There are women from the Birthday Party evening at Gar, Astrid among them, others he hasn’t seen in years. They stop what they’re doing to touch or embrace him. He listens, watching words form on their lips, but doesn’t quite hear what they’re saying. Or he hears but he doesn’t follow it.
In the kitchen Bishop pours two glasses of whisky. Lewis finds a legal pad and a pen in the cabinet underneath the phone. They take the whiskies out through the sliding glass doors of the breakfast nook and sit on the stoop.
The leaves of the young birch sift the hot air. The smell of the new black soil spread around the trunk is sharp. Succulent-looking green weeds have sprung up everywhere in the wide swath Lewis cleared with the machete.
Bishop holds out his closed hand for Lewis to take something—two capsules, white powder on a slant inside them.
“Ex,” Bishop informs him quietly. “I’m going to do mine before the ceremony.”
Lewis thanks him and looks down at the pills in his hand with half a mind to pop them right now. He puts them in his pocket instead. “Is it yours?”
Bishop is pleased that Lewis thought to ask. “It’s a special batch,” he says, nodding. “I was in the zone.”
Bishop would like to give a more detailed account, Lewis can tell, and he turns slightly away and looks down at the legal pad to discourage it. He should have begun this earlier. He remembers a line from Rilke he came across online: “You are not surprised at the force of the storm—you have seen it growing.”
He jots it down, thinks about it, crosses it out. The reference to storm is too fraught. They saw it coming, all right. And Lewis is surprised by the nameless heaviness bearing him down.
Cars have been parking along the street, the muffled clamor of doors closing. Now friends of Seth’s drift outside through the open sliding glass doors to smoke and speak quietly in small clusters: a homeless-looking man with a thin scar like a helmet strap under his jaw; someone with a mohawk; someone else wearing a gray wool cap in the heat of summer; an undersized young woman, who seems to have some sort of congenital condition. A few wave tentatively at Lewis, nod. They know he’s the brother, bits of his story.
“People think synthetic drugs are lacking the spirit of organics like peyote and whatnot,” Bishop says. Lewis looks at him. What’s he talking about?
“But if I’m in the zone, I can feel a spirit enter my synthetics,” Bishop says, flittering the fingers of one hand trippily in the air. “It happens toward the end, like a soul entering a fetus.”
Lewis nods. “That’s nice, Bishop,” he says. “But I need to write something for my little whatever-we’re-calling it.” Eulogy?
“Oh, of course!” Bishop says, rising.
Tori and Kaylee, wearing short tight black dresses, find him on the back stoop and embrace him tearfully for so long, one on each side of him, that he’s growing inappropriately turned on.
Abby comes out onto the stoop and beckons everyone inside. The air-conditioning has broken down and all the windows are open. The house is crowded and ripe-smelling with so many bodies. A sort of altar has been arranged on the marble mantle above the fireplace, lined with objects significant to Seth, guitar, skateboard. Above these, a blown-up photo of him with arms crossed. He gazes into the distance with an expression of self-mocking grandeur.
When he finds Abby, she says, “This just came in.” She holds up her cell phone. There’s a text message: our condolences
“I had to check the caller ID,” Abby says. “It’s from Gerty.” Lewis stands there shaking his head. “Can you believe it?” She turns to a group of her friends and shows them. “From Seth’s grandmother in Cambridge.”
“You are joking.”
There’s a stir at the door. Virgil has arrived, larger and more formal in attire than the others in his immediate vicinity. He’s wearing a dark-blue linen suit Sylvie bought for him in Paris. From across the room, Lewis watches him introduce himself to Astrid, who was the one to open the door. His mouth is compressed in a stoic smile that brings out a dimple in one cheek, a somber version of the public, formal face Lewis has seen him wear for post-lecture wine and cheese receptions.
Now Abby goes to him and they embrace for a long moment then stand speaking, gripping each other’s forearms. They are the parents of the dead child, Lewis thinks. Together they created the boy and now he has died and they are meeting again for the occasion of his memorial service. That two such different people were married and produced offspring is so odd and unlikely as to be either mistaken and obscene or transpersonal and destined.
