In public.
Vegas, Daytona Beach, Panama City, and Cancún. Tour companies offer vacation packages, everything included except the booze, drugs, and condoms. Unfortunately, sallow-faced grunions from the Pacific Northwest, without the money to do anything else, often descend on the shores of High School Highville and take over, bringing their booze, drugs, and condoms with them.
So much for Easter eggs.
It’s low tide and Twom and I walk the edge of the surf, staying as far away as possible from the drunken college morons farther up on the beach. Guys wearing board shorts so low their pubic hair is showing keep calling for tramp-stamped girls in Brazilian-cut bikinis to flash their tits. A sound system is blaring. There’s the smell of pot in the air.
Twom doesn’t look good. The scabs are gone but his face is tired and drawn and not quite his own. Twom’s grandmother paid for new front teeth but they don’t look right in Twom’s mouth. Too white, too straight, too perfect. There’s still blood in the corner of one eye. The doctors aren’t sure if it will ever go away.
“Montebello’s out of town for a week,” says Twom. “The whole family. Hawaii.”
“So?” I say.
“So I say we go in and trash the place.”
This totally stops me in my tracks. “I didn’t hear you say that,” I say.
“You want I should say it again?” says Twom.
“Last time was the last time,” I say.
“Which is what you said last time. Ephraim’s in. Dee is in. That leaves you.”
“I don’t need this,” I say, and I turn to walk away. Twom circles and steps in front of me. I try to move around him. He doesn’t let me.
“You sleeping much, Billy?”
I can see my reflection in Twom’s eyes. Or maybe it’s just that I think I can. My face is even more pale and exhausted than his. I don’t think I’ve so much as dozed in two weeks. Twom knows this. He knows why.
* * *
“My mom and dad want us to stop for a while.”
We’re in Gretchen’s front yard. She’s called and asked me to come over and now she’s come out to talk to me. From the tone of her voice on the phone, I know something is up. But I’m not expecting this.
“Are you going listen to them?” My stomach is doing flip-flops. This isn’t supposed to happen. I’m the one who’s supposed to do the breaking up with her.
“I don’t want to … but…” Gretchen can’t seem to look at me. “They’re saying I really let them down.”
“Why? Because you were screwing your boyfriend in the maid’s room?”
Actually I’m not capable of talking.
“It was horrible, Billy. They even made me get an STD test. All these things I never even heard of.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I say.
I’m trying to be funny but it isn’t. It makes it worse. All I can think of is a doctor sticking his fingers in Gretchen’s vagina. I realize I’m angry with her. Angry that she’s not braver than this and that she’s not standing up for us. I expected more from her, I really did. It’s as if she reads my mind.
“They’re my parents, Billy.”
Like it’s an excuse. I want to tell her that our parents do everything to us. Yes, they might try to provide for you, and do it because they even care about you and think they have your best interests at heart. But by doing so, they trap you, pure and simple. Even with the best of intentions they can mess you up completely. But I don’t say that. I don’t say anything at all. I’m dying inside.
Gretchen starts to cry. I hug her. She feels wonderful. I savor everything about her, trying to memorize it.
“Hey. It’s a not a problem,” I whisper. “I’ll wait.”
“You will?” Gretchen says. “Promise?”
“As long as it takes,” I say. But I won’t. I know I won’t. I never want to feel like this again. It’s just that for this brief and final moment, saying it gives us both a little hope.
Sometimes you don’t need a seashell to hear the ocean roaring in your ears.
* * *
“Do it for me,” says Twom.
He steps back. He stands down. “One more time, that’s all. Because if you don’t, I am gonna have to kill him.”
I don’t have to ask him who he’s talking about. And all of a sudden I realize I want to. Go truly, totally outlaw. I hold out my open palm. Twom taps it with the closed fist of chaos.
Fact.
Revenge is the dark side of justice. He who seeks vengeance digs two graves. One for his enemy. One for himself.
61
“Why, Ephraim, is that you?”
“Hey, Mrs. Kinsey,” says Ephraim.
“Well, what a surprise.” And not necessarily a nice one.
