Vernon Downs

by Jaime Clarke

  He didn’t know this part of it. He barely knew what he would say when he got into Harold Turnbull’s apartment, much less how to gain entrance. “You don’t know me, Mr. Turnbull,” he said, “but I’ve come to speak to you. It’s about my parents.”

  “Hello?” the husky voice asked again.

  Charlie cleared his throat and started again. “I’ve come to—”

  “Hello? Who is it? Hello?” the voice barked, and then clicked off. Charlie’s heart sank, and he searched the shadowed street for a pay phone—he’d copied Harold Turnbull’s phone number, too, and would try to call and explain—but he managed only two steps before the door buzzed, and he pushed it, slamming it against the wall. The door caught and closed slowly as a trapezoid of plaster plummeted to the floor.

  Charlie used the handrail to navigate the unlit stairway to the fourth floor. The door to Harold Turnbull’s apartment strained against the gold chain, and a set of owl eyes blinked out from behind a pair of enormous spectacles.

  “Hello? What do you want?”

  Charlie stood back, not wanting to distress his prey. “I think you knew my parents,” he said, choosing an expediency rooted in truth. “In Modesto. It was a long time ago. You were the city inspector there, right?” He flinched when the door swung open. The smell of ripe bananas escaped the apartment.

  “It’s nice to have a visitor,” Turnbull said. Charlie figured him to be about seventy-five, but it was impossible to tell because his loose flesh and bald head gave him the appearance of having been dead for a long time, resurrected only by Charlie’s visit.

  The tiny apartment was cluttered with unread newspapers, some still in their plastic sheaths. Empty orange juice cartons were stashed behind the recliner positioned directly in front of the television. A dozen or so chocolate bars were spilled across the tiny black-and-gray-flecked Formica kitchen table. A familiar scene from an old sitcom squawked from the television and they both stood and stared at it.

  “I’ll clear this away,” Turnbull said. A foul odor emanated as he swept a rack’s worth of bundled magazines off a ragged couch.

  Charlie lost his nerve. What if Turnbull looked at him and said, “Yes, it was your fault”? What if he said, “If you and your friend hadn’t been fucking around in the basement, your parents would still be alive today”? It hadn’t occurred to him that the only reason he’d sought out Harold Turnbull was that he wanted absolution, to have him testify it was an accident, that it might’ve been something else, anything—a meteor falling out of the sky, a bomb planted by terrorists, a rocket mistakenly fired from the local army base.

  Turnbull plunked into the recliner and elevated his feet. “Circulation,” he said, wincing. “Now, what is this all about?”

  Charlie fingered an imaginary spot on his pants. He felt Turnbull staring over his socked toes at him, and he summoned the Olympic courage he sometimes willed to power him through situations that he’d misjudged as easy but that proved surprisingly difficult. He told Turnbull about that day when he was seven, about him and his sixteen-year-old sitter, the neighbor girl, Kyra, roller-skating in the basement—it was safer than the street, where a car could roar around the corner and kill you dead just like that. It was his mother who had suggested it, actually. “Why don’t you go down in the basement if you want to skate,” she’d said. Charlie wouldn’t have come up with that idea in a million years, as appealing as it was. He told Turnbull about coming home later from the store, Kyra in tow, and discovering a gap of sunlight where his house had stood. He confessed how he sometimes saw the house in his dreams. Not the same exact house; sometimes it was red or green or blue, sometimes a single-story ranch, but no matter what color or shape, he always recognized it as his childhood home, the house disintegrating into colored confetti when he turned the brass knob.

  “Very interesting,” Turnbull said.

  “And so,” Charlie said, weary from the effort it took to expel the story he’d secreted away for most of his life, “I just need to know if you think what happened that day might have been an accident.”

  Turnbull removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “It was a lifetime ago,” he said.

  “I brought this,” Charlie said, handing him the yellowed copy of the police report.

  Turnbull held his glasses aloft, inspecting the document. “That’s my signature, all right,” he said. Charlie inched forward on the couch. He’d grown accustomed to the stench in the apartment. “The thing is … it was a lifetime ago.”

  “Are you saying you don’t remember?” Charlie asked. “How many houses have you seen blown to pieces?”

