That night I ate at Curt's house. Afterwards we picked up Mike Kinney and Jack Kelleher at Cunningham Beach and all four of us went down to the river.
And onto the island.
There were mosquitoes all around the river but there were no mosquitoes on the island. The air smelled of sewage down by the river but the odors on the island were sweet and alive and seemed to be somehow connected to the melodies that whispered up from the depths the lush, snaking vegetation that grew along its soft, crystal-dotted shore. Near the north edge of the island, just outside the reach of the Great Weeper, lay the Trilobite Man.
For a while we had treated it as a joke, putting glasses onto that great but bulbous globe we believed to be its head, trying to create symmetry and physique in that matrix of sinews and segments and bold, dimpled ganglia by laying out pants and shirts and shoes around it. It was never very funny. We would strip that stuff away and then see it for what it really was. What it was really becoming.
The sun was turning a rich, eye-imprinting orange. The translucent pink and red surface of the Trilobite Man seemed to absorb that orange and hold it deep inside, where it escaped only as graceful, pulsing glimmers.
Kevin and Ralph showed up about half an hour after we did, brandishing a bottle of bourbon. Mike, Jack and Curt took off after a couple of convulsive, obligatory swallows.
It was soon apparent that Kevin wanted to kill off the bourbon in a hurry, and so we followed him about the island, taking an occasional swig. He raved about the injustice of the world and how tough it was to be a really obnoxious guy whom girls just didn't understand. All the while the landscape around us, not even big enough to be a decent-sized backyard, seemed to open up to accommodate our wanderings, so that we stepped out from under the protection of the Great Weeper to look out on what, in our ever-drunkening state, seemed like a limitless peninsula along a still and shimmering sea. At its center was the desiccated corpse of the Trilobite Man, upon whose shell and bones and tendons the moonlight played dazzling, impossible tricks. The air around us filled with the buzzing songs of great, ancient insects, and those songs comforted us, gave us a sense of protection while the whiskey gave us a sense of strength.
Kevin killed off the bottle and almost immediately began puking his guts out. Ralph and I spent the next hour walking Kevin around, trying to figure out how to get him into good enough shape to walk home. In the end we had to give it up. He slumped in the long grass, moaning, his skin cold and wet, and quaking with nausea. Ralph and I just sat there, listening to him mumble, occasionally laughing if something sounded funny, but mainly just staying quiet. We didn't talk about Marty. We didn't talk about Colleen. Ralph had been my best friend since I'd moved here, and now I couldn't even bring myself to talk to him. And since he couldn't either, I guessed that he knew everything, which made it even more impossible to talk. Eventually we decided that Kevin wouldn't be able to go home tonight. I offered to look after him, so Ralph just gave a relieved shrug and left me there.
So I just sat there on the island. In between Kevin and me was the Trilobite Man, whom I watched gleaming in the moonlight, an impossible configuration of forms, beyond life and death and art, like a great geological secret rising up from the depths of the earth offering some kind of elusive salvation for us alone. What was the Trilobite Man? Why didn't we ever ask that question anymore? Was it because we were embarrassed not to know, or afraid because we did know and did not dare to mention it?
On the other side of the Trilobite Man, Kevin's drunken moaning seemed to take on an almost religious tone, as though the complex forms glowing in the moonlight were a gigantic, labyrinthine temple, and the moans were the choruses of the throngs of believers moving in its shadows.
The ground underneath me rolled and breathed and quivered. The epicenter was the Trilobite Man and those swelling, dirge-like choruses were coming from Kevin, but it appeared that the whole thing, the unstable dance of the ground beneath me and the low, mournful chants, was directed solely at me, as though I had to clear something useless away from my eyes and ears in order to know what was truly happening around me.
I placed my hand on the Trilobite Man, running my palm across its knotted limbs and threads and over its swelling ganglia. It was warm and wet and sometimes it even appeared to throb and shudder.
