Everything Happens Today (21 page)

 

“If your rifle needs improvement, let us know. Send us an EIR. You, the user, are the only one who can tell us what you don't like about your equipment. Put it on an SF 368 (Quality Deficiency Report). Mail it to us at Commander, US Army Armament, Munitions and Communications Command, ATTN: AMSMC-QAD, Rock Island, IL 61299-6000. We'll send you a reply.”

 

Wes wondered if the address were still active, and then he began to cry, and at that moment Nora entered the room.

“Oh Jesus not again,” she said in Bobby's voice, and sat herself down on the edge of the bed besides Wes, who rolled onto his side facing the wall. Wes was immediately mindful of the need to control himself in Nora's presence, but her hand on his shoulder only made it harder. At least he was good at crying without blubbering or heaving; he didn't even sniffle, though that would have to happen eventually. He decided it would be best if he didn't say anything for the moment; instead he emitted a low, croaking groan, as if Nora could be convinced that he was both suffering some sort of gastric event and that he was enduring it stoically. It was at such moments, Wes recalled, that the Buddhist visualization techniques that Delia had attempted to teach him came in most handy, and he closed his eyes and tried to recreate in his mind's eye the calf-brushing scene from his dream. He felt it wavering into coherence; he saw the calf, and his own hand on the calf's shoulder, clasping the toothbrush, and the toppling verdant landscape; but he felt nothing, and he realized that the singular critical element of the dream—its sense of endless, unfettered serenity—was entirely absent from his visualization, and that without it the calf was just a dumb animal, the poor suffering mute that had exploded in outer space to provide him with its sweetbreads. But now a different vision emerged, more promising, and he followed it with interest and nascent detachment.

“What's Leslie thinking?” Bobby asked.

“I'm thinking about a river in a book I read once.”

“Fascinating.”

“In this book, a woman is chosen to be the devil's consort at his annual ball. She's given a magic cream that makes her invisible, and a broom that flies her half way across Russia. She flies high above the silent forests and grassy plains. And finally, the broom slows down and leaves her on the edge of a bluff over a black river somewhere in the middle of nowhere. On the other side there's an encampment of frogs playing flutes and drums. And she dives off the bluff into the river, and the spray leaps into the sky and sparkles in the moonlight. For some reason I always remember that—the water flying up and glowing in the moonlight, and swimming naked in the black river in the wilderness in the middle of the night. Just imagine that—all alone in a cool river in the middle of the nowhere under a full moon, and feeling completely safe and happy.”

Nora was quiet, and Wes could feel her behind him visualizing the scene of Margarita in the river and creating all her own details, because that was the way her mind worked. One day, he hoped, she would read that book and love it as much as he did and it would be one more thing they had in common; but then again, Nora wasn't bookish.

“How many fingers does a frog have?”

“I don't know.”

“I don't think a frog can play the flute, because of the webs.”

“They're magic frogs.”

“Okay.”

“I'm just going to lie here for a while until I feel better?”

“You want Bobby to sit with you?”

“That's alright. I'll be down in a few minutes.”

“Okay.”

“How was the movie?”

“Bullshit.”

“Sorry for forgetting about you.”

“Jive turkey.”

“What time is it?”

“I don't know. Six? Six thirty?”

“I'll get dinner started soon. Want to help?”

“Groovy.”

When Nora had left, Wes didn't move. Not moving definitely seemed the right way to proceed. He tried to recapture the vision of the placid midnight river, but now all that came to mind was the scene from his dream in the Rose Reading Room where the jet liner banked over Bryant Park as it screamed towards the library windows. Wes had no interest in the occult, but he was beginning to see the dream, with its series of cascading enigmas, as a premonition of disaster. The question was—was his current situation the disaster it predicted, or was there worse to come? It didn't bear contemplating.

