Eleven Twenty-Three, page 11
MEET SOON
No one responds for fifty-five seconds. I keep count.
“Well, that’s alarming,” Michael finally says. “Did it just say that, or am I really out of it right now?”
“If it didn’t, this is one hell of a collective hallucination,” Hajime whispers.
Before anyone can ask a follow-up question to the cryptic message, the planchette slides to the T, then spins around and lands on the T again. Very quickly, the dead boy spells out TTYL and the session is over. Jasmine and then everyone else asks if Raymond is still with us, if he is upset, if he wants to be contacted some other time. Nothing happens. Jasmine finally flips over the board, whispers a quick pagan prayer of some kind or other, and Tara stands up and flips on the light switch while kissing me on the mouth. Hajime blows out the candles and Michael scratches at his groin.
Tara leans in and kisses me again, this time open-mouthed and horny. I can taste sour apple on her tongue and the hint of excessive cigarette smoke on her breath. I back away and look down at the flipped over Ouija board.
“That looked entertaining,” I say.
“Are you kidding?” Michael asks. “That looked like me shitting my pants in fear, is what it looked like.”
“The dead sometimes have fun with their contacts,” Jasmine says. “I wouldn’t freak out too much, guys. Raymond was probably just messing with us. It’s too bad, though. I had more questions for him.”
“I wish I had a spirit guide to answer all of my worldly questions,” I say. “Because I definitely have a few this evening.”
“I’m not sure how much wisdom an Internet-speaking teeny-bopper is going to have to impart,” Hajime says. “But that was pretty cool, regardless.”
“Do you guys want to try contacting someone else?” Jasmine asks us. “Whoa, the carpet is alive. Why didn’t someone say something? Did you guys know about this and just not tell me? I would have asked Raymond about it. Or maybe the girl in the living room.”
08:00:00 AM
I watch the alarm on Tara’s nightstand turn over and begin its cacophonous wake-up song. Tara stirs next to me, and I trudge across the room and fidget with the clock until it stops making noise. Then I head into the bathroom and take a scalding hot shower and stare at myself in the mirror for a long time. After I quickly dress in the early morning quiet, Tara wakes up and gets ready. Alone in her bedroom, I gaze through the window at the sporadic drops of rain that coat the yard and street outside.
Julie comes by the bedroom to wish me a happy return and condolences about my father. She puts her striking blond hair up in a bun and gives me a quick hug, asking me to relay the message to Tara that she will not be home until later. Miranda comes by a moment afterward and gives me the middle finger. I believe she has actually gained weight since we left, and her morning face resembles the way I envisioned it while we were gone. She makes coffee and goes back to her bedroom, slamming the door. I smile briefly and go back to staring out the window.
I try not to think of my father, of how he never even knew about the Olivia Glatz fiasco or that I’d left America when he died. I try not to think about my experience last night, either. I try not to think about anything except the rain, which paints the world the color of finality.
Tara bundles up and turns my heater on. A cold front is coming and when we came outside this morning, both of us dressed in sharp black and gray, we were taken aback by the chill weather. I begin pulling out of the back yard and around to the driveway, but remember something. I put the car in Park.
“What are you doing?” she asks. “We’re going to be late.”
“One second,” I reply, and slither out of the vehicle and run around back.
When I return, I pop open the trunk of my car and gingerly place the briefcase between two bags of clothes and a small box of old photos of my father and me. Tara stares at me apprehensively when I get back into the driver seat. We leave to go pick up my mother.
I stop at a gas station to buy some cigarettes. Inside I ask the gruff attendant with the muttonchops for three packs of Camel Lights and one of the little packets of Tylenol that they keep behind the counter.
“It’s going to be cold today,” the man says to me, taking my money.
“Today is going to be a lot of things,” I say, mesmerized by one of the donation buckets next to the American flag lighters, at the picture of the starving boy just above the coin slot.
When I’m handed my change, I slip the quarters and nickels and dime into the donation bin and smile a farewell to the clerk.
“We need to take care of ourselves before we take care of the rest of the world, don’t you think?” the attendant asks as I am about to leave the store.
“We are the rest of the world,” I say, but by then I’m outside so it doesn’t matter anyway.
My mother’s graying hair is smooth and lustrous this morning. Her ashen business suit, something new that I have not seen before and probably still harboring the store smell, looks great on her. I am reminded of the way things were, of her tenure at the college and the students hanging around her classroom after the lecture, prattling on and on to her about the plight of women in America, or the depiction of femininity in Southern film, or about how their boyfriends used to beat them before they found their inner strength and a Pell Grant and left. I am reminded of cocktail parties in our old house on Seminole Trace, the bright pink faces of other professors and deans and bearded men who knew exactly what was going on in Kosovo, and who listened to everything she had to say. They were taken aback by her scholarly radiance and female assertiveness.
