Know Your Beholder: A Novel (22 page)

Then he fed me my own mucus. Definitely one of the strangest moments of my life. My right hand was aflame with pain. My nostrils felt permanently stretched.

Glose pulled his fingers out of my mouth. “Good punch,” he said, and spit blood. Some of it sprayed onto my bathrobe.

We faced each other on the bearskin in a stare-down, the gamy, adipose smell of his fingers thick in my nose.

I was hoping to have at least knocked a tooth out, or broken his nose, but I had mostly just hurt my hand. With great pain, I opened and closed it. “Your face is like a massive mineral,” I said.

“I actually ate three tins of sardines,” Glose said. “And two microwave raviolis.”

We were breathing in an animalistic fashion, through mouths and nostrils. His breath was warm and fecal. “Have you even once reached out to Kent?” I asked.

Glose shook his head.

“You know you just about did his head in.”

He replied that Kent had fallen in love with the wrong homophobe.

“Do you ever wonder about Morris?”

“Not really,” he answered. “Morris was always in his own world. Good dude. Great musician. A little too
Lord of the Rings
for me.”

“What about me?” I said. “Did you ever think about me?”

“In the same way you think about a cafeteria plate,” he said. “Or like an envelope.” He wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “I think we needed a chick in the band. She coulda played keys. Sang all the high parts. A chick is good for balance—pH balance.”

“
Potential Hydrogen
,” I said. “Good album name.”

Using thumb and forefinger, Glose grabbed one of his two front teeth and made a wiggling motion.

I asked if it was loose.

“Just a little,” he replied. “Don’t worry, it’s not going anywhere thspethial,” he added, exaggerating a lisp.

I asked him to tell me what had happened to him out on the road, after New York.

He stopped wiggling his tooth and said, “I found my father.”

“Oh,” I said. “Shit.”

“His name is Dale,” he started in. It turned out he lived above a small-engine repair shop. His apartment was like a maintenance man’s closet.
TV Guide
s and horse-racing forms everywhere. A bare fifty-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling. Glose had shown up right before Christmas and there was a bluegrass-blue University of Kentucky Christmas tree in the corner with blinking lights that pulsed “Wildcats Are Number One.” His father was watching the Home Shopping Network. He looked like a man who’d survived something horrible, Glose said. Like he’d been struck by lightning or attacked by killer bees and never really gotten over it. Glose didn’t recognize himself in the man at all. He spent all day with him in his little room with the flashing blue Christmas tree, but his father didn’t know who he was. He told him his name and that he was his son, but the guy just kept watching TV.

I started to feel really uncomfortable speaking at such close proximity to a naked man with three testicles and a bloody mouth. I told him that I was sorry and I called him Rodney and said that meeting his father like that had probably been terribly painful.

Glose simply nodded and we said nothing else to each other for the rest of the night. I lay down on my bed and he sat on the bearskin, my thermals still bunched beside him. At some point he gathered the bearskin around his shoulders, sort of enfolding himself in it, and fell asleep sitting up.

The following morning Glose wasn’t simply enfolded in the bearskin—he was actually wearing it. He’d fitted the hollow of the snout over his head like a hat, the rest of the skin unfurling across his shoulders and down his back. He looked prehistoric and stunned.

I had to go downstairs to meet the meter man, a nice older-middle-aged guy named Randy who’s been wearing the same St. Louis Cardinals cap for as long as I can remember.

It was snowing again. It was March 6, and, yes, snow was falling. A light, unthreatening snow, but snow nonetheless. I hadn’t slept all night and couldn’t put two sentences together. After Randy finished his meter reading at the side of the house, he returned to the front porch and told me to have a nice day and I told him to have a nice car.

“A nice what?” he said, clearly confused.

“Day,” I said. “Have a nice day.”

When I came back from speaking with the meter man, Glose was sitting Indian-style, staring out at nothing in particular, the snout of the bearskin still crowning his head.

I told him he had to leave and he looked off toward nothing in particular some more and nodded.

“I’m sorry, Rodney, but this isn’t working.”

He nodded again.

“I mean, if we were playing music or something…”

He nodded a third time.

