Hearts In Atlantis (60 page)

I ended up in a holding cell meant for fifteen prisoners—twenty, max—with about sixty gassed-out, punched-out, drugged-out, beat-up, messed-up, worked-over, fucked-over, blood-all-over hippies, some smoking joints, some crying, some puking, some singing protest songs (from far over in the corner, issuing from some guy I never even saw, came a stoned-out version of “I'm Not Marchin' Anymore”). It was like some weird penal version of telephone-booth cramming.

I was jammed up against the bars, trying to protect my shirt pocket (Pall Malls), and my hip pocket (the copy of
Lord of the Flies
Carol had given me, now very battered, missing half its front cover, and falling out of its binding), when all at once Stoke's face flashed into my mind as bright and complete as a high-resolution photograph. It came from nowhere, it seemed, perhaps the product of a dormant memory circuit which had gone momentarily hot, joggled by either a nightstick to the head or a revivifying whiff of teargas. And a question came with it.

“What the
fuck
was a cripple doing on the third floor?” I asked out loud.

A little guy with a huge mass of golden hair—a kind of Peter Frampton dwarf, if you could dig that—looked around. His face was pale and pimply. Blood was drying beneath his nose and on one cheek. “What, man?” he asked.

“What the fuck was a cripple doing on the third floor of a college dorm? One with no elevator?
Wouldn't they have put him on the first floor?” Then I remembered Stoke plunging toward Holyoke with his head down and his hair hanging in his eyes, Stoke muttering “Rip-
rip
, rip-
rip
, rip-
rip
” under his breath. Stoke going everywhere as if everything was his enemy; give him a quarter and he'd try to shoot down the whole world.

“Man, I'm not following you. What—”

“Unless he asked them to,” I said. “Unless he maybe right out
demanded
it.”

“Bingo,” said the little guy with the Peter Frampton hair. “Got a joint, man? I want to get high. This place sucks. I want to go to Hobbiton.”

Skip became an artist, and he's famous in his own way. Not like Norman Rockwell, and you'll never see a reproduction of one of
Skip's
sculptures on a plate offered by the Franklin Mint, but he's had plenty of shows—London, Rome, New York, last year in Paris—and he's reviewed regularly. There are plenty of critics who call him jejune, the flavor of the month (some have been calling him the flavor of the month for twenty-five years), a trite mind communicating via low imagery with other trite minds. Other critics have praised him for his honesty and energy. I tend in this direction, but I suppose I would; I knew him back in the day, we escaped the great sinking continent together, and he has remained my friend; in a distant way he has remained my
paisan
.

There are also critics who have commented on the rage his work so often expresses, the rage I first saw clearly in the
papier-mâché
Vietnamese family tableau he set afire in front of the school library to the amplified pulse of The Youngbloods back in 1969. And yeah. Yeah, there's something to that. Some of Skip's stuff is funny and some of it's sad and some of it's bizarre, but most of it looks angry, most of his stiff-shouldered plaster and paper and clay people seem to whisper
Light me, oh light me and listen to me scream, it's really still 1969, it's still the Mekong and always will be
. “It is Stanley Kirk's anger which makes his work worthy,” a critic wrote during an exhibition in Boston, and I suppose it was that same anger which contributed to his heart attack two months ago.

His wife called and said Skip wanted to see me. The doctors believed it hadn't been a serious cardiac event, but the Captain begged to disagree. My old
paisan
Captain Kirk thought he was dying.

I flew down to Palm Beach, and when I saw him—white face below mostly white hair on a white pillow—it called up a memory I could not at first pin down.

“You're thinking of Jones,” he said in a husky voice, and of course he was right. I grinned, and at the same moment a cold chill traced a finger down the middle of my back. Sometimes things come back to you, that's all. Sometimes they come back.

I came in and sat down beside him. “Not bad, O swami.”

