Meeks (14 page)

Ben dressed, pulling on warm, dry underwear, warm, dry socks. His shirt, admittedly, stank—he would wash it tonight in the sink; he tucked the shirt into the perfect, flat-front pale trousers. He spat on his boots and polished them with the dirty sock in the corner. He plunged his arms gleefully into the cool, silk corridors of the jacket sleeves. He shrugged the shoulders into place and buttoned the jacket, feeling hung with a mantle of impervious white mist.

He stepped out into the hall; he could hear the buzz of voices downstairs; he hesitated. One or two bachelor voices boomed above the others, and then the sound of a laughing crowd. But there was no way to move except forward. He forced himself to descend the stairs and walk into the main room, already packed with young women and bachelors in pale suits. Ben eyed the young women as they passed: poised and animated; attentive and preoccupied; loud and shy; boyishly thin and soft, plump.

Someone handed Ben a drink. He finished it quickly and went in pursuit of another. He leaned against the wall and drank, keeping his eye out for young women left unattended. But they were never unattended. The bachelors were relentless, double- and triple-teaming women, boring them to death; and he decided to bide his time, to cultivate an air of mystery: the thinking man's strategy.

When the bachelors headed out to the fields to shoot, Ben hung back. He wandered the house, investigating its strange objects, the solemn faces on the walls, portraits of the presumably dead sitting in moody lightning-cracked landscapes or under the boughs of fruit-laden trees.

It had started to rain. Ben wandered downstairs into the kitchen. A young man, one of the cooks, was working by the gray light of an enormous window. Steam choked the bottom two rows of windowpanes, and a thin sheet of water sluiced over the edge of the roof into the muddy, gutted side yard. A heap of slender, black branches was on the countertop beside twin metal bowls of fruit. The cook worked down the branches with a paring knife, stripping off the clustered yellow and pink flowers, tossing them aside.

"Should I turn on the light?"

The young man looked up and raised his eyebrows expectantly. “Sir?"

"Must be hard to see what you're doing."

"The electricity is out in this part of the house. I'm used to it."

"Electricity,” said Ben, rolling his eyes comically. He baffled himself. The cook ignored him. Ben could smell the cut flowers. The water rushing over the roof gave him the feeling of being behind a waterfall. It struck him that he would like to live so simply—to stay right here with the cook and learn to handle the things of this world with such easy confidence. “Can I help?” asked Ben.

The cook hesitated and scanned the kitchen uncomfortably. “Are you sure, sir? The other bachelors are out hunting."

"Please—I'd like to. I'm Ben, by the way."

"Well . . . Ben, we do need a few more oranges, lemons, and limes—the trees are behind the house about a hundred feet.” He handed Ben a canvas sack and an enormous carving knife. Ben stared at them unhappily. “Sure. My pleasure."

Ben marched through the rain clutching the canvas sack and the knife—he had only wanted to stay in the warm, dim kitchen with the young man. He supposed he had brought this on himself.

Ben reached the stand of fruit trees, dark-limbed and green with wet leaves. Yellow, red, orange, and pale-green orbs shone among the branches, behind the veil of rain. It was beautiful and strange, like something Finton would have painted. He glanced back at the house and saw the silhouette of the cook standing with someone else in the window and watching him, possibly laughing.

Ben took a slender branch in his hand and bent it low. So he had been sent on a fool's errand by his new friend the cook. Fine. Drops of rain hit the small and deep green leaves, making them dip and spring. What had the cook ever accomplished? Ben's great-great-great-grandfathers had subjugated the wilderness and settled this land, and the cook had the nerve to send him out into the mud to nick fruit trees with a kitchen knife? Ben was descended from people who had taken all that they needed from life: leveled forests, gouged mountains, harnessed rivers, tamed this world so the cook could tousle it with a soft wooden spoon. They had taken their revenge in blood, and they had
invented
the long-form conversation that was the lifeblood of the old tales—and
Ben
was being made to feel the fool?

