B008J4PNHE EBOK (47 page)

There was a plasma-screen television in the center of the built-in entertainment center on the facing wall. Sam turned it on to watch something while he ate. Because it was the weekend, he wasn’t surprised to come upon another rerun of the Kenneth Novey episode of
Secrets Only Dead Men Know
playing on the same basic cable channel.

Novey rises from his panic room cot on the first morning of the twenty-first century, walks to the keypad by the vaulted door, punches the release button—and nothing happens. Two more times Novey jabs the button, but the keypad is black. “Uh-oh,” says the voice of the ghost, “this is . . . problematic.”

Sam’s cell phone rattled: it wasn’t Tess, it was Polly.

The possibility of ten or fifteen minutes of pleasant stroking, of Polly
whispering about her fingers and her nipples, of her making noises that started in her chest and emerged in kitten squeaks, unraveled before him. He thought about it, and the idea was as abruptly and flatly unappealing as cold, melted yellow cheese.

Sam glanced from the shuddering phone to the screen. Novey has developed a deranged beard and is laughing hysterically because his
Newsweek
with the picture of a double helix on the cover has come unstapled. The wings of pages drift to the floor. Soon he will kill himself.

It seemed to Sam that here, right here, through the snow of pages, is the moment when an escape hatch ought to appear—a crawl space, a loose floor panel, some cut in the world that could be peeled back and squeezed out through.

The phone stopped ringing, then a few seconds later produced the burble that alerted him that there was a message.

On the television, the show went to commercial: Jo-Jo’s pin-striped GTO fishtails out in front of a family of nerds in a minivan. “Hold on, yah?” The ex-catcher jumps from the car and rushes at the minivan. “No money down, my friends!”

Aware that he had made a choice, Sam picked up his sandwich and took another bite. The phone began to quake again. He went ahead and turned it off. If he was going to find his way back into Tess’s graces, it probably wasn’t going to be tonight.

The commercials ended, and the show returned. For the second time that weekend, Sam was beguiled by the reenactment of the senseless tragedy of Kenneth Novey and his malfunctioning panic room.

Maybe it was related to witnessing Novey’s entombment again, but Sam felt a sudden urge to get out, go somewhere. He didn’t want to see Mina or Booth, or even Tom, not right then. He hadn’t figured out how to talk to his sister, and he didn’t know what to make of his father. If he called Tess again, he risked making it worse.

Sam decided to drive the rental car across town, have a pass by the cottage where he had grown up.

At Main, he caught a red. While he waited, he heard the sound of fireworks but didn’t see them. To his left and his right, the orange streetlights cast spacey, acid-looking pools on the concrete.

On the other side of Main, he drove a half-dozen side streets, none of which he could have named but that, put together, formed the way home.

 ■ ■ ■ 

He parked curbside under a familiar, heavy-headed elm tree. The tree stood at the edge of a brief rectangle of lawn, which also held a darkened cottage with a white door and pewter-colored shingles that shone dimly in the night. A pickup truck sat in the driveway.

When he tried to imagine himself inside the house, Sam kept bumping up against furniture he didn’t recognize. It was a place where some other people lived now. He put the rental back into drive and pulled away.

Up the street a few hundred yards, at the Huguenot graveyard, he stopped again. Inside the enclosure of the low rock wall, a couple dozen earthen humps and rocky shapes were visible in the dark. There were no lights or reflectors to discern the specific hillocks, piles, and gravestones. (Costas Mandell, soon to be laid down in his own oblong of rest, came to mind—but Sam stayed fast and hurried him out as suddenly as he’d appeared, directing him to clop off the set and get into his trailer. Someone would notify him when he was needed.)

As Sam’s eyes adjusted he thought he discerned a few white flowers scattered on the ground, little peels of luminescence—or maybe it was a trick of moonlight. There was nothing else to see. The dead were well buried.

 ■ ■ ■ 

A little wired—the unexpected ease with which he had slipped past the stomping grounds of his childhood and adolescence had stirred him—Sam went to the hookah bar-café, Smoke Me Drink Me.

The establishment contained nothing like a traditional table-chair arrangement; couches and oversize pillows were littered around, along with a few low tables. Shelves on the walls displayed burnished hookahs of different shapes and sizes. Concealed speakers played jazz at a low volume. Pieces of translucent fabric hung in front of the track lighting to filter the room in aqua light.

