Wichita (9781609458904) (19 page)

“What the hell is
that
, Harry? That's some kind of
animism
or some shit, am I right? Just
hanging out in the open
for everyone to see. Wow. A guy goes in for a little rest, leaving behind a
Christian nation
, comes
out
and there's some kind of Japanese
paganism
running rampant in the streets!” He chuckles at this unfolding scenario. “How long was I
in
there? Can someone give me some perspective on this?”

“Abby?” Seth says, leaning forward to speak in her ear. “You're my mother. At least that's what I go around
telling
everyone. Cough cough. Give it to me straight. How long was I in there?”

“Seth,” Abby says, giving him a blank stern look in the rearview, “I would you like you to
chill out
.”

“The thing is, mother—” He turns to flash looks of shrugging incredulity at Lewis and Harry: what's with
her
?—“I
am
chilled out.”

“Good,” she says, “I'm glad to hear it.”

“Just ask my companions back here,” Seth calls to her. “Gentlemen, can I get a wita-ness? Harry? Chilled out, or not chilled out?”

“Fairly chilled out,” Harry allows.

“Harry! My man!” Seth violently smacks Harry's reluctantly upheld palm.

“Easy,” Harry mutters.

“Lewis?” Seth asks. “Chilled out?”

With a note of desperation in her voice, Abby says, “Just sit back and enjoy the ride, Seth. Would you, please?” Everyone is waiting for the drugs to kick in but they should have jabbed him in the neck with syringe of thorazine. This is not working.

“Enjoy the ride,” Seth echoes, suddenly ruminative. He nods slowly, rhythmically, tapping one foot. “Works for me, works for me. Though there's the question of whether you can
will
enjoyment, Harry. The Good Book says, ‘Love thy neighbor.' Same problem. Can
love
be
willed
? Don't answer right away, Harry, give it some thought.”

“Interesting question,” Harry says.

“I recommend a light tasing, I do!” Seth says, lunging forward to address Abby. “Counterintuitive, I know, I know. The effect is
very
stimulating, but at the same time incredibly
soothing
!”

“Seth,” Abby warns again in the rearview.

“No, no, no, check it out: this is an
investment
opportunity!” He chuckles to himself, rubbing his hands together as the idea takes shape. “In the not-too-distant future,
all
your spas and yoga retreats and what-have-yous will have their own
in-house Tasers
. Be common as microwaves. Along with the
fat retired pigs
to shoot them into the clients.” He imitates with eerie accuracy the clacking sound of the taser gun and pretends to zap Lewis in the ribs with stiff prodding fingers.

Abby sighs irritably, strikes the turn signal lever.

A silence ensues. Seth settles back in his seat, closes his eyes. Maybe the meds have kicked in; maybe he's worn himself down. Ahead of them in their lane is a white van with an image of a man wearing a service uniform and cap.
The man is holding a gun to his head
.

Lewis glances at Seth to see whether he's noticed it. The traffic light turns red and the van slows. It's not a gun. The man is saluting. It's some kind of advertisement for a cleaning company.

Abby's cell rings. She checks the screen. “Donald, please stop calling.”

Seth lets out a loud harsh bark of a laugh, glancing at Lewis and Harry, shakes his head in bitter wonderment. “'Donald, please stop calling!'” he imitates her.

“I realize that,” Abby says into the phone.

“‘I realize that,'” Seth mouths.

“I'm sure you didn't. But Donald?
Donald
! It
did
go too far!” She claps the cell shut.

“It went too far, all right! Truer words have never been spaketh!” Seth sits up and leans forward. “But can I just ask everyone one last thing? Abby?”

“What, Seth?”

“One last thing?”

She hesitates, sighs then says, “Ask away.”

“What the hell happened to
guns
?”

“Guns?” she asks numbly.

“That fire bullets.”

“I don't know what you're talking about, Seth,” she says. How deeply hard to have a child like this, Lewis thinks, pitying her, pitying himself. How he would love to open the door and get out right now, walk to the airport.

“What I mean is: how's a guy supposed to
suicide by cop
if the
cops
don't use their fucking
guns
?”

Abby slams on the breaks. The tires let out a loud, drawn-out screech and everyone flops forward. Lewis nearly bangs his nose back of the seat and the cars behind honk in alarm.

She bangs the Escalade into park, unlatches her seatbelt and wheels around to face Seth. “Do you want me to turn around and take you back to the psych pod?”

