Want Not (32 page)

“Yes,” he answered, “absolutely I agree,” earning himself a sneer from the physicist which in some small way felt like a reward in itself.

That was the night the dreams started. In the first one, he appeared as a kind of pharaoh, though not in pharaoh dress. (Just his same old 48x32 Dockers “Big and Tall” khakis and a Kenneth Cole shirt: a mallwear pharaoh.) Inside a giant sandstone cavern, a group of blue-suited slaves—how Elwin knew they were slaves wasn’t clear, but they were—carted wooden boxes in on dollies while others pried open the boxes and still others stacked the boxes’ contents in an exquisitely patterned way. In the shape of an arrow, it seemed; possibly a flower. For whatever dream-logic reason, Elwin didn’t recognize the contents at first. But then he did. There was his old tackle box, here was his wedding suit, there was the wristwatch his father’d given him upon his high-school graduation, here was his medicine cabinet with gypsum-dusted screws jutting from its back as if yanked straight from the wall. These were
his
goods, he realized: his stockpile for the afterlife. He shouted for the slaves to stop, because surely he wasn’t dying, not to mention that he
needed
this stuff—the medicine cabinet more than the tackle box, but still. The slaves ignored him. Panicking, he fled the cavern by clambering into a convenient elevator. For a long bizarro time the elevator rose and kept rising, despite Elwin jamming all the buttons. When its doors slid open, Elwin found himself stepping out into a desolate sand-swept landscape littered with the broken ruins of a sculpture. Awe flooded through him, and with it a sense of tranquility. The wind was warm against his face, like the nuzzling breath of a mother or perhaps a lover. He saw two stone legs, tall as houses, sticking out of the sand, and nearby a half-buried head. Something about the legs—cartoonishly plump, with sneakers on the feet—struck him as familiar, but when he walked to the head and brushed the sand from its face he toppled backwards in—

In what? That’s when he woke up, his eyelids springing open despite their heavy crust and his entire body feeling energized at once, as if by electrical switch, a hot and instantaneous current he could discern in his fingers, toes, penis, even his hair: a sudden and all-encompassing shock of corporeal awareness. The sensation was so extraordinary, in fact, that his first conscious thought, as he scanned the alien darkness of the hotel room, was that he’d died. Like that, boom. Like the deer on Route 202, without ever having seen it coming.

But then: No. Of course he hadn’t died. These were not the stiff sheets and scratchy bedspread of the afterlife. With scenes of the dream still swirling through his mind, he pulled himself up, noting the red digits of the hotel alarm clock spelling out 2:57
A.M.
For several minutes his mind seemed to operate on two separate frequencies, one mind replaying episodes from the dream, even as they faded, while the other was engaged in mundane physiological analysis of the dream’s causes. Had he eaten anything unusual? Half a Cobb salad, he remembered, dismissing any gastrointestinal basis. No one had salad dreams. Was it alcohol? No. He’d had just two glasses of chardonnay at dinner, and hadn’t even finished the second glass because frankly the wine was awful. Some Australian mega-brand that’d tasted like kangaroo pee. He tried recollecting the dream’s ending, the maybe-climax that had jolted him from sleep, but couldn’t—that’s where the film had broken.

But then something else occurred to him. The silence. Not the exterior silence: the air conditioning unit was thrumming beneath the window, the whoosh of passing cars sounded with arrhythmic regularity, somewhere a toilet was flushing. No, the interior silence: the yearlong conversations he’d been having with Maura in his head had stopped. That aggrieved chatter that spooled constantly, like background music, had disappeared, and in his mind now was a strange and blessed sonic emptiness. He rolled out of the bed and went to the window, and drawing open the heavy Marriott curtains he stood there, breathing in the view: the hotel roof, the parking lot, an empty intersection. The feeling was one of loss, but, weirdly, without the ache of loss. Loss without
loss.
He watched a car slow for a red light, pause at the intersection, and then glide on through, and for some reason this brought to his face a faint smile of rapport. He felt as though he, too, were gliding through something, though just
what
he didn’t know.

