Wichita (9781609458904)

by Ziolkowsky, Thad

  She takes up the shallow drum and playing it with her hand leads them all slowly around the birch three times, Stacy’s wheelchair whirring. Then she has them take up the strips of cloth again. Lewis stands with his eyes closed but he can sense Louise circling the tree and flinging liquids and powders, can hear the salt or sugar sprinkling over the ground. This goes on for a while, accompanied by “Hurai’s,” then there’s what sounds like a final “Hurai!”

  He opens his eyes as Louise pours out the rest of the vodka around the trunk of the tree. The smell of it makes him want to get drunk but it seems he’s barred from getting drunk today. She has everyone sip from the dish of water. It’s over.

  Lewis follows Bishop and Cody inside for another shot of whisky. After a minute the others drift into the kitchen.

  Abby approaches with an entreating expression, strokes Lewis’s arm. It turns out there’s yet another rite Louise would like to perform. Lewis nearly lets his head roll backwards with weariness and disgust.

  “It involves calling Seth’s spirit,” Abby says. “I’m actually not real clear on it but it’s nothing too elaborate. Louise felt it would be appropriate tonight. You’re free to opt out.”

  “I’ll just sit out back then,” he tells her. “If that’s OK.”

  “Of course it’s OK!” She hugs him and goes into the dining room, followed by Louise and the others, who have been hanging back deferentially. Lewis goes out to the stoop, sits down with the bottle of whisky but feeling a sudden revulsion at the idea of another shot stands up and goes out through the gate.

  He walks to the end of the driveway and looks up at the sky. The stars are out, the trees barely moving in the wind. He walks down the street, past the tight-lipped houses with their bass boats under taut, snapped-down tarps.

  He walks to the bottom of the neighborhood and stands looking into the stand of trees by the creek. Cottonwoods, maples, birches. Which tree was it they sat by? He closes his eyes, expecting to feel Seth’s presence here at his morning-glory spot if anywhere. He waits for a while then gives up and turns to go back to the house.

  When the tornado passed, silence fell instantly and the grass of the field lay still. The last red light of the setting sun shone in through the Escalade’s broken windshield, through the dirt caked on the windows, cast a warm light over the figures huddled there. Drew stayed behind with Abby, whose ankle was twisted. Calling Seth’s name, Bishop and Lewis searched the field. The earth was pocked and cratered, the undersoil churned to the surface. When they found no sign of him, they followed the swath of debris, crossing a creek with steep banks thick with cottonwoods, a few sheared in two low on the trunks. They went on through a backyard strewn with mangled gutters and tin siding hanging like skin in flaps from the body of the houses. Part of the roof of a house was missing. Telephone poles leaned at hard angles and sparks spewed from the tip of a dangling power line.

  There was a fire truck parked in a driveway, its light bathing the house and driveway in red. They were pointing flashlights up a tree, rags and shreds of cloth caught in the broken branches flaring in the beams. Now the beams shone steadily on something. Lewis approached in a kind of trance and stood looking up with the others, unable to speak. Two ladders were set side by side against the tree.

  “That’s my brother,” he finally told a fireman. Everyone turned. Lewis climbed one of the ladders, someone else the other. Seth’s head swung to one side and Lewis caught it with one hand and cradled it against his chest. The gauze bandage was gone from his head, the one for the blisters on the chest tat gone too, half his shirt ripped away.

  They lay him on a blue plastic tarp spread on the ground. Wet leaves were stuck to his chest and shoulder.

  “We found him,” Bishop said into his cellphone.

  Lewis peeled a leaf from the flesh of Seth’s shoulder. It left a fine, detailed welt—branched veins, serrated edge.

  “No,” Bishop said. “No, honey, he’s not.”

  Lewis goes into the backyard through the gate. Cody is sitting on the stoop smoking a cigarette. Lewis sits down beside him. Cody asks him whether he took the Ex. Lewis shakes his head.

  “Me neither.” Cody snickers in surprise at himself. “That’s gotta be a first.”

  “Seth!” they hear faintly through the open sliding glass doors. It sounds like an invocation.

  “Just didn’t feel like it,” Cody says quizzically.

  Then, hanging his head, he says quietly, “All I keep thinking about is how I should’ve been with you guys.”

