by Samuel Ligon
Before the campaign, during the campaign, after the campaign, Lambert had been fucking some seventeen-year-old from New Trier, Kara Tomlinson, though he claimed he didn’t know she was a high school student. And, of course, she got pregnant. It fell to Mark to take care of the problem, a nasty job, certainly, so do it and get it over with. He had to make sure she got the abortion—pay for it, drive her, whatever—but also make sure she kept her mouth shut. He had to dig up dirt on her father, who was head of oncology at Rush, and convince her of Daddy’s pending fall from grace, the destruction of her parents’ marriage, her family, I don’t know what all. She had to understand this was all scary and serious, but also just a stage of life, really, a part of growing up, almost typical. He had to show her the reality and make a trade. You got dirt. We got dirt. Let’s work together to keep it buried.
This is when he changed. His mother’s dying at home—and I felt so much for him then, because it was absolutely awful—but he couldn’t box up Lambert’s problem. He solved it, but he couldn’t let it go. I gave him space. I knew it was nasty. Maybe we had been true believers at one time. Maybe it was hard to see something so base in Lambert, so stupid. But we were veterans by then, grownups working to further the ideals we’d cultivated and fought for. I mean, whether you believe in it or not, whether you like it or not, the political fight’s going on, the scratching and kicking and clawing, and you can either be part of it, or you can retreat to your little Buddhist oblivion and get steamrolled. He was like a convert to veganism after six years slaughtering hogs, complaining about the pork grease he couldn’t wash off.
He landed a job with Dunning and Wright in New York, a propaganda machine that swung voter referenda and other ballot initiatives, furthering the agendas of the moneyed interests. I loved him, but I couldn’t stay with a man who was afraid to get his hands dirty for the greater good. And he couldn’t stay with me because I was in it up to my elbows. I had a feeling he’d be back though. Maybe just a hope. He was so good at the game, and I knew he had ideals he’d fight like hell for, part of what I loved in him.
When Kara contacted us again, looking for another payoff, I thought she might provide the chance he needed. I told her Mark would be in touch, but he refused to return my calls. I tried for weeks to throw him a lifeline, calling over and over, but he wouldn’t get back to me. He knew I wouldn’t wait forever. The girl would talk eventually, and once she did, Lambert would confess to everything. My job was to save him from himself, to save them both, maybe. And what I said to Mark in my mind, in his ongoing silence: You want to be a moralist? Lend a hand to somebody fighting the good fight—answer your goddamn phone and let’s finish what we started.
Mark
I sat in traffic surrounded by people going to work, imagining Cynthia and Kyle and the baby ghost floating through space, weightless, holding hands, never growing older, and I wondered what age would be ideal for death if that’s how you’d spend eternity—floating through space like an amoeba in the ocean. I thought of my mother drifting among planets and space debris, then remembered her fear of flying, how she took sedatives and finally gave up on airplanes altogether when I was six or seven. “They turn them on,” she said, “and never turn them off. Until they crash and turn themselves off.”
She and I took the train from Chicago to Seattle when I was in second grade to visit her closest friend, Peggy Lynch, who didn’t have a husband or kids, but did have a house full of candy I was allowed to gorge on. I slept with my mother on the train going out and in the big guest bed once we arrived, which was probably the best part of the trip—waking to her in bed beside me. On our last morning in Seattle, I got sick with a high fever, and all the way back to Chicago I came in and out of fevered consciousness as the country unrolled out the window beside my narrow bed, my mother there when I woke, feeding me chalky orange children’s aspirin, feeding me ginger ale through a straw, feeding me chips of ice, placing a damp cloth against my forehead, her cool hand feathering my prickly scalp, her eyes looking down on me with adoration.
I wanted that fever and train trip to last forever.
Nikki
The train into the city feels like a dry run for our escape, even though we have nothing with us and I worry that Celia’s already changed the locks to Kyle’s loft down on Broome Street. Alina seems lighter beside me on the subway downtown, excited as she always is to be in the city, as if the two of us are taking a break from our lives to go on this adventure, which in a way, I think, we are. She’s only been to Kyle’s place once, which makes me feel overprotective and stupid. Stupid, too, to think I’ll find anything of value to sell, to steal. We take the freight elevator to the top floor, then walk the dark hallway to his door, Alina hushed and shrinking, and I wonder at my stupidity, bringing her here when the evidence of his life will only remind her of his absence, which I’m feeling now too, away from Long Beach and the possibility of Burke finding us, because he’d never find us at Kyle’s place, and for just a second I think maybe we’ll settle here for a few days.
I open the door and light pours into the hallway. Alina walks in like she owns the place, but is stopped by the paintings of me propped against Kyle’s work tables. The entire space is given over to painting, except for the little kitchen and platform bedroom way in the back corner, the wide plank floors speckled with paint, and rough wood tables pushed against the walls. Skulls and doll heads and tin toys and flower pots and books and silk flowers and magazines cover every surface. Two assembled skeletons, one human, one bear, stand guard in their corners.
