The Wave (5 page)

12

Nella drove my car, and I got in the backseat with GT’s head on my lap. He was shuddering and sweating. He also smelled odd. It was a loamy odor, but I dismissed it. I thought that his hair was still dirty from the graveyard—at least that’s what I told myself.

“What’s wrong with you, GT?”

“Hungry, Airy. Starving. I’ve been so happy to see you that I forgot to eat.”

“Let’s get you something. Nella, stop at the next supermarket.”

“No.” GT wheezed and stammered.

“What?”

“Take me to the ocean, Airy.”

“Why?”

“Take me to the sea.”

He shuddered terribly and then went still. He was still breathing. His eyes were open, too. But he didn’t say another word, just stared up out of the window. I could see the reflections of the clouds in his clear and glassy eyes.

“Drive out to Santa Monica, Nella,” I said.

“What for?”

“Just do it, honey. Just do it.”

GT felt hot on my lap. The fever of his attack was taking hold. His eyes slanted at me at one point, and he smiled. The fingers of his left hand stirred, but the hand could not rise.

Nella was a fast driver. She brought us to a parking lot at the shore in under twenty minutes. When I opened the door, GT rose up and dashed out toward the Pacific. As soon as he reached the beach, he dove into the sand headfirst. By the time Nella and I got to him, he had already swallowed a great deal.

I tried to pull his head away, but he threw me off with little more than a shrug. His strength was amazing. By the time I was on him again, he had turned over and was now looking toward the sky. His mouth was caked with sand, but under that you could make out the smile on his face.

“Take me home, Airy,” he whispered. “I need to rest.”

His eyes closed then. I picked him up in my arms and carried him back to the car. A few bystanders gaped at us, but no one interfered. Nella opened the back door for me, and I laid his unconscious body across the seat.

“Where to?” Nella asked.

“I’ll drive” was my answer.

“We should be taking him to the hospital,” Nella was saying.

We were on Pico Boulevard, headed for my live-in garage.

“He said that he wanted to go home,” I said.

“And what happens if he dies?”

“He’s stopped shaking. He’s not hot anymore. Maybe he . . .” I tried to think how sand could be a cure for any ailment. “I don’t know, Nella. But I’m going to do what he said to do. I don’t want the hospital to get him.”

“Why not?”

“Because he knows a lot about my family that I don’t. And if they get him in there, they might see how crazy he is and keep him from us.”

“And you’re willing to risk his life for that?”

“I don’t think he’s going to die,” I said. “Damn. Just a few hours ago you were calling him Satan.”

“Do you hear those sounds coming out from his gut, Errol?” Nella asked.

I could hear the noise at the red lights with the motor idling. It was a muted thrashing sound, like a dishwasher might make.

“I never seen anybody eat a pint of sand before, either,” I said. “It could just be his stomach reacting. That’s all.”

“All right,” she said, throwing up her hands literally and with her tone.

We got him to my place soon after that. It was lucky that I could drive right up to my front door through the driveway. That way no one could see me carrying the comatose GT.

I laid him out on my bed. Nella put her arms around me and kissed my cheek.

“What are you going to do with him, baby?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. He knows more about my life than I do. It’s crazy.”

“Do you want me to stay here with you?”

“No,” I told her. “When he gets up I want to talk to him alone.”

The exhaustion of the day, the fears and revelations, had sapped my strength. I didn’t know what time it was, but the sun was still up. I sat down in the chair next to the bed. Nella kissed my neck. She said something that I didn’t understand, and when I looked for her again, she was gone.

GT’s stomach was still making that churning sound, though it seemed to be getting softer. He was breathing but otherwise still.

I nodded in the chair, catching myself two or three times. At last, though, I went with it, going all the way to the floor and curling up on the blue shag rug that lay at the foot of the bed.

It was very quiet in my place. Every now and then a truck rumbled down the street, and I’d feel the vibrations in the concrete floor. Light was still filtering in and through the roof window. Birds were chirping outside. As the light faded, I slipped deeper into sleep, and for a long time I felt nothing, thought nothing, and as far as I can remember, I had nary a dream.

A light flickered somewhere. The sudden flash interrupted my sleep but didn’t quite bring me to consciousness. I was still under a blanket of slumber but thinking about that light. At first I thought it was a match, someone lighting a cigarette. Then it seemed that the light, once it glimmered, had stayed. Maybe a candle had been lit, I thought. But there were no candles in my place. No fireplace or lantern. Maybe, I thought somewhere near Nod, it was just an electric light. But who could have turned it on? No one. Nella had gone home. But there was someone else. GT. The boy who said he was my father. Who was sick.

