In Nightmares We're Alone (16 page)

Arthur’s not looking for a mother-in-law with unfinished business and trying to resolve a relationship with a dead woman. He’s just trying to understand his wife’s roots, those tucked-away little parts of her soul that nobody else but her can really see.

“But I’ve seen things I can’t explain,” said the lion.

“And they’ve seen you,” said the Lion God. “They can’t explain you either.”

It occurs to me I’ve been staring out the window at the tree for some time and Arthur is still waiting for me.

“Grace,” I say. “Are you there? We’re hoping to talk to you.”

“It’s Arthur. It’s your son-in-law.”

“She’s here,” I say. “She says ‘Hello, Arthur.’”

Outside, the sycamore is watching. It’s transmitting to my brain on some psychic frequency.

“We all sprout from the same seed,” said the Lion God. “That first microbe in a puddle of mud has grown since the beginning and you, like everyone else, are just a tip of a branch that will grow thicker and stronger in time or break off in the wind and be forgotten. And I am just the tree.”

The Lion God morphed into a majestic sycamore.

Yeah, yeah. And we’ve all got roots we bury in the dirt and branches we stretch for the sky. We’ve been over this.

“Yes,” said the Sycamore. “But life is a set of Russian Dolls. Not only does each lion have roots and branches, but each lion is a root or a branch. Those who show beauty are held up to the sun, and others are best buried where the world can forget them.”

I stare out the window, blinking at the sycamore, searching for my sanity.

“You’re a root, Mr. Lion. A cheat and a scoundrel. An ugly, twisted mass best buried and forgotten.”

“Can you hear me, Grace?” asks Arthur.

“Yes, Arthur. I’ve missed you. How are you?”

“I’m fine, Grace. I hope… I hope you’re well. Not too lonely.”

“But we’re all too lonely, aren’t we, Mr. Lion? We’re all sick and dying, brown leaves blowing in the wind, latching to our tree with any strength we’ve got. We’re all reaching out and screaming for anybody with a spare hand to grab us, to hold us and connect us, so we won’t die off and blow away on our own. That’s all any of us is good for, isn’t it? That’s the reason for all those self-help books and con artists like you, telling people hands are grabbing out for them that aren’t really there.”

“But I do help them,” said the lion. “I make them feel better. I give the dead a voice to take the loneliness from the living.”

“Empty help. You mask their loneliness with lies, cover up their emptiness with shiny gift-wrap to make it presentable and easier to tuck away, but you don’t fill it. When they reach out in the wind and scream for you to catch them, you convince them someone else is catching them already, someone who isn’t there. You never grab on yourself. When was the last time you took someone’s hand?”

“I am not a root!” screamed the lion to the sycamore. “Now take out my fucking thorn!”

“Did I do something to upset you? Or Tom?” Arthur is asking. “I don’t know what it was, but I felt a presence when I was in that house recently that…” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

My hand throbs. I look down at my fingertips and the stems are protruding again, caked in blood and swollen flesh.

I curl my hand to hide it.

“That’s right, hide. Hide like the world will hide you. Your inner ugliness is growing so thick you have to groom it. Steal and screw and lie without connecting. Push away from the lives of others with one hand while you reach for their wallets with the other and wonder why your fingers don’t like what you’re telling them to do. Wonder why that thorn is buried so deep. Wonder why you’re fighting alone.”

Arthur is droning on and on and on, bearing his soul to a dead and buried woman in a quiet room with a man chasing a paycheck.

“What do you want!?” screamed the lion.

“How could I want from you?” said the Sycamore Lion God. “I am you. And so much more.”

And the Sycamore took the shape of a man named Casey.

“Serve the tree and the tree serves you,” He said.

My hand, aching and burning. I swear I can see the saplings sprouting right before my eyes. And when I turn my head up to the sycamore, it seems to be growing just as quickly.

I swing my head back to Arthur.

“It’s all bullshit!” I scream.

He stops talking and his mouth drops open. He stares at me with a blank look.