They embrace once more and Abby turns away and Lewis makes his way through the sweaty crush and shakes his father’s hand. Virgil looks relieved and grateful to see him, as if he expected Lewis to shun him, to leave him squirming in social isolation here in terra incognita. He asks about the people around them and listens distractedly as Lewis tells him what he knows, as if the purpose of the questions is to free Virgil of the obligation to speak himself. Abby reappears with a glass of red wine for Virgil.
Lewis’s cell thrums. It’s Eli calling to offer his condolences again. He’s in France. He asks to speak to Abby then to Virgil then gets back on with Lewis. He’s feeling guilty for not flying out for the memorial. It’s because of Hermione, Eli says again, and the trip to the South of France she’s had planned for them for over a year. Otherwise, Eli would be there for Lewis, without question.
“Eli, it’s fine,” Lewis tells him again. He didn’t expect anyone other than family to make the journey. But the more he speaks to Eli and listens to him bemoaning being unable “to be there for” Lewis, the more Lewis detects Eli’s relief at not having to deal with the emotional mess of the situation, and the more Lewis resents being let down by his friend, who has in fact chosen Hermione and the South of France over Lewis at a moment when Lewis should have been given priority.
When he gets off with Eli, Abby touches him on the arm and says, “Let’s begin.”
The house falls silent as Abby makes her way to the mantle. People sit on the floor and squeezed together on the couch, stand along the walls. More than a few must be from the Inter-Faith Homeless Shelter, administrators but the homeless or semi-homeless too, including Butch, looking dazed and shrunken. Lewis is impressed at the turnout but faintly disgusted by the pong and funk in the hot house. He’s having trouble catching his breath. He fans his face with a program Abby had made up for the memorial: the photo of Seth from the mantle, lyrics from one of his songs.
She closes her eyes for a moment then opens them and, looking serenely from face to face, smiles sadly, bravely. “Well, he really outdid himself,” she says and the room erupts in laughter, quietly rueful then gradually more raucous and joyful. She has nothing written down but she is a more natural public speaker than any of the professionals on the Chopik side of the family and it all emerges in effortlessly rounded paragraphs. It is wise, a wisdom born specifically of her time with Seth; there is foreknowledge and even a kind of joy in her words, but if Lewis grasps their meaning they also pour over him like music and he retains little, as if the purpose were to forget.
Now it’s Virgil’s turn but Virgil shakes his head, sending Lewis forward with a pat on the shoulder: you speak for both of us. Lewis wends his way through the crush to the mantle and looks out over the people sitting shoulder to shoulder on the floor, on the couch, in chairs, peering in from the dining room, craning to see in the doorway behind Virgil. In their upturned, expectant faces he seeks out Seth or signs of Seth but sees only eyes set in faces altogether their own. He’s the educated, sane brother. They expect him to say something noble and touching and pitch-perfect but nothing of the sort is occurring to him and he simply stares back over them, his attention drawn to the man with the helmet-strap scar, who is weeping into his puffy wind-burnt hands. And when Lewis finally opens his mouth to speak it’s as if he’s being ventriloquized by this man. All that comes out is a sob.
He struggles to get control of himself but ca
n’t do it and now someone has laced an arm around him—Bishop, smelling of Dr. Bronner’s and high-grade weed and whisky. Lewis allows himself to be led away from the mantle. Passing through the crowd, he is touched by many hands—consoling, congratulatory. As if by failing so completely, he’s achieved something, which angers him obscurely, like a consolation prize.
He pours another glass of whisky in the kitchen and drinks it off standing alone at the counter. He can hear someone else speaking at the mantle but the words are unclear. He thinks of taking the Ex Bishop gave him but lacks the energy or belief to fish the pills out of his pocket.
He goes back to the living room and stands beside Virgil as someone plays guitar, someone reads a poem, someone sings a song Seth wrote, all of it taking place, for Lewis, in a kind of silent, obliterative roar.
It’s twilight, midsummer twilight in which the light is a veil-like substance. Having declined Abby’s invitation to take part in the tree ceremony, Virgil sits looking overlarge and uncomfortable in his small rental car, knees riding up and the fabric of the suit trousers pulled taut. Lewis has walked out with him to say goodbye but now Virgil pats the passenger seat. “Sit for a second,” he says.
