Further Up, Further In (Part 1)
Note: Some language and themes in this story are not suitable for younger readers.
Peter knocks on Andrew’s door. He hadn’t called Andrew in advance, but he never does, and Peter knows he’s in there. Andrew’s always home when Peter comes over Wednesdays at 7pm.
Peter winces. He struck the door too hard with his left index knuckle. He wriggles the finger like a worm as he waits for Andrew.
Peter and Andrew are both bachelors and each live alone in homes too large for their aloneness. Maybe it’s some subconscious recognition of this unpleasant reality that spurs Peter to visit Andrew (and spurs Andrew to receive Peter). Their Wednesday evenings together have seemed to exist for as long as either of them can remember.
A few moments before his knock, as Peter rounded the corner onto Andrew’s street and saw the superficial, amputated gray brick of the suburban home’s façade, he’d felt his shoulders loosen and a peaceful sigh slip his lips.
Peter hates the suburbs on principle, but every Wednesday he must admit (to himself, never to Andrew) that reaching Andrew’s de-treed lane feels like he imagines splashing to Earth after a long, dangerous mission feels to an astronaut – sudden and jolting, but full of solace.
Given all this, Peter finds it strange he can’t remember when these weekly meetings began, especially since he is not an old man. Peter realizes in a flash of panic that he can’t mentally construct the story of how Andrew and he first met at the law firm, both of them new associates beginning their practices on the same day.
Peter writes it all off as a sign of the friendship’s depth, of their fundamental connection. Andrew has always just sort of been there for Peter, a brother in arms, a source of many needful things, almost another lobe to Andrew’s brain. Andrew supposes that in relationships like theirs the exact story of the beginning fades away but, if the ending does arrive, the story is indelible and scarring.
Peter is pleased with how he’s excused his forgetfulness, but still he frowns at the need for an excuse in the first place. He gazes at his image in the body-length, rectangular window beside the front door and looks for visible signs of aging, of becoming outwardly the kind of decaying man who inwardly forgets how he met his best friend.
Peter notes a few gray hairs have established beach-heads on his chin and temples. Andrew has thus far been spared any graying whatsoever. This disappoints Peter. Peter is competitive. To a fault. About everything. Even with Andrew. Especially with Andrew.
Peter always visits Andrew’s home for an hour – never longer. They always have two drinks – occasionally three, if they’re both feeling exceptionally festive because of life’s pleasant surprises, or stressed because of work’s predictable, minor damnations.
Peter always drinks enough to experience a buzz, but never enough to convince himself he should stay longer, wait for sobriety, and then drive home. This is by design.
As relaxing as Peter finds reaching Andrew’s door, he finds remaining in Andrew’s home for long unsettling in a way he can’t put into words. As he stands on the doorstep awaiting entry, just the random flitting of a thought about remaining overlong makes Peter wonder if he needs to head straight for the toilet after entering. And if it does mean this, Peter is unsure whether it means he would need to kneel before the toilet or sit upon it. Or, maybe, it means a little bit of both.
Thankfully, the roiling within his gut quickly recedes along with the pain in his knuckle as Peter hears three door locks disengage, sees the dark oak move, and meets Andrew’s face on the other side of the doorway.
“Hey, Pete. Good to see you. Come in.” Peter does.
Andrew leads him into the house. Andrew’s cat, a gray Maine Coon named Cleo, trails at his left heel. Andrew’s dog, a Yorkie named Drummond, follows him at his right. The trinity of mammals passes through the living room with Peter lagging behind them.
Andrew gestures toward the sofa. Peter sits on it, leans back, farts quietly, and takes pleasure in having two inarticulate mammals to blame for his flatulence, if it should come to that.
Andrew pauses at the threshold between living room and kitchen and looks back to Peter. “I’ll go get the drinks,” he says. “What does the week demand, Peter? Beer, wine, or a cocktail?”
Peter hesitates hyper-dramatically for a moment or two, tightens his eyes, furrows his brow, and does a balancing-scales/juggling-balls gesture with his hands. “Wine,” he says.
Andrew moves into the kitchen. Cleo and Drummond lie down in front of the fireplace and start to spoon their bodies into one another. Peter has always found their cuddling cute and absurd, a natural expression of the unnatural.
He looks around the room. It is as it was last Wednesday and the Wednesday before that.
Sprinkled along the tables, bookshelves, and all other available flat surfaces are bronze sculptures. They are all similar in size – each perhaps nine inches to a foot tall. They are all exacting in detail and impressive in craft. Andrew has cast each and every one of them.
There is a clear theme running through the artwork. All the sculptures are depictions of different historical characters – real people, not fictional (unless you are one of those modern pricks who appear in the news arguing Jesus never really sawed boards in Galilee). Besides their shared reality, each sculpture’s subject is engaged in celebrations of victory.
Joe Montana thrusts his arms skyward after throwing a touchdown against the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl XIX. Ali stands over Sonny Liston. Alexander Graham Bell embraces Watson after the first successful telephone call. Nixon offers his double victory signs from the door of an airplane. Truman gloats as he holds the newspaper proclaiming his supposed political death at the hands of Dewey.
This trend continues among the works dealing in religious themes. David stands atop the dead giant’s back with a detached, sinew-trailing head in one hand and an over-sized sword in the other. Jacob, his hard-won blessing in one hip pocket and his sudden disability in the other, limps along the Jabbok’s edge, his lips smiling but his eyes full of fear. And there, in what would surely make the greatest set of bookends ever, paired with the David sculpture, is Judith holding high the head of Holofernes as if it were the Stanley Cup.
But there is also a sculpture of Jesus. He’s hovering above a pair of stunned Roman soldiers. An empty burial cave looms in the background. One Wednesday evening visit not long ago, as Andrew poured the drinks in the kitchen, Peter finally got up, walked over, and looked at the bronze of the Easter morning Jesus more closely. For the first time he got close enough to peer into the tomb cave.
Its inside was colored a deep black. Upon the black there was a rendering of the Milky Way galaxy. It was painted faintly, but with clarity. Peter called out his discovery to Andrew in the kitchen with the excitement of a child who discovers an unexpected, bonus present in her Christmas stocking.
Andrew received Peter’s excitement, doubled it, and sent it back out to the living room. “Good eye!” he shouted from the kitchen, the force of his exclamation sounding like it might bust his gut. (This was not Andrew’s normal mode of expression.) Just a few seconds later Andrew hustled himself back into the living room ready to talk.
“Peter, the whole universe is in that cave, everything – absolutely everything,” Andrew said. “And Christ is leading it all out into a new morning, a new life. I’ve been waiting for you to notice the detail. You kinda need to see it for yourself. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t help you if someone just goes and gushes and points it out to you. You know?”
Back in the present, Andrew comes out of the kitchen holding two generous pours of wine. He hands Peter one of them (the slightly more full glass, Peter notices without trying to). Andrew takes the other glass with him to the recliner across from Peter and sits down.
“It’s a Cabernet Franc.” Andrew says. Peter nods.
