“I haven’t been able to work.”
“Do you enjoy your work?”
“You know I work for some bad guys.”
“Why do you?”
“Is family.”
“What do you do at work?”
“I see that all the bad guys play well with each other.”
Vladimir crossed his legs, untied his shoe, and retied it. Recrossed his legs and did the other shoe. I asked him what was on his mind right now.
“My dream from last night.” He uncrossed his legs and sat back on the couch. “Was with a large, headless woman. She was naked and had pale, pinkish skin, smooth and hairless like a baby. She was relaxing on a gray sofa. Each of her breasts was the head of a pig.” He looked at me.
I said, “What do you think it means?”
“The pigs were smiling at me.”
I asked him if he thought about his future.
“Never. It will come whether I think about it or not.”
I asked him what he admired about people, and he told me a strong will, physical strength, and silence. I explained that it might be difficult to change his thoughts and feelings, but that it would be easier to change his behavior, and when behavior changes, the thoughts and feelings will follow.
He quoted Lyndon Johnson. “If you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” He smiled.
“Yes, that’s the idea. You feel better for that smile, don’t you?”
“I suppose.”
“So what is it you enjoy doing?”
“Eating blinis and shooting pistols.”
“Well, why not take Cerise out for blinis at Baikal and then off to Point & Shoot for target practice.”
He nodded. “Blinis calm me down; pistols pick me up.”
I told him he should maybe keep a notebook and write down what’s going on when he feels blue and when he feels like himself, when he’s content. Maybe that way he can understand the causes of his depression and avoid them. He told me never to write anything down, ever. When he was leaving I asked him about his throat. He smiled. “You should have seen the other guy.”
19
Every therapist has a therapist. Mine is Thalassa Xenakis. I talk with her when I need some reassembly, when I feel lost in dark woods and all that. Stress I can handle. Stress is what martinis are for. And there I generally follow my father’s advice: martinis are like breasts, one is not enough and three are too many. This is not a rule I’d share with Thalassa, necessarily.
Thalassa is semiretired. She sees me and a few other clients of long standing, does not accept insurance, credit cards, excessive whining, or personal checks. She rents out her big house on the Intracoastal to snowbirds in winter and South Americans in summer, and she lives in her own backyard, in a 356-square-foot bungalow she built by herself in eight months. She’s got a small kitchen, a full bath, a loft with a queen-sized futon mattress, a cozy living room where she meets her clients, and a lovely, intimate front porch.
We sat on the two brown leather chairs, a rattan tray between us on which Thalassa had set two tumblers of fresh lemonade. On the wall across from us hung a large beaded Haitian voodoo flag depicting a siren with a red fish in one hand, a white trumpet in the other. When I walked in Thalassa was reading the poems of Alan Dugan, and she read me the opening line of a poem she liked. “What’s the balm / for a dying life, / dope, drink, or Christ, / is there one?” And then she said, “Talk to me, Wylie.” We’d been on a first-name basis since my first session at her old office on Gumbo Limbo, years ago, around the time of Cameron’s death, when I introduced myself and called her Dr. Xenakis. She said, “Call me Thalassa, Melville.”
I put down my lemonade and said, “I’m finding it hard to focus lately.”
“Why?”
“Myles is deteriorating. Venise is even more hysterical. I’m obsessed with a murder case. My friend Carlos is avoiding me. Phoebe’s moving away. I’m not doing my job as well as I should. All the distraction.” I watched Thalassa’s scribbled angelfish glide through the salt water in the aquarium.
“What do you need?”
“I don’t know that I need anything. I’ll survive. I’ll muddle along.”
Thalassa looked at the ceiling. “I’m hearing a lot of words, but no substance.”
“I guess what I want is, I don’t know, more control, maybe.”
“You guess?”
“I do.”
“Can you control your father’s health?”
“No.”
“Can you control Phoebe’s leaving?”
“Only if I can change the past. I keep thinking that soon I’ll be in Dad’s place, but there’ll be no dutiful child there to look after me.”
