A Dark Matter (43 page)

Boats gathered that he was supposed to walk to the chairs. His legs felt as though they could not move a single step, and his head had settled down into a nice steady throb. His chest hurt as though an enraged strongman had struck him there several times. He didn’t feel like going anywhere, but in the place where everything was everything, there was no anywhere, because all places were the same.

He took an unhappy step forward, and an invisible branch struck him in the forehead, opening a wound that throbbed and bled. A white card on the floor said HANDKERCHIEF.

“Yeah, thanks,” Boats said, and pressed his sleeve against the wound.

Dripping blood onto the painted concrete, Boats left the tan stripe and entered the green area, which seemed now to go on to the horizon. He looked over his shoulder and saw the same was true of the blue section of the floor—like the lake it represented, it exceeded the eye’s capacity to take it in. Then he pushed his aching legs toward the chairs.

A note on one of the folding chairs said
MALLON
. The other two notes said
DILLY
and
BOATS
. Immediately behind Dill’s chair was another note card that read
TREE
. Looking at what the chairs circled, Boats sat down on his card, crossed his knees, and folded his hands together. Six or seven old, well-worn dolls had been stripped of whatever clothing they had worn and stacked on top of one another. In the round heads, most of the eyes were closed, but two of the dolls stared upward open-eyed, both observant and blind for eternity. None of the little bodies had any more gender than was suggested by their ambiguous faces. Dirt that seemed baked on darkened the plastic faces; cracks and fissures threaded the ceramic heads. Most of the doll hair had been either pulled out or burned away.

“That’s nice,” he said. “A child is the same as a doll. They both mean nothing. It’s a shitty old world.”

And that was what it was about, he supposed. An aching body, an empty room, a stack of beat-up old dolls. Notes left behind by an absent and irritated god. It was a parody of meaning, an empty mockery—mockery completely without humor. Nothing meant any more than the wire hanger he had used to pull his “boat” to the “beach or shore.” The wire hanger spoke of a death-in-life. Stretching to infinity on all sides, Death-in-life surrounded him.

On impulse, knowing that he could not be permitted the last word, Boatman leaned forward across the stack of dolls to inspect one of the note cards, and saw that while he had been musing, the battered old dolls had been transformed into dead babies. What was now directly beneath his outstretched hand was a diminished version of what he had seen in the meadow. Too shocked to breathe, too shocked even to gasp, he snatched back his hand. Blood from his hand dripped onto the little heap of bodies that lay with their mouths open, heads lolling, fingers limp, little rows of teeth white against the dull red of their mouths, the bruised, crusted, dead-white skin, the tiny white penises, the small, folded slits … For some reason, it was the teeth that horrified him most: so inert and exposed.

In an instant, the transformation reversed itself, and he was back with the pile of naked dolls in the flat, dead world of the wire hanger. Even his relief was a dire, humorless mockery.

Boatman once again extended his hand over the sprawling, dead-faced dolls, more slowly than before, and leaned forward until he could touch the card that said
MALLON
. He closed his fingers on the edge of the card and brought it toward him. Through the name on the card he could see the shadowy traces of something written on its other side.

He slowly turned it over. On the back of the card a single word had been written in squared-off, careful block letters.
CONGRATULATIONS
.

the phenomenon of flight

A Week Later

S
carcely believing what I was doing, I rented a blister-red Honda Accord at the Salisbury-Ocean City Wicomico Regional airport, to which I had taken an uncomfortable and unreasonably delayed series of flights, and in that vehicle I traveled up Ocean Highway to US 13, now and then saying to the gospel singers and salvation merchants delivered to me by the Accord’s radio, “I know I shouldn’t be doing this, it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” thence into Rehoboth Beach. I drove, searching for a municipal parking lot, along the one-way streets past gift shops, bed-and-breakfasts, and cafés. I coasted down Lake Avenue and Lakeview Avenue and Grenoble Place. Twenty minutes later, thoroughly lost, I stopped alongside a policeman who was eating an ice-cream cone while seated on a bicycle and asked him if there happened to be a parking lot anywhere near the Golden Atlantic Sands Hotel and Conference Center, wherever that happened to be. The policeman said, “You’re in luck today, sir, and welcome to our town,” and pointed toward an empty parking spot across the street. “That big, long building right in front of us happens to be your destination, the beautiful Golden Atlantic Sands.”

