Immediately, Lynyrd Skynyrd blasted us from everywhere at once. “Sweet Home Alabama” never sounded sweeter than it did coming from Nate’s hideously expensive sound system.
Viper quick, her hand darted to the volume. I heard her finish, “…too loud!” as she squelched it.
This irritated me more than it should have.
“Sorry,” I said, not meaning it, and edged the volume up a little more.
I found a place to turn around and then headed back the other way.
Having a kid on the way limited my normal range of choices. I had to be extra careful this time. I shook my head, unsure what to do and growing distracted by all the internal cursing going on.
“Jesus, are you even listening to me?” Erika said.
“Oh, uh—yeah. I’m sorry…uh…just, you know, thinking about the wedding.”
“Why, what were you thinking?” she said, miffed tone vanishing without a trace. Watching my brother-in-law before my sister’s wedding had taught me one of the ancient secrets of female pacification. Women perk up like flowers in the sun if they think you’re interested in wedding preparations.
“Well you know…I can’t wait for the big day.”
I reached over and took her hand in mine, and for a moment I admired the delicate softness of it.
Squeezing my hand, Erika laughed and said, “Just one more week and I’m yours forever. Wow, your hands are sweaty.”
A week?
The internal cursing had increased in volume, causing my internal neighbors to start pounding the wall. I forced a laugh and squeezed back. I couldn’t marry her. Even if it weren’t morally wrong—which it was—I couldn’t pull off the Nate Act in front of all his friends and family. Man, what a letdown. For the remainder of my stay I’d be a prisoner in Erika’s company. Nice as it was, it isn’t what I’m about and it could end only in disaster. If she expected me to be amorous, I’d have to refuse. If not that, I’d forget to ask her something she’d expect me to follow up on, and that would hurt her feelings. Then she’d pull that silent treatment thing, causing me to follow her around going “What did I do?” or “Is it something I said?” She’d never tell me, I’d get angry with her and then she’d feed off that and start banging furniture around and lock me out of the bedroom.
Well screw that—right there’s what we film students refer to as a “showstopper.” I’d be damned if I slept on the couch after experiencing the luxury of that lead-lined quilt in that wonderful bed.
I wondered if I should have killed Mike Nichols. Could this be my punishment for having too soft a heart? If so, which Whomever was I working for anyway, and did he happen to have beatnik facial hair and a pointy pitchfork?
After mulling it over, I rejected the punishment idea. I’d been at this a long time and had never been punished for any of it, good or bad. Still, nothing I did wasn’t guided in some way. I’d been steered to this moment, directly and absolutely. I just didn’t know why yet.
Over time, I may have become inured to my many flaws but I’ve never been proud of them. I felt bad for this lady. Nothing good could come from associating with me, but it wasn’t like I could lean over and tell her that. I didn’t know how, what or when, but I knew something bad would happen just as surely as I knew the atomic weight of polonium. Nate would almost certainly get shot, stabbed, strangled or arrested in three to four weeks’ time, and then she’d be devastated. This wasn’t my fault, it was the Great Whomever’s fault. And all the fuzz with the washboard abs and millions of dollars and kids’ charities was simply more of the same perverse punishment I’d endured for years.
I glanced at Erika—eyes closed, doing her best to pretend she wasn’t listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd. She had a great profile. Erika transcended the ranks of the merely beautiful: she was holy.
Ah well. When life gives you lemons…or in her case, melons.
Lunch was tasty. For me, anyway. I ordered the Drunken Ribeye steak, and no surprise—every bit as good as I remembered it. I almost ordered one of their ales, brewed on premises, but I knew I didn’t have it in me to appreciate it. Instead, I got a soda. Lovely Erika ordered salad dressing with some salad on it and water. She even acted happy about it.
The place was packed for lunch, which leant it a comfortable buzz and sense of commotion. Easily enough to drown out the inevitable sense of oddness when I didn’t ask about her divorced mom, her sick brother or her friend’s latest fight with her shmuck boyfriend—or whatever. Life stuff. Stuff I knew nothing about.
Erika smiled prettily, the only way she knew how.
“So have you thought up any names yet? Boy and girl names?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What if it’s a tomboy?”
She laughed. No tinkling like waterfall laughs with this one. No, she snorted. Just a couple of little snorts, back-to-back. Like a piggy. It made her look a little more normal to me—and it came as a bit of a letdown.
I laughed, playing along.
“Sorry, stupid joke.”
“No, I’m happy you’re joking,” Erika said. “I mean…you’ve been all weird since you popped the question. And here I am, about to finally move in with you after only three months, and trying to act normal while you’re all quiet all the time and have to marry me and…and…” Her face tightened, fighting back tears. “I’m sorry, it’s silly.”
Then she dropped her head into her hands and started crying.
Chapter 21
I couldn’t take time to ponder what she’d said because normal human interaction doesn’t have a pause button. I glanced around, but if people were watching they weren’t obvious about it. This was the point where a real man would reach across, grab his lady’s hand and say, “There there.” Seizing the moment, I reached across. But just before I got to “there there”—
“—So how is everything? Is it all absolutely delicious?” our perpetually wide-eyed and ecstatic-to-be-there young waitress said, and didn’t mind in the slightest that we were having a private conversation.
