City on Fire (85 page)

That first night after she moved out, he would wake from his own dream of falling off a building to find himself rolling toward the declivity she’d left. For a moment, in the dark, he thought she was still there beside him. And so he had to go through losing her all over again.

He started sleeping on the sofa after that. And when the kids came over following their real Christmas with Regan for his paltry imitation and their inaugural custody overnight, Cate ignored the canopy bed he’d bought her and headed for the horsehair. She liked it for the same reason he couldn’t sleep on it: it smelled like Mommy. Otherwise, she seemed on edge. She’d packed her plastic cartoon-themed backpack full to bursting with clothes and toys, as though preparing for a polar expedition. She used to do the same thing for sleepovers with friends, he remembered, when she’d always call home halfway through the night, complaining of unspecified aches and pains. At which point he would have to throw on clothes and go retrieve her. Now he half-expected her, at midnight or at one, to insist on calling Regan.

Will, by contrast, seemed all right, at least at first. After dinner, they’d snapped together the drugstore tree and tossed on a few strands of lights (Regan having taken the boxes of decorations), and when presents had been opened and Cate had gone to bed, they stayed up flipping channels in search of Jimmy Stewart. They passed a rerun of the Saturday Night Live Christmas special, and he could see Will leaning forward, as if to absorb as much as he could before it was snatched from him again. Regan had never let him watch the show, though he claimed the other kids at school did, that he was culturally deprived, so Keith decided to leave the dial where it was. He’d mixed up eggnog by siphoning off half of the store-bought carton and replacing it with some rum of uncertain vintage. Now he offered a sip to his son. In the past, Will would have wrinkled his nose and declined. Then Keith could tease him. Oh, come on. It’ll put hair on your chest. This time, Will asked for his own glass. What could a dad do but pour him a finger or two? It didn’t make Will visibly tipsy; if anything, he seemed more in control, as though he’d realized his long-held ambition to bring every loose nerve-ending in his body under central command. He laughed even at the jokes that went over his head—laughed exactly as hard and as long as his dad did. Permissiveness got a bad rap, Keith thought. He was enjoying the bond it made. He poured himself another eggnog and tried to focus on this, the bond, and not on Regan. Then the telephone rang. It was almost midnight; it seemed impossible that anyone should be calling now, or that the call augured anything good, but rather than let it ring and wake Cate, he hurried to the kitchen to answer it. It had been almost a month since he’d last heard Samantha’s voice, but she didn’t have to identify herself. Was he free to talk? she said.

From down the hall boomed the laughter of the studio audience. There was no way anyone—even Will—could overhear him. Still, when he spoke, it was a kind of hiss. “You can’t call me here, do you understand? This is my life.” He returned the phone to its cradle a little harder than he’d meant to and stood there looking at it, the way you might look at a snake you’re not sure is poisonous. He waited for it to ring again. When, after a couple of minutes, it still hadn’t, he made his way back to the living room.

The fat guy from Saturday Night Live was chasing a longhair around with a samurai sword, and Will was on his knees, watching. “Who was that?” he asked, without turning around.

“Wrong number,” Keith said. And then it went to commercial. “You can actually do that stuff, can’t you, Will? The judo kick and whatnot.”

“Judo and jujitsu are like two separate things, Dad. Plus I’m only a green belt.”

“What does that mean, green?”

Will shrugged.

“No, really,” Keith said, or the rum said, or his hatred of his own deceit and the way it walled him off from other people said. “Let’s see what you can do.”

Will looked him over, as if to gauge his sobriety. “Fine,” he said finally, but they’d have to move the coffeetable. He made Keith stand in the middle of the rug and bow. That’s how they would both know they didn’t mean to hurt each other. Then he reached to take Keith’s hand, as if to shake. Within seconds, Keith was on his knees, and his arm was up between his shoulderblades, where the wings would have been, and blooming there was a hot white pain. So why did they call the belt green? More pressingly: Was his arm going to break? When he craned his head back, he could see his son standing over him, upside down, face flushed with effort. And there they were again to the left, doubled in the black glass of the window, surrounded by a million winking Christmas lights, in a painterly pose he could have sworn he’d seen somewhere before. The Prostrate Man. The Fierce Boy.

