Tumbledown

by Robert Boswell

“That should be plenty,” Barnstone told him.

  Mick put the utensils in the sink, which was full of dirty dishes. He began rolling his sleeves.

  “The profession tosses around a lot of labels,” Barnstone said. “They’re useful, but they can encourage circular reasoning and they often cause pain. Most things are like that. Take this roast, for instance.” She leaned over the counter and inhaled the odor. “Good for my taste buds and bad for my thighs.” She slapped her thighs. “Christ, I’ve got to get dressed. Are you going to do the dishes?”

  He paused in his sleeve rolling, eyes zipping about, trying to figure out his own intentions. “It looks like it,” he said.

  He was struggling, she understood. The boy probably never willingly took his meds. She would only mention it if he was really in trouble. This was how they learned what they needed.

  “You’re a saint,” she told him.

  “Saint Brown Nose,” Maura said.

  Who could blame him for wanting to be on his toes? Barnstone had never been a heavy drug user, unlike many in the rock world. Perhaps if she’d ever had the luxury of success, she might have felt she could indulge. She could not judge this boy, who was kind and handsome and intelligent, and whom, Barnstone was increasingly certain, Maura loved. She wondered whether Andujar would join them or spend the whole evening in his room. She was in the same position with him as Maura was with Mick. If Andujar were well, he would not be with a woman almost thirty years his senior. It meant she had to do all she could to make him well, or she’d become one of the self-serving ones who fed on the illness of others. Did Maura understand this? Was this something they could talk about?

  In her bedroom, Barnstone discovered Andujar standing in the corner he liked, a lit joint in his mouth. He was not beautiful like Mick Coury but he had an aura of masculinity that Mick lacked. She knew it was a facade and yet she liked the facade. He bent down and blew smoke through the screened window. “I thought you were at the park.” She had heard him leave while she was in the kitchen. He liked to walk down to the fountain and through the town park.

  Andujar nodded. “There and back. Got a little feeling edgy.”

  The window screen was bent, and she understood that he had climbed in through it, which was why she had not heard him return. The flimsy aluminum frame was cockeyed from his comings and goings. It would never again be truly straight.

  “Our guests have begun to arrive,” she said.

  “I know Mick. He goes way back.”

  “And you’ve met Maura.”

  “I’ve met Maura.”

  “All right then. Put that out and let me change clothes.”

  “I’ll wait in my room.”

  “All right then.”

  But Andujar didn’t move. She would have to change in front of him. She didn’t much care for showing off her body in daylight, but it was a silly concern. Andujar would not be affected one way or the other. Perhaps that was why she didn’t want to do it.

  Violet spent the morning cleaning Billy’s Dart. He promised to let her use it for the Barnstone excursion, and it was distressingly filthy. She found a rather amazing array of items beneath and between the seats, including several partial baggies of pot. The usual detritus—pens, coins, dollar bills, keys, ragged road maps—she put in an empty flowerpot by the front door. The drugs—she found unidentifiable pills, as well—she threw away. But what was she supposed to do with the Astral Personal Vibrator? It was the size of a ballpoint pen and looked unused. There was an enormous pacifier, too large for a baby’s mouth; a pair of joke eyeglasses that permitted the wearer to see behind him; bread crusts from perhaps a dozen white-bread sandwiches; three dirty and chipped coffee cups, one of which was shaped like a woman’s breast; earplugs; nose clips; a blindfold; an eye patch; filthy earphones; a Lumberjacks baseball cap; a crud-encrusted stuffed animal of indeterminate species; parking tickets dating back nine years; cracked CD cases; two paperback novels; used tissues; unused tampons; a Polaroid of a woman’s bare thighs and knees; and a pair of coffee-stained (she hoped) boxer shorts decorated with clocks. There were perhaps thirty lists, written on the backs of envelopes or scraps of paper—grocery lists, to-do lists, book lists, lists of names, lists of places, lists of mysterious words that made no sense to her—each in Billy’s awkward hand.

