She cleared her throat, reached for a paper cup with a dangling tea bag and took a sip.
Georgiana: I didn’t think he was capable of… I didn’t think he’d do anything like that. I thought I knew him better. I thought he was stronger than that. He never gave me trouble. None at all.
Alex: You had no idea what was going to happen?
Georgiana: I never saw it coming.
“Now there’s a fucking piece of irony for you,” said Wooly.
Nobody paid attention to him. We kept looking at the screen, Georgiana quietly sipping her tea, nothing left to say, still staring at the camera like she was counting the ions in the air between her eyes and the lens.
>>>>>>
We walked out of village hall under a cloudless blue p.m. sky. Genevieve called it a gorgeous day. Wooly disagreed. Big fucking deal, he said. The sun is out, no clouds—it’s all a fucking cliché. Genevieve invited me back for dinner. I politely passed. I had to start putting my notes together for the story, I said, start catching up with work again. Besides, I’d spent enough time in that house.
She and Wooly walked ahead, arguing with each other. I stayed with the hobbling Nickie. How’s the leg? How’s the shoulder? Both doing okay.
“How long you staying on for?” I said.
“They want me to stick around a few more days. Until he recovers from all the shock.”
“Few days? Pretty optimistic.”
“You’re holding up? You’re okay at the hotel?”
“It’ll do.”
“You need anything?”
“I’m okay for now.”
“Look, I wanted to say something. I just wanted to say—“
At which point Wooly, with his exquisite sense of timing, turned around to shout at us. “You know what this is? You know what this is? This is the worst fucking year of my whole fucking life!”
>>>>>>
GOD’S BALLS
A simple dawn—a single band of white light across the horizon. I’d slept almost the whole night. I’d slept well. My shoulder hurt, but my bones felt like they’d reached a release point, a signal that it was all over. I went back to sleep, got up a couple hours later. I wasn’t necessarily feeling good, but I could remember what feeling good was. I’ll take it.
The phone. Genevieve. I’m worried. I’ve got concerns. There’s something wrong with him. There’s something DIFFERENT about him.
Crime tape was still strung across the front of the house and in the area of the living room where the shooting had gone down.
“Look at this shit,” said Genevieve, meaning the yellow ribbon festooned around the furniture. “How’s a person supposed to live like this? Why did that Marco have to pick this place to die?”
No answer for that one. “What’s going on?”
“What’s going on? You notice how quiet it is in here?”
Not until she stopped talking, no. But once she did, the silence was hard to miss. The tension of the last few days was gone, replaced by a strange, heavy limbo silence.
“It’s him,” she said. “He’s not talking. Ever since he got up, I can’t get him to say a damn thing. You say something to him—nothing. Like he’s deaf. He’s like, I don’t know, past speaking.”
“Where is he?”
“Out back.” She started walking me to the kitchen. “He won’t go to the rock. He won’t do anything. He won’t even cut himself. I tell him, you want to slice yourself up? Will it make you feel better? Go right ahead, be my guest. But what do I get out of him? Not one damn response.”
The big furball was laying flat on his back in the middle of the yard. He’d covered himself head to toe with a blanket, completely bundled away from the world. He looked like a corpse on a battlefield.
Nickie was crouched next to him. I looked at her. She shook her head. Hopeless case.
I pulled the blanket down, uncovered his face. His coloring made lead look alive. “What’re you doing?”
His eyes were open but he wasn’t acknowledging my presence. I wasn’t sure if he was seeing anything.
“I’m putting the twerkulator on the percolator,” he said mournfully. “Getting my plate before it’s too late. The fish is all rough and scaly. The Yellow River, by I.P. Daily.”
He was lost in his head, singing some crazy sorrow song.
I shook his shoulder, got his attention. “You’re looking good.”
He thought. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“About what?”
“I don’t want to say anything.”
“Too late, you just did.”
He kicked the blanket off. “I got no sleep. All night. Didn’t sleep. Didn’t want too.”
“Sleep is not your enemy.”
“Mine is. I go to bed last night, I had a dream. I’m walking down Seventh Avenue, where I used to work? Everything’s the same, the buildings’re all the same. But all the street names are different. Seventh Avenue, now it’s Burnt Black Boulevard. The cross streets—stead of 37th, 38th, you got Lost Liver Lane, Dental Decay Drive. What kinda names’re these?”
“It was disturbing.”
“Never went back to sleep. Pulled an all-nighter.”
My turn to think. I looked at Nickie, back to him. “This is about the other day, right? The solstice?”
He shook his head. “I can’t talk about it. I can’t talk about that cause there’s no words to it. Nobody would understand.”
“Give it a shot.”
“It’s complicated.”
“It’s always complicated.”
He took one of the deepest breaths in the whole history of breathing. Then he raised his head and stared at Nickie. Really stared at her.
She got the message. “I’ll leave you two alone."
Even when she was back in the house, it took Wooly a while to get his mouth open.
“I had peace that day,” he said. “It was peaceful. Talking to you, all that, I finally found acceptance. Took a long time, you know? I’ve looked for that feeling a long time before that.”
