Family (5 page)

after we have all eaten our fill, Henry takes out His guitar.

when Henry plays guitar, it is easy to see how shelly could mistake Him for jesus.

myself, i suddenly wonder if in fact i do believe in god. (i have no doubt about how it is that i believe in Henry.)

i know it’s a cliché to say so, but Henry plays guitar like an angel.

assuming that angels can play guitars.

i figure that angels can do whatever they want to do. just like Henry. and anyway, it’s not angels i am interested in right now.

He plays folk music, the same music He played for me in the van, and it’s clear that all of the people here, all of His family, know His music well.

they sing along, hum, bob their heads, sway. they wrap their arms around each other, form tight cocoons. they touch, stroke, smile. the babies have long been put to sleep.

“He’s going to be famous,” shelly says to me. and i believe her. “He’s going to spread our family’s music. and love.”

seeing everyone, all of Henry’s
family
, swaying in tune, in concert, together, i believe her. i believe
it.

junior brings out a pipe, the tall, smooth, blown-glass type that i’d seen in storefronts when i first arrived in san francisco. Henry passes him a small plastic bag filled with something thick and green.

i know what that is, inside the bag. Henry and i smoked some while we were in the van. it’s different than the tabs He gave me; more mellow, less severe.

but in the end, they are the same. in the end, they are
all
the same, really: they are all something to carry you away. a chemical undertow.

after the pipe has been passed from outstretched palm to outstretched palm, Henry sets aside the guitar. He winks at shelly, who wanders over to junior’s side of the circle. she leans down to him, rubs his shoulders for a moment, pulls him up, and the two of them stumble off toward the barn.

leila giggles and rolls her eyes. she has hitched her shirt up like she’s sunbathing, and i can see the flat expanse of her stomach.

Henry catches her eye and laughs with her.

“dirty hippies,” He says. meaning shelly and junior, who are off to fuse their fevers, to collide their tides, to consume each other oh-so-casually.

this is what family does.

it is what family—even
Henry’s
family—does.

even. still. of course.
always.

some things, so many things, are
always.

i pause, reflect, and find that i am not surprised.

this family is flowing—
overflowing
—with love. this is how we share it with each other. how we collect the runoff as it spills down the surfaces of our skin. we are a chain of paper dolls, connected.

Henry catches my eye across the bonfire, asks me an unspoken question.

He knows, of course—knows my reply before i even have the chance to cock an eyebrow, to twitch a lip. He sees me. sees
through
me.

He knows that i am not surprised.

in the haze of smoke and tide and undertow, i understand. i
get it.

i see
—how it is that this family works. how we share. collide. fuse.

burn.

i am lightweight. i am afloat.

at peace. ready.

to love and be loved.

with my family.

dirty hippies.
that is what they are—what
we
are.

Henry is joking, of course. Henry knows there is nothing dirty about our family’s love. but. it’s what uncle jack would call us. and
he
wouldn’t be joking.

when uncle jack would read about the new west in the paper—about the drugs and the sex and the boys with hair almost down their back—disappointment, disgust, would drip from his voice.

“dirty hippies. diseased, you know. all of that
free love.”

free love.

i couldn’t say for certain what was going on with shelly and junior back at the barn. i mean, i had an idea, of course. something about music, and
now,
and tidal shifts. but.

“free love”?

i still wasn’t sure.

to me, that kind of love, the sex kind, didn’t ever really come free. that kind, the kind among family?

that kind, i learned from uncle jack, always had a price.

it was uncle jack’s love that was diseased, uncle jack’s love that changed the way i felt about love in general—any kind of love, all love.

the only free love was Henry’s.

and i was sure of only one thing, in that moment:

i was going to take what i could get of it. for as long as i possibly could.

when Henry found her, shelly tells me, she was—
where else?—
in the haight, hooking.

