Holy Water (33 page)

—
Anyway, I just wanted you to know. And to tell you to, you

know, to take care of yourself, Henry, and that I hope things t
urn out well for you over there.

—

—?

—I
’
m glad you
’
re happy, Rachel.

He stares at the last passages onscreen for a while, wondering if something else will pop up or if that will be the end of it between them, with all future communication initiated by her attorney. His in-box is filled with messages, all work-related. There was a time when he had a circle of friends who would call and later e-mail each other, but after he moved to the country he let more and more time go between sending and replying to messages. As the weeks turned into months, the incoming e-mails slowed to a trickle, and by the time last year that he decided to do something about it, most of his alleged friends
’
addresses had changed and his wry suggestions for long-overdue get-togethers were kicked back to him unopened. To be sure, there were more ways than ever to track his old acquaintances down—Google begat Classmates begat Facebook,
Linkedln
, Twitter, and all the subsequent social networks—but he made no further attempts. He found a sad sort of solace in the fact that he had at least tried to reconnect, once, and something else entirely in the epiphany that he hadn
’
t really wanted to in the first place.

The effort mattered more than the result.

He
’
s still staring at the screen when it blinks off, then on, then off again. The fridge motor has also shut down, and looking up, he sees that the light over the kitchen sink is out too. At the spa there were backup generators for Galado
’
s frequent power outages, but in USAVille this is not the case.

~ * ~

There Are No Bonus Rooms in the

Ruins of an Imagined Future

Two hours of solitary is enough.

He laces up his hiking shoes, grabs a sixteen-ounce bottle of Happy Mountain Springs water from the package Maya brought him, and heads out into the abandoned neighborhood.

A sheet-metal sky of factory particulate is suspended just above the base of the surrounding mountains, obscuring the post-noon sun and shearing off the rooftops of the empty homes of the valley. At first he purposely holds to the center of the broad paved street as he walks, content to contemplate from a distance the dozens of peripheral structures in various stages of incompletion. But the further he walks away from his driveway, the more he
begins to wander onto the pale, hard-packed dirt of the unclaimed front yards and within arm
’
s reach of the timber webs of unsheathed exterior walls and roughly framed saber-toothed gables.

In his life he has been guided through developments in progress where there was a palpable sense of what
’
s soon to come, the kinetic buzz and tease of anticipation. The pull of the imminent. But walking on the cross-hatched two-by-twelve floor joists of one of a hundred three-bedroom townhouses indefinitely frozen in Phase Two, he isn
’
t feeling the thrill of what
’
s yet to come, or what
might
one day come, so much as the cold surety of that which will never be.

In his life he has also explored many ruins, including an 1850s Colorado silver-mining town, a burned-out Victorian hotel on the lake of his youth, and an abandoned Boy Scout camp deep in the
Adirondacks. And those places, while spooky, held a different fascination. Their splintered and crumbled walls were dusted with the residue of human experience. There were memory shards in the rubble, and in the surrounding air the morbidly thrilling sensation of lives lost and unrequited dreams floated like a
phantasmagoric
presence.

But this place. Yeah, it
’
s a sort of ghost town, only one in which no one has ever lived or died. Which is something he finds in many ways eerier and more disturbing than a Civil War battlefield or a graveyard at midnight.

This place.

The ruins of an imagined future.

He hops off the first-floor platform onto the chalk-hard earth and takes a swig of Happy Mountain Springs
’
finest while surveying the frozen residential landscape of USAVille.

If music were an option, he decides that the song for this moment should be
“
Where Is My Mind?
”
by the Pixies (the Purple Tape, seventeen-song original demo-check).

And you
’
ll as
k
yourself

Where is my mind?

He tries to remember the rest of the lyrics, but without his iPod he can
’
t. Can
’
t recall anything beyond the only part of the song that had interested him in the first place: its self-indulgent, fatalistic hook. Any alt-rock lyric that celebrated alienation or disillusionment in the most remotely clever way, he realizes, resides on one of his playlists, wherever they are.

~ * ~

At the end of the cul-de-sac, just before the entry to the would-be mini-mall, sits a house much closer to completion than the others. Its exterior is sheathed in plywood, wrapped in
Tyvek
, and more than half covered with white composite clapboard. All of the doors and most of the windows have been installed and trimmed, and inside the framing studs are covered with
untaped
Sheetrock.

This, Henry thinks, is very close to the condition his house was in when he and Rachel first toured it. Even then, following their
Realtor from one subdivision to another, or to the rare yet out-of-their-price-range lone colonial on a hilltop, he didn
’
t feel anything close to a great sense of anticipation, or that a wonderful new phase of their lives was about to begin. He remembers feeling that looking for the house, buying the house, and finally moving there was simply something to do, a thing that perhaps they ought to do, if only because at that point, though they never articulated it to each other, they were at a loss for what else they might try.

What he also remembers about his first pass through the nearly finished rooms—besides stepping over the black cords of the carpenter
’
s momentarily discarded power tools and hearing himself actually asking the Realtor, because Giffler had told him to, if there was a bonus room, even though he had no idea what a bonus room was or why, in a house this size, he
’
d need it—is a distinct sense of dread. But he knew that it was a lesser dread than he
’
d have felt if they had done nothing at all.