Peter knows that a Cabernet is a red wine, and he knows he likes red wines. But that’s the end of his knowledge. He has no idea what significance the “Franc” plays. Does that mean it’s from France? Was someone named Frank (spelling?) involved in concocting the original recipe? Do wines even have recipes?
Peter says nothing about this internal cascade of asinine questions because he doesn’t want to betray his ignorance to Andrew. So he just nods in Andrew’s direction while he eyes the wine glass and tries to somehow inject what he’d call “appreciative appraisal” into his facial expression.
When Andrew shifts his body and forces a squeal from the flesh of the leather recliner, his wineglass makes a quiet chunkle sound. The chunkle reminds Peter that Andrew drinks his wine – even his red wine – with ice. Peter thinks this weird, especially for someone like Andrew who knows a bit about class stuff like wine, and he has told Andrew this. Andrew doesn’t care that Peter thinks it’s weird.
Andrew raises his glass, whispers “L’chaim!” and takes a gulp. Peter does the same. And then they get into the meat of their weekly, ritualized chat. Per normal, they talk about the typical things. They talk office politics and sports and women. They have the same tendencies when it comes to all three.
They both hate office politics and consider a lost promotion a fair trade for staying as far removed as possible from the petty machinations of office culture. They both like all sorts of women (very much), but lean toward black hair and brown skin. They both have a long-standing and deeply conflicted relationship with football, and feel – in their heart of hearts – that basketball and tennis are far superior sports, the best team and individual sports, respectively.
The go-to topics and their shared perspectives are familiar, and taken together they make a comforting hum in the room and in Peter’s head. The exchange is a warm wrap that bundles Peter and relaxes him because he doesn’t feel like he has to perform and impress. He knows he has his part of the conversation under control without much work, and so he lets his mind float away on its own currents, even as he stays active in the conversation.
In the drift, Peter looks at Andrew and turns the differences between them over in his mind, differences notable because of how much the two friends share in common.
Andrew tends toward the dour (Life is a Dumpster) while Peter is upbeat (But what a !!!!!pretty green!!!!! the Dumpster of Life is painted!). That difference between them makes sense to Peter.
For one thing, Peter has never been married, and Andrew has, but he is married no longer. Yet making a facile connect-the-dots move between that and Andrew’s dour default disposition doesn’t sound right, even inside Peter’s mind, and so he shakes his head no.
“What? Did I say something wrong, Pete?” Andrew asks, interrupting his extended soliloquy about the state of professional football’s current crop of free agent running backs.
“No, no, not at all. It’s nothing,” Peter says before sinking back into his mental current. Andrew satisfied, returns to his theme, but he shifts focus from running backs to wide receivers.
Peter is convinced that Andrew’s marriage and his downbeatedness aren’t connected by causation, but they are most certainly connected by correlation. How could they not be? Andrew had been married to – and is now divorced from – a woman Peter himself dated in high school. During their brief marriage – at least it seemed brief for how much mess happened during it – they lost a young son in a freak trampoline accident.
Still, there is, of course, more to it than that. Both Peter and Andrew are corporate attorneys who work at the same firm. As much as Peter dislikes the politics of the office, Peter loves the work, and he finds he slides through the politics easily, squeaklessly, as if coated in relational WD-40. And Peter loves the paychecks. God, he love the paychecks.
Andrew hates the office games passionately, and it shows; it whittles his chances of advancement at the firm down to nothing. One day you will probably become Andrew’s boss. This bothers you, but Andrew doesn’t seem to give the proverbial crap about the possibility of being your underling someday. Andrew is smart, bills well, and knows his job is safe. Beyond this, he cares for promotion and power like a bunny cares for a bicycle and a bourbon. You pity him. You are also envious of him.
Bigger yet, Andrew hates the practice of corporate law itself. He calls it being a brilliant butler to a fake person who happens also to be a greedy, fat prick. And an idiot to boot. You agree. You also know you and the greedy, fat, fake, prick have a lot in common – not as much as you and Andrew share, but close.
Andrew had always wanted to sculpt, but went into the law instead. He has never told you why he did this, why he “settled” instead of taking his “Big Risk on his Big Love for his Big Art”. The legal paychecks are simply a means to an end for Andrew. They pay for the bronze and the tools and the house in which he uses them. The law pays for his play.
He would put it differently. Andrew would say something playful and overwrought as a way of communicating the enormity of the issue to his spirit. He’d say something like, “My concession to my profession pays for my vocation of creation.”
The ample paychecks also pay for his clothes. You sit in jeans worn thin and soft by much sitting and washing. You wear a t-shirt championing a local ice cream shop. You wear a baseball cap atop your head turned backwards like you’re in junior high school, its bill curved into the shape of a minimal moon.
Andrew wears a wool suit. It is slate gray and set off by a black tie bearing a subtle, red pattern. The red in his tie is mirrored in the red flecks in his black socks. As Andrew gestures across the room, you notice he is wearing gold cufflinks.
The sculptures and the suit and the precise haircut always strike you as some sort of daily Halloween costume Andrew submits himself to. For his daily costume ball Andrew is presenting himself as a ‘60s era ad-man who has put His Art on hold and taken a job from The Man to impress a parental or marital someone, or at least to try to get that someone off his back.
But it isn’t a costume. You know this. This is Andrew as he is, at least as you have known him. This is your friend. He looks like a lawyer, but plays like a boy. You, well, are the reverse.
Then Andrew grinds gears as he shifts away from the NFL and toward something so unexpected it slams you fully back into the conversation.
You heard Andrew when he said it, but you weren’t really listening, and so the shock of what he says doesn’t sink into your stomach for a beat or two, but when it finally thumps you, you are terrified. Your gut somersaults. Your fight or flight instincts kick in. You ask him to repeat himself so you can make sure your floating, faraway mind heard what it thought it heard.
Andrew obliges your request. “Peter, I need you to house-sit for me. I need you to tend the garden, play with Cleo and Drummond, and hold everything together while I’m away. I think it’s finally time for us to do this. There is something I need to do. Somewhere I need to go.
“Peter, is that all right? I need you. After all, you’ve got no pets, no plants, no nothing really, or at least pretty close to nothing back at your place. You just have that sprawling, sterile condo downtown. But I’ve got all this – the plants and animals and art. Please help me. It will also be good for you. Trust me.”
So you did hear Andrew correctly. You feel like you may become sick, but you take a deep breath and pour some wine on top of the queasiness, and this steadies you.
“Huh,” you say. “How long?” you ask.
“A week,” Andrew says. “I’m sure that’s all it will take, if not a little less.”
“OK. No biggie,” you say. Then you get drunk.
*********
Day #1
Nothing unusual.
Took care of Andrew’s place in his absence.
Dusted the statues (because he asked). Dug in the garden and fed the roses (because I love to play in the dirt). Fed, walked, and scratched Cleo the Cat and Drummond the Dog (because they’re domestic pets and live for – and because of – those simple things. {And, when all is said and done, I suppose I do to.})
Couldn’t sleep well. Just three hours.
Day #2
Nothing unusual. See Day #1 above.
In addition, I felt bloated and wimpy – skinny in the places I like to feel fat, fat in the places I like to feel skinny – so I did 100 deep knee bends, 200 pushups, 300 stomach crunches, and flexed around in the mirror a little to try to regain some confidence. Didn’t work.