After a while the sounds and rumbling grew so violent I wanted to get the hell off the island. But when I looked around me, I saw nothing beyond the shore, no river, no rocks, just an obstructing blackness that held me snug within it.
Kevin awoke soon after sunrise. He stood with a start and asked me what happened.
"I couldn't get you off the fucking island, man. So I just let you stay here."
"And you watched over me all night? My hero! "
"Can you make it out of here all right now?"
"Yeah, I . . . I . . .” He winced and rubbed his forehead, and then his face. He looked down at the Trilobite Man. It was cold and polished and lifeless.
"Oh, shit, did I have some weird dreams."
"Really? Like what?"
He stepped around the "body," looking at it as though for the first time.
"I don't know. Just some weird fucking dreams is all. Did you get any sleep?"
"Naah, I couldn't sleep."
And then we just hopped across the little rock bridge and back into the old world. I felt a strange, unaccountable loss the moment we hit shore.
III
On the day Marty was finally well enough to go back to Cunningham Beach, I invited him over for dinner. When we got to my house my sister Jeannine was on the porch waiting for us. As soon as she saw us she began screaming.
Inside the house my mom was crying hysterically and shouting curses at Jeannine. Marty stepped in our door, thinking he might use the phone to call his folks, but thought better of it when he heard my mom and sister both filling the house with howls of angry hysteria.
I'll be honest. My mom and sister had had a pretty fucked-up time of it the past few years, what with my dad dying and leaving us with no money and Ronnie splitting and leaving Jeannine with no money and the two of them and me and Jeannine's little daughters all crammed into this house together against our will. There was never enough money, they were lonely, they'd never gotten along, and the world just seemed to be dropping misfortune after misfortune into their paths in the forms of humiliating jobs, old cars that never ran, insulting relatives and neighbors. But my problem with them always seemed to stem from the fact that in their dealings with me, I seemed to be the focus, the quintessential insult in their tragic lives. I was ugly, I was lazy, I was hairy, I was male, I was lazy, I was a horrifyingly bad influence on her two little girls, and most of all, I was just damned lazy. The only way they seemed able to end a fight with each other was to start in on me.
"I hope you're proud of yourself, you lazy rat!" one of them (it didn't matter whom) screamed at me as I stood there in the doorway, pondering the wisdom of asking what was for dinner. My mom just kept looking at me, shaking her tear-blotched head, and Jeannine kept pacing the house, slamming things, stopping every once in a while in front of me to deliver a new and improved threat and insult into my face.
"I should have seen this coming the moment I let you and mother move in with us! I should have known it! How daaarreee you bring this kind of dirt and ruin into my house, how dare you show your face here!" As usual, I had no idea what she was talking about. "You're sick, Danny, and all of your friends are sick, and I wouldn't be surprised if you started killing them off the way you killed all your friends in Hillside!!"
"Jeannine!" my mom cried, rushing forward to stop her and then thinking better of it and running off into the kitchen. "What's that supposed to mean?"
She got this crazy, I'm-going-out-on-a-limb-and-it-feels-great kind of smile on her face and stepped forward, realizing she'd hit a raw nerve. Or maybe she was just letting loose a suspicion she'd had all along.
"You and me don't have to kid each other, do we,
Danny?" Her voice was soft and almost seductive now. "I know about you."
"What do you know about me?"
"I know what you ARE!" screaming the last word into my face.
I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. "What do you know about me? Huh? Huh? WHAT AM I?"
I could hear Karen and Lucy crying in the background. Jeannine's eyes glazed wide and she let out a bloodcurdling scream, a scream she meant to be heard all over the neighborhood.
I let go and started to run out the door. I saw the two girls and I stopped and kneeled to them. Lucy ran away, but Karen, who had just turned nine and was the closest thing I had to a friend in that house just stood there, looking at me with a sad, tear-smeared face.
"Karen, what do you think I am?"
"KAREN, YOU STAY AWAY FROM HIM!!"
"Huh, Karen? Tell me, will you?"
