Into the Great Wide Open (12 page)

There was a crazy preacher on the radio, and Kenny turned it up. The Reliant was AM only, the last car in America like that. “The Persian Gulf is
well known
to be a land run by spirits and sorcerers,” the preacher said. Kenny couldn’t follow the overall drift. “The
Indians
know about it,” the preacher said. “They call it
ghost disease
.”

“Say it, brother,” Kenny said.

“The soldiers who have come back from
Viet Nam
,” the preacher said. “The soldiers who have come back from
Korea
, and
Cambodia
, and
Ethiopia
.”

Kenny tried to think of when we had soldiers in Ethiopia, failed. Although this was the black-helicopter station, the United Nations World Government broadcast—maybe it was just another State Department conspiracy. Maybe the Club of Rome was up to tricks again, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Elders of Zion.

“
Sexual intercourse
is the medium by which this evil seed is spread from man to woman,” the preacher said. “
Sexual intercourse
is the only way this can happen. We need an immediate crusade against
sexual intercourse
outside of wedlock, and the temptations of the body that we see on television and elsewhere …” Kenny switched the radio off, suddenly tired of the noise, plus he was 100 percent in favor of sexual intercourse at that moment and didn’t want to hear it maligned. But spirit disease seemed like a possibility, a decent explanation for all that was wrong. A revolution of souls was what they needed.

Revolution of souls: take your old soul out and make it new, scour it clean, get rid of the old filth of days piled on days. So what if your new soul dressed in women’s clothing? The old way was a disease, American sickness, guns and pies and Budweiser. No men and no women after the revolution of souls, no rich and no poor. The revolution of souls begins in bed and never leaves!

Meanwhile he could see the American disease working as he came down out of the suburbs and into the District, the winos with their paper cups, the junkies hawking flowers at the subway entrances, the shoppers in their bright cars. Kenny had a secret in his pants. He was alive: they were dead; they had the disease. He drove past the walkie-talkie that lived on the avenue; quiet today, he rested between garbage bags full of aluminum cans, his private fortune. Usually he was walking up and down the sidewalk, shouting, Motherfucker! Motherfucker! If I
ever
catch you fucking with my shit!

Kenny looked down on all of them from miles above, watching the wheel turning, smiling like a cherub in the corner of a bad French painting. A private joke between himself and the world. I’ve got a secret, Kenny thought. Ten feet tall and bulletproof. The revolution of souls had started and he was volunteering, him and Junie, he would have turned back then but her brother was already home, her father on the way. Normal life had returned. The supermarket parking lots were full of cars, the gas stations and strip malls and Hardee’s. Sometimes the sound of shattering glass as the ice broke loose and shattered on the pavement; utility crews were still working the roadsides, patching up the fallen lines. The regular, waking life of the world, Kenny thought. He felt an unexpected tenderness toward it, the massive project of love and pretending. He had seen something the night before in the mess of tears and laughter and come and blood: some dirty nest of feelings, the thing that ran the world, that kept it going. He knew the name, even if she wouldn’t let him use it. I am in love, he said to himself, practicing his new language. I love. I
am beloved. The wheel was driving Kenny along, but now he didn’t mind it. He found himself in favor of attachment, in favor of suffering, in favor of samsara. I’ll take my chances, Kenny thought. After the revolution, suffering would be abolished.

Not even the sight of the row of stained yellow-brick apartments brought him down again. Home, he thought; and wondered if his father had gone to work. It didn’t take much of an excuse to keep him home. On the other hand, he might not notice a simple thing like an ice storm. He parked in back, the wooden staircases climbing the houses in peeling shades of brown. A momentary darkness overcame him, a little cloud between Kenny and the sun: was it possible that he was attracted to her because of that veneer of money, good teeth and good taste? Yes, it was possible. He remembered her skating, gliding along in black, an elegant line against the gray sky. Her cut leg. Was it possible that he wanted her because he saw she was weak, wounded, because he thought he could sort her out from the crowd? This was a harder one but he finally had to answer yes, it was possible. If she was perfect, undamaged, she might be out of his reach.

