The Beautiful Miscellaneous Page 23

  AFTER WORK THAT DAY I went by the Donovan house. Matthew set off to take the dog for a walk so I followed him to the nearby park. I sat on a bench while he tied the dog to a swing set and did some pull-ups on a crossbar. He was probably about sixteen, athletic, good-looking in a bucolic kind of way. After the pull-ups, Matthew moved onto sit-ups and push-ups, then he untied the dog and jogged the perimeter of the park. While he jogged, the dog snapped up at him and each time, Matthew smacked it across the snout. The dog kept jumping, jaws open. I got my camera out of my bag and focused it. I wanted a shot of him, midstep, the dog snapping. Just as I was about to release the shutter, I felt somebody sit down next to me. I turned to my left. A man in his fifties, wearing a Greek fisherman’s cap, sat with his eyes trained on the vision of Matthew and the mutt running the park boundary.

  “That dog’s gonna bite the little SOB one day,” he said.

  It was Arlen, the psychic from the institute.

  “I been following you, Nathan, for a day now. Looks like I’m following the follower.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Last week I helped find a ten-year-old girl buried in a field in Ohio with her skin peeled like an onion. They brought me the kid’s pajamas. It loosened me up, made the signal clearer. I’m back in the big time.”

  “Did you hear from my father?”

  “Then yesterday I spent twelve goddamn hours on a Greyhound bus, sitting next to Jimmy Shitbags, who’s out on parole with his possessions in a paper bag.” Arlen looked around the park and pulled his coat collar up. Matthew and the dog began the run home. “Your dad’s hair got real chatty. So I thought I would come tell you in person. Plus I like to get out and see the country now and then.”

  I stood up. “Can we go for a drive? My car is around the corner.”

  “I’ve been on a bus for an entire day and you want to drive?”

  “I can think straight when I drive.”

  “Yeah, well I got until midnight, when the Greyhound leaves back for Iowa.”

  We pulled along the highway. Usually I took back roads and rural routes for the backcountry feel, for the look of suspicion that a farmer gave from his tractor as I slipped by. Tonight I wanted to see the flash of traffic. Arlen slumped in the passenger seat, his hands in his lap.

  “I appreciate you coming to find me,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, I’m the delivery boy. Goddamn psychic UPS is what I am.”

  I cruised the Olds at seventy. After a moment of silence, Arlen said something.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Heat,” he mumbled.

  “What do you mean?”

  He pointed to the opposite side of the highway.

  “I don’t see anything,” I said.

  “Wait a minute.”

  I waited, continued looking. After thirty seconds, a state trooper whisked past us.

  “Radar heat,” Arlen said.

  I lowered my speed to fifty-five and looked over at him. His eyes were rimmed red.

  “Did you dream about my father?” I asked.

  “More or less. It kind of crept up on me. I’ve been in a slump lately. Toothbrushes, bikinis, nothing gives, everything’s been kind of quiet, subdued. I taped that wrist hair of his to my headboard and a couple weeks ago I see his hands.”

  “What was he doing?” I asked.

  “Not he, they. We’re talking about hands and wrists suspended in midair.”

  “What did the hands do?”

  “They were writing a letter. One with the pen and one holding down the paper. Like I seen before, only more information. The reception came in clearer.”

  “A letter to me?” I asked.

  “Jesus, let the story unfold, man. These things are delicate.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry. Tell me.”

  “Happened the night after they sent me the murdered girl’s pajamas. I see his hands, the nails all bitten down and white, and the watch, but the watch has stopped ticking.”

  I looked down at the watch face: 9:35. That seemed right.

  “And like I say, he’s writing a letter on some blank paper. Now, I can’t be one hundred percent on this one. There is always the risk of the wrong image getting in there. Static, pulses, interference. I eat a bad burrito, my circadian rhythm is off, metabolism goes cuckoo, and things can get spliced.”

  “I understand. Would you just—”

  “You’re in a bit of a slump yourself. If you don’t mind the observation.”

