Little God Blues

by Jeffrey M Anderson

  She shook her head dubiously, yet with a certain confidence that I would get there. “At least you know what a prime number is, Mr. Not Good in Science.”

  I wanted to recite the one-digit primes, somehow knowing that would bring her a smile, wanting that smile, but couldn’t remember the first one. “Is one a prime?”

  “Technically, no.” She gave me a looser, more relaxed smile now. “A prime is a number that can be divided with no remains only by two numbers, itself and one. One is one so this would be itself with itself. This would be…” She threw her hands out into a crazy bouquet. Her laugh sounded rusty.

  I stood there, trying to remember the last time I had a math class.

  “I will have an update ready for you. Next Wednesday. I will say eight but will arrive at eight thirty as they do here. You may arrive any time you like until 8:29. This, by the way, is a prime, 829.” She gave me a full-wattage smile, laughing at her game yet, strangely, a leveling seriousness, too. I could win this unilaterally-imposed meeting with some chivalry over numbers.

  I was due to fly back to the States that Wednesday. Planes were bound to be full just before Christmas. I would have to call Mom and tell her of the delay. For many years it had been just the two of us at Christmas. I’d always made it back for her. The one time to be true for all the other times I hadn’t. Only this time her husband would be there. Later was better on that score.

  The physics student walked away. Her well-shaped rear had a hypnotizing propulsion system, a sideways sine wave, a winding and unwinding to leverage forward. A weight in her shoulders though, loneliness, as if she was returning to her convent. It wasn’t until I’d left the premises that I realized we hadn’t agreed on a venue. Well I had her number…‌maybe.

  CHAPTER 13

  Sunnydown Hills was a home for Alzheimer’s patients on London’s southern outskirts. I arrived in a taxi from the train station. It was a low-slung sixties quasi-breeze block structure designed, apparently, by an accountant. I went through the glass doors, then a second set of them into an empty foyer. There was an amateur oil of an English country scene, a commemoration plaque from its opening, a culinary award from twelve years ago, a wooden board with a company motto: Patients Are Our Virtue. An under-populated fish tank. No receptionist. I found the sign-in book, looked at the names, thumbed back to September/October. Nothing.

  Sunnydown Hills had been one of Kirk’s hotel calls. I had decided a visit there was the most efficient way of finding out its connection to him. There had been only a few others. Two restaurants, a travel agency, the US Embassy, and “directory inquiries,” probably for all of those. There were personal calls; two to his uncle at Imperial, several to California, and one to Hamburg (that number quickly diverted to an official-sounding message in German).

  I wandered down a hall, turning right past a row of offices, all empty. Then a set of locked double doors. I had just figured out where the button was to unlock them when it opened from the inside. A friendly Asian nurse, Filipino I guessed, appeared.

  “A friend of mine, my age, visited here in October.” I explained I was looking for the patient he’d visited.

  “They are residents,” she said. The motto must have been from an earlier era.

  “Maybe someone else would remember. I have a photograph.” I pulled Kirk’s photo, a PR one, from my wallet like an errant fan looking in the wrong place for my idol. “Maybe you recognize him?” She didn’t. Then it hit me, Professor Howell’s comment. “I think his name is Castle.”

  “No Castle here. You want Mr. Hardcastle?”

  “Yes, that’s him,” I bluffed.

  She took me through the doors in search of another nurse, finally found in one of the rooms helping a patient, I mean resident, drink from a two-handled plastic beaker. This nurse was introduced to me as Mr. Hardcastle’s primary caregiver. She kept her back to us, intent on her resident. I described Kirk, the date, my new name “Hardcastle.” Without turning she said that, yes, she remembered the visitor.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. There are not too many visitors your age who show up here unannounced, never to be seen again.”

  My age? She hadn’t even looked at me. I had to be more certain. The nurse barely turned to look at Kirk’s PR shot. “That’s him.”

  “Come with me, this way.” My first nurse said.

  We walked down a corridor, turning here, zigzagging through a chicane by a nurses’ station. Finally we arrived at the far end of a dead-end corridor. The nurse, her name tag said Linda, knocked, a friendly yet business-like one-two, and sang out Mr. Hardcastle’s name. She waited two seconds in the guise of propriety, then opened the door. He wasn’t there.