Only three hours of sleep.
Day #3
Nothing unusual. See Day #2 above.
Also, my guts sort of erupted today in a way about which I’d rather not elaborate except to say I spent a fair amount of time sitting on the Uncomfy Seat catching up on back issues of Time Magazine. And, after the unanticipated, extended reading time, I needed to make another extended, unexpected investment of time cleaning the aforementioned Uncomfy Seat.
Five hours of sleep. “You fool! I’m not good with sleep deficits!” cries my bowels to my mind. “No shit! Me neither!” cries my mind to my bowels. “Nice pun,” says my bowels to my mind.
Day #4
Nothing unusual.
Check that. Andrew apparently left a pleasant surprise for me. I finally felt like eating something about 1am, and so I drifted into the kitchen to raid the pantry. Sitting center stage on the floor of the pantry was an unopened bag of mini Almond Joy bars. I love coconut. Andrew hates it. But there it was. Thanks, Andrew.
I ate four of those little bastards. (Update: I ate six.) … How could I have missed the bag of AJs for four days? Obsessive vanity about my physique blocking out obvious, fatty foods sitting right in front of me? Did I flush away my brain along with my innards yesterday? House haunted? (Most likely theory, in my opinion.) Sleep deficit? (Probably the most likely theory for every person in the world not named me.) Is Andrew in here somewhere hiding and screwing with me via random acts of kindness?
No need to comment on sleep = it sucked = very little of it = fried = above theories about how I missed a hiding-in-plain-sight economy-sized bag of Almond Joy bars.
Day #5
Unusual. And painful. And painfully unusual.
I was out tending the roses again this afternoon. Clipping this here and that there. I dropped my shears into the mass of plants with all their stalks and thorns. I twisted my body and extended my left arm into the rose bushes to retrieve my tool and avoid the pricks. There was plenty of room. I’m sure of this, as sure as I am of the Almond Joys and of Cleo and Drummond. So I reached in and stretched as far as my arm would allow and got an index finger around one of the scissor handle holes.
Then the rose bush bit me. Really. A stalk went slinky and twisted around my arm quicker than a blink and then even faster constricted and released three times – onetwothree – bambambam – bitebitebite. Then it was over. Again there was space to remove my arm. Nine little puncture wounds from wrist to arm pit. Nine little domes of blood stretching out of shape, pulled by gravity, reaching for the dirt. Crazy.
Sick to my stomach tonight. But, oddly, I feel like I’ll sleep tonight. Can hardly keep my eyes open to finish this sentence.
Day #6
JesusChristJesusChristJesusChrist.
Day #7
Peter hasn’t yet slept during the night, and he knew he wouldn’t as he watches the approaching sun begin to turn the overnight sky dishwater gray. Lying there, Peter decides to respond with courage and nobility to the situation. He resolves to try to shake off what happened yesterday by getting out of bed, washing his face, and having coffee in the kitchen. He resolves to face his fear about the house and about himself by pretending everything is as it should be and not as it is, not as he knew it would have to be if ever he were stuck at Andrew’s.
So that’s what Peter does. He goes to the kitchen, refills Cleo and Drummond’s food bowls, brews a pot of coffee, pours a cup, sits at the kitchen table, and plays with the creamer bottle – sliding it across the table from one hand to the next like a Wild West bartender sliding a beer across a brothel’s bar top.
Peter returns to the kitchen counter to refill his cup. Behind him he hears the scuttle of small animal claws on tile and knows Cleo the cat and Drummond the Dog are entering the kitchen for their breakfast. He spins to greet them. He reaches out his hands to scratch their heads.
Cleo and Drummond are mismatched, Peter thinks. He knows this doesn’t make any sense, even as he thinks it. But when his shuddering mind becomes more precise about what he’s seeing, it really doesn’t help.
Drummond’s Yorkie body sways and fights for purchase under the strain of bearing Cleo’s massive Maine Coon head on its neck. Cleo’s gray, fluffed, bed pillow of a body not only clashes in color with the brown curls of Drummond’s head, but it mushrooms out in every direction beyond the dog head mounted upon it, almost enveloping the head, threatening to pop the teeny dog head off like a cork.
The blenderized animals look expectantly up at Peter, and he collapses onto the tile. He loses consciousness, and when he regains it, the sun is high in the sky, its light ripping into the kitchen and onto him through the sliding glass door, and cold sweat of beads on his forehead.
The dog and cat are no longer looking up at him; they are standing over him, looking down at him, the spatial opposite of the perspective Peter remembers from the last, godawful moment before he passed out. However, the dog and cat are themselves again, as they should be, but Peter knows that he is not.
Cleo and Drummond are grinning at him as Peter opens his eyes.
He scrambles to his feet. The sudden movement sends the dog and cat running from the room, correct legs carrying correct heads.
Peter needs a beer, and so he walks to the far end of Andrew’s long, thin, enclosed pantry room. It is a hardwood-floored hall lined on each side with cereals and cans of tuna and exotic spices, but these are not on Peter’s mind. His goal is singular – to make his final approach and then land at the refrigerator standing at the other end of the pantry. The fridge is his destination, the light at end of the tunnel of dry goods.
A too-expensive-for-the-room red carpet runner stretches from the pantry’s entry door to the refrigerator and serves as his runway, its bright red base weave and golden geometric flairs the lights guiding his approach.
When he lands at the fridge, Peter yanks the door open, takes out a can of beer out, pops its tab, swings it to his mouth, and starts gulping all in one motion. His eyes are squeezed shut, and in the blackness Peter projects the cat-dog and dog-cat smiling up at him from their kibble bowls and then smiling down at him as cat-cat and dog-dog.
(Smile? Everyone knows pets just seem like they’re smiling. No, not this time. Cleo and Drummond were really smiling. There was a mirthful rictus to their mouths that was connected to intent. Of this Peter is sure.)
All this makes him feel sick deep down. Peter loses control for a moment and drops the open can on the floor next to the rug. He pops into a squat, grabs the bottle with his left hand, and with his right flips the edge of the rug out and away from the spreading puddle of dark beer.
There exposed before him is a skinny door Peter didn’t know existed into a basement Andrew never mentioned having.
Under the door are steps, and after a detour into the living room to grab Andrew’s Joe Montana statue as a weapon, Peter descends them. It is very quiet in the basement, even his footfalls are silent. There are none of the squeaks he assumed were a given when it came to wooden basement staircases. A single, dim fluorescent fixture attached to the center of the ceiling lights the small room at the bottom of the steps.
The cubed room is bare concrete on all six sides with no adornment whatsoever. The only features that break the sameness are the light fixture and the opening into the stairs. It appears the room is all fifteens – the four walls each stretching about fifteen feet with a fifteen foot ceiling capping them.
The play of the weak white light on the untreated, gray concrete gives the sensation of entering a cubed compartment in the center of a storm cloud. The room is so dense and smooth and heavy everywhere that it sounds as if no sound had ever entered it, other than the high, quick pitch of Peter’s nasal breathing.
