The Wave (3 page)

6

The man on top of me was naked and foul-smelling. We struggled, but I couldn’t exactly call it a fight. He was almost embracing me.

“Airy! Errol! Honey! I’m alive!”

He was skinny, as my father had been in those last months, but this man was young—and strong. He was kissing my face, all elbows and knees, like a child so excited he didn’t know whether to laugh or go insane.

I pushed him off. He struggled to get back on top of me, to embrace me, but I pushed him off again.

“Errol,” he pleaded.

He got to his feet and held out his hands as if in prayer. The light of the moon illuminated his face. He was a young man, younger than I, and very dark-skinned, as my father had been. He had a mane of matted hair filled with twigs and clods of dirt. His mouth was yowling silently. His eyes were wide with fright and desire.

His penis was uncircumcised, large and ebony, again like my father.

But my father hadn’t had a full head of hair since before I was born. He was nearly sixty-one when he died.

“Errol.”

“Who are you?”

“Papa,” he said, slapping his chest with both hands.

He went down on his knees and looked up at me. The fear drained from his face, and I could see that this man might well be a younger version of my father. A thought occurred to me. Maybe there was something to what the distressed young man was saying. Maybe he was a messenger from my past.

“Here,” I said, stripping off my heavy apron. “Put this on.”

His body was rank with human odors. While tying the back strap, I gagged on the smell.

“We have to get out of here,” I said.

The grin on his face was that of a penitent’s gratitude to a high lord’s nod. He ran with me, ahead of me, backward at times—babbling things I couldn’t understand because he was laughing while he talked.

We got to the place in the wall where my canvas carpet had been laid.

“We have to climb over somehow,” I said. “I had a ladder to get here, but it fell on the other side.”

Grinning, the youth calling himself my father scaled the tree whose branches I had fallen through. For a moment I lost sight of him in the boughs. Then I saw him jump a good four feet onto the tarp. He was laughing, and then he was gone. I was sure he’d broken his neck, but what could I do?

I tried to climb the tree, but my cut finger was swollen by then, and my baby finger still hurt, too.

I heard the sound of wrenching metal from the other side and then “Airy!”

The wild man’s head had popped up at the top of the wall. He climbed to the middle of the tarp, maintaining his balance in the center. He started moving his hands one after the other in a lifting motion, and the ladder, its brace broken off, appeared over his shoulder and then came down to my side of the wall.

“Climb up, Airy,” he called. “Climb up.”

I placed the ladder against the wall, making sure the upper rung was secured by the razor wire under the canvas. When I got to the tarp, the maniac helped me keep my balance. Together we lowered one end of the broken ladder down to the outer wall of the graveyard. The young black man clambered down first and then steadied the ladder for me to follow.

It was easy even with my wounded fingers. The experience made me remember times with my father when I was a child. He made things so easy. He’d always been good with his hands. Master carpenters marveled at his work around our home.

“Climb down so good,” he said with a wide grin that reminded me of some of the African students I’d known at school. The Africans seemed less guarded, where American blacks kept humor on a lower, more controllable register.

“Who are you?” I asked again.

“Papa,” he said with a laugh.

The smell in the car was almost unbearable. I rolled down the window and leaned toward the breeze. I was driving us to my garage apartment. What else could I do? He was a wild man, a madman, but he was surely related to me. I believed that he was some bastard son my father had kept secret. This young man had been reared by a woman, probably a black woman, and somehow he had gone mad craving the affections of his absentee father. Maybe it was like the groundskeeper Jacob had said: this young man had come to his father’s grave and lost his mind. Maybe he knew about me from stories his mother had told. Maybe, in his madness, he became that which he so much wanted to have.

He was his own father, and I was this father’s son.

“How long have you been out in the cemetery?” I asked.

“Thousands of spans. Twelve thousand nine hundred and fifty-nine and more and more.” He giggled and rubbed his palms over the rough apron.

“What were you doing there?”

“Can’t count that high,” he said, cocking his ear as if to hear a whisper. “Not yet. New numbers falling over, over the line.”

“Where were you before you were here?”

“Down, down, down. Down deep and long past. Before the light and the moon and the soft stone crush.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Good Times,” he said with a smile. “Three times good times. Me.”

This last syllable came out like a drumbeat. Something about it made me chuckle. Good Times liked to see me smile. He patted me on the shoulder like a demented child petting a dog.

7

My wild half brother screamed when I put him in the shower. The water was warm, but it still tickled him or surprised him. He slipped and fell, tried to get away. But I made him stay and wash all the filth off.

After that I showed him all the places in the bathroom. The toilet and bathtub. The sink.

