by Lewis Shiner
I sat down. “Hey, Pop.”
“Hey there, Junior.”
He looked about fifty. His hair was completely dark, even at the temples, and cut fairly short. He wore a flannel shirt with a brown-checked pattern, buttoned to the neck, and khaki pants. Benny Goodman’s “Please Don’t Be That Way” played in the distance. It brought back countless Saturday mornings when I would wake up to the sound of the big bands. Music meant my father was in a good mood. I would put on my bathrobe and find him in the front room with his stamp collection, or maybe just listening.
No wonder I’d grown up loving music. I remembered Maynard Ferguson’s “Hot Canary” and Perez Prado’s “Cherry Pink,” my first two records, which I used to listen to over and over. They went back to before I was in school, before I could even work the record player by myself.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“I’m dead, Pop. Just like you.”
“Figures. What did you do, walk in front of a truck?”
“Funny,” I said. “Very funny.” Lady sprawled at my feet and panted happily. The song ended and Helen Forest sang “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön.”
“Did you ever amount to anything?” my father asked. “Or were you still farting around fixing record players?”
“Fixing record players is not so bad. This music sounds really good, Dad. I haven’t heard it in years. I miss it.”
“You have all of my old records. You could listen to them if you want.”
“Mom has them.”
“Unh.” He stared off into the distance. The impression he gave was that he was listening to the music first and the conversation was a distant second. One ankle rested on the other knee. There were worn vinyl house shoes on his feet.
I saw then that he was exactly the same as he’d ever been. I saw that jokes and arguments were the only language we’d ever had. There were no words for anything personal. Just because we were both dead was no reason for that to change.
Except that we were both going to be dead forever and forever was too long to keep it all closed off inside me. “You have to talk to me,” I said.
“Have to?”
“I want to know what happened to you. At the end. When you went over the edge. I need to know what you were thinking.”
“You want the truth? I don’t really remember.”
“But what about me? Were you thinking of me at all?”
“No, not really.”
“Did you ever think of me?”
“Sure I did.”
“What? What did you think of me?”
“I don’t know. I suppose you were all right, for a kid.”
I remembered dream after dream where I would hit him and kick him, stalk him with weapons, bash him with rocks. This would be the point, I thought, where the violence would start. Instead I said, “There’s things I never got to tell you when you were alive. Like when you had your heart attack, back when I was in high school. For months before it happened I had dreams about you, about you dying. Usually in a car wreck.” I looked down at the grass, at Lady lying there, at the black underside of her tongue. “The dreams made me feel good. I felt guilty for it, but they made me feel good. I liked the idea of you dying. I liked the idea because I hated you. I never got to say that to you.”
I half expected him to pull back into one of his sulks. Instead he said, “So what do you want, a medal?”
“I…” I felt like I was on the edge of something, but I didn’t know how to break through. “I…”
“Ay yi yi yi yi,” my father said. “You were always one for noises. When you were a little kid you were always going ‘but but but but but.’”
“‘Just like a motorboat,’” I said, finishing it for him. “Remember the kee birds? You always used to say, ‘It’s so cold the kee birds are out.’”
“Kee,” my father said. “Kee, kee, kee, kee-rist it’s cold.”
“So why did you have to be like you were? Why didn’t we ever play catch, or go down to the playground and shoot some baskets, like other kids did with their fathers?”
“You didn’t want to. You were always a weird kid.”
“No,” I said. “No, I’m sorry, but I don’t believe you. I don’t believe that if you came to me and said, ‘Let’s go play some catch,’ that I wouldn’t have crawled on my knees through broken glass to do it. I don’t believe you.”
“Believe what you want.”
“It didn’t have to be that way, goddamnit! I was just a little kid!” I reached in my back pocket and took out the photograph that I knew would be there. It was the picture of the three of us, my father, me, my mother, sitting on that bench in Laredo. “I was just a sweet little kid who didn’t know any better. Look at me, I’m right here in this picture. Why couldn’t you play catch with me?” I held it up to his face. “With this sweet little kid, right here in this picture? Why did everything have to be a competition? Why did you try to run all my friends off? Why couldn’t you ever tell me you were proud of me? Why couldn’t you have put my goddamned doll in the trunk, and not driven away and left it there on the side of the goddamned road?”
He looked down at Lady and wrinkled his nose. “Jesus, that dog still stinks. It’s not even a real dog, it’s some kind of goddamn phantom dog, and it still smells like hell.”
“Listen to me, goddamn you! We’re not talking about the dog! We’re talking about you and me, understand? You and me.”
“Oh, grow up.”
I got up, my legs trembling so hard I could barely stand. “No,” I said. I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. All I wanted was for him to put his arms around me, but I was not going to ask him for it. “You grow up,” I said. “You grow up.”
Finally he looked at me. He looked me right in the face and I saw nothing there but fear and loneliness.
“Let go,” he said.
He didn’t mean my hands. “I can’t,” I said, and finally the tears came. “I can’t let go.”
“Then don’t,” he said. “Suit yourself. But don’t come crying to me if it doesn’t work out.”