  “Just hold on,” Turnbull said. He kicked himself out of the chair and handed back the report. “Let me just—would you like a drink? I find a drink sometimes helps.”

  Charlie demurred. His heart was pounding. Turnbull poured himself two fingers of bourbon and flushed it down. He poured another glassful and returned to the recliner. Outside, a siren wailed and Turnbull’s apartment was briefly flooded with emergency.

  “Were your neighbors affected?” he asked.

  The question staggered him. His memories of that terrible day and since had never accounted for the neighbors, and he strained to conjure any details about them. The one across the street had maybe been a dentist, and he definitely remembered a patch of sunflowers in the yard adjacent to his, the sunflowers coming into view when he and Kyra kicked higher and higher on the plastic swing set his father had staked to the ground with metal chains the previous Christmas. But he couldn’t be certain. His neighbors in Denver had had sunflowers, and it was conceivable the dentist had actually lived opposite him in Santa Fe. A flush of embarrassment overcame him, dubious about whether Turnbull was chastising him for his self-absorption, or whether a detail or two about those who lived on his childhood street in California would really help spur his memory. The conceit that his neighbors, whoever they were, had carried on with their lives after his house had immolated seemed incredible—the street had assumed the form of a tableau in Charlie’s mind, untroubled by the present or future—and triggered the discomforting thought that someone had more than likely built a house on the ruins of his parents’ house, a sacrilege that he’d never considered. Did Kyra still live in the neighborhood? Why hadn’t he wondered that before? Maybe Kyra was keeping his memory alive on that tiny street. Maybe she wondered what had become of him, and he was startled at how powerful the feeling was.

  “What do you want me to say?” Turnbull asked. “Do you want me to say it wasn’t an accident? How could it be anything else?” He took another swig of bourbon. “Do you want me to exonerate you, assure you that you were not the cause of the accident?”

  Charlie didn’t respond.

  “Well,” Turnbull said, “maybe. Maybe the leak was caused by something else. Maybe it wasn’t a leak at all—hell, back in those days if a house blew up, we assumed it was a gas leak. We couldn’t do what they can do now.” He finished the second glass of bourbon. “I will tell you this,” he said. “Accidents happen and sometimes they change your life, but they’re still accidents. You shouldn’t try to look for meaning in them. An accident is an accident.”

  Turnbull sat back in the recliner. Charlie tucked away the photocopy of the police report. He thanked Turnbull for his time, but Turnbull started to snore loudly, so he let himself out. Something had just happened—he felt it—but what? Had anything Turnbull said made any difference, or was he saying that nothing anyone could say would make a difference, and by extension, that the past was the past and had no bearing on the present or the future? It was a homily he had trouble believing. The sun was starting to set on Mott Street, and Charlie fruitlessly hailed a cab, somehow sorry that he’d finally found Harold E. Turnbull, the years of hope and comfort he’d derived from the name whisked away on a hot afternoon wind of regret.

  The visit to Turnbull had been so taxing and left him so rent he failed to make it to the lobby to collect the mail, the annoyed doorman d
elivering it one afternoon wrapped with a thick rubber band. Among the mail was the unopened apology he’d mailed to the famous author Vernon had quarreled with, marked UNDELIVERABLE. He opened the letter and was reading the heartfelt apology when a disheveled Vernon Downs appeared, his hair matted to his head as if it were raining, his normally smooth face unshaven, a barbaric spark in his eyes. Charlie had girded against rebuke, but Vernon muttered something about California, his words slurring as he grabbed random articles from the loft and deposited them into paper shopping bags, Charlie revolving around him silently, the two pirouetting through the unkempt loft until Vernon hefted the two bags by their handles and stalked toward the door. The rush of excuses that had flooded Charlie’s brain when Vernon appeared evaporated, and without being asked, he followed Vernon down the emergency stairs to the street where the BMW languished amid the cacophony of honking cabs and animated, competitive sidewalk conversations. Vernon dropped the shopping bags in the backseat on top of his luggage from Vermont. After a confused moment where Vernon begged to drive to calm himself, Charlie slipped behind the wheel and listened to Vernon’s harangue against his editor, who had driven him to the fringes of madness over the latest revision of the new novel, punctuated by directions on how to flee the city by car.

