The Opposite of Music (12 page)

Dad refused to take his vitamins and supplements because he thought they might be unsafe. Mom was upset that he didn't trust her, and she is still getting over the fish oil incident. She bought some nutrient milkshakes in small cans, and Dad agreed to drink one.

Mom is at the supermarket. I tell Linda that the lemon candles are driving me berserk and that if she does not remove them I will tear a hole in her plush Garfield and stuff the candles inside. We're in her room, and I'm holding the Garfield and a pair of scissors. She leaps. We scuffle (quietly). We stop scuffling as Dad shuffles by.

Linda looks in a book Mom bought and calls Jodie, who comes over with two new lavender candles from the drugstore, each the size of a coffee can. Linda explains to Jodie the healing properties of the new candle scent.

I tell her the new candles are perfumey, cloying, and sickly sweet and I am sure Dad would feel the same, but she says too bad. She threatened two days ago to tell Mom about my leaving the house but has not done so yet. Jodie says I am a bad brother. It's obvious from Mom's expression when she gets home that she's noticed the new candles, but she doesn't say anything.

Yesterday Dad ate nothing but two nutrient shakes and his pomegranate seeds. He slept well for a couple of hours, though.

Then tonight, Dad got a craving for vanilla ice cream, possibly stimulated by his recent experience with fake milkshakes.

“You really want ice cream?” Mom said. “I guess it's all right, but I want you to have fruit and nuts with it.” She looked happy.

Linda and Jodie walked down to the nearby ice-cream place and brought back a quart of vanilla and some bananas and walnuts. Dad ate one and a half bowls, and Jodie commented that we looked just like a normal family. Dad actually smiled at Jodie. Mom smiled a lot then and danced Dad around the living room during calisthenics. Then Linda installed a third lavender candle in the bathroom, and no amount of towel-rubbing can get the stench off my body.

Why did Dad sleep for two hours last night? No one knows.

Why did he smile and eat ice cream? No one knows.

Do you hear that sound? It's the treatment team whistling in the dark.

Linda and Jodie have taken up calligraphy and are leaving ink everywhere. They are trying to get Dad to join them, even though occupational therapy is my treatment area.

“Linda,” I tell her right in front of her friend, “Jodie has a home. It would be okay to leave her there sometimes.”

The three of us were supposed to be the treatment team, Mom said. We were going to take care of Dad as a family. So why
is
she always here? Jodie seems to have no existence outside of being my sister's friend. It's like Linda is a slide projector and Jodie is a slide. If Linda were to die suddenly, Jodie would die at the same instant, of the same illness. Even if they were on opposite sides of the world.

Yesterday Dad had one nutrient shake and a dish of ice cream, and M. told him no more ice cream until he ate some of his brain foods, but then she let him have another bowl because he looked so skinny.

Then he had another bad night, so we took turns staying up with him. Linda did a couple of hours, and I'm sure Jodie would have too if she'd been allowed to stay. Mom kept asking him questions. Wasn't he feeling good the day before? What went wrong? Of course he can't answer this. What's he going to say?

Dad has had another bad night and day. At suppertime, Mom starts fixing the cooked salad and navy beans while Dad paces the other end of the house.

“Is Jodie gone? Is Linda ready for dinner?” she asks.

“I don't know.” Reading some additional library info in the living room, I rattle the photocopies loudly so she'll know she's interrupted me.

“Well, could you call her?”

“I'll call her in a few minutes. I just want to finish this article.”

“Oh, you're no help,” she says over the room divider.

I put my article down and go into the kitchen. “I'm no help?” I repeat.

“Go on. Go back to what you were doing. I'll call her myself.” She waves a pot holder dismissively.

“Linda!” I shout without leaving the kitchen. “Supper!”

“Billy.”

I put my hands in my pockets and raise my shoulders. “You just said I was no help. What exactly did you mean by that?”

“I didn't mean anything. I'm tired, okay?”

“No help with Dad? I'm no help with Dad?”

“Just forget it.” Mom turns down the heat under the bean pot, then removes the jar of brewer's yeast from the cabinet and checks the label.

