And you’ll ask yourself
Where is my mind?
He tries to remember the rest of the lyrics, but without his iPod he can’t. Can’t recall anything beyond the only part of the song that had interested him in the first place: its self-indulgent, fatalistic hook. Any alt-rock lyric that celebrated alienation or disillusionment in the most remotely clever way, he realizes, resides on one of his playlists, wherever they are.
~ * ~
At the end of the cul-de-sac, just before the entry to the would-be mini-mall, sits a house much closer to completion than the others. Its exterior is sheathed in plywood, wrapped in Tyvek, and more than half covered with white composite clapboard. All of the doors and most of the windows have been installed and trimmed, and inside the framing studs are covered with untaped Sheetrock.
This, Henry thinks, is very close to the condition his house was in when he and Rachel first toured it. Even then, following their Realtor from one subdivision to another, or to the rare yet out-of-their-price-range lone colonial on a hilltop, he didn’t feel anything close to a great sense of anticipation, or that a wonderful new phase of their lives was about to begin. He remembers feeling that looking for the house, buying the house, and finally moving there was simply something to do, a thing that perhaps they ought to do, if only because at that point, though they never articulated it to each other, they were at a loss for what else they might try.
What he also remembers about his first pass through the nearly finished rooms—besides stepping over the black cords of the carpenter’s momentarily discarded power tools and hearing himself actually asking the Realtor, because Giffler had told him to, if there was a bonus room, even though he had no idea what a bonus room was or why, in a house this size, he’d need it—is a distinct sense of dread. But he knew that it was a lesser dread than he’d have felt if they had done nothing at all.
It occurs to him now, dragging the top of a thumb through a layer of construction dust on the Corian countertop, that buying that home with Rachel was a form of marital nihilism, of relationship suicide, and that subconsciously they both knew it. Otherwise why else, without children, let alone a plan for having a family, would they move to twenty-first-century suburbia like moths to . . . no, moths don’t know that beyond heat and dazzling light the flame will suddenly destroy them, while Rachel and Henry, they certainly had warnings.
If anyone was a moth to suburbia’s flame, he thinks, it was his grandparents. In the late forties the concept was flush with momentum and promise. The latest incarnation of the American freaking dream. The thing to do after coming home from the blasted forests of Ardennes, the bloody waters of Leyte Gulf. After surviving naval assaults, artillery bombardments, and bayonets in the hedgerows while it seemed as if half your generation didn’t, the prospect of living far from the noise of the city in a generic subdivision of affordable prefab homes probably didn’t seem so bad.
When it came time for his parents to decide where they were going to live their lives, there was much more data to draw from. For starters, having grown up in suburbia, they were aware of and had experienced most of its benefits and shortcomings. They were the damaged children of Cheever and Rabbit and Revolutionary Road, just as they were the fortunate and comforted children of homecoming dances and firemen’s parades and Father Knows Best. More than once while growing up his parents had no doubt seen the air taken out of the suburban dream (adultery, alienation, cultural depravity), as often as they had seen it resuscitated (community, belonging, adultery). And most likely they knew exactly what they were getting into before they decided to sign the lease on their own contemporary ranch with detached garage and enough room in the backyard for an aboveground pool.
They had at least considered the data and made a decision.
But what data had he and Rachel considered? For sure they’d been exposed to an even broader cultural sampling than their parents had. Plus they’d had more than a taste of life away from suburban life, in college in Boston and later as young Manhattanites. By the time they had made their decision on that inbound train from Westchester after the harvest festival at the home of people whom, incidentally, they would never see again, they had generations of data to work with.
And Henry can honestly say right now that they ignored every last bit of it.
Which plays right into his relationship suicide theory. They had chased the absolute worst aspects of the suburban cliche to give themselves an excuse to unearth the reality of Henry and Rachel more rapidly: They were flawed. And their relationship—not suburbia—was flawed.
Suburbia, like USAVille, is simply a vessel waiting to be filled by angst or contentment, a lifetime of hopelessness or generations of happiness. Unfortunately, he and Rachel had seen suburbia as nothing more than an opportunity to ramp up their already escalating pangs of hopelessness and desperation and expedite the inevitable.
Of course he hadn’t been able to see it then, and Rachel undoubtedly has her own theories on the subject, but he does see it all quite clearly now, as he sits six time zones away from his past, pacing the length of the front porch of a home that may never be inhabited.
~ * ~
Back in New York he always made a point of avoiding the malls in and around his hometown, especially the large, enclosed malls, which seemed to have their own ecosystem, fed at the top of the food chain by human spirit and money.
He used to tell Rachel that every aspect of the mall experience depressed him, but she wasn’t sympathetic to his claims. She used to answer, “No shit. You think I like doing the zombie walk past the Candle Castle, the World of Womanly Lotions, and six different versions of the Gap? The days of mall as novelty experience—going to admire the atrium fountains and the latest-model Saabs parked in front of the Sunglass Hut—are long past. We go because we need shit, Henry, and for you to pretend that you are above it and won’t go because it’s not stimulating enough, or because it reflects too much truth about the world you refuse to engage, is an insult to my intelligence.”
