Prodigals

by Greg Jackson

  Tanner fell silent. My bladder was going to burst, I feared, but I was past the point of interrupting and hadn’t signaled to our waiter in forty-five minutes. Our wine was gone, as was the water in my glass, and although the evening had grown cold I noticed that my back, pressed against the iron chair frame, was coated in sweat. It is not hard to say what I felt, although in another sense it is hard to say it in fewer words than it took Tanner to tell. I had the familiar feeling of being a cracked vessel refilled by blind servants. And although this was not a pleasant self-knowledge to possess, I reconciled myself, to carry the metaphor further still, with the notion that all this water was being gathered to drown a prisoner who was free to leave. Which is all to say better cracked than whole.

  But maybe I am just more oblique than Tanner because I have more cause for self-protection. Or maybe I have lived longer in the jeopardy he describes. Or. Sometimes I think we might define ourselves by such simple words—“and,” “or”—and that I merely side with paralysis over fabrication.

  “So you’re back,” I said.

  Tanner looked at me sadly, seeing, I guess, that I did not understand or couldn’t say aloud how much I did, that this is what it meant to playact, to have bought in or sold out—never acknowledging how much you understood.

  “I’m not back,” he said.

  He got up, laid some amount of money on the table. I didn’t count. I didn’t offer to chip in.

  “What, is that it?” I said.

  “I’m tired.” He looked away. “Another time.”

  “Soon though,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “Soon.”

  When I returned from the bathroom Tanner was gone. I wouldn’t see him again for many months.

  When I did see Tanner next he had begun to fill back in. His hair was clean, his scruff shorn to a handsome stubble. The clothes he wore looked expensive and fit. He joked about our previous meeting, saying how he’d been in a state. “Overwrought” was the word he used, I think, and he described the intervening months as a rappel à l’ordre. We were at some insignificant party, on the roof, drinking cocktails out of Mexican glasses and gazing across the river at the city that loomed above. I watched Tanner as he laughed and made his way through the crowd, watched as he leaned in to make a joke or bent to catch a private word whispered in his ear. He seemed his old self and so I was surprised, later, when I saw him gazing at a print—Ruggiero Freeing Angelica, I believe—to catch a far-off look in his eye, a look he didn’t mask right away on registering my glance but shared with me, letting it settle briefly in the wry despair of officers who, without a word, tell each other they know their city will fall. It was too much for me, this brief window on the shoreless sea we carry around inside us. I said my goodbyes hurriedly and went home, settling in the living room as voices in the dark around me wove a thin fabric from the tatters of what we have been taught to call our lives.

  Perhaps you will not be surprised to learn—perhaps it is already clear—that Tanner and I had ceased to be different people. We are different in the sense that we look different, have different Social Security numbers and addresses, and that I never met the Magnusson sisters. But in another, and the more important, sense, of course I did, I have met them, and it has been the great joy and misfortune of my life.

  My memory is not perfect, nor would I hope it to be, for if my perception isn’t either this would simply be the faithful transcription of a mistake. But I can still hear the voices that spoke to me in the dark living room that night saying, “Once, when you thought she was caring for you, your mother was walking the fault lines of a perilous terrain. When you see the spires fall, you will know we are singing to you. It is a melody constructed from the martyrdom of a swimming pool filled with drowned cowards. The earth was ripped open so that you could fall in. It is we, the sisters, come. Come join us at the bottom, and sing!”

  Summer 1984

  There is a gun in Act I. I have put it there. I am one and a half when this happens, when Michaela’s story takes place, an age when the literature tells me the child’s personality has begun to emerge, a sense of independence, and the imagination too. When children first pretend to be people they are not, characters from books and movies, and when they may begin to mimic their caretaking on dolls. Because I am a boy-child I have no dolls. Many years later I am fascinated by the claim that “violence is essentially the form of the quest for identity.” I leave the conclusions to you. At one and a half, my parents tell me, I was curious, baffled, intent. I liked car rides, the quiet displacements beyond the glass. The simple magic of vision, the reality of space. I liked going home.