“What other help do you have? I'm it. I'm the help.”

“I'm going to have to try something else,” she says in a low voice. “I'll look in my books again after supper. I don't understand why he has good days and bad days, but overall—so far, anyway—he's not getting any better.”

Linda comes into the kitchen and opens the silverware drawer to start setting the table. “Have you thought about starting Dad on yoga, Mom? Jodie's mother says it's very centering.”

“That sounds worthwhile, Linda. Can you find out a little more about it?”

“Of course he's not any better!” I snap. “He's not getting better because we keep changing the treatments!”

My voice fills our small house. Dad comes in from his bedroom.

“Son…,” he begins, laying his hand on my arm.

“We can't start him on yoga now! There are already too many variables! How are we going to know what's working?”

“Too many variables?” Mom repeats.

“Variables! They're the things that change! Constants are the things that stay the same! You keep the constants the same and then you test the variables! You don't start five or six treatments at once and have them all overlapping! You use the scientific method! You only test one variable at a time! You pick one and you test it!”

“You don't have to explain the scientific method. I know what variables are. You don't have to explain anything to me.” Mom clutches the yeast jar with both hands, like a little kid. “I thought we decided it would be best to try everything we could.”

“Please don't argue,” Dad says, looking at his hands, flexing them.

“Well, obviously it's not best! We're not accomplishing anything! We have to start over, and this time use the scientific method! Just start all over, from scratch, and try the treatments one at a time.”

Linda dumps the utensils in a tangle on the table. “Can't you keep your voice down, Billy? Look how upset Dad is getting.”

“But we will have lost all these weeks,” Mom says.

“You can't look at it that way. If you really cared about Dad you would take what I'm saying seriously.”

“Take it seriously!” Mom snaps. “I'm not taking this seriously?”

“Things were getting better, Billy,” Linda says. “They were. We just have to figure out why. We just have to figure out what to do next. Why don't you lighten up on Mom—she's really stressed.”

Dad goes to the stove and puts one arm around Mom.

“Son,” he orders faintly, “apologize to your mother.” He's trying to be the old peacemaker Dad, but it comes off like an echo of an echo. A photocopy of a photocopy.

“But I'm right, Dad,” I plead. “You know I'm right.”

Mom's face looks soft and somehow dented.

“Apologize to your mother, Billy.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You don't sound very sorry.”

“Say it like you mean it,” Mom says.

“No.”

“I'm sorry to you, Dad.” I touch his arm briefly, the red hairs there that I also have. “I'm just not that sorry to Mom.”

“I can't take this,” says Dad. He leaves the kitchen to pace and rub his arms.

I go to my room and throw on my coat and shoes. I wheel Triumph across the living-room carpet. I leave a nice thick line of soil and sand.

“Can I come in?”

“Sure.
Mi casa
…Wow. You don't look good,” Gordy says.

He doesn't look good either. He's wearing sweats and white socks, and his face seems puffy and strange. Through the doorway comes the music of a brass band, turned up to a high volume.

“I'm sorry. Is this a bad time to stop by?”

“No, it's okay. I'd just as soon not sit around by myself.” He steps aside and turns down the stereo until it is merely loud. I drop onto the couch with my coat on. Inside my chest, something thin and gray and hollow as a used light-bulb is finally breaking.

“I hate to repeat myself, but you really don't look good,” Gordy repeats. “When was the last time you got any sleep?”

“He's not getting any better.”

“He's not? But you thought he was, didn't you?”

“Well, he's not.” I press both sets of fingertips into my closed eyes.

“You don't look right. Do you need something to eat?”

“No. In fact, I might prefer to throw up.”

Gordy goes into the kitchen and comes back with a bottle of blue Gatorade and two of the largest-size beef jerky sticks.

“Here.” He opens my left hand and slaps a sausage stick into it. “Bathroom's down there.” He points along a hall.

I let the hand drop into my lap. Gordy peels the wrapper halfway and slaps it into my palm again. “Take at least a few bites. When you're done eating, you can stretch out and take a nap on the couch.”

“Where's your dad?”