But she wasn’t. He had touched her. He could touch her again anytime he wanted, as far as he knew. A beautiful thing to know.

The television was going when he went inside, which was unexpected. His father didn’t usually leave it on when he left the house; didn’t usually leave the house if he was drunk enough to forget. A broken clock that hadn’t stopped: he ran in patterns, not the same as the rest of the world but you could figure it out after a while.

Another small surprise when he went out onto the front porch to get the mail and found the morning paper there, bundled tight in its rubber band, a little turd of information, Kenny thought. This was wrong. His father loved the
Washington Post
, an ongoing thirty-year argument like a bickering marriage. He remembered the telephone, unanswered the night before. He opened the paper and read the headline:
CITY PARALYZED BY ICE
.

A faint copper taste rose in his mouth. Kenny was afraid. He
moved gingerly through the rooms of the apartment, quiet, taking note of the evidence: a melted highball on the coffee table, an empty plate at the kitchen table, Kenny couldn’t tell which meal.

Get out of here
, he thought. Go back to Junie. She would take him in, turn him over to her mother’s care.

He found his father in the upstairs bathroom, lying next to the tub in a pool of puke and blood. At first Kenny didn’t recognize the unfamiliar shape, the maroon lump of the bathrobe against the white- and flesh-colored tiles, and then he saw his father’s outstretched leg and the yellow stump of his foot and saw that he was not moving. Kenny wedged himself into the bathroom, against the sink, afraid to touch. What? The
fact
of the body, alive or not. This time the body got to say what happened next. Also there was a feeling of being filled up, welling over with feeling to where he didn’t want to feel anything again. The blood came from a cut on the scalp but it had stopped. He had been lying there awhile. His face was peaceful, like he was sleeping. Kenny bent toward him, nervously touched the skin of his arm and felt the warm flesh; then saw a quick fluttering in his father’s chest, saw that he was breathing and felt a quick guilty disappointment. Alive. He didn’t wish any harm onto his father, that wasn’t it. These funhouse turns, the way Kenny could never tell what was going to happen next. He couldn’t feel any single thing, couldn’t sort a line out of the tangle of feelings. It was too much. He went into the bedroom and dialed 911, counting the rings. They answered in seven.

“What is the nature of your emergency?” she asked.

“I need an ambulance,” Kenny said.

“One moment,” she said; a series of clicks while she transferred him and then a man’s voice. Kenny gave his address, a rough description, was instructed not to move or touch his father in case of a head injury. In his imagination, his father’s flesh was cold, the temperature of dirt, deep underground. He could feel the cold still on his hands, though he knew he was making it up.

He hung up the phone and didn’t know what to do with his
hands, where to stand, where to wait. He went downstairs and then he came upstairs again.

He went back into the bathroom, where his father was folded, crumpled. His father wore his good maroon wool bathrobe, striped pajamas, slippers. He had been sitting on the toilet seat with the lid down. When his stomach was acting up—whatever he meant by that, anything from indigestion to cancer—Kenny’s father would sit there on the toilet, waiting, Kenny didn’t know for what. You and Elvis, Kenny thought. You’re the King.

He went downstairs and found a pack of his father’s cigarettes open on the coffee table, Merits. Kenny lit one: American tobacco, it tasted sour and strange in his mouth after the Dutch tobacco he usually smoked. Only then did he remember Junie. His heart started in his chest, as if he had betrayed her.

Junie. He paced up and down the living room, then back upstairs to stand outside the bathroom. He could see his father’s blue-veined foot, callous and swollen, contorted as an old tree root. Parts of our bodies become unlovable as we get older. Kenny saw what he was bound to become, lying on the bathroom floor, drunk, passed out, and thought of the lies he had brought to Junie. This is me, he thought. This is what you need to know about me.
Escape:
he was fine for a night, for a walk in the park, but in the long run Kenny wasn’t going anywhere. The good intentions and fancy houses couldn’t help him.
Self-pity
. The ambulance was later and later. Maybe his father was dying. He knelt on the bathroom floor, touching his father’s wrist and feeling the blood coursing through; though he couldn’t tell whether it was his own pulse or his father’s he was feeling. The strange gray color of his father’s face, blue lips. I want this to be over, he thought.