“Your abandonment issues.”
“And somebody is trying to kill me.”
Thalassa pressed her hands together as if in prayer and brought her fingertips to her lips. “You think someone is trying to kill you?” She raised her left eyebrow and nodded at my still-bandaged pinky. “One finger at a time?”
“I’m serious.” I explained what had been going on. “I’m not making this up.” I told her, yes, I had called the police, but the police, you see, were the problem.
“How do you feel right now?”
I stared at the angelfish as they carved their way through the water, swerving along the glass, rising to the surface, diving to the gravel, picking up pebbles, and spitting them out.
“I swear to God, Wylie, I’ll kill those fish if you don’t stop staring at them. I asked you how you felt.”
I was even a poor analysand. “I’m confused.”
“Confusion’s not a feeling. Confusion’s in your head. What’s in here?” She brought both fists to her gut. “Where are your metaphors, Wylie?”
Thalassa is fond of quoting Paul Valéry, saying that that which resembles nothing does not exist. I could have told her that I felt like her fish, swimming all day and going nowhere, but I didn’t want to further imperil the fish. So I closed my eyes to see what was there, and I saw myself as an exploding diagram with all my body parts at a distance from my body. Every muscle, bone, and organ was there on display and clearly labeled, but nothing was working. I told Thalassa I felt like the exploded man.
“Now we’re getting somewhere.” She smiled.
By the end of our session, we had concluded that:
•Perhaps I should spend my money on a bodyguard and not a therapist.
•Everything that we love vanishes (my abandonment issues).
•We cannot live without love.
•A vacation was in order—time to rest and recreate; and since I “could not” (me) or “would not” (Thalassa) leave my father in Venise’s care, he would have to tag along.
•I should do a cost-benefit analysis of my stubborn pursuit of equivocal justice.
•Guilt is the gravity weighing me down.
•I could sure use some buoyancy in my life (Django, Red, Bay, Patience—it’s a start).
•Guilt reflects my inflated sense of self-importance (“At least consider the possibility, Wylie”).
When Thalassa’s alarm went off, she stepped into the kitchen with our empty tumblers and returned with a chilled bottle of Pedro Romero amontillado and two sherry glasses. She poured; we toasted the end of the Everglades fires. She said, “You mentioned changing the past.”
“I did?”
“I’ve been thinking about this exact thing, about retrocausality. Can the present affect the past? Can the future affect the present?” She put down her glass. “If we imagine the future we want for ourselves and that imagined future causes us to strive to attain it—”
“But it’s not the actual future.”
“If we get what we imagined, it certainly is.”
I sipped the sherry and stared at the hardwood floor, trying to see my future in the grain. All I saw was myself at the end of a very long hallway, an open door ahead of me, and a dark room beyond the door.
“If you
revise your memories,” Thalassa said, “you change the past, and your clarified past will change your present. You remember what you’ve been trying so hard to forget—that awful time you left your lover, and you realize now that your leaving was hurtful, but not malicious, was not motivated by contempt or by gloom; you left to save your life, yes? You were terrified of waking up in thirty years and saying, I relinquished my dreams for this humdrum routine with this pleasant and contented person. And now you can unburden yourself of that grief and guilt and breathe again.”
I told her about nonlocality in the quantum world, a subject I’d gotten interested in when I played Ridley in Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood. I said, “If one particle can instantaneously affect another, even from the other side of the galaxy, if this can happen, then anything, time travel, anything at all, is possible. And then what happens to our stories? To narrative coherence? How do we help our clients shape their life stories?”
Thalassa said we’d still have stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, but maybe not in that order. We’d have plots, cause and effect, but maybe the effect precedes the cause. You’d be able to read a story backward or from the middle back to the start and ahead to the end at the same time. I’m not saying a thing to Inez.
20
Bay called and said he was happy to hear my adenoidal voice. He told me he’d heard from Open Mike, who’d heard from a reliable but anonymous source that I was dead.
“I’m not. Here, I’ll give you to Venise, who can verify.”
