David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

“Anything,” he said. “Maybe something on the austere side. Not a heartbreaker.”

“Oh, that is you ,” she said. “Well. You in one mode. God, I hope I don’t sound as critical as I sound . Well. Austere. Yes. We have just the thing. Almost just the thing.”

She began to play, from memory, the first of the Two-Part Inventions. He listened to the two lines of notes snaking around each other. Amazing, still, in the general what-a-piece-of-work-is-man sort of way, even if no longer something to love a person for.

—

Margaret kicked in her Bottom Feeder piece on Tuesday, attached to an email saying it was her last, and to send whatever checks she had coming care of Sylvia Moss—was that the mother?—at an address in Jupiter, Florida. It was unpublishable and unfixable. It started out with her on the bus from Albany and a TV up front blaring game shows and then to how the planet was done for—okay, no argument there—and human life was a virus. (Wasn’t that in Naked Lunch ?) She said it would be better to get shot trying to kill the president than to die “the slow death of consent”—an arresting phrase, but what did it mean, exactly? She said the whole ride long she pictured New York nuked before she could get there, then how sorry she was to see that it wasn’t. Then she had stuff in there about cancer—how did that connect to anything? Where would you even begin?

Aunt Lissa’s saying something very serious, and bad Carl’s playing with the metal creamer thing. He thumbs the lid up, lets it drop. Tiny clank. Aunt Lissa says, “Are you following?”

“Absolutely.”

“Give me strength.” Big sigh. “All right, enough said. What’ll it be? I don’t imagine you’ve been eating.”

“Coffee,” he says, which makes him sound blown away (like he’s not ) because he’s got a cup right in front of him. He just means he’s fine.

“You’ve got to eat a little something.”

“Let me look in the Book of Life.” He lifts the menu from the metal rack. “Pray Jee -zus that mah name be written thar.” Inside they’ve got a color picture of a hot dog with gleaming highlights. “This is incredible,” he says.

“Why am I doing this?” Aunt Lissa says.

“You’re an enabler,” he says. “That’s a joke.” He’d better start marking them as such.

“Carl. You do understand what’s going on, yes? Could you look at me?”

He sees in Aunt Lissa’s eyeglasses a miniature glimpse of his own face. Boy, he is never taking drugs again, except down drugs. “You mean do I know I got arrested?” he says. He rubs his fingers back and forth across the stubble on his jaw, and it sounds exactly, exactly , like sawing wood. He’s even going to get off the Paxil, which makes like an empty space underneath your consciousness.

“Thank heaven for little mercies.” She looks at her watch. A man’s watch. “I still don’t quite—You were visiting somebody here?”

“Long story.” He thumbs up the lid of the creamer again. Lets it down without a sound.

“I don’t want to know, do I?” She checks the watch again. “Now, what about your job? Do you need to call them? I assume this is a working day.”

“Hey, works for me,” he says. “Joke.”

“All right. I’ve done my duty,” she says. “I guess I should tell you, I called Elaine. I had no idea you two were…”

“Right,” he says. “Actually, you know what I actually want? I actually want waffles.” He holds his palms six inches apart to show her the squareness.

“Is there anything you would like to talk about?”

He picks up his fork and drags the tines across the paper napkin. “Okay, what movie?”

“What movie what ?”

He nods. “Think about it.”

“You know,” she says, “since your hearing isn’t until Friday? Why don’t we go down to the farm for a couple of days. I’m sure Henry would like to see you.”

“What, are you on the pipe?” He wouldn’t mind just staying right here. He looks down at his feet under the table: wet running shoes in a puddle of snowmelt. He’d patched them with Shoe Goo where the soles were separating from the uppers: so much for this, what’s the word, this canard that he doesn’t take care of himself. This duck .

“He is your brother,” Aunt Lissa says.

The waffles arrive, and Carl mooshes the ball of butter with his fork. “You never guessed my movie.”

“I’m afraid I’m not following,” she says.

He sucks the fork clean, drags the tines across his napkin again and holds it up so she can see the marks.

“Wait,” she says. “This is ringing a bell.”

“Should.” He puts the napkin in his lap. “You took me to see it. Film series they used to have?”

She claps her hands. “Of course.” Shakes her head. “What could I have been thinking of? You were all of what?” She watches him pour syrup. “If I could have just a bite,” she says, “I’d be your friend for life.”

When they get to the car, Aunt Lissa paws in her purse, then looks in the window. “I knew I left the keys in the switch,” she says. “Is your side locked?”

“You don’t have a spare?”

“Actually, I—Oh, damn it . It’s under the hood, and of course you can’t—Oh. This is so exasperating. Well, there’s a gas station.” He looks where she’s looking. Sunoco: sky blue, sun yellow. “Maybe they have one of those things you stick through the window. Don’t ever get old.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t worry.”

“Pooh. Just because—I don’t know. We don’t have time for this discussion now.”

“Good,” he says. “You want me to go over?”

“It’s nice of you, dear. But I think I’d better.”

—

Aunt Lissa’s driving him down the Thruway into the snow country. It’s the pea-soup Volvo Uncle Martin bought the year he died, and she still steers strong handed, chin jutting. She’d looked older when she showed up at the jail, but now she’s settled back into Aunt Lissa.

Drunk driving. Which is the most incredible joke in the world because he was only drinking to try to ease down off the other shit. In fact, hadn’t he gotten stopped right along here somewhere, near the exit for Coxsackie? He had Hot Country Radio going because the Best of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties had started playing Here come old flattop , which was not a helpful song when you just wanted words that hooked up to something. At one point he caught himself watching for the place where his parents died, except that was on the Connecticut Turnpike, near exit 63. Meanwhile he was working on a theory that if he could make it as far as Kingston he’d be okay. He had a bottle of Old Crow between his thighs, sticking up like a peepee, or a tepee—you know, as in “sticking up like a tent pole”—which he put there precisely because it was a joke. Here, let’s spell it out: being drunk fucks up your sexual performance. When the cop pulled him over, he turned the radio off but decided that hiding the bottle would look furtive. The cop said, “And do you know how fast you were going, Carl?” And Carl said, “I think I got carried away by the radio,” which was not a surreal saying but just the very, very traditional association of uptempo songs with driving fast. He pointed at the radio as evidence. The cop said, “You were going twenty miles an hour.”

Black trees are sticking up out of the white hillsides. Sky seems white, too. He closes one eye and looks from hills to sky, then back again. Maybe what it is, the sky’s a darker white? Aunt Lissa’s telling him, again, the story of how she and Uncle Martin came to buy the place in Germantown. The house just spoke to her , that’s her formulation, so they stopped and an old woman came to the door. “We were admiring your house and just decided to stop and tell you so.” And the old woman said, “Well, it happens to be for sale, and my son’s coming tomorrow to put a sign up.” They bought the house, Henry bought the hill.