Ten
Sometimes I forgot that my father was gone. It was as if he were on vacation or out of town, and in the back of my mind, that trickster of a spot, I had no doubt he’d be back. Then I’d remember that his absence was permanent, and couldn’t decide which was worse: the forgetting or the remembering, the loss of knowledge or its sudden return. He was fifty-one when he died, an absurdly young age, seriously ridiculous; an age that would force you to wonder what was wrong with his heart, potentially my own and others’ of my acquaintance, not to mention hearts in general, which seemed like flawed mechanisms all around.
Also there was the question of what I hated most. On one side was the fact that I was forgetting what he looked like. I knew he was angular and dark-haired, with hair bristling from his ears and nose; when I was little, I sometimes saw him in the bathroom, tweezing them out and swearing with pain, which made me feel both amused and sorry for him. But the way his eyes flicked rapidly from side to side when he talked, his rare laughter (highly prized by Wylie and me, because it was harder to get him to laugh than our mother) when we did something either funny or ridiculous, his tendency to fall asleep in front of the television and snore — at times I found myself recovering these things, and understood that I’d been losing them, that the reality of my father was receding and in its place were photographs, hardening.
On the other side was the fact that my brother looked a lot like him: the same dark hair, sharp shoulders, and slouch. Seeing Wylie bent over a map next to Angus was, however slightly, like seeing my father again, and I didn’t enjoy it at all. And the more I saw him, the more acutely I felt that slingshot process of remembering my own forgetting, the push and pull I’d stayed in New York to avoid. I thought of my mother’s voice on the telephone saying “Come home, you can’t have to work all the time,” and my own voice saying “I can’t get away.” We must have had this conversation fifty times since my father died.
And yet, I thought, looking at my brother, I’d been missing him, too. Missing people all around.
I stared over his shoulder at the map, even though he shot me a look of utter annoyance. I shrugged and said, “Don’t let me distract you.”
What they had was a map of the city, on which Wylie was highlighting, with a Day-Glo pink marker, a section of streets. I wondered if they had another sprinkler-related prank planned. I’d never met anyone who hated grass as much as they did.
“Up and down this whole street,” he was saying, “is water waste central.”
“Yeah, it’s hideous,” Stan agreed. “That is some ugly stuff.”
“I hear you, man,” Berto said glumly. He was eating corn nuts out of a plastic bag and, every once in a while, wiping his hands on his shorts. Sledge was lying there next to him, tenderly licking the fabric where this wiping occurred.
Irina sat nursing Psyche, a benevolent look on her face, and she motioned me over. “Isn’t it all highly exciting?” she said.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“Our committee is executing the second strike of the summer. Action number two.”
“Something to do with pools, I take it.”
From across the room I saw Wylie look up, and knew that he was waiting to hear my reaction.
“That’s right,” Irina said. Psyche pulled away from her breast, sucking her own lips and muttering to herself, and Irina covered her chest and smoothed the few strands of hair on the baby’s head. “It is of course highly sad to have pools of water in the center of the desert. It is a wrong. So we are going to drain them.”
“What, the public pools? In this heat? That won’t make you guys very popular,” I said. As soon as the first words were out of my mouth, I could feel unfriendliness building in the room. Only Angus continued studying the map, whistling under his breath.
“Not the city pools,” Wylie said, standing up and stepping toward me. “Private pools. In this neighborhood practically every damn house has a pool. Think of the amount of water that is, and how little it gets used. It’s a criminal overallocation of valuable resources.”
“You said it, man,” Berto said.
I pictured the pools of Albuquerque spread out in the brilliant sunshine, their turquoise surfaces ringed by gladioli and umbrellas, all of it pretty as a Hockney painting. “What are you going to do with the water?” I asked.
“Dump it into the aquifer!” Stan said.
“Can’t do that,” Wylie said. “We’ll have to dump it onto their lawns. And if it kills all the nonnative plants, it serves them right. We should kill all that East Coast grass.”
“Isn’t it a little bit mean?” I said. He glared at me. “Because it’s mostly kids who use pools.” He was still glaring. “And kids like to swim when it’s hot and everything,” I finished lamely.
“If you want to talk about kids,” he said, “picture the thousands who die of dysentery each year in India due to lack of clean water while little Johnny in Rio Rancho practices the front crawl with his private swim coach. Save your sympathy for the right people, Lynn. Chemically processing vast quantities of chlorinated water in the middle of an arid ecosystem is an absurd, destructive act. By confronting them with the untenability of this position, we can effectively illustrate the necessity of change.”
“Confronting kids?” I said.
My brother shrugged. “Presumably their parents will notice as well.”
“Totally, man,” Berto said.
“Those pools are ugly,” Stan said. “They are like an abomination upon the land.”
“Plus imagine the looks on their faces when they see they’re empty,” Angus said, and winked at me.
I could tell Wylie wanted to continue lecturing me, but Angus waved him over. “We do need to talk about the drainage.”
“Would you mind holding the baby?” Irina said. “I will be right back.” She deposited Psyche in my arms and went into the bathroom. Sound asleep, the baby lay motionless in my lap. Her head was heavy and inert, like a miniature bowling ball. She was snoring, and her tiny hands were curled in delicate fists. I sat there and studied her. After a few minutes, her weight started to cut off the circulation in my legs — not exactly painful, but not pleasant, either.
“Look, Lynn,” Wylie said, obviously bothered that he hadn’t convinced me of their righteousness. “Once people come out and see what we’ve done, they’ll have to ask themselves why.” He was standing against the counter now, arms crossed.
They’ll be asking themselves who vandalized their pool, I thought, but didn’t say so out loud.
“I’ve been thinking about these issues for a long time, and I’ve decided that the revolution has to move out of the wilderness and into the city. It’s no good sitting in a tree when the vast majority of people don’t go anywhere near that tree. It’s no good selling them calendars with glossy pictures of the landscape to help them decorate the breakfast nooks and entertainment centers of their oversized suburban homes. You’ve got to attack people where they live.”
His eyes glowed in the apartment’s dim light. Stan and Berto were nodding appreciatively, and Angus was looking at him and smiling.
There was a kind of logic to his argument, albeit only a certain kind. I couldn’t summon a ready defense of swimming pools, suburban sprawl, and waste. I wondered what the hell Irina was doing in the bathroom that took so long. “Listen,” I said to the room at large, “my legs are numb.”
Angus laughed. He took the baby from my lap — expertly, without waking her — and laid her down on his own. Holding one of Psyche’s feet in his hands, he peered into her sleeping face with a naked tenderness that made me feel somehow ashamed. She woke up and looked at him without dismay.