“Please.”
Time has stood still inside. “Oh boy, Richard. It’s almost identical to the last day I was here—my final day pass out of the palliative care unit. I wasn’t supposed to eat meat, but Dad cut my turkey up into bits the size of peas and said to hell with it. I puked my dinner and then some blood and then the paramedics had to come. My parents and sister were so frightened. It was such a bad scene.”
Richard stands in the front area and waits as I float through the house. A new TV here, a microwave oven there, some fridge magnets, but otherwise the house remains as it was when I left it. I approach the staircase, but Richard looks at me. “Are you sure you’re okay with this, Jared?”
“I’m fine. As long as you’re here. Let’s go up.”
He walks behind me and we enter my old bedroom, now a sewing room. Then I look in the old bathroom, my sister’s room, and finally my parents’ room. “Let me look first,” Richard says. I tell him it won’t be necessary, but he’s adamant. He nudges the brown door open, peeks in, blanches, and then tiptoes out. “Leakers. I guess I have to tell you it’s pretty gruesome in there.”
“I need to see.” I walk in, Richard behind me, and I see my parents’ remains mummified into their bedsheets and mattress. “Sorry, man.” Richard says.
“It’s okay. It’s Nature’s way.” I walk through the room—my photos are on the wall, they never took them down—and I see the hand mold I made in kindergarten. “Where are your own parents, Richard?”
“They’re in their Camry at the Douglas Border Crossing. Linus and I made an overnight mission down there last summer and found their car. We were going to bury the remains, but it just wasn’t, um, possible.” I look around the room some more. “It’s darkening outside,” Richard says. “I have to go now—to see Mount Baker. You want to come?”
“I want to stay here with my folks a bit more. I wish there was something I could leave you with,” I say, “a gift—a small miracle I can perform for you. Is there anything you want or need?”
Richard, now standing in the driveway says, “No. It sounds ridiculous, but I’ve got everything I need. Are you sure you want to stay here?”
“I’m sure. Good-bye, Richard. Thanks for coming in with me to see my folks.”
“It was nothing. Thank you for fixing Karen’s legs. When are you coming back again?” “In two weeks.” “See you then, buddy.” “Bye, guy.”
31
ONE IDEA WILL WIN
I was never a good “talker” when I was young and alive. Usually, a shrug and a smile carried me through most social situations. And to meet girls all I had to do was have a stare-down contest with them and make sure not to blink. It never failed. But now I’ve got the gift of clarity and directness. What’s clarity like?
Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on a beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth-century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation. This is why Richard drank. This is why my old friends used to spend their lives blitzed on everything from cough syrup to crystal meth. Anything to make that sloggy buzz make a retreat.
It’s been two weeks since my last visit. The sky is clear but smoky smelling and a fine ash falls from no identifiable source. In the house’s kitchen, both Wendy and Pam are playing solitaire on personal computers electrified by the Honda generator. Their hair is dirty. Linus, still partially blind, can’t get the water pump fixed—and their voices are raspy from uneven weather and from colds, which still seem to appear even without a population base to spread them. Their bodies are swaddled inside down coats adorned with hundreds of Bulgari jeweled brooches.
“Did Richard say he’d have the heater and the water fixed by the afternoon?” Pam asks, and Wendy says no. “Oh pooh. My hair feels all matted like a wad of Slim Jims. I’m getting a club soda. You want one?”
Wendy declines and strolls onto the patio where Linus is bundled up as though in a Swiss tuberculosis sanitorium. “Hey, Linus, are you sure you’re wearing enough white terry robes? You look like Bugs Bunny in Palm Springs.”
“Tee hee.” Linus is still recovering from a wicked cold garnered from the three-day-long blind walk home from up on the mountain where I gave him pictures of heaven.
“Brrr. It’s cold out,” Wendy says. “But the sky looks pretty.”
“I can tell by the sound of your voice,” Linus says, “you’re hiding something. Wait—let me guess. Yes, you’ve checked the Geiger counter, haven’t you?”
“Guilty as charged. Chattering like maracas.”
“Some surprise.”
They stand silent for a second, then Wendy says, “Jane is starting to reject her food. I’m not feeling so hot, either.”
