The fights between his parents stood outside this process, however. They just happened. There was no beginning and so, presumably, no end.
He tried to see it this way, at least, but couldn’t ignore the fact that most of the time his mom and dad seemed happy together. So happy that they didn’t need him, in fact. They would laugh and drink their special drinks from the cabinet, their conversations conducted in looks and implications that excluded him. If he was naughty or lazy, they’d gang up on him, two against one, and after he’d retreated—or been sent—to bed, he’d hear them on the deck, their voices calm and relaxed once again, now that he wasn’t around to cause trouble.
Then some afternoon—for no apparent reason—he would hear the distant sound of the whistle coming out of the woods on the other side of town, and he’d know the train was on its way. He understood it wasn’t a real train. He knew what he was hearing wasn’t even a real sound, but an itch inside his head. A sign that, sometime soon, there was going to be a fight.
But why? There was no track leading to their house. So how did the train always know how to find the way? The child had come to believe that the reason he could not see the cause was that he was the cause. He was the nail on which they snagged themselves. He was the station the dark train was trying to find.
It was his fault. It had to be.
And sooner or later, the train reached town.
This time it happened during dinner. It took place at the big old wooden kitchen table, one of the few things the family had wound up with after the death of his mother’s father. There hadn’t been much to pass on, which had been something of a surprise to all concerned. When they’d visited Grandpa in the old days, Mom always put on something smart and Dad grumbled in the car and seemed smaller all the time they were in the big old Victorian house on the better side of town. Then Grandpa died and it turned out there wasn’t much money in the house after all (in fact, there was minus money, though that didn’t make sense). The child remembered his father’s slow smile at this discovery. His face had radiated a warm, uncomplicated pleasure that the boy would have given anything to have caused.
After it had all been sorted out and bills paid and the big, grand house hurriedly sold, Grandma went to live with Mom’s sister in North Carolina and they got two small, ugly paintings and some silverware they never used, and the vast table in the kitchen. It was too large for the room—even the child could see that—but that’s where it went. He didn’t mind the table at all—it was great for spreading art things out on and made an ideal fort, especially when the big white tablecloth was in place, as it reached down almost to the floor on all sides—but his father did. He complained about it a lot.
In fact … Yes, that’s how the fight had started this time. It had been the trigger, at least.
The child had been finishing the last of his pasta with red sauce—his default fuel at the time—and in a vague world of his own, making up a story, as he so often did. Slowly he began to realize the weather system in the room had changed. He raised his head to listen.
No, his father declared, he was not prepared to work at this table. It was a big, dumb table and would not be convenient. The study was his domain and was going to stay that way. The subject was closed.
The child glanced at his mother and saw the subject was not closed. He was familiar with his father’s study, a tiny room on the upper floor. His dad had a typewriter set up there on a little desk and sometimes spent a while sitting at it. There was a pile of paper on the left side of the desk, sheets on which his father had typed words. They lay facedown. The pile didn’t ever seem to get bigger. That wasn’t surprising, as there would be weeks and months in which his dad didn’t go into the room. This appeared to be his mother’s point. The room would be better deployed as a closet, she believed, rather indulging his father’s futile “hobby.” The child wasn’t sure what a hobby was, but gathered it was a Bad Thing.
He swiveled his gaze from his mother’s face, saw the way his father looked, and turned hurriedly back to his cooling pasta. He loved his father, but sometimes his face changed. His jaw clenched and his eyes went flat. Usually this was a fleeting condition, but sometimes it would settle in, and it made the child feel scared. His father was looking at his mother that way, and that could only mean one thing.
The train was pulling into the station.
Right now.
Things were said. Many things, with increasing volume. The child tried not to hear.
His father stood, banging the table with his thighs. He shouted, his face red, the fighting vein standing out on his forehead. His mother jumped up too, shouting back. His father stormed out into the hallway. His mother followed. Even though they were farther away, the noise got louder as they spiraled up into the thundercloud.
The child slid off his seat and slipped underneath the table. It always seemed safer under there, the big white tablecloth forming a barrier to the outside world—though the shouting remained perfectly audible. He heard his parents storming back into the kitchen, shouting over each other. He learned, or was reminded, of some facts:
His father was a loser who never completed any task. His mother was a bitch who complained all the time. His father was an asshole who looked at other women, which is not allowed. His mother was a bitch who thought she was better than everyone because of Grandpa, who it turned out wasn’t the man everyone thought. His father was a liar and drank too much. His mother was a bitch, and was also a pot calling the kettle black.
The child closed his eyes and put his fingers in his ears. It wasn’t enough. The shouting went on and on and on. His mother was better at coming up with different rude words to call his father. But his father …
Yes, there it was.
The sound of the first slap.
