Yesim drove us out Route 56, past Snowbird, where mowers were clearing the slopes of the summer’s grass in preparation for the first snowfall. She took the road up which I’d followed her a couple of weeks earlier, and where she had turned left before, this time she took the right fork. The road became a path, the path became a track. Branches scratched the sides of the Outback. Then we were in a clearing. Before us stood a wooden ruin, painted white and green but nearly worn of its colors by weather and neglect. The siding sagged, the windows were blinded by boards, the porch had collapsed and only joists remained, the space between them full of earth and dead leaves, a red-and-yellow carpet that led to the front door. We got out of the car.
“Do you know what this is?” Yesim asked. “It’s
SUMMERLAND
the old hotel, or what’s left of it. I wanted you to see it before it changed.”
“Changed?”
“Can’t you guess?” Yesim said. “We’re going to fix it up. You can’t tell Kerem I told you, or he’ll never forgive either of us.”
She pushed the door open and we looked together into the dim rotten house. Here and there a gap in the boards over the windows let in a slice of gray light, showing us a section of floor, a bit of mantel, a door. Yesim took a flashlight from her pocket and swept the beam over an old parquet floor twisted by damp. “As you can see,” she said, “it’s going to take a lot of fixing.”
The hotel smelled like wet towels gone bad a very long time ago, a breath-stopping mildew smell that had itself decayed almost to nothing. The room we were in had been a lounge, from the look of it: a big fieldstone fireplace yawned across the room at what had been a bar. There was an indistinct area to the right that might have been a restaurant. Yesim said they were going to restore all the original details: the bar, the stage, the fireplace, the leather armchairs, even the deer heads on the walls. They were going to renovate the swimming pool, and reopen the gardens, and maybe put in some cottages in the woods. Oh, yes, and they were going to have music, just like in the old days. “What was the name of the band you played for me?”
“Gil Gideon and the Two-Time Tunesters.”
“We’re going to have music like that. We’re going to advertise on billboards all the way down the Thruway. Summerland, the good old days are back, something like that. My brother wants me to write the ads because I’m a poet.” Yesim laughed. “Do you want to see the upstairs?”
The air on the second floor was closer, harder to breathe. I covered my mouth with my hand. We walked down a long hallway, Yesim opened a door and there was light. We were in a bedroom that faced the upslope of the hill; beyond the window was a big tangle that might once have been Summerland’s famous garden. The room had never given up its old furniture, an iron-framed double bed, a sink, a rocking chair with a collapsed cane seat. A writing table, a chair. On the table, a stack of paper, and beside it a loose sheet that Yesim quickly turned over.
“This is my secret,” she said. “I’m writing again.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said.
“I don’t know if it’s wonderful, but it feels right, so for the time being I’m going to keep doing it.” Yesim looked bemused, as though she’d forgotten it was her birthday, and here were these presents to remind her.
“It looks like you have a lot of pages there,” I said. “Is it poems?”
“Not really.”
“A story?”
“Kind of.”
“Can I read it?”
“Maybe later,” Yesim said. After a while she went on, “It’s because of you that I’m writing. I’ve been thinking a lot about you, these last few days.”
“Me? Why?”
“Actually,” Yesim said, blushing, “I was thinking about your shirt. The one with the monkey on it? I was really surprised when I saw you in the Kountry Kitchen, wearing that shirt. It was so ugly and so cheerful at the same time. I didn’t think you would ever wear a shirt like that. If you had asked me, when we were kids, what you would turn out like, I would have said you were going to be kind of a nerd. You aren’t offended, are you? I don’t mean it in a bad way. I even think nerds are a little sexy. Anyway, when I saw you wearing that shirt, I thought, we don’t have to become anything. We can choose. Although now that I think about it, the shirt is a little nerdy, isn’t it?”
She looked so happy, it was impossible for me to be offended. “I’ll loan it to you, if you want.”
“I’m not sure it will fit me.”
