My grandmother wept for the bird. I feigned grief and gave her a big hug. I buried Tanis in the backyard, under the big oak tree we have out there. I said a few words because it was my understanding that when a pet died you were supposed to say a few words. My little sister, seven at the time, helped dig the hole.
“So long, Tanis,” I said. Elissa stood beside me holding the shovel. “Your namesake led a confused life, uncertain of who he was, where he belonged. You did, too. Some called you Tanis. Some called you Pretty Boy. There wasn’t enough time for you to let us know which one you liked better.”
My parents must’ve thought I was really upset about the bird croaking, because not long after, I found another parakeet living in Tanis’s cage. My grandmother whistled and fed the new bird little pieces of lettuce, made faces like she was trying to communicate with it telepathically.
“You’re a lucky bird,” she shrieked. “That’s right. A very lucky bird indeed. What should we call our new friend?”
“Tanis Two?” I suggested. It didn’t matter.
“Ugh,” my grandmother said. “No. That won’t do at all.”
She whistled a song and the bird cheeped its head off.
“We’ll call him Lucky Boy,” she exclaimed suddenly, as if a lightbulb had screwed itself into her brain.
“Why is he so lucky?”
“Because Pretty Boy got sick and passed away,” my grandmother said solemnly. “But Lucky Boy will live a long, healthy life.”
I rolled my eyes, went upstairs to the computer.
A few weeks went by and Lucky Boy’s feathers started to fall out. It wasn’t long before I dug a second hole under the oak tree and said a few words for him.
Ten years later, when I learned my father had cancer, I cried. It was on a ramp leading down into the Quik park on Seventy-First, near the building where we’d waited for the MRI results. I leaned against a wall and wept. People walking by slowed to look at me. I took my sunglasses off, wiped my eyes. Chip stood a few feet away, pretending to be waiting for the attendant.
My father was up on the sidewalk. I could see his outline against the sun. Once, he had traveled to Cambodia and gone in a canoe up the Mekong River. Once, he had built our deck with his bare hands.
The next day at work I am in a better mood because it is Friday. We are almost officially on vacation. During story time I sit on a child-size stool and read to a group of retards about a little bird born with only one wing. Broken Bird, he is called, and he is shunned by his friends and family. He flees to the city to live a life of depressed solitude. He meets another bird there that has also been cursed with only one wing. He thought he was the only one. She thought she was the only one. They fall in love and have normal birds as offspring. As I read, Tyrone, a four-year-old with Asperger’s syndrome, gets sick and throws up on Arham.
<< 5 >>
Wally and I have gotten hold of some Vicodin.
David Liebman, our friend, our suburban compatriot, our fellow immature, slacking BA holder, has to have knee surgery. Doctors remove cartilage from one of his legs, put it in a culture, grow it, skillfully implant it in his other leg. Afterward he is required to lie around on the couch for weeks, self-medicating and doing various leg stretches. He is issued this bizarre contraption: the Painease 5000, a lattice of flexible bracing mounted on a motorized plastic frame. It straps to his leg, sprockets and cogs meshing together, forcing his knee to slowly bend, slowly release, slowly bend, slowly release, ad nauseam. To complicate matters further, his parents have foolishly planned a vacation for the week immediately following David’s voyage under the scalpel. Isaac and Joan, a psychiatrist and divorce lawyer respectively, deem Wally and me responsible enough to care for David in their absence, to aid in his recovery. His father has procured copious amber pill bottles in David’s name to keep his pain at bay.
“I’ve spoken to the Futtermans across the street,” Isaac tells us. “They said you’re welcome to use their shower. It has a bench, so David won’t have to stand.”
We are sprawled on the floor, not paying attention, engrossed in a History Channel piece connecting Nazi Germany to the rise of Saddam Hussein. It is a Tuesday.
“The numbers where we’ll be are on the fridge,” Joan says. “Oh, and you can always call Grandma Emmy in Peekskill. In case there’s an emergency.”
“David?” Isaac asks. “Are you listening to us?”
“Yeah, Dad,” David says, but it’s hard to hear over the sound of the TV. Rommel is racing tanks across North Africa. Then they are gone.
