Another Broken Wizard (37 page)

The priest, a gentle if ineffectual old Irish man, said the words
In the midst of life we are in death.
It sounded so baffling that I almost had to believe it. It was a shard of mystery thrown into the cooling tumult of my guts.

After his words, most fled the cold. I lingered, along with some others for no good reason. I spotted an old friend, John Bedill, who had been a friend of Joe’s and an all-around good guy—until he robbed a sporting-goods store with a shotgun and, if memory serves, received a fairly stern sentence for it. I was surprised to see him out and about. We saw each other and embraced, released each other, nodded and went our separate ways, probably forever.

I paced and stared at the green marble box until it became clear that I wasn’t going to out-linger the other lingerers without a coat. I walked down the snowy, trampled grass back to Dad’s SUV.

63.

Jeff turned off the radio when I got in the SUV.

“The radio’s fine. You can turn it back on.”

Jeff didn’t turn it back on, so I did, but quieter, so the Aerosmith song coming through the speakers was a tinny hiss. We pulled away from the grave and then stopped by the cemetery office so Jeff could use the bathroom.

“So are you okay?” Emily asked, climbing into Jeff’s seat up front.

“You probably know better than me. I mean, I’m talking and walking and I want to get a sandwich or something. So I guess that I am okay. I’m not feeling the urge to drink my own weight or drive a hundred miles an hour. I guess that’s what okay is, right?”

“I guess it’s the best you can hope for.”

“I just wish there was something to do. To name a street after Joe, or pass a law, or to make it so that cop goes to jail. I wish there was some clear lesson in all this, besides don’t taunt a man with a gun. Or I wish it had changed something in me, that I could take all of this and use it to become a saint or a millionaire. And there’s none of that, no lesson, no meaning, no purpose. I mean, is he just another guy who threw away his life because he couldn’t figure out what he was so mad at?”

“You have to give it time.”

“It’s like, your whole life you try to think positive, to make the best of bad situations, to fix problems and so on. But there’s no way to fix this, no way to deal with it, no good to be gleaned from it. He’s just dead. There’s nothing to do and practically nothing to say.”

“I don’t think there is anything to do. Things will change in their own time.”

Jeff came out of the bathroom, walking with a stumble back to the car. Circling out of the graveyard, we saw the funeral directors, along with a guy in coveralls, converging on Joe’s grave. Through the woods, we found Worcester again. There was a reception in the church basement, but I skipped it. We drove around aimlessly, finally stopping for some sandwiches at Elsa’s Bushel and Peck, then crossed the tail end of Lake Quinsigamond, passed St. John’s and climbed into Shrewsbury.

“Can I have my sandwich?” Jeff asked.

“One minute,” I said. “We’re almost there.”

There’s a park connected to the lab in Shrewsbury where they invented the birth control pill. On a service road between the lab and the park is a gap cut about two hundred feet deep into the trees and brush to give it a view of Worcester. It’s a lovers’ lane that no lovers ever seemed to visit. Driving the SUV right into the snow bank, I parked there. It wasn’t late, but the sun was already lowering itself onto Worcester.

“You know, you shouldn’t miss Joe too much. You’re going to see him again, in another life,” Jeff said after a half sandwich had passed.

“Thanks man,” I said.

“Seriously. My dad told me this story about reincarnation. One of the gods, Indra, was building himself a huge palace to celebrate this war he won. He kept making the palace bigger and bigger, until the builder finally went to Brahma and said like, hey, get this guy off my back.”

“I thought your parents were Catholic,” Emily said.

“That’s mostly my mom. My dad is into all kinds of stuff, religion-wise. My mom is just the pushy one. I think she tried to convert him when I was a kid, but …”

“Okay, so Brahma decides to help out the contractor.”

“Yeah, so he goes to see Indra in the form of a little boy and he starts telling Indra all kinds of things that he never knew about his ancestors. And then the boy sees a trail of ants in the corner of Indra’s huge mansion and starts laughing. Indra asks why he’s laughing, and the boy says that each of the ants has been Indra an infinite amount of times before,” Jeff said, nodding.

“So what happened with the mansion?” Emily asked.

