Art drew a deep nasal hit of the salt air and felt his sinuses sluice. It was better than gulping heart-accelerating decongestants like MSM's from wake-up till sleeptime. A decade back he'd had his septum corrected, and polyps excised. A week following the minor surgery, a blood vessel high up in his skull decided to let go like a burst fire hydrant, liberating blood in fat, metronomic drops that obstinately refused to slow down, or dam up. This nasal apocalypse lost its comic value after about five minutes. What didn't drip out went down his throat in an unstoppable, inexorable, slow-motion torrent-now; that was funny, the thought that he could die from a nosebleed that didn't even hurt. All his blood would run out of his skull and he would die. Laugh riot. Just imagine the funeral for a guy who had croaked from a terminal runny nose.
He was vaguely ill and in the first stages of woozy shock by the time Lorelle drove him to the Half Moon Bay lire station and they caught an ambulance ride into the city, where a triage nurse estimated he had swallowed more than a pint of his own blood. A patient physician named Dr. Bloch had tried packing his nostrils with eight feet of some nonabsorbent material that looked like pasta. No good. Then, in one of those moments straight out of a 1950s sci-fi film-it'd crazy, but it just might work!-Dr. Bloch fed a catheter into Art's nose and inflated it with a hypodermic full of water, which applied the needed pressure to the unreachable rupture. The whole event was so comedic that it sharpened Art's appreciation of the fact that he could die abruptly, by ridiculous means. Death by absurdity, without hidden meaning or footnote.
Not so with Lorelle. Cancer wasn't as funny. He still said her name aloud, to himself, several times a day. Even now.
Art's sinuses mended and he was 100 percent okay. His cholesterol was negligible. Heart, lungs, blood, all fine. He was thirty-eight and could conceivably live to ninety; he just had no idea how he was going to get that far or last that long, for reasons having nothing to do with aging or his physical state. He was a lit, average man, hiding out in a sanctuary of his own making, logging work with little joy, mourning the loss of a revised director's cut of his own life-the version in which Lorelle had lived.
What he wanted now was a storm. A violent, freezing sky show, to inspire him. Thunder and fury. His stocks were good, and if catastrophe struck, his own garage was outfitted better than a bomb shelter. He wanted to bear witness while some black bitch of a hurricane cleaved around the battlements of his stormproof fortress, this product of his will. Then maybe he could return to the stoop labor of telling restaurant technology which way to swing.
Three mornings running, now, the sky had come up dour crimson. Old sailor sayings were apparently claptrap.
"Blitz! Beweg deinen Arch hier ruber!" he shouted on the return trek from Spilsbury's. The dog, having enjoyed a longer morning jaunt than usual, snapped to and obeyed. Art assumed his dog-voice: "You're a good boy, aren't you? Guter Hund. Du bit halt mein Beter!" Blitz loved the sound of the word good. He hung his tongue to the wind like a fluttering slice of ham, agreeing that he was, in fact, a good boy. Gulls winged about, buffeted mercilessly by gusts in their unending scavenge for refuse and dead things. Blitz wanted to jump high enough to snag them. Art saw the birds reflected in the dog's rich, coffee-colored eyes.
A quick scan of the websites on his Favorites file yielded no new consumer temptations, merely an endless avalanche of pop-up windows, click-now hot links, and animated come-ons. The World Wide Web had boiled down to three basic constants-porn, advertising, and a smorgasbord of humans declaring themselves and their likes to a world they could not see, in a frantic attempt to leave a visual benchmark amid the digital waterfall of data; perhaps lend some humanity to all those invisible ones and zeros. He was aware he had not yet turned on the halogens over his drafting table; that would be too much like an acknowledgment of work. With a soft, rubberized Number Two he sketched a wandering maze, like a sky view of a rat's tubular exercise run. The pencil came from a galvanized container of twenty identical ones, all identically sharpened on a matte black device that emitted a coffee grinder noise and was guaranteed for life by its Swiss makers. Springboarding from the idea of his bulletproof acrylic windows, he wondered how the entire restaurant complex would "present" if its accoutrements were totally composed of transparent material. To walk on a world of glass would be precarious and disorienting; it made him crack a grin that only involved half his mouth. He thought of Carlsbad Caverns, of Indian pueblos, of making the search for one's favored watering holes into some kind of urban exploratory expedition, all beneath a ceiling of skylights.