"Oh, Danny," she sobbed, shaking her head so sweetly at me. "Please go away."
I ran from the house. I ran all the way down Ellsworth Avenue until I reached the college field, where I collapsed on a hilltop and rolled around in the freshly cut grass, looking up into the violently carved clouds drifting over me. I had to go somewhere. The island? No, no, not after what my sister had said. I should have just gone home with Marty.
When I finally got up I headed past the Field House and the playing fields, towards Colleen Carlisle's house.
Colleen answered the door. She looked around to see where her parents were and then stepped out onto the porch. "Danny . . . what's up?"
I shrugged.
"Do you want to come in?"
"Not really. Can you come out? I've got to talk to you." I hadn't seen her since summer school had let out. She and Ralph had been having all kinds of problems, and instead of that bringing the two of us closer together, it had pushed her away from the core of the group and almost out of my reach altogether.
She hesitated. Oh, god, she knew. Of course she knew. "Okay. Can we go over to Curt's? Debbie and Sue are over there."
"Sure, sure, whatever."
She told her folks she was leaving and then we set off. I wanted so much just to spill it all then, about how she was all I could think about, how I'd do anything for her, how I couldn't live without her and would never in all my life stop loving her. But Colleen kept the conversation going all by herself, talking about how she'd had just about enough of that bastard Ralph and about a series of paintings she was going to start and had I ever thought about doing something besides cartooning because she really thought I'd like oil painting and how badly she wanted to go away and study ballet while her father wanted her to go into the hard sciences, like her older sister.
So I just listened dutifully, interested in everything she said because the words emerging from her lips were just for me, as they'd been on all those walks home from summer school.
We passed by Burger King, where a bunch of kids, most of them older than us, were hanging around the bridge, looking scary. Someone behind us shouted, "Nice tits, sweetheart!"
His friends all laughed. I whirled around, not even sure who'd said it. "Hey, FUCK YOU!"
Colleen grabbed my arm. "Danny, come on."
Todd Delaney stepped away from the crowd. He was a couple of inches taller than me—about six foot—and was almost as skinny as I was, but he was nineteen and he'd been in jail already and he had a reputation as a wild and cruel street fighter.
"What did you say to me, little boy?"
I didn't answer.
He stepped up to me, displaying a mouthful of snaggled and discolored teeth. He reached up casually and grabbed hold of my nose, pinching it and refusing to let go. His friends all laughed.
Maybe he wasn't expecting me to punch him, or tackle him afterwards, because in the next few seconds I made Todd Delaney look real bad, sending his head cracking onto the concrete in front of the bridge. My fists were flailing and there seemed to be no doubt in my mind that I was going to put this low-life away. I don't know when or how it all turned bad on me, but after the dust cleared I was dazed and bleeding and Todd had me on my feet, leaning me backwards over the bridge's edge with his palm on my face, telling me that if he ever saw me near the bridge again he was going to throw me over the edge.
And then he just hurled me away. I collapsed in the Burger King parking lot and rolled up to Colleen's feet. There were about a dozen of them back there, laughing. I looked at Colleen, stood and walked away, for the moment not caring if she followed or not, not caring whether I ever uttered another word or looked into another face for the rest of my miserable life.
But Colleen had her arm around me, she was palming my cheek and turning my face so she could look at me. She was not disgusted by my outburst or disillusioned at the poor showing I made in defense of her honor. When we got a couple of blocks away from the scene of my humiliation I stopped and turned to her, standing close and dropping my head toward her, almost close enough to kiss her.
"I can't go to Curt's. I just . . . not after . . .”
She took my hand. "All right, where do you want to go?"
"I want to go to the island."
There were all kinds of conflicting forces at work behind her face now, straining and illuminating her features.
"Okay."
She let go of my hand, and did not say another word to me all the way there.
When I stepped onto the island I felt the air change, heard the strange but now familiar calls of the birds and insects that seemed to live there and nowhere else in the world.
