Infinite Home (22 page)

I
N
THE
1966 mint-green Dodge Dart that Claudia had purchased for $4,250 the day she’d quit her job, Paulie sat up front with the window way down. The wind pushed back towards Edward, examining the contours of his receding hairline. Under her foot, the give of the gas pedal galvanized Claudia’s already electric mood; she kept turning up the volume of
Pet Sounds
and letting her left hand float out the window. Edward, strapped in by the well-worn seatbelt, wearing his only shorts—an unfortunate pair of bleach-spotted cutoffs—pressed his back against the vinyl and felt the car’s rapid acceleration. He wondered briefly at how quickly, how myopically, he’d agreed to come, but then his vision settled on the line of Claudia’s arm, now stretched across the middle section to reach Paulie’s shoulder, and he felt proud and awake.

“Paulie,” Claudia barked as she drummed four fingers against the peeling steering wheel. “Tell us about these fireflies. Lay it on us.”

Edward leaned forward. “Build a house out of facts, brother. I want to live in them.”

Paulie giggled, then cleared himself of humor to make room for sacrosanct focus.

“They’re called synch-ro-nous fireflies,” he began, talking over the rushing of the freeway and furrowing his eyebrows so that he looked, for once, like someone who had lived thirty-odd years. In the rearview mirror, an oversized soda cup danced wildly between cars, willing suicide. Trucks as long as Manhattan blocks trundled past.

“And they only live in two places on the earth. We’re going to one of them. Elk-mont, Tenn-ess-ee.” He gave each syllable attention; he wanted to honor this information.

“If
synchronous
reminds you of
synchronicity
, then you’re on the right track, my friends!”

Paulie told them that the
Photinus carolinus
gathered once a year, that thousands of the males pulsed in glowing simultaneity, competing for the attention of the females that clustered below, watching, each hoping to choose the brightest mate.

For Claudia and Edward, Paulie’s babbling crested and receded like the landscape out the windows. During a lull, in which Paulie stopped speaking and Claudia didn’t pick out another tape, Edward retrieved his video camera and began recording, moving first through the space between the front seats, bits of Claudia’s hair that whipped into the frame, then moved towards Paulie.

“Eddy!” he said. “Is this going to be a movie? Will you make me very famous? Here, get me smiling. Make my little teeth big.” In the one-inch viewfinder, close up, the rows of tiny white triangles could have been something else—hills in the distance, calcified shipwrecked things breaking through the sand on the bottom of the ocean—until the tongue broke through, fat and full.

T
HE
COUNTRY
T
HOMAS
HAD
REACHED
boasted of its beauty in a way that seemed to erase tract housing and mini-marts and rat-infested public transportation; the overwhelming height and age of the trees, the loud proof of the river beyond them, nullified his memory of anything else. When the map he’d hand-drawn at the library—a childhood habit and a comforting pleasure—indicated his location on the curving two-lane highway as half an hour or so from the possibility of Jenny, he pulled over on an untended shoulder. He would find his way to the water, which he believed he could smell.

On the silted bank, he accepted the probability of Jenny’s being long gone or dead, and he watched as the river, rather than bracing for impact, hurried its pace around the bend ahead. Picking up pebbles with his toes and letting them drop, Thomas waited there twenty minutes, until he felt his breathing had refined. Back behind the wheel, he signaled before he pulled out onto the concrete. He had not seen another car in hours.

At the point in the road where there should have been a turn into the community’s property, he searched for a clear demarcation but found none, let alone the hand-carved wooden sign or softly lit path of loose earth he had imagined in his more sanguine moments. The road neatly divided two biospheres, one that tumbled down in sharp angles of rock and trees that grew almost horizontally into the bleached altitudinous sky, the other a level forest dense with age and nearly lightless.

He left the car door open, the sensor dinging and nagging, as he paced back and forth along the road’s shoulder, pausing at points to will some divine clue and then blushing at his foolishness. On his final lap, ready to get in the car and scan the next few miles of road, he felt the pang of an approaching aura. Unwilling to embrace the uncomfortable swirl of color at the margins of his vision—
This doesn’t help me, not now—
Thomas settled horizontally on the damp and green side of the road with a hand over his eyes and waited for the ache to strike. As the pain descended, he tried to focus on the view, the trees that triangulated in their height and framed the lowering sun.

