Chapter One: The Lung of the World
The Tar Pit
“One day all this will be yours, Billiam,” and with a sweeping gesture with an open hand, Boyo Fugit encompasses all the scene surrounding. He takes in the interior of the Tar Pit, from the spacious, greasy Vegan kitchen behind the stainless steel counter to the dining room, its beat wooden tables, its high ceilings, its square pillars and unwashed walls painted Easter colors. He gathers in the four high windows painted with red balloon characters advertising java. They and the walls are still stained from a generation of cigarette smoke, and the the room still vaguely stinks of it, though the smoking ban is months old. Boyo's generous gesture gathers in every last denizen of the place, from the skateboard punks to the withered and unshaven old men whose hands shake. His forgiving net gathers in the plates before them – Bill's shit on a shingle and Boyo's bowl of espresso with milk – and it extends beyond the walls of the establishment, to the curb, where kids in hoods loiter around their bikes, and into the bowed street, lumpy with patches of tar. It extends beyond that, embracing the whole of the tired New England town, including the sprawling State University complex one way down the street, toward the city limits and the meager suburbs, and including the downtown blocks that support ancient, irregular buildings of red brick and a few squat modern ones of glass and steel. This is the town of Ashenfield. It's where the brothers grew up.
“One day,” Boyo says in his distinct voice, an alloy of growl and whine. It's a modern voice. What makes it distinct is the vivacity behind it. In fact, everything about Boyo indicates unusual vivacity. His eyes always sparkle with mischief. His thick fingers beat out rhythms in all the world's traditions. And yet he's dying. The dissonance can be very disorienting.
“Listen to me, Billiam. It has been prophesied that you would inherit it all. That a mopey wisp of a man would arrive from far away …” At this point, Karnak the prophet clears his throat. “How does that go, Karnie?”
Karnak speaks. “Well, originally, the prophecy said that it would be a woman who comes.” His eyes of innocent, California blue lock with Bill's “She comes from a wet but landlocked land to take over the ministry.”
“Ministry?” Bill dares.
“All in due time, William. Was it a woman, Karnie? Yes. Well, look at him. Maybe it was a metaphor. He's barely a man, as it is.”
“Thanks, Boy,” Bill says blandly.
“Anyway, he's all we've got. Billy, there is no second-guessing Karnak's work. For this project, he broke out the highest-caliber machinery available to man. For this job, we consulted the I Chimichanga, or Dragon's Lair, or … what was it?”
“The Roots of Yggdrasil,” Karnak corrects him. He delivers in a deep and gentle voice, from the height of an erect and taller than average spine. Karnak has the gravitas of a dreaming Brahma, clothed in the rags of a Rastafarian friar. A lopsided mass of dreadlocks fills out a huge knit cap in African colors. A wispy beard starts on his cheeks and dissipates in an insubstantial Assyrian square. Over his shoulders hangs a light vest in lavender, lightly streaked around the heart with yellow paint. He contemplates a series of crystals on the table, his long fingers touching each one lightly, reverently. They call him the stone-thrower. “This pronouncement comes from a pretty deep place,” he says.
“Right,” Bill answers. Bill finds it a difficult exercise, following this conversation on his first day in town, with his brother's illness weighing on him like an iron anchor on his chest. But he wants to indulge his brother.
Bill's Arrival
He leans into the door frame, gazing into the dim bedroom. It's a small room, Boyo's childhood room. The broad, sagging bed occupies all but narrow corridors around three sides, corridors that allow for a chest of drawers beside the door, a bookshelf on the other side of the bed, a bedside table, and boxes lined against the wall opposite the foot of the bed. On the other side of the chest of drawers is a cramped walk-in closet. Bill knows the house. He grew up across the hall.
Hunched over itself on the side of the bed is a shirtless figure, unmoving, its bare feet on the floor. His shoulder-length black hair is like a wild, dark nimbus around his head, hiding his face in shadow.
“Hey, Boy,” Bill says.
“Hey, Billy,” Boyo sighs.
“How you doing?”
“Oh, just dandy,” Boyo replies, and he swings his face up with a big, false grin. He lets his head swing back into its dejected position. “So … you're here.” He coughs a load of phlegm along his throat. “So … I guess you had a little talk with Cilice.”
“I did.”
“Cilice picked up the phone! Cilice figured out how to dial. Will wonders never cease?” He clears his throat again. His voice is hoarse. “Well,” he tries sounding cheerful, but quickly gives it up. “Okay, so you've made it. How was the trip?”
“Just dandy!” Bill replies. “Waited at the airport a while, just to be sure no one was showing up.”
“Damn, William! It hasn't been that long, has it? You know the way home.”
“I do.”
“Besides, our dear Cilice neglected to record your flight information. It didn't occur to her that I might need to know day and time.” He scratches his head. “Sorry. … Hey! Don't so that!” Bill was reaching for the light switch. “I just got up, Billy.”
“It's 1:30, Boy.”
“Why, so it is,” he growls with a charming smile. He runs a hand through his hair, and asks Bill, “What's for breakfast?”
“I don't know ...”
“Did you rent a car?”
“Right. Sure, let's go. … You're not going to suggest that dive.”
“I am. Thank you, city boy. The bill's on you. Get it? The bill.” Boyo is chipper now. He reaches for his shoes underneath the bed. Bill sees the jagged new scars, and a surge of adrenaline makes him flush.
“We'll get a chance to talk, right?” Bill regrets the desperate question immediately.
Boyo is beating an unwashed sock against the carpet. He stops without looking up. He starts up again, beating the opposite sock with the opposite hand. “Ground rules, Billiam: leave it alone. You don't get to fly into town and save the day. You're a little late for that, aren't you? … Aren't you, Billy?”
Bill sighs. He's fingering the light switch. There's a tattered bit of paper taped to the wall underneath the switch. Bill swings his head forward and tries to read it in the gloom. The writing is incomprehensible. It is sketched over and surrounded by doodlings in heavy black ink. “What's this?”
Boyo squints up. “I don't remember. Some quotation I wrote down when I was drunk.”
“Lie corpse …,” Bill tries. He shrugs. The first words he thinks he sees suddenly register with him, and inspire a chill. “Let's go, Boy, before the sun sets.”
“Dead man walking!” shouts a musclebound skinhead whose arms and shoulders crawl with tattoos. Boyo laughs and suggests that the grinning skinhead fuck off. He doesn't. “Torque, this is my long-lost brother, back from God's mansion.”
“Cool. Good to meet you, God's child.” Torque has an intense grin, both evil and friendly.
“And this! This is the mighty Karnak, Billy.” He pulls up a chair at the high-top table. Karnak rests his ocean-blue gaze on Bill. “This is him,” the prophet says in a melodious suggestion. “This is the missing brother.”
Bill's Life
The last day of Bill's life is a difficult one. Five o'clock finds him in his therapist's waiting room, tipsy and embarrassed. He and Travis left work early. It was only supposed to be an afternoon break. But it was happy hour at the Logos, and they were tempted by the beer.
“It hardly seems right, does it, Bill, that Pinkerton holds me back? A manager should overcome his smaller nature, his natural jealousies. That should be the first course in any MBA program: overcoming oneself, recognizing talent greater than your own. A manager should be like a jolly papa, don't you think? A man who will never be happy until his proteges are advancing further and faster than he himself did. And God knows Pinkerton has all the advancement potential of a lame horse. He should be shot. We could draw straws for the privilege. I would pay a month's salary just to corber the straw market, just to pull that trigger.” Travis coyly enacts the pulling of the trigger on a tiny rifle. “Not that I hate the man, Bill. I really don't have the capacity for hatred. It's simply that I can't abide by jealousy. And the day I walked in, I felt it radiating from those beady eyes. Eight months I've been biding...my...time. It's clear to everyone what I'm made of: at a moment's notice I could fill in for five of those non-entities they call department heads.” Travis sighs and turns his pint glass on its coaster. “I'm just not made for boredom. I'm not like you, Bill. You're one of those people who is basically content in life. You could push the same pencil for twenty years. I love that about you, but I've got to feel the wind in my face. I've … I have got to get that young lady's number.” Travis indicates with a slight nod which young lady has caught his attention. “I've been thinking, Bill, that I need to date a nurse. I need a nurturer, a caregiver. I was made to be taken care of. There's no sin in that. Some people are nurturers, and some are made for action. The two types were designed for each other. I would take such wonderful care of her, in my way.” Travis's smile is lecherous.
Bill doesn't like Travis much, though he's the nearest thing to a workplace friend. Bill contemplates the passing foot traffic on Nicollet Mall. He drinks his pint a little too fast. That's what leads to the second, and to the certainty that the two colleagues would not return to work.
Regina, Bill's therapist, is running late. Bill watches the clock apprehensively. Something is sucking the light and oxygen out of this antechamber. There are no windows. There is only a water cooler and wallpaper that might have been woven of pale bamboo by nano-weavers. There is much in this room that can be attributed to nano-technology. There is little sign of direct human intervention. Perhaps the sheen on the magazine covers unlikely, as well as the sheen in the celebrities' skin and teeth on those covers. He felt a curious itch along the skin of his neck. Idly, he hoped the nano-bots would do something about his breath.
Regina appears in the hallway, looking breathless. She is a slight woman with an attractive figure and straight, ultra-black hair. She has a penchant for high black boots that Bill finds very distracting.
Regina seems more harried than usual, almost frenzied, as she shuffles through thick files and then through the voluminous papers in Bill's file. Both boot soles are flat on the floor and the file sits in her lap, one inch from the hem of her short skirt, drawn over sheer black stockings. She licks her finger frequently as she shovels through the reams of paper.
The therapist stops suddenly and eyes Bill. She lets the papers fall into their pile inside the yellow file. “Bill, have you been drinking?”
Bill is scared. “I … it was just a quick happy hour. That is, after work.”
“Bill,” and she allows herself a dramatic pause, as though she's weighing whether the situation warrants the effort of a full sentence. “During our first appointment, we went over policies, and you did sign your understanding and consent. One of those policies is about alcohol and drug use.”
