Andrews sat in silence for a moment, letting my tirade permeate the air in the truck, despite the chilly wind roaring in through the back window.
Then he cleared his throat and said, as casually as he could manage to, “Don’t hold back. Tell us what you really think.”
I exhaled. “I suppose I do have a bit of pent-up something-or-other where he’s concerned.”
“Which is my point.” He continued to watch the road.
“And you feel that my attitude toward him may be incorrect.”
“I don’t know about that,” he dismissed. “He could easily be the next Hitler, I see that, but it’s just possible that you’re misjudging him based on your past association with him—a time when you were both boys, children. Personally, I’d hate to be judged for the rest of my life on my own schoolyard behavior. And my point is that your attitude toward him clouds your ability to see who he really is, or at the very least, what he’s really trying to say.”
“And what, please tell me, is he trying to say?” I glared at his profile.
“He gave you every kind of clue in the book,” Andrews answered accusingly, “and you didn’t pick up on a single one.”
“Clues about what?” I felt impossibly thickheaded.
“He was trying to tell you who shot you!” Andrews blasted. “Jesus. He had everything but charts and a hand puppet!”
I sighed again, and looked out the window. I slowly began to realize that I had not been especially observant in the meeting hall. Andrews was correct in his assessment: I had dismissed nearly everything Travis had done or said because he was, in some ways, invisible to me. I had the idea that I already knew everything about him, about who he was and what he was doing in this lifetime, so I casually, even deliberately, ignored everything about him.
“This is a problem,” I said, still staring out at the road.
“I know,” he responded.
“No, I mean, this is a problem that most people have. A problem of the human condition. We get ahold of some kind of shorthand in understanding people, and we think it works, and we use it to assess, categorize, and then, very often, dismiss people. It’s the basis of stereotyping, and profiling, and several other very sorry words that end in i-n-g.”
“Not sure I follow,” he said.
“People hear your accent, for example,” I explained, “and they think, ‘Oh, he’s an English guy.’ And they think that means they know you, know who you are. So they don’t have to think any more about it. That’s the shorthand: English guy, got it, now I don’t have to think anything more about him, don’t have to make any more genuine contact with him. All the rest is based on that.”
He nodded, but his brow was furled.
“All right,” I sighed, “I personally feel that the worst case of this sort of thinking has to do with race, with skin color. People look at something so facile, so obvious as the color of a person’s skin and think that they know something—know a lot, in fact—about that person. I think it’s the worst propensity of the American nature.”
“Well,” he said, hesitantly, obviously struggling to understand, “racial problems—it’s not just an American thing, right?”
“Right,” I agreed, “but I don’t know other countries, I only know this one, because I live here. And I’m telling you it’s one of the worst qualities we have, the notion that we can figure out everything about a person on first glance, as if that first look could give you every bit of information you would ever need. It’s the poison of racism at its root: instant judgment, instant dismissal, without any actual thought whatsoever. It’s destroying the nation.”
The truck slowed a little. Andrews continued to appear deep in thought. The moon broke from behind the clouds and suddenly silvered the road ahead, the pines, even the roadside weeds.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you discuss this sort of thing,” he finally said. “Not in all the years of our association. And it isn’t as if our primary concern here is, you know, racism in America. I mean, where the hell did all that come from, Fever?”
I stared out at the white, white road. “I don’t know.”
“Well, you’re pretty worked up about it.”
“No I’m not,” I protested. “I’m just thinking out loud.”
“Really?” he asked.” Look at your right hand.”
I glanced down. My hand was clutching the door handle so hard that it looked like a ball of snow. All of the blood was gone from it. I took a deliberate moment to loosen my grip, trying to calm myself. Then, without knowing why, I felt like crying.
“Chester did it,” I said quietly. “Chester made this happen.”
He nodded as if he understood, then slowed the truck a little more, and looked right at me. “Who the hell is Chester?”
