Bright Shards of Someplace Else Read online

  “Listen,” I finally say, when we’ve both relaxed sufficiently. “What do you think of these two jokers? I mean, I love Levi, don’t get me wrong, but we both know he’s kind of a flake. And my son Dee—sorry he’s here by the way—I did not invite him—I give you credit for not laughing and spitting up your wine when he was going on about restarting that bum’s heart and his ‘own heart as well …’”

  I start to laugh myself now, wild peals. My eyes are filling with tears and a little bubble of hysteria, pleasurable and frightening, rises in my chest. I touch Lucinda’s wrist to ground myself, to keep myself in the room and of this world. The warmth of her skin sobers me up, and I look at her, giving her a chance to let loose her own commentary and pained chuckle.

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean. Levi is a bright man. And your son … his story was amazing. I don’t know why a person would laugh at that.”

  Is she putting me on? Or simply making me disassemble the whole myth that Dee built around his addiction as a kind of flirtation? I laugh, to show Lucinda I’m onto her, and then comply. I tell her his story is unbelievable, full of logical holes and crazy claims, and even if it was true, Dee’s supposed epiphany and conversation struck me as cheap, sudden, and deluded. All that talk of destiny—destiny is just narcissism, a sad wish that the events of the world all ordered themselves around you. As I’m sure Lucinda knows.

  “I’m not sure about all that. Some strange things are true. When I was a young girl in Barroselas, we had a saying, ‘The water flows without cease.’ It means your life is traveling somewhere, somewhere beyond your control. On birthdays we’d make a chain of flowers, drop it in the river, then spend the whole day following where it floated. If the chain got snagged, we would have a picnic on the bank and wait for it to either break apart or get free. It was said that the snag meant your year would be difficult and it was always right. I got the snag the year my fiancé found his Spanish girlfriend. I was so angry I cooked up everything we had in the pantry and left seven full meals on the porch. But you, maybe you don’t think this way. You seem to be more of a business type person? A person who follows only facts and maybe money. That’s how you talk.”

  So there will be no meeting of the minds. I put my head down on the table for a moment, and let the room swim. Lucinda pats my head and walks out, the dogs heaving up with a joint sigh and following her out. The sink runs and pans clang and then the kitchen light goes out. Eventually, I get up. I have the space to myself. I walk around, a little drunk, peering at all Levi’s souvenirs and tchotchkes. With all the traveling he’s done, you’d think he’d develop some street smarts, some healthy self-protection.

  I think of what Dee would do alone in a big, opulent space like this. Steal. He would steal to feed his habit, steal out of some misguided attempt to balance out the scales of life. “You’re rich,” he had once said to me, after pawning off James Taylor’s signed set list for something he instantly shot or inhaled into his body. “You didn’t need it. It was just a fucking museum piece, morgue décor.” He’s stolen thousands of dollars’ worth of things from me over the years, stole so much that I changed my locks every few months as a matter of course. When he’d visit I’d follow him to the bathroom. I’d make sure he was wearing short sleeves, and I’d even ask him to empty his pockets in front of me when he left, which he’d do with a baneful expression, like some pauper cartoon character.

  Dee would steal. He probably already has. Levi is so innocent, so easily duped … There’s something both inspirational and unseemly in Levi’s openness, his willingness to trust all things. In a young man, it seems right and normal, but in Levi that innocence—suspended perfectly intact like some primordial bug in amber—feels spooky, unreal. How is it that he hasn’t changed at all? The bubble of fame can’t account for it. He was swindled out of money, swindled out of the rights to some of the best songs in his catalogue by Larry Devins, his manager in the eighties. He’s been through at least two divorces, as far as I know. His father was a harsh military man who thought his son’s dreams of a life in music were corrupt and delusional, and the man died right before we left on our first tour, before Levi could say “I told you so.” Dee would take him for everything he had.

