Kingdom (18 page)

Most afternoons were spent walking up and down the empty beaches, staring out into the gray-blue nothing, somehow relieved that they couldn’t go any further, both taking quiet comfort in the limitations imposed by the natural world. They would sit side by side in the sand, drinking from his flask, a massive blanket draped across their shoulders, and stare at the ocean for hours, pressed tight together against the wind, watching solitary freighters crawl across the gray horizon.

She had a beat-up cassette with a bunch of old punk songs on it and in one of those beach towns, at a pawnshop, she found a boombox—bulky and gray and covered in stickers from forgotten causes—and some nights they would blast the tape until dawn, rewinding it over and over as they sat in front of the small fire Dylan would make on the beach, drinking and talking about bands that had long since broken up, bands they would never see live, bands whose surviving members still went on tour but Meghan swore she’d never go see them.

That summer he made love to her on the beach a few times, a blanket underneath them, protecting them from the damp, shifting sand; another blanket draped over Meghan’s shoulders, blocking out the cool night air as she moved on top of him. And although beach sex was never what the movies promised—they never told you how much sand Deborah Kerr got stuck in her ass—afterward, lying side by side on the sand, watching the night sky, was paradise. They were far enough away from Tiber City that the sky was clear and bright and Dylan could see all the constellations and even though he had forgotten the names of the stars and their stories, he and Meghan made up new ones, tracing warriors and animals and gods in the sky, imagining new mythologies.

The world seemed to melt away with a totality that eclipsed any drug Dylan had ever used; when she whispered
I love you
in the dark his heart sang and any feelings of separation and boundary vanished. The universe felt electric and new and the boombox blasted all night long, Iggy Pop and Joe Strummer and Patti Smith shouting down eternity until the tape wore out. They buried it at sea before ingesting more speed, hitting the highway just as the sun poked over the horizon, the land glowing and alive.

There was an old amusement park on the coast and toward the end of that summer Meghan finally convinced Dylan to go.

But I hate amusement parks
, he protested.

But this one is different
, she assured him.

And she was right; it was nothing like the colossal theme parks littering the East Coast. There were no superheroes, no movie tie-ins, no rides named after aging rock stars—just an old wooden roller coaster, a Ferris wheel, and a few other “vintage” rides, most of which were broken-down and roped off from the public. They went at night, after the families were gone and the park was almost empty—there were some homeless guys and chubby Puerto Rican girls but no one hassled anyone—and there were no lines and even though the rides were older and simpler and looked like shit, they were happy.

They snuck in a bottle of wine and wandered the main concourse, stealing sips and playing the rigged carnival games—ring toss, water gun air, whac-a-mole, skee ball—laughing as they lost in impossible ways. When the attendant wasn’t looking, Dylan snatched a giant stuffed whale off the prize rack and, on bended knee, presented it to Meghan. They made out for a while behind the bandstand—just kissing and groping—and the night was electric and then some old woman was yelling at them, telling them to get a room, and Meghan’s mouth tasted like cheap red wine and gum and lip gloss and then they were running back through the park, toward the Blue Comet roller coaster—a rickety beast of wood and steel, one of the last of its kind in America.

And then they were aboard the roller coaster, her hand on his thigh, as the cars began to climb the wooden track, their ascent heralded by a series of mechanical creaks and groans, and as they rose higher and higher he could see the lights of Tiber glowing in the distance; he could see the stars overheard. A gentle breeze blew across the car as, having reached the top of the loop, the ride slowed to a crawl.

What if I asked you to marry me right now?

Well that depends
, she answered.
Are you asking me to marry you?

But before he could answer the roller coaster kicked back to life, plunging down the backside of the track, and she had her hands up, laughing and screaming as the ride whipped around the track at breakneck speed. The rest of that night was a blur of wine and cigarettes and when he woke up in the morning, she was already awake, sitting up in the bed, watching him.

You know
, she whispered,
I would have said yes
.

But in the end, the strain of his father’s suicide had been too great, pulling their relationship down like a weight around the leg of a drowning man, and things had fallen apart, like they always did.

“You know,” Dylan said, “you’re the only person I ever told about tonight, about how I come down here.”

“Look,” Meghan started, leaning up against the side of the bar. “Say the word and I’m out the door. I just wanted to talk to you, make sure you’re OK.”

“What?” Dylan asked. “Why wouldn’t I be OK? What are you talking about?”

“People are talking. A friend of mine said she ran into you last week at Ruin; said you were in really bad shape. And I saw those pictures in the Post; you looked awful. Your eyes were so…off. It scared me.”

“That’s pretty vague,” Dylan shot back, the effects of three rapid-fire whiskey shots starting to take hold.

“It is,” Meghan agreed, nodding, “But I don’t know. I was surprised how concerned I was, actually. I can’t really explain it.”

“Fair enough,” Dylan replied, first looking into her eyes, and then away, across the room, at an old cigarette vending machine stocked with brands discontinued last decade.