For those people who didn't do all their shopping on the internet, anyway.
It was a game try, but Art knew he was in a rut, forcing half-baked inspiration to service a contractual obligation. It was grim, akin to a gravedigger filling a hole, instead of a landscaper sculpting a garden. He had begun to wonder whether anyone actually looked at his designs anymore. So long as they came in on time, filled space, and were attached to the cachet of his name, did anyone really notice, or care?
The mailbag offered Citibank, telephones, gas, power, insurance, and the usual hustles from strangers. He resented the way printouts could be programmed for a nakedly obvious faux-personalization, then "signed" with a patently bogus printed signature. It was deceptive and meant to entrap, like the many ad campaigns for most of the restaurants slated for Art's reinterpretation. Places to eat needed to be inviting, not demanding. Customers needed the humanity the internet rarely offered. They plodded into mall shops like convicts walking the last mile. Buyers should want to enter, not be forced by some grim need. They always slapped down cash or plastic as though making a sacrifice to the gods of materialism. The phenomenon was most pronounced come Christmastime-which was to say, the "holiday" period extending from the day after Labor Day until ten days into January. There was not much left that was enticing about a holiday that lasted four straight months, though merchants saw it the other way around. Art had given up Christmas a long time ago.
A postcard dropped out of the stack. The Golden Gate Bridge , real tourist shit. Written on the back, in marker, Art read: YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE. HAVE A BEER, YOU FUCK. Followed by the initial D with a flourish.
That would be Derek… whom Art had not seen or communicated with for several years. There was no return address and the card was postmarked more than a week ago.
Derek-Darius Centurion Hill-had dropped out of Art's life shortly after Lorelle died. He had gone from being a once-per-week dinner guest to an invisible man. He had shot pool and drunk beer and hung out during a time when Art kept virtually no male friends. Buddy structures often collapsed as a casualty of marriage, but Derek had remained steadfast. When Art had blown sour blood-alcohol for a state trooper, Derek posted bail, picked him up, and warp-speeded him home, violating the posted limits all the way. When Lorelle had first been hospitalized, Derek was the first outsider to visit, lying to the duty nurse that he was a family member. He could be counted on to hoist the opposite end when something needed moving. The day he came into his inheritance, he promptly quit his job at Lockheed, where he had specialized in aerodynamic design. He had collided with Art at some tech conference and they stuck to each other, opting out of the dry roll call of seminars to seek adventure in Tucson, which, at the time, had been a new city to both of them. Instead of titty bars and sleaze, they found an air museum of antique warplanes, a science-fiction triple bill of vintage black-and-whites at the New Loft Theatre, and an excursion on rented Harleys into the high desert, deep enough that they encountered real Lawrence of Arabia-style dunes, no litter, and saw a live rattlesnake just crawling around out in the open. They watched it prowl with a mesmerized, almost benevolent interest; then they left it alone. The snake never acknowledged their intrusion in any way, which pleased Art enormously.
Lorelle had always read books voraciously; Art did not try to keep up with her and excused himself as selective. Derek could pace her, talking obscure classics and current bestsellers, always with
both of them swapping recommendations. Then he could digress onto the mean worth of the work of artists Art had never heard of or remembered, without missing a breath. He loved finding conversational links, and Art appreciated his way of thinking around corners. Derek entertained a succession of youngish girlfriends, mostly brown-over-brown fitness fanatics, and Art rarely bothered to try telling them apart, depending on Derek to clue him in if it was important. He lingered over one such partner-Art recalled her name as Erica-and the two of them had blazed off to Hawaii in search of volcanoes. That was it. Until today, two years later, or was it three?
