Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See (30 page)

Still, we’re adults. We want to fuck. But the logistics of psych-ward fucking are tricky, to say the least. For one thing, it is difficult to find a loophole in our unit’s no-touching policy that allows for penile-vaginal penetration. So we, Glenda and I, have chosen to disregard this draconian rule entirely. True, there are no locks—anywhere, at anytime. But we have found that the unlocked showers of our unlocked rooms afford us the most privacy. For at least a few minutes at a time. Then again, it’s not as if Glenda worries about things like consequences or getting caught or even being watched while we’re going at it. Sometimes I think she hopes we’ll be seen. I never know from one minute to the next what her desires will run to. It is like fucking a different woman every day. A different paranoid, psychotic woman who mumbles under her breath about government conspiracies. But beggars can’t be choosers and my potential dating pool is limited.

Besides, Glenda would kill me if I cheated on her.

TWELFTH

This is it. The last one. The one that will put Humpty together again. So they say. But how will I know whether or not I am whole now that I have lost so much? It seems an endless cycle—losing and gaining parts of myself. Gaining my sanity; losing the ability to hold on to five minutes ago. It can drive a person crazy. This endless loop. This crazy loop. Endless. Maybe I am just keeping them in business
.

If that’s the case, I could almost respect the marketing strategy
.

New York, 1993
. I knew it would happen eventually. It was inevitable. There are only so many people in the world.

I am in the Jazz section of the Sixty-Sixth Street Tower Records when I first catch sight of her standing at one of the listening stations across the store.

The ambient sounds of riffing and scatting muffled through abandoned headphones, of shopping bags rustling, and the tail ends of passing conversations all erupt, blossom, and wither like some great acoustic time-lapse photograph. In the microsecond it takes me to recognize her.

She looks different than I imagined. I guess I thought my leaving would have done more damage—something that I could see just by looking. Tattoos, a nose ring, some ugly form of rebellion. But she doesn’t really look any different. Older, but not different. Her hair is still long, shiny, and blonde, like the little girl who hugs her mother in the hair color commercial.

My first impulse is to run and hide. I’m not sure why. Maybe fear. Fear of what I want.

She smiles as she talks to the sales guy. He has a tattoo—it looks like barbed wire circling his bicep—and an artificial body, constructed by machine at a gym. She tosses her hair. Is she flirting? Jesus, he must be ten years older than she is.

“Can I help you?” A pale boy with unnaturally blue-black hair and lipstick to match has come up behind me.

“No, I’m just …”

The boy walks away.

I look down. My feet are moving—following her. I walk up one aisle and down another, pretending to browse. She joins some friends. They all stand with one hip cocked, wearing more or less the same thing—low-cut jeans and too-small hooded sweatshirt jackets. They all wear flip-flops on their feet, presumably to show off the hideously colored polish they wear on their toes. One girl is too chubby to pull off this uniform. Baby fat hangs out over the top of her jeans, which cling too tightly to her thighs. But she seems oblivious. They are giggling. My daughter and her friends shuffle down the aisles—talking, laughing, shopping, laughing; stepping on the backs of their too-long jeans, which are frayed and dirty on the bottom. Why are girls that age always laughing?

If I were still her father, I could ask. I would know her friends’ names. I would take them out for pizza. Do sixteen-year-old girls eat pizza or just salads?

I look up. I am standing in Rap/Hip-Hop. A middle-aged white man with thinning hair, wearing Timberlands, browsing in the Rap section. Not the least bit conspicuous.

One of the girls looks over and catches me staring. I panic, look away, study the fine print on the parental advisory sticker on the CD I am holding. She whispers to the others and they all look over. I can feel them. I know I shouldn’t look up, but I can’t help it. I need to see if there is anything at all in Willa’s face. Anything. I am older, I have grown a beard, but she would have to know me. I look up for an instant, lock eyes with her, and see nothing. She laughs and puts her hand over her mouth the way young girls do and turns away. She whispers to her friends and they turn to face me.

“Pervert!” The chubby one yells at me, and they all laugh and run down the aisle. My face burns. My stomach lurches. I walk quickly and calmly to the back of the store, hoping to find an employee restroom. Nothing. And no one around to direct me. I panic and run to the stack of boxes I’d seen one of the sales kids unpacking earlier and, bending over it, I vomit onto Garth Brooks’s latest release.