  My eyes fall on a small jade elephant, a trinket from Levi’s trip to India when he was in his full Buddhist phase. As I think of Dee and Levi—both so deluded in their own way, both so unreasonable—I pick up the figurine and switch it from hand to hand. The cool stone feels pleasant, bracing, as if it were a physical representation of the clarity that everyone in Chautauqua seems to lack. Idly, I move through the house with it, looking at old pictures of Levi and old pictures of me. Then I pocket it.

  The next morning Dee and Levi are at the table, talking about something they keep referring to as “the secret weapon.” I eat my oatmeal and watch the empty spot where the jade elephant had been. No one seems to notice.

  “I can’t wait to try out the secret weapon, man. I think you are totally right on that it’ll make that track.” Levi is saying to Dee.

  Then he turns to me. “Danny, you’ve got to come to the studio. You gotta hear what Dee and I came up with. We’ve got an incredible track, ninety percent done, we just need lyrics. Would you give a listen? I know you’ve been working on the lyrics … maybe you can match them up with what we got so far.”

  I follow them into the studio, the place I’ve been avoiding since I arrived. Levi’s walk is unchanged—eager and upright, he seems to rise up on tiptoe, as if trying to take a peek at something each stride. Dee walks with a measured, quiet step, like a contemplative monk walking the grounds, his hands clasped behind his back. Far different from the darting, manic boy who was constantly jiggling a leg or running his hands through his hair.

  Levi hands me the headphones and for a moment I hear nothing. Then the music comes in. Something like a muted toy xylophone reverbing. Then, Levi’s voice, strangely lilting, then falling into spoken word. Improvised placeholder lyrics and a vaguely Spanish guitar hook, and then some kind of clicking dirtied up the track. The tick becomes louder but remains muffled, like sticks snapping under a coat of leaves. Then, the guitar, this time more muscular, rising up and thinning out to a clear high sound that I feel in my teeth, like a tuning fork. And the tick, quieting. I pull the headphones off.

  “What do you think?” Levi leans forward and looks me in the eye. Dee stands over his shoulder and seems to be meditating, humming to himself with his eyes closed.

  “Interesting. A real departure. What’s that ticking sound that starts midway? It was distracting.”

  Levi smiles and looks back over his shoulder at Dee, who breaks into a wide grin. Then Levi laughs and slaps my knee.

  “That’s the secret weapon. That sound … it’s the click of a compressed sternum during CPR. Dee found the sample from some emergency training web video. Isn’t it amazing? That sound is just so … I don’t know … guttural or something. Fleshy. Bony. I love it. It’s full of life, huh?”

  I have quite a bounty in my pocket. The jade elephant from earlier, the sea horse ring, a brass swan incense holder, my own watch, and the ultimate prize—one of Levi’s and my gold records, slipped into the lining of my coat. It all clinks and chimes in my coat like frolicsome imps playing atonal music. I’m wandering all around Chautauqua, halfway looking for Lucinda and halfway plotting how to deal with Dee. And halfway—if I can have another halfway here—just enjoying the act of roaming around with all these thoughts and desires in my head, things no one knows about. Levi thinks I’m a blocked writer at odds with my perfectly nice son. Dee thinks I’m just stewing in my cabin, on the cusp of breaking down and believing him once more, opening my heart and wallet as butterflies of acceptance and love flutter about both our faces. And Lucinda thinks I’m a cynic, a killer of mysteries, and probably a dull guy besides, compared to sweet celestial Levi. But I’m not those things. If Lucinda saw me now, she’d see that I was electric with possibility. The taken objects—and th
e soft clamor of their physical presence—makes me feel a sudden confidence, a confidence that can come only when you hold something back from the world. Dee used to talk about the pleasures of a secret high when he was younger, that wonderful feeling of being stoned while no one knows or can tell. Extra points if you’re doing something exceptionally wholesome like cooking Christmas cookies with grandma. The swirls and shifts of the room—the wild non sequitur thoughts—these are all your own to savor and conceal.