“I know it.”
“I was ready to go. I accepted that. It felt, I don’t know if it felt good, but it felt right, you know? It felt like this was the thing to do. And then it didn’t happen, you understand? It didn’t happen. I’m sitting there, I’m ready for it, it didn’t happen.”
“So, basically, you’re depressed because you didn’t die.”
“I can’t explain it. I told you I can’t explain it. It’s like I’ve been waiting all my life for this to happen—that’s what it felt like. I’ve been waiting all my life to die, and now—and now what? That’s the thing. What do I do now?”
“I understand. I know what you’re going through. It’s not all that uncommon, what you’re feeling.”
“The fuck you talking about it’s not uncommon?”
“It can happen. Like with terminally ill patients? You know, they’re told they’re going to die, they prepare themselves for it? Then something happens, they go into remission, or something that didn’t work before works now. When they don’t die, a lot of them go into depression. It’s all in the expectation.”
Wooly took a reflective glance around the yard. “Funny you should say that. Terminally ill people. That’s almost what it feels like. Like there’s this big thing, this big tumor growing inside me.”
“I know. I know what it’s like. It’s like the world gets smaller. It’s like the boundaries of the world keep shrinking until they match the skin around your head.”
“Yeah, you know. I knew you’d know. I always knew that. Right from the beginning, when I asked you to come out here, I knew you’d know.”
I leaned closer into him. “Okay, so listen to me. What you felt the other day. The peace? The acceptance? You can get that without actually dying. You can actually do that.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. Anybody.”
“I’m not so sure about that. Not about me. You come down to it, honestly speaking, I’m
pretty fucking useless. I don’t know what it is, beat blood or whatever, but I’m a pretty fucking useless piece of shit.”
“Beg to differ. You saved my life. You get points for that.”
Wooly shook his head like he was trying to fling it off his neck. “I shot him cause I was pissed. I shot him cause he was after you and not me. That’s all it amounted to. Shit, if you hadn’t jumped all over him, it never would’ve happened.”
“Yeah, but still—“
“No, it’s on you. You’re the one who stepped it up. It was your balls, not mine.”
Now it was my turn to shake my head. “Actually, it was God’s balls, not mine. I had to pray for that. I had to pray to get there. I had to ask God for help—I couldn’t do it on my own. Which is the point I’m trying to make to you.”
He stared at the blanket lying next to him. “That’s you, not me. Me, maybe I’m just not, I don’t know, what’s the word, incented to God.”
“You think?”
“I don’t know. I think those lines might be kinda burnt out for me.”
“They never are. Might feel like it, but they never are. I mean I told you my story. Facing manslaughter, cranked out of my mind? What happened was simple. I said I want to live and I prayed for help. And I just kept doing it.”
“Yeah, I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
I told him that was okay. It was okay not to know. Good starting point. Because who we are, who we really are, can’t be known. The identity you can know is just a thought, just a name, and the whole of what we are is more than just a thought, just a name.
When I was up in Red Mountain, I said, I realized I needed to get my mind back. I needed all mind. And to do that, I needed to ask some basic questions. Like, where does your mind come from? When did you decide to create it? The thing, of course, is that I didn’t. It didn’t come from me. It’s bigger than that. It comes from life, from the world, from the universe, from God. And that’s where I needed to go for an answer. Go to God. Go to the source.
He was sitting up now, his face as twisted as a hangover. “I’m still stuck on what I felt. Still stuck on that feeling of peace. I really thought I’d been chosen for it.”
“It’s not like the fucking priesthood. You gotta work at it. Takes discipline, patience.”
“Patience.” Like he was spitting the word out.
“What? Little patience wouldn’t kill you.”
His head trembled a bit as he looked up at me. He opened his mouth, opened it wide enough to show his teeth and gums. I thought he was going to go into an angry wailing scream. But he didn’t. What came out instead was a laugh. Not loud, not demented. Just an empty, toneless, hysterical laugh. He wasn’t trying to stop it but I don’t think he could if he wanted to. He just sat there with that sound coming out of his mouth—a laugh with no relief in it, no remorse, no resignation, no hope.
It was one of the scariest things I’ve ever heard.
>>>>>>
I shuffled him into the house, the kitchen, moving at a Percoset pace. Genevieve and Nickie were waiting there, low hum of tension all around them. Nickie looked like she wanted to say something to me. I knew I wanted to say something to her. Wrong place, wrong time.
“So what’s his problem?” Genevieve said. “Did you figure it out?”
Since Wooly seemed reluctant to speak, I gave her an answer. “It’s because of that night. It’s because he didn’t die.”
“Are you’re kidding me? He’s down about that?”
“It was supposed to be my fate,” Wooly protested.
“Maybe it’s me, but most people I’d think would be happy about something like that.”
“Well some aren’t. It’s a fact. And I’m one of them.”
“Of course you are. Why not? It’s always about you, isn’t it?”
Wooly shrugged. “I don’t know why, but it always seems to work out that way.”
He went to sit at the table but he jerked to a stop before he got down.