Then I felt the hard concrete through the carpet. I opened my eyes and saw the light shining. It still didn’t make sense. The luminescence wasn’t flame or a lightbulb.

I sat up and saw the bright screen of my computer monitor.

I remembered that I hadn’t turned it off, that Shelly had been instant-messaging me. But then GT had run in with his blue towels flowing.

GT was in the same position I’d left him in. If I leaned in close, I could still hear the noises from his stomach, but they were much quieter now.

I went to the toilet to urinate and then came back to the bed, still very tired. I thought for a moment of lying down next to the young stranger who might have been my blood. But I decided that he shouldn’t be disturbed.

On my way past the monitor, I saw that Shelly had gone on with her message.

For almost a year I’d hoped for a personal communication from her; just a note of apology or even some angry reason for having left. Instead all I ever got were letters from her lawyer, informing me about the state of our divorce proceedings.

All that time I had been missing her, but right then I barely cared what she had to say. My life had picked up at last and headed on a path that led far away from our union.

13

I know that you don’t want to talk to me, Errol. I guess I shouldn’t expect anything from you, seeing how I acted. But you have to realize that it caught me off guard as much as it did you. I mean, we were together since the tenth grade. I didn’t know anything outside of our relationship. And when I started seeing Tommy he showed me so many things that I never experienced. He knows all of these interesting people and he lives in this great building in New York. And you know I had never had sex with anybody but you. It was so exciting at first. But I see now that it was just different, just sex.

The note broke off there. And then continued again, later, I suppose.

I see that you’re still online. I guess this means that you don’t want to answer. I was hoping that you’d ask me how I was doing out here. If you had, I would have told you that it’s not really working with Tommy and me right now. He’s a nice guy and all, but I don’t really fit in this world. And he feels guilty about what we did to you. I do too. I’m coming back to Los Angeles for a while. Tommy and I need a little space. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’d like to see you if you want to see me. I’ll be at my mother’s house a week from Friday. I don’t really know how long I’ll be there. At least a few weeks, I guess.

“What does it say?” GT asked.

He was standing right behind me. I jumped up from the chair.

“What does it say, Airy? You look so sad.”

“Can’t you read, GT?” I asked, forgetting all that I had felt just seconds before.

His bright eyes bored into mine. He seemed to be different again. It was as if he were transforming into a new man every few hours.

“Not yet.”

“My father could read. He was a very well-read man.”

“And I remember every word of it, Airy. Guy de Maupassant and Zola and Dumas and Márquez. I remember almost word for word Will and Ariel Durant’s
Story of Civilization
. But there’s a translation connection that hasn’t formed yet in my head.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked the beautiful youth.

“In some ways, Airy, I’m younger than the baby in your sister’s womb. I’ve just arrived, and all the synapses and little counts haven’t yet matched up. That’s why I was so lost out there in the graveyard. All I had was your name in my mind. Reading is a complex, nonbiological system. I won’t have it back for a while yet. As it is, I’m only now beginning to remember my mission.”

“What mission?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” GT said. “There’s something I have to do. Someplace I have to go. Someone I have to become. I don’t quite have it, but I will remember. It’s only a matter of time.”

“Do you want something to drink?” I asked.

The frown of trying to recall his mission reconstructed itself into a smile.

“You bet,” he said.

I went to the faucet in the kitchen and poured him a tumbler of water, which he downed as fast as he could swallow. He held the glass out, and we repeated the process.

Halfway through the fifth glass, GT seemed to get his fill. He put the vessel on the drain board and bade me sit next to him at the butcher-block dining table.

“I want you to believe in me, Airy,” he said. “I want to prove to you that I am who and what I say I am. Me sitting here in front of you is the most important event in the history of the world. I’m not crazy. I am your father. I was dead and I have risen, even though I never believed in God and I still don’t today.”

“But, GT.” I said the name almost as a talisman to keep his words from infecting my mind. “You haven’t said anything to prove you are who you say you are. It’s just your face, and as my mother said, you don’t have the scar.”

“A thousand thousand thousand years ago,” he said in a voice that a thespian historian might have used, “there was a great explosion upon the world. Probably a meteorite. And the First Life in all of its simplicity and strength was driven far below into a cavern miles under the surface. There it multiplied and bubbled. There it counted the long moments between where it had been and what it had become. While it was counting, there came an awareness, a knowledge of the selves of numbers. One knew its own count, and so did Two and Three and Four. And when Four knew that it was also One, there was an ecstasy and a motion, and then there was Five.”

