The organ changed its note and everybody stood as the choir marched in, singing in their stagy, loud voices. He didn’t know why they weren’t all embarrassed. Everything about church was profoundly embarrassing to him, as if religion was something that only took place in the most unnatural circumstances.
The organ played its final chord and the congregation’s reedy singing trailed off. At a sign from the pastor, they sat down again. Matthew studied the program to see how many more times they got to stand up. During the long stretches of sitting he went through a complicated, furtive calesthenics designed to keep one leg or another from falling asleep.
He shut out the minister’s voice as best he could. The minister was a dramatic speaker, given to pauses, whispers, and thundering crescendos of emotion that you knew he wrote out ahead of time and practiced, probably in the shower. It was all a big fake act. Nobody got as excited about anything as the preacher did, every week, on cue.
A hurricane at least was something real, and although he had not been there, he was able to imagine it as if he had, as if he were on a ship in the ocean with the storm building, and sheets of rain washing over the decks, as if he was one of the rescuers on the beach, making one last desperate effort to reach the injured and the stranded.
But the minister was talking about the hurricane also. That was weird; Matt looked around him, as if he’d been talking out loud and people were laughing at him. The minister asked the congregation to pray for those who had suffered losses in that terrible storm. The usual minister talk. Matt relaxed again.
The minister figured he’d latched onto a good thing and so they got a whole sermon full of hurricane. Life was full of powerful storms. They could blow us off course. Faith was our compass, Jesus was our anchor, heaven our safe harbor. The minister could make even a hurricane boring.
Because, see, our souls were a boat and life was the sea. This was our home port, right here, our church, our community, our family. He made it sound like a board game, the kind they brought out after dinner at one of Matt’s relatives’ houses, relatives who never let you watch anything good on television.
It didn’t sound like much of a life, going straight from here to heaven.
Finally the service was over and he stood up, waiting his turn to file out of the pew and inch along in the herd of dressed-up people until he got himself out of the sanctuary and the reach of the creepy organ music and out the front doors into the open air. Josh was at the bottom of the steps kicking at a loose brick in the walkway. They were laid out in a crisscross pattern that was supposed to be fancy, but over time the ground’s freezing and thawing had heaved them up. The church was trying to raise money to have them replaced.
“I’m getting a Game Boy,” Josh informed him.
“No way.”
“Way.”
Matt took a turn at trying to dislodge the loose brick. His mother and Marcie were still inside somewhere. His mother liked to gab with people after church. Josh said, “Uh-oh, here comes Tolliver. What a skank.”
“A skank ho,” Matt agreed.
They watched the blond girl with the ends of her hair crimped by a curling iron. She came down the steps with her parents and made a point of ignoring them.
Matt’s mother came out then, searching for him. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing to me. What if somebody trips over that and hurts themselves, then how are you going to feel?”
Matt shrugged. You weren’t meant to answer. Josh sidled off to find his own parents.
Back home his mother fixed Sunday dinner, which was supposed to be some kind of a special treat but usually turned out to be one of her bad ideas, like today’s ham-and-potato casserole. It had some kind of white glop all over it that was so thick, your fork could practically stand up in it. Marcie said it was making her sick to her stomach. Their mother said to finish what was on her plate and drink her milk and Marcie said she had to go to the bathroom and could she be excused please? On her way out of the room she made a secret, triumphant face at her brother, who wished he’d thought of the bathroom idea himself.
His father was scraping the white sauce off a piece of ham. His mother watched this, then said maybe from now on she should just pick up something from Kentucky Fried Chicken after church and see if that would suit them. She made it sound like something they would want to talk her out of.
His mother said, “My classes start tomorrow, so you’re going to have to order a pizza for dinner.” She was taking community college classes in English and history. It was weird to think of his mother doing homework.
His father said, “I don’t get it, why you want to go back to school, what’s the point? You going to get a job or something?” He winked at Matt.
“I might want to do just that,” his mother said. “Or I might want to get out of the house once in a while and have an intelligent conversation with other adults.”