“You both look nice this morning,” my mother says. “Tara, your hair is dazzling, sweetheart. I really like the color you’ve dyed it.”
“That’s her natural hair color, Mom.”
“Layne, turn down your idiot dial this morning, please,” Tara says. “It’s not my natural hair color, Ms. Prescott. And thank you. You look great today, too.”
“It’s too bad we can’t always look as nice as we do for funerals,” she says sullenly, staring at her door handle in the back seat. “Or act as polite and caring all the time the way we do at funerals.”
I am reminded of something Mr. Scott said that night in the airport bar. Something about funerals.
We pull into the parking lot of the funeral home, the one with the vermillion door that I was always troubled by as a kid because I was sure that it was one of the seven earthly gateways to hell. At the edge of the building, a large crowd of Dad’s family and the occasional stray friend from the old days at Nielson & Pickett has congregated, and they stare us down like birds perched along a power line picking a meal from a trio of small vermin scampering across the asphalt.
I see my Uncle Stan, who once drunkenly groped a girl I was seeing at a family reunion when I was seventeen. Then there is Aunt Linda, who had a coke problem for a while and indicates she still does by the way she sniffs at the cold air and stares at everything with yellow-eyed shame. The twin teenage boys are here, the kind of kids whose births a Greek soothsayer would prophesize with a sense of absolute terror. Uncle Oliver is trying to keep things light in front of two of my cousins and Aunt Helen by telling stories and pretending he hasn’t tried to commit suicide twice. There are first and second cousins milling about that I don’t think have names. There are also wives and girlfriends and husbands and boyfriends who seem to drift in and out of my relatives’ lives like fluttering scraps of paper in the wind. My grandparents are standing just inside the breezeway of the funeral home, both resembling sagging paper bags. They scowl when they see my mother and I approach.
“Just smile and tell them everything is fine,” my mother says through gritted teeth. “And Layne—try to understand what’s really going on here. Okay, baby?”
“Mom,” I say, stopping in my tracks. “I’m absolutely fine. I’d probably be more upset if your cats died than I am right now.”
“Don’t talk about my cats dying, please.”
“Sorry.”
“Where is Hajime?” Tara asks. “Is he here yet?”
“He’ll be here last minute, as usual,” I say. “Well…let’s go and say hello.”
“Was there no viewing?” Tara whispers in my ear.
“Not after the way he died, there wasn’t,” I respond back, and extend my arm for the first handshake.
Everyone is friendly enough. They offer condolences to my mother and me, and my grandparents both burst into tears and wrap us in a vice-like hug that lasts for what seems a very long time. The uncles shake my hand, and the aunts put their arms around me and pat my back while lightly kissing my cheek and saying how sorry they are. The nameless cousins and old friends simply mill around and look sad for my mother and me. The twins, Luke and Lance, smoke cigarettes and stay far away from the group.
“I haven’t seen you in so long,” my Aunt Linda says. “How is teaching going?”
“Um…fine. I’m doing it in China, actually.”
“China?” she repeats, dumbfounded and wiping at her nose. “What on earth for?”
“I live there for the time-being. Tara and I both do. Have you met Tara?”
I introduce my girlfriend to my aunt, the vacuum. Then I introduce her to the grandparents, who could care less and instead talk about how young he was, and that he did not need to die the way he did. I watch my mother with concern as she makes small talk with the uncles and cousins. I nod and try to smile when family and old acquaintances of my father’s go on about how much older I’ve gotten, and how I look great. I tell them they do, too. But I’m lying. Everyone is a wreck.
The casket is closed. There are two enlarged pictures of my father on each side of the polished black coffin, one more recent in front of what looks like the Space Needle, the other taken when he was thirty and I was still a child. In both, he hides behind that expensive haircut and toothy smile, the same smile that won over my mother and Cindy and about a thousand clients and friends, even as he robbed them of everything. There are flowers decorating the entire room, orchids and lilacs and roses and belladonna, along with boxes of tissues in every pew. Cindy is a mess, already seated up in the front of the chamber. Her blond hair looks nice, but her face is a crumpled ruin. I wonder to myself how she feels right now, especially in lieu of how her husband passed.
“Layne, you and your mother have a seat reserved up in front with us,” my grandfather whispers. “Your girlfriend can come too, if she likes.”
“Hello, Meredith,” Cindy coughs when we pass in front of her to sit.
“How are you holding up, Cindy?” Mom asks, hiding anything she may want to say or do right now very well.
“I’m—okay,” she says. “Layne, you look nice. How are you doing?”
“I’m fine, Cindy,” I mutter. “Sorry about—well, sorry.”
Cindy nods and inspects her lap. I move away from her.
