“Follow me,” he said.
His belly was hard, and starting to bloat.
“I gotta say you look really terrible.”
“Never better in my life.”
He led me to the living room where I used to watch TV with my mother. Where we ate ice cream from a shared wooden bowl. The carpet was the same dull gray, but now worn down and matted, balding in places. Outside light leaked in between creases, through rips in the cardboard covering the windows, but mostly the room was dark. An orange tabby beneath the glass coffee table, crouching, stared at me with silver eyes. A computer sat on the table. It was modern, thin-screened, and this was surprising, yes, but no more so than anything else. The sofa was covered by a white sheet, as if he were prepping to paint the walls. A pillow, a body-shaped impression. He’d been living in the living room and it stank of it.
“You can sleep here, or upstairs. I don’t go upstairs much. I have trouble sleeping up there.”
“So where?”
He pointed to the hallway, and waved his hand. “I know, I know, I know.”
“We need to sit, and start from the beginning.”
“You don’t know the half of it!” He sat and turned on a lamp beside the computer, a replica of the lamp in the dining room. “My lifeline, Junior. Isn’t she pretty?”
“You hate TV and you have this?” The sides of the computer were partly covered with yellow Post-it Notes.
“I still hate the TV! I keep two in the hall closet, never use them. But I hardly go out since your mother left.”
“You said she was here.”
“She’s always here. And without this”—he touched the screen—“no legs. I’m exhausted.”
We looked at each other, like we were both looking for the right words because how do you talk about this when you’ve never been here before? It was scary to see him like this. A laugh sprang from my insides. “You know what you look like? A baby. A filthy hairy baby.”
Anxiety fell from his face, and he laughed back at me. “Ha! Now we’re talking. I’m going back, Junior. Crawling back, diving in!” He rubbed his hands together. And then he looked at his hands, itched the back of his hands, one, and then the other. Rubbed, itched. Rubbed, itched …
“Dad.”
The spell broke, and he seemed embarrassed. Put his hands under his legs.
I walked over to the window and took hold of the heavy drapery. I dug among the folds for the drawstring and pulled. Bent back the cardboard. An explosive swirl of dust motes and a long shaft of daylight washed in. I turned to his nasty look.
“Put it back,” he said.
“It’s good for you,” I said, peeling away the cardboard.
“Let there be light!” he shouted, his arms half raised.
I laughed. He didn’t.
He said, “I said put that back.” He covered his eyes.
I walked over to him, and touched his shoulder. “Hey.”
He slapped at my hand, and said: “This is not your house.”
A white cat jumped into his lap and pressed its face against his arms. He stroked its back. “Good kitty.” He looked at me. The cat jumped, as he stood. He walked away, hand pressing to his side.
“We’ll talk more later,” he said. “I promise. I’m tired.”
I watched him walk away and this made me feel more alone than I’d ever felt. I had the terrible feeling that he would leave the room and I would never see him again. I folded the cardboard back in place, and heard the door of the bathroom slam shut. I heard him fasten the lock. It all sounded like he wanted me to hear it. I walked into the hall, and saw the red light spilling from under. I went back to the living room and dragged at the curtains, covering the windows. The shaft of sunlight drowned.
Time passed. An hour or so. I sat there in the dining room, at the table, and tried to get my thoughts together. I walked through the rooms, the kitchen, the living and dining rooms, and I was fascinated and moved by the most mundane things. The gilded frames on the living room wall, and how they’d been there for decades. They were now peeling and showing wood from beneath. I remembered my father buying them at a yard sale across the street, and hanging them on the wall just how he’d found them. They stayed empty for months. He eventually set a printed psalm within each.
I walked over to the bathroom door and called out his name. He didn’t respond. I heard him snoring. I shook my head, totally befuddled, feeling uneasy, a little sick. I almost knocked, but went outside for a smoke instead. I felt helpless and dumb, even responsible for what was happening, whatever it was, and my fantasy of saving the day dissolved into nothing but anxiety and shame. Afraid the door would lock shut behind me, I picked up a piece of wood from the porch and wedged it between the door and the frame. The sun was gone. But still that stink of fuel. Across the street two boys played handball in the vacant lot against the side of a neighboring garage. I took out my phone and dialed Sarah.