Yet this mall, dark and decaying, never complete and never new, he has no intention of avoiding. If anything, the ghostly emptiness sprawled before him is an attraction. As he enters the doorless center of the concrete-block edifice, bats alight from the aluminum header for a would-be interior storefront. Strolling down the darkening entry venue, he imagines Rachel’s atrium fountain at the end of his sightline, flanked perhaps by a Jamba Juice stand and a discount perfume cart. To his immediate right, maybe a Stride Rite shoe store, a crappy jewelry shop, a Bath and Body Works. To his left, he’s thinking a Chili’s or an Applebee’s. Something with aspirations a quarter-step above fast food, with a serviceable bar.
Much better to imagine it than experience it.
A second floor of retail ruins overlooks the first-floor atrium, but there are no escalators. He locates a concrete stairway on the back wall and makes his way up. Stacked on the edge of the far walls are bundles of aluminum wall studs and iron rebar, waist-high wooden wheels wrapped full with copper wire, and a half-dozen pallets of bagged mortar. He wonders why, with so much poverty all around, the materials here and in the surrounding homes haven’t been looted, stripped clean, reused, and resold. He decides that maybe the locals look at this place as a repository of bad spirits, like the forbidden peaks that Maya showed him, an evil place not to be disturbed. As he continues, he can’t help but be thrilled and relieved by the fact that none of this has come to pass, and in all likelihood never will.
Far above, a blue plastic construction tarp flaps, wind-frayed and brittle, along the edges of the large atrium skylight hole it was meant to temporarily cover. Standing in what could only be the food court— he’s thinking Sbarros, Burger King Express, some American-owned Chinese chain with the word panda in the name—he stares at the ragged hole in the sky, sun blinking through the synthetic fray like a semaphore, and he marvels at the absurdity of it all, a Western-style mini-mall in a remote rural region of a Buddhist nation.
&nbs
p; After several minutes he looks away from the opening and reconsiders the condition of the mall that never was. He wonders how much Himalayan wind and snow, sun and rain it will take to bring it all down again.
From below, a noise. Henry slowly tilts his head and sees movement in the atrium. It is a barefoot boy, maybe eight or nine, in a burnt-orange gho. His head is clean-shaven and he walks with a limp. Several times the boy passes from the front entrance of the mall to a place out of Henry’s line of sight, where Henry’s hypothetical Applebee’s might have gone. Probably stealing shit after all, he thinks. Or vandalizing, doing a little Himalayan graffiti tagging on the bare walls, and who can blame him, really.
Several times the boy returns and disappears. Henry is certain that the boy is unaware of his presence, but on his last pass before disappearing, he stops and looks up, directly at Henry.
They stare at each other for a moment, until Henry blinks and waves. Instead of waving back, the boy presses his hands together at his chest and bows gently and slightly from the waist.
The boy is gone by the time Henry makes his way back downstairs. He calls after him anyway, his American voice echoing off the garish walls of made-in-China cement. Outside, the sunset wind has begun its crawl down the backs of the peaks and into the valley. As he looks for a sign of the boy, who vanished like a phantom, he hears fabric flapping in the rising breeze. Overhead he sees the boy’s handiwork: the breathtaking, brilliantly colored squares of a prayer flag, strung across the broad expanse of the vacant building’s entrance. Five rows, each more than twenty flags long. He steps away from the building to get a better look and stops after a dozen steps, when he is out from under the shadow of the walls and can see the mall and the swirling flags framed by the sun-dashed tops of the surrounding peaks.
The blue, white, red, green, and yellow cloth squares represent, as Maya explained to him at dinner at her nephew’s place, the five elements: sky/space, wind/air, fire, water, and earth. Maya told him that as wind passes over the flags, the surrounding air is purified and energized with peace, compassion, and wisdom. Finally, if he remembers it right—and he’s fairly sure he remembers everything Maya has told him during their brief time together—at the center of the flags is the image of a wind horse, which combines the speed of wind and the strength of the horse to carry the blessings of love to all sentient beings in the universe.
“Including capitalists and liars?” he had asked her.
“As long as they’re sentient capitalists and liars,” she had replied.
Walking back to his temporary house in the development that never was, he can’t stop thinking about the boy and the sunset flags outside the mall and how beauty and absurdity battle over every pulse of his existence.
~ * ~
III
~ * ~
Uninvited Guests
The first death threat arrives via the opposite of a prayer flag, a handkerchief-sized homicide flag with his arrow-riddled likeness Sharpied onto red-white-and-blue fabric. He finds it nailed into his front door when he comes home after his visit to the abandoned mall. And now, inside, he is finding even more threats via different mediums—text messages, phone calls, and words slathered on his bedroom wall with what he is hoping is the blood of a chicken or some animal other than human.