While I bandaged my cut finger he went around the bathroom touching all that I had shown him, repeating the words as if he were just learning them.

“Rain,” he said, pointing to the nozzle jury-rigged above the tub.

“Shower,” I said, correcting him, “to get clean.”

“Clean,” he said. “Pure, perfect . . . the Wave.”

“The what?”

“The Wave,” he said, smiling brightly. “One after another and then again.”

As he said this, he pushed his left palm against his right. At the bottom of the arc, the right hand pushed back and the cycle continued. There seemed to be some truth in what he was doing, something that should mean more to me than I was able to know.

“Clothes,” Good Times said.

I had stripped to the waist to wash him. But he was looking at my pants.

In the past few years, I had put on a few extra pounds. There were handles at my sides, and my stomach stuck out a bit. GT (the name I decided to call him) was perfect by comparison. He had almost no body fat, and ropy muscles that flowed easily under his dark skin.

“You can wear my pants,” I said, “with one of my belts. Until we can buy you clothes of your own.”

GT smiled. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked deeply into my eyes.

“Are you still afraid of the fifty-foot woman?” he asked.

I jerked away from him and fell back against the sink. “How did you know that? How did you know?”

When I was a child, I saw the fifties version of the science fiction classic on TV. I was so frightened that I had to sleep with my parents for three nights afterward.

The smiling youth cocked his head and hunched his shoulders.

Maybe my father had another life somewhere, another wife and children whom he told stories about me. It made sense. The only way a young man who resembled my father would know intimate details about my life was if he had known my father, had been told what I loved and feared.

“Are you okay, Airy?”

“What about you, GT? What were you doing in that graveyard?”

“Cold,” he said. “Naked.”

He shrank back against the wall and slid to the floor. His hands fell down at the sides, and he pressed his knees together. He was the picture of abject defeat.

“Cooooold,” he moaned. “Dead.”

“Did somebody take you there?” I asked, intent on being reasonable.

“I woke up in a cold sea, on a wave that dragged me down, down, down.”

“Was it dark?” I wanted to keep him talking, maybe to pull him out of his bleak reverie with a logic that would release him from the delusions born from his obvious despair over our father’s death.

“No,” he said. “Bright. Clear. Rippling light forever. And a choir like they had in Atlanta. A choir singing everything ever known. Even me and now you.”

“Me?”

GT was smiling now, sitting with his back straight against the wall.

“Yes, you, Errol. Because I know you, and you are in my heart. And so now the whole earth sings about you on the edge of a Wave that goes around and around forever.”

He was a grinning fool on the floor, his hands held out in a Christlike gesture.

“Where were you born?” I asked him, and he looked at me as if I were the fool.

I got him to put on a pair of my jeans and a black T-shirt decorated with a picture of Mao Tse-tung delicately etched in gray and white across the chest.

I took out a family album that Mother had made for me and my sister on the first anniversary of Dad’s death.

“That’s my father,” I said, pointing at a picture of him taken when I was thirteen. We were at a Little League game in Pomona. I spent most of the time on the bench, but he was still proud that I had made the team.

“I remember that day,” he said. “You got sick in the car on the way over. You were so nervous.”

Another detail my father could have told him, I assured myself.

I turned the page. There was a picture of my mother in her wedding gown, surrounded by a group of white and black women. She was striking and quite young, smiling brightly and standing erect.

“I can’t look at this!” GT shouted.

He pushed the book to the floor and scrambled off the couch. He fell but bounced up quickly. Tears were streaming from his eyes. He looked even more wretched than he had in the bathroom.

“It’s so sad,” he whimpered.

“What?” I asked.

“Death. Dying. Lonely creatures forlorn in the twilight, the half-life, the sad sad waiting and hungering and longing for a memory.”

“I don’t understand. Are you talking about my mother?”

“She never really loved me, Airy,” he said.

“She never knew you, GT.”

“She loved a man called Bobby Bliss. He had a house on Myrtle Street. She told me that she loved him. That’s what she said.”

He seemed to calm down after saying these words. He made the circular gesture with his hands again and then smiled.

“But all of that is over now. Kingdom has come.” He smiled at me with that African grin.

“It’s time to go to bed,” I said. “You can have the couch over there. I’ll get you some blankets.”

He followed me to the trunk next to my bed, on the other side of the large room. I took out the blankets my mother had given me when she found out that I was living in the drafty garage. I handed these to him and then began to undress.

The deranged young man watched me strip down to my boxers. He started taking off his own clothes.

“You go to the couch, GT,” I said.

“Can’t I sleep with you?”