  Back through the endless corridors, redolent of disinfectant and scented-over urine. It was air that got right up in your face, stuck a finger in your throat. Mercifully it eased a bit as we rounded the nurses’ station.

  We approached a large communal room with a big screen TV showing a Western with the sound off. A woman, slumped in a wheeled armchair, barked loudly as we passed; no better word for it. Another went into a nah-nah-nah stutter, others were lolled in twisted sleep, mouths open. One or two looked at me. Then, a short, stout lady came up, took my hand, and started demanding something. Impossible to know what. Wouldn’t let go.

  Only two of the twelve assembled souls were men. Mr. Hardcastle sat smartly dressed by a window, away from the TV. Rust-colored cashmere sweater with a white shirt collar spilling out of it, green corduroy trousers, slip-on tan shoes. His posture was good. He sat with a vacant formality as if waiting, alert, without much hope, at a job interview. He looked at me with keen eyes.

  “Mr. Hardcastle, I’ve come to visit you,” I said slowly, loudly, inanely.

  Hardcastle mumbled words, every fourth one intelligible. The rest were nonsense syllables, guttural, slurred. “Muh no…‌duh house. Nuh not ny-ow.”

  “You may not remember me, Mr. Hardcastle.”

  Now his eyes focused. “Tom,” he said distinctly. A nurse with a soft, fixed smile beneath over-bright blond hair was feeding with commendable patience a never-satisfied resident who kept swatting the spoon away, then demanding more. The nurse waited patiently until her charge forgot about the game before she sent her plane in for another landing attempt.

  “Tom’s your brother, Mr. Hardcastle.” The nurse said this for my benefit, not in the loud, over-simple way you did to the patients…‌err…‌residents. “Was,” she added after a long moment, obviously working it so Mr. Hardcastle did not connect the two. “Take him for a walk. It would do him a power of good.”

  “Come on, Mr. Hardcastle.”

  The nurse abandoned her unhappy customer (she emitted an unintelligible squawking noise) and came over to help me get Mr. Hardcastle footborne. Surprisingly difficult. We could get him to a crooked knee standing position, but without our collective strength he would have fallen into his chair. The man had no idea about balance.

  Finally we got him moving forward a few steps, knees still crooked. This must have reminded him of the old days of forward propulsion; some semblance of balance came back to him.

  We exited the community room, taking small steps down the long, dark hall. We were an efficient unit by now. It was touching, the unquestioning trust of that arm gripping mine. I could steer him out the front door and out into the dangerous world and he would continue with his trusting clutch.

  Maybe the rhythm of walking would remind his brain that it could move forward too. He stopped; tried to stand independently. He peered at me, a half-sharp look. “I nyuh.” Know? His face loosened, head lost its poise.

  We did the small-step shuffle back into the community room, moving smartly, slowly, unstoppably to his chair. Our grace together announced us to all as a Comfortable Unit. Another nurse, tall, angular, Slavic, smiled at us.

  “He never walk like this since long time.”

  The bottled-blond nurse gave me a warm sm
ile (she was off on another feeding game with different rules involving mouth open/mouth shut). Unassisted, I got Mr. Hardcastle to sit. I had done enough for one day. “I’ll come back and see you again soon,” I said by way of leave-taking. To walk out without such a promise would be too brutal.

  I smiled good-bye to the blond nurse. I got up and patted Mr. Hardcastle on the shoulder, my feeble act of encouragement.

  Mr. Hardcastle yelled. “Buh! Buh! Buh!” His brows knitted tightly, fists clenched. Buh. Buh. It was like a cartoon, that dark cloud over his head. I leaned down to show concern. Out of nowhere came a vague right to my chest, followed by a weak tattoo of blows.

  “No leave,” he said, or this is how I interpreted “nuh lyuv,” that second word slurred into “love” with a strong yuh after the “l.” (I dismissed ‘don’t love’.) It occurred to me that more was going on in that head than I suspected. If only I could get a few minutes of coherence out of him, there were things he could tell me. He was equally frustrated. There were occasional sparks of sharpness; if I kept visiting, I just might get lucky.

