Rumors from the Lost World (15 page)

“Are we still talking about Lennon?”

“Who knows?” she said, biting a nail.

They had the abortion. They walked into a low-slung building with bars on the windows and she did it. Afterwards, Hugh lay on Deb's mother's mattress, his hands behind his head, and thought of things to say, but he never said them. Deb's regret was for the family they decided against; he regretted the need to decide in the first place. But she was so distraught he finally promised her they would get pregnant again soon.

He also became obsessed with the raccoons. He was a zealot. They had to go. Someone told him they hated loud music, so he positioned big speakers at either end of the crawl space and blasted guitar riffs into it: the Stones, the Dead, Led Zeppelin, Ten Years After, Jimi Hendrix, even the Beatles and Bob Dylan. When that didn't work, he called the outfit the Humane Society recommended. They filled the yard with cages. The cages trapped a possum, a rabbit, and one large male raccoon.

Hugh followed the Lennon story in the dailies, the news weeklies, the rock magazines, and even supermarket tabloids. One printed a photo of his pale face in the morgue, hair combed back, features at rest. The thing played itself out, finally fading even from the back pages, but sometimes Hugh dreamed about him, and, one day while it snowed, he played Lennon's last album,
Double Fantasy,
and stared from the window.

Then they caught one of the babies. All night it yelped plaintively in the cage near their bedroom window, and at dawn Hugh went out with a long stick. The mother, coiled above him on the largest limb of an oak, hissed. Deb, still in her post-abortion funk, stared from the window. With the stick Hugh poked the cage door until it sprung open. The baby darted into a tunnel under the bedroom. The mother, still ferocious, backed in after it. The whole family set up housekeeping there.

In Hugh's dreams, Lennon's murder became a mistake. He had a new album out and went on tour loose-limbed in a T-shirt and jeans, baking bread between sets, his wife and child on stage with him. He sang a new song, a rousing anthem of freedom whose dream lyrics echoed through the concert hall. But something happened to Lennon in the middle of the last chorus. His voice lost its vigor and settled like silt into river deeps. Maybe it was the bright lights, maybe the way Hugh's eyes blinked and blurred, but Lennon's features dissolved into silly putty, melting in bright indoor heat, and when Hugh could see again, he recognized
himself
on stage, and woke a little sick, a little angry. He tried to remember the lyrics to the dream anthem, thinking maybe he could find a way to record it, but the words were trapped on the tip of his tongue like the name of somebody he knew a long time ago, maybe even cared about, but couldn't remember to save his life.

A
nnie was a ballerina. She spent a lot of time alone.

“How come you're here?” she wanted to know when Doug arrived in Louisiana, exhausted after two days of driving. “I thought we agreed not to see one another.” Her voice low, resigned, she removed her garden gloves and tapped a spade until it was free of moist soil.

“So we did.” She had moved to Denver with him, then returned south with her husband Randy. “My actions have little to do with our relationship,” she had said.
“That
will continue, whatever the distance between us. But there's work to do.”

“Does that work have anything to do with Randy?”

“Look, Doug, I can't respond to that kind of low energy. Trust me.”

Now she paused on the balls of her feet, as though ready to stretch before rehearsal room mirrors, and settled into a lotus position. “Why are you here? At this particular time?”

“I love you.”

“What kind of reason is that, Doug?”

He stared at her. “I just thought it would be nice.”

“‘Be nice.' Is that how you decide what to do?”

“Why not?”

“We're not our likes and dislikes. I don't mean to sound harsh, but you're a grownup. You know better than that.”

“I've come a long way to see you.”

“Of course I'm glad of that. You're my spiritual brother.” She stared at the grass between them. “But I think you're still trapped in low energy.”

“Annie, I've really been traveling a long time.”

She smiled. “We've all been traveling, for centuries.”

How could he argue? He wanted to be with her because he loved her, but she didn't want to hear that. He felt like—oops, here I go, recording what I feel, identifying with my emotions.