  Violet found the letter written by Billy’s wife saying that she was leaving him, a brief, nicely written letter, explaining that she had adequately mastered English to pass a citizenship exam, and she no longer needed to be married to him. Didn’t he want this? Didn’t he feel obliged to hold on to the important documents of his life? She might have dragged Billy out to go through the things, but a dark, slender man had arrived on a motorcycle to visit him. Except for Lise, this was the only visitor of Billy’s she had seen. And Lise, as Violet might have predicted, had never returned for a second visit.

  The Dart’s tank was empty, of course. She took a break to drive to a gas station and fill it. With Billy riding to work with James, the Dart was available every day. She wanted to drive to the ocean, but didn’t yet feel comfortable negotiating San Diego traffic. She needed a few less-ambitious journeys first. She had thought Lolly might help her clean, but Lolly had discovered a gym nearby that was open on Sundays, and she went there to exercise. The car took fifty dollars of gas.

  Shortly after she got back to the house, a silver car pulled up. Violet was trying to decide what to do with a string of packaged condoms, linked like sausages, that she had found wedged in the crack of the passenger seat. A door to the silver car opened and Lolly climbed out, her gymwear made of shiny stretch material. A man had driven her home from the gym, a handsome man whose eyes took her in the way a hungry mouth devours a biscuit.

  “Cheerio then,” Lolly called to him, and Violet cringed. The man said something in a low tone before driving off.

  “Made a new friend?” Violet asked.

  “I was about to ask you the same thing,” she said, eyeing the condoms.

  “You wouldn’t believe the rubbish in this car.”

  “I wish I’d stayed and helped instead of going to the gym,” Lolly said. “I’m dreadfully sorry to dump it all on you. And it was a waste. The men in there just wouldn’t leave me alone.”

  “You’ll be happy to hear then that I’m not even close to finished.”

  “If only I weren’t so knackered from the workout Rudy gave me. That was Rudy who brought me home. He’s a personal trainer. He’s been showing me what his workouts could do for me. Free sample. Obviously, he just wants in my knickers, but why not get the freebie?”

  Billy emerged from the house with a bundle over his shoulder—a bedsheet, held by the corners, clothing stuffed inside. Shirt sleeves flapped free of the bundle. The thin dark man was with him. He walked directly past her without speaking, mounted his motorcycle, and sped away. Billy opened the Dart’s trunk and shoved in the clothing.

  “Looks like I’ll be riding with you to Onyx Springs,” he said.

  “Who was that?”

  “A guy I know. He fixed the hall toilet, the ceiling kitchen fan, and the lock on the back door. Was here an hour and a half. I gave him twenty-five bucks. That’s fair, isn’t it?” It took him three tries to get the trunk to close around the bundle. “Thought it’d be a good parting gift, fixing the stuff Jimmy’ll never fix.”

  “Parting gift?” she asked. “What are you doing?”

  “Getting a life,” he said. “You told me I ought to. I got a place in Onyx Springs. Just confirmed it on the phone—a neighbor’s phone. The place doesn’t have a phone right now. It’s way cheap. Shorter drive to work. I’ve been here long enough, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” she said, but too forcefully and his face fell. “I mean . . . I’m happy for you.”

  “I’ll let you know how it goes, and you can let me know how yours goes.”

  “My what?” Violet asked.

>   “Your attempt to get a life.” He headed back to the house for another load, but he paused at the door. “Thanks for cleaning out the car. I’ve been meaning to do that for like fifteen years.”

  Maura carefully poured gravy from the pot into a soup bowl—a gravy boat was not the kind of thing Barnstone would own. Maura had eaten Barnstone’s roast a few times, and this was her standard job. The roast was okay but it was obvious Barnstone wasn’t much of a cook. Maura ran a wooden spoon through the gravy, tasted it, and added salt. Adding salt was the sum of her talent with spices.

  Mick finished the dishes. The blade had cut through the meat, and he himself made it happen. Hardly miraculous work, but he couldn’t remember the last time anyone offered him a knife. “Should you be doing that?” he asked.

