Despite the mild, cloudless day, something about the rugged landscape kept the Donner Party prescient in Liam’s thoughts, even though snow in the region kept principally to the higher elevations. If it came down to cannibalism in a survival situation, it would owe to traffic calming measures and not the weather.
Given neither brother was much of a planner, little suggested itself as activity other than driving northerly toward Lake Shasta.
Place names in The Pacific Northwest, to the traveler’s thinking, betrayed a lack of imagination on the part of settlers and pioneers eager to push through the area and get somewhere else. The landscape was indisputably beautiful, but vertical and largely inaccessible. It was terrain suitable to diesel trucks chugging up splintery roads, but not recital halls or museums, which required a goodly amount of flat ground. One was either going up or down the exhausting landscape.
A retail store was found in Redding, where Lana had instructed Liam to buy Lucien clothes in a shower of Christmas tidings. The shelves were looking bare given the late hour, although the intended beneficiary ended up wandering down an aisle displaying bathroom scales. He took down a set and weighed himself. (Something he probably had not done in decades.) A mirror was also nearby, which produced stubbly patches on his neck from poor grooming in dark rooms; his appearance distressed him.
The recruited Santa talked him into buying several pairs of men’s briefs. If nothing else, they would provide additional padding for the springy bed. A mirror, lamp, and packet of disposable razors were also put into the shopping cart.
The motoring pair next came across an antique store, which seemed more promising for less obvious reasons. Lucien was animated in finding green Depression glass in the window, which was one of the few things his mother professed an active interest in during her life.
Liam also found memories among the stuffed raccoons and chipped delftware. His face bore a lugubrious expression. “This place reminds me of Margaret. Early in our relationship, we visited a lot of vintage stores.”
“Autistics shouldn’t date,” complained the eldest brother.
“We dated for nearly six years, and she ended it by executive order. No warning, no Come-to-Jesus meeting, no discussion. Five years of a life is a big piece of something to tear off and throw away when you get to be our age. It leaves you standing in a chasm, looking six years away to find the nearest neighbor memory that does not include her. That’s ancient history. That’s waking up from a coma.
I was fifty-five when I submitted to Margaret’s determination to have a boyfriend, even though I suspected she needed a boyfriend more than she needed me as a boyfriend. That bold confidence in youth is irresistible; and I did not resist. I could not break so dear and simple a heart. It was, in retrospect, a father’s love for a daughter: I gave her what she wanted, and it is a father’s mourning that I was left to endure.”
Lucien quietly regarded his brother, much as he had regarded unrealized stubble on his neck.
“If we could do away with conventional notions of marital love then, perhaps, relationships could be built on better terms and last a lifetime. But my behavior toward her was unconscionable. Her neglect of my feelings in the breakup was the turnabout of fair play. She was keeping a scorecard, unbeknownst to me, and when she had enough checkmarks, then she was able to leave with a clear conscience.”
The listener responded, accusingly, “A woman who loves truly will demand changes. That should have been your fair warning.”
“She was, perhaps, on the autistic spectrum, like us…”
The brothers passed shelf after shelf with little regard. A plastic tabletop Christmas tree, decorated with old Hot Wheel race cars, was the only thing either took away from this store of reminiscence.
The view of Mount Shasta had deteriorated, and from what Liam presumed to be snow further north. Closer by, the peal of holiday bells fell away from surrounding trees like glass ornaments. They called a crowd toward a town square.
Lucien caught sight of matted fur and panicked. “Bears?”
“Krampus,” announced Liam darkly.
The older brother disapproved. “It’s not good to taunt what lives in the mountains. Christ’s atonement gave us immunity from monsters. He died to end our isolation, to rent the curtain in the tabernacle, to remove all intermediaries, and to allow us to see more deeply into our a priori God. It was an essential software upgrade. Yet here we are paddling backwards into murkier waters.”
