The Outer Cape

by Patrick Dacey

  On the bus, Nathan stashes his duffel and sits in the aisle seat toward the back. He unties his boots, yanks them off, and sniffs the insides.

  An old man in black Velcro sneakers looks back at him, then turns ahead. He looks back again.

  “What?” Nathan says.

  The old man smirks.

  “We used to have real wars with real enemies you could actually hate because in a way you respected their guile. Now we fight terror. We fight a word. There’s no wonder we can never win or lose. Our enemy is a ghost of the imagination.”

  “Fuck off, pal,” Nathan says.

  “Exactly,” the old man says, and faces front.

  At the gate check in the airport, Nathan stands in line sweating furiously in the wake of impending authority. The only thing he has of any importance, or worth, is his old military ID, the prescription bottle filled with a combination of other prescription drugs—Klonopin, Xanax, Ambien, Zoloft, and five or so purple, diamond-shaped muscle relaxers from Brazil, all provided by Mason—and two changes of clothes. He puts the items into one of the gray plastic crates on the conveyor and watches them enter into the big metal box to be inspected. A lady with a mechanical wand directs him toward a body scanner. “Belt,” she says. He slips off his belt and puts it on the conveyor with someone else’s phone and shoes and money clip, a hundred-dollar bill pinched under the clasp.

  Inside the scanner, he lifts his arms to mirror the shaded, unisex human form in front of him and looks down at his bare feet, his untrimmed, yellowing toenails. He steps out and is searched again on the other side. The man behind him is also being searched. The TSA agent passes over the bullet pieces that had broken up in Nathan’s shoulder during his second tour in Tikrit. Nathan pulls down his shirt and shows the man the scar.

  “Just think,” he says, “six inches to the right and we would never have had such an intimate moment together.”

  “Let me thank you for your service,” the agent says, not looking him in the eye.

  Nathan picks up his materials from the conveyer and snatches the money clip.

  In the terminal lavatory, he slips the hundred-dollar bill into his coat pocket and ditches the money clip in the trash. He sits in the stall at the far end, locks the door, and lights a cigarette. He takes three quick puffs before extinguishing the butt in the toilet, then pops two Klonopins and follows that with two Xanax. Barring any screaming infants, he thinks, the pills should knock him out before the plane takes off.

  Only when the plane wheels slam against the runway in Boston does Nathan wake. A terrible pain crests across his shoulders and springs up into his neck. He senses the man in the next seat staring at him and turns slightly to see him with his left eye.

  “You drooled on my shoulder,” the man says.

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Middle seat, a stranger’s drool on my only blazer, and I’m ninety-five percent sure my wife is sleeping with one of my cousins.”

  “Not quite the American dream?”

  “My cousins are all so fucking good-looking. Their brains are mush, but they got these giant arms and big bulging shoulders and they all speak with this phony Greek accent, pretending they didn’t grow up in Bridgewater.”

  “Maybe they have small penises.”

  “In my dreams,” the man says, sullen. “Too bad we all went to school together. They’re hung like horses.”

  The man sits on his knees holding his carry-on. He’s small, blubbery, and sad.

  “Look at these people. It’s like they want to stay on the plane longer. Carrying their entire wardrobe—all you need is a blazer and you can go anywhere. Unless someone drools all over it, then I guess it’s a good idea to have more than one blazer.”

  Nathan, no longer paying attention to the pathetic stranger, thinks about his mother, how to approach her, how to make it seem like he’s doing well so that she won’t worry.

  The line moves ahead like a slow funeral procession, and he shuffles out into the gate area, through the traffic of ruddy-faced travelers, and out beneath the gray sky, surrounded by the smell of smoke and burnt coffee beans, the dropped consonants and phlegm-clotted laughter.

  Nathan boards the Plymouth/Brockton bus for South Station. Rolling over the lunar potholes, he’s reminded of the terrifying intricacies of this small, gloomy city he knew as a kid, chasing after his father who strode through the crowds as though they were invisible, and later when he was a teenager and would ditch school and catch a ride to Haymarket Square, and find a bar to serve him and his buddies, who had all grown enough stubble to look close enough to twenty-one. The way the roads dip under Boston Harbor as if falling from the earth, how the buildings appear crooked, built on the waves surrounding them, the flagrant grayness of the city itself, from the pale sky to the pale faces.

