by Chris Lynch
They look familiar. One or two, maybe, you remember doing, but they all look familiar. Like distant family.
And in the middle of this loosely arranged circular parade of a tribute to you, is the question. Written in block capital, Day-Glo yellow spray paint in Pops’s precious nail-clippered lawn.
NEXT?
They want to know.
They want to know what you know, Will. What do you know, Will?
Do you know?
“Maybe I do.”
You do not know, Will. You are not responsible. You do not know.
“Maybe I do.”
“You do what?” Pops barks at you. “Who are you talking to?”
His eyes are bugging, he is so angry. Sounds like he’s angry at you, does it not? How screwy is that? How screwy, and how true? Here it comes. You’d better be ready for this. Are you ready for this?
“Nothing,” you say. “Nevermind,” you say.
“No, I won’t nevermind. I want to know who you were talking to.” He has an ugly gnome under his arm. They are all ugly gnomes, of course, but this is an ugly gnome among ugly gnomes. You could swear it grunts when it hits the ground.
“Just leave him alone,” Gran pleads with Pops.
“Leaving ’em alone doesn’t work,” he growls. He is accusing her of something.
“Neither does browbeating,” she says, accusing him.
They appear, right there, simultaneously, to realize something, to remember something, to conclude something. And just like that they go watery, and nobody wants to get worked up anymore.
“Maybe you just want to lie down, Will,” Gran says. “Have you taken your medication?”
“Ya,” you say.
“Maybe you want to take some more,” Pops says, getting back to collecting monsters off the lawn as if collecting red and orange disintegrating leaves.
No, Will, maybe you don’t.
“Maybe I do.”
“Will!” Gran gasps.
You don’t want to take more.
“Maybe I do. Who’s going to tell me what I want and don’t want to do?”
“Who are you talking to?” Gran sounds scared. Pops hardly takes note. “Who are you talking to?” she repeats.
Who are you listening to? Pops? Are you listening to Pops? To him, Will? Don’t we know about him? Don’t we? Who are you going to listen to when you come to the end? Who will be there?
“Do you think so, Pops?” you ask, hard.
Pops is already back to the job at hand. The job that involves his hands alone. Busy hands. Pops is a good man with busy hands. If there is a task Pops can address with his hands, that job is as good as done.
Be not idle. Pops.
He is scooping up your ugly scary little wooden phantasms like nobody’s business. They are disappearing. His lawn, aside from The Question, is coming back to him.
NEXT?
“What?” he asks, as if the whole issue is a million miles gone behind us now. His hands are very busy.
“Do you suppose I should take more meds? Think that’s a good idea, Pops?”
Pops stops. His hands, for the moment, are not busy. Idle. Not at all good.
What does he want to say, Will? Before he says it, it is probably worth noting what he wants to say. In case he tries to alter it, like they do for your own good. Can you read it there on his face?
A very old face, no? An old, etched face. Older, even, than his many many long sad years. Are you thinking, perhaps, that what he wants to say is, Yes, take the whole bottle once and for all and for god’s sake let everybody else off the hook? Do you think?
“Pain’s bad, is it?” he asks sadly.
“It is,” you assure him. “It’s unbearable.”
It is as if your words are not words but numbers, factors of some kind, that he has got to work out every time you speak, before he can speak. An equation he’s been trying to figure for a long very long time.
“I don’t want you to take the pills, son.” He is walking toward the toolshed, head down and mumbling as if he is embarrassing himself. Ashamed of what he’s said, done. Not said, not done. “It’s only pain, son.”
Twice now. Pops has used the word son on you in two consecutive mumblings.
You don’t know, do you? How uneasily that comes to him. Twice. Do you know what this means? Do you want to know?
“I’m not your son,” you say, freezing him in the doorway of his beloved shed.
Why did you say that? Did you have to say that?
He drops his head so low that from your vantage point he looks like the headless, horseless, horseman. He doesn’t so much walk the rest of the way into his shed, as dissolve into it.
So? So.
“So nothing,” you say. “I can’t be responsible.”
“Responsible?” Gran asks. Her voice cuts across your face like a biting wind. You’re startled.
You turn to her. “Jeez, Gran, you scared me.”
Smack. It is likely this is the first time Gran has hit anyone, and it is surely the first time anyone has hit you for real.
“No,” she says, and that could be hate in her voice, if you have any ability to recognize hate or love or indifference. “He is not your father. Nobody understands that better than he does. And I am not your mother, or your father. And you are not your father. Nobody is him anymore.”
Fair enough.
“We are us. We’re what’s left. We’re it.”
You look at her, and wait. What are you waiting for, for her to hit you again? You would like that, wouldn’t you? Well, she’s not going to do it. For her to tell you what to do? For her to tell you what not to do? You shouldn’t expect any more of that, either.
So? What?
You follow, on to the shed, where you find your grandfather in among the gardening gear, various silly sun hats, hoses, an electric snow shovel which gets no use anymore because when it snows now they just stay in the house. And several leering, beaming sharp-featured characters offering lollipops or pansies from this pudgy evil little hands. He is surrounded by them.