“Men don’t sleep together.”

“You slept in my arms for three nights after dreaming that the fifty-foot woman was after you.” Again he sounded just like my father. The inflections, the insinuation, the hint of Atlanta hovering between his words.

“No, GT.”

“But I’m scared, Airy. Scared of the dark and the cold.”

A tear rolled down his cheek.

It was a big bed. Shelly and I had bought it together at an antique store in Venice. She had spent long afternoons with Thomas, the onetime captain of our high school football team, in that bed. Sometimes I wanted to burn it. But I needed a place to sleep.

“No funny stuff,” I said to GT.

He grinned and jumped on the mattress like a small child, giggling and pulling the covers up to his chin.

I turned off the lights around the garage and then climbed in on the other side.

“Good night, Airy,” GT said happily.

“Good night.”

“Airy?”

“Yeah?”

“The whole world is sleeping, but soon it will be morning. We will all rise up and be remembered.”

There was a song and a broad field of light gently undulating, ululating, rising higher with each swell and cry. It was cold and burning hot, but neither temperature bothered me. There was a firmament of ice so clear that I could see for miles through it. Deep within the ice were flames echoing the sun. Every breath I took was the first breath on a perfect summer’s morning. And there was no place but many places all at once, a jumble in my mind.

My mind was the jumble, however, not the places. They were set on a sea of awareness that knew only numbers, but numbers were everything.

I started screaming at some moment, and the numbers switched register. Hot became cold, and the clear distance became opaque; it never ended, never changed for a billion trillion beats and then again.

8

GT was hugging me from behind, but I didn’t feel sweaty, as I had when sleeping so closely with Shelly. When I realized that he had his arm slung over my shoulder, I pushed him away.

“I told you, no funny stuff,” I said.

“You were screaming in your sleep,” he explained. “When I put my arm around you, you calmed down like you used to when you were a little boy and afraid of what was in the cabinet under the sink.”

Could my father have told GT’s family so much about me while we never even knew that they existed? Everything about the young man unsettled me. His voice and his knowledge about me, his lunacy. It was all crazy, like a bad dream I couldn’t awaken from or a daydream I couldn’t shake.

“Is something wrong, Airy?”

“Go take a shower, GT,” I said. “Take a shower and let me get my head together.”

He bounded out of bed and went to the makeshift bathroom.

Watching him go, I thought about my father. Even if he’d had another family somewhere, he had still been a better man than I. I had no money and no children. My wife was divorcing me for a man who, she said, “was better than you would be on the best day of your life.”

The phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Well?” Nella Bombury said in my ear.

“It’s a little hard to explain,” I said, lifting the bandage to inspect the deep cut in my ring finger.

“Did you go?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“He’s here.”

“What? You brought a zombie home from the graveyard?”

“He’s not a zombie. Just a kid. Confused, you know.”

“And you slept with him in your house?”

“He’d been living in a graveyard,” I said by way of explanation.

“I’m coming right over.” Nella hung up on me.

Nella wasn’t even quite my girlfriend, but she was running to my side to protect me. Shelly had never done anything like that. She never worried about my safety or well-being. I was her boyfriend, then her husband, but at our ten-year high school reunion, she met her man—Thomas Willens.

We’d been friends in high school, Tommy and I. He was an amiable sort, never frowning or worried, like me. I remember he used to say to me, “Aw, come on, Flynn, what could be so bad?”

I went to my computer and signed on to my ISP. I looked up cemeteries in Southern California inside of news items. I wondered if there had been strange activities reported from other southland graveyards. There was nothing of interest. The usual desecration stuff. But no movement to take on the identities of the dead.

Hi, Errol.

The words popped up on my screen. The sender was Shellyshell11.

I didn’t answer.

I saw that you were online and I thought I’d see how you were doing. I’m at our place in Chelsea. It’s really hot in New York.

Our place
was what I focused on. Shelly and Thomas making a home for themselves.

“Look at me!”

I turned from the screen to see that GT had wrapped himself into three blue bath towels. One for his waist, one for his shoulders and one for his head. He was grinning and strutting in the ensemble.

“I made my clothes, Airy. I dressed myself with just this fabric I found.”

“You need pants and a shirt to go outside.”

“Why?”

“Because people don’t count towels as clothes on the street.”

He pouted and sat on one of my kitchen chairs.

I had separated the garage space into different areas. The center was my living room, marked off by a table, two chairs, and a couch. In the four corners I had my bedroom, kitchen, office, and bathroom. The bathroom was the only space around which I had erected plasterboard walls.

“I like it,” GT complained.