“Well, here I am,” Dylan said. “Now what?”

Shaking her head, Meghan smiled sadly.

“I’ll go,” she said. “I guess maybe you are OK. I just needed to find out. I hope I didn’t ruin tonight—I just didn’t know how else to get in touch.”

Dylan was suddenly aware that he and Meghan were the only two patrons in the bar. The television above the bar, which had been off when they arrived, was now on, displaying images from a riot that had broken out downtown at IDD Energy Stadium. The sound was turned down—Johnny Cash was still playing in the background, letting everyone know what happens when the man comes around—but the news crawl at the bottom of the screen added details to the images of riot police, of protesters with bandanas wrapped around their noses and mouths, of a young woman lying unconscious on the concrete, of Heffernan’s people spinning the day’s events, all while the stadium burned in the background.

“No,” Dylan said, signaling to the bartender, “I want you to stay. Let’s see if I have any stories about my old man you haven’t already heard.”

The Journal of Senator Robert Fitzgerald
Excerpt # 3

To Dylan,

When Michael Morrison approached me to run under the Progress Party banner, I thought it might be an opportunity to vanquish my feeling of alienation—to connect with my fellow man. Instead, my alienation has been amplified. Newspapers in Tiber City are heralding a new “political awakening” driven by an “unprecedented connection” between candidate and citizenry. If only they knew the darker truth: that the connection is completely one-sided. My life is a blur of legislative sessions, fundraisers, fundraisers, fundraisers; rallies and late-night phone calls and people whispering terrible things in my ear. I miss votes on the floor. No one cares. I am told I have star power. I am told I am the voice of a generation. I can only recall the past in the third person, as though I were watching a movie: my parents, my childhood, my first love—all storyboard concepts I am familiar with but don’t know by heart.

I miss you and your mother but I have begun to spend less time at home because I am afraid; my behavior is growing so erratic, so unpredictable. I have lashed at your mother on several occasions—my mask of control is growing harder to sustain. There are periods where I black out for 10, 20 minutes; sometimes for up to an hour: I’ll come to on the couch, in the shower, even on the kitchen floor, sobbing.

So I look for other ways to eclipse this growing darkness, the anxiety and unease that waits for me around every corner of every anonymous convention center or when I sit alone in my darkened hotel room, after the rallies and the flesh-pressing, the flashbulbs and fake smiles, staring out across the illuminated skylines of a thousand cities, every single one the same, glass after glass of scotch to wash down the fistfuls of pills I’ve started taking. I watch the people go home from work and the light slowly leak from the land. The neon lights roar to life and a new wave of people wash across the city streets and below me there is life: some good, some bad but it is all life and it is in these moments when my sense of alienation is most acute. There is a rhythm to the world but while I can apprehend this rhythm, which I can understand as a concept, as something I might learn from a textbook, it is forever beyond my grasp. I feel as though something crucial is missing, that I am somehow incomplete and therefore I can only sense this other; I can never experience it directly.

So instead, I sit here in the darkness, numbing myself until they come to get me. And when they do, I will turn on again, like a machine. I will stand before the very people I now watch and they will believe in me, despite the fact that I have come to believe in nothing.

Love,
Your Father

Tiber City
Aug. 31, 2015
7:16 p.m.

S
pringwood Rest Home had always disturbed Dylan. It was not simply the fact that the woman who gave birth to him was essentially incarcerated here, doped up for the majority of her waking hours and dependant on an anonymous, revolving cadre of administrators. That was certainly part of his disgust but there was something more to Dylan’s loathing of the hospital—a still-evolving philosophical revulsion.

Part of this loathing, Dylan considered as he approached the main building, the rain coming down hard and soaking his jacket, was generated by the phrase “rest home.” Over the past few decades, a vast societal consensus had formed: By adding or subtracting a few syllables, man could put enough distance been himself and reality to make it through the day. Of course, reality wasn’t altered; it was just enhanced.

In Dylan’s opinion, this trend—the embrace of the euphemism—only made the inevitable breakdowns in civilized behavior all the more atrocious. It was as though when the stark realities of life finally slithered their way under, over, around, and through all the artificial constructs man threw up, the strain was too great and people just snapped. And not snapped like
punching a hole in the wall, but snapped like shooting up your office then cannibalizing your boss. Or driving off a bridge with the family in the car because the kids were possessed and DCS frowned upon DIY exorcism—that kind of snapped.

One such solution devised to keep these existential demons at bay was the rest home. But unlike, say, substituting police action for genocide or vision clearance engineer for a fucking window washer, the name rest home was quite apropos; just not in the sense most people applied it. A rest home, Dylan had come to discover, was not designed to provide “rest” for its occupants. However, it did provide a great deal of rest for those on the outside, relieving the arbiters of sanity of any further responsibility. Keeping the undesirables under chemically induced lock and key was just another means of keeping reality at bay; no need to interrupt life.