The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

by Jonathan Lethem

  Instead I put on my shoes and went to the kitchen for a bottle, and sat down on the couch in the moonlight and drank.

  It wasn’t any good. I couldn’t be in the house. I put on a jacket and took the bottle for a walk around the neighborhood.

  13

  To the west, in my Hell, there’s a place I call the Ghost Town. It’s like a Western movie set, with cheap facades passing for buildings, and if anyone lives there, they’re hiding. The moon lights the main street from behind a patch of trees, throwing cigarette butts and crumpled foil wrappers discarded there into high relief. Sometimes I can make out hoofprints in the dust.

  In the middle of the street is a naked, crying baby.

  Gusts of wind rise as I walk through the Ghost Town, and they grow stronger as I approach the baby, whipping the dust and refuse of the street into its face. The baby’s crying chokes into a cough, sputters, then resumes, louder than before. The baby is cold. I can tell; I’m cold myself, there in the Ghost Town. By the time I reach down to pick up the baby, the wind tearing through my little chest, I’m seeking its warmth as much as offering my own.

  If I pick up the baby it turns into The Happy Man. Instantly. Every time.

  I’ve already said what happens when The Happy Man appears.

  Needless to say, then, I avoid the Ghost Town. I steer a wide berth around it. I often avoid the west altogether. As much as I want to go back to my life, I can’t bring myself to pick up the baby, knowing that I’m bringing on Colonel Eagery. I’m not capable of it. And I’m not comfortable walking through that town, feeling the rising wind and listening to the baby’s cries, and not doing anything. Hell seems so contingent on my actions; maybe if I don’t go in that direction there isn’t a baby in the first place. I’d like to think so.

  Anyway, it had been months since I’d walked through the Ghost Town.

  But I walked through it that night, in my dreams. I don’t know why.

  14

  I woke up still dressed and clutching the bottle, on the living room couch. What woke me was the noise in the kitchen. Maureen making breakfast for Peter.

  Head low, I slunk past the kitchen doorway and into the bedroom.

  By the time I woke again Peter was off to school, and Maureen was out too, at work. I put myself through the shower, then called the station and said I wasn’t coming in. They took it all right.

  When I went back out I found Uncle Frank making coffee, enough for two. I accepted a cup and grunted my thanks.

  “Can you handle some eggs?” he asked. “There’s an omelet I’ve been meaning to try. You can be my guinea pig . . .”

  I cleared my throat. “Uh, sure,” I said.

  He went into action while I let the coffee work on my mood. I was impressed, actually. Frank seemed to have diverted some of his eccentric passion into cookery. He knew how to use all the wedding-present stuff that Maureen and I had let gather dust. The smells charmed me halfway out of my funk.

  “Here we go.” He juggled it out of the pan and onto a plate, sprinkled some green stuff on top and put it in front of me. I waited for him to cut it in half, and when he didn’t I said, “What about you?”

  “Oh,” he said. “I ate before. Please.”

  I put the whole thing away without any trouble. Frank sipped his coffee and watched while I ate.

  “I used to cook for you when you were a little boy,” he said. “’Course then it was eggs in bacon grease, smeared with catsup—”

  My throat suddenly tightened in a choking spasm. I spurted coffee and bits of egg across the table, almost into Frank’s lap. He got up and slapped at my back, but by then it was over.

  “Jeez,” I said. “Some kind of hangover thing. I’m sorry . . .”

  “Relax, Tom.” He got me a glass of water. “Probably the memory of those old breakfasts . . .” He laughed.

  “Yeah.” Or the thought of Maureen and her new pal in the sack. I didn’t say it, though. I suddenly felt intense shame. Frank represented my family, he stood in for my dad. I didn’t want him to know the reason for my bender.

  “Listen, Tom,” he said. “What say we go down to the water today? That’s not a long drive, is it?”

  “Sounds great,” I admitted. “I need to get out of the house.”

