by John Gould
No. Better to spare himself this daily ordeal. Better to spare her, too, the ordeal of seeing him emerge, fuzzy-eyed and fancifully-crested, from his exile. Better to lie low till she’s gone out, or settled into her office at the far end of the house. Morning is his wife’s most tender time. Messing it up would make Matt feel like dirt, and does he need that? He does not.
Kristin isn’t right. Katherine? She only said it once, and kind of gaspily at that.
The hotel’s device takes a little figuring. By the light slicing through that slash in the curtains he finds the power button. By the light of the menu screen—“Welcome to the Starlight Executive Inn”—he finds the channel and volume changers, triangles aimed up and down.
So let’s see now. Here’s that sitcom star, what’s his name, and he’s written a book about his ex-wife’s postpartum depression. It’s a courageous book (this by his own admission), and he profoundly hopes it will help others. Here’s a woman weeping, over the caption “Ellie—about to meet her son’s father.” Here’s an emaciated kid cooking baby rats over an open fire in an African savannah setting, and here’s that guy from Jeopardy! begging us for help. Here’s the news: West Nile virus, Vatican sex crime cover-up, still no WMDs in Iraq, rogue asteroid, White House press conference.
REPORTER: “What do you think of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and would you consider campaigning for him?”
THE PRESIDENT: “I will never arm-wrestle Arnold Schwarzenegger.” (Laughter.)
The bigness and blandness, the sheer routinized horror of this world—surely it counts as some sort of meditative vision. Matt craves his regulars though, and hey, here’s Law and Order, that distinctive sting, doingg-doingg, a cross between a gavel gavelling and a cell door slamming shut.
“These are their stories,” says Matt, or tries to—he’s so parched his tongue produces only a ticking sound against the roof of his mouth. He’s going to have to move soon. And he’s going to have to move soon, get the hell out of this palace. Starlight Executive Inn? Fricking Jatinder.
Matt risks another glance at the bedside table. Four bottles from the mini-bar, two scotches, two Drambuies. A pre- and a post-coital shot each. Or no, wait, Katherine declined, so Matt chivalrously drained hers too. Two before, while she freshened up, and two after, once she’d slipped away. Karen?
“I’m getting a young man, J-something. John? Jeff?” This is Kevin Scion, Matt’s second-favourite TV psychic. The audience member upon whom he’s trained his mediumistic gaze shakes his head, no. He’d love there to be a John or a Jeff but there isn’t one. Maybe, then, Kevin is a fake. Maybe there’s no afterlife, maybe this is it. Maybe our lives are pointless little flares of light between frigid eternities of impenetrable darkness.
“A brother,” Kevin insists. No panic. “A cousin? He was close to you, closer then either of you ever realized.”
Nope, sorry, nothing.
“There’s a voice, a young man’s voice, no, a young woman’s voice. Not a man, a woman. Jane? June?”
“Jenny,” says the poor guy, and he starts to weep.
Oh, Lord. Matt thumbs down the volume, rolls out of bed and slinks into the bathroom. He’s naked—he recalls waking up dawnish to strip off his T-shirt and jockeys, which were horrid with sweat. What was that dream? Zane was there, a young Zane, but Matt was old. There was a gnu too, bawling pathetically and crying out for his daddy. Matt and Zane tried to comfort him with a song but they couldn’t agree on what to sing. They couldn’t even agree on what kind of creature they were singing to. Matt said gnu, Zane said wildebeest. They scrapped about it, schoolyard scrapped—“Oh yeah?” “Yeah!” “Oh yeah?” “Yeah!”—until the flight attendant popped her head in and sang, “Gnu-u, wildebeest, Gnu-u, wildebeest …” to the tune of “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story.
Is this maybe a perk of fever, that your dreams get fancier? Most nights they’re so drab, Matt’s dreams.
He sits to pee. Still shaky but not so bad. With luck it’s already behind him, the what’s-it, the wacky temperature. How does West Nile work? On the toilet’s right arm (this toilet has arms?) there’s a console, knobs and buttons and blinking lights. Rear Jet, Front Jet, Water Pressure, Water Temp. A treat for later.
