Rumors from the Lost World

by Alan Davis

  “Perhaps it’s better,” Gilbert suggested, fondling a small ceramic elephant, “if Sid stays at the cottage with Stephanie. Maybe that will help him come to terms with what’s happened.” At that first meeting, Ruth in fact glowed with vitality, and finally rose from the davenport for a “tour.” She and Gilbert exchanged wry smiles that Sidney was too nervous to appreciate or even notice.

  “Really? You think so? He’ll remember everything there.” She thinks I’m an ally, Gilbert thought, interested in connections, someone who knows his place, who has no credentials except her son’s friendship and my unofficial role in the summer as village troubleshooter.

  “It’s not really for us to decide, is it?” Through the window over her shoulder he saw Sidney, still in blue trunks, step to the porch. The screen door slammed. His mother started.

  “Hello, everybody,” he said. His mother, ready to return him to the sanctuary of the past she imagined he once lived in, started to rise, arms opening. He placed a hand on her shoulder. “No, don’t get up, not for me. Don’t disturb yourself. I can’t stay.”

  “Darling, let me fix you something to eat.” The bottom of her face was slack.

  “That would be nice,” he said. Still, he held her down. “Maybe some other time? I’m just here to pick something up.” He hurried into the bedroom. Unable to contain herself, she followed.

  Gilbert sat alone as a shower of late-aftemoon sun puddled on the floor.

  Sidney emerged with a sleeping-bag under one arm.

  “Delinquents, beach bums, stray dogs, and worse,” his mother said. He answered politely, his voice soothing, and Gilbert, standing restlessly now, opened the screen door for him.

  “You know where Ruth is, don’t you?” Sidney asked. His glance dissected Gilbert. Until Gilbert emptied his mind and took a cleansing breath, as though jogging, a flurry of associations careened wildly through his mind, a canoe adrift in white-water. She’s lost, elsewhere, I don’t know, he thought, but yes, dead, accept loss or become its victim. “You do know where she is.” Sidney’s voice was blotchy, beginning to peel. He still wore the blue-striped trunks. “I tell you what. If she should by chance end up at your place, will you tell her I’m waiting?”

  *

  Ruth appeared that night. A shower pelted the roof until morning. Unable to sleep, Gilbert jogged through rain, the cool splash of water, the churning of ocean against its shores, the sound of bare feet on wet sand. Everything felt right. He had routines, and they were harmonious with the cruel traction of the world.

  Back in bed, damp towel around his waist, insomnia lifted; he drifted between cool pelting rain on the roof and more rapid waters of nightmare where Ruth swam, liquid, whirling. The sun splashed a rainstorm of light, soaking her hair, drenching her with sun and shadow, body towed helplessly, lungs full of water, arms aflail.

  On the beach road next morning he met Stephanie, walking barefoot, avoiding bits of gravel and swords of beach grass, hair braided and curled into a knot, as though grief required a mouming-cap. “Going to check on Sid,” she said.

  “I’ll come along. I want to retrieve those Melvilles Ruth borrowed.”

  Bleary-eyed, Sidney refused to leave the beach until Stephanie agreed to take his place. Eyebrow screwed up, he stared at Gilbert. “You going to wait?”

  “Not for Ruth, no.” Sidney smiled sardonically and stumbled away. In the dry slanting glare of morning, he was clearly mad. Gilbert told Stephanie her indulgence fed into his delusion and became outright participation in his madness.

  “Get off it. I spend part of my day on the beach, why not now?” Handfuls of scooped sand trickled through long fingers. “Whatever made you chink up that charade on the beach? It was grotesque, that plaque, those people.”

  Gilbert pulled his brows close, hooding his eyes. “People die. What would you have us do? Pretend she stepped out for a pack of cigarettes?” With a wave of her hand, Stephanie contemptuously dismissed the routines of community life—a special ordinance that allows a section of isolated beach to serve as a memorial, the muted punctuation of a funeral, a solid line of type in the obituary columns. Independent, talented, a young painter who knew her craft and didn’t imitate the latest rage, thick highways of paint scraped across the canvas with a rake, she still refused to be serious, never worked for a living. That’s what Gilbert thought. People looked out for her. Gilbert was one of them.

