“No, it’s all right. Don’t look so worried! We learned something, didn’t we? And I asked you to try it. I wish I knew more about the latest brain-body research. I better read up on it. If I could just design some nice tight simple experiments …” He snagged a clean coffee cup from the table behind.
Rob poured fresh coffee into it, marveling at this resilience, and Edwin took a long thirsty swallow. When he was sure Edwin was okay, Rob said, “Listen, Ed. You know I spent the summer reading books. I did read about one guy like me.”
“You did? Holy mike!” Edwin banged his new cup down on the table.
“Don’t get excited,” Rob begged. “It was a guy five thousand years ago. A king, name of Gilgamesh.”
Edwin looked blank. “Never heard of him. Is he a Biblical character?”
“I don’t think so. I read a long poem about him.”
“I guess I better get a copy of it.” He pulled out a notepad and a pen.
Rob nodded in approval. Then the sight of Edwin’s notepad brought something else to mind, and he took out his own. He almost expected the page to be blank. If you copy an inscription in a dream it shouldn’t be there when you wake. But he knew it hadn’t been a dream, and his careful copy of the funny writing was there where he drew it. He tore the leaf out and passed it over. “Can you read that?”
“Nope.” Edwin shot a humorous green glance across the table. “I am actually not all-knowing, Rob. I may act like I know it all, but don’t be deceived.”
Rob laughed. “I didn’t really expect you could. You think we could find someone to translate it?”
“I guess, if it’s really writing. But why? Where did you get this?”
“I was lost,” Rob said slowly. “And I was looking for directions. And I found a signpost, with this message on it. I never found writing before, it’s not that sort of place, so this must be important.”
Edwin leaned back and stared at him. “I’ve fallen off the sled here.”
“I—I’m sorry, Ed. I don’t think I can explain better.” All his inner journeyings were incommunicable, Rob realized. Describing his own actions and crimes was straightforward. But his inner adventures were too vivid, too intimate, for mere words. He might never be able to convey their reality. It was the guy thing, in spades. For a moment he felt utterly desolate.
“Don’t worry about it,” Edwin said quickly. “There’s plenty on the plate to deal with. Let me see what I can do. Would it be okay if I digitized it and uploaded the writing onto the Internet? That’d be the fastest way to find out what it is.”
“Sure, why not.”
“So let’s leave it there for the moment. And now, moving on to the next item on our agenda—would it be all right, Rob, if we discussed your personal situation?”
Rob frowned. “What for?”
“I can’t believe that it’s comfortable sleeping outdoors in October.” Edwin pushed his empty cup aside and leaned forward on his elbows. “And in no time the snow’ll be flying. You can’t crash at a fur salon forever, Rob. Suppose you came and camped out on my sofa-bed?”
“I appreciate the offer, Ed, but no thanks. It would be an imposition.”
“All right. How about a homeless shelter? My church helps run one in Silver Spring. They offer job counseling and sleep space.”
“An Open Door Center.”
Edwin raised an eyebrow. “You know it?”
“There’s one in Fairfax too. I sent a bum there once.”
“But you’ve never stayed at one yourself, am I right? So it would be a new experience for you. Why not give it a try?”
Edwin was so persuasive that it was easier to give in. “All right,” Rob said. Somehow the former ease of their talk had slipped away. He sat silent, staring down at his hands folded on the red Formica tabletop.
Edwin rubbed the back of his neck. “Look, Rob, I have to ask you this. I know you said you were giving it up. But, except for just now—have you been messing with my head?”
Rob looked up, shocked and yet unsurprised. “No! I mean—I don’t know, Ed. I haven’t deliberately done a thing, I swear it. But—I told you, about Angela and Davey. I do stuff without knowing it. I’m so damned strong. That’s why it would be crazy to stay on your sofa. I can’t get too close to anybody. I
don’t dare. It’s not safe. I’m not safe. Maybe even this homeless shelter is a dangerous idea, maybe even the street. Sometimes I think I should get right away from everybody, live in the Arctic tundra—”
Edwin reached a sympathetic hand across the table to touch his clenched fingers. Rob jerked away from the contact, the words trembling on the tip of his tongue, You don’t see me! But Edwin spoke first, cutting them off:
“It’s okay, Rob, it’s okay! You don’t have to escape. Everything’s fine!”
