It was Helen. Her voice was thick, gritty, full of something I hadn’t heard in it before. “That you, Les?” she said.
“Yeah, what’s up?” I pinned the phone to one shoulder with my chin to keep my hands free, and began dipping glasses in the rinse water and stacking them to dry. I kept my eyes on the customers.
“I just wanted to tell you I’m moving out.”
I watched Jimmy Brennan light a cigarette and lean out over the bar to fetch himself an ashtray. I caught his eye and signaled “just a minute,” then turned my back to the bar. “What do you mean?” I said, and I had to whisper. “What are you saying?”
“What am I saying? You want to know what I’m saying, Les—do you really?” There it was, the grit in her voice, and more than that—anger, hostility. “What I’m saying is I’m moving in with Kurt and Adele because I’m in love with Kurt. You understand that? You understand what I’m saying? It’s over. Totally. Adioski.”
“Sure,” I whispered, and I was numb, no more capable of thought or feeling than the empty beer mug I was turning over in my hands, “—if that’s what you want. But when, I mean, when are you—?”
There was a pause, and I thought I heard her catch her breath, as if she were fighting back the kind of emotion I couldn’t begin to express. “I won’t be there when you get home,” she said.
Somebody was calling me—“Hey, bartender!”—and I swung round on a big stupid-looking guy with a Fu Manchu mustache who came in every night for two or three drinks and never left more than a quarter tip. “Another round here, huh?”
“And, Les,” she was saying through that cold aperture molded to my ear like a compress, “the rent’s only paid through the thirtieth, so I don’t know what you’re going to do—”
“Hey, bartender!”
“—and you know what, Les? I don’t care. I really don’t.”
I stayed late that night. The bar was alive, roaring, seething with camaraderie, chaos, every kind of possibility. My friends were there, my employer, customers I saw every night and wanted to embrace. I drank everything that came my way. I went out to the kitchen and smoked a joint with the busboys. Muddy Waters thumped through the speakers with his mojo workin’ (“All you womens, stand in line, / I’ll make love to you, babe, / In five minutes’ time, / Ain’t that a man?”). I talked a couple of people comatose, smoked a whole pack of cigarettes. Then came the moment I’d been dreading since I’d hung up the phone—Jimmy Brennan got up off his barstool and shut down the lights and it was time to go home.
Outside, the sky seemed to rise up out of itself and pull the stars taut like separate strands of hair till everything blurred and there was no more fire, just ice. It was cold. My breath steamed in the sick yellow glow of the streetlights. I must have stood in the empty parking lot for a full five minutes before I realized Helen had the van—her van—and I had no way to get home and nobody to call. But then I heard a noise behind me, the rattle of keys, a slurred curse, and there was Jimmy Brennan, locking up, and I shouted, “Jimmy, hey, Jimmy, how about a ride?” He looked puzzled, as if the pavement had begun to speak, but the light caught the discs of his glasses and something like recognition slowly transformed his face. “Sure,” he said, unsteady on his feet, “sure, no problem.”
He drove like a zombie, staring straight ahead, the radio tuned so low all I could hear was the dull muted snarl of the bass. We didn’t say much, maybe nothing at all. He had his problems, and I had mine. He let me off at the end of the dark lane and I fumbled my way into the dark house and fled away to unconsciousness before I could think to turn the lights on.
Two days later I put down five hundred dollars on a used Dodge the color of dried blood and moved in with Phil Cherniske, one of the waiters at Brennan’s, who by a cruel stroke of fate happened to live on the next street over from the one I’d just vacated, right on the shore of the same muddy lake. Phil’s place stank of mouseshit too, and of course it lacked the feminine touches I’d grown accustomed to and cleanliness wasn’t all that high on the list of priorities, but who was I to complain? It was a place in which to breathe, sleep, shit, brood and get stoned.