“Oh, I think Indra decided to forget about it and seek wisdom, or something.”

“I wish my thesis advisor was so easy to placate,” Emily said in her low punch-line voice.

All of Route 9 glowed as it climbed up from Lake Quinsigamond, anticipating the dusk. It grew bright with orange streetlights, white parking lot lights and a dim rainbow of back-lit plastic signs. Beyond it was a glimpse of the few tall buildings of downtown Worcester.

“Oh man, here’s your present. I got it just for you,” Jeff said, taking a brown paper bag from inside his coat pocket.

Inside the bag was a clay wizard with a conical cap and star-spotted cloak. The wizard held a marble for a crystal ball in one hand. The wizard had a long, white beard and his mouth was wide with joy. It was exactly the kind of gift you’d expect your mentally ill friend to give you in a time of bereavement.

“Thanks man. I like it, a lot.”

Jeff leaned between the front seats to touch the wizard.

“His open hand is for incense. I just figured that, with everything going on, it might help you relax.”

“Thanks. It’s a great gift. I really appreciate it,” I said and put the wizard on top of the dashboard.

We finished our sandwiches while the sun pressed itself into the hills. I was all cried out and all talked out. My eyes were as hollow as my cheeks. I drove Jeff and Emily to the church parking lot and said good-bye. Jeff nodded again and again with his eyes wide as we said good-bye. Emily seemed more wary.

“Call me anytime you need to—night or day. But I guess you already do that,” she said.

There were still cars in the church parking lot, and I considered going inside. But by then, communal mourning had gone from being a high imperative to a poisonous form of self-abuse. I drove around Worcester as the roads filled again with rush hour traffic. Meandering in Dad’s SUV, I wondered at what Jeff had said about an infinite universe, where you play every part again and again. It seemed fair, but dizzying. And it made my present anguish seem foolish.

Despite everything, I prefer the Catholic scale of things. In it, everything matters. Everything is real to everyone. Even Christ loses his patience on the cross and demands that God explain why He has forsaken His only son. Even for Christ, pain is as real as God, and even more real, for a moment. And though reality may have a happy ending in heaven, there’s a lot of suffering between here and there. For the first time, the agony and struggle of Catholicism made real sense. I decided to buy some beer.

After making a hundred lefts and rights just to stay within twenty minutes of the red hot center of the pain, I pulled into the big liquor supermarket on Park Avenue. Abstracted with thoughts of suffering and God, I parked too hard into the parking lot’s huge snow bank. The clay wizard rattled against the windshield and then fell down by the gas and brake pedals. In my suit, I walked fast against the cold to the liquor store. But the doors were locked. Checking the sign on the door and my cell phone, twice, I saw that it had closed three minutes ago. I knocked, but only drew the attention of a surly Puerto Rican clerk, who pointed at the sign. I held out my hands in supplication to the scratched plastic doors of the liquor store as he walked away.

Back through the orange sodium light of the parking lot, I cursed. I opened the door to Dad’s SUV and hopped inside. But my feet didn’t hit the mat evenly. I leaned down to see what I’d stepped on, my stubbly neck pressing against the fake wood steering wheel. I retrieved the wizard Jeff had given me, now in two pieces, the wizard, and the arm that held his crystal ball. I held up Jeff’s gift, with a piece in each hand. The crystal ball caught the headlight of a car making a u-turn on Park Avenue.

“Another broken wizard,” I said to no one, and wept. I went to punch the car radio, but remembered it was Dad’s, and pulled back.

Eventually, I put the pieces of the wizard-shaped incense holder in the passenger seat and put the car in reverse. I took Chandler Street downtown, passing the old Worcester Market with the gorgeous terra cotta bull’s head at its roof peak. I worked through the rotaries and one-way streets back to Route 9, where the snow banks had already turned their final dirty color, somewhere between gray and brown. It was the color of the long-haul portion of the winter that sends the old-timers and the short-tempered running for Florida. I drove past the Price Chopper, Papa Gino’s and Newbury Comics in Shrewsbury, past the West Side Grill, which waited in the cold to go out of business again, then past the Fountainhead.