The card was not from Hawaii. It had been postmarked in San Francisco. Art propped it on his desk-not his drafting table, but the wraparound workstation where the computer monitor dominated a third of the space. He wondered if Derek had any idea how to find him, then smiled to himself again.
"Hey," he said in English to Blitz. "Remember Uncle Derek? From when you were still a puppy?'' Blitz cocked his head, trying to figure out if the question had anything to do with anything edible. Art hit a key command to let the computer slide to sleep mode. The monitor made a strange little boink sound that always caused Blitz to bark, exactly once. Art was perpetually amused by this, and never chided him.
The house clicked and popped from a sudden strong gust of wind. Art knew all the sounds of the house intimately. Sometimes he dreamed Lorelle was walking through their front door-now refaced in stainless steel, another task yet undone while she was alive.
She returns from some errand and he hears the locks crank, and the jangle of keys. Cvery person's keybunch has a sound as characteristic as a fingerprint. He hears the thud of her leather shoulder bag on the glass-topped entryway table. She calls into the house to determine whether it's empty, and he hears her voice ring. The acoustics are different because the house is a wreck and most oh the seaward windows are boarded up with plywood, prior to reinstallation. They can't keep the plaster dust out oh the kitchen and are forever stepping on stray screws or nails or sharp curls o/j cut metal. Most of the furniture is sheeted in plastic, or not yet bought. Plans and the detritus oft reconstruction are everywhere. Art hears Lorelle call his name into this wasteland, this work in progress…
… then he always bolted awake, panic about burglars popping a quick sweat on his skin, the silence broken only by his own breathing. He could always smell the emotions he dragged back from the dream state and they always embarrassed him. There was nobody to be embarrassed before, until Blitz intruded with his own menu of needs. Dogs are tolerant and forgiving. No matter how you screw up, they look at you with an expression that says they still love you.
It had always been difficult or impossible for Art to get back to sleep after these Lorelle interludes, which did not actually classify as dreams. Every tiny noise sprang him back to queasy wakefulness, and as a result he suffered a misdistribution of REM sleep similar to that experienced by alcoholics.
Art was what is known in idiomatic parlance as a "morning bear." It was generally not a good idea to speak to him or otherwise distract him, or list demands, until about two hours after he'd opened his eyes, had coffee, gotten oriented to the day. He often thought of the rattler he and Derek had seen in the desert-its aggressive patterning, its never-blinking slit-eyed gaze, the warnings inherent in the devilish design of its weaponlike head. No molestarme. Don't mess with me. Art often fancied that the snake was coiled inside his own chest, its blunt length separating his lungs, its ballistic skull resting atop his heart, absorbing body heat. Once it warmed up, it could pursue its own meditations, and safely be ignored. Lorelle, a talker, had never fully comprehended Art's need for quiet upon waking and his disinclination toward breakfast chitchat, but she accommodated it, accepting the trait as Art's wall against distraction. She usually rose before he did and left him fresh coffee on the nightstand, retreating to putter. She maintained an intriguing work habit, which was to install herself before her own computer immediately upon waking, before caffeine and the real world could fully kick in. In this half-asleep, half-awake Zen state, she said, things flowed around the logic roadblocks in her brain, directly to her fingers, and her keyboard, making her good for a thousand words, minimum, before she had to think about getting dressed for real or what obligations the day mandated. She had been halfway into the bones of a novel when she died.
Art would wonder forever how that story was supposed to end.
