Prodigals (16 page)

(III)

You are twenty-nine. You are going home. This is happening. Kick and scream if you will. Carp all the way to the airport. Complain to your friends, to Anita. Such a
drag
. A duty, really, and joyless. No, you
love
your mother, she's just impossible, deluded. The way parents are. Such lame-o's, irredentists lost to an irrecoverable past. You look a bit bedraggled, you must admit. A bit showily causal in your knockabout jeans and Keds. No sense getting dressed up for your mother, but it's like you're trying to prove you've left. Prove you don't belong. And yes, you've been away too long, it's true. A year, can it be? And yes, everyone else in what was once your family now has a different family of his own. Meanwhile your mother's life has shrunk to the space of three stories she tells herself not exactly riveted to the truth: that she and your father continue to enjoy a spiritual bond since the split; that she is happy, all things considered; that you and she are a pair, alike in loneliness, although you often have girlfriends whom she continues to conceive of as very close women friends.

It rains your first days home. You sit with your mother in the back room and she says she's been feeling close to God lately. We talk, she tells you and says He put her on her own to know Him better. Water runs down the frosted glass. You should have more conversations with real people, you say. You know the sort: flesh-and-blood,
visible
, prone to unfortunate differences of opinion. I never knew what profound companionship I could find in God, she says. And what you want to say is that a person can't find companionship in an echo, that she is listening to her echo and the thing about an echo is it will never surprise you. But you say nothing. You can rip the bandages off everyone else's private wounds, not hers.

Your father and me, Jesse, we just wanted different things.

Anita told me to tell you to date more.

It's nice you have such nice friends, she says.

The rain taps out your silence. On your third day home you escape Ma.

The weather has broken and hot sun floods the shadeless downtown. The heat culls moisture from the hollows. You pause at the old department store. Through the windows you can see the dais and pulpit where Amy's father used to preach. People you don't know are gathered at a card table with coffees and notepads—congregants, strangers, new stewards of what was once yours—and you have the brief urge to go in and tell them to stop, that you and Amy have explored this blind alley and can tell them the dimensions if they like. It is a kind of vertigo you feel, a queasy lurch at the precipice of collapsed time, seeing those things continue on from which your own life has diverged. And it reminds you of watching the high school girls play soccer on a visit home years ago, the sudden truth in your stomach, as they ran in their red pinnies through the quickening dusk, that new bodies would keep coming to fill those jerseys year after year, shouting in a joy that was itself the very act of forgetting—forgetting those who had come before, forgetting how they would disappear themselves.

At the new coffee shop a barista pulls the lever on the espresso machine like she isn't sure what will happen. A finger taps your shoulder. Oh, goodness, you say, and you and Amy's mom are hugging. She's grown bigger over the years, cut her hair short, let it gray. How is she? Just lovely, she says. She's remarried. Yes, you heard. A younger man, a naval engineer, the stuff of light gossip. Larry, she says. You look so great! Well, thank you, she says—but she does. And how beautiful are women of a certain age, when they stop obsessing over weight and clothes and come to inhabit the world without pretense.

I'm doing yoga, she tells you.

My girlfriend likes that, you say. She smiles, says nothing. And what do you hear from Amy? you ask.

A shadow passes over her face. Do you know, Jesse, I haven't heard from her in
months
? I hardly recognized her the last time she was here. She got involved in, what do you call it, helping the janitors at her school get a decent wage? And she was in those protests up in New York. Helping folks after the storms hit. I said, Amy, we got storms down here, honey. People in need down here. That's what the church teaches, after all. And you know what she said to me, she says, What
about
the church, Ma? Do you have any idea what goes on in this country while we talk about Jesus this, Jesus that? Well, I said, you can't save everyone, sweetheart, try as you might. And she says, Talk to me when you've tried. But I think she felt bad because she said, We could all be trying a little harder. My own daughter! But you know, I was proud of her too, Jesse, because I could hear God's love in what she said.

If God loves one person, it's Amy, you tell her.

What a sweet thing to say, she says. But you know, she kept saying how revolution was the only hope. I mean,
revolution
—in this day and age?

Amy's very pure hearted, you say. When she thinks something, she's got to believe it all the way down, as deep as it goes.

But Amy's mom is staring out the window. She kept saying how all the problems were structural. Everything was
structural
. I don't pretend to know what that means.

You say you guess it means we're all caught up doing one another little harms we don't even notice. You touch her shoulder. You and Amy are still young, you remind her.

But you don't feel particularly young. In fact you feel older than just about everyone on earth. And how did mothers get so innocent as they aged? How, instead of revealing itself to them, did the world grow ever stranger and more worrying, as though you formed a system with them and moving in one direction caused them to move in the other, unseen cables in the dialogue of souls?

So you're still up north, Jesse, she says. You like it up there? You'll let me know if you hear from Amy, won't you? She always admired you so much.

Oh, well, did she now.
Really?
You'll take it. But parents say shit like that all the time and who knows, who really knows? Who can say the filters of necessary illusion the lives of children pass through on their way to settling in parents' minds? What did your own parents think all those years as your hair grew shorter, when you gave up makeup, dresses, and the posture of an apology? No doubt they had their own confusions to approach in glancing and unpracticed dives. No doubt they would hold whatever they could still in their shifting world, even you. You would hold them still. You would sit like dolls at the kitchen table. What noise? you would say. What rumbling?