In the meanwhile, I tried to get hold of Helen. She’d quit Brennan’s the day after our phone conversation, and when I called Kurt and Adele’s, she refused to talk to me. Adele wouldn’t say a word the next day at work and it was awkward in the extreme going through an eight-hour shift behind the bar with Kurt, no matter how hip and impervious I tried to be. We dodged round each other a hundred times, made the smallest of small talk, gave elaborate consideration to customers at the far end of the bar. I wanted to kill him, that’s what I wanted to do, and I probably would have too, except that violence was so unhip and immature. Helen’s name never passed my lips. I froze Kurt out. And Adele too. And to everybody else I was a combination of Mahatma Gandhi and Santa Claus, my frozen smile opening up into a big slobbering insincere grin. “Hey, man,” I said to the cheapazoid with the mustache, “how you doin’?”
On my break and after work, I called Kurt and Adele’s number over and over, but Helen wasn’t answering. Twice I drove my Dodge down the street past their house, but nobody was home the first time and then all three of them were there the next, and I couldn’t face going up those steps. For a while I entertained a fantasy of butting down the door, kicking Kurt in the crotch and dragging Helen out to the car by her hair, but it faded away in a pharmaceutical haze. I didn’t run through a checklist of emotions, like one of those phony Ph.D.s in the women’s magazines Helen stacked up on the coffee table like miniature Bibles and Korans—that wasn’t my way at all. I didn’t even tell my parents we weren’t together anymore. I just got high. And higher.
That was what brought about the culminating wreck—of that series, anyway. I was feeling bad one day, bad in every sense of the word, and since it was my day off, I spent the afternoon chasing down drugs in every house and apartment I could think of in Westchester and Putnam Counties, hitting up friends, acquaintances and acquaintances of acquaintances. Phil Cherniske was with me for part of the time, but then he had to go to work, and I found myself driving around the back roads, stoned on a whole smorgasbord of things, a bottle of vodka propped between my legs. I was looking at leaves, flaming leaves, and I was holding a conversation with myself and letting the car take me wherever it wanted. I think I must have pulled over and nodded out for a while, because all of a sudden (I’d say “magically,” but this was more like treachery) the leaves were gone and it was dark. There was nothing to do but head for the restaurant.
I came through the door in an envelope of refrigerated air and the place opened up to me, warm and frank and smelling of cigarettes, steak on the grill, fresh-cut lime. I wasn’t hungry myself, not even close to it, so I settled in at the bar and watched people eat dinner. Kurt was bartending, and at first he tried to be chummy and unctuous, as if nothing had happened, but the look on my face drove him to the far end of the bar, where he tried to keep himself urgently occupied. It was good sitting there with a cigarette and a pocketful of pills, lifting a finger to summon him when my drink needed refreshing—once I even made him light my cigarette, and all the while I stared hate into his eyes. Adele was waitressing, along with Jane Nardone, recently elevated from hostess. I never even looked at Adele, but at some point it seemed I tried to get overly friendly with Jane in the corner and Phil had to come out of the kitchen and put a hand on my arm. “Brennan’ll be in soon, you know,” Phil said, his hand like a clamp on the meat of my arm. “They’ll eighty-six you. They will.”
I gave him a leer and shook him off. “Hey, barkeep,” I shouted so that the whole place heard me, all the Surf ‘n’ Turf gnashers and their dates and the idiots lined up at the bar, “give me another cocktail down here, will you? What, do you want me to die of thirst?”
Dinner was over and the kitchen closed by the time things got ugly. I was out of line and I knew it, and I deserved what was coming to me—that’s not to say it didn’t hurt, though, g
etting tossed out of my own restaurant, my sanctuary, my place of employ, recreation and release, the place where the flame was kept and the legend accruing. But tossed I was, cut off, eighty-sixed, banned. I don’t know what precipitated it exactly, something with Kurt, something I said that he didn’t like after a whole long night of things he didn’t like, and it got physical. Next thing I knew, Phil, Kurt, Jimmy Brennan and two of the busboys had ten arms around me and we were all heaving and banging into the walls until the door flew open and I was out on the pavement where some bleached-out overweight woman and her two kids stepped over me as if I were a leper. I tried to get back in—uncool, unhip, raging with every kind of resentment and hurt—but they’d locked the door against me, and the last thing I remember seeing was Kurt Ramos’ puffed-up face peering out at me through the little window in the door.
