The second coming, p.55
The Second Coming, page 55
Did it work? To this day, he can’t tell you how a thunderstorm comes into existence, yet when he smells one gathering, it is always mixed with Joanna: homemade deodorant and oil paints, drops stippling the sill and her coffee breath in the clipped hairs near his ear and her medal swinging free of her smock’s neck as she leans forward, the better to see.
A.5: “Ecclusiastics” (6:59)
Another memory, this one mine: I am walking with my father who says music. Who says water, but also music; water is good, but music will be key. Or possibly “king”? It is a little hard to hear when the ocean is trying to have sex with my ear. In any case, he is weirdly calm, my father. Calm and also the hurricane around it. And I’m realizing that it has always been this way. How his best self appears in the middle of someone else’s crisis. My hand is in his hand or vice versa, but it’s neither filial nor romantic, we are like two men in a medieval Islamic village out to take the air.
Are like, and then briefly are.
Have I mentioned his voice? It is not quite a tenor, yet is higher generally than you would expect for someone as tall as he is, the reason for which, I’m now realizing, is so that it has a place to descend when it wants to mean something. This octave range—more typical of a singing than of a speaking voice—is how he works his magic; how he convinces you against all experience to trust him. And is also my favorite thing about him. A question mark where you wouldn’t expect it, a sudden softness, laughter of great frequency, even more than his grin, and lacking a mirror, I don’t think he really knows he is doing it; for him this is just himself. He finds the voice he needs at the moment he needs it, and at the point where the words leave his lips, I think, he really does believe them. Which is how he stays so calm now, or anyway seems to, when I need that: no fixed principle, nothing he is trying to defend.
And though I know somewhere, flickeringly, that he must also feel increasingly desperate to reach wherever he’s hoping to find supplies before the probation officer gets wind, he seems to be talking himself as well into this calm. He is redescribing Ocean City to me, this shit burg or berg off to our left, which I would have thought thoroughly plumbed already. We keep to the sand because it will be harder there for anyone to see us but also I suspect because the shuttered remnants on the dilapidated boardwalk are a labyrinth things can hide in, living things, and I keep remembering a rail-thin guy in Juggalo paint out at Coney Island, “Shoot the Freak,” real malice to his voice, and at times the gulls tucked atop the fluid iron rail of the boardwalk seem to wish us well but other times they threaten to turn into little wrapped mummies. As at times, the red lightning going atop the hotels’ cell-phone battlements feels like a warning. Everything, in short, trying to decide which way to go, what to become. And here is my father filling the world with his voice.
He remembers when that building there went up; it was the tallest one in Ocean City, just imagine, with a player piano in the lobby and ice sculptures, a shrimp buffet…and now that he mentions it, it does take on a gleaming aspect. He sometimes even knows when to be quiet, too. At one point we pass—I’ll never forget this—one of those concrete slabs by the steps to the beach, with a showerhead at head-height and another for feet. And though obviously the water has been cut off for the winter, some leaves (but from what trees?) have blocked the drain, and maybe a pipe burst somewhere, for a puddle has formed. Just enough light from up on the boardwalk reaches it that I can see them in there, the leaves, goldbrown and rust-colored, of an oak, I guess, their fingers rippled by a current passing from nowhere to nowhere, and though they seem trapped I summon my zendo training and try what he said, just going with it, and I discover that what they’re really doing is dancing. But behind me now the names are dropping off the things. And it occurs to me that I do not know where music comes from, either. Or even what it is. Still, I am trying to find a way to tell this that is like music.
A.6: “Over the Hills and Far Away” (4:50)
They rolled in by convoy, his father’s design, the two of them up front in the truck in case they needed to stop somewhere for gas, the girls following behind them in the car. He would never have called them “the girls” within hearing range, of course; Mom must have been like thirty-seven by that point and would never have stood for it, Ethan thought. He was even then the worst sort of mama’s boy, and as the lanes collapsed from four to two he was pretending he could read Mom’s lips in the juddering sideview mirror, though if he’d been back there, he probably wouldn’t even have been listening. Sometimes he used to sit on the stairs of the rowhouse, just out of sight, and let his ears go blurry while she and Dad talked, her mouth making visible shapes on the air like the smoke her friend Barnesy used to blow into soap-bubbles on the patio at parties. But with Dad he couldn’t read anything, because what kind of shape does silence make? What kind of shape does watching, does judging? Maybe the discomfort was just Ethan’s bladder, though, since later, after they’d finally stopped outside some rural filling station and he saw Moira in the mirror jump out as if to beat him to the john, and so (on impulse or compulsion) raced around the back of the painted cinderblock to whizz in the high grass—after all that, when he climbed back into the empty cab to wait, he could feel himself relax. He settled on his back with his feet tucked up against the door and looked out the open window that cut off the crown of a nearby oak until all he could see was the haze of a late summer sky, the dirty clouds piled there indistinctly; he was thinking for some reason of the Paramount Pictures logo, convincing himself that these were not clouds but enormously tall mountains, and that that was where they were going, up into the snowcaps, high over everything. Then Moira appeared in the window with her big fat head. “Ethan? What are you doing?”
