What could I say? Thomas always made sense. “Yes.”
“Okay.” He gave me a little coach’s pat and we returned to the Grand Am, where a separate colloquy had apparently taken place in our absence.
“Ricky wants his sister to play the Good Samaritan,” Irene sang out, with a cheeriness that betrayed her dread of Thomas’s reaction.
“What sister?”
“She’s seventeen,” Ricky said. “She just, I don’t know, it like fits her better than me.”
Thomas gaped at him, unable to believe the kid was slipping through his fingers. He seemed completely at a loss. Ricky tried again to explain. “She’s the type who would actually save a person’s life, know what I’m saying?” he asked. “Like, she could really do that.”
It was sweet the way he said it. He loves his sister, I thought.
“Okay, how do we find her?” Thomas sighed, then added under his breath, to Irene, “Let’s just pray they look alike.”
“She’s at work,” Ricky said. “TCBY. I don’t know the number.”
“That’ll be easy,” Thomas muttered to Irene. “There’s only one every fifteen feet.”
“Highcrest Mall,” Ricky said sullenly.
Irene called information, wrote down the number and handed it to Thomas, along with the phone.
“Name?” Thomas called as he dialed.
“Charlotte.”
“I mean your sister,” Thomas said, his voice brittle with impatience.
“Charlotte. Her name is Charlotte. My sister.”
Thomas shut the phone. For a moment his head hung in a kind of bow, and when he lifted it again, his face had been rinsed of anger and harassment and was brimming instead with an awed delight that made him look about six. “Your sister’s name … is Charlotte?”
“Ding ding ding.”
Thomas grinned—a grin that was like curtains flung open, a grin I couldn’t help mirroring, despite the fact that I loathed him, rued the day that our paths had crossed and (briefly, in moments) wished him dead.
Thomas touched two fingers to his lips and raised them to the sky. “Kismet,” he said.
Somehow, without Moose’s even realizing it, the hazy blue sky of mid-afternoon had clouded over and swelled with what suddenly looked to be rain clouds. How long had he been sitting here? Moose wasn’t sure, having fallen into a sort of trance as he gazed at Lake Michigan. The water had been light, aquamarine when he’d first sat down, but now it was gray-brown and opaque, the color of waves in nineteenth-century paintings of gun battles at sea. Moose pretended to study the lake and its variegations, pretended the way a person might pretend to whistle merrily during a stroll through Chicago’s South Side—to conceal his awareness of some danger close at hand. The ominous presence was lurking behind him, a presence whose vast and imposing shape Moose could not ignore for very much longer. Finally he turned, slowly, nonchalantly, turned as if to look back at the park, the distant tennis courts whose thop, thop he faintly heard from where he sat. There was no one behind him. Or anywhere near him. He was alone except for a few joggers and one or two loping Labradors the color of chocolate. He was alone. And what exactly was he doing here?
Moose rose to his feet very slowly, as if awakening from a nap, his every move calibrated to conceal what was actually going on inside him: an incipient roar of fear at finding himself in Chicago—so far afield! How would he ever get back? The distance between his present location and the tightly framed world in which he passed his days felt beyond negotiation; the relative spontaneity and lightheartedness of the visit was lost upon him now, as he slowly—painfully slowly—began walking back in the direction of his car beneath the bruised and swollen sky, a sky on the verge of some violent discharge. Alone, Moose was alone, no one even knew he was here! All around him, in those glass apartment buildings overlooking the lake, lived a legion of strangers, people who didn’t know, who couldn’t see, and Moose was alone because his vision had divided him from these people—had altered him internally so that the child he’d once been, the little boy who had walked alongside him earlier today, by the lake, when the sun was out, no longer recognized him.
And only now, as Moose huffed toward his car past sailboats rocking in Belmont Harbor like cradles in the rising wind, only now did he permit himself to turn his mind to his niece and her defection. “I don’t want to be like you,” she’d said, “I want to be like everybody else.” And a worse thing, too, a thing whose exact contents he mercifully could not recall, the gist of which was that she would rather die than live a life such as Moose’s own. And even as he recoiled, half staggering at the impact of these memories, Moose understood.
