“Danny?”
“Yeah?”
“Come home. I’m willing to try again.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“I need to go down to the beach, Samantha. I need to go for a swim.”
“You’re not coming home?”
“Samantha . . .”
“What about Joe?”
“I love Joe.”
“What’s going to happen to him? How’s he going to make it without a dad?”
“Kids do it all the time. I barely had a dad.”
“I can’t believe I married you.”
“Look, I didn’t say I was never coming home. I just need some more time.”
“You’ve always needed something, Danny. Always.”
He didn’t know what to say to this. It was true. He’d needed love or thought he did. Samantha had given him that. But it wasn’t enough. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have come here and fucked Celebrity. Otherwise, he wouldn’t still think of that warm night and those faceless girls.
He hung up the phone. Not out of anger. He didn’t think he could be angry at Samantha anymore. He hung up because he didn’t have anything else to say.
“Danny? Oh, hell, Danny. You didn’t just hang up. Shit.”
Samantha tossed the phone across the motel room and went into the bathroom to take a shower. She always cried best in the shower. It was the only time she could ever really let herself go.
As she cried, she thought about her tears joining together with the hot water and sliding down her naked body into a pool at the bottom, near the drain. She tried to watch one as it fell off her face, but once it hit the water, it was impossible to know where her tears ended and the water began.
After his friends left, Joe watched movies. He read his comic books. He walked down to the 7-11 and tried to buy a Hustler. Dude wouldn’t sell it to him. Naked girls always seemed to make Joe less afraid. He bought a slushy instead.
He drank it as he walked home, enjoying the sweet cherry flavour, until he neared the bottom and the straw made a gurgling, sucking sound. He thought of the sucky and tossed the cup in the road. An eighteen-wheeler crushed it under its front right tire a few seconds later.
There was a message on the machine when he got home.
“This is your dad, Joe. Just checking in. I miss you . . .” He hesitated here, as if wanting to say more. In the background, Joe heard the ocean sucking, and he thought the ocean must be the original sucky. “I’ll call you soon,” his dad said at last.
There was something about his voice. Joe knew from the way he pronounced “soon” that his father wasn’t coming home. And shortly after this realization, Joe had another: he could hear the sucky again. Gearing up for him, breathing out a huge blast of silence, making room in its iron lungs for a great pull.
Danny walked along the beach for a very long time. His bare feet got wet, and his ears got used to the rhythmic pull of the ocean. A very long time ago, he’d walked this same stretch of beach hoping to meet a faceless girl to hold him in her arms and tell him . . . What? That it would be okay? That she’d love him forever? No. The truth was, he didn’t know or couldn’t explain what made him want the faceless girl or any girl for that matter. Here he was nearly thirty-seven, and Danny had not gained one ounce of insight into what he wanted from women. This, despite being married to one for nearly fifteen years.
He passed two men smoking reefers, a stray dog, and three women whose hidden faces scrutinized him as he shuffled by.
He turned to the ocean now, another mystery. There was a moon high above him, and its shine lay on the waves, squirming with every deep pull of the undertow. He thought about Joe. The lie he’d told. Maybe, a voice inside him suggested, the easiest way would be to give up. He’d found the bottom of his life and from here, the only place that looked inviting was the deep ocean. He wondered how far he could swim, and when he finally stopped swimming, he wondered how it would feel to let himself sink, the warm seawater covering him and then soaking into him as he found the undertow and rode it to wherever it was going.
Three steps in, he began to shed his clothes. Two more and he was naked. Moments later he was swimming, the water warm and salty on his lips.
Joe sat on the roof, outside his parents’ bedroom, looking at the moon. He wondered why they didn’t come out here on nights like this. Or maybe they did. His parents were a mystery to him.
Tonight felt pleasant, warm and humid. Joe could feel the air, and he liked that. The moon hung heavy and fat, a pale pumpkin, streaked with wisps of smoky clouds. Somewhere far away, the ocean pulsed. Beats just out of earshot, but Joe knew they were there, just as he knew the desert/belly waited for him and its infinite hunger would never be filled.
Inside the house, he heard the phone ringing. Grudgingly, he pulled himself from his perch and climbed back inside. The sucky roared. He felt no surprise at this. It would have to happen tonight. All these years. It had been waiting for tonight.
He picked up the phone, putting his free hand over his other ear, to muffle the noise.
“Joe?” His mother’s voice sounded very far away, and for an instant he had an insane thought that she might be dead and this was one of those ghost calls they always talked about on the paranormal shows.
“Hey, Mom.”
“I’m sorry we left you.” Was she crying? It sounded like she might be crying.
“It’s okay. You’ll be back tomorrow.”
Mom made a weird sound. A murmur.
“What? You won’t be back tomorrow?”
“Of course I will, Joe.”
An awkward silence followed this statement, and in that silence, Joe read the language of intent, the unspoken dialogue he now saw was the province of adulthood.
“But Dad won’t,” he said.
“I can’t speak for your father, but I will say he needs to talk to you himself. I’m very angry at him right now.”
