Connor cleared his throat. “Not really.”
Wingard whispered, “Let’s vacate.”
“And you’re here because?” The seer’s voice had changed, the featheriness replaced by a sweetened irony, a fluted whimsy. “Help me sit up.” He motioned for Connor to come closer. When he put out his hand for Connor to help him, Wingard said, “Posthaste,” and fled the room.
Connor stood there. The white translucent hand hung in the air, until Connor finally took it, surprisingly warm for what he’d expected would be cold marble. Connor carefully leaned him back against his headboard. The sodas sweated under the overhead light.
“Ahh, repose,” said the seer. His thin eyebrows were burned albino white by sun or illness.
“I heard you can see the future,” Connor said.
The oxygen mask went back on. After a few stringy, wet breaths, the seer took it off and said, “Tomorrow is Friday. The sun will set in the west. The Heteropterus morpheus lives thirty-one days. Does that help?”
“I knew it was a hoax.” He wanted to hurt somebody. Could you hurt the wind? Could you damage the absence of flesh? “I thought you could tell me something about what I should do after I graduate.”
“Channel seven, please,” the seer said, and motioned for Connor to turn on the television high up on a metal bracket in the corner of the room, just like in a hospital.
Connor got the remote from the desk with the sodas and turned on Channel 7. It was Oprah. “I love the Angel Network,” the seer said. He watched Oprah walk down the aisle to the cheers of her adoring fans. Connor put his hand on the doorknob.
“Watch this part,” the seer said. Oprah called people up onstage and told them they were getting free cars. It was the Pontiac giveaway show. Hadn’t that happened years ago?
“Is this a repeat?” Connor asked.
“It’s all a repeat,” the seer said. The audience was opening their gift bags and finding car keys, too. They were going nuts, their faces lit up with monstrous joy, a frenzy of stupid happiness. “I never noticed you in school. You have very little presence,” the seer informed Connor.
“My mother’s dying,” Connor told the seer, looking into his watery blue eyes that had lost their focus on the television.
The seer waved for the TV to be shut off. “Listen,” he said. His voice suddenly had strength, heft, basso profundo, as if coming through speakers on the wall. “You should know better than to come here.”
“I thought you could help me.”
“Are you listening?” The voice was becoming weak and fluttery again.
“I’m listening.”
The seer patted the bed for Connor to come sit next to him. Connor did so, gingerly, lowering the safety bar and putting his weight on the edge of the spongy mattress. The seer, light as a ghost, slanted toward him, as if he might roll down a hill and be lost.
Wingard called through the door that he needed to leave. Time passed. Minutes? An hour? Mrs. Seer tapped musically on the door, came in, smiled at Connor and pursed her lips with thoughtful satisfaction at her slumbering son. She took away the silver tray with the untouched sweating sodas and the lemon-iced cookies, as if this happened all the time—her doomed boy sleeping beside a visitor who couldn’t seem to leave.
The room darkened, the air circulated, the seer’s breathing became so soft that Connor wondered if he’d slipped into unconsciousness. He put his ear to the feathery boy’s chest. He heard a slow swishing, as if someone were moving a broom back and forth in an inch of water.
Outside, Connor slung his backpack over his shoulder and kicked the door of his car, his mother’s really, since she didn’t drive anymore. The Geo had a dent from getting T-boned and had never been fixed. You had to bash it with your foot to open it and then slam it like a vault door to get it closed.
He gave the Geo, purple with metallic bruises, another kick.
“What’d he say?” Wingard asked.
“Get in.” Connor was giving Wingard, who had been waiting impatiently, a ride home.
“You were in there for like forever. What happened?”
“Nothing happened.” In truth everything had happened, but nothing he could explain.
“So why’d you stay?”
“I felt sorry for him. Why’d you leave?”
“I couldn’t take it. He was like a mummy or something. I thought he was going to put a spell on me.”
Frankly, Wingard exasperated him. Fueled by a daily intake of six bowls of Reese’s Puffs, he constantly networked with other World of Warcraft bangers. He slept by his computer and talked about people named Orgrim Doomhammer and Jaina Proudmoore as if they were blood relations. He’d been trying to get Connor interested in the brain-sucking game since they’d been sophomores.
