Wonderland (8 page)

It all seemed obvious to me then: that my father was continually laboring to open a seam in the world, to split it until it gave up a knowledge it didn’t know it had, while my incandescent mother, like a cursed princess in a fairy tale, was continually stitching the winding sheet of her own entrapment. An entrapment in motion, in picturesque places, but an entrapment nonetheless. It all seems less clear to me now, of course, less easy; they did love each other. Was he really so much freer, never turning down a commission, driven to every collapsing roof or unmoored staircase or solid, impenetrable façade, like a knight in a different fairy tale who is condemned to an endless series of nearly undoable tasks, cutting through stone, iron, concrete? He was as quixotic as he was heroic. Over the years of the big work, rotting warehouse by condemned house by roofless armory, he broke his own body down, crumpling a vertebra, a kneecap, a hip, losing the hearing in his right ear. The structures he cut open cut openings in him as well. Metal pins hold significant parts of him together these days. After the collapse of the marble wall at the half-built fascist gymnasium, he was in a coma for two weeks. We were told he might die. My mother, in the hospital in Rome, went and kneeled in the hospital chapel. When he woke up, she left him.

Also, question to self: am I my father or my mother? Think twice before answering.

H
IGH ABOVE THE
old town square, the skeleton on the Orloj strikes the hour of noon. The air is sweet. Zach and Alicia and I, along with a throng of tourists, watch the medieval skeleton with his little hammer. We have left the hotel in search of throat lozenges, socks, and a candle for Alicia’s room. All we’ve found at the big mall in the center of town are the socks and bad gelato in supernatural colors. Zach is spooning up neon-green gelato; Alicia’s is bright yellow, in a cone; mine is a swirl of blue and red that tastes sort of like almonds and sort of like bubble gum.

“We should go to the Kafka house,” I say. “It’s not far. I think there’s a bus?”

“When I was on tour with Beck in Russia,” says Zach, more to Alicia than to me, “I went to Stalin’s house in Georgia.”

“What was it like?” Alicia delicately licks at her bright yellow cone.

“Wooden.”

“Huh.”

“He was a fascist,” offers Zach, eating a spoonful of neon-green gelato.

I don’t bother to correct him. We haven’t spoken about the fumble in Göteborg, and I know that if I acknowledge it in any way, I will lose. I carefully do not look at him, nor take note of the proximity of his elbow to Alicia’s. Shirtless boys with rats on their shoulders pass through the crowd in the square. On one corner, a white, beefy man with short gray hair kneels on the ground, his forehead touching the cobblestones, before a cap with coins in it. On the opposite corner, a man who looks not unlike him does the same thing, except that he is bent over a dog.

“We’re playing with Frogs and Foxes tonight,” I say. “And this other big group, some kind of musical collective.”

“That Frogs guy is such a douchebag,” says Zach.

“I’m thirsty,” says Alicia.

A Britney Spears song plays somewhere in the crowd; somewhere else, a pop song in French prances along. Prague is warm at midday, cool by dusk. We arrived yesterday, took a ride on a tourist boat down the Vltava, admired the swans, looked at the sky. Tom drank many beers. A Muslim family at the boat’s stern were the only other passengers; like us, they took pictures of the swans with their cell phones. One of the little boys stared quizzically at Boone the entire time. The motion of the boat was slow, oddly restful, like being rocked. I slept for twelve hours last night, woke up unsure for a minute where I was, which city, which year of my life. I looked at my cell phone for the time and remembered:
Czechoslovakia.
It seemed so improbable that I laughed out loud, alone in the vast hotel bed.

Zach says, “I promised my dad I’d go to the Jewish cemetery. Supposedly I’ve got a great buried there somewhere.”

Alicia looks impressed.

“You go ahead,” I tell them. “I’ll meet up with you in the lobby for dinner.” They head off, her face uplifted to his as he gestures, talks, walking in his slightly duck-toed way. I go back to the hotel, where I read the
International Herald Tribune
and then fall asleep again. My dreams are syrupy, heavy afternoon dreams filled with people, with colors. I wake up wanting to call Jim, but manage (just) not to do that. He’d asked me, specifically and respectfully, not to, the one exception being an emergency, like if the plane I was on was plunging out of the sky. I’d said, “I guess I should put you on speed dial, then ,” but he didn’t laugh.

