Olivia did not mind sitting in the car. The Lexus had a great stereo system. She could play a compact disc and compose herself in preparation for their visit with John. She loved classical music, especially Glenn Gould’s rendition of the Goldberg Variations. For reasons she could not verbalize, Olivia had been immediately touched by his music. She was not a musical expert, had no scholarly vocabulary, but felt that she needed Gould’s piano playing in order to feel more substantial. Each series of notes, played straight, inverted, repeated, became the reason she could get out of the bed some mornings. The music came to mean even more to her after she read about Gould’s life, how he had quit performing publicly without the slightest warning. On that evening, he had signed an autograph for a backstage technician, told him that he was never going to perform again, and then played for the last time for an audience. It was wildly eccentric, Olivia thought, and impossibly romantic. It was the sort of rebellion that only a genius could have pulled off. Olivia wondered what Gould had felt that evening, how a weight must have lifted from his shoulders and drifted up into the rafters. As she and Daniel drove into Ballard in search of John, Olivia felt only sadness. While Gould had been very eccentric, quite probably mentally ill, he also managed to produce some of the greatest music of the twentieth century. Olivia wondered if her son, John, would ever be able to create anything of value.
John had left Olivia and Daniel’s home shortly after high school graduation. Daniel had encouraged the move and preferred to view it as some sort of initiation into manhood. Secretly, though, Daniel hoped that the move would be good for John, who had become increasingly withdrawn and distant. Most teenagers were temperamental, but John’s mood swings seemed to be too dramatic. Sometime during high school, he began to go immediately to his room after coming home. He would play one of the powwow music tapes he had bought, and not come out until morning. When Olivia brought John dinner in his room, Daniel felt that was being far too accommodating. But he knew he had been fairly lenient himself, due in large part, he thought, to John’s status as an adopted child. Oh, there were lots of times when John was simply their son, with no need for any qualifiers, but the stark difference in their physical appearances was a nagging reminder of the truth. If Olivia and Daniel could not forget that John was adopted, then John must have carried that knowledge even closer to his skin. Daniel wondered if his worries about John were normal parental worries, or unfounded obsessions that somehow changed John’s little teenage rebellions into full-scale wars. Maybe that was why John played his music so loudly, so he could not hear himself thinking about his mysterious origins. Sometimes, John would play his powwow music deep into the night.
“John!” Daniel would shout. “Turn that down!”
John would turn the music down for a few minutes, but then he would slowly increase the volume until it was as loud as it had been. Those drums filled the house. Midnight. One in the morning. Olivia seemed to sleep through it, but Daniel lay awake, a pillow over his head. Finally, after trying to shout the music down, Daniel would crawl from bed and storm down the hallway to John’s bedroom. It was always dark but Daniel never bothered to switch on the light. The walk was so familiar he could have closed his eyes and found his way quickly. Daniel sensed that life was all about patterns, with humans, animals, and insects finding those patterns and holding onto them with all of their strength. God was a series of recurring images. Daniel had walked faithfully down the dark hallway to John’s room without incident for eighteen years, bringing glasses of water and warm milk, comfort from nightmares and sleepy frustration, quiet discipline. Then, one evening when John was playing his powwow music at an exceptionally loud volume, Daniel tripped over a chair that had not been there before. As he hopped around and rubbed his bruised toe, Daniel did not stop to think about anything other than the pain and the music. He pounded on John’s door, which was jammed shut. A few months earlier, Daniel had removed the lock from the door because John had taken to barricading himself in his room, but John then kept the door shut to outsiders with a butter knife inserted into the jamb.
“John!” Daniel shouted while pounding on the bedroom door. But the music only increased in volume until it sounded like a whole tribe was beating drums.
Daniel pounded on that bedroom door for hours, years, until he found himself pounding on John’s apartment door in Ballard. Daniel wore a tailored suit, dark blue and tasteful, and a muted purple paisley tie, slightly out of style, his way of expressing his individuality. Olivia wore her favorite dress, red with large, black buttons. They both wore similar black overcoats. Daniel thought it vaguely embarrassing that he looked like his wife whenever it rained, without realizing how much he and Olivia always looked alike. Daniel pounded on the door. Olivia stood behind him. She had done this so often before, Daniel knocking and knocking, while John sat inside, ignoring them. Usually, if they stayed long enough, John would eventually answer the door. Once or twice, she had talked the landlord into opening the door, and then felt more like a trespassing thief than a mother. The landlord eventually gave her a key, but Olivia had never used it.
“He’s not home,” said Olivia.
“He’s home,” said Daniel, frustrated and slightly frightened because John had disappeared before.
Now, again, no answer as Daniel pounded on the door, as Olivia held her breath, as they tried to make contact with their son. The neighbors, Salgado in 401 and Heistand in 402, turned up their televisions. They had heard this knocking many times before. In the beginning, it had been touching and slightly irritating, the audible proof of parental love. But it had become desperate and lonely.
Olivia and Daniel were silent on the long drive back to Bellevue. As they drove over the 520 bridge, Olivia looked down and saw a man in a kayak, or actually the dark silhouette of a man in a kayak, passing beneath the bridge. A crazy man, thought Olivia, to be all alone, out there, on the dark water. Glenn Gould played his piano. Olivia did not say anything when Daniel switched off the CD player, silencing Gould, and turned on the radio.
“Hello out there, folks, this is Truck Schultz on KWIZ, the Voice of Reason…”
16. Greek Chorus
“…AND BOY, DO I HAVE a problem. You see, folks, I just got this newsletter from the Washington State Indian Tribes for Aboriginal Gambling. The W.S.I.T.A.G. How do you say that anyway? What do you think it means in Indian? Well, I think it means they want to turn our state into a nest of sin and debauchery.
“The W.S.I.T.A.G. wants to increase the number of full-scale gambling casinos in Washington. We’re talking blackjack, poker, slot machines. We’re talking roulette, keno, bingo, with absolutely no bet limits or state supervision. That’s right, folks, the Indian tribes in this state want to subvert our constitution. They want to ignore the wishes of our government officials, of the voting public, and establish Vegas-style gambling casinos, complete with show girls, neon lights, and Wayne Newton.
“The Indian tribes insist that they have the legal right to establish casinos. They contend that the state has no say in these matters because of treaties that the tribes signed a century ago with the federal government. Can you believe this, folks? The Indian tribes believe that they are above the law. I wonder how far these Indians are willing to take this. What’s going to happen next? When you wake up tomorrow morning, will there be an Indian tribe camped out on your front yard, demanding that your land revert back to them?