  An hour later we parked out by the Marina and walked down to the strip of beach. I expected Uncle Frank to tire quickly; instead I had to hurry to keep up. I felt like I was seeing him slowly come back to life, first in the kitchen, concocting the omelet, and now out here on the beach. He seemed to sense the deadness and emptiness in me and tried valiantly to carry on both ends of a chatty conversation. I heard glimpses of the old raconteur in his voice, which only made me wonder more what had sent it into hiding in the first place.

  “Frank,” I said, when he came to the end of a story, “what happened? What’s got you on the run?”

  He took a deep breath and looked out over the water. “I was hoping that wouldn’t come up, Tom. I don’t want to get you or Maureen into it.”

  “I’ll decide what I want to get into,” I said. “Besides, it doesn’t necessarily protect us to keep us in the dark.”

  He turned and looked me in the eye. “That’s a point. It’s—it’s the Mob, Tom. Only it’s not so simple anymore, to just say Mob. There’s a blurry territory where it crosses over into some federal agency . . . Anyway, it’s enough to say that I got crossed up with some real bad guys. I screwed ’em on some property.” He was looking out to sea again, and I couldn’t read his expression. “I’m not sure how much they really care, or how long before they get distracted by something else. Could be they just wanted to throw a scare at me. I just know it felt like time to get out of town for a while.”

  “God, Frank. I’m sorry. That sounds tough.”

  “Ah, it’s all my own goddamn fault. Anyway, I won’t stay much longer at your place. I would have gone already if you weren’t—you know, away. And Pete seemed—I don’t know. I felt like I could be of some use. It took my mind off my own problems.”

  “Stay as long as you like, Frank.”

  He smiled grimly. “I’m not necessarily in the right, you know . . .”

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “When you go through some of the shit I’ve gone through, it gives you a different perspective. Right isn’t always a relevant concept. You’re family.”

  He turned and looked at me, then. Hard. Suddenly he wasn’t just my cliched notion of “Uncle Frank” anymore; he was a complex, intelligent, and not always easy to comprehend man whom I’d known since before I could remember. Maybe it was just my emotional state, but for a moment I was terrified.

  “Thanks, Tom.”

  “Uh, don’t mention it.”

  We looked out over the water without saying anything.

  “I’m hip to Maureen,” said Frank after a while.

  I probably tightened my fists in my pockets, but that was it.

  “There isn’t really anything to say,” he went on. “Just that you’ve got my sympathy.”

  “Don’t hold it against her,” I said. “I make it pretty tough. My whole setup makes it pretty tough.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you met him?” I asked.

  “Nope. Just a phone call I wasn’t supposed to hear. Not her fault. My ears tend to prick up at the sound of the phone right now.”

  “Peter?”

  “Jeez. I don’t think so, Tom. Not that I know of. But he’s a smart kid.”

  “No kidding.”

  We came to a high place over the water, with a concrete platform and a rusted steel railing. I leaned on it and smelled the mist. Birds wheeled overhead. I thought about the night before, and wondered what I was going to say to Maureen the next time I saw her.

  After a while I guess I choked up a little. “God damn,” I said. “I didn’t even get to see my kid last night.”

  “That’s not your fault,” said Frank quietly.

  “I always hang out with the kid, Frank. I’m neve
r so wrapped up in my goddamned problems that I don’t have time for him. I only just got back.”

  Frank got a cheerleader tone in his voice again. “Let’s go pick him up at school,”, he said. “Smart guy like him can miss half a day.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “C’mon. It’s easy. You just show up and they turn him over. Big treat, makes him a celebrity with all his pals.”

  “You do this a lot?”

  Frank got serious. “Uh, no,” he said. He almost sounded offended, for no reason I could discern. “They’d never turn the child over to anyone but his mother or father.” He turned away, the mood between us suddenly and inexplicably sour.

  “Something the matter?” I said.

  He closed his eyes for a minute. “Sorry, Tom. I guess I just all of a sudden got an image of my friends from back east showing up at the schoolyard. I’m just being paranoid . . .”