“I don’t remember you being this big-time scholar. You didn’t ever crack a book if you could help it. You used to say those people were too smart for their own good.”
“I guess I used to think you were a lot smarter too.”
“Can I be excused?” Matt asked.
After dinner he took his basketball out to the driveway and practiced his layups. Dribble right-handed, plant left foot. Head up, eyes on the backboard. Drive through any defenders, shoot right-handed, elevate right knee. He scores and he’s fouled! A chance for the three-point play!
He was hoping that maybe Josh would come by on his bike, or somebody else he knew. Instead his dad came out of the house. “Hey tough guy, how about some one-on-one?”
Matt muttered that he was just messing around.
His dad took a stance between Matt and the basket. “Let’s see what you got.”
“Dad.”
“Whatsamatter, afraid to try? Huh?” His dad put his arms out and shifted his weight from side to side. He looked more like a wrestler than a ballplayer. Whenever Matt went up against his dad, his dad just reached out and clobbered him, smothered him with his weight. It wasn’t any kind of a game.
Matt backed up to midcourt to draw his dad out. His dad would be expecting him to fake left and go right. Instead he went straight for the basket, pulled up, took the shot, missed, followed it, grabbed his own rebound on the baseline and came back out again.
“Hah!” his dad said. He was winded and his face was sweaty. He wasn’t used to much running. He’d probably had a couple of drinks after dinner too. “Sneaky guy. Let’s see you hit something.”
“I don’t feel like playing.”
“Bawk bawk bawk.” Chicken noises. His dad was always wanting to arm wrestle with him, or race him, or beat him at some stupid game. Sometimes it was fun and sometimes it was creepy.
“Half-court,” said his dad. “Play to twenty-one.”
It started off pretty even. His dad was a lot taller than he was, but Matt was quicker. He got off a couple of shots and made one, then his dad got the ball and sank one of his famous belly-floppers, where he just about ran to the basket and heaved the ball in. Matt called traveling but it never did any good.
“I don’t want to play if you’re not going to follow the rules.”
“Aw, whatasa matter wid da widdle baby? Did somebody steal his ball?”
That pissed Matt off and he started to play in earnest. He scored on a reverse layup, leaving his dad flat-footed at the head of the drive. Then they fought for a rebound and his dad got it but couldn’t hang on to it and Matt scrambled and came up with it and tipped it in.
“Up by two,” Matt called out, but now his dad was really red in the face and really mad, though he was trying not to show it. His dad got the ball and cleared out with his elbows. Matt planted himself right under the basket. His dad was so slow, everything he did took about five minutes. When his dad went up for his shot, Matt did too, but his dad leaned in and came down right on top of him and Matt caught an el
bow under the chin and went down hard.
“You OK?” his dad asked.
His mouth was bleeding where his teeth had jammed into his upper lip. His tailbone hurt. His dad put a hand out to help him up. “Come on, let’s have a look.”
Matt rolled onto his knees and got up from there. “Leave me alone.”
His dad bounced the ball against the drive. “What, you quitting? You quitting because you got hurt?”
“Fuck you.”
“WHAT DID YOU SAY TO ME?”
Matt turned his back on him and headed into the garage. His father’s hand fell on his shoulder. “GET BACK OUT HERE, MISTER.”
He swatted the hand away. His heart was going so hard he felt light-headed. There was no way to unsay it. All he could do was to keep disobeying. He went around his mother’s car so as to keep it between him and his dad. His dad cursed too, but in a lower voice, something Matt couldn’t make out. Matt ran into the house, into the kitchen.
His mother was running water in the sink. “Matt? What happened?”
His dad shoved the back door open and it cracked against the wall behind it. “DON’T YOU WALK AWAY FROM ME WHEN I’M TALKING TO YOU. YOU WANT TO TELL YOUR MOTHER WHAT YOU SAID?”
“Will you stop shouting? What did you do to him?”