Something else was wrong, too, but it lingered just beyond Wes's peripheral understanding. He lay there and listened to hear if it would pipe up, like an unseen bird calling from the upper branches of a tree, so that he might at least focus his attention in the right general direction. It was silent; in fact, all the sounds of the world had gone oddly muted, or muffled, as if a great wet sheet had been draped over the city, and Wes opened his eyes and saw that the sun had set, somehow, and he was lying in darkness. When had it happened? Had he slept without realizing? Had it already been dark when James had called, when Nora had stopped in? Wes listened: a truck ground its gears on Hudson Street; two drivers angrily exchanged horn-fire; a pair of stilettos made its way uncertainly up Perry, stopped for a few moments as if they were aware of being listened to, then continued on their way. They sounded as if they were alone, but of course there was no way to tell; a pair of soft-soled shoes could just as well have been walking beside them, exchanging intimacies, but there was nothing in the pace or rhythm of the footfall that indicated such a companion. That, of course, was the problem with listening to footsteps in the night—for some reason, they always sounded lonely, no matter the reality. It was almost as if you wanted them to be lonely, because there was something sympathetic to the heartbeat in the sound of lonely steps echoing on a quiet cobblestoned street, the heart just sort of fell into step naturally beside them. The phone rang, lost somewhere in the tangled sheets, but Wes did not bother to look for it. The ringtone, mimicking the metallic bell that dial telephones had had before Wes was born, was oddly consonant with the disembodied message of loneliness sent by the stilettos. Wes could imagine the wearer of those stilettos pausing in the street to the distant sound of an unanswered telephone. She would stop just as she had done, look around in confusion, and wonder why she felt as if she were being watched; then she would shake her head—it was just an illusion, a trick of the lamplight through the breeze-laden branches—and be on her way. Wes wondered what the chances were that Lucy was feeling that way at this very moment, if perhaps the image of the woman in stilettos was a message that she had sent him telepathically, like the message of love that the alien Mrs. Fielding had sent him in room 405; although Lucy seemed the more practical sort, it might have been an inadvertent message, like the kind Obi-Wan Kenobi received upon the destruction of Alderaan. Wes felt as if he knew precisely what it would be like to hear a million voices cry out and suddenly be silenced—it seemed as if it happened to him a dozen times a day.

He sighed and sat up, feeling the iPhone slip and bump against his thigh. He reached for it and activated the screen. It was 6.47 p.m. on November 1 2008. There was one missed call, no message. The missed call was from Lucy, but Wes could face no further news, good or bad. He felt like André on his death bed, sickened by the prospect of another course of legless optimism. In a situation such as that in which he now found himself, the only possible course of action was one of blind duty. There were sweetbreads to be made, a mother to feed.

On his way downstairs, Wes pressed his ear against his mother's bedroom door and, detecting the sedate drone of a news broadcast, peeked in. She turned towards him with a crooked smile and the blank, open gaze of one who could not recognize an intruder at fifteen feet. Wes crossed the room and sat himself gently on the bed alongside her; she patted the back of his hand and returned her attention to the television.

“Can I get you anything, mom?”

“I am hungry.”

“I'm just getting dinner started. You want something to drink?”

“Just some pudding, Leslie honey.”

“No pudding tonight, mom. I'm making a real dinner.
“What are you making?”

“Mom! I'm making sweetbreads?”

She turned to him with a look of astonished horror, made all the more grotesque by the lazy eye that seemed to focus on something beyond Wes' left shoulder. She gagged and cleared her throat of her first attempt to speak, but managed on the second to emit a kind of croaky, froggy gasp. “Sweetbreads? Whatever for are you making sweetbreads?”

“Whatever for am I . . . ? Mom, you asked me to make sweetbreads, remember? Paris? Handbag?”

“I don't know what you're talking about, Leslie. I hate sweetbreads. I would never have asked you to make sweetbreads.”

“You've never eaten sweetbreads, so how would you know if you like them or not?”

“I certainly have eaten sweetbreads. I ate sweetbreads on my honeymoon, as it so happens. Do I have to tell you I don't like them, goddamnit?”

Defeated, Wes hung his head as he held on to his mother's hand, cool and pulpy and inert. Outside, he knew, beyond the heavy curtains and sealed windows, the evening, too, was soft and cool, maybe fragrant as the dawn had been with a breeze that had flowed across the autumnal woods of the Catskills, the Berkshires, the Hudson valley, and further north the vast whispering darkness of the Adirondacks, dappled with deep, cold, slumbering lakes and ponds. And above it all a silver moon, waxing gibbous, under which to swim—to swim ever so gently, without a sound, without breaking the surface, to the center of a lake, and there to roll onto his back and float, and there to invite this breeze to wash this taste of clinging decay from the inside of his mouth and lungs. Wes closed his eyes and felt it penetrate, purest water, purest sky, for the briefest moment the impossible, dreamlike state of non-longing that had enveloped him as he draped himself across the calf's neck. No people, no phones, no books, no disease, no roads, no lyrics, no sex, no sensation but eternal, ineluctable cleanliness. Wes felt himself overcome by an almost messianic sense of kinship and sorrow for the tragic fate of Bob Ross, who had also yearned for impossible purity and had been condemned to spend countless hours and decades under hot studio lights, groping clumsily to communicate his vision to a congregation of the insensible blind. Wes opened his eyes to find that his mother's attention had wandered back to the television.

