Rumors from the Lost World (11 page)

He tripped off the porch into the night.

The heart knows its ways, they tell me, but I've never seen much proof, Gilbert thought. He was anxious to call Stephanie, to convince her to put him away for a little while, shoot him up or hypnotize him until he came back to the world, but first he poured a stiff drink and broiled a steak. He ate it carefully, slowly, savoring each bite. Then he cleaned up the debris and tacked a strip of cloth over the broken window.

“He's in great shape,” he told Stephanie on the phone. “Jumped through the window, searched the place and went home to meet her. Is he back yet?”

“I don't know. I mean, I'm staying with friends. He wanted the place to himself. He's all right?”

“Look, he needs attention. Convince him to get it. He's having a breakdown. It happens, to some people. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Look, spare the sermon. You afraid?”

“What do you mean, afraid?”

“He's jealous, he might jump you. It scares you, I understand that.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Have you thought jealousy might be good for him?”

Ruth had the ability to mediate between opposites. She protected Sid, provided him with a word or two, a glance to shift his bearings, reach a new awareness. Maybe Stephanie expected that to happen. But without Ruth it was impossible, and his emotional outbursts insulted them all, Gilbert felt. Get flighty or fanciful and you're lost.

He reached the cottage in twenty minutes. Through its small porch window a table lamp glowed near the sofa. Gilbert couldn't quite make out the words, but he heard Sidney talking to someone, so he knocked and called out to him, to save him. The door opened, Sidney smiled. “Come in.” He tilted up one eye. “You can't take her away, you know.” He hunched before Gilbert. “Sit on the sofa,” he said, working his knuckles. “The rest of our place is off-limits.”

“Off-limits? What are you hiding, Sid, an inflatable doll?” The living room, Stephanie's room, was filled with ferns. The shadows of ferns flickered on walls, windowsills, the ceiling. Sid karate-chopped his palms in menacing fashion, balanced on the balls of his feet, swaying, involved in some intricate dance.

“You're trying to take her away, aren't you? Leave me with nothing.”

“I gave her to you. Why would I want her back?”

Sidney karate-chopped Gilbert harmlessly in the chest. They embraced, grappled like wresders in dim light and huge rolling shadows of ferns. Gilbert quickly worked his way behind him, an old service trick, and tripped him up. Sidney was stronger than Gilbert thought, but even at the start his muscles trembled, and Gilbert pushed him to the sofa with a muffled sound. He felt dizzy, standing over Sidney, uncertain who controlled the situation. Sidney turned to his back and stared at the white, empty ceiling. “Sid?”

“Haven't you done enough?” Stephanie's doorway voice startled Gilbert, who jumped as if bitten and turned. “How long you been there?”

She stared at him, still hunched for an attack.

“We better call an ambulance,” he said, straightening.

“Yes, that's true. Please go away. Okay?”

They sat in silence among fems, Sidney vacant-eyed on the couch, Stephanie stroking his forehead. When the village ambulance arrived, Gilbert left. On the beach, hands in pocket, he listened to the ocean and trailed sand until morning. The world took on the mood of a dream. The wind on his cheeks, the daily commerce between common sense and mystery, so easy to sink into forever, so self-indulgent. Grains of sand between his toes whirled into orbit, he stumbled home drunk with insomnia to sit near the window Sid tumbled through. A gull dropped from the morning sun, wings on fire, face wrinkled and human, spotted with newborn blood. The hypnotic pattern of shadows swirled like curtains, splashes, long dizzy falls. His phone was an unanswered cry from another world, the endless horizon of possible human contact so terrifying he ran great distances, ate well to survive whatever was happening, to fix on the cruelty of the world, and find purchase on the solid earth. There's nothing else, above or below, he thought sternly. Ruth, Sidney, Stephanie took on the wavering forms of figures seen in lightning and rain, Ruth before him in early light, hair soaked, Stephanie at the door, eyes staring, but the doorway was empty. When he heard Sidney had recovered and was living with his mother, the life she wanted after all, it was time for Gilbert to leave. He decided to walk to see Sidney, say farewell to whatever remained of their friendship, punctuate the summer, but on the beach he stopped, wet sand between his toes. He couldn't go on. He stared at the ocean, his toes, fingers, the light springy hairs on the back of one hand. Who was he? What was this stuff?

