One of the taller boys threw rocks at the water, and then ran up the beach away from the others. The pack leader called after him and lowered his torch to the sand. The boy ran even farther up the beach.
The sky was opening up some. I saw clouds. A subtle light sneaked up from behind us. There were different shades of blue in the morning.
Dad said, “Maybe it’s a dream of Heaven.”
“Of what? You okay?”
The light was back in his eyes. He said, “Your dream.”
“Doesn’t feel like Heaven.”
“Heaven is a beautiful place.”
“Well, the dream definitely is not beautiful. How do you feel?”
The sky grew lighter. The boys were crouched, poking at something in the sand. The pack leader held the fire up high, looking out for the boy who’d run off. By now, the torch seemed superfluous.
“What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”
“I’m really glad you’re talking.”
I turned and looked at the court, at the ball in the drain. The basketball hoops were bare, no nets or chains. My father’s eyes went blank again. I couldn’t look at his face when his eyes went blank. A rosy mist was dawning in the sky. But the question was a good one. I’d driven cross-country and seen things that won’t go away, like when Sarah and I stopped at Cadillac Ranch while driving through Texas. The cars half submerged out there in the desert ground like they’d been here a thousand American years. The headlights and front grilles buried in the sand, and I remember saying to her that the idea of an ostrich doing the same thing is ridiculous. If it were true at all, the ostrich would eventually die away and no longer exist as a species.
He said, “Where am I?”
“You’re here with me in California. On the beach.”
His eyes glazed dully and he looked at me like I was a stranger.
I said, “Once, we drove through the Redwood Empire coming back from Mendocino.”
He looked straight ahead at the water.
“I don’t know how many hundreds of feet, the sequoias. Green leaves up top like a beard. Three thousand years old. And all I could think was, Hey, I think this is actually their planet.”
The kids were at the water, and the pack leader was looking around.
“Sometimes Heaven’s like a house,” he said. “But always different.”
I tucked the blanket under his legs and said, “Tell me your favorite Heaven.”
He wouldn’t look my way. He said, “There’s a front porch. Upstairs, and downstairs. I saw the room where stars are made.”
The water was taking on the lighter colors of the sky.
I said, “I was driving I forget where and saw a mountain on the side of the road. A white mountain, I forget where. Out in the middle of nowhere, scrub brush, and there’s this shining mountain of bright white sand.”
“Heaven is all white with clouds,” he said.
“Like a miracle out there. The full bottom half of an hourglass. I had to cover my eyes, it was so bright. I climbed as high as I could and I swear the mountain was singing and humming right there under my feet.”
“Heaven sings.” He reached out a hand in the air. “Everywhere, and you can feel Him on your skin, and His throne is like a skyscraper.” He opened his hand in the air. “You can feel the light with your fingers.”
“And what else,” I said. “I’ve never seen a volcano. I want to go to Hawaii and see the lava pouring out and sizzling in the ocean, the world remaking itself. I saw something once in Death Valley, or just Death Valley, leave it at that. Rocks in the Racetrack desert. One was the size of a Volkswagen. This is way below sea level, no water at all. The rock has a long trail behind it, moves hundreds of feet, and nobody knows why. Like I’m staring at the tree in the riddle. A tree falls in the forest blah, blah and nobody’s there to hear it. I was staring right at the riddle.”
He said, “Heaven gets dark. It gets dark, and I keep getting smaller.”
I looked up, and that boy was coming right for us.
He waved, and his feet made slapping sounds on the concrete as he hurled himself at the ball waiting in the drain. He had trouble bouncing it with one hand, so he dribbled with both. He tossed it in the air, but he couldn’t reach the backboard. Dad looked at the water. I stood and said hello to the boy.
His uniform was looking a little shoddy, sand grit falling from every crease. His red tie was turned backward. I put up my hands and he tossed the ball my way. I dribbled and threw it right back to him.
