The Lost Boys Symphony (11 page)

“I don’t care how hard it is. I want you to take me back.”

“And if we follow the course of these new memories, I’ll oblige you. From this room we’ll walk to a nearby footbridge that crosses the Esopus. I’ll call forth the music, and when I awake you’ll be there next to me. That in itself is rather incredible. I don’t quite know how it’s possible to take you with me, but my new memory tells me that it is. When you get home you’ll call your doctor and pack your bags for Lung-Ta. For a while, you’ll feel good. Things will get better between you and Val, but it won’t last.”

“It will,” said Henry. “I’ll do anything. I’ll get them back.”

“You won’t.”

“I will.”

“I’m sorry, Henry, but this house, your time with me, this moment right now? This is real. There will be no question in your mind. You’ll try to forget your certainty, or at least keep it hidden, but it will be much harder than you think. A few years from now the music will return and you won’t be able to escape it. The rest will play out much as before.”

“So you failed.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“You still lost Val. You still lost Annie.”

“There are other considerations.”

“Like what?”

“A silver lining—”

“To what? Total fucking desolation? The loss of the only people that love you?”

80 huffed in frustration. “I know it doesn’t seem—”

“No,” said Henry. “There is no bright side.”

“Fine. Not for you. Not right now. But before I came to get you I didn’t learn to control this until I was in my seventies. After this morning, after this meeting, you’ll do it earlier. A decade earlier.”

“That doesn’t really speak to my concern, does it?”

“Not directly, no, but you’re missing the point. I agree. There’s no bright side, not really and not yet. Your future, my past—it’s mediocre at best. But we can change that.”

Henry hated being sold to. His instinct was to fight back, but it seemed futile. 80 knew everything about him. If the old man wanted to convince him of something, was it even possible for him to resist? There was something else, too. Besides the fear, the anger and sadness, Henry knew that he was a little excited, too. He resented 80’s manipulations but he couldn’t deny that they were in an extraordinary position. The great mystery he’d carried with him his entire life—this was as close to a solution as he was ever likely to get. Could he really throw that away?  

“I can tell you all you want to know about your future,” said 80, “but you’ll never fully understand it until you live it for yourself. I
have
lived it. I’m telling you that we can learn from it. The situation I’m in today, having lost Val, my own daughter like a ghost to me—that’s not the life I was meant to live. We can have more.”

Henry was on the edge, but something kept him from jumping into the unprecedented unknown. He wet his lips. “Where does it end?”

“That question,” said 80. He shifted in his seat, leaned in to Henry. “It’s a red herring. In my new life I’ve been thinking about it for forty years, and the only conclusion I’ve come to is that it doesn’t mean anything, not really. I admit that we can’t control everything. We’re bound to make mistakes—I already have—and it’s good to be wary. But we
can
control ourselves. It stops precisely when we want it to.”

Henry’s skepticism remained, but 80’s presence weakened his resolve. In forty years, Henry would agree with everything the old man was saying. More than that, he would
be
the old man. To disregard everything 80 said would be absurd.

Henry stood and walked to the bay window by the door. It was dusk. In the distance a mountain peak glowed with the amber light of the setting sun. Henry wished he were up there, alone. “What are you proposing?” he said. He didn’t turn around. He didn’t want to see 80’s face.

“We push back the point of first contact.”

Henry turned from the window and sat down again. He leaned all the way forward in his chair, his eyes focused on the floor.

“These experiences,” said 80, “they have a way of interrupting our illness, correct? At least momentarily. So we intervene at a time when we need that cure. One way or another, that should do us some good.”

Henry thought of his last fugue when, approaching thirty and with a baby on the way, he’d headed out on tour. Things got weird fast. The band’s tour bus evolved into a microcosm of the eternal, epic struggle between good and evil, and his fear of that struggle grew with every passing day. The music echoed everywhere, ever present but just out of reach. Voices threatened him and his unborn baby girl.

Why wouldn’t he try to save himself from all of that?

“It just seems so dangerous,” said Henry.

80 cleared his throat. “It is. It always will be.”

“And what if I say no? You could do this without me.”

“Whatever choice I make from here is yours to make as well.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” said Henry. “You can do whatever you want. I can’t stop you, and if I disagree, what difference does it make? You’ll just console yourself with the knowledge that someday I would have come to agree with you.”