“You sound fine,” Linus says. “Jared’s back tonight. He’ll tell us what to do.”
From the living room they can hear Hamilton cursing the cold, throwing a Yellow Pages into the fireplace for a meager dollop of heat.
“Oh—look!” Wendy says. “Up there—a bald eagle—still alive. Flying.”
“I’ll take your word for it. This pesky blindness, you know.”
“I mean, it’s so large—the big white head, the yellow beak. It’s so big I can see the color from here.”
“I’ll live. I’m going inside now.” He has difficulty finding the latch.
Inside the living room, Linus feels his way past Hamilton, asking, “What are you reading?”
“I’m taking my minty fresh new brain out for more test drives. Industry and Empire by Eric Hobsbawm—about the English Industrial Revolution. Also, One More Time by Carol Burnett. The funny lady of television and films remembers her beginnings. The coast-to-coast bestseller that warmed the hearts of millions.”
“Well it’s cold in here. We should find a smaller house that’s easier to heat.”
“No. Maybe we can just start putting bits of this house into the fire, and when we run out of this house we can find another big house.”
At that moment, Megan’s bedroom explodes with a top-forty hit from 1997. “Bloody hell.” Hamilton sits bolt upright then stomps down the hall to Megan’s door. “Turn down the bloody boom box, Megan. We can’t think out here.” Megan makes no response, so Hamilton nudges open the door and finds Megan and Jane sitting on the bed where they’ve stationed themselves for the past two weeks—a landscape of half-used Gerber jars, cigarette butts, CD’s, and batteries. Hamilton turns the music down to a low level. Hamilton glowers at Jane, who gawps right back at him. Hamilton has the spooky sensation that Jane is far more aware of the world than any of the others. “Are you coming out for dinner tonight?” Hamilton asks. “It’s a Sunday dinner. A good one.”
“Maybe. How do you know it’s Sunday?”
“Wendy’s PowerBook.”
“Right.” Megan turns off the stereo and picks up Jane. The two look out the window onto the driveway, where Richard has parked the car and is carrying cases of tinned foods into the house. “Oh goody-goody,” says Megan, “more canned food. No, excuse me—I see a few boxes there, too. Lucky us—such variety.” Richard sees Megan and suddenly Megan feels badly for Richard, who is the one person trying hard to maintain civility and comfort during the entire fucked up and crazy year. She calls out the window, “Dad, do you want me to help you with those?”
“They’re nearly all in, Sweetie. Thanks anyhow.”
Richard places the final box down on the garage floor. Walking into the house, he sees Karen by the small pool, which in the course of a year has converted itself into an enormous science project on algae. “You okay down there?” he asks.
“I’m fine. I went for a small run. Now I’m just taking in the air. It turned warm a few min
utes ago.”
Richard goes inside and Karen resumes her sentry over the gone-to-seed backyard. The sky is oranging and she is sad because her voices have departed. She can no longer see into the future or even try to explain the unexplainable. She is merely mortal, and a frail mortal, too. But we’ve all had our hopes returned, she thinks. Jared will know what to do next.
From somewhere in the house comes the sound of rattling paper. It’s Linus feeling his way back out to the patio carrying a bag of charcoal briquettes. “It’s gotten warm out all of a sudden,” he shouts, “let’s barbecue, methinks.” Within minutes, the ball barbecue is opened, the briquettes lit, the embers are glowing, and spirits are raised.
The darkening sky is becoming a warm, dead Xerox and the winds blow forcefully as though aimed from a hair blower. Yet there is no sound—a warm river flowing over the skin; the amplified sound of the Moon. It is summer in mid-winter.
My old friends are seated on the back patio, toasting marshmallows and joking around. They know that my two weeks are up and I’ll be returning shortly.
Richard asks Linus, whose eyesight is just now returning, to count how many fingers he’s holding up. Karen darts about serving drinks and flaunting her new legs (“Shirley MacLaine in Irma La Douce”). Hamilton and Pam sit calmly, their facial muscles loose, their crow’s-feet vanished. They listen to the voices of the others with the peace of small children. Wendy helps Linus guide his stick near the flames; she is silent about her pregnancy by me, having kept details of our encounter hush-hush. Megan, seated on a faded folding chair, beams as baby Jane gurgles and clicks with her continuing enchantment with the gift of sight, not crying once since her encounter with me. Richard, bearing a marshmallow-clumped trident at his side, is simply pleased to see his friends so jolly.