A bucket, overturned and half-sunk in the mud, pinged quietly under the rain. Several of the trees had been slashed for sap, which was collected and trucked to the city. Ben studied the slashed trees; they made him unaccountably sad. The rain picked up, pouring over the sagging brim of his hat; his suit had darkened in the downpour to a deep cream color. The oranges shone, plump and bright in the light gray rain: He was as useless as a boy in a hatchery of suns. He wanted to lie down, to stretch out beneath the trees, to be absorbed by the wet green ground; his suit, already soaked, would be ruined. The small and dark green leaves shook, hit by rainfall; the smell of soil was everywhere: it was so dark and damp with life, he wanted to lie down in it.

"Ben? Ben!"

Ben stepped back and tried to peer through the veil of rainy trees.

"Ben!” She was calling his name, she was walking right at him. He was afraid to be holding the knife and dropped it.

"Ben,” she said, when she was closer, “come inside, please. It's raining."

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Last night I dreamed that the Brothers of Mercy had me pinned to the ground. They were hunched over me, their heads silhouetted by the setting sun. They were swabbing my face with a strong-smelling cloth that made me want to fight, and I struggled and fought with all my strength, which seemed to amount to nothing. They cut away my pale suit, and then they brought over the park bum and forced him to lick my naked body. I was disgusted—by the smell of him, by the feel of his coarse, wet tongue on my skin, by his muffled voice crying out in protest and revulsion as the Brothers of Mercy pushed his head down again and again. It was almost more than I could bear, but the dream took mercy on me and dropped me in the bow of an old whaler, painted blue and black and white, sailing upriver toward the Mountain Lakes, where our parents had taken us as boys, where the hearth was always hot and the world silent and white, the sleeping bees and foxes waiting in the dark for the golden fuzz and mint green of spring. When I was a boy and I used my brain for other things! Some men were carving up a whale on the shore: clouds of fat fell open in the sun. Some men are innocent, I thought, and others are not, but all seemed well with the world again. The clear, cold water split around the bow. Then I heard a soft thumping, the
thunk . . . thunk
that always invaded my dreams, and I looked over my shoulder and saw that my brother was in the boat with me. He was slumped beside the fishing lantern; the lantern cast a thin gold light over the water as it swung back and forth, cutting into my brother's head.

I woke up, sighed with relief when I saw that we were still safely in our little room by the train station. There was my brother, passed out on his bed of coats. I liked to watch over him, just as our mother watched over us when we were boys, leaning over our soft round heads in the dark, dreaming about what we might become. Poor Mother. All of our relationships deform us (i.e., make us “human"), but how do these loving creatures (our mothers) survive the person-imploding disappointments of their sons?

By the time I turned sixteen, I knew who and what I was (an artist). I told my mother that I planned not to marry, but rather to live and die in the theater. After the briefest hesitation, she gave me a wry smile. She was masking internal panic with an amused look—oldest tactic in the book. Then she began to recite the Old Prisoner's Tale, the grisly tale of “impossible choices” that she had told us almost every night when we were boys. “Do you know the story about the old prisoner?” she said. I had no choice but to listen, and I sat at the kitchen table with her and buried my face in my hands and mumbled, “Yes, but it feels good to remember."

"They told the Old Prisoner that they would set him free—on
one
condition. He must saw off his own hands—
both
of them. They gave him a handsaw. There was nothing else in his cell—not so much as a dead
spider
. Well, he saw what kind of choice he'd been given—it was an
impossible
choice
.
And so, with dignity, he chose to live out his years in prison. It was a life with some limits, but it was
life.
"

"That's your interpretation,” I said. “I think he just chose to live in his own head, where there are no limits—to go insane rather than accept that his life had been predicated on a lie."

"I don't understand you at all."

That night, I watched my brother helping my mother in the kitchen. They were mocking me, asking if the Great Artist would prefer carrots or squash for dinner. I decided that these cheap amusements were a kind of foreign import loaded onto local heads (my mother's, my brother's) and that they would come around in time. They didn't.

Then they had left me no choice but to fail into my art. I calculated the exact grade of failure necessary, so that I could slide, failing, into what I really wanted: the life of an artist. But the life of an artist is an impecunious one, and I was forced to dine often at my mother's house, collapsing my sense of outrage into a dense, hot, bright star that I hid in my heart while I filled my belly and fantasized about the day when I would come home a star of the theater, beloved by the people, worshipped by my mother. It was the kind of game I'd always loved to play: the entertainment of false alternatives.

