Prodigals

by Greg Jackson

  Linda began most of her notes by telling me how crazy and hilarious my life at home was; then she’d tell me about sailboats capsizing on the lake, taking ticks off campers with blown-out matches, girls getting their periods for the first time, convinced they were diseased or dying, campers who got so homesick their parents had to come get them. Homesick? I thought like love this referred to an emotion I lacked the sensitivity to pick up. Late at night, Linda said, she and the other counselors snuck out to meet up with their counterparts from the boys’ camp nearby. I may have done a certain something with Hot Josh, she wrote. Aaaah! I feel crazy! I skimmed for a couple of pages until Josh’s name stopped appearing. I didn’t know this Linda. Foucault had died and she hadn’t even mentioned it.

  As much as Linda described it I failed to understand what camp really was. I kept thinking, You do what all day? sure I’d missed something. It wasn’t envy I felt. I felt the way I did when I read about Buddhist monks walking barefoot on hot coals. I felt: Why?

  On breaks at work, while the others smoked, I skimmed the papers looking for news from the south. People were killing one another here in the U.S. too—at McDonald’s, in San Diego, in Alaska. That was different, I thought. That was despair. They wanted to kill. To kill intransitively. That was how the AIDS virus killed, science had just told us, so long as you agreed it wasn’t punishment from God, believed it followed the thoughtless compulsion of its biology or chemistry or whatever clockwork urged it on, like the freak tornado swarm that had swept through just east of here while I was at school, killing dozens and wreaking its fantastic havoc. People still spoke of the tornadoes in low tones like fate were listening. Violence of this sort unnerved me. It didn’t believe in the world.

  At work Bobby sometimes asked me to tell him again what it was I was studying in college.

  History, I said. Latin American history.

  You, he’d say, shaking his head. You I do not understand.

  But the truth was, if there was a truth, that thin strip of umbilical land between Mexico and Colombia turned out to be the only thing that could hold my attention: Nicaraguan land reform, Panzós and the Spanish embassy fire, Rigoberta Menchú’s memoir, the assassination of Archbishop Romero. I read article after article on the unfolding revolutionary chaos, the power seizures and coups, the juntas, the leftist turns against the juntas, the brave stands taken by peasants and clergy. That spring in São Paulo, a million and a half had gathered in the Anhangabaú Valley demanding democratic elections. And though the vote had failed, things seemed to be changing, the impulse spreading—the impulse to change everything, to take every mistake and inevitability that went by the name of life—as in, that’s life—and erase it, like footprints in the sand, or to cut it off like chains binding us to the past. I had no real clue what I would do if I made it to Nicaragua or El Salvador, but I knew that I would never forgive myself if I failed to see what was happening firsthand. If I failed in whatever small way to participate. History still existed there and it had dried up here at home. I don’t think I put things to myself in those terms then, but I sensed a fissure in me that would otherwise never heal.

  I thought about the reality of these distant countries as I gazed into the woman’s house, the soft lit world beyond its panes. I imagined the woman’s husband returning from the revolutionary tropics, from some grim mission attending to American interests, as they’re always called, coming back to this snow globe world and giving in to the delusion that the two worlds did not exist in one continuous reality, separated only by permeable space. Maybe he was the dignitary she was always expecting. Or maybe the house was just her way of curating that delusion.

  Of course I didn’t know the first thing about her husband—whether he was alive, where he was, what he did, if he existed at all. I knew only that she wore a ring, a silver band, and the name she spoke the one time I heard her speak might have been anyone’s—her husband’s, a child’s, God’s. Probably not God’s, but you never know. It was a July night full of plant heat. The day had been suffocating too and crowns of vapor fringed the lights set to burn in the dark. The woman had her windows cracked and when the phone rang the sound passed out into the yard like the trilling of Max’s birdsong. She disappeared and I went around to the other side of the house where, standing on the metal lip of a window well with my hands on the sash, I found her again, a silhouette across the unlit room.