The Painease 5000 whirs and groans, leeched to David’s leg like a robotic parasite, his knee flexing and unflexing at an excruciatingly slow pace.
“Does it hurt?” I ask him.
“Only if I stop taking the pills,” he says, his eyes fluttering with sleep.
“Which ones?”
“Any of them,” he says with a gesture like he is waving good-bye to the room. His mouth hangs open and his breathing eases. He drifts off.
I gather up the bottles that are scattered across the rug and read the labels one by one, nodding with satisfaction. I arrange them in a line like little pain-relieving soldiers. I imagine myself as a pharmacist, doling out pills to people in agony, people in need. I imagine myself working in a medevac tent during World War II. I am in charge of medicating recent amputees, keeping them cognizant, keeping them pain-free. Or better yet, I am in charge of selecting who becomes an amputee. Which limbs are too far gone.
“I’d make a good pharmacist,” I say aloud to no one.
“I’d make a good tail gunner,” Wally says, his hands grasping imaginary guns. He makes cannon noises with his mouth. On television, a man in a well-tailored suit stands in front of a wall-size map of Iraq.
“According to biographers, Saddam never forgot the tensions within the first Baathist government,” he says, his accent thick, British. He knows things we don’t.
Wally and I last about fifteen minutes. We tire of the television, the drab curtains David’s mother has chosen to match the upholstery, the ticking of the grandfather clock. I sneak a bottle into my pocket. We leave.
It doesn’t take long for the pills to kick in. The Vicodin is a gateway to a strange world where everything slows, gears down, and we hear things no one else can. We walk through the strip mall, travelers lost in a beautiful dream, giddy and elated, though we don’t know why. There is an air of superiority in our movements. I am somehow immune to the problems of the working world. I am above it all. I don’t have to deal with my family’s issues. Anyone’s issues. It is spring break. I have the week off. We go to Carvel, eat ice cream out of waffle cones, and imagine the girls behind the counter want our phone numbers.
I ask Wally to drive. He has blond hair, blue eyes. He is of Polish descent. Since his graduation from a similar small northeastern liberal arts college, he has staunchly refused to seek employment. His parents pay his loans. He mooches drugs off everyone and is, all in all, heading down a much darker path than me. He seems to never think about the future. I tend to think of nothing but.
The hatchback bounces along Route 9. We shoot over the Tappan Zee toward Nyack, heading for Harriman State Park. We seem to be traveling at a gingerly pace, as if Wally wants to capture every detail of highway asphalt passing beneath us.
“There’re a lot of hawks in the sky today,” I say, pressing a finger to the window, tilting my head back. “It’s unsettling.”
They circle above the car like dive-bombers, darting and swooping from the limbs of trees, avian acrobats swimming through air. I am convinced they are just biding their time, hatching a plot to attack us. I study the trees, trying to get a jump on the birds.
“I’ll get the jump on these birds,” I say, reassuring Wally. “You just get us to the woods. I’ll worry about the birds.”
“I’m not worried about the birds,” Wally says.
Then my mood shifts completely. I feel joyous, bubbly. I’m not so much concerned with sinister
birds. I reevaluate the trees. I look for myself in their boughs, search for humanity in those myriad leaves. As if I might discover the components of human emotion.
We park near some other cars, half in a ditch, half on the street. Traipsing over fallen trees and boulders, we follow a broken path to the center of a large limestone outcropping overlooking the lake. I collect five rocks and throw them, one by one, into the black water. I look at my face in the ripples.
“This is the best Tuesday of my life,” Wally says to no one.
I sit. I lean back. I watch the wind tear across the lake. Far away, on the other side, I think I can see a cave.
By a complete stroke of grand luck, whimsy, we encounter Doug M. and his troop of live-action role players: a bunch of guys who obsess over Dungeons & Dragons and use terms like “gem mint condition.” We know they are worse off than we are. Bigger losers than Wally or I can ever hope to be. While we have temporarily retrograded back to our high school selves, they will stay this way forever. It is comforting to be around them sometimes.