I try to write down the syrupy dreams in
Wonderland,
maybe there’s a song there somehow, but the syrup only runs, granulates. I see a text from Boone, sent half an hour ago.
Come on down, we’re all going to dinner. Hry.
I put on my shoes, smooth my hair, and rush down to the lobby. Zach, Alicia, Tom, Boone, and a tall black man with short, blond dreads are waiting.

Tom introduces us. “This is my friend Anton. He lives here.”

“And what do you do?” I ask Anton as he leads us to dinner, a place he knows where we can sit outside.

“I’m a writer,” says Anton, looking down at me.

“What do you write?”

“Novels, mostly. I translate a little.”

“You’re Czech?”

“My mother was Czech.” He smiles. “My father was from Oakland.”

We arrive at a restaurant in a square with many tables outside. Set up in the square is a jumbotron on which soccer players, their heads soaked with sweat, mill around tensely. The screen is so big that even at the back of the seating area—the tables in front are full—I can see the hair on the players’ legs, the mud on their shoes. Their faces are surreally close. Everyone in the square is watching intently, hushed.

“Who’s playing?” I ask Anton.

“Spain versus Germany. Spain is red, Germany is white.”

“Like wine.”

A player in white on the side of the field picks up the ball to throw it inbounds and the crowd in the square boos and hisses loudly. A few people bang on the wooden tables.

“We’re for Spain?”

Anton smiles. “Oh, yes. We’re for Spain.”

A player in red steals the ball with one quick foot and the crowd cheers. A table nearby waves at us to sit down, get out of the way, so we do.

At another table, two women are smoking, speaking English with British accents. They appear to be the only people here not riveted by the game. “To play that card then,” says one of them, in a businesslike blazer and skirt. “To play that.” The other, younger, wearing a necklace of large black beads, nods sympathetically.

Anton, in consultation with Tom, does the ordering, which makes me fear what might arrive, but I’m never that hungry before a show anyway. “How do you guys know each other?” I ask.

“From college,” says Anton. “We actually—we had a band.”

“It was great,” says Tom, Purelling his hands, then carefully arranging his napkin in his collar.

“It sucked,” says Anton. “But Tom was already really good. We knew he could make it.”

Tom shrugs. “Just got lucky.”

“Man, when was the last time I saw you?”

Tom pulls at his chin. “I don’t know. Was I here when I was out with Carmela?”

“I guess. Time flies.”

I wonder about Anton’s life here, how long he’s been here, as thick brown bread and various big pizzas and terrible wine arrive, as Anton explains that the Czech name for Prague means “threshold,” as Spain gets a goal and the restaurant tables nearly fly up in the air with collective joy, as Boone, tapping his watch, reminds us all that we have to get dressed, get ready, be at the venue by nine, we can’t be late. Tom folds a last piece of pizza, devours it, and pats his stomach, which I notice is already bigger. Alicia, having eaten nothing but a heel of bread, is smoking and watching the game, shadows in the hollow of her throat. Zach is leaning close to her, talking fervently. Alicia, expertly sending up a smoke ring, nods. Her platinum hair glows in the near-dark. The men on the big screen are clearly exhausted, drenched, but they line up again. They keep watch on the ball as if they are all in love with it.

We go on at midnight. We’re playing a basement club tucked way back into a curve of Prague on a cobblestone street. After Frogs and Foxes and the collective, the stage is littered with broken strings, abandoned beers, what looks like a bikini top though I don’t remember seeing anyone topless, gum wrappers, a few stubbed-out cigarettes. Tonight is no-stockings, which means I have to remember not to lean over too far, lest I show Prague the world. With no-stockings, I have decided on the braid. My face feels naked. The stage beneath my feet, as I walk onto it, my band behind me, feels uneven, not so much rickety as warped. I need sea legs for this one, and I’m not sure I have them yet. I turn around to smile at my band, all brushed and polished and dressed, and Tom makes devil’s horns at me. They all look smart tonight, what my mother would call
spiffy,
and even Tom is in a clean shirt. The light, as it falls on them, makes them look both more and less than mortal. For a moment I don’t understand them, why they would come all the way out here with me, wait for me in hotel lobbies in foreign countries, what it is that we think we’re doing. Did I ever know what I was doing?

