Into the Great Wide Open (24 page)

Beware! Beware! The alarms were ringing loudly in Kenny’s head. Something was coming, something bad.

“All that drinking,” his father said. “I’ve been trying to think about it.”

“What?” Kenny asked.

“They talk about self-medication, I’ve been reading about it—where you try to make something better with drugs or alcohol. You know, I think the real problem is
depression
. I think it’s wrong to just focus on the drinking part by itself. It’s just a symptom, in my case. You know, it’s a sickness, Kenny.”

“I know that.”

“It’s not something that you choose to do. It’s not like ordinary sadness. It’s a disease.”

Not just that he had to support his father’s life; but that he had to support his father’s
version
of his father’s life. Kenny had to admire the nerve. There is only one King, he thought, and Elvis is his prophet.

“I guess it’s complicated,” Kenny said, hoping to end this.

“I know it’s been hard for you,” his father said, wiping away months of work with a sentence, a simple breath. “I appreciate everything that you’ve done, standing by me. It seems like we’re going to have to make a choice here, especially with Ray coming back. I mean,
I don’t know if I can use the word
family
. I don’t know if I’ve got a right.”

“It’s OK,” Kenny said.

“We just have to hang together,” his father said. “We have to take care of each other.”

A little late to start now
. Kenny didn’t say it. He saw himself bound to the hospital bed with thousands, tens of thousands of tiny invisible threads, like Gulliver. On the other hand, he didn’t have anywhere else to go, not in particular. He had not been back to high school since the day he followed Mrs. Connolly out; he didn’t have a job, or any plans, or even any particularly vivid dreams. There was a kind of guilty pleasure in drifting, in not-knowing. He had gotten to the ending point somehow, painted himself all the way into the corner, and now he was waiting for things to start again. Or not: he thought of male nurses, lives unstarted. Then there was Junie, the one good thing. Sometimes he thought she would rescue him; but just then, it felt like she was already gone.

“Would you do me a favor?” his father asked.

“Sure, I guess.”

“Would you run up to the avenue and get me a pack of cigarettes? There’s money in the drawer of the hall table.”

“You’re not supposed to,” Kenny said.

“I’m not going to die from it. I mean, look at me.”

He held his big weak hands toward Kenny again, demonstrating his weakness, his wreckage; and again the alarms went off, a trick! Beware! The green shoot down deep inside his father, like the blade of grass, the blind dark root that breaks upward through the sidewalk, crumbling it. It was masquerading as weakness. Something Kenny didn’t have: the
will
.

“What will Dr. Nguyen say?”

“That little zip? He won’t say anything, not unless you tell him. Come on, Kenny, be a good guy.”

“I don’t think so,” Kenny said.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t want to see you back in the hospital again. You’re doing all right. Why don’t you leave it alone?”

“I know you smoke up there. I can smell it.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Damn it, Kenny, one goddamn pack of cigarettes. It’s not going to kill me and it’s not going to kill you.”

“I don’t think so,” Kenny said.

“Why don’t you get the hell out, then?” his father said, in the low solid voice he used when he meant business. “If you don’t want to pitch in around here,” he said, “I’m sure there’s somewhere you can go.”

Pure Kabuki, Kenny thought, the empty sleeve, the empty gesture. He didn’t want to follow his father but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. “Who’s going to wipe your ass if I’m gone?” he asked.

“You can hire people for that. The Blue Cross will pay for it. You hire them and they do what you ask them to and they don’t give you a lot of crap about it.”

“Go ahead,” Kenny said; full teenage now, blabbermouth. “See if you can find somebody who cares what happens to you. See if you can hire somebody to take care of that.”

A mistake, he knew it as he said it, and in the lull before his father’s reply he heard the first fat drops of a spring rain falling down outside the open kitchen window. He wished for a cigarette, an airplane, a magnetohydroscope to whirl him away from here, down into the submarine world, the blue light, anywhere.

“I’m surprised to hear you say that,” his father said softly; and just then the doorbell rang. Escape! He ran to answer it.

Junie stood in the entry light. He saw right away that something was wrong. Her face was blotched with tears; her hair was wet, although it wasn’t raining hard, was barely raining at all.