The dreams persisted throughout the trip. At first they seemed unrelated, save for their vividness and volume. Sharon made a cameo in one, wheeling by on a bicycle. Long-lost friends showed up, resurrected after decades of disregard. More than once his father appeared, one time swimming with Elwin in an antifreeze-colored river that cut through a decimated, abandoned cityscape, the two of them nevertheless splashing and laughing the way they’d done at the shore almost half a century ago. After the third dream Elwin took to hastily transcribing his wake-up memories on a bedside notepad, which was how he came to note the connective dream-tissue binding them together. In each of the dreams, he discovered, was a monument. Of a sort, anyway: his own pharaoh’s tomb; a discordantly gleaming edifice in the midst of that blighted riverside cityscape; a skyscraper-tall stack of junked cars in one odd episode (made odder still by the stack’s curator, the television actor Gabe Kaplan of
Welcome Back, Kotter
fame); a stone cairn that in another dream some children were building and pleading for his help to finish it. He mulled this thematic tie, but not too much. Dreams were just dreams, he figured, the byproducts of the brain’s digestive tract, the off-gasses of cognitive fermentation. Still, the dreaming was pleasant, and, even back home in New Jersey, where the dreams dipped in frequency, he soon found himself looking forward to sleep, nestling himself in early for some REM-sleep entertainment.

He was in the midst of one such dream when a hard metallic banging roused him from sleep. Someone was knocking on the screen door. Bologna sounded a dim bark, less a warning against intrusion than a drowsy corrective for the disturbance. Elwin rolled out of bed and sat up. It was 3:31
A.M
. Out of fresh habit, he immediately tried to seize the remnants of his dream, but this one went leaking out fast—all he could catch was the somewhat alarming image of infants swaddled in Saran Wrap. He sat listening, but there was only silence now. Minor house creaks, the patter of rain outside. Had the knocking been a dream too? A dream layered atop another dream?

But then the knocking resumed. Elwin struggled into some pants and went puffing down the stairs. His first theory, conceived halfway down, was that Maura had finally come back. It was the symmetry of it all that sold him on the idea: She’d dumped him at 3:30
A.M.
, and now here she was returning to him. This was her decisive hour. What would he say to her, he wondered, as though he hadn’t rehearsed the scene a thousand times in his head.
Yes,
of course. He’d say yes. To whatever she asked. She was the sword he was fated to fall upon. Yet he felt an odd lack of excitement for this potential, evidenced by his slackening pace as he reached the bottom of the stairs. Here was his Christmas, and he wasn’t sure he wanted his gifts. Stricken with apprehension, rather than joy, he cracked the door open for a peek.

It was Christopher. His hair was rain-soaked, and though Elwin couldn’t be sure because of all the dripping, he looked to have been crying. He had a pillow under his arm.

“Doc! Jesus, been banging like crazy—saw the Jeep—figured you was back—just . . .”

“Is everything okay?” Elwin asked, adding the obvious: “It’s kinda late.”

Emptying his lungs through his nose, and lowering his gaze to his shuffling wet sneakers, Christopher said, “You mind if I crash for the night, Doc?”

“Yeah, sure, come’n in,” said Elwin, glancing past Christopher’s shoulder to make sure Maura wasn’t lurking there, her reconciliation mission having been upstaged at the last minute. “What’s up?”

“Fucking usual. Dad’s being a prick.”

“Couch or the guestroom—your pick. How so?”

“Couch’ll do. Just won’t stay off my fucking ass.”

Elwin flipped on the living room light and assessed Christopher in its glow. The old saw about looking like a drowned rat, he decided, fit with an unfortunate precision: Christopher’s sniffling runny nose evoking a rodent’s twitchy snout, the rainwater dripping from his mustache as from whiskers, his eyes beady and raw. “I’ll fetch you a towel,” Elwin said. “Maybe some—dry clothes.”

When he returned he found Christopher on the couch cupping his head in his hands. Elwin set a towel before him on the coffee table, and beside it a t-shirt and pair of sweatpants that wouldn’t possibly fit him but oh well. Christopher didn’t move. For an awkward minute Elwin stood there, rubbing his hands, until finally he asked, “You want to talk about anything?”

Christopher looked up. So he
had
been crying, Elwin confirmed: the red evidence of it was ringing his eyes. But he’d also been drinking. That yeasty beer smell. Owing to recent episodes in his own life, Elwin didn’t need reminding that the two activities could sometimes conjoin. “Yeah,” Christopher said, and then paused. “Y’know what I
wanna
talk about, Doc?
Fishing.
The Mets. This chick I met Friday at McGuinn’s, gave me her number and all that.”

Elwin blinked a few times. “That sounds pretty good,” he said, while thinking:
but not at 3:30
A.M.
when I’ve got an eight o’clock seminar to teach.
He picked the towel off the table and pressed it upon Christopher who gave his wet face a halfhearted swipe.

