The Goldfinch (56 page)

When he said this, I began to laugh uncontrollably, so hard I nearly fell off the swing, because I knew then for sure he saw the same thing I did. More than that: we were
creating
it. Whatever the drug was making us see, we were constructing it together. And, with that realization, the virtual-reality simulator flipped into color. It happened for both of us at the same time, pop! We looked at each other and just laughed; everything was hysterically funny, even the playground slide was smiling at us, and at some point, deep in the night, when we were swinging on the jungle gym and showers of sparks were flying out of our mouths, I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe. For hours, we watched the clouds rearranging themselves into intelligent patterns; rolled in the dirt, believing it was seaweed (!); lay on our backs and sang “Dear Prudence” to the welcoming and appreciative stars. It was a fantastic night—one of the great nights of my life, actually, despite what happened later.

xvi.

B
ORIS STAYED OVER AT
my house, since I lived closer to the playground and he was (in his own favorite term for loadedness)
v gavno,
which meant “shit-faced” or “in shit” or something of the sort—at any rate, too wrecked to get home on his own in the dark. And this was fortunate, as it meant I wasn’t alone in the house at three thirty the next afternoon when Mr. Silver stopped by.

Though we’d barely slept, and were a little shaky, everything still felt the tiniest bit magical and full of light. We were drinking orange juice and watching cartoons (good idea, as it seemed to extend the hilarious Technicolor mood of the evening) and—bad idea—had just shared our second joint of the afternoon when the doorbell rang. Popchyk—who’d been extremely on edge; he sensed that we were off-key somehow and had been barking at us like we were possessed—went off immediately almost as if he’d expected something of the sort.

In an instant, it all came crashing back. “Holy shit,” I said.

“
I’ll
go,” said Boris immediately, tucking Popchyk under his arm. Off he bopped, barefoot and shirtless, with an air of complete unconcern. But in what seemed like one second he was back again, looking ashen.

He didn’t say anything; he didn’t have to. I got up, put on my sneakers and tied them tight (as I’d gotten in the habit of doing before our shoplifting expeditions, in the event I had to flee), and went to the door. There was Mr. Silver again—white sports coat, shoe-polish hair, and all—only this time standing beside him was a large guy with blurred blue tattoos snaked all over his forearms, holding an aluminum baseball bat.

“Well, Theodore!” said Mr. Silver. He seemed genuinely pleased to see me. “Hiya doing?”

“Fine,” I said, marvelling at how un-stoned I suddenly felt. “And you?”

“Can’t complain. Quite a bruise you got going on there, pal.”

Reflexively, I reached up and touched my cheek. “Uh—”

“Better look after that. Your buddy tells me your Dad’s not home.”

“Um, that’s right.”

“Everything okay with you two? You guys having any problems out here this afternoon?”

“Um, no, not really,” I said. The guy wasn’t brandishing the bat, or being threatening in any way, but still I couldn’t help being fairly aware that he had it.

“Because if you ever do?” said Mr. Silver. “Have problems of any nature? I can take care of them for you like
that.
”

What was he talking about? I looked past him, out to the street, to his car. Even though the windows were tinted, I could see the other men waiting there.

Mr. Silver sighed. “I’m glad to hear that you don’t have any problems, Theodore. I only wish that I could say the same.”

“Excuse me?”

“Because here’s the thing,” he continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “
I
have a problem. A really big one. With your father.”

Not knowing what to say, I stared at his cowboy boots. They were black crocodile, with a stacked heel, very pointed at the toe and polished to such a high shine that they reminded me of the girly-girl cowboy boots that Lucie Lobo, a way-out stylist in my mother’s office, had always worn.

“You see, here’s the thing,” said Mr. Silver. “I’m holding fifty grand of your dad’s paper. And that is causing some very big problems for me.”

“He’s getting the money together,” I said, awkwardly. “Maybe, I don’t know, if you could just give him a little more time…”

Mr. Silver looked at me. He adjusted his glasses.

“Listen,” he said reasonably. “Your dad wants to risk his shirt on how some morons handle a fucking ball—I mean, pardon my language. But it’s hard for me to have sympathy for a guy like him. Doesn’t honor his obligations, three weeks late on the vig, doesn’t return my phone calls—” he was ticking off the offenses on his fingers—“makes plans to meet me at noon today and then doesn’t show. You know how long I sat and waited for that deadbeat?
An hour and a half.
Like I don’t got other, better things to do.” He put his head to the side. “It’s guys like your dad keep guys like me and Yurko here in business. Do you think I like coming to your house? Driving all the way out here?”

I had thought this was a rhetorical question—clearly no one in their right mind would like driving all the way out where we lived—but since an outrageous amount of time passed, and still he was staring at me like he actually expected an answer, I finally blinked in discomfort and said: “No.”

“
No.
That’s right, Theodore. I most certainly do not. We got better things to do, me and Yurko, believe me, than spend all afternoon chasing after a deadbeat like your dad. So do me a favor, please, and tell your father we can settle this like gentlemen the second he sits down and works things out with me.”

“Work things out?”

“He needs to bring me what he owes me.” He was smiling but the gray tint at the top of his aviators gave his eyes a disturbingly hooded look. “And I want you to tell him to do that for me, Theodore. Because next time I have to come out here, believe me, I’m not going to be so nice.”

xvii.