  She was standing in a small interior hall, partly obscured by the doorframe and turned away from me so that I couldn’t see her face. Light from the kitchen washed dimly into the hallway. I couldn’t make out her words at first, only what sounded like distress in them. An old distress, I thought, nothing unexpected. An unscabbed wound. I strained to hear, pressed against the mullions, then the window lurched in my hands, opened under an upward pressure, and I heard her say, Gabriel. Gabriel. A pause. Hold on. Hello? she said in a loud, timorous voice. I held still, my head ducked out of sight, waiting, letting the very faintest breath escape me while my heart drummed mercilessly in my chest. In the silence the static of the crickets rose up, so loud I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it before. The sound was deafening. It seemed to pulse. I thought I heard the insects humming in the fluid skin above the pond. Then I heard her say, Nothing, I guess. Two dozen? Too many. What about—Well, how does it run? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. She laughed. Karen? No!

  A few days later I got a letter from Linda telling me how madly in love with Josh she was. He’s thin, but he’s strong too, she wrote. Sometimes, when the stars are out and everything’s quiet, I rest my head on his chest. I listen to his heartbeat and the frogs by the lake, and I think I’m hearing God. I think, This must be what people mean by God. That the universe is listening, that you’re listening to it. I know it sounds ridiculous but that’s what I think. I think: God is everywhere … Oh, Michaela, what’s happening to me? I almost let my girls retrieve their arrows before everyone was done shooting. Someone could have been shot! I’m distracted all the time. I cry for no reason. I think about marrying Josh …

  The letter was eight pages long. I didn’t read the whole thing. I concluded that Linda had gone insane and I put the letter back in its envelope. I considered writing Return to Sender and dropping it in a mailbox or possibly burning it, but in the end I just lost it.

  At work Bobby said, What do you think it’s like to kill someone? That depends, I said. Okay, said Bobby. There’s lots of ways to kill someone, I said. You could choke someone to death, look right in their eyes. You could be one shooter in a firing squad. You could get the order to drop a bomb. You could give the order to drop a bomb. You could kill someone by accident … I’m talking about face-to-face, gun to the head, Bam! Bobby said. One second they’re alive, next second they’re dead. I looked at Bobby. He was covered in sweat. Actually, I don’t want to talk about this, I said.

  I didn’t realize how much I didn’t until I got to the women’s room and found I was shaking. I felt sick, like a summer flu had exploded inside me. I opened the window. The air was even hotter outside, as sickly moist as dog’s breath. The sun fell through the window like scalding water on my skin.

  Fucking, cocksucking, Mellie muttered, banging through the door. When she saw me she stopped for a second. Hey, she said, you know that fucking asshole Randall, the supplier? Fucking spook’s joking around with Radar and Stan, looks me up and down, takes his sweet time, and I’m like, Take a fucking picture, why don’t you? And he says—I don’t even fucking know—some slimy shit, and Radar and Stan and him are all cracking up. I swear Judson would kill that—

  I had my hand up. The heat, the shouting—it was too much. Part of me maybe had a crush on Mellie, but just then I could have smashed her head through the porcelain sink. I thought I saw the tragedy of her life in that one instant stretching off like a highway that ends in a hopeless desert. I was feverish the rest of the day. I drank water and imagined it was paint I was pouring into me. An unabsorbable plastic substance embalming me from the inside out. When
I went to the bathroom for the fourth time Bobby winked at me and said, Time of the month?

  When our shift ended at four o’clock and we’d gathered in our circle I was ready to come apart. You don’t look so good, Carl said. You look, as the saying goes, like death. I feel cold, I said, though I was sweating profusely. I feel terrible, actually. I felt cold inside my bones.

  That’s funny, Bobby said, addressing no one in particular. I was just thinking how it’s going to be a wonderful day. He was smiling up at the ceiling like he’d finally lost his mind. I was just thinking how everything’s coming together. How it’s going to be a … a magical, wonderful day! We were all staring at him. He laughed and started coughing. I don’t know when we saw the revolver in his hand, but we must have all seen it pretty fast. You could feel something change in the room, the air come alive with what may, in fact, have been a kind of magic. It was air in which things could now begin and end. There were recesses in the space around us; the space itself had become more capacious. I briefly thought about dancing, there was so much space! The past disappeared. Maybe it’s truer to say it flowed into the present, lingered on around us longer than it should have, until it became self-aware and consumed itself like burning paper on the air.