“Can I come in?” she said.

“Of course you can,” he said, and held the door open for her, and prayed that his father wouldn’t fuck this up. He sent the message: now is not the time, now is not the time, now is not the time.

Not that it mattered, the house was bad enough, without any extra ugliness: the hospital bed unmade in the living room, the bedpan in plain sight, the TV going with the sound off. His father wheeled himself in from the kitchen in his striped pajamas and his maroon wool robe, the good one, with the cigarette burns in it. The remains of their dinner were visible on the table behind him; the smell of hamburger grease hung in the air, and the smell of his father’s body.

“This is June,” he said to his father. “My father,” he said to her.

“Very good to meet you, June,” his father said, pumping her hand gravely. She struggled to understand his words but his face was reassuring—his good-father act, distinguished gentleman, his at-home-in-the-world look. Sometimes it was easy to see how he managed to hold on to his job so long.

“You’re a friend of Ken’s from school?” his father asked her; and she cast a sideways look at Kenny, who translated for her.

“A friend of mine from school,” he said.

“More or less,” she told his father.

I am not ashamed of you
—he sent the thought in her direction, hoping she could hear it. I didn’t tell him about you because I didn’t want him to poison it (knowing at the same time that he
had
betrayed her, he
had
denied her).

“We’re a little better friends than that,” Kenny said.

“She’s beautiful,” his father said; as if she had left the room somehow. “I don’t know why you didn’t bring her earlier. He’s secretive, don’t you think?”

“What’s he saying?” Junie asked.

His father went on talking, oblivious: “He had a little box underneath
his bed, a cigar box. Heaven help you if you opened it. But I mean, it didn’t have a lock or even a latch that worked right. I was in there one day, I don’t know what I was looking for but I picked it up and it fell open and you know what fell out? A few seashells and a shark’s tooth, that was all. That was his big secret.”

“I don’t think she can understand you,” Kenny said; and it was true, she was listening with the blank politeness of the foreigner who has not been able to get it across,
no hablo inglés …

“Come on,” he said, taking Junie’s hand.

“Where are you taking her?” his father asked.

“Upstairs, where we can talk. Is that all right?”

He pretended to ask his father; really he was asking Junie. She looked from one face to the other, panicky. I told you it was bad, he thought. Told you, you wouldn’t like it.

“Let’s go,” Kenny said.

“Don’t forget those cigarettes,” his father said. “You were going to go and get me cigarettes, remember?”

“We’re going
upstairs
,” Kenny said, and led her away. The yellowing wallpaper, the open bathroom door. Kenny never saw the point of living like others could see you but now he did: she took it all in, the piles of decaying laundry, the soapstain (permanent) on the bathroom sink.

His room was worse: the unmade bed, the cigarette butts stubbed out in an old beer can by the window; and then the undiscarded refuse of his childhood, not so many years ago, the basketball posters and the Farrah Fawcett picture and the terrarium where the lizard lived that Boy had given him. Junie lived like a little adult, with prints of real art on the walls, folk fabrics, good furniture. Her clothes were folded neatly into their drawers, a room he knew as well as his own, a world he thought he belonged in for a minute.

“This is picturesque,” she said; trying to be brave.

“But squalid,” he said, trying to play along.

Junie shrugged; she couldn’t disagree; then Kenny saw that it
was worse than he thought, and he put his arm around her and lowered her to the bed while she began to weep. Don’t say anything, he thought. Don’t say
anything
. Just hold on here, and we’ll be fine. He shut off the bedside light and they sat in the dark, the angle of light coming out of the hall, and the cars of the wedding party casting their headlights through the window, making moving patterns along the walls. Let us be children together, Kenny thought. Let somebody else take care of us. Then her tears were gone, and she caught her breath again, and it was time for Kenny to know.

“I need to tell you something,” Junie said. “I just found out today.”

There’s the official version: the history of a year in which the events are set out, more or less in order, in which people are driving the same cars from scene to scene, in which they wear the clothes appropriate to their age and station.

