American Morons Page 16

  Spinning so fast he almost twisted right off his feet, Ferdinand took two fast steps back the way he’d come. He was saying something, too, shouting, maybe just making sound, trying to cancel out the racket the way noise-blocking headphones supposedly did. His eyes had started to stream—from exhaust, just exhaust, it was probably healthier to hike across Bikini Island after a nuclear test than to spend fifteen minutes down here—and now he was singing. The Bond theme, the guitar bit, dung-de-de-dungdung-de-duh-duh.

  There had been an up escalator, hadn’t there? He hadn’t noticed. Sweat broke out all over him, and without lowering his hands or stopping humming or opening his eyes any wider than he had to he scurried back to the bottom of the shaft from which he’d descended, and yes, there it was, gliding silently up. The way out. Home. He took another step, and Q grabbed his shoulder from behind, turned him, and as he saw his friend’s face once more, Ferdinand smiled a single, desperate smile, and said, “Petra.”

  Q’s fingers tightened, dug hard into Ferdinand’s skin. “What the fuck did you just say?”

  Ignoring the pain—relishing it, really, so sharp, so undeniably there, the first time in so unspeakably long—Ferdinand reached up and touched Q’s hand with his own. “I said my wife’s name.” His eyes welled and overflowed. “My wife’s name was Petra.”

  Around them, barking erupted again, louder this time, more distinct. When Ferdinand craned his neck, he saw his overhead reflection swarmed by thousands of flashes of color, as though set upon by sharks in a frenzy. He couldn’t stay here. Not in this tunnel. Not one more second. And the fastest way out wasn’t up, but straight. Onto the freeway. Ripping free of Q’s hand, barely registering his friend’s gaping, terrified face, Ferdinand flung himself forward.

  Seconds later, he was doubled over gagging in the sunlight. Eventually, he felt blindly with his hand, found the mesh metal bench the city had thoughtfully provided to mark the bus stop, and sat down. For a long time, he concentrated on trying to breathe. Behind him, the sounds continued to swirl, rioting in their cavern. Petra. Nothing else. Just the name. And the certainty. Ferdinand felt tears mass in his eyes again, let them come, held on tight to the bench as the passing traffic rattled him.

  Finally, Q emerged, too, stumbled to the bench, sat down. Another long minute passed before Ferdinand realized he was sobbing.

  “Milt,” Q said, through the fingers curtaining his face. “My son.”

  Which was right. Of course it was. For Christ’s sake, when Julio had been very young there was no one on earth, not even Ferdinand and Petra, that Julio had wanted to see more than—

  Julio.

  DDDD, wailed the voices behind him. Dddddaaaahhh.

  Half-screaming now, as the wind of two massive trucks thundered over him, he looked down, one last time, at his hands.

  Fist on top of fist. Batting position. Ferdinand surged fully awake in one headlong, convulsive rush.

  The cookie on the ceiling of Space Mountain. The furniture in the guest room, which had never been a guest room. Bunk bed, plastered with L.A. Raiders stickers. Poster of Farrah in that hideous brown bathing suit upside down right next to the head of the top bunk, “So she’s always looking right at me, and only at me, Pops.” Bukowski on the bookshelves, which Ferdinand had railed against, hoping his disapproval would disguise at least some of his pride at his boy’s discovery of such writing at the age of twelve.

  His son’s room. His son’s room. Even through his own screams, he could hear Q’s, took half a moment to wonder what he’d just remembered. Then Ferdinand was saying Julio’s name again. Just the name, turning it in his mouth like a key in a lock, feeling it click, watching his whole life swing open.

  Milt and Julio together. Striking each other out with the Wiffle, demanding constantly to be left alone, to go off alone, go downtown, take the bus….

  “Oh, no,” he said, and somehow, through the aching that gripped his entire frame like a vise, he sat up. “Oh, no.”

  They’d come here. Julio. Petra. Milt. All. Sooner or later. How long ago? How fucking long?