He went into the bedroom overlooking the street and saw nothing of the ambulance. My father is dying, goddamn it! But it was all a performance, there was no real passion. Stubbed out the cigarette in
the ashtray on the bedside table. His father’s books: economics, policy, military history. This last was his hobby, second-guessing famous generals. If only Dad had been at Tobruk, at Stalingrad, at Guadalcanal and Waterloo … He looked down, and saw that he had stained the knee of Junie’s borrowed jeans with his father’s blood when he knelt on the bathroom floor.

The surgical waiting room at Washington General was packed, it stank of bodies and fast food, the television blared. The family of the boy who was knifed was in the corner eating fried chicken from Church’s out of a big bucket. Nobody said anything, everybody looked up scared when a doctor or a nurse came into the room; the studied blankness of their faces, professional politeness. “Mrs. Grosvenor? Thank you. Could you come with me, please?”

Kenny’s father had suffered a stroke. They were cutting open his head to relieve the pressure. Kenny was searching for the zero, the place where he didn’t have to be anywhere at all, didn’t have to think or move. His eyes rested on the television. He finally figured out who Pat Sajak was, and Vanna White. He knew the names, mostly as the punch lines for jokes, but he had never seen them before. Hurray for me, Kenny thought. I’m a good American after all. His thoughts weren’t doing him any good at all.

His father might die, the doctor said. Most likely he wouldn’t. The question of recovery was left hanging; something difficult. Cross that bridge when we come to it. Takes two to tango. A stitch in time saves nine. Not so much that he was tired but he couldn’t keep anything straight, it was like dawn on a Greyhound bus once, coming back from New York, the gas flares and factories of New Jersey passing by in the gray light.

Kenny thought: I need to find something to think about my father.

Kenny thought: I will find a way to praise him. Religion of the body. He needs my faith in order to be healed. Kenny cast his mind back.

He has always been kind, whenever he could spare the attention. Besides, it wasn’t strictly true. That wouldn’t work.

He was good at his job, presumably. Kenny had no way of knowing. In this article in
Parade
magazine Kenny read once, this was listed as one of the real strengths of the career alcoholic—the ability to hold on to a job no matter what.

He had stuck with his mother for longer than anyone else could have stood it, which was true. But he had given up eventually. Anyone would have; but he
did
.

Something cold at the middle of this, like a wet stone: the wreckage, the wedding pictures of his parents, 1961. His father went to Columbia, his mother to Sarah Lawrence. Her family had money, spent by now on hospitals, on quacks and cures. The boy and girl on the wedding cake, his father in a black tuxedo, his mother in curls and lace and flourishes. This happened to everybody: they got married, they got divorced, they had the pictures to remember it by. Kenny felt a tug toward the big fake house in the suburbs, as if he belonged there.

He hadn’t eaten for hours, not since breakfast, though that was almost noon. He was about to give up, head for the bank of vending machines in the basement and improvise a dinner, when he remembered the one good thing: the evening when the Clarks came to his house, to ask if they could take Ray with them to Australia. Their son was Ray’s best friend, Ray was sleeping over there more and more anyway. They were planning to go by sailboat—take six or eight months from San Diego and gypsy down through the South Pacific, Fiji, Tonga, Bora Bora.

This was over dinner, Kenny had made spaghetti, Ray sat with his head bowed while the Clarks outlined their lighthearted plans to
his father. Waiting for the insult, the threat; his father was drinking red wine, which was never good, it always went to his face. But that night he was pale, off inside somewhere, surfacing once every few minutes to nod at the Clarks as if he was listening. They made their pitch and then there was a pause. Nothing was said about alcohol, about breakdowns, abdications; it was all happy, all positive. Kenny and Ray knew what was going to happen next. It took their father minutes, it felt like, to drag himself up to the surface again.

“Well,” he said, and put his hands down flat on the table in front of him. He looked at them, like his hands would tell him something. “I guess this sounds attractive to you. Does it, Ray?”

“I guess,” Ray said.

“You’d better do more than guess,” his father said. “This is halfway around the world. Do you want to go or not?”