She didn’t need to say this because Joe heard her voice shaking; he could even picture vividly the look on her face, her eyes locked on nothing, the corners of her mouth edging toward a grimace she could barely control. Or maybe she’d stopped trying now. Maybe it was so over, she didn’t even care to control her disdain.
“Okay,” Joe said even though it was not okay. It was far from okay. His parents were done, finished, sliced in two. He heard it in what his mother said and what she left unsaid. His mind went to the sucky and then through its great iron lungs until he found that awful gray desert, where not even light or darkness can exist, just the rotten, timeworn colours of no more laughing and despair.
“Are you okay, Joe?”
He nodded and then realized she couldn’t hear him. “Yeah. I’m going to go take a bath.”
He heard his mother smile. “I thought you’d be using our shower.”
“I thought you didn’t listen to me about the sucky,” Joe said.
“No, we listened, but we decided it was better if we didn’t make a big deal about things. It’s funny because the sucky was one of the few things we agreed about. Anyway, I’m glad you’re over it.”
“Me too. Bye, Mom.”
“Bye, Joe.”
When he hung up the phone, he didn’t let himself think about what he was doing, and he walked, zombie-like to the roar in the hall bathroom. The wallpaper was gone, and the walls looked threadbare underneath, as if the sucky was pulling layers of skin off it until there was nothing left but brittle bone. The toilet seat was up, straining against its bolts to come off; Joe actually heard the groaning of the screws. And as he stepped into the room, he felt himself stumbling forward, as if he’d entered a wind tunnel. He fought it long enough to strip off his clothes (they never hit the floor as he dropped them article by article; instead, they levitated over the rim of the t
ub before disappearing into the gaping black hole like diving birds); being naked made no rational sense. In the desert/belly he’d want clothes, but this was something he thought about later. At that moment, he acted instinctually, as he had thousands of times before. A bath meant being naked. That’s all this was, Joe thought, a bath.
Now naked, he stopped fighting and let himself be pulled into the tub. An instant later the world was a slick darkness, and he fell.
Down, down, down into a darkness like no other, Joe fell. There was sludge and stink and something oppressive like the air just before a great storm. Joe didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know why he couldn’t stop, or why his eyes were blanketed with a heavy, nearly total darkness.
When he stopped at last, it was only for an instant, a brief respite, before he heard the lungs kick into gear and he felt himself being jerked along a muddy path. Looking around, he saw the spillway from his dream, or something like it. In the dream there had been concrete and water and a certain manmade aspect to the setting that was missing here. Here mud reigned and junk surrounded him. Old bicycles, clocks, clothing, trash, pieces of automobiles, and mangled paperback novels moved alongside him as if on a conveyor belt made of mud.
Above him, however, hung a dazzling blue-black sea. Looking up was like looking into an aquarium without the glass. The water itself formed a dome made of silky blue where schools of fish and other underwater things floated past. Despite the extreme unlikelihood of the sea being suspended above him, Joe did not doubt his eyes. It made sense. He’d gone underneath the world, to the very bottom, and when he was spit out at last into the dull, colourless desert that cannot be filled, he will have found hell.
Swimming with long strokes, Danny made his way out to sea. Occasionally, he stopped and floated on his back, staring at the moon. It looked bigger out here in the middle of all the water and space. He felt small, unimportant in the waves. Danny let himself sink into the water.
There was a pulse here. If you remained still, you could hear it thumping around you, transfiguring you until you become part of the current, part of the mystery. Danny was still. He waited, blanking his mind of Celebrity and Samantha and, most of all, Joe. He forgot about breathing for a while. He let the ocean push him like a marionette, here and there, there and here until he forgot even himself and there was no discernible difference between his body and a ripple in the current.
Like this, he made the decision to sink some more. He could be reborn after he was dead. This all came to him in a slow stream, like a current steadily pulling away the earth. He could not deny it. He was hypnotized by the rocking pulse. He didn’t need his own anymore. So he let it go.
Last thought before darkness, not a good one: Joe, alone. Joe, facing the entire world and everything it squeezed you with. Joe, facing this by himself.
The desert with his eyes closed was a pleasant place. There was no heat. No cold. A dryness on his skin made him shiver and shake.
When he opened his eyes, he saw bruises everywhere. Bruises on the sky, bruises on his naked skin, bruises on the sand. In front of him there was nothing until the sky touched the ground, but even that disintegrated into ash and Joe couldn’t tell sky from ground, up from down.
He turned and saw a body at his feet. For a long time, Joe looked at it without moving. For a long time, he was unsure who it was. In the desert/belly there weren’t really fathers. Here there were only remnants, half-realized things, so hard to grasp they practically made themselves invisible. But part of him remembered Dad. Dad, who was supposed to come back home.
Joe dropped to the ground beside him and touched his heart. A slight pulse. A tiny, micro pulse, more of an echo than a reality.
Joe learned how to do CPR in health class two weeks ago. A fireman came in for a week and taught all the seventh graders how to save somebody’s life. When he was done, the fireman handed out little badges that said, I’m a Camden County Certified Lifesaver!
