A moment before, Alisa had said, “I stand corrected” in that supercilious way she had, as if she hadn’t actually been wrong at all. But I suddenly thought of something so obvious and stupid about her plan that she would have to admit she was wrong no matter what.
“So what’s to prevent your neighbors from flipping the switch themselves? Especially if the light is burning in the middle of the day or the middle of the night when it doesn’t have to be, or it isn’t on in the evening when it should be? You live in a four-flat. That’s three other sets of neighbors who can flip the switch any time they come down to do the laundry.”
“Ah, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. You don’t even know the light switch I’m talking about. The one right above that long folding table for the laundry? No one ever touches it because it’s not connected to anything.”
She was right again. Suddenly, I had an image of the little Gilbert science kit I’d received for my seventh or eighth birthday, not long before we’d been forced to move back to Buenos Aires for a few years. It had a miniature light bulb you screwed into a circuit board and a bunch of switches you had to flip in just the right order to complete the electrical series and make the connection work properly. I couldn’t figure it out for a long while, and the bulb remained stubbornly un-illuminated, and I felt really disappointed and incompetent. But finally I’d gotten the switches in the right order and the miniature bulb suddenly glowed. It was incredibly beautiful, that minuscule glow. It had made me feel so happy and triumphant, even though I turned on and off lights all over the house all of the time, and those bulbs glowed in pretty much the same way. Maybe it was because I’d done it myself. My feelings now were a little more complicated, but inside of my head, right at about the spot where MariAngela had appeared, a little spot was glowing.
7
If anything, I felt even more excited than I had as an eight-year-old, so we tried the experiment for several nights running, but this time around, neither one of us could flip the switches in a way that worked. I couldn’t remember my dreams for the most part, and when I did, they had nothing to do with the light switch in the basement of Alisa’s condo, much less what position it was in. Most of them were my usual confused dreams about traveling and getting lost on trains and subways, and Diane would probably say that this was really all about my memories of passing through the birth canal or my fears of passing through that other tunnel into the bright white light at the moment of my death, or something. In any event, as Diane also said, my dreams were about being helpless and lost, and that helplessness extended itself to being utterly unable to “see” what Alisa was doing with the light switch.
Alisa and I went down to her basement once or twice, but to what end, I cannot say. We’d just stand there looking at the switch and at the laundry table, and Alisa would sigh, a bit wistfully, as if she’d been expecting more from me. As long as we were down there, I’d check the chipmunk trap that I’d periodically bait with a dab of chunky peanut butter. It was a cage the size of a toaster oven, placed in the corner behind the washing machines, and it was always empty. But the previous summer, the small cage had captured six or seven of the little guys, and so had a second trap I’d set in Alisa’s condo, right near the heating grate in the living room. One time I’d placed a granola bar, still in its silvery wrapper, about a foot away from the trap in the living room so I could catch one of them in the act. That same day, while Alisa and I were in the kitchen making sandwiches, we heard an unmistakable rustling, wrinkling sound and tiptoed back into the living room to see a chipmunk struggling to open the bar; he looked like a lumberjack trying to balance a log on his shoulders. After a while, the chipmunk gave up trying to tear through the wrapper (he didn’t understand that there was a little notch in the wrapper, nor did he have the opposable thumbs to exploit it), so Alisa and I watched, fascinated, as he sniffed his way toward the peanut butter at the back of the trap, and then, when he triggered the mechanism and the barred gate slammed shut behind him, he twirled around and flung himself against the gate in a scrambling panic. I took the trap out to a nearby park and let the little guy go, and for all I know the basement and living-room traps were populated, all that summer, by the same two chipmunks making the same journey—over and over, from the park where I’d left them, across the busy street, and back into Alisa’s condo.
Maybe the low emotion that Diane had referred to was out of the question, because I was in my own sort of caged, scrambling panic. I could barely sleep at all. Mostly it was because of my job. A lot of companies were pulling in their horns as far as traditional marketing programs were concerned, spending less on PR and advertising and building cross-platform social media programs—or taking all the work in-house. I wasn’t exactly on the bubble, but I could sort of sense in my normal, non-psychic way that my boss was humming thoughtfully every time he passed my desk and I wasn’t working on anything. It made me feel like even more of a failure than I already thought I was, and that made it very hard to get back to work. So during the day I was staring at the office walls a lot, and at night I was staring at the ceiling a lot.
In fact, I was examining the off-white wall in my office at the very moment when my father, for the first time in several months, called me on my cell.
He said, in his still-serviceable English, “Hello, Carlos. I’ve shattered my kneecap.”
His tone was a little muzzy though; his voice seemed hollow and very weak, like the outline of an elaborate drawing that hadn’t been shaded in.
“Your what? Your kneecap? Shit, Dad. How?”
“What does it matter how? I need you down here. I’m in agony.”
“I know, I know. Let me—I have to see what I can do.”
“Why?”
“I mean about when I can get down there.”
“I know. Why?”