I told him I was sorry about his dad and that whole situation but that things were just too cramped in the attic. I wrote him a check for a thousand dollars, and as I was writing it, Glose requested that I make it out to cash and I said I would. It occurred to me I was essentially paying someone to stay out of my life.

“Can I keep the bearskin?” Glose asked, a little sadly.

“Sure,” I answered, “it’s yours.” I had spent all that money flattening and steam-cleaning it, and I knew I would miss it, but it was his after all. By now it no doubt smelled like him anyway.

After I handed him the check he continued to just sit there. I offered my cell phone.

“Maybe call your mother,” I said.

He nodded and accepted the phone.

I told him to leave my cell phone on the table when he was done with it.

He nodded again.

I was too bitter and sleep-deprived to say good-bye, so I simply walked out. Before I shut the door, I said, “Please don’t take Kent’s bass.”

“I won’t,” he promised.

I went down to the laundry room intending to transcribe more of these pages but wound up sitting on the floor beside the Corona. I cried a little. Before I did so my body convulsed like I was going to vomit. It was more a series of whimpers than an arrangement of actual consistent-sounding crying. Whatever slim chance there had been of getting the band back together was totally fucked now. And no matter what I had told myself, no matter how truly awful things had been at the end, I knew I was always secretly hoping for a reunion.

The truth is that we weren’t complete without Glose. Without his drums, his voice, his Kaoss Pad skills, and his lunatic senselessness, we were just another highbrow art band, a little full of shit and full of ourselves, pretentious even. Glose brought chaos and weirdness and, dare I say, a spirit of joy to the music. It was hard to admit, but he might have been the most important piece of the puzzle and now that was all over.

The Third Policeman was truly over.

Someone had dropped onto the laundry room floor a piece of Snuggle fabric softener, which I used to dab at my eyes and upper cheeks. I think it was the first time I had actually released tears into the full volume of my beard, which absorbed whatever wetness I didn’t catch with the fabric softener. My face smelled like bluebells and buttercups and black-eyed Susans.

I grabbed my typewriter, along with the box containing this manuscript, and headed back upstairs, vowing to never again allow myself to be displaced from my writing sanctuary, where I now sit once more.

When I got back to the attic, Glose and the bearskin were gone. He’d left my cell phone on the table and he hadn’t taken Kent’s bass.

Three days later, on March 9, the teddy bear arrived in a small cardboard box. Inside, Mansard had left a note, which simply said:

Its other eye was now missing. I imagined Mansard’s hounds playing tug of war with it, trying to eat its face. Bethany Bunch’s bear was blind. I did put it in a shoe box lined with tissue—well, quilted toilet paper actually, but it gave the same effect. I was placing the shoe box beside my bookcase when there was a knock on my door.

A wide-eyed, smiling Baylor Phebe greeted me when I opened the door. He was wearing a big orange T-shirt that said
I’M THE GUY IN THE BIG ORANGE T-SHIRT
.

“I got the part!” Baylor boomed. “I got Willy Loman!”

I congratulated him vigorously and we high-fived. It was maybe the third time in my life I had executed a sincere high five. Our right hands met squarely and made a fleshy thunderclap.

“And you helped me,” he said. “I owe you.”

I told him he owed me nothing but the monthly rent, and he said, “But I do, though. Rehearsals start next Monday, week from today, and then I’ll be busy. Come ice fishing with me this weekend.”

I told him that I’d love to but couldn’t.

“Oh,” he said. “Why not?”

“Because I’m agoraphobic,” I replied. It was the first time I’d admitted this to anyone. It flew out of my mouth like some harmless biographical fact, as if I had said that I was a registered Democrat or a lover of Vermont cheddar cheese. I explained to Baylor that I hadn’t been able to leave the house in over two months.

“Well, that’s awful, Francis. Have you tried talking to anyone about this?”

I told him he was the first person. I told him that I had more problems than I cared to admit. “Not unlike Biff Loman,” I added.

He said he was sorry to hear this and wanted to know if there was anything he could do.

I told him that I hoped to eventually get over the condition, and related some inane bromides about time and wounds healing and letting scabs be scabs.