Then there’s the rest of it, intangible, fleeting. The feeling was there for as long as it took to feel it and then it was gone, changed into something else: complex as a perfume, orchestral music, grace notes and bottom notes.
Love
, for instance: he always had some feeling for her that could be called by that name, maybe still, maybe ten years later, maybe always (as he had promised her once, the only time she would listen). But somewhere it shifted, from
I can’t wait to see you
to
Baby please don’t go
to
Please take your clothes off
to
When will I see you again?
Not that he stopped feeling any one of these things: Kenny was pure and impure all at once, hopeful, regretful, blind, and psychic. The exact feeling at any moment was beyond any one word, complex and shifting, changing itself into something else and gone before it could be defined.

Something was left, though, some dry powdery residue of feeling like pine pollen.
Evanescence:
like the faces in a dream. Somewhere Kenny is still feeling every moment of this, not even memory
but still feeling it. A sight of spring leaves, a turn of the wrist can open him back up, and suddenly he is feeling it again in all its confusions. Yesterday it was a woman in a department store—he had gone in to buy socks—who was wearing the perfume that Junie’s mother used to wear. He didn’t recognize the logical connection until later; it was the perfume itself, the smell that brought the feeling back over him. He stood in the Men’s Furnishings section, burning with love and fear, the beginnings of tears in his eyes. Ridiculous, he knew it. It didn’t stop.

“You think biology is going to be abolished, just for you,” Mrs. Williamson said. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t get angry.”

Kenny didn’t see why not. They were in the lair, Mrs. Williamson behind the desk, Kenny in the punishment seat out front, Junie looking pale by the window.

“I don’t know,” he said, for the hundredth time that day.

“What are you going to do?” Mrs. Williamson asked her daughter, for the hundredth time that day.

“I don’t know,” Junie said.

“It’s your life,” her mother said. “That’s what I want you to remember: it’s your own life and it’s worth something. It’s not something you can just throw away lightly.”

“I’m not doing any of this
lightly
,” Junie said.

They ran out of words again—each of them apart, magnetized in opposite poles, Junie as distant as any of them. Alone, the broken nun with her closecropped hair, a wooden slat chair, a stone wall, medieval light. The witch, he thought, brought in for burning. The witch’s betrayer, the inquisitor. He watched her body, as if the life inside her would suddenly reveal itself, a little fetal light; but her body was outwardly unchanged. Kenny wanted to go to her, to touch her; but he knew it was forbidden. Things had been broken. The beautiful curve of her face in the dim light.

Junie’s mother caught him. “That’s another thing,” she said. “I thought I could trust you. You’re not stupid, either of you. I could pinch myself.”

There was no apparent reply to this, either. Nothing presented itself. Kenny understood that he was there to take his punishment and he would just as soon get it over with; because beyond that was a world of complication that he had barely glimpsed. A marriage, Kenny thought. A catastrophe. He couldn’t tell.

“I know you don’t want to hear this,” Junie said. She was speaking straight to her mother, Kenny had gone. “This thing is alive inside of me, I can feel it. Do you understand?”

“I know there are a lot of difficult feelings,” Mrs. Williamson said; a mistake, to show her professional side to Junie.

“This isn’t
a feeling
,” Junie said. “This is a baby and it’s alive inside me. You talk like I was making this up or something.”

“I wish you were,” Mrs. Williamson said. “A
baby!
Jesus. You talk like it was a puppy. I know I sound unsympathetic.”

“Well, yes, you do.”

“But somebody’s got to do the thinking for you. You can do all the feeling you want, if you’ll let me do the thinking, all right?”

“No thank you,” Junie said. “I’ll figure this out.”

“How do you think you got here?” Mrs. Williamson asked.

They weren’t allowed to see each other in private; they could talk on the phone; they could see each other with a third party; Junie needed to rest, and think; Kenny was a disappointment.

He went to Boy’s house afterward, in the hopes of getting high. He drove through the end of an afternoon, the crowded cars invisible, disappearing in the half-light. You could put your hand through it. And none of them, not one of them, knew what was inside Kenny: none of them suspected the size of his feelings, the tragedy. In a Reliant, stuck in traffic.