Matt’s bladder releases and he hazards a peek down. No condom, Christ. Never mind birth, what about death? This is exactly how it happens. You go decades being careful and then one night you get a little zesty and expansive, you get a little hopped up on fate and, bingo, it’s in your blood. She’ll be pregnant, he’ll be sick. Birth and death and it took how long?
Matt groans. Nice echo in here so he groans again. Is this how it was for Zane too? He’s another serial monogamy guy, his tally of partners just as pathetic as Matt’s. There was Jean Michel, there was Mauritz, there was Phil, there was Nico. Is Nico? And then that one slip-up, that one segue, that one episode of desperate whoopee between bouts of I-love-you …
Guilt, yeah. There’s guilt here for Matt (why wasn’t he there for his friend that night?) mixed in with something even stranger. Jealousy? Not precisely, but … Here it comes again. Burnished by years of handling, this memory, but imbued this morning with an extra edge, a hallucinatory intensity. Febrile, feverish …
You couldn’t call it fucking. For one thing they were always fully clothed, he and Zane. For another thing they were ten years old at the time. Their bodies weren’t capable of sex yet, so you couldn’t even say they had a sex, could you? A sexuality?
Summer of ‘69, a cinch to remember since it was the year of the Apollo landing, the first walk on the moon. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Erin had got herself a sex by then, in a rudimentary sort of way. Thirteen. That was the summer things started to change for her, to go wonky. That was the summer their parents bombshelled them, broke the big news. That was the summer, too, that Erin caught them at it, caught him and Zane. Their very last time.
It was Matt’s turn to be on top that day. He liked it on top. He liked it underneath too. Crush or be crushed, smother or be smothered, both were good, everything was good.
“Man,” he murmured—or at least that’s what he murmurs in his memory, and who’ll contradict him? “Man, is your mum … whoa.” Earlier that afternoon, when they’d crashed into Zane’s place to grab his cap gun, they’d surprised Mrs. Levin on the patio tending her pots in an orange two-piece. It’d knocked the wind right out of Matt, the water-bomb weight of those things—hooters, jugs, bazoongas—and the slo-mo way they shifted when she stood. Preview of the landing, just hours to go, she’s on the moon.
Zane opened his eyes. He looked dopey, he looked drugged. His upper lip was still pricked with sweat from their game of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, peow-peow-peow, in the midsummer heat. Matt had been Robert Redford that day, Zane had been Paul Newman.
“Fuggoff,” Zane sighed. The syllables were muggy against Matt’s neck.
Matt executed a searching shimmy of his pelvis, denim on denim. He said, “You fuggoff.”
That’s another thing, they didn’t even know the word yet. Which didn’t stop them using it, of course. A spell, an incantation, doubly potent for being so impenetrable. Fuggoff. They’d shush it if need be, bring it right down to a lip-read—around adults, around other kids, around anybody but each other—but that just intensified it, that just sweetened it on the tongue.
That particular day, though, it felt different to Matt. In fact it felt kind of creepy. He and his friend weren’t saying the same thing anymore. For Matt the sound was now soured with meaning. Erin had overheard him fuggoff-ing the night before, and had taken it upon herself to straighten him out. “Only imbeciles use words they don’t understand,” she’d scolded, and gone on to detail the gross, the farcical mechanics. Cross-legged in her rose hot pants she’d had G.I. Joe bounce up and down on top of Barbie, little sis Skipper smiling sweetly on. In those days Erin was constantly bringing Matt bulletins from the grownup world, jabs of unwelcome news about Santa, or Disney, or death—a
cruel-to-be-kind sort of thing, her way of inoculating him against the world and its betrayals. Most times Matt relayed these bolts of wisdom directly to Zane, but this fucking thing was too bizarre. And, since Erin had taught him the modifier while she was at it, too fucking bizarre.
“They shouldn’t die,” said Zane. “Butch and Sundance, they should shoot their way out at the end.”
“Next time for sure,” said Matt. This was a bit of wiseassery in which they indulged every time they saw the movie, three-four-five times so far. The funny fantasy that things could be different, that you wouldn’t always end up at that same place, two friends going down together in a blizzard of bullets.