Only breath and the body matters, he told himself, discipline. What else is there? What else can there be besides the will except for soft sinking marshland and the bottomless stories of the ocean where everyone drowns without beginning or end? Think of the body, he demanded of himself, but at Stephanie's cabin, where he walked without knowing it, he was breathing hard, not right with the world.

He was alone, too grievously alone for any theory to make sense.

The door opened, Stephanie stepped to the porch. With her hair pulled back, she looked something like Ruth, Gilbert thought. “Hello. You want that set of books?”

“No.”

“Well. What then?” She turned from him to face the dunes, with their driftwood, their tides, their winds perpetually funneling at a slant into the earth, their sentimental sand castles that washed away each morning, their black moonlit waves that glinted bright in the sun like grain to be walked on and harvested. “Cat got your tongue?” she said. Then she turned to face him and he felt as though he was losing himself in her stare. Neither blinked, and for just a moment the crash and cradlerock of surf rose to meet them both, and they listened together to the watery compass of time.

T
he plant conservatory outside the gates of the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago was glassy-green and moldy, as alien to the highrises west of the park as a pagan temple. Inside, in hot air full of moist, clinging things, Lydia stared at the unwrinkled stillness of a small pond. Stubbled buildings, she thought, a phrase from some waking dream. She was pregnant not with child but with fat lopsided fears. Stubbled buildings, muggers, shave them all away. They could be anywhere, on the lakefront, behind newspapers, over chessboards, could stroll to her daughter Robin's school, put out their cigarettes and eat the child right up, make her disappear to the size of a grainy photograph taped to a light post. She would be too frightened to scream.

Her husband Bruce, in a waist-length Army jacket and aviator shades, was sermonizing the plants in a rapid-fire voice. “Owning a gun is a form of Buddhism,” he said, scratching the three-day growth on his face. “The vets who became Buddhists were the best killers, better than Special Forces.” Ahead, Robin disappeared into a roomful of ferns. “Guns and Buddhism,” Lydia said, manic with caffeine. “This is wonderful. Why don't you talk about Mars? Why don't you say the moon is green?” She shook dollops of humidity from her forehead. “Why don't you just leave now instead of next week?”

“You're taking this wrong, Lydia. Some time apart will do us good. I'll study murals, learn graffiti, do some writing. We can both breathe.” Bruce was gathering material for a book on WPA murals and public street art in Chicago and New York.

“You jerk. You just want an easy way out.”

He stopped in his tracks. “That's your trick, babe,” he said, and crouched over an untied shoestring. “You're the one who thinks anything more risky than living inside a paperweight is the dungeon, but I don't take the easy way out. No sir, not me. Time enough in the grave for that.” Under the force of his anger, Lydia covered her face below the eyes with one hand, as though donning a surgical mask. “That's it,” she mumbled, “snap your fingers, change your mind.”

Robin sauntered up, a sword-like leaf in her hand, and stood over Bruce, still fumbling with the shoestring. “Stop fighting, I'm back.” She pricked him playfully in the face. “What's wrong, Bruce, can't tie your shoe?”

“Cut it out,” he said. He grabbed her wrist and pretended to tickle her. “The tickle-beast! He's here!”

“How immature.” Robin frowned. “You want me to call the cops? This is abuse, buster. One scream and they'll lock you up, maybe for good. You know about inappropriate touching?”

Bruce raised his hands as though under arrest. “Hey hey hey/Aren't we precocious today,” he chanted. “You win, high and mighty. You loved that tickle-beast once. But now Ms High and Mighty, just like your mother.” Lydia refused to fly off the handle. She sat on a bench half-obscured by ferns.
The choices we make,
one of her clients had said. “Maybe you've had a stroke,” she told Bruce, “maybe that's why you're like this lately,” but he wasn't listening anymore. He had a knack for remembering details from the Vietnam era with clairvoyant precision, but otherwise going off into a fugue state or a mystical rhapsody until he didn't know where he was, much less who he was. “Besides,” she said, “what would be so bad about living inside a glass paperweight? Lots of snow, a gingerbread cottage, everybody safe, and we could still look around.”
A real life that's far more real than what I want,
said the low-pitched voice of another client, a short, stocky Norwegian woman. For nearly a year Bruce once rented an AP wire-service ticker so he wouldn't miss any news about Vietnam. Every evening he'd setde into a beanbag chair with his headphones, a scissors, and reams of paper, all the day's news. He'd cut-and-paste until midnight. Before he lost interest in the whole endeavor, he filled up four sets of neck-high filing cabinets with clippings and nearly drove Lydia crazy, the machine spitting out fifty words a minute day and night.
You go on for the sake of others. Life is sacrifice.
Her auditory hallucinations intensified.
Sovereign solitude/ In the nude.
“Live inside a paperweight and you meet the witch. Street art, though, that's a different ticket,” he said, justifying his new obsession. “Live on the street and you understand lots of things, everything from AIDS to aliens, from Buddha to Jesus. The world is a circle and we're back to square one, babe.”