  “I’ll be back!” I called out over my shoulder, a delicious sense of impending freedom washing over me. That poor trapped man had been here many months before my visit, I told myself; what’s another few days? Still, I felt guilty as I walked down that corridor away from him.

  The blond, her name tag read Shirley, came with me to the exit.

  “You’re good with him. Don’t take his anger too seriously. It’s normal.”

  “Normal,” I repeated to myself, thinking of those blows, how they came from somewhere else.

  Hallelujah! I was out in the free, albeit cold, wet air. Life was good. Look at me move! Look at me!

  After the vaguely functioning residents of Sunnydown Hills I was ready for the challenge of breaking that prime code and calling my physics femme fatale. I stopped off at the Kentish Town library to get to the internet. It was surprisingly easy. All UK cell phone numbers are eleven digits. They all begin with “07.” It took me half a minute to realize that you wouldn’t count the first zero, so it was ten digits, three and seven. The Internet informed me there was only one three-digit Goodall and one seven-digit Lucas. In less than five minutes, I had her number.

  The voice mail message was automated, so I’d have to hope it was the right number. I left my message, a trifle awkward since I didn’t know her name or she mine. I made a weak joke, describing myself as her prime interest. Was it the right number? If it was, would she get back to me?

  CHAPTER 14

  “Song for Molly” from The New Billion (Third Album) 4:12

  My song. A slow blues number with one of Kirk’s best solos; slow, quiet, fuzzy. Twenty six takes. Different engineer. Kirk gave up after eleven. The only time he ever went along with over-dubbing.

  Six years is a wide gulf between sibs. Molly was a mewling baby until I rounded third on the way home to teenagerhood. Then she was a little girl with all that unintelligible little girl stuff; dolls, echoes of adult fashion, dance class, histrionics. All clothed in pink or lavender.

  Molly was twelve when I left home for college, fifteen when I left that for my new career. I always had the sense of eventual responsibility, ready to intervene, do the twenty-first century equivalent of challenging some cad to a duel over her honor.

  We had started to connect those last visits home. So strange to find her a nearly-formed woman with an entire adult life structured around her. Her friends, her tentative suitors, her passions (dance and film). Her fights with our mother who didn’t understand that this was a girl who could take care of herself.

  The last time I saw her was at dinner at our house in San Rafael. We were playing in San Francisco. Headliners. I know I’m her brother, but Molly was beautiful. Blond like me, with the same light blue eyes. Whereas I’m on the stocky side, her body was lithe, fluid. That first sighting, that calm yet fierce face, that grace, it gave even me, the Big Brother, a hitch in my breath. Still a bit of fat in her face. In a year or two when that thinned out I may well spend most of my time fighting duels.

  We only had one show in San Francisco before we were off to Seattle. My mother, who didn’t approve of my new career, kept harping about my lack of a degree. What are you going to fall back on? She would not let Molly attend. She knew about these rock concerts, she said. All the drugs. She was not having her daughter winding up on the street with needle marks.

  Molly gave me a see-what-I-have-to-put-up-with look, light-hearted for all that. She was a ducker and weaver, not a fighter. She only had a year and a half remaining, so she would compromise to take the cleanest, straightest path through the ordeal. Mom only had Molly. I was gone, my father long gone. Molly accepted that, and backed away. There would be plenty of time to see her brother in concert.

  Only there wasn’t. Six months later she was dead, a car crash. Some drunk. Immediately, unquestionably, I wanted to strangle that asshole. There was no point: he hadn’t bothered with a seatbelt, wasn’t expected to make it.

  Kirk never talked about My Loss. Never except in this song’s solo. All his talent on display. The man is talking to me, conveying sympathy, sorrow, respect, maybe even love. He hits a magisterial fondly retrospective summing-up vibe. He mines loss and finds optimism. He compasses grief and arrives at humanity. He is quiet; he builds. He plays slowly, holding back, an understated discipline that creates its own tension. Of course it is impossible for me to hear that solo objectively. It has been mentioned in the rock press as one of the great guitar solos. Kirk talking to me.