There were creaky footsteps from up above—Matt’s dad in the living room, freshening his highball. Fussing with the rabbit ears no doubt, switching from news to news, from Knowlton Nash to Walter Cronkite and back. The boys tracked the sound from their lair in the basement rumpus room, set to jimmy themselves apart and look busy with the mini–pool cues. Matt’s mum—a real mum, brisk and unbeautiful—would be in the kitchen tossing salad, imparting a geometry of bacon to the TV-shaped face of the meatloaf. Erin would be in her bedroom curlicueing in her diary, or maybe she’d have a friend up there with her, Penny or Sharon or Sue, and they’d be modelling for one another, searching out the most becoming poses for their new, mini-bazoonga-ed bodies.
Matt sighed, stirred. Beneath him Zane wriggled, maximizing contact.
“They’ll be on the surface in, um, twenty-four hours, not even,” said Matt. “Sea of Tranquillity.”
“Fuggoff,” said Zane. “Dad says the whole thing’s nuts. He says they won’t make it down, or if they do make it down they won’t make it back up, or if they do make it back up they won’t make it home, they’ll burn—”
“You fuggoff,” said Matt. “They will so make it. And after the moon, Mars. Then Jupiter. Then …”
They’d have had on the Monkees—“Daydream Believer,” most likely—at a scritchy whisper. No point inviting the old man to galumph on down there. “My mistake,” he’d smoker’s-croak, “I thought you rascals had some music on.” Big laugh, the laugh that made you feel so small, so safe. He’d tug his comb from his hip pocket, drag it through his wet-shiny hair. Then he’d launch into one of his rants, one of his routines. There’d have been some galling item on the six o’clock, a goddam Beatle in bed in Montreal, a riot at some fagotty club in New York.
Or no, that particular night it would have been liftoff, we have liftoff. “How’d you like to be on that launch pad, boys? Feel all that power building up under your ass?” For Matt’s dad—an airplane mechanic turned supervisor, then supervisor-supervisor—it was all about the machine, the moon just a handy target. Matt tried to feel that way but couldn’t, kept imagining the moon’s sooty surface and then the earth from up there, a little greeny blue ball spinning in black. This flaw—Matt’s ongoing failure to care about the right things—was maybe his second-dirtiest secret.
“Picture it, boys. You’ve got your hand on the stick and everything’s a go. T minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six …”
But no. The boys were alone that day. They pursued their practice in peace. At a certain point the friction got too intense for Matt, tangled up as it was with that discombobulating image of Zane’s mum. He went to peel himself away. Erin must have been there by this time, in the shadows at the base of the shagged basement stairs.
“Five,” said Matt. “Four. Three.”
Zane grabbed fistfuls of Matt’s T-shirt, strove to hold him down. They tussled. The old couch—paisley, once pink—emitted a cough of dust and shed skin.
Matt thrashed. “Two. One. Zero. Ignition.”
“Fugg off,” said Zane.
“You fuggoff,” said Matt—and turned, and saw his sister as she fled.
The weird thing is that she never used it on him. She knew the word fuck, so presumably she knew the word fag too. Why did she hold back? They weren’t even brother and sister anymore, not technically. Adopted, that was the word their parents had taught them that summer. Adopted. What did that even mean? Matt pictured his mum and dad browsing at the church rummage sale, selecting a swaddled baby Erin from amongst the mugs and the dog-eared magazines.
Whatever the word meant to Erin it made her even more tender with Matt, even more patient and protective than before. Years later, when she was well on her way to dying, Matt reminded her of that day and she said, “Love, Matt. There’s nothing bizarrer than love.”
Jeezuz aitch. The phone, the phones—there seem to be about seven of them scattered strategically about the suite’s alarming acreage, and they’re all ringing. Matt could reach the closest of them (the clunky kind of thing Garbo might have snatched up in, say, Grand Hotel) without budging from his command-centre of a commode.
Karen? Nobody else knows he’s here. Mariko assumes he’s with Zane, Zane and the old man assume he’s with Mariko. The Matt they know has disappeared, wandered witlessly offscreen. New Matt stares at the phone. Answering it would mean what? That something’s over? That something’s begun? Matt reaches … and the phone quits ringing. He picks it up anyway, calls down to room service.
Yeah, big shot.
