Under the Rainbow

by Silvis, Randall;

  “You shouldn’t feed wild things,” Donald says. Then, “Shoo!” and the squirrel races to safety up the nearest tree.

  “Why not?” Travis asks, not even angry.

  “Diseases.” Donald sits beside his son, moving stiffly, a man made of sticks, it isn’t easy for a man his age to sit lotus on the ground, where did all the springiness go? “Rabies,” he says. “Fleas. Germs. Ticks. Invisible things.”

  Travis smiles. Offers him a cracker.

  “Son,” says Donald, a hand on the boy’s leg, so youthful, so strong, this stride can conquer mountains. “You can’t go through life like this, thinking good things all the time. Don’t you hear the sirens at night, son?”

  “Don’t you hear the breeze, Dad? Don’t you hear the song of the universe?”

  “You should read the news more. War, famine, brutality, perversion. Listen to the police channel on the scanner.”

  “You should tune into the gaia, Dad. The oneness. Just open yourself to it, and let it in.”

  “In the course of their lifetime, one in three people will fall victim to a violent crime. One in two marriages will end in divorce. Three out of three people will die.”

  “Life is a classroom. Some of us learn faster than others.”

  “But suicide, Travis. Suicide is a negative. A step back. I need you to promise me you will never try it again.”

  “When I graduated from junior high,” Travis says, “first in my class, you were proud of me, weren’t you?”

  “Of course,” Donald says, “But—”

  “And when I won the Science Award last year, and sang a solo at District Chorus, and broke the junior varsity scoring record for the most baskets in a single game? You were happy for me, right?”

  “I thought to myself, this boy is a wonder. This boy is going to be special.”

  “I am special, Dad, and so are you. Everybody is somebody special. So please, don’t expect me to adhere to your agenda. I have my own itinerary, and I’m anxious to move on. And when I do, I hope you will be just as proud and happy for me as you have always been in the past.”

  Donald stands quickly, nauseated, voice and knees aquiver. “There are medicines for people who think like that, Travis. There are treatments available. And believe me, I’m your father, and I’m going to protect you whether you like it or not.”

  There are so many things going on in Donald’s life, so many unrelated things to worry about, to fear, that his life feels broken somehow, fragmented, laying about in so many scattered pieces. He is on his hands and knees, naked, trying to crawl away from this mess. Every move cuts deep. Every jagged shard slices flesh, draws blood. A trickle here, a drip there. Here a squirt, there a spurt. He is anemic from all this bleeding. A quart low. Leaking like a sieve. Which way is out? Who hid the door?

  Leeanne has been promoted again. When Donald first met her at Jerry’s funeral she was a secretary, going to night school and weekend college. She was sobbing when Donald met her, sitting alone in a rear corner of the room, a pretty young thing, petite, stylish, a lace handkerchief dabbing at her eyes. There are at least a dozen such women in similar positions throughout the room, the place is thick with perfume and tears. Donald, at a loss himself, lost in his own fog of grief, comes into the room and sits beside her, sits there for fifteen, twenty minutes before her scent of fuchsia penetrates his clogged sinuses, and he looks away from the casket finally, he turns to her, this woman nearly a child, not quite half his age.

  Feeling protective, paternal, moved by her sadness, feeling too alone with his own, he slips an arm around her, she leans into him, they have a drink at the place on the corner, they eulogize Jerry, they go back to her place and make love on the futon.

  Now Leeanne sleeps on a kingsized platform bed in a much larger apartment. She has an MBA and is working toward her doctorate. She is the first female vice president in the history of her company. And today she has been promoted to the position of senior vice president, a promotion she tells Donald about while sipping a glass of white wine and watching him wash the breakfast dishes she didn’t get around to washing that morning.

  “In fact,” she says, “I can now afford not only a new car but a housekeeper. Especially if I hire an illegal alien.”

  “Sounds as if I’m about to lose my job,” Donald jokes.

  “By the way, did you notice the new doorman downstairs?”

  “They seem to get younger everyday, don’t they?”

  “From the looks of things, he’s hung like a horse.”

  “He’s barely out of his teens.”

  “It sure would be nice to get screwed with some energy for a change.”

