Fun With Problems (8 page)

"Thanks, Eric," Annie hastened to say. "We don't drink wine."

Taylor thrust one of the bottles under Annie's nose to show her what the wine cost. Like everything else on the island, the wine was grossly overpriced. Taylor laid the bottle lengthwise on the table and rolled it casually toward where Eric was standing. Annie made a move to catch it if it fell.

"Wow!" she said. "Thanks anyway," she told Eric kindly. The prices were a little disgusting given the state of the world, but he had only meant to be polite.

"Waste of money," said Taylor. Annie saw that he might be at the point of tossing them outside, breaking them. But Eric had a corkscrew out. He took one of the bottles straight from Taylor's hand and uncorked it.

"Guess I'll have to drink them both then," said Eric, grinning.

Mainly to distract Taylor, Annie hastened to bring Eric a fruit jar.

"He'll just piss it out," Taylor said. "Won't you, Eric?"

"Ah!" Eric said. "But first the buzz! Right, Annie?" He raised his fruit jar to her.

It made Annie dizzy to watch him drain it. Of course it had been a mistake to let him crash at the house—she had known as much at the time. It had been a bad day for Taylor because there had been special trips for big shots on the ferry. Fog had grounded planes.

"Hey, let's eat!" she said with feigned delight. Taylor belched again, set his juice on the table and shambled to the stove. Annie watched him as though she were forcing him there by her will. "Veggie stew," she declared, "always better the second or third day." She looked at Eric, trying to convey anxiety, a warning, something to make him cool it.

Eric poured himself more wine, drank it and stood up.

"Going out for a smoke," he explained. "Be a second." He took the wine with him.

"What?" Taylor asked loudly.

Outside, the breeze seemed only to turn the enveloping fog on itself. The air was sweet. Eric felt excited but confused. What was with the looks Annie was giving him? Did she have a clue how lovely she looked with her guileless Oregon-blue eyes? She seemed innocent but mysterious. Clearly the husband was a menace. He was in danger.

In recent years Eric had tried to internalize a mechanism that controlled his impulsiveness. But he had gone on drinking and smoking too much dope, traveling too much. Strange thoughts assailed him. In Haiti, it might have been, or Indonesia—somewhere that powerful, perhaps infernal, supernatural beings roamed—he dreamed that an unmanageable spirit had entered into him. Flashbacks? Second adolescence on the way down? One never knew.

He smoked one Marlboro after another. Turning toward the Shumways' door, he thought, Make an entrance! An inappropriate urge, like so many. He opened the door dramatically to face them. Annie looked alarmed. Eric marched to the table and opened the second bottle of wine.

"Hey," he said. "Sorry, bad habit."

"Well," she said, "it reheats."

Taylor served the stew in silence, a somnambulist waiter. Eric noticed that the cardinal's struggles continued into darkness. He thought that unusual.

"Veggies, right?" Eric asked them. "Love 'em! Never eat anything with a face. Seriously," he asked them, "I mean, what is meat? A certain consistency to the teeth. A rub for the gums. Like chomp chomp, right? No more to it. Hey, guys," Eric said, "how about some more plonkorino?" He poured some into his fruit glass. "Overpriced? Yes! And yet? Not so bad."

Taylor had begun to smile unpleasantly. Eric looked at the plate before him. He took a forkful of the vegetable stew and put it in his mouth, as much to silence himself as anything else. He glanced at Annie. She seemed strangely calm.

"Hey, Eric," Taylor said finally, "why don't you tell us what you're really doing out here." Eric shrugged and kept his eyes on his plate and swallowed. "He's a wanderer," Taylor told his wife.

A wanderer, Eric thought. That was a good one. "The conference," he said. "At Heron's Neck."

"You ain't part of that shit, are you?"

"No." Eric tried to explain. "I came out to see ... what local people had to say."

"Local people?" Taylor asked. "What do you mean by that?"

"He doesn't mean anything," Annie said.

"I got nothing to say," Taylor told him. "Annie's got nothing to say neither."

"I might, Taylor."

"I should have been here earlier," Eric explained. "Fog. And I had you guys' address from Lou. And I wanted to maybe meet her friends. So I thought I'd call and say hi. So here I am. Tomorrow..."