  He arrives at South Station and out into the oil-rich air with the smell of exhaust fumes and overfull garbage cans, and stands listening to a raggedy-looking addict play Bob Dylan’s “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” There are no coins in the musician’s guitar case, no dollar bills. It’s tough for a street musician these days; no one deals in cash anymore.

  On the train, he studies the passengers, most communing with their phones and tablets. They work in a kind of rhythm, along with the rushing of the train—whirling, symphonic—it all seems a natural movement into the day, and for once in a city, the people flow around and over him, as though he is a loose rock in a rushing stream, soon to be carried away to some new destination.

  The cold is a charge, an input. Nathan has always felt comforted being close to the ocean, as if a giant hand is ready to receive him, though not today. And this, along with the smaller joys he had when he was a boy—the walks he took along felled autumn leaves, swiping his finger across the crystallized windows of storefronts in winter, the smell of cut grass and damp earth on the baseball diamonds, dangling his feet over the harbor bulkhead in summer—now appear distant and unattainable. Where have they gone? Brief flashes, scenes infused with color congealing into a mass of bleak gray; times when he could feel what it was like to be the person who felt things.

  Nathan walks with the crowds—their haunted faces have the unhealthy pallor that clings to the skin during frantic times—unceremoniously roaming the coffee-stained brick neighborhoods of Beacon Hill. Zombies. Human flotsam. What is that line from Under the Volcano?

  “The Lighthouse, the lighthouse that invites the storm, and lights it!”

  He heads downtown and into the State House, where his brother’s wedding had been held, when? Nine, ten years ago? The last time he had been in Boston, just home from Iraq, his mother begging him to wear his uniform, his brother begging him not to.

  He rides the elevator to the top floor and enters the large reception room, where, from the ceiling-high windows on the top floor overlooking Back Bay, he can see the ocean dimple from the light rain. He remembers how it was to dance with his mother, and his sister-in-law and her mother. How beautiful they all looked. Andrew’s father in-law had made millions selling bathroom fixtures to fast-food restaurants, and though his left eye twitched feverishly, his voice had the relaxed tone of a father reading his child a bedtime story. He was Jewish and heavy, and it took five of Andrew’s bullnecked friends to lift the man up on the chair as they danced the horah. But it was that moment with his mother, when he put his cheek against hers, as they stood by the windows in the waning end of the celebration, while guests were collecting their coats and asking one another which bar they should meet up at, when he felt a warmth in his body so infantile, so new, he gripped her tightly, attempting, he guesses, to pull her into him, so that he could feel this heat and comfort he had somehow known was about to disappear.

  Nathan pictures the scene so clearly, he feels it must hold some kind of significance.

  Then the wedding party was gone, and only his father was still there, sitting at a cluttered table with his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette and touching the ash int
o a half-drunk glass of champagne.

  “Jews and fags,” he had said. “It used to be you could make a joke every now and again. Not anymore. They lock you up, call it a hate crime.”

  He dropped the half-smoked cigarette into the glass, looked past Nathan to the diminishing crowd.

  “Do you think it will last?”

  “I do,” Nathan said.

  “He’s underwater now,” his father said, not to Nathan so much as to himself. “He’ll never be able to come up for air.”

  Nathan’s father had taken off one of his snakeskin boots, shaken a pebble out in his palm, then flicked it carelessly onto the table.

  Approaching now, a sharp-featured young woman with a harsh New England face—thin lips, cat eyes, sunken cheeks—“Sir, we have a wedding rehearsal beginning this afternoon,” she says. “You will need to vacate.”

  “Vacate?”

  “Leave.”

  “I know what it means.”

  The woman scratches her cheek with the tip of her white painted fingernail.

  “My brother was married here,” Nathan says. “Andrew Kelly. I was the best man.”

  “We have many weddings here. This is a very popular space.”

