The Bend of the World: A Novel (14 page)

Her toe and her failing eyesight. And pedophiles.

Hm, yes, Dad said. I remember when you were in preschool, she was very concerned about the satanist day cares in California. Do you remember, Suzanne?

Yes. I remember.

She wouldn’t believe that it was all a hoax.

She still doesn’t believe that it was all a hoax, Mom said.

I laughed. That’s why she always loved Johnny, I told them. They both believe in everything.

How is your friend Johnny? Mom asked. I can’t remember the last time I saw him. No, that’s not true. It was at your uncle’s Christmas party a few years ago. He and your father were embroiled in a conversation about concentration camps all night long.

He’s very knowledgeable about the Eastern Front, my dad said.

Yes, Mom said, but at Christmas?

He’s good, I told them.

Before we left to walk to the theater, I excused myself and went to the restroom. The club still used bathroom attendants, and I struggled mightily to pee into the marble urinal while a little old man who looked like a turtle in a tuxedo stared at my back. I managed to dribble something out. I washed my hands. He handed me a towel, then collected it in a little basket. Keep an eye out, he said as I turned to leave.

I’m sorry? I said.

Have a nice evening sir, he said.

I stepped into the hall. The whole place seemed a little down on its heels of late. If those captains of industry and politics had once run a good portion of the world, or at least the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, out of these rooms, anymore it looked like an overgrand B&B, flocked and dusty and a few decades out of date. But what was odd was that I thought I saw my mother at the far end of the corridor, grasping the hands of the fat maître d’ in a weird, cross-armed handshake. It was dim, and they were far away. They saw me looking and swished through a door. I should not have smoked that weed, I thought. I went back downstairs and found my parents, both of them, at the table. So, I said. Yes, said my mother. Let’s, Dad said.

19

But Johnny was not good at all, and during a witch’s sabbath scene whose staging was what I imagined a drag show by Hegemonica Preshun would look like, my phone vibrated in my pocket, which, when surreptitiously checked, presented a text from Derek: hey call me asap re jonhy. So I slipped out of the auditorium and through the lobby and lit a cigarette under the marquee.

Hey, Derek answered. I’m glad you called so quick. Listen. Johnny got picked up by the cops.

Oh shit.

Don’t freak out.

I’m freaking out a little. They arrested him?

No. It’s nothing like that. Forget what we talked about. Nobody knows about any of that. He’s not in jail. He’s at Presby.

The hospital? Oh Jesus.

It’s okay. I don’t know that much, but he’s okay. High and paranoid, but okay. Mine was the last number called on his phone, and apparently he’s got me listed as Brother Derek, so they thought I was actually his brother. They called me from the hospital and sort of gave me the rundown.

Which is what?

Well, they’re not sure exactly what he’s on. Some kind of dissociative, or dissociatives. So apparently he went down to the museum dressed in some kind of Nazi costume and was pacing around the sculpture garden telling people that the tide was turning. You may remember that turn of phrase.

Fuck.

Yeah. Anyway, the guards called the cops, but no one wanted to press charges, and the cops didn’t want to throw some highed-up wack job in county, so they took him to the hospital. I figured maybe you’d know how to get in touch with his family.

Yeah, I said. Well, his parents are down in Florida and they’re completely estranged, and his brother died years ago, and so did his grandparents.

Does he have insurance?

Does he seem like he’d have insurance?

Point taken.

Oy, I said. I’d better go over there.

Are you sure?

Yeah. I’m wearing a suit. I look like an upstanding citizen. If someone has to talk to cops and doctors, it might as well be me.

Let me know if you need anything?

I will, I said. Thanks for calling me.

Sure, he said. What are friends for but to deliver bad news?

20

There were two police at the hospital, Officers Bild and Granson, the former thin, black, and wearing dark shades; the latter large, white, and with the suggestion of muscle below his fat that implied a former military man. After they clarified our relationship—No, not a relative, a friend; he hasn’t got any family; we grew up together—Bild said, We aren’t going to charge him. He resisted arrest a little, but I think your buddy must’ve been strung out for a few days now, because once we snatched him up, he pretty much collapsed.

Yeah, I said. I’m sorry about the inconvenience.

That ain’t your fault, sir, said Granson.

True, I said.

We do have to file a report, though, said Bild. And we’ll need you to sign saying we released him into your custody.

Isn’t he in the hospital’s custody?

Technically? Bild said.

You know what, I said. I don’t care. Yes, I’ll sign.

I signed their report.

I really am sorry, I said. He can be a handful.

He was docile enough once we got him in the squad car, said Granson. The cop laughed. He told me I looked like Volstagg.

Who? I said.

That’s what I said, Granson told me. Apparently he’s a fat guy in comic books.

He’s Thor’s friend, Bild said. He laughed, too. My kid’s into comics. He asked me what I thought about them putting a black guy in the
Thor
.

Oh man, I said. I’m really, really sorry.

No, Bild said, and he patted my shoulder. Don’t worry about it. He didn’t mean nothing by it. I told him I didn’t give it a lot of thought, and he told me that if America can put a black man in the White House, Kenneth Branagh can put a black man in Asgard.

21

They’d sedated Johnny, and I fell asleep in a chair beside a nurses’ station down the hall from his room. I dreamed of Helen. We were standing in a familiar round room, featureless but for the pale luminescence of the walls. There was a sound like the sound of the hospitals in Oakland, although, it occurred to me, it might also be an engine. If he dies, she said, we’re in the hospital. A timing issue, I said. I’ve heard that before, she said. Is it true, I asked her, that you were the youngest artist-in-residence ever at artPace? Because even in my dreams, apparently, I’d been Googling the shit out of her. Everything is true, she said. I’ve heard that before, I told her. V’ayn kal hadash tachat ha’shamesh, she said. Huh? I said. Shh, she said, and she touched my face with her hand.