It rang once, and I ended the call, regretting I had tried.
I dialed again, immediately ended that call, and decided I would never call her again.
I dialed one more time, and left a long and awkward voice mail, telling her where I was. That she was right about Dad, and I thought she should know.
Sitting on the porch step, I lightly stubbed my cigarette on the brick. I lit the tip again. The smoke wiped my busy brain clean. But there was also something in the spark of match to cigarette that I always loved, the simple act of setting fire to the paper’s end. I liked the partial loss of me that came with every cigarette, the surrender, the abandon of will, the mindlessness of it all, like the emptiness you feel during a good long run. If I never turned my head, the house would disappear and take my father with it. I checked the digits on my phone. A blue rubber ball came rolling across the street.
One of the boys jogged over. He wore tube socks over his hands with holes cut for his fingers. The ball bounced against the curb, and the boy grabbed it. He threw it to me. I caught it, threw it back, and he jogged off. I wanted to get drunk. I wanted to stop myself from deciding what to do. I wanted to wait until morning to call someone about Dad. It seemed obvious. I had to call someone. But now? The man was sleeping. For sure, yes, a doctor, psychiatrist, someone would have to look at my father. They’d want to know everything. Where had I been, and how did this happen? How was I supposed to know? Was I supposed to know? I wanted to get drunk and not have to think about it and then drunkenly stew in the facts that my mother was no longer here anymore, not in this house, or on this earth, and it seemed a little unfair that he was stealing my attention away from her memory. But it was also totally unfair of me to think that way, because the man was obviously not doing well without her. I needed a drink, and one solid memory of my mother to cling to, before I could get myself together and attend to Dad. I figured I would look for the family album.
I also figured a fifty–fifty chance Sarah would return the call. But that was not a good bet.
I knew she wouldn’t call. She shouldn’t have. How is it we can love someone who refuses to love us back? A fucking teenager’s question! But still … I mean, can you really love someone who’s not really there? Not anymore? Which one of you is more of a ghost? Three thousand miles away, practically on the moon, and I was pining. Then again, so much of what I’d loved was already gone. Sarah. Mom. My business at the time, or what was left of it, was already swirling in the crapper. Now Dad was not looking especially good. There had to be a reason. Maybe that I hadn’t been to church in over two decades. I mean if I really wanted to cut through the fat, like Dad said, so much fat, the question then was this: What exactly was the trajectory that followed from my brief career as a prophet? Scratch that: the failed prophet from Richmond Hill, Queens. Young Josiah Laudermilk, one of God’s Great American (Would-be) Men. How did I get here? I’d been doing my best as an adult man to avoid the question. In fact, I had run from it, as far as I could.
I had run from east to western ocean, over mountains, and
through deserts. Actually, I drove; I rented a green Jeep Cherokee because that vehicle made me feel like I was on a mission, and I never once looked in the rearview mirror. I ran through women, unabashedly, but ashamed, always shamed by needing someone, always someone, a woman, another woman, because love always ends, until I met Sarah. But then I ran from her after pretty much our first talk of children. I ran through cash, and professional success, and away from my livelihood. Thank God for my right-hand man, second in command, and closest friend, Mr. Amad Singh, who kept the great leaky boat afloat without me, minding the store way back in California. I ran from Mom, thinking death might be catching. And I ran from that stage, that damnable podium, practically as soon as I could leave the house (this house!), not realizing, of course, that I was headed right for the future—like all of us—headed for the year of prophecy 2000. (Not to mention the woeful and belatedly apocalyptic September that followed.) I ran from Dad. I ran from his insistence I was special, from his compulsive and overwhelming need to believe, from his very blood, which of course I couldn’t get away from, no matter where I went. In fact, here I was sitting on the steps of his front porch.