“Me too, man. But if you go outside like that, they’ll arrest you.”

“Arrest,” he repeated, playing with the word, moving it around. “Rest. Cell. Restrict. Like death. Death.”

“Where were you born, GT?”

“ ’lanta.”

“Is that where your mother is?” I remembered that my father had made a few business trips to Georgia when I was a boy. Maybe that was when he would visit his second family.

“She’s in the graveyard I rose from.”

“Not my grandmother,” I said. “
Your
mother.”

“I am Arthur Porter, Errol. I’m your father. At least I was. Now I’m your father and part of the Wave.”

“What’s the Wave?”

“Move-ment,” he said, making the circular motion with his hands again. “Motion.”

“It’s a movement? Like a cult?”

“It is the whole world. Living planet. The one and the many.” He closed his eyes, and ecstasy crossed his face. “Every beat and count remembered and passed on.”

“Are you’re a member of this group?” I asked, trying to get past the spiritual hocus-pocus.

“Yes,” he said, smiling brightly, his eyes still closed.

“Do you have a title?”

“I am a memory of the ancestors of the numberless. I am rec . . . reco . . . recollection. Recollection, yes.”

The knock on the door didn’t faze GT. I left him smiling at the deep elation brought out by his gibberish.

Nella was at the door, wearing a yellow sundress with a wide-brimmed red straw hat. There was a cloth bag slung across her shoulder, and on her feet she wore blue wooden shoes. My heart skipped at the thought that such a wild and beautiful woman could be my lover.

“Where is it?” she asked.

“He’s on the couch. Don’t scare him, okay?”

She moved past me, clacking her wooden heels on the concrete floor. She walked right up to GT, who was still in his blind reverie. He opened his eyes when her shadow fell across his face. His smile was beatific.

“What are you?” she asked him.

“A memory.”

“A memory of what?”

“Of who I was. Of all those that I knew. Of the move-ment under the earth. Up from the deep, our destiny.”

“Are you from hell, then?” Nella asked.

“I came from hell,” he said. “But that was before I was put in the ground. That was your world. Yours and Airy’s.”

“Take that towel from your head,” she commanded.

GT did as she told him. He threw off the towel, revealing his matted mane.

She searched through the hair with her fingers, rubbing his scalp and pulling on his locks.

“You don’t have horns,” she said at last.

“Are you my son’s lover?”

“All right,” she replied.

“You are very beautiful. Eyes and skin, teeth and bone. Do you love him?”

“I . . .” She hesitated, staring deep into his eyes. “Did you climb out of the grave, Mr. Porter?”

“Yes. I rose from the deep memory, replenished by the numberless, reminded, readied, and then released.”

Nella sat down next to the wild-eyed youth. She took his hands in hers and examined his fingernails. They looked perfect, from where I stood.

“Did you claw your way out?”

“I flowed through the mud. First one cell, then the second, then the first again. Like leapfrog. Leapfrog.” He grinned madly.

“And when did you come awake?” she asked.

“You don’t believe this shit, do you?” I asked Nella, interrupting the spell.

“I just want to hear what he has to say for himself,” she said.

“There’s nothing to know. He’s crazy.”

“No, Airy,” GT said while keeping his eyes on Nella. “I am a syllable in the annunciation. The word echoed back into the air.”

“No, GT. You’re a kid. You’re confused. That’s all.”

“Then why did you bring me to your home? Why did you let me sleep in your bed?”

“You slept with him?” Nella asked.

“He was frightened.”

“And so you put him in your bed?” she asked. “Did you take off your clothes?”

“Make up your mind, Nella. Either you think he’s a zombie or my gay lover.”

“He might be both.”

“And my father, too?”

This last argument seemed to stump her, at least for the moment.

“He’s just some crazy kid, probably a relative, who believes he’s become my father. I think he might be a half brother from some other family. Probably from Georgia.”

“Why you say that?” she asked.

“He looks a little like my father. Around the eyes and cheeks.”

“Do you have a picture of your dad when he was a young man?”

“No. My sister has those pictures.”

“Let’s go look at them.”

“Why?”

“Let’s just go,” she said.

I liked her fiery side, her quick decisions. I needed to be led. Since my wife left and my job evaporated, I couldn’t seem to get going. The only reason I continued to work at the pottery studio was because Nella always urged me on. Some days, when I didn’t show up, she’d call to make sure I was going to come in and work on my line of mugs.

“Get dressed,” Nella said to GT.

When he shed his towels, a gasp of appreciation escaped my new girlfriend’s lips.

“My,” she said, “they didn’t leave anything out when they resurrected you.”