Wichita (9781609458904) (6 page)

 

T
here's a loud fist hammering on the door and Seth opens it and pokes in his head to take in what Lewis is doing—standing at the bookshelf looking startled and annoyed.

Seth makes a disappointed face, as though he hoped to catch him in act of something compromising, and says, “Dude, come out with us. It's—” he glances at the clock on Lewis's nightstand—“nine-fucking-thirty.”

“Out where?” Lewis is touched to be invited, if belatedly and possibly at Abby's insistence, but doesn't want to seem overeager. He's expecting Seth to name a bar or club or strip joint but he says: “Bowling!”

Lewis ends up in the backseat of Kaylee's Honda with his knees up, squeezed between Tori and Seth, who is humming “This Could Be the Last Time.” The windows are rolled half way down and hip-hop gusts around the interior. Outside is the subdued glitter of passing subdivisions, light traffic: a weeknight in Wichita, with its signature watery blankness.

“I thought you'd be in Yurup—or France,” Seth says to Lewis, playing the hick.

“France is
in
Europe!” Kaylee cries after a pause, glancing in the rearview with outrage. On the floor is a paperback called
Indecent: How To Make It and Fake It as a Girl for Hire
.

Seth turns to face Lewis. “You came back for me, didn't you?”

Lewis senses by a shift in her posture that Tori waits to see how Lewis will react. There's been a lot of less-than-necessary-seeming passing of a silver one-hit pipe and lighter and bag of weed that entails Tori's mashing her artificially enhanced boobs into Lewis, his first. He wishes he could say they didn't succeed in turning him on. He had a puff to be sociable and is regretting it. “I didn't know you were here,” he says.

“Your Oversoul knew,” Seth says.

“His
what
?” Tori said. She wears a lot of musk, not patchouli but something like it, and Lewis's clothes must be saturated in it.

“Don't mind Tori: she's from the Dark Side,” Seth tells Lewis in a low voice. “There's a little more you need to learn
from the Master
,” Seth says.

“The Master!” Tori hoots, turning aside to look out of the window.

“And you straight-up care about me. Admit it,” Seth says, elbowing Lewis. “I want to hear you say it.”

“Say it about
me
,” Lewis says, taken aback again by Seth's uncharacteristic touchy-feelyness.

“I care about you, Lewis,” Seth says evenly.

Tori shakes her head. “You guys talk like bitches.”

“OK, stop the car!” Seth calls to Kaylee, who slows down to play along, looking in the rearview. “Let's put Tori out on the side of the road. She doesn't believe in brotherly love.”

“Brotherly
bitches
,” Tori says.

“She'll just have to suck some truck-driver dick to get home,” Seth says as if it's a ho-hum routine they've been through many times. “No problem there.”

“Bring it on, right, Kaylee?” Tori says, leaning forward toward Kaylee. “Big truck-driver dick, hmm—good!”

“There's a truck now!” Seth says. He lunges forward and steers the wheel to the left and the car veers sharply toward oncoming traffic, headlights flaring, horns blow wildly. Kaylee wrestles the wheel back into the lane, cuffing Seth in the face back-handed.

Holding his nose with both hands, he reels backwards into his seat.

There's a momentary shock then Cody peers wide-eyed over the top of his seat. “Yo,
what the fuck
, Seth?”

Crushing her breasts against Lewis, Tori whacks Seth in the head. Lewis would hit him too if Seth weren't already bleeding.

Pressing the hem of his T-shirt to his nose, Seth says, “Oh, they died in a head-on collision, boo-hoo!'”

“Fuckin' A, Seth!” Kaylee says in the rearview. “Fuckin' nut case!”

“Ah, you think it's so painful and tragic,” Seth says through his upheld shirt hem, “but it's just a little bump and then you're sucked through into pure joy. I'm trying to HELP! I took the vows!”

Ignoring him, Tori pounds on Kaylee's seat and hollers, “Turn this shit up!” Everyone seems to have recovered miraculously quickly from nearly dying in a head-on collision but maybe it wasn't as close as it seemed or this is a more commonplace form of excitement than Lewis knows.

Tori and Kaylee are singing lustily along to a hip-hoppish song as if it's their anthem:

 

I've been knowing her for years!

I've been seeing her for years!

She got dark dark wavy hair!

With a voice like she just don't care!

She got a skirt with a halter top!

She got a daddy never gave her fuck!

She drinks a beer with a malted top!

She got knocked up in a pickup truck!

 

“I love you, Lewis,” Seth says, turning back to him, prodding him in the arm. “Say that.”

“I love you, Seth,” Lewis says and it's true: why not say it? Seth leans closer, speaking in a low urgent voice, like a trainer to a boxer. Except he's the one who's bleeding. “You have a great opportunity here, you realize that, right? It's like when Candy and I split. Not to compare the two. I mean your thing with what's-her-name is, let's be real, a
joke
compared to the towering insane legendary passion and love of the Candy-Seth conflagration.” He pauses to gauge Lewis's reaction to this insult.