The car, the car—he limped toward it, collapsed behind the wheel and began to drive, but driving failed now to relieve him as it had earlier today; a worrying thought intruded as he nosed into traffic on Lake Shore Drive, the traffic of beachgoers fleeing the impending storm. A worrying thought: he’d gotten into this car intending to go to the University Club for lunch as his father used to do, but he hadn’t been able to. In fact he’d barely managed to drive into Chicago and sit by the lake. Or rather, he’d done it easily enough but now wished he had not; it had taken too great a toll. Simple things were becoming so much harder to do. Would he ever don a suit and spoon those raspberries from a silver bowl? Why did this seem a fantastical wish?
The answer lay in the vision itself: a different man than Moose was the one who thrived in this new world, a sociopath who made himself anew each afternoon, for whom lying was merely persuasion. More and more they ruled the world, these quicksilver creatures, minotaurs who weren’t the products of birth or history, nature or nurture, but assembled for the eye from prototypes; who bore the same relationship to human beings as machine-made clothing did to something hand-stitched. A world remade by circuitry was a world without history or context or meaning, and because we are what we see, we are what we see, such a world was certainly headed toward death.
Moose drove west on Addison toward I-90, forcing himself to move slowly, slowly, though he wanted desperately to flee. Only this studied languor could halt his progress into panic. Because Moose and his ilk were not part of the great glittering future that everyone seemed to believe was now upon them; they crouched in its cracks, its interstices. They had before them a herculean task of persuasion: warning people without souls, people assembled from parts like shoes or guns of a hundred years ago, that a world populated by such as themselves was doomed. And Moose had failed—failed in all these years to explain to even one human being what had happened to him that summer afternoon when he was twenty-three, driving home from Hank Sternberger’s parents’ house in Wisconsin. A moodiness had been on him for weeks, a deep preoccupation whose catalyst was a tourist pamphlet on Venetian glassblowing he’d flicked open while watching football in someone’s rec room. Clear glass, perfected in Murano circa 1300, glass that made possible windows, eyeglasses, mirrors, and eventually microscopes and telescopes. These simple facts, mentioned in passing, had hijacked Moose’s imagination. The birth of clear sight, of people’s awareness of their outward selves—these seemed the origins of a phenomenon whose reach extended all the way to the present day—screens, frames, images—a world constructed and lived from the outside.
He’d been alone in the car that day, or he likely wouldn’t have noticed something amiss on the grassy embankment beside the interstate, would not have pulled over onto the shoulder in the first place. A bitch nursing a few pups, it turned out to be—a cur, a mutt—what was she doing there? His car on the shoulder, the dog and her wretched pups sprawled panting in the longish, blighted grass, and for some reason (and here was the gap, the stitch, the missing step in Moose’s personal history) for some reason, rather than get back inside his car and continue home, rather than haul dog and pups into the backseat and drop them off somewhere more hospitable, Moose had left his car parked beside the interstate (dangerously) and climbed the parched, grassy slope that hugged the overpass, climbed wi
thout knowing why, then sat immobilized looking down at the traffic, hypnotized by the flux and flow that had surrounded him only minutes before, a crush of humanity in whose midst he had subsisted blindly, un-reflexively until that moment. Hours passed, so many that when he looked again, the bitch and her pups had vanished. He lay on his back in the grass and let the sky push against his face. From somewhere came the whistle of a train. And Moose had understood that it was over: the trains, the factories—the world of objects was gone and imagery was ascendant, whirling over tiny filaments of connection he could actually hear amassing hungrily, invisibly beneath the soil. Wires that weren’t even wires. Information that lived on the very air.
Now Moose drove so slowly that the cars behind him began to honk. It was starting to rain, big sloppy drops spilling onto the windshield. No thunder yet. His driving was stymied by a clobbering sensation of loss. But what exactly had he lost? Himself as he had been, firm-bodied and flabby-minded? Some clarity of vision he once had possessed? Or was it the old, dormant chamber of his bicameral mind calling out to him, reminding him of the days when rocks and trees and statues had spoken with the voices of gods?