I woke up. A nurse had her hand on my shoulder. Hon, she said. Your friend is awake.

What time is it?

About five.

In the morning?

Yeah, sweetie. It’s the morning.

He was in a private room, a single IV dripping into his arm. He was staring into the middle distance, but when he saw me, his eyes focused on my face, and when they did, when he smiled, although I’d resolved to be angry, to be firm, to ask him just what the fuck he thought he was doing, I found that I had tears in my eyes. How did they get there? I touched them away with the back of my hand. You fucker, I said.

Hey, he said. His voice sounded like an engine with a bad starter. He smiled. His lips were cracked. Nice tie, he said.

1

By the middle of March the city had forgotten about flying saucers; Mary Tremone had reneged on her deal with Kantsky and announced her intention to contest the mayoral primary; the head of the local Blue Cross/Blue Shield turned up drunk and belligerent at the home of his wife’s lover and proceeded to smash all of the first-floor windows with a tire iron before the cops arrived. The
Trib
had done a person-of-interest interview with Helen Witold, a New York artist who now called Pittsburgh home. What’s your biggest phobia? Reptiles. Favorite food? Bad coffee, embarrassingly. Artist? Hogarth, or Rothko. One thing you can’t live without? A mirror. I’d pretty much decided that whatever I’d seen that night on Mount Washington had largely been the effect of too much drinking and an ill-advised cocktail of drugs. Lauren Sara was still pissed at me for blowing her off after the opera. It had been an emergency, I’d argued, but she’d only grudgingly accepted. Not for the first time in my life, I felt that I’d serially overindulged and let myself be caught in the undertow of my best friend’s weirdness. And all I wanted was to swim parallel to the shore until the outrushing current released me and let the waves bear me back onto the sand. But it’s hard, you know, to do what you know you’re supposed to do when it would be so easy to float away.

2

When we were about fourteen—I could pretend to remember exactly, but memory is the most statistical of all our senses and sentiments; that is to say, the greater the specificity, the lesser the confidence level—my father acquired, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, one of the early Sony Handycams. He may have brought it to the beach that year, but I doubt it. It sat in his study, perpetually charging for a few months, before Johnny noticed it and decided that we should make a movie.

We dutifully set out to write a script, but discovered that writing scripts was boring, and decided that we would rely on improvisation within the confines of the hazy story we’d talked out. Johnny had two classic, full-head rubber masks: Tor Johnson and a gorilla. I don’t know where he got them; they weren’t relics of Halloweens past or anything like that; he dug them out of a closetful of his and his brother Ben’s old toys and kid’s books, but the masks were too big and too real to realistically date from that earlier epoch of childhood. Ben had gone off to college that year or the year before and couldn’t be consulted. We suspected they might have belonged to Johnny’s Pap, who was an indiscriminate collector of odd things, although not, to our knowledge, of costumes.

In any case, we had these two masks, and that seemed sufficient for a movie, and we knew that the movie would be called
Hunting for Headless
and would follow a man on his quest for a deranged mutant killer named Headless. In retrospect it’s hard to say exactly what we were thinking: Headless, as a character, was defined by nothing so much as the fact that he was a rubber Tor Johnson head; he was the opposite of headless; but that sort of error of logic and continuity didn’t really trouble us at the time.

We needed only a forest and at least one other member in our cast and crew, so we recruited our friend Billy Drake, who’d overheard us planning principal photography in the cafeteria and bought his way into the picture with the promise of extensive camping gear and expertise. All that remained was to convince my parents to let me go, which I did by eliding the fact that, while Johnny’s Pap was going to drive us up to the mountains, near Ligonier, he was only planning to drop us off. My parents had met Pap a few times, and since he dipped and spoke with a southwestern PA accent and wore a camouflage army jacket, I suppose they assumed he was an outdoorsman and a hunter and all that. It’s worth mentioning that my mother was originally from Cambria County and should have known better, but college and medical school and marriage to my father and self-will had almost entirely eradicated her Appalachian good sense, and she and my dad both thought Pap was 100 percent authentic. He was 100 percent authentic, all right, just not authentically what they thought he was. I don’t think he’d touched a gun since Korea, and the closest he came to camping was falling asleep in his shed while working late on his invention.

Nevertheless, Pap took the essentially anarchic view of childhood that still prevailed in the woodier parts of the state, beyond its enclaves of money and urbanity. He saw nothing wrong with dropping us off on a state route roadside somewhere on Chestnut Ridge. We had some maps, and he told us to meet him at the Main Square in Ligonier at eleven the next morning. He also told us that the state had been reintroducing mountain lions into the woods around. They don’t like fire, apparently, he told us, and they smell like piss. He was hunched over the wheel of his old Bronco. Johnny rode shotgun.

What kind of piss? I asked. Time around Pap was a license to swear and talk a language that was thoroughly discouraged in my home.

How the hell should I know what kind of piss? he said. Panther piss. I don’t imagine you get a lot of other animals pissing on a panther.

He also told us to keep an eye out for any bigfoots. Billy laughed, and Pappy said, What’s so goddamn funny? and Billy said, There’s no such thing as bigfoot.

I’ve seen bigfoots as surely as you see me right now. They used to get in my trash when me and Mona lived down in Fayette County back when I worked for the coke company. Rootin around in there and making a mess. Plus I’ve done extensive research on the subject. They are highly prevalent in this area. They smell like rotten eggs, and sometimes—he raised an eye to the rearview mirror—they will attempt to mate with a human female. His eye wandered toward Billy, who had long blond hair and the features of a Grecian youth. So keep an eye out, hot dogs, Pappy said.