Chang-Rae Lee - Aloft

"Sure it does," I say, instantly sounding a bit too much like I'm trying to convince myself of something. "Look at me. I've had a whole life of After."

"Is this when Theresa's mother died?"

"Sure. When it happened I thought everything else would fall apart. I had no idea how I was going to raise the kids and still run Battle Brothers. For a couple months there nobody wanted to get out of bed. We'd get wake-up calls from the principal's office at the kids' school. Then I met Rita, and she saved our lives. Rita was After the After."

"You were lucky, Jerry," Paul says. "My life's going to be too sorry to save."

"Look, son," I say, in the gravest in-all-seriousness mode I can muster, "she's not going to die."

For a second Paul's eyes desperately search me, as if I might know something he doesn't. But then he sees that of course I don't.

He says, "It's good of you to say that. You should keep saying that."

"You ought to, as well."

"I know. Keep reminding me."

"Okay."

"You're not exactly like Theresa always said you were." Paul says, "She's always complained about you a lot."

"Hey, hey, a lot?"

"Well, much less these days. Actually not at all, lately."

"But before."

"Yes. She griped regularly how you'd run roughshod over anybody whenever things got troublesome for you, or something got in your way or made you work harder than you had to.

That you had this supernatural ability to short-circuit dealing with the needs of others, so well in fact that people generally avoided any attempts to involve you."

"She couldn't just say I was 'lazy'?"

"Theresa has her way. There was also the usual complaint about how you could never bear doing anything purely for someone else, unless there was at least some modicum of benefit to you, but that's not relevant, because what I was going to say is that Theresa is so much like the person she makes you out to be, really just the same except she's perhaps more forthright and aggressive in her stance than you are, which you'd think would invite more discourse and interplay but shuts it down all the same, and even more finally in fact. And I'll admit to you now this is pissing me off, Jerry. I'm sorry, but it really is. It makes me feel a lot of anger toward her that I certainly can't express to her but that I can hardly deal with anymore. Yesterday I made a whole spinach lasagna with this nice béchamel and I browned the top of it a bit too much. Normally that would be acceptable but you know what I did? I took it out of the oven and walked to the back of your yard and I just chucked the whole thing, glass casserole and all, as far and high as I could, and it cracked into at least fifty pieces on a pile of logs."

"I was wondering why we ordered in."

"I went to clean it up this morning, but some animal had eaten the whole thing. I just collected glass, and the episode made me angry enough again that I cut myself picking up the shards. I bought you a new dish today, just so you know."

He shows me a bandaged finger, and says, "I'm losing my grip here, Jerry."

"That's okay."

He says, "Maybe the truth is I don't want to know anything."

Here's surely something I can relate to, but it's not the moment to let him give in to the Jerry Battle mode of familial involvement, that ready faculty of declining, my very worst strength, and I have to say, "You're not built like that, Paul.

Whatever you're thinking of late about your writing, I know you can't accept being in the dark or on the 'periphery.' I've read every word you've published and even if I haven't really understood the half of them I'm pretty certain you're a guy who can't stand not being part of what's happening. I don't need a Ph.D.

or square-framed glasses to see that it's killing you to just stand by and let Theresa make all the decisions about what's going to happen. It's her body and I'm sure she's got all kinds of rationales and constructs about that to throw at you, but it's your life, too, and you probably can fling some funky constructs right back at her, plus the fact that you're miserable. Let her know that — show her. Lose your shit if you have to. We Battles only really respond to fits and tears and tantrums, the more melo-dramatic the better."

"Theresa sometimes talks about how bad her mother got, which I think really scared her. She sometimes still has nightmares."

"Really?"

"She had one last night, in fact. Her mother was a very intense woman, huh?"

"Really only at the end," I say, realizing that I'm instantly defending myself, and trying to forget the picture of my daughter at the tender age of five, sitting at the dinner table with cheesy macaroni in her mouth, too fearful to even chew as Daisy chopped cucumbers for the salad furiously at the counter, white-and-green log rounds bouncing all over the floor.

"I'm sorry I'm so focused on myself, Jerry," Paul says. "Here I am talking to you about your not-so-well daughter, and now your father is missing."

"I'm doing all right."

"It most seem as though things have taken a strange turn."

"They're both going to be fine."

"Yup." Paul smiles, nodding with hollow vigor and optimism, all welcomed, and I join in as well, and it's enough good gloss between us to make me feel that I can believe whatever either of us might say, or propose. For while Pop is presently MIA, I have this strong conviction that he's not in any real trouble, that the old gray cat isn't so much wounded or confused or fighting back feral youth in whatever cul-de-sac or strip mall he's lost in, but rather delighting in the open possibility of the range, perhaps in fact sitting in a coffeehouse lounge, chatting up some willowy chai-sipping widow. The only detail gumming up the works is that it doesn't seem that he left with anything but the clothes he was wearing, save for his Velcro-strap black orthopedic walkers, his last outfit being his polka-dot pajamas, which you'd think the sight of in public on an unwashed and unshaven old man would prompt any number of citizens to alert the authorities.

The home show ends and I browse channels. Paul excuses himself to get some tea from the dining room. I find an animal program that I've seen before, about the lions of the Serengeti: the "story" is of a crusty old male lion they (the producers, the native bush-beaters, the cinematographer?) named Red for the color of his mane, which, apropos of nothing, is exactly the hennaed hue of Kelly Stearns's last self-dye job. Red has long been the dominant male of the pride, showing his appreciation of the hunting prowess of his lionesses by serving them sexually whenever they are in heat and then spending the rest of his time power-dozing and snapping at flies and sometimes chasing off the younger upstarts or killing some death-wishing hubristic hyena who thought he could carry off a cute cub and get away with it. Red has apparently ruled this lair for a long time, but is now being challenged by a very large mature young male newly arrived on the scene, named Nero (for no specific reason), who is making forays into Red's territory, sniffing at the females, and generally making a show of himself as an electable new king.

Red, of course, hitches himself up and out from the sorry shade of his acacia and charges the interloper, driving him off, but only temporarily. Nero comes back that night, and although there's no footage of the battle, the next morning we see that Red has been badly mauled, his right hindquarter slashed nearly to the bone, his mane matted with his own blood, a deep gash in his jowl. He's limping off to an old den, maybe the one where he was born. Nero, meanwhile, is holding court by the tree, spraying it liberally with his stud juice, receiving unctuous groveling licks from the males and females, and brusquely mounting most of the latter. The King is dead. Long live the King. The last we see of Red, he's lying on his side, slowly pant-ing in near-death, too weak to even shoo the multitude of flies who swarm about the huge hind wound in a teeming shiny quilt of black. Before nightfall the pack of vengeful hyenas picks up his scent, and by the morning Red is but a rickety boat-shell of ribs and hide; he's not even an appetizer for the scrawny young jackal who's scampered by too late, and later on birds will take the scattered tufts of that arrogant hennaed mane as thatching for their nests.