“
A house divided against itself cannot stand
. I know you’ve heard the idiom, but you don’t know where it’s from. I just found out. I was thinking about you, about this meeting, and this saying came to mind, so I looked it up, and like so much else that’s trite and self-evident it comes from the Bible. Mark, the New Testament. The scribes are debating with Jesus—really they’re just jealous of him—and they start saying he’s possessed by the devil. Jesus says, ‘How can I be possessed? I exorcise the devil out of others. How can Satan cast out Satan? A kingdom divided can’t stand. A house divided cannot stand. If I’m Satan,’ he says, ‘how come I’m fighting Satan?’

“Personally, I think whoever wrote the book of Mark was a little confused on this point, or maybe Jesus was, because you’d have to be a piss-poor student of human nature not to see that we fight against ourselves all the time. Countries, houses, individuals—we all struggle with ourselves. It’s not a logical inconsistency, it’s a precondition for humanity. But for us—you and me—we can’t afford that.”

“So you want us to be in agreement?” said Henry. “That’s it?”

“I don’t want it just for the sake of wanting it. It’s absolutely crucial. When I change my past I change yours with it. And if, through our effort, you ever gain the ability to control your own travel through time, you’ll be playing with my life along with yours. If we don’t act together, as the single person that we in fact
are,
who knows what kind of damage we could do to ourselves? At some point there may be many versions of us, each with the ability to do whatever he pleases with his past. Our lives will multiply faster than we can understand them; our passage through time will tangle like a string. That’s when your question of where it all stops becomes much more urgent. We need to be united,” he said. “Completely. And to that end, there are three things you need to know before you decide.”

Henry assented with a blink and a blank stare.

“First, I remember hearing exactly this same argument when I was you. I remember how you feel, and it’s for that reason that I want so badly to change your mind. Take this for whatever you think it’s worth, but I deeply regret that I didn’t listen.”

Henry didn’t know what that was worth. He hadn’t decided yet. It seemed unwise to assume that 80’s advanced age made him right, but it seemed just as unwise to mistrust advice from the man Henry would one day become.

“Second—we’re in a loop. I remember being you and eventually you’ll live this moment as me. You’ll try to convince a forty-one-year-old
you
to take a chance, and you’ll remember being
him
. He too will get older and try to convince another younger
him
. Objectively, this moment will happen only once, but in some real way you and I will repeat it for eternity. It is always happening. So, you’ve said no to this proposition maybe millions of times before. And you’ll say no to it a million times more.”

“Or maybe this is the first time,” said Henry.

“Or maybe it’s the last.” 80 coughed. All the talking seemed to have sapped his energy, and with the fading afternoon light deepening the shadows in his lined face, he looked exhausted.

“If this will only happen once,” said Henry, “then you already know it’s impossible for me to change my mind. It happened the way it happened.”

“In a sense, that’s true,” said 80. “But my life
happened the way it happened
once before. Then, when I met you this morning, I came to inhabit an entirely different life. There was one immutable truth, and now, paradoxically, there is another. I don’t know what will change if we do this, but I’ve just remembered the life we’ll live if we don’t. And soon I’ll die, knowing that forever and ever an endless procession of yous and mes will sit in this living room, debating each other. It’s too depressing to bear.”

80’s talk of deathbed heartache was overwrought, to be sure, but Henry felt less certain than he had before. It wasn’t necessarily that he believed the old man, or that he thought 80 was right. It was that Henry didn’t want to
become
80. He couldn’t stand the thought of ending up so lonely and pathetic, and whatever else the old man might be plotting, he was offering Henry a possible way out.

“We could change things,” said Henry, “and you could end up with regrets much worse than the ones you have now.”

80 bobbed his head, his lips pursed and his brow pleated.

“You thought you could save yourself starting with me,” said Henry, “but nothing much has changed. If I agree and we go find ourselves on that tour bus, why would it be any different?”

“Well. That’s the third thing. When I found you on the street this morning, it was apparently already too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“Val. She had an affair.”

Henry’s first reaction was to laugh, but the nervous chuckle was washed away by a wave of heart-thumping nausea.