  “‘Make it more Vernon Downs–y,’” Vernon repeated incredulously, his eyes bulging, his breath stale from cigarettes. “What does he know about it?” he asked angrily. “Take the George Washington Bridge.” Charlie followed Vernon’s directions, Manhattan slowly receding, the skyline shrinking into miniature. “What does anyone know about it?” Vernon asked softly.

  “What did the editor mean?” Charlie asked.

  Vernon cracked the window and lit a cigarette. “It’s a tired impression at this point, is all,” was the answer. “You take what they give you and you burnish it, indulging it even,” he said, “and then you realize you’re in a prison of your own construction. I mean, I let it happen. This unrecognizable person in the papers was infinitely more interesting than I was. I’d read what they wrote about me and aspire to their interpretation. That was my mistake. I didn’t understand how important it was to control your own narrative.

  “I remember when I first learned Minus Numbers was going to be published, I was elated that something I’d dreamed up was going to find its way into print. That was it” —he exhaled through the open window— “but everything after that got … easier. I struggled and worried and fussed with Minus Numbers, and after it was published, I swear I could’ve published an annotated grocery list and it would’ve gotten the same reception as the books I did publish. You want to know why? Because the machinery was already in place to dictate the outcome. You’re young, you write a book, you become famous, maybe make some money, which unleashes praise and jealousy in equal measure. So from then on out, a certain number of people worship you and a certain number of people loathe you. It’s a mirror of everyone’s life, just played out in the press.” Vernon stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray, where it smoldered among a salad of empty candy wrappers. “You once asked me what the most untrue thing anyone ever said about me was. ‘Controversial and reclusive East Coast literary novelist.’ The person who first coined it should’ve trademarked it. If words were money, that person would be rich beyond rich. Ask anyone, there’s nothing controversial about me personally. You see something, you translate it into words and create fictional characters to generate meaning, and then you’re liable for these things that you simply witnessed and recorded. And they call you reclusive if you don’t want to answer questions asked by someone who either hasn’t read the work or wants to confuse your characters with you. And worse: You take the bait and start equivocating on earlier denials that your work is any kind of reflection on your life. You have some fun blurring the edges, fanning the embers of the secret desires people who hardly know you harbor. Disappearance is the only remedy. What other answer is there? I’m forced to disappear if I want to wake up and live the way I was before Minus Numbers and everything else. I can’t go back to New York. There’s no peace in New York.”

  Vernon had leaned against the window as he rambled on about the ways his self-impersonation had gone astray, how he had allowed what was said about him to inform his perception of himself, how he had acted his way through life accordingly. He fell silent and Charlie assumed he’d finally dozed off. “Against all my better instincts, I went to the tenth anniversary of Nell’s,” Vernon said, barely audible, his voice shot through with sadness. “I went there very early with a friend of mine; we thought we’d have a glass of champagne and it would be like the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. I hadn’t been there in five years, and we realized it would be really scary but we had to do it. We had spent so much time hanging out there with so many. It was really at one point the nexus of publishing. It was the hub of where everyone who was involved with publishing in New York would hang out. So we walk in and we sit in the same booth we always sat in whenever we were there, and then we noticed that a couple of us were drinking Diet Cokes, people were smoking light cigarettes, no one was doing blow on the table, everyone was checking their watch. Basically we all felt really old. Everyone was controlled by how manic the times were, which sort of demanded that you rush out to every restaurant you possibly could, party with every famous person you possibly could, buy everything you read about in magazines, act this way, look this way, do this.”

  Vernon’s monologue saturated Charlie’s mind as he struggled against the monotony of the road. He resisted Vernon’s interpretation, ascribing it to fatigue and a toxic moroseness induced by whatever had happened in Vermont. He guessed Jacqueline Turner and the other authors gathered at Bemelmans on that not-so-long-ago afternoon would’ve traded some privacy for an ounce of Vernon’s exposure. Everything had a price, he knew well, and it was either paid voluntarily or forcefully extracted. Still, Vernon’s madness was real. They were on their way to California, to his mother’s house in Los Angeles. That was real. He wondered at Vernon’s game plan for a second act in L.A. Perhaps it was just to be closer to friends and family. But his money would run out eventually. Vernon’s celebrity would hamper his ability to interview for the variety of jobs people held to pay their bills, much like Charlie’s own resume, which was largely a chronology of absence.