“There’s a body in your front yard.”
“No, there isn’t.”
“I’m telling you.”
“I’m on my way.” I hung up, excused myself, called Carlos, and told him what I’d just learned. He told me to meet him at the house. Melancholy is out of Carlos’s jurisdiction, but he knew about every deputy with the ESO.
Red did not see who it was coming up behind him. It was dusk, and he was cleaning up after trimming the bougainvilleas. His forearms were cut up despite the long-sleeved shirt I’d given him to wear that morning. He was listening to the radio when whoever it was walked up behind him and fired a bullet into the back of his head. Red was dead before he fell into the pile of thorny branches he was carrying. The shooter may have used a pistol suppressor. No one in the neighborhood heard a shot. Red lay there on what passes for a lawn for several hours before he was discovered by Jem Rowan, who was out walking his Airedale, Duncan. About the time the killing happened, I’d been at the playhouse auditioning for a role in a new play, Lobotomobile, which is about the real-life doctor who popularized the ten-minute transorbital lobotomy in the States in the forties and fifties. I was trying out for the part of one of the patients, a Mr. Felix Fortune, who was trying to confront the doctor, wanted to express his outrage and his shame, but couldn’t find the words. It’s a play about the arrogance of certainty, and God knows there’s a lot of that going around.
We stood outside my house, Bay and I, behind the crime scene tape, waiting for Carlos to finish his consultation with the lead detective on the case. Perdita Curry, wearing a teal jumpsuit and gold slingbacks, leaned against a squad car and whispered into the ear of a uniformed officer. She saw me, smiled, and waved. “This just keeps getting better and better,” she yelled.
Bay said, “She needs to get off of her knees and onto her meds.”
Carlos asked me if Red had any enemies.
“Not that I know of.”
“Who would want to kill him?”
“Maybe they thought he was me.”
“That’s unlikely.”
“Someone ran me down last week, remember?”
“We’re working on that.”
“Maybe he came back to finish the job.”
Bay said, “If they’re after you and find out they botched the job again, they’ll be back.”
I said, “Thank God for police protection.”
Carlos gave me a look. He said, “Don’t stay here tonight.”
“My cat.”
Carlos pointed to the pet carrier in the driveway. I walked over. Django was looking out the mesh window. I pressed my finger on his nose.
We went to Bay’s and set Django loose, and he went right for the terrarium and meowed at Grendel the bearded dragon. I called Venise and Oliver to say they’d have to watch Dad tonight, which was fine because he was already asleep at the kitchen table. I told Venise about Red. She said, “Who’s he?”
We sat on the dock and drank and talked about Red and what we thought might be the motive for the killing.
1.The killing was a senseless and random act of violence, some gangbanger’s initiation into the Melancholy Kings, maybe.
2.Red may have made an enemy back in his derelict life, someone he may not have even known about. You can’t leave the past behind, Bay said.
3.The killer thought Red was me. This was, I had to agree, a possibility, but wasn’t one I could reasonably consider. It was like your brain trying to conceive of its terminal unconsciousness.
Bay said, “You should be afraid.”
“I am.”
He plucked a stirrer out of the air and stirred his blue ruin, Sapphire and Schweppes. “How’s Myles?”
“He hardly eats. He’s pissed off a lot. He told Wolf Blitzer that Obama was never a liberal to start with. The only thing he cares about is not pissing off the rich.”
“You should bring Carlos with you when you go to your office tomorrow.”
That’s when I realized I had no clean clothes for work. Bay said we should get them. Technically, the yard’s the crime scene, not the house. We drank and drove.
I looked at Red’s gray camp pad and his tattered sleeping bag laid out on the tile floor of the Florida room, and at the bouquet of paintbrushes arranged in a cobalt-blue Fiestaware coffee mug on a footstool by the door. I’ll just leave everything where it is for now, I thought, in here and out at Camp Soileau. A half dozen of Red’s watercolors of the beach and the pier were clothespinned to a length of twine he’d strung across the room. I expected to feel, or I assumed I would feel, outrage at this moment, or some other violent emotion, but all I felt was surrender, and I was disappointed in myself. Red had salvaged his broken life, had left the gloom and squalor of Act I behind, and just as he was redefining himself as a painter and a humanitarian, some cold-blooded asshole killed him.