  I hit the steering wheel. “Arlen, what was my dad writing?”

  “Fine. Two weeks before he died, he wrote a letter to Him.” Arlen pointed at the roof.

  “Him?”

  He nodded.

  “Who?”

  “God! He was writing a goddamn letter to God, all right.”

  I looked out at the sodden fields, glints of water in the furrows. “He didn’t believe in God.”

  “Hey, what the hell do I know? Like I say, I’m the UPS driver.”

  “To God?” My voice was high and scoffing.

  “The letter is in a room with lots of books. Inside a book, something to do with zero gravity, whatever the hell that is,” Arlen said.

  “His study.”

  “I’ll leave the rest to you. Now listen, I got to get a bus and you’ve been driving like a banshee, so how’s about we turn around.”

  I felt a bite at the base of my neck. Had I taken the brisk turn onto Anger Boulevard that my mother feared? “I can’t believe he wrote a letter to God and not to me,” I said. I braked hard and turned the car around. Arlen fidgeted with his hands.

  “Christ I need to sleep,” he said.

  “Take a nap.”

  “Yeah. That does sound kind of good. Wake me at the bus station. And Nathan?”

  “What?”

  “You’re lousy at following people. That family? They feel it. They know somebody’s listening. They know they don’t have a right to be found interesting. Wake me, all right?”

  I rushed the car back up to seventy. My mind was off-kilter. If Arlen was right, why had my father written his dying words to God—a figment he didn’t believe in—instead of to me? That would be the ultimate insult: at death’s door he found it in him to make peace with the alleged creator but couldn’t tell me I’d been the answer to all his prayers. Wasn’t that all I’d wanted? The unconditional love of my father. Wasn’t that the kind of blatant acceptance everybody wanted? Some are born with genius; others are born with hope. Gillman had said something like that once.

  I thought about the people I followed, about their little wooden or stucco houses, about a life portrayed by the keys a man carries in his pocket or the dumb shows that betray who a person really is—the solo golf game at three in the morning, the rummage of unsold shoes in a man’s living room. If I’d wanted to, I could have named every major natural disaster in recorded history, America’s favorite television shows for fifty years, the specializations of the five islands of the human brain, but none of it meant anything to me. What use was information if I didn’t believe in anything? There was no invisible kindness favoring us; the unified field wasn’t the place where all matter and energy coalesced, it was a ticker-tape parade of random data-bytes.

  I could feel my chest tighten. I let the car drift for the shoulder. A row of six beaten mailboxes appeared up ahead, lining the roadside in front of a cluster of houses. Scarred metal tubes on stumps, skewed and tilted, betraying the age and economic standing of the subdivision. HAZEL WOOD, a sign read. The Oldsmobile edged onto gravel; the car had always pulled slightly to the right, so loosening my grip on the wheel felt like releasing an animal from its training, back to brute instinct. A series of clipped, scraping noises. Mail scatters. The ungathered credit-card offers and electric bills. Off-white envelopes wheeling through the night.

  The steering wheel shuddered. Arlen jolted upright just as a mailbox, now a projectile, hurtled up the hood, into the windshield, and onto the roof. It rolled across the t
op of the car and I saw a flash of metal in the rearview mirror as it rolled down the trunk.

  “We’re dead!” Arlen screamed.

  “It’s okay,” I said. I gently guided the car back toward the right lane.

  “I don’t die in Wisconsin. I die in Mexico, you little creep. What the hell are you doing?”

  “I lost control for a second.” Technically that was true. “But it’s okay. We’ll get you to your bus on time.”

  From behind us, great knives of red and blue cut through the night. At first I thought it was full-blown synesthesia coming back, words glimmering in the air. Then I heard a siren and looked in my rearview mirror and saw a state trooper’s car. By now a half dozen people were standing on their front porches.

  Arlen rubbed his face and said, “Nathan, I have some screams in my throat with your name on them.”