It’s the day after the beach day and we’re at my house. Mom glances at me, wondering what this is all about. Mom probably hasn’t so much as thought of Ephraim since he was thirteen years old and was caught trying to sell downloaded porno stills from a makeshift stand in front of his house. Ephraim’s mother screamed so loud the whole block thought she was killing him. She promptly sent him to off to overnight nerd camp for the rest of the summer.
“How is everything?” says Ephraim. He’s trying to be nice. He knows. Everybody in the neighborhood knows.
“Fine, thank you,” says Mom. It’s anything but. Dad and Mrs. Taylor are living who knows where, Mr. Taylor hasn’t returned home, and lawyers are talking. It’s already understood that Mom will keep the house. Dad just wants the wine cellar. Mrs. Taylor wants the dachshund.
“We’re just going to hang out for a while,” I say.
“Have fun.” She quickly turns and leaves.
Here’s the thing.
I don’t think Mom was so much in love with Dad as she isn’t sure what she’s going to do without him. Even though they were like cars cruising in separate lanes, after almost twenty-something years together, I think she was sort of used to him. And they went through Dorie together.
Here’s the second thing.
Both Mom and Dad would have been so much happier not having a lot of money. They weren’t ready for it. They weren’t trained for it. It wasn’t in their DNA. Comfortable would have been just fine. Struggling slightly might have been even better. They would have stayed in Tulare and gone to small-town Fourth of July parades and backyard barbecues. Dad would play golf and go bowling with carpenters and plumbers on weekends. Mom might have taken a part-time job. Summers they would have driven to Yosemite with Dorie and me in a rented RV and we all would have really enjoyed it. When Dorie got sick, Mom and Dad would have felt supported by real friends and neighbors.
Rich people are totally isolated. They live in this state of terror that everything’s going to be taken away from them at a moment’s notice. You wonder how many of them would just once like a hot dog as opposed to a lobster tail.
I want to tell Mom that she’s still pretty nice looking for someone in her early forties and that she still is rich. One day soon, the house will be filled with suitors feasting on the livestock. I just hope she chooses someone who isn’t so desperate and miserable he can’t make her happy. In the meantime, she sits around the house, staring into space and sighing. So do I for that matter. Thankfully, Mom’s been too preoccupied to notice and worry about me.
“Got it!”
We’re in my room. Ephraim is at my desk, on my computer. He’s here because his grades have gone to hell, he’s failing right and left, and his parents think it will help if they take away all of his computer privileges. This has been like trying to take heroin away from an addict and so of course Ephraim has found other sources. For the first time ever, he’s been going to the school library where he can log on. After school, he goes to Kinko’s and rents time at a workstation. And at night, under the sheets, he browses the Web with his iPhone which, because of its small keyboard, he doesn’t like so much. Now he’s on my Mac and even though Ephraim’s a PC man it’s taken him about two seconds to break into the Mon
tebellos’ home security system.
“Write it down,” I say.
There’s no paper on the desk, and before I can stop him, Ephraim opens the middle drawer, looking for some. He is suddenly very still. The room, the whole house, seems very quiet. Ephraim takes Mr. Taylor’s Glock out of the drawer.
“Is this real?”
“Put it back,” I say.
Ephraim turns and aims the gun at the wall. Comfortable with it. Ephraim cut his teeth on Doom, if not the first, certainly the graphic best, of all first shooter video games.
“It is, isn’t it.”
“Put it back, you fuckwad.”
“Is it loaded?”
My voice rises. “Now!”
“Okay!”
He puts it back. Reluctantly.
“Now shut the drawer.”
He does.
“Now wipe the hard drive.”
After he does that, I tell him to go home. After he leaves, I go down to the drum room, take off my clothes, and play until my nails, feet, ears, gums, and nose bleed.
62
A police car cruises the street. It passes the Montebello house. As it turns at the end of the block, we jump out of Deliza’s Mercedes, where we’ve been lying on the seats, and we race across the street. There is the bloodlike taste of copper in my mouth and the fast thump of double bass drums in my chest. I can’t seem to take a deep breath. The air is vibrating.