  Leeanne grows meaner with every promotion. She has gone past assertive, beyond ambitious. Donald wonders why he continues to visit her. Why she abides his presence.

  “Come and give me a foot massage,” she says.

  He dries his hands, kneels at her feet, takes one small foot between both hungry palms.

  “I’ve been missing Jerry more than ever lately,” he says. “Sometimes I even talk to him as if he’s there in the room with me. That’s pretty weird, isn’t it?”

  Leeanne takes a sip of wine, lays her head back, flexes her toes. “In a little over a year I’ll have my Ph.D.,” she says. “By that time I’ll have moved up another rung. I’ll be two steps from the top then. Second in line for the presidency.”

  “Sometimes, I swear, I can actually hear his voice.”

  “The only ones in my way are Johnson and Mateo. Johnson’s an old fart; he’s just marking time until retirement. But Mateo, he could be a problem.”

  “Do you ever think about Jerry these days?”

  “Unless, of course.… I wonder how a sexual harassment charge would look on Mateo’s resume.”

  “I really need somebody to talk to these days. My son wants to kill himself. But how can I convince him not to when what I really want is to kill myself?”

  “Hmmm,” Leeanne says, and thinks for a moment. “You know, maybe I should buy my new doorman a little gift. Just to welcome him on board.”

  Every night the ritual of locking up. It is barely past nine but to Donald the hour seems late, so late. Jessica is watching TV as he comes home, hangs his jacket in the foyer closet, stands there on the tile, as tired as mud. She is watching a special about sex in the former Soviet Union: one out of three high school girls would do it for money, prostitution ranks eighth in a list of the ten best professions.

  Donald stands frozen in the Siberia of his foyer. He is crumbling like communism. His soul is as empty as a meat market in Minsk.

  “Is Travis in?” he asks.

  Jessica glances over her shoulder. “Of course.” She smiles.

  Of course Travis in in. Upstairs in his bedroom, doing homework or surveying the heavens through his telescope. His stereo tuned to an NPR station, to sounds as ethereal as an interstellar chinook, “Music from the Heart of Space,” a synthesized orchestration as numbing as sodium pentathol.

  Jessica works to keep the accusation from her voice, the fear, and wonders aloud, casually, “Where you been?”

  “Driving around,” says Donald. “Looking for shots. Ideas. Pictures. You know.”

  “Find any?”

  “Nope.”

  She half-turns on the sofa now. Lays a hand across the headrest. “Come watch the rest of this with me. It’s really interesting.”

  “As soon as I lock up,” he says.

  The order of lock-up is very important. Donald does not know why, except that once established, a ritual must be maintained. Or else it is not a ritual at all.

  First comes the front door, outside storm door and then interior wooden door: lock, jiggle; lock, jiggle. Secured. Now through the livingroom to the kitchen and the back door. But on his way Jessica interrupts.

  “Could you adjust the color for me?” she asks. “Ted Koppel’s been green all night, and I can’t get him to look natural.”

  Donald fiddles with the knob
s. “How’s this?”

  “Better. But now the bushes in Gorky Park are pink.”

  “It was a red country,” says Donald.

  “Too much red is just as annoying as too much green. Try turning both knobs at the same time.”

  It takes him another three minutes to get it right. Now he must return to the front door to go through the motions again. Unlocks the wooden door to jiggle-check the storm door. Closes, locks and jiggle-checks the wooden door. Secured. On to the kitchen once again.

  It isn’t that he thinks the doors might have come unlocked while he was fiddling with the TV, he isn’t that crazy, not yet. But the rhythm has been broken, the natural order. If he had allowed the lock-up ritual to go unrepaired, he would later lie in bed restless, tense, unfinished. He will feel that way anyway, no matter what, but now there will be one less possible cause.

  “You’re obsessive,” Jessica says when he returns from locking the back and basement doors.

  “I don’t disagree,” he says, and sits beside her, thighs touching, hers warm, his itchy with guilt. He always fears that he has carried Leeanne’s scent home with him, the fragrance of Obsession. Jessica, on the other hand, smells of crushed rose petals.

  “You think that makes it okay?” she asks. “That you know your behavior is unnatural?”

  “I think it’s better than not knowing, don’t you?”

