by Jenny Diski
‘Hiya, Mikey,’ Bet chirruped when Jim wheeled him into the kitchen, as if he were making a rare and delightful surprise visit, and was not just coming home as he did every day, and would be for the rest of their lives.
‘Hey, Mom, how ya doing?’ Mikey shouted, playing back at her, and chuckling his pleasure at seeing his mother and father and the kitchen all there, still unchanged, still welcoming their long-lost boy home.
Mikey was delightful. He entered a room, took a deep breath into his heavily overweight belly and bellowed a great ‘Hi’, smiling long and hard into your face, then roaring with laughter, and you were lost in the gaiety. It worked such a charm that, whenever things went a little quiet and a silence fell between people, Mikey would bellow, ‘Hi, how ya doing?’ Like a comedian’s catchphrase, it was irresistible and touching, that and Mikey’s sweet need to keep everyone happy.
‘Oh, Mikey,’ Bet laughed, all sadness and fondness.
‘Hey, son, how’re you doing?’ Jim said.
‘Well, I’m doing just fine,’ Mikey would shout, like the punchline of a joke, and the hilarity would shimmer around the room.
God knows what Mikey had been like as an undecided youth or a trainee policeman, but as a damaged survivor he made magic. It took a little while to understand his speech, but once your ear was in, you compensated for his slowness in getting his syllables out, his heavy arrhythmic sentences and his stuttering difficulty in articulating words. It even added to the fun, knowing what was going to come (‘Well, I’m doing just fine.’ ‘Hey, Jenny, will you marry me?’ ‘When are we gonna eat?’), and then its eventual arrival, just as expected. I learned quickly to make fun of Mikey’s little ways and to avoid responding to them as tragic symptoms of a broken body and mind.
‘Come on, Mikey, spit it out.’
‘Just … just … just … you w … wait. Donut be in su … su … uch a god … d … d … dam hur … hurry.’
‘Watch your language, young man,’ Bet would say severely.
‘Huh, sorry, god … god … goddam it.’
Mikey was like Udi, he wouldn’t let you not love him. It was a gift.
But Mikey was no less aware of his affliction than we were. We joked and he joked about the dozen exactly similar radios he had in his room and the multiple copies of his favourite CDs, which he bought over and over again on his Saturday outings with Jim to the mall to spend his week’s wages because he forgot he had them already. He stubbornly refused to listen to Jim when he told him he had the new Santana, and insisted on getting it again, because he had no recollection of the pleasure of getting what he wanted the first time, and then the next. If everything felt new, nothing felt old and safe and regular. He forgot that he had eaten and demanded another pizza because he was genuinely hungry, if not for food then for satisfaction. That and the fact that he couldn’t exercise had made him considerably overweight. Often he tried to do things for himself that took two or three times as long to do than they would if someone did them for him, but you stood back and let him. Sometimes, though, the frustration would mount up, he would be too slow making a coffee, lighting a match for my or his mother’s cigarette, or getting to the loo in time, and he would crash down the mug, sweep the matchbox on to the floor, or slam the door shut on himself in his room, cursing darkly in a way that Bet couldn’t stand. Mikey knew exactly what had happened to him, how he had once been, that he could once drive cars and go out with the boys, meet girls, get drunk, have sex, make plans, fail exams because he didn’t care, not because he couldn’t write, and stay out wherever he wanted for as long as he wanted. He remembered in his grown man’s body that he had once been a grown man in other ways before he had been condemned to play the lovable child for all his life. When he shouted his anger at Bet, Jim responded immediately.
‘Don’t ever talk to your mother like that.’
Mikey, of course, got over his tantrum quickly enough, forgetting it had happened, but for the rest of the evening Jim would be sunk deep into his armchair, his hand over his forehead, half covering his eyes, while a game-show host urged his contestants to ever higher peaks of hysterical, squealing excitement.
Jim was particularly pleased that I got on with Mikey. It was what had most worried him about my visit. Right at the beginning we had established that he and I had different views of the world. While driving back from the train station Jim had made some passing remark about welfare and liberal pinkos, and I decided I’d better establish my credentials and leave it at that.
‘Listen, Jim, I’m so liberal pinko, I’m virtually blood-red. But we’ll manage to coexist for the few days I’m here, won’t we?’
‘Sure, so long as you don’t try any of your communist world domination tricks on me.’
