“I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul.” ~Salvador Dali
His petite mort was perhaps inevitable, even had Blythe been long lived. The orphan reasoned that an artist can only invent a thing once in innocence. By the time he comes to revisit and critique what he has created, he has become an imitator of himself and his purer impulse.
Truly Liam lost his immortality when his mother died, as well as whatever super powers he imagined himself to possess. He would no longer be a son, except to those family relations who outlived her. Nor in his estimation would he ever again be the blue-eyed darling whose achievement was a promise to be fulfilled. The puer aeternus was coming to grips with a geography that had been a settled order for a long while.
And yet it was a comfort that, in the years before her passing, he came into a measure of maturity and penitence in realizing his failings; and had made some small repair toward them. Still, the son had loosened apron strings he could never fully sever; and she had let him falter without appearing intrusive, knowing how it would be: Because he became a man in the end, he would return to her as a child.
Blythe had been made of sterner material than her boys. A witch had cursed her while still in her mother’s womb, telling Agnus that her child would be born a chicken. This did not happen, although the girl had a boyish Adam’s apple for a time, and contracted histoplasmosis playing in dirt fields among bird droppings in Depression Era Arkansas: This pulmonary condition was only determined later in life, and contributed to her rapid decline amid other health complaints.
Liam and his brother had partaken of the sugary wafers of the polio vaccine, and so were ushered into a different epoch of medical miracles that, theoretically, would extend their lives past those of their parents. Still it seemed impossible that his mother, his one certain friend, had been dead for eight months, or that he would have even regarded her as a friend where no others assumed that fraught role.
The air passenger was forced to endure his flight without the sedative benefit of alprazolam. He white-knuckled it across several panhandles, and presently approached the pale jade Colorado River from where it descended from high plains desert: Its twisting path seemed an insufficient boundary from thirty thousand feet, and resembled molted skin of a garden snake on red sun-baked clay.
“We are about to begin our descent into the Los Angeles basin,” the pilot announced. “We are expecting turbulence so remain seated.”
No sooner had the plane crossed into California than everything in the bright cloudless window disappeared. The craft was at once enveloped in a grey formless brume. This was the beginning of a terrifying magic trick, where the pilot, flying by instruments, was as blind as his passengers. Unseen fingers in a glove began squeezing the thin-skinned fuselage, and left the impression the plane was suspended in midair while scenery was being rearranged beneath it.
Turbulence rushed over flexing wings; the nose dipped and wobbled as engines, working independently of one another, surged and released in a subtle dance of turns. Mountains were imagined shooting up perilously like fireworks, and only faith in electronics would prevent the airliner from slamming into one.
A down-thrusting flap tore through the last of the misty synapses and ended a long string of torturous mental pictures. Rain-splattered palm trees passed languorously below the airplane. Beyond them, rows of warehouses stretched away over colorless wet pavement. Yet nothing in these warehouses was ordinary. This city was not conjured out of the mind but from the cloud of a mystical mountain.
Weak-kneed, Liam disembarked and shuffled across the terminal to make his last connection to San Francisco.
The last message received from his brother was from The Bottleneck in Barstow. Somehow the pilgrim got past the Mojave Desert and Death Valley and, without plans or funds, made it into the wooded north of California.
San Luis Obispo, somewhere below, was a drizzling abstraction. A grey ocean was a better landmark. Soon enough, the traveler was returned to solid earth. A rental car (arranged for him by his sister) was picked up, and he drove speedily away over The Golden Gate Bridge. Here again misty veils dulled the full effect of his vertigo, and the time spared for contemplation of ghostly plungers was brief.
Little of Sausalito was seen for a fog, though one or two pinecones tumbled from the sky like grenades. A sign for Leggett came and went, and too a church with an empty manger and graffitied shepherds turned backwards.
Liam could not say whether the boarding house where the older sibling lived was gingerbread or bloodless grey in color since a crowding ridge might well keep the property in shade three-quarters of the day. He parked the car and glared northward toward the snowy peaks of Mount Thompson and Wedding Cake. Above the alpine range, a low sun, and one of its two parhelion, shown through vellum clouds.
The apartment complex was miserable and squatty. No grass grew here—a thick mat of sienna pine needles saw to that: It spread in all directions and over painted lines sectioning the parking lot.
