magic has been granted to you. I’m damned if I know where it came from. But I knew it. I knew it right away. When you were born.”
Barrett keeps blinking back the tears he’s determined not to shed in front of her, though he wonders, with increasing urgency, what, exactly, she’s talking about.
“Tyler is popular,” she says. “Tyler is good-looking. Tyler can throw a football … well, he can throw it pretty far, and in the direction footballs are supposed to go.”
“I know,” Barrett says.
What strange impatience rises now to his mother’s face? Why does she look at him as if he were sycophantically eager, desperate to please some doddering aunt by pretending surprise over every twist in a story he’s known by heart, for years?
“Those whom the gods would destroy …” his mother says, blowing smoke up into the crystals of the modest dome-shaped chandelier that clings like an upside-down tiara to the living room ceiling. Barrett isn’t sure whether she can’t, or won’t, finish the line.
“Tyler is a good guy,” Barrett says, for no reason he can name, beyond the fact that it seems he has to say something.
His mother speaks upward, toward the chandelier. She says, “My point exactly.”
This will all start making sense. It will, soon. The square crystals of the chandelier, worried by the electric fan, each crystal the size of a sugar cube, put out their modest, prismed spasms of light.
His mother says, “You may need to help him out, a little. Later. Not now. He’s fine, now. He’s cock o’ the walk.”
Cock o’ the walk. A virtue?
She says, “I just want you to, well … remember this conversation we’re having. Years from now. Remember that your brother may need help from you. He may need a kind of help you can’t possibly imagine, at the age of ten.”
“I’m nine,” Barrett reminds her.
Almost thirty years later, having arrived at the future to which his mother was referring, Barrett pulls the plug on the bathtub. There’s the familiar sound of water being sucked away. It’s a morning like any other, except …
The vision is the first event of any consequence, in how many years, about which Barrett hasn’t told Tyler; which he continues not mentioning to Tyler. Barrett has never, since he was a kid, been alone with a secret.
He has, of course, never kept a secret quite like this.
He’ll tell Tyler, he will, but not now, not yet. Barrett isn’t ready for Tyler’s skepticism, or his valiant efforts at belief. He’s really and truly not ready for Tyler to be worried about him. He can’t bring himself to be another cause for concern, not with Beth getting neither better nor worse.
A terrible thing: Barrett finds sometimes that he wants Beth either to recover or die.
The endless waiting, the uncertainty (higher white-cell count last week, that’s good, but the tumors on her liver are neither growing nor shrinking, that’s not so good), may be worse than grieving.
A surprise: There’s no one driving the bus. There are five different doctors now, none of them actually in charge, and sometimes their stories don’t match up. They make efforts, they’re not bad doctors (except for Scary Steve, the chemo guy), they’re not negligent, they try this and they try that, but Barrett (and Tyler, and probably Beth, though she’s never talked about it) had imagined a warrior, someone kind and august, someone who’d be sure. Barrett had not expected this disorganized squadron—all upsettingly young, except for Big Betty—who know the language of healing, who reel off seven-syllable terms (tending to forget, or to disregard, the fact that the words are incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t a doctor), who can operate the machinery, but who, purely and simply, don’t know what’s going to work, or what’s going to happen.
Barrett can keep this one about the celestial light private, for a while. It’s not an announcement Tyler needs to receive.
Barrett has, naturally enough, Googled every possible malady (torn retina, brain tumor, epilepsy, psychotic break) that’s presaged by a vision of light. Nothing quite fits.
Although he’s seen something extraordinary, and hopes it isn’t the precursor of a mortal ailment he failed to find on the Internet, he has not been instructed, he has not been transformed, there’s been no message or command, he is exactly who he was last night.
However. The question arises: Who was he last night? Has he in fact been altered in some subtle way, or has he simply been rendered more conscious of the particulars of his own ongoing condition? It’s a hard one to answer.
An answer might account for how and why Barrett and Tyler have lived so randomly (they, the National Merit boys—well, Barrett; Tyler was a runner-up—club presidents, Tyler crowned king of the fucking prom); why they happened to meet Liz when he and Tyler went, as each other’s date, to what has lived on as the Worst Party in History; why the three of them escaped the party and passed midnight together in some divey Irish pub; why Liz would eventually introduce Beth, newly arrived from Chicago; Beth who in no way resembles any of Tyler’s previous girlfriends, and with whom he’d fallen so immediately in love that he resembled some captive animal, fed for years on what its keepers believed to be its natural diet and then suddenly, one day, by accident, given what it actually ate, in the wild.
None of it has ever felt predetermined. It’s sequential, but not exactly orderly. It’s all been going to this party instead of that one, happening to meet someone who knew someone who by the evening’s end had fucked you in a doorway on Tenth Avenue or given you K for the first time or said something shockingly kind, out of nowhere, and then gone away forever, promising to call; or, with an equally haphazard aspect, happening to meet someone who’ll change everything, forever.
And now it’s a Tuesday in November. Barrett has gone for his morning run, had his morning bath. He’s going to work. What is there to do but what he always does? He’ll sell the wares (it’ll be slow today, because of the weather). He’ll continue with his exercise regimen and the no-carbs diet that will not make any difference to Andrew but will, might, help Barrett feel more agile and tragic, less like a badger besotted by a lion cub.
Will he see the light again? What if he doesn’t? Maybe he’ll grow old as a tale-teller who once saw something inexplicable; a UFO person, a Bigfoot person, a codger who experienced a brief, wondrous sighting of something inexplicable, and then went on about the business of getting older; who is part of the ongoing subhistory of crackpots and delusionals, the legions of geezers who know what they saw, decades ago, and if you don’t believe it, young one, that’s all right, maybe one day you, too, will see something you can’t explain, and then, well, then I guess you’ll know.
Beth is looking for something.
The trouble: She can’t seem to remember what it is.
She knows this much: She’s been careless, she’s misplaced … what? Something that matters, something that must be found, because … it’s needed. Because she’ll be held accountable when its absence is noticed.
She’s searching a house, although she’s not sure if it (what?) is here. It seems possible. Because she’s been in this house before. She recognizes it, or remembers it, in the way she remembers the houses of her childhood. The house multiplies into the houses in which she lived, variously, until she went away to college.