“Scabs are scabs for a reason,” Baylor offered, gentle as a priest.

I asked him not to tell anyone.

He promised he wouldn’t, and then his face got stuck, meaning his upper lip got trapped on his upper gums so that his big blond horsey teeth looked skeletal and terrifyingly alien, but then his upper lip flipped back into place and he resumed being overjoyed. “You should see the woman playing Linda,” he said, thrilled as a Cub Scout on his first canoe trip. “What gorgeous arms on that one. I think her name is Roberta. She’s from Centralia.”

I congratulated him again and we actually hugged, which was sort of hard to pull off physics-wise because of his enormous stomach. I had to stick my ass out and shift my weight onto the balls of my feet, which put a lot of stress on my lower back. For the briefest moment I thought how ironic it would be if a hug were to cause me to slip a disc in reality, to precipitate a nonfictitious back injury. What a funny story this would be for later in life, gathered around a hibachi, turning hot dogs with a barbecue fork while friends and family—whoever they might be—allowed me to regale them with the funny anecdotes of my pre-midlife life as a housebound landlord whose only friends were his tenants.

That Friday, March 13, Baylor left a note on my door:

Saturday afternoon, following instant oatmeal and equally instant instant Folgers, I went down to Baylor Phebe’s apartment.

He greeted me with his big yellow smile.

To my surprise, he owned taxidermy. Mounted on one wall was a bear’s head, the fangs yellow. In the corner facing the door, a full coyote, stoic, with colorless glowing eyes, the pupils sickle-thin, rearing back on its hind legs, its front paws perched on a woodland stump. And the bust of some sort of big-game cat mounted over the entrance to the bathroom, with craven, amber eyes.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the cat.

He said he’d found it at a flea market in Mississippi, while on a fishing trip at the Tunica Cutoff.

“It’s a cougar,” he added. “Eighty-five years old.”

There were also a pair of deer-hoof lamps on either side of his plaid love seat, a largemouth bass that looked like it might break into song mounted over the kitchen nook, and a little red fox on a shelf containing bowling trophies and framed fishing lures. Arranged on the wall opposite the love seat was a huge flat-screen high-def TV.

Baylor was holding a remote. He pressed a button. “Check this out, Kemo Sabe.”

The TV pulsed to life in vibrant high-def Technicolor. On the screen, an ice-fishing video game.

Baylor handed me a controller. “Let’s fish!” he said.

We Wii ice-fished for three hours.

Baylor was having the time of his life and I have to admit it was pretty fun. Not normally a fan of video games, I gave myself over to it and things got pretty competitive. Baylor wound up out-ice-fishing me four to three in a best-of-seven series. After ice fishing we ordered pizza and bread sticks with marinara dipping sauce, which Baylor insisted on paying for.

While eating the pizza I noticed an eight-by-ten photo of a woman, framed in gunmetal, set beside the bowling trophies. The woman was very pretty, with a high forehead and prominent cheekbones. “Is that your wife?” I asked.

“That’s Ellen, yeah.”

“Pretty,” I said.

“She was a beauty,” he agreed. “Hard to believe she’s been gone three years,” he went on. “She died on June fifteenth.”

I told him about my mother.

“Was she ill?” he asked.

I told him about her cancer, her long battle with it.

“That’s a real shame,” Baylor said. “Ellen had a thrombotic stroke. Blockage in her carotid artery. Didn’t even know it was there. A freak occurrence. She passed out while she was taking dishes out of the dishwasher. Fell to the floor like a coat off a coatrack. I rushed her to the emergency room. Her face turned this deep, strange blue in the truck. Three hours later she was dead. Nothing they could do. She was only fifty-four.”

We ate pizza. Baylor made terrific masticating noises. There was something unconsciously savage about how he devoured each slice. This man was made to ingest large amounts of animal fat and survive in the Arctic.

After a silence, Baylor asked me about Lyman. “Is your dad still alive?” he said.

I said that he was and he asked me what he did for a living and I told him that he’d had his own accounting firm but that now he’s retired and living down in Florida. “After he remarried he gave me the house,” I added.