“well, technically,” she says, “topless dancing. but it was never enough money, and there were always men willing to pay for something extra.”

in the parking lot outside of the strip club. that’s where the “extra” would happen, where she turned her tricks. except, she doesn’t call it a strip club. she calls it an
exotic nightclub.

whiskey breath and roving hands: how exotic.

shelly is originally from oregon, she says. like me, she never had a mother. and her father showed his love the same way uncle jack did. shelly knew disease and fever.

like me.

“so frankly,” she says, “stripping seemed like a big step up. at least i was getting paid.”

shelly was one step ahead of me. she knew, even then, that there was no such thing, really, as “free love.”

she is not self-conscious, either; unlike me, she will happily shed her clothes as a snake shakes off its too-tight skin, will gleefully wind her way around the campfire at night, bathing in flames and warmth and light and Henry’s orbit. she thinks nothing of offering her body, welcomes the touch of someone, anyone, the family, reaching out to share her, cup her, coax her, hold her. drink her in.

Henry helped her, she explains. to remove her doubt, her second thoughts, her mirror-self. to let go of the halflife and shake off her too-tight skin. she has been reborn.

through Henry, she has been reborn.

let me be your father.

it sounds familiar; i should be jealous, could very easily be jealous. but of course, there is more than enough of Henry to go around. enough for everyone, for our entire family.

Henry is infinite.

i learn the story of how shelly met Henry at a party: one of the other dancers from the
exotic nightclub
was having people over, and of course, shelly was in. shelly was always in, always up, always down for anything: free drugs, alcohol, drinking in skin. anything to beckon the undertow back, to help to fold it, slide it beneath the surface again.

“He walked in,” she tells me. “Henry. and the entire room just—
whoosh
—dropped away.”

she waves her hand to show me
whoosh.
she doesn’t have to. i know that feeling, the spinning, yawning, antimatter sensation that comes from Henry’s orbit.

“i knew right then that there was something special about Him, that He was someone i was supposed to meet. supposed to be with.”

she sighs.

He was with another girl that night, someone He’d brought with Him to the party. not leila, but one of the others, someone named margie, or merri, someone who hadn’t stuck around. He had invited shelly to come stay with them in their apartment—back then, He’d had an apartment (how conventional, ordinary, everyday, how jarringly
normal
)—which shelly did. but it turned out margie-merri wasn’t one for sharing.

unlike shelly, margie-merri wasn’t in, up, down for anything.

margie-merri—and here shelly snorts and rolls her eyes—she didn’t understand that Henry was too much, so much, filled to bursting. that He couldn’t be contained. that it would be selfish not to share Him.

margie-merri would rather have forsaken all Henry than sacrifice her own small bit, the amount of Him that she could fight in one tightly balled fist.

i think: it is just as well that she didn’t stay. i would never have understood her, margie-merri. i could never
get
someone like that.

clearly, margie-merri had no sense of family.

and there is no room for that sort of thinking, here on the ranch.

here, now,
forever.
on the ranch.

obviously the little apartment in the haight wasn’t big enough to hold Henry and all He had to share. it wasn’t long before He bought a van secondhand and headed out to the desert, out to the ranch, out to
forever
, family in tow.

it was dreamlike, this idea, this notion that we had all just up and followed Him. like something out of a fairy tale, out of a storybook. out of a fable scripted in a dead language, scratched on wafer-thin parchment in spindly scrawl etched in disappearing ink.

but did that make Henry the pied piper? or the golden goose?

it made a difference, you see:

whether we’d clutched at His tail feathers in the hopes of brushing our fingers against something gilded.

or whether we were infested,
we
were the vermin, and He, Henry, was leading us out, away, gone.

dirty hippies. free love.

it made a difference.

but i couldn’t be sure. not then.

not yet.

junior wants.

according to shelly, back in his old life, back in the
before,
junior was some kind of small-town god.

attractive, amiable, athletic. a classic american good-old-boy hero.

on the surface, junior is the most wholeness i have ever encountered. even teeth and sandy hair and eyes like ocean. eyes like
infinite.

still, though: he is here. in the
now.
in the fractured fantasy.

he is here; therefore, he is broken.
must
be broken.

it is an unavoidable piece of logic: in his own way, junior is fractured, shattered, shrinking. running out his half-life just like all the rest of us, here on the ranch.

i see the way he seeks approval. takes it as the mark of confidence that it is when Henry awards him a girl, two girls, a group, a gaggle, for the night. these things make junior feel important, which Henry understands.