All saying pretty much the same thing: Go away or we will kill you.
In the upstairs bathroom he washes his hands and face, strips down to his boxers, brushes his teeth, and climbs into bed. But falling asleep proves difficult with Die Imperialist Yankee scrawled in mystery blood on the opposite wall, next to a framed Thomas Kinkade Snow White Discovers the Cottage print. He stands and considers doing something about the visual assault, but the best solution he can come up with is to turn the print around, with Snow White facing the wall.
He’s getting back into bed when his cell phone rings again. He’s reluctant to answer. Receiving prerecorded death threats is one thing, but he’s not ready to handle them in real time. Sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the tiny screen, he sees that it’s not a would-be Galadonian political assassin. It’s not even Rachel. It’s Maya.
“Maya?”
“Yes. Just checking to see if everything is all right.”
He rises and begins to pace the new ivory broadloom. “Other than the threats on my life, the knots in my stomach, and the uncontrollable trembling, yeah, I’m just splendid.”
“Death threats?”
He parts the curtain and peeks out at the darkened street, at Madison Ellison’s empty driveway. Was our meeting this morning a hallucination, he thinks, or does such a woman actually exist? “Yes,” he says to Maya. “Death threats.”
He tells her about his walk through the neighborhood and the empty mall and what was waiting for him when he returned.
Maya sighs. “These are the actions of the Cultural Preservation Movement. I doubt that they will carry through with any of it.”
“I was hoping for a little more assurance than ‘doubt.’”
“Going on midnight adventures with an individual such as your friend Madden, drawing that kind of attention to yourself, is not the best way to ingratiate yourself to them.”
“I imagine working for an American multinational and living in a subdivision called USAVille isn’t the most diplomatically subtle move either.”
She laughs. “Do you want to return to the spa?”
“No. Hopefully, I can get to sleep. I’ve been trying, but I don’t know why it’s taking—”
“Maybe because it’s only seven o’clock, Henry. And last night you slept for more than fourteen hours.”
“Oh.”
“Have you told your chaperone about this? Shug? Perhaps he can come and make sure that—”
“No, thank you. I’d rather deal with political assassination than character assassination.”
“Shug is a better man than you think. Have you eaten?”
“Not since brunch with the PR person to the despots. Would you be interested in joining me?”
Maya pauses. Henry thinks he hears an adult male voice speaking to someone on her end. The guy he saw in the car with her? “That won’t be possible tonight. Why don’t you eat some of the rice and vegetables I prepared for you?”
“Can you guarantee it hasn’t been poisoned?”
She laughs again. “I’m calling to make a plan for tomorrow. We should meet at the call center first thing in the morning.”
“For what? Trust falls? Our annual holiday party? A meeting of the board of directors?”
“Not far off, actually. I guess you haven’t been checking your e-mail.”
“I kind of lost interest after I saw my corporate profile pic PhotoShopped onto the body of a man hanging from the national tree. What’s up?”
“Audrey and Pat are coming.”
Henry walks over to the Kinkade print and turns it back around. The river in Snow White Discovers the Cottage, he decides, bears an eerie resemblance to the emotional high point of Audrey and Pat’s Happy Mountain Springs creation myth video. “To Gal-ado?”
“Yes. According to . . . is it Giffler?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, according to Mister Giffler, the sale of a supposedly eco-friendly company like Happy Mountain Springs to a huge corporation, despite being welcomed by the financial markets, has apparently proven to be wildly unpopular with the loyal, environmentally responsible Happy Mountain Springs base. In fact, he said that his suggestion that they visit was based on one of your earlier ideas.”
Henry approaches the wall and traces his finger along the dried blood of the letter D in Die. He likes it that she used the phrase supposedly eco-friendly. “Wow. What a shocker. I mean, who would have thought that selling out to a soulless conglomerate would have such a negative impact on a core group of spiritually enlightened, environmentally responsible consumers?”
“Irony, yes?”
“Yes. And they feel that making a trip here and publicizing it will be a wa
y to make some kind of karmic corporate reparations?”
“This, in essence, is correct.”
“When?”
“According to Giffler—”
“Who is an absolute looney toon.”
“Well,” Maya continues, “he says they are scrambling to pull this together ASAP. He wants us to come up with a tentative agenda by end of day tomorrow.”
“Eight a.m.: meet and greet with psychotic delusional prince.”
“If you like,” she says, “I could pick you up.”
“Nine forty-five: press conference with nonexistent members of the electronic Galadonian media.”
Maya, deciding to play along, adds, “Eleven a.m.: photo op alongside dried-up riverbed. Noon: explain female homosexuality to a population that does not have a word for it, let alone acknowledge the concept.”
“Now we’re talking!” He laughs, and it feels as if it is for the first time in weeks. “Are you sure you don’t want to brainstorm tonight? We could go back to your nephew’s place.”
Holy Water Page 19