In the Land of the Living (21 page)

you will see his eyes, gray eyes the color of a wave below the curl, below the storm winds that smite the waveheads and shatter the spindrift on the white air, Captain Change and his indissoluble will

Leo leaned against the arch. Two pigeons bobbed their heads as they wandered the sidewalk. One was fat, with a healthy green shine on the feathers around its neck. The other was skinny, and had been splashed with tar, its useless feathers black and glued to themselves. It was missing an eye.

“Looking
good,
brother!” he said.

Where was his “hour of splendour in the grass”? He could forget about illness and death—if he could spend the days of his youth in bed with Michelle, without fighting, just peace between them, her naked body. The screen of the sliding door would admit the odor of the sky and ocean. The room of a beach house would smell like fresh linen and there would be sand in the carpet. In Amagansett she would press her naked left buttock into his rough-haired groin, in private. A girl: wears lipstick, perfume, has long hair, armpits with scarcely a shadow, wears a dress, is prudent and wise about her ring finger, about her eggs and her vagina, which she maintains with regular service calls like some men do their brake pads.

He remembered the pictures of Michelle in the yearbook. Solitary, pensive, sober, dappled, under the tree. And the field hockey pictures. She once said she liked to run past other players like they were standing still. That was the person who thought that when we died we became nothing even though he argued that from a Berkeleyan standpoint this was impossible. The person whose mind housed many unlike things: a waitress shift schedule, Stafford Loan deadlines, long shadows of unhappiness and how they would look on a lithograph, “pretty pictures.” She’d lived on the same street as his friend David Kim, whom he’d teased for being Korean—imagine that, teasing a kid about his eyes. Not funny. That was Ohio for you. David lived farther up Fernway, maybe. He wasn’t even sure anymore. Once, in the middle of the night he saw two black guys in matching red T-shirts jogging down that street with javelins. It was true.

Leo passed under the arch, and wandered on amid the graves.

On his father’s tombstone was a line from
Macbeth
:

Then he is dead? Ay, and brought off the field. Had he his hurts before? Ay, on the front. He’s worth more sorrow and that I’ll spend for him.

The chill deepened over the quiet graves as the sun went down. No trees resisted the dominion of the falling star and it raked the naked cemetery with orange fire and thrust into it long spears of darkness. The shadow of the angel with the broken wing crept far out onto the grass, and orange light ignited the western facets of the headstones and obelisks. Leo’s skin felt cool. The embarrassed angry blood in his face had drained.

He could see a girl, back toward him, sitting on a bench on the other side of the cemetery’s pointed black iron bars. She was hunched over some papers on her lap. She could have been Michelle. The same brown hair, falling over the shoulders in the same way, tucked behind one ear in the same way. It was her! his heart said, leaping up. He had seen her head move in just the same way, looking from one piece of paper to the other on her lap. He could envision Michelle’s face with the body of that girl. He experimented: It was really her, merely yards away! It was her! They would go to a restaurant and she would tell him about Miró.

The girl looked up for a moment as if she had heard her name; she had a piggish nose, looked nothing like Michelle. But when she looked back down he could practically see again—turned away from him, looking down—Michelle’s face. Her army-green coat that was too thin for winter (she always shivered in it), the coat with the leather collar. Her jeans. Her breasts. Her hips. It was her!

Ah, fuck, it was nobody.

I came here looking for you, Daddy, but you aren’t here
.
I guess I wasn’t good enough after all
.
I’m only my pitiful small self, my irrational self, raving with wounds
.
Self-pitying fool!

Yes, but can’t anyone take pity on a boy who is unknown to himself, and wild with grief?

The rabbi pities you. Yes, you’re a case for the clergy now. But they don’t quite get it, do they. Always bow it around to the useless mystery of God. Then you’re alone all over again.

But someone took pity on Lear. The fool, was it? Ape Tits says—yeah, I call my professor Ape Tits, shoot me—Ape Tits says the fool never exits. Or was that the kid with red hair. Kid with red hair never exits, just sits in Linsly-Chittenden. The kid with red
hair must have said it. Remember? Ape Tits says nothing. He’s a “New Critic.”

You just leave me here? To wander the tombstones? No word of help or regret? No blessing? No compliment? Because I am too raving mad? Fucked in the head, Corey says. You don’t know him. You don’t know about John Lennon or the Berlin Wall or the Gulf War or Star Wars or anything after 1974. You never even got to see Europe. But you knew about cemeteries. And Keats. And the moon like a seal on the sky.

Leo stood in the cold wind. The tip of the cloud-capped sun had impaled itself on a mausoleum.

A mosquito hawk dances on the wall
.

Look, Daddy. I blow the butterfly.

Leo, Leo, Leo. It’s okay, Leo. Daddy’s here. That just scared you. The mosquito hawk scared you. Daddy got rid of it. I shooed it away, Leo. Okay, put your head right there on Daddy. You’re okay.

