitting a heavy bag.

  “What do you think?” asked Wesley. “Am I ready to be loved?”

  Sam didn’t like to be discouraging, but he had misgivings. Choosing one at random, it was hard to imagine the woman who could love a man who clung so tightly to his urine-scented Popsicle pajama pants. He tried to be gentle: “I feel like, by any fair accounting, you’re a handful, Wesley.”

  “Am I too much of a people pleaser? Is that it?”

  They talked for a few more minutes, and Sam invited his friend to come up. In light of the Jo-Jo situation, Sam had been thinking that it might be in the best interests of his skeleton to stay clear of Brooklyn until Polly’s husband cooled off.

  Wesley actually said he’d consider it, which was surprising, because to do so would surely violate several items prohibited by the “List of Seventy-four Things That Cause Unnecessary Fatigue.” However, before he committed to anything, he needed to weigh the pros and cons of a computerized flyswatter that delivered bons mots when you smacked it against something.