Mount Richard rumbled, though.
From his self-imposed exile in what had become ‘his’ Starbucks, he’d sent her a text, arranged to meet her for lunch at The Campaign, a quiet upscale Salem restaurant they once favoured, and an important early mutual staring venue in the first year of their relationship. She’d texted she would take a cab. It was to be the first time they had seen each other since he’d bolted out of the house in the middle of the night.
He’d shown up twenty minutes after the appointed time.
‘Sorry to be late,’ Thelonius lied. And when she looked him over, he felt it rumble, felt the lava glow, unglue itself, break through, and begin flowing down the sides of the mountain.
She waited for him to take a seat.
Just Get Started.
He sat.
She flipped on, without warning, an odd half-smile he had never seen before.
‘Every one of us knows,’ Becky said calmly, all in peach, dark eyes clear, firing the first round, ‘that as time goes on we get a little older – tick tock, tick tock – and a little slower, too. Tick tock.’
Something had changed. She knew all about the Plum.
How she’d found out, Thelonius couldn’t say, but there was no doubt that she knew. For a split second he considered leaving, because he had no plan in place now, a perilous situation. But he had been in quarrels with Becky before. Walking away would only make things worse. Better to ride it out.
He considered asking her outright, nailing down when and how she’d found out, whether Dad had had anything to do with it, but after looking into those eyes, malevolent and clear and quiet and terrified, the resolution he saw there led him only to crevices and unstable hot ground.
Stress breath.
Calm her down.
‘You look nice.’
‘Don’t I, though. Richard thought so.’ A false wink. She was beyond herself, well beyond.
Wait. Had Dick Unferth had her since Thelonius had last seen her? The mountain churned and glowed. Deep seduction in her eyes now, but the kind that only gleamed with toxins.
The waitress came, thank God. Early twenties. Short, blonde, ponytail, radiant, clear skin, well-balanced features, loose white blouse with the sleeves rolled up, jeans too tight, Celtic tattoo on her forearm. Smiling with them as though she had been part of the conversation she’d interrupted. About to introduce herself. On the cusp, the inhalation point, of some word beginning with H.
‘Take away these flowers,’ Becky ordered.
‘Sure,’ said the waitress, puzzled only for the briefest instant. Beaming grin. Both she and the vase of wildflowers disappeared.
‘Have a drink?’ Becky asked, too bright and too sudden. ‘She’ll be back soon, you know. You can ask her for anything.’
‘No, thanks.’
‘To our new life.’ She toasted him with what appeared to be a shot of tequila. She downed it. Her cheeks flexed in parody of an instantaneous grin, which then collapsed. She held the shot glass toward the stained-glass lampshade above them. ‘To it. However badly it may suck.’
‘Is that your first shot of the day?’
‘No.’
‘Not safe for the drive home.’
Becky always drove whenever the two of them travelled. It had become a habit of over a decade’s standing. Never challenged, never discussed. Like which side of the road one used.
‘Oh, it’s perfectly safe, perfectly legal.’ She set the shot glass down in front of him. ‘Or. Or – you’ll be driving home. That’s better. Such a big boy, now. And you’re well below the legal limit. Come on. Have one. Bet you can’t catch up. I got here early.’
Thelonius took up the shot glass and sniffed it. Tequila.
‘Not my brand. Sorry. So. How are you?’
‘Don’t be sorry, T. Please don’t be sorry about anything, ever. How. Am. I. Well. How should I be? Really, how am I? You and Dad would know better than I would.’
He set the glass down in front of her.
‘You put on quite a show the other night,’ she said.
‘I needed some time to think.’ And he faked a grin.
‘And? What did you think up? After all that time thinking?’
‘Becky, I came here to tell you something it looks like you already know,’ Thelonius said.
‘Do I?’ Becky asked, perilously cheerful.
‘I think it’s time for us to talk about finding a way for you to be better taken care of.’
‘Do you?’ Becky demanded. ‘Do you think that? Have you been studying up on the Massachusetts spousal commitment statutes, T? Is that what you’ve been busy with?’