His father was better at that part, though Mom was pretty good at throwing things. If it hadn’t been his parents doing this to each other, it might have been interesting to watch these evenly matched players hacking and sawing at each other’s weak points. But they were his parents, and the boy loved them, and so it made him want to push pencils into his ears until he could not hear. It made him want to disappear, forever.
His mother’s feet hurried past one end of the table as she moved to put the piece of furniture between her and the man at whom she was screaming obscenities. And …
Yes, there was the sound of something smashing on the wall. A plate or bowl. Possibly the child’s bowl. It wouldn’t be the first time his things had been used as ammunition. It would be replaced tomorrow, with hungover but heartfelt apologies. The apologies made the child feel angry and numb.
He screwed his eyes up tighter and pressed his hands harder over his ears. It helped, but not much. He tried to fill his head with light in the way that sometimes also helped, a white light of non-thought and non-hearing and non-seeing. He tried to find a place inside that was calm and the opposite of the dark woods from which the first sounds of the train whistle came.
Meanwhile the fight above him raged on, like arcs of red lightning. Did the opposing troops, these mythic armies, have any idea he was under there? Would they care? The child had never been sure whether he was his mother’s fault or his father’s—he’d heard arguments for both sides—but he was someone’s fault, that was for sure. Best to keep out of the way, then. To lie low. To fade into the background, or further still.
Better to not be there at all.
But then …
Gradually the boy became aware of a prickling sensation on the back of his neck. It was a bit like the feeling he got when he heard the first echo of the faraway train, but it couldn’t be that—the train had already arrived.
He opened his eyes, but the feeling didn’t go away. He moved his hands from his ears—causing the sound of the fight to leap in volume—and lowered them to his lap, frowning. What worried him most was the idea that this might be some new kind of sign, a yet more ominous version of the train whistle: a warning that the fight was going t
o get more than usually out of hand, and that someone—his mother, probably, though that couldn’t be for certain—was in danger of getting seriously hurt this time.
The feeling expanded, seeping downward from his neck until it felt like gentle pressure was being applied to his upper back, along his shoulders, and down the spine.
He turned and saw that a boy was sitting under the table behind him. The boy was sitting neatly, legs crossed, hands in his lap.
The child blinked, unable to speak, at first incapable even of working out what question he might ask.
The boy smiled—a bright, sunny smile that said he knew the boy and liked him very much, and wanted nothing more than to hang out and have fun together when the silly fuss raging around them had blown over, which at some point it would, as it always did, and so in the end everything would be okay.
“Hello, David,” he said.
“Who … who are you?” David whispered.
The boy’s smile got broader, shining up into his sharp blue eyes.
“I’m your friend.”
David woke, rigid in the dead of night with his pregnant wife beside him, and finally knew where he’d first seen the man in the blue jeans and white shirt.
He remembered his name, too.
Maj.
Part Two
I believe that the human imagination
never invented anything that was not true,
in this world or any other.
Gérard de Nerval
Aurélia
Chapter 18
My name is Billy, and in the mornings I wake up. The first adventure of the day is finding out where I am. It may be on a bench in a park. I may be propped against the wall in a backstreet or sitting in the bakery section in a grocery store. I may be on someone’s floor.
I try to make it happen somewhere different every day, but sometimes when I open my eyes I realize I have woken there before. You’d think in a city as big as New York that would be impossible, but when it’s time to turn in I’m so worn out these days that sometimes I end up doing what I’ve done before without realizing. Everybody’s the same, I suppose. You get up, you go to work, you come home, you eat food that’s very similar to what you had yesterday or last week, you sit in front of the shows you always watch, and finally you go to the same old bed. If you could retreat up into the sky like some alien or god and watch any given person, day after day, you’d see that however complex and variable their days might seem to them, they follow tracks. Once in a while this angers or saddens them and they make a big deal of changing something. They leave their job, they move house, they screw somebody slightly different from their partner, and they get divorced.
Then, before too long, they find themselves rolling along a new set of near-identical tracks.
I have tracks of my own. They run to different destinations: sites of memory or places that have proven useful for killing time. There are some of us, Journeymen and Angels and Cornermen, who have found methods of spending their days that do not seem like a waste. I tried to find something too. Once I started to get the picture, however, I felt something break.
There was a period before all that when I used to be delighted with the whole deal, I’ll admit. The Dozeno Phase, as the Gathered call it, otherwise known as dumb ignorance. There was an incredible sense of freedom. Nothing I had to do. Nowhere I had to be. An endless Friday night, one long freshman year or an endless spell in your early twenties, when it feels like infinity is there to play for, that no doors will ever close, and the only way life will change is by getting even better.
I didn’t notice when it started to change, only that one day I didn’t feel the same. I went through a period of feeling listless, depressed. Eventually one of the others took me to one side and explained the score.