  “You’re neurotic, sweetie.”

  “I don’t mind. Everybody else is neurotic too.”

  “I’m not.”

  “A touch paranoid maybe. In a certain endearing way.”

  “I suppose it’s typical of the modern world. To be one or the other.”

  “A little bit of both is okay too,” he says. He slips an arm around her, his life-mate, he will never cheat again. “So what’s this show all about?”

  “It’s about how all the old values of the Soviet Union are disintegrating,” she says. “Because of American influence.”

  “The blind leading the blind,” Donald says. “The dead leading the dying.”

  Jessica and Donald can not agree on the disposition best for their son. Jessica, lying in the middle of their bed, knees raised, Donald undulating langorously atop her like an inchworm caught between two tines of a fork, says “I want him to be happy, but not as happy as he is. I just want to take the edge off his happiness. Could you move a little higher, darling?”

  Donald shifts a bit more of his weight forward, a subtle maneuver but one which increases the angle of his dangle by a few degrees, sufficient to elicit from Jessica a mew of pleasure, a purr.

  “But you,” she continues, “do you have to read the newspaper headlines aloud at breakfast? You with your statistics and dire pronouncements. You want him to be miserable.”

  “Not true. I want him to see the world as it truly is.”

  “Sometimes I think you’re getting bigger down there,” she says. “You must be exercising it somewhere I don’t know about.”

  “It’s grown fat with angst. Turgid with ennui.”

  “You didn’t used to be able to go this long.”

  “Sometimes I think I can go forever,” he says. “It makes me sad.”

  She, hoping to buoy him, raise his spirits, digs ten fingernails into his buttocks.

  “I wonder if maybe it does have something to do with sex,” he says.

  “This is sex, Donald. Or maybe you hadn’t noticed.”

  “I mean Travis. His condition. The way he is.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re beginning to agree with mother.”

  “It’s not that I think she’s wrong about the world, I don’t. It’s just that her correctness seems excessive. She’s too right.”

  “A little faster now, honey. It’s starting.”

  “It just seems to me that maybe Travis should be a bit more preoccupied with sex.”

  “Oh,” she says, knees beginning to twitch now, hands to flutter, “ho boy.”

  “He should be hiding girlie magazines under his bed. Hanging out at cheerleader practice. Spending too much time in the bathroom.”

  “Jesus god, oh god oh goodie. Oh give it to me baby, oh give it give it give it ohoohoooh gawd, Donald!”

  A few moments later they are lying side by side with the sheet pulled up to their necks. Jessica says, staring at the ceiling, “You didn’t even come, did you?”

  “I think I might have,” he says. “I guess I’m not sure.”

  And Jessica begins to cry. “We have sex more often these days than we have in years,” she says. “I have more and better orgasms than ever. And you’re not even here!”

  “I’m here, Jess. I’m always here.”

  “You’re as far away from me as you can possibly get. You’ve got a long-distance cock, that’s all. You fax me your love.”

  Donald does not know what to say to this. He hasn’t the strength to deny her claim. He adores her, desires only her, wants only her and Travis’s happiness. But there is no door he can lock now to keep her fear at bay. He has not yet found the proper ritual that will sanctify his home.

  Donald can not sleep. The rhythym of Jessica’s susurrous breathing is broken now and then by the clack of her jaw, teeth grinding. She chews violently on the gristle of her dreams, she gnaws at the flesh and sinew of whatever terrors attend her now.

  Donald is weary enough in muscle and bone to sleep well into the third millenium, but his soul is as tense as an overstrung guitar wire, vibrating stiffly, one more pluck and it will snap. Besides, he has his own dreams to avoid. He slides in darkness off the side of the bed, pausing for a moment on his haunches, not wanting to disturb his wife, to deprive her of whatever small amnesia her sleep obtains. He feels for his trousers on the floor, can’t find them, gives up, tiptoes in his underwear into the hallway.

  Outside Travis’s bedroom he pauses, listens, then peeks inside, gliding the door open by another four inches. There is his child on the moonbathed bed, Travis stretched out as long as the mattress yet still just a baby, as innocent as a newborn.

  Oh son, Donald thinks, and stops the tears only because he knows they will do him no good. Where did I fail you, my boy? Somebody please tell me what I didn’t do right.