  “I don’t believe in funerals because I’ve been there,” she said, refusing to face him. “Things fall into place.” For a moment he wondered whether she was taking her promise to Sidney seriously. A nervous leap of her eyes usually qualified or deepened her words; a twist of her full mouth hinted at her mood. But now he had only a severe angular profile of a dark woman sitting cross-legged, staring at coins of sunlight on the water. “Artificial bouquets, business suits, who needs it? Besides, most of those creeps were there to make you feel better, not because they thought a few poems and speeches on a beach was a great idea.” She sifted another handful of sand. “You ever see one of those New Orleans funerals with a brass band? That sort of thing would be okay.” She trailed off. “I like to imagine her far out at sea. I like to think she’s halfway to Africa by now.”

  Gilbert touched her. She stiffened. “No. I don’t need your solicitude.”

  “Even your mother knows the value of ritual.” He chose his words carefully. “She protects investments, avoids exploitation.”

  “I still bum candles for my father. Burning candles isn’t a ritual?” She turned to him.

  He was lost, swimming in dark eyes. “I dreamed of Ruth last night, that couldn’t have happened by itself. The memorial service had to snap something into place. Ritual. Ritual helps. Ritual, exercise.”

  “Exercise?” She looked thunderstruck, a hand raised to one cheek.

  “Activity. He needs to survive, that’s the first priority.”

  “God, you’re a mushbrain. You’re not even you. You’re a pod that looks like you. Is that it?” She drew in her lips. “All that Hemingway crap, that Bogart stuff. A stiff drink, a pull on a cigarette?” She covered her thighs completely with sand. “Ever think Sid might need something besides three rounds in the ring?”

  “You can wait if you like,” he said, standing and stretching in his sweats. “I’ve got a date with some saw grass.”

  He slapped through sand, light surf, past an occasional sunbather, relishing the thought of the estuary and its breezes, concentrating on his breath, but still Ruth rose, disappearing in the undertow, arms waving, a corner of her mouth twisted because he wasn’t there to save her.

  *

  Heavy-limbed, torpid, strangely ill at ease, he nursed a drink as daylight faded. He was stupified, unable to move, his bones dusty, filtered through lamplight and the pages of a book.

  He woke, book still in hand, to the screen door banging on its hinges, curtains blowing wildly. Again he had dreamed of Ruth, in a gallery, a portrait museum. Ruth, Sidney, and Gilbert. A screen of moss or gray hair covers every picture. Portraits of Gandhi, Einstein, Lou Gehrig—dozens of paintings and photographs, all slowly breathing. Ruth covers her face with a pair of claws, bends over, the claws mutate into shovels. She tunnels into the sand-floor of the gallery. Sidney calls after her, the sand is serene, undisturbed. They’re alone in a vast desert, Gilbert takes a portrait in his hands, a small cameo.

  He latched the door and window. The phone rang. “Is Sid there?” Stephanie asked.

  “No. Something wrong?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know, okay?”

  Light-headed, far from his stupor, he couldn’t touch ground. “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t know what I mean? Well, let me tell you, okay? Is that all right?” He could see her eyes, leaping with each phrase. “What’s wrong, he wants to know.”

  Someone knocked viciously on the screen door and kicked its bottom panel. “Let me in!” Sidney shouted. He pulled on the door, moved to the window.

  “Liste
n, okay? After all this, let’s celebrate. Okay? Celebrate. No funeral, a celebration. Get it?” As Gilbert put down the phone, Sidney smashed the window with an old board, stepped through shards of glass and splinters of wood, and shook his head, wild-eyed. “Hello,” he said, and plucked small splinters from his skin. His eyes darted into the dark bedroom. “How are you? A tad chilly?”

  He was bleeding. “You want a towel?” Gilbert tried to be gende, but he wasn’t practiced at it. Still, aggravated impatience was clearly no way to handle a weak man in the middle of breakdown.

  “Oh, that.” He glanced at the curtains. “I’m sorry. I lost my balance. But I’ll replace it.”