“All's I'm saying is you need to, like, stretch the lips of the wound
wide
. There's a hole in the thick elephant hide of your ego now. Maybe, just
maybe
, a little light will pass through to you. People say, ‘Keep it together, don't go to pieces over a bitch, excuse me, a girl, a woman, a wench, a skank, ho, whatever the quote unquote politically correct term is at this moment in time.” Again he checks Lewis's reaction as if glancing at a monitor for readout. “But
I
say, do you know what
I
say? I say
let
yourself fall apart. It's your only fucking
hope
: collapse and total dilapidation. The same goes for Virgil, now that Sylvie has left his sorry ass. Gone back to Yurup! I know all their dirty little secrets. He needs to come to me for help cracking himself open but he can't deal with the fact that I'm his teacher. But he will! Oh yes. And here we are!”

Kaylee turns into the parking lot of the bowling alley, which is nearly full.

“Must be
league night
,” Seth says as he climbs out. “Cool!”

Lewis walks with Cody. “North Rock's got the most lanes of
anywhere in the state
,” he says, rolling his eyes but also clearly proud of the distinction. Inside at the long counter, Seth burlesques a bored big-spender show of paying for the lane, the last available, rental of everyone's shoes and higher-grade, glittery-colorful bowling balls, topping it off with an enormous cardboard tray of soft drinks and junk food from the snack bar. Licking his thumb, he peels the bills out of a money clip. His nose starts bleeding again and the clerk passes him a stack of napkins.

The league players in the lanes to either side cast curious, wary, lingering glances at Kaylee and Tori but above all at Seth, who reacts by twitching and muttering to himself like an escapee from a mental ward, letting out random bleats, staring at the bowling ball as if it's a meteor fallen at his feet through the ceiling. He's twisted a napkin and shoved it into one nostril to stanch the flow of blood and the napkin is slowly turning red. It's not merely goofy exhibitionism: something is going on with, in Seth; he may be on the verge of an “episode.” Though Lewis no sooner settles into this alarmist conclusion than Seth puts a lighter, more purely pranksterish inflection on what then comes to seem like mere cutting up. And if the league bowlers weren't so bovine and “decent” and easy to outrage, Seth might find no resistance in them and cease acting out. Maybe. In any case it seems within Seth's control and therefore wrong to Lewis, his messing with their heads, unnecessary, aggressive, idle. He's remembering how exhausting and stressful it can be to be out in public with his brother, how it chafes against the grain of Lewis's preference for blending in, for anonymity.

His cell phone is thrumming in his pocket. Checking the screen, he recognizes Eli's number and feels inordinately grateful to be located in North Rock Lanes, reminded that there's a world beyond New York. Eli his friend of many firsts: door-man building (Eli's), after-hours club, game of squash, line of cocaine.

“Where the fuck
are
you?” Eli asks when Lewis answers. He has an enviably deep, relaxed voice, as of a bygone era of masculine entitlement. They were in the same freshman class at Columbia but Eli graduated on time and has already finished his first year at Harvard Law.

Lewis presses closed his free ear with his index finger to hear over the din. “Bowling!”

“He's
bowling
!” Eli tells someone delightedly.

Standing behind Tori now, Seth is showing her how to hold the ball then “slips” and they collapse onto the floor together. The ball drops thunderously onto the boards and rumbles into the gutter. Eli is speaking but Lewis can't hear what he's saying. Tori is face down but her back is arched, rump up, and each time Seth attempts to rise, pressing up off the floor with his arms on both sides of her, he quickly falls, landing a thrust with his pelvis into Tori's ass. “Oop! Damn, sorry, babe!”

“That's OK!” she says, giggling, casting pornographic looks over her shoulder.

“Here, Jeez, it's these damn slippery
shoes
!”

“And watching my brother simulate sex with his stripper girlfriend,” Lewis says into the phone, having backed up to the snack bar area to put distance between himself and them, though Seth and Tori have now disentangled themselves and gotten up off the floor of the lane.

“Your
brother's
there? I thought your brother was in Colorado.” The only child of a happily married neurologist and angelic—if heavily medicated—former-model mother, Eli is fascinated by the tumult of Lewis's family life.

“I did too,” Lewis says. “Where are you?”

“We're in a cab—on 86th—heading over to dinner with limey friends of Mi's.”

Shifting into a serious, paternal register, he asks how Lewis is holding up. Like Abby, Eli is if anything relieved to be rid of V., who disapproved of his hard-partying ways, specifically the coke, which Eli quipped was like disapproving of joie de vivre. But it was through Eli that Lewis met Victoria, back when Eli was dating Victoria's best friend, a grad student in English named Bethany. Now, two girlfriends later, Eli is seeing a British grad student in Art History named Hermione, “Mi.”

“I'm really doing OK,” Lewis says self-consciously, as if Hermione were eavesdropping, which she may as well be: what Lewis tells Eli probably finds its way to V. through Hermione—the two, while not friends, are friendly. “Getting out of town was the right move,” Lewis adds, thinking of this. He has pieced together from things dropped by Eli that in V's circle, the cold social reality is that her dumping of Lewis for Andrew the Rhodes Scholar has restored her credibility, which had been damaged by the protracted involvement with the relatively aimless, younger Lewis.