“Why? Because I have a job, and because what if this is another one of your false alarms?”
“What do you mean, fucking false alarm? I lost a lot of blood. The pain from the kneecap—it’s beyond description. Thank God I lost consciousness. It was like the worst electric shock you could imagine. For the first few minutes, I prayed I would die. And then I prayed…and then the ambulance came.”
“Shit, I’m so sorry. How did this happen?”
“Just come down here, and I’ll explain the whole story.”
“Dad, I have responsibilities. I can’t just come down there. Especially when you’re not being honest with me.”
“You don’t believe I’ve shattered my kneecap? I’ll text you the picture. It’ll make you puke your guts out.”
“That’s not what I mean by not being honest.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. You started to say ‘and then I prayed….’ What could you possibly pray for after you prayed to die?”
“Well, that I’d live, of course. That the ambulance would come. I changed my mind, okay?”
“Dad, that’s not what I heard. What I heard was you starting to say ‘and then I prayed he’d die.’ ”
“Who is he?”
“That’s what I’m asking you, Dad. Who did this to you? If you’d just shattered your kneecap, you would’ve told me how it happened by now—you slipped on a step, another taxi hit you, some story with alcohol slopping around in it for sure. But you haven’t told me how, so I have to think it’s something bad, and that would mean that someone did this to you because of something you did.”
“My God. My God. You should have been a detective.”
“So someone did?”
“Shot me. Yes.”
“Because of Trilenium?” That was the casino he frequented; I’d had a vague idea that he’d been losing a lot of money there, just as, when I was a child, I’d remembered my mother fighting with him about his visits to Chicago-area racetracks like Maywood and Arlington Park.
“So, because of Trilenium. I figured.”
“All I want is for you to come down here and take care of me.”
“Father, you know I can’t do that. Not now. Isn’t Mother taking care of you?”
“I’m on so many painkillers right now I couldn’t tell you who’s doing what. I just can’t go through that again.”
“Wait. Go through what again?”
“Shithead, being shot again.”
“Again, why again?”
“Because the first two kneecaps were just to get me to pay attention.”
“Wait a minute. First two? You said ‘kneecap’ before. Now it’s both? And just how many kneecaps do you have?”
“You know what I mean, idiot. Your mother has two of her own, plus they said they’d shoot me in the head next. God, I can’t tell you. The first one was such a shock and such agony, but the second one was far worse. Far worse. Because by then I knew how painful it was, and when I saw this gigantic shithead in a shiny blue-green suit aiming for the other one, the, I don’t know how to call, the dread, and the outrage, and the unfairness of it, my God, it was overwhelming. And that guy, the guy who shot me, I mean, he was so wide, it was like a block long of nothing but shiny blue-green fabric so that even if that first shot hadn’t blown apart my kneecap, I think it would’ve taken me a week to run around him, it just left me feeling so hopeless and, I don’t know, shit.”
“And how are you still alive after all of this ostensible trauma?”
“I don’t know the meaning of this ‘ostensible.’ Like I said, it was a warning. He made a point of showing me it was a .22. He said, I mean before the first knee, ‘We don’t want to kill you. But it’s still gonna hurt.’ ”
“And you want me to come down there to protect you? Me? I don’t know anything about the Argentine Mafia or whatever it is. They’d just laugh at me. And a .22 can still kill you if it’s aimed at your head, you know.”
“No, not protect me exactly.”
“So what, exactly? If the first two kneecaps were just to get you to pay attention, then I wonder pay attention to what? Do you mean pay attention or just pay?”
There was a long pause.
Then he said, “Just pay.”
“So you really just need my money, right? So you can pay these guys your gambling debts before they shoot you in the head? Is that it? Why don’t I just wire the money to you?”
“Because you’re going to need to come down here to negotiate for me.”
“And why is that?”
“Because, in U.S. dollars, I owe over sixty thousand.”
I paused for a long moment and looked up at the ceiling as a respite from the identically colored wall.
“So you need me to give you sixty thousand bucks, is that about the size of it?”
“The size, the amount, however you want to say it, yes.”
“And not visit?”
“No, not unless you would like to, of course. Your mother and I are always delighted to see you.”
“Delighted to see me? Are you serious, Father? I thought you wanted me down there to take care of you! What about your two shattered kneecaps, then?”
“Yes! This is exactly what I said! They threatened to shoot them off without the money!”
“Father, your English sometimes goes in and out with the tides. Do you know exactly what the word ‘threatened’ means?”
“Yes, Carlos, you idiot. I know better English than you do.”
“So, father, if I have this clear, your kneecaps are still intact.”
“In what? Yes, they are still not shot, but they will be soon. That’s what I’ve been trying to say from the beginning of this conversation, idiot.”
