“Is there a channel just for your songs?” asked Tommy as we drove over the railroad tracks and headed north to old Route 22. Angus tapped the radio screen until he found something he liked. “Like is there a satellite that just beams ‘Do It All Day’?”
Angus nodded. “That would be the Burnout Channel.”
“This is the Cowsills,” I said. “That song about the park and other things.”
“And then I knew,” chanted Tommy, “that she had made me happy.”
“Happy, happy,” echoed Angus. He began to sing his own words.
Outside the remnants of old Kamensic slid past, stone churches, the sprawling Victorian where Angus had grown up, now a B&B; the ancient cemetery with its strange stone animals; Deer Park Inn, a former dive that had been cleaned up and christened the Deer Park Tavern, its shattered blacktop newly paved and full of SUVs and Priuses. It was easy to blame these changes on Marian Lavecque, the domestic maven whose reign had redrawn the town’s aesthetic and cultural boundaries.
But I knew the decline stretched back longer than that, to the years when Angus and I had first become entangled. So it was hard sometimes—for me anyway, since my academic background had trained me to see patterns everywhere, a subtle tapestry woven into the grungiest Missoni knockoff—not to feel that our folie a deux had broken something in the place we loved most.
One upshot was that we had to go farther afield now to find a bar that suited us. I’d never heard of the Folding Man being anywhere but the Old Court.
I reached to touch Tommy’s knee. “You okay back there?”
“Sure,” he said. “We’re on a quest.” He smiled as Angus’s voice filled the car.
Tommy was the one who’d always believed in things. Even though he could never really explain to you exactly what those things were; only trace circles in the air when he was drunk, or go into long rambling exegeses of conspiracies between real estate developers and the Zen Buddhists who’d built a retreat house on what had once been old-growth forest, or the purported sexual relationship, based on a mutual desire to make artisanal cheese, that existed between Estelle, the woman he’d been obsessed with, and a dotcom millionaire who also lived in Vermont. I felt protective of Tommy, although when drunk he could become bellicose, even violent. Asleep he resembled a high school athlete fallen on hard times, his T-shirt riding up to show a slack torso, gray hair, an appendectomy scar like a wincing mouth, a bad tattoo of a five-pointed star.
Whereas Angus retained the body he’d had as a teenager, his skin smooth and unblemished, pale as barley; he slept curled on his side and breathed softly, like a child, occasionally sighing as in some deep regret he couldn’t acknowledge in waking life. Then the lines on his face seemed to fade, and his eyes, closed, held no hint of what burned there when he stared at you.
“Let’s stop for a minute,” I said as we crested the hill overlooking the Old Court.
“He won’t be there.” Angus glanced into the rearview mirror. “You said he left.”
“Yeah, he left.” Tommy opened his window. A green smell filled the car, young ferns and the leaves of crushed meadowsweet. “But stop anyway.”
Inside, the Old Court was sunlit, its curved oak bar glossy as caramel and warm to the touch. A few elderly bikers sat drinking beer or coffee and watching the Golf Channel. We sat at the far end, where it was quieter, in front of the brass bowl that held the Folding Man’s handiwork.
“Back already?” Nance, the bartender, smiled at Tommy, then glanced out the window to see whose car was parked there: not Tommy’s, so she could serve him. “You want the same?”
Tommy and I had red wine, Angus a rum and Coke. Tommy drank fast—he always did—and ordered another. I drank mine almost as quickly, then shut my eyes, reached into the brass bowl and withdrew a piece of folded paper.
The Folding Man’s work isn’t exactly origami. Tommy has showed some of it to a woman he knows who does origami, and she said it was like nothing she’d ever seen before. The Folding Man doesn’t talk about it, either, which is probably why Tommy became obsessed with him. Nothing gets Tommy as revved up as being ignored—Angus says he’s seen Tommy get a hard-on when a woman rejects him.
Not that Tommy had ever actually met the Folding Man, until now. None of us had, even though he’d been a fixture at the Old Court for as long as we’d been drinking there. We first began to notice his work in the early 1980s when, before or after a wild night, we’d find these little folded figures left on the floor near where we’d been sitting.
“This is like that guy in Blade Runner,” said Tommy once. He’d picked up something that resembled a winged scorpion. “See?”
I looked at it closely and saw it had the face of Angelica Huston and, instead of pincers, a pair of spoons for claws.
But then Tommy carefully unfolded it, smoothing it on the bar.
“Don’t get it wet,” warned Angus.
“I won’t.” Tommy looked puzzled. He slid the crumpled paper to me. “It’s gone.”
“What’s gone?”
I looked at the paper, and saw it was a square taken from an ad for Yves St. Laurent Opium perfume—the word OPIUM was there, and part of the bottle, and I could even smell a musky trace of the fragrance.
But there was no woman anywhere in the ad. I turned the paper over: nada. No spoons, either.
“Edward James Olmos.”
Tommy and I turned to stare blankly at Angus.
“That’s who played that character. “ He took the paper and scrutinized it, then flicked his cigarette lighter and set it on fire and dropped it in his ashtray. “In Blade Runner. Edward James Olmos. Great actor.”
The Folding Man’s stuff was always like that. Things that were never quite what they seemed to be. Sea anemones with eyes and wheels, body parts—vulvas were a popular theme—that sprouted fingers, exotic birds with too many heads and hooves instead of feathers, a lunar lander printed with a map of the Sea of Tranquility, the extravagant effects produced by some infernal combination of paper-folding and whatever was actually printed on the paper. None of them was any larger than the area I could circumscribe with my thumb and forefinger, and some were much smaller.
But if you unfolded them, they were never what they didn’t seem to be, either—you ended up with nothing but a page from a magazine or travel brochure, or a paper menu from McDonald’s or the Kamensic Diner, or (in the case of the lunar lander) a fragment of the Playbill for Via Galactica. They were like origami figures from the Burgess Shale, beautiful but also slightly nightmarish.
And what made it even stranger was that no one except for me and Tommy and, to a lesser degree, Angus, ever seemed to think they were weird at all. No one paid much attention to them; no one thought they were mysterious. When Tommy started asking about who made them, Nance just shrugged.