It will frighten you away!

you little gollywhopper

you prince of the dashing mien, you Apollo and sailor of the seven seas, doctor-man, Harvard-man, pipe-man, beard-man, go-to-sleep-on-your-chest-man, daddy longlegs. You Young Siward

we’re are best friends, we’re are a family

They buried whole families together in the Grove Street Cemetery. Eli Whitney and Noah Webster’s bones were lying somewhere here. But they wouldn’t bury Leo in New Haven, that was for certain. If they did, his putrefying corpse would get up and flee.

Leo jogged along the path back to the front gate of the cemetery. The wind blasted against him as he ran, biting through the hole in the breast of his sweatshirt. There was another mailbox outside the cemetery, this one without a homeless lady on it. He pulled out the letter of withdrawal addressed to the Yale registrar and flung it down the throat of the mailbox, slapped its blue mouth shut with a clank.

He wandered east, toward the Town Green. There were more dead there under the grass. But before crossing Elm Street, and for no reason he knew, he stopped. He had never noticed the building there: Branch Four of the New Haven Free Public Library.

It looked like an old fire station. He climbed the steps and passed through the double doors, whose gray paint was badly peeled. The library’s one room was pitiful compared to the magnificent Yale libraries. Dusty fluorescent tubes, exposed by missing ceiling tiles, cast a tepid light down onto stained yellow window shades and dying plants, wall-to-wall brown carpeting, blue plastic chairs, and round tables with faux bois veneers and steel legs. A sign on the checkout desk said the library was only open until 6:30
P.M.
You couldn’t even study there if you were in school. The place was useless. He sat at the round brown table.

“Closing soon,” the librarian said. She was a high school girl.

Leo understood the place very well. He’d been in a public library before. It was a hushed place full of books available to anyone who wanted them. There were quiet, organized people there called librarians, who guided you toward the explanations, exaltation, escape, or help you sought in books. But this library couldn’t save him, with its shabby little collections, its early closing time, its oblivious teenage librarian doing her homework, making fat redundant loops of blue ballpoint ink on some wide-ruled notebook paper. So this was the decayed land outside Yale, where he now made his way; this was home now, not a home but a wasteland. Leo looked around the children’s section, which comprised half the room. The library was for the children in the New Haven public schools and Leo felt sorry for them. He pressed his ear to the table.

“Leo.” He heard a whispered voice: “Leo.”

It was his father.

“Yes?” Leo said.

But there was no one really there. The Greeks were vanished into whispers in the graveyard—a memory of a man reaching down for a plum, his big body providing shelter from the wind.

Good-bye, Daddy
.

He raised his head up off the table and scanned the shelves as if some book might redeem the place or the moment. He shored himself up: he would swim for his life in the changing fortune and convoluted currents of the ocean, which glittered and destroyed. He pulled out a notebook and wrote on the lined paper in blue ink,
AQUABOY.

And when he had shored himself up, Branch Four of the New Haven Free Public Library offered up its redemption, on the colorful covers of the children’s books. He read their titles to himself. Stars. Bees. Summer. They were arrayed at brave angles, like doors half-open to the worlds their titles named. It was closing time, and the adolescent librarian ushered him out. He stepped outside into the street.

WELL, AS SO
often seemed to happen after about the middle of June, it was now: late June. Say June 22, 1999. And that meant he was on an airplane halfway up the precipice face of giant clouds. He was there to launch his brother on a new life. Also, to see what had healed, if anything, and what more, if anything, could be healed without any near-fatal conversations. To quarry some magic from the banks of the Elwha River or up on the Rocky Mountain slopes, though neither he nor his brother believed in any magic. And finally to return to their point of origin, which was Cleveland, Ohio, where Leo had another wedding to go to, and stand up in. A couple of Jewish brothers from Cleveland on their way back home, to Lake Erie, to that old industrial port where the Indians played, the city that helped to win World War II and then never won anything again. In 1969, on the first wedding anniversary of Leo and Mack’s parents, Isidore and Laura, the Cuyahoga River caught fire and everybody in the whole world laughed like somebody’s mother had stepped in a pie. Right on June 22, that very day. (Probably all Jews were by then somewhat sensitive about fire.) And apart from the Superman story, that’s all you need to know about being a Jew from Cleveland. Mistake by the Lake, my ass. Burn on, you big ruined river soaked in tar, burning with the blood of old war machines. From Cleveland the brothers would carry on, together or apart, to Philadelphia, New York, and the future.

The flight attendant came by with the cart and everybody ate with chilly silverware and arms drawn in like praying mantises in the dull blue nitrogen glow of the sky. Out the window, symphonic five-hundred-story clouds rolled like glaciers on the upper atmosphere. The sun gilded their arpeggios and from the west,
lontano, morendo, misterioso, mesto ma non troppo,
bossed with heavenly light their shadow-forked clefs.