  “I gave quite a memorable toast, as toasts go.”

  And it was memorable, in a way, if only for the fact that he had cast Andrew as a nerd and Kirsten his savior. Locked away in his dorm room, reading advanced microeconomic theory, his eyes like red stones, not so different from when he was a boy and stayed up all night putting together a puzzle of Monet’s Water Lilies, Evening Effect, or playing chess against himself (an invented opponent of Russian descent named Boris Popov). Nathan thought Andrew would never come out of it, never meet anyone if all he did was study, until he met Kirsten; and here he paused and looked toward Kirsten, who sat at the head table with an air of impatience and annoyance, the folds of her dress like a cream custard, so perfectly frozen about her. A lone uncle or old college roommate of Andrew’s whistled inappropriately. Nathan, seeing her face, turning to the light, said of love, “How crazy it makes a man; how perfect it makes a woman,” and emptied his glass of scotch to arrhythmic applause. “To love and peace and the absurdity of happiness,” he closed.

  “The absurdity of happiness,” he repeats aloud, thoughtfully.

  “Please, if you wouldn’t mind, sir,” the woman says.

  Nathan has never felt comfortable being called “sir,” whether in a regimental sense or as a regular citizen. He looks out the windows, to the graying clouds hanging over Back Bay, and the clock tower. A pair of seagulls perch there like carved statues.

  “Okay, then,” he says.

  Once outside, he queues up with a school field trip, boys and girls in ugly soft orange T-shirts, chanting some horrifyingly senseless song—1773 is when we dumped the tea, our taxes were hiked and the British were psyched, so we threw their love in the sea—clearly the work of a first-year, overzealous high school teacher whose hope has yet to be zapped.

  Nathan walks alongside the group. They visit the Old Granary Burying Ground and meet with the headstones of Paul Revere and Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine. The teacher explains that these men were heroes in their time. Nathan stands behind the children, nodding thoughtfully, thinking, if I were teaching this class I would say something like, “Children, they were heroes for certain men, thieves and slaughterers for others. Who knows, we may have been better off had the British won.” The teacher moves on to another grave, and the children weave through the headstones, playing a game of Can the Dead Feel This, jumping as high as they can and landing with a thud on the browning grass where so many tourists have walked before. As is true in most American cities still recovering from the recession, the local government is unable to provide sufficient maintenance for its most treasured monuments, trusting an innate respect for the dead that children are incapable of possessing because they are, as of yet, unafraid, that possibly they have awakened the ghosts of these supposedly triumphant men.

  “John Adams was a pussy,” Mr. Putter had said one afternoon during Nathan’s sophomore social studies class, and he had always remembered it. A couple of days later Mr. Putter was put on leave, and Nathan never saw him again. He guesses now that Mr. Putter’s trouble wasn’t unusual; it had something to do with booze and regret and boredom, of being a white, American male stuck with the derivative seed flowering rows and rows of dull lives.

  Nathan leaves the group of children and walks through the Common to the Public Garden, between the overhanging elms, the fecund-smelling flowers, and bubbling fountains, saluting George Washington: “You tall, stone-legged son-of-a-bitch.” Only one unhappy-looking couple is out in a paddleboat, their arms wrapped around their bodies, bicycling toward the center of the pond.

  He sits on a bench and picks up the metro section of the Herald, which has been left on the place beside him. A spider crawls up the page and skitters along the broadside onto his hand. He presses his hand to the bench and the spider crawls off. “B1, Above the Fold: A pregnant woman shot in the stomach: double homicide. The shooter had intended to kill someone else. He expressed his sorrow in court, pled not guilty. B1, Below: A girl kidnapped by her own father, who hung her by the feet in the basement of his house in Fall River. She is okay now, the paper says. Back home. Safe and Sound. B1, Right Column: Corruption, toll hikes. B2: The Mayor’s relationship with an old, blind white woman, who may or may not be a mystic he visits regularly. B3: Whitey Bulger, who’d been caught by the FBI on a tip given from a former Miss Iceland, is said to be living a decent life behind bars.” Nathan’s father had admired the gangster, said he was smart enough to rig the lottery and cash his own ticket.