“He’s just a sick kid,” Connor said about the seer. “I felt okay there with him.”
“You were in there for an hour. I was in the kitchen with the old lady. You think that was fun? She was talking my ear off about her church and Sandy’s faith and how we should really go watch him play guitar with the choir. ‘He’s a miracle, Salvatore,’ she told me. Nobody calls me Salvatore.”
“Why’d you tell her your name then?”
“I didn’t. All right, somehow she got it out of me. The whole family’s a bunch of aliens! So were you, what, holding his hand or something?”
How did you know? He had taken the weightless boy’s hand after a while, unbidden, listening to the soft hissing of the aluminum tank filling the seer’s lungs with a hundred percent pure oxygen; he had pictured the seer’s red blood cells slurping up the fuel, growing darker and richer with every breath. It had been a long time since he’d felt so peaceful, and if it hadn’t been for Sandy’s mother knocking on the door, he might have stayed there all night.
They pulled up in front of Wingard’s condo, where he lived with his mother and stepfather. “You coming in?” Wingard asked. The condos were older ones with tar-pebbled roofs that baked in the sun. A skein of yellow citrus tree leaves floated on the surface of the unused pool. Wingard, with his pale freckled skin (not unlike the seer’s when Connor thought about it), had proudly declared he’d never stepped foot in it.
“I’ve got to go,” Connor said. “I’m having dinner at Sergeant Kenner’s.”
“Again?”
Connor shrugged, made a vague gesture that he knew Wingard would detect as insincere.
“You’re crazy, man. Why do you want to hang out with those guys?”
“You’re one to talk. You sit in front of your stupid computer communing with trolls and gnomes all day.”
“You hate violence. You can’t even watch horror movies. You want to die in some country where they hate our guts? Hey,” Wingard said, suddenly looking proud of himself. “I get it. You have a death wish.”
For once, it seemed, Wingard’s brain had not, in fact, completely liquefied from playing Warcraft twenty-four seven.
It was not the first time Sergeant Kenner had invited him to his home, a wistful, low-slung ranch house in the foothills on a couple acres of parched land studded with prickly pear cacti and bleached-out yucca that poked up like feather dusters. He’d been here three times before, mostly, he suspected, at the urging of Mrs. Kenner, who felt sorry for Connor because his mother was dying and always complimented him on his “bravery” and good manners, in the same breath. He was exceedingly polite—the good Connor who wanted to kill someone but would undoubtedly say, “Excuse me,” before he did.
The Kenners had a seventeen-year-old daughter named Jody. She was Korean. Well, she was American, actually. They’d adopted her at birth, and she spoke contemptuously to her parents, mostly about how much she hated school, how little interest she had in what she called “world affairs,” how much weight she had gained (although she was, Connor thought, if anything too thin, and he suspected an eating disorder), and how much they, the Kenners, her adoptive parents, annoyed her. Tonight she wore torn black jeans, a low-cut black knit top with criss
crossing spaghetti straps, and plum-colored, ankle-strap sandals with stacked wedges. Her bottom lip was pierced with silver, her nose studded with gold, and she laughed crudely at the table whenever her parents tried to ask her a simple question such as what had happened to the fifty-dollar check she’d (somehow) cashed that was meant for her school choir retreat.
In the three times Connor had been over to the Kenners’ house, Giigee, as she called herself, had finished exactly one meal with them, barely. The other two had resulted in her being sent to her room, not to be seen for the rest of the evening, while Connor and the Kenners watched TV on the sofa together. The third time, she had made it to the end but then threw a butter knife across the table in the direction of her mother. “That’s it,” Sergeant Kenner had said, and walked around to (Connor hoped) rip Giigee up from the table and kick her out the door or to social services or boarding school or a psychiatric facility or junior boot camp. But, no, Sergeant Kenner pointed to her room, stocked, Connor knew, with iPhone, iPod, iPad, and Netflix, and told her not to come down until she thought long and hard about her behavior.