  “It’s just a window, Sid. That’s not the problem. You’re the problem. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Don’t try to pretend nothing’s changed. Everything’s changed.”

  “You don’t mind if I take a leak.” He sauntered from room to room, searched cabinets, opened garbage cans and closet doors, flushed the toilet and returned, still blood-spotted. “You think I don’t know what’s going on?” He leaned against the wall.

  “Nothing’s going on, Sid.”

  “Last night I dreamed of rising,” he said. “I was on my back on a mattress in a white room with white furniture. Wicker, I think. There were lots of people, mostly strangers. They were urging me to fly. So I tried. I floated up. The sky was white, too. It was nice, very peaceful.”

  If only Gilbert could take him to a gravesite, dig up her body, grab him by the scruff of the neck, tell him to see. Look at this, Sid. Look. He struggled for composure and smiled.

  “I have to go,” Sidney said. “Ruth’s coming home tonight.” He screwed up his eyebrow. “I want to be there.”

  He tripped off the porch into the night.

  The heart knows its ways, they tell me, but I’ve never seen much proof, Gilbert thought. He was anxious to call Stephanie, to convince her to put him away for a little while, shoot him up or hypnotize him until he came back to the world, but first he poured a stiff drink and broiled a steak. He ate it carefully, slowly, savoring each bite. Then he cleaned up the debris and tacked a strip of cloth over the broken window.

  “He’s in great shape,” he told Stephanie on the phone. “Jumped through the window, searched the place and went home to meet her. Is he back yet?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I’m staying with friends. He wanted the place to himself. He’s all right?”

  “Look, he needs attention. Convince him to get it. He’s having a breakdown. It happens, to some people. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Look, spare the sermon. You afraid?”

  “What do you mean, afraid?”

  “He’s jealous, he might jump you. It scares you, I understand that.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Have you thought jealousy might be good for him?”

  Ruth had the ability to mediate between opposites. She protected Sid, provided him with a word or two, a glance to shift his bearings, reach a new awareness. Maybe Stephanie expected that to happen. But without Ruth it was impossible, and his emotional outbursts insulted them all, Gilbert felt. Get flighty or fanciful and you’re lost.

  He reached the cottage in twenty minutes. Through its small porch window a table lamp glowed near the sofa. Gilbert couldn’t quite make out the words, but he heard Sidney talking to someone, so he knocked and called out to him, to save him. The door opened, Sidney smiled. “Come in.” He tilted up one eye. “You can’t take her away, you know.” He hunched before Gilbert. “Sit on the sofa,” he said, working his knuckles. “The rest of our place is off-limits.”

  “Off-limits? What are you hiding, Sid, an inflatable doll?” The living room, Stephanie’s room, was filled with ferns. The shadows of ferns flickered on walls, windowsills, the ceiling. Sid karate-chopped his palms in menacing fashion, balanced on the balls of his feet, swaying, involved in some intricate dance.

  “You’re trying to take her away, aren’t you? Leave me with nothing.”

  “I gave her to you. Why would I want her back?”

  Sidney karate-chopped Gilbert harmlessly in the chest. They embraced, grappled like wresders in dim light and huge rolling shadows of ferns. Gilbert quickly worked his way behind him, an old service trick, and tripped him up. Sidney was stronger than Gilbert thought, but even at the start his muscles trembled, and Gilbert pushed him to the sofa with a muffled sound. He felt dizzy, standing over Sidney, uncertain who controlled the situation. Sidney turned to his back and stared at the white, empty ceiling. “Sid?”

  “Haven’t you done enough?” Stephanie’s doorway voice startled Gilbert, who jumped as if bitten and turned. “How long you been there?”

  She stared at him, still hunched for an attack.

  “We better call an ambulance,” he said, straightening.

  “Yes, that’s true. Please go away. Okay?”