For some reason Peter forces himself to stop his breathing for a few beats, perhaps to feel the silence like you might in an ancient, empty cathedral during the middle of the day, and this creates the space necessary to hear the one other small noise in the space. It is the ragged breath of someone else.
There is a figure slumped on the floor across the room from the base of the stairs where Peter stands feeling confused and unmoored, adrift and floating in the center of a rain cloud.
But Peter does not hesitate. He drops the statue and begins to cross the room toward the figure, making out a little more detail with each step. All Peter sees are clothes, a man’s expensive gray suit, Andrew’s wool three-piece, leaning against the wall, arranged as if the suit’s body had been suddenly hoovered out of it, save for a little ball of something in the suit’s fabric abdomen beneath the jacket and vest and tie and button down shirt, a balled core that moves in and out almost imperceptibly, each movement synched with each shudder of breath. (Suits don’t breathe, do they? Maybe here they do.)
The suit is before him now, at his feet, the tip of his grimy running shoes almost touching its crotch, and still Peter does not hesitate. (Peter notes – almost like someone observing the scene on television – that his lack of hesitation in this situation is as absurd as the mismatched pets and the respiring Savile Row suit, as absurd as Peter dropping his weapon before he knew what he was facing.)
Peter kneels and starts ripping the clothes apart from the shirt collar down. He pops buttons and yanks ties and at last exposes Andrew’s face underneath the cloth, deep within its folds. The face looks up at him with irises the same color as the walls.
Looking at his friend Andrew, Peter remembers the old-man-children who’d make the local evening TV news reports every once in a while way back when people used to watch the local evening TV news.
The boy geezer on TV might have a comb-over wisp of hair still clinging to the scalp like its owner clung to life, or the boy might be totally bald, but the afflicted/celebrated boy in the report was always a 6th grade Yoda who had won a free, all expenses paid, balls to the wall, everything and the kitchen sink vacation to Disney World.
As eleven-year-old Peter and his parents sat there chewing their cheeseburgers at the coffee table – effectively making the hot, tanned anchorwoman the fourth diner at their table – Peter would withstand his father’s silent but deadly lite beer burps and his mother’s periodic muttered refrain of “I guess if it bleeds, it leads”, and they’d all watch the news’ hyper, quick-cutting pastiche of the progerian’s tour of the Magic Kingdom.
There he was (always a he, Peter thinks) all horrid with his wrinkles and smiles under a mouse-eared cap. There he was standing next to an employee decked out in a gargantuan Minnie suit, and the boy’s stature and eerie flesh made him look every inch like Minnie’s prematurely born fetus swaddled in checkered shorts and a t-shirt covered with the light cycles from Tron.
Then there would be the inevitable interview segment of the report, first with a full-sized, smoothed-face person talking about so much giant courage in such a little body, and then with the little body itself croaking something about loving his mommy and daddy and dreams come true and hope.
Peter would sit there chewing and watching, and he’d interface with the moment on multiple levels at once, and he’d know he was doing this even at eleven, even as it was happening.
On one level he’d be cursing himself for not telling his father (again!!!) to tell the burger people to hold the mayo on Peter’s burgers. On another level, he’d be watching the news and weighing the (+)s and (–)s the report presented.
(-): Looking like a living version of one of the balcony-sitting hecklers from The Muppet Show, even though you were only old enough to be learning for the first time about the different forms of rock (igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic);
(-): Early-onset death;
(+): A free trip to Disney (Peter wouldn’t go until his early thirties as the leader of a pilgrimage for his only child and two of his son’s hyper-active cousins);
(+): Getting a news report dedicated to you. Well, dedicated to your plight, which was your plight, at least.
On at least one occasion this mental weighing of options slipped out into his hands and Peter put down his burger and did the juggling invisible balls gesture, which his mother noticed, and which caused her to lean over to his ear and whisper, “Son, what the hell are you doing?”
His mind now back in the basement with his eyes locked onto ancient baby Andrew’s eyes, Peter realizes that he had been remembering all the stuff about the news reports and his parents, really remembering it, fully and truly. No gaps.
He digs into Andrew’s shirtsleeves looking for Andrew’s hands and Andrew starts to hyperventilate a little but seems to be slightly smiling at Peter and at what is unfolding.
Deep within the sleeves, far beyond the gold cufflinks shaped inexplicably into the silhouetted form of sitting apes, Peter uncovers Andrew’s little baby hands. He touches them. Fingertip to fingertip.
Upon contact, Peter remembers everything. It ripples through him, a shockwave of himself.
He remembers his wife and her three distinguishing birthmarks – one on the left hollow of her neck, one on the top of her left shoulder, and one on the rope of tendon attaching her inner thigh to parts unmentionable.
He remembers the hardness of a paintbrush’s wooden cylinder between his fingers as he stood in calf-deep, waving grass before a canvas that stood before a waterfall.
He remembers how he met Andrew – rather, how he and Andrew never needed to meet and yet how everything depended on them finally meeting and Andrew shepherding Peter to this moment.
Peter remembers.
Then Andrew’s dollish hand crumbles to wet dust beneath Peter’s touch, and the arm follows its lead and disintegrates, and then the whole of Andrew’s body becomes a sand castle disassembled by a fast-rising tide. Then the remains of the sand castle, hidden again for a moment within the dirty pile of Andrew’s British suit, rise out of collar, cuff, and sleeve like a swarm of mites who join together into one great mass right before Peter’s eyes and then flow into his slack-jawed mouth.
They taste like honey and they make him whole and they tell the man in the hospital bed, the man of flesh and blood, the man with the wife bearing the three birthmarks, the man within whom all this is happening, this man they tell to open his eyes for the first time in a long time.
He does. He opens his eyes and sees to his left a computer beeping and booping his vitals and to his right he sees a plastic bag dangling there like a hanged man as it drips liquid into a tube and so into him.
Before him he sees his wife. Her mouth is gaping like his did before the swarm entered him. Her eyes are tearing up and her voice is tearing out of her and saying raggedly, over and over again, “I cannot believe it. I cannot believe it. I cannot believe it.”
He tries his voice. “I’m thirsty. My mouth is dry like I’ve been licking the beach. Is there anything to drink?”
She wipes her tears with the back of her sleeve as she nods yes. He thinks he would be willing to drink her tears if there is nothing else on offer, but there is. She offers him her own styrofoam cup. She rotates the cup’s bendy, slinky-elbowed straw his way as she offers the cup to him, and as he sips he remembers how as a child he would for some reason covet that kind of straw when his family went out for fish on Friday nights at Long John Silver’s.
He feels good looking at his wife, more than good actually, and in that moment the water is more than wetness for his throat, it is a sacrament of sorts because of the love he suddenly feels in the room. The love is so present and palpable and essential that he thinks it warrants its own blipping, bouncing green line on the computer screen between his heart rate and O2 count.
His wife is chanting now: “Oh, Happy! Oh, Happy! Oh, Happy!” He wonders why in this moment her syntax has gone so weird and primitive, but then he remembers something more and his memory corrects him.
She is actually saying, “Oh, Appie! Oh, Appie! Oh, Appie!” Appie is a play on his initials, her love name for him, a name given life by years of intimacy and play.