Closer to him than the wash of sky, thirty feet above the ground, a length of faded mauve cloth stretched from one branch to another. A foot above glinted a section of pink ribbon, taut and pearled with the near-dusk. A slash of green. Orange. Yellow. He gripped grass in his fists and looked, but saw no clear indication of how whoever tied them there had scrambled up, no marks in the tree but those of weather. The aura rippled and bled his perspective of the colors, and he waited for them to clear, his mind renouncing worries one by one, like muscles giving out.

—

I
T FELT DIFFICULT
to believe that an hour before, he’d lain curled in the throes of a migraine on the shoulder of the road: now he walked through patches of light where the trees parted their tangled meetings, now he saw—far ahead, but not unreachable—the system of structures.

He momentarily believed, with the kind of unblemished optimism that only accompanies new places, that he had nothing to be afraid of: he would end up with Adeleine or he wouldn’t, he would find Jenny or let the blurred idea of her go, he would accept the lost agency of his body and find another use. Fed by rosy resolve, he approached the cluster of buildings set against the forest in ragged lines, and made for the largest, where a slipshod porch cast blue shadows. The shade of a veranda, composed primarily of a drooping sweep of fishnet, was woven with the spines of hardback books, the lone soles of hiking boots, gnarled pieces of wood that varied in lengths and browns.

In the small of his back and the balls of his feet, Thomas felt the men approach.

He turned to witness their congruent outlines, long hair that fell around stern faces, clothing patched and repatched so thoroughly it obscured any original layer. Their ages seemed indeterminable, as if instead of possessing a certain number of years they shed and gained age, as circumstances required, from one great shared well. In one motion, all of them extended their arms upward in Vs. Either like reaching for something hidden, Thomas thought, or preparing for a fall.

“Raise your arms up to greet us,” said one with gray eyebrows that nearly met and a tattered rope of violet cloth in his long hair, not ungently. He was trying to guide him, Thomas could tell, attempting to lead the foreigner’s first communication.

“But I—can’t,” said Thomas, pointing at his limp arm with his virile one. “But I
can’t
.”

—

L
ATER
,
INSIDE
, a hardening clustered among the men. He was a stranger, and he had asked to speak with Jenny, had used her birth name as if he owned it. “I’m here,” he had said, “on behalf of her mother,” as though that would make it better, as though it weren’t offensive enough, his arriving there insisting she belonged more rightfully to some other life.

They were seated in what he assumed was a common area, under polished conch shells that sat on foot-long shelves of birch high up the wall. Bags of rice rested on tapestries of crudely stitched images of forests and rivers. Tortoiseshell cats entered and exited, turning corners purposefully. In a specious reversal of power, all the men sat on square pillows they had removed from a pile in the corner and arranged in a half orbit below Thomas, who balanced in a modest rocking chair. Looking at them, he noted they had mastered the art of listening and threatening simultaneously. The door, which leaned slightly off its hinges, was half open and suggested escape, but he understood they would not permit him to walk out.

“Her son is trying to take her home from her,” he said, his voice hushed with exasperation. “Jenny’s
brother
.”

“Song,” they said. Every time he said
Jenny
, all the figures in the room murmured
Song
in correction, further contributing to the impression that they were forever collectively processing.

“She was one of the first ones here, wasn’t she?” Thomas heard himself continue. “She came with Root.” He hoped that this might indicate a respect for their mythology, that he had not arrived to beg without understanding what they risked by giving, but the mention of the lean man in the forty-year-old photographs made them lower their heads.

“I’ll take you to see Song,” said the one Thomas now understood to be the eldest, “but after, it will be time for you to go.” He rose without checking to see whether Thomas was following, used a careful thumb and forefinger to open the door. Thomas, who hoped to express some thanks, stood to speak, but their heads were pressed into their laps, and their long hair in grays and browns ran over their ears and onto the dusty hardwood. The man he was meant to follow was already outside, and the day was already losing its downy heat.

E
DWARD
AND
C
LAUDIA
took turns at the wheel, slipping in and out of the driver’s seat without much discussion: he could tell by the change in her breathing, low and shallow, when she’d grown tired, and she knew when he became quiet, no longer mocked billboards and bumper stickers. Paulie alternately napped and enthused, woke into excitement and wore it out again. He resembled a maladroitly assembled angel under the staticky corona of hair that encircled him, and he glowed with the dew of sleep in the refracted sun. As he drooled on the bright blue sweatshirt pressed against the window as a pillow, Claudia periodically looked over and gave thanks for the temporary quiet. It was as though every time he regained consciousness, he remembered not only their destination and the much-anticipated dance of the fireflies, but also every moment in his life that had amused or satisfied him, every song and birthday and windless afternoon.