Willa and her friends are still there when I collect myself and return to the front of the store. I feel somehow stronger now, purified, ready to face her head-on. I stride over to the Employee Picks station where they are sharing earphones. At the final moment, though, I freeze, and instead of closing the last few feet between us, I stop at the end of the rack and pick up a CD.

“Look, guys,” says Chubby, “the Perv’s back.”

I look up at her. Cunt. Bitch. Cow. I know exactly what she is going to be in twenty years.

“Now listen here, young lady,” I say in an entirely unconvincing parental tone of rebuke that none of us believes. “I don’t know where you learned your manners, but—”

“Why are you following us? Why are you, like, staring at her?” one of them asks, pointing to Willa.

“I’m not … I … I … I’m … because I’m her …”

Willa looks at me, her eyes searching. “My what?”

“Your father.”

There is no sound. At least I don’t hear any. Willa looks confused. Her friends are stunned; their mouths hang open.

“My father,” she says. It isn’t a question.

I nod. “I know this must be … I mean, after such a long time, this isn’t … Do you think we could go talk somewhere?”

“Um … I don’t think …,” she begins.

“You are fuckin’ nuts, mister,” says Chubby. “You better get the hell away from her.”

“Pardon me, but what goddamn business is it of yours?”

“I’m her SISTER! And you’re not our fuckin’ father. So fuck off.”

So. Fuck off. Not our father. Fuck. Off. My Sister. Not. Her Father.

It’s like they are all very far away. Like I am looking through the wrong end of a telescope. And silence. Someone has pressed the universal mute button. I don’t know for how long.

I am looking at Willa—staring, squinting. Until my eyes sting.

“Willa?” I ask desperately.

She looks at me and sadly, slowly shakes her head. “Sorry,” she says, and means it.

“But I …”

“I’m from Wisconsin. My dad’s a dentist.”

Chubby grabs her arm and pulls her away. The other girls follow, giggling nervously.

Willa looks over her shoulder at me as she is being led away. “I’m really sorry.”

Something is wrong. I stand there, going over the calculations: height, weight, age, eye color. I had been so sure this time. I had made a mistake in Chelsea. And in Tampa. And Stockholm. And Berlin. I am willing to admit that. But this time I had been sure. Absolutely.

Maybe she was just afraid. That would be understandable. I am sure there was something in the way she looked at me, spoke to me. I look around the store. She and the others are at the register paying.

“Can I help you?” A skinny kid with odd facial hair and a small silver hoop through one eyebrow steps in front of me.

“No, I can’t see my—” I try to get around him.

“What? I don’t understand. Can I help you find something?”

“I don’t want any—just get out of my—”

“Okay man, just chill.”

I push him out of my way. I can just see Willa and her friends going through the revolving door out onto Broadway, where another group of kids and three adults stand. One of the kids wears a brand-new T-shirt from a current Broadway musical. The adults—two women and a man—study a Manhattan Streetwise map. They look like sensitive progressive schoolteachers who go by their first names and sit cross-legged on the floor talking honestly with kids about sex. The whole group starts down the stairs into the subway.

I push through the revolving door to run after Willa.

I don’t realize I am holding the CD until the alarm goes off and I am standing on the sidewalk. I feel the security guard’s hand on my shoulder. Tight. I look at the CD. Notorious B.I.G. The kid with the facial hair jogs up behind me. “Hey, Mister,” he says. “You can’t just walk out without paying.”

The security guard and the kid argue for a good ten minutes over whether or not to call the cops. The guard locks me in the tiny employee break room where I sit in a plastic chair decorated with anti-Reagan graffiti, staring at a wall covered in posters of popular female vocalists caught—of course, completely unexpectedly—in obvious states of dampness and chill.

The longer I sit there, the more scared and confused I get. I begin to wonder if someone or maybe some organization is planting girls who look like Willa in cities all over the world. That somehow they know where I will be when. That they are trying to drive me crazy or get me to do something. I start to panic. I tell myself I need to calm down. Because the guard and the kid could be involved. I clear my throat.

“Excuse me, could I please use your phone to make a local call?” I ask, and then wonder if they notice how much I sound like a robot.