She won't go on, so Bill makes a reply, “It was just happy hour.”
Regina sighs. “You know we can't go on with the session.” Slowly, her face tenses into the expression that mesmerizes Bill. It's a grotesque mask of concern. Her eyes lock on his intensely, and they telegraph expectation. The more they ask for something, the more he freezes up. Her mouth pouts. And then the foot starts. She has swung one leg over the other, and the toes inside the black boot of the suspended foot begin to flex. Then the boot begins to kick. Bill finds this ritual too much to bear, and his mind goes blank every time.
She speaks again in a flat tone. “Have you thought about what we discussed last time?”
“Ahem! And what was that?”
“I suggested meds.”
“Right.” He knows he has flushed. And the muscles of Regina's face are clenching into concern again. He has a response, but it fades behind a wall of static.
The therapist chips away at the impasse. “There's a lot I would like to talk with you about, Bill. … I want to hear about your grandfather and your aunt, and the years you spent with them. … But we can't talk when ...”
“I'm so tired,” Bill says, and the words surprise both of them.
“You know, it's my professional opinion that we won't be able to make any progress unless ...”
“And I've told you, … I've done all that. I've been the crazy kid. I've done all the pills. I won't.”
“I know. I know hat was painful, and maybe it didn't help. You're an adult now, Bill. This will be the last time. This time it will work. … Bill?”
Bill has tipped forward into space. Regina has a line of windows in her office the full length of her wall, and knee-to-ceiling high. The view outside is predominated by the summer clouds, grey with weather. They fill the sky with rolls of somber weather, reaching all the way from this southern suburb to the miniature towers of downtown, gathered in a comically tight cluster on Minnesota's flat horizon.
“Bill?”
Bill sits in the driver's seat of his parked car for ten minutes. Above him to the left, Regina's window is empty. His mind is blank. He repeats to himself without intention, “I'm so tired.”
With a sinking feeling in his gut, Bill sees that Frieda has beat him to the restaurant. He rubs his face with a heavy hand, as though he could uncover a happy man. He wrestles with the unwieldy chair. Frieda likes this Irish pub -- O'Flack's -- drafty, dark and more for the value than any Irishman would really pay. Why come to an Irish bar to drink red wine?
Two of Frieda's fingers rest on either side of the stem of her wine glass. She hasn't said a thing. She gazes up at her boyfriend from under thick, black eyelashes. Her full lips are set in an enigmatic half smile. They might have held that expression for ages, captured in the amber of bar-light for all time. These lips are a taste for Bill of the glass half empty; the enigma in them seems bound by gravity to bring him down.
“Hi,” he says with a show of good cheer.
“How did it go?”
“Oh, it was swell. We're making great strides. Mm hmm, I'm feeling … like I need a drink.” He tries for the attention of a waitress.
She looks at him skeptically, tipping her head to one side so that the straight, glossy Portuguese hair hangs over her bare shoulder. “Good.” She twists the wine glass on its base, one way, then the other. “Is she still insisting on meds?”
“Yep. She is, and we're not really seeing eye to eye on that one. I'm working on her. She's giving me a chance to, you know, prove myself.”
“Are you being a good boy?” Frieda says with a provocative twist of her ancient half-smile.
Bill is overcome by sleepiness. His eyelids sink like they're weighted. “I'm a good boy.”
“Are you tired?” she asks. And isn't this what Bill hates about Frieda, this hyper-attentiveness? It's not kindness motivating her question; it's enforcement. In Frieda's company, one isn't allowed wandering notions or wandering emotions.
“No. It was a tough session,” Bill concedes. “Hard work.”
“Meds,” Frieda muses. She lightly wipes the base of her wine glass with a finger. “Shouldn't you trust your therapist? I mean, if you're going to go to a therapist ...”
“Not my idea.” That was a tactical error. He signals again for the waitress. This time she sees him, and approaches.
Frieda's eyes flash. She waits until the waitress has taken Bill's order. Sensing the direction of the conversation, he passes on the red wine and orders whiskey. “Whose idea, Bill?” Bill doesn't answer; he sighs. She takes it another step: “Who am I dating? Why am I here? Why am I waiting for you to show up late to one more date, just so you can yawn and whine? When after all, I'm basically dating myself. I can do that at home.”
“Okay, okay.”
“'Not my idea,' he says. We're at my restaurant, talking about my decision to go back to therapy, so that I can finally enjoy something like a satisfying relationship.” Frieda has, degree by degree, leaned forward and straightened her back.
The first quick and familiar shot of adrenaline dissipates, and the jolt only serves to tire Bill more. “Can we breathe a little?”
“We? Have you shown up? Has Bill shown up?”
“Aren't you taking this a little far?” Bill is complementing Frieda's posture with a sinking slouch of his own.
“Taking what? Is there something here? I thought I was talking to myself.”
Bill comments by an arch of an eyebrow. Another tactical error.
“You fucker! Well, show up! It's time for you to show up!” Now she's leaning over the table, and her lovely fingers, usually engaged in languorous play are balled up in fists that strike the table.
“I'm here, I'm here. I just wasn't ready for issues night.”
“Don't start that,” Frieda warns, and her voice has dropped a register.
“Issues night at O'Flack's. Hmm, what's on the menu?” He runs a finger along the laminated page. “Issues au gratin, issues a la mode, issues with bleu cheese, issues and chips, issues in alfredo sauce, issues ….”
Frieda stands and throws her napkin on the table. He looks up at her with a maliciously innocent smile. She starts to say something, and stutters. Bill's gaze hangs on her lips. They're quivering, grimacing in something between hatred and tears, and still they're an image of beauty. Then they're gone.
The waitress returns with Bill's whiskey. “Well, it looks like you can take the red wine away.”
“Date didn't go so well?” she says as she reaches for the glass.
“Not so well. We have issues.”
He walks home, through downtown. He takes a turn around Loring Park. In the spring, he was taking this walk before work. It was a strategy. As winter waned, he found himself uncomfortably numb through his days – his week days, his weekend days; it didn't make a difference. So he resorted to fresh air and found himself conducting internal inquests that began with, 'Why?' Why am I depressed? Am I? Why? Mj job is all right. My apartment is all right. Frieda is all right. And so on. He became acquainted with a man who spent a week under ragged blankets on the hill above the tennis courts. On the first day that he noticed the man, a pile of rubbish had rustled and erupted as he strolled by, and a human head had emerged, its black hair and beard far gone in oily chaos. “Hello! Hey, friend, what time you got?” Bill had stared for a brief interval before he reached for his cell phone, and the phantasm didn't seem to find it rude. In fact, he seemed to have forgotten he asked, as he began to fish underneath his cardboard and torn wool blankets for something. Bill said it was twenty to eight, and the homeless man asked again. Those were the only words they exchanged on that day, and never again did the camper care about the time. But Bill always offered a polite greeting even when the rubbish pile was motionless. The morning that the encampment disappeared was a day warm enough for a video crew and a blonde starlet in tennis skirt to have taken over the tennis courts. Men in black conferred over clipboards and conferred behind a chunky video camera, while the starlet flashed a bright smile and swung a tennis racket while she swung her sunny pony tail. She would repeat and glance over her shoulder. Bill watched for five minutes. Then he shouted down to them, “Don't you need a ball for tennis?” The men in black looked up at him, bemused. The self-conscious ritual wasn't working, and Bill discontinued it after another week or so.
Tonight he goes back, and though the choice to walk through the park is somewhat unconscious, he awakens to it, and he looks around for signs. Maybe the meaning he had missed in the spring would leap out at him from behind one of the trunks of oak. Maybe he would see the raggedy camper, and the unwashed man would utter wisdom.
Nothing was discovered. After a slow circling of the larger of the park's miniature lakes, Bill leaves the park.
The moon is near full and hovers above the roofs of his neighborhood. A lot of people are out. They stagger by in clusters, laughing loudly. They drive by at a crawl, and they stare. Someone is yelling from the street to a high window. A boy suddenly runs by.
The bear is back. The bear is a local who likes to stand in the parking lot next to Bill's apartment building. He rocks from side to side and mutters. He's bundled in layers of army surplus and wears a heavy pack. Under the brim of his limp fishing cap are thick, tumbling locks of greying hair and a long beard. The high lamp above him casts his face in shadow. As Bill approaches, the bear begins to move, waddling for the sidewalk. Bill steps up his pace. As he passes, the bear emits a grunt. It's a laugh; it's a whine. It's a hello; it's a challenge. Bill quickly rounds the corner into his entranceway, jiggles the key in the building's front door lock until it gives. Two floors up, down the hall, and he's into his dark, stuffy place, closing the door without a sigh. He sits in the dark, the dark that's not so very dark because the parking lot lamps shine in, casting wavy light through the drapes onto the ceiling.
His missed a call on his cell. Someone has left a message. It could be Frieda. He doesn't want to start the post-fight processing yet. He peers out the window, hooking the curtain with a finger. The bear stands in the parking lot, tipping left and right. He's holding his hands out a foot from his sides, and his beard twitches with words. Bill releases the curtain.
Time to face the other beast. He accesses his voice mail. He's shocked to hear not Frieda's voice, but his mother's. It's a short message. He is stunned into several long minutes of stillness before he can play it again. On the bureau are several unopened letters from her. He realizes he should have read them.
The Poet Speaks
Torque has pulled up a chair and is leaning toward Boyo's ear, shouting about a new band. He demonstrates a few songs with a very physical impression of drumming, bobbing his shaved head as though it were another muscle brought to the work. Boyo listens with a studious face. Karnak fingers his crystals. Bill idly looks around the Tar Pit.
“It’s a matter of resonance,” Karnak says suddenly. He glances up, follows Bill's gaze.
There's a young man at the unstable table by the square pillar, the pillar imprinted with a death’s head caricature of Bush fil raining missiles upon daisy-toting Iraqi children with moustaches. Bush has glistering rubies for eyes.
“That's the Poet,” Karnak says about the youth. They watch him a moment, and the Poet is oblivious to their attention. His wide, pale eyes are focused with extraordinary intensity on the papers that he shuffles, orders, shuffles, and stares through.