“What do you mean, what am I doing? I’m waiting for you to finish, nerd.”
“Finish what? That’s the new house, next door. The truck wouldn’t clear the tree. But anyway, you’ve arrived. We’re here.”
A.7: “Visions” (5:23)
Does the security state too date back to the fall of 2001, he thinks, or is that just another poetic misremembering? The bent metal metal-detector things stationed like garment racks to the left and right of the doors—likely these were in place already, as were the little beige surveillance cameras he keeps expecting to clamber down from their corners until he reminds himself to take his own advice and just go with it…whereupon the cameras are just cameras again. But then what of the sunglassed policeman exiting when they came in, preoccupied with a bag of Funyuns? And what of those black-glass palantirs bulging from every third or fourth acoustic square, occluding within their curves further cameras, so that conceivably the oldfangled beige ones are just decoys anyway? It seems to be not so much his refusal to believe he can actually be tripping as his sense that these lidless black eyes are judging him for it that drives the paranoia.
His daughter, meanwhile, is stuck at a tabloid rack back by the door, staring at Brangelina and/or Bey-Z, who admittedly seem to pulse right off the page. With her hair under her hat, her pallor, Jolie herself looks destitute, like a runaway in a train station, and also deeper into her own trip than before. Though of course if you’re the weedy carrot-topped clerk who is the only other flesh-and-blood human left in sight you probably assume a certain level of drugginess just from the fact that someone’s in this twenty-four-hour CVS on the wrong side of a late-November resort town at like eleven here at night. It is as an exercise in ceding control, steering into the skid, that Ethan goes right up to the counter. He hasn’t accounted for the difficulty, though, of not getting sucked into the guy’s point-of-view…of not reaching out to stroke his cheek and say, Hey, buddy, shh, it’s going to be okay…don’t be so sad. Then, seeing Jolie’s eye start to wander toward a security mirror, he tightens his grip on her arm. Swallows the remaining shred of blotter he’s just discovered in the process of clearing his throat, not trusting himself not to accidentally spit it onto the counter, evidence of his own depravity. “We were in here earlier…I don’t suppose you guys carry camping equipment.”
“Camping equipment?” The guy’s Adam’s apple jumps. Skin is terrible. He too seems to be working hard to avoid the convexities in the corners, all those reflective surfaces.
“Or maybe just beach chairs? Towels?”
“Might be a few over in Seasonal. I don’t know, man, I just work here.”
Christmas fever hasn’t yet reached these far outposts of empire—not yet—but the Seasonal aisle, in between office supplies and adult undergarments, is choked with wheeled plastic tubs fresh off the truck, some radical advance in containerization, ready to disgorge fake fir and receive the meager lot of unsold Thanksgiving crap for whatever its life is to look like post-recycling. But now Jolie is hunching slump-shouldered over a phone that’s supposed to be broken, and when he snatches it from her hand, he sees through the hypodermic jags of glass not more celebrity gossip but “Emergency calls only” and then a message Sarah sent an hour ago:
Jolie, listen, I made contact with your “friend” Grayson. I know you’re at the Elysian Shores Motel, 204 N. Baltimore Ave, in Ocean City; I just can’t believe you’d let your father take you down there. And Nana says you have your passport, so whatever you’re planning, or he is, it needs to stop before someone gets locked up—understand? Either I hear from you by midnight, saying you’re on your way back home, or I’m calling in an AMBER Alert, understand?
He half expects to see one now, just below where the text ends: “Ocean City MD AMBER Alert: White Ford Econoline Van, six-point rack, tail.” But what he feels, with Jolie looking panicky again, is the surrender he’s been preaching finally taking hold, or the freedom of almost certain doom: Sarah may be bearing down on him from one side and Morales from the other, but it doesn’t matter what happens to him in some hypothetical morning that may never come—or even that he’s caused Sarah the fear she’s obviously feeling, and himself such guilt…
What matters is what happens to Jolie right now.
He grabs the phone to power it off and pulls her toward a small lot of brightly colored beach things huddled at aisle’s end, where he indeed finds a couple of towels, and a sweatsuit labeled OCMD: RIDE OR DIE for if she gets cold. And let’s see, what else…? Water for hydration, an orange Gatorade in case this vitamin C thing really does work, a boombox essentially unchanged in twenty years, a sleeve of D batteries, and—sweet—a rack of compact discs in dusty shrinkwrap. Let’s see: CSN, Kid A, Court and Spark, remaindered Portishead, Skeletons from the Closet, all equally prehistoric now…and fine, some American Spirits, because he remembers how cigarettes can make time pass, or seem to. These are of course the things the clerk will itemize at midnight, when the policeman, alerted like every other, remembers seeing them here and comes rushing back in to take a report (See, Officer, the guy couldn’t possibly have been her father, he bought her cigarettes, it’s right here on the receipt) but by that point they’ll be long gone, and the camping thing was a red herring anyhow, no way to make it out to Assateague, that local mecca of tripping, or even to the state park at Henlopen absent any ability to drive. Does the clerk seem a little twitchier than before—is his own cellphone already jumping in alarm? Of course, Ethan’s would be, too…unless the powers-that-be have some way of hiving off the offending node from everyone else’s. In any case, when he and Jolie emerge into the blighted streets, there’s what seems to be a police cruiser sitting dark down there, so he wheels in the other direction and begins to march her almost at a run up the inland side of this narrow peninsula, to where no one will think to look for them—but where trees still grow and marsh grasses double as screens and the bridges to the north and south stretch over the Assawoman Bay.