  I feel, Bobby strained to find the right words, just a tremendous sense of hope.

  His face gleams as he says this, says, I was watching that Sudden Impact movie the other night. Great film, great film. You know what Dirty Harry says? He says, Go ahead. Make … my … day. Just like that! Isn’t that great? Bobby cocks the gun and points it at Stan. Make my day! He laughs. Stan stares at the floor, eyes like a drowsing drunk’s. Or how ’bout you, bucko? Buddy, buddy, buddy, Bobby says, turning the gun on Carl. Go ahead. Make. My. Day. Carl’s looking off to the side of Bobby. It’s a strange look on his face, like something almost funny’s going on in the corner of the room, and I think I hear a kind of warbling sound come from him, but I’m not sure, and then it’s my turn, anyway, Bobby’s pointed the gun at me and asks me, or encourages me, to make his day, whatever that really means. I look at Bobby. I can’t look down the barrel of the gun, so I look Bobby in the eye and with a particular intensity, because part of me knows this may be the last thing I ever see. Bobby’s face is round and red, glistening in the light. His thin hair rests damply on his forehead. There is a faint colorless fuzz in his pockmarks. It might as well be the first time I’ve looked at Bobby. And then it’s very funny to me all of a sudden that someone like Bobby, on a day like this, a day that means nothing, can hold my life in his hand, in a tiny displacement of his finger: resting on the trigger, squeezed. But the thing I want to say now is that we are all people like Bobby, each day is crucial, meaningless. And I think of my father for the first time in years without hate and wonder if the news of his daughter’s death will reach him wherever he is, and if he’ll care; and that’s when I know I’ll never see him again, even if I don’t die this day, I’ll never see him again, and I laugh to think my mother will cut the hair from my cadaver to feed Mad Max.

  By the time I have every last one of these thoughts Bobby has moved on, to Radar and Mellie and Ellen S. and Ellen V. I don’t feel sick anymore. Something else has risen up in me, and I think Bobby’s right, it is going to be a wonderful day, what’s left of it.

  When he’s done he opens the chamber and dumps out the bullets in his hand. We sit there, slow to move as he wipes the gun with a chamois cloth. He looks at the bullets in his hand, then at us, then back at the bullets, counting.

  One of you would have lived, he says.

  That August I flew south.

  * * *

  The gun does not go off. Michaela and I meet thirty years later. I am grown by then, having passed through the appropriate stages of development, or so I hope, having grown more fixed in myself, set in my ways, and more open to inhabiting another’s life, I think—an irony which, like all ironies, must resolve somewhere in a deeper truth. Michaela tells me her story, gives me permission to use it, and I do, I write what you have read, something quite different from what Michaela told me, her name, of course, not being Michaela at all, which means “who is like God.”

  A meaningful detail? I don’t know. Don’t ask me to go on the record. I named her that; my attention went to other things. I liked the name, I kept it. What is my responsibility to any of this, a face pressed to the glass, peering in? A ghost, a spy. Let me be the trellis of vantage points, I might say, the lattice hidden everywhere in the leaves of another’s story. Probably not the way it works, but what do I know.

  Well, this.

  In the summer of 1984 there are consolations ahead that Michaela can’t know about. Five years after Bobby points a gun in her face and says it is always and only today that a thing begins or ends, the movement that began as Diretas Já succeeds in bringing democratic elections to Brazil; Joe Moakley, U.S. representative from Massachusetts, the state to which I have just moved at the time, travels to El Salvador to investigate the killing of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter; the history of evil is being disinterred, recorded, and the creeping vines of complicity will stretch from the fine verandas of San Salvador to the banks of the Potomac. There are setbacks too, of course. What comes to light, like everything so terrible and pointless, is destined for a living burial in summaries, figures, and paragraphs. In the way our attention drifts. The acid bath of bald numbers is always the second death in which people, as individuals, melt away. But first the stories will be heard, the people will seen, and that much alone will cost lives.