First his unnaturally long eyelashes fluttered, then his eyelids snapped up like blinds. His slack fingers twitched, then all straightened at once, like something being turned on, and clapped his face. “Oh my god!” yelled Paulie, so loud that Edward jammed his index fingers into his hairy eardrums. “We’re getting there, aren’t we!”

In Edward’s few moments alone—pissing in increasingly squalid gas station bathrooms, the rare occasion of focused thought made possible when both Claudia and Paulie had fallen asleep, on stretches of highway shoulder where they stopped occasionally to move their legs and establish some distance from one another—he admitted to feeling a little worried. Claudia looked towards her brother with a fierce adoration, yes, but she also assaulted the gas pedal with the unyielding force of a waterfall, she also seemed unconcerned with the existing flow of cars when merging onto the freeway. He had stopped suggesting she glance over her shoulder, which only made her driving more aggressive.

For the first three or four hours of the trip, her cell phone had rung and shaken at a near-constant rate. She had turned up the stereo and sung louder to
Sticky Fingers
, she had insisted on an inane car game in which one alphabetically listed the fictitious people they knew. Paulie had strained to remember: “At the party, I saw Aranda . . . Bernard . . . Caligula . . . Dan . . . Eloise.” Finally, without fanfare, she had turned off the phone and let it slide down her glistening palm, past her chipped blue fingernails, and onto the freeway.

Edward mentioned it later, at a cinder-block marriage of a Subway-KFC-ARCO where eleven-year-olds congregated to suck down cigarettes and a voice bleated over damaged speakers when a rented shower became available.

“What were you thinking? Just get rid of your phone? Think that was
whimsical?
What if mine was stolen! What if—”

He realized his mother and the anxiety he had inherited were glinting in his grating tone, and he recalibrated his voice. “Claude,” he said, unsure of when he had adopted the shortened version of her name, but certain some milestone of intimacy had been stomped over. “Wanna tell me why you’re acting like the entirety of
Thelma and Louise
sped up and played on loop?
Mid-Life Crisis: The Musical?
Should we do some screaming in headscarves, cut off our hair, prank call our exes? Is that it?”

Paulie slumped against the passenger window of the car, exhausted after singing to Jagger’s yowl, and they could see him napping from where they sat. Claudia brushed some crumbs of fried chicken off the table’s oily surface, folded her hands on the plasticked red, and put her head down and started to cry.

“I just want to have this. Can I just have it? Will you just let me have it?” She bolted upright again, and her fingers were straight and quick as knives as she passed them across her wet face.

“Have what? A terrifying sandwich served by a pregnant teenager named Kimmi? You just did.”

“Once I go back,” she continued, “everything is going to be different. I’m going to do what I should have done and make sure he’s always taken care of. I have to get Paulie and me a place together, build a client list and work from home. I have to keep him safe. Drew is losing his shit—who leaves someone not even two years into the marriage, he said, which, who can blame him—and that was him on the phone. He cries in some messages and swears in others. About every third one there’s some kind of threat.” She spit the words out low and hard, gnawing a tiny crescent of skin from her thumb, and he tugged the digit away from her mouth’s nervous bite, held it between two of his fingers.

“Okay. If you need me to support you in your no-holds-barred Spring Break-a-Thon, so be it. I’ll attach a boozy IV to your arm once we get to the Smoky Mountains. We can act out a commercial for herpes medicine, go white-water rafting and high-five on mountain peaks. But I have to ask you here to be a little bit cautious, and not drive so goddamn fast, and not start believing this is your very last shot at living. If you don’t start being a little more careful with yourself, I’m hailing the first Greyhound back to New York City.”

Claudia had never been known as beautiful. She had always dressed in high, flattering waists and dull gold ear studs, kept her brown hair tied and clean, her life small in the service of others. There, however, in the combination Subway-KFC, she loosened. His teasing coaxed her orthodontically corrected teeth into a smile that curved under her still-wet cheeks, and her hair fell tangled around her face, protesting a lifetime of imprisonment. She closed her eyes and began to nod, as though envisioning the cleaning of many rooms, the stacking and sweeping and mopping and finally, the space around her, gleaming.