“It’s him again, Mother,” said Murray Essrog. “It’s that goddamned Bailey kid. He’s still out there. All these years.”
I was still a kid to him, just as to me he’d been an old man since the first time I called him.
“I don’t know why you care,” came an older woman’s voice, every word a sigh.
“Baileybailey,” I said softly.
“Speak up, kid, do your thing,” said the old man.
I heard the phone change hands, the old woman’s breathing come onto the line.
“Essrog, Essrog, Essrog,” I chanted, like a cricket trapped in a wall.
I’m tightly wound. I’m a loose cannon. Both-I’m a tightly wound loose cannon, a tight loose. My whole life exists in the space between those words, tight, loose, and there isn’t any space there-they should be one word, tightloose. I’m an air bag in a dashboard, packed up layer upon layer in readiness for that moment when I get to explode, expand all over you, fill every available space. Unlike an airbag, though, I’m repacked the moment I’ve exploded, am tensed and ready again to explode-like some safety-film footage cut into a loop, all I do is compress and release, over and over, never saving or satisfying anyone, least myself. Yet the tape plays on pointlessly, obsessive air bag exploding again and again while life itself goes on elsewhere, outside the range of these antic expenditures.
The night before, in Kimmery’s alcove, suddenly seemed very long ago, very far away.
How could phone calls-cell-phone calls, staticky, unlikely, free of charge-how could they alter what real bodies felt? How could ghosts touch the living?
I tried not to think about it.
I tossed the cell phone onto the seat beside me, into the wreckage of Zeod’s sandwiches, the unfurled paper wrapping, the torn chip bag, the strewn chips and crumpled napkins gone translucent with grease stains in the midmorning sun. I wasn’t eating neatly, wasn’t getting anything exactly right, and now I knew it didnșt matter, not today, not anymore. Having broken the disastrous flow of dialing tics, my mood had gotten hard, my attention narrow. I crossed the bridge at Portsmouth into Maine and focused everything I had left on the drive, on casting off unnecessary behaviors, thrusting exhaustion and bitterness aside and making myself into a vehicular arrow pointed at Musconguspoint Station, at the answers that lay waiting for me there. I heard Minna’s voice now in place of my incessant Tourettic tongue, saying, Floor it, Freakshow. You got something to do, do it already. Tell your story driving.
Route 1 along the Maine coast was a series of touristy villages, some with boats, some with beaches, all with antiques and lobster. A large percentage of the hotels and restaurants were closed, with signs that read SEE YOU NEXT SUMMER! and HAVE A GREAT YEAR! I had trouble believing any of it was real-the turnpike had felt like a schematic, a road map, and I in my car a dot or a penpoint tracing a route. Now I felt as if I were driving through the pages of a calendar, or a collection of pictorial stamps. None of it struck me as particular or persuasive in any way. Maybe once I got out of the car.
Musconguspoint Station was one with boats. It wasn’t the least of these towns, but it was close to it, a swelling on the coast distinguished more than anything by the big ferry landing, with signs for the Muscongus Island Ferry, which made the circuit twice a day. The “place of peace” wasn’t hard to find. Yoshii’s-MAINE’S ONLY THAI AND SUSHI OCEANFOOD EMPORIUM, according to the sign-was the largest of a neat triad of buildings on a hill just past the ferry landing and the fishing docks, all painted a queasy combination of toasted-marshmallow brown and seashell pink, smugly humble earth tones that directly violated Maine’s barn-red and house-white scheme. This was one shot that wasn’t making the calendar. The restaurant extended on stilts over a short cliff on the water, surf thundering below; the other two buildings, presumably the retreat center, were caged in a fussy, evenly spaced row of pine trees, all the same year and model. The sign was topped with a painted image of Yoshii, a smiling bald man with chopsticks and waves of pleasure or serenity emanating from his head like stink-lines in a Don Martin cartoon.
I put the Tracer in the restaurant lot, up on the hill overlooking the water, the fishing dock, and the ferry landing below. It was alone there except for two pickup trucks in staff spots. Yoshii’s hours were painted on the door: seating for lunch began at twelve-thirty, which was twenty minutes from now. I didn’t see any sign of Tony or the giant or anyone else, but I didn’t want to sit in the lot and wait like a fool with a target painted on his back. An edge, that’s what I was after.
Edgerog, 33, seeks Edge.
I got out of the car. First surprise: the cold. A wind that hurt my ears instantly. The air smelled like a thunderstorm but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I went over the barrier of logs at the corner of the parking lot and clambered down the grade toward the water, under the shade of the jutting deck of the restaurant. Once I’d dipped out of sight of the road and buildings, I undid my fly and peed on the rocks, amusing my compulsiveness by staining one whole boulder a deeper gray, albeit only temporarily. It was as I zipped onlurned to see the ocean that the vertigo hit me. I’d found an edge, all right. Waves, sky, trees, Essrog-I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement. I experienced it precisely as a loss of language, a great sucking-away of the word-laden walls that I needed around me, that I touched everywhere, leaned on for support, cribbed from when I ticced aloud. Those walls of language had always been in place, I understood now, audible to me until the sky in Maine deafened them with a shout of silence. I staggered, put one hand on the rocks to steady myself. I needed to reply in some new tongue, to find a way to assert a self that had become tenuous, shrunk to a shred of Brooklyn stumbling on the coastal void: Orphan meets ocean. Jerk evaporates in salt mist.
“Freakshow!” I yelled into the swirling foam. It was lost.
“Bailey!” vanished too.
“Eat me! Dickweed!”
Nothing. What did I expect-Frank Minna to come rising from the sea?
“Essrog!” I screamed. I thought of Murray Essrog and his wife. They were Brooklyn Essrogs, like me. Had they ever come to this edge to meet the sky? Or was I the first Essrog to put a footprint on the crust of Maine?
“I claim this big water for Essrog!” I shouted.
I was a freak of nature.
Back on the dry land of the parking lot, I straightened my jacket and peered around to see if anyone had overheard my outburst. The nearest activity was at the base of the fishing docks below, where a small boat had come in and tiny figures in Devo-style yellow jumpsuits stood handing blue plastic crates over the prow and onto a pallet on the dock. I locked the car and strolled across to the other end of the empty lot, then scooted down the scrubby hill toward the men and boats, half sliding on my pavement-walker’s leather soles, wind biting at my nose and chin. The restaurant and retreat center were eclipsed by the swell of the hill as I reached the dock.
“Hey!”
I got the attention of one of the men on the dock. He turned with his crate and plopped it on the pile, then stood hands on hips waiting for me to reach him. As I got closer, I examined the boat. The blue cartons were sealed, but the boatmen hefted them as though they were heavy with something, and with enough care to make me know the something was valuable. The deck of the boat held racks covered with diving equipment-rubber suits, flippers, and masks, and a pile of tanks for breathing underwater.