“I've told him that the spirit of this place doesn't like his stuff.”
“The spirit ...”
The spirit of the Tar Pit.”
“Hmm. Why not?”
“Hubris,” Karnak says, and Bill waits for a smile. Instead, Karnak explains, and his cornflower eyes do not waver. “The spirit doesn't like tinkerers.” He shrugs. That's that. And he returns to his crystals.
The Poet is digging into paper with his pencil. He is wrestling with Time. He’s writing poetry. Spirits hate that, Bill thinks. They're much too pragmatic. Or maybe it's a species of professional jealousy. Why would a boy with a pencil presume power over the clock, deploying mood like an alchemical spell, hoping to bust the machine? Spirits love Time. But humans are the prey of Time, and like any skulking prey, they have developed an intense and itchy sensitivity to their enemy. That’s integral to human beauty, a doe-like wide-eyed beauty that's very appealing to spirits.
The Poet's coffee-splattered notebook, warped with rain and bent by kicks about the bedroom, is paged with marks in pens, pencils, markers, and crayons. The lines inside deliberately wander, obedient to the rule that disorder is a sign of inspiration. In the Tar Pit, the boy's hair becomes tousled and his manners brusque. After a half-hour’s labor, his eyes are bloodshot and his knee is clocking milliseconds.
Bill orders more coffee. On the way back to their table, he stops at the Poet's table. He's just curious enough and just bored enough with Boyo's crew to introduce himself. The Poet turns bland and yet brilliantly lit eyes up toward him. “Have a seat.”
A glance toward Boyo reveals that he's watching Bill and he's amused. Bill pulls up a chair. “You seem very concentrated. What are you working on?”
“A poem,” the Poet replies in a fervent, high-pitched voice. “I'm writing a poem. I'm a poet.” He seems to have been severely rattled by Bill's interruption. Or maybe it's too much caffeine. The Poet doesn't seem to know where to settle his gaze. He starts shuffling his papers that are thick on his table. “Do you write?” he asks.
“Not a word.”
The answer makes the Poet happy. His lips twitch into a quick, thin-lipped smile. He's staring at a page that he has isolated. “Not a … word. Yes. … It is not easy, writing a word.”
“I'm no good at it. My penmanship is awful.”
The Poet laughs and fixes Bill with an unsettling, delighted stare. “Yes! There are too many levels to this thing, to writing a word.” He laughs again. He turns his attention back to the page in his hand. He sighs, and then he launches into a breathless monologue.
“See? See?” he starts, “I've gotten snagged on one word. Right here!” He jabs at the page. “I wanted to write, 'I see that the moon is waxing gibbous', which isn’t remotely true. The moon last night was a quarter full, and it was last night. This isn't a case for the present tense. In fact, not much is, if you think about it.” The Poet licks his lips and gestures forward. “What I see right now is an ashtray waxing gibbous. I don’t smoke. Nobody smokes indoors anymore. The coop just doesn't have the heart to throw them away. I like it because it … makes me think of dirt. It's dirty. I'm reminded of squalor. Rimbaud has said we must disorder all the senses, and I've always taken that very seriously.”
The Poet glances up at Bill, measuring whether he is losing his auditor. “Honestly, I'm just enjoying the word 'gibbous'. And I'm bound to speak only in the present tense, and thereby bound to lie.” The Poet shrugs. “I was assigned the present tense by the professor of my workshop.”
“Why distance yourself from your reader?” his professor had asked him one day. “You’re already so far from her.”
“From who?” he had whispered in class. “From my mother?”
“Well, I can’t comment on that, can I?” she said gently. “I was speaking about the reader.” The rest of the students were now free to snicker and lavish him with contempt. His cheeks burn at the memory. He pushes the ashtray away abruptly. He pulls it back.
“Your reader is already removed from the subject of your poem,” the professor had continued, “having only words on paper, and whatever craft you can bring to your task, to draw her into a complete experience.”
“But,” the Poet had protested, aware that the day’s credibility had been shot, “I’m writing about vomiting mother’s milk when I was six months-old. The reader knows it happened a long time ago. Past tense. Why pretend?”
“Pretend?” she had replied with flute-like virtue, and her eyebrows arched. The students had tittered and that was that.
The Poet is visibly frustrated by his performance in that dialogue. He raps the table’s surface with the end of his pencil, and he wonders what devil’s impulse drives him to say such stupid things. He knows she was right. He musses his hair another degree. He sums up his assignment. “I will lie, but I will lie with honor.
“Well if you've got to lie ….” Bill consoles.
The Poet stubbornly returns to his dilemma. “I wrote this line, see, and then I realized that really I had 'noticed' that the moon was waxing gibbous. The second word is more accurate. I notice; my attention is at that moment captured by the sight – but notice! The sight! A sight is something you see! So it’s not inaccurate to say 'sees'. I see the gibbous wax of the moon. That communicates a different experience. I notices: the eye flickers; it jumps. I see: the eye lingers; it loves; it caresses. What relationship am I suggesting? What is the etymology of 'gibbous'? Is it a cousin to 'monkey'? Well, aren’t we all? I 'notice' the gibbering moon; I’m reminded of the mud from which we all arose to climb the ancient banyan tree.. It’s melancholy. Is it irony? I 'see' the simian moon: I feel kinship and … and humility. Maybe there’s beauty in that. And listen to 'feel'; it rhymes with 'see'. Which suggests the 'sea', the source of all life. The waxing, gibbonous moon rises out of the sea. But where am I then? I mean, the narrator. I must be in Africa, on the Red Sea. Pharaoh! But this was just last night, wasn’t it?” The Poet takes a deep breath; this puzzle weighs upon him. “Choices, choices,” he mutters. Writing is all about choices.”
The Poet falls into a sullen silence. Bill sips his coffee in mental solitude. He surveys the Tar Pit, gazing through the columns of dust back-lit by sunlight from the window. He follows their lazy trajectory toward the tin ceiling. Beyond the churning veils of dust and humidity, present-day Africans sit beside the balloon letters painted in the windows, hunched over a chessboard, rattling off long, insistent discourses in a sharp-edged language. Near the furthest wall sits a solitary long-hair with years of patient smoking etched into his face, meticulously and deftly completing another masterpiece of detail on a bright red Etch-a-Sketch. Several finished pieces are on sale on his table. One is a choo-choo. Another is a dragon. In the dim back of the spacious room grumble and stew the angry ones in torn black clothes, the angry ones who pickle their youth in attitude, the hilarious ones who have blue and green markings on their skin that are so elaborate as to be indecipherable.
“Well, I wish you well with the Poem,” Bill says, rising to his feet. “I'm sure the second line will go a lot better.” The Poet stares up in amazement, and Bill awkwardly waves good-bye.
As Bill rejoins his group, Karnak shrugs as if to say, “See?” Boyo looks at him sardonically, while he attends Torque's discourse with a royal ear.
Enter Shellac
Her entrance is announced by the scraping shuffle of her fuzzy, flat-soled slippers against the concrete floor. Kanak leaves off touching his crystals to look straight ahead. She stops at Boyo's shoulder. She assesses all – the pills, the dazed sorcerer, the meals – with black, impassive gaze. Torque drops a riff and bares his teeth in a vaguely frightening grin.
“Shellac, my darling,” Boyo says without looking up, “welcome. It's an auspicious day.”
She has fixed Bill with an unflinching glare.
“Billy, meet Shellac, the belle of the bar.”
“You got a smoke?” she asks without blinking.
“I don’t … got.”
“Shelly, this is my brother Billy.”
Her glare deepens, as though the near-black of her irises has intensified. But otherwise, she betrays no reaction. After a beat, she reaches for a wooden chair from the next table, swinging it around, not without a certain grace, not without a mild shriek as the chair legs grind against the floor. She slumps upon the seat, facing Boyo, knees spread wide. She regards the men with disdain. Slowly as the beam from a distant lighthouse, her gaze swivels, through a winter fog, toward Bill. When it arrives, it lazily takes in all of him. Her lips set in an obsidian sneer. “Boyo’s brother,” she drawls. Everything about her but the face slouches and spreads and refuses form. Her hair is partially pulled back; most of it escapes in a thick chaos of curls and frizz. Her massive rumpled sweater boasts nearly as much fuzz. It has bands of color that can’t be named. Underneath there seems to be a grey sweatshirt: these layers in defiance of a late summer sun made profound in the stale air and high glass. Cotton, mashed and beaten pants bunch in coils around her legs that have been lost inside. They spill over work boots scratched and striped with hard wear. Her arms hang limp inside the heavy strata of fabric. Only her face has sharp lines, round cheeks smooth but made grave by the severe cut of the mouth. She has large eyes, darker than coffee and preternaturally focused by malice. “Brother. Right. Kind of late.”
Bill glances at his watch. The gesture is automatic, a kind of confusion, but it comes across as an anemic sort of joke. To her credit, Shellac doesn't respond in any way. The bitterness she radiates is constant.
Only Torque is enjoying himself. His toothy grin is eager and his knee bounces. Shellac is finally distracted by him, looks at him dismissively, and then turns to Boyo. She has sat next to him. She takes his hand in hers. With her other hand, she delivers a sound slap to the bright scar. “How are you doing, Boy?”
Boyo jumps as though plugged into the wall. His face drains of all color. Torque grimaces dramatically and mouths a long “Ooooooh!” Karnak's calm eyes measure the scene as though the crystals have hinted at something like this.
“So, how are you doing, Boy?” Shellac repeats with a hiss.
“Fine, my dear, fine,” Boyo groans as he leans over his wound.
“Asshole,” she tosses off, and she lets go of Boyo's wrist.
“Wow,” Torque breathes. He admires the new arrival. Bill is quietly horrified. Karnak, ever sensitive, notices, and leans closer to him to explain, “She's not happy with him.”
“You don't say.”
“You knew about the …,” and here Karnak draws vague circles with his open hand, suggesting something he shouldn't mention.
“Yeah.”
A Rainy Night
“Look, Billam, let's establish something right away. You don't deserve this. Do you understand that?”
“Understood.”
