B008J4PNHE EBOK

by Owen King

  No mention was made of satyrs, Brooks Hartwig, Jr., Who We Are, or Samuel Dolan.

  ■ ■ ■

  The news of Costas Mandell’s death was flummoxing. Like an unexpected traffic snarl or an out-of-order elevator, it was an obstruction for which there was no leeway in a tight travel plan. Although Sam had spoken to him once, on that long-ago morning on the lawn in front of the Russell Film Department, the man was, to Sam, almost as much a creature of fantasy as the satyr he played. Now Mandell was to be buried, but what he was every day of his actual life—the unfilmed days—had instantaneously burned down to the paragraph of his obituary. The man’s very being had never made sense to Sam, so how was he supposed to process the demise?

  The answer was that he didn’t know, couldn’t begin to know, didn’t know if he wanted to know.

  Sam abruptly shut his laptop and set it to the side and climbed under the covers of the bed. “Nope,” he said to the room. “Not thinking about that right now.”

  ■ ■ ■

  The bedroom was nominally his because his godfather insisted that it should be. However, it lacked the sedimentary quality of a true childhood room. There were no movie or band posters, no bulletin board of photos from his teenage years; the drawers of the built-in desk were empty. The only proof of Sam was a bookshelf with some Vonnegut novels that he had read, some Pynchon that he hadn’t, a few high school textbooks, and the parked model of the P-51 Mustang that Tom had helped him build and that had somehow survived the intervening decades. The wing decals were curling slightly, but otherwise, it was in good shape. The whole space had a vacation smell of wood and dust and stale air. Late-day shadows painted the floor.

  Sam closed his eyes and pretended that he was in his right place—a boy in the old house down the street from all those dead pilgrims, safe and mothered—in the time when he might have made different choices, followed different interests, become some other, better self, the right self for Tess and for everyone else, too. The narcotic stupor of daylight sleep began to draw him under.

  With the coils and meters of his brain ticking down, Sam’s guard was lowered enough to allow a passing thought of Brooks, wherever Brooks was, whatever glassy ward or seaside sanitarium. The assistant director appeared to Sam in a thick white robe, tucked into a deluxe chrome-appointed wheelchair and parked in a sunny spot. There was a peaceful set to his dozing face, and his eyebrows were still.

  Sam felt a flaring of rage at Brooks, but it quickly dissipated to pity. What he did to Sam was awful. What he did to himself—inside, where the animal heads cackled and ridiculed, and the satyr wept, and the invisible documentary crew jabbed their cameras—must be worse.

  Now Sam felt a pang of envy. Brooks had checked out. Brooks was worry-free. Brooks was in a big wheelchair in sight of the ocean, dreaming, well doped.

  Another wheelchair creaked up beside them. Sam was in a wheelchair, too, sitting beside Brooks. The ocean below was choppy and gray.

  “Jezebels,” said Costas, by way of greeting. A nurse had rolled him up and parked him between the other two. Hooves protruded from beneath the lip of the dead man’s robe. “Looks almost like some kind of art, doesn’t it?” He pointed at the ocean.

  Sam called to the nurse that he couldn’t be thinking about this and would need to be moved. The nurse rolled him to the Brooklyn Bridge and parked him in the river wind. She yelled that she’d be back when she remembered her answer, and left to hail a cab.

  ■ ■ ■

  His cell phone chirruped. He dug it out of the pocket of his jeans. “You took a cab . . .”

  “It’s Tess.”

  He opened his eyes; the digital clock read 4:31 P.M. “You remembered your answer? Why we enjoy awful things?”

  “No, not yet—but I saw the thing about the satyr guy, and I called Wesley, and he said he’d tell you, but he wasn’t sure how you’d take it.” She cleared her throat. “And I just wanted to say that I’m really sorry for your loss, Sam.”

  Sam tried to work through this statement. It was like attempting to grasp a lug nut with his toes. “Shit.” He rolled the blankets tighter around himself, locking his hand and the phone into place by his ear. “You know about my movie?”

  “Yeah,” said Tess, “I know. At the wedding, I actually recognized your name from your business card.”