“Yeah,” I said.
If it’s possible, she got even wider-eyed and more ecstatic.
“Greaaaat! So by now you’re probably thinking about our Mile High Chocolate Challenge, hmm?”
“Not really…Erika?” I said, and then looked at the waitress again and said, “No, we’re fine—way too challenging.” When she didn’t reply, I added, “Thanks.”
“Aw, that’s too bad,” she said, affecting a weird, frowny face. “I’ll be right back with the check—no rush. And I’ll get you some refills in a jif-jif.”
The intrusion gave cover for Erika to compose herself.
I looked at her closely—she didn’t look as red and blotchy anymore.
She had looked red and blotchy, right?
“You didn’t get the chocolate cake,” she said, almost like an accusation.
I shrugged.
“I’m not really hungry.”
“Are you sick?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “My steak was bigger than I thought—filled me right up.”
Erika gave a half-pint version of her snorty laugh.
And then I realized—she’d seen Nate’s fridge. Turning away chocolate cake fell outside Nate’s normal range of behavior. Not a critical mistake, but one of a thousand little paper cuts that were going to bring me down. If she asked about my mother, I was toast. If she asked me to give her a drive to work—wherever that was—I was toast.
“So, did you remove anyone else from the list like I asked you?”
Not just toast—more like toast-scented vapor.
Plodding forward, I said, “I keep meaning to, but…”
“Uh huh. Do you want me to do it? My family isn’t that big and you have so many friends. People will think it’s strange if I only bring four people. They won’t realize I’ve only been in the area a few months.”
“I’ll make sure to drop it in conversation,” I said. “It’ll s
eem natural. Trust me.”
Ignoring that, she said, “We’re getting married next weekend—you ran out of time for this weeks ago.”
“They’re my peeps—my bro’s. They got my back, fo’ shiggidy.” I flashed her a gang sign.
She ignored that too.
“I just wanted a small, quiet wedding with the two of us. Is that so bad? I know you have to marry me, but…”
Mentally crossing my fingers, I let a little irritation slip into my voice.
“Erika, we’ve been through this.”
“I’m also worried how my family will react to being suddenly surrounded by all those people. They’re very conservative, and with Tim there…Not to mention Rob and Mike. God, Rob gives me the creeps. He’s always looking at me.”
Before I could respond, our waitress-thing returned with the bill.
“Hurray!” she said. “Drinks, drinks, drinks! No rush on the check—you sure you’re not up to the Chocolate Challenge, hmmm? It’s yummy…”
“No, thank you,” Erika said.
Throwing out teensy little bu-bye waves, she said, “You two have a wonderful afternoon.”
When I looked at the bill, I saw it had teddy bears and hearts scrawled all over it, with her name—Trisha!!!—underlined three times.
On the way back to the house, I learned that Erika planned to move in after the wedding. I wondered if she were from Chicago, since she’d just flown in from there, but I couldn’t come out and ask her. Nate already knew these things. And then I thought, He gets her pregnant, proposes, but won’t live with her? She wants a small wedding, but he doesn’t?
By the time we got back to the house, Erika and I were fine again. She gave me another one of those great kisses in the driveway and then drove off to Victoria’s Secret or wherever girls like that go when they’re not with their stud boyfriends.
I felt worn out, so I went to the bedroom and stripped down, intending to take a nap. Nothing like lunch and an afternoon nap, right? Sadly, my mind had its teeth sunk deep like a puppy with a tug toy and wouldn’t let go. I lay there, not sleeping, going over what I’d learned so far. It wasn’t much. None of it helped me figure out what Nate had done to piss off the Great Whomever. I mean, if Nate were such a monster, why would he marry her? He could easily afford child support. The type of people I’d encountered over the years didn’t go around getting married because they felt bad.
A chill didn’t actually go down my spine, but it did so metaphorically. If Nate were a molester, then raising a kid of his own could appeal to him in a darker, more sinister way. Why buy milk with a cow at home, right?
I felt well fed and increasingly comfortable and relaxed. After driving Ferraris and kissing beautiful women all morning I seriously needed a nap, followed by some chocolate cake, dammit.
I napped.
***
It isn’t possible to sleep in the Great Wherever because the thing inside that lets you fall unconscious is missing. Or rather, there’s something missing around you: a tired body. Being unable to sleep means you also can’t dream, and this is a bigger disadvantage than it seems. So much so that I believe the ability to dream is all but wasted on the living.
When most people have dreams they wake up and forget them. Or when they wake up they remember only a little part and forget the rest. I once read an article that claimed most people can’t recall more than a dozen dreams they’ve had in their entire life. I number the dreams I remember in the tens of thousands, depending on how you demarcate them (they do sort of blur together).