  We exchanged a long look.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  15

  It was a relief to learn what a pain in the ass it was to get a kid out of school halfway through the day. We had to fill out a visitor’s form just to go to the office, and then we had to fill out another form to get permission to yank Peter from class, and then a secretary walked us to the classroom anyway.

  It turned out it was a computer class. A bunch of the kids there had played Peter’s software Hell, which made me a visiting celebrity. I had to shake a lot of little hands to get back out. Frank was right: the visit would make Peter the most popular kid in school tomorrow.

  We went out for hamburgers downtown, then we went back home. If Peter was disturbed by my drunken sprawl on the couch that morning, he did a good job of covering it up. He and Frank were full of computer talk, and I could see how well they were getting along.

  Eventually we got around to the traditional post-Hell update, Peter and I huddled at the computer, punching in whatever new information I’d picked up on my trip. This time Frank sat in.

  “Robot maker built a terrier,” I said. “A little livelier than the usual crap . . .” Peter typed it into the proper file. “But Eagery’s thing was a robot wolfman, as tall as me—me now, not in Hell. He could talk. He sounded like Eagery, actually.” I turned to Frank. “The Happy Man’s personality has a way of pervading his robots . . .”

  Peter’s cross-reference check flagged the wolfman entry, and he punched up the reference. “In the south, Dad, remember? You met a wolfman, a real one, in the woods. You played Monopoly with him, then he turned into Colonel Eagery.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Never saw him again.”

  “Boy,” said Frank, speaking for the first time since we’d punched up Hell. “You guys are thorough. What do you think the wolfman means?”

  I froze up inside.

  But before I could speak, Peter turned, twisted his mouth, and shook his head. “Hell doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “That’s not the right approach.” He’d heard the spiel a dozen times from me, and I guessed he’d sensed my tenderness on the issue; he was sticking up for his dad.

  Then he surprised me by taking it further. “Hell is like an alternate world, like in X-Men. It’s a real place, like here, only different. If you were going down the street and you met a wolfman, you wouldn’t ask what it means. You’d run, or whatever.”

  Frank, who hadn’t noticed my discomfort, winked at me and said, “Okay, Pete. I stand corrected.”

  Peter and I went back to our entry, more or less ignoring Frank. A few minutes later Maureen’s car pulled up in the driveway. I tried not to let my sudden anxiety show, for the kid’s sake.

  “Tom.”

  She stood in Peter’s doorway, still in her coat. When I looked up she didn’t say anything more, just inclined her head in the direction of the bedroom. I gave Frank the seat beside Peter at the computer, and followed her.

  “Look at you,” she said when we were out of earshot.

  “What?”

  “When you’re not drunk you’re retreating into the computer. It’s just as bad, you know. Computer Hell. You’ve found a way to be there all the time, one way or another. You don’t live here anymore.”

  “Maureen—”

  “What’s worse is the way you’re taking him with you. Making him live in your Hell too. Making him think it’s something great. When you’re not here, he and his friends spend all day in front of that thing, living your Hell for you. Does it make you feel less lonely? Is that it?”

  “I live here.” I knew I had to keep my voice quiet and steady and fierce or she’d talk right over me, and soon we’d be shouting. I didn’t want it to escalate. “Last thing I knew I lived here with you. Maybe that’s not the way it is anymore. But I live here. Seems to me it’s you who’s got one foot out the door.”

  There was a moment of silence and then it hit me. Call me stupid, but it was the first time I felt the impact. Last night, making love, had been goodbye. The gulf between us now was enormous. Things weren’t going to suddenly get better.

  It would take a huge amount of very hard, very painful work to fix it, if it could be fixed at all.

  “Do you ever think of the effect it has on him?” She was sticking to safe territory. I didn’t blame her. She had a lot of it. “You and your goddamned inner landscape—”

  She broke off, sobbing. It was as though she’d been saving those words, and their release had opened the floodgates. It also occurred to me that she was opting for tears so I wouldn’t attack her, and I felt a little cheated.

