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

“Relax, Tom.” He got me a glass of water. “Probably the memory of those old breakfasts…” He laughed.

“Yeah.” Or the thought of Maureen and her new pal in the sack. I didn’t say it, though. I suddenly felt intense shame. Frank represented my family, he stood in for my dad. I didn’t want him to know the reason for my bender.

“Listen, Tom,” he said. “What say we go down to the water today? That’s not a long drive, is it?”

“Sounds great,” I admitted. “I need to get out of the house.”

An hour later we parked out by the Marina and walked down to the strip of beach. I expected Uncle Frank to tire quickly; instead I had to hurry to keep up. I felt like I was seeing him slowly come back to life, first in the kitchen, concocting the omelet, and now out here on the beach. He seemed to sense the deadness and emptiness in me and tried valiantly to carry on both ends of a chatty conversation. I heard glimpses of the old raconteur in his voice, which only made me wonder more what had sent it into hiding in the first place.

“Frank,” I said, when he came to the end of a story, “what happened? What’s got you on the run?”

He took a deep breath and looked out over the water. “I was hoping that wouldn’t come up, Tom. I don’t want to get you or Maureen into it.”

“I’ll decide what I want to get into,” I said. “Besides, it doesn’t necessarily protect us to keep us in the dark.”

He turned and looked me in the eye. “That’s a point. It’s — it’s the Mob, Tom. Only it’s not so simple anymore, to just say Mob. There’s a blurry territory where it crosses over into some federal agency… Anyway, it’s enough to say that I got crossed up with some real bad guys. I screwed ’em on some property.” He was looking out to sea again, and I couldn’t read his expression. “I’m not sure how much they really care, or how long before they get distracted by something else. Could be they just wanted to throw a scare at me. I just know it felt like time to get out of town for a while.”

“God, Frank. I’m sorry. That sounds tough.”

“Ah, it’s all my own goddamn fault. Anyway, I won’t stay much longer at your place. I would have gone already if you weren’t — you know, away. And Pete seemed — I don’t know. I felt like I could be of some use. It took my mind off my own problems.”

“Stay as long as you like, Frank.”

He smiled grimly. “I’m not necessarily in the right, you know…”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “When you go through some of the shit I’ve gone through, it gives you a different perspective. Right isn’t always a relevant concept. You’re family.”

He turned and looked at me, then. Hard. Suddenly he wasn’t just my cliched notion of “Uncle Frank” anymore; he was a complex, intelligent, and not always easy to comprehend man whom I’d known since before I could remember. Maybe it was just my emotional state, but for a moment I was terrified.

“Thanks, Tom.”

“Uh, don’t mention it.”

We looked out over the water without saying anything.

“I’m hip to Maureen,” said Frank after a while.

I probably tightened my fists in my pockets, but that was it.

“There isn’t really anything to say,” he went on. “Just that you’ve got my sympathy.”

“Don’t hold it against her,” I said. “I make it pretty tough. My whole setup makes it pretty tough.”

“Yeah.”

“Have you met him?” I asked.

“Nope. Just a phone call I wasn’t supposed to hear. Not her fault. My ears tend to prick up at the sound of the phone right now.”

“Peter?”

“Jeez. I don’t think so, Tom. Not that I know of. But he’s a smart kid.”

“No kidding.”

We came to a high place over the water, with a concrete platform and a rusted steel railing. I leaned on it and smelled the mist. Birds wheeled overhead. I thought about the night before, and wondered what I was going to say to Maureen the next time I saw her.

After a while I guess I choked up a little. “God damn,” I said. “I didn’t even get to see my kid last night.”

“That’s not your fault,” said Frank quietly.

“I always hang out with the kid, Frank. I’m never so wrapped up in my goddamned problems that I don’t have time for him. I only just got back.”

Frank got a cheerleader tone in his voice again. “Let’s go pick him up at school,”, he said. “Smart guy like him can miss half a day.”

“I don’t know.”

“C’mon. It’s easy. You just show up and they turn him over. Big treat, makes him a celebrity with all his pals.”

“You do this a lot?”

Frank got serious. “Uh, no,” he said. He almost sounded offended, for no reason I could discern. “They’d never turn the child over to anyone but his mother or father.” He turned away, the mood between us suddenly and inexplicably sour.

“Something the matter?” I said.

He closed his eyes for a minute. “Sorry, Tom. I guess I just all of a sudden got an image of my friends from back east showing up at the schoolyard. I’m just being paranoid…”

We exchanged a long look.

“Let’s go,” I said.

It was a relief to learn what a pain in the ass it was to get a kid out of school halfway through the day. We had to fill out a visitor’s form just to go to the office, and then we had to fill out another form to get permission to yank Peter from class, and then a secretary walked us to the classroom anyway.

It turned out it was a computer class. A bunch of the kids there had played Peter’s software Hell, which made me a visiting celebrity. I had to shake a lot of little hands to get back out. Frank was right: the visit would make Peter the most popular kid in school tomorrow.

We went out for hamburgers downtown, then we went back home. If Peter was disturbed by my drunken sprawl on the couch that morning, he did a good job of covering it up. He and Frank were full of computer talk, and I could see how well they were getting along.

Eventually we got around to the traditional post-Hell update, Peter and I huddled at the computer, punching in whatever new information I’d picked up on my trip. This time Frank sat in.

“Robot maker built a terrier,” I said. “A little livelier than the usual crap…” Peter typed it into the proper file. “But Eagery’s thing was a robot wolfman, as tall as me — me now , not in Hell. He could talk. He sounded like Eagery, actually.” I turned to Frank. “The Happy Man’s personality has a way of pervading his robots…”

Peter’s cross-reference check flagged the wolfman entry, and he punched up the reference. “In the south, Dad, remember? You met a wolfman, a real one, in the woods. You played Monopoly with him, then he turned into Colonel Eagery.”

“Yeah, yeah. Never saw him again.”

“Boy,” said Frank, speaking for the first time since we’d punched up Hell. “You guys are thorough. What do you think the wolfman means?”

I froze up inside.

But before I could speak, Peter turned, twisted his mouth, and shook his head. “Hell doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “That’s not the right approach.” He’d heard the spiel a dozen times from me, and I guessed he’d sensed my tenderness on the issue; he was sticking up for his dad.

Then he surprised me by taking it further. “Hell is like an alternate world, like in X-Men. It’s a real place, like here, only different. If you were going down the street and you met a wolfman, you wouldn’t ask what it means. You’d run, or whatever.”

Frank, who hadn’t noticed my discomfort, winked at me and said, “Okay, Pete. I stand corrected.”