  He looks over at Lewis. “You heard me asking your mom. I said, ‘Can I come?’ There was all them empty seats!”

  Lewis says nothing. Darkness has engulfed the yard but the strips of cloth hanging from the branches glow. “I would’ve got on that bike with him, man,” Cody says now.

  In the light from the kitchen, Lewis can see tears on Cody’s cheeks. “Don’t say that, Cody.”

  “I mean it,” Cody insists.

  “Well, don’t say it,” Lewis tells him. “Not to me.”

  “All right,” Cody says after a moment. “I’m sorry.”

  “You can’t say everything that comes into your head,” Lewis says gently.

  “Hurai!” they hear above a general murmur coming from the dining room.

  Cody says, “But I mean, what am I supposed to do now?” He seems to expect an answer.

  “I don’t know,” Lewis says.

  “He was the only person who ever gave a shit about me. Him and your mom. What am I supposed to do now?”

  Lewis puts his arm around him and Cody slumps gratefully against him, his face pressed into Lewis’s chest. Lewis pats him on the back. After a bit Cody seems to gather himself. He sits up and lights a cigarette but puts it out after a single drag.

  “Seth!” floats out through the sliding glass doors. “Hurai!” Lewis wishes they would give it a fucking rest now. He considers going for another walk.

  Cody lets out a sigh and Lewis glances over to check on him and where Cody was, Seth is sitting.

  Lewis stares, thunderstruck.

  Seth simply sits there, turned slightly away. The right side of his face is clear of the tattoo.

  Lewis stares. It’s all he can do. It’s as if he’s paralyzed, might pass out. But where is Cody? Has Seth possessed him, replaced him? Has Cody given his assent to this? What has happened?

  Seth says nothing. But he is here and, fighting free of amaze­ment, Lewis reaches out and wraps him tightly in his arms. He has him now, he’s holding his dead brother who is somehow not dead. The problem of Cody can be worked out later. Now he’s going to haul Seth into the astonished light of the house, where everyone there will see him too and nothing, not a mote of dust, will be left unchanged.

  29 (BROOKLYN)

  The sink has flame-shaped lavender stains under the faucets and a cracked rubber stopper attached by a chain to a kind of pierced metal nipple. When he shuts off the tap, the pipes make a high startled moan.

  On the way downstairs, he stops at the front-hall window. He thought he heard gunfire last night. He parts the stiff lace curtains. The morning is shining, sunlight falling through the bone-like limbs of London planetrees from a flawless blue sky. Maybe it was firecrackers. He’s not sure what gunfire sounds like.

  In the dark, faintly sour-smelling kitchen there’s half a pot of coffee left by the housemates who have to be at jobs by nine. He heats a cup in the microwave and drinks it in the small garden out back. A mourning dove slips through the gap between the gate and the post and pecks at the walkway then hastens out when Lewis raises his cup to drink.

  A dream he had last night comes back to him now, part of it at least. Seth was alive but wheelchair-bound. Stacy, no longer in need of her own wheelchair, pushed Seth around the house in Wichita. Why did Seth steal the graduation present money? Lewis wanted to know. You were going to leave, Seth said simply.

  “I wasn’t going to leave,” Lewis said. The more he thought about it, the more o
utraged he became. “I wasn’t going to leave!”

  Seth shook his head. “You were going to leave.”

  “How did you know where it was hidden?” Lewis asked then.

  Stacy was pushing the wheelchair away. Turning back, Seth said, “I know how your little pea-brain works.”

  He finishes his coffee and goes back inside the house. On the walls of the mudroom are framed photographs, circa 1970, of the lease-holder, a semi-retired professor of sculpture named Lewellyn Lynch. Wearing overalls and cowboy boots, he’s standing alone or in comradely groups against the desert scrub of Marfa, Texas, where he lives for most the year.

  Rinsing his cup at the kitchen sink, Lewis hears Lynch trudging up the basement stairs. To have another room to rent out on the floors above, he sleeps down there on a futon, bare light bulbs turned on with lengths of string, forgotten boxes of stored clothes and books left by long-gone tenants, jumbled piles of furniture. He’s lived here for thirty-eight years, first with a wife, then with a series of girlfriends, many of them students, then illegal subletters like Lewis, whose rents underwrite Lynch’s life in Marfa. The house belongs to the Brooklyn College of the Arts, which, instead of trying to evict Lynch, refuses to do any repairs. It’s slowly falling down around their ears.

