“Kit, it’s incredible what’s been happening, since you took me on. It’s like—you’re incredible. Kit, totally. You don’t even hold my father against me.”
Her father, his father. Kit was stumbling over every kind of junk there was.
“And today you did this like, heroic thing, this incredibly brave and noble deed. And still you’re on the job. You’re on the job, you’re letting me know. Even if it means coming all the way out here. You’re thinking about me, you’re making sure I’m part of it. The next issue.”
That roused him. “Aw, Zia.” Kit reached for his coffee. “I don’t know about the next issue.”
“Oh, it’s going to be a killer. A motherfucker.”
“I don’t know, Z.” The drink was an unlikely mix by now, bitter but sugary. “I’m not sure what to do, about the next issue.”
“Oh, hey Kit. He-ey.” Zia laid a hand inside his elbow, her fingers light. “You must be tired.”
“Zia, I’m not sure. I’m in bad shape.”
So I left our blue boy, our pseudo S&Mie. With an itch in my arm, I went looking for a darker dive. And the Cue & Ayy I laid out above, my day with the dilettante — well as you’ve probably guessed, that isn’t exactly what took place. Not exactly, no. It’s what those of us in the news business call a “made-up quote,” or a “total fabrication.” Every now and then we have to do that sort of thing in order to get our point across. But my point, remember, is that this guy had missed the point.
This guy was lost. Way out of his depth. His friend Garrison might’ve had some ghostly substance, yeah, okay. Garrison kept fooling me, yeah, a stubborn bit of bad news, buoying up into view no matter how jaundiced an eye I cast over the scene.
But Our Subject, Our Scandie Ayy — he was lost. He didn’t get it.
And I’ll have more to say about that, me basement boys and girls. Lots more on how we tell the true hearts from the clueless, in this day and age. Watch this space.
Meanwhile — Z my name is Zia, I’m going to live in Zanzibar.
Chapter 5
He liked the wind off the channel, the way it reshaped his bruises. The wind itself came in battered shapes in the Woods Hole crossing. Here in the Hole, along the ferry lanes between Cape Cod and the islands, two ocean currents collided — the Gulf Stream and the Buzzards Bay. The thick sea broke apart into whirlpools, into patches of white-flecked chop, and above the water the airflow wrestled through rough-edged directional shifts. North, east, west, south — in January the wrestling was worst. Yet Kit took the brunt of it. He stood at the forward rail of the Nantucket ferry, a lone outdoor voyager on a boat three-quarters empty to begin with. He liked the wet scrub in each new blast of air.
The wind even whistled through his stitches, faint, faint. Kit started tipping his head, trying to create the whistle. He savored the tickle at his sutures.
Not that this wasn’t a strange place to find himself, Friday afternoon. Hardly a day had passed since he’d gotten these sutures. Hardly a day and a night since the phone call that had set up his bruising. And here Kit stood, playing sickbed games with the Atlantic Ocean. Strange, no question. His farthest yet from the things that needed doing.
North, east, west, south, Kit saw nothing but storm and twilight. The mainland had disappeared as soon as he and Bette were out of the dock. Martha’s Vineyard didn’t show till the ferry was in the harbor. Now between the Vineyard and Nantucket they moved without landmark, without bearing. A ghost adrift. When Kit first stepped out of the ferry cabin, the churning, misted vertigo forced up a shout — wordless, raw-throated.
Yet Kit liked the taste of the air, too, rich and natural as a rained-on heap of leaves. It freed him from the odors of his coat. Bette had sponged off the fabric before he’d woken, but the stink of Monsod had lingered. During the ride down from Boston Kit had dozed off again, and the smell had triggered headachy stabs of nightmare. Eventually he’d needed his Percodan. Now, however, even Kit’s painkillers couldn’t dull the kick of this whipsaw gray, this chaos of touch and whistle right in his face.
It allowed no mind games either. No layout & pasteup.
*
Bette joined him at the rail without a word. She wore a long coat without a waist, an undertaker’s coat. Her hat was fur, with earflaps.
“The air,” Kit said. “It’s good for me.”
Still watching the sea, she adjusted her hat. Kit thought of Zia last night, tugging at her headscarf.
“The air’s good for my head. Bette, I’ll tell you one thing, I’ll tell you this for starters.” He’d told Zia nothing, finally. “Lately Betts, I’ve been — overfantasizing.”
That brought her around. Frowning, lips moving, Bette seemed to be trying out his last word.
“Bette, I’ve got to tell you. If I’m going to tell anyone I’m going to tell you. For starters, anyway.” Here they came, yes, the things that needed doing. Unhinged as the windcurrents over the Hole. “I’m overfantasizing. If that’s the, if that’s… Betts, listen. I’m inventing newspapers in my mind.”
“Oh, come.” She had a way of straightening her head, making a T-square with neck and shoulders.
“In my mind, Betts. It’s got me worried.”
“You’re not inventing papers in your mind, Kit. You’re actually bringing them into print and making them available to the public.”
“No, no. Also in my mind, Bette. I’m running double-columns up there. I’m composing whole, weird….” And though sometimes he had to stop and massage his neck, sometimes he couldn’t believe the words he came up with — nonetheless just letting Bette in on this much of his trouble left Kit feeling relieved. This much was the easy part, sure. It was the least of his reasons for calling Corinna, over at the office, and telling her she’d have to go on taking messages till Monday. Yet as Kit talked with his bundled-up wife he enjoyed a renewed sense that their getaway might work after all. He and Bette were taking the weekend at “the Cottage,” her family place on Nantucket.
“It’s strange, Betts,” he was saying. “The columns might start with something in my life, they might comment on something there. But next thing you know, they begin to comment on each other.”
Her eyes, enlarged, held an obvious question.
“I’m not crazy, Bette. I’m — I think this might be a way of not being crazy. My invisible layout and pasteup. It might be what I have instead of crazy. But, hoo boy. The flashes I get up in there.” He jerked a gloved finger at his head. “Sometimes they’re not even newspapers, exactly.”
“Bette,” he asked, “you remember when I called you about Cousin Cal? I called about Cousin Cal, and all I could think about was making love with you. You remember that conversation?”
“I do.” She seemed to be fighting a smile. “It was Monday. Monday, yes.”
“Monday. Back when this whole mess was just starting.”
To Kit, his runaway imaginings during that phone call looked to be part and parcel of the head games that had since come on worse. “I told you, then. About what was going on with me. And even then, I knew it wasn’t right.” But that same morning he’d also felt this sopping beehive in his chest, this heart not yet dried out and eggless. The humming bulk remained, stirring in the channel winds.
“Kitty Chris.” Her look showed some of its old open-endedness. “And to think I’ve always wanted to drive men wild.”
“Aw, Betts.”
“Well. Invisible layout and pasteup, what am I to say?”
Good question. Kit couldn’t be sure of his smile.
“Perhaps it’s a symptom of stress. Over the Med School don’t you know, they talk a lot about stress.” She’d spoken to the Med School before they left, needing a deadline extended.