In the Land of the Living (14 page)

“Your full name,” he’d said.

She’d laughed and told him. He’d not laughed, but perhaps had smiled at her mistake. Maybe that was why she’d liked him, because he’d been behind a desk. There was the rumor out there that she liked him still.

It seemed to be true. She said yes. She said she was planning to go to a party, but she’d go to a movie instead if that was what he wanted.

He picked her up in a light-gray-on-dark-gray Plymouth Horizon whose bumper was tied on with twine. (He liked to point that out to people in a self-deprecating way, but really he believed it gave him a certain street cred.) She didn’t wear a coat, just a pink sweater. He was wearing a too-warm ski jacket that puckered out in the front. They barely spoke. At a stoplight a man in another car rolled down his window and yelled at him angrily, but they couldn’t hear him. It seemed to be about the bumper tied on with twine. Leo laughed nervously and she laughed and said, “Jeez.” All that mattered, anyway, was whether he would kiss her.

There was no movie showing that he really wanted to see, and she expressed no opinion. (There was an appealing softness about her, an old-fashioned deference—she let him decide everything.) So they saw the movie
D.O.A.
, a remake. It was in black-and-white and had Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan in it and the guy who’d played the villain in
Dreamscape,
a movie which had caused Leo to fear his own dreams for months. Leo sat paralyzed beside Kathy in the dark. Once or twice he looked over at her and she looked back at him. She was very pretty, but he couldn’t enjoy her smooth bare arms (she had pulled off her pink sweater) or her long hair or her nice new breasts or glossy lips. Her prettiness seemed to indict him with errors: he did not deserve to be there with a girl who looked like that, who was popular. But he was going to do it, do it come hell or high water. He wondered if he should do it there in the theater, but his arms lay straitjacketed at his sides. He couldn’t be sure what she thought of him anymore. Maybe if he were back behind the desk.

There was a clock ticking affectedly throughout the movie and it seemed to be ticking down for him:
when time is up, you must act
. He paid no attention to the plot, which had something to do with the murder of a young novelist, and watched the entire movie with boredom and anxiety as if he were watching instead a long spilling of sand between the bulbs of an hourglass. Dennis Quaid’s character said that the unpublished manuscript was the best book he’d ever read. Funny to call a manuscript a book. The credits rolled up the huge screen as the final particles of time rolled down the hourglass neck. Leo’s heart again became a fluttery bird trapped inside his ribs.

They drove in silence up Cedar Road in the Plymouth Horizon. He didn’t even turn on the radio. He listened to the sound of the heat blowing through the vent and the car engine groaning over the cold street. When they finally arrived at her parents’ house, they sat for a minute parked in the drive under an elm tree. The birdwings inside him were flapping so wildly he thought she could see the blood fountaining up his neck. All he could think of was Dutch elm disease and whether it was an elm and whether it would die. Did he even say anything? Did he say “Good night” or “I had a nice time” or “Thank you”? Certainly he had not complimented her on how she looked. But he leaned forward to kiss her and she didn’t stop him. Her lips were soft and wet and cool. His lips were compressed and firm like the tip of a pool cue. She began to get out of the car, backing away quickly as if from a spill that would ruin her clothes. “Wait,” he said. “Let’s try that again.” She let him, but he was just as stiff the second time, and the light had by then gone out of her eyes. She ran away from the elm tree and went into the house and it was true that after that she would not look over at him anymore in biology class. The sight of him did not cause pleasure to her mind anymore.

He was so ashamed that he drove home with his head hanging below the steering wheel. He had to look up over the dashboard occasionally to make sure he didn’t drive into a telephone pole. The words “Let’s try that again” played over and over in his mind. This noise in his head really would kill him someday.

AS THE CANDLES
were burning down on the dining room table, and with them the last hours of 1988, Leo watched the cars rolling through the darkness of Shaker Boulevard in front of the house and thought that nothing good would happen in the world in 1989. What good could arise in the free world when its leader was George Bush, the man without a plan? What good could arise on a cold, black New Year’s Eve without a female heartbeat anywhere in sight or hearing? At the family party there would be his mother and father, his aunts, uncles, and younger male cousins, his grandmother and two great-aunts, the one who’d never married and the other who made blintzes and never talked. This year the blintzes aunt’s husband had wasted from cancer and died, so Leo’s great-uncle, who never talked even when he was alive, would be more silent than ever, and furthermore not there. Then Leo’s friends would be getting drunk at Singer’s house and watching the entire miniseries
V: The Final Battle,
about man-eating reptilian aliens. Jesus Christ.