“But you know what I gotta talk about,” said Christopher,
“instead?”

Elwin shook his head.

Christopher screwed up his lips, as though preparing to spit, and rocking his head back and forth he began, “That motherfucking—that old fucking sonofa—”

Boomboomboom.
Now came another knocking at the screen door, sharp and insistent. Christopher, knowing better than Elwin who was at his door, closed his eyes and went limp. “Hold that thought,” Elwin said, thinking surely
this
time it was Maura, but when he swung open the door he saw:

Big Jerry. Red-faced but not red-eyed, dressed in a New York Giants nightshirt with a torn collar exposing a swath of wet pink shoulder in something like (but also very unlike) the old
Flashdance
style from the ’80s. (Maura had torn her shirts like that back then, kicking her legs to Jane Fonda videos on the old TV, something Elwin had found unbearably sexy.) Big Jerry’s hair was bed-crazy, gray spikes shooting everywhere, which only added to the air of toxic lunacy Elwin sensed. He realized at once that he’d dropped or been dragged into the bad middle of something.

“Sorry to bother you at this crazy hour, Doc,” Big Jerry said, his hands forming and unforming fists, his big voice pinched and tense, “but I saw the light was on, and I’m looking for—”

At that moment he drew his gaze past Elwin’s unexposed shoulder and there on the couch he spotted: “
Christopher!
You piece of
shit!
Get your ass out here!”

Elwin said, “Whoa, Jerry, let’s calm down . . .”

Big Jerry wedged a foot inside the doorway while Elwin widened his defensive stance, their bellies lightly crashing. Big Jerry seemed oblivious to Elwin’s presence, however, as if blocked by a fence or some other inert matter. “You can’t hide from me, you little shit!” He was poking a meaty finger in the air toward Christopher, close enough to Elwin’s ear to provoke evasive head action. “You gonna take it like a man!”

Recalling Christopher’s middle-fingered response to his father on the night they’d cleaned the deer, and therefore wanting to be prepared for Big Jerry’s inevitable blitz if Christopher did likewise tonight, Elwin glanced back at Christopher. But Christopher looked incapable of anything remotely like that. Perhaps the excess beer had emboldened him that far-gone night, or maybe the obstructed distance between Big Jerry in the bedroom and himself out on the driveway, or the safety net of his mother’s hovering influence. But there was no safety net now, Elwin realized (save Elwin himself), and Christopher was cowering, his forearm raised to protect himself. With a despairing scowl, Elwin noted the forearm: the way Christopher was holding it appeared subconscious, almost instinctual, as if he wasn’t even aware it was raised, a nurtured rather than natural response that signaled to Elwin all he needed to know about Big Jerry’s parenting tactics. Christopher was twenty-two years old yet in that ugly and trembly moment he looked ten, or six, a teary-eyed boy afraid for his life. A quick fusillade of
ah-ha
s went rippling through Elwin’s mind, as he recalled some of Christopher’s darker quirks, like his hair-trigger temper and his tendency during tantrums to assault inanimate objects, or the bullying tone he developed after six or seven beers at McGuinn’s and the related paranoia that somebody in the bar was keen to kick his ass. Dropped hints, mumbled clues, inscrutable little tics. It all made sense now—or if it didn’t quite make sense, because nothing human ever did (Maura, for instance), it pointed in the general direction of sense. Big Jerry fathered with his fists. Elwin felt a stiff turning in his gut, a revulsion spiked with outrage, and turning to Big Jerry and placing a palm against Big Jerry’s chest he said with uncommon firmness, “We need to calm it down.”

Big Jerry sneered down at Elwin’s hand, through which Elwin could feel Jerry’s chest throbbing, and leaning into the palm so that Elwin’s forearm muscles went taut against the pressure, he hissed, “Move out the way, Doc.”

“That’s not a good idea,” was all Elwin could think to say.

“This ain’t your fucking business.”

“But it is my—my fucking house.”

Big Jerry leaned in harder, compressing the distance between him and Elwin so that their bellies were now in full contact, and bellowed over Elwin’s shoulder, “You tell your new best friend here how you got fired from work? Didya?” Elwin could feel wet droplets of spittle cooling on his ear and cheek. “I didn’t think so.” To Elwin he said, “I set ’im up with that job,
me.
That was a legacy hire, right there. Fucking dipshit can’t get to work on time. Made
me
look like a piece of shit.”