Twin. Double. Queen. King. Then what, Emperor, maybe? Matt’s never seen, let alone slept in, a bed this big before. On the floor he discovers a robe, a monogrammed gown of bleached terry which must have slithered off the shimmery bedspread during the night. He slips into it, dizzying briefly as he straightens, and plonks himself on the end of the bed. The bedspread feels like rough silk, a bit of nubble to it, fabric fine enough to be flawed. Extruded by worms raised on organic arugula, one imagines, spinning to piped-in Pachelbel. This place, it’s the un-Lair, the very opposite of home.
The TV’s got tai chi now. A young Chinese woman pushes through incense-tangled air, naming her moves as she executes them. Jade Lady Works Shuttles. Wave Hands Through Clouds. Mariko went through a tai chi phase a couple of years ago, did this same little dance out on the Lair’s back deck. Exquisite. Matt watches for a while, hunched there like an incubus worn out after a long night’s haunting. Then—what the heck—he hoists himself to his feet. Why not join in for once? As the image moves, Matt moves too. Maybe a little of it will leak in through his eyes, the tranquility, the grace. Who knows? Apparent Closure. Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain. The television urges him to centre his being in his belly, so he does. Grasp Sparrow’s Tail. Step Back and Repulse Monkey. Why didn’t he join in when Mariko was doing this? He’d have been shitty at it, but so what? Maybe if he’d—
Cripes, that was quick. The knock is studied, astute. Matt tai chis his way over to the door, inventing new moves at will. Sad Lady Bids Farewell. Reach Out and Comfort Gnu …
The room service guy bears a tray laden with three large glasses of orange juice (Mariko’s forever on at him about vitamin C) and a couple of quartered slices of toast. With tip, this spartan breakfast costs Matt roughly what he and Mariko used to spend on their special-occasion blowouts at Bravissimo. Old Matt would have freaked out at the ludicrous figure. New Matt? New Matt can’t afford to. New Matt has to get miserly with his panic, hoard it for the days ahead.
What to do? He isn’t going anywhere near the sickie or the old man, not for now. He feels a touch steadier than he did last night, but his body still hasn’t got its thermostat set right. It continues to toggle, every few minutes, between sweats and chills.
WWZD? This is a question Matt will often pose himself when he’s feeling lost or bemused. What Would Zane Do? He’s considered having a bracelet made up, like the Jesus people. WWJD? It wouldn’t hurt to know that too, of course.
But Zane, what would he do? He’d call Zane, wouldn’t he? You can’t save somebody without at least speaking to them, can you? Fine, good. But what would Zane say to Zane?
It’s a poser. Matt’s been puzzling over it ever since his last call a few weeks back. His angle that time went something like this: What if Zane isn’t actually good at al
l? What if he’s just clever—clever enough to give his compulsion a purpose? You get a big ugly sweater from your mother-in-law for Christmas. It’s yellow, the yellow of a smoker’s fingers, and festooned with quasi-floral patterns in lime green and salmon. It’s stippled like a plucked chicken. You wear the hideous thing to your mother-in-law’s once and then you donate it to the Sally Ann. Sure, it’ll keep some poor soul warm on a winter’s night, but that isn’t going to get you into heaven, is it? You’re just ditching the damn thing.
So what if Zane’s just ditching his life? What if the whole Gandhi bit’s a ruse, a virtuous-looking way to let him live with his own death? How would you counteract that impulse?
You’d be reduced, Matt figured, to some sort of life’s-worth-living schtick, some carpe diem routine. Seize the damn day. This was the approach he settled on. He settled on it at midnight one night, three in the morning Zane’s time. Out of consideration for his friend (the guy certainly needed his immunity sleep) Matt stayed up till three his time, finally too frantic to wait any longer.
“‘Lo?” said Zane that morning. Six his time, still a little dopey.
“Up and at ‘em, sport.”
Hack. “The hell?”
“Rise and shine there, buddy ol’ pal.”
“You must be joking.”
Tricky fellow that he was, Matt led with Zane’s side of the debate, a catalogue of reasons life wasn’t worth living. Having so recently psyched up for his own suicide he was well prepared.
“Yeah, okay,” he said, “so the planet’s pretty much trashed. Pollution, terrorism, fundamentalism, bigotry, bird flu, blah blah blah.”