Know Your Beholder: A Novel (30 page)

Lyman said, “Wow, sounds intense.”

I told him that she’d dedicated the story to me.

“Well, you two were always two peas in a pot.”

“Pod,” I corrected him.

There was another pause, during which I thought I heard an elderly person say,
I’ll trade you my daughter for those car keys
. Or maybe it was,
I’ll take your daughter to the South Keys
.

“What was the crime?” Lyman asked.

I told him that the college student murders the little girl’s parents.

“Jesus crow,” Lyman said. “As in cold-blooded murder? But why on earth?”

“I think to start his life over. You get the sense that his life is meaningless up to that point. That he’s sort of blank.”

“So he gets rewarded with a new life for murdering people?”

“It’s more complex than that,” I offered. “I highly doubt Mom was condoning murder.”

“I knew she liked to spend time down in the shelter,” Lyman said, “but I always thought she was just watching movies and reading those big Russian novels.” He said she mostly went down there after I had gone to bed and that sometimes, with her insomnia, she would be there all night.

“Her prose is really beautiful,” I said. “She wrote with a lean poetry.”

“Look, kiddo, it seems like we’re gettin’ into a serious convo here and I’m in the middle of a card game. Maybe I should call you back.”

I asked him if he wanted to read the story.

“How long is it?”

The question disgusted me. I was stunned that he would ask something so trivial. “She didn’t number the pages,” I said. “It’s a quick read, though. I got through it in one sitting.”

“Is there anyone like me in it?” he asked.

The self-involvement was mind-blowing. “Not really,” I said. “But don’t you want to know what she wrote?”

“Sure I do,” he said, “sure. It’s just that…”

He hesitated—and then, without warning, he was crying. Sniffling like a child, with a sound like little squeaks of air being released from a balloon. I imagined him turned into a corner of the clubhouse, covering his face with his trembling left hand.

Lyman becomes a complete stranger when he cries. I’ve seen it only twice. Once in 1986 when the Chicago Bears won the Super Bowl and the morning after my mother died. He was alone at the kitchen table, actually sitting on the table, as all the chairs had been taken into the living room. It was early, just before dawn, and everyone was asleep, scattered around the house, in sleeping bags on the floor, sharing the sofa, two to a bed, wherever there was one to be had. I’d been in the basement. I’d fallen asleep in a retired La-Z-Boy, in full recline, while looking at an old photo album. I’d come upstairs to use the bathroom. Lyman was in his pajama bottoms, bare-chested, crying his eyes out, driving his fists into his brow. He was at that age when all of his body hair was falling off, and his torso had lost definition, so he looked like a gargantuan toddler whom someone had deserted on the kitchen table. His face becomes completely different when he cries. His eyes disappear and his mouth sort of implodes, as though he’s been forced to swallow some thick, bitter-tasting medicine.

“I’m sorry, Francis,” he said from Florida, his voice clogged and small. “You know how much I love your mother…”

I told him that I did know.

“I guess there was this part of her that I never really knew,” he said. “Go figure.”

He apologized for losing it on the phone.

“It’s okay, Dad,” I said, and I told him how I’d recently learned that I cry in my sleep. “I don’t even know I’m doing it,” I added.

“Well at least you don’t embarrass yourself in public like the giant asshead you’re on the phone with.” Lyman cleared his throat and said Sissy was waving at him to come rescue her from Harley Dukes and his child bride. “She’s making the international choking sign,” he said, laughing now. “It looks pretty serious over there.”

Before we hung up I told him that I’d make a copy of the story and put it in the mail.

It’s late.

I haven’t slept. I’m convinced that from reading my mother’s story I’ve somehow inherited her insomnia. Are sleeping disorders, like cancer, inherited, waiting for us as we slowly lean into our midlife? Waiting like a hawk hovering over prey, its shadow expanding as it draws near?

I’ve taken a Percocet but it’s only relaxed me a bit. It tricks my heart and mind into a syrupy warmth, which makes me want to lie down on my back and float, but every time I close my eyes something jumps in my blood.