“This looks so much like you,” Alina says, looking at a painting of me hung on the one clear wall, Kyle’s work space. “But then it doesn’t,” she says.
“Right,” I say, looking at Cynthia’s eyes.
“I like these better than the one he gave us.”
She opens the door to the rooftop deck and walks outside, leaving me staring at myself in oils, all the reds in these paintings, all my arrogance, based on nothing, captured perfectly, and I wonder how I could have been so distant from him. I flip through the canvases, some of me, some of Cynthia, and I feel so awful, not so much from the loss, but from how I kept myself removed from him, denying myself the possibility of loss. If I wouldn’t or couldn’t love him right, what had I been doing with him in the first place?
I’d take off my clothes in this place and remove myself from myself as he painted me, music filling the studio I would lose myself in, drinking a glass of wine as Kyle memorialized me, part of me thinking I deserved to be transformed into an object of beauty, another part of me understanding that the object had nothing to do with me, propped on his 1940’s sheet-covered divan listening to Lucinda Williams or Luscious Jackson while he turned me into an abstraction. I didn’t think he deserved this expensive loft in Soho, which I thought should belong to an already successful artist—not someone on the verge of possible success, not someone who hadn’t earned the money it would take to live and work in a place like this, full of props and toys. I resented his trust fund money and this beautiful place his wealth had gotten him, never smart enough to see that smallness in myself, never trying to overcome such small sickness.
I climb the ladder to his sleeping platform above the tiny, useless kitchen and smell his sheets, the brick walls covered with photos of me and Cynthia and famous painters and women I don’t know.
Alina walks in below and sits on a gray stool at one of his work tables. She picks up a skull and holds it away from herself, up toward the window, tears coming down her face but silent. I was only a little older than her when I ran out into the world, thinking I was finally free to become something other than my mother’s nurse, so full of anger and life and unable to separate the two. She puts down the skull and picks up a dented copper pot, puts that down and picks up a flat, jointed, little wooden man, swinging it so his legs and arms spin.
“Hey,” I call down.
She looks up
at me startled, puts the little man back on the table.
“You can have that,” I say, and Alina says, “It’s not yours to give.”
“He’d want you to have it,” I say, climbing down the ladder.
“You don’t know that,” she says.
I was a fool to think we could stay here, with his and Cynthia’s presence saturating everything. A fool to think I’d find anything to sell. I just need to call Mark and see if he can help us. But something holds me back. When I was 17 and penniless in Providence, I did practically anything for money. To survive. I had no problem with the implied exchange of sex for food or a place to stay. I had no problem stealing. And this isn’t any different, even if I am so much older. Even if I do have Alina now. Because her survival is as important, more important, than mine then or now. Anyone would do anything to protect her child.
Maybe coming here is just a way of saying goodbye.
I rummage through a few drawers and cabinets, as though I’ll find money or bags of gold, Alina over my shoulder asking what I’m looking for.
“My stuff,” I tell her.
If Mark can’t or won’t get the money, we’ll hit the road in the morning, or I’ll put her with a friend while I handle Burke. But what will I tell her? I can’t just park her at a friend’s house so close to home. Or maybe I can. And I know Mark will help, if he can. Just the way he looked at me. Just because he has to. Just because we’re in the middle of all this together. The only question is what words to use, though words don’t always matter so much if something happens between people.
Alina
You can see the twin towers from his rooftop deck poking over the squat wooden water towers on the roofs around us, old fashioned water towers like for trains in the wild west, except rising over rooftops. Mom’s back inside with the paintings he made of her, naked and red and sort of empty or tired and way too sexual, always falling back on her body like she does. He probably would have painted me, too, not like that, not without clothes on, but I do have a sketch he made of me down on the beach that looks exactly like me, except a little prettier maybe—not the way you would ever see yourself, but more the way he saw me, probably. I knew he was sketching me that day because he kept looking over his sketchpad as I read in a beach chair, pretending I didn’t notice and acting surprised when he gave me the drawing, which I love as my most cherished possession. It’s on the wall over my desk back at Interlochen, which makes me wonder how I’m ever going to get my stuff, and I sort of panic for a minute and forget why I’m so sad and dead feeling, but then I don’t care, because I remember he’s gone forever, and then I do care, because that picture he drew of me is all I’m ever going to have of him.
On a clear day, you can see the twin towers from the bay side of Long Beach, which makes me wonder if we were ever looking at them at the same time, him on his deck here in the city and me back in Long Beach, riding my bike home from Magnolia Pier with Ashley. It’s only my head in the sketch he made, and you can see every single hair, but he made another one, too—of me and my mother—that he drew from a photo she gave him. She has her arm around me on our front porch and we’re smiling and look exactly like ourselves. Except happy, because nothing like this had happened to us yet.
I can hear her moving around inside, but when I walk through the sliding door from the deck, she’s gone. It’s such a huge cluttered space, she could almost blend into the paintings of herself or the skeletons in the corners or these big stuffed birds hanging from the ceiling among Chinese looking strips of long colored cloth fluttering. So much of him is here, it doesn’t seem possible he won’t just appear.
