* * *
Patrick lit a Turkish cigarette and asked the stewardess for another glass of brandy. He was beginning to feel a little jumpy without any smack. The four Valiums he had stolen from Kay had helped him face breakfast, but now he could feel the onset of withdrawal, like a litter of drowning kittens in the sack of his stomach.
Kay was the American girl he had been having an affair with. Last night when he had wanted to bury himself in a woman’s body, to affirm that, unlike his father, he was alive, he had chosen to see Kay. Debbie was beautiful (everybody said so), and she was clever (she said so herself), but he could imagine her clicking anxiously across the room, like a pair of chopsticks, and just then he needed a softer embrace.
Kay lived in a rented flat on the outskirts of Oxford, where she played the violin, kept cats, and worked on her Kafka thesis. She took a less complacent attitude towards Patrick’s idleness than anyone else he knew. ‘You have to sell yourself,’ she used to say, ‘just to get rid of the damned thing.’
Patrick disliked everything about Kay’s flat. He knew she had not put the gold cherubs against the William Morris-styled wallpaper; on the other hand, she had not taken them down. In the dark corridor, Kay had come up to him, her thick brown hair falling on one shoulder, and her body draped in heavy grey silk. She had kissed him slowly, while her jealous cats scratched at the kitchen door.
Patrick had drunk the whisky and taken the Valium she had given him. Kay told him about her own dying parents. ‘You have to start looking after them badly before you’ve got over the shock of how badly they looked after you,’ she said. ‘I had to drive my parents across the States last summer. My dad was dying of emphysema and my mother, who used to be a ferocious woman, was like a child after her stroke. I was barrelling along at eighty through Utah, looking for a bottle of oxygen, while my mother kept saying with her impoverished vocabulary, “Oh dear, oh my, Papa’s not well. Oh my.”’
Patrick imagined Kay’s father sunk in the back of the car, his eyes glazed over with exhaustion and his lungs, like torn fishing nets, trawling vainly for air. How had his own father died? He had forgotten to ask.
* * *
Since his luminous remarks about ‘that mental thing’, Earl had been speaking about his ‘whole variety of holdings’ and his love for his family. His divorce had been ‘hard on the kids’, but he concluded with a chuckle, ‘I’ve been diversifying, and I don’t just mean in the business field.’
Patrick was grateful to be flying on Concorde. Not only would he be fresh for the ordeal of seeing his father’s corpse, before it was cremated the next day, but he was also halving his conversation time with Earl. They ought to advertise. A simpering voiceover popped into his mind: ‘It’s because we care, not just for your physical comfort, but for your mental health, that we shorten your conversation with people like Earl Hammer.’
‘You see, Paddy,’ said Earl, ‘I’ve made very considerable – I mean big – contributions to the Republican Party, and I could get just about any embassy I want. But I’m not interested in London or Paris: that’s just social shit.’
Patrick drank his brandy in one gulp.
‘What I want is a small Latin American or Central American country where the ambassador has control of the CIA on the ground.’
‘On the ground,’ echoed Patrick.
‘That’s right,’ said Earl. ‘But I have a dilemma at this point; a real hard one.’ He was solemn again. ‘My daughter is trying to make the national volleyball team and she has a series of real important games over the next year. Hell, I don’t know whether to go for the embassy or root for my daughter.’
‘Earl,’ said Patrick earnestly, ‘I don’t think there’s anything more important than being a good dad.’
Earl was visibly moved. ‘I appreciate that advice, Paddy, I really do.’
The flight was coming to an end. Earl made some remarks about how you always met ‘high-quality’ people on Concorde. At the airport terminal Earl took the US citizens’ channel, and Patrick headed for the Aliens’.
‘Goodbye, friend,’ shouted Earl with a big wave, ‘see you around!’
‘Every parting,’ snarled Patrick under his breath, ‘is a little death.’
2
‘WHAT IS THE PURPOSE of your visit, sir? Business or pleasure?’
‘Neither.’
‘I’m sorry?’ She was a pear-shaped, slug-coloured, shorthaired woman wearing big glasses and a dark blue uniform.
‘I’m here to collect my father’s corpse,’ mumbled Patrick.
‘I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t catch that,’ she said with official exasperation.
‘I’m here to collect my father’s corpse,’ Patrick shouted slowly.
She handed back his passport. ‘Have a nice day.’
The rage that Patrick had felt after passing through passport control eclipsed his usual terror of Customs (What if they stripped him? What if they saw his arms?).
And so here he was again, slumped in the back of a cab, in a seat often repaired with black masking tape, but still opening occasionally onto small craters of yellow foam, back in a nation that was dieting its way to immortality, while he still dieted his way in the opposite direction.
As his taxi bounced and squeaked along the freeway, Patrick started to register reluctantly the sensations of reentry into New York. There was of course a driver who spoke no English, and whose lugubrious photograph confirmed the suicidal gloom which the back of his neck could only hint at. The neighbouring lanes bore witness to the usual combination of excess and decay. Enormous battered cars with sloppy engines, and black-windowed limos, swarmed into the city, like flies on their favourite food. Patrick stared at the dented hubcap of an old white station wagon. It had seen so much, he reflected, and remembered nothing, like a slick amnesiac reeling in thousands of images and rejecting them instantly, spinning out its empty life under a paler wider sky.
The thought that had obsessed him the night before cut into his trance. It was intolerable: his father had cheated him again. The bastard had deprived him of the chance to transform his ancient terror and his unwilling admiration into contemptuous pity for the boring and toothless old man he had become. And yet Patrick found himself sucked towards his father’s death by a stronger habit of emulation than he could reasonably bear. Death was always, of course, a temptation; but now it seemed like a temptation to obey. On top of its power to strike a decadent or defiant posture in the endless vaudeville of youth, on top of the familiar lure of raw violence and self-destruction, it had taken on the aspect of conformity, like going into the family business. Really, it had all the options covered.
Acre after acre of tombstones stretched out beside the freeway. Patrick thought of his favourite lines of poetry: ‘Dead, long dead, / Long dead!’ (How could you beat that?) ‘And my heart is a handful of dust, / And the wheels go over my head, / And my bones are shaken with pain, / For into a shallow grave they are thrust, / Only a yard beneath the street,’ something, something, ‘enough to drive one mad.’
The slippery humming metal of the Williamsburg Bridge reawakened him to his surroundings, but not for long. He felt queasy and nervous. Another withdrawal in a foreign hotel room; he knew the routine. Except that this was going to be the last time. Or among the last times. He laughed nervously. No, the bastards weren’t going to get him. Concentration like a flame-thrower. No prisoners!
The trouble was that he always wanted smack, like wanting to get out of a wheelchair when the room was on fire. If you thought about it that much you might as well take it. His right leg twitched up and down rapidly. He folded his arms across his stomach and pinched the collar of his overcoat together. ‘Fuck off,’ he said out loud, ‘just fuck off.’