It’s some untold predawn hour. I don’t even want to look at my clock. Everyone, everything, is asleep but me. I can’t even hear the neighborhood owl that’s been hooting lately.

I’ve been tempted to go down to the shelter, to see if that would bring any relief, as it had for my mother, but something about the place feels haunted now. I’m afraid some new secret will reveal itself. Another manuscript in another stationery box.

Another story from Beyond.

Earlier tonight Baylor Phebe’s daughter, Emily, buzzed the attic. It was her father’s opening night and when they arrived back at the house Baylor was drunk.

“I need your help,” Emily said into the intercom. “My dad’s had a lot to drink.”

When I met them downstairs, Baylor was yawing up and down the front porch, pushing off the screen panels, barking lines from the play, completely and classically shitfaced. He was wearing a charcoal-gray suit with a matching fedora and brown wing tips. His tie had been flipped over his shoulder and a big gravy stain spread across his dress shirt. He was so off balance I was convinced that if he didn’t fall on his face and go crashing through the front porch floorboards, he would tear an ACL or break an ankle. He knocked over one of the Rubbermaid ashtrays. Emily followed in his wake, righting the ashtray, trying to guide him like some human dirigible that was losing gas.

“Spite, spite, is the word of your undoing!” Baylor cried to some phantom audience that seemed to be closing in on him with knives. “And when you’re down and out,” he bellowed, whirling on them, “remember what did it. When you’re rotting somewhere beside the railroad tracks, remember, and don’t you dare blame it on me!”

His eyes were wild, his head thrust moonward. He hissed sibilantly between sentences. The Kindest Man on Earth was suddenly a pathetically drunk and embittered runaway house beast.

“Daddy, come on now,” Emily implored, coaxing him with her hand on his back.

He seemed to focus for a moment, grew very still, closing and then opening his inflamed eyes. He teetered, shuffled his feet, finding purchase. Finally he relented and she took him by the arm and guided him down to the wicker love seat, which I thought would surely cave in, but it didn’t. She managed to get him to lean back on it. His enormous stomach rose and fell like some continent struggling to rise out of the sea. His breaths were long and deep and troubled. Emily undid the top button of his dress shirt and loosened his tie.

He passed out in about twelve seconds, his mouth wide open.

Emily explained that after the curtain call he wouldn’t take his costume off. “He’s still wearing it,” she continued. “He hasn’t come out of character the whole night.” At first everyone was getting a kick out of it, she said, and he was the life of the cast party, but things started to turn dark and weird. “He kept quoting the play and telling the actor who played Biff that he’d better start thinking about his future in a real way and that he should give the pen he’d stolen back to Bill Oliver.”

I asked if Baylor was maybe joking.

“He was dead serious,” she said. “You could see it in his eyes. It was like he crossed over to the other side.”

Apparently the director had to ask Emily to take Baylor home. She was worried that he wouldn’t be well enough for the next evening’s show.

I asked Emily how the actual performance had gone.

“He was magnificent,” she said, stunned. “I had no idea he had this amazing talent. When he came out for the curtain call the entire audience leapt to their feet. I think it might have been one of the greatest nights of his life.” Emily had the dazed, resolved air of someone who’d been forced to wrangle a tireless four-year-old all night.

I told her that I was glad to hear he’d turned in such a great opening night performance.

“You hear the spite!” Baylor suddenly growled, briefly coming to but quickly fading, his mouth again hanging wide open.

Emily said she’d never seen him like this.

I asked if we should maybe try to get him downstairs.

She suggested that we leave him be and let him sleep it off a bit.

I could smell the alcohol roiling out of his lungs. I asked Emily what her father had been drinking and she mentioned vodka. She said it was probably the first time he’d been drunk in years.

Her cell phone rang. She took the call on the other side of the porch, speaking softly.

In his sleep, Baylor said, “What—what’s the secret?”

It was a line from the audition scene I’d read with him. I patted him on the shoulder and peered into his enormous hippopotamus mouth, which was plagued by what seemed to be hundreds of years of dental history. He had gold and silver fillings, bridgework, liver-colored receding gums, a blue incisor, yellow ancient molars, and an esophageal opening so large it looked like it might lead to some strange land of salivary Lilliputians.