“I’m sorry,” said 80. “I thought by reaching you when I did we could stop it from happening, that we could get her back. I would have come earlier, but I needed you to reach the bridge. I needed you to hear the music, to shift again. It was the only way to make sure you’d believe me. It was only after that I realized. We were too late.”

For minutes Henry sat, dumb and paralyzed, seeing nothing through his open eyes as he succumbed to pain and fury. Pain at the betrayal. Fury at himself. He’d never thought it possible that Val would want anyone else, but now it seemed so obvious. Why
wouldn’t
she?

“Who?” asked Henry.

80 didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Henry’s intuition had already kicked in. He didn’t speak Gabe’s name, but when he saw pitying affirmation in 80’s eyes, a jagged moan tore at his throat.

He sat in bleak silence as the room turned dark around him.

Y
ou should come
see me sometime.

Val hadn’t planned to invite Gabe to visit her. The words had just tumbled out of her, a kind of a joke, really. But then he assented, and Val was surprised by the pleasure it gave her.

I can’t wait.

She cringed when she thought of how she’d said that. It felt wrong. Henry was insane. He’d run away from home. That was why Gabe had called her in the first place, and it was sad. So, so sad. And yet she felt happy—giddy, even. It bothered her so much that she had sat alone in her room and picked it all apart until finally she had an explanation that felt right. Her happiness was just an unsettling symptom of her loneliness. A sign of just how much she was craving something that would feel like home. It was proof of her brokenness, and for some reason that made it okay.

Over the week leading up to Gabe’s arrival, she planned and replanned the menu, gave careful consideration to what clothing she might wear. It seemed important that she appear to be doing better than ever. Part of her felt she owed that to Henry—and, by extension, to Gabe—after what she had sacrificed to come to the city. Another, less generous part of her whispered that she wasn’t doing well at all, that her attempt to prove otherwise was a sad ruse indicative of just how deeply confused she was.

It had been six months since the phone call from Henry. Her anger had lingered for a while, surprising her from time to time with a sudden burning contraction beneath her clavicle. But more consistent than her anger was the hope that Henry would call back. Val knew she was owed an apology and expected to receive it. But the hope was stronger than that simple need for closure should have warranted. Val wanted that call to be the beginning of something, not the end. She imagined how the apology would lead to a discussion of all that had gone wrong between them. That conversation would in turn lead to more. She and Henry would reclaim their common ground. Val didn’t give much thought to what would happen after that. She just regretted having lost him entirely, regretted having lost the part of herself that felt at home with him. That, she was sure, could be undone.  

Val had spent the summer in the city. She worked at a Tex-Mex restaurant a few nights a week to pay for the room she sublet in the East Village. The other two occupants of the apartment were twentysomething men who, as far as she could tell, had figured out a way to make a living by smoking pot and watching nature documentaries. By the end of her first week there Val had learned how to slip in and out without attracting attention. That strategy was worth pursuing for how much awkwardness it saved her, but it required her to spend hours alone in the tiny space that passed for her bedroom. It was just big enough for a bed and the wicker dresser that was her closet, vanity, desk, and filing cabinet.

When she was working or out with friends, Val looked forward to her time alone. Then, as soon as she was safely ensconced in her private corner of the world, she yearned to be outside and surrounded by people.

The sound of the air conditioner obscured any noise from the street. It blanketed her thoughts and left her feeling sort of weightless, as if the whole room were her body, the girl inside it just another piece of furniture. It made her feel vulnerable. At first she didn’t know what she was afraid of or what it was that she wanted. The yearning that churned up from deep inside her was vague and shiftless. After a few silent days followed by hectic nights, Val figured that all she really wanted was to connect with someone to whom she mattered. Her mom didn’t count. The girls she hung out with didn’t either. More than once she scrolled all the way through the contacts list on her phone, as if she had simply forgotten who it was that could make her loneliness disappear.

She worked. She went out drinking. She tanned by the Pond at Central Park or on the steps of the fountain at Washington Square. She laughed when things were supposed to be funny and shook her head in sympathy when things were supposed to be sad or unjust. When food was supposedly good she made herself look as though she was savoring it. When the supposedly right kind of guy hit on her, she showed interest. When the supposedly wrong kind of guy talked to her, she feigned indifference and laughed about him with the girls later on.