They look at each other. The kid shrugs.

“Sure. But make it short.”

“Cool,” I say, trying to compensate for the robot thing. My hand trembles as I dial Walt’s number. I am in the principal’s office because I was in a fight. I am in the Beverly Hills Police Department because I TP’d a neighbor’s house. I am in the Tower Record’s break room mistakenly accused of shoplifting. I am in trouble. I don’t know if Walt will come. Why should he? We hardly know each other. They look over at me—the guard, the kid—and I lower my head. In shame. There are specks of vomit on my shoe. Walt answers and I struggle to tell him everything at once. That I have been falsely accused at Tower Records, that I threw up and passed out and don’t want to impose but …

“It’s gonna be okay, son,” he says. “I’m on my way.”

And Walt comes and gets me. On the way home, we stop for pastrami sandwiches and cream soda. I never tell him about the girl. Willa.

It is long past dark when we get back to the apartment. Walt follows me up to my place, sits down on the sofa, and kicks off his shoes.

“Let’s see if there’s a decent movie on,” he says, without turning around to look at me or asking if I want him to stay. I don’t understand. It’s late. I know he must be tired.

And then it dawns on me. I am being taken care of. Someone is taking care of me.

I sit down on the other end of the couch. “Thank you.”

He nods, barely, and aims the remote at the TV. “
African Queen
, it’s our lucky day.”

New York, 1994
. I am walking home from the Pick, one of three places I go when I leave the house these days—the other two being the liquor store and the video store—when I see a small crowd gathered outside my building. As I get closer, I see what looks like an ambulance but it isn’t pulled up onto the curb. “Medical” something is written on the side. I can’t see the rest. There are too many people standing around blocking my view. And still, for no good reason, I begin to walk faster. And to feel slightly ill. I push my way to the front door and get there in time to see two men in white uniforms trying to fit a stretcher through the narrow entryway, tilting it this way and that—a body, zipped into a black plastic bag, rolling precariously with each attempt.

I can tell, without even unzipping it, who is in the bag. Time slows to a crawl. My breath is gone. I blink, but the scene around me does not change. Something is off. I blink again. And still, crowd watching, men in white clumsily, almost comically, failing at their macabre task. Employing the same failed strategy over and over. Not understanding the square peg will never fit through the round hole.

There are movies where this would be funny—Chaplin, the Keystone Kops, the Marx Brothers. I have laughed at those movies—the absurdity, the gallows humor. But I am not laughing now. Now I am wondering what the Marx Brothers are doing in my tragedy. I drop my leather messenger bag and rush toward them screaming.

“Stop! Just stop it. Put him down!”

“ ’Scuse me, sir,” the older bulky one says, “but who are you?”

“I’m … I’m … his … son.” Some of the neighbors exchange looks.

“Oh, well, very sorry for your loss, sir.”

“Why don’t you take a moment?” the younger skinny one offers.

They put the stretcher down inside the entryway. On the floor, underneath the mailboxes where Walt and I first met almost two years ago. I unzip the bag so that I can see his face. He is and is not still Walt.

I sit down cross-legged on the cement floor and lift him into my lap, cradling him in my arms. Was it his heart? A stroke? An aneurysm? And if I had been home could I have saved him? What if I could have saved him? I could have saved him if I’d been home. I pull Walt closer and hold his head to my chest. He smells faintly of aftershave and pot. My tears fall onto his cheeks. Now we are both crying. Maybe, I think, it means he will miss me too.

“Sir, we need to take him now,” the big one says to me.

“No, please,” I am begging. “I … I don’t have … anyone else.” I’m sobbing in front of my neighbors. I am ashamed but I can’t stop. “He … He … took care of me.”

The big man kneels down and puts his arm around me. “It’s tough. Losing your dad, even at our age. But think of it this way, you’re lucky you had as long with him as you did. That you and your old man were so tight. Not everyone’s so lucky.”

I look up at him and nod. And then he zips the bag closed, takes him from my arms with the help of the skinny one, and carries him out the narrow entry of our building and over to the truck. “Medical Examiner” is what’s written on its side. The two men take Walt and lay him on a gurney in the truck and hand me some papers to sign. Which I do with some indistinct mark. And then they drive away.