  MICHAELA’S STORY (AS TOLD BY HER)

  I signed on with D.H. for a second summer because it was a sure thing and I needed the money if I was going to Nicaragua. All summer my dreams would be dark coiled things sprung from a wilderness I didn’t, or hadn’t yet taken the time to, understand. I was back from college, living at my mom’s, trying to get through Paulo Freire. I was reading too much news. Central America had become an obsession with me, I couldn’t get enough. I read articles on breaks at work, bought magazines and dailies on my nightly walks. There wasn’t much else to do. My sister Tatiana—the youngest after me—had finally done what Kiki, Viola, and Erin had all done, which was to leave. She wanted to go to the far side of the continent and ride motorcycles through redwood forests with guys named Bruce, it turned out. So that left me. I was glad D.H. took me on. Tatiana and I had set a record the summer before, painting four dorm rooms in a day, and I guess that was résumé and interview.

  I worked with Mellie wallpapering the first week. Mellie was twenty-three. She put me in mind of a tomboy who had grown up prettier than anyone expected and I’m not sure she understood her effect on people. A lot of what she told me had to do with her boyfriend Judson and their sex life, a semipublic affair inflected by some exhibitionist hankering. Mellie could be racist too, but these failings aside, and I certainly counted Judson a failing, she was my favorite on the crew. I granted her a good soul that had come under a bad influence, which was probably granting her too much, but I liked her so that’s what happened.

  A Mellie vignette: Sometimes we’ll be out, and Judson’ll tell me to go wait for him in the stall. Just get ready and wait. A few minutes later he’ll come in. I’ll be turned away, but I’ll know it’s him by how he’s breathing. I’ll feel his eyes on me. It’s the most exciting thing, Michaela, that moment, right before anything happens. She’ll have stopped working, the seam roller in her hand hovering at her shoulder. Her gaze will drift to the window, like out there somewhere is her real life … I’ll feel him looking, and sometimes my heart just catches it’s beating so hard. Do you know what that’s like, just surrendering like that?

  Show me again how to get the bubbles out without it creasing, I might say, just to say something. And Mellie would give me a look like my big sisters used to and say, Ah, you’re too young to understand.

  But that didn’t seem to me to be the problem. I kept imagining the poor person trapped in the stall next to theirs, listening to the bullish exhaust of Judson’s appetite. Clearly that was part of what thrilled them, though, the possibility of being discovered, overheard, seen. I was back to painting the next week, anyway, and that was the end of Mellie’s stories. I had to work with Bobby, but otherwise I preferred painting, which was mindless and voiding. We’d been contracted to do the sports facilities that summer, the basketball complex, the doorframes, chairs, the mascot logo at center court. Don’t let that idiot near it, D.H. told me, meaning Bobby, meaning the logo. So for a few days it was just me and that mischievous grinning face, eye to eye.

  The coach stopped by one day to see how we were making out. It was pretty decent of him, I thought, given his status in our town, which compared favorably to the Messiah. He had a growth on his head. It caught me off guard and for a second I thought it was a trick of the light, but then I looked again, without really meaning to but also shamelessly, and
there it was, wan and hideous like a tree fungus. He flinched. His hand leapt to his head and he brushed his hair back.

  Let’s hope this heat breaks, he said.

  Oh! I said, which wasn’t what I meant to say.

  Our work began early and ended in the late afternoon. Every day at four we trickled into the basement room by the lockers: me, Mellie, Bobby, Carl, Radar, Stan, Ellen S., and Ellen V. Because we couldn’t leave until everyone was there, we sat around chitchatting, changing our shoes, and watching Bobby pick the calluses on his feet. Most days I rode home with Carl, but when luck turned against me I was stuck with Radar and Stan.

  They were cousins of some sort, that’s what they said anyway, but if they shared anything it was an omission, I thought, the absence of a trait necessary to the composition of a full human. They are missing the chromosome on which God placed love, Carl once said, seeming to pluck the idiotic phrase from the ticker tape homily of his mind. Radar was short and round, Stan tall and gaunt. Together they made a backcountry Laurel and Hardy. When I rode with them, always in the back, they seemed to forget I was there and told stories that might’ve even made Mellie blush.