“I'm not the brother you get to rescue at sunset, while you're on vacation from your sinking-ship, bourgeois life. I'm the brother who spits in your runaway, middle-class eye, You don't get to show up at the last minute and play family man.”
“Yeah, okay, Boy. Think I've got it now. Have another drink, would you? And you can pay for it yourself. How's that?”
“No need to get nasty, Billy. Buying drinks is a whole nother matter.” The brothers sit across from each other at a square, brown table in the back of the Clap Trap. Each of them has three empty glasses in front of him, squashed limes languishing among the melting ice, tiny wrecked straws bent and abandoned among the dregs. “And it seems to me we're due for another round.”
“A deal's a deal, Boy. I buy, you talk.”
“You do NOT ….”
“I don't deserve it. Fuck you. Now talk!”
“Oh, Billy, has it come to this? Why resort to language like that?”
Bill answers in a steady voice, “Because you have no right to put family and friends through this.”
Boyo chokes and coughs. “I have …!” He pushes himself back in his chair. “William, … put through!” Boyo stares astonished at Bill, sitting back in his chair, his hands in his lap. Half a minute passes. Bill holds his position, chews on ice. Boyo nods. He slumps forward, putting his weight on his elbows.
“William, you don't know what you're saying. You can't. If I thought you did, you would be spending some of your own time in the hospital.” He throws his hands up with abandon, but he is avoiding his brother's eye. “Hey, I can be generous. My life is not my own anymore.” His growl is subsiding into hollow grumble. “You have no idea how much better it would have been if I'd had the guts to see it through. For Ma, for me, for you. Now we wait and we suffer.”
Bill starts to object, but Boyo shuts him down with a wave.
“It's my life. This is my life, and I say Death doesn't get to call all the shots. Death wins the game, but I have a say in how it goes down – if I weren't such a coward.” He glances up at Bill ruefully. He holds up the violated wrist, right handing gripping it and shaking. "So simple. And I couldn't finish it. So it goes. So it goes. Man is weak, and God knows it. I let the shock get the better of me.” He places his wrist back on the table. With the tenderness of fear, he inspects it. He continues, “You all say, 'Don't kill yourself, Boyo. Let the cancer do it. That's what the family says. That's what Shellac says. Boyo, take the slow, painful way. Waste away until you are a shadow of yourself. We can't let go of you until then.” Again, he shushes Bill.
“I was drunk. We were all at a party at Karnak's place. The house was mad crowded, and the night already looked to get out of control. I wanted to spin off the planet just like that, shot into space on the best petrol, on the best beat, on everything I called good. I'd kind of wandered alone into the backyard. It was raining, and I stood out there a while, staring up into the clouds. They were low and winging along just overhead, all tattered and spilling life on the grass. And just like that, I was resolved. I went back inside. I broke out a blade in Karnak's bathroom. And I went back into the yard and sat in the mud, holding that blade,” Boyo mimics the motion above his wounded wrist. “Everything was shining in the rain. It was beautiful. … I cut.” Boyo makes a quick jab with his fist.
Boyo stops, and slowly a smile spreads across his lips. He allows the offending hand to fall. He laughs. “That's how it is, Billy. We are never quite strong enough for our dreams. Wow! I can tell you now, will power is nothing to pain. Ha! That woke me up. … Isn't that how life goes? You make a plan, and then you take the cold slap in the cheek. Reality never matches the plan. … Yep. So they found me out there rolling in the mud and crying like a baby, blood everywhere. Makes you proud, doesn't it? You never really know what you're made of until you fail. I can't even die on my own initiative.”
“I'm glad you failed.”
"You shouldn't be. You could have been here for the weekend, thrown some dirt on me, and been back to work on Monday."
“Stop. You've earned your drink.”
“Bloody right, I did. And more.”
Destiny
On his first day at the Tar Pit, Bill has had too much coffee. He is becoming familiar with the famous bathrooms. The lavatories at the Tar Pit are the subject of two Master’s dissertations at the state college, one in psychology, the other in art crit. The clouds of slogans and visions read like Sibylline texts. Wild-eyed lovers of life have spend long shifts inside one or the other room in the wee-est hours of the 22-hour day at the cafe, crafting what might be the twin Sistine of the western world.
One of the most prominent prescriptions on the eastern wall of the men's room tells us to
'Breathe', in the work of an anonymous young pointillist. The word is lovingly urged upon male patrons, and many of the latter have benefited from the advice while eliminating. The dictum seems general enough, but actually it is inspired by local history. Legend persists, even into the era of the smoking ban, that the Tar Pit serves as the lungs in the organism that is the town. How any tradition evolves that assigns human organs to an entity as inorganic as a small New England town remains a mystery, but it appears to have blossomed some time in the 70s. That roughly coincides with the opening of the Tar Pit, and it would be fair to say that the legend and the Tar Pit both reflect the same zeitgeist. It was a time for theories; it was a time that was infatuated with bodies.
Some say the legend was fostered by a long-time employee at the convenience store on the next block. His name was Claude; he was long in frame and long in tooth. He had discarded his last comb in teenage years, and his gaze was skeptical. He would pass matches across the milky counter and say enigmatically, “Cancer IS the cure.” After a long shift, he would sit in the darkest corner of the Tar Pit, stirring his green tea and smoking. He had cigarettes for anyone who asked, and he would advise that person that he or she was one more tumorous cell in the lung of Soughley County. He would congratulate them with a wink
Years later, Karnak would give impromptu workshops about the power of the organ of breath, describing the lungs as the center of the vital force and therefore the seat of all happiness and personal energy. Heart, stomach, brain, and blood were nice accoutrements, but the lungs were the spirit. By then, the tradition had been further elaborated, the heart being signified by the Luigi Theatre on old Main Street. The Luigi was the oldest continuously operating theater within several counties, debuting in 1948 with 'The Wizard of Oz'. The brain was the Catholic high school, St. Stephen's, established in the 1870s on Pinesap Hill by a disoriented Italian friar named Pietro. The stomach was the ancient greasy spoon on Poultry Lane named Mickey's. And the Oakfell Mall, the first indoor mall in the county, was the greater and lesser intestine. According to some, the Cocytus Club was the town's pineal gland. These latter traditions were recent additions and not universally accepted.
There's a photo in the archives of the Fair-Standard, the town's newspaper, depicting Shellac protesting the smoking ban, standing outside the Tar Pit with a cardboard sign painted with the one-word slogan, 'Breathe'. The word bears a degraded resemblance to the masterpiece on the men's room wall. Without the photo’s caption, many would have mistaken her side of the debate. In the photo, (as now) Shellac's eyes are afire. The world hasn't been the same since the smoking ban. “What is the fucking lung of the world without a smoke?” she asked in many a bitter moment. She's bitter tonight. She's chewing on the extinguished stub of a cigarette now, stewing over the state of a world in which Boyo tries to extinguish himself. Are humans themselves to be the subject of idiotic bans from above?
Bill is ruminating over one of the many aphorisms on the men's room wall, this one declaring, “Cock-a-doodle-doo; ergo sum,” as he returns to his seat. Shellac turns on him, “And you – brother! – where have you been all this time?”
“I had to pee.”
Boyo coughs. Shellac spits. “You ass. Where have you been while your brother's been sick?”
“I was in Minneapolis.”
She arches her eyebrows. “Oh, you don't say?” The poison is palpably accumulating in her voice.
“What my brother wants to say, darling, is that he didn't know.”
Shellac's glance jumps from brother to brother. She pauses.
Boyo adds, “You know Cilice.”
Shellac glares at Bill as she picks a bit of tobacco from her tongue. She evidently decides that the explanation adds up. She turns away in disgust.
Torque stares at Bill. He wears a wide aggressive smile, teeth parted. “Ah! You're the runaway brother, the psycho. We've heard about you.”
Bill glances angrily at Boyo. He mumbles, “Yeah, that's me.”
Only Karnak's eyes are kind now, and they would be kind to dark matter.
“Billy, I have loyal friends,” Boyo says with a shrug.
Bill smiles. He has to concede that it’s a good thing.
“My dearest finch,” Boyo adds tentatively, “Billy is the answer to the prophecy.”
“Oh God,” she responds in an acid tone. She buries her face in her hands.
“It was only weird chance that he heard about me at all. … You remember the prophecy, don't you? Sweet pea?”
“No. Stop! I don't care. Karnak, ...” she holds up one finger in warning. Karnak stays silent. “What weird chance?”
“Cilice called him.”
Shellac's eyes flood with red rage. Her cheeks fill with expletives. “She...! What the …? What a weird fucking chance!” Her volume is soaring.
“Shelly, Cilice never calls...”
“She's your mother!” she's screaming.
“Darling, Cilice is afraid of phones. She doesn't know how to use one.” This much is true of the Fugit brothers’ matron. Cilice suffers from a delicate nervous constitution. The ring of a phone causes her acute pain. Her habit is to unplug the home phone from its jack. When it happens that Boyo has plugged it back in and the bell sounds, she leaps and she succumbs to a spell of trembling weariness. With great sighs, she eventually retires to her bedroom.
“I didn't know,” Bill says with quiet feeling.
“Can I have a refresher, Karnie?” Torque asks. “What's the prophecy?”
With a gentle smile, even with some tender indulgence, Karnak watches Shellac for another disruption, but she has turned away in general contempt. He raises pure eyes toward the tar-stained ceiling, and he looks for that ethereal line from the great script, so like a coil of smoke reaching for annihilation. He recites softly, “A woman travels from the lakes to pick up the work of the goddess.”
Torque and Shellac look at Bill. “A woman,” she says.
“Well, you know …” Boyo starts.
Shellac gestures toward Bill.
“We can't dissect every word of the prophecy. There has to be some room for interpretation,” Boyo insists.
“Boy, there are about five words to this bullshit prophecy. Don't make it sound like a book of the Bible.”
Torque shakes his head tragically. “Woman,” he mutters.
Suddenly everybody is very sad. Torque looks up at Boyo with boundless, aggressive sympathy in his eyes, and he says, “Man, this is going nowhere.”
And indeed, this is the story of how Bill fails his destiny.