Leo and Mack had not spoken for such a very long time, except for exchanges like this:

Leo: “Save some brisket for the rest of us, man.”

Mack: [silent for eight years]

It was impossible to tell how far away they were, those slow and giant nomad clouds. Nothing up this high to scale them. Very far, probably. A far cloud god presided out there on the mist plateau like a sphinx.

Come, his brother had said.

There were palm trees in West LA along La Cienega, there was stucco on the houses and Spanish tile on the roofs and rarely a second floor. Mack gave Leo the bed and slept at Will and Zhilan’s house. At about 6
A.M.,
there was an earthquake, which knocked over a guitar.

Things were in boxes and, aside from the bed, all the furniture was gone. There was nothing in the refrigerator but a very, very old lemon. Leo got himself water and sat on the kitchen floor in his bare feet. There was a stack of paper on the floor. The papers said at the top

and each of Mack’s students had filled one out and the first one Mack had filled out himself. It said

A student named Eddy Fariss wrote specifics for everything, except for “best science project” he wrote “
all of them.
” Some kids wrote “
I will miss
him
,” as if, for a personage so important as their teacher, the pronoun “him” needed no antecedent, as is sometimes the case with God; “Him”—who else? Another kid wrote that the best math lesson was “
okay
.” A student named Exeline Ward had filled out her page like this:

Henry Vincent didn’t fill out anything. He just drew a picture of himself smiling, holding hands with Mr. Auberon next to a stop sign, which, if you knew anything about Henry Vincent and all his trouble and all his good intentions, was fairly tragic.

They drove to Mailboxes Etc. to mail Mack’s wire hangers. He said he was mailing half and the other half he’d bring with him in the car. Leo said he was crazy to mail wire hangers
or
to bring them in the car, which started everything off all wrong. But it didn’t really matter much.

“See all the traffic?” Mack said. “And the smog? Those are the only ways LA lives up to its name.”

“Yeah?”

“Okay,” Mack said, “here’s the famous intersection of Hollywood and Vine. That’s right. It’s a gas station and a 7-Eleven and…wait, there’s nothing else. It’s basically just Warrensville.”

“Warrensville. Ha.” Warrensville was a borderline neighborhood in Cleveland and it was pronounced with just two syllables and a long “o” as in “worn out”—“Wornsville.”

“What’s funny?” Mack said.

“You.”

“Why? LA is the worst city in the world.”

“You mean Compton.”

“No,” Mack said. “Compton is fucked up, but at least it’s real. LA is the fakest place in the world. I’m not joking.”

“I know,” Leo said. “But you said the same thing about Brown. A lot of people like LA. It’s a whole entire city. A lot of people like Brown.”

“Oh, you mean lesbians? Yes, Brown is good if you’re majoring in penis-machete, yes, that’s true.”

“Ah, yes, penis-machete. I forgot about that major. Hard to get a job with it these days.” Leo sang the words “vagina dentata” to the tune of “Hakuna Matata,” which was an old joke of Mack’s. The words were from an English class in which Mack had been assigned a story about “Amazonclitwoman.”

They both cracked up until they drove past a restaurant and Mack got angry again and said, “Oh, and that dump is supposed to be some famous place.”

Before they went back home to get ready for dinner, Leo said he wanted to see the ocean, so Mack took him to the Santa Monica beach and they got out. It was six o’clock but it looked like the middle of the afternoon and the air itself seemed to be shining with sweat and everyone was shirtless and some black dogs were running with crazy tongues hanging out.

“By the way,” Mack said, “that’s not sand. It’s dirt.”

That night the other Compton teachers from Teach for America threw Mack a going-away dinner at a hibachi place. They gave Mack a Philadelphia Zagat and a city map.

Leo sat next to a Compton high school math teacher and his wife, who taught English.

“He calls himself Max now, right?” Leo said. “Yeah, Max here gave me the Pessimist’s Tour of LA.”

“LA’s not so bad,” the English teacher said, and asked her husband, “don’t you think?”

“It’s a good place to do community service,” he said. “Better than Ghana.”

The teacher husband and wife were from Wisconsin and no older than twenty-five. The wife was better-looking than him, as though they had paired off in some small town that didn’t have any good-looking men in it. She had big healthful blue eyes, so healthful they didn’t look quite made of flesh and blood—they had no red vessels or tears in them, but seemed wholly mineral, white as new snow with irises gemstone blue—and she was blond and peach-pale with big heifer breasts, and looked as though she had never had a cold. She ate every bite of her teriyaki chicken before Leo was half done with his miso soup.

Leo already felt a craving for Wisconsin breast milk when the wife said she didn’t like her haircut.

“Something about layers,” the husband said. “Looks fine to me.”