  So down to the motel, Radar said on the Tuesday after a long weekend, me and Derek are out drinking beers by the pool. And there’s this girl, she wants to go swimming. She’s maybe eleven or twelve, I don’t know, and the thing is, and you can see where this is going, she doesn’t have a suit. Well so the mother says, Ah, you don’t need none, just go in. And Derek and me’s looking at each other like, did we just hear right? We’ve maybe had a few at this point. The girl’s stripping, Derek’s cracking. And thing is, she like … likes it, you can tell. She’s, like, showing off. Stan hit a fist against the doorframe. What’s the mother thinking? Fuck, said Radar, for all I know they’re nudists. His voice took on a sudden sober conviction. I’ll tell you this though, boy—she gave us a show. Bet you saw a little pink button, Stan said. Shit, said Radar. Size of my pinkie.

  It amazed me in those days how quickly my presence, my very existence, seemed to disappear from people’s minds. I got to the point of daydreaming so deeply, dreams empty of any content, that I began to think myself some astral walker, present but on a different plane, and when people spoke to me it often took me long seconds before I could remember how to speak. And yet even as I entered states of attention so total and immediate as to purge my mind of thought, I found I could later recall what had taken place around me, indexed with emotions like the colors on file tabs. And what I felt recalling Radar and Stan, with the benefit of some distance, was not disgust, though they were gross, but the tragic smallness of what they needed and still could not get, the smallness of their need next to the need that drove others not so very far away, the people whose stories I read daily in the news, to martyrdom and murder in conflicts that stretched into other lifetimes. I don’t mean Radar and Stan were pathetic. I mean I couldn’t reconcile the scales. And I knew nothing of sex then. I’m still mystified by its true nature, whether it is an itch to scratch, an exercise in power, in pleasure, a form of togetherness, of renewal, an act of reckless hope, slavery, or freedom. All I feel confident saying, I suppose, is that you act differently when there are eyes on you. You undress differently observed.

  My mother worked odd hours at the furniture factory. She was never around when I got home, so after checking on Mad Max, the screech owl that flew freely in our house that summer, and sometimes picking a cicada for him from the pear tree out front, I set out into the endless summer evening, cutting through the developments next door, that creeping mold of selfsame houses and curving roads, crossed guardrails and culverts, dirt lots and light-industrial blight, past baseball fields where kids called to one another in the hot, low sun and the dust rising from the infield was gold powder, all the way to the rutted path that traced our little river, a river of rocks that summer, which I would follow until it turned off into the nicer part of town.

  It was there, in one of the cafés, among the antique shops and sycamores that I first saw her. She was a woman of some dignified middle age, in an elegant sleeveless dress the color of the sky before, or maybe after, a storm. She had short hair, silver earrings, a cup of tea before her, and a piece of white cake she was eating slowly. Looking back I don’t know whether it was her appearance that made me glance at what she was reading or what she was reading that sensitized me to the air of loneliness, or incongruity, that had settled around her. It was a magazine article I’d read a few days before on El Mozote, about which great controversy then raged. It was enough, anyway, for me to take note and then recognize her a week later in front of a house, trimming sundrops and coral bells in gray gloves. That was early evening. The sun coursed down like a river, washing over her and the house’s weathered brick all the way to the rhododendrons in the back, which stood guard at the border where her yard abutted a small park with a pond.

  I had no history of spying on people, no buried desire in this direction, I think, and I did not, even much later, consider my curiosity a violation, although it was in its way. I did not—here was the thing—I never associated what I was doing with the sort of furtive spying you saw in movies and on TV, which grew out of some disorder or perversion and went by the name of peeping. I simply fell into the habit of passing through the small park on my nightly walk and, when it was dark and I could do so unobserved, slipping through the bushes into her backyard.