W
HEN
I
CAME BACK
into the living room Boris was sitting quietly and staring at cartoons with the sound off, stroking Popper—who, despite his earlier upset, was now fast asleep in his lap.

“Ridiculous,” he said shortly.

He pronounced the word in such a way that it took me a moment to realize what he’d said. “Right,” I said, “I told you he was a freak.”

Boris shook his head and leaned back against the couch. “I don’t mean the old Leonard Cohen-looking guy with the wig.”

“You think that’s a wig?”

He made a face like who cares. “Him too, but I mean the big Russian with the, metal, what do you call it?”

“Baseball bat.”

“That was just for show,” he said disdainfully. “He was just trying to scare you, the prick.”

“How do you know he was Russian?”

He shrugged. “Because I know. No one has tattoos like that in U.S. Russian national, no question. He knew I was Russian too, minute I opened my mouth.”

Some period of time passed before I realized I was sitting there staring into space. Boris lifted Popchyk and put him down on the sofa, so gently he didn’t wake. “You want to get out of here for a while?”

“God,” I said, shaking my head suddenly—the impact of the visit had for whatever reason just hit me, a delayed reaction—“fuck, I
wish
my dad had been home. You know? I wish that guy would beat his ass. I really do. He deserves it.”

Boris kicked my ankle. His feet were black with dirt and he also had black polish on his toenails, courtesy of Kotku.

“You know what I had to eat yesterday?” he said sociably. “Two Nestlé bars and a Pepsi.” All candy bars, for Boris, were ‘Nestlé bars,’ just as all sodas were ‘Pepsi.’ “And you know what I had to eat today?” He made a zero with thumb and forefinger.
“Nul.”

“Me neither. This stuff makes you not hungry.”

“Yah, but I need to eat something. My stomach—” he made a face.

“Do you want to go get pancakes?”

“Yes—something—I don’t care. Do you have money?”

“I’ll look around.”

“Good. I think I have five dollars maybe.”

While Boris was rummaging for shoes and a shirt, I splashed some water on my face, checked out my pupils and the bruise on my jaw, rebuttoned my shirt when I saw it was done up the wrong way, and then went
to let Popchik out, throwing his tennis ball to him for a bit, since he hadn’t had a proper walk on the leash and I knew he felt cooped-up. When we came back in, Boris—dressed now—was downstairs; we’d done a quick search of the living room and were laughing and joking around, pooling our quarters and dimes and trying to figure out where we wanted to go and the quickest way to get there when all of a sudden we noticed that Xandra had come in the front door and was standing there with a funny look on her face.

Both of us stopped talking immediately and went about our change-sorting in silence. It wasn’t a time when Xandra normally came home, but her schedule was erratic sometimes and she’d surprised us before. But then, in an uncertain-sounding voice, she said my name.

We stopped with the change. Generally Xandra called me
kiddo
or
hey you
or anything but Theo. She was, I noticed, still wearing her uniform from work.

“Your dad’s had a car accident,” she said. It was like she was saying it to Boris instead of me.

“Where?” I said.

“It happened like two hours ago. The hospital called me at work.”

Boris and I looked at each other. “Wow,” I said. “What happened? Did he total the car?”

“His blood alcohol was .39.”

The figure was meaningless to me, though the fact he’d been drinking wasn’t. “Wow,” I said, pocketing my change, and: “When’s he coming home, then?”

She met my eye blankly. “Home?”

“From the hospital.”

Rapidly, she shook her head; looked around for a chair to sit in; and then sat in it. “You don’t understand.” Her face was empty and strange. “He died. He’s dead.”

xviii.

T
HE NEXT SIX OR
seven hours were a daze. Several of Xandra’s friends showed up: her best friend Courtney; Janet from her work; and a couple named Stewart and Lisa who were nicer and way more normal than the
usual people Xandra had over to the house. Boris, generously, produced what was left of Kotku’s weed, which was appreciated by all parties present; and someone, thankfully (maybe it was Courtney), ordered out for pizza—how she got Domino’s to deliver all the way out to us, I don’t know, since for over a year Boris and I had wheedled and pleaded and tried every cajolement and excuse we could think of.

While Janet sat with her arm around Xandra, and Lisa patted her head, and Stewart made coffee in the kitchen, and Courtney rolled a joint on the coffee table that was almost as expert as one of Kotku’s, Boris and I hung in the background, stunned. It was hard to believe that my dad could be dead when his cigarettes were still on the kitchen counter and his old white tennis shoes were still by the back door. Apparently—it all came out in the wrong order, I had to piece it together in my mind—my dad had crashed the Lexus on the highway, a little before two in the afternoon, veering off on the wrong side of the road and plowing headlong into a tractor-trailer which had immediately killed him (not the driver of the truck, fortunately, or the passengers in the car that had rear-ended the truck, although the driver of the car had a broken leg). The blood-alcohol news was both surprising, and not—I’d suspected my father might be drinking again, though I hadn’t seen him doing it—but what seemed to baffle Xandra most was not his extreme drunkenness (he’d been virtually unconscious at the wheel) but the location of the accident—outside Vegas, heading west, into the desert. “He would have told me, he would have told me,” she was saying sorrowfully in response to some question or other of Courtney’s, only why, I thought bleakly, sitting on the floor with my hands over my eyes, did she think it was in my father’s nature to tell the truth about anything?