Rick Moody - The Diviners

The ‘brother’ dreams. On Amtrak. Heading northeast. Outside: marshlands of Connecticut. A state noted both for its marshes, for the fractal subdivision of rivers as they empty into the Sound. Time: late afternoon. Day: Friday. Lighting effects are consistent with the light of late afternoon in Connecticut, which is the flickering light of things passing away, the light of things coming to an end. Eschatology. Amtrak riders know that the water side of the train is the side of flickering light. Ends of things. What else to do here but remember? Tyrone remembers, the better to avoid thinking about current events. Tyrone, with ski cap pulled down over his eyes. Tyrone, having shaved his head and chin that morning in the apartment, having sacrificed his dreadlocks. Tyrone, sporting chinos and some shirt his mother bought for him that had never before been free of its packaging. He looks like the “model person of color” here on the Northeast corridor. He counts seven people reading various daily newspapers. Seven readers who might have acquainted themselves with the headlines and who might have the kind of intelligence that assembles photos of suspects in newspapers and applies these pictures to passersby. Flickering light, bare trees. Light of Connecticut estuaries. Tyrone can’t, won’t think of the enormity of his predicament. He is a voracious eavesdropper, and overheard cell phone conversations contain portions of narratives, scraps of consciousness, grocery lists, birthday wishes, at least until the Old Saybrook stop, where the weekenders decamp. By then he’s satisfied that it’s okay to stroll the car. Tyrone heads for the snack bar, and he’s on his way there, in his chinos and his Italian dress shirt, when a stylish and elderly woman, having recently boarded in the village of Old Saybrook, she of the “excessive pastels” and translucent hair, asks him if he will loft up her rolling suitcase onto the luggage rack. He thinks about telling her to “fuck off,” but instead he puts his back into it, hoists up her seventeen-hundred-pound rolling casket. After which she presents him with her ticket. Of course, because he’s the well-groomed black man in the car. In truth, the only reason he doesn’t “scare” the lady with the translucent hair is because he’s clean shaven and “on the lam.” She should be scared of him, according to news reports. He is randomly felonious, according to at least one tabloid. Indeed, he’s just about to tell the “pastel lady” that “bidialectalism is a natural ability” while taking her ticket and shoving it in his mouth, or perhaps just hanging on to it so that he can cash it in somewhere, maybe the casinos. But instead he whispers, “I’m a passenger myself,” at which the woman blanches in recognition of her dangerous political mistake. Her rouged cheeks flush, and she is silenced, and he knows that she will never identify him to the interstate authorities because to identify him would be to admit that she believed he was a conductor or rail employee simply because he is a black man. She won’t say it in any venue. No prosecutor can make her say it. She is humbled, and he goes back to his seat. He sleeps. The train gathers its lateness into itself, as if it is the patron saint of lateness, it bisects the marshes and then it subdivides the pine barrens of the Bay State. Cell phone gabbers shout to their neighbors about the restaurant they are going to tonight. Up the Northeast corridor, on the lam, in the shuddering and occasionally silent interior of the Amtrak train.

“Hi, Mom,” the “brother” whispers, on Hillcrest Place, the interstate train having given way to the commuter train, the commuter train having given way to the taxi, the taxi having given way to the lawn of the Duffy home, which badly needs to be raked. An unused rake is balanced against a birch in the yard, at dusk.

Now that the door is opened, he feels how heavy his secrets are.

“Billy? What are you doing here?”

Awkwardly, Tyrone says, “Surprise! Just wanted to, uh, see the old neighborhood. . ”

They’re in the condition of not knowing how to stand there, as if lessons in casual standing haven’t yet taken place. His mother calls upstairs. “Honey? Honey?” When there’s no response, she goes up, one step at a time, and Tyrone, standing with his overnight bag in the foyer, takes in the place. The living room, where the neglected furniture is, as always, barely presentable. The furniture is coffee stained, mildewed, neglected; the rugs are matted and sun bleached. The Duffy household is prepared for the leave-taking of the last child, the natural child, Max, who has just the one year left before college, probably at Yale, where the White Dwarf went. When Max, the natural child, is gone, the Dwarf and his wife will retire to their separate studies, but perhaps in a smaller house befitting a minister in his dotage. On cue, they clump downstairs, Indian file.

“Look at what the cat has dragged in!” the Dwarf observes. “Looking really good, Billy. Neat hairstyle, what there is of it. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

“I needed a break.”

They wouldn’t ask. They have given up asking. His answer, whatever it is, will entail bad news and irresponsibility. They no longer want to know, nor to feel that they caused it, whatever it is, nor to find themselves wound into the knots of his strange thinking. If a question is put to him in the wrong manner, he will go back to raving, blaming them somehow, asking weighty questions that should go unasked and doing it in an ugly, vindictive way featuring much simulated “ghetto” cursing.

“How long can you stay?”

A few days, he says, and then he tries to close out the subject. Anyway, his father is probably trying to get a sermon together. That’s what he’s usually doing. Do not distract the White Dwarf from the job of sermonizing. Do not distract his wife, who will be wanting her heaps of rancid cottage cheese and salad while she looks over her five-hundred-page textbook on adolescent depression. She’s been sifting through the topic for ten years, for a study that has, as part of its source material, her own experience with a pair of adopted black children. Who knows whether the black children were adopted for the study or whether the study was adopted for the benefit of the black children? It no longer matters.

His father, standing one carpeted step up, reaches out for a hug. Though Tyrone doesn’t budge, the White Dwarf clamps his arms around his lanky son and tells him how good it is to see him, and Tyrone almost believes him.

“Come on, get out of the doorway. Make yourself at home.”

In a brief attack of the dutiful variety, he follows them, his parents, as they scuttle into the kitchen. Inside, it’s the same mixture of leftover pieces of china from other people’s houses, glasses with the names of regional country clubs on them, church sale finds. They all sit down at the table. Clipped hydrangea blossoms dry in the centerpiece, blue and cream and gray. To forestall silences, Tyrone panics and rushes to tell them, yes, the job is going fine, really, yes, he is making some art, yes, he just talked to Annabel, yes, he is seeing someone, yes, an Asian curator, and he is feeling well, and, yes, he’s okay, he just wanted a short rest, yes, so he took some time off. They seem to be satisfied, or maybe they’ve just given up. Who knows? He would never be open to scrutiny, he has his notion of dignity, and his notion of dignity is about living beyond their scrutiny. They know. The agreement is for partial disclosure. Soon his parents edge out of the room.

A ragged spider plant on the pantry shelf needs watering. An article clipped from the Globe, dangers of herbal remedies, curls on a countertop. A distant cassette plays the cello suites, Pablo Casals sawing away. He’s been there a quarter hour, in the kitchen, a quarter hour of staring absently at a dish overflowing with aspartame packets. A quarter hour of turning objects over in his hands. Feeling the heft of a soup ladle left out to dry. A ceramic bowl. His mother crosses through the room several times, appearing, disappearing, carrying more papers. He mutters some more, why can’t he stop, about Annabel, oh yeah, about this story she’s developing, making up details as he goes along, embellishing, “Multigenerational thing, guys out in the desert with forked sticks, rattlesnakes, scorpions, dig here, the Mormons coming across the plains, the origins of Las Vegas, water wars, a story about dowsing.” His mother looks at him in that way, that I-am-still-your-mother way, that way she always looks at him. Mothers, with their night vision goggles. He pretends fascination with the matter of spots of yellowing paint here on the wall by the back stairs. His mother, with her wrinkly face and her pile of unpaper-clipped monographs, all compassion, all exhaustion, looks at him, telegraphing, Go ahead, tell me.