Where double doors used to lead to the theater proper, there was now a solid wall. In circling the block for a parking space, Sam had discovered that the entire rear of the original structure, where the seats and the screen once stood, had been leveled to create a municipal parking lot. He recollected Tom mentioning this development, maybe as far back as four or five years ago, but somehow or other, Sam had never seen or noticed. Not that there was a whole lot to see or notice; it was just a parking lot.

Inside, Sam drew away from the groups of younger people sharing bowls on the rugged floor, and carried the herbal tea that he had purchased up the stairs, through thin, flitting clouds of acrid smoke. An arrowed sign on the landing pointed
TO THE PATIO
.

On the second floor, the double doors remained. Sam stepped through to the balcony.

Though the theater had been razed, the balcony yet protruded from the building, in the form of a patio with one open side. What remained were two decks—upper and lower—linked by a brief set of stairs. The movie seats had been cleared away except for the front row. A drape of thick plastic sheeting hung from the roof to fall down in front of the balcony railing, presumably to keep out the insects.

Sam descended to the railing and chose a seat in the middle. He turned on his cell phone; there were ten messages from Polly. Whatever else, the day was certain to go down in his personal history as a bumper one for women wanting his attention. He clicked the phone off before she could get through again.

Through the plastic sheet, he could see the parking lot, his rental car and some other cars, a Dumpster, the rear of another building, and a small cut of sidewalk with a streetlight. He had a vague memory of his father taking him up here one time, predivorce. It was like an old reel without the sound elements—Sam could see the outline of his father’s face against a red wall, but the conversation was gone.

If the day had proved that his father was different somehow—worthier somehow—then what was he supposed to do with Booth now? He couldn’t exactly see himself calling Booth for advice. Sam tried his tea; he had added a lot of honey, and it was delicious.

“How’s the movie?”

The springs of the neighboring seat twanged as a girl dropped down
beside him. Sam recognized her from that afternoon—she was the one with the spiderweb on her face.

In the gloom, her swan neck was particularly white and sinuous. The way the web carved up her face produced a multifarious effect that made it hard to meet her gaze straight on for longer than a second or two. It was like she was looking back from all her different sections; not that it was ugly or scary or threatening, but it was somehow insistent, strongly insistent. Immediately, Sam wanted her to like him.

“I’m not sure I get it. I keep waiting for something to happen, but so far, it’s all parking lot. I do like the plastic drape—it gives the scene a cool little blur.”

She had a careless grin that tiptoed right up to the edge of a smirk. “Oh, it’s an arty film?”

“That’s right. We should be seeing Europeans having sex any second now.”

This earned him a throaty smoker’s chuckle. She patted her stomach; there was a small bulge. “I hope you don’t have any ideas. I’m taken.”

“I’m Sam.” Since he didn’t know precisely how the so-called local children viewed Booth, Sam thought it safest not to mention their relation.

“Bea.” They shook. “I hope you don’t mind the company. My friends are communing with the spirits. It freaks me out. I’m afraid a ghost will get offended and I’ll end up giving birth to a Satan baby.”

Sam scratched his head.

“Ouija board,” Bea added.

“Oh, that’s dumb,” said Sam, and she said, “I know, I know.”

The new acquaintances sat in silence and stared at the parking lot. A skunk stalked onto the little stage of street between the buildings but didn’t break pace, just continued off left.

“So that’s it,” she said. “The skunk survived. The end. Lame, dude.”

Sam said that for some reason, the skunk had him thinking of the end of Antonioni’s
Blow-Up
. She asked what happened at the end of
Blow-Up
. He asked if she was sure she wanted to know, and Bea said yeah, go ahead, and Sam said it was a classic, and she said, “Don’t be a tease.”