  Anyway, I took her in my arms. I’m not completely stupid.

  “I don’t want him to live like that,” she said. Her fists balled against my chest for a moment, then her body went slack, and I had to hold her up while she cried. After a minute we sat on the edge of the bed.

  “I don’t know, Tom. I don’t know what’s happening.”

  “Well, neither do I.” I felt suddenly exhausted and hollow. “It seems like the ball’s in your court—”

  I could feel her tensing up against my shoulder. So I dropped it.

  I smelled onions frying in butter. I listened: Frank was cooking again, and explaining the recipe to Peter.

  “It’s not an inner landscape,” I said quietly. “It’s a place where I live half my life. I get to share that with my son—”

  She pulled away from me and stood up, straightened her clothes. Then she went into the living room, without looking back.

  16

  I lay back on the bed, only meaning to buy some time. But I must have been depleted, morally and otherwise, and I fell asleep, and slept through dinner.

  When I woke again the house was dark. Peter was in his room; I could see the glow of the night light in the hallway. Maureen was slipping into bed beside me.

  When I reached for her she pushed me away.

  I didn’t make it into a big deal. I didn’t feel particularly angry, not at the time. In a few minutes we were both asleep again.

  17

  When I woke again, it was to the sun streaming in across the bed, heating me to a sweat under the covers. It was Saturday; no work for me or Maureen, no school for Peter. But Maureen was gone. I didn’t feel too good, and I lay there for a while just looking at the insides of my eyelids. There wasn’t any noise in the apartment, and I suspected they’d all gone somewhere to get out from under the shadow of you-know-who.

  I didn’t let it bug me: I took a nice slow shower and went into the kitchen and made some coffee and toast.

  But I was wrong. Peter was home. He wandered into the kitchen while I was cleaning up, and said, “Hey, Dad.”

  This time I could see he knew something was wrong. I didn’t have what it took to keep it from him, and I guess he didn’t have what it took to keep it from me, either.

  “Hey, Pete,” I said. “Where’s your mom?”

  “They went out shopping,” he said. “Also to look at some place for Uncle Prank to live.”

  I nodded. “What you doing?”

  “
I don’t know. Just some game stuff I got from Jeremy.”

  “It looks like a pretty nice day out there—”

  “I know, I know. I heard it already, from Mom.” He looked down at his feet.

  There was a minute or two of silence while I finished clearing the table.

  “I guess I should offer to ‘throw the old pigskin around’ or something,” I said. “But the truth is I don’t feel up to it right now.”

  The truth was my guts were churning. I couldn’t focus on the kid. Seeing him left alone just made me think of Maureen and where she probably was right now. Frank was almost certainly playing the beard for her, and “shopping” by himself. If they came home with packages she’d have to unpack them to know what was in them.

  “That’s okay,” he said seriously. “I don’t think we have an old pigskin anyway.”

  I managed a smile.

  “I’ll be in my room, okay, Dad?”

  “Okay, Peter.”

  Pretty soon I heard him tapping at his computer again. I sat and nursed the cold coffee and ran my thoughts through some pretty repetitive and unproductive loops. And then it hit me.

  Just a twinge at first. But unmistakable.

  I was on my way back to Hell.

  I realized I’d felt inklings earlier that morning, in the shower, even in bed, and hadn’t let myself notice. It was already pretty far along. I was probably an hour or so away from crossing over.

  By this time I’d perfected a kind of emotional shorthand. I went through all the traditional stages in the space of a few seconds: denial, bargaining, fear, etc. But underlying them all, this time, was a dull, black rage.

  I’d almost never had so short a time back. That hurt. The fact that I was crossing over while Maureen was holed up in her midday love nest hurt more. Unless she came back in the next hour, I wouldn’t get in another word. I couldn’t make up, couldn’t plead, and I couldn’t threaten, either, or issue an ultimatum. All the words I’d been rehearsing in my head flew right out the window. She would come home to find me a zombie again.