  Right then, glancing to his right down the freeway, Ferdinand saw the bus. Giant, empty, shambling straight toward them. A year or two ago—it was almost funny, not funny at all, that he could remember this but not his family—Q had showed up outside Ferdinand’s classroom door outraged, waving a newspaper. He’d waltzed right into Ferdinand’s first-period class and brandished the paper at the students. “You don’t exist,” he’d practically shouted. “It’s right here in the paper. You don’t exist.” The article he’d been waving had come from the Sunday Times, reporting on a City Council vote to remove the name South Central from all future maps of Los Angeles. Too many negative associations. And it hadn’t ever been a real place, anyway. Had it? Not one you could fix a precise location to.

  “One by one,” Q croaked. He was all the way standing, now, staring at the bus, which crawled closer, towering over the traffic before it. Shepherding it.

  “One by one,” Ferdinand murmured back.

  Everyone they’d cared about. Everyone they’d loved. Everyone around them. One by one, each for their own reasons, they’d glided down those escalators and stepped aboard the Transitway, which had swallowed not only them but the memory of them, wiping them clean out of history. Was this whole thing some unthinkable top-secret city project, a logical extension of that Council vote? The runoff channel the city had needed for so many decades, to help it funnel the unnecessary and unseemly into the sea of oblivion?

  Or maybe the desert had arisen at last from the distressed sand, reclaiming itself from the teeming creatures it couldn’t possibly sustain.

  Or was the Transitway a Transitway, after all, a service that simply shuttled riders elsewhere?

  “Come on,” Q said, grabbing Ferdinand’s elbow and trying to tug him back toward the tunnel.

  Ferdinand just opened his mouth, turned, and stared. “Come on? Where?”

  “Anywhere. It’s coming, you idiot. Run!”

  “Run where?” Both of them were shouting. It was the only way to be heard. Behind them, the sounds in the tunnel seemed to have cohered into a rumbling, feline snarl. “Q, I’m going where the bus goes.”

  “It goes nowhere, man. Don’t you get it?”

  “It goes where they went. Where else would you want to be?”

  “Right fucking here, dude. Where I can remember. Where I can grieve. You go cop out. I’m taking their lives back with me. Or their memories, anyway. I persevere, and I preserve. It’s what I’ve been doing my whole life.”

  In the tunnel, the snarling intensified. When Ferdinand looked toward it, the light in there seemed to have dimmed. “Q,” he said. “I’m not sure we actually have a choice.”

  “One way to find out.”

  Without another word or a good-bye glance, Q launched himself off the traffic island and ran straight for the tunnel. Ferdinand almost went after him, though whether to drag him back or follow he couldn’t have said, then caught sight of the bus inching closer. All but here. He stopped, stared at it a second, looked back toward Q.

  It was like watching a car back over one of those rows of angled spikes set up next to signs reading DO NOT BACK UP—SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE. At the mouth of the tunnel, Q took a little leap, and so he wasn’t even touching the ground when his body shredded. It simply came apart in the air, in dozens of pieces, and Ferdinand fell to his knees screaming and weeping, but he couldn’t close his eyes.

  The most astonishing part, in the end, was the absence of blood. Each shining sliver of Q seemed to shoot straight up, like a spark ejected from a fire, and for that one moment, all the things he was and knew seemed to hover in the air, all jumbled up, a kaleidoscope of bone and books and beer and muscle and love of kids and quiet, seething desperation. And then it vanished. Every speck.

  Falling forward onto his hands, Ferdinand crouched, rocking, blowing heaving breaths through his lips. Tasting the fouled, poisoned air. Remembering.


  Then, slowly, he stood, turned. The bus had come, was sliding into the station with a weirdly human breath that seemed to echo all the way across the endless lanes of endless traffic.

  Black hair. His wife had had black hair. She’d worn a clip in it, every single day, right at the base of her neck. Clenching his jaw, Ferdinand tried to remember more. But nothing came. Not now. Not yet. Soon. He’d see them soon. Petra. Julio.

  Or else he wouldn’t. Regardless, he was going. Either way, he wouldn’t be alone anymore. He hadn’t ever been, not in the way he’d imagined all these…however many years it had been. Years, though. He allowed himself one quiet prayer: that the Transitway had taken Q, too. That all ways out of this place led somewhere, or at least to the same nowhere. Drying his eyes on the drooping sleeves of his ridiculous blue shirt, Ferdinand stepped toward the bus as the doors sighed open.