“Oh,” Wally says. He is beaming, stumbling awkwardly to his feet, clutching a shrub for support. “The LARPers are here. Look at them.” He is bursting with emotion.
I swivel on my limestone seat and feel it, too. I am speechless.
A dozen men, boys, young adults, creep from behind bushes, appearing amid the foliage where seconds earlier they had not been. Dressed in chain mail hauberks, horned Viking helmets, fur loincloths, velvety cloaks adorned with crescent moons, monk robes. They carry battle-axes, bludgeons, quarterstaffs, weighty sabers, morning stars, lances, rondels. It is magnificent to behold. They speak like kings to each other. They are kings. They sparkle. They are no longer the losers I so frequently dub them.
As Wally and I look on, the warriors split into two distinct groups and square off, hesitantly waving their weapons in the air. They eye each other with fierce delight. I am not exactly sure what is happening, but it is clear a battle is taking shape before us.
“Quickly, or I’ll be forced to annihilate you all!” I hear one of them yell: an oversize collegiate with a Prince Valiant haircut and an enormous sword. He shouts with a fake accent, his voice ringing out above the wind. “Draw your blade. I can see in your eyes you have a warrior’s strength!” he thunders.
Doug M., dressed like a knight, lifts the hinged visor on his rusty basinet and shouts back: “But not a warrior’s courage!”
“Draw your blade!”
“Your father sent us here to rescue you,” one of the wizards shrieks suddenly from a few paces behind everything. He steps forward. His staff has a red orb taped to the top of it. Clearly battery powered, it is blinking like a traffic light. “You are in the embassy of the royal city.” His voice is high, effeminate, wizardly.
“I shall not draw my blade against the lord,” Doug M. responds.
“Hey, Doug,” Wally calls out. “You gonna be at that warehouse party tonight?”
“This is not real,” the wizard warns, waving his staff. The orb jiggles, threatens to fall off.
“You’ll draw your blade against all the lords of the White City!” Prince Valiant says. His minions jitter at his side, waiting for commands.
“If I must,” the wizard says, “I will use my lightning-bolt spell.”
“Coward!” someone yells out of nowhere. “Scum!”
“I am a priest of the light!” the wizard protests. His eyes are afraid. They dance from face to face. I have no sympathy for him.
“Draw your blade!” Prince Valiant says.
“No!” Doug M. yells. It doesn’t matter.
Prince Valiant rushes forward, his mop of hair bouncing across his forehead.
“They draw against us,” he screams. “Destroy them all!”
I gasp and try to step backward as the warriors clash. My body is so alive it can’t move.
It all seems very real. Death is surely imminent, though the weapons make no sound as the warriors swat at each other.
“Kill the evil!” someone shouts.
“Ow, Julian! That hurt!”
“Suck it up, Kurt!”
“Kill the evil!”
“Run away!”
“Attack!”
The dialogue disintegrates into a jumbled mess of screams and laughter and indecipherable gibberish. The wizard prances about, calling out, “Lightning bolt. Lightning bolt.” The only ones who seem to stay in character are Prince Valiant and Doug M.
I turn to Wally. His eyes are wide, flat stones.
“As far as I can tell,” I say, holding a finger up, “Doug M. is some kind of king and he’s trying to protect that lady from those elves over there that want to take her captive.”
“I don’t see any lady,” Wally says, squinting in the sunlight.
“She’s there,” I say. “Her name is Gretchen or Gretel or something. I saw her once at the public pool. She’d fallen on the pavement outside the snack shack and there was a hole in her head.”
“Is she attractive?” Wally questions, his voice arcing out over the lake behind us. I can almost see the words.
“I don’t know,” I say. “She wears a hat to cover the hole.” I never understood this hat. Why cover the one thing that makes you unique? Webbed feet? A cause for celebration. Giant ears? Beautiful. A lazy eye that wanders and travels along its own lines of vision? Something to be proud of. Six fingers. Auxiliary nipples. Wally and I lack that sort of defining characteristic. Our faces are blandish, nebbishy, standoffish, a thousand “ishes” that keep us in the background, blurred. Our bodies are forgettable. We go to parties and the next day no one can remember having seen us there.