When you live with another person for a significant length of time, your body sensors become attuned to the sounds of your partner, elsewhere in the house. Art missed waking to the smell of fresh-ground brew and hearing the fluting sound of his wife's half tunes. Lorelle sang to herself, and hummed a lot, never complete songs. Hence, Art now kept his stereo hot, and the big-screen TV on most of the time, just to experience voices or a presence other than himself that could aid in defining spaces and the acoustic weight of rooms in which he was the sole occupant. He preferred cinema channels with no commercials and no "original series"-just movies-but Blitz actually seemed to pay attention to the nature channels, especially the ones that featured graphic veterinary surgery and looked, at a glance, like shows about the warp and woof of torture. Art was also held victim to a bizarre fascination for the History Channel, or as he called it, the Hitler Channel, since every other program seemed to focus on World War II. ''That logo, that little H in the box? It stands for Hitler." That never failed to crack Lorelle up. It was part of their secret language. The Hitler Channel was about the past; you could see it was the past because of the black-and-white footage, the film scratches, the view through a time-keyhole refreshingly free of digital perfection.
Art fired up all systems and settled for CNN, to see if anything in the world had really changed. Nothing had. He got more coffee, bisected a bagel, and continued doodling.
Before the semicircle of black leather sofas grouped around the electronic fireplace of the TV screen was a low glass table the size of a child's inflatable swimming pool. Art perched his athletic shoes on it. Once a week he rigorously cleaned and dusted all the surfaces in the house. You had to anyway, with a dog in residence. Shortly after Lorelle had died, he'd disengaged their housekeeper, Mrs. Ives, a top-heavy, gray-bunned Welsh lady with a gait like a pouter pigeon.
He'd discovered that he could fill time with basic maintenance.
Keeping track of seven principal rooms with two and half baths could become a job instead of a chore. Every time he vacuumed rugs or polished countertops, he thought that no matter how thoroughly he cleaned, there would always be pieces of Lorelle in the house-microscopic motes of shed skin cells, fading scents on still-hanging clothes, a baseboard scuff where she'd once kicked a door shut in anger. Last week he'd found one of her auburn hairs behind an antique armoire, and he'd slid slowly down the wall to a sitting position, legs out like a kid in a sandbox, and wept for twenty minutes.
The memory, even dulled by time, could flood back that quickly, blindside him that unexpectedly, and cut past all his calculated defense mechanisms, draining hope from his heart and disturbing the rattlesnake, who held fast within his chest, coiled around Art's emotions, its slanted, evil-looking mouth seeming to grin.
The corridor to the south wing, bedroom and library, was crowded with framed photographs that also haunted him. Wedding shots, excursions, parties, adventures on foreign soil. Pictures of both her late parents still hung there. Lorelle had been born a month before Neil Armstrong had stepped onto the surface of the moon. Her mom and dad had been college students trying to fathom the Summer of Love. They had died within a year of each other, in 1992. Dad had acquired ALS-amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more popularly known as Lou Gehrig's disease-and had hung on long enough to see his daughter marry; it was almost as though he could let go once Lorelle had found Art. Mom went totally unexpectedly, after a bus jumped a yellow light verging on red and broadsided her Acura. She arrived at the hospital comatose and never woke up. Lorelle and Art had been there for all of it, the deathwatch,
the sorrow, the funeral, and the discomfiting silence and emotional flatline that polluted their next few months.
Doctors discovered Lorelle's tumor in March 2000, and by mid-April Art found himself back on the deathwatch chair. As time ran out, Lorelle's hospital stay seemed both excruciatingly protracted (in terms of her pain) and too fast, too soon for Art. Morose hindsight taught him that one either winds up dying, or watching someone else die. Do this long enough, and all too quickly your points of reference for the world are systematically erased. Events grow distant, celebrities die, your friends and family precede you, and suddenly nobody knows what you're talking about. That was when time itself had begun to blur for Art. The next thing he remembered was trying to answer questions from strangers as to how his wife should be buried. They never decided definitively what kind of cancer it was, exactly, and everyone apologized a lot. It did not require a medical education for Art to realize the doctors were out of their depth. Tumors morphed into new and frightening forms; that was enough information to forestall keener inquiry from strangers who didn't care anyway. People apologized. And the globe spun on.
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