Henry understands: junior
needs
to feel important. Henry can do that for him, and does.

Henry knows how to give people what they need.

my first night here, my first campfire. Henry picked.
me.

shelly and junior wandered off, entwined.

and Henry rose.

“dirty hippies.”

He winked. it was the punch line to a joke, but finally—i
got
it. i understood.

we:
all of us. all of our
family
. we’d been made to feel dirty, outside, other.

but this, the ranch: it was, is, always will be home.

here, we have nothing to explain, nothing to account for. here, we are only ourselves.

and we have one way—our own way—to fill our hollow places up.

the fire throws sparks.

i stretch forward, unafraid. i like to feel the flames lap against my cheeks.

“mel,” Henry says, His voice like a clap of thunder, “will you come with me?”

no one has ever asked before.

certainly not uncle jack. never.

so when Henry takes me to the barn, to shelly and junior and hunger and hands, i go with Him.

i go with Him. i go slack. i give myself over.

and when shelly puts her mouth on mine, puts her hands on me?

with Henry watching, His gaze sharp, potent, approving?

i follow her mouth, her hands, with my own. i fill her hollow places.

i float.

with junior, though, it is different.

junior’s hands are cold. just the tips of his fingers skating along my bare skin makes me shudder, makes me shrink.

makes me fold in on myself.

with junior it is different.

i know, though, what Henry expects of me. and so i go along. He has been so much, so many things, for me, given so much
to
me. i cannot disappoint Him.

and so. i tune myself to another frequency. i detach.

but i cannot float. not fully.

junior is too cold for that.

through my squeezed-shut eyes, i can still see junior, so clearly. i see him like he is carved of glass, ice, crystal. my eyes go right through him, and i am relieved when he collapses, finished. pulls away from me.

shelly puts a hand over mine. Henry drapes an arm around my shoulder, kisses me on the forehead like i imagine a father would.

i can be your father.

“i told you,” He says.

“i told you that you would love my family.”

i nod. His voice is a lullaby, and i begin to sway, to give myself over to the haze and the clouds and the undertow. the ogre in the sky is breaking apart, reassembling himself into a cocoon of safety. that is the power of Henry’s orbit. His pull.

His half-life.

still, though: i see.

i see junior. see the way that junior
wants.

i see the way he soaks in Henry’s aura, basks in Henry’s light.

i see the way that he embraces the fever.

he is glass, ice, crystal.

and he is primed to shatter, to splinter.

to melt.

the man on the sofa shakes his head, pushes himself up on one elbow. sleep crusts the corners of his eyes.

he blinks, shakes his free wrist, peers at his watch. his hair is flattened, pressed against his skull from where he dozed off on the sofa.

he looks small, disoriented. confused.

“what time is it?” he asks. “was i—?”

then he takes in junior: six feet tall, clad in shadow, cheek spattered with mud.

junior, bearing down on him.

“who are you?” the man on the sofa asks. he is still uncertain. still not quite concerned, not too terribly worried about the turn that this evening has taken.

he should be.

junior draws himself farther, higher, until he is tall as a tree, a tower, a tornado.

he slides his pistol from his waistband, cocks it.

click.

my stomach clenches, a swarm of hornets, fluttering wings locked in beat.

“i’m the devil,” junior says.

“and i’m here to do the devil’s business.”

then: silence.

then: sounds.

then: fever.

and i can do nothing to stop it. not any of it.

the half-life, the orbit, the vortex has opened, and we are all being pulled inward.

we are all being crushed by gravity, by antimatter, by the yawning black hole.

we are all collapsing in upon ourselves.