Now I was a grown man, of course, making my own decisions. If my life was once a project for which another (namely, my mother) had the highest hopes, then I was
choosing
now to build a pyre under it, to use as firewood the life my mother had made and cared for.

I'd been sneaking gunpowder from the workshed behind the police station for weeks, hiding it in the upturned cuff of my work pants, which could be easily explained away—I was a clumsy workman, presumably weak with hunger and disease, shakily sorting the gunpowder.

My brother came home from his shift at the gum factory and set down three murky bottles of bad spirits, which the factory workers brewed illegally in the storerooms.

"What are you doing?” he asked.

"What are
you
doing?” I said. “That stuff will kill you."

"You're one to talk."

"I don't go near gum liquor,” I said, touching the scar on my forehead delicately.

"Is that gunpowder?"

"Why, yes it is, Brother. I've been bringing a little home every day,” I said, and poured the gunpowder through a makeshift paper funnel into one of our empty tea envelopes. I filed the envelope in the wooden tea box. “See? I've thought of everything."

"I don't understand what you're doing."

"I'm making a bomb,” I whispered, and I was deeply gratified by the look of surprise and fear on my brother's face.

"You're trying to make a bomb?"

"No, Brother. I
am
making one."

"And what are you going to do with this bomb?"

"I'm going to destroy the city and everyone in it."

"On Independence Day?"

"That's right. On Independence Day."

"How much gunpowder is there?"

"Almost a whole tea box."

My brother picked up one of the tea envelopes I had filled with gunpowder. “There's enough in this box to blow your head off, or mine, maybe crack the Reynolds Branch. That's it. Then the play will go on . . .” While some part of me conceded that he was probably right—he had always been the more practical brother—I pretended not to understand.

Just last week, I was dropping a pinch of gunpowder into my upturned cuff when a Brother of Mercy burst into the room. I let out a small scream. He was out of breath, full of predatory intensity. He took a long, hard look at me and said, “Did you see him?"

I hesitated, wanting to understand the rules of our game better before I jumped in. “Did you see something?” he said.

"I'm sorry, see?"

"See the prisoner—he got away from us and ran."

"The prisoner?” I echoed and scratched my head. Against all common sense, I was enjoying his company (I rarely spoke to anyone other than my brother); besides, we were both “professionals,” after a fashion, and there was no harm in a bit of conversational sport, a mood game to be played out of the sight of the citizenry.

"Well, I did
hear
something,” I lied, and then the man looked pleased, and I was pleased.

"It was a sound like chains in a box,” I said, immediately regretting it.

"What are you talking about?” he said, and then he gave me another long look and seemed to think he understood something about me, something he had missed at first, and he turned without another word and left.

I went back to stealing gunpowder, looked forward to the day when I would see his body piled among the others.

Ben

Ben watched her every move. It was still raining outside. The fire, orange and pleasantly shapeless, burned in the fireplace; the warmth hit his knees, drying out his pale trousers. Each pop of the wood as the fire ignited deposits of sap was a declaration of his happiness. Her youth and her seriousness. The blackness of her hair. The smell of wood burning. The milk cascading from the cold metal pitcher into her cup. The roundness of her gestures, the abundance of milk. Probably, he would have to leave as soon as the storm passed. She was so kind! Perhaps out of kindness, she tolerated him. That morning, she must have stretched in bed without self-consciousness, sighing awake beneath the light sheet. Ben imagined leaning over her, touching the edge of the counterpane as he stood dizzily within the inner chamber.

"Cookie?” she said. She held out a silver tray of cookies, rare and diverse, as if collected from the world's most remote territories: pulled from the soft, ridged ocean floor, plucked from the canopy of misty trees. One cookie was a cylinder of thin pastry, perfectly burned around the edges, as if shaved from a tree with a hot sword. His hand hovered over the tray. He worried that she was getting tired of holding the tray. But how could he think clearly in the presence of this insane splendor?