Tom takes his place at the drums, waits for the nod from me. Except for Anton, standing with arms folded at the back of the room, the audience is made up mostly of teenagers, all of whom seem to be on their iPhones, probably texting one another. By my foot, a gangly boy with several nose rings bobs his head up and down, though there is no music playing. He looks up at me beseechingly. I wonder if he thinks he’s come to see some other band. The flavor of the crowd is punk, or punkish, which we definitely are not. Standing on the edge of the crowd is the lead singer of Frogs and Foxes, a young British guy with curly brown hair and a crooked nose, his arm around a small, round young woman from the musical collective. He is drinking a beer after his loud set of songs that actually seemed to be about frogs, also zebras. There might have been a giraffe. Zach, arranging himself in his bass, subtly eyes the room, raises an eyebrow at me. Alicia touches her cello gently, leaning forward to it, eyes half closed. I brace my legs on the warp, turn around, nod. Tom raises his drumsticks. I turn back around. 1, 2, 3, 4.

I’m in good voice tonight, we’re all in good voice, pacing one another, a team of well-trained horses, well-watered, well-fed. The pizza wasn’t bad. Spain won. Prague means threshold. I pace the stage until I get my sea legs—
here
is the dip, and here as well. Here we go. It’s our short set, so its mood changes often. The gangly boy bobs his head in the same rhythm no matter what’s playing; like a stopped clock that’s right twice a day, he’s in time with us now and then. The teenagers find beats wherever they can and obligingly dance to them, pretty cheeks pink and damp, hair damp. One young girl sticks her tongue out; I see the little white pill; another girl, quick as a wink, tongues it up. I cue the band for “Orchids” instead of “Waiting for a Sign.” “Orchids” is faster, lighter. Alicia spits on her hands, adjusts her grip on the cello bow. Even the bartender in the back is nodding along affably by the middle of “Orchids.”

When the crooked nose of the lead singer of Frogs and Foxes rises in the air, my first, irrational thought is that it is his nose alone floating there—are we not in the land of Kafka, after all? But then I see his naked chest (when did he take his shirt off?), the soles of his big shoes, the teenagers staggering under his weight, and I realize he is surfing my crowd. The small, round young woman is dancing ecstatically in his wake, and the teenagers follow suit, forming a loose conga line, slam-dancing to the irregular melody we’re playing so beautifully, which can’t hold a slam. It is like a fist going through balsa wood. In the split second during which I am trying to decide how to take the ball back—what would Spain do?—Zach picks up an abandoned beer bottle by his feet and lobs it with stunning precision at the douchebag’s head. Warm beer rains over me and Alicia. The bottle hits the guy’s forehead, a seam in his face opens up, blood falls all over the teenagers, who at first seem to think it’s part of the act and laugh hysterically, dropping the douchebag, who hits the floor hard.

Tom stands up behind his drums, mouth open.

We don’t finish our set.

H
E FELT IT
and he didn’t feel it at the same time, like a wave crashing over him, except the wave was made of marble. The pain was infinite, and then it was gone, because he was gone. His broken body lay curled and bloody on the ground, one leg bent under him, his fingers curled over his palms, his shirt shredded, but within him there was nothing. One of the assistants told my mother over and over about his watch, miraculously intact and ticking on his wrist,
orologio non rotto non rotto,
as if this were a sign of life, of hope, but in fact he died that day. His spirit left his broken body. It went away on its own. His body, trussed and swaddled and intubated, lay in the hospital bed in Rome, waiting for his spirit to return; the only part of him that could be said to exist was that waiting. He was a space of waiting. Rome—our Rome—whirled around the empty point of his small, slender form in that bed. He looked like an Etruscan statue, a white form without a name. We were not a religious family. We knew he was all but dead—that, in a way, he was dead.

When he woke up, he asked for water. Lila held the glass with both hands, guiding the straw to his lips. He sipped, smiled, slept. The odors of the hospital—bleach, tomato sauce—didn’t change. I saw that people could die, people could be born, and nothing about the hospital smell would change. In the weeks that followed, his smile became speech; his arms moved; first one leg moved, then the other. He had surgery. After several weeks more, he was permitted to walk very slowly to the hospital garden and sit in a wooden chair, stubble-faced, with bad breath, pale. Lila and I sat on either side of him, each of us holding one of his hands. His grip was weak. His eyes were dull.