Under the Rainbow

by Silvis, Randall;

  “It’s a weird feeling, knowing you’re dying. Feeling it happening all the time. It’s like.…

  “Remember being a kid, a teenager, and going to the sock hop? Getting up against a girl for the very first time?

  “Remember falling in love with some sweet warm thing whose name you didn’t know? And not working up the nerve to ask her to dance until the very last song? And then finally getting her in your arms? and listening to the music? feeling it in your blood? and knowing it was going to end any second now, it was all going to end, all that delicious warm fear of feeling her heart thumping against your own …?

  “That’s sort of what this thing is like, bud. This is the last dance. And I’ve finally got her in my arms, the Big Blonde, the one I’ve been watching for a long time now. The music is playing and she’s pressed up against me and I’m as nervous as a teenager, you know? She’s all hot and sweaty from dancing all night, and there’s this scent of sweat and cheap perfume she’s giving off, the perfume is called Musk, remember that stuff?

  “I’m so fucking dizzy with the scent and the heat of her, I don’t know if this is love or what. All I know is that the music is going to end sooner or later, it has to. So in the meantime.…

  “Don’t try cutting in on us, Don. I love you, man, I really do, but this is something else entirely.…

  “I’m holding onto this one until the lights go out.

  “I’m going home with her.

  “Christ, she scares me.”

  “What’s it like where you are?” Donald asks.

  And Jerry says, “Gray.”

  “Gray?”

  “More of an off-white, I guess. Eggshell.”

  “Geez,” Donald says.

  “How about if I ask a question now?”

  “Be my guest.”

  “What’s your favorite instrument?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I’m taking a survey, okay?”

  “The saxophone.”

  “Why the saxophone?”

  “Why?” says Donald. “I don’t know. Because it has a ropy kind of quality, I guess. It sounds like something I could swing on. Something I could climb on, like a kid. Something I could shinny up, out of sight, do the Indian rope trick on.”

  “What’s bugging you, my friend? Talk.”

  “Everything.”

  “Be specific.”

  “I don’t care what day it is.”

  “And that worries you?”

  “You don’t think it should?”

  “Today is Friday.”

  “You see? You see how little that news affects me? I simply do not care, one way or the other, that today is Friday.”

  “And why should you? You don’t have an employer to work overtime for, you don’t watch Saturday morning cartoons, you don’t attend religious services. Every day is just a day. Nameless, without distinction. There are no divisions of weeks for you. No months.”

  “Right. So how can there be so many years? So many years behind me?”

  “It does strain one’s credulity, doesn’t it?”

  “Can I tell you something else, Jer?”

  “That’s why I’m here, pal.”

  “I hear things.”

  “So you’re not deaf, count your blessings.”

  “Often I hear a kind of dull muffled roaring in the sky.”

  “Thunder, that’s what it is.”

  “On a perfectly sunny day. Not a cloud, not a hint of gray.”

  “A jet then. The Concorde, for example, way up in the upper stratosphere.”

  “It’s not a jet, not even the Concorde. The intonation isn’t right. Or the pitch, the modulation, whatever you call it. I know a jet when I hear one.”

  “The jet stream then. Wafting down from Ottawa. Racing up from Waco.”

  “There are other things too. When I’m in the shower, I hear the phone ringing. The doorbell. People screaming for help.”

  “Water in your ears.”

  “Often I have the feeling of being watched.”

  “Typical of the times.”

  “A savage insatiable lust. I want to fuck everybody, but nobody appeals to me.”

  “Nonspecific urethritis. A mild inflammation. Too much caffeine in your piss.”

  “Does prayer really work?”

  “Cranberry juice works better.”

  “Is there a God?”

  “I’ve heard certain rumors.”

  “Are you in Heaven or Hell?”

  “It’s your darkroom, pal. You decide.”

  Donald is sitting at his breakfast table, a mug of black coffee in his hands as he stares out the window at his parcel of lawn, his driveway, his neighbor’s lawn and driveway, neighbor after neighbor, lawn and driveway after lawn and driveway.