Something else changed in me that summer. There was the “vision,” yes, but also something else. I felt like I had grown up, which is ridiculous, I guess, because I was only twelve years old. Nonetheless. I felt different. Stronger. More assured. And less lonely—because of Issy, who all of a sudden started coming over to my house. Which brings us back to Issy, who for some reason remains entangled among my thoughts even to this day. Not every thought, no, but thoughts of family, of my parents, and the frightening and attractive idea of having a child.
Havi had apparently grown tired of him. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Yet our subsequent friendship was surprising to me. But also ennobling. Can I say that? Yes. Ennobling. Because he brought out something good in me, and so I was good to Issy. Or as good as a twelve-year-old can be, or be aware of. I was certainly aware that he was good, and not just to me. Just plain good. So when Havi got a girlfriend—who was three years older than him, by the way, which seems so wrong to me now (then again, his mustache had sprouted, on the sides of his lips mostly, a thin hint of a mustache, his mouth in a whisper of parentheses, so he did look older than he was), my point: Havi dropped Issy like a toy he got tired of. And it just so happened that around this time I was playing less and less with action figures, my Star Wars figures propped on shelves, like trophies from much younger days, and no longer climbing from my pockets. I swear it had something to do with that ceiling. Lost innocence? Too much? My point is simply that Issy’s timing was good when one sunny day, after Sunday church, he asked to come over to my house.
This happened right around the same time Mom first got what she called body tired. “My whole body is tired.…” How could we know she was sick? She was tired.
I said, “Mom, you know Issy.”
This was in the front hallway of the church, by a large pastoral painting. Mountains. Blue sky. Green grass. A lake. But no people. Not one person. The kind of painting you see in a thrift store, and wonder who painted such a big, boring, and unpeopled painting? And why such an elaborate wooden frame? What good is the view with no people? An Eden with nobody in it. Just waiting. We prayed daily for the end of the world, and here’s what the world might have looked like before we got there.
Mom said, “Of course, sweetie, is your mother here?”
“No, she no here,” Issy said.
I said, “Issy wants to come over.”
“To hang out,” he finished my thought.
It was plain that this tickled my mother, and she could hardly hold back her smile. I didn’t have lots of friends, hardly any in my own neighborhood, which was only walking distance from Issy’s, it turned out, and, especially since what had happened onstage. I was “weird.” Even the kids at school had found out. Who told them? Mom didn’t like to talk much about what had happened, and maybe this is why I especially felt so much love for her. Not that I loved Dad any less. It was complicated. Mom said my sermon had been lovely, even “inspiring” to the other kids in the congregation. But it had scared her. Dad scared her, too. How he then insisted that our family Bible study should happen twice or three times a week, from now on, not just once anymore, and how he would look at me, right into my eyes, like he might find some revealed secret there. He insisted I had a gift for communion. Take this seriously. A friend could only be a good thing.
She mussed Issy’s hair. “No trouble at all. How about later today? We’ll walk over and pick you up.”
This amazed me. Confused me. How did she know where he lived? She somehow knew, and I didn’t? What else did she know? She knew of whole blocks and neighborhoods, I soon found out, ones I’d never been to or heard of before. So we walked to Issy’s house that afternoon, waved at his mother actually hiding in the window, who never did come out to meet us, and Issy came over. Not all mothers were the same, I knew this now. She stayed at that window and spied on us like we were stealing away her child. I saw scabs and cuts on her face. The house itself was a shambles. The front yard covered in large plastic toys, neon Big Wheels, basketballs, and broken bike parts, all at the feet of a powder-blue Blessed Mother Mary statue. As far as I knew, Issy had no brothers or sisters, and so we figured they weren’t the only ones who lived there. Issy later told me the toys belonged to the other kids his father sometimes brought over, and that his mother always refused to talk to those children or cook them food or even come out of her room when they were in the house.