The somewhat dowdy, cheap haircut and the husband’s comments on it were so domestic, husbandly, and proprietary, Leo thought he ought to sweep her away and go have seven children with her on a dairy farm somewhere north and cold where the haircuts were really bad and everyone had faultless skin.

Mack wanted to remember LA, and his friends remembered things for him. They remembered the smog, seeing no stars, seeing no hill. “Remember the time there was so much smog, you couldn’t see the smog?”

They really seemed to like Mack. But as soon as they’d begun to laugh and remember together, Mack began to bite his lip and grew younger before Leo’s eyes. When people teased or made idle jokes, he got stuck on them as if they implied some criticism or hurt feelings, something he’d done wrong to lose his friends’ affection, and he worried aloud that he’d given some offense and he hurried to explain things that needed no explanation and apologized for things that needed no apology, rather like a salesman who is down to his last customer. And he said crazy things that everyone except him knew to be false—like “
I
certainly expect to be friends with you guys for the rest of my life, assuming you guys do, are you in?”—and he was so earnest in this that Leo began to feel blushy and hot and ticklish in his esophagus.

Leo noticed Robby looking at him from across the hibachi grill. Robby was the oldest one, whom they called Gramps (he was twenty-nine).

“So you’re out here being the good big brother,” Robby said, “helping the little brother move.”

“Yep,” Leo said.

“Max keeps you quite a secret,” Robby said. “I pried out of him that you were in medical school. And you dropped out?”

“Nope. Went all the way through.”

“Oh,” Robby said. “So you’re a doctor.”

Mack bit his lip and nodded as if he’d been caught in a lie, but he wasn’t sorry about this one, Leo guessed, he was only sorry that the lie wasn’t the truth, and that Leo was there to hear it.

There was something odd about Robby and his questions. The brothers and their unsolved mysteries had piqued something in him. And now it was Leo who felt the need to bring something to light, to explain that which needn’t be explained, that which he couldn’t quite explain, anyway, even when he tried.

“Our father was a doctor,” Leo said. It was 9:30
P.M
. now and the jet lag was falling. He felt he could go right to sleep and his left eyelid drooped down over half his eye.

Robby turned to Mack and said, “Your father is a doctor? I thought he was some kind of businessman.”

Then Leo said the man was dead. This brought more unwanted questions, about ages and time and place, and Leo gave the answers.

“So you guys are from the same father, then,” Robby said.

“Same one,” Leo said.

“When you said three years old, I thought you must be from the same mother but different fathers,” he said to Leo. And he turned to Mack and said, “How come you never told me?”

And Mack looked guiltier than before and wouldn’t meet Leo’s eye.

“We’ve had some heart-to-hearts,” Robby said, “but he never mentioned this.”

“It didn’t seem relevant,” Mack said.

After dinner they went back to Robby’s place in West Hollywood—maybe Robby was gay—and Leo tried to stay awake and not be crushed by the depression of Robby’s questions and his matchstick blinds, the same ones Leo had had in his own room in Baltimore, bamboo matchstick blinds hung on nails, which bespoke rootlessness and budget and playing house. They drank warm beer and when they had to go, it seemed that Mack said good-bye to everybody at least twice.

And then Mack and Leo drove home and Leo said, “Just think of the open road out there, Mack. All the cities and places and people out there in the dark. It’s like, have you seen those
Viking
pictures of Mars? Mars is a place, you know? With shadows and rocks and hills and a horizon, an entire planet full of places and they’re all out there, existing, right now. The massive simultaneity of it, you know? And here, this huge country is like that, but it’s full of people and not just red rocks and sand. It’s full of girls, Mack. It’s all just waiting for us to explore it.” Leo was young and single and girls had always seemed to like his face and he’d at long last taken to heart the importance of drink, as well as trained his liver to handle large quantities of it. There was no reason why on the road he shouldn’t fall in love again or have sex again or talk literature with some girl under a bridge, watching the marina lights wink on and off.

“You make it sound good,” Mack said, apparently a little unconvinced, like he knew that Leo was convincing himself.

Mack took him back to the empty, bare apartment and left him there alone.

The day before they departed they went to brunch with Mack’s college roommate, Nathan, who had starred in the Disney flop
Newsies
and was a stand-up comic on the Sunset Strip.

They sat outdoors. All the men wore yellow-tinted sunglasses and all the women were beautiful in a way that ached in the teeth. Nathan said the waitresses had to audition for their jobs. They were even more beautiful than the girls sitting at the tables with their mimosas, and were bare-legged except for boots that came up above their knees. They seemed to be wearing bikini bottoms. Leo felt the foreign attitude of the place, the people, burning on his skin like the sun, like the smog. He was wearing a shrunken gray T-shirt and he needed a haircut. When he’d looked in the mirror that morning, his hair was bulging out on the sides so his head had the shape of a lightbulb.