His friend Singer was a lothario who had sex with all the girls in the theater department. Singer was Adam this year in the winter production of
The Apple Tree
and Leo knew for a fact that Singer and Eve had already tasted of the tree of knowledge together. It was nothing to Singer to spend an evening laughing at, or even seriously enjoying,
V: The Final Battle
with a bunch of fucking nerds.

Mack brought a huge steaming pile of brisket and mashed potatoes to the table. No matter how much Mack ate, he seemed to weigh forty-five pounds.

“Hey. What are you doing later on, man?” Leo said.

Mack paused with his fork in front of his mouth. “Do you mind if I eat something? I just sat down.”

“Uh, sure.”

Mack went on chewing, then shook his head slowly back and forth as he loaded up another bite.

“What, is it a matter of national security or something?” Leo said. “I just—”

“Going out with friends,” Mack said.

“Yeah, where?”

“It’s really none of your business.”

“What? It’s none of my business?” Another of Mack’s mind-fucks. Leo felt vaguely like crying. “Wait. What are you talking about? Because I’m just talking about what you’re doing later tonight, because my plans suck.”

“I feel like you’re trying to make it out like you’re being normal,” Mack said, practically holding his breath to keep the nerves and the anger out of his voice. “You’re making it out like that, but you have an agenda.”

“It’s not an
agenda,
Mack, I’m just—whatever.”

After dinner, Leo’s mom asked him to get the candles from the “bar,” the weird closetlike room with a sink in it and wood shutters that unfolded into the den on brass hinges. WASPs had built it before Philip bought the house. Leo went inside the bar and opened the low cabinet and found a funny little candle in a jar. It had a blue-and-white label with two small Jewish stars on it next to the bar code and tiny Hebrew letters and it said in English
MEMORIAL CANDLE
and
DISTRIBUTED BY GENERAL WAX CO.
It was a
Yahrzeit
candle, a Jewish candle for the dead. He brought it out into the hall.

“Hey, Mom,” Leo said. “How come we didn’t light this, this year?”

Leo’s mother stopped in the hall with an armful of wrapped presents. “I was going to light it, but I actually didn’t want to make you think about it if you didn’t want to.”

“Oh.”

“Did you want to light it? Because we can light it right now. Come on, we’ll light it right now.”

“No, that’s okay.”

“Are you sure? I just want to do whatever works for you, honey. Are you okay? I just decided, you know, I think about him whether I light a candle or not.”

“Yeah, I’m okay.”

“Do you need to talk?” The presents were slipping out of his mom’s arms. She lifted one leg up to keep them from falling.

“Here, let me help you,” Leo said. He took one of the presents, and the others fell on the floor. He and his mother bent down to pick them up.

“Whose is this one?” Leo said. “It feels like a book.”

“That’s for you.”

“Oh, good, I’m excited to see what it is.”

“You know, I’ve been thinking that this is a hard time of year for us,” Laura said. Her eyes seemed suddenly to fill up with the sight of her son and nothing and no one else. The presents lay littered on the floor around her. “There’s truth to the idea of an anniversary response.”

Philip came into the hall holding a big tarnished silver menorah by its neck like a strangled goose and he leaned through the double doors into the den and gave a loud, perfunctory roundup call: “Okay, boys, it’s-time-for-candles-and-presents! Turn-off-the-TV!” He turned and saw Leo and his mother there, and said somewhat absently in the same perfunctory singsong, “Come on! Let’s go! Everybody in!” Then he said in the lower register of his regular speaking voice, “Laurie, do you know where the candles are?”

One might have concluded that he didn’t perceive the electromagnetic intensity between mother and son. But Leo knew that he had perceived it, and also that he didn’t like it. Otherwise, he would have asked for the candles in a happier way and called Laura “my dear.” He didn’t like it if Leo made his mother upset, an attitude Leo couldn’t understand very well because he wasn’t married and didn’t know what a pain in the ass it is to have an upset wife.

They celebrated Chanukah on New Year’s Eve. Between the ages of six and twelve, the holiday had not been about time or stalagmites of old purple wax at the base of the tarnished menorah. But it was about time now, as it had been in the beginning for Judah Maccabee.

