Wichita (9781609458904) (11 page)

“Anyway,” he says lugubriously, “I just—I'm worried, is all, about your brother. Like I say, he's
it
for me.”

 

 

L
ewis takes Bishop's footpath through the weeds, passing the tent, where a butterfly flits drunkenly at the entrance, and around to the back of the house, entering stealthily through the sliding glass doors to the den/TV room. He's hoping to slip through the house to his room and take a nap without bumping into Abby. Last night's lack of sleep has caught up with him and doesn't have the energy to deal with her or anyone else. He also wants to deprive her for a little while longer of the chance to apologize properly, as he knows she's hankering to do.

But as he rounds the corner into the hall to his room, Abby is coming out of the bathroom. She's still wearing her elegant spa clothes but appears somewhat less refreshed and relaxed now. She was probably in some endless powwow with Bishop while Lewis was out walking.

She leads him by the hand to the couch in the den and pats the cushion beside her, curling her legs beneath her. She lays out bagels but never touches bread or any other such fluffy carb herself, rice or pasta, refined sugar. Thus her trim figure. He sits farther away, with his back to the armrest.

“Lewis,” she says, gazing with a chastened expression into his eyes, which he averts, “I'm sorry I was flip about the thank-you letter to Cyrus. I didn't mean to belittle what you're dealing with there. And that I snapped at you. That was inexcusable.” She's always been admirably quick to apologize to him when she's in the wrong. He admires her for this and now that it's happening he's glad, it's air-clearing; at the same time he feels his hurt at the injustice well up afresh.

“I'm
not
a professor,” he says sullenly. By what process did “professor” become a slur? “That's what I'm supposed to be getting
credit
for.”

“And you
are
,” she says, squeezing his forearm for emphasis. “I was
totally
out of line. It won't happen again.”

“Really?” he says. “How can you be so sure? Things are pretty volatile around here,” he adds, lifting his chin in the direction of the backyard.

Annoyed or merely surprised by the degree of difficulty he's mounting, she compresses her lips in a disappointed expression but says evenly, “Because I won't let it happen again.”

He makes a skeptical face, finds himself pushing his advantage. “Because, look, if this is too fraught a moment for me to
be
here—”

She sighs hissingly through her nose and seems for a second prepared to take up the gauntlet of this veiled threat. A strong light is pouring in through the living room windows and in it the lines on her forehead and around her mouth are etched unflatteringly. She won't be able to attract men forever; one day there won't be a
poly
to her
amory
. Though what do wrinkles, what do looks, have to do with it? Knowing Abby, she'll turn out to be one of those sexually frisky nonagenarians.

“You got here
last night
,” she says now, having softened or decided he needs more mollifying. “All right? It's not like this around here
every day
, I can promise you that.”

Now Donald walks past with exaggerated discretion, tip-toeing like a bad actor.

Abby has slid a thick family photo album from the underneath the coffee table. She traces a crack along the spine. “I need to have the binding repaired,” she says then begins paging through it. It's organized into sections devoted to photos of each of them, minus Virgil's—those were expunged years ago, though he appears in a few beside Seth or Lewis.

When she turns to Seth's section—even as a towheaded toddler he looks like trouble, at least in hindsight—Lewis says, “I ran into Cody and Stacy. They're worried about him.”

“Are they?” Abby says drily.

“They think he's on the verge of an episode,” Lewis says.

She chuckles. “They're like animals that can sense an earthquake, those two. If only they could
prevent
the earthquake, they could actually do something for us.”

Lewis's eye falls on a photo of him and Seth, ages four and seven or so, both shirtless, sway-backed, little-boy bodies, summertime. Lewis is both showing Seth an orphaned robin and fending Seth off from grabbing the bird.

“You think they're wrong.”

She turns down her mouth. “Not wrong. They may be right about the episode. I think they're wrong to worry about it.”

“Why?”

“What is it, worry, when you come right down to it?”

“It's natural to worry,” Lewis says. Here he goes again, taking the dull middle-of-the-road truisms, as if ventriloquized by Virgil.

“‘Natural,'” Abby says. “It's natural in the same way self-dramatization and egoism are natural: look at me! I'm wringing my hands so hard they're about to fall off, that's how
deeply
maternal I am!”

She slips the album back into the rack beneath the coffee table. “Worry not only doesn't do any good, it actually contributes to the reality of the thing they're so worried about. And then everyone gets to congratulate themselves because it turns out they were
right
to worry!”

He finds he's laughing along with her but at the same time he's not quite following. “So you're not worried,” he says.

“I gave up worrying in general a long time ago,” she says a little grandly, “and gave up worrying about Seth specifically last year, when I flew out to San Francisco in hysterics.”