I avoided looking at him. “One of the monsters from my dreams, or from my memory, or from something that my mother told me that’s mixing in my dreams and my memories. Or a figment of my imagination. Or a desperate hallucination because I was in a coma for three months. Take your pick.”
“You know,” he ruminated philosophically, “you were pretty messed up before you died, but since you came back? You’re absolutely gone around the bend.”
“Yes, all right,” I grumbled, “but here’s what I know about Chester.”
“Now he’s the man who tried to kill you.”
“No,” I answered, “he’s the man who killed T-Bone Morton.”
“Well then,” he mocked, shaking his head, “now we’re getting somewhere. Who the hell is T-Bone Morton?”
“A jazz saxophone player from 1926.”
“I’m going to run the truck off the road now,” he said casually, “if it’s all the same to you.”
“T-Bone Morton is a jazz saxophone player from Chicago.”
“Chicago.”
“Look, don’t run this truck off the mountain just yet, do you mind?” I sat up, suddenly revitalized by something of which I was not quite conscious, something that felt very much like the first moment of a new day. “I actually think I might be—I’m beginning to see the connection between my weird dreams and my, well, equally weird life, actually.”
“Okay.” Andrews cleared his throat.
“And it has to do with the relationship these dreams have to some strenuously buried memories, things my mother must have told me.”
“Jung’s idea, of course,” he began hesitantly, “is that dreams are a kind of window to your unconscious. And when you can look through that window clearly, you can find solutions to things in your waking life.”
“Exactly,” I agreed. “I have to be a kind of psychic archaeologist.”
“I’m very uncomfortable with that phrase,” Andrews allowed.
“Be that as it may,” I assured him, “I’m going to excavate certain memories, dig into the images. Like Theseus.”
“Wait. Like Theseus?”
“Haven’t we talked about this before—the theory of the Minotaur? The labyrinth on Minos is actually a metaphor for the human subconscious. Everybody is Theseus. Everybody has to dive into the caves of the mind and slay the Minotaur, the monsters that live there, the troubles that lead to psychoses.”
We were nearing my home, and I was feeling more awake than I had since I’d come home from the hospital. The cold air rushing through the cab was like a plunge into freezing water. I felt astonishingly invigorated. Just as I was about to tell Andrews that I had turned a corner where my health was concerned, it started to snow very hard, and suddenly the entire world turned white.
20.
Back home, safe in my living room, we sat for a while watching the snow and thinking. I had started a fire, made espresso, and settled into my chair close to the flames.
Andrews had collapsed onto the sofa, shoes off, feet toward the hearth.
“I should probably remind you,” he said, raising his head to take a sip from his cup, “that the mythological Minotaur was a product of a mixed relationship: the queen of the
island mated with a beautiful white bull. Her love for the bull was a punishment from the gods. And whom the gods would punish they first make mad. I bring it up because—”
“Half of what I’m saying seems insane,” I interrupted, “the product of scattered images and half-conscious concepts. I know that. I know that I’m not right. I was afraid of this state of mind when I first woke up. I can confess that now, to you and to myself. But I’ve had a few experiences that I thought were hallucinations but turned out to be real, as confirmed by your perceptions. I’ve taken a bit of courage from that. But mostly, something seems to be falling into place.”
“Okay,” he sighed, obviously exasperated. “First: what do you mean about the hallucinations that turned out to be real? I mean, I haven’t seen any bats or green lizards.”
“The man from New Orleans,” I said softly. “He’s pretty strange, and he could easily have been a phantasm of my troubled mind. But he really was in a Cadillac and then he really was in my kitchen, right?”
“I’ll give you that,” he admitted. “That guy’s very odd. So, to continue: what’s falling into place?”
I stared into the fire. The sparks rose up like red stars, shooting upward, all the way to the top the chimney, I imagined, and into the snow-blurred sky. “I think I’m beginning to remember something important that my mother told me when I was a child. And if I could remember everything entirely, I believe that I could not only solve some questions concerning the person who shot me, but I could also slay a few of my own very serious minotaurs.”
“Oh.” He set down his cup, lay back, and folded his arms across his chest. “Well, that is something.”
