The fact is he doesn’t really want to be back home. He wants to be someplace different. He wants to be with Ronnie.
So why did you drive her away?
Throughout his life, Flynn has wished he could pick up a guidebook, a text, that would clearly explain his motivations, show a route from sparks in the brain all the way through speech, movement, physical activity. He wants a field guide to his own mind and desires, a primer that would treat him as an object, or better, an idea, something a method can be applied to or layered over. Like an instructional transparency. Like those Mylar illustrations in the Britannica that show the interior of the body, one sheet lying over the next, respiratory system, circulatory system, nerve pathways, connection of the bones, until a whole is formed, an entire unit, a complete body.
Halfway through his third Scotch, Flynn became aware of a simple truth that was so obvious and so pathetic that he now feels embarrassed by both its presence and his long ignorance of it. But it’s there and it’s not going away and it was Ronnie who induced its birth in his conscious, if raving, brain:
It’s not the jam. You stupid bastard. It has never once been the jam. You don’t care about the jam. You’re heir apparent to Wallace and you couldn’t care less about jamming. You could go either way. Take it or leave it. You dumb, pathetic fuck. It’s the jammers. It’s the family. The connection. You want to belong. Look at yourself. You’re the mediator, the father confessor, the counselor, banker, errand boy, historian. You want to keep them together. You want to be at the heart of the home, the center of their lives. The idea has nothing to do with it. You’re a political idiot. You’ve lied to yourself that you’re some provocateur. But you want to be Abraham. You want to be Big Daddy. You want unity and you want blood-love.
And the biggest question is: Why couldn’t you make a normal family?
Now Gabe crosses the space between them, eyes on the floor, hands pushed into his pockets. He’s dressed in the standard black T-shirt, ripped blue jeans, and high-top sneakers. Flynn watches the boy walk toward him and remembers being fifteen.
Flynn has always thought of his own childhood as a classic, if nonunique, tragedy: a compilation of archetypal images, as automatically known as that black-and-white film portrayal of the helpless widow at the mercy of the black-caped, handlebar-mustached banker/landlord/robber baron. He tends to recall his first decade in terms of snapshots: the nuns of the orphanage grouped around the head dining table, the dingy kitchen of the first foster home.
But now he feels that, even as an orphan, a displaced, exiled child, he probably had an easier time than Gabe. Because Flynn knew instinctively, reflexively, how to act the part of the integrated when necessary. And Gabe is one of those people who never will, who’ll go a lifetime just missing the markings of the franchised. He’s been betrayed by a hesitant tongue that will always recoil at the first pulses of nervousness or fear. Flynn may always feel isolated, but Gabe is a truly marked individual. His isolation is visible outside the skin, like a defective infant whose stomach developed outside the epidermis. Gabe will never be able to fake integration the way Flynn can. And they both know this.
So when Gabe comes to a stop next to Flynn’s shoulder, Flynn makes it easy for him. He pivots toward the kid and extends a hand and says, “Looks like your people have really cut and run this time.”
Gabe simply gives a sad nod.
Flynn shrugs. “Why don’t we tell the gang here to head home? It’s all over. Nothing’s going to happen here tonight.”
Gabe sits down on the floor next to Flynn and pretends to look into the diorama.
Flynn puts a sloppy hand on his shoulder. “Want to thank you for coming out here tonight, Gabe. I know it was an awful choice. And to be honest, I’m surprised. I mean, it’s no secret how you feel about Hazel.”
“You’re la-la-loaded, G.T.”
“Can’t disagree with you. But it’s medicinal. Broke some fingers.”
“I da-da-don’t think I’ve ever s-seen you loaded.”
“Well, consider it another first. We’re breaking records all over the place tonight.”
Gabe gives him a weak smile. “Na-none of this is your fault, G.T.”
Flynn shakes his head. “I didn’t exert enough force. I tried to appease everyone. I couldn’t bring the whole thing into focus.”
“What do you ma-ma-mean?”
Flynn puts a hand on his shoulder, but then lets it fall away. “I mean,” he says, louding up on the last word, “that I couldn’t make the big picture clear enough. That the reason we all end up here doesn’t have much to do with jamming.”
Gabe stares at him like he’s segued into a lost language.
“Forget it,” Flynn says, looking back at the diorama.
“Why don’t we ga-get out of here, G.T. Okay? La-let me take you out. I know a new place down in the za-zone.”
“I’ve had quite a few already, right?”
Gabe shrugs. “Sa-so one more won’t hurt. La-let me—”
And his sentence is broken off by the sound of Hazel and her group throwing open the museum’s doors and stomping into the room. It sounds like they’re all wearing jackboots. They halt into a phalanx behind their leader and she stands with her hands on her hips and surveys the room, a punk Patton juiced up on attitude, certainty, and probably a hit or two of speed.
“Son of a bitch,” Flynn yells in a voice of delighted surprise. “I knew it.”
He struggles up to his feet and yells, “The kids have come home.”
He starts to walk toward Hazel and says, “Daughter of mine, I knew you wouldn’t let me down.”
She looks surprised, cranes her neck out slightly, and says, “Jesus Christ, Flynn. You’re shit-faced.”
“It’s a new look,” he says. “I was due for a change.”
Hazel looks past him at Gabe and says, “You get lost, sport?”
Gabe opens his mouth to speak, but Hazel cuts him off with a disgusted shake of her head and says, “I nailed you as a lightweight from the start.”
Flynn steps directly in front of her, face-to-face. He drops his voice, plants a kiss on her cheek that she tries not to react to, and says, “I knew you’d come, Hazel. I knew you’d remember.”
She turns her face away from him and says, “Go sit down, Flynn.”
No one makes a move. It’s like the whole room is waiting for some delayed performance to begin. There’s an edginess that’s apparent without any manifestation in sound or motion.
Finally Flynn says, “What? You’re running the show tonight, Hazel?”
She stares at him and there’s no meaning he can put to the look on her face. He hopes the booze is responsible for this. But he’d bet against it. He’s about to lose her, he knows. He’s about to lose this whole pathetic family. She’s come to make it official. There’s nothing he can do. Any impressions of control he once felt are gone. And the infuriating and heart-crushing frustration comes most of all from the fact that he doesn’t know what he did wrong. He’s always felt that at a basic, cellular level, this was a cause-and-effect world. But now something in his intestines, rather than his brain, tells him he’s been wrong. Logic and patterns and inviolable rules of force and reaction are just imposed explanations, convenient fables that comfort us if we don’t fuck with them too much.
All he can think to say is, “What did I do wrong, Hazel?”
“Knock it off, Flynn,” she says. “Don’t embarrass yourself here—”
“Embarrass myself?” he screams, and the room sits up at the volume and the echo. He’s suddenly furious. “Where the fuck do you come off talking to me like that?”