Тэд Уильямс - The War of the Flowers

"But you're my friend, man!"

That caught him short. It took a moment to move forward, to continue letting go. "Thanks. Really. You're my friend too, John, don't ever doubt it. I'm just not going to be very good at friendship stuff for a little while. I'm… I don't know, I'm just out of juice. My batteries are empty."

"So what are you going to do, now that… ? I mean, you gonna go back to Khasigian's?"

"Not right now. I'm going to sell the house, take a little time. You know that old joke — 'Death is life's way of telling you to slow down'? Well, it works best when you're the one that dies, but I found out it pretty much works no matter what." He hesitated, unwilling to wander too far out into the things he had been thinking about. It wasn't really the kind of shit his friend wanted to hear, or would even understand. "I'm just not ready to be in the world right now, Johnny. Give me some time, I'll be back."

"You better, or I'll come over and kick your ass."

When he was off the phone he took a deep breath, stared hard at the pile of real estate forms on the dining room table, and decided that it really wasn't too early for a second beer after all. You could pour things into an emptiness like this all day but it would never fill up.

Hey, I'm doing paperwork, selling property, right? That means I'm employed. I'm just lucky enough to have a boss who allows me to drink in the afternoon.

He emptied half the beer in the first few swallows, then rubbed the cool bottle against his forehead, wanting everything to soften up, to get smooth and simple. Sure, he was drinking too much, but give a guy a break. He'd lost his girlfriend, their baby, and now his mother, all in a few months. Not a therapist in the world would fault him. And if he bumped into one who would, well, he'd smack him in the mouth.

Shit . He stared bleakly at the forms, at the boxes of his mother's carefully ordered papers. The house was oppressing him, everything staying just where he left it each day because no one else lived there. All the clean, desolate surfaces, the empty rooms, his mother's things already stuffed into boxes and moved out to the garage because it was just too damn depressing to look at them any more. But yesterday the real estate lady had been in two or three times with clients, and seemed in her horrifyingly chipper way to think that she had a few serious buyers already.

Thank God for a strong housing market . The faster it sold, the less time he'd have to live there.

He finished off the beer, contemplated briefly getting two or three more out of the fridge and just cashing in the afternoon in front of some stupid television movie — not that he'd find anything decent, because his mom had never bothered to get cable, but that wasn't the point, was it? The point was to blot out the long hours, to smear the transition into evening, when he would have the excuse of going out to get dinner somewhere; then he could come back and safely, responsibly drink a few more beers like any normal householder, fall asleep watching the late news, and not have to think until the morning sun was blazing through the windows again.

Something gurgled in his throat. It took a moment before he realized it was a scream bottled in his innards, a blast of misery trying to force its way out. He felt a chill across his hot skin, like the first signs of a bad flu.

What am I doing? I don't belong here.

He forced himself to get up and go to the table, staggering a little as he went — had it been four beers already, or just three? He sat in front of the boxes and spread papers, the tidy big blue envelopes from the realtor, his mother's address book and card files, but he found he couldn't move. The light suddenly seemed wrong even with all the drapes pulled, as though the entire house had been lifted out of the warm but unexceptional Northern California sunshine and dropped down onto the boiling surface of the planet Mercury. Worst of all, he felt something else staring out through his eyes, as though like a television image gone out of sync there was suddenly more than one Theo. It was the dream, the terrible dream that came to him so often, but he was awake. The alien presence was just… there , no thoughts he could share, nothing but a vague, oppressive sense of connection.

Whatever the other Theo was, though, he didn't like it at all. It felt horribly cold, this phantom self, even in the midst of the heat that scorched his brain, cold as a nugget of ice dancing in the tail of a comet.

What, am I having a… a stroke or something? Oh, God, please, no…

His thoughts fizzed for a moment like a string of dud firecrackers, then the twist of strangeness suddenly loosened, leaving only the normal bleak light of a warm, shuttered living room and a single thought that remained echoing in his brain.

Dead. They're all dead.

He put his head down and waited until he felt like himself again, one single self. It was just a sort of fainting spell, coupled with depression. They weren't all dead, of course. Catherine was still very much alive, alive and dating someone else. And Johnny — shit, Johnny was immortal.

Don't even think it. Don't jinx him like you jinxed the baby…

Theo pushed the beer and also that terrible thought away, but when he tried to concentrate on the real estate papers again it was hopeless, like trying to read the grain of a piece of wood. Lender's details, fire insurance, contents insurance, title insurance. Hours of research. No way he was going to manage it with his head in this kind of shape. He looked at his mother's box of personal papers, saw the edge of an envelope with blue and yellow flowers stenciled on it, and pulled it out.

It was a card, a kitschy illustration of a kitten playing with a ball of string while the mother cat watched contentedly. The printed verse inside read,

And here came the damn tears again.

He couldn't even remember giving it to her. From the writing he must have been about six or seven. What was surprising was that she had saved it — his mother, the queen of unsentimental pragmatism. What else was in there?

He took the box back to the couch and tipped it over. Most of what fell out were the kind of things he had expected to find in the carton, insurance policies, old bankbooks for saving accounts long closed — so why the hell was she hanging onto them, then? — and a few marginally weird things like a handbook for breast self-examination, hidden in its own little manila envelope as though it were pornography. But there were also a few letters to her from his father, one of which seemed to have been written in the Fifties, before they were married, while Peter Vilmos was still stationed in the Philippines and she was still in Chicago. Any hope that it might reveal his father's lusty, romantic younger self — the self a younger Theo had wanted to believe had been there before normal life had crushed it, but had never quite been able to believe in — disappeared quickly as he read it.

Dear Anna ,

Well, it's been a few weeks so I thought I should write you again, since you said you wanted me to write. Life is pretty much the same. Jenrette, the guy in the next bunk, still snores like crazy. The food is pretty bad, but at least there's not much of it! (Joke) I hope you and your Mom and Dad are good, and that your Dad isn't still having so much trouble with being sick and missing work, like you wrote. We had to put together a supply hut the other day and I was in charge, which was harder than it sounds because it is really windy here, "blowing up a gale" most of the time, and the sheet metal wants to blow away and it is really heavy! But we got the hut built OK