  When the lights were on I could see into the house. Sometimes I saw her in an armchair, reading, music playing at low volume, or else in the kitchen preparing a meal, an apron strung around her waist, steam rising from steel pots. The house looked like she might be expecting a dignitary at any minute. There was a mantel clock above the fireplace, long pretty curtains gathered neatly at the windows. I don’t know what I hoped to discover. Possibly I was just bored and this opportunity had fallen into my lap. Someone seemingly as alone as me, and yet completely different. Or maybe I convinced myself that the secret of the massacre lived in this house, whatever that might have meant.

  I didn’t drink then, I already found the world confusing enough, but Bobby drank, and as June wound into July he began showing up to work drunk and then drinking on the job. It meant I had to work harder to keep us on pace, and laboring amid oil and epoxy fumes I got terrible headaches. Head rushes swept over me, leaving my vision abuzz and scattered in blocks of color. At times I had to lie down to let the nausea pass.

  D.H. found me like this one day, on my back in the bleachers. Michaela, he said, you’re a good painter: you’re fast and you’re precise. But if I catch you lying down on the job again, I’ll fire you without a second thought. I couldn’t respond; the moment had come and gone too fast. Woo-ee, Bobby said when D.H. had left. Look who ain’t long for the world!

  I tried to talk about it with Carl on the ride home that afternoon. In a fair world, Carl philosophized, I’d say rat out the drunk. But we don’t live in a fair world, and it’s probably worse to be thought a snitch. I just don’t see why I care, I said. Carl smiled. It’s all for naught, he said. You know what that means? I blinked at him so that I didn’t hurt him. Who didn’t know what all for naught meant? He said it all the time, anyway, like a ludicrous mantra. In his thick accent it sounded like he was saying it’s often hot—which was true, it was.

  But it wasn’t all for naught, not for me anyway. I needed the money so I could leave, like my sisters had, so I could fly to Nicaragua, or El Salvador, and begin what I imagined to be my life. I had already told college I wouldn’t be back in the fall and part of me doubted I ever would. College was fine. It was just fine.

  When I got home from my walks, I often found my mother on the sofa, watching reruns and drinking Stroh’s. Sometimes Max would be perched on her head and turn his eyes on me, fixed in their dead-ahead regard. Something was wrong with him, I’d say a broken wing if that didn’t sound so stupidly symbolic, but his summer in our house anyway was a convalescence.

  One night my mother asked me
to come over and sit down, and before I knew it she’d cut a lock of my hair with a pair of scissors. For Max, she said, who needed the roughage for his digestion. You could have asked, I said. And what’s wrong with your hair? You don’t want Max eating dye, she said aghast. She cut a raw steak into small pieces and wrapped them in my hair. See how much he likes it, she said. He seemed to like it the exact amount he liked everything.

  In those moments when our eyes met, I thought I saw my mother’s wobble, unable to fixate or lock, as though steady gaze and the picture of the world it offered were a thing she’d given up, a thing taken from her or traded away, and in those moments I had the urge to flee and never come back. I sometimes thought I heard goats bleating out back, before I remembered that we no longer kept goats, that it had been my father’s idea to keep goats, before he left us and left us the goats, the asshole. I didn’t intend to forgive him, even as I forgave my sisters, wordlessly, without a second thought, knowing that in their shoes I would have done the same. You save yourself first.

  My only companionship that summer was my college friend, Linda. She was a camp counselor in New Hampshire, a thousand miles away, and for the first half of the summer we wrote each other diligently. Having nothing to report myself, I told stories from work. The Dynamic Duo, I wrote, which was the name I’d given Radar and Stan, recently hatched a plan to knock over a convenience store called Binny’s. Now Binny’s is possibly the saddest convenience store on earth. I don’t know whether they accept or have ever seen paper currency, but well, the boys, they’re like Sonny Wortzik and Sal when they get plotting (remember when we saw that at the Nugget?). They think it’s a cinch because it’s all stoned teenagers working there over the summer, but what about me? What do they think I’m going to say to the cops? If I die under mysterious circumstances please show them this letter.