  The Muldoon

  “He found that he could not even concentrate for more than an instant on Skeffington’s death, for Skeffington, alive, in multiple, unforgettable guises, kept getting in the way.”

  Edwin O’Connor

  That night, like every night we spent in our grandfather’s house, my older brother Martin and I stayed up late to listen. Sometimes, we heard murmuring in the white, circular vent high up the cracking plaster wall over our heads. The voices were our parents’, we assumed, their conversation captured but also muffled by the pipes in the downstairs guest room ceiling. In summer, when the wind went still between thunderstorms, we could almost make out words. Sometimes, especially in August, when the Baltimore heat strangled even the thunderclouds, we heard cicadas bowing wildly in the grass out our window and twenty feet down.

  On the dead-still September night after my grandfather’s shiva, though, when all of the more than two thousand well-wishers we’d hosted that week had finally filed through the house and told their stories and left, all Martin and I heard was the clock. Tuk, tuk, tuk, like a prison guard’s footsteps. I could almost see it out there, hulking over the foyer below, nine feet of carved oak and that bizarre, glassed-in face, brass hands on black velvet with brass fittings. Even though the carvings all the way up the casing were just wiggles and flourishes, and even though the velvet never resembled anything but a blank, square space, the whole thing had always reminded me more of a totem pole than a clock, and it scared me, some.

  “Miriam,” my brother whispered. “Awake?”

  I hesitated until after the next tuk. It had always seemed bad luck to start a sentence in rhythm with the clock. “Think they’re asleep?”

  He sat up. Instinctively, my glance slipped out our open door to the far hallway wall. My grandfather had died right out there, felled at last by the heart attack his physician had warned him for decades was coming if he refused to drop fifty pounds. It seemed impossible that his enormous body had left not the slightest trace in the threadbare hallway carpet. What had he even been doing up here? In the past four years or so, I’d never once seen him more than two steps off the ground floor.

  The only thing I could see in the hallway now was the mirror. Like every other mirror in the house, it had been soaped for the shiva, and so, instead of the half-reassuring, half-terrifying blur of movement I usually glimpsed there, I saw only darkness, barely penetrated by the single butterfly nightlight plugged in beneath it.

  Reaching over the edge of the bed, I found my sweatpants and pulled them on under my nightgown. Then I sat up, too.

  “Why do they soap the mirrors?”

  “Because the Angel of Death might still be lurking. You don’t want him catching sight of you.” Martin turned his head my way, and a tiny ray of light glinted off his thick owl-glasses.

  “That isn’t why,” I whispered.

  “You make the ball?”

  “Duh.”

  With a quick smile that trapped moonlight in his braces, my brother slid out of bed. I flipped my own covers back but waited until he reached the door, poked his head out, and peered downstairs. Overhead, the vent pushed a useless puff of cold air into the heat that had pooled around us. In the foyer, the clock tuk-ed.

  “Voices,” I hissed, and Martin scampered fast back to bed. His glasses tilted toward the vent. I grinned. “Ha. We’re even.”

  Now I could see his eyes, dark brown with huge irises, as though bulging with all the amazing things he knew. One day, I thought, if Martin kept reading like he did, badgered my parents into taking him to enough museums, just stood there and watched the way he could sometimes, he’d literally pop himself like an over-inflated balloon.

  “For what?” he snapped.

  “That Angel of Death thing.”

  “That’s what Roz told me.”

  “She would.”

  He grinned back. “You’re right.”

  From under my pillow, I drew out the sock-ball I’d made and flipped it to him. He turned it in his hands as though completing an inspection. Part of the ritual. Once or twice, he’d even torn balls apart and made me redo them. The dayglow-yellow stripes my mother hoped looked just a little athletic on his spindle-legs had to curve just so, like stitching on a baseball. And the weight had to be right. Three, maybe four socks, depending on how worn they were and what brand mom had bought. Five, and the thing just wouldn’t arc properly.

  “You really think we should play tonight?”

  Martin glanced up, as though he hadn’t even considered that. Then he shrugged. “Grandpa would’ve.”