I realized it was the first time I’d bounced a ball on the court. I didn’t think I could make a basket. This would be an embarrassing failure of adulthood and might ruin him, for all I knew.
The sun stepped over the foothills and over the houses, the pink terra-cotta tiles. There was a dreamy glow of light in the air; the morning mist was wavering and heading for the water. I wondered how many suns there were: a sun for seagulls, and for Amad’s Little Josie, even for the ticks on a stray dog’s ass. A dog isn’t so selfish as to think it shines for him alone. I watched the boy throw the ball and chase it, and throw it again. The boy didn’t know it, but he was me, and I was him, and maybe God didn’t know our names after all. If He did, He hardly said them aloud anymore because of the thousand ways we daily do our loved ones in. I figured that waiting for the End is the End. And I figured the End was already here, always had been, and was happening over and over and over again, every last one a blessing and revelation if we’d only take a good hard look.
The boys at the water started singing again: “This land is your land, / This land is my land, / From California to the New York island, / From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters, / This land was made for you and me.…” Then for some reason I started to wish they’d stop singing the goddamn song already. I muttered this, and felt immediately bad about cursing in front of the boy, because then the boy started cursing as he bounced the ball. He kept saying “bastard,” which sort of cracked me up.
He said things like, “Our pack leader is a bastard,” and, “Today has been a real bastard.” He threw the ball and got it nowhere near the hoop.
I dribbled, and set myself at the three-point line. It was light out now and I saw the hoop clearly. I couldn’t use the dark for an excuse. I dribbled, bent my knees like you’re supposed to. I bobbed there with the ball in my hands, and tossed it up in a high sailing arc, when my father called out with a noise.
He was pointing out to the water.
I went over and knelt there in front of him, in the sand. His eyes were lit from the inside. I said, “It’s okay, Dad. What? I’m here.”
The waves rolled out like carpets plashing on the shore, and the air was heavy with moisture. I could feel it with my fingers. The water was deep and long; something forever about the water. How it lay there how many millions of years already before I ever came along, and it even let the otters stay until the last one got too old, and filled up with water, and fell through the water like a dark thick leaf dancing in air. The dawning light was on the Pacific like a yellow dust and the horizon had gone soft and disappeared. Dad was pointing and making that awful noise, trying to communicate to me what it was he was seeing.
I looked out again, and saw nothing—until I did.
Out there on the horizon where the morning light was going soft, I definitely saw something. There was this white and floating void quivering just above the water, and above it there was a dark and rising mass floating there in the air. I saw turrets and I saw towers. It was like the silhouette of an almost invisible city, and it hovered like a vision of the Heavenly Kingdom. It was there, right there, and I could see it. I bit my lip, hyperaware of how spooky all this was.
Then the boy came up beside us. “What are you looking at?”
Dad was still pointing.
The boy looked, and said, “What? Catalina?”
He started walking back to the group, and said back over his shoulder, “We take the ferry over
and camp. Sometimes we stay the night in Avalon.” He ran back to the others by the water.
Of course it was Catalina. But Dad looked on without blinking, his face practically radioactive with joy. I saw now the trick of light on the Catalina Island mountains, and the clouds, and the vapor mist along the horizon, and already the mass was changing shape, becoming something altogether different, but no less radiant.
I said, “Dad.”
His eyes were blank.
I kissed my father’s head, and we rolled back over the sand to the walkway, and I started pushing him home. We took our time. The oil derricks pumped behind chain-link fences beside the Pacific Coast Highway, and by the time we reached my street the morning sky was simply bright and blue and beautiful. I pushed him up the front path to the courtyard. I rolled him alongside the building and parked the chair. I touched his face. I unlocked the front lock and propped the screen door open with a flowerpot. I lifted him from his chair, and he was light, his long hair covering his face. I decided it was time I cut it. I carried him, and we crossed the threshold together.