‘It’s a deal. Not a domino will fall. I’m so wishy-washy liberal that I’m prepared to coexist with you.’
‘Just for five days, right?’
‘Yeah, just for five days.’
But his real concern was how I would manage with Mikey. He feared, I think, pity, sentimentality or an open expression of sadness. Once it turned out OK, he relaxed, pleased that Bet had someone to talk to, taking off on his own to the base for longer periods because he felt that she had company. But I was not the best of company, staying for long periods, when Mikey was at work, in the trailer, reading, avoiding Bet’s engulfing need to talk, to have the company of another woman, to go over and over the childhood pain she had experienced. I listened for as long as I could, but it was never enough. Jim, full of love for Bet as he was, had stopped listening years ago. Not that Bet stopped talking to him, but he switched off and you could almost see the words slithering around and over him as he sat at the kitchen table thinking his own thoughts or not thinking them. On the second morning of my visit I woke with my eyes pouring tears and feeling as if knives were being turned in the irises. When I staggered into the kitchen from the trailer, Bet found some drops which we tried at the kitchen table, and then, my eyes red raw and streaming, not much improved, she continued with her monologue while I held paper tissues to my face, using up an entire box as each got drenched. She was concerned, but whatever was happening to my eyes had happened before, I told her, and having established that I didn’t have to be rushed to hospital, her need to talk reasserted itself, and I sat, weeping and flinching in pain, while she continued with whatever story it was she was telling me.
The same morning I received a letter from England. It was proofs for an article I’d written just before I left, and I had given Bet’s address to the editor to send them to me for checking. I was quite pleased to get something that looked like work to keep me in my trailer. That evening, early, I took my hosts out to eat. We went to Bet and Jim’s favourite Tex-Mex restaurant. It was in a local mall. Mikey liked it. They knew him well there and joked with him easily. The food was neither here nor there, except there was plenty of it, and as Jim said, ‘It ain’t fancy.’ Always a plus in his eyes. We had to eat very early because the final game of the World Series was on TV that night. Baseball, American male ritual, Jim and Mikey in front of the TV eating chips and popcorn, drinking beer.
When we got back, Bet snapped on the small TV in the kitchen to see how the preparations for the game were going. What I know about baseball is nothing except that it functions quite like religion for American men. I even had to be told, with eyes rising towards heaven, that the World Series was baseball and not football. I worked out for myself that ‘world’ in this case meant just the USA, revealing what Americans really thought of themselves. The men were in the kitchen, Jim explaining that the final was between the Raging Somethings and the Wild Whatevers, when disaster struck. The Wild Whatevers were owned by Ted Turner, and the commentator said that Turner and his then wife, Jane Fonda, were in the stadium to watch their team.
‘Shit!’ Jim barked, and Mikey looked up astonished to hear such language from his dad.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ Bet groaned.
‘What?’ I asked. The atmosphere wa
s thunderous.
‘Turn it off,’ Jim said.
‘Jim, it doesn’t matter. Just watch the game. You always watch the final of the World Series.’
‘I’m not watching anything that bitch is watching. Hanoi bloody Jane. I don’t want to see her ugly traitor’s mug on my TV set. Turn it off.’
‘You’re not going to watch the game?’ I asked.
‘I saw men die in Vietnam while Miss Ho Chi Minh Fonda was prancing around in Hanoi encouraging the Commies to kill American soldiers. She should have faced a firing squad. She ain’t going to show her face in my home. Turn the frigging TV off.’
It was the first time I’d heard a real person use the word frigging.
‘But she was young. Even the GIs thought it was a bad war.’
‘I don’t know what kind of war it was, except my country asked me to fight and if necessary lay down my life. I didn’t see Hanoi Jane risking anything. Or she thought she wasn’t. But I tell you there are people even now who wouldn’t go to any picture she was in, not even to spit at the screen. We won’t forget. She deserves a bullet for what she did. She’ll never be forgiven. How dare she sit in the fancy seats of the World Series final under an American flag? She used to burn it.’
‘Turn that bitch off,’ he ordered Bet.
‘Don’t be silly. Mikey wants to watch. Jenny’s never seen the World Series. Just don’t look at her when she comes on screen. Come on, let’s pop some corn.’
Jim made a popping noise of his own and stomped out of the kitchen into the darkened lounge. The noise of a quiz show blasted out of the large TV, drowning out the commentator on the kitchen set.