“Yeah, that’s right, run and hide behind your mommy,” his dad said, and now he was mad about not being allowed to be as mad as he wanted to be. His face was all twisted up and purple.
“He’s bleeding! Matt, let me see that.”
Matt put his hand to his mouth and shook his head. He didn’t want her near him either.
His mother wheeled around to face his dad. “Why can’t you just leave him alone?”
“Go ahead, treat him like a baby.” His dad looked for something to hit or kick. He upended two of the kitchen chairs and sent them skidding across the floor.
“Now who’s acting like a baby.”
“Get out of my way!”
“Matt,” his mother said, “go to the phone in the den and call the police.”
“Go ahead, call them. Tell ’em you lost a ball game.”
His mother said, “Matt, I want to apologize to you for not finding you a better father.”
His dad sat down in one of the chairs he hadn’t thrown and put his head on the table with his arms around it. He made a horrible squealing sound that was crying.
Matt and his mother looked at each other. His mother said, “How about if the two of you apologize to each other for whatever it was?”
Matt didn’t want to. But he said, “I’m sorry, Dad. I was just upset.”
“All I ever wanted was a little respect.” His dad was still crying. It was awful.
“I do respect you, Dad.”
His mother said, “One of these days he’s going to be bigger and stronger than you are, and he’s going to be the one knocking you around. Matt, let me get you some ice for that.”
“I don’t need any.”
“Come on,” she said in her coaxing tone, and he shook his head because it was true, she wanted to make a baby out of him.
His dad raised his head. His eyes were red and weepy, but he’d recovered his voice. “Do what your mother says.”
His mother put some ice in a plastic bag and wrapped the bag in a dish towel and told him to keep it on the cut. She asked if he wanted anything else and he said a Coke, and she poured one out in a glass for him. He wasn’t the one who’d been crying, but his face was hot and his stomach hurt as if he had.
“Now,” his mother said. “Let’s all just calm down and try and be considerate of each other.”
His father took a paper napkin from the holder on the table and blew his nose. “I’m taking down that goddamn basketball hoop.”
“Good riddance,” his mother said.
Matt took the ice and the glass of Coke back to his room. His dad wouldn’t take down the basketball hoop. He never did any of the things he said he was going to. Just like his mother never really called the police.
He had posters of Michael Jordan and Karl Malone, big ones, on his closet doors, which was the only place his mother let him tape posters. He had a Star Wars poster on heavy cardboard propped against one wall. It was from the first Star Wars movie, the best one, before they got into gross stuff like Leia was his sister and Darth Vader was his dad, and you had to look at Darth Vader’s leaky old bald head under his helmet.
It was better when you had parents who weren’t your real parents because then somebody could kill them off and nobody felt too bad about it. Luke didn’t get to do anything while his aunt and uncle were still around.
In case God was listening, he thought he’d better take back the part about wanting his parents dead, so that if they should happen to die, it wouldn’t be his fault.
His mouth had stopped bleeding but it was going to hurt a while longer. If you were the hero of a movie, like Luke, you could save the whole galaxy. If there was ever a movie of his own life, most of it would be the waiting-around part, before anything you did mattered to anyone.
Chicago
JANUARY 1990
He couldn’t sleep. He hadn’t slept well for weeks, months. It began with one bad night here and there. Then two or three or four in a row, then the dread of them piled up and, as his intelligent, reasonable wife pointed out, his mind became the enemy of his body.
In the beginning Ryan hadn’t been too concerned. When he’d got his first jobs in computer programming he’d often worked odd, late-night, all-night hours, because that was the way the work got done, how everyone did it, and if you slept on a cot next to your desk and lived on snack food and Mountain Dew, so much the better. It proved you were an ace, a pirate king.
But he’d been younger then, and if he needed to, he could sleep twenty straight hours over a weekend to catch up. This was different. He stayed awake for no reason, then wore himself down with fretting over it. He went through his days draggy, wired, gravel-eyed. Nothing helped. Drugs didn’t work; they shoved him into a black tunnel and drew him only partway out again.