  I slowed and pulled onto the shoulder. The trooper came striding toward us.

  “Step out of the car, gentlemen,” he said. His face was all in shadow from his hat, but his chin seemed enormous.

  “Was I speeding?” I asked.

  “It’s not your rate of speed that concerns me. Step out.” The term rate of speed made me sound like a particle pulsing down a chute.

  We stood beside my car and placed our hands on the roof.

  “Are you going to frisk me?” Arlen asked casually.

  “Why, do you have a weapon?”

  “Nope,” Arlen answered.

  “I’m sorry if I was speeding,” I said.

  He patted the backs of my legs, my stomach, then felt the inside seam of my pants. He repeated this inspection on Arlen.

  “You know any Iowa troopers?” Arlen asked.

  “Turn around please, sir.”

  “You know Jimmy Hallbeck?”

  “No.”

  “Commendation. Helped him with a drowned boy.”

  The trooper asked me for my driver’s license and registration. I reached inside the car, opened the glove compartment for the registration, and handed him my driver’s license from my wallet. He looked at them and then walked back to his cruiser. We stood waiting beside the car, flooded with the whiteness of his headlights.

  “Dumb-ass,” Arlen said to me. “This is the Midwest, you don’t fuck with people’s mail-delivery systems. Mail felony is a federal offense. Write me a letter from the big house. Did you think about that when you decided to careen off the goddamn road?”

  People watched us as they streaked by on the highway, and I wondered, amid a feeling of mild humiliation, where they were headed: leaving spouses, driving stolen cars to distant states, shuttling toward motel-room sex romps. After a while the cop came back.

  “Do you want to explain what happened back there?” he said.

  “I lost control of the vehicle,” I said.

  “Have you been drinking?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Probable cause says I can search the vehicle,” he said. He didn’t seem to have a face; it was either all washed out by the light or his chin was so enormous you didn’t notice anything else.

  “Probable cause,” I repeated. Again there was something esoteric about the way it sounded. The uncertainty principle, the probable cause, was he talking about the possibility of drugs and stolen goods in my car, or was he referring to the unlikely scenario that the universe conceals meaning?

  “Have you been drinking?” he asked again. “Either of you.”

  “I weren’t drivin’,” Arlen attested.

  “No,” I said.

  He took out a pen from his pocket and held it in front of my face. He did it with a certain hypnotic flourish. “Just keep your eyes on the pen as I move it and don’t look at my face.”

  “You don’t have a face, so that’s easy,” I said.

  “What?” the cop asked.

  “My night vision is not so good.”

  He started to arc the pen in all directions, sometimes moving so far into my peripheral vision that I became aware of the backs of my eyeballs, of the things that kept them in place. When he was done he said, “Reckless driving is a serious matter.”

  “I see.”

  “I’d like to search your vehicle. You can refuse, but that will complicate things.”

  “That would be fine,” I said distantly. It was my father’s intonation.

  “I have to get the midnight bus to Iowa,” Arlen said.

  The cop shone his flashlight into the interior of the Oldsmobile and probed his hands under the seats. He came upon some fast-food wrappers and a biography of Gandhi.

  “He could go six weeks without food,” I said.

  The policeman nodded and tossed the book aside. He popped the trunk from the driver’s seat. As he moved to the back of my car he said, “This thing has over three hundred thousand miles on it. You must do a lot of driving,” he said. He opened the trunk.

  “I like to drive,” I said, though I didn’t think he could hear above the swish of traffic.

  I was still standing with Arlen beside the hood of the car, my hands touching the chill metallic body. After a moment he told us to come and look at something. We walked around to the back of the car, where he was shining his enormous flashlight at the contents of my trunk. He held up several photographs to his light beam: Megan Trudy kneeling beside her bell-pepper plants, weeping; Jim Trollup chipping golf balls into his empty swimming pool; a college girl in a tank top, reading Jack Kerouac in the shade of an elm tree.

  “What are these?” he said.

  “Photographs, I guess,” I said.