“He's working. He usually is. Don't worry, you're not disturbing anything.”

“I can't sleep now,” I tell him. “I shouldn't even stay.”

“Do your parents know where you are? Do you want me to call them?”

“No, don't do that. Let them wonder. Let them wonder where I am.” I picture Mom, that tiny faraway holographic Mom, getting along without me. We could abandon one another.

“I'll tell them you're staying here for a few hours.”

“No, I won't stay.” I tear off a bit of the leathery jerky. “I just needed to get out for a while.”

Gordy opens a bottle of blue Gatorade for himself. “So your dad isn't any better?”

“No.”

“Is he worse?”

“He might be.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“I don't know what the next step should be. If I knew, I would do it myself.”

Once I've finished both jerky sticks and drunk some of the Gatorade, Gordy brings me a pillow and a New England Patriots blanket. I push my sneakers off toe to heel. The room is painted dark green, with a grandfather clock and glass-front cases filled with old books. On the stereo, a solitary drum taps like a heartbeat. After a signal from the cornet, the band begins “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” But the sound is slow, screeching, and loopy, not like church music, from any church I've been to at least. It sounds drunk and dizzy, like the soundtrack of an ancient cartoon. The musicians veer off in different directions with no unison in pitch or timing. Like some grief has set them loose and cursed them to wander.

When I close my eyes, pictures are there, of a brass band in black suits, a hole in the ground with my mother and Linda standing beside it. Where am I? I'm playing in the band. But I won't cry. I won't cry yet.

When I open my eyes again, the sad music is over. I sit up and push the blankets aside. The band is playing “Oh, Lady, Be Good,” swingy and brash with curlicues of improvisation. Gordy is waiting in the doorway, having changed into khakis and a sweater.

“How long did I sleep?” I ask him.

“About an hour. Let's go do something.”

“I should get home.”

“Have you done anything remotely fun since Boston?”

“Fun?
No comprende
‘fun.'” I dig under the blanket for my coat. “I need to get home. Thanks for the break.”

“Let's go to the arcade for an hour.” He hands me the cell phone. “You can call your parents and tell them where you're going.”

“Nope. Thanks.”

“Too bad—I'm kidnapping you,” Gordy says, getting his parka from the hall closet. “Call the cops if you want to. We're going.”

We walk half a mile along the shoreline. The low tide smells like the fish oil Mom tried to give Dad. The sky hangs cold and black, fingered with gray where clouds have been.

The arcade is a creaky wooden building that once had a carousel, nickelodeons, and other little-kid amusements. My parents had brought me here to play Skee-Ball, watch cartoons in a machine for a nickel, or pay a puppet fortune-teller a dime to wave her arms over a crystal ball and spit out my fortune. After a while someone caught on that the whole operation was too cheap. They sold the old amusements and put in carpeting and overhead TVs and much newer games that cost fifty cents or a dollar. I begged and begged my parents to take me to the place they now called A Big Waste of Money.

Gordy slides ten dollars into a change machine. He dips his hand twice into the mouthful of quarters and hands me some. The air is thick with electronic shooting sounds—
voot, voot
—and the voices of synthetic race announcers. Bells mark a hundred microsuccesses, important in the moment but quickly forgotten.

Gordy stacks quarters on the counter to reserve a turn on the Dethbord, a skateboard simulator that has a safety bar on four sides and orange warnings all over it. We watch the current player, a boy younger than us, nearly fall over as the board approaches, at high speed, a pit of flames. He seems surprised when the skateboard on the video screen starts to fall away from his feet, first skidding forward without him, then twirling downward like something running down a drain, getting smaller and smaller. He collapses against the handrail. Heartbreaking.

“Hunker down!” Gordy shouts to him. “Reach for the board!”

I drop two quarters into a game that involves tossing small plush animals—possibly prizes left over from the old arcade—into the gullet of an animatronic figure that looks sort of like a man but is covered with hair and has scary green eyes. The monster breaks through a gate toward me, bellowing, as soon as my second quarter lands in the coin-box. I toss a buck-toothed beaver in a construction hat, then a brown teddy bear with a patchwork heart, and then a yellow kitten in a square-dancing dress. The animation is so lifelike that you can see muscles moving under the monster's skin, and each time a cute little animal goes down the monster's throat, the bellows are interspersed with a high-pitched scream like a baby falling out a window, and the panicky shouts of helpless townspeople.