My room has a large bay window. Outside the sky is the color of clouds. Cold weather has arrived. It's drizzling. In the schoolyard across the street children play on covered walks—got-you-last, red-light, ring-around-the-rosie.

Tangle, my goldfinch, rushes from her cage with a whisper of black wings and perches on a book called
Truth.
The Jehovah's Witnesses, a whole family of blacks in Sunday attire, brought it to my door. My neighbor across the hall had threatened to sic his dobermans on them, so maybe they expected another rebuff. The group's patriarch, an old man with white hair and skin creased like shoe leather, scratched his head and studied my face. He could tell I was wide-eyed, at sea in the world, and he asked, “What is eternal life? How can we live in peace and happiness? Why is the world filled with trouble?”

Embarrassed at being found out, I grabbed the blue book held open before me and slammed the door. After some whispering, the patriarch cleared his throat. “Sir, we'd like a donation.”

Playful now, I slipped a dime under the door. He cleared his throat again, as though to curse my threshold with a wad of spit, then they went away. The echoes of the man's dark wing-tip shoes and his wife's high heels faded, leaving nothing but indecipherable silence.

When I skimmed through the book, there were footnotes in it from
Look
magazine. Now floorboards creak and water gurgles in the pipes—the girl next door is preparing for work. She looks so much like Annie—does she spend her evenings with esoteric books, weighing the wisdom she finds?

It's late. I should get to work.

No. I'll start again.

This is a story about Annie. She sent Doug a letter yesterday: “I am not my emotions, Doug. I am not my relationships with others. I am not my ideas. I am not my experiences. I am something else. What, I'm not sure about. But I don't
have
to be friendly. I don't even have to smile. I'm not trying to exclude you, but to include others. Do you think I'm crazy? If not, please send me some good energy. I
need
it.” In the letter was an owl feather; Doug placed it on the dashboard of his car. There was a P.S.: “My number one priority is racing consciousness. (Can you believe that? I was going to scratch it out and write the word I meant to write, which was
raising,
of course—but I thought it too funny to scratch out. Freudian slip.)”

Sometimes she lives alone, in a one-room cottage near the Bayou Teche, sometimes in town with her husband Randy. Once, the three of them—Annie, Randy, Doug—lived together, renting a big tilted place with three bedrooms which has since been demolished to make way for a row of townhouses. Randy slept alone there, unaware that Annie and Doug were lovers. In the morning Odessa, her golden retriever, would nudge them awake before he discovered them together.

Let me start again.

I shut the window and turn on the radio. After a minute it brings me the world's tinny message: a love song! Paul and Linda McCartney singing “It's Just Another Day.” I laugh and sing along. I slap my knee.

The schoolbell rings. Some of the children, protected by earmuffs and winter gear, continue to play in the cold. The rain's stopped, but the sky is grayer. I pour a glass of orange juice and listen to the radiator. I'm not going to work. The Jehovah's Witnesses might be in the bushes, birch rods in hands, wing-tip shoes giving them away. No, I don't believe that, and I'm tired of my playfulness. I'm not going because I want to think about Annie. I miss her so much. I spend most of my time waiting for her—I live a small life, study sidewalk cracks, and stare into the street.

A man who looks a lot like my grandfather is standing at the edge of the schoolyard in a windbreaker. He fingers his few strands of white hair and then grips the chain-link fence.

Tangle, back in her cage, cracks seeds and chirps. When her mate Mossy disappeared through an open window, Annie and I spent hours discussing whether to free Tangle, too. A few of Annie's friends, in headbands and drawstring pants, were outraged at the very
idea
of a caged bird. They celebrated Mossy's flight. But we decided Tangle would never survive in the natural world.

There's danger in this room, in its ticking silence. It is here, the silence says, it is here. Annie would say a memory from a past life, or a voice from the invisible world, tried to reach me, but that my soul wasn't subtle enough. “You are it, Doug, you are it.” Could that be true? I don't know how to think about the spiritual life. When she slept beside me, she would tunnel into her pillow toward the source of all wisdom, the moon bathing her dark shoulders and thick tangled hair. A Buddhist altar stood witness near the birdcage. On our waterbed, every slight turn jostled us together. Like Mossy and Tangle, I thought, we would follow our happiness together; the complicated canvas of the world would change into primary colors and whirl us away.