His wife and daughter slept. He prowled the apartment, barefoot on the cold floor. Most nights he went to bed when his wife did, then woke up two or three or four hours later, unable to get back to sleep. The windows were cold to the touch, rimed with white frost. Outside, the same frozen street, same dirty-pink mercury-vapor streetlight, the same stick tree throwing its bare shadow. Although they lived on a Wrigleyville street regarded as quiet, if you watched for even a couple of minutes, some car or truck always rolled along, even during the dead and frigid hours. It was easy for him to imagine, at such times, that he was lost in a nightmare loop of time, when it would always be a black night in stark and staring winter and he would always be awake to see it.
His wife, who had not yet entirely lost patience with him, suggested he enroll in some kind of sleep study. She’d heard of such things. Surely they had them at the big university hospitals. He told her he’d call around and see, although he never actually did. He didn’t like the thought of filling out nosy questionnaires, or trying to sleep with wires attached to his head in some blue-lit observation room. If you could fall sleep in a place like that, why would you need any help? His wife (still trying to be constructive, she didn’t mean it unkindly) remarked that maybe he wanted to be sleepless, for some reason that he himself did not comprehend, it filled some need.
Ryan didn’t like the idea that he was bumbling around with secret, destructive motives he was too stupid to figure out. “What, I need to be miserable?”
“Maybe you just need some time alone.”
He’d had to think about that one. At work he was often isolated, but never alone. His daughter, a boisterous and piping two-year-old, made any normal adult privacy hard to come by, and solitude impossible.
His wife said, “God knows, if I could keep myself awake long enough, I might try a little insomnia now and then.” She stayed at home with their daughter and had her own complaints.
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Every effect had a cause, you had to assume that, and maybe the cause for his sleeplessness was a simple matter of fizzing brain chemistry. Not some big hurt that needed worrying about. Only the usual modern complaints: dullness, impatience, staleness. Maybe he should take up some expensive, challenging hobby, such as skiing. A lot of guys he knew were into skiing.
He was thirty-five, which didn’t feel either old or young. He didn’t know how to measure. It wasn’t an age anyone looked forward to, as in “someday, when I’m thirty-five.” By now many things had been decided, or decided for him. He missed the sense that everything he did was important and urgent. A kid’s feeling. That didn’t make it any less true.
But what portion of his life would he change if it meant that his daughter would never have come to be?
His wife said, “Maybe you should get back into running. It used to tire you out.”
He’d run along the lakefront in good weather. Lots of people did, at times the whole city seemed to be made up of rangy, purposeful runners pounding out the miles. There was always the lake to watch, its boats and circling birds, its moods in sunshine or its metallic look beneath clouds. There were the beaches, the volleyball games in summer, the strolling pairs, the roller skaters and bicyclists, everybody out to enjoy the city’s great front lawn. He guessed it had been the closest he ever came to alone time, taking his place in the communal scenery. It was his city now, and he belonged to it as well. He didn’t volunteer to people that he was from Iowa. They always thought that meant he’d grown up on a farm.
But he kept injuring himself, which depressed him because it meant age creeping up on you a little more every year no matter how you tried to stiff-arm it, and by the time he’d healed, the weather had turned cold, and though there were still runners out there, wearing propylene and goggles and earmuffs, he just wasn’t that hard-core. He missed it, sure, but he didn’t think it was making his body have some kind of nonsleep tantrum about it.
Then there were a few days of thaw, the false warmth you knew not to trust, and a little after midnight, marooned in sleeplessness once more, on impulse he dug out his running shoes and a down vest and a wool hat and wrote his wife a note in case she woke up and missed him. He let himself out and jogged a few blocks over to the Inner Drive and set himself a course of four easy miles, two up and two back. The temperature was in the forties and the sidewalks were wet but not slick. There wasn’t anyone else out on foot, but that in itself didn’t make him feel unsafe. He had enough confidence in his speed to think he could outrun most problems, he had enough confidence in his judgment to believe he could spot them ahead of time.
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