That day we walked back to my house, and my mother, I see now, was asking all sorts of questions to better understand Issy’s situation. How long had he lived there? Did he like his block? Did he have lots of friends in the neighborhood? Did his mom have a job? And what was his favorite thing to eat, because maybe she could make it for him.
He and I went straight to the backyard, which wasn’t so big a yard compared to some, but Issy just could not get over how huge. He said their landlord wouldn’t let them use their backyard. We sat at the wooden table for a while and talked about Havi, probably because we had that in common, and about how he didn’t call Issy anymore and ignored him at church. I remember more than anything else a small mouse in the grass, and Issy pointing at it. It was a dead mouse, curled up in the grass as if he’d been cupped in a palm and set there to sleep. Issy got up from the table, crouched down beside the mouse, and gently petted his finger along its rounded back. He sat there for a minute or so, and then looked up at me, his face like he wanted to say something, like he was disappointed. I could see he was about to cry, and he wiped his eyes and stared at me. Almost like he was daring me to laugh at him. I didn’t.
I stood over Issy and said, “We have mice.” I pointed at our house.
He smiled a big smile, and dug at the grass and dirt with his fingers and scooped out a hole in the earth and placed the mouse in it, moved it with a stick. We scoured the yard for what seemed like all day long, looking for the perfect rock to cover the hole. The mouse and the hole and the rock put us in the same world somehow, away from Havi, and all that came before. We never mentioned Havi again, and I realized I’d always wanted a brother.
It seems to me that Issy was somehow aware of death, or maybe just of sadness or maybe the harder parts of life, in way I wasn’t, not yet. His life was more precarious than mine, less secure. My father was unorthodox, yes, but he was there. My mother didn’t have marks and cuts on her face. This made me want to be a big brother to Issy. I probably never said it to myself or out loud, but that’s what it was. And here he was a year older than me. But it wasn’t just about wanting to protect him, if I could. There was something in him I recognized, something in myself, but also I was jealous of him. The Laudermilk house was a more secure place, absolutely, when compared with Issy’s. But compared with the average family on our block, we were freaks. Daily life in the Laudermilk home was tricky—it was slippery—and even though I was dealing, always dea
ling with it, because I had to, it made me anxious. And here was Issy living a life lots more tricky then mine, in everyday ways, and yet he never once seemed anxious. If you could only have seen his face. He was untouched by it, or maybe he was just resigned and I’m romanticizing it all, or maybe he just never knew anything else. I wanted his peaceful way.
He came back that week, almost every day, and pretty much every weekday afternoon for the rest of the summer. Sometimes Saturdays. He occasionally joined us at church. One day, in our backyard, we talked about the girl in the yellow dress. We guessed at her name, and Issy decided to call her Ariel, after Princess Ariel from one of our favorite cartoons. How do I remember this? Thundarr the Barbarian. We loved that cartoon! We watched it, completely rapt, together in the living room, sprawled out on the floor in front of the TV, eating instant Jiffy muffins. I even remember the show’s intro. A runaway cartoon planet flies by the earth and causes a global catastrophe in the future year of “1994.” Just fourteen years away, at the time … Did I ever consider the coincidence, then? I don’t think so. Six years off from my own “prediction.” And in the year 3994, two thousand years later, Thundarr is born to save mankind. I even married Issy and Ariel, one day, the girl in the yellow dress played by a thin maple in my backyard.
Issy said, “You can do it because you’re a priest.”
Later that summer, Issy said we should go meet some girls. What girls? He knew girls? There were two girls that wanted to talk to us, he said. What do you talk about with girls? We spent hours, all morning long, learning how to use hair sprays and gels and trying to look as old as possible.
“You’re supposed to use a hair dryer,” he said. We were in the upstairs bathroom.
I looked in the closet where Mom kept the towels and the sheets and what looked like a tackle box filled with creams and makeup. I found the hair dryer.
“Here.” He took it from me and plugged it in, and we blew our slick hair into deliberate cowlicks over our foreheads and sprayed.
High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel Page 7