  “Happy Halloween,” Arlen said, looking down at the scatter of photos.

  The cop dipped his hand into the box of pictures and pulled out some more. Then he opened the safety kit that Whit had placed in the trunk, with its road flares and space blanket. For a brief second I saw myself through his eyes: a kid driving nowhere in an ancient Oldsmobile, running into mailboxes, snapshots of strangers in his trunk, a delirious-looking man with crazy eyes, a biography of some Indian mystic in the front seat, army rations in the trunk.

  “Do these people know you took their photographs?” he asked.

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “And what’s with the flares?” the cop asked.

  “In case of emergency. A friend of my father put that in there. He used to be an astronaut and takes safety very seriously.”

  “Are you on drugs?”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “I could do a urine test if I suspected.”

  “I was sleepy. I fell asleep at the wheel, that’s all,” I said.

  “He just received some psychic data about his dead father,” Arlen added.

  “Where are you going now?” he asked.

  “Home. Not far.”

  “And you? Do you drive?” the cop asked Arlen.

  “I prefer not to.”

  He looked one last time at the photographs and the tinfoil shimmer of the space blanket. “I need to take you to your local police station, Nathan. At a minimum, you’ll pay for those mailboxes, but you could also lose your license. You’ll need to come as well, sir.”

  Arlen looked worried. “I have a Grey pooch to catch, Officer…Trailways for a patch there out of Dubuque.”

  “You’re arresting me?” I asked. I found myself nodding, agreeing with this course of action.

  “No. I’m not charging you with anything yet. We’re going to ride back to your town and they’ll call your parents. They’ll get your friend on a bus once everything is verified.”

  “His father is deceased,” Arlen said.

  “Your mother?” the cop asked.

  “At home with the astronaut,” I said.

  He led us toward the cruiser.

  “What about my car? I can’t just leave it,” I said.

  “Come get it in the morning. It’ll be fine.”

  We got in the backseat of the cruiser. It smelled like a new pair of shoes. I put the seat belt on as he pulled out into the flow of traffic,
lights still flashing for a moment. We pushed through the night, passing sedans and sealed convertibles, people’s faces turning toward us. I felt momentarily powerful. To them I was a nameless felon, and I enjoyed the fact that they all turned away before I did.

  “Do you believe in God?” I asked the cop. “Anything. Some kind of meaning?”

  “Don’t worry about him,” Arlen said.

  The cop pretended not to hear.

  At the police station the state trooper handed us over to the locals, who said that they wouldn’t charge me as long as I paid for replacement mailboxes. If I committed any more driving violations in the next five years I would lose my license. Arlen missed his bus. They called my mother and made us wait in a conference room—the interrogation room, the windowless, brick cube where alibis were vetted or discarded. Whit and my mother appeared sometime after midnight and my mother refused to speak, as if the station, with its smell of fast food and envelope glue, with its metal desks and Styrofoam cups, was beneath her dignity. Whit didn’t look at me; he’d been coached.

  “This is Arlen,” I said. “A psychic from the institute. He came to visit.”

  Whit nodded hello. My mother led us to the car in silence.

  When we arrived home, Whit called the bus station and found out Arlen could leave at five in the morning. We sat at the kitchen table and my mother made us some tea. Life may come undone, sons may fall to petty crime, but the small details of civilization, the necessity of stern talks over hot steeped beverages had to continue.

  “I’d prefer milk,” Arlen said. “Full cream, if you have it.”

  She fetched him some, then came and sat. “Where did you go?” she asked, stirring her cup.

  “Went for a drive,” I said.

  “Do you know what time it is?” she asked.

  “Z-time,” I said, trying to get a smile from Whit.

  My mother said, “Birdie Peters called me tonight. She said you’ve been coming to work late and shelving books in the wrong place. She’s been finding religion and philosophy on the mathematics shelf.”

  “Oh, really,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “His mind’s on the fritz,” Arlen said.

  “Do you know the future?” Whit asked Arlen.