"On your merry way?" Annie Shumway asked. "Up to the Neck and the conference? Hey, this ratatouille turned out really well."

"Well, no," Eric said.

She was watching Eric being overcome by the wine. He was ever so slightly like Taylor. Like her dad too, though not quiet and surely not violent. These people shouldn't drink. Like her dad. Scandinavian family on her side. Surely not violent, but you could never tell. She had discovered once that drunks were boring and unpleasant, and she had left Taylor once, before they lived on the island. Then the guy she had gone with had told her: Boy, that asshole—meaning Taylor—was work. He was your job, not a lot more than that. She had thought, Oh, I don't know. Because he, that guy, was also boring and unpleasant, and violent sometimes himself, not as brave as Taylor, and that turned out to count with her, as it did with most women. He was not committed to the world outside himself the way Taylor was.

She got tired of the guy mocking Taylor; she came to see it as mockery against herself. So love has no pride like the song says, and she had found out how ruthless she could be in a worthy cause, and she had gone back to Taylor, who took her back quite lovingly. They had moved to the island, and she had made people unhappy and she had helped people and she thought helping felt better, as was well known. So that was love for Annie.

"Veggies pretty good," she told the men. "Very nice, Taylor."

"The bird life is interesting here too." The word for Taylor's smile, Eric thought, was grim. Unless he had started imagining it, the cardinal was still at the window. "You a bird watcher too?" the grim ferryman asked. "You know," he asked his wife, "you remember the last pack of weird bird watchers we had?" He turned the rictus back on its subject. "They were Feds, Eric. They were government spies. Now, you say you're here for that conference. You say you're talking to local people. What's up, partner?"

"Well, not really." Eric proposed to explain himself further.

"Maybe you know something we don't, Eric."

Perhaps because of the bird outside, the dark Paraclete descended on Eric once again.

"Know something you don't?" He turned to Annie with a radiant countenance, then to Taylor. "That may be."

Taylor trembled.

"Taylor probably doesn't believe a lot of what he reads in the papers," Eric ventured, addressing Annie.

"You got that right," said Taylor. "I disregard the trash."

Annie watched, less anxiously. Having seen these situations before helped. Fraught as they got, they usually ended with some bloodless antler-rattling when she rallied herself to protect Taylor's feckless prey.

Eric had fallen under the spell of his demon.

"This is wise," he said. "It's not just a matter of slanted perspective. It's a matter of arrant fictionalizing. They rarely get caught."

"He says it himself!" Taylor declared. "Admits it's all bullshit!"

"I've never heard it put that way, Taylor, have you?" Annie asked. "I want to hear." And she did, if she could not change the subject.

"Like those planes!" Taylor did not raise his voice but spoke with great passion. "That was faked, wasn't it? The planes into buildings. For oil, wasn't it?"

"There were no planes," Eric said.

"But wait," Annie exclaimed.

"I knew it!" Taylor shouted. He half rose from his chair. "No planes whatsoever!"

"No, Taylor," Eric said. "No planes." The force within him drove him to assume a wise condescending expression. An air, perhaps, of punditry. "Annie? There were no planes, do you understand?"

"But people were killed," Annie said. Taylor, triumphant, only grew more angry.

"Annie? Taylor? Have either of you ever heard of fractal imaging?"

"I have," Annie said. "I think." Taylor looked as though he were hearing something he had always known without quite realizing it.

"Did you know," Eric asked, "that in professional wrestling the outcome was always agreed to? The referee called the signals. This did not mean that people didn't get hurt." Eric chuckled. "Oh yes, Annie, people got hurt. Even killed. Did you know that the former Soviet People's Army accepted a four percent casualty rate in maneuvers?"

"This wasn't the Russians," Taylor said. "This was no maneuver."

Eric looked at the empty fruit jar and spoke thoughtfully. "That depends, Taylor, on what you mean by a maneuver. Think about it."

"What are you trying to do, man," Taylor asked, "make some bullshit excuse or something?"

"No no no, Taylor, don't misunderstand."

Annie watched Eric carefully. Taylor took a deep breath and puffed through closed lips. Eric leaned backward in his uneven captain's chair with an air of complacency.

"Watch the chair, Eric," Annie warned, but Eric took no notice.