  I knew that he’d considered it plenty. And that gave me my first conscious inkling of just how much our grandfather had meant to my brother.

  This time, I followed right behind Martin to the door, and we edged together onto the balcony. Below us, hooded in shadow, stood the grandfather clock and the double-doored glass case where Roz, the tall, orange-skinned, sour-faced woman Grandpa had married right after I was born, kept her porcelain poodles and her milky blue Oriental vases. Neither Martin nor I thought of Roz as our grandma, exactly, though she was the only one we’d known, and our mother had ordered us to call her that. Beyond the foyer, I could just see the straightened rows of chairs we’d set up for the week’s last mourner’s kaddish, the final chanting of words that seemed to have channeled a permanent groove on my tongue. The older you get, my mother had told me, the more familiar they become. Yit-barah, v’yish-tabah, v’yitpa-ar, v’yit-roman, v’yit-na-sey…

  “You can throw first,” my brother said, as though granting me a favor.

  “Don’t you want to?” I teased. “To honor him?” Very quietly, I began to make chicken clucks.

  “Cut it out,” Martin mumbled, but made no move toward the stairs. I clucked some more, and he shot out his hand so fast I thought he was trying to hit me. But he was only flapping in that nervous, spastic wave my parents had been waiting for him to outgrow since he was three. “Shush. Look.”

  “I am look—” I started, then realized he wasn’t peering over the balcony at the downstairs hall from which Roz would emerge to scream at us if she heard movement. He was looking over his shoulder toward the mirror. “Not funny,” I said.

  “Weird,” said Martin. Not until he took a step across the landing did I realize what he meant.

  The doors to the hags’ rooms were open. Not much. I couldn’t see anything of either room. But both had been pushed just slightly back from their usual positions. Clamminess flowed from my fingertips up the peach fuzz on my arms.

  Naturally, halfway across the landing, Martin stopped. If I didn’t take the lead, he’d never move another step. The clammy sensation spread to my shoulders, down my back. I went to my brother anyway. We stood, right in the spot where the mirror should have reflected us. Right where Grandpa died. In the butterfly-light, Martin’s face looked wet and waxy, the way it did when he had a fever.

  “You really want to go through those doors?” I whispered.

  “Just trying to remember.”

  I nodded first toward Mrs. Gold’s room, then Sophie’s. “Pink. Blue.” The shiver I’d
been fighting for the past half-minute snaked across my ribs.

  Martin shook his head. “I mean the last time we saw them open. Either one.”

  But he already knew that. So did I. We’d last glimpsed those rooms the week before the hags had died. Four years—almost half my life—ago.

  “Let’s not,” I said, and Martin shuffled to the right, toward Mrs. Gold’s. “Martin, come on, let’s play. I’m going downstairs.”

  But I stayed put, amazed, as he scuttled forward with his eyes darting everywhere, like a little ghost-shrimp racing across an exposed patch of sea bottom. He’ll never do it, I thought, not without me. I tried chicken-clucking again, but my tongue had dried out. Martin stretched out his hand and shoved.

  The door made no sound as it glided back, revealing more shadows, the dark humps of four-poster bed and dresser, a square of moonlight through almost-drawn curtains. A split second before, if someone had asked me to sketch Mrs. Gold’s room, I would have made a big, pink smear with a crayon. But now, even from across the hall, I recognized that everything was just the way I’d last seen it.

  “Coming?” Martin asked.

  More than anything else, it was the plea in his voice that pulled me forward. I didn’t bother stopping, because I knew I’d be the one going in first anyway. But I did glance at my brother’s face as I passed. His skin looked even waxier than before, as though it might melt right off.

  Stopping on the threshold, I reached into Mrs. Gold’s room with my arm, then jerked it back.

  “What?” my brother snapped.

  I stared at the goose bumps dimpling the skin above my wrist like bubbles in boiling water. But the air in Mrs. Gold’s room wasn’t boiling. It was freezing cold. “I think we found this house’s only unclogged vent,” I said.

  “Just flick on the lights.”

  I reached in again. It really was freezing. My hand danced along the wall. I was imagining fat, pink spiders lurking right above my fingers, waiting while I stretched just that last bit closer….