“Everything, this, all of it. The dead don’t talk. Not to me, not to anyone. They rot and decompose and in a best case scenario they feed worms and bugs who fertilize the soil so trees can grow and feed the animals and that’s all there is. That’s it. As soon as they’re gone, they’re gone, and only the things they said and did to us are left and if there’s anything more to it than that, none of us knows it yet. If you don’t want to go in that house, don’t go in, but there’s no ghost in there trying to kill you. It’s as empty as everything else.

“You want to help your wife, love her. Ask her about her day. Tell her you’re there for her and mean it. And whatever you need to do to put yourselves on the right path, go do it, because ten years from now one of you is going to be just as dead as your mother-in-law is now and the other one’s going to be in a strange room with a self-serving prick like me and asking, ‘How does my dead spouse feel about my new job’ and getting a vague answer and paying for the privilege of it, and… and that’s life! That’s how fucking empty and vicious and cruel it is.

“You’ve got a wife who’s not dead and she’s hurting. Why are you here? Why are you throwing away your retirement fund on a fortune-telling mountebank? Go be with your wife! Keep your wallet in your pocket, tell me to fuck off, and go home! Go home and love her until she’s dead and then go love someone else because—
fuck!
—life is gonna tie you down and kick you till you can’t breathe and anyone who makes that experience more bearable is the best it gets. The best anything gets. Forget the dead until it’s you.”

I have to catch my breath when I stop. My hand is shaking but I don’t feel the pain anymore. I just stare at Arthur, sitting there with that empty expression on his face.

Something comes out of him that I think is almost a laugh. He shakes his head in disbelief. I’m wondering if he’ll come pound me in the face with his cane or demand back all the money he’s ever given me or if he’ll break down crying and tell me he knows all this but he needs me to lie to him.

Instead, after an eternity of silence, he stands up quietly, buttons the top button on his jacket, and heads for the door without looking at me. When he’s opened it and he’s about to step out into the world, he hesitates, turns back to me, and says, “Thank you.”

And even though they always say that, for the first time since I started doing this, I think maybe this one I earned.

* * * * *

Ashley Hall used to be a role model parents pushed on their kids. TV’s good girl. On camera, a thirteen-year-old genius with a huge social circle and boys lining up for her, but more interested in finding the right college than the right boy. Off camera, a pop princess and a devout Christian, always singing the praises of her family for their endless support. But ever since she turned eighteen, it seems like her career is centered around her tits.

She’s on a billboard behind Martin when we sit down at the bistro, naked from the waist up and advertising shampoo or body wash or car batteries or something. Fuck if I know. I’m not looking at the product.

Statistically, wherever you are, if you look around, there’s probably a naked woman selling something.

That’s not how I turned into the sack of shit I am, but maybe it’s relevant. One little factor. One gust of wind.

Everything has to change. This irresponsible, self-aggrandizing existence I started after the divorce, or back in high school, or whenever it started, I’ve got to shrug it off and reinvent myself. My whole life the world has been planting seeds of cynicism and darkness in my mind and I’ve done nothing to groom them. Through ignorance and lack of willpower, I let myself become this thing. Well I’m uprooting all of it, starting now.

I choose to be a positive influence on others and on myself.

Bullshit. No more mantras. Change comes from within, not from a book—no matter how many books say “Change comes from within.” When some asshole writes words that make you try to be a better person, it’s
him
who’s changing you—
his
words. If he never wrote that book, you wouldn’t have changed, so that’s just more of the world pushing you around. Planting you somewhere. Wind blowing your branches. A bird nesting in your psyche.

Fuck ‘em all. Enough years of talking. Time to rip up my roots and walk. If I’m going to eradicate the growths, I can’t let the world plant new ones.

I take Martin out of school at lunch and right out of the gate he asks, “Are we gonna go to the lake and con somebody? Because I didn’t bring a change of clothes.”

“No,” I say. “I think we’re not gonna do that anymore.”