“I was ready to fly out too,” Lewis reminds her. This is a half-truth: in the throes of finishing a paper when the crisis erupted, he bet Abby would decline his offer, which she did.

“I wasn't questioning that,” she says calmly. “I'm talking about how Mom flies out to make son stay in ICU and finds when she gets there that he's jerked the IVs out of his arms and flown the coop! He doesn't want to follow the doctor's orders.” She holds up her palms: what can one do? “Seth wants what he wants when he wants it. He's a grown man. Do we strap him to a hospital bed and force him to heal? Then force him to live out his average biological life of seventy-two. Four years or whatever it is?”

She looks at him in her level, clear-eyed way and he wishes he hadn't drawn her onto this topic. He should have just accepted her apology and left it at that. As used as he is to assuming Seth may die young and by his own hand, even cavalier and callous, especially when telling friends like Eli about the situation, he forgets how frightening it is, freshly confronted, how helpless and small and unlucky he feels.

“But I
believe
it's going to be OK,” Abby says. He can believe too, she means; it's just a matter of believing, of faith. She smiles and it's convincingly serene, not a falsely brave smile. “That makes all the difference.”

He goes to his room and gets undressed and climbs into bed. Closing his eyes, he begins to fall asleep and sees a view of Stonington harbor from the perspective of the small jetty down the street from V's summer house, the glassy water reflecting gray sky, the paler gray of the small floating dock with its looped handrails, a cormorant on top of a wood dock pylon. It's as if he's somehow there, standing on a boulder of the jetty, seeing it in real time. Sailboats at anchor, the distant green of shoreline. His soul has gone in search of V. but can't find her. Then he's asleep.

 

I
t's late afternoon when he gets up. Looking a bit spectral—cheekbones sharper, smudges of shadow beneath his eyes—Seth is sitting on the couch in the den beside Cody, who is breaking apart a bud so pungent Lewis scented it the instant he opened the door to his room. A translucent orange prescription bottle labeled in red magic marker, “O.G. Khush/3.5 g.” lies uncapped on the coffee table beside a small blue bong and lighter. Sitting down in a low sisal chair, Lewis wonders whether this medical-grade stuff is what he had a hit of last night and if so no wonder he felt duct-taped to the car seat. The pot high for him is nearly always at least a little unpleasant. Why does he keep thinking it will be otherwise? It's the fragrance, the cultish enthusiasm of others, some stubborn hope that it will turn out as advertised and he'll be converted.

Seth has been smoking daily since he was fourteen, in secret at first, then more and more openly and ultimately, once the futility of opposing it became obvious, in the house with Abby's consent. It was in no small part because he lost the battle over this issue that Rennie, Abby's most conservative live-in boyfriend, moved out. And woe betide the man who would take up arms now. Still, the sight of pot so brazenly out in the open sets off faint, vestigial alarms for Lewis.

Meanwhile, as if in an unwitting nod to Seth's victory, Donald casts a gingerly glance in at the proceedings on his way past the doorway, calling, “Hi there!” which Lewis makes a point of replying to, guessing neither Seth nor Cody will bother. They don't.

Having packed its bowl, Cody passes the blue bong with two hands to Seth, who lights up, inhales and goes in a humorous Groucho Marxian crouch to blow the stream of smoke out through the screen of the open sliding glass door—Abby's one lonely little rule, obeyed intermittently. Smoke leaking from his nostrils, he offers the bong to Lewis, who declines with gusto, then to Cody, who accepts gratefully, passing the long flexible flame of the lighter back and forth over the bowl.

Lewis has been expecting some sign from Cody to do with their talk about Seth but so far it's as if Cody forgot about it, or rather
is forgetting
in the ritual details and haze of this blaze-up with Seth. But it may be that he's simply afraid to risk it. Seth being unusually alert to such things.

When first making the case for his right to smoke, Seth referred to pot as his “ally,” a term from Castañeda, one of the household authors Seth and Cody discovered once Abby began homeschooling them. A psychedelic like peyote can be a shaman's “ally” or helper in the performance of wizardly deeds. Given Abby's weakness for this sort of thing, Lewis had to admire the shrewdness of the approach. But what an enormous phony Castañeda turned out to be, at least according to the same anthro course in which Lewis learned about Ponzi schemes.

