Yes, I’d said.
How do I feel, I ask myself now, in the car.
You feel great, he says, appearing suddenly by the window, a wind with green eyes made this time from dark leaves. Yowu. You feel like you know what you have to do. I nod at him, and he is gone again. Warden struggles with a dream, does not wake up. I lean my face against the car door and it warms slowly under my cheek.
Metal is like love, it takes its temperature from touch. How did we get here?
This way.
Open me, the day says to me that morning. Go ahead. Sunlight on the lawn, the gold stitches of the needle of light coming through our trees. I go outside with my coffee and dew steams off on my bare feet, until they are cold, and then I return to the house. The phone rings and I glance down to my caller ID, and I see the name, in block letters, flash there under the number: gorendt, ERIC, and I freeze, watching it flash, letting it go to the machine, and then go, as the caller hangs up.
What happens next, is the phone rings again, and I pick it up, even as the name flashes back across the screen.
Hello, Warden says, even as I know who it is. Even as I know now who he really is. Fee.
Yes, I say.
He’s crying then, and then he coughs and clears his throat, and he says, I need you to come here.
I can’t, I say.
No, I really, really need you to come here. I’m not going to make it. I may not make it even if you come, but please.
And inside the cold space in me, still cold like my feet, I hear myself say, Not one more. Not even one more. And I say, Okay. I am coming. Where are you. As I say it, knowing and yet, really not knowing, where that man lived in this world.
I thought he had killed a woman, at first.
His legs stick out from behind a chair, like the way it is in monster movies. I know it isn’t him anymore, that he’s not there in the body, but I say his name. Eric, I say. I see the pale legs, rounded calves, the pale, pale feet. And I turn to see Warden come toward me. His pale face. Angel, I say. Why. I say it and the word fills up with my fear.
And he comes toward me, wraps his arms around me. Fee, he says. And then he lets go.
Love’s not Time’s fool, Shakespeare writes. No, Love’s not. He’s still right. Love buys time like we used to buy ice, cold pieces of it brought home to keep what’s loved preserved from every day’s heat. In a box in the basement are the pictures. Here, he says to me, hands me a sheaf of pictures, programs, clippings. Here, you’re right there. Aphias Zhe. First soprano.
Ways to kill a fox-demon:
Burning. Trap it in a house. Set the house on fire.
He knows who you are now, and then you know now, too: he was Baby Eddie, the big-headed baby who peed down his mother’s leg, the boy who bounced like a toy strung on a sunbeam, standing there with these pictures of you, transmissions from oh-so-far away, of Little Eric and you side by side in a sleeping bag, your hands slanting over your eyes as you hold your hands out to stop, as if you could stop, the light from landing on the film to color the negative, to make the space that burns the silver into place on the contact sheet, that makes the photograph. I did this for you, he tells you. After he does it. This is what you don’t see: he has all the pictures, he is burning all the pictures, he is scattering fire, and then the house is burning, and he leaves, and you leave, and there is nothing and everything between you and him. There is a way he was meant to be with you more than Bridey, except that what you had for each other you have given each other and if there is more for you and Bridey it has nothing to do with what is meant by gods but what is chosen, in the most mortal way. Which one wins? The Fates rocked my cradle, Oscar Wilde once said, and you remember this saying right then, thinking that perhaps that is what this wild swinging of the earth is.
We decide that he has to go to the police and confess. I wait in the car for him. When Warden comes out finally, he’s smiling.
What, I say.
Nothing, he says. Just happy to see you.
We drive in silence, or rather, you do. You drive him. You don’t know what’s going through his head and you don’t ask. His happiness seems unlikely to the far extreme, it seems a product of insanity, but it’s really, you find out, for some other reason altogether, when, as you near the exit sign for the highway, he looks at you and says, Take it.
What, you ask.
Take the exit. The house is burning now.
What?
Fee, he says. We have to go somewhere else now. I couldn’t go to the police. And he curls up in the seat. He rolls the window down and produces a cigarette from his pockets, which he lights with the lighter. Smoke from his mouth. I set the fire, he says, and it’s as if the fire is inside him. The house burning but the smoke coming out of him instead.
Jesus, you say, and you really are calling for him when you say it. For you see, Warden’s happiness is from him thinking that he has you now.
And so in the car as you drive you realize that Eric is dead, and to the sky in front of your eyes, receding as you approach it, you address yourself to him, you say, I knew it from the beginning, always something you wanted, always, that there was something in you you wanted to have seen: that you were like us somehow, that inside the heavy body of you was something small and heavy, fear tidied up in muscle and skin. I wanted you dead and now you are dead and now I run from what I know, now I see what you always wanted us to see, the part of you that was just like us burns free now somewhere behind me. Zeus is you is the sky is dead. Ganymede getaway car. Escapes nothing.
You want to tell this boy next to you, how his father isn’t dead. Not the part he wanted to kill. Not as long as you are there. He’s hiding inside us now, you want to say, but you drive him away from the fire instead.
14
I go to my parents’ house. I let Warden and myself in the back door, leave a note to my mother that I am napping on the sun-porch, and then do so, lie down on the beat-up couch under a sunbeam as thick and warm as a blanket and there in the bird-chirped quiet of the afternoon abandon myself. Warden sleeps on the floor below me.
I wake sometime after the sun had started setting. The sky deep blue above me leaves me nothing but a cold night’s rest, waiting for me to resume it. For a moment I forget everything of why I am there. My mother, in the doorway, watches me as I raise my head. I was expecting you, she said.
I screwed up big, Mom, I said. She smiles.
Bridey called here, she says. We spoke. He’ll be all right, I think. He said you’d had a fight, but he didn’t say what and I don’t want to know unless you want to tell me. He certainly didn’t.
I laugh. It’s not a fight. Not exactly.
Your father won’t be home tonight, by the way, she says. He’s got a conference down in Boston so he stayed in Portsmouth. Did you and your student want something to eat?
He spoke to you, I say.
You know he’s my outlet buddy. He’s my boy. Oh Fee. Come have some coffee.
In the kitchen, I drink her coffee. Warden walks around the yard, smoking, and I watch him through the windows. Did he tell you where he’d gone to, I ask.
He went to New York, she says.
Who’s he staying with?
I think he’s staying with John Mark, she says. It looked like his number when I wrote it down.
Did he mention anything else?
Fee, why don’t you call him yourself.
I dial the number. It was indeed John Mark’s, my friend, whom Bridey had gotten along with better than I had. John Mark, I think, had loved me in secret for some time, and then scorned me underneath that love, and so when Bridey arrived, he could welcome him. They’d become friends quickly. Bridey picks up the phone. Caller ID, he says. Hello Mister. Or is it Mom?