  “That’s all right,” said Sam, trying to get the lug nut. He preferred to hold off on explaining his connection to Who We Are until a second date, but the revelation was pretty much inevitable.

  “How are you holding up?” she asked.

  “I don’t think I’ve absorbed it yet. I suppose that in some sense, he’s been an important part of my life, but I didn’t really know him . . . So it’s . . . multifaceted. I’m mostly just tired out. I was up at dawn and ran around with my father most of the morning and afternoon, and . . . I’m just tired. Let’s, maybe—let’s talk about the guy some other time?”

  She said okay. Sam tried to raise his eyelids, but his eyelids stayed closed.

  “Would it be weird if we talked about the Segway, then? ‘Really talked’? I mean, given the circumstances?”

  “I guess,” said Sam, wondering if he was partly dreaming.

  “Did you honestly think the Segway was worth the hype, or were you just jollying me?”

  “I’m not a big jollier, Tess.” Sam shifted within his cocoon, relaxing into a new, more comfortable position. “I don’t know if it was worth the hype. I was just saying . . . it seemed pretty cool.” He paused to yawn. He abandoned the lug nut. “I’m not a Segway expert, though. Never even driven one.”

  “My family exhausts me, too.”

  “Yeah?” The cocoon was warm and deep.

  She had grown up in Massachusetts, near Braintree. Her mom was a social worker, retired now. Her parents had met in college, at UConn; both were in student politics, her mom more than her dad. Her mom got arrested for handcuffing herself to the doors of the university’s ROTC chapter. She was that kind of woman, Tess’s mother; if her mind was made up to go right, you would have to haul her kicking and screaming if you wanted her to go left. She was a bomb thrower through and through. Tess’s father was more of a gaping bystander. Of course, he had a job, he was an entertainment lawyer, apparently, he kicked ass at that, but the rest of the time, he was an unbearable misanthrope. Maybe all Sam needed to know about her dad was that he had this fetish about lingering by the checkout aisles at the health food store to count how many people talked on their cell phones right in front of the sign that said PLEASE DON’T TALK ON YOUR CELL PHONE. It was revolting, the delight he took in observing incivility, how it gratified his lousy opinion of humanity. But for Tess, it was an incredible grind to be near him, all of the negativity. So Sam probably wasn’t going to be surprised to hear that

  ■ ■ ■

  “We’re leaving.” A creature had crawled on top of him and was tapping his forehead. The room was pitch-black.

  “No,” he told the creature.

  Mina flicked his nose, and Sam jerked away, upending her with a thud, and used his free hand to pull the blankets all the way over himself and create a protective enclosure. The phone was in his other hand. “Tess?” Sam asked into the receiver. His heart was slamming; his pulse was jittering around inside his neck. “Are you there?” Something was wrong, something was lost, something was broken; he was hot and frantic. Sam didn’t know her at all, not really, but he needed her to be there.

  And she was. “Yes,” said Tess. “I’m here, I’m here.”

  He breathed. His pulse slowed. He smelled fabric, himself, the wood, the dust. The world locked back together. The fear left as abruptly as it had flowered.

  Beyond the seal of his blanket, he heard Mina call him a spastic and say he had to be downstairs in fifteen minutes if he wanted to come to Booth’s class. “Or stay. Whatever.” The door banged shut.

  “I’m here, Sam,” said Tess.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”

 
; “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m okay.” He threw back the blankets to blink his sticky eyes at the red digits on the bedside table clock: 6:17 P.M. They had been on the phone for nearly two hours. He had slept through everything about her. “Ah, shit. Have you been talking—”

  “No. Once you started snoring, I shut up. You only missed about a half hour of my life story.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry. I was tired and—”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Hold on,” he said, but the line was already dead.

  ■ ■ ■

  Allergic as he was to obligation, Sam tried to be polite. He held doors for women and waited for them to order first. He didn’t automatically hang up on telemarketers. Even when people were blatantly wrong, he made an effort not to talk over them.