“Good deal!” Eli says, audibly relieved not to have to listen to more. “Well, just wanted to check in! Mi says ‘hi.' Roll a strike for us! Talk soon!”

Lewis watches a ball bowled apparently by Cody gradually overtake a ball thrown either by Kaylee or Tori, while a third ball, ahead of these other two but in the same lane, crashes so softly into the pins that it's closer to a slow-motion replay than an event occurring in real time.

If the manager doesn't kick them out, it's going to be a long night.

But here comes the manager.

 

 

L
ewis's eyes click open like a doll's for no discernible reason. He lies listening to the faint hum of the air-conditioning; a stringy murmur in a pipe inside a wall; wind in the trees outside; pouring through the trees, pausing; pouring through the trees again.

He sits up and stares at his long pale feet that seem to float below as though dangled from a dock then pulls on his jeans and goes into the den and turns on the flat-screen TV and channel surfs with the mute on: prison cellblock, wedding, open-heart surgery, delousing chimps, Amish barn raising, particle accelerator, star fruit, home birth, red sauce on simmer, corkscrewing seal, bar scene.

On the coffee table is a cork bulletin board, images torn from magazines, a clear plastic box of pushpins. Abby's been working on her “inspiration board,” which hangs above the computer, a technique recommended in
The Secret
, last year's big book. She employs the technique in a modified fashion, he can't remember how. In the light of the TV, he shuffles through the piles, his hand moving aside an image of an espresso machine in the kitchen, underneath which is an image of an airliner with “Lewis” written in Abby's hand across the fuselage.

A figure sweeps by the doorway to the living room. Lewis sees it out of the corner of his eye and sits frozen, listening hard. His first thought is that it's Butch, who performed some ancient hobo trick on the lock to the back door (assuming Abby even bothers locking up) and has come back to take revenge on Lewis for “disrespecting” him. Seth is to blame, Seth the head wound through which evil enters.

Lewis stands listening in the doorway of the den then pads across the living room and stops on the threshold of the dining room and listens. The wind flings a handful of grit against the side of the house. There's a faint concussion; he feels it in the floor. Now it sounds like chairs are being rearranged in the kitchen, followed by a series of soft blows.

He picks up a heavy candlestick on the hutch and goes on to the doorway to the kitchen with the candlestick held tight in his hand. He peers around the corner of the doorjamb into the kitchen and sees Donald, wearing a voluminous T-shirt and boxers, his face lit by the light of the microwave.

Lewis switches on the overhead lights. “Donald!” he says with relief.

Donald blinks and bites his thick moustache but otherwise makes no reaction, staring into the microwave with mild consternation, as at an aquarium where a guppy floats belly-up. The smell of cineplex popcorn fills the air. Is he sleep-walking?

Then Lewis notices the silhouette in the breakfast nook and hops straight into the air with fright. It's Seth. Lewis puts his hand to his heart. “Fuck!”

Seth says, “Who says white men can't jump?”

Lewis turns on the breakfast nook light. Seth sits in a chair, shirtless, tat bandage, hands in the pockets of his jeans. “What the fuck are you doing in here?”

Seth lifts his chin at Donald. “Making sure this fool doesn't burn the house down.”

“You scared the shit out of me,” Lewis scolds, heart pounding hard. “You should have said something.”

“You were gonna be scared either way.”

Lewis decides this is probably true but it doesn't lessen his irritation.

“Hey,
Donald
,” he says and prods Donald in the soft flesh of his upper arm, to no effect. He seems to be reading a copy of the
Wichita Eagle
lying on the counter. Lewis can see part of the headline:
Autopsy Shows Kansas
.

“What're you doing up?” Lewis asks, turning back to Seth. Seth shrugs. Not sleeping can be a symptom of an oncoming episode. “Seriously, why aren't you sleeping?”

“Why aren't you?”

Donald is opening drawers in search of something.

Now the microwave beeps and shuts off and Donald opens the door and slides out a pan of Low-Cal Orville Redenbacher. With a fork he found, he plucks an opening in the swollen foil and begins to eat small handfuls of the popcorn while staring straight ahead.

Seth gets up and goes to the counter. “Hey, Donald, think I should get an
iPhone
?”

Donald goes on eating. Seth scoots the pan out of his reach. Frowning, Donald gropes for it with both hands as if playing chords on a keyboard.

“Seth,” Lewis says feebly. “Come on.”

“Donald!” Seth says. “iPhone or
not
, you know?” He wrinkles his nose. “I just can't seem to
decide
. What's your take? On the
iPhone
. Donald! Someone help me fucking
decide
! Donald! iPhone or no iPhone?”

Lewis is getting up to intervene, despite the fact that he's finding it pretty funny and obscurely well-deserved, when Donald turns and looks Seth in the eye.

“No,” Donald says firmly. “Don't get one.”

“Okay,” Seth says, nodding thoughtfully. “Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

With that, he takes Donald by the arm and leads him back through the house to Abby's room.