Bay asked me why I had my thermostat set to seventy-two. I said I kept it at eighty when I bothered to turn it on. It’s freezing in here, Bay said. Maybe Dad had turned it down this morning. I played the voice mail on my landline while I packed a few things in a Publix grocery sack: Hang up; hang up; hang up with whispered aside, which neither Bay nor I could decipher; Jack Roberts of Citizens wanting to speak with me regarding my flood and windstorm insurance policies. And then some guy affecting a soothing, high-pitched NPR radio voice: Took care of your little vagrant problem for you. No thanks necessary. Let’s just say you owe me one, and I plan to collect.
Bay said, “You really need to take a vacation, get out of town for a while. Until they nab whoever did this.”
“I’d have to reschedule appointments, take care of Dad, the cat. I’ll have to think about this.”
“Don’t think too slowly.”
I grabbed a bag of cat food and a box of Cat-Sip, a clean bowl, and a little red catnip mouse. I looked around the kitchen, and something in my field of vision seemed different, but I didn’t know what it was, so I stopped and stared. Something—but what?—was out of place. The junk drawer was open an inch or so, I noticed. I opened it fully. The box of blue-tip matches was there, and so were the chopsticks, the Kirin beer bottle opener, and the take-out menus from the local restaurants, but not snug in their rubber band and no longer in alphabetical order. The door to the microwave was ajar, not something I would do, and Red never used the microwave. Every item on the counter had been moved, it looked like, and then put back, but not quite correctly. I said, “Someone’s been here.”
“The co
ps were inside getting your cat and the carrier.”
“And snooping around, maybe.”
“Make sure your valuables are here.”
I got my computer, my extra set of keys, got my locked metal safe of important papers out of the freezer. We turned off all the lights except the one over the stove. Bay opened several drawers in the bedroom an inch, crumpled a dollar bill, and tossed it on the bedroom floor. He slipped pieces of paper between cabinet doors and the molding.
Django went to bed with Bay. I couldn’t sleep and was too distracted to read more than the same paragraph of a Georges Simenon novel over and over again. So I grabbed a glass and a bottle of Hennessy and went out back to sit on the dock. I felt more relaxed, but every few minutes I looked around and pricked up my ears. What I heard was the occasional airborne mullet slapping the water and the plangent squawking of a night heron. The light was on in the living room of the house directly across the canal. I could see a young couple having an animated conversation. The sliding glass doors were uncurtained and screened. I thought about my intruder and wondered if I was, in fact, meant to understand that I had had an uninvited visitor. Or maybe he just didn’t care enough to cover up his home invasion, as they called it on Channel 7. Back in the day when Cam would steal my car, he’d return it to the driveway with the gas tank empty, with cigarette butts and roaches in the ashtray, with condoms and Ziploc bags of twigs and seeds on the floor. And then he’d vociferously deny that he’d been anywhere near my car. That must have been a chapter in The Scumbag’s Manual: pitch a royal fit if you get caught, scream till you’re blue in the face, act like a persecuted innocent, and later forgive your mark for his unwarranted, unseemly, and vicious attack. You’re a compassionate man, after all.
I heard the man in the living room yell something about the woman’s enjoying Brazilian cock, and I knew he was not talking about barnyard fowl by the way he was standing over her and jabbing his finger at her face. I walked to the end of the dock. He was screaming now, and he grabbed her by the throat and lifted her out of her chair. I figured I could swim across the canal, but I knew that wouldn’t happen as soon as I imagined swimming into a barracuda or a severed head. The woman was crying. The dog chained to a pole in the yard began barking and lunging for the house. I yelled out, “Are you okay, ma’am?”
No Regrets, Coyote Page 20