“Okay.” He leaned forward, rubbed his hands together. “The protagonist of the film, he’s been wrapped up in this kind of—I don’t know,
there’s been a mystery, right? Let me see if I can remember. It’s been a while. Right: so there’s this guy—”

“Amazing so far. No way I’m getting up to pee—”

“Shut up. This guy, he may have witnessed a murder. He’s a photographer, a very slick operator. He’s the main character, and it definitely seems like there was a murder that he saw in this park. Seems that way, but it’s actually not definite. And this is the sixties, the swinging sixties, London. But someone breaks in to the photographer’s place and steals the photos that might be evidence of the murder. Also, there’s a woman, Vanessa Redgrave, who has been on his case, and she’s a big mystery, too. But still. It’s not clear. He never figures it out one way or another what’s truly happened, if maybe nothing’s happened.”

“And that’s the end?” Bea grimaced. “Thumbs-down.”

“No, no,” said Sam. “Hold the fuck on. The end is that the photographer, he finds himself by these tennis courts. A group of mimes happens along. And they all start playing mime tennis.”

“That’s it? Mimes playing tennis?” Bea rubbed her webbed forehead as if it ached. “Mega-thumbs-down.”

Sam shook his head. “That’s still not quite it. There’s one more thing:
he hears the tennis balls
. He hears the balls bouncing, hitting rackets. That unmistakable tennis sound. And so the guy, our hero, he joins in.”

“It’s meta-tennis,” said Bea.

“It’s an acquiescence to the unknown.”

The girl with the tattooed face sprawled back in her chair. “So deep.” She pretended to make herself barf.

Sam couldn’t restrain a smile. “You haven’t even seen it!”

“I don’t mean to sound like a philistine, but it’s a cop-out. ‘Oh, I can’t figure out an ending! Mimes playing tennis! Life’s a big old mystery!’ You could quit on any story at any time and use that ending. Seriously, what’s the point? Mimes? Mimes are everything that is wrong with everything.”

“I guess the point is that we can’t ever be sure that something is exactly what it seems, and—mimes. Huh. I might not have done it justice. I haven’t seen it since college.” The ambiguity once appealed to Sam, the unsettled quality, the lingering question of what was real and what wasn’t real and whether there were invisible forces at work. Now, through her eyes, it was, well, a bunch of mimes playing tennis.

“So what was the connection with the skunk, Mr. Movie?” Bea laughed. And how long ago was he in college—a hundred years?

 ■ ■ ■ 

The amiable tattoo-faced girl asked Sam to come down and meet her friends. “I need some backup in case they got possessed while they were fucking around with the Ouija. It’s always the pregnant woman that the ghosts most want to get their hands on.”

Sam agreed; he was curious to meet her friends, and he wasn’t afraid of spectors. If, to take an example, ghosts were real, that meant Brooks Hartwig, Jr., was the sanest person he had ever known; and to take another, if there was a way for the dead to communicate with the living, Sam had no doubt that he would have heard from Allie by now, to offer her opinion on a whole range of issues from his grooming habits to his brooding to, most recently, his shoddy treatment of Tess Auerbach. “Sure,” he said, “I’ll come say hello to these spiritualists.”

Downstairs, the boy in the checkered pants, the girl who had been strumming the guitar, and a couple of others were gathered around a coffee table covered in a drape of silky yellow fabric and situated in a small alcove at one side of the lounge’s main room. The Ouija board had been set aside, and they were sipping from steaming, widemouthed ceramic cups. Sam and Bea brought over a couple of pillows to sit on.

Bea introduced him to the group, and everyone said hello. He noted right away that the boy in the checkered pants was wearing what must have been one of the T-shirts that Booth had given away: it bore a reproduction of the poster for
Buffalo Roam,
showing a white buffalo standing in a line at a hot dog stand along with a Native American in a feathered headdress, a hippie girl in fringe, and a boy holding a red, white, and blue balloon. A teaser read, “A Legend of America!” Sam knew if you looked closely at the credit block at the bottom that Booth was the last listed actor: “and Booth Dolan as ‘Dog the Cloud.’” It almost made Sam laugh, not because of the movie—an inarguably tedious stoner epic that made the overrated
Easy Rider
look like
The Rules of the Game—
but because he was imagining all the street kids uniformly dressed in Booth’s T-shirts. It was as if Booth had adopted his own fucked-up Little League team. The girl, who had been strumming the guitar, Elsie, had the
Devil of the Acropolis
poster on her shirt.

“I thought you were communing with the dead,” said Bea.

The boy in the checkered pants rolled his eyes. “Elsie kept screwing around.”