“Not hard, either,” he said. “It's that day at the infirmary all over again, except that Carbury's probably dead and this time I'm the one with a tube in the back
of my hand.” He raised one of his talented hands, showed me the tube, then lowered it again. “I don't think I'm going to die anymore. At least not yet.”

“Good.”

“You still smoking?”

“I've retired. As of last year.”

He nodded. “My wife says she'll divorce me if I don't do the same . . . so I guess I better try.”

“It's the worst habit.”

“Actually, I think living's the worst habit.”

“Save the phrase-making shit for the
Reader's Digest
, Cap.”

He laughed, then asked if I'd heard from Natie.

“A Christmas card, like always. With a photo.”

“Fuckin Nate!” Skip was delighted. “Was it his office?”

“Yeah. He's got a Nativity scene out front this year. The Magi all look like they need dental work.”

We looked at each other and began to giggle. Before Skip could really get going, he began to cough. It was eerily like Stoke—for a moment he even
looked
like Stoke—and I felt that shiver slide down my back again. If Stoke had been dead I'd have thought he was haunting us, but he wasn't. And in his own way Stoke Jones was as much of a sellout as every retired hippie who progressed from selling cocaine to selling junk bonds over the phone. He loves his TV coverage, does Stoke; when O.J. Simpson was on trial you could catch Stoke somewhere on the dial every night, just another vulture circling the carrion.

Carol was the one who didn't sell out, I guess. Carol and her friends, and what about the chem students they killed with their bomb? It was a mistake, I believe
that with all my heart—the Carol Gerber I knew would have no patience with the idea that all power comes out of the barrel of a gun. The Carol I knew would have understood that was just another fucked-up way of saying we had to destroy the village in order to save it. But do you think the relatives of those kids care that it was a mistake, the bomb didn't go off when it was supposed to, sorry? Do you think questions of who sold out and who didn't matter to the mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, lovers, friends? Do you think it matters to the people who have to pick up the pieces and somehow go on? Hearts can break. Yes. Hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't.

Skip worked on getting his breath back. The monitor beside his bed was beeping in a worried way. A nurse looked in and Skip waved her off. The beeps were settling back to their previous rhythm, so she went. When she was gone, Skip said: “Why did we laugh so hard when he fell down that day? That question has never entirely left me.”

“No,” I said. “Me either.”

“So what's the answer? Why did we laugh?”

“Because we're human. For awhile, I think it was between Woodstock and Kent State, we thought we were something else, but we weren't.”

“We thought we were stardust,” Skip said. Almost with a straight face.

“We thought we were golden,” I agreed, laughing. “And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

“Lean over, hippie-boy,” Skip said, and I did. I saw that my old friend, who had outfoxed Dearie and Ebersole and the Dean of Men, who had gone around
and begged his teachers to help him, who had taught me to drink beer by the pitcher and say fuck in a dozen different intonations, was crying a little bit. He reached up his arms to me. They had gotten thin over the years, and now the muscles hung rather than bunched. I bent down and hugged him.

“We tried,” he said in my ear. “Don't you ever forget that, Pete.
We tried
.”

I suppose we did. In her way, Carol tried harder than any of us and paid the highest price . . . except, that is, for the ones who died. And although we've forgotten the language we spoke in those years—it is as lost as the bell-bottom jeans, home-tie-dyed shirts, Nehru jackets, and signs that said
KILLING FOR PEACE IS LIKE FUCKING FOR CHASTITY
—sometimes a word or two comes back. Information, you know. Information. And sometimes, in my dreams and memories (the older I get the more they seem to be the same), I smell the place where I spoke that language with such easy authority: a whiff of earth, a scent of oranges, and the fading smell of flowers.

1983: Gobless us every one
.

