Jonathan Lethem: The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

Maureen and I sat on the couch and kissed.

“Hey,” came Frank’s voice eventually. “Pete and I were talking about catching a movie or something. We could get a slice of pizza too, take the car and be back in a few hours—”

“Peter?” I said.

He appeared in the doorway, right on cue. “Yeah, Dad, there’s a new Clive Barker movie—”

“Homework?”

“Didn’t get any.”

I gave Frank the car keys and twenty bucks for pizza or whatever. I was being tiptoed around, sure, but I didn’t let myself feel patronized. The few breaks I get I earn, twice over.

They left, and Maureen and I went back to kissing on the couch. We still hadn’t exchanged a word. After a while we went into the bedroom like that, affectionate, silent. We didn’t get around to words until an hour or so later.

Turned out it was just as well.

Maureen had closed her eyes and rolled over on her side, curled against me. But the muscles of her mouth were tight; she wasn’t asleep. I put my hand in her hair and said her name. She said mine.

“How’s it been?” I said.

She waited a while before answering. “I don’t know, Tom. Okay, I guess.”

“I wasn’t gone too long this time,” I said, though it didn’t need saying.

She sighed. “That last one just took something out of me.”

“What are you saying?”

She spoke quietly, tonelessly, into the crook of my arm. “I don’t know how long you’ll be around. I can’t trust it anymore. I feel like if I let myself relax I’ll get ripped off again.”

There wasn’t any answer to that, so I shut up and let the subject drop. “Peter all right?”

“Yes. Always. He’s going to be on some debating thing now. I think he likes having Frank around.”

“Do you?”

She didn’t answer the question. “He’s so different from when I first met him, Tom. When we got married. I thought he was such a buffoon. Such a loud, intrusive character.” She laughed. “I was afraid we’d have a son like him. Now he’s so polite .”

“He’s a guest in your house,” I pointed out.

“It’s not just that,” she said. “He’s gotten old, I guess.”

“He said he’s been cooking. Is he in your way? He’ll go if I tell him to.”

“He wants to move out here. Did he tell you that?”

“Yes,” I said. And thought, As well as something odd about the telephone. I didn’t say it. “But he’s got money, I think. We’ll find him a place—” I stopped. She still hadn’t said whether she wanted him around, and the gap was beginning to irritate me. I was sensitive enough to her by now that I noticed what wasn’t being said.

And she was smart enough to notice my irritation. “He’s fine, really,” she said quickly.

“He’s actually quite a help, cooking…”

“Yes?”

“I’ve just gotten used to being alone, Tom. With you gone, and Peter out with his friends. I’ve had a lot of freedom.”

The skin on my back began to crawl. I took my hand out of her hair.

“Say it,” I said.

She sighed. “I’m trying to. I’ve been lonely, Tom. And I don’t mean lonely for some odd old relative of yours to sleep in the guest room, either.”

“Is it someone I know?”

“No.”

I thought I could manage a couple more questions before I blew my cool. “Does Peter know?”

“No.”

“ Are you sure? ”

“Jesus, Tom. Yes, I’m sure.”

“What about Frank?”

“What about him? I didn’t tell him. I can’t imagine how he’d guess.”

“There aren’t any letters, then. Or weird phone calls. You aren’t being sloppy—”

“No, Tom.”

That was all I could take. In pretty much one motion I got up and put on my pants. Almost burst a blood vessel buttoning my shirt.

Then I surprised myself: I didn’t hit her.

Instead I put on my shoes and went to the kitchen for a bottle, and sat down on the couch in the moonlight and drank.

It wasn’t any good. I couldn’t be in the house. I put on a jacket and took the bottle for a walk around the neighborhood.

To the west, in my Hell, there’s a place I call the Ghost Town. It’s like a Western movie set, with cheap facades passing for buildings, and if anyone lives there, they’re hiding. The moon lights the main street from behind a patch of trees, throwing cigarette butts and crumpled foil wrappers discarded there into high relief. Sometimes I can make out hoofprints in the dust.

In the middle of the street is a naked, crying baby.

Gusts of wind rise as I walk through the Ghost Town, and they grow stronger as I approach the baby, whipping the dust and refuse of the street into its face. The baby’s crying chokes into a cough, sputters, then resumes, louder than before. The baby is cold. I can tell; I’m cold myself, there in the Ghost Town. By the time I reach down to pick up the baby, the wind tearing through my little chest, I’m seeking its warmth as much as offering my own.

If I pick up the baby it turns into The Happy Man. Instantly. Every time.

I’ve already said what happens when The Happy Man appears.

Needless to say, then, I avoid the Ghost Town. I steer a wide berth around it. I often avoid the west altogether. As much as I want to go back to my life, I can’t bring myself to pick up the baby, knowing that I’m bringing on Colonel Eagery. I’m not capable of it. And I’m not comfortable walking through that town, feeling the rising wind and listening to the baby’s cries, and not doing anything. Hell seems so contingent on my actions; maybe if I don’t go in that direction there isn’t a baby in the first place. I’d like to think so.

Anyway, it had been months since I’d walked through the Ghost Town.

But I walked through it that night, in my dreams. I don’t know why.

I woke up still dressed and clutching the bottle, on the living room couch. What woke me was the noise in the kitchen. Maureen making breakfast for Peter.

Head low, I slunk past the kitchen doorway and into the bedroom.

By the time I woke again Peter was off to school, and Maureen was out too, at work. I put myself through the shower, then called the station and said I wasn’t coming in. They took it all right.

When I went back out I found Uncle Frank making coffee, enough for two. I accepted a cup and grunted my thanks.

“Can you handle some eggs?” he asked. “There’s an omelet I’ve been meaning to try. You can be my guinea pig…”

I cleared my throat. “Uh, sure,” I said.

He went into action while I let the coffee work on my mood. I was impressed, actually. Frank seemed to have diverted some of his eccentric passion into cookery. He knew how to use all the wedding-present stuff that Maureen and I had let gather dust. The smells charmed me halfway out of my funk.

“Here we go.” He juggled it out of the pan and onto a plate, sprinkled some green stuff on top and put it in front of me. I waited for him to cut it in half, and when he didn’t I said, “What about you?”

“Oh,” he said. “I ate before. Please.”

I put the whole thing away without any trouble. Frank sipped his coffee and watched while I ate.

“I used to cook for you when you were a little boy,” he said. “’Course then it was eggs in bacon grease, smeared with catsup—”

My throat suddenly tightened in a choking spasm. I spurted coffee and bits of egg across the table, almost into Frank’s lap. He got up and slapped at my back, but by then it was over.

“Jeez,” I said. “Some kind of hangover thing. I’m sorry…”