Climbing reluctantly into the car, Lewis notices the cardboard container holding half the ashes lying on its side in the back seat. Virgil plans to have a memorial service in New York for the Chopiks.
Staring through or at the dust-streaked windshield, Virgil says, “I regret sending him to the clinic that summer.”
“Abby feels bad for not sending him to more clinics,” Lewis says.
Turning toward Lewis at the unexpected remark, Virgil gives off a whiff of cologne, something Sylvie forbade because he tends to use too much. But Sylvie is not around to intervene in Virgil’s personal style. Virgil is free to wear fedoras and trench coats again, sleuth his way through the stacks. “Really?” he asks.
Lewis nods. It’s not true of course but Virgil seems so miserable.
“I was caught completely off guard by the whole episode,” Virgil says, sinking back into regretfulness. “But why was I cut off? I should have made a point to know him better. All those people who showed up today, for instance. I had no idea he had so many friends!”
They sit for a moment in silence.
“Well—” Lewis says, placing a hand on the door.
“I spoke with someone,” Virgil says now, holding him in place, “a friend of Abby’s. She said that that was the very first time Abby had ever gone out on one of those ‘tornado chases.’”
“That’s right,” Lewis says, thinking this can’t be news and wondering where this is headed: somewhere. Virgil is not one to think aloud; he has a thesis.
“Tornado Ally, she called the company?” Virgil asks now. “A pun on Tornado Alley, I take it.”
Lewis sighs to show his impatience with this retreading of established ground.
“I tried to find out more on the website,” Virgil says in his defense, “but it had been taken down. Understandably.” Lewis glances at the house in the hope of being signaled to by someone, called inside.
“We did mushrooms once, your mom and I,” Virgil says abruptly, apropos of what, Castañeda/Ally? Maybe he is rambling. “Did she ever tell you that?”
Lewis shakes his head quickly.
“No, well, that doesn’t fit so neatly with my stodgy professor image.”
He pauses, savoring Lewis’s surprise. “It was in Rome, when I was at the Academy. You were, let’s see, you would have been two. We left you with a sitter, went to a friends’ house for the afternoon.” He turns down the corners of his mouth, shrugs. “I enjoyed it. It was like—being part of a sort of pneumatic mosaic.”
Lewis is trying to decide how he feels about this revelation—it’s like hearing Virgil recount some sexual tryst—when Virgil turns toward him with narrowed eyes and asks in an interrogator’s quick, jarring cadence, “Were there drugs involved that day, Lewis?”
“Yes,” Lewis says quickly, as if jolted into confessing, “lithium.”
A smile flickers over Virgil’s lips and his eyelids droop in acknowledgment of the deftness of the evasion. “And Symbyax,” Lewis adds. “Seth had just started on that.”
“‘Recreational’ drugs, I mean—mushrooms, LSD. Maybe Bishop and Abby? A little trip to spice up the experience?”
“No,” Lewis says, frowning: how absurd, no never. Meanwhile remembering the hits of Ex in his front pocket. And who knows, Bishop might have been mildly high on one of his designer concoctions.
“I know Bishop is a chemist,” Virgil says. “He has quite a web presence on sites devoted to psychedelics. And Abby was always so fond of her Castañeda.” Pronouncing the name with slight curl of the lip.
Lewis holds up his hands then drops them in his lap: what can he say?
“It just seems so crazy, to get that close to a tornado!” Virgil cries. He reaches suddenly towards the cut above Lewis’s eye, causing Lewis to draw back. “You could have been killed too,” he says. “You all could have.”
Lewis considers objecting to the use of “killed” but thinks better of it.
Virgil tugs at one cuff of his white shirt with an expression of abstracted annoyance. “I just don’t feel like I know the whole story,” he says finally.
Nudging open the passenger door, Lewis says, “Neither do I.”