He looked away again. I dropped to my knees. Something tore loose inside me. The music was suddenly louder. I couldn’t think for the music that filled my head. It came from down the path, back the way I’d come. Everything that had seemed so distant and painless exploded in my head. Lori, Elizabeth, Jimi. Vomiting milk up onto my shirt, Boy Baby abandoned beside the road, the Duotones in the band shell without me. Lady sat up and howled from deep inside her chest.
“And do something with your goddamn dog, will you?” my father said.
I sank into the earth and the trees arched over me into a dark green tunnel. I was falling then, and I felt the wind on my face. Then I felt nothing at all.
c h a p t e r 1 0
RAY
I opened my eyes. I was in a hospital. My mother sat in a chair in the corner, working a puzzle in a crossword magazine.
“Mom?” I said.
She hurried over to put her arms around me. “Oh thank God,” she said. “Thank God.”
I was in bad shape. It was hard to lift my arms and the air whistled as it went in and out of my lungs. I had bruises and IV tracks on my arms. I was calm, though. I had no desire to get out of bed or do anything but lie and look at the trees outside my window.
“What happened?” I asked.
“You’ve been in a coma for over a week.” The word “again” was implied. “You had a heart attack in the ambulance that brought you here. Your heart stopped and you were legally dead for a minute and a half. It’s a miracle you’re alive at all.”
“I remember dying,” I said.
“I’d better ring for the doctor.”
“Fine. Whatever.”
That night I tried to go back again. Sort of. It’s hard to explain. I put it together in my mind, London in 1970 first, then L.A. in 1966 when that didn’t work. Not that I wanted to go, exactly. I wanted to open the door, to see if those places were still on th
e other side. I had to know if I could still do it.
I couldn’t. Or maybe I didn’t want to go badly enough, or I was too scared. In any case it didn’t happen, and when it didn’t I felt only relief.
It was Elizabeth who found me, it turned out. She got concerned when I never answered any of her messages. Mom told her I was in California, so she called Graham and found out I wasn’t. She came over and pounded on my door for a while and then let herself in. She found me on the living room floor, unconscious, and called EMS, then my mother. I was on my way to St. David’s when I died on them. They gave me CPR and a shot of adrenaline and that got me started again. Which was a good thing, I learned, because they don’t have electric defib machines on ambulances, there’s no way to ground them.
Elizabeth bowed out when my mother got there. They kept me in ICU overnight, then moved me to a private room. I lay in a coma for a week and then, with no warning, simply woke up.
They let me walk around after a couple of days. I didn’t want to talk to anybody about what had happened. They hadn’t been there, they couldn’t possibly understand. All I had to know was whether or not Brian Wilson was still alive. I called a local radio station and they said yes, he was alive and more or less well. So I don’t have that to feel guilty about, not in this world, anyway.
I didn’t talk and I wasn’t interested in TV. I ate what I could. The food tasted good, it was just that I filled up so quickly.
Mom had a jam box there that used to be my father’s. One of the tapes she brought was the Goodman Carnegie Hall concert, recorded off those same old green-label Columbia LPs my father used to listen to. She told me she’d played it her first day there, but not since. I let her think I was humoring her when I asked her to play it again.
On Wednesday, my third day out of the coma, Elizabeth called my mother and had her ask if it was okay to come by. I said it would be fine. She showed up an hour later, with flowers. She kissed me on the cheek and then sat down across the room. My mother went to the cafeteria and left us alone.
“I guess you saved my life,” I said. “Pretty weird, huh?”
“When I told Frances about it, she said I should have let you die. That that’s what she would have done.” She smiled to show she meant no harm. “I don’t hate you, Ray. You know that. Whatever else has happened between us, you know I don’t hate you.”
“No,” I said.
“And I hope one day you can stop hating me.”
“I don’t hate you.”
Elizabeth made a sound.
“Look,” I said, “I won’t pretend I wasn’t hard to live with. I was pretty boxed up. But that Ray died. Now I’m here, and I don’t know what I feel. I don’t feel a lot, if you want to know the truth. But I don’t hate anybody, and I for sure don’t hate you.”
We talked about school and she told me her lawyer had worked up a preliminary draft of a property settlement. Whenever I felt up to it. I told her to go ahead and send it to the house.
“There’s one more thing,” she said. “This is hard. Maybe I should do it another time.”
“Just tell me,” I said.
“Well. It’s that guy I’ve been seeing. It looks pretty serious.” I nodded encouragement. “It happened so fast, I’m scared to trust it. But it seems really…really good.”
“I’m happy for you,” I said. “Really.”
“I’ll probably give up my apartment at the end of this month. I mean, we’re already pretty much living together. There’s no point in…anyway.” She got out a notebook and wrote a few lines and tore out the page. “Here’s the address and phone number. You can call me, you know. Whenever. Any time.”
She touched my hand, told me to say goodbye to my mother for her, and left. I had this nagging sense that I had disappointed her again. That she would have liked to see it hurt me at least a little. It did hurt: partly the lost years, mostly that Elizabeth had somebody and I didn’t. I just didn’t want to show it.