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The major symptom, basically, is this dream I keep having. I’m walking around a city where it’s late afternoon. Some part of me knows nine-to-fivers should be out having last smokes of the day, but there’s no one on the streets. The sidewalks are pristine, like ads for sidewalks. Above are tall buildings whose top floors catch the sun. And here’s how I know it’s a dream: each one’s covered, roof to sidewalk, with a linen veil. The veils are all different colors, unripe lemon, rose, hazard-cone orange, alternating in no pattern I can name. From each new corner, having forgotten how I got there, I can see them luffing in and out, as if behind them aren’t buildings at all but something breathing. Watching. Or waiting. At some point, I start to run. I know that if I turn to the side, the way in waking life you turn to check yourself in shop windows, the veils will dissolve and leave me face-to-face with whatever’s hiding back there. But already great hands are pressing against the sides of my head, turning it. I try to call for help, but I no longer have a mouth. I try to fight, but I’m not in control of my body. Just at the point of maximum fear—just when I’m about to gaze upon the naked face of the Thing That Waits—I wake up, soaked in sweat, gasping. I haven’t slept through the night in almost half a year.

And the thing is, I’ve had this dream before. The first time was when I was a high-school junior, in my first year at boarding school. I remember my roommate calling me out on it in the Refectory the morning after the fifth or sixth recurrence. His name was Sean Baldwin. He was this redheaded and freakishly adult-looking scholarship kid from Roxbury, Mass. Also—though I don’t know how we’re defining “relevant”—a minor celebrity with the girls from across the Quad. More than once I came back to our room to find the corner of his IRA flag peeking from under the door, per the code we’d agreed on back when it seemed like a joke. Maybe because of this, there was some shunning from the other boys. I wasn’t quite an outcast myself; circa ’81, being from actual New York (as opposed to, say, New Canaan, or New Jersey) gave you some social traction. But I was inward by nature, and we usually refected just the two of us. Sean would regale me with stories of his conquests. It was to tease me about the one-sidedness of these conversations, I think, that he first mentioned the noises he’d been hearing from my side of the room after lights out, which he characterized as “groaning.” He wasn’t going to say anything, I remember him saying, but it was going on like four nights in a row. “I think that’s a symptom of gonadal inflammation. We’ve got to get you laid, old man.”

In fact, I’d been involved with a girl from the senior class since September, a Californian, though sneaking her into the boys’ dorms wasn’t either of our style. It was her essential integrity as a person I’d fallen so hard for in the first place. And so she remained, like everything that mattered to me then, secret—to be pursued in the woods by moonlight, when I was supposed to be studying. But here was Sean, watching my face, holding the ends of his school scarf out from his body like the toggles of a parachute that’s just blown. He probably would have actually jumped out of a plane for me, but I wasn’t sure how much I could trust him, if that makes sense. Still, against my better judgment, I leaned in and started explaining about the dream. How the more it happened, the more I had to know: What was back there, behind the veil?

“You ever hear of vagina dentata?” he asked.

He could be a dick sometimes, and I told him so.

If he’d had a beard, he’d have been stroking it. “It just sounds very sexual to me.”

“Everything sounds sexual to you,” I said.

“Fine. You really want to know what I think?” The scarf-ends dropped, and his persona seemed to slip a little bit. “You said you’re in a city, right?” In the dream, he meant. “I think you’re nervous about the holidays coming up, and having to go back to your family in New York.”

I said I wasn’t nervous. Why would I be nervous?

“You tell me,” he said. “They seemed like perfectly nice people at Parents’ Weekend, but you obviously have a huge thing about your dad.”

“My thing about my dad is that he’s an asshole. He and Mom should have split up a long time ago. Anyway, I’m not looking for etiology. I’m looking for sleep.”

Sean said he found it was what he wasn’t consciously thinking about during the day that came up in dreams. “Maybe before your eyes shut you should try to focus hard on what you’re really afraid of.” This sounded plausible enough in the mild light of an early-winter morning, but of course I had no idea what I was really afraid of, was the problem, and that night the dream returned with new intensity, waking me just after midnight. By the time finals rolled around, I was a basket case.