Appie is happy as his wife reaches out with the hand not holding the cup and pushes his hair back from his forehead.
Peter winces. He struck the door too hard with his left index knuckle. He wriggles the finger like a worm as he waits for Andrew.
Peter and Andrew are both bachelors and each live alone in homes too large for their aloneness. Maybe it’s some subconscious recognition of this unpleasant reality that spurs Peter to visit Andrew (and spurs Andrew to receive Peter). Their Wednesday evenings together have seemed to exist for as long as either of them can remember.
A few moments before his knock, as Peter rounded the corner onto Andrew’s street and saw the superficial, amputated gray brick of the suburban home’s façade, he’d felt his shoulders loosen and a peaceful sigh slip his lips.
Peter hates the suburbs on principle, but every Wednesday he must admit (to himself, never to Andrew) that reaching Andrew’s de-treed lane feels like he imagines splashing to Earth after a long, dangerous mission feels to an astronaut – sudden and jolting, but full of solace.
Given all this, Peter finds it strange he can’t remember when these weekly meetings began, especially since he is not an old man. Peter realizes in a flash of panic that he can’t mentally construct the story of how Andrew and he first met at the law firm, both of them new associates beginning their practices on the same day.
Peter writes it all off as a sign of the friendship’s depth, of their fundamental connection. Andrew has always just sort of been there for Peter, a brother in arms, a source of many needful things, almost another lobe to Andrew’s brain. Andrew supposes that in relationships like theirs the exact story of the beginning fades away but, if the ending does arrive, the story is indelible and scarring.
Peter is pleased with how he’s excused his forgetfulness, but still he frowns at the need for an excuse in the first place. He gazes at his image in the body-length, rectangular window beside the front door and looks for visible signs of aging, of becoming outwardly the kind of decaying man who inwardly forgets how he met his best friend.
Peter notes a few gray hairs have established beach-heads on his chin and temples. Andrew has thus far been spared any graying whatsoever. This disappoints Peter. Peter is competitive. To a fault. About everything. Even with Andrew. Especially with Andrew.
Peter always visits Andrew’s home for an hour – never longer. They always have two drinks – occasionally three, if they’re both feeling exceptionally festive because of life’s pleasant surprises, or stressed because of work’s predictable, minor damnations.
Peter always drinks enough to experience a buzz, but never enough to convince himself he should stay longer, wait for sobriety, and then drive home. This is by design.
As relaxing as Peter finds reaching Andrew’s door, he finds remaining in Andrew’s home for long unsettling in a way he can’t put into words. As he stands on the doorstep awaiting entry, just the random flitting of a thought about remaining overlong makes Peter wonder if he needs to head straight for the toilet after entering. And if it does mean this, Peter is unsure whether it means he would need to kneel before the toilet or sit upon it. Or, maybe, it means a little bit of both.
Thankfully, the roiling within his gut quickly recedes along with the pain in his knuckle as Peter hears three door locks disengage, sees the dark oak move, and meets Andrew’s face on the other side of the doorway.
“Hey, Pete. Good to see you. Come in.” Peter does.
Andrew leads him into the house. Andrew’s cat, a gray Maine Coon named Cleo, trails at his left heel. Andrew’s dog, a Yorkie named Drummond, follows him at his right. The trinity of mammals passes through the living room with Peter lagging behind them.
Andrew gestures toward the sofa. Peter sits on it, leans back, farts quietly, and takes pleasure in having two inarticulate mammals to blame for his flatulence, if it should come to that.
Andrew pauses at the threshold between living room and kitchen and looks back to Peter. “I’ll go get the drinks,” he says. “What does the week demand, Peter? Beer, wine, or a cocktail?”
Peter hesitates hyper-dramatically for a moment or two, tightens his eyes, furrows his brow, and does a balancing-scales/juggling-balls gesture with his hands. “Wine,” he says.
Andrew moves into the kitchen. Cleo and Drummond lie down in front of the fireplace and start to spoon their bodies into one another. Peter has always found their cuddling cute and absurd, a natural expression of the unnatural.
He looks around the room. It is as it was last Wednesday and the Wednesday before that.
Sprinkled along the tables, bookshelves, and all other available flat surfaces are bronze sculptures. They are all similar in size – each perhaps nine inches to a foot tall. They are all exacting in detail and impressive in craft. Andrew has cast each and every one of them.
There is a clear theme running through the artwork. All the sculptures are depictions of different historical characters – real people, not fictional (unless you are one of those modern pricks who appear in the news arguing Jesus never really sawed boards in Galilee). Besides their shared reality, each sculpture’s subject is engaged in celebrations of victory.
Joe Montana thrusts his arms skyward after throwing a touchdown against the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl XIX. Ali stands over Sonny Liston. Alexander Graham Bell embraces Watson after the first successful telephone call. Nixon offers his double victory signs from the door of an airplane. Truman gloats as he holds the newspaper proclaiming his supposed political death at the hands of Dewey.
This trend continues among the works dealing in religious themes. David stands atop the dead giant’s back with a detached, sinew-trailing head in one hand and an over-sized sword in the other. Jacob, his hard-won blessing in one hip pocket and his sudden disability in the other, limps along the Jabbok’s edge, his lips smiling but his eyes full of fear. And there, in what would surely make the greatest set of bookends ever, paired with the David sculpture, is Judith holding high the head of Holofernes as if it were the Stanley Cup.
But there is also a sculpture of Jesus. He’s hovering above a pair of stunned Roman soldiers. An empty burial cave looms in the background. One Wednesday evening visit not long ago, as Andrew poured the drinks in the kitchen, Peter finally got up, walked over, and looked at the bronze of the Easter morning Jesus more closely. For the first time he got close enough to peer into the tomb cave.
Its inside was colored a deep black. Upon the black there was a rendering of the Milky Way galaxy. It was painted faintly, but with clarity. Peter called out his discovery to Andrew in the kitchen with the excitement of a child who discovers an unexpected, bonus present in her Christmas stocking.
Andrew received Peter’s excitement, doubled it, and sent it back out to the living room. “Good eye!” he shouted from the kitchen, the force of his exclamation sounding like it might bust his gut. (This was not Andrew’s normal mode of expression.) Just a few seconds later Andrew hustled himself back into the living room ready to talk.
“Peter, the whole universe is in that cave, everything – absolutely everything,” Andrew said. “And Christ is leading it all out into a new morning, a new life. I’ve been waiting for you to notice the detail. You kinda need to see it for yourself. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t help you if someone just goes and gushes and points it out to you. You know?”
Back in the present, Andrew comes out of the kitchen holding two generous pours of wine. He hands Peter one of them (the slightly more full glass, Peter notices without trying to). Andrew takes the other glass with him to the recliner across from Peter and sits down.
“It’s a Cabernet Franc.” Andrew says. Peter nods.
Peter knows that a Cabernet is a red wine, and he knows he likes red wines. But that’s the end of his knowledge. He has no idea what significance the “Franc” plays. Does that mean it’s from France? Was someone named Frank (spelling?) involved in concocting the original recipe? Do wines even have recipes?