The Tar Pit
“One day all this will be yours, Billiam,” and with a sweeping gesture with an open hand, Boyo Fugit encompasses all the scene surrounding. He takes in the interior of the Tar Pit, from the spacious, greasy Vegan kitchen behind the stainless steel counter to the dining room, its beat wooden tables, its high ceilings, its square pillars and unwashed walls painted Easter colors. He gathers in the four high windows painted with red balloon characters advertising java. They and the walls are still stained from a generation of cigarette smoke, and the the room still vaguely stinks of it, though the smoking ban is months old. Boyo's generous gesture gathers in every last denizen of the place, from the skateboard punks to the withered and unshaven old men whose hands shake. His forgiving net gathers in the plates before them – Bill's shit on a shingle and Boyo's bowl of espresso with milk – and it extends beyond the walls of the establishment, to the curb, where kids in hoods loiter around their bikes, and into the bowed street, lumpy with patches of tar. It extends beyond that, embracing the whole of the tired New England town, including the sprawling State University complex one way down the street, toward the city limits and the meager suburbs, and including the downtown blocks that support ancient, irregular buildings of red brick and a few squat modern ones of glass and steel. This is the town of Ashenfield. It's where the brothers grew up.
“One day,” Boyo says in his distinct voice, an alloy of growl and whine. It's a modern voice. What makes it distinct is the vivacity behind it. In fact, everything about Boyo indicates unusual vivacity. His eyes always sparkle with mischief. His thick fingers beat out rhythms in all the world's traditions. And yet he's dying. The dissonance can be very disorienting.
“Listen to me, Billiam. It has been prophesied that you would inherit it all. That a mopey wisp of a man would arrive from far away …” At this point, Karnak the prophet clears his throat. “How does that go, Karnie?”
Karnak speaks. “Well, originally, the prophecy said that it would be a woman who comes.” His eyes of innocent, California blue lock with Bill's “She comes from a wet but landlocked land to take over the ministry.”
“Ministry?” Bill dares.
“All in due time, William. Was it a woman, Karnie? Yes. Well, look at him. Maybe it was a metaphor. He's barely a man, as it is.”
“Thanks, Boy,” Bill says blandly.
“Anyway, he's all we've got. Billy, there is no second-guessing Karnak's work. For this project, he broke out the highest-caliber machinery available to man. For this job, we consulted the I Chimichanga, or Dragon's Lair, or … what was it?”
“The Roots of Yggdrasil,” Karnak corrects him. He delivers in a deep and gentle voice, from the height of an erect and taller than average spine. Karnak has the gravitas of a dreaming Brahma, clothed in the rags of a Rastafarian friar. A lopsided mass of dreadlocks fills out a huge knit cap in African colors. A wispy beard starts on his cheeks and dissipates in an insubstantial Assyrian square. Over his shoulders hangs a light vest in lavender, lightly streaked around the heart with yellow paint. He contemplates a series of crystals on the table, his long fingers touching each one lightly, reverently. They call him the stone-thrower. “This pronouncement comes from a pretty deep place,” he says.
“Right,” Bill answers. Bill finds it a difficult exercise, following this conversation on his first day in town, with his brother's illness weighing on him like an iron anchor on his chest. But he wants to indulge his brother.
Bill's Arrival
He leans into the door frame, gazing into the dim bedroom. It's a small room, Boyo's childhood room. The broad, sagging bed occupies all but narrow corridors around three sides, corridors that allow for a chest of drawers beside the door, a bookshelf on the other side of the bed, a bedside table, and boxes lined against the wall opposite the foot of the bed. On the other side of the chest of drawers is a cramped walk-in closet. Bill knows the house. He grew up across the hall.
Hunched over itself on the side of the bed is a shirtless figure, unmoving, its bare feet on the floor. His shoulder-length black hair is like a wild, dark nimbus around his head, hiding his face in shadow.
“Hey, Boy,” Bill says.
“Hey, Billy,” Boyo sighs.
“How you doing?”
“Oh, just dandy,” Boyo replies, and he swings his face up with a big, false grin. He lets his head swing back into its dejected position. “So … you're here.” He coughs a load of phlegm along his throat. “So … I guess you had a little talk with Cilice.”
“I did.”
“Cilice picked up the phone! Cilice figured out how to dial. Will wonders never cease?” He clears his throat again. His voice is hoarse. “Well,” he tries sounding cheerful, but quickly gives it up. “Okay, so you've made it. How was the trip?”
“Just dandy!” Bill replies. “Waited at the airport a while, just to be sure no one was showing up.”
“Damn, William! It hasn't been that long, has it? You know the way home.”
“I do.”
“Besides, our dear Cilice neglected to record your flight information. It didn't occur to her that I might need to know day and time.” He scratches his head. “Sorry. … Hey! Don't so that!” Bill was reaching for the light switch. “I just got up, Billy.”
“It's 1:30, Boy.”
“Why, so it is,” he growls with a charming smile. He runs a hand through his hair, and asks Bill, “What's for breakfast?”
“I don't know ...”
“Did you rent a car?”
“Right. Sure, let's go. … You're not going to suggest that dive.”
“I am. Thank you, city boy. The bill's on you. Get it? The bill.” Boyo is chipper now. He reaches for his shoes underneath the bed. Bill sees the jagged new scars, and a surge of adrenaline makes him flush.
“We'll get a chance to talk, right?” Bill regrets the desperate question immediately.
Boyo is beating an unwashed sock against the carpet. He stops without looking up. He starts up again, beating the opposite sock with the opposite hand. “Ground rules, Billiam: leave it alone. You don't get to fly into town and save the day. You're a little late for that, aren't you? … Aren't you, Billy?”
Bill sighs. He's fingering the light switch. There's a tattered bit of paper taped to the wall underneath the switch. Bill swings his head forward and tries to read it in the gloom. The writing is incomprehensible. It is sketched over and surrounded by doodlings in heavy black ink. “What's this?”
Boyo squints up. “I don't remember. Some quotation I wrote down when I was drunk.”
“Lie corpse …,” Bill tries. He shrugs. The first words he thinks he sees suddenly register with him, and inspire a chill. “Let's go, Boy, before the sun sets.”
“Dead man walking!” shouts a musclebound skinhead whose arms and shoulders crawl with tattoos. Boyo laughs and suggests that the grinning skinhead fuck off. He doesn't. “Torque, this is my long-lost brother, back from God's mansion.”
“Cool. Good to meet you, God's child.” Torque has an intense grin, both evil and friendly.
“And this! This is the mighty Karnak, Billy.” He pulls up a chair at the high-top table. Karnak rests his ocean-blue gaze on Bill. “This is him,” the prophet says in a melodious suggestion. “This is the missing brother.”
Bill's Life
The last day of Bill's life is a difficult one. Five o'clock finds him in his therapist's waiting room, tipsy and embarrassed. He and Travis left work early. It was only supposed to be an afternoon break. But it was happy hour at the Logos, and they were tempted by the beer.
“It hardly seems right, does it, Bill, that Pinkerton holds me back? A manager should overcome his smaller nature, his natural jealousies. That should be the first course in any MBA program: overcoming oneself, recognizing talent greater than your own. A manager should be like a jolly papa, don't you think? A man who will never be happy until his proteges are advancing further and faster than he himself did. And God knows Pinkerton has all the advancement potential of a lame horse. He should be shot. We could draw straws for the privilege. I would pay a month's salary just to corber the straw market, just to pull that trigger.” Travis coyly enacts the pulling of the trigger on a tiny rifle. “Not that I hate the man, Bill. I really don't have the capacity for hatred. It's simply that I can't abide by jealousy. And the day I walked in, I felt it radiating from those beady eyes. Eight months I've been biding...my...time. It's clear to everyone what I'm made of: at a moment's notice I could fill in for five of those non-entities they call department heads.” Travis sighs and turns his pint glass on its coaster. “I'm just not made for boredom. I'm not like you, Bill. You're one of those people who is basically content in life. You could push the same pencil for twenty years. I love that about you, but I've got to feel the wind in my face. I've … I have got to get that young lady's number.” Travis indicates with a slight nod which young lady has caught his attention. “I've been thinking, Bill, that I need to date a nurse. I need a nurturer, a caregiver. I was made to be taken care of. There's no sin in that. Some people are nurturers, and some are made for action. The two types were designed for each other. I would take such wonderful care of her, in my way.” Travis's smile is lecherous.
Bill doesn't like Travis much, though he's the nearest thing to a workplace friend. Bill contemplates the passing foot traffic on Nicollet Mall. He drinks his pint a little too fast. That's what leads to the second, and to the certainty that the two colleagues would not return to work.
Regina, Bill's therapist, is running late. Bill watches the clock apprehensively. Something is sucking the light and oxygen out of this antechamber. There are no windows. There is only a water cooler and wallpaper that might have been woven of pale bamboo by nano-weavers. There is much in this room that can be attributed to nano-technology. There is little sign of direct human intervention. Perhaps the sheen on the magazine covers unlikely, as well as the sheen in the celebrities' skin and teeth on those covers. He felt a curious itch along the skin of his neck. Idly, he hoped the nano-bots would do something about his breath.
Regina appears in the hallway, looking breathless. She is a slight woman with an attractive figure and straight, ultra-black hair. She has a penchant for high black boots that Bill finds very distracting.
Regina seems more harried than usual, almost frenzied, as she shuffles through thick files and then through the voluminous papers in Bill's file. Both boot soles are flat on the floor and the file sits in her lap, one inch from the hem of her short skirt, drawn over sheer black stockings. She licks her finger frequently as she shovels through the reams of paper.
The therapist stops suddenly and eyes Bill. She lets the papers fall into their pile inside the yellow file. “Bill, have you been drinking?”
Bill is scared. “I … it was just a quick happy hour. That is, after work.”
“Bill,” and she allows herself a dramatic pause, as though she's weighing whether the situation warrants the effort of a full sentence. “During our first appointment, we went over policies, and you did sign your understanding and consent. One of those policies is about alcohol and drug use.”
She won't go on, so Bill makes a reply, “It was just happy hour.”