  And though he held no illusions about his prowess, he was diligent about giving head and open to direction. If he wasn’t drunk, he generally made an attempt to get up for seconds. If a woman he had hooked up with wanted him to, Sam was happy to stay until morning and to foot the bill for breakfast. Polly had teased him mercilessly for asking her, after the first time they screwed in the changing room of the Bergdorf’s at the Shining Hudson outlet mall (conveniently located right off I-87), whether she wanted to grab a bite at the food court. “Oh, that is so chivalrous of you, Sam. All of sudden I don’t feel like I just got fucked in a mall changing room. I feel like a princess.”

  Canny film editors sometimes use actors’ reaction shots out of place; take an actress’s come-hither smile originally filmed for a scene in the first fifteen minutes of a picture; and appropriate it for a moment in the last fifteen minutes, when she confesses her affair to her husband. In the late scene, the come-hither smile adds a note of defiance to the performance. It was a technique that Sam once would have used without hesitation, but these days, he wasn’t sure he’d have the gumption. It was stealing, really, to take a smile like that for your own ends. Maybe that meant that he didn’t have the stuff anymore, if he ever did.

  When Sam called Tess back, the first ring sent him to voice mail. He recorded that he was sorry, that he wanted to be a good guy, that when you got right down to it, that was probably the biggest reason why he tried so hard to avoid entanglements like the one he found himself in with her. It was damned difficult going when you couldn’t do whatever you wanted. He’d finally figured that out, he said. “I really like ‘really talking’ with you,” Sam added, and finally let it rest.

  ■ ■ ■

  It took him a few minutes to get up, wash his face, and regain his wits. When he did shuffle downstairs, he did so only to issue his regrets and officially resign from the evening’s festivities. The most ambitious plan he could conceive of was to make a sandwich, drink a beer, and head back upstairs for more sleep.

  They had already left anyway. On the floor in front of the door lay a blue index card with a message from Booth:

  Rest easy, my son. Perhaps some other time I can elucidate the subtexts of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial for you. We shall return.

  Sincerely,

  BD

  Once he had made his sandwich and uncapped a beer, Sam went to Tom’s study and had a seat on the cracked leather couch. On the wall to his left was a framed copy of the New Roman Empire poster—Horsefeathers Law dangling the pocket watch. Sam thought about directing his father that afternoon, the little note he gave him on the radio spot, and how Booth had gone right ahead and done it perfectly. It was silly, nothing, really, an ad for a sandwich joint, but in retrospect, Sam appreciated the moment. It was nice to feel useful. He tipped his beer in the poster’s direction and swigged.

  There was a plasma-screen television in the center of the built-in entertainment center on the facing wall. Sam turned it on to watch something while he ate. Because it was the weekend, he wasn’t surprised to come upon another rerun of the Kenneth Novey episode of Secrets Only Dead Men Know playing on the same basic cable channel.

  Novey rises from his panic room cot on the first morning of the twenty-first century, walks to the keypad by the vaulted door, punches the release button—and nothing happens. Two more times Novey jabs the button, but the keypad is black. “Uh-oh,” says the voice of the ghost, “this is . . . problematic.”

  Sam’s cell phone rattled: it wasn’t Tess, it was Polly.

  The possibility of ten or fifteen minutes of pleasant stroking, of Polly whispering about her fingers and her nipples, of her making noises that started in her chest and emerged in kitten squeaks, unraveled before him. He thought about it, and the idea was as abruptly and flatly unappealing as cold, melted yellow cheese.

  Sam glanced from the shuddering phone to the screen. Novey has developed a deranged beard and is laughing hysterically because his Newsweek with the picture of a double helix on the cover has come unstapled. The wings of pages drift to the floor. Soon he will kill himself.

  It seemed to Sam that here, right here, through the snow of pages, is the moment when an escape hatch ought to appear—a crawl space, a loose floor panel, some cut in the world that could be peeled back and squeezed out through.

  The phone stopped ringing, then a few seconds later produced the burble that alerted him that there was a message.

  On the television, the show went to commercial: Jo-Jo’s pin-striped GTO fishtails out in front of a family of nerds in a minivan. “Hold on, yah?” The ex-catcher jumps from the car and rushes at the minivan. “No money down, my friends!”

  Aware that he had made a choice, Sam picked up his sandwich and took another bite. The phone began to quake again. He went ahead and turned it off. If he was going to find his way back into Tess’s graces, it probably wasn’t going to be tonight.

