“Are you talking about school?”
“No, the Air National Guard.”
“Why were you suspended from school, Angie?” He heard his voice getting shrill.
“Because they’re a bunch of morons.”
“But specifically.”
“I answered a question on my civics test about what kind of government we had, and I said a Mediocracy. And they marked it wrong. And I said that proved that I was right. So they sent me home.”
“You called it a Mediocracy?” In spite of everything, he couldn’t help smiling. She was his daughter. Stein heard a familiar-sounding dog bark. “Was that Watson? Angie, are you at our place?”
The phone was covered again. There was muffled struggle or horseplay. “Stop it,” Stein heard Angie whisper. Though not to Stein.
“Who’s there? Angie, I want you to go to Lila’s.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“Just go there, will you please?”
There was an interminable silence. “Fine,” she said at last. He felt his body relax. “But not tonight.” The line went dead in his hand.
His first impulse was to call her back. Angie was obviously there with a boy, but what could he do about it? He had never demanded the obedience from her that a lot parents did. It didn’t seem like a trait, that if well learned, would serve her as an adult. Instead, he had encouraged her to question authority, and foolishly presumed he’d be granted immunity. Another responsible choice would be to call Hillary. That tactic might preserve Angie’s virginity for one more night, if indeed it still existed to be spared. But it would be at the cost of losing Angie’s trust permanently.
When Angie was first born, Stein had harbored so many romantic projections of the way they would share all of her milestones, how he would have a knack for saying the exact right thing at the occasion. Instead, he’d always been two turns of the road behind what she had already done, trying to play catch-up. Edna Greene had said it right: Children make us strangers to our own lives. He thought about calling Penelope. But the concepts of Penelope and Chaperone did not quite merge. She’d more likely go over and make it a threesome.
He felt an irresistible tug on his male umbilical to get home. To be there. To fix what was wrong. To plug the leak. But there was nothing he could do. He could not Mighty Mouse himself there at the speed of light. That umbilical was cut. Maybe it had been cut for a long time and he was just now accepting it. She was there. He was here. And he had to do finish what he came to do.
He placed both buds out on the coffee table and studied them one last time. Stein had not gotten high for six years three months and a few days, give or take. Men hate to break streaks. Men like to elongate. One of the countless numbers of women he had met in his excursion through the Single Scene-her name might have been Brenda-who had called herself a Feminist Behavioralist, attributed the male linear orientation to the absence of a menstrual cycle. The only people who were surprised when Columbus discovered the world was round were men.
He took a bottle of Courvoisier from the minibar and poured it into a snifter. He covered the glass with a piece of aluminum foil from the stem of his complimentary rose and pulled it taut across the rim of the glass. He tapped delicately on the foil with the needle from his sewing kit, making a cluster of tiny holes against the rim of the snifter. Directly opposite, he cut out a small mouth hole. He snipped a small sliver of Goodpasture’s orchid and carefully pared it into shards. These he placed over the mesh holes he had tapped into his improvised bong. He had the sensation that he was watching himself from above.
He lit a match and placed his lips on the opening he had cut in the foil. The sweet smoke billowed down into the snifter, met resistance at the level of the brandy, and was drawn up and out of the glass into the wind tunnel down into Stein’s alveoli. Clusters of nearly atrophied neuro-receptors in Stein’s cerebellum sprang to life. The last crescent of sun radiated a shaft of orange light that shot across the room from the window to the sofa and Stein was astonished to see that it was filled with atoms. Trillions of them. Jumping and dancing through the air like a hatching of mayflies.
He smiled as he visualized the indulgent looks on people’s faces if he told them he could see atoms. They would explain that he was seeing particles of dust in suspension being carried about by tiny vectors of air currents. What a laugh, Stein thought. As though atoms and dust particles were remotely alike. Dust flecks were clunky, sluggish dirigibles; fish tank diving bells that could rise or sink slowly. Stein was seeing clouds of minnows, sunlit quicksilver darts of energy.
The shaft of light passing through the vase of flowers and the fruit bowl cast a perfect shadow profile of John Lennon onto the middle section of the sofa. His thin wire frame glasses. The long shoulder-length billow of his hair. The beard. Stein reckoned that John had come to impart a secret to him. People of John’s status did not make unannounced appearances without reason. Stein rose from the bed to come closer, but in doing so his own corporeal body broke the plane of light and the effigy disappeared. Was that the message the cosmos was sending to him-don’t get too close to people, they’ll die? Don’t stand in people’s light?
But John was leaving. Not fading, but morphing slowly into less of a likeness of himself. Now Stein saw a cow grazing in a grassy field. He flashed on that summer on Crete when the tour guide had explained how archaeologists had put together the few fragments they had unearthed of two thousand year old Minoan tiles, and had extrapolated from them what the full mosaic would have been. Art books carried pictures of those extrapolated Priest King frescoes for decades. Lately more fragments had been found which demonstrated that the experts’ projection of the whole picture had been completely wrong. The figures in the mosaic weren’t priests at all, they were monkeys.
He grokked in its fullness that the angle between earth and sun was changing and that to keep John here, he simply had to move the vase and the bowl of fruit. But no, they were so perfectly set. He would move the sofa to catch the day’s last afterglow. Ah, but to move that he would first have to move the end table. Wisdom revealed itself in layers. The truth that the lamp sitting atop the end table was plugged into the socket under the armoire was not revealed to him until he tugged the table to the left, yanking the support out from underneath the lamp.
The truth of galvanic response was next revealed to Stein as his torso instinctively lunged forward and made a shoe top catch of the bulb and saved it from shattering. The truth of the lamp cord next revealed itself, as it had pulled taut around his ankle like a bolos. The wire went under the armoire. The electric socket was centered on the wall behind it. To reach it, he would have to pull the huge mahogany closet away from the wall. He braced his body, placed his open palms on the side of the armoire and pushed. His muscles strained. Ligaments exerted to their breaking point. But nothing budged. He had reached the crossroads of The Truth of Healthy Retreat and The Truth of Never Quitting.
He tried an alternate approach. He lay on the floor and reached his arm as far as it would go under the armoire. His extended fingers could just reach the plug. He tugged on the wire. It pulled free from the wall. Or more accurately, the ancient wire pulled free of its own plug; the plug remained embedded in the socket. He sat with a live electric wire in his hand.
In his enlightened sagacity, he knew this was not a good thing. He would have to slide the frayed wire carefully out from under the three inch high clearance without the two exposed ends making contact with each other or the underside of the armoire. He imagined himself one of those steel-nerved British explosive specialists who did the delicate work of defusing unexploded German ordinance. Slowly he drew the wires out toward his chest. What a savage bouquet, he thought.