Mikey, Bet and I watched the game with the sound down low. Mikey tried to explain the finer points of baseball to me, while Bet got intermittently excited and punched the air at some unfathomable thrilling moment. We all felt slightly guilty and treacherous, aware of Jim’s powerful sulk next door, but equally committed to common sense and doing what all America, except Jim, was at the very same moment doing. I watched the game in much the same way I watched the test card as a child – waiting for something to happen. So far as I could see it was rounders but so slow it made cricket look like an extreme sport. Men in ridiculous clothes posed and gyrated and almost invariably produced no-balls, and so had to begin the posing all over again. When a ball was good, someone ran a few yards to the next base, people cheered, the commentators did arcane arithmetic and the whole sequence began again.
‘Excuse me, does anything else happen in this game?’
Mikey and Bet looked at me reproachfully.
‘It’s a great game. You don’t understand.’
The camera picked out Ted Turner and a matronly, most unrevolutionary Jane Fonda cheering their team on. At the mention of their names by the commentator, the TV in the next room rose several decibels.
‘Hey, Jim, keep it down.’
But he couldn’t hear over the yelps of glee as someone gave the correct answer to a question that was worth a whole laundry room full of white goods.
* * *
‘How do you like the trailer?’ Jim asked the next day.
We had made a trip to Santa Fe, Mikey took the day off work. Santa Fe was, according to Bet, ‘where the artists all live’, but wandering around it seemed more full of posers than last night’s baseball. Hampstead on a bad but sunny day. In fact, there was the Georgia O’Keeffe museum, which might have been interesting, but when I mentioned it I got a distinctly cool response from my hosts. We went to the tourist shopping street, and once again I found myself staring at modern parodies of cowboy boots and modified saddle bags with mobile-phone holders. I managed to get them to the strangely jolly cathedral, all light and colour, the Mexican influence overriding morose Catholicism. Though the Catholicism fought back. A notice informed the congregation that the holy bones of the tepidly virtuous St Thérèse of Lisieux would be arriving to be venerated on the New Mexican leg of their American tour. Bet lit a candle for Mikey. I just lit a candle in the belief that there ought to be as much light as possible in the world.
‘The trailer’s wonderful. Love it. A great place to work.’
‘Yeah, I can’t get her out of it. I think she’s hiding from me,’ Bet complained, only half joking.
‘No, honey, she’s like me, busy doing nothing. I got nothing to do and I’m still only halfway through it. Hey,’ Jim said to Bet. ‘I’ve had a great idea. You like Jenny, I like Jenny, Mikey likes Jenny. You like Jenny, don’t you, Mikey? Why don’t we keep her?’
‘Yeah,’ Bet agreed. ‘Good thinking. How we gonna do that?’
‘Hell, no one knows she’s here. We can keep her in the trailer. It’ll be just like Misery. You know, that movie about the writer? We lock her in one night, and I’ll take it off on my hunting trip. We’ll go way out in the woods, and I’ll just shoot deer and let my hair grow until the search for the missing English Commie lady writer blows over.’
‘Just pinko, Jim.’ I tried to join in with the game.
‘Nah, it’s no good,’ Bet said. ‘She got a letter yesterday. She told her boss our address. She must have known we’d decide to keep her for ourselves. They’ll know she was here.’
‘That’s OK. We can say she was here but she left after a couple of days and we don’t have any idea where she’s gone. Did you see Misery, Jenny? You remember James Caan was a storywriter and…’
I’d seen Misery. I thought it was quite funny. A nice take on the folly of writers’ best hopes and worst fears. But during the drive back to the empty suburbs of Albuquerque, Bet, Jim and Mikey took on a more shadowy reality in my mind. As if they’d turned inside out, an underlying darkness gleaming glossily on the surface. The veneer of joking affection was replaced by a mythic malevolence, and an overriding will to action. My vision adjusted. Rationality, which I had held on to so far, receded, and I began to see only the gothic underbelly, the monsters that are created by lurking unresolved pain and disappointment; the underworld of decent normality, of suburban vacancy, of the ordinary turning to horror, that American movies understood so well. I passed from America-in-the-movies into movie-America, just as Buster Keaton had wandered dreamily from his seat in the cinema to slip through the screen and become part of the celluloid action.