  Jessica and Deirdre are seated across from him, talking, mother’s and daughter’s voices so similar as to sometimes blur into one. He doesn’t want to look at either of them just now, the morning is too new, unformed, he hasn’t the stomach yet for interaction, for facing the mirrors in their eyes.

  Donald gazes out the window and wishes there were some mountains in his life, a range of purple majesty upon which to fix his gaze, on which to hang his thoughts. He wants not figurative mountains, not the lofty slopes of dreams nor the perfect peaks of poetry, he wants dirt and rock piled high, stratum upon stratum, epoch upon epoch. The Rockies. Sierra Madres. The Grand Tetons. Mount St. Helens.

  “I read once,” he says aloud, not knowing there are words in his mouth until he hears them roll out, “that people who can gaze out their windows and see a mountain or two live longer and happier lives.”

  From across the narrow table comes silence. Jessica stares at him and wonders something, he can only guess what.

  “Longer and happier than what?” Deirdre asks. “Than whom?”

  “Than people who can see only plain. Desert. Pasture-land. Lawn.”

  “I can understand that,” says Jessica, ever the ally, peacemaker to the world. “The beauty of nature. The panoramic view.”

  “Some people are city people,” Deirdre says.

  “Concrete walls,” Donald muses. “Curtains of carbon monoxide. Windows full of bald-headed mannequins who have forgotten how to smile.”

  “Reminds me of somebody I know,” says Deirdre. Then, “Anyway, place is unimportant. It’s what’s inside that matters. Faith. A belief in something bigger.”

  “Mountains are bigger,” says Donald. “A lot bigger.” He is looking at his neighbor’s lawn-ball now.

  “Faith can move mountains,” says Deirdre.

  “I believe what I can see.”

  There is an argument brewing, so Jessica hurries to lower the heat. “In a sense,” she says, “you are both talking about the same thing. To gaze upon a mountain is to feel a sense of awe. To experience the magnificence of nature. In that regard, to merely gaze upon a mountain is a form of worship. An exercise in faith.”

  “If you need the physical reassurance,” Deirdre says. “If you aren’t capable of finding it within yourself.”

  “I’d like to photograph some mountains,” Donald says.

  Deirdre tells him, “It’s been done.”

  “Everything’s been done,” he counters, blood pressure rising now, veins beginning to bulge.

  “I’ll tell you something that hasn’t been done,” Deirdre says, and gets up to pour herself another cup of coffee. “That grandson of mine hasn’t been put on the right track yet.”

  Donald stiffens, about to respond, to reach for the cutlery. But he is disarmed suddenly by Jessica’s hand squeezing his, her smile, the light of forgiveness ever glinting in her eyes.

  He squeezes her hand in return, then stands, heads for the back door, tossing over his shoulder a petulant, “If faith really can move mountains, Deirdre, how come I never see you levitating back home?” And he ducks quickly outside, the only way to win.

  Donald and Wright once made a book together. Photogra
phs by Donald, text by Wright. A coffeetable book. A Nature Walk, they called it. Brilliant color photographs of a waterfall limned with crystal ice. Spring cow-lilies pushing through the dirt. A murderous-eyed Cooper’s hawk perched on the spear of a dead swamp tree.

  Each photograph is accompanied by a short poem. Each poem is rigidly structured, metered, rhymed. Amateurish and sentimental. Unpublishable.

  An editor telephones Donald a few days after one of the book’s many rejections. “Let me hook you up with another writer,” he says. “A professional. Your photographs are wonderful. I would love to work with you on this.”

  For seven years now a copy of the unpublished book has languished in a box in Donald’s basement, collecting the scent of mold. Wright has a copy too, which he keeps sending out. He shows Donald the rejection slips. Thirty-nine so far. Donald never asks to see them, never mentions the project unless Wright brings it up, which he hasn’t done for several months.

  These days, lately, one of the unproductive things Donald does alone in his basement office is to hold that moldering book in his lap, turn the thick pages and look at the photographs and wonder who the man with the camera was. That middle-aging boy able to fill a frame with the blue beauty of a flower the size of his thumbnail. Able to make a frozen waterfall resonate off the page with the music of a glass celesta, the tinkle of icicles falling. Able to find the cosmos in a dew-sequined cobweb, the sanity in a star.