In the early, idealistic days, Abby provided a syllabus and books recommended by a national homeschooling organization–Steinbeck, Harper Lee. Seth and Cody boycotted math and science completely but plucked down from the shelves in the house whatever, in addition to Castañeda (drawn by the admittedly great cover art), struck their fancy: New Age adventure tales like
Journeys Out of the Body
,
The Autobio­graphy of a Yogi
, the Whitley Strieber accounts of abduction by UFO's, and
Seth Speaks
, by a medium named Jane Roberts, whose gaunt face in the cover photo used to frighten Lewis as a boy and to whom Seth naturally felt a special link. Abby also ordered from Amazon anything they asked for—histories of Punk like
Please Kill Me
, Kurt Cobain's
Notebooks
, “street knowledge” memoirs by gangsters and pimps. There was a Gnostic Gospels phase that led to a fiery exchange of emails between Cody and his “plyg” father back in Arizona, which Abby forwarded to Lewis because she found Cody's stand so eloquently expressed and evidence of homeschooled empowerment.

“Wake 'n Bake 'n Read” Lewis called the curriculum, in New York. He feels bad about that now. He was in fact impressed and happy that they were reading anything, stoned or sober, “classic” or New Age. In Seth's case, Lewis held out hope it would lead to college but in the end Seth never bothered any more than Cody about taking the GED exam.

Though it's not “the end,” Lewis reminds himself sternly: Seth could and might still take and pass the GED, still go to college. He's
twenty years old
. He could attend Columbia himself one day, and get the faculty-brat tuition waive, just like Lewis did.

Well, O.K., not Columbia. Lewis barely got over the threshold, after attending Horace Mann for a year and half and with back-channel negotiations on the part of Gerty and Virgil a full professor on the faculty. There would be no such family push behind Seth: what was left to burn of that bridge he torched on this recent visit of his to New York. In fact, he lit that match early, when he was four and sitting between Lewis and Abby in the audience of a graduation ceremony. As Virgil and the other professors began filing into the auditorium in their bright regalia, hoods and tams and robes and gold braids, Seth stood up and shouted joyfully, “Here come the clowns!” A story Abby loves to tell, of course, and which never fails to get a laugh. Lewis thought it would amuse the Chopiks at the dinner table in Cambridge his first summer there. It did not.

An arts college, maybe. Seth showed an active interest in that route a couple of years ago, flying into New York for National Portfolio Day, typically last-minute. Lewis had two midterms the next day, in German and Astronomy, and no time to waste making sure Seth was OK under the guise of showing him around, which is what Abby asked him to do. He was deliberately late to their rendezvous at the A/C/E stop on 14th Street, expecting Seth to have forgotten the time or blown it off. But there he stood, portfolio case propped against his legs. He was heavier due to a new drug regime and his jeans looked too tight but otherwise he seemed fine, functional. Having verified as much, Lewis was about to slip back down into the stairwell and blow it off himself when Seth saw him and, as if intuiting everything, raised his hand in heartbreakingly tentative greeting. Whereupon Lewis felt as shittily cold-hearted as he'd ever felt: he was going to become his cousins if he wasn't careful.

They wandered downtown through the West Village, with Lewis pointing out the occasional landmark but wishing they were in almost any other neighborhood: the West Village was so theme-parkishily genteel, not the New York he wanted to expose Seth to, having warmed to the idea of being Seth's tour guide. He thought of searing things he'd glimpsed when he first arrived: the young couple, robbed of everything, emerging like exiled Adam and Eve from Central Park with their hands over their crotches; the refined yet street-smart face of a young man framed by the upturned collar of his elegant coat in Union Square at dusk; the pair of teenaged black boys seen from a bus as they swaggered along 125th Street in the rain, bumping into people as they moved along the street with hoodies up and skull-and-crossbones in their eyes.

But Seth seemed perfectly awe-stricken with this tamer New York. After walking east on Bleeker for a while they sat on the stoop of a multi-million dollar brownstone and looked through his portfolio: posters he had made for his band, IED's, shows at places like Glenville Baptist Church talent show; ornate skate-punk scenes in black or blue ballpoint, so densely worked over that the paper seemed almost wet and heavy with ink, a few reworked to the point of abstraction. Would this impress the folks at Parsons and Pratt? Lewis had no idea. For something to say, he asked about the title of one of the abstractions, “Terminal B.”

“We're condemned to be,” Seth said as if it were obvious, “to exist: terminal B.” They walked east on Bleeker, talked about Virgil and Abby, caught up like any other two brothers. Seth was behaving so socially appropriately that Lewis began to believe it might be possible for him follow through with this plan. This was also before the facial tat. His appearance was weird but acceptably, familiarly weird. Art schools in New York were full of guys like Seth, arriving from Oregon and Louisiana and Vermont with their skateboards and prescription bottles. Lewis allowed himself to imagine them as students together in the city, taking walks like this whenever they felt like it.

They paused in front of a small CD shop. A toddler boy, passing behind them, announced proudly to someone, “I made it—it's beautiful!”

Turning, Seth smiled at this. “He's got the right idea. He's taking radical responsibility.”