“What are you saying?” I asked.

“That there is something more than the singular mind. There are connections between moments of awareness that blend together and cannot know blame.”

“So you’re saying that this First Life thing took over your dead brain and brought you back to life?”

“Yes.”

“From all the way down in the middle of the earth?”

“No. For all those years, First Life has been migrating, becoming the Wave. Rising up toward the surface. It washed over what was left of me when I was put in the ground.”

“Those are just words, man,” I said. “They don’t prove anything.”

I yawned then. Despite my long nap I was still tired from the past few days. And my two injured fingers were throbbing.

“Listen to me, Airy,” GT said. “I’ll tell you something that only I could know. Look under the top center drawer of your mother’s bureau in the bedroom. Read what I wrote and see when I wrote it. Look at the pictures, and then dig where I say.”

“Top center drawer,” I said to make sure I got it right.

“If that doesn’t prove it, you will never know happiness.”

After that I went to bed. GT said he’d rested enough and that he wanted to stare at my books to see if he could remember how to read.

From the moment my head hit the pillow, I was asleep. I dreamed about Shelly. She was on her knees before Thomas Willens. He had a huge black erection (which was odd, because he’s a white guy), and she was naked with her hands tied behind her back. She was sucking and kissing his hard-on passionately. It was as if she had been starving and this was her first meal in many days.

14

GT was gone when I woke up. He had taken
One Hundred Years of Solitude
from its place on the shelf. There was also a sweater missing, but he’d left my tennis shoes.

Shelly hadn’t sent me any more notes, so I logged off. I made a bowl of sweet oatmeal and topped that with sliced bananas that I grilled in the broiler. But by the time I sat down to eat, I had no appetite.

When I was in the shower, the bandage on my sliced finger lost its stick and fell off. That was the first time I realized that my hands no longer hurt. You could still see where the razor wire had cut, but the skin underneath had healed. The swelling was gone. There was crust from the scab, but that just brushed off like sand. My smashed nail was almost completely healed. I remember thinking that at least I was healing well.

I seemed to be over Shelly, and Nella was now in my life. The crazy kid was gone. Maybe I’d even call AT&T and get a job working in Visual Basic or Web design.

It wasn’t until about ten that I thought about the top center drawer of my mother’s bureau.

I loved my mother, but she had always been distant, like the moon. I had never had long talks with her, and she didn’t seem to understand emotional pain. If I was sick, she’d take my temperature. If I had a fever, she gave me children’s aspirin. But if I was heartbroken over some little girl, she’d just say, “In a hundred years, none of this will matter.”

I had always thought that my mother was immune to passionate love. That’s why the thought of her having an affair was so strange to me. Her role was one of regularity and emotional invulnerability.

She went to work at the
Olympic Gazette
every morning at eight-thirty, came home for a forty-five-minute lunch at one, and then went back to work until at least six but more often until eight or nine. She never got sick or lazy. She never varied her schedule for anything unless somebody in the family was ill.

I hurried off to the pottery studio and had finished most of my chores before Nella arrived.

Instead of saying hello, she kissed me. I liked that.

“He’s gone,” I said.

“Your father?”

“GT. He took a book and a sweater and went on his way.”

“No. He wouldn’t do something like that.” Nella’s disbelief almost convinced me that he might be there when I returned home.

“You sound like you know him,” I said.

“He talked a lot while you were getting your mother,” Nella said. “He told us about the giant life of numbers under the ground. He said that that life was bubbling up and all of our fears for all the years we’ve been here would soon melt away. He said that all of the dreams human beings have had would be realized and then seen as paltry things.”

“And that means he wouldn’t just leave?”

“He told us how much he loved you and Angelique. He wanted to spend time with you.”

“But did he tell you about his mission?” I asked.

“No.”

“Last night he said that he’d been given a mission. But that he didn’t remember what it was yet.”

“What mission?”

“Yeah. One shudders to think.”

“Is that why you’re here so early?” Nella asked me. “Because your father was gone and you were lonely?”

“He’s not my father. He’s a nut. And I came in early because I have to go do something.”

“What?”

“File my divorce papers.”

“Oh.” Nella smiled. “Now that you’re a free man, you will want to bed every woman you can.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m going to sleep with a hundred women. All of them named Nella Bombury.”

That made the island woman grin.