The battle ends just as it began. The role-playing knights, the kings and wizards, mages and peasant farmers, the Vikings, the noblemen, retreat into the woods, following paths to their parents’ cars. They drive off in tandem, a funeral procession back to whatever painful realities await them. I hear catcalls, hooting, hollering. Someone wants to know where the “mead celebration” will be taking place. Wally and I nod to each other as the sun dips below the trees.
<< 6 >>
We have time to kill before the party, so Wally and I swing by David’s to make sure he’s still breathing. We find him right where we left him, splayed out on the couch in what appears at first glance to be a coma, watching a documentary on the cosmos, entitled Cosmos.
“I’ve seen this,” I tell him. “Carl Sagan narrates. It’s thirteen hours long.”
“Everything’s been seen before by someone,” David says, narrowing his eyes to little slits so he can scrutinize our faces.
“What does that mean?” Wally asks.
“Don’t listen to me. I’m very emotional right now.”
“Is it the pain?” I ask. “Are you medicating?”
“Do you need anything?” Wally asks.
“It’s the pain, isn’t it?” I ask. “We’ve had an exhilarating day.”
“I could use some water,” David says. “It takes me forever to get to the kitchen on my own.”
“Okay, great,” Wally says. “Water. Got it. Great. Coming right up.”
The Vicodin torpor has worn off at this point. My limbs have come back to me, intact. Wally returns with a glass.
“Should we stay with him?”
I watch as a meteor hurls through space and collides with another meteor.
“He’ll be fine,” I say.
I pilot the hatchback to 7-Eleven for the purchasing of beers. We arrive at the warehouse just after nightfall. Part of an eerie industrial park. Abandoned and unused, seated behind the railroad tracks on the outskirts of Oscawana. I don’t know what adventurous soul first discovered the spot, but over time it has become a regular destination for mischievous denizens of the county. The place of choice for secret rendezvous, displaced college frat parties, meetings of clandestine organizations, unbridled romantic exploration. For many, it is the wellspring of regret. Wally and I often waste idle daylight hours here smoking weed and wa
ndering around, climbing the dilapidated infrastructure and breaking windowpanes. It was here I took Patti Reynolds behind a gravel pile one summer during college. I put my hand down her pants.
Cars are everywhere, parked at odd angles. Headlight beams crisscross, casting yellow light on the people, the dirt. Wally and I awkwardly make our way through the crowd. I bump into more than a few people. I recognize many faces from the woods. Where earlier they had been regal, inspiring even, now they are unremarkable. Only Doug M. retains any sort of glorious air. Wally and I join him. He is perched on the hood of his 1971 Chevy Nova, arms folded across his chest. Even though he no longer wears a basinet and his broadsword is now a pink wine cooler, he still looks kingly. A massive, rotund man with a wild crown of bushy hair. I imagine trumpet fanfare playing when he enters a room. Gretchen or Gretel or whatever her name is stands nearby, half lurking in the shadows, a baseball cap pulled down over her eyes.
“It’s Hole in the Head,” I whisper to Wally as we drop our six-pack into the cooler and exhume colder cans from the bottom.
“That was some battle today in the woods,” Wally says.
“Yes, it was,” Doug M. says. He finishes the last of his wine cooler in one sip and tosses the empty bottle over his shoulder with a casual elegance. “Gabby was almost slain,” he says.
“Gabby,” I say, her true name returning to me.
“What?” she says, stepping out of the shadows. She tilts her head back so her big eyes can peer right at us all. I see the sight of her visibly shakes Wally. Fear comes into his face.
“Nothing,” I say quickly, stifling a laugh. I try to sip some beer and look natural. “I was just saying your name, is all.”
“What about my name?” she asks.
“Take it easy,” Doug M. tells her out of the side of his mouth.
“It’s crowded tonight,” Wally says.
“Baseball game over in Fishkill.” Doug M. nods. “High school kids celebrating the victory.”
“I saw you once,” I say to Gabby. “At the public pool.”
The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac Page 4