A.8: “I Know Places” (3:15)
It is somewhere around this point that the trip goes narrative; naturally, the narrative is one of escape. He is Daedalus, the puzzler, maker of mazes, to her Icarus, prone to overexcitement and melting. But this must be one of those mazes that reconfigures itself behind you the farther forward you go, for at least some of the lampposts seem to have become the trunks of trees, the same ones that left the most graceful leaves aswirl in the beautifulest puddle—though weirdly the leaves have also regenerated overhead, they still flesh the canopy at the center of faintly humming lines of pale color, and about this much, he’s been right: riding atop the moment offers a measure of protection from it. But now a plane is both passing behind the branches and, it seems, zippering the back of her head to the front—and wow, shit:::::though the sky up there is black, motionless, there is some kind of crazy halation effect, that infrared bomb-scope thing where you can see the person’s breath coming off them like smoke but not whether they are a terrorist mastermind or a child on its way to a wedding.
Then Bong go the circles of a church, calling her back to her mother’s threat to call the cops at midnight and the question of how long it’s been, but maybe checking her phone, too, counts as looking in a mirror, the thing everyone seems to know not to do. And how could she be a target for someone else’s drone when these leaves are breathing so greenly above and, with each streetlight passed under, bristling themselves into the bearded faces of green men? It is the stubbled face of her father, her calm and confident and for a while now she’s suspected strategically nonchalant father, from which she’s suddenly getting the fear. But of what, when the lack of any siren must mean something’s stayed her mom’s hand or held off the probation lady?
They have come upon a cross-street that T’s into estuary shallows, a water tower to the left, the long bridge from earlier rippling slightly to the right, as if its stanchions were playing that game Crack the Whip or doing the Wave. And before her: the Assawoman Bay. Stretching away to either side of where they stand is a circuitboard of ’80s-style condos shingled in unpainted wood but also, like her grandpa’s place, trailing docks out back. And she can feel her dad years from now, grandfather-aged, a monad, the power-center the maze will be constructed to protect, dipping grilled cheese into tomato soup eaten straight from the can and watching TV, so why is he out here with her right now, risking everything? Apparently it is to lead the way onto a little strip of parkland baffled by cattails along the bay…where he whipsaws the beachtowel as she has foreseen, exploding deep colors into the sky. And when he gets the two towels roughly squared up on grass that should be cold now but isn’t and the batteries are unpacked and loaded into the boombox, he bids her sit or (if she wants to) lie down, and listen to the music; he does seem to be feeling a little funny since the drugstore, and should answer the call of nature while still in possession of all his faculties, he’ll be right over there by that water tower, in actual eyeshot this time but don’t move; look, here is water he bought her, here is a safe space where she can stay, he’s even bought her smokes. And he must know what he’s doing leaving her alone again, she thinks, for she hardly notices the weight in her hat anymore, and this water is the water of life, and Gatorade is thirst aid for that deep-down body thirst. And music is key, is king, is everything. So again: Why so much fear?
A.9: “When Doves Cry” (5:54)
But of course what had really sent him drugward was sadness, at least at first, a vibration he must have felt coming on the air, for when the words “4 p.m.—appointment” had appeared in his mom’s messy handwriting on the family calendar that seventh autumn, he’d assumed it was with a divorce lawyer. Where had Dad been then? Out at St. Anselm’s, running spreadsheets on his squat brown Mac, still trying to revive his failing school. Or at the marina with a bucket of boat paint and a stiff-bristled brush, as if a mania for order ever saved anyone; as if the laws of physics (at least as taught to the second form by wizened Mr. McGlaugharn) didn’t require that each move toward order within the system be offset by a slightly greater increase in disorder elsewhere, in an inexorable march toward the heat death of the universe. Perhaps this was why on some level Ethan would hold his dad responsible for his mother’s dying…but that would be later. Now? Now Ethan took it upon himself to be the disorder, the eater of sin, and when both Dad’s car and Mom’s truck with its rattletrap board-rack were gone, he would take a few nips of codeine cough syrup from the medicine chest and then go commandeer the sunroom he was no longer technically forbidden to enter—having served as her gofer and amanuensis—but not technically invited to treat as his personal party pad, either. The once-verboten record player had not only a red light that snapped on with a pleasant click, but also a second, periscopal light that sent a corridor of ridged and stable and shimmering gold across the endless revolutions of black wax. And beyond the inner rings of Purple Rain lay a white field pelted with flowers and a set of typefaces he could never locate on that other prodigy of the forbidden, Dad’s computer. Sticky sadness. But oh, no, he wasn’t gonna let de-elevator bring! Him! Down! He didn’t hear Mom’s truck rattle up, and so didn’t know she was back until she was in the doorway watching him dance. He jumped a little bit, and the record skipped.