I should also flag here as of possible clinical significance that I’d been a pretty steady abuser of controlled substances since the year I turned thirteen. That was 1977, the blackout year. Also a year I’d just as soon black out. My parents had just started living in separate apartments. Then, the morning after the lights actually did go out, Mom and Dad were all of a sudden back together, with no explanation of what had happened to them in the night, while the city burned.

Something else happened even later that year, for which I likewise got no explanation: One evening after school started in the fall, I came home from basketball practice to find my parents splitting a beer at the kitchen table. It had become a kind of ritual. Only between them now was a stranger: a wiry, almost vampiric little man with a leather jacket and paint-splashed pants and a cigarette, which no one else would have been allowed to smoke indoors. I knew even before my mom introduced him that this was Uncle William, her brother, my namesake. My whole life up to that point, he’d been nothing more than a rumor. But now he was giving me the chin-nod, like we’d met a thousand times before. Eventually, I moved on to my room, but I’ll never forget the shock of seeing him that first time in Brooklyn Heights. He himself was a recovering drug addict, my father “let slip” a few weeks later. This was supposed to puncture my evident fascination with Uncle William, probably, but only reinforced it. Because he was also an honest-to-god artist, the thing I’d decided I wanted to be. And later still, when I found in a cutout bin a copy of the LP he’d cut with his punk band back in the mid-’70s, I more or less wore out the grooves. Those songs would come to stand, in my fantasies, for the distant planet of art and sex and possibility waiting just across the Bridge, and it occurs to me now that it was this—the possibility of this possibility—that freed me to start sneaking out at night myself.

Exactly what I found out there would be hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t around in those gray years of late Carter/early Reagan, but I guess the point here is to try. Budget cuts and crime and unemployment had brutalized the city, and you could feel on the street this sense of soured anarchy, of failed Utopia. But as sad as it was, it was in many ways the ideal playground for ninth graders with preoccupied families and fake IDs. You could go hear the early rap records or the late New Wave ones or the thing disco was becoming at unlicensed clubs where black and brown and white and gay and straight still mixed openly. My buddy Ken Otani and I, having told our folks we were staying at each other’s houses, would score whatever we could get our hands on—painkillers, acid, black beauties—and tromp around downtown kite-high, listening for loft parties thumping within the darkened buildings. And at three or four in the morning, wobbling back toward Brooklyn, we’d hear our voices echoing up the buildings to fill the vault of the sky. As if there were secret trails of freedom my uncle had cut through the city a decade earlier, in the Bad Old Days. Which was probably why, though they never confronted me about what I was up to, my parents decided to send me to St. Paul’s.

But back in the city, that winter break in ’81, my explorations resumed. And I found that by recalibrating my intake of controlled substances—lighter on the pills, heavier on the booze—I was able to start sleeping through the night again. Self-medicating, you’d call it. I slept any time I could. At lunchtime, on the pretense of going to shoot hoops, I’d head over to the Promenade and drink vodka out of a deli cup, then come home and lock myself in my room and conk out until my little sister banged on the door. My mom wanted me to play with her, but Dad said to let me alone—supposedly because he was on my side, but really because afternoon naptime was two fewer hours a day he ran the risk of my company. And by the time I returned to school, I’d forgotten my nightmares completely. It was my great gift, this forgetting, I used to think.

Anyway, the second “episode” was when I was twenty-four and here in L.A., crashing on a friend’s couch and just generally going through a rough time in my life—a kind of crack-up or mid-major depression. I’d moved here to act (which after two years of walk-on parts in industrials was depressing in its own right), but also because of Julia, my high-school girlfriend, whom I’d already followed to college. We’d moved in together, co-signatories on a little bungalow with a lemon tree out front. She was in graduate school for her teaching certificate. I waited tables. My late nights plus her early mornings meant seeing each other mostly on weekends.

Except one night I came home to find her waiting up on our futon. I knew something was wrong even before she told me to have a seat. For months, she said, she’d been feeling confused. And she didn’t know how it had happened, but she’d slept with someone else.