“I can smell the skins burning,” Linus says. “Carbon.”
“Isn’t it just the prettiest thing?” Pam adds. “Hey, King Neptune—start toasting your prongs.”
As I look down at them from the sky, their barbecue is the only speck of light on Earth for hundreds of miles save for the lava that oozes down Mt. Baker’s slope and a small forest fire north of Seattle. I become a star in the sky and grow until Megan sees me and says, “Look. I bet that’s Jared now.”
Seconds later, I appear at the patio’s edge and Megan smiles, saying, “Jane, say hello to Jared,” making Jane twitter birdishly.
“Are you able to eat, Jared?” asks Karen. “Marshmallows—a bit stale, but they plump the moment they burn.”
“Hey, Kare, no food, thanks, no.”
“A dance, perhaps?” She sweeps around the patio, her dress twirling and her eyes flashing because she is in love with the world.
“How about some lemonade?” asks Hamilton. “Num num. Made from a powder, of course, but lemony fresh nonetheless.”
“Thanks again, but no, Ham.” I move a bowl of potato chips and sit down on a stump Karen’s father once used as a chopping block. Linus, semi-blind, holds up his glass in my general direction and says, “A toast to Jared.” The others join in with a cloud of hear-hear’s. “Our miracle man.”
I blush. Wendy, who’s heavily dolled herself up for the night, sugars moonily, “Helloooo, Jared.”
“Hey, Wen, looking good.” And then there’s a pause as in the old days when we made bonfires down at Ambleside beach, a bonfire’s flames with embers hypnotic and silencing. “Guys—I need to speak with you all,” I say, and I receive seven smiling faces in return—eight, now that Jane, as well as Linus, has vision. “Please listen.”
The fire spits as insects kamikaze inward.
“It’s hard for me. It’s hard stuff. It’s about all of you.”
“Us?” Karen asks.
“Yup. All of you. And just because I’m able to speak more clearly than when I was alive doesn’t mean I feel any more comfortable doing it. Cut me some slack. I’m here to speak to you about transforming your lives and yourselves. Making choices and changing who you are.”
32
SUPER POWER
“You’ve all been wondering why it was only the eight of you who remained to see the world’s end. It’s because you’ve all been given a great gift, but a confusing one, too.”
“Confusing? Duh,” Karen says.
“Gift?” Hamilton doesn’t believe me.
“Uh-huh. You’ve all been allowed to see what your lives would be like in the absence of the world.”
Silence while everybody bites their lips.
“This is like that Christmas movie,” Pam says, “The one they used to play too many times each December and it kind of wore you down by the eighteenth showing. You know: what the world would have been like without you.”
“Sort of, Pam,” I say, “but backwards. I’ve been watching over the bunch of you ever since Karen woke up, to see how different you’d be without the world.”
“Why us, Jared?” Linus asks. “I mean, why not a syphilitic middle-aged rice trader in Lahore, India, with, urn, urn, a collection of taxi-dermied squirrels.” He pauses. “Or a five-year old Nigerian girl who communicates to the world, um, um, only through a green-painted Barbie she found in the alley behind the Finnish Embassy. I mean, why us?”
“Why you? People never asked that question of Jimmy Stewart’s character in If’s a Wonderful Life.” “That’s the name,” Pam says. “Just go with it,” I recommend. Richard harrumphs.
“You were spying on us?” Megan accuses—these modern kids—so paranoid.
“Nope. Just watching. And caring. And worrying. And freaking out.
“What was so wrong about our lives that we had to go through the past year?” Linus asks. “At least Jimmy Stewart was having a life crisis. Our lives were going along pretty smoothly, actually.”
“Were they?” I ask. “I mean, were they really?”
“Hey, Jared,” Hamilton says, “it’s not as if you were out there selling Girl Guide Cookies when you were down here. Who are you to watch over any of us and tell us what our lives should or shouldn’t be?”