“There, you see?” Rob said bitterly. “How did you know that I was going to tarnhelm, unless I transmitted it to you?”
“Sherlock by name, Holmes by nature,” Edwin said. “I didn’t need the weirdness. Anyone could see what you were going to do, written in your face. I didn’t mean to upset you, bud. It’s just that—the things you told me Thursday would unsettle anybody. And when it began raining cats and dogs I woke up in the middle of the night on Friday and thought, Is Rob out in this? And then I lay in the dark and thought, Is he making me care, making me get involved? So it sort of got on my nerves.”
“Oh god, I wish I were dead.”
“Don’t say that! It’s okay, Rob, truly it is. If you’re drawing me in, that’s fine. I—I consent, all right? People need to care more, not less.
I’m a younger brother. I can deal with strong-minded people. You must meet
Carina sometime. No one could stand up against your deliberate manipulation, you’ve proved that, but your unconscious influence can’t be malevolent.”
“Not malevolent?” Rob demanded incredulously. “And you’re supposed to be smart. I told you about New York!”
“That wasn’t really you, Rob. You recognized that yourself. This whole thing had dropped on you like a grand piano, and you were miserable. You aren’t really a bad person.”
“It wasn’t really me,” Rob repeated. The kindly words were an overwhelming relief. He himself wasn’t the liar or rapist; it was some separate unsavory entity that he could expel or defeat. But Rob felt impelled to add, “But I’m still dangerous.”
“Dangerous, what’s to worry? We’ll deal with it somehow. In the meantime, what I want to deal with now is dessert. Our family motto is, Dessert Always.”
With a flourish he held a dessert card out. Rob took it, saying, “I appreciate your trust, Ed. But you’re crazy, you know that.”
“I may not get to do many crazy things in future,” Edwin said absently, studying the menu. “No scope for it in the space program. Hot fudge for me—how about you?”
CHAPTER 3
Rob had never set foot in a homeless shelter before. The Open Door Center was in Silver Spring, a suburb a couple of miles around the Washington Beltway from NIH. A big crumbling gray bungalow on a transitional street had been converted into offices and dorm space. Rob gave the man at registration a minimum of information, pocketed the house rules without reading them, and went straight to bed in the men’s dorm room at the back of the ground floor.
He woke the next morning to raindrops on his face. For a second Rob was back on the park bench in New York City again, despair filling his chest like quick-set concrete, but then he came fully awake. A large grayish stain was spreading on the plaster ceiling above the folding cots, and water dripped down. A few beds over, another man burst into tears, and someone else bellowed, “Hey! The fucking roof is fucking leaking fucking again!”
Rob rolled out of bed, muttering, and put his shoes on. Wasn’t anyone going to pick up the ball? Going up the stairs he met a very pink young man coming down. “The roof is leaking down here,” Rob barked. “What’s being done?”
“Um, I don’t know. Let me go check the volunt
eer’s manual.”
The carrot-headed young man skittered on downstairs. Growling, Rob ascended to the smaller upper floor and went from room to interconnecting room inspecting the ceilings, ignoring the sleepy complaints of the mothers and kids. He was looking for an attic access hatch. He found it in the bathroom ceiling. By standing on the old-fashioned bathtub’s rim he was able to pop it open. The pink youth came in just as Rob was preparing to climb higher.
“You got a flashlight?”
He blushed even pinker. “You’re not supposed to be here. This is the women’s John!”
“The roof is leaking,” Rob explained patiently. “You never ignore a roof leak. Especially when it’s not even raining. Now—I need a flashlight.”
After some delay a flashlight was found. Rob hoisted himself into the attic. The slanting ceiling was so low he had to squat. The space was cobwebby and littered with mouse droppings, but quite innocent of insulation. This at least made it easy to find the large pool of water on the floor near the dormer. “You should insulate,” Rob said.