I climbed into my car and fired it up with a roar that gave testimony to a seriously compromised exhaust system. When the smoke cleared—and I hoped they were all watching—I hit the gas, jammed the lever into gear and shot out onto the highway on screaming tires. Where was I headed? I didn’t know. Home, I guessed. There was no place else to go.
Now, to set this up properly, I should tell you that there was one wicked turn on the long dark blacktop road that led to that dark lane on the muddy lake, a ninety-degree hairpin turn the Alien had christened “Lester’s Corner” because of the inevitability of the forces gathered there, and that was part of the legend too. I knew that corner was there, I was supremely conscious of it, and though I can’t say I always coasted smoothly through it without some last-minute wheel-jerking and tire-squealing, it hadn’t really been a problem. Up to this point.
At any rate, I wasn’t really paying attention that night and my reaction time must have been somewhere in the range of the Alzheimer’s patient on medication—in fact, for those few seconds I was an Alzheimer’s patient on medication—and I didn’t even know where I was until I felt the car slip out from under me. Or no, that isn’t right. It was the road—the road slipped out from under me, and it felt just as if I were on a roller coaster, released from the pull of gravity. The car ricocheted off a tree that would have swatted me down like a fly if I’d hit it head-on, blasted down an embankment and wound up on its roof in a stew of skunk cabbage and muck. I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, of course—I don’t even know if they’d been invented yet, and if they had, there wouldn’t have been one in that car—and I found myself puddled up in the well of the roof like an egg inside a crushed shell.
There was no sense in staying there, underneath two tons of crumpled and drooling machinery—that wasn’t the way things were supposed to be, even I could see that—so I poked my hands through the gap where the driver’s side window had formerly been and felt them sink into the cold ooze. There was a smell of gasoline, but it was overpowered by the reek of deconstructed skunk cabbage, and I didn’t give the situation any more thought or calculation than a groundhog does when he pulls himself out of his burrow, and the next thing I knew I was standing up to my ankles in cold muck, looking up in the direction of the road. There were lights there, and a shadowy figure in a long winter coat. “You all right?” a voice called down to me.
“Yeah, sure,” I said, “no problem,” and then I was lurching up the embankment on splayed feet, oozing muck. When I got to the top, a guy my age was standing there. He looked a little bit like Kurt—same hair, same slope to the shoulders—but he wasn’t Kurt, and that was a good thing. “What happened?” he said. “You lose control?”
It was a ridiculous question, but I answered it. “Something like that,” I said, my voice thick with alcohol and methaqualone.
“Sure you’re not hurt? You want to go to the hospital or anything?”
I took a minute to pat myself down, the night air like the breath of some expiring beast. “No,” I said, slowly shaking my head in the glare of the headlights, “I’m not hurt. Not that I know of, anyway.”
We stood there in silence a moment, contemplating the overturned hulk of the car. One wheel, persistent to the point of absurdity, kept spinning at the center of a gulf of shadow. “Listen,” I said finally, “can you give me a lift?”
“A lift? But what about—?”
“Tomorrow,” I said, and I let one hand rise and then drop.
There was another silence, and he was thinking it over, I could see that. From his point of view, this was no happy occasion. I wasn’t bleeding, but I stank like a corpse and I was leaving the scene of an accident and he was a witness and all the rest of it. But he was a good man, and he surprised me. “Yeah, sure,” he said, after a minute. “Climb in.”
That was when things got very strange. Because as I directed him to my house at the end of the lane by the side of the soon-to-be-refrozen lake, a curtain fell over my mind. It was a dense curtain, weighted at the ends, and it admitted no glimmer of light. “Here,” I said, “stop here,” and the curtain fell over that part of my life that played itself out at Phil Cherniske’s house.
A moment later, I found myself alone in the night, the taillights of the good samaritan’s car winking once at the corner and then vanishing. I walked down the dark lane thinking of Helen, Helen with her silver-foil eyes and smooth sweet smile, and I mounted the steps and turned the handle of the door thinking of her, but it wouldn’t turn, because it was locked. I knocked then, knocked at my own door, knocked until my knuckles bled, but there was no one home.