  “Loosen,” Maura commanded, shaking her behind as an example. “We need music.”

  Mick followed her into the living room. He had not skipped his meds but had taken a two-thirds dose at bedtime instead of in the morning. He did not believe he might tip over into the irrational. Now and then he balanced it perfectly. But there was no system. He would need his regular dose tomorrow, and the day after he might not need any. He liked imagining the day that he would need nothing and would return to the world as it had been before. The simplicity of it, the basic clarity of existence, would once more belong to him. There were times when it was so near that he brushed up against it—a warm transparency. If he could lean down and position his arm just right, he should be able to nab it. Like at the door, he had heard Barnstone calling “Come on in,” yet the tone of the voice was crumbly, which could indicate that she meant the opposite, like how people would say fuck you while they were laughing, or how the same word from different mouths had distinct meanings, and the sunlight on the stoop merely emphasized the shadows, and the shadows made the whole house seem ready to fall. These things meant something. Even the disarray inside the house, the scatter of magazines and throw pillows, a guitar lying on the floor; they seemed to him not signs of a comfortable life but the ruins of an orderly life. This world, his world, was the ruins of the life he’d had before. Yet he could sense that other world lingering within the archaeological site, rooting for him, waiting until he could knock his head through the curtains.

  “She listens to awful stuff,” Maura said, “but I left some of my CDs here.”

  He asked, “Do you know a song that has a sewing machine in it?”

  “Imogen Heap,” Maura said without looking up from the CDs. “Or maybe it’s Regina Spektor. I don’t have any of their stuff here.”

  “I drove to this beach one time. My car was full of people.” He told her about taking friends from Yuma to Mexico, a remote beach so vacant that it seemed like a landscape out of a dream. They had stayed the night, three girls, Mick, and another guy. The girls were all supposed to be spending the night at each other’s houses.

  “A nice trick,” Maura interrupted to say, “and not as hard to pull off as you might think.”

  Mick could not imagine trying to pull it off now. “I wasn’t pretending. I just told my parents that I was going to be out all night.”

  “They let you do that?”

  He shrugged and continued. They built a campfire. The girls were in the choir and sang songs. One of the songs had a sewing machine in it. Late in the night, they went skinny-dipping, and still later the ocean suddenly became a source of light. They all witnessed it. There was a full moon, and when they went to the water’s edge to investigate, they saw that the whole beach was glimmering. It was covered with tiny silver fish. “Grunion,” Mick said. “I didn’t know the name for them at the time, but they’re grunion. They mate on the shore.”

  “You were the kind of boy who went off with a bunch of girls and stayed out all night?”

  Thinking about it now, he wondered at the confidence he’d had, the ability to feel wonder, to let himself become part of an unknowable world.

  “When I take my meds before bed,” he said, “I have dreams that are just pictures.”

  “You want Arcade Fire?”

  Luckily, she waved a CD case at him. “Sure,” he said.

  “What do you mean pictures?”

  “Like a movie screen of things.”

  “A landscape.”

  “More like a toolshed. Or medicine cabinet. Or kitchen cupboard.”

  “You dream a cupboard? What happens to the cupboard?”

  “There’s just a cupboard or one time a desk. The dashboard of a car. I’m not in the dream in any way.”

  “There’s nobody?”

  “Just this image—not like a photograph. It’s real enough. Like someone could reach up and take something, but there’s never anyone there to do it.”

  “That’s a really lousy dream,” Maura said. “If you were Barnstone’s boy, she’d take you off that shit. She took me off everything but iron and an antidepressant.”

  “I need it some, for another week or two. But if I take it every day, I get . . . flat.”

  “I’ve seen you like that. You’re like a zombie.”

  “Maybe I never told you, but when I got sick, I was in my room watching Night of the Living Dead.”

  “You should sue.”

  “I didn’t become a zombie. It’s the meds that do that.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I started writing down all the lyrics to the movie.”