She's yanked her sunglasses off to glare at him, there are faint crow's feet at the corners of her eyes, which are clotted with mascara and shrunken in fury.

“No,” Seth says, chastened and shocked.

“Because that's where they
strongly urged
me to leave you!” Behind them a car whips angrily around, followed by a line of others, the passengers glaring and gawping in as they pass.

“And I'll tell you right now, you seem pretty damn insane to me. What's insane? Insane is a
lack of gratitude for life
; insane is arrogance and recklessness and impiety. That's what makes you a ‘danger to yourself and to others,' Seth. And if you don't show me, pretty damn quick, that you're at least
willing
to begin taking responsibility for
your own role
in the quality and nature of your experience, then I'll have you committed! I'll do it like that—” she snaps her fingers under his nose—“and I'll feel
zero
regret. Is that clear?”

Seth sits there blinking, temporarily stunned into non-insanity. Harry, who still has his arms braced against the back of the front seat, observes this with interest.

“It's a
new day
,” Abby says. She pops the car into gear and drives on.

 

 

B
lue and white wild flowers, bees, butterflies, crisscrossing dragonflies—the backyard is like a meadow now. It's refreshing, the green-tinted air, the rustle of the leaves in the wind. Lewis likes to sit out here on the stoop, when it's not his time to keep an eye on Seth, and read or stare into space. He, Abby, Harry, and Bishop have been rotating through shifts for the past week. The goal, the main idea, is for Seth to come down from the high of the “mood episode” but not so far down as to enter a depression. Harry, who's been in daily therapy sessions with Seth, said yesterday he thought they might be through the worst. Still, just to be safe, Harry wants to put him on Symbyax, a combination of Zyprexa and Prozac, since he may have sunk a tad low on lithium alone. And if Symbyax doesn't work? They'll try Wellbutrin. Lewis didn't want to know what they would do if the Wellbutrin failed.

One of the dogs has laid his head in his lap. Stroking the fawn ears, his fingers encounter a pellet-sized thing. He clears away the fine soft fur—a tick the color of tarnished silver.

“Hold on,” he says but as he tries to get a good grip on the tick—or should he use a pair of tweezers? —the mutt squirms free and leaps from the stoop, vanishing from sight in the weeds except for a thrashing ripple it makes as it flees around the side of the house in the direction of Bishop's tent.

The tallest plants come up to Lewis's chest, his chin, dim the light in his room to the point that he has to read with a lamp on in the middle of the day. The vine beginning to snake its way up the legs of the patio furniture when he arrived now blankets the porch like kudzu, the heart-shaped leaves tracing the seams of the louvered windows and sliding glass doors, seeking entry.

He cleaves his way out to the fiberglass toolshed in the corner of the yard and peels back the tendrils of ivy sealing the door, which rumbles like stage thunder when he slides it open. The tendrils leave a raised chevroned residue on the fiberglass. In the dim bluish light large leggy spiders clamber into the upper corners.

There's a lawn mower coated in bits of dried grass, a box of garbage bags, pruning shears, a pair of canvas gloves, and, lean­ing against the wall beside the door, a machete in its unopened cardboard scabbard/package.

As he's closing the door of the shed he sees out of the corner of his eye someone's head above the fence but when he turns it's gone. Oren.

He carries the machete, the gloves, and the box of garbage bags back to the stoop. The gloves, which are too small and stiff, he sets aside. On the cardboard scabbard it says, “Corona Professional 18' machete tempered steel blade for greater strength and long service life.” He pulls the serrated tab and unsheathes it, hefts it in his hand. When a stalk of Queen Anne's Lace bends toward him in the breeze, he leans out and decapitates it, the blade ringing with a clean metallic
ping
.

The scouring grind of skateboard wheels on macadam drifts over the house. Lewis goes to the gate by the trash cans and, nudging it open with the machete he's absently holding in his right hand, looks through the gap.

Seth is riding toward the street on the driveway. It's close to ninety degrees out. If he works up a sweat, he could faint or get sick; lithium levels rise as fluids are lost. Lewis read that online, taking a break from Google-stalking Victoria (she's a panelist on Emily Dickinson and Hymn Culture at Amherst College scheduled for April of next year). Be wary of hot weather and limit consumption of diuretics like coffee and alcohol.

Seth has gone off his meds, Lewis imagines, maybe wishes. He's going to skateboard out of sight, to the bus station or train yards or highway.

But he pivots by the mailbox and pushes back down the driveway. He's pale and ten pounds heavier from the meds and ten days camped out on the couch in the den watching TV with Cody.