It had the ring of one of Abby's catch phrases. “That's what I'm trying to do,” Seth said. “Not blame the world for my experience of it, you know?” he asked, looking earnestly at Lewis, who said, “Sure, of course.”

“I made the world,” Seth said, gesturing at the street. “The world is me writ large.”

“You made the world,” Lewis said with what he hoped was gentle skepticism.

“In the sense of its subjective qualities,” Seth said, “its
meaning
, yes.”

“What about, I don't know,” Lewis asked, “gravity? You made gravity?”

“What gravity
means to me
, yes,” Seth insisted. He held up a hand, squinting into a band of sunlight that had suddenly appeared in the west. “See, what else matters besides what it
means
?”

“Hmm, I don't know,” Lewis said lightly, braced now for a resurgence of the true Seth: prophet, guru, monster.

To his relief, Seth shrugged. “Me neither, really,” he said. “It's just sort of a theory.”

Lewis remembered that if they kept going to the end of Bleeker they would come to the Bowery and CBGB's, a punk landmark that would thrill Seth. He waited until they were within sight of it then turned Seth by the shoulders and pointed to it and watched his face light up. When they arrived in front of the humped awning, a bespectacled man was addressing a small group of what looked to Lewis like Euro tourists.

“Founded by Hilly Kristal in 1973,” the tour guide was saying, “C-B-G-B—does anyone know what these letters stand for?”

“Country, Blue Grass and Blues,” someone said in maybe a Dutch accent.

“You are correct!” said the guide. “OMFUG anyone?” That was what it said on the bottom half of the awning: OMFUG. If Seth were ever to know trivia, this was it. But Seth had stalked off down the street.

“What's up?” Lewis asked when he caught up to him. He was walking fast with his head down, as if in flight from a crime. “Seth,
what's up
?”

“I don't know,” he said finally, glancing back up the Bowery. “The guy, the whole—” he waved his hand and strode on.

Lewis grabbed his arm and stopped him. “Talk to me.”

“I just need to eat,” Seth muttered, pulling away. Lewis led him into a narrow falafel joint and they ordered standing at the glass counter, Lewis watching Seth in the mirror behind the counter. Taking a bite of his sandwich when it was served up in a plastic basket, he seemed to recover himself. He sipped from a plastic cup of water, blinked, looked over at Lewis as if seeing him clearly again. How was school going, he asked. Lewis mentioned the midterms.

“Are you ready?” It was more than he'd ever asked Lewis about college.

“Not really,” Lewis admitted.

Seth frowned. “So wait—shouldn't you be at the library or whatever?”

Lewis considered telling a white lie but then said, “Proba­bly.” If he left for the subway now he might be able to cram enough, staying up most of the night, to do okay.

Behind them, a man got up from a table and, going past, bumped hard into Seth. Lewis glared after the man and Seth touched his mouth and looked at his fingers as if checking for blood then followed the man out, holding the falafel in one hand like a stone. “Hey!” he called.

“Seth!” Lewis said quietly, catching up to him on the street. Bent forward in a leather jacket, the man walked quickly away. He either didn't hear or thought better of stopping. Seth trotted up the avenue after him, reared back as if to hurl the sandwich then turned and flung it into a wire mesh trashcan.

Lewis stood next to him. What happened to Seth's radical responsibility, not blaming the world? Or was throwing the sandwich into the trash the extent of it? The wind snatched at the wax wrapping paper and Seth, staring at it and shaking his head in a continuous, palsied way, finally plucked it out and let the wind blow it away down the street.

A month later he was in San Francisco with Candy.

So maybe it is too late for Seth. He'll never go to college, of any kind or caliber. Maybe it's always been too late. Is that so tragic? The main thing is he's alive, safe at home with his weed and his stoner disciple. For the moment, all is basically well. That's a lot. That's maybe everything.

 

Passing through matchstick blinds, sunlight prints lozenges of wavering striated gold on the floor. It's been holding Lewis's attention for a catatonically long beat. He seems to have gotten high just sitting here breathing the air, no big surprise there.

Now Donald goes by holding a cellphone to one ear and in a loud voice says, “Representative!”

Seth and Cody look at each other with expressions of painfully suppressed hilarity. Donald, down the hall now, can be heard saying, “Member!” which sends them over the edge. Watching them flop around on the couch, Lewis finds it contemptible rather than cause for relief and gratitude. They'll live at home; they'll never leave Wichita.

He goes to the kitchen and makes a cup of Earl Grey tea. Assuming Seth doesn't, in fact, explode or implode or whatever it is Stacy and Cody fear, Lewis will just have to get through a certain number of days like this one. He needs to snap out of his blues about V. and do something, get a job, study German. It eats at him that he was never able to read it comfortably. There's an essentials grammar in his book bag. He should go back to his room and open that to page one, begin again.