“Can I make a U-turn, officer?”

“Just this once,” the policeman said, and abetted the lawbreaker by propping the bike against a lamppost, strolling out into the middle of the street, holding out an imperious hand (while still consuming the ice-cream cone), and halting the sparse oncoming traffic. Quickly, I cranked the wheel and crossed two empty lanes, then backed up until I could slip into the parking spot. I got out, dealt with the metering system, and yelled, “Thanks!”

I looked up at the long stretch of the hotel and regretted the impulse that had brought me to it. There was a sense, I knew, in which Jason Boatman had brought me to this pass: Boats’s story had helped spur me into setting up my tickets and actually going through with this stunt. In 1994, eroded by a lifetime of theft, Boats had seen Meredith Bright’s universal cynicism taken to its ultimate point. If the things of this world at all existed as physical entities, it was as no more than the gestural emptiness of a wire hanger. George Cooper had moved toward the same bleakness, and it had laid waste what remained of his life. In such a world, very few things counted, and the best of them was truth.

I wanted to understand what my long marriage had really been: I wanted to know its true shape. Was it the narrative of cooperation and accommodation I had imagined it to be, or had my own role in it been only secondary, because long ago—perhaps from the beginning!—usurped by another? Even after so long a time, wasn’t that a point you had to make clear?

After Olson and I had returned to Cedar Street, I debated with myself, then called the reservations desk of the hotel now before me. When a clerk picked up, I asked to speak to a guest named Spencer Mallon. The clerk informed me that while Mr. Mallon was indeed expected at the Golden Atlantic Sands, his arrival was not scheduled for another twenty-four hours. Yes, Mr. Mallon was a frequent guest at the Golden Atlantic Sands, the clerk was happy to say. Mr. Mallon was a fine gentleman who cut quite a figure in the informal world that was Rehoboth Beach.

“Aristocratic,” I said.

“I’d say that’s an excellent description of the gentleman,” said the clerk.

Could the clerk also check to see if a Ms. Lee Truax was expected around the same time?

“Oh! Ms. Truax!” the clerk exclaimed. “Everybody here knows her, she’s a fabulous person! We all just love her, honestly we do. Well, listen to me, chattering away like a magpie. Well, she
is
special. You know it, too, if you know her.”

“Oh, yes,” I said.

“We like to say our hotel is Ms. Truax’s second home, she’s with us so often … Let’s see, now. No, I can’t find any reservations in her name, I guess it’ll be a while before we have the pleasure of her company again. Is there some other way I can be of help to you, sir?”

No, but thanks for asking.

Where would the Eel be staying while she sojourned in this beachfront community, if not in the hotel where everyone loved her so profoundly?

Actually, there was a reasonable answer to that question. I called back and asked if the ACB had taken accommodations of any sort over the next few days. No, sir, came the answer, the ACB had requested no accommodations until their meeting in May of next year. So that door slammed shut. The Eel had told me she would “probably” stay at the usual place: the question that animated me now was whether or not she would be staying there with someone else.

I had called her cell phone, but she did not answer. Three hours later, I called again, with results only slightly more satisfactory. She was too busy to talk, she would call back later. Where in Rehoboth Beach was she staying? No, she wasn’t there yet, she’d leave Washington tomorrow. Well, where was she staying in Washington?
Where?
That was a question I seldom asked. But if I really wanted to know, she was staying in the guest room of her ACB friend Heidi Schumacher, who owned a beautiful house in Georgetown—she was being to Heidi what Dilly was to him! As for Rehoboth Beach, there were a couple of possibilities. What was happening, was I worried about her? Just curious, I said. I’m a little old blind lady, I can’t get too wild, she told me. Don’t worry, don’t worry about anything. Hold tight, do some work, she’d be home after the weekend, and then they could make arrangements for Hootie.