Liam pointed at the hairy brutes up the block, chortling, “If anything, those hoofed clowns are pulling up your rear guard! They are the last of your allies! That cavalcade of evil comprises what remains of those who still believe in the wages of sin. They are the last rag-tag Confederate soldiers leaving Atlanta before Sherman’s decimation—only this is Sodom and Gomorrah, and those mountains hereabout are active volcanoes.”
Lucien maintained, “And I believe you are Rhett Butler, who will join the Confederate Army to fight only after you know it has become a lost cause.”
Liam could not help but laugh at the comparison. “You’re the idealist. I’m the wheelman.”
The younger sibling played the Socratic gadfly on occasion, but his brother’s monk-like asceticism imparted a valued perspective, even allowing for its Section Eight bleakness.
A strategy around the celebration was mapped out, and this discussion was, for the moment, tabled.
The menu boasted of a holiday turkey dinner with the fixings. Muzak played seasonal chestnuts and, dissuaded from lambast, the preacher wallowed in the rare humanizing moment. “The last time I saw Mom, she was so feeble,” he began. “I wanted to cradle her in my arms, kiss her, and put her to bed. I wanted her to conserve every last drop of energy she had to stay alive for me, even if I had to feed her intravenously.”
“She would never become an invalid to please you.”
The dinner companion noted that nothing in the holiday music was of a sacred or dolorous nature. The advertisements on television were similarly disconnected: A holiday of commerce commemorated itself. He pondered aloud, “Envisioning Heaven, or what manner of thing it should be, is uncomplicated for the true believer, I suppose. When we attended church services as youths, we were backbenchers, and practically hid among the potted geraniums in the vestibules. What then, in our capable imaginations, are we to make of Heaven? We see the crude machinery of inborn religiously in all, and possibly even in the example of chimpanzees that inexplicably, but ceremoniously, throw rocks at a dedicated tree. Where does this leave us?”
“I was at my best in college,” answered Lucien, “where I lived away from home for the first time in a dormitory. I made a few friends, and we dined together each night in the building’s cafeteria. I stayed in that college town chiefly because of these fond associations, longer than I should have. I even thought of applying for a job working at the post office in that dorm, just to preserve those times. Years later this dorm became a frequent location in my dreaming, where having a warm bed and a hot meal always waiting for me was my sole goal in navigating the fourteen-story building. There were always difficulties in translation: My meal plan card did not work; I could not remember on which nosebleed floor my room was located. In one dream I even took that mailroom job.”
“So a college dorm is your idea of Heaven?”
Lucien confessed, “I feel like simple fisherman Peter, when Christ took him up a mountain and showed him, in the midst of the prophets Moses and Elijah, His True Radiant Transfigured Self. Peter missed the point of the exercise and set about building altars.”
Liam was inspired to relate, “I, too, dream of mysterious heights, and by way of a recurring mountain that is both terrifying and beautiful. Its size is difficult to gauge. Sometimes it sits in the middle of a university campus, like your crystal-clear dormitory with coal-black elevator shafts. Other times it is shrouded in mist, and one arrives at its summit without premeditation or skill. It may resemble the mud tower of African termites, or a carbuncle made of Playdough, yet in each instance its surroundings are drawn into its eidetic unreality.”
The men finished their meals and returned to the street. Effigies of commerce—snowmen, Santas, and reindeer—were come to gladden a void and evoke chains of tutelary ancestors.
Lucien was shaken out of his ambivalence. He gazed past the fire engines to a spectacle of enormous wings. They stretched from sidewalk to sidewalk, and it was all the dirigible’s wranglers could do to keep them from tangling. Before the colossus angel reached the brothers, a wind gust set its braids of golden hair, like fanned flames, scaling windows in a five-story building. When several of the line guides tore free of those frigid hands retraining them, the deity climbed into a nearly upright position. The remaining guides released their tethers to avoid injury, and watched their charge ascend into a crystal blue sky. The parade never broke stride. The winged shadow swallowed an entire block of spectators before its umbra passed into surrounding trees
Excited, Lucien pulled his brother down an alleyway toward their parked car. He did not look again at the soaring colossus, yet directed the driver to Lassen Peak.
Copyright © 2008-2024 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.