My God, Connor had thought, the sergeant was a pussycat—or a pussy, as the word got thrown around so frequently at the recruiting station about wannabes who had “fagged out,” after “almost” signing up, unofficial talk, of course, which Connor was privy to and took as a warning that he’d better not do the same. But here, in this house, Sergeant Kenner appeared to have no backbone, as emasculated as any man in America. Why would he let Connor see him like this?
Now they were attempting dinner again. Would Giigee give her father the finger as she had last time? Would she spit in the bowl of caramelized carrots as she did when her mother asked her to go easy on her pungent perfume that wafted with deadly astringent force like some biological weapon through the dining room? Would Connor just sit there and watch this as if he’d been a member of the family since birth?
“And what did you do today, honey?” Mrs. Kenner asked him now. She had lit some tall lavender tapers in polished copper candleholders and placed linen napkins in matching copper rings on fleur-de-lis gold-banded dinner plates. A basket of warm and sweet Hawaiian dinner rolls waited in front of Connor. Fish was on the menu tonight, some kind of snapper, imported to this landlocked state. Last time they’d had meatloaf and peas, a dish he thought only existed in fifties sitcoms. Before that Mrs. Kenner had made a Mexican casserole, which Giigee had disliked and nudged away with the glittery red talon of her pinky.
“I went to see someone,” Connor answered. Why not? What did he have to lose? “He’s a kid who’s ill. I think he’s going to die.” At this, the table went a notch quieter, some perceptible noise cancellation that vacuumed out any false cheer. “They call him the seer because he can read the future. I think he has a respiratory disease of some kind.”
“Is it cystic fibrosis?” Mrs. Kenner asked, a bit too brightly for the subject.
“I’m not sure. Anyway, I sat with him for quite a while. It was very…I don’t know…serene.”
“You’re a very good friend to go see him,” Mrs. Kenner remarked.
“Connor’s a good man,” Sergeant Kenner added. He ate close to his plate, more as if he were shoveling in rice than taking bites. “He’s going to make one helluva Marine. I’m proud of you, son.”
“But I didn’t go see him because I was his friend. I’ve never spoken to him before.”
Giigee made some sort of hissing sound, a tire deflating, though Connor wasn’t sure it was directed at him or just her general exasperation. He was used to her sounds by now, hisses, tragic sighs, impertinent burps, bellicose snorts, and tried to ignore them. “I thought he could help me. I was going to ask him about my mother. I did tell him my mother was dying. But I didn’t ask him what I wanted to.”
“You poor dear,” Mrs. Kenner said, and reached out to pat Connor’s hand. “More salad, anyone?”
“What I really wanted to ask him,” Connor went on, realizing that he hadn’t quite prepared himself well enough for the question and that the seer couldn’t have helped him anyway, “is whether I’m a murderer.”
Giigee spit out her food. “Oh. My. God.”
“Whether I’m killing her,” Connor tried to clarify. “My mother, that is.”
Mrs. Kenner laughed nervously. “I can’t imagine how I would feel in your situation, but I know all sorts of thoughts must cross your mind. And there’s nothing wrong with expressing them either. I think we all know that grief makes us have irrational ideas, don’t we, Nelson?”
“I don’t know,” answered Sergeant Kenner, shoveling food faster into his mouth. “You’re the psychology grad. But it sounds right to me. I wouldn’t worry about it, son. We know you don’t mean it.”
“I do mean it,” Connor said. “I’m killing her before she dies.”
Sergeant Kenner picked up his head. “Con, it can’t be easy. But there’s no need to be inappropriate. I’m sure you love your mother a whole lot more than you can say.”
“I don’t see the contradiction,” Connor said. Giigee was watching him intently.
“Exactly,” Mrs. Kenner said, “and that’s what you’re expressing with your feelings—”
“But I don’t know if I’d call what I’m doing an act of love. It’s more like an act of God. God behaving badly in me.”