"I've been doing this all my professional life, my two friends. I've been—you might say—behind the scenes. Listen to your Uncle Eric, as I'll call myself tonight. Whatever you think is happening, be certain it's not happening. Nothing you ever see or hear is correct. Shit, it's not even real. See, some are content. Others confused. Some shocked into a dreadful unprotesting silence. Some incensed, filled with impotent rage. All persuaded."

"I'll give you impotent rage," Taylor said softly.

"It's a funny idea," Annie said. "But our rage isn't impotent at all, I'm afraid. Although," she said to Taylor, "we're very peaceful people. We've accepted peace."

"You!" Taylor kept his seat but turned corpse-white. "Maybe it's your job to keep people persuaded! Could be that's what you're doing here."

Eric laughed.

"Think it's funny, Eric? You gonna tell me those planes weren't part of a U.S. government conspiracy? Invented in every detail?" He raised his voice. "And fuck the people! A monster conspiracy, right?"

Eric looked into Taylor's small, very blue eyes with an expression of serious sympathy.

"That's precisely what I am telling you, Taylor."

"The phone calls! The whole thing invented by baby-raping motherfuckers. And you, man—who we don't want in this house—I can tell you're one of them!" He breathed heavily. "Second plane! Third plane! Bullshit!" he shouted.

Annie knew the one thing she could not do was threaten to leave the room or actually leave it. To her surprise and dread, Eric seemed oblivious to the danger. He laughed into Taylor's uncomprehending rage, his eyes wild. He looked desperate until his gaze settled on the fire.

"It's all conspiracy," he said to the fire, then looked to Annie. "It's all conspiracy, Annie. I can explain it for you."

Neither of them answered him. Annie wondered briefly if she might hear some valuable information. She thought it unlikely.

"You guys heard about history being mere fiction? That's the way it's always been. Heard of the Romans?" Eric demanded. "They never existed!" He raised his voice. "It's baloney. I mean there's Rome, right. But there never were any Romans with togas and shit, and helmets and feathers. A fairy tale out of the Vatican Library. They even dreamed up the idea of a Vatican Library. There isn't one!"

Taylor and Annie exchanged looks.

"The Greeks! There weren't any Greeks, not ever. I know there are Greeks, but they're not
the
Greeks. I've been to so-called Greece. Plato? Mickey Mouse's dog. Babylonians. Israelites? The pyramids are like forty, fifty years old, Annie. Right, Taylor? This shit is all made up by the government. Once more unto the breach, dear friends—what a laugh. You think people in iron suits rode around on horses? Horse
shit
is more like it. Don't give up the ship? I mean—come on!"

Annie became giddily curious to hear what he might say next. It was a kind of intoxication.

"Why?" she asked Eric. "Why do they do it?"

Taylor watched him with what Annie knew to be a gossamer web of caution he might cast off in a moment.

"Why?" Eric shouted. "Why do they do it? To fuck up you and Taylor!" He rose from the table and staggered toward their sofa, half paralyzed with mirth. "You're on all the lists!"

When Eric lay unconscious, Annie half dragged her husband into their bedroom. "You stop where you are!" Annie told Taylor when she had him behind the closed door. "He's passed out and I'm not going to let you kill him in my living room. Forget about it."

"The prick is still laughing," her husband protested.

Annie opened the door a crack and peeked out at Eric, who remained unconscious on their sofa.

"He's dead to the world! Let him be. He'll be gone tomorrow."

Assured of her control, she leaned against him.

"Come, baby. Come on to bed, sweethome."

She got under the handsome white-and-yellow sunburst quilt her friend Vera Gold had done in Boston. Taylor sat down on the bed and slowly undressed. But in a moment he was on his feet again, raging. She knew, however, that it was unlike Taylor to attack in his underwear. He was physically
quite modest. When he was settled beside her she took up her night's reading, which involved the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson.

"What does he mean, 'the lists'?" Taylor asked.

"Honey? Do you not see that he's a crazy? He's sort of a homeless person, I think."

"I think maybe we should call Lou. Find out if he really knows her."

"Taylor," Annie said, "if anyone would come up with such a guy, it would be Lou."

"I don't like it, Annie," Taylor said. "That conference happens. Then this jerkoff turns up. Then he says we're 'on the lists.'"

"Taylor, everything is not connected. Shit happens, right?" Annie was not sure this was the explanation for it all. It would have to do.