Peter says nothing about this internal cascade of asinine questions because he doesn’t want to betray his ignorance to Andrew. So he just nods in Andrew’s direction while he eyes the wine glass and tries to somehow inject what he’d call “appreciative appraisal” into his facial expression.
When Andrew shifts his body and forces a squeal from the flesh of the leather recliner, his wineglass makes a quiet chunkle sound. The chunkle reminds Peter that Andrew drinks his wine – even his red wine – with ice. Peter thinks this weird, especially for someone like Andrew who knows a bit about class stuff like wine, and he has told Andrew this. Andrew doesn’t care that Peter thinks it’s weird.
Andrew raises his glass, whispers “L’chaim!” and takes a gulp. Peter does the same. And then they get into the meat of their weekly, ritualized chat. Per normal, they talk about the typical things. They talk office politics and sports and women. They have the same tendencies when it comes to all three.
They both hate office politics and consider a lost promotion a fair trade for staying as far removed as possible from the petty machinations of office culture. They both like all sorts of women (very much), but lean toward black hair and brown skin. They both have a long-standing and deeply conflicted relationship with football, and feel – in their heart of hearts – that basketball and tennis are far superior sports, the best team and individual sports, respectively.
The go-to topics and their shared perspectives are familiar, and taken together they make a comforting hum in the room and in Peter’s head. The exchange is a warm wrap that bundles Peter and relaxes him because he doesn’t feel like he has to perform and impress. He knows he has his part of the conversation under control without much work, and so he lets his mind float away on its own currents, even as he stays active in the conversation.
In the drift, Peter looks at Andrew and turns the differences between them over in his mind, differences notable because of how much the two friends share in common.
Andrew tends toward the dour (Life is a Dumpster) while Peter is upbeat (But what a !!!!!pretty green!!!!! the Dumpster of Life is painted!). That difference between them makes sense to Peter.
For one thing, Peter has never been married, and Andrew has, but he is married no longer. Yet making a facile connect-the-dots move between that and Andrew’s dour default disposition doesn’t sound right, even inside Peter’s mind, and so he shakes his head no.
“What? Did I say something wrong, Pete?” Andrew asks, interrupting his extended soliloquy about the state of professional football’s current crop of free agent running backs.
“No, no, not at all. It’s nothing,” Peter says before sinking back into his mental current. Andrew satisfied, returns to his theme, but he shifts focus from running backs to wide receivers.
Peter is convinced that Andrew’s marriage and his downbeatedness aren’t connected by causation, but they are most certainly connected by correlation. How could they not be? Andrew had been married to – and is now divorced from – a woman Peter himself dated in high school. During their brief marriage – at least it seemed brief for how much mess happened during it – they lost a young son in a freak trampoline accident.
Still, there is, of course, more to it than that. Both Peter and Andrew are corporate attorneys who work at the same firm. As much as Peter dislikes the politics of the office, Peter loves the work, and he finds he slides through the politics easily, squeaklessly, as if coated in relational WD-40. And Peter loves the paychecks. God, he love the paychecks.
Andrew hates the office games passionately, and it shows; it whittles his chances of advancement at the firm down to nothing. One day you will probably become Andrew’s boss. This bothers you, but Andrew doesn’t seem to give the proverbial crap about the possibility of being your underling someday. Andrew is smart, bills well, and knows his job is safe. Beyond this, he cares for promotion and power like a bunny cares for a bicycle and a bourbon. You pity him. You are also envious of him.
Bigger yet, Andrew hates the practice of corporate law itself. He calls it being a brilliant butler to a fake person who happens also to be a greedy, fat prick. And an idiot to boot. You agree. You also know you and the greedy, fat, fake, prick have a lot in common – not as much as you and Andrew share, but close.
Andrew had always wanted to sculpt, but went into the law instead. He has never told you why he did this, why he “settled” instead of taking his “Big Risk on his Big Love for his Big Art”. The legal paychecks are simply a means to an end for Andrew. They pay for the bronze and the tools and the house in which he uses them. The law pays for his play.
He would put it differently. Andrew would say something playful and overwrought as a way of communicating the enormity of the issue to his spirit. He’d say something like, “My concession to my profession pays for my vocation of creation.”
The ample paychecks also pay for his clothes. You sit in jeans worn thin and soft by much sitting and washing. You wear a t-shirt championing a local ice cream shop. You wear a baseball cap atop your head turned backwards like you’re in junior high school, its bill curved into the shape of a minimal moon.
Andrew wears a wool suit. It is slate gray and set off by a black tie bearing a subtle, red pattern. The red in his tie is mirrored in the red flecks in his black socks. As Andrew gestures across the room, you notice he is wearing gold cufflinks.
The sculptures and the suit and the precise haircut always strike you as some sort of daily Halloween costume Andrew submits himself to. For his daily costume ball Andrew is presenting himself as a ‘60s era ad-man who has put His Art on hold and taken a job from The Man to impress a parental or marital someone, or at least to try to get that someone off his back.
But it isn’t a costume. You know this. This is Andrew as he is, at least as you have known him. This is your friend. He looks like a lawyer, but plays like a boy. You, well, are the reverse.
Then Andrew grinds gears as he shifts away from the NFL and toward something so unexpected it slams you fully back into the conversation.
You heard Andrew when he said it, but you weren’t really listening, and so the shock of what he says doesn’t sink into your stomach for a beat or two, but when it finally thumps you, you are terrified. Your gut somersaults. Your fight or flight instincts kick in. You ask him to repeat himself so you can make sure your floating, faraway mind heard what it thought it heard.
Andrew obliges your request. “Peter, I need you to house-sit for me. I need you to tend the garden, play with Cleo and Drummond, and hold everything together while I’m away. I think it’s finally time for us to do this. There is something I need to do. Somewhere I need to go.
“Peter, is that all right? I need you. After all, you’ve got no pets, no plants, no nothing really, or at least pretty close to nothing back at your place. You just have that sprawling, sterile condo downtown. But I’ve got all this – the plants and animals and art. Please help me. It will also be good for you. Trust me.”
So you did hear Andrew correctly. You feel like you may become sick, but you take a deep breath and pour some wine on top of the queasiness, and this steadies you.
“Huh,” you say. “How long?” you ask.
“A week,” Andrew says. “I’m sure that’s all it will take, if not a little less.”
“OK. No biggie,” you say. Then you get drunk.
*********
Day #1
Nothing unusual.
Took care of Andrew’s place in his absence.
Dusted the statues (because he asked). Dug in the garden and fed the roses (because I love to play in the dirt). Fed, walked, and scratched Cleo the Cat and Drummond the Dog (because they’re domestic pets and live for – and because of – those simple things. {And, when all is said and done, I suppose I do to.})
Couldn’t sleep well. Just three hours.
Day #2
Nothing unusual. See Day #1 above.
In addition, I felt bloated and wimpy – skinny in the places I like to feel fat, fat in the places I like to feel skinny – so I did 100 deep knee bends, 200 pushups, 300 stomach crunches, and flexed around in the mirror a little to try to regain some confidence. Didn’t work.
Only three hours of sleep.