You can still only see the silhouette of his hunched bony back.
He is, still, damnably hard to talk to. Is he not damnably hard to talk to?
“For chrissake,” you shout, “everybody is damnably hard to talk to.”
He turns around. You’re looking in his face now, as he is looking in yours. And what do you know?
Who’d have figured?
He sees something, somebody, somewhere, in your face, here in the little temple where he hides away, with your little freaks and his rakes as congregation.
He is not even going to ask who the hell you are speaking to.
“Yes they are,” he says. “Damnably hard. But you have to try, don’t you? Isn’t that the thing? That you have to try?”
“Do you, Pops? You think? Maybe you don’t have to. Maybe, you know, some people are supposed to just not try. Maybe that’s why, some people . . . why things just don’t work out for some people, because everything’s already set up, the rules are laid out, the dominoes are falling down, and everybody has their bit already made up for them. And maybe some people’s bit is just to fuck up, and fall down.”
He picks up one of those little claw things gardeners use when they are down on their knees tearing up the dirt. He turns it around and around in his hands, as if there are working parts on it that need his attention, oiling, tightening, whatever.
“No,” he says firmly.
You shrug, you try and turn away. “I was just saying, maybe some people—”
“No,” he repeats, a little stronger. “It’s not set up, and it’s not dominoes, Will, it’s life. Life is life, and it’s not anything else.” He is gesturing now, with the claw, and at the same time his gaze is drifting, up to you, then over, and beyond you. He looks like a claw-handed professor, lecturing on something grand and important and probably outside your grasp.
“You get one life. And it’s yours, and you are in cha
rge. And all right, somewhere along the line there is a moment when you need more. You need intervention. You need a hand up. Every single person has this moment, but it is only a moment and after that your life is your life again.
“Call it charity, Will, call it love, or call it blind bloody luck, but comes a time when somebody needs somebody else to pull his wagon for him. And you know what? Most of the time, life being what life is, that somebody is right there for you.”
You are aware, you are not, that you are extracting something from Pops. That you are making Pops be not Pops. That he is going where he doesn’t go, saying what he does not say, approaching something—
“Is this all of them?” you ask.
“What?” He is stunned. He might be angry.
“Them. The things, the woodworks. Is this all of them?”
You can see his teeth, bared now as he speaks. “Are you here, Will? Do you understand what I am saying? If somebody doesn’t make it in life, it’s not because that was the plan for him all along. It’s just that . . .” His voice drops in half, as he struggles to the end of this. “It’s just that somebody wasn’t there, with the right help, at the right moment. The people left behind have to live with that.
“But they live with it.
“Do you understand me, Will?”
Do you, Will? You will. Understand? Agree? Give a damn? If you listen, you will know something now. What are you listening to?
“Is this all of the carvings that showed up?”
You have done it now. You have finished him. He drops the claw, turns his back to you, and buries himself in the darkness of the back of the shed.
“That is all of them,” he says.
You are looking around. As if he could possibly have missed your most famous work if it was here. No. It’s not here, Will. It is still out there, Will. It is not an accident. It is still out there.
And you are responsible.
You stand now, staring at your grandfather’s back. The two of you motionless, clueless as to what comes next, as the two of you seem to increasingly be.
And then you are released.
The ringing of the phone far off on the second-floor landing, faint but clear, sends a shock of energy through you. You run.
“That was unplugged,” Gran calls desperately from the far end of the yard. “Pops . . .”
Walking has been job enough lately, but running now feels effortless. There is no broken hand now, no petrified filthy clothes hanging on lifeless creaking bone rack of a body.
Ring, bastard, ring, bastard.
The bastard will ring, ten, eleven times. You will get there. He will wait.
You nearly break down as you hit the stairs to the second floor. Your left knee buckles and your right hand reaches out to break the fall, and there you feel it, shooting up your arm, shoulder, into your eyes to blind you with the pain and remind you.
You answer with your left hand, and all your remaining breath.
“Hello?”
Dead Frank Sinatra is on the line.
You wait. You can’t wait through much of it, though. Not this.
But you can’t seem to not listen either.
. . . and still the days . . . those lonely days . . . they go on, and on . . .
“I’m going to hang up,” you say finally.
“Don’t do that,” he says. He turns the music off.
The two of you wait. What are the rules for this? You have both been waiting for this, but now, how does it work?
“Angel, you didn’t show,” he says. “You let us down.”
“What?”
“You know what. The freak chick. She’s supposed to be dead now. You fucked up.”
You were waiting for this phone call. You were longing for this phone call. Now that it’s come, you are paralyzed.
“So what’s up?” the voice goes on. “You lost your power? Or was that one just a dud? Is that it? You stick me with a dud? Fuckin’ shame, you know, ’cause we really wanted to see the freak chick out. She shouldn’t be here . . .”
You sink deeper as he goes on, and on. Deeper into his words, into the morass, for which you see, finally, clearly, indisputably, you are responsible.
You are responsible.
Next?
“You know, right? Of course you know. We know you know.”
“Hey,” you snap into the phone, you snap off his words.