  That boy, whomever he was, Donald has lost him, that life-loving boy. Did he die with the first rejection, or the twentieth? What experience or fear made him doubt his eye for the beautiful, made him suspicious of the stirrings of his heart? When did he lose his passion, his drive? When did his talent go belly-up?

  Donald, so lonely, Donald wishes he knew.

  Kittenfaced girls and ratfaced boys. Orthodonture by the acre. Baggy loud clothes and shoes untied, thirty dollar haircuts, this is what Donald sees in the city, in the park, as he sits on a bench with his Lieca in his hands. Children are so tall these days, so loud. How can sperm and ova go so awry? Was he ever this arrogant, this sure of himself?

  Don’t dwell on it, Donald. Look elsewhere.

  There, for example. The water-fountain shaped like a lion’s head. That tiny tyke wanting a drink. Cute little towheaded boy climbing into the lion’s mouth, dragging himself up. Ah, success! He beams, grins proudly, now kneels on the fiberglass mandible and leans forward for a drink.

  Donald raises the camera to his eye. A lovely picture. His finger on the button. But wait. Sure the boy is happy now, he’s innocent, he doesn’t know a thing. But someday he will look up from his comic book to see Daddy sock Mommy in the eye. He’ll see Uncle Freddie gunned down in a drive-by shooting. Somebody will poison his dog. A cloud of toxic waste will hang over his neighborhood, dust his tricycle, shimmer in his sandbox. His parents will send him to Clear-water, Florida to live in a trailer park with Granny, who supplements her social security check by selling tiny bags of white powder, but somewhere over King’s Island, while the boy is nibbling on a bag of peanuts and watching the sea of clouds below, a swarthy man sitting three rows ahead will mutter a prayer to Allah, and the Boeing 737 will explode.

  Donald lowers the camera. He holds it bloodless on his knee. He takes no picture, exposes no film to the glare of this day, to its sunny scarification, its sere illusion of laughter and hope.

  “I’ve been having such weird dreams lately.”

  “It is the nature of dreams to be weird, is it not?”

  “In this one, I’m walking through the city at night, and I get lost, and I end up in a blind alleyway.”

  “The symbolism’s fairly sophomoric here, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “Out of nowhere comes a big ugly mugger. He rips the camera from my hands, then stands there looking at it, like a gorilla or something who can’t understand what a camera is for. So I pull out my wallet and I say Here, take it all, take everything I’ve got, just please don’t take my camera.”

  “And he eats the camera, right?”

  “He takes my wallet, but then he hurls the camera against a wall. When it breaks, pieces fly off into space like pieces from an exploding kaleidoscope. The mugger punches me a good one in the belly, and then he turns and walks away laughing, until he disappears in the darkness.”

  “Did you recognize the mugger as anybody you know? Your father, maybe? Your high school sweetheart?”

  “Wait, I’m coming to that. So anyway, when I get my breath back I stumble out to the street. It’s daylight now, a bright winter afternoon, the sun is as bright as burnished metal. There’s a cop at the intersection directing traffic, so I hustle over to him, dodging cars, nearly getting run over a couple of times. And I tell him I’ve been mugged. He takes out a pad and pencil and asks for a description of my assailant. And I say Well, he was of medium height, brown hair, green eyes, he was wearing a red and yellow flannel shirt, blue jeans and a pair of dirty sneakers. The cop stops writing and stands there looking at me strangely. And that’s when I realize—”

  “You’ve given him a description of yourself.”

  “He reaches for his billy club, so I start running again, upstreet through the traffic, weaving in and out between cars. Meanwhile the cop is hot on my tail and now he’s shooting at me! Bullets are flying everywhere. Ricochetting off the pavement, pinging off car doors, thunking into pedestrians. People are dropping like flies. The gutters become rivers of blood. Me, I’m running like crazy for the river, don’t ask me why, but that’s where I feel I need to go. My lungs are on fire, my legs are like mud, and the cop keeps getting closer and closer. And he never runs out of ammunition!”