Day #3
Nothing unusual. See Day #2 above.
Also, my guts sort of erupted today in a way about which I’d rather not elaborate except to say I spent a fair amount of time sitting on the Uncomfy Seat catching up on back issues of Time Magazine. And, after the unanticipated, extended reading time, I needed to make another extended, unexpected investment of time cleaning the aforementioned Uncomfy Seat.
Five hours of sleep. “You fool! I’m not good with sleep deficits!” cries my bowels to my mind. “No shit! Me neither!” cries my mind to my bowels. “Nice pun,” says my bowels to my mind.
Day #4
Nothing unusual.
Check that. Andrew apparently left a pleasant surprise for me. I finally felt like eating something about 1am, and so I drifted into the kitchen to raid the pantry. Sitting center stage on the floor of the pantry was an unopened bag of mini Almond Joy bars. I love coconut. Andrew hates it. But there it was. Thanks, Andrew.
I ate four of those little bastards. (Update: I ate six.) … How could I have missed the bag of AJs for four days? Obsessive vanity about my physique blocking out obvious, fatty foods sitting right in front of me? Did I flush away my brain along with my innards yesterday? House haunted? (Most likely theory, in my opinion.) Sleep deficit? (Probably the most likely theory for every person in the world not named me.) Is Andrew in here somewhere hiding and screwing with me via random acts of kindness?
No need to comment on sleep = it sucked = very little of it = fried = above theories about how I missed a hiding-in-plain-sight economy-sized bag of Almond Joy bars.
Day #5
Unusual. And painful. And painfully unusual.
I was out tending the roses again this afternoon. Clipping this here and that there. I dropped my shears into the mass of plants with all their stalks and thorns. I twisted my body and extended my left arm into the rose bushes to retrieve my tool and avoid the pricks. There was plenty of room. I’m sure of this, as sure as I am of the Almond Joys and of Cleo and Drummond. So I reached in and stretched as far as my arm would allow and got an index finger around one of the scissor handle holes.
Then the rose bush bit me. Really. A stalk went slinky and twisted around my arm quicker than a blink and then even faster constricted and released three times – onetwothree – bambambam – bitebitebite. Then it was over. Again there was space to remove my arm. Nine little puncture wounds from wrist to arm pit. Nine little domes of blood stretching out of shape, pulled by gravity, reaching for the dirt. Crazy.
Sick to my stomach tonight. But, oddly, I feel like I’ll sleep tonight. Can hardly keep my eyes open to finish this sentence.
Day #6
JesusChristJesusChristJesusChrist.
Day #7
Peter hasn’t yet slept during the night, and he knew he wouldn’t as he watches the approaching sun begin to turn the overnight sky dishwater gray. Lying there, Peter decides to respond with courage and nobility to the situation. He resolves to try to shake off what happened yesterday by getting out of bed, washing his face, and having coffee in the kitchen. He resolves to face his fear about the house and about himself by pretending everything is as it should be and not as it is, not as he knew it would have to be if ever he were stuck at Andrew’s.
So that’s what Peter does. He goes to the kitchen, refills Cleo and Drummond’s food bowls, brews a pot of coffee, pours a cup, sits at the kitchen table, and plays with the creamer bottle – sliding it across the table from one hand to the next like a Wild West bartender sliding a beer across a brothel’s bar top.
Peter returns to the kitchen counter to refill his cup. Behind him he hears the scuttle of small animal claws on tile and knows Cleo the cat and Drummond the Dog are entering the kitchen for their breakfast. He spins to greet them. He reaches out his hands to scratch their heads.
Cleo and Drummond are mismatched, Peter thinks. He knows this doesn’t make any sense, even as he thinks it. But when his shuddering mind becomes more precise about what he’s seeing, it really doesn’t help.
Drummond’s Yorkie body sways and fights for purchase under the strain of bearing Cleo’s massive Maine Coon head on its neck. Cleo’s gray, fluffed, bed pillow of a body not only clashes in color with the brown curls of Drummond’s head, but it mushrooms out in every direction beyond the dog head mounted upon it, almost enveloping the head, threatening to pop the teeny dog head off like a cork.
The blenderized animals look expectantly up at Peter, and he collapses onto the tile. He loses consciousness, and when he regains it, the sun is high in the sky, its light ripping into the kitchen and onto him through the sliding glass door, and cold sweat of beads on his forehead.
The dog and cat are no longer looking up at him; they are standing over him, looking down at him, the spatial opposite of the perspective Peter remembers from the last, godawful moment before he passed out. However, the dog and cat are themselves again, as they should be, but Peter knows that he is not.
Cleo and Drummond are grinning at him as Peter opens his eyes.
He scrambles to his feet. The sudden movement sends the dog and cat running from the room, correct legs carrying correct heads.
Peter needs a beer, and so he walks to the far end of Andrew’s long, thin, enclosed pantry room. It is a hardwood-floored hall lined on each side with cereals and cans of tuna and exotic spices, but these are not on Peter’s mind. His goal is singular – to make his final approach and then land at the refrigerator standing at the other end of the pantry. The fridge is his destination, the light at end of the tunnel of dry goods.
A too-expensive-for-the-room red carpet runner stretches from the pantry’s entry door to the refrigerator and serves as his runway, its bright red base weave and golden geometric flairs the lights guiding his approach.
When he lands at the fridge, Peter yanks the door open, takes out a can of beer out, pops its tab, swings it to his mouth, and starts gulping all in one motion. His eyes are squeezed shut, and in the blackness Peter projects the cat-dog and dog-cat smiling up at him from their kibble bowls and then smiling down at him as cat-cat and dog-dog.
(Smile? Everyone knows pets just seem like they’re smiling. No, not this time. Cleo and Drummond were really smiling. There was a mirthful rictus to their mouths that was connected to intent. Of this Peter is sure.)
All this makes him feel sick deep down. Peter loses control for a moment and drops the open can on the floor next to the rug. He pops into a squat, grabs the bottle with his left hand, and with his right flips the edge of the rug out and away from the spreading puddle of dark beer.
There exposed before him is a skinny door Peter didn’t know existed into a basement Andrew never mentioned having.
Under the door are steps, and after a detour into the living room to grab Andrew’s Joe Montana statue as a weapon, Peter descends them. It is very quiet in the basement, even his footfalls are silent. There are none of the squeaks he assumed were a given when it came to wooden basement staircases. A single, dim fluorescent fixture attached to the center of the ceiling lights the small room at the bottom of the steps.
The cubed room is bare concrete on all six sides with no adornment whatsoever. The only features that break the sameness are the light fixture and the opening into the stairs. It appears the room is all fifteens – the four walls each stretching about fifteen feet with a fifteen foot ceiling capping them.
The play of the weak white light on the untreated, gray concrete gives the sensation of entering a cubed compartment in the center of a storm cloud. The room is so dense and smooth and heavy everywhere that it sounds as if no sound had ever entered it, other than the high, quick pitch of Peter’s nasal breathing.
For some reason Peter forces himself to stop his breathing for a few beats, perhaps to feel the silence like you might in an ancient, empty cathedral during the middle of the day, and this creates the space necessary to hear the one other small noise in the space. It is the ragged breath of someone else.