  He remembers Travis’s birth, the prolonged labor, interminable fear. The baby, this unknown quality, invisible thing, is stuck sideways in the birth canal, lodged indelibly, it won’t come forward and it can’t go back. The umbilical cord is a noose around its neck. With every contraction, as Jessica is jolted rigid, shocked out of her pain stupor momentarily, the noose cinches tighter. A heart monitor, its electrodes plugged somehow to the baby’s buried skull, beeps. Every now and then a beep is skipped, and when this happens, Donald’s heart skips too. Gasps. Holds its breath until the monitor beeps again.

  The number of beeps per minute, Travis’s heartrate, is diminishing. One hundred sixteen. One hundred twelve. The noose pulls tighter, strangling, choking. Is the unknown quality in pain? Does it know fear? One hundred four. Ninety-nine. The doctor’s eyes, all that is visible of his face beneath blue cap and above blue mask, the eyes look worried, bright with ominous concern. He has been working for over an hour now. He is losing confidence, losing resolve, it shows in his eyes. Get her upstairs! Donald wants to scream. What are you waiting for, do a ceasarian! Jessica is beyond pain now, the pain its own narcotic, her hand in his is limp.

  The doctor says “Get me the suction” and one of the nurses scurries to produce it. It is a strange-looking contraption, the rubber cup of a plumber’s helper attached to the truncated handle of an old-fashioned handpump. What mad scientist thought up this torture device?

  The doctor disconnects the electrodes from the baby’s skull. The heart monitor falls silent, a din as loud as death. The doctor works the suction cup inside Jessica. She groans vaguely. He attaches the cup to the slippery small head. Then pumps furiously on the handle, increasing suction pressure until Donald feels his own heart ballooning, about to burst. Then slowly, firmly, the doctor b
egins to pull, easing the contraption toward his chest.

  Progress stops suddenly. He cuts a look toward Donald, eyes glassy with … what? Then another tug, and pop! the slimy red baseball of a head appears. And an instant later whoosh! a slippery purple body, a skinned squirrel.

  The doctor unclamps, snips, syringes, wipes, and lays the ugly viscuous thing on Jessica’s chest. “Here’s your fella,” the doctor says. “Here’s your little guy.”

  Donald is blubbering, he kisses the slimy face, the bloody forehead, he kisses Jessica and smears the blood across her sweatslick cheek. “It’s a boy,” he sobs, trying to convince himself, to believe.

  The baby’s skull is shaped like a cone, a dunce’s cap.

  “From the suction,” the doctor explains. “It will go back to normal in a day or two.”

  Donald leans away to catch his breath. He is hyperventilating. The baby, Travis, has not uttered a single cry. “Travis honey,” Donald gasps, and holds the slippery hand, “it’s me, baby, it’s your daddy.”

  Travis turns his head toward Donald, he opens his eyes, he smiles.

  “Well will you look at that!” the doctor says.

  There is a message on Donald’s answering machine. Donald is on his way to the darkroom, barechested, barefoot, to talk with Jerry’s filmy image on the wall, to commune, when in passing he glances at the answering machine, sees the signal light. He rewinds the tape, plays it back, and listens stunned to Wright’s voice speaking as if from the grave, from some damp and foggy Aberglaube.

  “Hey buddy, how you doin’ these days.… Listen … I’m sorry about never answering your calls … never picking up. I appreciate your concern, I really do.…

  “Hell, I … I know you just want to help, Don. Not that anybody can help, not unless you’re Christ himself, or you’ve got a miracle cure up your sleeve. But I know you want to, and that’s a good thing to know. That in itself helps, it really does. Having a friend like you. It helps a lot.

  “So anyway. I’m feeling better these days, relatively speaking. For awhile there I was pretty badly off. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t urinate, couldn’t defecate, I was sleeping maybe ten minutes at a shot. Then I had a little stopgap work done, just to open things up temporarily. I felt so good for a week or so, I almost called to invite you out to a twi-night double-header. In the end, though, I went by myself. Boy, was that a mistake! I came home after the fourth inning. Those hard seats, I just couldn’t take it. And all those people. The noise. I never felt more alone.…