The young man stood on the bathtub below, staring through the hatch as if Rob were proposing to hang upside down from the rafters like a bat. “That would cost a fortune!”
“You probably blow a fortune in oil every winter—this place has oil heat,
right?” Rob could feel the old Harry Homeowner instincts kick in. Leak first, then insulation! He shone the flashlight at the pool of water on the floor. Where was the water coming from? Not from overhead—it was a frosty clear morning outside. He peered between the louvers of the gable vent. “I get it, here’s your problem. Look at that!”
“What is it? What is it?”
“The gutters. Come on.” Rob climbed down again, swinging by his hands from the edge of the hatch until he could balance on the tub. “You got a ladder?”
“No, of course not.”
Rob swept past him and down the stairs, where one of the boards was missing, to the front door. The front porch spanned the width of the house and had once boasted gingerbread and fretwork railings, all broken and faced with plywood now. Rob climbed up and stood on the rickety rail, and then shinned his way up the corner porch post. Leprous chips of paint and chunks of spongy rotten wood shredded away under his hands and legs. “Don’t do that,” the young man begged from the unkempt lawn below. “We should ask the committee! We should call Pastor Phillipson!”
Rob sat on the edge of the porch roof and glared down at the little twit.
If there was anything he despised it was deliberate incompetence. But afer all, the kid was a volunteer. “How old are you?”
“Uh, nineteen. I’m Jonathan, by the way.”
“I’m Rob. Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“I am! At Montgomery Junior College. But I don’t have Monday morning classes, so the college fellowship tapped me for the Center here.”
“Well, Jonathan, maybe they haven’t taught you yet that dealing with gutters is one of an American male’s duties and prerogatives.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Says so right in the U.S. Constitution—go look it up. It’s just after the right to bear arms.” Jonathan actually seemed to be seriously considering this. “Besides, the ladies admire this kind of work,” Rob couldn’t resist adding. “Girlfriends. Mothers. That’s the sort who particularly abhor roof leaks. You should take this opportunity to learn about them. It will have a significant impact on your relationship with the opposite sex.”
“Golly! Maybe I better take you up on it.”
Rob gave him a hand up onto the porch roof, thinking, If I teach him, then the next time this happens he can fix it. And I won’t be climbing on a rickety roof at eight A.M. “See, here’s the attic. This flat bit must be
the roof over the men’s dorm. And here’s the water. It must be coming in under the dormer, and then on down into the bedrooms.”
“Wow! No wonder it’s leaking! Why doesn’t it run down to the ground?”
Rob splashed through the standing pool which had formed near the base of the attic dormer. “Here’s the downspout, all blocked up. Hand me that stick, will you?”
With the stick Rob fished wet clots of leaves out of the downspout. The water began to seep away immediately with a satisfying trickling noise. Jonathan helped by tossing more leaves over the edge of the roof. Like an old war-horse at the sound of the trumpets, Rob leaped into battle. He circled the entire roof and cleared the gutters all around. “It’s autumn,” he pointed out. “The leaves are still falling. Come early winter, say on a nice dry day in November or December, you climb up here and do this again. Then you’ll be all set for the winter. No more roof leak.”
“I can’t believe it,” Jonathan said. “It’s like a miracle.”
Rob rolled his eyes and climbed down to ground level again. It was ten o’clock and he was starving. Hanging out with a food fiend like Edwin had gotten him into eating far more than he used to in New York. He left Jonathan to explain the miracle of gutters to another Center counsellor, and went inside to wash up. Because of zoning regulations there was no kitchen at the Open Door Center, For meals the residents were supposed to hit a nearby soup kitchen. Rob foresaw having to do that someday soon, but at the moment he still had quarters. He’d walk a couple blocks over into downtown Silver Spring and have a decent breakfast.
They were still yattering on the porch when he came out. “Rob!” Jonathan said. “This is Mrs. Ruppert, the jobs counsellor and daytime manager.”
“Hi,” Rob said reluctantly.
“You are handy,” Mrs. Ruppert pronounced.