Blinded by the Light
SO THE SKY is falling. Or, to be more precise, the sky is emitting poisonous rays, rays that have sprinkled the stigmata of skin cancer across both of Manuel Banquedano’s cheeks and the tip of his nose and sprouted the cataracts in Slobodan Abarca’s rheumy old eyes. That is what the tireless Mr. John Longworth, of Long Beach, California, U.S.A., would have us believe. I have been to Long Beach, California, on two occasions, and I give no credence whatever to a man who would consciously assent to live in a place like that. He is, in fact, just what my neighbors say he is—an alarmist, like the chicken in the children’s tale who thinks the sky is falling just because something hit him on the head. On his head. On his individual and prejudicial head. And so the barnyard goes into a panic—and to what end? Nothing. A big fat zero.
But let me tell you about him, about Mr. John Longworth, Ph.D., and how he came to us with his theories, and you can judge for yourself. First, though, introductions are in order. I am Bob Fernando Castillo and I own an estancia of 50,000 acres to the south of Punta Arenas, on which I graze some 9,000 sheep, for wool and mutton both. My father, God rest his soul, owned Estancia Castillo before me and his father before him, all the way back to the time Punta Arenas was a penal colony and then one of the great trading towns of the world—that is, until the Americans of the North broke through the Isthmus of Panama and the ships stopped rounding Cape Horn. In any case, that is a long and venerable ownership in anybody’s book. I am fifty-three years old and in good health and vigor and I am married to the former Isabela Mackenzie, who has given me seven fine children, the eldest of whom, Bob Fernando Jr., is now twenty-two years old.
It was September last, when Don Pablo Antofagasta gave his annual three-day fiesta primavera to welcome in the spring, that Mr. John Longworth first appeared among us. We don’t have much society out here, unless we take the long and killing drive into Punta Arenas, a city of 110,000 souls, and we look forward with keen anticipation to such entertainments—and not only the adults, but the children too. The landowners from several of the estancias, even the most far-flung, gather annually for Don Pablo’s extravaganza and they bring their children and some of the house servants as well (and even, as in the case of Don Benedicto Braun, their dogs and horses). None of this presents a problem for Don Pablo, one of the wealthiest and most generous among us. As we say, the size of his purse is exceeded only by the size of his heart.
I arrived on the Thursday preceding the big weekend, flying over the pampas in the Piper Super Cub with my daughter, Paloma, to
get a jump on the others and have a quiet night sitting by the fire with Don Pablo and his eighty-year-old Iberian jerez. Isabela, Bob Fernando Jr. and the rest of the family would be making the twelve-hour drive over washboard roads and tortured gullies the following morning, and frankly, my kidneys can no longer stand that sort of pounding. I still ride—horseback, that is—but I leave the Suburban and the Range Rover to Isabela and to Bob Fernando Jr. At any rate, the flight was a joy, soaring on the back of the implacable wind that rakes our country day and night, and I taxied right up to the big house on the airstrip Don Pablo scrupulously maintains.
Don Pablo emerged from the house to greet us even before the prop had stopped spinning, as eager for our company as we were for his. (Paloma has always been his favorite, and she’s grown into a tall, straight-backed girl of eighteen with intelligent eyes and a mane of hair so thick and luxuriant it almost seems unnatural, and I don’t mind saying how proud I am of her.) My old friend strode across the struggling lawn in boots and puttees and one of those plaid flannel shirts he mail-orders from Boston, Teresa and two of the children in tow. It took me half a moment to shut down the engine and stow away my aeronautical sunglasses for the return flight, and when I looked up again, a fourth figure had appeared at Don Pablo’s side, matching him stride for stride.
“Cómo estás, mi amigo estimado?” Don Pablo cried, taking my hand and embracing me, and then he turned to Paloma to kiss her cheek and exclaim on her beauty and how she’d grown. Then it was my turn to embrace Teresa and the children and press some sweets into the little ones’ hands. Finally, I looked up into an untethered North American face, red hair and a red mustache and six feet six inches of raw bone and sinew ending in a little bony afterthought of a head no bigger than a tropical coconut and weighted down by a nose to end all noses. This nose was an affliction and nothing less, a tool for probing and rooting, and I instinctively looked away from it as I took the man’s knotty gangling hand in my own and heard Don Pablo pronounce, “Mr. John Longworth, a scientist from North America who has come to us to study our exemplary skies.”
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