He began to breathe into his father’s mouth. At first softly, but then with more urgency. He tried to mimic what the fireman had done when he demonstrated on the dummy, but, most of all, he just tried to breathe hard. He did this for a very long time while the desert/belly waited.
When his father woke up, the sky changed. The horizon came back, an inky dark slash in the distance. Dad sat up, salt water spilling from his mouth.
Joe stood behind his father and watched as he got up, shaking the sand off his naked body. The sun burned the ocean and bright streamers of light stretched almost to the beach. The sky dissolved into an intense blue.
Joe followed his father down the beach. They’d come out of the belly somehow, perhaps spit back up because something between them disagreed with it. Dad walked until he found a bundle of clothes half buried in the sand. He dug out a shirt and then a pair of pants. He did not put them on. Instead, he went through the pockets until he found his wallet. Then he emptied the wallet on the beach, shaking out bills, coins, photographs, credit cards. He went through them one by one, until he found what he wanted. Joe slipped up behind his father, so close, he smelled the seaweed in his hair. His father held a photograph in his hands. An old photo, Joe barely recognized the smiling little boy holding the scrawled illustration up to the camera. He’d been happy then.
He needed to be happy again. His father placed the photo up on dry sand and then took the rest of his belongs and tossed them as far as he could into the ocean. Just as Joe began to feel the fading (he couldn’t tell if he was fading or the place was fading, but everything turned to grayscale, and the bright sun became a watermark in the sky, and then it was gone completely), he saw his father go pick up the photo, look at it once more and then evaporate like ocean spray.
After trashing his clothes and wallet in the ocean, Danny made a mad dash for his hotel room. He banged on the door until Ralph opened it.
“Jesus Christ, Dan. You’re naked.”
“And cold. Let me in.”
Ralph moved aside. He had a beer open and porn on the television. “Why are you naked?” he asked.
“I need a shower,” Danny said.
In the shower, Danny tried to remember what happened. He couldn’t, and that was okay. He did remember the photo, finding it where it was supposed to be. Knowing he had to start over, get rid of everything that didn’t matter, but at all costs hold on to his boy. He didn’t feel so bad anymore. He knew he was going to let his boy down, but he also knew his boy would survive. Because that’s what people did when they didn’t die.
As he stepped out of the shower, one image flashed through his mind, fleeting, yet clear: Joe’s face looming over his.
Danny held onto this one, tried to burn it into his synapses, thought a crazy thought: Joe had saved him so he could, in turn, save Joe. He did not know how, but it was true.
Danny smiled, liking the way it felt to believe something with his heart even when his mind said it wasn’t possible.
Joe made it back home, eventually. The tub never so much as gurgled again. That doesn’t mean everything was great for Joe from that point on. In fact, Joe’s parents got divorced and stayed that way. Samantha met an ex-minor league baseball star who believed in drowning a day’s problems in a fifth of Jack Daniels. Joe didn’t like him at all, but even when he got drunk and threatened to kick Joe’s ass, Joe never heard a peep from the sucky.
His father found a girl without a face and married her. Joe doesn’t see him half as much as he’d like to. He never sees her.
There’s part of Joe that is always coming back from the desert. During his trip down the sucky, he picked up a lot of dirt and grime and bathwater. In his mind, he is forever walking, shedding drop by drop all the nasty stuff. Bathing doesn’t help. Only walking. And even that only helps a little. Some of the stuff, he knows, will stick to him forever.
Thirteen Scenes from Your
Twenty-Fourth Year
; Scene 9
A phone rings in the middle of the night waking you from dreams you will never remember.
“It’s your brother,” says William.
Alfred turns in his sleep. Outside the motel room, the city seems to do the same. You take the phone.
“John.” A rough voice. Coarse. Your brother, Reg.
“Yeah?”
“Mom’s in the hospital. She had a stroke.”
William and Alfred are both up now, dark shapes across the room, breathing silently. They are your best friends in the world, yet in the darkness they recede like shadows.
“When?” You have never been able to say anything to your brother.
“Today.”
“Is it bad?”
“I think so.”
“Okay.”
William and Alfred move as one, straightening up, readying themselves to speak words they do not know.
Scene 1
There is no soundtrack when you move home. It’s late fall and the tree branches lay bare, cold-kissed by the wind until they are thin tendrils, icelike and brittle. The nights are cold and the air burns your lungs.
You leave friends, a job, school. And driving home, you feel like everything has been put on hold. When you turn into your old neighbourhood, you feel as if your heart might burst.
Mom is in her chair, wearing a sweat suit, still beautiful, still serene, long and tall and blonde—though her dark roots are finally showing past the hair dye. Her face is lined, her brow furrowed as if she has been concentrating fiercely.
You put a hand on her shoulder.
She says welcome home.
Scene 2
There are no friends here. Your father stays in his room, sitting in his chair, his half face glowing in the light from the television set. He emerges only for waffles and to empty his colostomy bag.
The house reeks.
Mom tries to be positive.
It’s hard.
Shoebox Trainwreck Page 21