Call me when you get to Rehoboth Beach, I’d asked. She promised, and she did call, but the reception was so foul I scarcely understood a word. Since then, nothing. Unable to keep from doing so, I had told Don I had to go out of town on a business matter, and would be back in a day or two. My accountant, my business manager, it was too boring to explain, but I had to go. And after that I got on the phone, packed a bag, and, despairing, went.

I
knew
I was being crazy. The one saving grace in my ridiculous scheme was that if Lee Truax should happen to walk down the Boardwalk when I happened to be lurking there, she would be unable to witness my shame. This reflection was not without a private shame of its own, namely that I had thought of it at all. I stood beside the ugly little car, looking at a hotel where my wife was a beloved guest, and told myself it was not too late to turn my back on both the hotel and my witless scheme. All I had to do was get back in behind the wheel, start it up, and drive back to Wicomico Regional Airport to wait for the next flight that could begin the process of returning me to what seemed now the land of the sane. Why was I here, anyhow? Because I thought my life might have been saved by a man motivated by guilt over cuckolding me? Because my wife had scarcely bothered to invent a good reason for coming to this little beach town? Because I knew Spencer Mallon was still alive and had good reason to keep on visiting the place?

I locked the car and walked past the hotel’s sign to take a path around the side and get on the Boardwalk. If I saw them, I thought, it would be there—and for the first time realized that although my wife would be incapable of seeing me, Mallon certainly would not.

No sooner did I enter upon the Boardwalk then I was faced with the day’s second awkward recognition, that it was early June, and although the Delaware shore had been hot, hazy, and as humid as New York City in mid-July, the season had not yet begun. Although some tourists and pleasure seekers were strolling in and out of the shops and fast-food outlets, they were far fewer than I had anticipated. I felt exposed, as if a spotlight played upon me. If I were to remain unseen, I needed a disguise.

In the first likely-looking store I examined a shelf piled with caps and hats and paid $32.99 for a wide-brimmed straw number with a bobbing fringe of untrimmed straw around the brim. In the same shop, I passed twenty dollars over a different counter and purchased a bug-eyed pair of sunglasses so dark I could barely see the way back to the door. A little way further down the Boardwalk, I bought a copy of the
Cape May Gazette
from a vending box and carried it to a bench near the railings over the long beach. A few deeply tanned couples, some of them equipped with books they were not reading, lay sprawled on towels and loungers.

I perched myself on the bench’s inside edge, opened my newspaper, leaned back, and through my inky shades and beneath the screen of the dangling straw fringe, cast a long look in both directions before concentrating my attentions on the wide glass doors that led into the hotel where my wife had become such a beloved figure.

That, with many rattles of the newspaper and long sideways looks, also a few swift inspections of the long beach and a single pee break, was what I did for the next five hours. At six o’clock, starving, I folded the paper under my arm, got my overnight bag out of the car, and went through the hotel’s main entrance to check in.

I was given a room on the fifth floor, which awakened some dim echo, not of something I had seen or heard, but something once described to me, some part of a tale, an anecdote. I had heard this said:
You watch the needle swing up and see it stop on the fifth floor … The next elevator comes down and opens its doors, and you jump in and push 5 and the Close Door button before anyone else
can get on
. The anecdote, the story, had to do with Spencer Mallon and some “mind-blowing” nonsense he had passed off as wisdom. Its fragmentary mental reappearance now was a completely meaningless coincidence.