Point of reference.
Oneirophrenia is a hallucinatory state caused by prolonged sleep deprivation. You’re not aware of time. You’re not attentive to place. The condition makes it impossible to formulate a suitable response to an emotional event.
Translation?
If I don’t fall over the edge and down the hill into complete psychosis I should have a wonderful time tonight.
I retrace my steps around the side of the house and the others follow. In the back, I use the EZ pick to open the French doors. We enter to the beeping of the security system. I move to the panel on the wall to key in the code.
I stop.
“What are you doing? C’mon,” says Twom. “The code.”
I just stand there.
“What the hell, Billy?” says Twom. He sounds tense and annoyed. Maybe he’s been experiencing what I felt at Casa de Esperanza. Good.
“Will you just do it!”
I don’t.
At that moment the alarm goes off. If it’s designed to scare the shit out of any would-be robber, it certainly works. I quickly punch in the code and the alarm goes quiet. Before the phone can ring, I take it off the hook.
“Maybe they’ll be here, maybe they won’t,” I say. “You probably have ten minutes.”
“Asshole,” says Twom. He and Deliza turn away and are gone.
“What do we do?” Ephraim says. He’s ready to shred his skin. He has no real idea why he’s here.
“I don’t care what you do, Ephraim. Just leave me alone.”
He hesitates, looking like he wants to implode, and then he runs from the room.
There’s nothing I want to do in this house. Explore in this house. Learn in this house. There is no place I will lie down in this house.
I follow my fellow Night Visitors toward the kitchen.
As Deliza rakes shrieking appliances from the countertops, Twom pulls a drawer from a counter and throws it into a glass-fronted cabinet. Crystal glasses disintegrate into dust and broken glass. As he goes for another drawer, Ephraim has the refrigerator open and is sweeping food and jars and bottles out and onto the floor. Deliza picks up a bottle of ketchup and throws it. It explodes on the wall like a blood bomb.
We move into the adjacent family room. Twom and Deliza bring kitchen knives. I watch as artwork is slashed and wallpaper is slit. I do nothing as chairs and sofa are stabbed, cut, and hacked. Stuffing flies like guts and entrails.
I turn as something crashes. Ephraim has pulled a huge, flat-screen TV out of a pewter-colored media cabinet. Wires and cords and veins and arteries tear free and tangle. DVDs fly and fall. Ephraim begins to crazily jump up and down on the television, the look on his face saying he’s been wanting to destroy things his entire life and only now does he have the courage and the opportunity to do so.
I move into the dining room just in time to see Twom and Deliza pull a large gilt-framed mirror from the wall.
Breaking a mirror is not just the destruction of your appearance but also the shattering of your soul.
The mirror lands on the dining room chairs and table. It shatters. Shards soar across the room. The floor is covered with scattered reflections. In each one, Deliza laughs like a delighted goblin at a children’s party.
There is a gold chandelier above the table. Jumping up onto a chair, Twom grabs it and swings. His weight rips it creaking from the ceiling and it crashes down onto the table, splintering it. The sound reverberates through the entire house.
I turn away. I walk down a hall. I’ve become like Twom. None of this is really happening and if it is I couldn’t care less.
I stop in the doorway to a study just in time see Ephraim pick up a laptop computer—his totem, his brother and sister, his kin. He raises it high and smashes it down on the floor. He picks it up and throws it down again, disengaging battery from deck, life force from carcass.
I turn away.
I follow Twom and Deliza to the garage. I stand watching as Deliza rakes the hood of Montebello’s Porsche with a screwdriver. Taking a can of white house paint from a shelf, Twom dumps it onto the seats. It’s old and curdled, the color of decaying teeth.
I turn away.
I find Ephraim in a bedroom. He’s breaking children’s toys one after another. Snatching a stuffed unicorn from the bed, Ephraim rips it to shreds. He turns to see me watching him.
“Get away from me!”
He picks up a book and throws it at me. It bounces off the doorjamb. I look down at it. Where the Wild Things Are. The story of a boy who wreaks havoc and runs off to an island inhabited by mythical, fanged beasts. No. The beasts, the wolves—the wild things—are here in this house tonight.