Some of his things still needed unpacking. His books and papers were in boxes beside the fridge. Resting on top of his boxes was a blank red spiral I found myself unaccountably attracted to. I swore one day I would fill it. The jawbone and a picture of my young mother were on the coffee table where he could see. His mail-order shield was on the wall beside the mirror. This was the very first thing I attended to after unpacking his clothes. The white cat napped on the back of the sofa. I could not in good conscience leave her behind. The plank flooring had a curved scratch and groove from the door where it rubbed, and the radiator clicked, and the stairwell was dark because the bulb had gone too dim. I saw us in the mirror over the sofa, my father in my arms, and the mirror caught a shard of sun from outside and flashed, filling up the glass. I looked at us, a little bit afraid to look away. His head was on my chest, and he turned away slightly. His long hair moved, and a sleepy medicinal smell of bedclothes and of days long ago home sick from school, and of that terminal air you find in waiting rooms and clinics, and of my mother’s soft and hairless camphorous head filled up my senses. I steadied myself and set him down on the sofa. Even if I could get to know all the space in my own skull, I’d never get inside of his. I combed back his hair and looked at his face. This was not a gullible man, not at all. I saw a man who was hungry and cunning in his own curious way, and was stubbornly still here, his lost and lank body afloat there on the mystery of the world.
* * *
There are three kinds of time, as far as I can tell. There’s God Time, infinity, which really isn’t any time at all, but beyond time, and borderless, not in our purview. It’s a scary thought, and I’m not so sure we ever come to really know it, whether we go out like space dust in death, like some manna from Earth, risen food for hungry angels, and fall back inside God, or if we fall forever forward, deep inside the advancing cosmos, pure expansion. And there’s Earth Time, our time, great clock of the Holocene, and all of it somehow stuffed and stored inside a plastic pocket watch. It’s the time of ends and there isn’t a single speck of grace or evil outside of it; it’s imperfect and enough in its broken wholeness. Then there’s the Time of In-Between, outside of place, and inside of sex, of memory and dream, the time of saints, and of the dead we remember. It’s the time of two times at once, of invention, of Beth Sarim and supernatural knowledge. It’s the time of sticky nostalgic want, false memory, and cheap reminiscence, so be careful. It’s the time of the world, and the world that we want. It’s from where we pluck the saintly face of Issy. And it’s where my father lives, the time of visions.
* * *
Look up and see there: the Great Room, the sky, and the ceiling. The boy sees the crack across a butter-yellow moon, and he doesn’t know how he missed it. The ceiling is just a ceiling. I see the men and women dead a hundred years, dangling from strung-up leather pulleys, on ladders, and balanced on scaffolding, carefully painting suns and drawing the circles of planets. I see my Dad in that pacific place between disappointment and hope, filling with pride for his little guy standing up there in a nice clean suit. And Mom with long red hair curling over her shoulders, filling up with one day’s portion of worry, honor, and delight. And I see Sister Hilda Famosa, frozen cross-legged forever in her balcony seat with her family, like she never got killed one day because she forgot to look both ways and walked herself in front of a speeding city bus on Queens Boulevard. I see the little boy Issy running past me at lunchtime, crazy looking for the girl in the yellow dress because now he’s all in love, because there is only one thought in all the world: what’s her name, I forget her name, nothing matters like her name. Forget the killers, remember the dead. Remember love and everybody’s name. A man with a paintbrush stands on the bridge above the stage. He stretches for the ceiling, and signs his name on Heaven. The men and women stand beneath a blank white ceiling before they drag the heavens down to Earth, because they never once imagined in a million years we’d ever get to go up there alive. See the ghost of a small boy guiding his father’s hand. He describes the great and strange unreachable craters of the moon.