There is a figure slumped on the floor across the room from the base of the stairs where Peter stands feeling confused and unmoored, adrift and floating in the center of a rain cloud.
But Peter does not hesitate. He drops the statue and begins to cross the room toward the figure, making out a little more detail with each step. All Peter sees are clothes, a man’s expensive gray suit, Andrew’s wool three-piece, leaning against the wall, arranged as if the suit’s body had been suddenly hoovered out of it, save for a little ball of something in the suit’s fabric abdomen beneath the jacket and vest and tie and button down shirt, a balled core that moves in and out almost imperceptibly, each movement synched with each shudder of breath. (Suits don’t breathe, do they? Maybe here they do.)
The suit is before him now, at his feet, the tip of his grimy running shoes almost touching its crotch, and still Peter does not hesitate. (Peter notes – almost like someone observing the scene on television – that his lack of hesitation in this situation is as absurd as the mismatched pets and the respiring Savile Row suit, as absurd as Peter dropping his weapon before he knew what he was facing.)
Peter kneels and starts ripping the clothes apart from the shirt collar down. He pops buttons and yanks ties and at last exposes Andrew’s face underneath the cloth, deep within its folds. The face looks up at him with irises the same color as the walls.
Looking at his friend Andrew, Peter remembers the old-man-children who’d make the local evening TV news reports every once in a while way back when people used to watch the local evening TV news.
The boy geezer on TV might have a comb-over wisp of hair still clinging to the scalp like its owner clung to life, or the boy might be totally bald, but the afflicted/celebrated boy in the report was always a 6th grade Yoda who had won a free, all expenses paid, balls to the wall, everything and the kitchen sink vacation to Disney World.
As eleven-year-old Peter and his parents sat there chewing their cheeseburgers at the coffee table – effectively making the hot, tanned anchorwoman the fourth diner at their table – Peter would withstand his father’s silent but deadly lite beer burps and his mother’s periodic muttered refrain of “I guess if it bleeds, it leads”, and they’d all watch the news’ hyper, quick-cutting pastiche of the progerian’s tour of the Magic Kingdom.
There he was (always a he, Peter thinks) all horrid with his wrinkles and smiles under a mouse-eared cap. There he was standing next to an employee decked out in a gargantuan Minnie suit, and the boy’s stature and eerie flesh made him look every inch like Minnie’s prematurely born fetus swaddled in checkered shorts and a t-shirt covered with the light cycles from Tron.
Then there would be the inevitable interview segment of the report, first with a full-sized, smoothed-face person talking about so much giant courage in such a little body, and then with the little body itself croaking something about loving his mommy and daddy and dreams come true and hope.
Peter would sit there chewing and watching, and he’d interface with the moment on multiple levels at once, and he’d know he was doing this even at eleven, even as it was happening.
On one level he’d be cursing himself for not telling his father (again!!!) to tell the burger people to hold the mayo on Peter’s burgers. On another level, he’d be watching the news and weighing the (+)s and (–)s the report presented.
(-): Looking like a living version of one of the balcony-sitting hecklers from The Muppet Show, even though you were only old enough to be learning for the first time about the different forms of rock (igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic);
(-): Early-onset death;
(+): A free trip to Disney (Peter wouldn’t go until his early thirties as the leader of a pilgrimage for his only child and two of his son’s hyper-active cousins);
(+): Getting a news report dedicated to you. Well, dedicated to your plight, which was your plight, at least.
On at least one occasion this mental weighing of options slipped out into his hands and Peter put down his burger and did the juggling invisible balls gesture, which his mother noticed, and which caused her to lean over to his ear and whisper, “Son, what the hell are you doing?”
His mind now back in the basement with his eyes locked onto ancient baby Andrew’s eyes, Peter realizes that he had been remembering all the stuff about the news reports and his parents, really remembering it, fully and truly. No gaps.
He digs into Andrew’s shirtsleeves looking for Andrew’s hands and Andrew starts to hyperventilate a little but seems to be slightly smiling at Peter and at what is unfolding.
Deep within the sleeves, far beyond the gold cufflinks shaped inexplicably into the silhouetted form of sitting apes, Peter uncovers Andrew’s little baby hands. He touches them. Fingertip to fingertip.
Upon contact, Peter remembers everything. It ripples through him, a shockwave of himself.
He remembers his wife and her three distinguishing birthmarks – one on the left hollow of her neck, one on the top of her left shoulder, and one on the rope of tendon attaching her inner thigh to parts unmentionable.
He remembers the hardness of a paintbrush’s wooden cylinder between his fingers as he stood in calf-deep, waving grass before a canvas that stood before a waterfall.
He remembers how he met Andrew – rather, how he and Andrew never needed to meet and yet how everything depended on them finally meeting and Andrew shepherding Peter to this moment.
Peter remembers.
Then Andrew’s dollish hand crumbles to wet dust beneath Peter’s touch, and the arm follows its lead and disintegrates, and then the whole of Andrew’s body becomes a sand castle disassembled by a fast-rising tide. Then the remains of the sand castle, hidden again for a moment within the dirty pile of Andrew’s British suit, rise out of collar, cuff, and sleeve like a swarm of mites who join together into one great mass right before Peter’s eyes and then flow into his slack-jawed mouth.
They taste like honey and they make him whole and they tell the man in the hospital bed, the man of flesh and blood, the man with the wife bearing the three birthmarks, the man within whom all this is happening, this man they tell to open his eyes for the first time in a long time.
He does. He opens his eyes and sees to his left a computer beeping and booping his vitals and to his right he sees a plastic bag dangling there like a hanged man as it drips liquid into a tube and so into him.
Before him he sees his wife. Her mouth is gaping like his did before the swarm entered him. Her eyes are tearing up and her voice is tearing out of her and saying raggedly, over and over again, “I cannot believe it. I cannot believe it. I cannot believe it.”
He tries his voice. “I’m thirsty. My mouth is dry like I’ve been licking the beach. Is there anything to drink?”
She wipes her tears with the back of her sleeve as she nods yes. He thinks he would be willing to drink her tears if there is nothing else on offer, but there is. She offers him her own styrofoam cup. She rotates the cup’s bendy, slinky-elbowed straw his way as she offers the cup to him, and as he sips he remembers how as a child he would for some reason covet that kind of straw when his family went out for fish on Friday nights at Long John Silver’s.
He feels good looking at his wife, more than good actually, and in that moment the water is more than wetness for his throat, it is a sacrament of sorts because of the love he suddenly feels in the room. The love is so present and palpable and essential that he thinks it warrants its own blipping, bouncing green line on the computer screen between his heart rate and O2 count.
His wife is chanting now: “Oh, Happy! Oh, Happy! Oh, Happy!” He wonders why in this moment her syntax has gone so weird and primitive, but then he remembers something more and his memory corrects him.
She is actually saying, “Oh, Appie! Oh, Appie! Oh, Appie!” Appie is a play on his initials, her love name for him, a name given life by years of intimacy and play.
Appie is happy as his wife reaches out with the hand not holding the cup and pushes his hair back from his forehead.