Coasting along, he looks down at his feet, knees nearly knocking, preparatory to a kick-flip move of some sort. It's ugly, so much of street skateboarding, the sudden, scalded postures. More often than not the attempts are blown. Though Seth was once quite good, won local competitions, had sponsors. Lewis is divided between hoping he lands the move and feels a little uptick of self-respect and achievement, and hoping he falls, so that his hubris and arrogance are further torn down.

If there's any left. When Harry and Abby decided it would be best to have the memorial tattoo removed, Seth agreed. Fine. No, he didn't mind that the process would be lengthy and a bit painful, whatever. He was so zombie-like that the dermatologist spoke to Abby as if he weren't there. “Was Seth Chopik a friend of his?” he asked her. “
He's
Seth Chopik.” “Pardon?” The first procedure seemed to go well enough but later tiny blisters erupted over the area. Now under his T-shirt is a bandage like the one he had on when the tat was new, the skin covered in anti-bacterial unguent.

Seth squats and leaps, bringing his knees up to his chest. The board spins in the air below but something goes wrong and it clatters to the driveway. He lands with his feet planted on either side of it, flips it over with the toe of his sneaker, and pushes back toward the head of the driveway.

The door to kitchen opens. Lewis moves over to the side door with the small window and sees Bishop, whose shift it is but that doesn't mean he hasn't forgotten about it, as he did yesterday, leaving Seth unattended for two hours while he finished cooking something up in the basement lab.

Lewis is convinced that Bishop is at all times at least a little altered on one of his designer drugs. He carries around a pocket spiral notebook in which he jots down assessments of their effects, using a rating system. Lewis found it on the kitchen table the other day and flipped through it. “Visuals lasting 15 seconds,” it said on one page in Bishop's scrawl, on the next: “with 175 mg, orally: intellectually lucid but odd. 2 hrs at a ++++, but ultimately a neither-here-nor-there stuff.” On another page: “Distinctly dizzy, visuals minor, need to lie down” and “2–3 mg. smoked dur: 3 hrs wholesome small-town 4th of july atmospherics / the Norman Rockwell of tryptamines.”

Bishop goes to the threshold of the garage and checks on Seth, who's blown another attempt from the sound of it. Bishop is wearing an unbuttoned madras shirt, shorts that might be boxers, cheap flip-flops, like he's on his drag-ass way to the communal bathroom in a flophouse. He scratches his beard, plucks a pair of pliers from the wrack of tools and rags and screws and nails and brackets washed up there over the years. Bishop stands looking at the Masonite board, finally hanging the pliers on silver clips in an outline drawn by one of Abby's other “lifetime companions” in black Sharpie, Lewis can't remember which. Maybe Bishop is high on a single-molecule concoction that inclines one to tidy up.

Turning, he notices Lewis at the window of the door and flinches, raises a hand to his heart. Recovering, Bishop smirks under his beard and says, “Everything's
under control
, big bro,” Lewis having chewed Bishop out for forgetting about Seth the other day.

Lewis gives a hearty thumbs-up, semi-sarcastic, where Bishop can see it in the frame of the window and turns away.

He slips in the earbuds of his iPod and goes to work at the edge of the yard, swinging the machete backhand then forehand, as he's seen it done on TV, “natives” clearing brush for naturalists and documentarians.

Berries clinging in green and red clusters on the underside of a certain enormous weed go flying. He rips up ivy in sections like carpet, chopping hard to sever the ropey vines, the blade hacking deep wounds into the ground.

He cuts down a spray of baby's-breath-like flowers that makes him think of Izzy's engagement party in Cambridge in two weeks. She's marrying a Harvard graduate student named Ben—blond, blue-eyed, mildest of mild manners. They met two summers ago, when Ben paid a reverential visit to the house to interview Cyrus for a dissertation on post-war Anglo-American literary criticism and Izzy answered the door. Lewis was only invited once he'd groveled his way back into Gerty's good graces. Now he's probably on her shit list again for declining so that he can be here to help out with Seth.

There's a species of tough, sinewy weed he has to seize like hair and hack away at before he can sever it. Viscous white sap oozes down the stumps and into the earth. He straightens and closes his eyes and leans backwards, stretching the muscles in his back. The white sky spins like a layer of fat on tissue. He closes his eyes and steadies himself, bends at the waist and catches hold of another head of weed hair and hacks at the base.