It occurs to him now, dragging the top of a thumb through a layer of construction dust on the
Corian
countertop, that buying that home with Rachel was a form of marital nihilism, of relationship suicide, and that subconsciously they both knew it. Otherwise why else, without children, let alone a plan for having a family, would they move to twenty-first-century suburbia like moths to . . . no, moths don
’
t know that beyond heat and dazzling light the flame will suddenly destroy them, while Rachel and Henry, they
certainly
had warnings.

If anyone was a moth to suburbia
’
s flame, he thinks, it was his grandparents. In the late forties the concept was flush with momentum and promise. The latest incarnation of the American freaking dream. The thing to do after coming home from the blasted forests of Ardennes, the bloody waters of Leyte Gulf. After surviving naval assaults, artillery bombardments, and bayonets in the hedgerows while it seemed as if half your generation didn
’
t, the prospect of living far from the noise of the city in a generic subdivision of affordable prefab homes probably didn
’
t seem so bad.

When it came time for his parents to decide where they were going to live their lives, there was much more data to draw from. For starters, having grown up in suburbia, they were aware of and
had experienced most of its benefits and shortcomings. They were the damaged children of Cheever and
Rabbit and
Revolutionary Road,
just as they were the fortunate and comforted children of homecoming dances and firemen
’
s parades and
Father Knows Best.
More than once while growing up his parents had no doubt seen the air taken out of the suburban dream (adultery, alienation, cultural depravity), as often as they had seen it resuscitated (community, belonging, adultery). And most likely they knew exactly what they were getting into before they decided to sign the lease on their own contemporary ranch with detached garage and enough room in the backyard for an aboveground pool.

They had at least considered the data and made a decision.

But what data had he and Rachel considered? For sure they
’
d been exposed to an even broader cultural sampling than their parents had. Plus they
’
d had more than a taste of life away from suburban life, in college in Boston and later as young
Manhattanites
. By the time they had made their decision on that inbound train from Westchester after the harvest festival at the home of people whom, incidentally, they would never see again, they had generations of data to work with.

And Henry can honestly say right now that they ignored every last bit of it.

Which plays right into his relationship suicide theory. They had chased the absolute worst aspects of the suburban cliche to give themselves an excuse to unearth the reality of Henry and Rachel more rapidly: They were flawed. And their relationship—not suburbia—was flawed.

Suburbia, like USAVille, is simply a vessel waiting to be filled by angst or contentment, a lifetime of hopelessness or generations of happiness. Unfortunately, he and Rachel had seen suburbia as nothing more than an opportunity to ramp up their already escalating pangs of hopelessness and desperation and expedite the inevitable.

Of course he hadn
’
t been able to see it then, and Rachel undoubtedly has her own theories on the subject, but he does see it all quite clearly now, as he sits six time zones away from his past, pacing the length of the front porch of a home that may never be inhabited.

~ * ~

Back in New York he always made a point of avoiding the malls in and around his hometown, especially the large, enclosed malls, which seemed to have their own ecosystem, fed at the top of the food chain by human spirit and money.

He used to tell Rachel that every aspect of the mall experience depressed him, but she wasn
’
t sympathetic to his claims. She used to answer,
“
No shit. You think I like doing the zombie walk past the Candle Castle, the World of Womanly Lotions, and six different versions of the Gap? The days of mall as novelty experience—going to admire the atrium fountains and the latest-model Saabs parked in front of the Sunglass Hut—are long past. We go because we need shit, Henry, and for you to pretend that you are above it and won
’
t go because it
’
s not stimulating enough, or because it reflects too much truth about the world you refuse to engage, is an insult to my intelligence.
”

Yet this mall, dark and decaying, never complete and never new, he has no intention of avoiding. If anything, the ghostly emptiness sprawled before him is an attraction. As he enters the doorless center of the concrete-block edifice, bats alight from the aluminum header for a would-be interior storefront. Strolling down the darkening entry venue, he imagines Rachel
’
s atrium fountain at the end of his sightline, flanked perhaps by a
Jamba
Juice stand and a discount perfume cart. To his immediate right, maybe a Stride Rite shoe store, a crappy jewelry shop, a Bath and Body Works. To his left, he
’
s thinking a Chili
’
s or an Applebee
’
s. Something with aspirations a quarter-step above fast food, with a serviceable bar.

Much better to imagine it than experience it.

A second floor of retail ruins overlooks the first-floor atrium, but there are no escalators. He locates a concrete stairway on the back wall and makes his way up. Stacked on the edge of the far walls are bundles of aluminum wall studs and iron rebar, waist-high wooden wheels wrapped full with copper wire, and a half-dozen pallets of bagged mortar. He wonders why, with so much poverty all around, the materials here and in the surrounding homes haven
’
t
been looted, stripped clean, reused, and resold. He decides that maybe the locals look at this place as a repository of bad spirits, like the forbidden peaks that Maya showed him, an evil place not to be disturbed. As he continues, he can
’
t help but be thrilled and relieved by the fact that none of this has come to pass, and in all likelihood never will.