I got to my mother’s apartment at 1:55. My sister and I both had keys. I knocked to be sure, but nobody answered. I went in through the front door and down the left hall, which ended at my parents’ door. The furniture in my parents’ bedroom had not changed since I could remember. There was a queen-size bed, a small maple desk, and a maple bureau with a wide mirror and three rows of drawers. I pulled out the top middle drawer, half expecting to find nothing while hoping for another memory from my father through his bastard son.

There was a manila folder taped to the underside of the drawer. The tape was yellowed and brittle. It had obviously been there for many years. The tape broke away when I tried to peel it off, and the folder fell into my hands. I sat there in a half-lotus position, afraid, suddenly, of what I might have found.

There was a full-length mirror leaned up against the wall across from me. I watched myself for a moment or two, wondering how I might have kept from coming to this place and time. Maybe if I hadn’t gone to the graveyard. I tried to think my way back to that decision, but it was gone, and I was there like a thief in my mother’s house, unable to stop moving forward.

The folder contained a dozen eight-and-a-half-by-eleven glossy black-and-white photographs and a letter penned in purple ink.

The detective had found a way to put a hole in the wall of the motel room where my mother and Bobby Bliss had their trysts. He had probably taken hundreds of photos, but these twelve were certainly the most damning.

At first I didn’t think it was my mother. Maybe, I thought, the detective had fooled my father by showing him pictures of another woman with Bobby Bliss—a woman who resembled his wife. But looking closer, I saw that it was her. It was just that she was unfamiliar to me because I’d never seen that kind of ardor in her face. One shot after another showed her contorted visage, her adoring his erection, her slung over his shoulder, her screaming and begging for his touch.

My mother’s lover was a bronze-colored man with a shaven head and big muscles. He had a thick mustache that would have made women think he was handsome.

I imagined how my father must have felt and how my mother would feel if she knew that pictures like this existed. I determined never to tell her.

But that was before I read the letter.

September 19, 1984

This letter is a confession penned by Arthur Bontemps Porter III on the date above. I write these words while my wife is sleeping in her bed. Our bed. I don’t know who will read this or under what circumstances, but these are the pictures that have driven me to a terrible act. My wife has made me a cuckold and has therefore given me no other way out.

The man in the pictures with Maddie is Robert Randolph Bliss, an unemployed maintenance man who lived in Culver City. For a short while he worked at the hospital where my wife’s brother was operated on. I suppose that is where the affair began. I think it must have gone on for a long time. For months I suspected but said nothing. When I finally confronted her, she lied and said that they had parted. But while I was at work, they would still meet. I hired the detective and he brought me the proof.

I went to Mr. Bliss and offered him twenty-five thousand dollars to break it off with my wife. I told him that I wanted a letter from him that I could deliver into her hands. The letter would say that he was leaving her, that he never loved her.

I had saved that twenty-five thousand for us to travel around the world, first-class. But I was willing to throw it away on revenge.

I met Bliss in our home while my wife was away, thinking she was going to meet him. He made a date with her and then brought me the letter. I gave him the cash in a big plastic folder. While he was counting his lucre, I shot him in the left eye.

I buried him, along with all the other evidence, under the wood floor of the back room in the garage.

I put Bliss’s note in an envelope with Maddie’s name typed on it, and sealed it. When she came home, I gave it to her. I told her that I found the note under our door when I came home. She cried all night, telling me that it was her time of month. I comforted her with a whiskey and some nice words, knowing all the while that I had slaughtered her Mr. Bliss and put him in a garbage-bag coffin not ten feet from where she started her car.

In the next few months she will be sad. Bliss’s family, if he has any, will also rue his disappearance.

He’s dead and gone and Maddie is inconsolable.

I’ve had my revenge but I feel no better for the retribution. I realize that she was lost to me before ever meeting that man. Now that I have killed him, I know that if he were alive again, I’d let him live. Because I know now that there is no cure for the pain.

Arthur Bontemps Porter III

The floorboards were loose in the toolroom at the back of the garage. I cleared the dirt away from the corpse with only a broom. He was wrapped in six garbage bags tied together in the center to keep him from smelling up the area. The skin had shrunk up next to his bones. Upon his chest lay a corroded .22 pistol, the murder weapon. Next to the body bags was a plastic envelope that held the twenty-five thousand dollars, all in twenty-dollar bills.

The guilt my father felt kept him from holding on to the money. He probably threw it down in a last moment of passion. Or maybe he buried it later, hoping somehow to serve penance for the damage he’d done.