“If you don't like your dinner, I'll bring you some pudding. How's that, mom?”

“That sounds just fine, Leslie honey.”

In the kitchen, as he began to assemble the ingredients for the sweetbread dish, Wes realized that for the past few seconds or minutes—he wasn't sure which—a phrase had been revolving around and around in his head. “What is the meaning of
anything
?” With the stress on “anything,” it sounded as if it was the answer to a question, as if someone had asked him “What is the meaning of ‘circumnavigate?'” or “What is the meaning of all this?” It kept repeating itself, meaninglessly, with that deeply irritating and equally meaningless emphasis on the last word, without any apparent expectation of being answered. In Wes's experience, when a phrase got stuck in his head this way, it was because it was the lyric of a song or a snippet of a conversation overheard without necessarily having been noticed, but in this case that was not possible, as no music was playing and there had been no conversation to overhear but his own with his mother, in the course of which nothing even vaguely resembling the phrase “What is the meaning of
anything
?” had been uttered. Where, then, had it come from, and what was he supposed to make of it? Wes could only suppose it was a message from his own subconscious, sent from some subterranean communications command post to alert his conscious self to a compelling task of analysis, but the phrase was so vague and portentous that one could only laugh at it. Who could ever answer such a question? It's hard enough identifying the meaning of something.

With all of the ingredients assembled on the counter before him, Wes found that he'd forgotten to provide for a starch. Noodles or polenta or rice would do just fine, but a cursory exploration of the overhead cupboards revealed none of these. The only plausible option available, short of another trip to the store, was a box of freeze-dried potato flakes and a quarter pound of sweet gorgonzola, which Wes' father liked to eat for breakfast with a glass of dry vermouth. Wes hoped that the blue cheese crumbled into the instant mash potatoes could, in theory, work as a credible substitute for risotto. He thought of Bobby and his love of all pungent cheeses, and that reminded him that he had promised Nora that she could participate in the preparation of dinner. He found her in the back yard, sitting under the light of a single flood with their father, bent over a Mastermind board perched on an upended cable-drum between them. Crispy sprawled on the cracked bluestone, panting.

“This dog get walked?”

“Sit down and shut up, daddy-o.”

Wes found a chair and sat, facing the back of the yard. The sky was quite dark now, a deep purple, but under the sycamore very little of it was visible. The oriole had fallen silent. Wes felt a kind of serenity descend upon him, not a pleasant serenity like that of his dream but a contingent resignation. He looked at his dad, his face cramped in concentration over the Mastermind board. It occurred to him that his father's only winning quality was his willingness to continue playing against Nora, who never lost. It does not take many qualities—patience, consistency, fairness, one or two others maybe—to allow a son to worship his father, and the time when Wes had worshipped him seemed both impossibly recent and irretrievably lost. Wes could still remember himself at that age, the issues that had obsessed or preoccupied him, the way he had thought and felt, the hungry boy's self-serving contortions of logic. The terrible thing about losing faith in one's father is not watching him change and falter, Wes considered, but watching oneself grow into stronger understanding, an understanding that gradually but inexorably reveals that the father has not changed at all but has always been like this, even in those days when it had seemed that he was perfect in every way. Wes could still recall a moment, back around the time of 9/11, when he had been emotionally overwhelmed in school by the feeling of how beautiful and lucky it was to be born in the United States, the greatest country in the world. The teacher must have said something inspirational, or maybe some class parent had been killed in the attack, because the entire class had erupted in enthusiastic response. Wes had felt that way about his father, too. It had been more than a mere emotion, that certainty that he was the luckiest, happiest boy in the world to have such a dad. His love for his father—his pride in having such a brilliant, handsome, funny, sophisticated, loving and universally beloved father—had been a whole emotional republic in which he had been blessed to be born, live and cavort. And although Nora was too young to remember those happy times, she had felt the same way, Wes knew. Children know where to draw the line, but if Wes and Nora had ever dared to set the choice between mom and dad when they played the game of who would have to be killed by the kidnappers, both of them would certainly have selected their mother. It was odd, looking at his father, to think that he had been the same person then that he was now.