The gift from his mom and dad was a copy of Locke’s
Second Treatise of
Government
.

“You must be the only sixteen-year-old in America who asked for John Locke for Chanukah!” Philip said. He patted Leo’s back.

Maybe his dad wasn’t mad at him.

Three more hours till midnight. He went to get water.

Uncle Ollie was on the phone in the kitchen.

“Dr. Greenblatt,” he said. “I received a page.” Uncle Ollie pretended to pant and rolled his eyes. He’d been sitting in the living room for a long time with the great-aunts. “Is it midnight yet, boy?” he whispered, and flickered one of his eyelids like a lizard. “Can we turn the clocks forward?” Then he picked up a pad of paper, turned to the stainless steel countertop, and identified himself again in the uninflected, bureaucratic manner of doctors answering pages, giving rude treatment to the cherished Greenblatt name.

Leo sat in the breakfast room, where the white clover patterns on the wallpaper swam in your eyes, and listened to his uncle. He wondered what the words meant—“creatinine,” “albumin,” “sodium.” Albumen was in an egg. Sodium was in a salt shaker. Creatinine sounded like an epoch you’d see on a chart at the natural history museum.
Long before the Pleistocene was the Creatinine: when the cells got together in the primordial piss
.

His mom came in.

“Mack doesn’t care about me,” he said, though he knew it was a craven tactic to pull his mother into it.

“That’s not true,” she said.

“It is.”

“Why are you saying that? He worships you.”

Leo laughed seriously.

Laura went out and came back to the breakfast room with Mack, who was in his winter jacket, a ski jacket with the Peek’n Peak tag still attached to the zipper.

“He thinks you don’t love him,” she said to Mack.

Mack said nothing.

“Well? Do you love your brother?” she said.

His face said it all. Cold air was flowing into the kitchen through the garage.

When Mack had gone, Laura lit the
Yahrzeit
candle and said she could never remember the mourner’s kaddish. She said that anytime they went into a synagogue.

Why should anyone remember it? The mourner’s kaddish was a sick and twisted thing, written no doubt by some Dark Ages rabbi who knew that disaster and grief debilitated faith in the fairy tale of a personal God. And so you were asked in your moment of grief to think not of your own feelings or of your loved one’s, but of the feelings of the medieval rabbis, who were very worried, the poor things. For their sakes you were asked to attest to what you knew to be false.

The Mercator map was rolled down like a window shade. Again total silence. Snowflakes hurried in every direction outside the window. The sky was gray.

Michelle sat at a desk with illegible graffiti on it in green Magic Marker. He sat at one that said
LIFE SUCKS
in pencil.

Josh Helpern was waiting for her outside the classroom, talking to some other girls.

“How are you?” Leo asked with incredible insouciance, his arm draped casually over the back of the chair.

“I’m okay, I guess.”

“You guess? Everything all right?”

 She said her parents were getting divorced. “I don’t know why I told you that,” she said. “Sorry.”

“Divorce,” he said. “Sorry. That sucks.” Plagiarizing desk graffiti. Snow swirled past the window. The American flag snapped, the rope jerked, and something metal lightly clinked on something else metal and clink-clinked, and the cracked wooden flagpole rumbled in its holster.

“What are you doing for this project?” she said.

“I’m doing something on the cycle of mistrust between England and Spain as an example of an arms race. It’s really no different from what’s going on now with the Russians.”

She said nothing.

“You seem like you’re mighty impressed with my idea: the Cycle of Mistrust.”

She watched him: he supposed she thought he was a rampaging nerd.

“I sound like a dork, huh?”

“Noooo,” she said, and he couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not.

Well, they didn’t get it, his peers.
You are walking on thin ice. Reality is not nice. Everything bad can happen and does, all the time
. He wrote it down.

But he had his books and his poetry to protect him. He was a rock. He was an island. And a rock felt no pain. And an island never cried. He could be alone forever, even with his Deprivations. He could persist in the wasteland by an exercise of indissoluble will, like Captain Change. And he didn’t have to feel ashamed. It wasn’t his fault he was cracked. He would fix the crack with a great career. He would go to Harvard or Yale because he was
that
good. He was a rock, he was an island that felt no pain and got all As and would be a writer-doctor like Anton Chekhov or a doctor-writer like Sigmund Freud (not Michael Crichton, Dr. Spock, or even Oliver Sacks).