You let him hang for a second more. Now it’s time.
“So you want to see who’s next.”
Something has changed. With the words, the words you did not know you would say, but which sounded familiar and practiced and inevitable to your own ear.
Right. That’s how it feels now. So entirely right. Nothing has felt that way in a long, long while.
You hear a short quick blast of anxious breath shoot out of him before he speaks. “Of course I do. Shit yes.”
“So you will. I’m going to the beach. Now. Bring it.”
He is saying something, but it does not interest you in the least, as you hang up.
• • •
The wind seems to be blowing about a thousand miles an hour as you sit there. The sand is packed wet and cold everywhere, and it’s drawing any warmth out of you like a needle pulling blood. But you are not interested in being warm. You would be somehow disappointed, cheated, if you were comfortable.
You are far less surprised than he is.
“Whoa,” he says, standing over you in his thigh-length black leather jacket and nearly matching cap. He has got the sculpture under his arm. He is staring at your face.
“You don’t look so good.”
You have no patience for the sound of his voice. You get to your feet.
“And what did you expect death to look like?”
You rip the wood out of his short-fingered hands, and start walking toward the surf. The tide is halfway in.
“Good to have this back,” you say, stroking the wood like a precious Angora cat. “I was worried you’d turn it into a video rack.”
He laughs nervously from a couple paces back.
“Right,” he says. “Listen, like, I gotta know what we’re up to. Who is it? What’s going down?”
Your turn to laugh. You like the way he sounds. You like the way all the Sinatra cool runs out of him. You like the smallness of him.
“Should we wait, do you think?” you say, casually. “Maybe we should wait, and get some press coverage. Hardly worth doing something if you don’t get credit for it.”
“Ha,” he says. “Right. Well, you got nothing to worry about, right? You’re famous already. You’re there.”
You snort. Then you stop, drop the wood, and spread your arms wide as you lean into the wind off the ocean. You inhale deeply, smelling it, smelling all that’s in there under the gray-green secret skin of the ocean.
Here’s the spot. Fifty yards from the surf.
You point at the spot. “Let’s get to work.”
He drops to his knees and digs like a mad dog. You start down to help, but he insists, “No. You’re the Man.”
“I’m the Man,” you say, and shake your head. You turn back to the water.
You could nearly cry, couldn’t you? Nearly. It is talking to you. It is simultaneously screaming and whispering to you. It is saying all the names, in all the voices, in angry and sad, and lost and helpless tones.
It is saying your name.
And your name suddenly sounds like the saddest word you have ever heard. Your name, coming off the surface of your adored ocean, is making you want to cry with gratitude and apology.
“Done,” he says, jumping to his feet.
You turn, and see that it is in fact done, and done well. Deep and firm, the rooting of this monument. But it stands no chance. The tide will not permit it. It doesn’t have long here.
“Nice, nice work,” you say, and he cannot help smiling.
You grab him roughly, but friendly. You pull him close, facing him out to sea with your
arm around the back of his neck. Your lame hand rests on his collarbone.
“Next . . .” you say.
You pull him closer to you, tighter, harder, and you feel him. You feel that he is nothing. He is barely even there. You squeeze tighter and feel that you could just about lift him off his feet and finally pull tight enough to pop his head right off and boot it into the sea. His deadly cool coat flaps behind him. Perhaps he is a kite.
“Death to the freaks,” you say.
He squirms in your grip. You turn your face to examine his, right up close. He smiles broadly from within the headlock. Only because he does not know what else to do. He turns just his eyes toward you.
“You want to be famous. Like me.”
He just keeps smiling his petrified smile.
You start walking. Walking him along. Walking to the water. You release him from the headlock but retain a firm grasp on his collar. Leading him toward water.
Thirty yards from the water.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Doing what I do. You know what I do. And now I’m going to show you what I do. You want to see, right? Wanna do what I do? You wanna go where I go, boy?”
Fifteen yards from the water.
“Trying to fuckin’ scare me, is that it?”
He still doesn’t understand, does he, Will? Does anybody, do you suppose? Is it even possible, in the end, for anybody to understand anybody?
Still, you try and help him understand.
“Why would I want to scare you? Why would I possibly care, whether you are scared, or brave, or happy, or stupid?”
You reach the water. You do not stop.
He pulls away from you. “I’m not going in there, ya crazy shit.”
You are in up to your ankles. You turn to look at him once more.
“Good,” you say, and your smile, broad, almost painful, shapes and distorts your words. You don’t recognize the voice. “Stay out of my fucking water. Run home to Mommy. It’s over for me, but it’s just beginning for you. Now you be famous. Now you be responsible. You’re gonna wish you came with me.”
Maybe it’s the bared teeth, the electric voice. Maybe it’s the angel of death authority of you. But he listens. He runs. Leather coat flapping away, leather cap flipping right off his head. He refuses to come back for it, as he kicks sand up behind him stride after desperate stride. You watch him run a wide arc around your monument. Your own monument now. He falls. He gets up. He falls again. He gets up. He runs and runs and runs. From whatever plague it is you carry.