55
We showered. Wriggled back into our clothes. Stepped from our motel room into the empty parking lot.
It was dusk.
Sleep had made an end to the previous day. The day when driving to Rockford, Illinois, together had seemed like a good idea. Or even a reasonable idea. An idea that was appealing in the smallest possible way.
I filled the gas tank. Dust and squashed bugs and bird shit were baked onto my beautiful blue car.
We had ridden in silence before. Top down. A brimming, windy silence.
This one was vacant. It roused in me an urgent need for talk: “Road.” “Signs.” “Sky.” “How was?” “Where were?” “Radio.” “Temperature.” Forced conversation hovering over a void.
Z listened to my efforts with a dazed look. With each word, I was becoming less the person he imagined.
I saw this clearly. But I couldn’t stop.
I read, sitting in the Grand Am with the light on in hopes that the battery would expire, a subversive impulse I was having more and more as I observed the mounting juggernaut around me. Each time I looked up, I saw volunteers returning with gigantic blue plastic tarps, which the mutinous production assistants began tying to stakes in preparation for rain. There was no question now of a storm; the tarps bellied and rattled in the rising wind, and clouds like three-dimensional bruises were bearing down, leaking occasional drops. Lightning bit at the edges of the sky.
By now, a multicolored chain of cars reached all the way down to the interstate, and spectators continued to amass, milling about under flowered umbrellas, waiting for something to happen. When Thomas knocked on the window of the Grand Am and asked me to test the ditch, these onlookers pressed toward me with interest. I left the car and walked the length of the ditch. Now, at last, I discerned its purpose: to lower me three feet below the surface of the field, so the corn would tower over me as it would have last August, presumably, had I been able to walk.
“Beautiful work,” Thomas commended Mike and Ed when I emerged from the ditch. “Smooth. Even. You guys are real professionals.” The men nodded politely, sucking their Winstons, but when Thomas turned away, they shook their heads.
And then the girl arrived. Charlotte.
I recognized her instantly—before I saw her, it almost seemed, as if some part of me had remembered the name, or her brother’s face from the photographs in Ellen’s dressing room. She parked down the hill and came into sight on foot, walking briskly up the slight incline, her narrow frame silhouetted against the dreadful sky. She looked different, I saw this even at a distance. No more glasses. The dreamy quality I remembered had burned off, leaving in its place what I guessed was maturity, though it registered as sadness. No one seemed to notice her, and as she scanned the group for a face she knew, our eyes touched briefly, then hers moved past without recognition. Of course, I thought—that day I had looked like no one, wrapped in a scarf, sunglasses and pancake makeup pasted over my bruises. But even as I congratulated myself on having eluded identification, I had a feverish impulse to speak with this girl, to remind her of our previous meeting.
“Sis,” Ricky called. He went to Charlotte and brought her to Thomas, who was adjusting the camera. I watched Thomas turn and see her, watched the crestfallen look he tried unsuccessfully to mask as he measured the distance between sister and brother. He nodded, smiling frozenly. He was at my side three seconds later (I counted). “We’ve got to lose the girl,” he said.
“I like her.”
“It’ll be easy,” he murmured, thinking aloud. “I’ll just say it has to be a guy. I’ll tell her you have to be carried.”
“You think that scrawny brother of hers can carry me?”
“I’ll tell her …”
“Thomas. She came all the way out here and found us.”
Thomas cocked his head and peered at me. “I came all the way out here from frigging New York,” he said through a tight smile. “I’m the one spending money to get this shot exactly right. And that girl is not going to be in it.”
“Fine,” I said. “Neither am I.”
He stared at me without comprehension.
“Use my niece,” I told him, “she’s better looking. God knows she’s younger. She can fall in love with the Good Samaritan at the end.” I longed to walk away, but the sight of genuine alarm catalyzing in Thomas’s face was too great a pleasure to forfeit.
“Hey,” he said. “I know we’re both tired.”
“I mean it. I quit,” I said, the very words unleashing a vertiginous sensation of freedom. “It’s your movie, great. Do it without me.” I knew I should walk away, but I couldn’t.