The elevator took me to my floor without incident. In absolute peace, comfort, and silence, I followed the directional arrows around several corners and gained my room, 564. Where a bellman once turned on lights, opened closets, and located the bathroom, now the weary guest does it all for himself, thereby spared the expense of a handsome sum in the neighborhood of five dollars. In the continuing state of peace, comfort, and silence, I removed my hat and glasses, zipped open my overnight bag, arranged my clothes atop the dresser, and carried my toiletries kit into the bathroom, where an incurious glance into the mirror put an end to peace and comfort, also silence. What the mirror displayed made me groan, “Oh, God.”

I seemed to have aged at least ten punitive years. A shrunken, defeated old man was looking back at me. The old man was Lee Harwell, but not in an incarnation I ever wanted anyone to see. My eyes seemed sunken and as red as if filled with blood. Wrinkles carved my face, and my hair was dull and lead-colored. My entire head seemed to have shriveled, and my teeth looked yellow and enormous. My shoulders hunched over the suggestion of a concave chest. Whatever appeal or charm had once been visible here existed now as a ghastly parody of itself. That I had felt so fine only seconds before astonished me. Clearly, I was tottering on the far edge of exhaustion.

The mirror, I realized, had given me a moral shock: Here you are, this is what you have made of yourself.

To avoid looking any longer into my blood-filled eyes, I splashed cold water over my face and rubbed it in. Under my hands, the contours and planes all felt familiar and unchanged. When I lowered my hands, that depraved and dying animal was still gazing at me from the opposite side of the mirror. I fled the room, picking up my sunglasses on the way and slipping them on before I reached the elevator.

On the way down, I hunched in the corner, wondering how long it would be before I would need a cane. The elevator stopped at the third floor, and two slim blond girls in their early teens walked in, followed by their mother, also slender and blond, and like her daughters attired in a tight-fitting T-shirt and jeans. Their flip-flops revealed the small, scarlet nails of fresh pedicures. I withdrew deeper into my corner and avoided displaying my teeth. The girls cast haughty, peeved looks at me, and the mother ignored me completely. At the lobby, they bolted as if from a foul stench. I cast around the lobby until I noticed a set of stairs rising to a dark wooden arch, investigated, and discovered the hotel’s main restaurant, the Ocean Room.

The restaurant featured low lighting and paneled walls mounted with giant stuffed fish. The opacity of my lenses made it difficult for me to see even the hostess at her podium, who, lit from beneath, bore a passing resemblance to a floating severed head. She spared a curious look for my glasses, but was too polite to ask. I felt like an elderly vampire.

From the waiter’s endless recital I ordered French onion soup, roasted chicken with mushroom and pine-nut sauce. With a glass of pinot noir. Discreetly, I scanned the room for two faces I was certain would burn through the murk of my optics like spotlights. Though the restaurant contained any number of gray heads, none belonged to either Lee Truax or the wizardly creature who had addressed me in the Dane County airport. My soup arrived.

After the better than acceptable soup came an uninspiring chicken. When arrayed on the breast of a dry and overcooked chicken, mushrooms and pine nuts do not join hands and sing. Because I was still hungry, I labored through the meal, then signed the check, and pushed myself away from the table.

From the top of the steps, I surveyed the lobby. I was bored, and the pine nuts were still irritated with the mushrooms. A priest in a soutane swept through the lobby, followed by a sobbing woman. What was
that
about? In an envelope of laughter-spilling babble, a group of teenagers moved out of an open elevator and swerved toward the Boardwalk exit. A line of frustrated-looking men and women waited to check in at the registration desk. A knot of people moved into the elevator the teenagers had left, among them a striking silver-haired man in loose black clothing who turned to face the front of the car just as the doors began to slide shut. I had time only to notice his prominent cheekbones. Had his hair been unusually long for a man of his age, did his eyes penetrate the darkness? Three or four women I barely took in had been standing near the man. I moved rapidly down the stairs, watching the glowing red numbers track the ascending elevator.

Had one of those women in the elevator been small, white-haired, astonishingly lovely? Did the desk clerks and the maids adore her?