Conversation wasn’t working, so I tried silence. After fifteen minutes he said, “These last few months I’ve gotten into the habit of watching television.”
“Meyer!”
“I know, I know. A laxative for the mind. Thinking makes lumps in the mind. Bad memories make lumps. Television flushes them away. At five o’clock, alone there aboard my boat, I’ve been able to get a rerun of M*A*S*H on one channel and then switch to another rerun on another. Old ones. Trapper, Hawkeye, Radar, Hot Lips. You know, the introduction has stayed almost exactly the same. The helicopters come around the side of the mountain. Then you get a shot from on high of the hospital complex. Then an ambulance, a closer shot of the choppers, and then people running up a hill toward the camera. In the left center of the screen a young woman runs toward you, slightly ahead of the others. You see her for four and a half running strides. Dark hair. Face showing the strain of running and her concern for the wounded. A pretty woman, maybe even beautiful, with a strong, lithe, handsome body. She is in uniform. A gleam of dog tags at the opening of her shirt. I’ve thought about her often, Travis. That shot of her was taken years ago. She’s probably in her thirties now. Or even forty. I wonder about her. When they filmed that introduction she had no way of knowing that she would be frozen there in time, anxious and running. Does she ever think about how strange that is? Multiply viewers times original episodes and the countless reruns on hundreds of stations, and you can see she has been looked at a billion times. What do you pay a person to be looked at a billion times? How many thousand miles has she run? It’s the fly-in-amber idea, plus a paradox of time and space. Maybe she never thinks of it these days. Or yawns when she sees, herself. Last night I saw her again, late, in a Toronto hotel room. And she became Norma: dark hair and vitality. Now she is caught in some eternal time lock. Death is an unending rerun until the last person with any memory of you is also dead.”
I had not heard him say this much since that bloody June day when Desmin Grizzel had so totally terrified him that he had, in his fear, violated his own image of himself. I did not make any response because I wanted him to keep talking. I was afraid that anything I might say would make him clamp shut again, like an endangered clam.
“I went through the long list of all the things I should have done and didn’t do,” he said. “Go to the wedding. Or at least pick out a present and send it instead of a check. She was my very last blood relative. It’s like a superstitious fear, having no one left in the world directly related to you by blood. As if you had started somehow to disappear. She wasn’t at all pretty, but being in love made her beautiful. I noticed that. And I haven’t been noticing much lately, have I?”
“No. No, you haven’t.”
“In that sense, to that degree, Desmin Grizzel won after all. All my life, until this last year, I have always noticed everything. Noticed, analyzed, filed. I watched people, understood them, liked almost every one. If he killed that in me, then he killed me, because he killed that part of me that made me most alive. And I let it happen.”
“No, Meyer. There wasn’t any way-”
“Be still!” he said with a surprising vehemence. “I’ve been dwelling on my sorry image, how I sat on the floor like a dumb pudding, peeing in my trousers, while I watched a maniac start to kill the best friend I ever had. In some kind of inverted fashion I fell in love with that image of Meyer. Oh, the poor dear chap! Oh, what a pity!”
“But-”
“So today in that aircraft I took a longer steadier look at myself. I saw my face reflected in the window beside me. One can become weary of shame, self-revulsion, self-knowledge. I am an academic, damn it. I was not intended to become some sort of squatty superman, some soldier of misfortune. It was not intended that I should be unafraid of sudden death. Curiously, I am not afraid of the prospect of my own demise. Plainly I shall die, as will you and everyone we know, and I do not think that a fact worth my resentment. Life is unfair, clearly. One must hope that the final chapter will be without too much pain. It was his terrible eyes and those four barrels on that strange handgun he had. Something inside me broke into mush, into tears and pee and ineptitude. But it does not signify!”
“I tried to tell-”
“I did not listen. I was too enchanted with my humiliation, with how I had failed my adolescent dream of myself as hero. There was a child on the airplane, directly across the aisle. The seat beside me was empty. I smiled at her and did finger tricks, and she giggled and tried to stuff her head under her mother’s arm in shyness. She finally came over and sat beside me, and I told her a story about a cowardly goblin who refused to go out on Halloween and scare people because he was too fat and too shy. Partway through the story I realized I was telling a story about Meyer the Economist. It made the ending easier. They had a meeting of the Goblin Council and called him in and told him not to worry. There had to be room in each pack of goblins for a cowardly goblin who stayed home in the cave. Otherwise, who would count all the others as they came back home after their adventures? So there is room for me: counting goblins, including my own.”
“There always has been-”
“No, Travis. Not for the Meyer of the past year. No room for him at all. But for this Meyer? Why not? I am not the same as I was before the incident, I am less naive. Is that a good word?”
“I think so.”
“You have always been less naive than most of us, Travis. You are a different sort of creature, in many ways. But you are my friend, and I don’t want to lose you. I want you to help me. Somebody blew up my boat, and with it all the artifacts of my past and my last close relative. I want to find that person or those people. And kill them. Is that an unworthy goal?”
“It’s understandable.”
“You dodge the question.”
“You want a moral judgment, go to Jerry Falwell. Anything you really want to do, I will help you do. And it is nice to have you back, even in slightly altered condition. Okay?”
I glanced over at him and saw in the angle of a streetlight that he was smiling. It was a fine thing to see. Utterly unanticipated. I had thought this would be the end of him. Instead, it shocked him out of it not all the way out, but far enough to lead one to hope.
“I keep remembering that Sunday evening aboard the Flush,” he said. “They were really in love, weren’t they?”
Three
THE EVENING had not been awkward because Evan Lawrence was not the kind of man to let that happen. I guessed him at about forty, ten to twelve years older than his bride. He had a broad, blunt face, brown sun-streaked hair, snub nose, crooked grin, the baked look of an outdoor person, and large fan-shaped areas of laugh wrinkles beside his eyes. He was perhaps five-ten, hardly an inch taller than his wife, but broad and thick in chest and shoulders. In repose, Norma was almost homely. Narrow forehead, long nose, an overbite and a dwindled chin, long neck. But her eyes were lovely, her long hair a glossy blue-black, her figure elegant, her movements graceful. In animation, and when she looked at Evan, she was beautiful.
Evan asked Meyer a dozen questions about how he had made the meat sauce. tie asked me fifty questions about my houseboat. We went through several bottles of Chianti (aassir.o while we ate the ceviche I’d made and then had the spaghetti al dente with the meat sauce Meyor had brought.
In the warmth and relaxation after dinner, Evan told us how he had met Norma. “What I was doing, I was down there in Cancun, gone down to Yucatan to visit with my friend Willy, and I was putting in my time helping him sell off some time-sharing condos. He had some he couldn’t move at what he needed to make out, which was one hundred big ones, so he’d taken to selling them off in one- and two-week pieces for three and six thousand, people buying those same weeks for life and Willy explaining how they had tied into the big vacation computer so the pigeons he was selling to could like exchange with some other patsies who’d bought the same two weeks on maybe the coast of Spain or Fort Myers, Florida. I had no work license, so when I sold stuff, Willy had to slip me the pesos in cash and keep it off the books. I can always sell. I’m a scuffler, and there are always things to sell and people to buy them, so I’m home anywhere. Good thing, the way they keep moving Norma around the shaggy places of the earth.