“I smell eggs,” he said. “I smell eggs in this house.”
“No you don’t,” said Genevieve.
“Where are they? I told you, no fucking eggs in this house.”
“Aren’t any. You said no eggs, I threw ‘em all out.”
“Well there’s something eggy around here.”
“There are no eggs here!”
“I smell ‘em! They’re here somewhere!”
“Look in the refrigerator you want. Look anywhere. No eggs!”
He sat himself at the table, completely unsatisfied, looking like he wanted to break something.
“Ever think you need help?” said Genevieve. “Professional help?”
“I can give you names, numbers,” said Nickie.
“Bring it on,” said Genevieve. “You won’t hear me object.”
“He gets help,” I said, “this could all change. It could all grow away.”
“Fuck all of ya!” said Wooly.
Genevieve turned away. Enough. She took salt and a box of grits from a cabinet, butter and cheddar cheese from the fridge.
“Least he’s saying something,” she said. “Can’t believe this is coming out of my mouth, but it’s almost good to hear him talking again. The silence around here is murder.”
“You notice the silence, do you?” said Wooly.
“Of course I do. It’s like walking into a wall.”
He looked out the windows, gave a good stare into the woods. “Sometimes I think it’s waiting for me, you know? Feels like the silence is just waiting for me.”
“Well you’ll have some food waiting on you in a minute. You just sit there and eat.”
Wooly paused a moment and then went to say something, but he stopped. He just stopped. There was some slight movement to his mouth, like words were on their way, but they never came. He just sat there. He looked like he was trying to remember something, but he couldn’t quite get it back.
>>>>>>
MEXICO CITY AT 3 P.M.
The weather reports the next morning were calling for a mother of a hot day. Eastern Long Island was getting hit with a burn-the-earth high pressure front. The temperature at 10 a.m. was already 88 and it could go to 103. This was going to be the hottest day of the year, no contest, and it would probably set a record for all the June 24ths in recorded weather history.
Not that I much cared. I was getting ready to leave here, leave this loco town. I’d been answering messages most of yesterday and this morning, scrolling my way into other stories that were waiting to be worked.
Only a few things left to do here. Stop and see if Wooly was doing any better. Try to find Jen, who wasn’t answering my texts and voicemails, and pay her the $20 for that last night. Say goodbye to Genevieve. Try to clear things up with Nickie, if I could.
The day was so hot and the hotel a.c. units so ancient that the windows kept steaming up with condensation. I was wiping one clean, getting ready to call Jen again, when the cell buzzed in my hand. It was 10:22. I remember. Exactly 10:22.
It was Genevieve, but this wasn’t like her other calls. She wasn’t panicked. She wasn’t pissed. She was in pure quiet shock.
He did it. He did it. The son of a bitch, the bastard. He finally did it.
“Did what?”
Did IT.
“Meaning what?”
You KNOW what I mean.
“Jesus.”
Wooly had killed himself. He’d gotten up early, telling her he had to—if he slept too much, he said, he’d remember his dreams. He told her he was going to the lab, check in on things. She didn’t know it at the time, but he left the house with a bottle of champagne, a Krug Clos d’Ambonnay. They’d been saving it for a special occasion.
The Sunday crew found him when they got in. He’d locked himself in the test room he’d called Mexico City at 3 p.m., the one where textiles were exposed to hazmat doses of carbon monoxide and other pollutants. He’d turned the pumps up high and then gotten himself numb and delirious on the
champagne while the fumes slowly poisoned him. They found him on the floor of the room, curled up in a fetal position with the bottle still in his hand.
If you’d lifted the Hidden Lake Hotel and laid it on my chest, let the entire weight of the building crush my chest, it would feel like this.
I kept talking to Genevieve, trying to comfort her. I wiped the steam off the window as the feeling of 10:22 settled over me. Tourists in the streets, weekend traffic. Three teen girls were walking by the hotel, laughing, chattering with each other. How could they do that? How could anybody do that at a time like this?
Who were we before we were born? Who will we be after we die?
>>>>>>
Walking into the house was like walking into a land without shadows. Nickie was talking to Genevieve, speaking solace-words very slowly, very clearly, as if Genevieve barely understood English. Genevieve couldn’t answer with anything more than one- or two-word phrases. Her words sounded like individual stones tossed down a canyon, each one echoing as they fall.
He’d left a note for her on the kitchen table.
I am so sorry about this. But what else is there to do? It is very hard for me to write anything down. I love you. I will always love you. I do not know what else there is to say. My brain is too fucked to think. I feel like I have been waiting all my life to die. Please bury me under the rock. I guess that is all I have to say.
Genevieve said she didn’t know what to do. She had to make arrangements, she didn’t know who to call. They’d never made arrangements about arrangements.
Nickie and I said we’d help, we’d make calls. You won’t be alone.
Weeping, Genevieve went for another tissue, but first she asked Nickie if she was done with her juice and she put the glass in the sink before reaching for the Kleenex.
“When he got up,” I said, “did he say anything else? Did he say anything that would make you…”
The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams Page 17