  “You never said where you were from,” Vernon said, yawning. “With most people … it comes up.” Vernon yawned again. “Just stay on the I-80 West.”

  Charlie struggled with the question, rescued by a suite of sighs that preceded a light, melodious snoring. A calm settled over him as the extent of his liberation unfolded. Kline’s demands, the drama with Christianna, the threat of reunion with Olivia with Shelleyan as witness—all erased. Like in Denver, when he’d forsaken Jesse Mason’s friendship after the Batman and Robin skit to throw his lot in with a group of popular kids, a transition Jesse’s mother and Mrs. Kephart ignored as Jesse’s birthday party loomed, the awkwardness aborted when Charlie landed with the McCallahans, who were ignorant of the drama involving Michelle Benson. Not his pretend nuptials, but that after a brief acrimony toward the boyfriend she’d broken up with to be with him, he and the ex-boyfriend became friends, to Michelle’s chagrin. Charlie eventually spent more time with the ex-boyfriend than he did with Michelle, and soon they were distributing He-Man Michelle Haters Club cards they’d printed on the ex-boyfriend’s home computer. He recoiled when he thought about how easily he adopted the manners and interests of others as a coping mechanism for always being the new kid in the new school. He still didn’t drink orange soda because Michelle hated it; he adopted Jesse Mason’s opinion that the moon landing had been faked, something Jesse’s parents had told him. He became a Vernon Downs fan because of Olivia. He could think of endless examples. Vernon had liberated him from the mess back in New York like his move from San Diego to Phoenix had freed him from academic embarrassment, his short tenure as Miss Wade’s student aide. His chemistry teacher’s initial attentiveness was flatt
ering, and he held the position with a pridefulness that other students must’ve found distasteful. But when he began to hear whispers that Miss Wade was a motorcycle-riding lesbian—rumors that were never confirmed—his attitude underwent a transformation, and it wasn’t long before he was leaking the answers to Miss Wade’s exams to anyone who asked, which was briefly a fountain of popularity. Miss Wade quickly discovered the hustle when the exact sequence of correct multiple choice answers were applied to an alternate test she’d utilized so that students couldn’t pass answers from class to class. Charlie’s demotion to study hall wasn’t as perilous as the ire of the student body, and he was mulling begging the Wallaces to allow him to transfer high schools when he was shipped out again, to Phoenix, the immediate threat ameliorated just like that. Same for the trouble he’d gotten into with some classmates the summer of his junior year at Randolph Prep; the emancipation the Chandlers helped him engineer bailed him out of having to testify to the administration about how the fellowship at Garden Lakes, a sort of summer camp, had gone awry.

  He slowed as the night sky colored red and orange, the taillights of the cars ahead of them flaring. The nose of the BMW almost kissed the bumper sticker on a yellow VW that read, IF YOU WERE AN AIRLINE PILOT, WE’D ALL BE DEAD. Charlie obsessed over all its meanings as the line of cars snaked forward in the dark. Vernon shifted in the passenger seat, his sleep cycle unbroken. The car at rest, and without the lullaby of the tires on the road, Charlie was wide awake. A police cruiser with its lights flashing passed silently on the shoulder, followed by an ambulance. He wondered idly if the driver of the yellow VW was embarrassed about the bumper sticker in this instance, when it could be that someone did actually die, and possibly due to poor decision making. Or did the driver even remember that the bumper sticker was there? Charlie could envision a scenario where the driver slapped it on, as either a statement or a joke, and then quickly forgot about it, maybe only remembering it when he noticed it, or if someone asked him about it, where they could get one too. The bumper sticker morphed into a provocation as Charlie was compelled to stare at it when traffic came to a standstill. The deep woods on either side of the interstate bred a claustrophobia he attempted to abate by turning on the air conditioner. The slight breeze simulated enough movement to quell the aggravating implication that Charlie was as disconnected from his various experiences as the driver was from the bumper sticker on his car. It had meant something to him once, but he barely considered it now. To his relief, the yellow VW put on its flashers and pulled over to the side of the road. As he passed, Charlie smiled at the driver, a bearded man in his fifties who jumped out and popped his trunk.