‘What? No.’
‘No? You sure?’
The waitress returned and resumed her assault on the conversation with the same battle-tested initial consonant: ‘Hey there, guys.’ Imperturbable. Professionally upbeat. As though the flower thing had never happened. ‘I’m Sally and I’ll be your waitress tonight.’
Becky sniffed, pursed her lips, and spewed a gob of greenish spit at the waitress.
She missed. Not by much. It flew past a white-clad, cotton-covered shoulder, landed on the garish, geometric orange-and-black carpet beyond.
‘You know, I’m really not a political person,’ Becky announced to the world at large, far too loud, while fixing the waitress in her crosshairs. ‘But someone like you looks to someone like me to be socially active, if you know what I mean, Sally. One of the Young Reformers, capital Y, capital R, and leading, shrewdly, with those ominous breast implants and that tightly clad groin. Yes? That’s you? Social revolutionary? So quiet all of a sudden. Where’s the perky? You do get paid for perky, right? I mean, the tips do correlate with that, over time, yes?’
Sally, frozen, made a tight ‘O’ with her mouth. Thelonius guessed she was now attempting to leave and not succeeding. Perhaps something had happened to her once.
Things were always happening to people.
‘So, Sally, Sally, clarify, please. Are you one of those serially polygamous, personal-relationship reformer types? What I mean to ask is, are you out to change the world for the better now, like my husband here? Get to the bottom of everything? He’s got a conscience now, it turns out. Harry Truman, sleep deprivation, unconstitutional, et cetera. What the hell did he marry me for, you might wonder? Anyway. You. Sally. The moment I saw you, I wanted to ask you: Do you suppose that maybe if you screwed my husband in that storeroom back there, he and I could even things out and then perhaps pick up from where we left off? Wouldn’t take you two but five minutes or so. I said screw. Apologies. I presume upon your virtue. You could stay upstairs with him if you like, for all I care. No, no, I know there is no architectural upstairs here. Stay fully clothed, I mean, if that’s important to you. He doesn’t have to go downstairs, this one. He’s quite happy with upstairs. You’d be striking a blow, as it were, for liberty or self-determination or autonomy or the ability to sleep or whatever it is you people post all your messages about. Watch out, though. No straps, no blindfolds. This one will go on at length about Harry Truman, about civil liberties. About having a conscience.’
She sniffed, spat again. Hit Sally square in the face. Shaken out of her trance, Sally screamed, dropped her menus, and ran off in a kind of crouch.
A short, bald manager, and what appeared to be the entire wait staff, stood in front of the bar, rapt. The manager received a whisper from a tall man behind the bar. The tall man, who sported a crew cut forty years behind the times, produced a telephone and began to dial it.
‘He knew I was sick, by the way.’ She was standing and shouting now, full voice. To everyone and no one. To Sally, now weeping and cowering in the storeroom.
‘He knew it. But I have to get checked up for everything, everything now, whether or not Dad knows about the appointment. That’s what they forgot. And my husband knew I was sick, Sally. Kept that to himself. Not sick venereally, though; you two don’t have to worry about that. But sick in the head. That’s why I cheated on
him. Just so we can all know what he came here to find out. That’s why I did it. Get him back. For not fucking telling me I’m sick in the head. Still working on how to get Dad back. Can you ever really get Dad back? Anyway, Sally. Sally. What’s your answer? If you two were to start right now, back there in that storeroom, do you think I would get this guy back by the time we got our appetizers?’
The man behind the bar punched a button, nodded to the manager, and put the phone away. Then: nothing. An awful silence descended upon the whole restaurant.
Only Thelonius heard the volcano’s low rumble. It forced his eyes shut, made him think of what it would be like to shoot rat-eyed Dick Unferth through the head. Who ought to have known better, for Christ’s sake. Who at least ought to have come to him.