We’re sitting at the table, Martin drinking his Cokes and me drinking my cappuccinos, both eating those good pulled pork sandwiches. That naked young girl over Martin’s shoulder keeps pulling my eye, showing off all but a few square inches of nipple deemed inappropriate by someone somewhere. Whether she needed the attention or the check, whether the photographer felt like a sellout or a lottery winner, whether the marketer who pitched the ad thought it’d send him to Hell or the strip club, we all ended up here because of something bigger than ourselves. Her on the billboard and me looking at her body. All of us getting pushed around by the world.

The desire to fuck other women when I was married, did it generate from a lifetime of being advertised to with sex? Being told, ‘This will make women sleep with you,’ as though that were the ultimate litmus test for a possession’s worth? A lifetime surrounded by other boys, and then men, who place the value on sex they’ve been conditioned to place on it? Or is all of it the other way around?

What came first, the plant or the seed?

“Why aren’t we gonna do the drowning con anymore?” asks Martin. “We didn’t get busted, did we?”

“No.”

“Are you worried we’re about to?”

“I don’t think we’re going to do cons in general anymore. I don’t know what I was thinking with that. Lying and stealing and manipulating people. There’s a lot of shit that I do… or, I guess I should say there’s a lot of
crap
that I do that… I don’t know. A lot of
junk
.”

“I get it.”

Suddenly it feels like we’re all just dominos. I robbed Martin of his morals and turned him into a sociopath before he even knew it was happening, all because of outside forces that shaped me into a bad father. Outside forces that never had a chance because everything was set to make them into what they became.

“A lot of what we’ve done together isn’t really the kind of stuff a father ought to teach his son about, or that people should be doing in the first place. The world’s a shitty enough place already without guys like you and me making it worse for people.”

“You dying, dude?”

I give him a look to tell him he’s being a smart ass.

“It’s plant cancer, isn’t it?” he asks. “That thing you said grew out of your foot.”

“I’m not dying,” I tell him, and I hope I’m not lying. “I mean, we all are. Every day you’re a day closer. That’s why you grow. You try to get better at the ‘being alive’ thing. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“Whatever,” says Martin.

One time I had a family. A wife and a son, a home. A job pretending to talk to the dead, but still a goddamn job. And a flirty client with a crush who used to send nude pictures to my phone. Pictures I didn’t want—or most of me didn’t, anyway. And one time, just once, I run out of the house with my cell phone still lying on the coffee table and a pussy pic comes in and ruins the whole marriage.

Now I ask: If there weren’t naked women on every billboard and in every commercial, if every movie weren’t about a man struggling to convince a woman to have sex with him, if we didn’t make it into the entire mark of success in a life as a human male, would I still have gotten that picture message? Or would I have been more forthright in telling Daphne I didn’t want her pictures?

I’m no puritan and I’m not dodging out of responsibility. I know the what-if game is for the uninspired. I’m just saying it’s all seeds and plants.

“We can still go see movies and stuff. And you can come to the house and hang out and… and I was serious about you moving in the other day. I’d really like you to move in.”

He refuses to give me any kind of acknowledgment. Not even eye contact.

“Martin, I’m really trying here. I’m really trying. If there’s something you want me to do, to change, some way I can be a better father to you… I really want to figure out how to do this. I think I’m going to change a lot of things about myself.”

There’s a long silence as I wait for him to say something. All he comes out with is, “I told you I don’t want to live with you.”

I take a breath. “Can you tell me why? Is there something I do that you don’t like? Or something I don’t do?”

“I just like Mom more.”

I nod. The most hurtful things Martin ever says to me, I can never tell if he means for them to hurt me. But I pried the answer out of him and I got it. And in typical ten-year-old fashion, it’s an empty answer that can’t be refuted or fixed. He likes Mom more. Can’t say I blame him. Sometimes I like Mom more too.

After the pussy pic, I slept on the couch for three months. I deleted Daphne from my phone and refused to make appointments with her. I swore I’d never touched her and it was true. She sent me pictures and that was it. But it wasn’t good enough for Rose. One day she woke up and said fuck it, and that was it.

When she suggested the divorce, I fought her. I said I wouldn’t let her take Martin away and all the other stuff divorcing parents always say, but Rose didn’t play it by the book.

She said, “Fine. Take him. I just want my life back.”