He wakes to music, always to music; the shrill
beep-beep-beep
of the clock-radio's alarm is too much for his mind to cope with during those first blurry moments of the day. It sounds like a dump truck backing up. The radio is bad enough at this time of year, though; the easy-listening station he keeps the clock-radio tuned to is wall-to-wall Christmas carols, and this morning he wakes up to one of the two or three on his Most Hated List, something full of breathy voices and phony wonder. The Hare Krishna Chorale or the Andy Williams Singers or some such. Do you hear what I hear, the breathy voices sing as he sits up in bed, blinking groggily, hair sticking out in every direction. Do you see what I see, they sing as he swings his legs out, grimaces his way across the cold floor to the radio, and bangs the button that turns it off. When he turns around, Sharon has assumed her customary defensive posture—pillow folded over her head, nothing showing but the creamy curve of one shoulder, a lacy nightgown strap, and a fluff of blond hair.

He goes into the bathroom, closes the door, slips off the pajama bottoms he sleeps in, drops them into the hamper, clicks on his electric razor. As he runs it over his face he thinks,
Why not run through the rest of the sensory catalogue while you're at it, boys? Do you smell what I smell, do you taste what I taste, do you feel what I feel, I mean, hey, go for it
.

“Humbug,” he says as he turns on the shower. “All humbug.”

•   •   •

Twenty minutes later, while he's dressing (the dark gray suit from Paul Stuart this morning, plus his favorite Sulka tie), Sharon wakes up a little. Not enough for him to fully understand what she's telling him, though.

“Come again?” he asks. “I got eggnog, but the rest was just ugga-wugga.”

“I asked if you'd pick up two quarts of eggnog on your way home,” she says. “We've got the Allens and the Dubrays coming over tonight, remember?”

“Christmas,” he says, checking his hair carefully in the mirror. He no longer looks like the glaring, bewildered man who sits up in bed to the sound of music five mornings a week—sometimes six. Now he looks like all the other people who will ride into New York with him on the seven-forty, and that is just what he wants.

“What about Christmas?” she asks with a sleepy smile. “Humbug, right?”

“Right,” he agrees.

“If you remember, get some cinnamon, too—”

“Okay.”

“—but if you forget the eggnog, I'll
slaughter
you, Bill.”

“I'll remember.”

“I know. You're very dependable. Look nice, too.”

“Thanks.”

She flops back down, then props herself up on one elbow as he makes a final minute adjustment to the tie, which is a dark blue. He has never worn a red tie in his life, and hopes he can go to his grave untouched by that particular virus. “I got the tinsel you wanted,” she says.

“Mmmm?”

“The
tinsel
,” she says. “It's on the kitchen table.”

“Oh.” Now he remembers. “Thanks.”

“Sure.” She's back down and already starting to drift off again. He doesn't envy the fact that she can stay in bed until nine—hell, until eleven, if she wants—but he envies that ability of hers to wake up, talk, then drift off again. He had that when he was in the bush—most guys did—but the bush was a long time ago.
In country
was what the new guys and the correspondents always said; if you'd been there awhile it was just the bush, or sometimes the green.

In the green, yeah.

She says something else, but now she's back to ugga-wugga. He knows what it is just the same, though: have a good day, hon.

“Thanks,” he says, kissing her cheek. “I will.”

“Look very nice,” she mumbles again, although her eyes are closed. “Love you, Bill.”

“Love you, too,” he says and goes out.

•   •   •

His briefcase—Mark Cross, not quite top-of-the-line but close—is standing in the front hall, by the coat tree where his topcoat (from Tager's, on Madison) hangs. He snags the case on his way by and takes it into the kitchen. The coffee is all made—God bless Mr. Coffee—and he pours himself a cup. He opens the briefcase, which is entirely empty, and picks up the ball of tinsel on the kitchen table. He holds it up for a moment, watching the way it sparkles under the light of the kitchen fluorescents, then puts it in his briefcase.

“Do you hear what I hear,” he says to no one at all and snaps the briefcase shut.

Outside the dirty window to his left, he can see the city drawing closer. The grime on the glass makes it look like some filthy, gargantuan ruin—dead Atlantis, maybe, just heaved back to the surface to glare at the gray sky. The day's got a load of snow caught in its throat, but that doesn't worry him much; it is just eight days until Christmas, and business will be good.