I turn away.
In the master bedroom, Twom pulls drawers out of a bureau and throws them to the floor. He picks up a jewelry box and heaves it at a lamp across the room. Somewhere, somehow he’s cut his hands. Laughing, Deliza takes them and, lifting them to her mouth, licks the blood from his knuckles. They kiss feverishly. Twom paws Deliza’s breasts with bloody hands. She wraps a leg around Twom’s hips, pushing her pelvis against him.
“Stop it!” Ephraim screams from the doorway. “Don’t do that!” His eyes are bulging, ready to burst behind his glasses.
Deliza turns her head to look at him. She laughs. Taking a step back, she falls back onto the bed, pulling Twom down on top of her and between her legs.
Ephraim runs.
I watch, not really seeing, as Twom and Deliza begin to have sex on the bed. I’m no longer embarrassed. It’s not like it’s even them. Whenever I close my eyes, then open them, it’s someone else. It’s Linda and Gordon. Dad and Mrs. Taylor. Miss Barber and Gretchen. Everyone trying to escape into one another, even if it’s just for a moment.
I turn away.
I’m on my way out the back door when I smell the smoke.
63
In the living room, the gas jets of the fireplace are on high. The hissing flames rise from the gas line and fill the entire hearth, blue at the bottom, white at the top. Throw pillows burn in the grate, the down stuffing charring black. Torn, pulled down, silk curtains hang from the mantel in flames. Fire has begun to crawl across the adjacent wall.
Ephraim’s back is to me. He is spraying something from an aerosol can onto the wall in grand sweeps. The wallpaper bursts into flames so suddenly that Ephraim throws up an arm to protect himself. He turns, facing me. He is holding the can in one hand. He is holding the gun in the other.
This is not how it happens.
“I told your mother I left my jacket in your room
,” says Ephraim, brandishing the gun. His voice comes from a sinkhole. His face is stained with soot. His eyes are liquid behind his glasses. Something inside the wall snaps as the heat hits it. Paint bubbles and burns as the fire climbs toward the ceiling where the smoke alarm hangs, disconnected and useless.
“I turned it off,” says Ephraim. “I turned everything off.”
This cannot be how it happens.
“This is so bad, Ephraim. This is so, so bad.” It was from the beginning. We knew it would be. But not this. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Ephraim raises the gun and aims it at me. I quickly back up, wondering if I’ll hear it or feel it first.
“You think you’re smart. Always so smart? Well, I’m smart too, you know! I matter too!” Spittle flies from Ephraim’s lips.
“No one ever said you didn’t,” I say. But no one ever said you did, I think.
“Fuck that! Fuck it!” Ephraim throws the aerosol can at me. He misses by a mile. “Ephraim the nerd! Ephraim the geek! Knock faggot Ephraim down in the shower!”
He’s crying. His hopelessness is more frightening than his anger. He sags. The gun lowers just a bit.
“It’s always her, Billy. Why her? Why not me?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Ephraim pushes the gun toward my face, furious again. “Don’t say that! Don’t say that! You know. You know!”
I do.
“Ephraim, you’re my friend,” I say. What else is there to say?
“Am I, Billy? Am I really?” His voice is sad and plaintive. He wants to be.
“Sure you are,” I say. I try to smile as if it’s all okay. “Now c’mon, let’s get out of here. We’ll go home, order up a pizza, some sodas, it’ll all be fine.” I sound incredibly reasonable. Considering the circumstances, I’m proud of myself. Maybe I have a future in this. Deal making. Hostage negotiations.
“Yes. Go,” says Ephraim, and putting the barrel of the Glock into his mouth, he pulls the trigger.
This is how it happens.
I’ve turned away. My eyes are closed and I stumble into something—a chair, a couch, furniture. The shot has my ears ringing so loudly I can barely hear myself howl. I tell myself over and over again this is impossible, that it’s all part of another bad dream and it’s time to wake up now, it’s time to wake up. But I know I’m already awake.
The Tragic Age Page 17