He looked down at his feet in their tattered athletic shoes. “Thank you.”
“We should have no problem placing you.”
Rob tensed. He knew, without any mental stuff, that he shouldn’t say he didn’t want a job. Not to a jobs counsellor. “Maybe after breakfast,” he muttered.
“But before we begin the placement search, we were wondering, do you know anything about—plumbing?”
“You see,” Jonathan broke in, “the downstairs toilet has never worked right. Every now and then it just runs over. It’s gross.”
Rob couldn’t help smiling into his blond beard. “I’m not a real plumber, but I can do fixes on toilets. I have—I mean I used to have an old house we were fixing up.”
“If you would look at it, at your entire convenience of course, we would be so grateful!” Mrs. Ruppert, a very short middle-aged lady, beamed adoringly up at him. Obviously working toilets loomed large in her concept of happiness. Rob hoped that Jonathan was absorbing the lesson.
“Let me make a pass at it after breakfast,” he said. “While I’m gone, maybe Jonathan can scout around for a pipe wrench.”
That morning Rob replaced the innards of all three of the Center’s toilets.
In the afternoon he cleared a slow drain, caulked all the shower stalls, and began on the windows. It took all day Tuesday to finish caulking the outsides of the windows and doors, with only one short break to patch a hole in the dry-wall near the office. By Wednesday Mrs. Ruppert had twisted Pastor Phillipson’s arm and gotten authorization to replace some long-missing floor boards and linoleum squares. Rob began installing them immediately. He also made the radiators quit knocking by bleeding the sediment out of them.
It was an almost poignant pleasure to work with his hands again around a
house. No wonder he had been so desperately unhappy in New York. Looking back, Rob wondered how he could have been so stupid. After working all his adult life and years of being an energetic homeowner, and then entering the marathon called raising twins, he had switched to idleness, just panhandling and reading newspapers all day long. A recipe for misery! It was much better, much more fun, to do things. And this building needed work. From something the hardware store man had said when Rob was buying spackle, he gathered that the Center was not considered an asset to the neighborhood.
On Wednesday evening Rob sat cross-legged in the hall mea
suring the last board for the floor and pondering lawn care economics. On the one hand grass was merely cosmetic. Spreading fall fertilizer on it wouldn’t increase the comfort of the residents one bit. On the other hand it could be argued that any improvement in the way the place looked might placate the neighbors. Rob was realistic about the Not-In-My-Backyard phenomenon. Having a homeless shelter on your street did nothing for your real estate values. Heaven knew that if the county had proposed one on the Lewis block in Fairfax, Julianne would have hit the ceiling.
Julianne. She never fertilized or mowed the grass—that had been Rob’s task. Had she just let the lawn go to hay this summer? More likely she’d hired a lawn service. Rob looked up at the pay phone, which hung in the hall near the front door, and temptation seized him.
His hand was on the receiver, the other fishing for quarters in his pocket,
before Rob got a grip on himself. What exactly would he say to her? “Hi honey, I’m in Tanzania … No, I don’t know when I’ll be back … No, no paycheck …” The lies he’d have to tell wouldn’t deceive a baby, yet he’d have to muscle her into swallowing them. And what good would it do? At least he’d had the sense to command her not to worry about him. There was nothing more he could add to that. He swallowed hard and leaned his forehead against the graffiti on the wall. It had been so much less painful to just not remember. The doorbell chimed right above his head, making Rob jump. He looked through the glass, and flung the door open. “Ed! Thank goodness you’re here!”
Plump as a robin in a red down parka, Edwin said, “Hey, Rob, what’s wrong?”
Rob shook his head. “Nothing. Just—just a little homesick, that’s all. Come on in, you’re letting in the cold.”
“Is that okay?” Edwin looked uncertainly towards the common room, where some residents were watching a sitcom.
“Well technically, no—no visitors allowed. But we’re not supposed to go in and out at night, either. So either you come in, or we yell through the door at each other.”
Rob ushered him across the hall to the dingy little office, and unlocked it. “You have a key,” Edwin noticed.
How Like A God Page 13