  They sat in silence among fems, Sidney vacant-eyed on the couch, Stephanie stroking his forehead. When the village ambulance arrived, Gilbert left. On the beach, hands in pocket, he listened to the ocean and trailed sand until morning. The world took on the mood of a dream. The wind on his cheeks, the daily commerce between common sense and mystery, so easy to sink into forever, so self-indulgent. Grains of sand between his toes whirled into orbit, he stumbled home drunk with insomnia to sit near the window Sid tumbled through. A gull dropped from the morning sun, wings on fire, face wrinkled and human, spotted with newborn blood. The hypnotic pattern of shadows swirled like curtains, splashes, long dizzy falls. His phone was an unanswered cry from another world, the endless horizon of possible human contact so terrifying he ran great distances, ate well to survive whatever was happening, to fix on the cruelty of the world, and find purchase on the solid earth. There’s nothing else, above or below, he thought sternly. Ruth, Sidney, Stephanie took on the wavering forms of figures seen in lightning and rain, Ruth before him in early light, hair soaked, Stephanie at the door, eyes staring, but the doorway was empty. When he heard Sidney had recovered and was living with his mother, the life she wanted after all, it was time for Gilbert to leave. He decided to walk to see Sidney, say farewell to whatever remained of their friendship, punctuate the summer, but on the beach he stopped, wet sand between his toes. He couldn’t go on. He stared at the ocean, his toes, fingers, the light springy hairs on the back of one hand. Who was he? What was this stuff?

  Only breath and the body matters, he told himself, discipline. What else is there? What else can there be besides the will except for soft sinking marshland and the bottomless stories of the ocean where everyone drowns without beginning or end? Think of the body, he demanded of himself, but at Stephanie’s cabin, where he walked without knowing it, he was breathing hard, not right with the world.

  He was alone, too grievously alone for any theory to make sense.

  The door opened, Stephanie stepped to the porch. With her hair pulled back, she looked something like Ruth, Gilbert thought. “Hello. You want that set of books?”

  “No.”

  “Well. What then?” She turned from him to face the dunes, with their driftwood, their tides, their winds perpetually funneling at a slant into the earth, their sentimental sand castles that washed away each morning, their black moonlit waves that glinted bright in the sun like grain to be walked on and harvested. “Cat got your tongue?” she said. Then she turned to face him and he felt as though he was losing himself in her stare. Neither blinked, and for just a moment the crash and cradlerock of surf rose to meet them both, and they listened together to the watery compass of time.

  INCOMING ROUNDS

  The plant conservatory outside the gates of the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago was glassy-green and moldy, as alien to the highrises west of the park as a pagan temple. Inside, in hot air full of moist, clinging things, Lydia stared at the unwrinkled stillness of a small pond. Stubbled buildings, she thought, a phrase from some waking dream. She was pregnant not with child but with fat lopsided
fears. Stubbled buildings, muggers, shave them all away. They could be anywhere, on the lakefront, behind newspapers, over chessboards, could stroll to her daughter Robin’s school, put out their cigarettes and eat the child right up, make her disappear to the size of a grainy photograph taped to a light post. She would be too frightened to scream.

  Her husband Bruce, in a waist-length Army jacket and aviator shades, was sermonizing the plants in a rapid-fire voice. “Owning a gun is a form of Buddhism,” he said, scratching the three-day growth on his face. “The vets who became Buddhists were the best killers, better than Special Forces.” Ahead, Robin disappeared into a roomful of ferns. “Guns and Buddhism,” Lydia said, manic with caffeine. “This is wonderful. Why don’t you talk about Mars? Why don’t you say the moon is green?” She shook dollops of humidity from her forehead. “Why don’t you just leave now instead of next week?”

  “You’re taking this wrong, Lydia. Some time apart will do us good. I’ll study murals, learn graffiti, do some writing. We can both breathe.” Bruce was gathering material for a book on WPA murals and public street art in Chicago and New York.

  “You jerk. You just want an easy way out.”

  He stopped in his tracks. “That’s your trick, babe,” he said, and crouched over an untied shoestring. “You’re the one who thinks anything more risky than living inside a paperweight is the dungeon, but I don’t take the easy way out. No sir, not me. Time enough in the grave for that.” Under the force of his anger, Lydia covered her face below the eyes with one hand, as though donning a surgical mask. “That’s it,” she mumbled, “snap your fingers, change your mind.”