  I turn off into the woods. Bars of light bend over the high branches and thin as they focus in on the forest floor. This is wild country—there are no trails, and Rosa multiflora keeps snagging me, like a clutch of fans desperate for whatever piece of me they can get. The hillside seems repetitive and smudged; nature seems to me a dull pattern, a decorative border. It’s steep, and I slide on my heels a few times. An enormous rotted log, mossy and covered with the sinewy trails of some boring insect, lies across the way. It’s split in the middle, right down to the ground. I pull the record out of my coat lining and take a look at it. It’s the gold record for “Many a Moon.” The frame includes the silver-painted record, the little certifying plaque from the RIAA and a photograph of Levi and me, riding double on a statue Civil War horse on tour long ago. I sat in front of the general, and he sat behind, hugging the stone figure with what appeared to be a rush of affection.

  It was an unexpected hit for us. The song used lunar imagery to describe the way a man and a women drift apart and back together. She kept me waiting on her half-lit eyes … As I wrote the thing I imagined Levi and me laughing over it over a joint, wadding it up and tossing it in the busted base drum we used as a trash can. Levi had no high sense of irony, I knew, but even he would find this an occasion to roll his eyes and drop, for a moment at least, his blinding sincerity. I kept writing, pushing the lyrics into schmaltz and sugar, to baroque despair, and then, finally, an unearned and soaring end. I felt strange and elated when I handed Levi my work. He laughed just a little, said “crazy, Danny,” then began to play and sing. He mugged and oversang for a few bars then let the thing fall into a kind of weird hiccupping tone, something between crying and laughing, a lovely kind of thing that kept the eye-rolling in it as well as that overarching sense that it mattered.

  I pop the record out of the frame. The photo of Levi and me flutters off. I push the record into the groove in the wood. The last quarter inch or so protrudes and catches the light. I put my hands in the dirt, pull up some moss and leaves, and spread it over the edge of the record. Done and done. I break down the frame, throw the glass at a tree, kick earth on the shards.

  Levi will surely notice it is gone and I already have my reaction planned. I will simply turn to Dee with a sad look, a look of deep disappointment, a look of fragile trust broken. I’ll hold up my wrist and show that my watch, too, is gone. Dee will start rolling out his denials, and Levi, watching the tableaux, will see what Dee truly is—a charmer, a fraud, a spinner of tales. I want to hear his sputtering denial, see the confusion break over his face. Of course it’s true that he didn’t actually steal the thing, but small matter. It will give him a little taste of what it feels like to talk to him during one of his binges. The way a word in the conversation would suddenly slide off the rational, and you’d know. Every time he called and at least started the conversation with “Hello,” I used to be filled with hope, since so many of his calls began midstream in what best resembled the jump cuts and shorthand of an inner monologue, as if you were simply a microphone he switched on in his brain.

  I turn and run up the hill, tromping over brambles, letting others snag me and spin me around for a moment. I leap over a log into a tangle of vines and fall onto my back. The wind is knocked out of me, and I look up at the little lacework of sky through the trees, waiting on my breath. Actually, it feels like I’m waiting to breathe out, not in. It’s fine I can’t write anymore, I think, enjoying the breathless silence of my own body. What’s the big obsession with letting things out into the world? Songs, ideas, stories … the real pleasure is keeping it all in. That’s where the power is.

  When I get up, gasping, I continue racing up the hill where Lucinda, as if fated, stands watching the dogs sniff and poop amongst the trash sculptures. Her back, draped in a golden camel cape, seems to nod and beckon as she pets one of the strange, stilted dogs. I swoop behind her and do the least expected thing: lift her up and spin her, watching her face go ashen and then, with enough revolutions, a shocking red.

  “And how is the writing going? And what’s happened with Dee?” Natalie asks. She sounds so aggressively no-nonsense that I half expect all of Chautauqua to crumble into the void as she talks, the house lights to flick back on, and real life to resume. Her voice in this atmosphere is completely out of place; there’s nothing I could say that would make sense to her now, and nothing she could say that would be relevant here. You always get into these moments with lovers, though, and you learn to cloak experience with bland chatter rather than try to convey the impossible.

  “The writing’s tough. I’ve taken a lot of time off, as you know, but I’m slowly warming up again. Dee’s still here but laying low. It’s fine. I’m not letting him get to me.”