The summer ended. She moved back into student housing with Kara. They weren’t best friends or anything, but they’d lived well together and there was no one else Val wanted to live with more. By the time she’d finished putting her clothes away and setting up her computer, Val felt almost as if the summer had never happened. It reminded her of the sensation she’d first experienced with Henry—that disconnected familiarity that made her feel as though she’d just awoken to her surroundings for the very first time. As if her memories were incidental to the being that inhabited her body.

How had she gotten to be twenty years old? How was it possible that she was living in New York City?

Then Gabe called. She laughed to herself when she saw that it was him. And despite what he told her about Henry’s sickness and disappearance, when finally she hung up she felt good. She knew that was wrong, but still she prepared for Gabe’s arrival with a juvenile excitement she hadn’t felt in years. It was an excitement laced with fear. Gabe might fill her mind with the unforgettable details of Henry’s decline. Val would listen because she had to, because there was nobody else, but she didn’t think she wanted to know.

Then he arrived, and her fear disappeared. His face was bright with ill-contained joy. He was just as glad to see her as she was to see him, and Val understood then that he was lonely. Perhaps even lonelier than she was.  They never even mentioned Henry’s name. There were a few allusions and euphemisms, but that was all. And Val was fine with that. The hours passed effortlessly, just as they had before. Val felt like the person she remembered being. Gabe wasn’t the answer to the big unspoken question she’d been living with since leaving Rutgers behind. His presence simply made that question irrelevant. She didn’t care what kind of life she was
supposed
to be living when she felt that free and at home with herself.

When it came time for her to get into bed, she invited him. It would have been a bold move had it been a move at all. Val just thought they would both be more comfortable. She couldn’t remember when their whispers had ended and when sleep began, and the next time she opened her eyes it was just barely dawn and she saw Gabe’s face just inches from her own. She very nearly pulled herself close to him. She wanted to place her open palm on the curve of his chest. She imagined lifting her leg and resting her inner thigh against his waist, imagined how easy it would be to hook the back of her heel into the space behind his knee, to touch her forehead to his sleeping lips. And with those thoughts in her mind, she fell back asleep.

It hadn’t felt like a betrayal of Henry until later in the morning, when she came out of the bedroom and stretched in her doorway. Gabe’s face showed signs of the same pained hunger that she’d felt for him in the light of dawn. A familiar thrill ran down the length of her body, then settled into a cold pool of confused regret.

She went to the bathroom, looked at herself in the warped mirror that Kara had found on the street and hung behind the door. She repeated the stretch and appraised herself. Seeing what Gabe had seen, she understood his reaction.

She clipped back her hair and washed her face, inspected her eyes and turned her head to each side, testing all angles for imperfections. Then she gave herself a confused look in the mirror, as if daring her reflection to attempt an explanation. Had she done the wrong thing, she wondered, inviting Gabe into her bed like that? She had abandoned Henry, who hadn’t necessarily deserved it—she might have even driven him crazy. And now that Gabe had come to her for comfort Val had quickly turned it around. She had found comfort in him. There had to be something wrong with that, wrong with her.

She walked out of the bathroom. A few awkward moments later, Gabe skulked out as if he were a stranger. Val closed the door behind him and tried to locate the regret and confusion she thought she should be feeling. But as she scanned her body looking for the telltale signs of her curious depression, all she felt was the residue of excitement. It felt like hope.

In the kitchen, she put away the dishes from dinner. Kara pranced into the room in socked feet, full-length pajama pants, and an oversized T-shirt from Disneyland. She leaned against the refrigerator door and glared at Val expectantly.

“What?” said Val.

“What do you mean,
what?
” said Kara. “I’ve been stuck in my room all night and now you’re not even going to tell me what for?”

“I don’t know why you were stuck in your room all night.”

“Well, I didn’t want to bother you. So, what happened?”

Kara went to church every Sunday—in fact, she would be spending the next hour and a half getting ready to do just that—but she affected a self-realized worldliness. In her own mind, she was just another modern, normal, feminist, independent college student in the big city. Her lack of a poker face belied the fact that she was just as sheltered as she claimed not to be.