Regina sighs. “You know we can't go on with the session.” Slowly, her face tenses into the expression that mesmerizes Bill. It's a grotesque mask of concern. Her eyes lock on his intensely, and they telegraph expectation. The more they ask for something, the more he freezes up. Her mouth pouts. And then the foot starts. She has swung one leg over the other, and the toes inside the black boot of the suspended foot begin to flex. Then the boot begins to kick. Bill finds this ritual too much to bear, and his mind goes blank every time.
She speaks again in a flat tone. “Have you thought about what we discussed last time?”
“Ahem! And what was that?”
“I suggested meds.”
“Right.” He knows he has flushed. And the muscles of Regina's face are clenching into concern again. He has a response, but it fades behind a wall of static.
The therapist chips away at the impasse. “There's a lot I would like to talk with you about, Bill. … I want to hear about your grandfather and your aunt, and the years you spent with them. … But we can't talk when ...”
“I'm so tired,” Bill says, and the words surprise both of them.
“You know, it's my professional opinion that we won't be able to make any progress unless ...”
“And I've told you, … I've done all that. I've been the crazy kid. I've done all the pills. I won't.”
“I know. I know hat was painful, and maybe it didn't help. You're an adult now, Bill. This will be the last time. This time it will work. … Bill?”
Bill has tipped forward into space. Regina has a line of windows in her office the full length of her wall, and knee-to-ceiling high. The view outside is predominated by the summer clouds, grey with weather. They fill the sky with rolls of somber weather, reaching all the way from this southern suburb to the miniature towers of downtown, gathered in a comically tight cluster on Minnesota's flat horizon.
“Bill?”
Bill sits in the driver's seat of his parked car for ten minutes. Above him to the left, Regina's window is empty. His mind is blank. He repeats to himself without intention, “I'm so tired.”
With a sinking feeling in his gut, Bill sees that Frieda has beat him to the restaurant. He rubs his face with a heavy hand, as though he could uncover a happy man. He wrestles with the unwieldy chair. Frieda likes this Irish pub -- O'Flack's -- drafty, dark and more for the value than any Irishman would really pay. Why come to an Irish bar to drink red wine?
Two of Frieda's fingers rest on either side of the stem of her wine glass. She hasn't said a thing. She gazes up at her boyfriend from under thick, black eyelashes. Her full lips are set in an enigmatic half smile. They might have held that expression for ages, captured in the amber of bar-light for all time. These lips are a taste for Bill of the glass half empty; the enigma in them seems bound by gravity to bring him down.
“Hi,” he says with a show of good cheer.
“How did it go?”
“Oh, it was swell. We're making great strides. Mm hmm, I'm feeling … like I need a drink.” He tries for the attention of a waitress.
She looks at him skeptically, tipping her head to one side so that the straight, glossy Portuguese hair hangs over her bare shoulder. “Good.” She twists the wine glass on its base, one way, then the other. “Is she still insisting on meds?”
“Yep. She is, and we're not really seeing eye to eye on that one. I'm working on her. She's giving me a chance to, you know, prove myself.”
“Are you being a good boy?” Frieda says with a provocative twist of her ancient half-smile.
Bill is overcome by sleepiness. His eyelids sink like they're weighted. “I'm a good boy.”
“Are you tired?” she asks. And isn't this what Bill hates about Frieda, this hyper-attentiveness? It's not kindness motivating her question; it's enforcement. In Frieda's company, one isn't allowed wandering notions or wandering emotions.
“No. It was a tough session,” Bill concedes. “Hard work.”
“Meds,” Frieda muses. She lightly wipes the base of her wine glass with a finger. “Shouldn't you trust your therapist? I mean, if you're going to go to a therapist ...”
“Not my idea.” That was a tactical error. He signals again for the waitress. This time she sees him, and approaches.
Frieda's eyes flash. She waits until the waitress has taken Bill's order. Sensing the direction of the conversation, he passes on the red wine and orders whiskey. “Whose idea, Bill?” Bill doesn't answer; he sighs. She takes it another step: “Who am I dating? Why am I here? Why am I waiting for you to show up late to one more date, just so you can yawn and whine? When after all, I'm basically dating myself. I can do that at home.”
“Okay, okay.”
“'Not my idea,' he says. We're at my restaurant, talking about my decision to go back to therapy, so that I can finally enjoy something like a satisfying relationship.” Frieda has, degree by degree, leaned forward and straightened her back.
The first quick and familiar shot of adrenaline dissipates, and the jolt only serves to tire Bill more. “Can we breathe a little?”
“We? Have you shown up? Has Bill shown up?”
“Aren't you taking this a little far?” Bill is complementing Frieda's posture with a sinking slouch of his own.
“Taking what? Is there something here? I thought I was talking to myself.”
Bill comments by an arch of an eyebrow. Another tactical error.
“You fucker! Well, show up! It's time for you to show up!” Now she's leaning over the table, and her lovely fingers, usually engaged in languorous play are balled up in fists that strike the table.
“I'm here, I'm here. I just wasn't ready for issues night.”
“Don't start that,” Frieda warns, and her voice has dropped a register.
“Issues night at O'Flack's. Hmm, what's on the menu?” He runs a finger along the laminated page. “Issues au gratin, issues a la mode, issues with bleu cheese, issues and chips, issues in alfredo sauce, issues ….”
Frieda stands and throws her napkin on the table. He looks up at her with a maliciously innocent smile. She starts to say something, and stutters. Bill's gaze hangs on her lips. They're quivering, grimacing in something between hatred and tears, and still they're an image of beauty. Then they're gone.
The waitress returns with Bill's whiskey. “Well, it looks like you can take the red wine away.”
“Date didn't go so well?” she says as she reaches for the glass.
“Not so well. We have issues.”
He walks home, through downtown. He takes a turn around Loring Park. In the spring, he was taking this walk before work. It was a strategy. As winter waned, he found himself uncomfortably numb through his days – his week days, his weekend days; it didn't make a difference. So he resorted to fresh air and found himself conducting internal inquests that began with, 'Why?' Why am I depressed? Am I? Why? Mj job is all right. My apartment is all right. Frieda is all right. And so on. He became acquainted with a man who spent a week under ragged blankets on the hill above the tennis courts. On the first day that he noticed the man, a pile of rubbish had rustled and erupted as he strolled by, and a human head had emerged, its black hair and beard far gone in oily chaos. “Hello! Hey, friend, what time you got?” Bill had stared for a brief interval before he reached for his cell phone, and the phantasm didn't seem to find it rude. In fact, he seemed to have forgotten he asked, as he began to fish underneath his cardboard and torn wool blankets for something. Bill said it was twenty to eight, and the homeless man asked again. Those were the only words they exchanged on that day, and never again did the camper care about the time. But Bill always offered a polite greeting even when the rubbish pile was motionless. The morning that the encampment disappeared was a day warm enough for a video crew and a blonde starlet in tennis skirt to have taken over the tennis courts. Men in black conferred over clipboards and conferred behind a chunky video camera, while the starlet flashed a bright smile and swung a tennis racket while she swung her sunny pony tail. She would repeat and glance over her shoulder. Bill watched for five minutes. Then he shouted down to them, “Don't you need a ball for tennis?” The men in black looked up at him, bemused. The self-conscious ritual wasn't working, and Bill discontinued it after another week or so.
Tonight he goes back, and though the choice to walk through the park is somewhat unconscious, he awakens to it, and he looks around for signs. Maybe the meaning he had missed in the spring would leap out at him from behind one of the trunks of oak. Maybe he would see the raggedy camper, and the unwashed man would utter wisdom.
Nothing was discovered. After a slow circling of the larger of the park's miniature lakes, Bill leaves the park.
The moon is near full and hovers above the roofs of his neighborhood. A lot of people are out. They stagger by in clusters, laughing loudly. They drive by at a crawl, and they stare. Someone is yelling from the street to a high window. A boy suddenly runs by.
The bear is back. The bear is a local who likes to stand in the parking lot next to Bill's apartment building. He rocks from side to side and mutters. He's bundled in layers of army surplus and wears a heavy pack. Under the brim of his limp fishing cap are thick, tumbling locks of greying hair and a long beard. The high lamp above him casts his face in shadow. As Bill approaches, the bear begins to move, waddling for the sidewalk. Bill steps up his pace. As he passes, the bear emits a grunt. It's a laugh; it's a whine. It's a hello; it's a challenge. Bill quickly rounds the corner into his entranceway, jiggles the key in the building's front door lock until it gives. Two floors up, down the hall, and he's into his dark, stuffy place, closing the door without a sigh. He sits in the dark, the dark that's not so very dark because the parking lot lamps shine in, casting wavy light through the drapes onto the ceiling.
His missed a call on his cell. Someone has left a message. It could be Frieda. He doesn't want to start the post-fight processing yet. He peers out the window, hooking the curtain with a finger. The bear stands in the parking lot, tipping left and right. He's holding his hands out a foot from his sides, and his beard twitches with words. Bill releases the curtain.
Time to face the other beast. He accesses his voice mail. He's shocked to hear not Frieda's voice, but his mother's. It's a short message. He is stunned into several long minutes of stillness before he can play it again. On the bureau are several unopened letters from her. He realizes he should have read them.
The Poet Speaks
Torque has pulled up a chair and is leaning toward Boyo's ear, shouting about a new band. He demonstrates a few songs with a very physical impression of drumming, bobbing his shaved head as though it were another muscle brought to the work. Boyo listens with a studious face. Karnak fingers his crystals. Bill idly looks around the Tar Pit.
“It’s a matter of resonance,” Karnak says suddenly. He glances up, follows Bill's gaze.
There's a young man at the unstable table by the square pillar, the pillar imprinted with a death’s head caricature of Bush fil raining missiles upon daisy-toting Iraqi children with moustaches. Bush has glistering rubies for eyes.
“That's the Poet,” Karnak says about the youth. They watch him a moment, and the Poet is oblivious to their attention. His wide, pale eyes are focused with extraordinary intensity on the papers that he shuffles, orders, shuffles, and stares through.