But this is a museum now. I hope it can stay like this forever, so I can come here when I want to be close to him, but they’ll never let me do that, I’m sure. Maybe his mother would like me more than she likes my mom though, because of how much I really love him. Maybe she’ll want me to be almost like a daughter to her, almost like a replacement for him, once she sees that I’m not at all like my mother.
I sit at one of his long work tables and pick things up he held in his hands.
My mother calls to me from a place I didn’t know was here, hidden down at the end of the room on a platform up near the ceiling. She wants me to take something of his that isn’t hers to give, a little wooden man. I hear her rustling as she comes down from the platform, and I put the wooden man in my pocketbook, not because she said I could, but because I knew I would all along.
She’s beautiful in the paintings around me and kind of haunted in some it seems, or private, like he found something in her and showed it to the world, something she would have never shown herself. Something kind of lonely. Something private and kind of fierce and a little afraid maybe, but mostly strong and lonely.
Then she’s right beside me holding a green toothbrush.
“Did you take that little man?” she says.
She pets my hair and I jerk away.
But she’s been crying, her face washed out, nothing at all like in the paintings.
“Why do you have a toothbrush?” I ask her, and she looks down at it, and says, “It’s mine.”
“Why don’t we stay here?” I say.
“We can stay as long as you like.”
“Forever,” I say.
“Alina,” she says.
Like I’m just a stupid kid.
Burke
I wake up weak and wobbly and have to get out of this place. I call Cinnamon from the payphone and get her goddamn machine again and think that every one of them’s just exactly the same, all whores of Babylon trying to tear a man down. I swallow an oxycontin with my coffee, watching the whores in the coffee shop, young and old, all of them with secret whores inside them, and then while I’m looking at the comics and sort of brooding, the oxycontin smoothing everything out and bringing me back to normal, I get another revelation from Carl.
And it’s this: Ain’t no such thing as a pure, true victim. Victims make themselves victims, somehow want to be victims or done something that makes them deserve to be victims. Like Cinnamon not taking my calls. Or, worse, me all weak and weepy over Nikki, giving her the upper hand and making myself a victim. That’s what hits hardest. How I’m letting her turn the tables on me, when it’s her that killed Cash and ruined my family. Her that wants to be a victim.
It’s a just God in a just universe, Carl always said, everything happens for a reason, but sometimes we can’t see the whole picture and can’t understand the justice that’s being handed down. And if we get in the way of the hand, it’ll reach out and crush us. To make yourself a victim is the greatest weakness and greatest sin, the reason the Jews was all gassed and burned, because none of them stood up to Hitler. But how could one man stand up against all that power? I asked him. Most couldn’t, he said. Only a man who hasn’t made himself a victim—a man strong enough and righteous enough to never really be imprisoned, no matter where he is—only that man can become a true, pure instrument of the hand, because the hand wouldn’t take up with victims. It might make victims, but those people are weak and aren’t really victims because they want to be victims. It’s a matter of being strong in your mind, taking control of your life, and punishing those that deserve to be punished. Teaching them. Making them pure as you. A victim can only be a victim if she deserves to be a victim, which the guiding hand always determines.
That’s when I feel the universe start to align again, me pushing my weakness away and deciding to test it by calling Cinnamon, having pure faith she’ll answer, which of course she does, so happy to hear from me. We make plans for the evening, and I’m perfectly fine now—right and aligned—her all sweet and playful and apologetic about missing my calls, telling me she called too, over at the Royalty, and that she’s looking forward to seeing me again, too, just a hint of the whore in her now, but in a good way. I tell her I want to take her out for dinner, and she says she knows a good place,
but it’s kind of expensive, asking my permission more or less, which I give her. At the mall buying new clothes for our date, I feel myself growing stronger and stronger, Cinnamon and me better than Nikki and Cash ever was, all these shoppers and me among them, a pure true instrument of the hand.
19
Mark
Everyone had called and left messages during my one day absence, including my father and sisters and friends and work and Denys and Nikki and Cynthia. No, not Cynthia. Cynthia was dead. The people who’d called, the living, were all sorry and wondering how I was doing. Nikki wanted me to call her back—she sounded a little drunk, with PJ Harvey playing in the background—but I was afraid to call her back. I didn’t know if she was better off knowing what she knew or better off not knowing what she knew. It didn’t seem likely that anything I’d learned would make much difference to her—Cynthia and Kyle’s dead baby, if it was their baby—but maybe it would, and maybe it would only hurt her. She didn’t seem capable of being hurt, though, a horrible, dehumanizing thought. Of course she was capable of being hurt. Everybody was capable of being hurt. And then I wondered how to hurt her, and thought it best if we never talked again.
Cards pushed through the mail slot lay in a scattered pile in the hallway, offering condolences. The phone rang and I was sure it was Nikki, hoping it was and hoping it wasn’t. And then I thought it was probably Cynthia. But it was Cynthia’s sister, Beth, calling to ask how I was doing.