By the third round of the game I feel jumpy and robotic. The hundred points per cute stuffed animal makes me feel guilty, but I don't want the monster to bellow all the way down his platform to me. So I lob and lob, reacting only to the advancing monster and the beeps of the electronic scoreboard, blocking out the pathetic cries of the little prizes: 6100, 6200—
Eeee! Eeee!
Then I hear Gordy hollering. I wonder, is he in trouble too? I lob a pink snail with a rainbow-striped shell and big sunglasses, then glance over my shoulder until I see him, attracting a crowd around his stint on the skateboard. Turning back to my game, I see Mitchell at the pinball machines, with Andy.

Mitchell has been lobbying to come over, or to have me to his house, for the past two and a half months. “I don't know what you did to get grounded on this scale,” he said a few days ago, “but I hope it was fun.” That was his parting shot, I guess, since he has stopped asking.

Now Andy notices me, but Mitchell hasn't. I reach into the bin of small plush animals while watching Mitchell over my shoulder, and the bin feels empty. I see that the monster is only two feet away; if I don't weave or duck he could graze me with the horrible black nails on his subhuman, flailing hands. Having missed the last few throws, I've been punished with an empty bin. My score disappears and an electronic display flashes:
WHAT WILL YOU DO NOW?

I leave my game to go and yank on Gordy's jacket. He has begun another round on the skateboard, several feet above a cheering crowd of girls, kiddies, and moms.

“We have to go!” I tell him. “It's late!”

Gordy turns his head for a second. “Not now! I'm in the Seventh Circle!”

Across the room, Andy is telling Mitchell something and pointing toward the plush-animal game. Mitchell starts looking around.

“I'm going now, with or without you.”

Gordy hops down. He picks one little kid from the crowd.

“You, little fella. You can finish this game,” he tells the boy.

“You mean it?”

“I'm going!” I tell Gordy. I break into a run.

We're almost out of the arcade, but Gordy looks back at the last moment. “Hey. Did you see who's here?”

“Wait a minute, you guys,” Andy calls out.

They catch up to us between the customer service stand and the lost children booth.

“Oh, hey, Gordy, Morrison,” Mitchell says. “Morrison, I thought you weren't allowed out except to go to school. I thought you were grounded or something.”

“Hi, Mitchell. How was your score?”

“The hell with that, okay? You said you weren't allowed out. I've known you since birth, practically. You could just tell me if you didn't feel like getting together.”

“I'm having some problems, okay? Some personal problems. I can't really talk about it right now.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I made him come with me,” Gordy says. “I kidnapped him. Really.”

“Why can't you leave the house?”

“All I can tell you is, any time I'm not at home, I feel sort of sick and lousy.”

“That doesn't sound good,” Andy says. “Are you getting that disease where people are afraid to leave their houses? I think it's called acrophobia.”

“Agoraphobia,” Mitchell corrects him, keeping his eyes on me. “Well, don't expect me to ask you to do anything again. Don't hold your breath about hearing from me, period.”

“It's my fault,” Gordy says as we walk past the beach again. “I shouldn't have pushed you into it. I thought you might feel better if you had a change of location. When my mom was sick, I always got an energy boost if I went out once in a while.”

Back at Gordy's, I retrieve Triumph from a stone archway leading to the front steps. It's one of the few times I've left the bike without the Kryptonite lock, and I have to make sure I don't do this again. Starting out, my headlamp is weak too—the battery could get permanently drained. I can't let this happen again, that I stop thinking and just let things go. If I can't manage myself, how can I help anyone else?

Must get home, must get home,
I chant. I burst into a sprint at the bottom of our hill. The sound of my wheels brings Mom and Dad to the picture window. They're already in their bathrobes. Their silhouettes are dark against the bright glass, like two lighthouses in negative, and I open the door.