‘Look at me, you sick bastard,’ Becky screamed. ‘You had this coming. You both did. I have been double-crossed for the last time. You hear? I will not let either of you, or any other man, get the jump on me, ever again. I will not be infantilized. I am taking up management of R. L. Firestone, Incorporated for the foreseeable future, and I will control our messaging as I see fit, by whatever means I see fit, and I will pursue whatever kind of alliance with Dick Unferth that I decide makes the most sense for you and me strategically.’
Thelonius, who had been trying to make the scene go away, stood, opened his eyes.
The volcano blew.
He flipped the table. Silver clattered. Glass shattered.
‘Choose. Him or me. By the time I get back from this mission. You hear?’
Becky turned away from him.
She headed toward the door without a word and was gone. The restaurant went still as a corpse. Thelonius stood in the middle of that stillness for a long time.
‘He could have warned me,’ Thelonius shouted. ‘He knew before I did. It was his damn fault things got out of hand. That bastard could have told me.’
‘Told you what?’ asked the Raisin.
The cell again. The window again and the city at nightfall outside again. The book again on the windowsill. All of it waiting for him. Had he wanted this discussion? Was it even worth avoiding?
‘That my wife was over the goddamned edge. That she wanted him, wanted his body, I mean, but only to prove a point.’
The Raisin turned away. Negotiated a new pack of cigarettes that needed opening.
‘A private matter,’ the Raisin said.
Another emptiness. Just like Becky turning away when he flipped the table.
Damn it.
‘Don’t you dare tune me out. Listen, I try to fix things when they go wrong. I do try. Your eating with a fork or with your fingers. It’s none of my business. I know that. I try. Sometimes the words just come out wrong. But when they do, it’s just words, goddammit. It’s just words we say. We’re not murderers, you know. Listen to me. Hey. Look me in the eye when I’m talking to you.’
He had, without quite realizing it, advanced upon the tiny grey figure. He had come to within an inch of it, and was hissing into its face.
32 In Which I Interrogate Clive
‘So. America is in a rage,’ the Raisin hissed right back, closing in to within an inch of Thelonius.
‘America is about to strike. And it is always the women and the children who end up suffering whenever you resolve to make one of your points, whenever you decide to say something no one can ignore, whenever you choose to destroy something you think needs destroying.’
The ‘s’ sounds caused little drops of spittle to land on Thelonius’s face. The Raisin’s cigarette breath was raw and open.
Thelonius began backing away. He had not meant to go nose to nose, had not meant that at all.
On the floor, the little milk carton on his lunch tray began to vibrate.
‘I am an old woman now,’ the Raisin pronounced carefully, but with a lower, deeper, angrier rasp than before, a rasp that cut right into him. ‘I may seem an easy target. I am fifty, but seventy to the eye, I know, and likely enough to die soon. Two years in here, America. And twenty-four on your American cigarettes. Haram. I shall die here. I have lost a husband and two sons. The husband to the BII, one son to disease, another to murder. All I had. Never a grandchild. Because of you, America. And I have something left in me.’ The word ‘left’ growled with a ferocity that unsettled him.
Thelonius, stepping and stepping and stepping his way backward, hit the cot, stumbled, flopped upon it without meaning to, and stood again. He took up a position to the side of it, with his back against the wall, as far away from the diatribe as possible. His heart beating hard. The little carton of milk on his tray vibrating still.
‘Are you listening, America?’
cxxxvii. America
I shall grasp and then conceal the grey-handled steak knife with which I sliced the turkey sandwich that Clive brought me the other night. My lie detector.
An old woman?
‘Two sons from my womb, do you understand?’ The rasp. The blanket. The eyes, yes, no, wait. Wait.
‘Stop messing with me,’ Thelonius shouted, ‘I just want out of here. Stop shaking things. Stop shaking the milk, goddammit. How the hell do you do that? Whatever you’re doing, man. Just stop. What do you mean, you’re an old woman? Woman? What is wrong with you people? How stupid do you think we are? What is with that shaking?’
And still the little milk carton shook.