  “I bet I know who the cop looks like.”

  “What’s it all mean, I wonder.”

  “Did the cop eventually catch you?”

  “I make it to the river, but now it isn’t winter anymore, it’s summer. And the river is the Caribbean Ocean. And I’m trapped there on the beach, caught between the water and the policeman, whose bullets are nicking me with regularity now. And just when I think I’m dead for sure, all of a sudden you come swooping in above the beach in your parasail, and you scoop me up off the sand like a hawk snatching a rabbit.”

  “Interesting simile.”

  “And you carried me up into the sky. Higher and higher we went. So high I eventually couldn’t even hear the cop shooting at me anymore. The clouds kept getting thicker and thicker, and they smelled like antiseptic, like a hospital room. I looked up at you and yelled, Where are you taking me, Jer? And when I said that, we all of a sudden stopped moving. We just hovered there for a moment. When you looked down at me, your face was sad, and a little bit angry. And you said, You had to ask, didn’t you? And then you dropped me. I guess I woke myself up screaming. Jessica didn’t wake up, though, so I guess I only dreamed I was screaming.”

  “Too bad you woke up. It might have been interesting to see where you landed.”

  “Why did you drop me, Jerry?”

  “It seemed the natural thing to do.”

  “I don’t feel like sex tonight,” Donald says.

  And Leeanne, who in her living room has already begun to disrobe, pantyhose peeled to her knees, says, “What do you mean you don’t feel like sex?”

  “I don’t feel like sex.”

  “Well I feel like sex.”

  “So okay, no problem. We’ll have sex.”

  “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Sex is why you’re here.”

  “It’s not only sex.”

  “We’ve never not had sex.”

  “Sex isn’t everything.”

  “It’s six o’clock Tuesday night. Every Tuesday night at six o’clock, we have sex.”

  “Sex on a timetable.”

  “I don’t care if it’s on a coffeetable, I’m ready for sex. I brushed my teeth for sex, I’ve psychologically programmed myself for sex, I’ve cleared my schedule for sex. And I fully expect that, one hour from now, I will be heating up my
microwave dinner for one while still all aflush in the relaxing afterglow of a satisfying session of sex.”

  Donald stands and smiles. “Let there be sex.”

  “Hey bud,” the phone message says, “how’s it hangin’?” Wright’s voice as soft and damp as moss coming from the plastic box is a peculiar kind of frightening; there is terror in that voice, an understated terror that pricks the hair on Donald’s arms, a chill that makes his nipples sore.

  “Boy, am I glad you don’t have one of those machines that cuts a guy off after thirty seconds. I never know what I’m going to say until I say it.”

  But there is another quality to the voice as well, a resignation, wide-eyed and awestruck, a kamikaze kind of eagerness for the terror. Donald hugs himself, plucks his glasses off. The world of his basement becomes a frosty blur.

  “I bet after that last message of mine you think I’ve lost it, don’t you?”

  There is a brief liquid sound, muffled slurp, followed by a clink. Is Wright drinking a beer? Scotch on the rocks? Donald wants to know.

  “But I’ll tell you something, Don. This is strange but … I don’t know, maybe it’s not so strange after all. Maybe it’s only natural.…

  “Let’s say I look out my window in the morning. You know the Somerfields across the street? That bed of peonies and mums around their front porch? Well I can smell those flowers, bud. I mean from behind my bedroom window, I can really smell them! It’s weird.…

  “I can taste things I haven’t tasted since I was a kid. Coffee soup, for example. Do you know what that is? My old man used to make it for breakfast when I was a boy. All I have to do now is to think about it, and I can fucking taste it. And all the while I can smell our old coal furnace on a winter morning, just like I’m sitting there by the register the way I used to.…

  “And then yesterday? I was lying on my bed in the afternoon? Just thinking about nothing in particular, I guess. Trying to make my mind a blank. And you know what I heard, Don? Not imagined, but heard? I heard a violin playing. Honest to God I did. It was as if Itzak Perlman himself were sitting there on the edge of my bed, it was that real. And it wasn’t coming from outside, or from a radio, or anything like that. It was coming out of the air.