I reached in my pocket and pulled out my fossil trilobite. Thank you for finally pulling it all together, thank you for making it all clear, at last . . .
IV
The sounds that rose from the rocks and grasses and from the interlacing, gently rocking tree limbs and from within the canopy of the Great Weeper were all living sounds—speaking, singing sounds, a complex, repeating pattern carried on the breezes and then rising upwards into a sky so full of stars and lacy nebulae that it truly did resemble a lush fabric ceiling, the gentle, protective, dark-gloved palm of God sheltering us from the brutal but pathetically brittle world we had just left.
I tried sitting in the grass, but the moment I kneeled, my ribs exploded with pain, so I stumbled and collapsed instead. Colleen was next to me in a second, helping me sit up. Her hand rested on my right forearm as she sat directly across from me, still looking up at the sky but pausing for longer and longer stares into my own eyes.
"It’s so beautiful. I've never seen a sky like this . . . Not even out in the country . . . it's almost . . .”
"No, not almost. It is." Oh, shit, I thought, here it comes! "I wish we never had to leave this island. I wish we could just stay here forever, never have to face any of them ever again, never have to . . .”
I shook my head. It seemed that the number of things I needed to escape from was too enormous to express. Her hand tightened around my wrist. I looked over her shoulder and saw the Trilobite Man lying in the dirt, staring up into the stars with his black, gaping eyes.
She let out a nervous laugh. "Sometimes I don't understand what I'm doing, like everything in the whole world is just a big mistake and I'm not a part of it, not even supposed to be a part of it. But every time I think about running away I start thinking . . . where would I be running away to? I mean, where do I go if I don't want to do any of it?"
"You can stay here." Out beyond the Trilobite Man, beyond the Great Weeper, the landscape seemed to spread out forever, an unblemished patterning of island and ocean stretching out towards a haze-blanketed horizon. "With me."
She took her hand away. The ground beneath me seemed to be moving, groaning lightly, as though awakening from a long sleep.
"I wish I could." She looked down at the water lapping against the rocks. "You're the only one in the world who understands me anymore. Sometimes I . . . feel so bad about you."
"Huh?"
"Because of Debbie and Curt, because of Ralph, because of me. Danny, I know abo
ut you . . . the way you . . . I've been afraid all this time, because I'm just so crazy about Ralph and he doesn't . . . want anything to do with me anymore. And you're always there. Your voice is always so soft for me, and never for anyone else. It's like you're a completely different person for me. I don't . . . deserve this."
I touched her cheek with the fingertips of my right hand. It was still a soft, babyish cheek. Her face glowed beneath all those lights while the moonlight broke up on the lapping water and reflected in her eyes as sharp, electrical glimmers. It seemed to me now that all I'd ever really wanted in this lonely fiasco of a life was this moment, to be alone with this girl and to prove to her all that she seemed unable to see.
"Colleen, I adore you. I'm absolutely crazy about you." My palm went flat against her cheek and my fingers found the back of her neck, which Ralph had once inadvertently informed me was the most ticklish part of her body. She shut her eyes and I could feel her holding back the tremble.
Beneath me the ground rolled and shook in a series of shock waves, spreading out from the enthroned grave of my only God.
I had the trilobite fossil in my other hand. I placed it in her upturned palm.
"What's this?"
"It's yours. I want you to have it."
She looked down at it, refusing to show me her face.
"It's the fossil. Your trilobite. You can't give me this. This is . . .”
She looked up at me suddenly, as though trying to scoop something out of me with those eyes.
"I'll be anything you want me to be. I know I'm a fuck-up and I know the way those guys all talk about me, but that doesn't matter anymore. Everything is different because of you. I'm different. I swear I am. Just give me the chance to prove it to you."
"Do you love me?"
"Yes."
"Then tell me. I want to hear you tell me that."
"I love you, Colleen Carlisle. Okay? Do you want to hear it again?" I was probably getting a bit drunk on all this. "I'll shout it so the whole world can hear it."
Don't Clean the Aquarium! Page 15