The Raisin scowled, gathered the blanket up shoulder-tight, and rushed at Thelonius like a skittering insect, unpredictable, immediate, inevitable, across the length of the cell in an instant.
She slapped him across the face with surprising force. She grabbed his right wrist.
‘We all want out,’ came the sharp, lethal rasp again, and she placed Thelonius’s hand at the fold of the blanket covering her chest. ‘Feel this. Feel it.’
Thelonius did. Her cold hand clasped upon his. He felt her heart beat through the blanket. It paralyzed him.
‘Do you feel this? Do you, America? This is the breast of a woman who nursed two baby boys gone. One from the typhus. When you took out the power grid and the water in 1991. One from a BII sniper, 2001. Both of them dead. All my milk for nothing. You understand?’
Thelonius shook his head. He did not understand.
‘You in your national rage. Making your points to the world. 1991. 2001. 2002. 2003. Your oceans of rage, your flames and your press conferences, your shock and your awe. And always the women and the children cut and howled at and killed in your rage. I will thank you to stay on your own side of the room henceforward, sir. Thanks to you, they came for me. For me. Because I dared to say out loud that the government you installed should be taken down. Concerned I might elicit sympathy, might organize the female inmates. Stuck me here. You want out? You have the State Department to talk to. They will get you out. I will die here, America. With the men. On your cigarettes. And with all my milk spent for nothing. For America. For you. For your rage. For you to blame your mistakes on others. For you to pretend only other nations go insane. You will stay on this side of the cell, Murderer. Do we have an understanding now?’
He nodded.
From the corner of his eye, Thelonius saw Sergeant USA crouching at the edge of the cell, his red-white-and-blue mask ablaze in the remnants of the midday sun, levelling a revolver at the wrinkled old woman.
‘No, Sarge. Don’t. Don’t do it.’
She unlocked his hand, surveyed the cell and regarded him with a familiar, professional tolerance. She withdrew slowly, stepping away, her eyes trained on him. When she reached her cot, she averted her gaze again like a cat that knows it is out of attack range.
She just sat there for the longest time.
‘Do us both a favour and avoid telling me how sorry you are,’ she said. ‘Sorry compounds the problem at this stage.’
She picked up her pack of cigarettes, stared at it, discarded it, picked up the prayer beads instead and began to mumble. Sergeant USA holstered his revolver and slipped noiselessly under the cot.
That left Thelonius to sit mute, listening to the mumbling and the humming of the milk carton, which combined for strange harmony. He couldn’t look at the carton for more than a second at a time. So he stared at the ceiling, or at the floor, or at her watching him.
After five minutes or so of moving her beads, she stopped and said, ‘Whenever something vibrates, America, slow down. You should learn how to look at it. Vibrating means change. It means Allah wants you to notice something. And grow. Allah says, “You see the earth barren and desolate, but when we send down rain to it, it vibrates, and its yields increase. Truly, He who gives life to the earth can give life to those who are dead.” Vibration is life. Change. Growth. If it bothers you at first, look at whatever is shaking for a while and then look again, longer next time, so as to slow down. Keep looking until things slow down.’
Thelonius was glad when the guard, oblivious, came to collect the trays.
He stayed on his side of the cell.
cxxxviii. his side
Clive tried, alas, to change the subject. Asked for a shoulder rub. Disrespectfully.
That grey-handled knife’s gleaming, serrated edge raised itself to the lower hollow of seated Clive’s unguarded throat. His halitosis and his sudden sweat stank. Did he in fact remove all key cards, individualized or generic, from the possession of that nigger maid whose name I cannot now recall? A simple question, deeply relevant to my privacy, meriting a simple yes-or-no answer. In the long silence that followed, I had my response.
cxxxix. cell
Reference, indirect but indisputable, is made in track thirteen to your biological father, a rising member of the Directorate who was instrumental in eradicating the OJE terror cell. This man, whom I trained in the SERE techniques, is analogous to ‘Daniel’ in his triumph over that song’s doomed protagonist, who is in turn analogous to T. Raccoon = coon = nigger and/or niggerlover.
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