In the days after, your thoughts run to Amy and the trip you took as high school seniors. A storm had torn up the coast where a friend of Pastor Bob's, another DTS alum, had his congregation, and it fell to you and Amy to drive down the van with all the clothes and food, the tools and blankets, your church was donating. Our very own angels of mercy, Pastor Bob said. And how exciting it had been! The open road, the two of you, set free in service to a simple good. South and east you drove, on country roads that cut through spectral cotton fields and shuttered towns, places boarded up but for old gas pumps and Chinese takeouts. Embry's. Golden Chopsticks. You ate lunch at a rest stop, sitting next to Amy by a bushy swale that smelled of moist decay and life, and you thought,
This
. Right
here
. I will live forever in states of exception, like today.

Since her arrest the year before, Amy had been more devout than ever, but you had become interested in painting—and what did she make, you wanted to know, of art that flirted with sacrilege, beauty assembled from the raw material of sin?

But that's what's so exciting, Amy says. Looking for God—
finding
God—where you least expect to.

In your memory the sun is spilling through a crack in the afternoon. Pale gold sluicing the tidal gray. Washed-out starlight above a Chevron station. And what will you think looking back? That in your rush to know your friend you forgot how statements are postures, not truths, and most people mysteries even to themselves? How we are all waiting to be stripped down to our least garment and known when we can't even manage it ourselves, from the inside out?

Years later you paint a series of scenes from your arrival in town. The vantage point hovers in midair, several feet above the eyes of a standing observer. It is evening. The houses have a posed beauty in the glowing light, splintered, hushed, spilling forth clothing and furniture, curtains, toys, downed gutters. People on lawns carry panels of siding and plywood in their hands. They move, as you remember, in something thicker than air. The breeze through the van window is as warm as skin, alive with salt. You sleep in a stranger's living room that night. Candlelight laps at the ceiling. And you wonder what resolve leads people to go on living in the path of storms, only to remember, slipping among indistinct strata of consciousness, that the people here don't believe things happen by accident.

And where would they go? Amy says the next day in the car. Their lives are there. Their families and friends. Their job, their church.

And what's the difference, does she think, between a thousand acts of charity done in faith and the same one thousand acts done without it?

Well, Amy says, but falls silent. The farmland rolls on beside you, tracts of cash crops growing hay colored in the autumn sun.

The difference, I think, she says at last, is that the person without faith might think a thousand acts were enough.

And you remember this much later, like a last remark at the crossroads where you and Amy part. How otherworldly she seemed just then. How awesome and unreasonable. You felt you were walking down into the valley while Amy, growing tiny above, climbed the steep and narrow path to a distant temple. And you felt so
happy
all of a sudden, so inferior to Amy and so
happy
to be.

But that wouldn't be her last incarnation, not by a long shot. And how does the force of belief not diminish as one conviction supplants the last? Where does Amy go to reemerge, to break apart and come back whole? Where is she now? Where are you, Amy? you whisper. Where do you go?

And then you see her. It's back in Baltimore, at some pop-up dance event Anita's dragged you to. You step outside to smoke and there's Amy, looking off at the dock lights in the distance, the harbor beyond her, the low buildings and piers like a crust along the shore.

Amy, hey!

You might be a ghost to judge by her look. No one else in her group turns.

Jesse, she says. My God.

What are you doing here?

What do you mean? She smiles. Same as you.

That's not true, you say. I came to dance.

She tilts her head toward the group.
Anarchists
, she mouths—like that explains anything.

So, what? Anarchists don't dance? I'd have thought that was about all they could get together on.

She laughs. It's good to see you. She shakes her head. Boy, a little strange. But good.

It's been forever. Hey, I saw your mom.

Her smile fades and she shakes her head. I just can't talk to them anymore, she says. And while you know she means her parents, with her words it is your town that lurches into the night, your childhood behind it, as fake as a soap you watched too many seasons of long ago, a fairy tale wound in gauze,
that
false,
that
rich in dream life, in the shabby promise of days bandaged in their amazing heat, ropes of water turning coruscant in the sun, parents—yours, Amy's—congregants, group prayer, praying next to Amy praying, the endless pretense of shared dreaming, of so many privacies obscured below the canopy of that easy discarnate happiness, as if the thing billowing in the laundered shirts that blew from clotheslines, fanning streamers on your bike, and glinting in the eye of the horse across the street who ate apples from your hand were
one
thing and you it. And later if you snort coke in a club bathroom? And later if you run your tongue in Anita's cunt? Will home know anything of this? Will this know anything of home? And if we say no, how is it then that the woman before you in black clothes, with a streak of pink in her hair, was once the girl reminding you to take out your contacts before a crawfish boil, before your fingers grew sharp with spices, raffia dishes of potato and Jell-O salad appeared to anchor blown linen, before children's cries filled the air and fireflies emerged to sear the ripening canvas of twilight? How is it some people listen to the wind blowing through the vacancies of their hearts and hear a voice urging them on in flight, and some don't hear it at all?

And Amy must feel it too because you ask her, So babe, when's the revolution?

And she says, You know the funny thing about that word, Jesse, is where you wind up at the end of a revolution.

(IV)

Honesty is a lie, a more arduous self-deceit, like a white light that approached and seen up close decomposes into every color but itself. So begin the problems with ideas, with chitchat, with nuance. Nuance is a terror, a widow turned courtesan. Pillow talk in a bed that collects everything and nothing. It is a nice bed, of course. Certainty is no better.

On the day I think this—something of the sort—I am sitting in BWI waiting for a plane that will take me to another plane and so on in this manner to Berlin. It is a year and a few months since Anita left. She left just after my thirty-fifth birthday, the night she said, I'll do anything you want, just ask, and I took it as a provocation, the way it made itself out to be a present when it was really the request for a gift. There was a time it might have thrilled me, of course, the submissive possibility of it, but by then I didn't care. It rang only with Anita's desperation and her desperation with the pain I would cause her, which made me want to get out, leave at any cost, made
me
desperate and ready to punish her in advance for the pain she would make me feel in making me hurt her.