“Yes, it is,” I insisted. “I might be able to shake loose from a couple dozen difficulties that have kept me on the strange side of life for most of my born days. The demons that have kept me off balance and odd. I mean I might be waking up from that.”
“Only an unstable individual,” he countered, “suffers from the illusion that he can escape his basic nature. That’s my belief.”
“But what if being ‘off balance and odd’ isn’t my basic nature after all?”
“Look, Fever,” he sighed, “you’ve had a rough time of it recently. I mean, you got shot, you got dead, and you came back. You’re in a bit of limbo now, don’t you think? I wouldn’t make too much of any insights you think you might be having in this condition. Things will shake down. You’ll get back to normal soon enough. What you want is rest, good food, Lucinda—and my scintillating company.”
“I remain undeterred by your little speech,” I told him briskly. “What if I could find documentary evidence? That is, what if I could find something like proof of my theories?”
“What theories?” he snapped. “You’re just rambling.”
I leaned forward, more energetic than ever. “I’m saying: what if I could find tangible facts about Chester and T-Bone and their connection to me and my family? What if I could prove to you—and what if this very unusual man from New Orleans—”
“Enough!” Andrew sat up and glared at me.
I exhaled. His face was so tense I thought he might hurt himself, and his eyes were rimmed in red. Clearly there was more to his current state than I understood.
“Why are you so upset?” I asked.
He ran his hand through his hair, massaged his forehead, and then tugged absently on his earlobe. “The truth?”
“Of course the truth.”
“You’re scaring me.” He shrugged.
I think I cocked my head a little like a dog.
“You’re not the same person you were, Fever.” His voice cracked. He swallowed. He was clearly very upset. “I’m afraid something is really wrong with you. I’m trying not to demonstrate my alarm to you, but there you have it: I’m scared.”
I had no idea how to react. I couldn’t remember another time in our entire acquaintance that Andrews had spoken so emotionally.
“Everyone’s concerned,” he went on, managing to collect himself a little. “Lucinda more than anyone, of course. You have to … you should reel yourself in a bit, is all I’m saying.”
I shook my head. I wanted to reassure him, but I didn’t want to lie. “I don’t think it would be the right thing to do if ‘reeling myself in’ means not being honest about what I’m going through. And you have to give me a little leeway, don’t you, given that I was—that all those things happened to me: shot, dead, coma, everything. And then someone took another whack at me in the woods, blew out my truck’s rear window, my beloved truck, and then I was threatened with barbecue, for God’s sake.”
That made him smile. “You weren’t threatened with barbecue, you were threatened by barbecue.”
“I stand corrected.”
“Well, you’d think I’d be used to your very strange peregrinations by now.” He sighed. “But you always seem to find new and different ways to worry me.”
“It takes a lot of planning,” I agreed. “I make charts and everything.”
“So what is it that you think you need to do now?”
“I guess we could go to sleep now and talk about the rest in the morning,” I answered, “if you’re tired.”
“I’m beat with a brickbat.” He slumped back into the sofa. “I may just sleep here. What I don’t understand is how you’re so energetic.”
“I know,” I marveled. “I feel the same way I did a long time ago when I had a near-fatal allergic reaction and they gave me steroids and Adrenalin. I think I could lift up this house. Oh, and let’s take my truck in tomorrow morning first thing to get a new rear window.”
“Rear Window,” he mumbled. “I love that movie. Why couldn’t you do that, be like that: the grouchy Jimmy Stewart–style invalid? Just sit around your house all day.”
“Because you don’t have that kind of luck,” I assured him. “Are you really going to sleep right there?”
He didn’t answer, which I took to mean yes.
I felt increasingly more manic, so I eased out of my chair as quietly as I could and tiptoed upstairs. I wasn’t really thinking about anything in particular when I headed into my mother’s room. I simply seemed to drift in that direction. I flicked on the light and passed through her doorway into another world.