She sat on the bed and I sat down beside her. If I had known what would happen because of what I did next, all the terrible consequences that would follow, I want to say that I wouldn’t have done it, but actually, when I think about that morning at Summerland, the dusty smell, the sunlight descending yellowly through a crack in the clouds, all I remember is how beautiful Yesim looked, even with dark circles under her eyes, and something in me was saying, now, now, now!
I don’t remember what I said. Something about the cosmological constant—can that be right? And how the expansion of the universe is accelerating, how the stars we see in the sky are the only stars we will ever see, how the stars are retreating from us, in millions of years they’ll be out of sight, and cool, and turn to iron, and the sky will be entirely black, I don’t know, my mind, to change metaphors, was like a forest on fire, and thoughts were leaving it like animals, running away in packs toward a faraway river, but I remember how Yesim looked at me, perplexed, and moved to the far end of the bed. I swung my legs onto the bed and crawled toward her, because it wasn’t fair that I should be such a poor persuader; it wasn’t fair that Richard Ente had done so much harm without passing on to me the power to get what I wanted most in the world.
“No,” Yesim said. “What did I tell you, I can’t do this.”
I kissed the hollow of her collarbone.
“Stop,” she said, but I didn’t stop, and a moment later she encircled my head with her arm, drawing me closer. I worked my fingers through the gap between the buttons of her blouse, and circled her navel with my finger.
“Fuck,” Yesim said.
I took it as an imperative. We sank together; a puff of dust rose from the bed, composed of spores of mold, insect feces, particles of skin left behind by guests who were now in their graves, powdered wallpaper glue, all the dusts that fill a house when it has begun to die. I pulled Yesim’s blouse up and kissed the stiff cup of her bra. “So good,” Yesim said. I sprang her from her hooks and snaps, she slipped my buttons through their slits, our clothes came off, we lay together on the old poisonous mattress, pushing out clouds of dust. The bed’s frame groaned happily, the springs yawned, it was as though the room were waking up, with each thrust a little life came back to the building. Soon hot water would be running in the pipes, maids would do their dusting, bellhops would buff their shoes and set their caps on straight, then come to attention as the grumble of the first car echoed up the road, the fire would be lit, the registry clerk would uncap his pen and prepare himself to write on the first page of his new book, the first new name.
“Yes,” Yesim said, “yes yes yes!”
We lay there, just breathing, then Yesim felt the wet spot on the mattress and cried out, “What did you do?” She jumped up and gathered her clothes in her arms.
“I’m sorry,” I said, but Yesim was already running. I ran after her, barefoot, naked, down the stairs, but she wouldn’t stop; then I heard another voice say, “Yesh?” Kerem and a man who was probably his architect stood in the lobby, and now Yesim was in Kerem’s arms.
“Yesh, what happened?” Kerem asked, then he saw me. His face changed, and a look appeared on it that I had never seen before, but that I understood at once. Fury. I’d seen the black eye he got in Philadelphia; I’d seen him at fifteen, kicking rocks and throwing beer cans, but I never figured out, never bothered to figure out, what he was feeling. Fury. I think he must have had it all along: fury at his parents drove him from Thebes and fury at the world brought him back, fur
y at the world that had fucked his sister up. Maybe that was the reason for the restoration, the secret project, maybe it was intended to keep Yesim interested, to keep her in Thebes. I was intended to help her too; it was as if Kerem had brought me in to help her, and now look what I’d done. Fury! Kerem lunged at me and I ran. I don’t know how I got past him; I guess my desire to disappear was greater than his desire to catch me. I ran through the grass to Yesim’s car and got in the car and locked the door. Kerem was shouting. He banged on the windshield with his fists. I noticed that I was sitting on something sharp, I reached under my buttock and felt the plastic haft of an automobile key.
“Sorry,” I mouthed to Kerem, and I started the car.