He's become too aware of the volumetric mass of the weeds, how like fingers and fleshy appendages and limbs they are. There's a stout-stalked, sinewy plant the color of rhubarb that crumples in his hand like a windpipe when he tries to snap it off, smears his fingers with wet fiber. Ants, beetles, crickets, spiders and insects he can't name flee as before a fire. Bits of plant gore cling to his sweat-soaked T-shirt. Pausing to catch his breath, he closes his eyes, hears himself murmur, “I'm sorry.”

He comes to nettles with frilly leaves that sting his hands and forearms and his legs through his socks and jeans. Resistance and resentment emanate from the plants. They know him now. His little apology, uttered too late and half-heartedly, meant nothing. The dead and mangled ones want their bodies back. They want the yard. They want the earth. They wish him ill. They would enter the house through the windows and split it open from floor to ceiling and scream with joy as the sky and rain poured in.

When he narrowly misses cutting his foot, he can hear a faint, spiteful laughter. The heel of his hand is blistered from gripping the machete handle, which is dangerously slippery with sweat running into his eyes and down his arms. He should take a break, have a glass of water, dry off the handle with a towel, but he hacks harder and faster. He'll finish the whole job in one furious assault. As he chops he's also falling to his knees, he's holding Gerty around the legs, pleading. She places her blessing hand on his head. Get out, she says,
you're being
dragged down
. You must decide who's side you're on, Lewis,
that of the weeds or of the tomatoes
.

I have decided, he says.

Decided what?

I want to go back, I want to begin again, Grandma.

This makes me very happy. How far back?

I'd like to be six years old.

No farther?

May I?

Yes.

Then I'd like to start over, be born again.

Very well,
I
will be your mother. Where would you like to be born?

Not Austin, not Wichita. May I be born in Cambridge?

Yes, you may. But I am too old. I will bring you to term inside a hollowed-out dictionary.

The blade strikes something hard and the machete flies out of his hand. He crouches down and clears away half-severed vines. Underneath, there's a large round pale stone, a Zen-garden remnant. He picks up the machete: there's a triangular chip in the blade.

Wiping the sweat from his face with the hem of his T-shirt, he looks over what he's done. He's cleared a little more than half the backyard. That still leaves the side, where Bishop's tent is. The cut plants are wilting fast, turning brown.

Something makes him look back toward the stoop. Abby is waving her arms slowly back and forth like someone signaling a ship from a desert island. He plucks out the earbuds and walks across the stubble.

She's smiling but something's wrong. “We need to run Seth over to the emergency room.” Like it's a trip to the grocery store.

Lewis's heart sinks. “What the hell happened?”

“He hit his head skateboarding,” she says. “It's not bad but it needs a few stitches.”

“Fuck!” he says and flicks the machete down, driving the tip into the ground by his foot. “Where was Bishop?”

“Bishop was
right there
in the garage
,” she says, looking at the quivering machete with a frown of disapproval. “Calm down.”

“Bishop,” Lewis scoffs. “He's always fucked-up on something!”

“Bishop can't stop Seth from falling on his skateboard, Lewis.”

“Why did Bishop let him skateboard to begin with?”

“Why did
you
? You saw him skateboarding too, according to Bishop.”

He nods, caught out, but stands there scowling. It's still somehow Bishop's fault.

“What's gotten into you?” she says, looking him up and down with narrowed eyes. “You look like you've been in a battle.”

“I couldn't read!” he says, pointing at the weeds by his room, which he has yet to cut down. He should've begun over there. Then, more calmly, “It was blocking the light out.”

“Oh,” she says, cautiously, humoring him now. One insanely violent son is enough for the moment.

“Where is Seth?” he asks.

“In the car.” Lewis starts away but Abby stops him with a touch on his arm, saying, “Don't. He's not in the best mood.”

Lewis stops in his tracks. “Jesus.”

Abby glances over in the direction of the driveway and says in a lower voice, “I think it's the lithium. It throws his balance off.”

She turns to go then stops. “Oh, but on a sunnier note, we have a client!”

Lewis raises his eyebrows, struggles to produce a glad face. He'd all but forgotten about Grateful Gaia or Tornado Ally, whatever they're calling it.

“He's flying out tonight—from Virginia,” Abby says, walking backwards toward the driveway. “I think we'll just head out in the morning.”

“What about Seth?” he asks. The Escalade horn honks impatiently.

“I think Seth should come along,” she says, walking backwards. “Assuming he's up to it. Don't you think it would do him good?”

“Probably,” Lewis says, “yeah.”