The visitor was ready to dismiss every detail until, in coming on an open courtyard, a large bronze moose, resting unnaturally on its haunches, marked a division between two identical cinderblock buildings. Its workmanship was as impressive as its imposing scale; and doubtless it was commissioned when the property had pretense in attracting discriminating renters. Why the animal was posed in the throes of death was not obvious.
A roll of buzzers grubbily decorated a lobby door. Each was labeled with a name embossed on a strip of plastic tape; the one without an identifying tag felt promising. The ring summoned Lucien’s bewildered voice to the cracked speaker.
Seeking to clear an occlusion, the visitor explained his presence. “I’m here to spend Christmas with you. Compliments of The Great Oz.”
The recluse, with serviceable hospitality, opened his slatted blind to allow in the light. He peered out his one window, between peeling mullions, but gave no reply. The studio apartment looked like a tsunami had tossed waves of debris, unconnected to any sensibility, to its four corners. Liam assessed the brother’s state in the eye of the storm.
“Last month I dreamt Mom led me to a forest,” began Lucien, “where she laid down on a narrow bed and gazed above her. I was stroking her arm, feeling it go stiff when a golf ball struck a nearby tree; distant claps from a crowd arose. I turned to see a fairway in the clearing. I thought it strange, and later, after looking on Google Earth, I found first the woods abutting the cemetery where our parents’ gravestone lies, and then, in a straight quarter mile jump over I-40, the Colonial Country Club course: home to The Danny Thomas Open.”
“Mom loved her TV golf,” remarked the younger brother. “The shamrock green pants suit she chose for her burial clothes reminded me of putt-putt turf.”
(His brother’s anecdote reminded Liam of his own experience.)
“I have a recurring dream that teeters on a nightmare,” he reported. “In them, I find myself alone in our Vernon Cove house. It is unlit, and the boundary between outside and inside is blurred. Something out there is threatening me or my sleep. Often one of the family dogs has strayed into this in-between world and I, a frightened child, go in search of our parents—though mostly I seek Mom.
I fear she may be in Arkansas visiting her Mother and sisters, and I worry she may not return. I scan the carport for her car, and then hurry down to her bedroom where the house is indescribably dark. A pale glowing gray form of covers are built up in a mound over her four-poster bed; I presumed she lies beneath them since I can hear her breathing, or the sound may be her oxygen generator. This mound is motionless, like an icy igloo, and whatever comfort I may momentarily gain from my discovery of her location, this comfort soon shatters—this is the actual beginning of my nightmare!
Due to the dream’s short duration, these final details remain close by: I am seeing Mom as she rests in her closed casket beneath the earth. Sometimes, she is more visible to me, but only in profile, with her body straightened as if lying across a funeral bier in repose. I find these nightmares unnerving.”
Lucien, absorbed in this description, injected, “She’s at peace now, and out of that house, at last.”
The resident resumed his stare out his window. “I, on the other hand, am surrounded by lease breakers: psychopathic chainsmokers and people screaming at appliances at all hours. I have a guy who burns popcorn in his microwave at four in the morning every morning. When I peek out my peephole midday, I see only strangers with their hair sticking up, or shirts turned wrong side out with the garment label hanging off like a skin tag.”
“You look a wreck, Lue.”
The dread sponge shrugged.
Liam set his duffle bag in the floor and noticed an infestation of gnats swarming over a toothbrush on the bathroom sink basin.
Lucien gestured through his window. “See those Koreans in greatcoats smoking on the sidewalk down there? They own the facing building and make crystal meth in the laundry room.”
“Why don’t you move?”
“This is the only apartment complex in the area that takes Section Eight.”
“Move to Oakland,” replied the brother.
“You can sleep on the bed,” strategized the tardy host. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”
More clutter sat atop the bed. Lucien was already removing papers from this horizontal make-do filing cabinet. Bills, jumbled together with outdated sales circulars, included late fee charges.
When Blythe was healthier, her enviable memory was the default memory for both her absentminded sons. Now the ascetic’s life was one of habitually cycling through dirty shirts pulled off the top of a clothes hamper.
Soon he set about chiseling a couple of Banquet TV dinners out of his frost-encrusted freezer. They were nuked in a microwave oven lately enamel white in color. The two ate their Christmas Eve meal standing since the tenant owned no chairs.
The host brooded over the last of his Spanish rice. The emptied food tray was dropped in the overflowing waste can (one better suited for an office cubicle than a kitchen).
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.