  I walk around the cabin as I talk and peer in the closet. A hefty pile of objects now, from both the main house and the studio. I smile when I see the bejeweled dog collar at the top of the pile. I slipped it off as one of beasts trotted by, so smoothly that it didn’t even break stride.

  “And you?” I ask, as I sit down at my desk. I flip my notebook open, where I’ve now written every interesting phrase Dee has ever said during a binge. Dozens have come to me in the last hours. I figure if I write them all down, then cross them all out, I might purge my brain of them, too. It feels good to scratch over them. As good as any writing session.

  Natalie tells me all about a student of hers—a brilliant girl, gifted in math, whose boyfriend is a notorious neighborhood thug. This girl, Olivia, keeps playing hooky. The mother’s doing nothing. Natalie drives into the girl’s block and confronts the girl’s mother in the street. Words are exchanged. It’s unprofessional viewed one way, viewed another it is absolutely necessary … My mind drifts as she talks—words are exchanged—the cliché seems weirdly apropos, as it describes what’s happened with Dee’s old phrases. He’s given me his words and taken all of mine.

  I let Natalie talk, let her feel as if we’re sharing something. Then I tell her I love her and goodbye.

  When Levi, Lucinda, and Dee all appear at my cabin door, I assume they’re inviting me to dinner—insisting that I come out, take a break from all the work. The second possibility is that they’ve confronted Dee about his stealing and are dragging him to me, like wardens, so I can pass the final judgment on him. I keep my face neutral so I can be ready for either possibility. Levi asks if they can come in, and I step aside. They all file in—Dee and Lucinda sit on the bed, Levi in the corner rocking chair and I sit at my desk.

  Levi clears his throat and rearranges himself in the chair several times. Lucinda keeps her profile to me, her eyes on Levi. She’s wearing what looks like one long rose-colored scarf, wrapped multiple times around her body to make a dress. I get the feeling if I grabbed one end and pulled, her whole person would unravel and I’d be standing there, holding nothing but a bolt of limp fabric. Dee’s skin is sheened with sweat, and a few strands of his hair cling to his hairline in even swoops, like crown molding. He seems to be sitting in a position to best show off his “ink.” His wrists are turned up so the trust tattoo shows. His right leg is crossed over his left, and his jeans ride up so the roots of the tree on his calf can be seen, reaching down into his sockless tennis shoes. The small picket fence on his collarbone pokes through a gap in his collar. A strange tattoo—is it a commentary on the emptiness of suburban striving? Does it indicate that he’s within the fence—trapped—or that we, the onlookers, are the ones trapped, and he’s actually on the outside, in some more authentic bohemian beyond? He swall
ows hard and the pickets rise up for a moment.

  “Danny, we’re here because …” Levi coughs and scratches his neck. He takes a few breaths. The yellow wood of the cabin reflects a gold light on his colorless hair; he looks like a beatific stained-glass saint, complete with the weepy eyes. He jumps up from his chair and gestures with both hands.

  “I just want to say, right off, that this isn’t about the stuff, you know? Material things—they’ve never meant shit to me, you know that, right Danny? That’s not what this is about. It’s about you know, just why? What’s going on with you? If you want something, just ask. You’re my friend. I want to give you things. You’ve gotta know that. So why the secretive stuff?”

  I look at Dee, who is rubbing his wrists together and looking at the ceiling.

  “What secretive stuff?”

  “Well, gee Danny. The taking things. You’ve been taking things. Lucinda says you’ve been walking around the house late at night, just grabbing stuff, I guess …”

  “Wait.” I get up and step towards Dee, standing over him. “You’re calling me a thief? When this guy’s skulking around the property? Here’s your problem. This kid. He’s causing trouble. Stealing and pinning it on his dad. It’s not the first time he’s pulled this kind of shit. This is what he does.”

  “Goddamnit, Dad,” and now Dee is up, right in my face. Lucinda is up too, her hand on him, and I can hear her begging him to be calm, murmuring some mantra about quiet waters. “I haven’t done anything, Dad, and you know it. You’ve got the problem, you—”