Route 9 was a profoundly unconscious stretch of the human enterprise, like so many places. The stores, the empty patches by woods and lakes, the apartment complexes, the uneven peppering of red lights—they all seemed immune to remark. I worked the gas and the brake. It was the best I could do. The night spread out forever. The earth vanished as Route 9 rushed me and my fellow travelers to the dream scenarios of parking lots, private homes, shopping centers, junkyards, interstate highways, airports and oblivion.

And death—my death and every death—was always there, just waiting. But you could lose it pretty easily, like you can lose the late afternoon sun in the downtown of a city. You only had to turn a corner, and it was gone.

From the road, I saw the lights I was looking for, and turned.

Epilogue

64.

New Haven is the line. It separates the New England and New York spheres of influence, separates Red Sox and Yankees fans, separates the dour authority of the British Puritans from the avaricious free-for-all of the Dutch merchants, separates the winter that is a way of life from the winter that is an inconvenience.

I had made the New York-to-Worcester trip hundreds of times—in a car, a train, a bus—and I always felt the changeover. This time, I crossed through the Heroes Tunnel on the Merritt Parkway. It was a few weeks after Christmas, a year after Joe was killed. I knew it was going to be a triathlon of sadness. But sadness becomes less of a good reason to do or not do something as time goes on. I got the day off work and rented a car.

New Haven and Hartford sprang up and drifted by with memories of being a teenager, knowing nothing and acting stupidly, wanting love or transcendence and not knowing how to find them. I remembered how the Hartford bus station’s grimy possibility had stirred me, back when nearly every place in the world had seemed an improvement.

The intervening year had taken its toll. I lost Serena and gained twenty pounds. Dad healed. I went back to New York, and turned thirty. I held my tongue and took a job for less pay. The days rolled in and out, growing imperceptibly easier as they did. The months of living on an emotional diet of weeping, rage and exhaustion had passed, and had changed me. But I’d rejoined the living. At the end of the summer, I’d even met a special sort of girl, and I was thinking of proposing to her.

Joe was not altogether gone. He came now and then in dreams. Once I met him at Spag’s, which was still open in the dream. He was working at the garden shop, by the rear parking lot. They were holding a carnival there, just like they never did. Joe was angry with me, because I’d gained so much weight. I tried to joke it off, to say how glad I was to see him. But he wouldn’t let it go. After he’d harangued me for too long, I asked him what death was like.

“I can’t tell you that,” Joe said, his face in half a grin. “It’s against the rules.”

“Come on, man. It’s me. Anyway, you break the rules all the time,” I said.

“Not these rules,” he said, his grin flattening.

“You’re a dick,” I said, to which he gave me his big, confrontational smile.

I was only up for the day, and only up to see Joe’s grave. Dad’s job had transferred him to Florida in September. I’d seen Mom over Christmas in Framingham. Olive had asked me to call her the next time I was in the area, but I didn’t.

The grave was just a bronze plaque screwed into the lawn in the middle of nowhere. I had gone back because Joe mattered to me. And he still had to matter, dead or not, or else I myself would be lost. Maybe that’s not perfect logic. But I am a small man in a large world, and it is the best I could do.

65.

Marissa had moved into a three-decker on Vernon Hill. She shouted my name from the second-floor balcony, waving a Budweiser and a cigarette. I got my bag out of the rental car and climbed the stairs. Her ex-boyfriend had her daughter for the night and she was having some friends over. She hugged me hard in the hallway.

“Jim, I’m so glad you’re here. I miss him so much,” she said, holding on.

“Me too,” I said, not sure of what I meant. I’d been wary of maudlin outbursts and generally suspicious of my own emotions for a year by then. I never wanted to make mourning my vocation. But there I was.

The party started out fun—Marissa fought a guy on crutches and we all drank and drank. A Puerto Rican schoolteacher who was slurring her words got upset and ran off, leaving behind her purse and cell phone. Marissa gave me a folder of Joe’s old drawings of robots and war scenes to flip through. A drunk skinny blonde kept trying to kiss me in between her crying jags. Finally some guy in a backwards baseball hat, first called her ex-husband, then her husband, showed up.