Was it a surprise? Well, yes. Though … maybe I’d had some inkling. I’d known there was something missing, some point to life I hadn’t been able to find. But everyone feels like that, don’t they, from time to time?
Everything was basically fine. Everything was sort of okay, though I couldn’t seem to find the place I was meant to be. I knew people, counted some as friends, but they didn’t feel as if they were the ones I’d been waiting for. I did things, and I had a life, of a kind. It just didn’t feel like what I’d had in mind.
Time passed, years went by, but I never got the sense that I was getting closer to anything that I recognized from the dreams of the future that I’d once cherished. Assuming they were dreams and not memories.
Now I know what I am, but I cannot get it to sit right. I cannot accept this is all there is, all I can ever be. I was loved once—can it never be that way again? Can’t things go back to the way they were, when we meant more to each other than anything in the world?
I guess not. It’s never happened before that anyone knows of. That doesn’t stop some from trying, of course. Rapping on windows. Living in their friend’s house. Hiding their keys. Constantly on their shoulder, always a few steps behind. I heard recently that one of us has made real contact with his friend, even spoken to him. The guy’s called Maj, and I counted him as a friend before I stopped caring much about that kind of thing. I still see him around. Maj is a very forceful person, though, one of the most accomplished Fingermen. He’s got solidity and heft. If he can’t pull the thing off, I doubt any of us can. Certainly not me. My heft was never strong, and I can feel it deserting me. Every morning I look at my hands. Each day they look less substantial.
Sometimes I can smell the odor of hospitals and hear the whisper of people shuffling down corridors in thin, papery gowns they will never take off.
I’m not sure I’ve got it in me to fight.
At night I stand in the street outside the house where I think I’m supposed to live. I recognize everything about it—the shape of the front and the color of the bricks, the arrangement of the lintels and the roof, the positions of the trees outside on the street. I know how it looks inside, too, though the glimpses I sometimes get through the windows suggest either that I’m not remembering it correctly or parts of it have changed—different color curtains, different color walls.
Several times it’s gotten to be too much and I’ve walked up the steps to the door, four stone steps I remember running down so many times as a child—or think I do—and try to knock or ring the bell. Nobody ever comes, and the door never opens. I can touch things, but I can move almost nothing, so perhaps that’s the problem. Maybe they just don’t hear. I hope that’s the answer. It’s better than thinking that they hear but choose not to open the door, choose not to allow me to come home.
That’s why I try to find somewhere different to spend each night. In the hope that when I wake in the morning, everything will be different, that I might even find myself in a bed in that house, in a life that makes sense. Lately I have begun to dream of that less, however, and find it harder to believe.
Lately I have also found myself looking at graveyards and thinking of cellars. There’s one I know, under the control of a man who doesn’t understand the world as well as he thinks. A number of us already nod there. I’ve started to wonder if perhaps it would be comfortable to go down there and sit with my own back to the wall.
To go in there and never come back out.
Chapter 19
David stepped off the train at the exact time he and Dawn had arrived the previous Friday. He’d climbed on the first available service from Libertyville—the nearest town to home with a train station—and hadn’t even realized it was the same one until he saw the clock at Penn Station. This made him feel very guilty, even guiltier than he’d felt throughout the journey and in the shower and ever since the idea had first dropped into his head as the two of them sat eating cereal together.
But that was dumb, right? He was a grown-up. He was allowed to leave the house, and the town.
He set off for the escalator—still feeling guilty, and confused, and more than a little scared.
He’d waited until Dawn ha
d left for school and then written a note explaining that the novel idea he’d been nurturing had given unexpected birth in the night, presenting him with a litter of sub-ideas and plotlings that he needed to bottle feed with fact. One of these story-lines was going to unfold in New York. He needed to check out some locations, and sure, he could fire up Google Maps and get Street View on it, but he thought it might be cool to go check in person, soaking up the atmosphere and letting the city do some of the work. He hoped that was okay.
This last sentence, seeking permission, disappeared in the second draft. He didn’t need her to say it was okay. This was the kind of thing writers did.
It went back for the third draft. It made him feel better. As he stood in the kitchen giving the note a final read, marveling at the unusual neatness of his handwriting, he was relieved to see the contents came across as credible and plausible and not-at-all-crazy.
Even if they weren’t. He wasn’t going to New York to research. He was going because … He didn’t know why he was going. He was just going. And if he was going then he might as well go, instead of standing in the kitchen dicking around redrafting an excuse that wouldn’t be found until after he was gone, or perhaps even back home.
He left the note in the center of the kitchen table—the one that, long ago, had graced the big kitchen in Grandpa’s house, one of the handful of possessions he’d shipped to Rockbridge when he’d moved. It was a big, sturdy piece of furniture and (propped against a bowl full of wholesome red apples, and with a smiley at the bottom) the note looked like the most reasonable thing in the world.
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