  The commercials ended, and the show returned. For the second time that weekend, Sam was beguiled by the reenactment of the senseless tragedy of Kenneth Novey and his malfunctioning panic room.

  9.

  Maybe it was related to witnessing Novey’s entombment again, but Sam felt a sudden urge to get out, go somewhere. He didn’t want to see Mina or Booth, or even Tom, not right then. He hadn’t figured out how to talk to his sister, and he didn’t know what to make of his father. If he called Tess again, he risked making it worse.

  Sam decided to drive the rental car across town, have a pass by the cottage where he had grown up.

  At Main, he caught a red. While he waited, he heard the sound of fireworks but didn’t see them. To his left and his right, the orange streetlights cast spacey, acid-looking pools on the concrete.

  On the other side of Main, he drove a half-dozen side streets, none of which he could have named but that, put together, formed the way home.

  ■ ■ ■

  He parked curbside under a familiar, heavy-headed elm tree. The tree stood at the edge of a brief rectangle of lawn, which also held a darkened cottage with a white door and pewter-colored shingles that shone dimly in the night. A pickup truck sat in the driveway.

  When he tried to imagine himself inside the house, Sam kept bumping up against furniture he didn’t recognize. It was a place where some other people lived now. He put the rental back into drive and pulled away.

  Up the street a few hundred yards, at the Huguenot graveyard, he stopped again. Inside the enclosure of the low rock wall, a couple dozen earthen humps and rocky shapes were visible in the dark. There were no lights or reflectors to discern the specific hillocks, piles, and gravestones. (Costas Mandell, soon to be laid down in his own oblong of rest, came to mind—but Sam stayed fast and hurried him out as suddenly as he’d appeared, directing him to clop off the set and get into his trailer. Someone would notify him when he was needed.)

  As Sam’s eyes adjusted he thought he discerned a few white flowers scattered on the ground, little peels of luminescence—or maybe it was a trick of moonlight. There was nothing else to see. The dead were well buried.

  ■ ■ ■

  A little wired—the unexpected ease with which he had slip
ped past the stomping grounds of his childhood and adolescence had stirred him—Sam went to the hookah bar-café, Smoke Me Drink Me.

  The establishment contained nothing like a traditional table-chair arrangement; couches and oversize pillows were littered around, along with a few low tables. Shelves on the walls displayed burnished hookahs of different shapes and sizes. Concealed speakers played jazz at a low volume. Pieces of translucent fabric hung in front of the track lighting to filter the room in aqua light.

  Where double doors used to lead to the theater proper, there was now a solid wall. In circling the block for a parking space, Sam had discovered that the entire rear of the original structure, where the seats and the screen once stood, had been leveled to create a municipal parking lot. He recollected Tom mentioning this development, maybe as far back as four or five years ago, but somehow or other, Sam had never seen or noticed. Not that there was a whole lot to see or notice; it was just a parking lot.

  Inside, Sam drew away from the groups of younger people sharing bowls on the rugged floor, and carried the herbal tea that he had purchased up the stairs, through thin, flitting clouds of acrid smoke. An arrowed sign on the landing pointed TO THE PATIO.

  On the second floor, the double doors remained. Sam stepped through to the balcony.

  Though the theater had been razed, the balcony yet protruded from the building, in the form of a patio with one open side. What remained were two decks—upper and lower—linked by a brief set of stairs. The movie seats had been cleared away except for the front row. A drape of thick plastic sheeting hung from the roof to fall down in front of the balcony railing, presumably to keep out the insects.

  Sam descended to the railing and chose a seat in the middle. He turned on his cell phone; there were ten messages from Polly. Whatever else, the day was certain to go down in his personal history as a bumper one for women wanting his attention. He clicked the phone off before she could get through again.

  Through the plastic sheet, he could see the parking lot, his rental car and some other cars, a Dumpster, the rear of another building, and a small cut of sidewalk with a streetlight. He had a vague memory of his father taking him up here one time, predivorce. It was like an old reel without the sound elements—Sam could see the outline of his father’s face against a red wall, but the conversation was gone.