28
Louise comes out through the sliding glass doors wearing a quilted robe, shiny purple and high-collared, with ivory toggles. It’s printed with I-Ching-ish emblems and zodiacal figures. Her boots are upturned and elfin. Lewis is sitting on the stoop. When he asks whether she’s not hot in that thing, she smiles tolerantly and pauses to lay a long-fingered hand on his shoulder, the touch passing soothingly into him as if across the barrier of his skepticism about her and this ceremony.
He watches her set up a card table next to the tree and from a National Public Radio canvas tote bag she removes various items and places them on the table—a lighter, an incense burner, an evergreen sprig, strips of white cloth, a shallow circular drum with tassels, a bundle of sage tied with white string, a wooden whisk.
Lewis hears the gate by the trash stall clank and Cody comes around the corner of the house in his low-slung jeans and tight white wife-beater T. He stands staring at Louise and the tree then, spotting Lewis, scuttles over and sits next to him on the stoop. He rubs his chin to show his approval of Lewis’s clean-shaven face and offers a cigarette from a pack. Lewis takes one but refuses the light and holds it unlit in his fingers.
“Sort of weird, a tree thing,” Cody says in a confidential voice, speaking out of the side of his mouth. When Lewis says nothing, Cody leans closer and whispers, “I mean, ain’t that—?”
Lewis closes his eyes and sighs and says, “Yeah, it is, Cody. And yeah, I think it’s weird. But it’s what Abby wants—”
“Nah, I hear you,” Cody says assuagingly. He drapes his arm over Lewis’s shoulders. He smells of Tori’s patchouli musk. Lewis wonders whether she’s been giving consolatory lap dances. “I hear you, bro.”
Abby comes outside with the gray hexagonal cardboard box containing her half of the ashes and a stack of ceramic bowls. She sets the bowls on the ground and distributes the ashes evenly into them.
“Ash” is actually the wrong word, Lewis thinks, touching his portion: it’s coarser, oilier, with bits and spurs that must be the remnants of bone. He wishes they’d found no body, that it had been translated into the sky Old Testament-style, atomized.
No he doesn’t.
Midsummer night has fallen, almost fallen. Abby has Lewis and Bishop and Cody stand with their arms around each other in a kind of huddle, a silent tuning in to Seth’s spirit. Lewis feels only the familiar heaviness, along with a dull impatience to get all this over with. Then they move off into the yard in separate directions, scattering the ashes wherever they like. Lewis wanders to the toolshed, flings a bit over the fence into Oren’s yard on a mischievous impulse. On the far s
ide of the house, Bishop lets out a whoop of what Lewis imagines Bishop imagines is Seth’s joy at being free of his body. Which seems tone-deaf to Lewis but who knows.
They meet back at the stoop and Abby collects the empty clay bowls and takes them inside. Now Louise comes out leading the other people who will participate in the tree ceremony. They form a circle around the birch: Abby, Lewis, Cody, Bishop, Harry, Astrid, the lesbian couple whose names Lewis will never get straight, along with their infant asleep in its sling, Stacy in her wheelchair, looking less drugged now.
Louise lights the incense on the card table then the bundle of sage. She moves around the tree waving the smoking sage then directs them to take up the strips of white cloth, one strip in the right hand, one in the left. Other than Lewis, only Bishop knows about the tattered pieces of sheet caught in the tree they found Seth in. Or Abby, if he told Abby about it. But if Bishop sees the connection, he isn’t letting on. But then Bishop looks pretty smashed on his Ex.
“The barisaa, or prayer tree,” Louise says, sounding like a solemn PBS documentary, “is an important site of worship in the Siberian–Mongolian tradition. By performing this ritual, we will be creating a barisaa of this beautiful young birch and it will bring peace both to the area, including the house, and to Seth’s spirit.”
She goes to the table and lights the evergreen sprig and walks around fanning the smoke outward. Watching her, Lewis thinks: she has my five-thousand dollars; I want my five-thousand dollars back; I want to go to Bali.
“Nature spirits of this place,” she intones now, returning to her place in the circle, “Suld souls of the recently departed! Having forgiven what has happened in the past, be aware that you can do good for all living things, inspire people with visions of the future, bring calm and confidence, fill their hearts with peace and love. Hurai! Hurai! Hurai!” She makes a wide clockwise gesture as she says, “Hurai!”
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