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

Peter and I went back to our entry, more or less ignoring Frank. A few minutes later Maureen’s car pulled up in the driveway. I tried not to let my sudden anxiety show, for the kid’s sake.

“Tom.”

She stood in Peter’s doorway, still in her coat. When I looked up she didn’t say anything more, just inclined her head in the direction of the bedroom. I gave Frank the seat beside Peter at the computer, and followed her.

“Look at you,” she said when we were out of earshot.

“What?”

“When you’re not drunk you’re retreating into the computer. It’s just as bad, you know. Computer Hell. You’ve found a way to be there all the time, one way or another. You don’t live here anymore.”

“Maureen—”

“What’s worse is the way you’re taking him with you. Making him live in your Hell too. Making him think it’s something great. When you’re not here, he and his friends spend all day in front of that thing, living your Hell for you. Does it make you feel less lonely? Is that it?”

“I live here.” I knew I had to keep my voice quiet and steady and fierce or she’d talk right over me, and soon we’d be shouting. I didn’t want it to escalate. “Last thing I knew I lived here with you. Maybe that’s not the way it is anymore. But I live here. Seems to me it’s you who’s got one foot out the door.”

There was a moment of silence and then it hit me. Call me stupid, but it was the first time I felt the impact. Last night, making love, had been goodbye. The gulf between us now was enormous. Things weren’t going to suddenly get better.

It would take a huge amount of very hard, very painful work to fix it, if it could be fixed at all.

“Do you ever think of the effect it has on him? ” She was sticking to safe territory. I didn’t blame her. She had a lot of it. “You and your goddamned inner landscape —”

She broke off, sobbing. It was as though she’d been saving those words, and their release had opened the floodgates. It also occurred to me that she was opting for tears so I wouldn’t attack her, and I felt a little cheated.

Anyway, I took her in my arms. I’m not completely stupid.

“I don’t want him to live like that,” she said. Her fists balled against my chest for a moment, then her body went slack, and I had to hold her up while she cried. After a minute we sat on the edge of the bed.

“I don’t know, Tom. I don’t know what’s happening.”

“Well, neither do I.” I felt suddenly exhausted and hollow. “It seems like the ball’s in your court—”

I could feel her tensing up against my shoulder. So I dropped it.

I smelled onions frying in butter. I listened: Frank was cooking again, and explaining the recipe to Peter.

“It’s not an inner landscape,” I said quietly. “It’s a place where I live half my life. I get to share that with my son—”

She pulled away from me and stood up, straightened her clothes. Then she went into the living room, without looking back.

I lay back on the bed, only meaning to buy some time. But I must have been depleted, morally and otherwise, and I fell asleep, and slept through dinner.

When I woke again the house was dark. Peter was in his room; I could see the glow of the night light in the hallway. Maureen was slipping into bed beside me.

When I reached for her she pushed me away.

I didn’t make it into a big deal. I didn’t feel particularly angry, not at the time. In a few minutes we were both asleep again.

When I woke again, it was to the sun streaming in across the bed, heating me to a sweat under the covers. It was Saturday; no work for me or Maureen, no school for Peter. But Maureen was gone. I didn’t feel too good, and I lay there for a while just looking at the insides of my eyelids. There wasn’t any noise in the apartment, and I suspected they’d all gone somewhere to get out from under the shadow of you-know-who.

I didn’t let it bug me: I took a nice slow shower and went into the kitchen and made some coffee and toast.

But I was wrong. Peter was home. He wandered into the kitchen while I was cleaning up, and said, “Hey, Dad.”

This time I could see he knew something was wrong. I didn’t have what it took to keep it from him, and I guess he didn’t have what it took to keep it from me, either.

“Hey, Pete,” I said. “Where’s your mom?”

“They went out shopping,” he said. “Also to look at some place for Uncle Prank to live.”

I nodded. “What you doing?”

“I don’t know. Just some game stuff I got from Jeremy.”

“It looks like a pretty nice day out there—”

“I know, I know. I heard it already, from Mom.” He looked down at his feet.

There was a minute or two of silence while I finished clearing the table.

“I guess I should offer to ‘throw the old pigskin around’ or something,” I said. “But the truth is I don’t feel up to it right now.”

The truth was my guts were churning. I couldn’t focus on the kid. Seeing him left alone just made me think of Maureen and where she probably was right now. Frank was almost certainly playing the beard for her, and “shopping” by himself. If they came home with packages she’d have to unpack them to know what was in them.

“That’s okay,” he said seriously. “I don’t think we have an old pigskin anyway.”

I managed a smile.

“I’ll be in my room, okay, Dad?”

“Okay, Peter.”

Pretty soon I heard him tapping at his computer again. I sat and nursed the cold coffee and ran my thoughts through some pretty repetitive and unproductive loops. And then it hit me.

Just a twinge at first. But unmistakable.

I was on my way back to Hell.

I realized I’d felt inklings earlier that morning, in the shower, even in bed, and hadn’t let myself notice. It was already pretty far along. I was probably an hour or so away from crossing over.

By this time I’d perfected a kind of emotional shorthand. I went through all the traditional stages in the space of a few seconds: denial, bargaining, fear, etc. But underlying them all, this time, was a dull, black rage.

I’d almost never had so short a time back. That hurt. The fact that I was crossing over while Maureen was holed up in her midday love nest hurt more. Unless she came back in the next hour, I wouldn’t get in another word. I couldn’t make up, couldn’t plead, and I couldn’t threaten, either, or issue an ultimatum. All the words I’d been rehearsing in my head flew right out the window. She would come home to find me a zombie again.

I felt my claim on her, and my claim on my own life — on Peter, the apartment, everything — slipping away. I had a sudden, desperate need to at least see Peter. I would cram two weeks’ worth of unfinished business into the next hour. I got up and went into his room, my head whirling.

He turned from the computer when I appeared in his doorway. “Hey, Dad,” he said. “Look at this. I had an idea about Hell.”

I went and sat down beside him. I was afraid to open my mouth, afraid of what would or wouldn’t come out. I wanted to put on a big show of fatherly affection but I couldn’t think of a damned thing to say.

Peter pretended not to notice. “Look.” He’d punched up our entry for the starting point: the breakfast table, the horse, and the witch’s house. “You get up from the table,” he said. “You go off through the hedge in some direction, east, west, north, south. But there’s a direction you never go in. It’s so obvious. I can’t believe we never thought of it.”

It wasn’t obvious to me, and I felt irritation. “Where? What direction?”