  Now Lynch stands bracing himself in the basement doorway, the tips of his fingers mashed against the frame as if he’s dizzy from the climb and fears falling backwards.

  “Morning!” he says when he notices Lewis. He has a handsome, deeply lined face, fierce blue eyes, thick straight gray hair cut in a tapering blunt line. Having recovered from the climb, he crosses the kitchen in his black, slab-like geriatric shoes and pours a cup of coffee, stands staring into the microwave window as it heats up, then decants a stream of sugar from a spouted glass dispenser.

  “First day of classes, Sculpture 101,” Lynch announces in a quavering voice, staring with comical bleakness at Lewis. “It never fucking ends.”

  He stirs the coffee with a tiny espresso spoon, takes a sip, sets the cup down. “Well, it would end if I’d retire, of course, but they didn’t pay me enough to retire on!” He barks out a laugh.

  “Do you realize I’m going to draw my last breath standing behind some kid trying to think of something to say about his shitty sculpture?!” He laughs at the vision. “I really think that’s how it will fucking happen! The kid’ll be waiting for my comment.” Lynch hunches his shoulders and pouts in imitation an art student. “He’ll have this shitty little frown on his face: ‘Hey, my parents paid good money for this old fucker’s praise! What’s taking so long?’ He’ll finally look around and I’ll come crashing down on top of him!”

  As if remembering his manners, he lurches across the kitchen and pours cold coffee sloshingly into the rinsed cup Lewis is absently holding then carries the pot back to its place in the coffee maker.

  “What I usually do on the first day is pass out copies of ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ and have them sit there and read that,” Lynch says. “Do you know it?”

  Lewis considers lying but confesses that he does not and Lynch makes a slight dip of the head to indicate that he expected as much then narrows his eyes and says, “Well, if you read only one piece of art criticism in your life, read ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ by Miss Rosalind Krauss. And not just because she talks about the kind of work I make—or made. What did ol’ Lewellyn do? I dug a hole in the ground. Earth Art. It’s not architecture but it’s not landscape either. That was Krauss’s contribution to the conversation. It came ten years after the fact, but still. It helped people grasp our accomplishment.”

  He makes a hat-tipping gesture to an imaginary Rosalind Kraus and Lewis glances at his watch and shoulders his backpack.

  “Off to guard the horde of the Robber Baron?” Lynch asks. Lewis smiles crookedly in answer.

  “You must be willing to give your life for a Vuillard, Lewis!” Lewis is surprised Lynch remembers his name and what he does for money. “To give your life!” Lynch calls after him.

  On the front stoop, he pauses to open his backpack and peeks in to be sure he remembered to pack his navy-blue guard blazer, which he’s responsible for having dry-cleaned once a week. It’s in there.

  He sets off for the subway in the clear September morning. London-planetree leaves, tan and desiccated and curled, lie scattered on the sidewalk, the shadows beneath them black, satiny voids.

  Lewis wonders what Lynch, with death so much on his mind, would say if Lewis told him about the story of Seth’s return in the body of Cody, how he came back from the land of the dead to see Lewis, to be seen by Lewis. Lynch, Lewis imagines, would either unhesitatingly match it with a ghost story of his own. Or he would smile pityingly and say something grimly existential like: death’ll scare you into seeing all sorts of shit!

  The museum is housed in the Upper East Side mansion of a family that made its money in oil. Lewis puts on the blazer in the staff room and stashes his backpack in a locker. The whiteboard where the gallery assignments are written has him in the Paul Klee salon for the second week. He goes to the sunny room where the Klees hang and takes up his post in an upholstered chair beside an air-quality monitor that scratches out a reading on graph paper with a frail needle.

  A pair of middle-aged tourists enters. The woman acknowledges Lewis’s presence with an indirect fraction of a smile. He’s here and he’s not here. He’s an animatronic statue that can be called upon to give directions to the restrooms or gift shop.

