Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

“Large dog, he,” said Marcus.

“Pullman!”

The disobedient leviathan finally cantered to his side and, with a single fart, laid himself down.

“Ho!” said Marcus, smiling at the dog as if awaiting another outburst.

“I really should go — I’m supposed to be with the cousins.”

“Toulouse!” said Grandpa Lou sternly. “Talk with your father a little—”

“What should I say?” shot back the boy.

“It’s all right,” said Marcus. “Another time.”

“You didn’t even see me!” said Toulouse contemptuously. “I was in the Mauck, and you didn’t even see me!”

“The Mauck?”

“The truck that took you to that grave,” said Mr. Trotter.

Without missing a beat, Marcus said, “Of course I saw you.”

“Bullshit!”

The old man restrained himself. He expected the waters to be a little choppy.

“I didn’t mention it,” Marcus went on coolly, “because I feared it was something you weren’t glad about. Did you hide away? I did that once at your age — at the Huntington, in San Marino. Holed up in the library, clear through to the next morning. Scared all hell out of my parents.”

“I’m gonna go,” said Toulouse, flustered.

“All right, son.”

He ran to the house, Pullman leaping ahead.

He heard his father shout after him, not without emotion, “I’m sorry, boy! I’m so sorry about everything!”

When Toulouse ran off, a somber mood washed over this stranger in a strange land — a wave of what philosophers have called ontological sadness. (A phrase that of itself can make one wistful.) He floated on that tide like a creepy jellyfish whose tentacles wished to caress but had only managed to sting the flesh of a small bodysurfing boy: Toulouse …

Toulouse!

That would be from the tattoo he got in Paris (he was hypo-manic at the time) after they first saw La Colonne Détruite—

Né Toulouse

It was still stretched across his shoulder, bleached by sun and hard times, a silly thing Katrina ill-advisedly took to heart after he fled the other tower, the Frankish one’s better half, on Carcassone Way …

Toulouse: he would not have wished that for his son — a name born from a loser’s pun — but so be it. Pay the piper. His mind caromed between wife and boy, and the old man let him be.

When his son-in-law vanished into the maze, Mr. Trotter had a nagging fear he would end his life somewhere within. Holding the towel-wrapped ice pack to his neck, he slowly climbed the steps that led to the house. Suddenly, Marcus burst from the boxwood asking for pen and paper, and watercolors, too, if they were to be had. Mr. Trotter enthusiastically conducted him to the Withdrawing Room, where the visitor spent scant moments marveling at treasures before settling down to business.

During the next few hours, each time he was looked in upon, the man was hard at work. Candelaria brought food, which he barely touched. Around eight in the evening, he blotted what he’d made and requested a large envelope. He said he was tired and wished to be driven home.

“I want you to know how much I appreciate all you’ve done,” Marcus said, standing at the Town Car. “Plucking me from prison and arranging it so I could visit my dear Janey. You’ve looked after me, and I shan’t forget it.”

The old man couldn’t help but wonder if he was saying good-bye.

“And bringing me together with the boy! That was sure a noble, risky thing and cannot have been easy. Bold! Can’t say I would have done it myself.”

Louis chuffed, stroking his chin. “He’ll come around,” he said. “The boy’ll come around.”

“I’d like that — I’d like it fine! But I’m not so sure. The unbreakable does break; I know it too well.”

“I don’t want you to be discouraged. I wouldn’t want—”

“I left him once,” said Marcus, as if reading his mind. “I shall not leave him again.”

“Time,” abbreviated the old man. “Time.”

“You’ll give the boy my package, then?” he said, proffering the envelope.

“Of course.”

“Does — does she know I came today?”

“No.”

“And will you tell her?”

He nodded. “I am going to tell her that I brought you here to meet your son.”

Marcus sighed. “ When you talk to her — to Katy — ask if I might write to her.”

“I’m sure that would be fine.”

“I would not like to presume. I imposed my absence on her; and don’t wish to impose my comeback. But would you please, sir, mind just telling her that I wanted to put down some thoughts? And that I’d like to share them with her, if she’s willing? And that it is not incumbent on her to respond?”

“Yes. I’ll tell her.”

“It is not incumbent on her …”

Words failed him and so they embraced — and any trepidations the old man had of having done the wrong thing by bringing him to Saint-Cloud dissolved as smoke into air.

Tull opened his eyes just before midnight. The air was stagnant and fetid; the wind of the dozing Dane was rank.

Life was strange. For most of the year, since learning that his father was alive, he’d been like someone convalescing after a blow to the head. And now that they had finally met, he felt no different from before he knew the man existed. He rummaged his brain for the few times he’d seen him: from a distance at the Hotel Bel-Air … crouching over a grave … wailing in the back of the Mauck … then pressing his flesh in the backyard of Saint-Cloud (the backyard!), and all of it seemed like a dream or — dare he say it — a hallucination . The very word struck fear in the heart of him. How many times in as many months had he awakened from troubled sleep to rev search engines for chat rooms and bulletin boards on the p-(key)word: “psychosis.”

Edward, that paragon of cynical morbidity, had giddily helped fuel the theory that somewhere an errant gene-spore was already shooting tendrils into the plant box of Toulouse’s brain. It was a concern he never mentioned, not to his shrink (whom he’d stopped seeing anyway), not to his mother (she was already crazy), not even to Pullman, to whom he dared tell everything. He had read somewhere that, like Apert, schizophrenia usually skipped generations … or maybe he just imagined having read that. Maybe he’d hallucinated it. A kind of pre-psychotic disposition—“prodromal,” one of the websites called it — would even explain his blasé, somewhat irritated reaction to the man he shook hands with at the maze.

Toulouse wondered if he should begin taking medication. The therapist had had him on antidepressants, but he’d balked, because the pills made him dry-mouthed and nauseous. A kind of virtual shame engulfed him as he slipped through the Internet’s cracks — the same mortification he knew he would feel on becoming homeless. That seemed a fait accompli … anyway, was there any real difference between what had happened to Bluey and what had happened to his father? Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia were busy coursing through his veins! At least his dad could be treated — or managed … maybe . He imagined himself in ten years living downtown in rags like those men he saw in boxes when they visited Boulder. Lice in his hair, toothless, falling-down pants smeared with shit, ready for a little recreational fecal-play. Sores on his head from AIDS … scarred and scabbed from cop beatings, and a hundred broken-bottle scuffles. There would come Edward and Lucy in the Mauck, all grown-up, searching. He’d be rescued just as Grandpa Lou had rescued Marcus, and they would let him stay in Edward’s long-vacant rooms above the Boar’s Head Inn — he would live out his days watching movies at the Majestyk, tended by male nurses who’d suck his dick after doping him up. But maybe the cousins wouldn’t be so kind. Maybe they’d by then have become Scientologists or militant throwbacks to the pre-millennial concept of “tough love” and Toulouse would be farmed out to an asylum. One of Uncle Dodd’s empty asylums! Or maybe the Trotters would build another wing where Bluey was and he could just hang with his demented grandmother, both of them heavily sedated, walking arm in arm on the infinity road that wended through the garden his by-then-probably-even-more-famous mother had once designed—