Jesus Christ, she thought, where is my life?
You're abandoned for what you are, not for the role you play.
Where is my life? What have I done with my life?

“NASCAR driving, baby,” Bruce said, finally swerving to their curb. “This is a pit stop.” Inside, Robin started humming “Yellow Submarine” and Lydia kicked off her shoes. “Parachute to safety,” Bruce shouted. He dropped his knapsack near the door. Lydia flopped into the love seat by the bay window. Someone else is inhabiting my body, she thought, someone I should know, and then slipped into her own fugue state, imagining a tumor, maybe in her lungs, maybe inside her heart. There was cancer everywhere and everyone was getting it. “I'm cutting loose,” Bruce screamed into her ear, as though it were a walkie-talkie. “I'm hitting the turf on the run. Charlie's a rice field away. Give me air cover, gunships. Dust off! Sucking chest wounds, pelvic bones shattered, legs blown off at the hips!” He grabbed Lydia and pulled her to her feet. “I'll save you, Li-dee-a! Incoming rounds! Incoming rounds! Keep your head down, sweetheart!”

“Why did you give me the name of a bird?” asked Robin at breakfast. “It sounds twerpy.”

“That's why,” said Bruce.

“Bruce,” said Robin. “No teasing, or I'll hide your teeth.” She turned a mischievous moon-face to her mother. “Guess who forgot the garbage?”

Lydia studied her bowl of cream of wheat and narrowed her lips. “Sorry,” she said sarcastically to Bruce, who smiled. In her husband's dream-time, a house without garbage was unnatural. “Why not compost it?” he said. “Compost it?” she repeated. “Where, for goodness sakes? This is an apartment.” Bruce clicked his tongue and snickered. “Well, forget it, then, let the world go to hell. Besides, it's not my place to remember the garbage.” Lydia crunched her toast, comparing her life to an Australian aborigine's on a walkabout, something always dangerous around the corner. Downtown, she might walk through somebody's cough and contract TB. The stuff was everywhere.

Robin, reading the back of the cereal box, giggled. Bruce figured out the movies, following the blips with his finger. “At 1:30 it's
Death and the Maiden.
Jimmy Stewart defends a woman accused of shooting her family. I think I'll watch that. At 3:00 it's
Mr. and Mrs. Bojo Jones.
Two teens forced into marriage by pregnancy. Bad news, real bad news.” He summarized ‘Ryan's Hope,' his favorite soap. “So Ken decided to postpone his suicide until Barry recovered from Faith's affair. And in ‘Guiding Light,' Lucille tried to kill Jennifer but stabbed herself instead. Jennifer told the cops it was an accident, because she doesn't want people to know about her
other
identity as Jane Marie. And because she cares for Amanda. She wants to protect her. But on the way to the hospital, Lucille told Amanda Jennifer tried to kill
her
and—“

“Her? Who's
her?”
Robin said. “Amanda or Lucille?”

“Forget it. You're just laughing. No appreciation for the better things in life,” Bruce said, grimacing in mock-anger. Robin gripped the breakfast table to keep from falling backwards, her giggles turning into deliberate, antagonizing horselaughs. “Of course I'm laughing, but not at you. At that awful crap. When did you ever get so sensitive?”

“Robin, watch your language,” Lydia said.

“Maybe I won't go to New York,” Bruce said. “Maybe I'll just lock us all away here until we suffocate or strangle each other. Maybe I'll throw you in the oven.” “Don't call me Robin, Bruce. I want another name.” Lydia remembered Bruce fiddling with his tie, tugging on it like a noose, arguing, over drinks, that Robin should call her family by their first names. “It's a necessity of modern parenting, Lydia.” “Do we even have one opinion in common?” Lydia countered. “‘Momma' or ‘Mommy.' Maybe ‘Mother.' That's it.” That wasn't it. “Mommy is Lydia, Daddy is Bruce, and Grandma is Claire. Who's the baby?” he repeated at dusk a few days later on the lakefront. His fatigue jacket flapping, he tossed Robin in the air.