  After the memorial service, Abby told Lewis he could leave whenever he liked, she was fine. The next day she couldn’t get out of bed. Her limbs felt filled with mud, she said. Lewis and Bishop and a group of her friends cooked and did the chores. One morning he was with her in the bathroom. She was trying to find the strength to put on makeup at a mirror by the window. There was a spider the size of a crumb in the bottom corner of the window frame, motionless in its little web. “If I could trade places with that perfectly still little consciousness, I would do it,” she said. “There’s nothing ennobling about what I’m feeling, this suffering. It hurts, period.” Then she went back to bed.

  For exercise, Lewis walked to the Towne East mall, walked around in it. There was a path beaten into the grass alongside the road but he never encountered anyone else on foot. Twice, out drinking at night, he drove around in search of the roadside bar where Tori worked but couldn’t find it. He’ll supposedly get his graduation money back two-fold once Abby has resumed the Birthday Party celebrations but she seems to have lost interest in that, or at least her enthusiasm isn’t what it was, and Lewis doubts he’ll ever get the money back. Not that he ever really felt it was his.

  Other than Abby, he’s told no one about what happened on the stoop with Cody, not even Cody himself, who remembered nothing out of the ordinary except the hug from the normally restrained Lewis. Abby’s reaction was unsurprised, almost blasé. “I had a feeling something like that might happen for you,” she said, adding, “Bishop did too.”

  Bishop. Lewis wonders whether Bishop didn’t slip something into the whisky that day, one of his designer psychedelics called Apparition or Vivid Ghost or Dead Brother. Or Lewis willingly took something that then erased the memory of his having taken it. Twice, since he left, Abby has asked lightly on the phone, “Have you seen Seth lately?” No, he told her, which is the truth. But her asking places him under a slight but real pressure to offer something up, something new, as time passes and what happened, astonishing though it was, fades, loses its force. He also worries that his telling her about the experience has given her false hope, caused her to skip or compress some necessary stage of grief. Whatever a stage of grief is. And didn’t Kubler-Ross repudiate all that in the end anyway?

  “Ooh, goody—Paul Klee!” the tourist woman stage-whispers. She claps her hands in childlike glee and, bringing her nose to within an inch of the first canvas, beckons to the man. “See the little creatures? Come closer—see?”

  The man obeys
. “Oh, yeah—tiny little things,” he notes flatly. “Wings. Cute.”

  “Do you know what I adore about Paul Klee?” The man shakes his head.

  “His whimsy!” she says “There’s not enough whimsy in modern art, not like this.” She glances at Lewis for his agreement and approbation and Lewis smiles obligingly. Lewis liked Klee’s whimsy too, until he spent two weeks with it. Now it’s begun to cloy.

  Eli spends half the week in Cambridge, half in New York at Mi’s apartment. Lewis meets him for lunch at the French restaurant Eli and his parents have been patronizing since Eli was a toddler. They’re seated in the traditional family banquette in the corner by the window but Eli has been irritably distracted by changes in the décor and staff, the menu. When they’ve ordered their meals and their glasses of red wine arrive and Eli sips from his and seems momentarily satisfied and settled, Lewis finds himself telling the story of Seth’s appearance on the stoop.

  “Phew!” Eli says, sitting back, his eyes wide. “Wow.”

  Then his manner undergoes a subtle change. It’s as if he ages, assumes the bulkier, slightly hunched body of a much older man—that of his father, the neurologist’s. A pained, apologetic expression appears on his face and he says in a low voice. “Grief is a kind of stress—”

  Now he frowns at a slice of baguette he’s dug this thumbs into and holds it up for Lewis’s inspection. “What would you call this, fiberglass? Plastic?”

  He sits back in his chair and raises his hand just off the table and a waiter appears. “Could we trouble you to bring us some bread that is actually fresh? As in edible? Thanks so much!”

  He sighs through his nose and watches over interlaced hands as the basket of bread is removed. “This place—I come back out of robotic habit. I need to make a change.” He follows the waiter’s movement to the bread station. “What was I even saying?”

  “Grief is stress,” Lewis prompts him. He can see where Eli is headed. He regrets having told the story, having cheapened it by telling it, but Eli’s dismissal will at least allow it to go back into the dark.