This was not the first conversation along these lines that I’d had with my father when he was drunk. On the previous occasions, when the putative injury was a broken leg, I’d given him the money he’d asked for out of weariness and sheer admiration for his brazen prevarication, but he’d never asked for $60,000 before. I couldn’t afford it; I couldn’t afford anything, really, and yet I had no doubt that someone was threatening him and my mother over his gambling debts, and I feared for him. But the fear was tempered by past and present disgust.
I did have one disturbing dream during this period, but it wasn’t about my father or the Argentine Mafia, or about light switches and dark tunnels, and it wasn’t even psychic. In the dream, I was in a grammar school classroom filled with a bunch of twelve-year-old kids running around and whooping it up, I guess because the teacher wasn’t there for some reason. I’m not even sure I was in the dream myself, or whether I was just an observer. But one of the little girls was seated very calmly at the desk instead of running around like the others, and the weird thing was that she was transparent. It was like she was made of clear, uncolored gelatin or something, so you could see her bones beneath the clear jelly. And you couldn’t just see them, you could hear them, bumping softly against each other, the sound muffled—and therefore, oddly, magnified—by the jellied flesh that covered them.
I knew exactly who that girl was. It was little Elizabeth, of course, and although I’d been responsible for her death at the age of three-and-a-half months, I was somehow imagining her as a twelve-year-old, a clanking skeleton, and thus just as dead as she actually was anyway. But why twelve? My guess was that it took me until I was twelve to understand the significance and the horror of her death, so I saw her death in my dream as taking place at the same time that death became real for me.
It also could have something to do with the fact that when I returned from Buenos Aires to Chicago, I was about twelve, and, back on familiar ground, I might have begun thinking about her again, even though when I was twelve she would have been four, had she survived the slow process of being suffocated in a tangle of blankets and sheets between her sister’s bed and the wall. Or it could have been that when I returned to Chicago, Willa herself, who really would have been twelve at the time, like me, was nowhere to be found, in my school or in my neighborhood, and so I was thinking subconsciously about how she wasn’t there, and somehow she’d become dead too, in my mind. Either way, it seemed plausible that the first iteration of this dream had happened when I myself was twelve, though this was, of course, impossible to determine.
Maybe the transparent girl in the dream was some sort of amalgam between Willa and Elizabeth or, as Diane would put it, was unstably “shifting” between those two souls. Maybe part of that little girl was actually me, too, though I doubt it. All I know is that I couldn’t stop thinking of her, and the faintly clattering bones that I could hear through the transparent, jellylike flesh.
8
Every day, I got a little bit more worried about my job situation, but as summer began to take hold of the city, I got a call that would lead me to everything I would come to discover about me and Alisa and Willa and MariAngela.
The call came from my friend and coworker Mon Bowen, who also was, in a manner of speaking, my “agent.” My musical career was so moribund, and so below the radar, that I didn’t have an actual agent, but Bowen, who was a moderately successful soundtrack composer for documentaries and basic cable television programs in his off-hours from the agency, would sometimes keep his eye open for paying gigs other than Berto’s. He’d also post an occasional performance of mine on YouTube, and once I actually got a favorable comment from someone I didn’t know, and I was so excited I couldn’t sleep, so that gives you an idea of the level of my fame. Anyway, when he connected me with a weekend gig at some other club in the area besides Berto’s, I’d pay him by buying him dinner, the value of which approximately equaled the amount I’d get paid for the gig, and a couple of beers, which put me in the red. We were both fine with this arrangement, though Alisa thought the whole thing was a childish waste
of time.
But this was something unexpected. He and his girlfriend had been in Hawaii on vacation, and they had befriended the manager of the lounge in their hotel in Honolulu. Bowen had bragged on me, as he was wont to do, and had somehow managed to convince the manager to book me for a full week of shows. It wouldn’t even pay the cost of my airfare, much less Alisa’s, but I’d never been to Hawaii, and I had some vacation time built up. Maybe if I wasn’t around to be fired, they wouldn’t fire me. Stupid, I know, but that’s the way I liked to think.
Bowen was pretty excited himself. The “Mon” part was just a joke; his first name was Malcolm, but he was the product of a union between an Irish father and a Jamaican mother and had grown up in Jamaica. He had a high-pitched voice and a lilting speaking pattern that accentuated the near-indistinguishability, under the right conditions, of Jamaican and Irish accents, those right conditions being, respectively, ganja or Guinness. He tried to get me to partake of both, but other than the occasional pint of stout, I wasn’t all that interested. In fact, his curly hair was receding and his eyes always were a little or a lot red, and it made me think that with every spliff he smoked, he, rather than the spliff, was inexorably burning away. Still, he was a genial guy and a good friend, and he kept me from getting too broody in my music.
I yanked out my cell and called Alisa.
“Guess where we’re going?”
She sounded distracted. “I don’t know. I’m not psychic.”
“Hey, did you hear about the guy with the psychic girlfriend? She broke up with him before they met.”
“Ha, ha. So where’re we going?”
“Okay, get this. Hawaii. The week of June 22nd.”
“Really? Why?
Everything Solid has a Shadow Page 5