When Emily returned she said she’d been on the phone with the assistant stage manager. “He’s worried about the costume getting ruined. Wants to make sure it gets hung up and steamed in the shower.”

I asked her if I could get her anything.

To my surprise she said, “You don’t happen to have any pot, do you?”

I told her that I did but suggested we not smoke it on the porch.

“How about my car?” she said.

“Sure,” I said.

Her car, a little Ford Focus, was maybe twenty feet away, parked in front of the house, but it might as well have been in the middle of the Sudan. By deploying some quick mental jujitsu, I convinced myself that it was actually
part
of the house, or at least a kind of friendly satellite. If I started to panic I could just open the door and run back to the front porch.

Emily went down to her dad’s apartment and returned with a wool blanket. While she was arranging it over Baylor’s titanic torso, I went up to the attic to roll a joint, after which I also reapplied my deodorant, brushed my teeth, and ran a comb through my beard. When I came back downstairs, I could see that Emily was waiting for me in her car, the silhouette of her profile poised in the driver’s side window, her hands perched on the wheel as if she was about to pull away.

The walk to the car was interminable. I kept reaching out for an invisible handrail. My legs felt heavy and slow. My chest was seized with that awful thickening again.

When I arrived at the passenger’s side, Emily leaned over and opened the door for me. I slid in, and out of some childhood habit, I put the seat belt on. It was the first time I’d been in a car in months. The smell was still that new-car smell, at once citrusy and sterile. It’s the smell of loneliness.

“We going for a drive?” Emily said.

I undid the seat belt, embarrassed.

“You okay?” she asked. In the moonlight her eyes were big and round and cavernous. I noticed that she’d applied lipstick. “You look a little pale,” she said.

My hands were shaking, and there was no hiding this fact. “I’m good,” I said, producing the joint and a Bic lighter. Despite my trembling hands, I managed to light the joint, inhale, and pass it to her.

“This is so completely illegal,” she said, and took a toke.

“Welcome to the dark side,” I joked.

When she inhaled she squinted, like she was afraid of burning her eyelashes, then passed the joint back to me.

My head had started to race a bit and I closed my eyes and tried to imagine that I was back inside, up in the attic, on my corduroy chair, within arm’s reach of my record collection, underneath the soft glow of my reading lamp.

“You sure you’re okay?” Emily asked.

I opened my eyes and told her that in all honesty I was a little freaked out.

She asked if she’d done something wrong.

“No, I sort of have this problem,” I said, and offered her a cursory definition of agoraphobia, citing the fear of crowds, public places, open areas. I told her how I’d ventured out only three times the whole winter; how the first time, in the back lot by the Dumpsters, I’d thought my heart was going to explode; how the second time, that dreamlike visit to the Radio Trees, had been much more pleasant; and how the most recent attempt had been a disaster. She asked me how long I’d had my “condition.”

I told her that I wasn’t exactly sure, that I stopped going outside sometime before Christmas.

“Did something happen?” she asked.

“Nothing out of the ordinary.”

She said that being a landlord was probably the perfect profession for me. “You never have to leave for work,” she said.

“It’s done wonders for my weekly commute budget,” I agreed.

She laughed and smoked. Then, like her father, she asked me if I was seeing anyone about it.

“The idea of having to go to some shrink’s office just about does my head in,” I said.

“Well, maybe you’re improving on your own. At least you don’t appear to be having a heart attack this time.”

“It could hit me at any moment,” I said. “I hope you know CPR.”

She said she was certified, that it was a job requirement at the prep school where she taught.

“Do they drug test you?” I asked.

“I think they know they’d lose half the faculty if they did that.”

Headlights emerged at the end of the block, ominously pointed at her car. As the lights moved toward us, we sank low in our seats.

Emily covered her face with her hand as the car slowly passed. “Is it a cop?” she whispered.

I mouthed the words
I don’t know
.

After the car was gone she burst into laughter. She said she felt like she was fourteen.

We didn’t rise back up in our seats. Framed in the windshield was our old sycamore, its naked branches silhouetted by starlight. It looked like a giant hag’s hand.