He followed me, still shouting, as I backed up until the road was wide enough to turn around, beating the roof, the side windows, the hatchback, shouting words at me that I couldn’t make out through the solid car. I drove back down the rutted road and after maybe a quarter of a mile the black Explorer appeared in the rearview mirror. I drove faster; the Outback bounced down the hill and skidded onto Route 23. I drove west, away from Thebes, too fast in the middle of the road. My teeth were chattering. Maybe I can go now, I thought. Maybe I can just keep going, take 23 to 88, 88 to 86, 86 to 90, and cross the country that way. I wasn’t wearing any clothes, I didn’t have any money, but maybe that was the only way I would ever leave Thebes. I fumbled on the unfamiliar dashboard for the heat and the radio came on. Gautier del Hum was bringing us the greatest hits of the 1980s and today. I wanted to turn the radio off but I couldn’t find the control again, or the switch for the heat, and it was too much, I had to get my bearings, to figure out how the car worked. I stopped in the middle of the road and I’d just found the button for the radio when there was a sound.
The Explorer ran into the Outback; the Outback gave way before the Explorer. In another century, in another country, it might have been a tragedy, but these cars weren’t built for tragedy. These were family cars; they crumpled where they could; beyond that they stood firm. There was a crunch, a curse, a hiss as the air bag let out its air. Then Kerem was standing beside the Outback, looking in through the window. He asked if I was all right.
“I think so,” I said.
Kerem tugged at the driver’s door but it wouldn’t open. He walked around the wreck and tried the passenger door. “I think we’re going to have to cut you out,” he said. He went to the Explorer for his phone, then came back. “Why did you stop, anyway?”
“I couldn’t find the heat.”
“You what?”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry,” Kerem said, “you’re sorry? You asshole, these aren’t even your cars.”
In a quarter of an hour the tow truck came, its yellow lights flashing. Charles climbed down with his cane and limped over to us. He saw me naked and looked away, embarrassed. “Man,” he said, “this brings back memories,” and it was only then that I realized my father had done much the same thing thirty-one years earlier.
THE RICHARD ENTE PERIOD
I spent the day in a hospital in Albany. There was almost certainly nothing wrong with me, a cut on my forehead, some bruising on my chest, but even so, said Dr. Weiss, the attending physician in the emergency room, there might be a tiny hemorrhage, something the machine couldn’t detect, but which, if it went untreated, could give us problems. I think the fact that I was admitted to the hospital wearing nothing but a Mylar blanket had aroused his concern. And sure enough, when Dr. Weiss was gone, a nurse came in and told me that she was going to ask a few questions. What was my name? Where was I? What year was it? Who was the president of the United States? I answered the first three correctly and objected that the fourth wasn’t a good test of mental acuity. Imagine a hermit, I said, who’s been living without television in a hut in the woods, he’s still clear in his mind, but … The nurse made a note in my chart and that afternoon I was visited twice by other nurses who took my temperature and blood pressure and asked me the same questions. Finally I told them who the president was and they had no choice but to let me go.
Charles was waiting for me with some of my clothes. “How would you feel about a beer?” he asked.
“I shouldn’t drink. I might have a concussion.”
“Just one beer.”
He drove us to Maplecrest: a gas station, the cracked plaza of a supermarket that hadn’t been able to stay in business, then my uncle’s garage, dark for the night, a couple of houses decorated with jack-o’-lanterns and skeletons and American flags, a bar that took up the ground floor of a white, two-story house. The Crossroads, it was called, although there wasn’t actually a crossroads there. Possibly it had moved from another location. Charles got us a couple of beers and we found a table at the back of the room.
“Listen,” my uncle said, “there’s something I didn’t tell you the other day. When I was seventeen, eighteen, I was what you’d call a stoner.”
“So?” I said. “It was the sixties, everyone smoked pot.”
“That’s true. But the thing is, when Rich, your father, came to Thebes, he didn’t have a connection. I happened to be fairly well connected in those days, so I hooked him up.”
“You sold my father dope?”
“I’m not proud of it,” my uncle said.
“I’m sure if you hadn’t done it, he would have got his pot from someone else.”
“Very likely,” said my uncle, laughing.
We sat for a while, watching bubbles rise up through the jukebox’s glowing tubes.
“That’s what you wanted to tell me?” I asked.
“I feel responsible for what happened,” Charles said. “I didn’t contribute to your father’s mental stability.”
I thought about this. “How much pot did you sell him?”