Val entertained herself with the thought of saying
Yeah, we totally fucked all night. I forget his name but he said he’s allergic to condoms so I was like, whatever, you know?
But messing with Kara suddenly seemed boring. “I didn’t ask you to stay in your bedroom,” she said. “It’s your apartment too—you should have just come out. It wasn’t a date or anything.”

“Oh really,” said Kara, teasing.

“Really,” said Val, her face ruthlessly straight. The dishes put away, she grabbed the kettle from the stovetop and filled it with water for the French press. “We’re old friends.”

“Friends who sleep in the same bed together?” Kara stepped to the cupboard. She was enamored with Cinnamon Toast Crunch, her only apparent vice. She opened the box and found a bowl. “That doesn’t sound like the kind of friends I have.”

“No, it does not sound like the kind of friends
you
have,” said Val. She hoped that would be enough. When Kara sensed that she was acting uncool she usually shut down and waited for a cue as to what to do next.

“I mean, you know, I’m not like that,” said Kara. She poured her cereal and got the milk from the refrigerator. “But I’ve never known anyone who sleeps in the same bed as a man and doesn’t fool around even a little bit. My friend Tracey got herself into a lot of trouble once, sleeping on the back three seats of a bus—you know, that bench next to the bathroom? This guy Skylar was all over her.”

“Trouble?” said Val, and she laughed. “Did you have to stone her or something?”

“No, not
that
kind of trouble.” Kara sat down at the table and popped a heavily laden spoon in her mouth, then crunched as she spoke. “They didn’t have sex or anything, he just felt her up. It was just, you know—moral trouble. I guess you wouldn’t understand.”

“No, I’m not acquainted with these ‘morals’ you speak of.”

“You know that’s not what I meant.” Kara slurped whole milk through her teeth.

Val leaned against the counter next to the stove. She could feel the heat from the burner radiating dangerously close to her elbow, but she didn’t move away. “I guess I can see how it might seem weird,” she said. “But, honestly, it didn’t
feel
weird.”

“So you guys didn’t…” Kara raised her eyebrows and puckered her lips into a tight approximation of a kiss.

“No. Nothing like that. We just slept.”

“Well, I know I’m not, like, the authority on this kind of thing, but, seriously, I think that’s a little weird.” Kara punctuated her words with jaunty waves of her spoon. Val wanted to tear it out of her hand and throw it across the room. “People don’t just sleep in the same bed together unless something is going on.”

“Sometimes they do, though. I just did.”

“And isn’t he, like, your ex-boyfriend’s best friend or something?”

Val thought about that. In the simplest terms, that description was true, but it was so inadequate as to sound almost meaningless. And if it was complicated before, it was even more so now with Henry missing. She and Gabe were the only two people aside from Henry’s mother who really knew him. That bound them together, especially if he never came back.

“Henry’s missing,” said Val. She sat down.

Kara stopped chewing.

Val continued. “He kind of…lost it, I guess. Had a mental breakdown at school. Stopped eating, started saying crazy things. And now he’s gone.”

Kara dropped her spoon into the bowl and reached across the table to take hold of Val’s wrist.

“How long’s he been gone?”

“Three weeks.”

“Oh my gosh!” said Kara, and the alarm on her face made Val feel self-conscious. Why wasn’t
she
that distressed? What was wrong with her?

The kettle emitted its first plaintive whistle. Val broke Kara’s grip and stood up to turn off the stove. “It’s not as bad as it seems,” she said, though she wasn’t sure what that meant. Nobody knew how bad it was. “At least Gabe doesn’t think so. Henry’s sick, but he was talking about running away for a while before he actually disappeared. Based on what he was saying to Gabe before he took off, I think he doesn’t want to be found right now.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“Well, I guess it just means that his being gone this long doesn’t necessarily mean he’s dead.” The word left Val’s mouth like an artillery shell, then expanded like a cloud of gas. She closed her eyes, took two breaths, and opened them again.

Kara looked disturbed, but if she had anything to say it stayed locked behind her sugary lips.

“His mom must be flipping out,” said Val. A startlingly clear picture of Jan flashed into her mind. She was alone in that big house, cooking elaborate meals for nobody but herself, carrying the house phone in one pocket and her cell in the other out of fear that she’d miss the call that would bring Henry back.

“Why aren’t you?” said Kara.