“Charlotte,” he said. “Charlotte, Charlotte.” He’d reverted to my full name, which was something. “Charlotte, you’re everything,” he said, taking my hands in his (hot, moist), and gazing into my face. “You’re it. The sine qua non. Without you, the whole thing is nothing. All this”—he waved an arm at the sky, the corn, the audience—“is just empty. And if I haven’t been appreciative enough, if I haven’t made you feel how crucial you are to this project every minute that we’ve worked on it, I apologize. I honestly do. Maybe it’s just—maybe it’s some perverse side of human nature that we take for granted the things we value most.”
Where did he come up with this stuff? And yet even as I listened distrustfully, disbelievingly, I felt the words seeping into me like some witchy potion, flattening my rebellion into a thin wafer of complaint. I stood before him pouting. “I want Charlotte to play the Good Samaritan,” I said.
Thomas swallowed and looked away. I saw how hard it was for him to yield—even now, with the threat of my defection immediately before him. He was a tyrant: a tiptoey, apologetic tyrant. “We’ll keep talking about it,” he said. “And I promise”—he held up a hand—“the last word is yours.”
He smiled at me. I smiled at him. “You’ve already heard it,” I said.
Moose drove slowly, slowly. The rain had retracted, sucked back inside the clouds; tornado weather, he thought, then wondered if the tornado was real or metaphoric. This thought came to Moose innocently enough, a moment of literary-critical speculation, but in passing through his mind it raked against him in a way that felt damaging, a tiny tear in an astronaut’s suit. In Shakespeare’s plays, thunderstorms accompanied crescendos in human affairs, but those storms were metaphorical, of course. And here was the ominous sensation back again—oh, yes, closer than ever, a very large body passing so near to Moose that it lifted the hairs from his head. Was it the whale? Had the whale returned after a long metaphorical absence? Moose searched for his notebook, digging for it in the crack of the seat; not finding it, he finally wrote on the leg of his pants with a black Magic Marker, Thought, sensation, whale, tornado, realizing as he wrote that he was getting it backward; the tornado had come first, generating the origina
l thought, which was—what? Oh, oh, he had to remember; Moose swerved in his lane as he rummaged metaphorically in his mind (which was crammed with metaphors), desperate for that thought—yes, there, he seized it like a rope, realizing only as he did so that it was a troubling rope, a troubling thought, a rope pulling him toward thoughts perhaps better left unthought, but it was too late. He was holding rope and thought. Thought: what proof did Moose have that his vision was not, itself, just a metaphor? His mind wheezed like a bellows as he attempted to grasp the implications of this query: that the revelation he’d devoted his life to understanding might not exist in itself, might be a metaphor for something within Moose—a mistake, a mutation, a disorder of the brain. That the vision was not the cause of his isolation, as he had always supposed, but merely an expression of it.
“No!” Moose shouted at his windshield. “No! I reject that vision, that antivision. I reject the accusation of solipsism because I know I’m right. I know I’m right. I know I’m right!” He was yelling, battling the beast, wrestling with an apparition from the icy sea that was also a minotaur, not to mention driving a 1978 station wagon through incipient rainfall. Really, it was a feat! But one he probably could not sustain much longer, especially if the lightning he saw gnawing the horizon was actually headed this way.
I sat on a folding chair in the cornfield, away from the reaching eyes of my audience, which now included some hundred Rockford teenagers and swarms of their parents, all drawn to this field as if by a heavenly sign, some gleaming emanation of Hollywood. I sat under a small tarp held aloft by Charlotte and Ricky, rain prattling at the plastic with an eerie restraint that was irreconcilable with the fat, lowering sky. I held the manuscript in my lap and read sporadically in the jaundiced light.
Pammy, who was acting as Allison’s assistant, held up last Halloween’s issue of Seventeen (they saved them all) so her sister could see it. “7 Easy Steps to a Wretched Bloody Mess,” I read amid a pinwheel of girl-faces so white and clean they resembled bars of soap. Many years ago, one of those faces had been mine. My nieces began Step One, which involved making wavy lines along my cheekbones with a set of soft purple crayons.