“The doctors taking care of him say there’s no way he could have known.”
“Psychiatrists …”
“And even if he did know, there’s no way he could have communicated it.”
“Not to them. But I think I knew the first time I walked into his room. It’s like that sometimes. You walk close enough to them, their soul leaps into your own. It’s an electric arc. Blue, and all but blinding-you can almost smell it afterwards. Like a welder’s torch.”
“You guys want another drink?” Don asked.
“No. No, I don’t think so. But thanks, man.” I shook my head.
“Okay. So you identified with Danny Eskew. I can understand that. What I’m not clear on is how you get from there to stalking Alouette.”
“No, no. That’s not it, not at all, I don’t identify with Danny. This has nothing to do with me. Stalking her? God, no. I’m only trying to help. The girl doesn’t know about her brother, doesn’t even know he exists. She should. And he’s stranded, marooned, all alone. I’m just a channel, a conduit, from Danny to his sister. Through me he’s reaching out, speaking to her.”
“There on the porch, for instance?”
“I’m sorry about that. I didn’t think she was home. When I heard her coming out, I panicked-started to run, then in my confusion turned around and ran right into her. I’m glad she wasn’t hurt.”
“Where’d William Blake come from?” Don said suddenly. You’d have sworn he hadn’t been paying the least attention.
“Another patient of mine. Old soul, he called himself. Always going on about Madame Blavatsky, Nostradamus, Native Americans. Had a book about Blake on top of a stack of them in his room. I picked it up one morning and it fell open to this picture of a painting, some kind of monster walking across a wooden floor, with curtains right by him so that it looks like he’s on a stage. The book was there for me to find. Instantly I realized that I’d known that painting forever, though I’d never seen it before. Since then I’ve read everything by and about Blake there is…. Maybe I will have that drink.
“Blake talked to angels, you know,” he said when Don came back with our drinks.
“Yeah. Yeah, I heard that. You?”
Terence nodded. “They don’t answer very often, though.”
Chapter Thirty-One
As we stood by the front door saying final things that morning, a youngish man in watch cap and sweater had come to the window outside. In the moment before the frost of his breath obscured it, his face showed, and when the frost cleared, he was gone. For that moment I could have sworn it was my son’s face pressed there against the glass, looking in.
Two hours later, at home trying to piece back together with coffee what brandy had torn down, I was still remembering that face outside when the phone rang.
“Lewis, haven’t seen you down to the park of late.”
“Lester. How are you?”
“Fit, thank you. Yourself?”
“I’m good…. The boy’s okay?”
“Never better. That boy and Mr. Blue are inseparable. Just sit there looking out the window for hours at a time, the both of them content as can be. Boy gets a bath, Mr. Blue has to be in there too. I fix the boy lunch, I got to fix somethin’ for Mr. Blue. Beats all I’ve seen. That was a good thing you did, Lewis.”
“I’m glad it worked out.”
“You ought to get on down to the park soon and have you a look. Bring along a good coat though, that wind’ll slice meat right off your bones. And you won’t believe it when you see it. Pigeons came sweeping back in all at the same time, like they knew. Like they were coming home. That park’s a little corner of my heart’s country-you know that. Seeing those birds again did my heart some righteous good.”
“Tell the boy I said hello?”
“I’ll surely do that. And will I be seeing you?”
“Soon. I promise.”
Hanging up, I thought for a moment how lonely Lester must be. How lonely we all are, all of us like Ulysses just trying to find our way home. And I thought about my son. Maybe there is something to this notion of karma. Maybe the good things we do-Guidry’s sponsorship of the school, Alouette’s community work, even Terence Braly’s efforts in their own way-maybe somehow these can make up for all the rest.
I’d gone out to the kitchen to pour the rest of the coffee down the sink, a healthy dram or two of Scotch into my cup, when the phone rang again. Carried cup towards the hall and dipped into it as I lifted the phone. Cast down your bucket where you are, as Booker T. Washington advised us.
“Good morning, Lew. Hope I didn’t wake you.”
“Not at all. Up and working.”
A pause, then: “Working?”
I filled her in on the past few days, Alouette, Terence Braly, these latest brambles and snags. “How are you?”
“Fine, just fine…. We opened last night. It went well. Extraordinarily well, I think…. I hoped you might be there.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay. I didn’t think you would, I just hoped.” She was quiet a moment. “Am I never going to see you again, Lew? I’d hate that. I’m not sure I could stand it.”
“You’ll see me.”
“Good.”
Doors, I thought. Their hearts do business like their doors. Apollinaire. LaVerne telling me how as a child she’d look out the back of train windows at all the people and places she passed, these lives she’d never see again, every passage a chain of good-byes. Alouette at the door when I’d ferried her home from the hospitaclass="underline" Our lives are an apocalypse served in a very small cup.
“I’m glad to hear things went well.”
“The place was packed, Lew. Packed. I couldn’t believe it. Blue-haired little old ladies, students lugging backpacks, even a couple of families with kids in strollers. White-faced young women in all black, bangs, clunky shoes. Others in evening dresses complete with mouth-watering show of thigh and breast. Most of one whole row was all Willie’s friends. Remember Willie? I told you about him.”
“Rap version of Greek choruses.”
“That’s the one. Calls himself Bad Dog Number Fifteen-which is how he insisted we list him on the program. And these guys, his posse he calls them, were having more fun than anyone else. Slumped down in seats with their big-legged droopy pants and oversize shirts, talking low among themselves. Willie’s a talent, Lew. A natural who came out of nowhere. He gave me a copy of this play he wrote, British Knights. It’s so good that after I read it I wanted to just go off somewhere and cry. I knew I could never write anything like that.”
Moments pulled themselves like discarded newspapers across the floor towards sunlight.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you this, Lew. When I was researching early theatre, I found an article on what seems to be the first real civilization. Mesopotamia, on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, 2500 B.C. The Sumerians kept extensive records, etched them in a script they’d devised onto damp clay tablets which were then baked. Eventually, like all others, their civilization declined. The great libraries and record houses where they stored these tablets, these documents of what they’d been personally and collectively, of how they’d lived their lives and the more they’d envisioned-all this fell into ruin or burned to the ground. Walls crumbled back to stone, but the tablets remained. Fires that consumed libraries and whole cities simply turned the clay tablets brick-red, baked them to a new durability.”
“The city falls, the pillars stay.” Apollinaire again. Or stretching further back: All Pergamum is covered with thorn bushes, even its ruins have perished.
“I knew you’d like it.”
“That I’d steal it, you mean. And I will, first chance I get.”
She laughed. “I’ve got to go, Lew. The production’s been extended, it’s on through the end of the month, Tuesdays through Saturdays. Maybe longer, who knows? And maybe you’ll come some night.” Getting no response, she said, “I miss you.”
Then I stood with the phone’s black anvil in my hand, dial tone in my ear.