  “B11: Weather today: cloudy and mild with a chance of rain.”

  Nathan rolls up the paper, sees that the spider has returned, and goes to smack it dead out of natural instinct, but stops himself just as the paper is about to land, lets it unfurl there on the bench, and watches the spider crawl back across the columns. He stands but doesn’t move, like one of those statues of colonial heroes, face motionless in a godlike expression. Some boys are pushing each other, pushing one boy more than the others. They are playing Captive, a game Nathan had played when he was young and had scabs behind his ears. He, like this boy, was always picked first to play the captive. The boy is pudgy with thick, bowl-cut hair and a red-cheeked face. The captive boy has five Mississippis to find a way out or else he will starve—which might not be a bad thing—and be forced to playact his own death for the amusement of everyone watching. The only way to get out is to push through the boys hard enough that their arms break free. When he had been inside the circle, Nathan ran with all his might through the boys’ arms, tripped and fell, muddied his shirt and pants. The boys had laughed at him. They had called him fat ass. He rolled over onto his back. He had cried from confusion. There was no way to win the game except to know it was a game. The boys shove the captive from one cruel troll to the next, smacking his head, pulling his arms, tearing his shirt at the collar, kicking his ankles. Grown men walk past and look back. Perhaps they remember what it was like to be inside and outside the game, surrounding or being surrounded by each other.

  The boy is on the ground now, covering his head as though from nearby gunfire. He will never be free, Nathan thinks. Even when the bullets stop and the dust settles, he will live forever inside this tiny circle trying to find a way out.

  Nathan continues on, past the T-shirt and souvenir vendors at their stalls, smoking, selling, rapping with one another. He takes the stairs to the subway tunnel and catches the next train. He needs to move, to be moved, to feel the rails beneath him, the car rattling back and forth. His elbows brush against the arms of strangers. He feels the tiny bumps on their skin. He hops on the Red line for Braintree. The T bumps along the rails like an old trolley car, except in the old days you could see the man at the controls: he greeted you when you got on and said, “Have a nice day, folks,” when you got off. At least that’s how
Nathan imagines public transportation used to be. Now he can barely hear the name of the station as the train approaches the snuff-stained cement landing of each dreary outpost along the northeastern shore.

  If he hadn’t fully felt the effect of the drugs over the course of the flight, and his brief walk through Boston, Nathan feels them now as his legs turn gelatinous and he finds it necessary to sit in an empty seat near the automatic door. Through cloudy vision he sees a subway car full of drooping heads. Then the heads fall off and roll from side to side with the shimmy of the car. The heads knock against each other like bingo balls in a cage. Their pupils dead and unwavering. The headless workers grip the rails above, armpits clenching a coat or tablet or sheaf of papers, knees wobbly, legs ready to fold. They are as alive as insects, all nerves and instinct. One by one, they reach their stop, pick up their heads, and fit them back on their necks. Their eyes begin to move like the faces on battery-powered dolls.

  It occurs to Nathan that if it is true what Mason had said about the mind being a hotel, then his hotel is set for a riot. The people on the subway car handling their bags, punching the keypads on their phones, staring blankly at the advertisements overhead, are waiting to check in, and he, Nathan Kelly, a thirty-eight-year-old with faulty wiring, acts as a porter of sorts. Then there are those who sneak past while he isn’t paying attention. How, then, is he able to spend so much time at the door of the hotel, while also inside the hotel, and here on this train? Surely he, too, has taken up a bed in other hotels. His family, past lovers, friends, and, quite possibly, the woman sitting beside him curling her hair around her finger while reading a textbook on music therapy all have offered him a room for one night, if not longer, in their own hotels.

  “The human race, bored with itself, has not changed all that much,” Mason had said once, while lighting a roach, inhaling, speaking distinctly through coughing spurts. “Distant worlds are invented to entertain as mystic storytellers did in tribes thousands of years ago. We are a fearful race. So we retreat to inner worlds with infinite freedoms, where one can go backward or forward in a matter of seconds, never having to be present, never having to be—”