  The harbor town where Michaela and I walk is protected from the sea. Still, it gets quite a lot of wind, waves too. It is winter, so—cold. Wind turbines turn across the bay. Lighthouses mark the points where land juts out. Some sweep through the night and some are just relics now. We pass the breakwater. Michaela is telling me a story, a funny story with bits in it that aren’t so funny. We are passing friends in a moment, the sort that lasts a few months. It is odd, I think, how these intimacies happen, how we grow close in circumstances that promise only to abandon us, at first chance, to the estrangement where we began. Meanwhile Michaela might have been my big sister, and why not? I would have liked that, walking together like this, the wind off the ocean meeting us with its parcels of sea spray. And were I a child she might have told me, Once upon a time a ship full of people landed here. They were far from home and they were full of hope. This is how you tell stories to children, of course. Once upon a time. Full of hope. And the eyes blinking in the forest? they ask. The thick woods chime with green light.

  What about them? you say.

  Metanarrative Breakdown

  As he lay dying, Icarius remembered something that had happened not long before. Dionysus had taught him how to plant the vines and look after them. Icarius watched over their growth with the same love he had for his trees, waiting for the moment when he would be able to squeeze the grapes with his own hands. One day he caught a goat eating some vine leaves. He was overcome by anger and killed the animal on the spot. Now he realized the goat had been himself.

  But something else had happened that had to do with that goat. Icarius had skinned it, put on its pelt, and, with some other peasants, improvised a dance around the beast’s mangled corpse. Icarius didn’t appreciate, as he lay dying, that the gesture had been the origin of tragedy, but he did sense that the death of the goat was connected with what was happening to him, the shepherds circling him, each one hitting him with a different weapon, until he saw the spit that would pierce his heart.

  —Robert Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

  To begin with, the house. A large house. Shingle style, on an island bluff in a northern American state. A handsome house, my grandparents’ house—or so it had been, and that was how I first knew it. Once upon a time they had sailed up the coast. Once upon a time they had packed a summer’s worth of books and clothes on their sailboat and set off with no more than a direction in mind. A sense of adventure.
A muted good-burgher quixotism. After a month of following the bights and inlets of the shore, tacking upwind to round headlands and capes, from the calm waters of the bay they saw it glinting in the sun: their house. This is the story I was told. I don’t question it because I like it. I forgive it dubiety and simplicity because this was a time when stories were easier to tell. When the arcs were cleaner and optimism cast like daylight into the corners of a June afternoon redolent of flowers slaked with rain. Was it on such an afternoon that my grandparents first arrived?

  In later years, when they were feeling whimsical, or perhaps extravagant, they would fly a flag bearing our family’s coat of arms from a mounting bracket between the second and third stories of the house. It was either a charming or an affected display because we had not the slightest trace of heraldic legacy. Our ancestors had been émigré Jews who arrived in this country penniless and built what they had out of daydreams and hewn wood: furniture makers, shopkeepers, gold rush prospectors, salesmen. They told a better story every year. The house was no different. It was a fantasy, a shoreside idyll. Before a legacy—always—a property, and the dull present.

  My grandfather was still alive, but the house now belonged to my aunts. They were his daughters, my mother’s sisters, Cynthia and Ruth, and although they all lived together in the summer, they lived apart. My aunts had remodeled the house to accommodate the sense of grievance that lingered between them and their father, a change undetectable from the outside but which divided a building constructed in a style preoccupied with unity into two distinct living spaces, two houses, so aesthetically incoherent on the inside that moving between them felt like passing between eras, temporalities, consciousnesses—a seamless entanglement of discontinuity that called to mind nothing so much as exotic species grafted onto each other, a vaguely ouroboric and labyrinthine autophagy, like knotted cities in a China Miéville novel.