By the time my mother got back the hurt had faded and the conversation felt like no more than a period after a sentence. Marking, finally, the end.
When I was in Nashville I tried for a month to sleep on a split shift, three to seven, A.M. and P.M. both. It was the only way to get eight hours’ sleep when band practice lasted until two every night and I had an eight o’clock class every morning. I began to dream in intense, vivid detail. I started a journal and the first thing I noticed was that I died at the end of every dream.
In one dream I’m sitting in a bar when I start choking to death. I woke up in my dorm room, in my bed, where I should have been. Only I was still choking. I fell out of bed and crawled toward the door, and as soon as I touched the door handle I woke up again; back in my dorm room, back in my bed.
I never completely got over the feeling that I’d woken up too many times, that the world where I ended up was not the same as the one where I’d started. That’s how it was with dying. I’ve seen worlds where Brian Wilson finished Smile and Jimi Hendrix woke up on September 18. I’ve been dead and seen an afterlife. What does “reality” mean to me?
When they let me out of the hospital it was conditional on my seeing a therapist twice a week. My mother asked if I wanted her to stay on for a few days and I said yes. I assumed it was what she needed to hear. Once it was said, though, I realized it was true. I wasn’t ready to be alone.
My first night back in the house I called Lori. It was ten o’clock and my mother had already gone to bed. It wasn’t something I thought about for a long time, I just needed to hear her voice. My luck was good and she was there alone.
“I miss you,” I said.
“I’ve been thinking about you too.”
“What were you thinking?”
“I was worried. I had this feeling something was wrong.”
“Yeah, well, there was. There is.” I told her I’d tried to rescue another album, that I’d had a heart attack, that it had nearly killed me.
She said, “Oh God.”
“Lori?”
“This is so scary.” She was crying. “Are you going to be okay?”
“They say I’ll be fine. I have to take it easy. They’ve got me on some drugs and I have a diet and an exercise program and all that. There’s nothing to be worried about.”
“I want to be with you.”
It was what I’d been waiting to hear. I took a breath and said, “Then come.”
“You know it’s not that easy. If I came up there it would be…there would be no way to go back.”
“Exactly.”
“This is not a good week. Tom got into some fire coral and I’ve been taking the tour out. If I left he’d have to refund their money and it would probably wipe him out.”
At the same time that her words cut me, the sound of her voice made me dizzy. I could see her mouth and deep blue eyes, the crisscross tan lines on her back. I wanted to hold her and smell the coconut oil on her skin. “There’s never going to be a good time to leave him. You can always find a reason to stay. You’re going to have to just decide and do it.” The silence went on and on.
“What?” I said. “What are you thinking?”
“There’s only one reason I’ll ever leave him, and that’s because I’m ready to go. Just like there’s only one reason to stay, which is that I’m not ready yet.”
“When will you? Be ready?”
“I don’t know that, I can’t tell you. You want hard-and-fast answers, and I haven’t got them.”
“Do you love me? Because if you love me it seems like you would want to be with me.”
“I do want to be with you. I already told you that. And yes, okay, I do love you. But if you’re going to take the gloves off, then there’s a couple of things I have to ask you. Are you so sure you know what you want? Do you love me or are you just in love with the idea of me? Have you seized on me to replace Elizabeth because you have to have a woman in your life at all times? How long ago did she leave?”
“Almost three months.
”
“Three months. That’s not a hell of a long time. And it sounds like you haven’t stopped long enough to think. So tell me. How long have you ever gone without being involved with somebody?”
There was another long silence, mine this time.
“Ray, that wasn’t a rhetorical question. I’d like an answer.”
“Six months.”
“So if I don’t show up in six months, maybe you’ll have found somebody else.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want anybody else. But that’s not the point, is it? Look what you’re asking me. You want me to just wait here for you, on the off chance that you might leave Tom. Meanwhile you’ve got him and I’m up here all alone.”
“You think I don’t care about you, but I do. More than you realize. There are a lot of people that care for you. You don’t want to hear this, but your father talked about you when he was down here. He was proud of you, he thought it was great that you hung up your corporate job to start your own business. He couldn’t say it to your face, but he talked about you to everybody else.”
“Could we leave my father out of this? We’re talking about you and me.”
“I don’t think we can leave your father out of it. And I think maybe being alone might be the best thing you could do right now. Not for my sake. For yours.”
I should have cried. I mean, that’s been my reaction lately when I feel persecuted. It always used to get me what I want. But this time I was too mad. Mad and bitter and scared of something, though I couldn’t say what.
The silence went on for at least a minute, maybe two. I wanted her to offer some kind of hope or consolation. She made me ask for it. “Will you call me sometime? Collect?”
“Yes. I will.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.” Then, “I love you, Ray. You have to believe that.”
“I love you too. But I don’t know what I believe anymore.”
“I have to go. Will you promise to take care of yourself?”
“Yes. I promise. Tell me you love me one more time, and I’ll let you go.”