She was always able to recall each of her dreams in detail. I can't remember mine, Doug would complain. “But you're not your dreams, Doug.” Playfully scolding, still in another world, she would smile. “You know better than that.”

Annie, Doug thought, I know I'm not only my dreams, and certainly not only my ideas. And yes, I can accept I'm not only my emotions. Hallelujah! But not my relationships to others?

“No, Doug,” she said once as they sat in the park, feeding ducks in a small pond. “I think you misunderstand the nature of invisible things.”

“Look,” he said, squinting into the shadows. “There's some kind of invisible
thing
eating the bread.”

She stared. “Can you see what it is?”

“No. The water's too muddy.” They threw more bread. “Look! Whatever it is got one of the
ducks.”

She folded her cotton dirndl around her legs. “You poking fun?”

A delivery truck downshifted nearby. The conversation died and they looked for pebbles, the ones bright like coins. They scrubbed their hands against the bark of butternut trees and waited on the curb for traffic to clear. She leaned forward, hands on her dancer's thighs.

Annie, how
do
we define ourselves? Isn't contact necessary?

Let me start again.

“Would you like to come back to Denver and dance?”

“Well, I don't know if I should tell you this,” Annie said, “but I had a dream. I was dancing in a large studio. There was snow outside.”

“You'd be welcome. More than welcome. We'd both have privacy. You'd dance, I'd work. In any case, I made a decision. I've decided I won't return here, not for a while, but I'll leave a space in my life for you.”

“Thank you, Doug.” She painted a Christmas card. He leafed through record albums and put something by Joni Mitchell on the stereo. Outside, bare branches grazed against the shingles of her cottage. “Did you bring the weather with you from Denver?”

She was surrounding a charcoal-colored angel with an aura. The half-finished card rested on a miniature easel. “Roy G. Biv,” he said.

“Who?”

“No, what. The colors of the rainbow.” He started scribbling.

“Doug.”

“Shush. I'm writing something for you.”

“Doug, I tell you what: why don't you write something for me?”

“With love and squalor?”

She frowned. “You call this squalor?”

“I was joking.”

“Naturally.” She unbraided her hair and its darkness cascaded over her shoulders. She leaned forward again, a hand on either thigh, elbows slighdy akimbo. “Um, can I ask you something?”

“I guess.”

“Well, listen. Answer carefully. A, B, or C. Doug, are you emotionally involved, as they say? In our relationship, I mean?”

He wanted to touch her face. Joni Mitchell was singing something about always being bound to someone.

She waited, fingers forming a steeple.

“So.” He looked away. “I guess I
am
emotionally involved. Better yet, I'm not emotionally involved, but I love you. Does that make sense?”

“I guess.” She moved to an armchair covered with a bedspread, lit a cone of incense and placed it in a miniature replica of an adobe house, her gestures delicate enough for a tea ceremony.

The music stopped.

“Okay,” she said. “Here we go.” She folded her hands. “This is how I feel, in a nutshell. You're my brother, Doug. I
like
to see it that way, it doesn't exclude anybody or anything.” She took a deep breath. “Above all else, this is where I place my energy. It's open and it's high.” She stopped. “What you think?”

He folded his own hands. “I think relationships, like writing, are transfers of energy.”

She held up a finger. “Not so fast. One more thing, okay? I can't have a relationship, not the way people expect, and that doesn't only mean you, Doug. I have other work to do. Energy, as you know, is environmental, but force makes things happen.” Smoke swirled from the tiny adobe chimney. She brought the tips of her fingers together. “Again. Putting aside wrong-thinking brought about by man's erroneous measure of time, I recognize we've vibrated in the presence of each other's energy over many lifetimes.” She grinned. “Quite a mouthful, huh? But—to continue—I think we're both against imprisoning thoughts and possessive relationships.”