* * *
Last year, Amad told me the good news he’d heard about Sarah. I didn’t even know she’d gotten married, or that Nikos had been out of the picture for so long. We were hanging up the sign for store number two, two beaches south, in Huntington. Teri was pleased. I have to say that good news about Sarah sent me down a deep dark hole. In fact, Amad and I were supposed to celebrate that night with dinner, but I excused myself and went home, where I got very drunk with Dad. And when I say that, I mean I got drunk while my poor Dad lay twisted in bed, not saying a word and completely immobile. He’d been lying there for over a year. He was here, but he wasn’t here at all. Only his eyes were alive, lit with that same anxious fire that showed on his face for as long as I could remember. That final night he saw something, I don’t know what. If I were more romantic, I would say my mother’s ghost was there in the room, and that he saw her. Because his face softened, and his eyes cooled, his heart was eased. A peace descended upon him, a peace he’d been looking for his whole life. I don’t know what frightened me more, watching death slowly descend upon my father or how he seemed to welcome it body and soul. I kissed his still head. I sat with him for a very long time. And then I went outside. I walked, and then I ran over the sand, like a free beast, running alive into the night.
NO MORE DOMINION
WOODFORD, KENTUCKY, 1801
They come along the path out of the wood and rounding the tall tulip tree, all one hundred feet of sky-scratching smooth brown bark, the wide waxy green leaves growing in clusters. Past the coffee trees and thick leathery bean pods that dangle like bats from the branches. It’s dusk and the air is rich with river smell, and with pig meal, and the char of the canebrake burning. Some come on horseback, but most come carriaging, gathered on wagons. Two wheels, four wheels. The clop and crack of hooves on limestone like splinters in the evening air. There is the buzzing chirp of katydids as bony hooves slap rock. And behind the farmhouse, brook water passes through tufted grass into a blanket of watermeal buds. Some of the wagoners ring handbells as they ride by in procession. The clappers knelling doleful as the sun goes low. The drivers click at their teeth, side-mouth, waving at the small boy as they ride by the farm.
Orr yells, “I don’t know, Daddy. And there’s more wagons up the way.”
He pulls his hand from his pocket and opens his palm. His daddy’s voice is low. Orr sees him, barely, through a cloud of smoke by the crackling canebrake high on fire. His father cutting a girdle in a hickory’s bark by the riverside, says, “You steer clear. Just pick a pig. Go on now.”
A baby shrew he found in the grass hugs blindly there at the boy’s fingers, its whiskered and pointy snout sniffing at the air. A cashew, pink and soft. Orr nudges it some, and shakes his palm gently every time the shrew gets steady.
Another wagon rolls by.
“Orren Laudermilk, you get away from the road.”
He turns to see his father coming up from the riverbed, the canebrake behind him burning alive with red fire. His father coughs as he walks, waving the smoke from his face. Jumping from the fence, Orr wipes at his pant legs and opens his palm. The pink ball of shrew uncurls itself. It sniffs, raising its head, sizing him up maybe. He rolls the tail softly between his fingers.
“What you got there?” His daddy brushes his fist with the hat.
“Nothing.” He puts his hand in his pocket.
“You don’t look no better, all ghost white.” Orr’s daddy presses his forehead with the back of his hand. “Warm as toast. Can’t be pox. Can’t be.” His daddy feels the air for moisture with his fingers. “We need rain before our grass goes brown. And you can make yourself useful even when you’re sickly.” He points toward the hogs and pigs behind the fence, scattered about on their bellies and sides in the yard. Pink muddy mounds of belch and snore. “It’ll be fall before long, and your time to kill. We’ll do it together, I promise. But you need to pick the pig.”
Orr nods some, Yessir.
“Look at me.”
Orr looks.
“Your mother’d be in hearty agreement. No good reason to be afraid of killing.” His father motions toward the yard.
“Yessir.” He looks at the pigs, not sure what it will mean to pick a pig. Picking’s not the same thing as killing, he knows that much. He nods toward the wagon up the road, and says, “Where they off to?” A sour spark fills him up, thinking what other kinds of places in the world there are.
High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel Page 24