Mrs. Kenner exchanged a glance with her husband. Connor knew what that glance meant. The boy was sicker than they thought, not just sad, but disturbed—yes, that was the word, and he would just barely qualify for the service, though not if he went on like this in public. He would have liked to explain that he had deprived his mother of his company these final days of her life, and that he was causing her heartache by not assuring her he had a future other than one as a soldier in some murderous foreign land and that he wasn’t allowing her to die peacefully with the illusion of her house in order, and that he had no kindness he could fake on her behalf, and that, in this way, he was the agent of her death. It was unpretty all right, and he wished he wasn’t responsible for such distress and that he wasn’t killing her spiritually as well as physically. He would have liked—or tried—to make this clear if he thought for a moment Sergeant Kenner and his wife would have understood. He knew, though, they wouldn’t, and he was not surprised, given all they’d been through with Giigee, when Mrs. Kenner cheerfully observed, “Well, time for dessert, kiddos.”
He was surprised, however, when he and Sergeant Kenner were having their customary pool game after dinner in the converted garage and Giigee slunk in barefoot and announced she wanted to play. She had never done this before, always disappearing during or shortly after dinner.
She had changed into a more modest outfit, a ruffled skirt sprinkled with wildflowers and a light pink blouse, opened a respectful two buttons at her smooth tan throat and just above her snug pointed breasts. She looked composed, young and womanly, someone whose hand you might ask for in marriage from her father.
“Why don’t you kids play,” Sergeant Kenner said. “I’m going to hit the sack.” He started for his daughter, as if to give her a kiss goodnight, then thought better of it and turned and left.
“Eight ball,” Giigee said right away. “You break.”
Connor did, but failed to knock in a single ball.
“Five ball in the side pocket,” Giigee declared. It was a difficult bank shot requiring passage through a tight channel of balls. He couldn’t see why she didn’t go for the easy fifteen ball teetering on the edge of the corner pocket.
Then he understood. She ran the table. Connor stood with his pool cue in hand, shifting it from right to left, chalking the tip, murmuring sounds of approval. He hardly knew what to say. She shot with such aggressive confidence that he blinked at the explosive fission of the cue ball smacking the others. Whether with her legs spread like a gunslinger, or with the cue behind her arched back, or with the nonchalance of someone dropping letters in a mailbox, she called and sank every shot. For the game winner—corner
right pocket—she stretched across the table. Her blouse slid up her lower back, and the single eye of a tattooed turquoise octopus peeked out at him.
A scratch.
“I’ve never seen anyone play pool like that,” Connor said, dumbfounded at the display.
“But, you see, I lost. I scratched.” With her fingernail, she flicked the eight ball against the felt bank. “I always blow it.” She appeared sad at this confession.
“You lost on purpose. I saw you shoot the cue ball straight in.”
“On purpose? You think there is such a thing?”
“I don’t know,” Connor said, finding her suddenly fascinating. “Why are you so mean to your parents? They’re good people.”
She shuffled over to him in her bare feet and ran her hand across his smooth scalp. “You should grow your hair out and dye it strawberry. It would look cool.”
“You didn’t answer me about your parents.”
“What does the word ‘good’ taste like?”
“Pardon?”
Giigee backed him up against the rack of pool cues on the wall. “Open your mouth. I’ll show you what ‘bad’ tastes like and you can make it all good.”
They lay down on a couch, his pants around his knees, her ruffled skirt pushed up to her waist, her bra, which he fumbled to get undone, hanging from her neck like a sling. She grinded against him, but his erection, which had proved so ready at the prospect of sex, now wilted at the act. After a while she stopped moving. “You think I’m ugly.” It wasn’t a question. “Don’t you like my body?”
“Your body is fabulous!” he said, sounding, he knew, like a talk show host praising a guest’s new movie.
“So what’s wrong then?”
“I don’t know…I guess I’m nervous.”
“Relax then,” she commanded, pushing his face against her tits, but after sucking and licking and stroking and imitating the slew of porno examples on the web to the best of his ability, he sat up.
It was late. He had to get home. “My mother, she’s not well…” A mishmash of excuses came pouring out of him. Giigee, unlike what sympathetic girls do in books and movies, didn’t reassure him or tell him not to worry about it; she instead stood up, got dressed, and went through the side door without another word, leaving him sitting there with his pants literally around his ankles.
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