I won’t pretend to know everything about dreams, but I know they aren’t just the unstructured flashing of neurons or a mere side effect of unconsciousness. I can say with certainty they tell you more about yourself than you’ll ever admit. When you weep in a dream over something and laugh it off in the morning, you’re telling a convenient lie—as if to assure yourself, I’d never feel so intensely about that, so I’ve already decided it doesn’t affect me. When you wake up screaming and your parents rush to your room, you begin to tell them what you saw and then a funny thing happens. You hold back. You don’t tell them you saw your mother stabbing your father over and over again while your sister held you down, immobilized, forcing you to watch. If pressed, you tell them you dreamed someone cut you and leave it at that. And if you’re normal, the dream will most likely vanish from your recollection.
By the way, the reasoning behind that little dream is obvious. Deep down, way down beneath a trapdoor I’d long since forgotten about, I knew on some level my mother hated my father. But I also know she loved him more. It was obvious if you knew her, though more complex than what we grow up thinking about “love.” In a movie, every kiss burns with passion and every glance caresses with love so sweet it’ll spoil your dinner. In real life, love’s a daily struggle against the tendency toward selfishness. In real life, love and hate are often only separable if we’re willing to recognize our demons and choose to become better people. That’s an important truth I’ve learned about being human: we either outshine our darkness or we are engulfed by it.
All this from a single, remembered dream.
Another dream I had, also forgotten, involved a highway overpass. I mention it now because I still find it incredibly perplexing. Well, that and one other reason.
***
He stands in a playground next to a double-lane highway in a city he doesn’t recognize. The road is empty of cars but filled with people, and all of them are looking and pointing up at the sky. With good reason: stretching across maybe a quarter of it is an enormous black bruise that blocks the sun and casts the world in a murderous red backlight. It is nothing like the eclipse he’d once gone outside to witness with the viewers they’d made in school from cereal boxes and aluminum foil. That had been a taking away and giving back of the sun. This blackness took not only the sun but spread like a juice stain, devouring the rest of the sky with it.
The people around him are frightened, yelling and pointing at it. Their yammer intensifies when the secret of the bruise is revealed: billions of things are flying out of it, streaming endlessly in all directions. Soon, the ones coming his way are visible—winged men and women with beautiful, intelligent faces, riding the sky in a circling, predatory manner that precisely reflects the mocking expressions on their faces. They corral the people below together, laughing wickedly all the while—jeering—and this shocks the boy because he knows now what they are. They aren’t aliens from another planet set upon invasion. Nor are they demons with hideous faces and horns and enormous bat wings. No, they are as far from that as good from evil, as beautiful as they are terrifying. They are angels.
The road passes beneath an overpass and away from the city. The men and women in the road who manage to evade their tormentors are running toward it, desperate to escape. The narrow confines of the dream’s reality beget an unspoken realization, more fundamental than natural law: beyond the overpass lies salvation.
The angels, seeing their quarry trying to escape, frenzy and dive from the sky in bold, swooping strikes, and as they rise they are clutching people by their arms or ankles or even hair. Then they soar toward the bruise in the sky, calling triumphantly.
The boy is frightened, but he does not run in circles as the others do, nor does he scream and point. Instead, he begins to pray: “Please protect me, please protect me, please protect me.
” He doesn’t wonder who he’s asking to protect him for the same reason he doesn’t wonder about the air he inhales. His focus is on getting to the overpass, knowing it’s hopeless, yet praying anyway. He knows they will come for him, grab him and taunt him as they carry him to the terrible black thing in the sky, but it doesn’t matter.
“Please protect me, please protect me,” he prays, on and on.
The angels spot the boy. They soar toward him, but unlike the others—grabbing mortals and carrying them away—these angels hover. No longer are they jeering and laughing, at least not at him. Their expressions have changed. For him alone, their faces shine beatific, warm and kindly. They circle him, flying about joyfully and following above him as he makes his steady way to the overpass. He is still praying the same mantra as he passes beyond, “Please protect me, please protect me…”
Then he is dreaming no more.
***
It is the strangest dream I’ve ever had. Even stranger than the one I had when I was six, where all the shoes in the house could talk and we were hiding from the evil shoes in the closet downstairs (this dream came courtesy of the opening credits to My Three Sons, some bullies at school and just a dash of dream dust). But the one with the overpass is the oddest because it derives its origin from almost nothing in my life to that point. I mean, I’d never seen a movie or heard a story where angels were mean to people. By that point in my short life my only religious education came about once a year on trips to Uncle Rick’s farm. Even then, everything in my modest exposure led me to believe the sky was Heaven. So the idea of wicked angels descending on humans and dragging them unwillingly to the sky made no sense at all. But in the dream, what made perfect sense was that the overpass was the gateway to Heaven, and the black bruise thing above went to the other place. Hell, or something like it. And why would angels fly out of Hell, anyway?
What made all this suddenly interesting to me was that during my nap I had the dream again, for the second time ever. Only this time, I was one of the angels, and the city street teemed not with strangers but with all the people I’d ever ridden. Killers, rapists, arsonists, pedophiles and brutes of every sort, each looking at me with recognition, and every one of them cowering from me in terror. All except one. Alone, standing there looking at me head-on and unafraid. Blond, beautiful and boiling with hatred.