Rick Moody - The Diviners

Does he want food? Because there is food of some kind, leftovers. There are plastic containers, the food of northeastern intellectuals who disdain culinary flaunting, who prefer the legacy of their forebears, leftover food of minimal flavor, wine from jelly jars. There’s tuna casserole in a plastic container, which is similar in consistency and mouthfeel to chicken salad, also in a plastic container, which in turns resembles pasta salad, all from the same spot on the color wheel, yessir, jammed into the refrigerator every which way. Should he decide to eat, he will be well nourished by beige foods. There are many beige choices. He closes the refrigerator immediately, goes into the pantry, but here, too, the range of choices crushes him. How many kinds of cereal can one household have? There must be thirteen brands of cereal, and they are all varieties of flakes; there are bran flakes, oat bran flakes, corn flakes, oh wait, there are rice puffs. All the same color. The flakes are beige. It’s the same with the crackers. Maybe a hint of orange or ochre. He starts taking a cracker out of each box, setting them out on the counter in the pantry. From the wheat thin to the saltine to the old-fashioned digestive, it’s all in the same family of color tonalities. He needs to know. He is comparing the hue of these crackers to see if there are crackers that are different from the other crackers in any way, looking to discard anything wide of the beige family; he requires the consistency and perfection of beige.

“Max is late at school. Some kind of rehearsal. He should be back any time now.”

The proof is immediate. On his way upstairs, Tyrone overhears the garage door opener beneath him. It’s the Great White Hope. The “genetic copy.” The White Dwarf can be heard stirring in his cloister, as if the Dwarf has an uncanny sense of the movements of the “genetic copy.” The White Dwarf is saying something to his wife about All Saints’ Day, which appears to have been the theme of last week’s sermon, and then the “genetic copy” says something, for now he is on the scene. Soon there are footfalls on the stairs.

The first thing that must be said is that Max’s lower lip is pierced. It’s an innovation that Tyrone has somehow missed. Max’s head is also shaved. Of course, there are two, three, four earrings. Some Maori-style tattoos on the arms. Black jeans and a torn-up flannel shirt. Maximillian Rivers Duffy, public-access television host, advocate of assisted suicide and antiglobalization. Genetic copy. Radical teen.

Tyrone nods imperceptibly from his place on the bed in what is now the guest room. A potpourri dish only inches from him, on the side table, with its bed-and-breakfast olfactory redolences.

Max says, “Hey, Bro.”

Tyrone stares.

“Got someone I want you to meet.”

Tyrone stares.

“Have you talked to Sis?”

Tyrone says, “Diphthongization in certain regions is incrementally breaking away into triphthongization. If the trend continues, it will no longer be possible to understand certain regions, especially those that are marginalized along cultural or racial lines.”

The “genetic copy” stares back.

“I really do have someone I want you to meet.”

“In certain counties in North Carolina, the word dead has three syllables.”

Apparently, there is no choice but to stride past his brother, the “genetic copy.” Back in the living room, like the caged animal he always was at this address, Tyrone now feels an additional confinement anxiety, the possibility of future penal confinement. He’s flipping through the LPs collected on a shelf on the wall, looking at some jazz from the fifties, the cover of each LP summoning up a swinging time in his parents’ past. Pipe smoking was pandemic. Sideburns indicated a knowing acquaintance with the New Criticism, and that’s the moment, in this reverie of all things of which he’s contemptuous, when there is old-fashioned tolling of an American Telephone and Telegraph handset. Their rotary-dial phone.

He knows immediately.

He hears his mother call out his sister’s name, “Hi, sweetheart!” He’s already loping, in his rangy way, past his mother’s office, into the pantry, through the kitchen, up the back stairs again, the maid’s staircase, with all the political ramifications, never the front staircase, into the teenager’s bedroom, that bedroom which observes all the Congregationalist trappings, a homely bedroom, without decoration, no wall-to-wall, just a little Oriental area rug in the middle. Max is actually sweeping his homely bedroom, and Tyrone says, having changed his mind entirely, “Okay, let’s go.”

“Where are we going?”

“To see your friend.”

The sweeping is undeterred by the conversation. As if sweeping enables reasoning.

“The one you were mentioning before. Let’s go.”

“You changed your mind fast.”

“Don’t waste my time.”

Max reaches up to the window, opens it, the screen is nowhere in sight, a legacy of some youthful mischief, and Tyrone says, “Let me.” He means the arachnid that is fleeing ahead of the piles of dust. Like Jonathan Edwards’s pet arachnid. Tyrone knows about the perfection of the webs; this has all been covered in his own diaristic commentary on his childhood, which is near upon sixteen thousand pages in length. He takes the arachnid, reaches one loafer-clad foot out the window.

“You don’t actually have to —” Max says.

Tyrone is on the roof, where he can hear his mother calling urgently to the White Dwarf, his mother who is now in possession of the major facts. The broad outline of the facts, the allegations. He can see the shades half drawn in his father’s office. There is gesticulating. There is the pantomime of alarm. The semiotics of alarm, which you can know, instantly, without fear of misrepresentation, when you see it from out the window of the house. From out on the roof. Through transparent curtains that doubtless need washing. Now is the beginning of the end of a safe place. This is what Tyrone Duffy thinks of his predicament now, that wherever he goes, he is the ill wind. In every face, now, the tightening of distrust, because Tyrone Duffy is here, with his sad story.

“Come on, brother. Take me to your leader.”

The “genetic copy” doesn’t have to be asked twice. They are on the roof, and the roof is a sanctuary, a retreat with access to the light pollution of the night sky. And yet the night sky is opening into the infinite. In this night sky, interstellar gas, remnants of first light, four fundamental forces, trial by jury, confinement. They pause, mismatched brothers. Somewhere nearby the arachnid, released, makes for a gutter.

Tyrone watches as his pierced brother, the “genetic copy,” launches himself off the roof above the living room and into the loving arms of a Norway maple that is brushing against the house. A maple that keeps its secrets. By its permanence. Down onto the lawn they go, and then they are across the lawn in an interstellar flash, under the forgiving melancholy of willows beside the creek up the street. The maple takes in these things, this legacy of mistakes.

Lois DiNunzio, Means of Production accountant, first met Arnie Lovitz in the one foolproof place to meet eligible men these days, the smoker’s ghetto. The civic legislation on the subject of cigarette smoking was profound, was far-reaching, or that’s how the city council talked about it when they passed the relevant legislation in 1995. How profound, how far-reaching wasn’t clear exactly, until these little societies of smokers began to appear at street level. Cast out of their places of employment. The tide of public opinion had turned against these miscreants, as if all at once. Once, they were worldly, they were crime novelists or back-room politicians. They were salesmen out late indulging in whiskey and women and cigars. Lois’s father, Louis DiNunzio, was like that, on the road thirty weeks a year, overnight in cheap motels, with sample industrial chemicals. Who knew what he got into? Now here they were, out in front of the building.