“The thing is,” my uncle said, “it wasn’t just pot. My friend Douglas Turpin had a brother who was a Hell’s Angel in Albany, he could get us coke, speed, acid, PCP, and sometimes we sold a little, just between friends. Then Richard Ente comes to town, and he was so cool, I won’t say I didn’t feel the tug of the desire to do mischief. Not to hurt him, just to show him that we were all players in the same game. You know what I mean?”
What Charles did was, he found out that Richard had never dropped acid, and invited him to climb a mountain and watch the full moon rise. “When we were at the top of Espy Peak,” he went on, “I took out my tabs, and Richard said, What’s that? and I said, Acid, it’s part of the ritual. He couldn’t back out. I gave Richard a big dose, probably bigger than I should have given him, and he and Doug and I all sat there waiting for the moon to rise. Then it came on. I was, like, Richard, tell us about the moon! But Richard had turned very, very white, and whatever he knew then, he wasn’t telling. I guess he experienced some heavy things, like, afterward he told me he had died about halfway through the trip. He said death was gentle, like potting a plant in a bigger pot, you moved the consciousness into the earth, where it had room to grow, and if you left it long enough, you’d find you had a planet-sized mind. Fucking Richard Ente! I thought I was showing him, and there he was, showing me.
“Then Richard went away for a few months. When he came back that summer, he was, like, Charles, my man, I’m counting on you, you’ve got to fix me up with that good stuff that you were kind enough to procure once, in what seems to have been another life. Richard was always strange, but now he was really strange. He talked a lot about balance, about how evil was necessary in order to make good. Even the greatest evil, World War Two, and everything that happened to the Jews, was necessary. We paid in blood, Rich said, and now we will collect in light. I ought to have said something to Oliver, but how could I tell him that I’d given his attorney LSD?
“Meanwhile, Richard made me come with him to meet these old mountain freaks who lived on state land. They baked their own bread, and we brought some back to my folks. Hoc est enim corpus meum, Rich told them, holding out this little crusty loaf. I thought that was pretty funny. The
truth is, I was in awe of him! The more drugs we took, the more it seemed like we were walking down a path together, a spiral path that led right to the center of a garden. The garden was all of human thought, and when we climbed the hill in the center of it, we would understand everything anyone had ever said or done.
“Also,” my uncle continued after a moment, “there was a social benefit to be reaped from supplying Rich with drugs. For a while, I was the second-coolest person in Thebes. You should have seen, I had this black leather cowboy hat with a green feather in it, like Robin Hood had stuck in his hat, or hood, whatever. I’m only telling you so you understand, I wasn’t trying to harm Richard in any way. I only wanted to be someone different, not just a Thebes kid anymore; and I was, I was different. I drove Richard down to Albany to hear Janis Joplin at the Civic Center, we got good tickets from Doug Turpin’s brother, in the front row, and a drop of water landed on my cheek, I thought from nowhere, and Richard said, Holy shit, you know what that is? That’s Janis Joplin’s sweat, don’t touch it, that’s some precious sweat you’ve got there, mister. I wiped it off. It’s sweat, I said. Don’t sweat it. Like it was nothing to me then.”
My uncle stopped talking, and I didn’t know what to say either. I didn’t understand how Charles could have sat by and watched as Richard Ente lost his mind, and at the same time I appreciated how completely he must have been under Richard’s spell. What a number Richard had done on him, I thought. What a number he’d done on all of us. Finally I asked, “What did he promise you?”
“What?”
“You said he promised everyone something. What did he promise you?”
“You really want to know? You and me, he said, you and me, Charles, we’re kindred spirits. We both want to know the truth of things. I want you to go to college and read everything. You have a first-rate intelligence; get it in order. Because one day, you and I are going to meet again. We’re going to talk this life business through, and we’re going to blow it open. Richard suggested that I move to California. San Francisco or Big Sur, some place by the ocean. I’ll find you there, he said. I’ll always know where to find you.” My uncle coughed. There was a deep knocking in his chest, like a vending machine delivering a can of soda.
Luminous Airplanes: A Novel Page 18