“I've told him that the spirit of this place doesn't like his stuff.”
“The spirit ...”
The spirit of the Tar Pit.”
“Hmm. Why not?”
“Hubris,” Karnak says, and Bill waits for a smile. Instead, Karnak explains, and his cornflower eyes do not waver. “The spirit doesn't like tinkerers.” He shrugs. That's that. And he returns to his crystals.
The Poet is digging into paper with his pencil. He is wrestling with Time. He’s writing poetry. Spirits hate that, Bill thinks. They're much too pragmatic. Or maybe it's a species of professional jealousy. Why would a boy with a pencil presume power over the clock, deploying mood like an alchemical spell, hoping to bust the machine? Spirits love Time. But humans are the prey of Time, and like any skulking prey, they have developed an intense and itchy sensitivity to their enemy. That’s integral to human beauty, a doe-like wide-eyed beauty that's very appealing to spirits.
The Poet's coffee-splattered notebook, warped with rain and bent by kicks about the bedroom, is paged with marks in pens, pencils, markers, and crayons. The lines inside deliberately wander, obedient to the rule that disorder is a sign of inspiration. In the Tar Pit, the boy's hair becomes tousled and his manners brusque. After a half-hour’s labor, his eyes are bloodshot and his knee is clocking milliseconds.
Bill orders more coffee. On the way back to their table, he stops at the Poet's table. He's just curious enough and just bored enough with Boyo's crew to introduce himself. The Poet turns bland and yet brilliantly lit eyes up toward him. “Have a seat.”
A glance toward Boyo reveals that he's watching Bill and he's amused. Bill pulls up a chair. “You seem very concentrated. What are you working on?”
“A poem,” the Poet replies in a fervent, high-pitched voice. “I'm writing a poem. I'm a poet.” He seems to have been severely rattled by Bill's interruption. Or maybe it's too much caffeine. The Poet doesn't seem to know where to settle his gaze. He starts shuffling his papers that are thick on his table. “Do you write?” he asks.
“Not a word.”
The answer makes the Poet happy. His lips twitch into a quick, thin-lipped smile. He's staring at a page that he has isolated. “Not a … word. Yes. … It is not easy, writing a word.”
“I'm no good at it. My penmanship is awful.”
The Poet laughs and fixes Bill with an unsettling, delighted stare. “Yes! There are too many levels to this thing, to writing a word.” He laughs again. He turns his attention back to the page in his hand. He sighs, and then he launches into a breathless monologue.
“See? See?” he starts, “I've gotten snagged on one word. Right here!” He jabs at the page. “I wanted to write, 'I see that the moon is waxing gibbous', which isn’t remotely true. The moon last night was a quarter full, and it was last night. This isn't a case for the present tense. In fact, not much is, if you think about it.” The Poet licks his lips and gestures forward. “What I see right now is an ashtray waxing gibbous. I don’t smoke. Nobody smokes indoors anymore. The coop just doesn't have the heart to throw them away. I like it because it … makes me think of dirt. It's dirty. I'm reminded of squalor. Rimbaud has said we must disorder all the senses, and I've always taken that very seriously.”
The Poet glances up at Bill, measuring whether he is losing his auditor. “Honestly, I'm just enjoying the word 'gibbous'. And I'm bound to speak only in the present tense, and thereby bound to lie.” The Poet shrugs. “I was assigned the present tense by the professor of my workshop.”
“Why distance yourself from your reader?” his professor had asked him one day. “You’re already so far from her.”
“From who?” he had whispered in class. “From my mother?”
“Well, I can’t comment on that, can I?” she said gently. “I was speaking about the reader.” The rest of the students were now free to snicker and lavish him with contempt. His cheeks burn at the memory. He pushes the ashtray away abruptly. He pulls it back.
“Your reader is already removed from the subject of your poem,” the professor had continued, “having only words on paper, and whatever craft you can bring to your task, to draw her into a complete experience.”
“But,” the Poet had protested, aware that the day’s credibility had been shot, “I’m writing about vomiting mother’s milk when I was six months-old. The reader knows it happened a long time ago. Past tense. Why pretend?”
“Pretend?” she had replied with flute-like virtue, and her eyebrows arched. The students had tittered and that was that.
The Poet is visibly frustrated by his performance in that dialogue. He raps the table’s surface with the end of his pencil, and he wonders what devil’s impulse drives him to say such stupid things. He knows she was right. He musses his hair another degree. He sums up his assignment. “I will lie, but I will lie with honor.
“Well if you've got to lie ….” Bill consoles.
The Poet stubbornly returns to his dilemma. “I wrote this line, see, and then I realized that really I had 'noticed' that the moon was waxing gibbous. The second word is more accurate. I notice; my attention is at that moment captured by the sight – but notice! The sight! A sight is something you see! So it’s not inaccurate to say 'sees'. I see the gibbous wax of the moon. That communicates a different experience. I notices: the eye flickers; it jumps. I see: the eye lingers; it loves; it caresses. What relationship am I suggesting? What is the etymology of 'gibbous'? Is it a cousin to 'monkey'? Well, aren’t we all? I 'notice' the gibbering moon; I’m reminded of the mud from which we all arose to climb the ancient banyan tree.. It’s melancholy. Is it irony? I 'see' the simian moon: I feel kinship and … and humility. Maybe there’s beauty in that. And listen to 'feel'; it rhymes with 'see'. Which suggests the 'sea', the source of all life. The waxing, gibbonous moon rises out of the sea. But where am I then? I mean, the narrator. I must be in Africa, on the Red Sea. Pharaoh! But this was just last night, wasn’t it?” The Poet takes a deep breath; this puzzle weighs upon him. “Choices, choices,” he mutters. Writing is all about choices.”
The Poet falls into a sullen silence. Bill sips his coffee in mental solitude. He surveys the Tar Pit, gazing through the columns of dust back-lit by sunlight from the window. He follows their lazy trajectory toward the tin ceiling. Beyond the churning veils of dust and humidity, present-day Africans sit beside the balloon letters painted in the windows, hunched over a chessboard, rattling off long, insistent discourses in a sharp-edged language. Near the furthest wall sits a solitary long-hair with years of patient smoking etched into his face, meticulously and deftly completing another masterpiece of detail on a bright red Etch-a-Sketch. Several finished pieces are on sale on his table. One is a choo-choo. Another is a dragon. In the dim back of the spacious room grumble and stew the angry ones in torn black clothes, the angry ones who pickle their youth in attitude, the hilarious ones who have blue and green markings on their skin that are so elaborate as to be indecipherable.
“Well, I wish you well with the Poem,” Bill says, rising to his feet. “I'm sure the second line will go a lot better.” The Poet stares up in amazement, and Bill awkwardly waves good-bye.
As Bill rejoins his group, Karnak shrugs as if to say, “See?” Boyo looks at him sardonically, while he attends Torque's discourse with a royal ear.
Enter Shellac
Her entrance is announced by the scraping shuffle of her fuzzy, flat-soled slippers against the concrete floor. Kanak leaves off touching his crystals to look straight ahead. She stops at Boyo's shoulder. She assesses all – the pills, the dazed sorcerer, the meals – with black, impassive gaze. Torque drops a riff and bares his teeth in a vaguely frightening grin.
“Shellac, my darling,” Boyo says without looking up, “welcome. It's an auspicious day.”
She has fixed Bill with an unflinching glare.
“Billy, meet Shellac, the belle of the bar.”
“You got a smoke?” she asks without blinking.
“I don’t … got.”
“Shelly, this is my brother Billy.”
Her glare deepens, as though the near-black of her irises has intensified. But otherwise, she betrays no reaction. After a beat, she reaches for a wooden chair from the next table, swinging it around, not without a certain grace, not without a mild shriek as the chair legs grind against the floor. She slumps upon the seat, facing Boyo, knees spread wide. She regards the men with disdain. Slowly as the beam from a distant lighthouse, her gaze swivels, through a winter fog, toward Bill. When it arrives, it lazily takes in all of him. Her lips set in an obsidian sneer. “Boyo’s brother,” she drawls. Everything about her but the face slouches and spreads and refuses form. Her hair is partially pulled back; most of it escapes in a thick chaos of curls and frizz. Her massive rumpled sweater boasts nearly as much fuzz. It has bands of color that can’t be named. Underneath there seems to be a grey sweatshirt: these layers in defiance of a late summer sun made profound in the stale air and high glass. Cotton, mashed and beaten pants bunch in coils around her legs that have been lost inside. They spill over work boots scratched and striped with hard wear. Her arms hang limp inside the heavy strata of fabric. Only her face has sharp lines, round cheeks smooth but made grave by the severe cut of the mouth. She has large eyes, darker than coffee and preternaturally focused by malice. “Brother. Right. Kind of late.”
Bill glances at his watch. The gesture is automatic, a kind of confusion, but it comes across as an anemic sort of joke. To her credit, Shellac doesn't respond in any way. The bitterness she radiates is constant.
Only Torque is enjoying himself. His toothy grin is eager and his knee bounces. Shellac is finally distracted by him, looks at him dismissively, and then turns to Boyo. She has sat next to him. She takes his hand in hers. With her other hand, she delivers a sound slap to the bright scar. “How are you doing, Boy?”
Boyo jumps as though plugged into the wall. His face drains of all color. Torque grimaces dramatically and mouths a long “Ooooooh!” Karnak's calm eyes measure the scene as though the crystals have hinted at something like this.
“So, how are you doing, Boy?” Shellac repeats with a hiss.
“Fine, my dear, fine,” Boyo groans as he leans over his wound.
“Asshole,” she tosses off, and she lets go of Boyo's wrist.
“Wow,” Torque breathes. He admires the new arrival. Bill is quietly horrified. Karnak, ever sensitive, notices, and leans closer to him to explain, “She's not happy with him.”
“You don't say.”
“You knew about the …,” and here Karnak draws vague circles with his open hand, suggesting something he shouldn't mention.
“Yeah.”
A Rainy Night
“Look, Billam, let's establish something right away. You don't deserve this. Do you understand that?”
“Understood.”