“For starters, Hamster, I’m a ghost, so that gives me a few extra course credits. No, I didn’t get to stay on earth for an extra few decades, but I did get to see—oh, good God, Hamilton—what do you want me to have—wings and a halo?”
“For sta—”
Karen interrupts: “Will you testosterone cases clam up? Shush!”
Wendy says, “Jared, I get the impression that we were supposed to have been doing something else down here this past year—and that we’ve failed some kind of test.”
“Yeah,” Richard adds. “And what if we had done the right thing, Jared? What would we have won—a trip to Rome on Sabena Airlines? A year’s supply of Rice-a-Roni? Maybe you haven’t noticed, but Earth is a big slag heap these days. There’s not much we could alter even if we wanted. What—we’re supposed to start a new race of human beings? A new civilization? Assemble some new Noah’s Ark? Build a legacy? We don’t even know what we’re going to be able to eat in a year or two. Tang? Each other?”
Wendy adds, “Jared, there’s radiation here now. And the weather isn’t weather anymore. We can’t plan for five years when we’re unable even to plan for a week.”
“Wendy, you’re carrying our kid,” I say … oops. “What kind of life do you expect him to lead?”
Wendy replies, “Him? You know the gender already? If you know the future, Jared, you ought to have thought of that beforehand.”
“Wait wait wait wait wait,” Linus says. “You two made it?” Wendy’s sigh is a confirmation. “You bastard!” he shouts at me, throwing a patio chair at the spot where he roughly imagines me to be floating. One of the chair’s legs knocks over the barbecue’s dome and the embers fall onto the ground, missing Richard by inches.
“You pinhead!” Richard shouts, “You could have brained me.”
Linus ignores Richard and turns me. “You couldn’t even keep it in your pants when your dead, you dumb jock.” He swivels toward Wendy. “Very well. W
here’d you do it? How’d you do it? Now I know why you’ve been so moony lately.”
“In the canyon. Two weeks ago. It wasn’t sex sex,” Wendy says, “It was a soul-to-soul thing. I didn’t even remove my clothes.”
“Don’t soul-to-soul me.”
“Linus,” I say, “Cool down. I simply made her stop feeling lonely.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
Wendy and I sigh. “Linus—do you want me to make you pregnant, too? It’s not impossible. I can arrange it.”
Richard is sweeping the embers into a small pile with a stray brick. Linus is confused. He wants to be angry but now he isn’t sure what should be the anger’s focus. Karen says, “It’s not bad like you think, Linus.”
Linus sulks and the group stands silently and looks at me. Surprisingly, it is Richard who breaks the quiet, saying, “Jared’s right to be worrying about us.” He puts down his marshmallow trident. “We really don’t seem to have any values, any absolutes. We’ve always maneuvered our values to suit our immediate purposes. There’s nothing large in our lives.”
Hamilton snaps in, “These past weeks are the first time I’ve felt good in years, Richard, and you’re starting to bring me down. Do we really need to analyze our shortcomings so thoroughly?”
“Yes, I believe we do,” Richard says. “Jared’s here to ask us to take a look at ourselves, Hamilton. I mean, look at us: Instead of serving a higher purpose we’ve always been more concerned with developing our ‘personalities.’ And with being ‘free’ “
“Richard?” Karen asks.
“Karen, let me say what I feel: This has been on my mind ever since Jared first appeared. I think we’ve always wanted something noble or holy in our lives, but only on our own terms. You know, our old beefs: The World Wide Web is a bore. There’s nothing on TV. That video tape is a drag. Politics are dumb. I want to be innocent again. I need to express the me inside. What are our convictions? If we had any convictions would we even have the guts to follow them?”
Marshmallows broil then slime through the grill and into the embers. Papery carbon husks above are blown away in the breeze like used black cocoons. “It’s true,” Linus says, and all eyes move to him. I let him speak because he’s saying the right things. “Our lives have remained static—even after we’ve lost everything in the world—shit: the world itself. Isn’t that sick? All that we’ve seen and been through and we watch videos, eat junk food, pop pills, and blow things up.”
Girlfriend in a Coma: A Novel Page 24