  “It’s not lyrics.”

  “I wrote page after page, I couldn’t keep up, and for some reason it wasn’t okay to pause the DVD. When the movie was finally over—it makes a movie long, believe me, to write the whole time. When it was over, I couldn’t read what I had written. It looked like it was that Japanese picture writing.”

  “I think it’s called calligraphy.”

  “I thought maybe I just couldn’t read my handwriting, so I picked up one of my textbooks. The writing looked like English but the words kept coming loose and sliding up to the next sentence, and they got jumbled. I remember one thing I was trying to . . . something like . . . The Paleolithic bony mass conforms to expectations. I kept thinking that was the key to everything, and I copied it down and watched it change into Japanese as I wrote it. My hand would form a letter but it would come out a picture word.”

  “That’s a weird breakdown.”

  Mick listened to music without speaking, a love song, though not a very happy one. Why was love so depressing? Karly was avoiding him. For instance, why wasn’t he with her today? He should be upset with her, but how he felt about Karly was like a thin raincoat he had to wear inside out. Try putting that into words that would mean something to somebody. He was grateful to Karly, even for snubbing him. The way the dog that’s been spanked still wants in the owner’s lap? More like the blind man who trips over his guide dog and falls onto broken glass, but while his eyes are full of shards, he can see color where before there was only the black. Is that something a person could speak?

  There was one time his father picked Mick up after a session with his psychologist, this nice woman who wore dresses that were like suits, which seemed to Mick like banners she waved to prove she was qualified for her job. The day was cool and his father had the heat in the car on high. He probably meant to be respectful and show interest in his son by picking him up with the heat on high and then saying, “My therapist knows your therapist.” There, coming out the door, her professional flag bearing the pressures of her body, was Mick’s psychologist, walking in those stiff psychologist shoes along the hard, cold sidewalk. His father’s therapist was a marriage counselor, and Mick imagined the two therapists talking and his dad’s counselor saying, If you can just get that boy to straighten up, this marriage will be fine.

  Now, if he tried to say how he was grateful to Karly, and how his new way of seeing made him want to say thank you to her (if she would only let him near), Maura would likely only get enough of it to feel bad, which w
as how Mick had felt with his father. The problem with complicated feelings (were there any other kind?) was that the small part you could put into words was never enough to take the listener all the way to the end. If he could be like a dog or an elephant or the bird that flies low and hungry over the ocean thinking only fish, fish, fish, then he would have no trouble explaining, and Maura would hear him and shrug and start on some other topic. But he wasn’t that dog, that elephant, that ravenous bird. And wasn’t ravenous a word to mean full of the raven? Could there be a seabird full of the raven?

  Maybe he should have taken a scribbling bit of his meds this morning, he thought. Just licked the pill.

  Candler was to meet John Egri at a bar in La Jolla. “If I’m not there when you arrive,” Egri had said over the phone, “sit your butt down and wait for me. Don’t tell anyone what you’re doing.”

  “Is all this intrigue necessary?” Candler asked.

  “I don’t know,” Egri replied. “I don’t think our phones are tapped—though I’m calling you from a pay phone just to be safe.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m pretty sure I’m being followed. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but you be careful going down there. Make sure no one is on your tail.”

  Candler felt idiotic doing it, but he took elaborate precautions, driving north on Liberty Highway and stopping on a deserted stretch, studying the cars that passed him, doubling back to look for parked cars, and then heading north again. He took a county road west to the coast, where he drove south into La Jolla. Vigilant today, but the night before, he had told Lolly that he was secretly meeting with Egri about the promotion.

  “I feel weird about the whole thing,” he told her.

  “We’re going to need the money.” She had been over his finances. Without the promotion, they would be pinched until she got a job—and it’d have to be a decent job, as she would need a car. The conversation took place in bed with the lights off. “I spent a big part of my life trying to believe that money doesn’t matter much,” she went on, “but I was lying to myself. I like money, and so does everybody. People who say otherwise are liars or pretending.”