The smell of it took hold of me, the ancient dried lavender and rosemary, the dust, the ever-so-faint presence, after all those years, of an Avon perfume called Unforgettable—her favorite, or so she’d told me when I was seven or eight. I’d saved up money from chores and odd jobs nearly half a year to buy her a small bottle of it for Christmas. Clearly the bottle was still somewhere in the room, though I’d never found it.
I suppose I was hoping that I might stumble upon some secret, mystical trove of information about—about what, exactly, I didn’t know. I had spent so many hours in that room when I was a child and my parents had gone—off touring their show. I had always hoped, in those days, to find out something more about my mother, something that would explain her to me. I had thought, then, that hidden somewhere in things might be the key to perfect understanding: why she seemed to think of me as the price she’d had to pay for something wrong she’d done. When I’d first learned about sex, I’d come to the conclusion that she’d had sex with my father, gotten an unwanted pregnancy, and had the child because of the straightlaced community in which she lived. It only took me a short while to realize that my mother cared about the moral dictates of our little community only marginally more than she cared about German opera, which she hated. She would often actually spit at the mere mention of Wagner’s name.
So I knew at a relatively early age that guilt had not made her treat me like penance instead of a person. She had no guilt gene. She cheated on my father several times a day when she thought she could get away with it. He either didn’t know, which seemed unlikely to me, or didn’t care, which seemed incomprehensible to me. Either way, I remained baffled about their relationship even long after they were both dead and buried.
Still, sitt
ing down on the floor in my mother’s room was an experiment in nostalgia and regret bordering on madness, as usual. A gaggle of salamanders gyred in my gut. I did my best to battle the melancholy ghosts, one by one, as they seeped into my pores from the very air around me. Then, a bit less commonly, my heart began to beat faster and my breathing grew shallow. My eyes stung and my lips dried. Something in my stomach threatened to return to my mouth, and sweat beaded at my hairline. The pounding in my chest grew more profound, and I could hear it in my ears, suddenly louder than thunder. All I could think, for some reason, was, “True! Nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”
I realized that I was glaring at the floor in front of me as if I might be able to see through the wood, and it suddenly occurred to me that the quotation from Poe might be another gift from my unconscious: there might be something buried underneath those planks. I considered that my feeling of nausea might well be more existential than gastronomical.
I leaned down, trying to see if there was any clue anywhere that some of the planks might not be battened down. Nothing presented itself immediately, but just the thought of investigation made some of my uneasiness abate. I reached into my jeans pocket and found a quarter. I used it as a pry, inserting in first between one floorboard and another to see if anything felt loose. The first couple of tries were fruitless, but the fifth time found a bit of a disjunction. With only a little effort, a three-foot section of wide, well-worn plank came up. There, underneath, in a dark wooden hollow: a small metal box. It was another antique candy box like the one that had been stolen from my mantel. This one was red with silver outlines and seemed to depict a great oak tree under which two lovers were kissing, but the box was so dented and dirty that the tree could have been a waterfall, and the lovers might have been two great fish.
I reached in, collected the box, sat back, and set it in my lap.
Before I opened it, I took a second to let the wonder of it sink in. Hundreds of times before, in the home where I grew up, I had spent so many lonely hours waiting for my parents to return, searching all over the house for any hint as to who and what they really were. After all those years, I could still unearth something so significant as this hidden treasure. Or was it that I had half-remembered something my mother had told me when I was young? It seemed unlikely, as I took in a few deep breaths, that I would have come up with the idea to tear up floorboards unless I had already known, somewhere in the dark wilderness of Mnemosyne, that something was there. And I would only have known about it if my mother had told me. So, I reckoned that I had accessed some hidden switch that had illuminated another maternal land mine. Only this one was still ticking. It hadn’t exploded yet. And while a part of me desperately wanted to return the tin box to its hiding place, put the board back, and forget the whole thing, the worst part of me had to see what was inside. I even heard my mother’s voice echoing in ancient air. “Don’t do it, Fever. Don’t run after this thing. Forget all about it.”
A Corpse's Nightmare Page 16