  Cruel sister, you left me with ne’er a goodbye

  Cruel world you shucked me; the stars are a lie

  CHAPTER 15

  Saturday, I came back from the late show, a trio at the Jazz Café in Camden. It was a fine, cold night. Only a twenty-minute walk back to my apartment. I felt alone and adrift. I walked briskly, as if I could leave this feeling of implacable loneliness in my wake. I saw my trek from far away, a small arc on a large globe.

  A bare-breasted babe coasted by, smiling and falsely confident, on a newspaper sailing east. She wrapped around a utility pole, pinned by the frozen wind, the top half of her head angled toward me. Overly made up, straw-like bangs, painted-up eyes. I walked on past endless shuttered shops, a strip of litter against most of them like a tide of consumption—newspapers, food wrappers, Styrofoam cups, beer cans, entire boxes of take-away, taken away, now abandoned. A vast, commercial beach at low tide.

  My cell phone beeped twice. In the sallow yellow pool under a streetlight I fumbled around, my unpocketed fingers quickly cold. A text message from that double prime. I am looking forward to seeing you. Wrestlers in South Ken. Just like that, there went the blues.

  I got back to Onslow Mansions to find flashing lights, people milling outside in tired, excited knots. An ambulance with rear doors open, empty. I asked an older man in the nearest knot what happened.

  “Bloody teenagers,” he said.

  The woman next to him, maybe his wife by the way she snarled at him, said, “Party got out of control. Nearly hit Mrs. Rafferty with a beer bottle. And the noise!”

  “Future of this country…‌pathetic.”

  I saw a cop shining her flashlight on the balcony of 4B; one quick arc revealed a shattered door behind her. I could hear the clatter of empty bottles as she moved around. She bent down, picked something up, put it in a plastic bag.

  “Well, I think I know the hostess,” I said by way of leave-taking.

  The police wouldn’t let me up to my flat, too dangerous.

  “What? It’s just a bunch of teenagers letting off some steam.”

  “That’s the way they start,” one of the cops said wearily, happy to talk. “Then word gets out ‘n’ an older, more sinister lot shows up.”

  I didn’t get it. Who would want to hang with a bunch of thirteen-year-olds?

  “Pushers trawling for new clients; thieves; blokes who like the thought of drun
k, stoned, innocent young things.” He shook his head. “I’ve got an eleven-year-old daughter; makes me sick.”

  “So what’s the danger?” Surely they would have cleared out at the first sign of police.

  We were interrupted by his two-way radio; some operation was under way. I saw police running down the street. Two youths came out of the bushes and the chase was on. Lights came on in a fourth-story flat, a boy tottered to the balcony, climbed over the railing. He perched there in a confused yet defiant way.

  “Damn! That’s my flat,” I said to Mrs. Upton from 3A, who had wandered toward my protective aura. She had a bandage on her head. She had been hit, but refused to go to the hospital, invoking the fight and spirit of the Blitz.

  To add to the drama, a stretcher appeared in the entranceway. I saw long, blond hair. What was it about this country? When they weren’t having tea, man they got down to some serious stuff.

  Kate, Matthew Steyning’s partner, came up to 5B to apologize. Her besieged look said they had enough to deal with for now. Matthew Steyning would call me in the morning about clean-up arrangements. The party had spread to my flat. (They had got the boy by then.) It looked like a tornado had hit it, one that had twisted through a brewery. An impossibly large litter of beer cans was strewn everywhere. Two panes in the French windows to the balcony had been kicked in. Cigarette butts randomly thrown on the floor. By some miracle the two oriental carpets, the leather sofa and armchairs were undamaged. What I could see of it. By an even greater miracle, the mystery book of my father’s poems was exactly where I had left it on the dining room table, as if some Soviet force field had protected it. The bathtub had a large pool of vomit too thick for the drain. My US Passport was nailed to the bathroom door with a steak knife. It was like all the parties I had ever been to rolled into one, then multiplied by some large chaos coefficient. My surly teen adventures shrank to small-time rebellions. This here, man, this was revolution.