When I got back to the house, I tried to walk the fearful feelings, the absurd feelings away, through the wide empty streets that went nowhere. I found myself in anywhere and everyplace, the empty space of modern American living, and I recognised it with an increasing chill in my heart. The movies were my only guide to these depleted suburbs, the bedrock from which the contemporary monsters of America emerged. In the cinema I had seen Freddy Kruger and his ghastly peers stalk these unending, dangerously clean, lethally clipped, vacant, peopleless, inhuman streets, free to pick and choose among the near identical residences which front door (always closed except to enter or exit the car) to storm, to which blankly normal household he would announce his beastly reality. Now I saw how these films came about, how they couldn’t not have sprung into the head of anyone who walked along the antiseptic avenues, as I did, looking for signs of life. I walked for what seemed to be miles, but house after house stood mute, a clipped bit of lawn, a car or two, maybe a truck or a trailer, but no shops or bars or cafés appeared where locals could meet, greet and gossip. There was no sound of kids, no sight of the young, mixing and injecting life and play into the emptiness. It was uncanny. So safe that danger echoed with every footstep. Hitchcock, John Carpenter, Wes Craven and Stephen King understand this vacuum, this white hole available to be filled with all that is darkest and murkiest in the human psyche. The new gothic landscape, a heaven that whispers hell in all its neat, inhumane silence.
By the time I was back inside my trailer – now hovering impossibly between a haven and a threat – I was feverish with unreality, or, as it increasingly seemed to me, clearly observing the reality that I had until now failed to see. I have never been mad as such, by which I mean that I have never
thought myself someone or somewhere other than I am, not heard voices informing me of truths inaccessible to the rest of the world, not seen visions that bore no relation to what was happening in the sight of everyone else. At any rate, whenever any of these things did occur, it was usually in my twenties and directly attributable to a very carefree use of drugs. But I do know a kind of madness that lies low in the mind, half-buried in consciousness, which lives in parallel to sanity, and given the right circumstances or even just half a chance, creeps like a lick of flame or a growing tumour up and around ordinary perception, consuming it for a while, and causing one, even when not at the movies, to quake in fear of the world and people and what they – I mean, of course, we – are capable of.
In the dark, that night, I had no doubt that the joking threat of kidnap was no joke at all. As a matter of fact, even in the cool sanity of this present moment, I suspect that there was something more than just a tease, but that night in my head the threat combined with Jim’s evident fury, Bet’s need for company and the wish of both for a sympathetic soul to keep Mikey happy, and whatever portion of cool sanity I possess couldn’t be seen for dust. I spent the night in lonely terror, like all the children who had been spirited away in grim folk tales, like James Caan in Misery, like Tony Last at the finale of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, condemned for ever to read Dickens to a madman in the jungle. I believed, by morning, that I would be consumed by these emotional cannibals I had unwittingly set myself among. They would refuse to let me leave. I would be secreted by them. Imprisoned. Sequestered. Killed. The waking nightmare lasted into the daylight. When I say I believed this to be the case, I mean that I absolutely knew it to be my situation. I knew also that it was ridiculous. That I was in a condition. That I might be pleased these kind and generous people with whom I had little in common liked me enough to joke about wanting to keep me. But knowing that was nothing like as powerful as knowing that I was enmeshed in a horror movie that had come to life. The horror, of course, was my horror at having got off the train; at joining the parade instead of letting it pass me by. Even for five days. I felt that I was dying and made it easier on myself by letting myself think that someone out there – instead of me – was doing the killing. That day, in order to shake the horror off, I read books (Zizek, for God’s sake, on fantasy), I worked on the proofs, I lay on the bed breathing deeply, fighting for calm, but the fear that I would never leave that place remained. I wasn’t due to catch the train until after lunch the following day. Until then I was trapped in anxiety: until the moment when I was due to leave, I couldn’t know for certain that they would let me go. They just don’t take me to the station. They keep me away from the phones. There is no other form of transport to get myself to the train, no passing pedestrian I can appeal to for rescue. They just drive me away in the trailer and I am lost. Getting to the train became crucial. And the more I tried to feel the absurdity of my fear, the more my fear told me that such things happen, that craziness occurs, that I might well be captured and … and what? Killed? Kept as a friend for lonely Mikey? Punished for having an easy life? It didn’t matter what. The sense of threat was everything. An engulfing black cloud descended over me, and made a nonsense of all attempts at rationality or efforts at distraction.