“I'm not the brother you get to rescue at sunset, while you're on vacation from your sinking-ship, bourgeois life. I'm the brother who spits in your runaway, middle-class eye, You don't get to show up at the last minute and play family man.”
“Yeah, okay, Boy. Think I've got it now. Have another drink, would you? And you can pay for it yourself. How's that?”
“No need to get nasty, Billy. Buying drinks is a whole nother matter.” The brothers sit across from each other at a square, brown table in the back of the Clap Trap. Each of them has three empty glasses in front of him, squashed limes languishing among the melting ice, tiny wrecked straws bent and abandoned among the dregs. “And it seems to me we're due for another round.”
“A deal's a deal, Boy. I buy, you talk.”
“You do NOT ….”
“I don't deserve it. Fuck you. Now talk!”
“Oh, Billy, has it come to this? Why resort to language like that?”
Bill answers in a steady voice, “Because you have no right to put family and friends through this.”
Boyo chokes and coughs. “I have …!” He pushes himself back in his chair. “William, … put through!” Boyo stares astonished at Bill, sitting back in his chair, his hands in his lap. Half a minute passes. Bill holds his position, chews on ice. Boyo nods. He slumps forward, putting his weight on his elbows.
“William, you don't know what you're saying. You can't. If I thought you did, you would be spending some of your own time in the hospital.” He throws his hands up with abandon, but he is avoiding his brother's eye. “Hey, I can be generous. My life is not my own anymore.” His growl is subsiding into hollow grumble. “You have no idea how much better it would have been if I'd had the guts to see it through. For Ma, for me, for you. Now we wait and we suffer.”
Bill starts to object, but Boyo shuts him down with a wave.
“It's my life. This is my life, and I say Death doesn't get to call all the shots. Death wins the game, but I have a say in how it goes down – if I weren't such a coward.” He glances up at Bill ruefully. He holds up the violated wrist, right handing gripping it and shaking. "So simple. And I couldn't finish it. So it goes. So it goes. Man is weak, and God knows it. I let the shock get the better of me.” He places his wrist back on the table. With the tenderness of fear, he inspects it. He continues, “You all say, 'Don't kill yourself, Boyo. Let the cancer do it. That's what the family says. That's what Shellac says. Boyo, take the slow, painful way. Waste away until you are a shadow of yourself. We can't let go of you until then.” Again, he shushes Bill.
“I was drunk. We were all at a party at Karnak's place. The house was mad crowded, and the night already looked to get out of control. I wanted to spin off the planet just like that, shot into space on the best petrol, on the best beat, on everything I called good. I'd kind of wandered alone into the backyard. It was raining, and I stood out there a while, staring up into the clouds. They were low and winging along just overhead, all tattered and spilling life on the grass. And just like that, I was resolved. I went back inside. I broke out a blade in Karnak's bathroom. And I went back into the yard and sat in the mud, holding that blade,” Boyo mimics the motion above his wounded wrist. “Everything was shining in the rain. It was beautiful. … I cut.” Boyo makes a quick jab with his fist.
Boyo stops, and slowly a smile spreads across his lips. He allows the offending hand to fall. He laughs. “That's how it is, Billy. We are never quite strong enough for our dreams. Wow! I can tell you now, will power is nothing to pain. Ha! That woke me up. … Isn't that how life goes? You make a plan, and then you take the cold slap in the cheek. Reality never matches the plan. … Yep. So they found me out there rolling in the mud and crying like a baby, blood everywhere. Makes you proud, doesn't it? You never really know what you're made of until you fail. I can't even die on my own initiative.”
“I'm glad you failed.”
"You shouldn't be. You could have been here for the weekend, thrown some dirt on me, and been back to work on Monday."
“Stop. You've earned your drink.”
“Bloody right, I did. And more.”
Destiny
On his first day at the Tar Pit, Bill has had too much coffee. He is becoming familiar with the famous bathrooms. The lavatories at the Tar Pit are the subject of two Master’s dissertations at the state college, one in psychology, the other in art crit. The clouds of slogans and visions read like Sibylline texts. Wild-eyed lovers of life have spend long shifts inside one or the other room in the wee-est hours of the 22-hour day at the cafe, crafting what might be the twin Sistine of the western world.
One of the most prominent prescriptions on the eastern wall of the men's room tells us to
'Breathe', in the work of an anonymous young pointillist. The word is lovingly urged upon male patrons, and many of the latter have benefited from the advice while eliminating. The dictum seems general enough, but actually it is inspired by local history. Legend persists, even into the era of the smoking ban, that the Tar Pit serves as the lungs in the organism that is the town. How any tradition evolves that assigns human organs to an entity as inorganic as a small New England town remains a mystery, but it appears to have blossomed some time in the 70s. That roughly coincides with the opening of the Tar Pit, and it would be fair to say that the legend and the Tar Pit both reflect the same zeitgeist. It was a time for theories; it was a time that was infatuated with bodies.
Some say the legend was fostered by a long-time employee at the convenience store on the next block. His name was Claude; he was long in frame and long in tooth. He had discarded his last comb in teenage years, and his gaze was skeptical. He would pass matches across the milky counter and say enigmatically, “Cancer IS the cure.” After a long shift, he would sit in the darkest corner of the Tar Pit, stirring his green tea and smoking. He had cigarettes for anyone who asked, and he would advise that person that he or she was one more tumorous cell in the lung of Soughley County. He would congratulate them with a wink
Years later, Karnak would give impromptu workshops about the power of the organ of breath, describing the lungs as the center of the vital force and therefore the seat of all happiness and personal energy. Heart, stomach, brain, and blood were nice accoutrements, but the lungs were the spirit. By then, the tradition had been further elaborated, the heart being signified by the Luigi Theatre on old Main Street. The Luigi was the oldest continuously operating theater within several counties, debuting in 1948 with 'The Wizard of Oz'. The brain was the Catholic high school, St. Stephen's, established in the 1870s on Pinesap Hill by a disoriented Italian friar named Pietro. The stomach was the ancient greasy spoon on Poultry Lane named Mickey's. And the Oakfell Mall, the first indoor mall in the county, was the greater and lesser intestine. According to some, the Cocytus Club was the town's pineal gland. These latter traditions were recent additions and not universally accepted.
There's a photo in the archives of the Fair-Standard, the town's newspaper, depicting Shellac protesting the smoking ban, standing outside the Tar Pit with a cardboard sign painted with the one-word slogan, 'Breathe'. The word bears a degraded resemblance to the masterpiece on the men's room wall. Without the photo’s caption, many would have mistaken her side of the debate. In the photo, (as now) Shellac's eyes are afire. The world hasn't been the same since the smoking ban. “What is the fucking lung of the world without a smoke?” she asked in many a bitter moment. She's bitter tonight. She's chewing on the extinguished stub of a cigarette now, stewing over the state of a world in which Boyo tries to extinguish himself. Are humans themselves to be the subject of idiotic bans from above?
Bill is ruminating over one of the many aphorisms on the men's room wall, this one declaring, “Cock-a-doodle-doo; ergo sum,” as he returns to his seat. Shellac turns on him, “And you – brother! – where have you been all this time?”
“I had to pee.”
Boyo coughs. Shellac spits. “You ass. Where have you been while your brother's been sick?”
“I was in Minneapolis.”
She arches her eyebrows. “Oh, you don't say?” The poison is palpably accumulating in her voice.
“What my brother wants to say, darling, is that he didn't know.”
Shellac's glance jumps from brother to brother. She pauses.
Boyo adds, “You know Cilice.”
Shellac glares at Bill as she picks a bit of tobacco from her tongue. She evidently decides that the explanation adds up. She turns away in disgust.
Torque stares at Bill. He wears a wide aggressive smile, teeth parted. “Ah! You're the runaway brother, the psycho. We've heard about you.”
Bill glances angrily at Boyo. He mumbles, “Yeah, that's me.”
Only Karnak's eyes are kind now, and they would be kind to dark matter.
“Billy, I have loyal friends,” Boyo says with a shrug.
Bill smiles. He has to concede that it’s a good thing.
“My dearest finch,” Boyo adds tentatively, “Billy is the answer to the prophecy.”
“Oh God,” she responds in an acid tone. She buries her face in her hands.
“It was only weird chance that he heard about me at all. … You remember the prophecy, don't you? Sweet pea?”
“No. Stop! I don't care. Karnak, ...” she holds up one finger in warning. Karnak stays silent. “What weird chance?”
“Cilice called him.”
Shellac's eyes flood with red rage. Her cheeks fill with expletives. “She...! What the …? What a weird fucking chance!” Her volume is soaring.
“Shelly, Cilice never calls...”
“She's your mother!” she's screaming.
“Darling, Cilice is afraid of phones. She doesn't know how to use one.” This much is true of the Fugit brothers’ matron. Cilice suffers from a delicate nervous constitution. The ring of a phone causes her acute pain. Her habit is to unplug the home phone from its jack. When it happens that Boyo has plugged it back in and the bell sounds, she leaps and she succumbs to a spell of trembling weariness. With great sighs, she eventually retires to her bedroom.
“I didn't know,” Bill says with quiet feeling.
“Can I have a refresher, Karnie?” Torque asks. “What's the prophecy?”
With a gentle smile, even with some tender indulgence, Karnak watches Shellac for another disruption, but she has turned away in general contempt. He raises pure eyes toward the tar-stained ceiling, and he looks for that ethereal line from the great script, so like a coil of smoke reaching for annihilation. He recites softly, “A woman travels from the lakes to pick up the work of the goddess.”
Torque and Shellac look at Bill. “A woman,” she says.
“Well, you know …” Boyo starts.
Shellac gestures toward Bill.
“We can't dissect every word of the prophecy. There has to be some room for interpretation,” Boyo insists.
“Boy, there are about five words to this bullshit prophecy. Don't make it sound like a book of the Bible.”
Torque shakes his head tragically. “Woman,” he mutters.
Suddenly everybody is very sad. Torque looks up at Boyo with boundless, aggressive sympathy in his eyes, and he says, “Man, this is going nowhere.”
And indeed, this is the story of how Bill fails his destiny.
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