I sit at the end of the front pew. My mother sits down next to me and takes my hand and gives it a sharp squeeze.
“We’re going to make it through this,” she whispers emphatically into my ear. “Everyone will.”
Immediately after she says this, something inside her breaks and she begins sobbing.
I almost feel bad for Cindy now, thinking back on what my mother told me long distance three days ago.
The girl was the one to call, but it was the day after it happened, long after she had left the suite. She had taken all of his money, his cell phone, and even stripped him of his wedding band and gold watch, a gift from my mother. The pills were gone, too.
When Cindy got the call, she was afforded little opportunity to grieve amidst all of the new information that had surfaced. One revelation was that my father had become addicted to OxyContin following a minor back surgery last year, and when he tried to kick that habit, became re-addicted to Vicodin and Hydrocodone. The other big news was that those “business trips” he had been taking recently had actually been cliché sabbaticals to fuck a rather expensive prostitute named Clementine. My father had been employing the services of the well-known twenty-year-old call girl for over four months before he died. He was with her in their usual honeymoon suite at a Holiday Inn just outside of Portland the night it happened. He had already been taking pills that evening with the girl, and made matters worse when he had a couple of drinks in the hotel bar with her.
It was not long after the two began another round of foreplay back in the room that my father’s heart beat became irregular, sweat squeezed out of every pore in his body, blue-white foam gurgled from his mouth, his capillaries burst, his heart stopped, and he died.
I’m not sure how Mom knows this. I doubt that Cindy would have told her. The only thing that comes to mind is that it was Aunt Linda, who always got along well with my mother and not so well with her much more successful brother. But I am glad she knows, and I am glad that she told me. It seems better this way. Any doubts regarding our antipathy toward this man are instantly eradicated, and we are left secure with the fact that we are, in fact, burying a villain.
Hajime shows up not long after Pastor Robbins begins his sermon and eulogy. He is wearing a black button up shirt and almost invisible black tie, but his pants have cargo pockets and I bite my lip to keep from laughing. He smiles at me and mouths an “Are you all right?” before giving me the thumbs up and sitting down in one of the last rows, behind the twins and my dad’s old friend who used to call me “Layne-Change.”
I notice when I look back at Hajime that the funeral home is only a little over halfway full this morning. Dad would have been disappointed by this. He always demanded a capacity-sized crowd for anything that involved him.
Only the slightest hints are ever given during the sermon about what really happened. Sin and corruption are mentioned, along with excess and the importance of faith and being true to yourself and your family even when faced with the opportunity to ignore all of it and lose yourself in the temptations of a dying world. Robbins runs his hand through his thinning black hair and clenches his fists when he mentions how young Paul Lester Prescott was, and how shameful and tragic his death is. He glances uncomfortably at me when it comes to the part about the importance of family in times such as these, and peeks at my mother’s face as he mentions the loving wife Paul left behind.
He never once looks at Cindy.
“Paul Prescott was a fun-loving, caring man that I knew very well since he was this big, folks. In fact, I recall the day he received the news that he would be a father. Now this guy was clueless, everyone: just out of college, just getting started in the real estate business, still living in a tiny apartment with Meredith—but that didn’t stop him from being wild with excitement. No sirree. He already had a list of Biblical names for both boys and girls, and wanted to go through it with me to find the best one. Then he wanted to discuss how old was old enough to have your child baptized. After that it was a request that I pray for him and his wife and their upcoming child. Then we had a long discussion on how to reconcile a good, moral life for his child with a sinful, wanton planet lurking just outside their front door. He asked me if I thought he was ready to be a father, and I told him ‘of course.’ It went on like this for almost an hour, and after that, well, he was quiet for a minute, and you know what he finally asked me before he left?”
The crowd waits in rapt attention. My cousin Mary’s newborn begins to cry and Mary quickly evacuates the room.
“He said, ‘Pastor, I just got one more question for you now that we’ve gotten all the other stuff worked out. It’s kind of important,’ and I said, ‘Go ahead, Paul.’ And he asked me, ‘What exactly do I do with it once it’s born?’”
Everyone in the funeral home laughs pensively at this anecdote by the preacher, all except my mother and me. We don’t laugh because Pastor Robbins never gave young Paul Prescott an answer.
11:14:23 AM
Mother and I ride with Cindy in the lead car on the way to Oak Meadow. Tara and Hajime follow in my Accord. In the front seat of our car, the driver coughs and furtively tries to write text messages on his cell. None go through, and he scowls. In the back seat, no one says anything. Our composure has been restored by the tapering rain, the cold day, and a realization between us that things really aren’t so bad. But our voices are gone; there is nothing to talk about.
The cemetery grass is wet and gray in the dim sunlight, and there is already a small crowd gathering underneath the shadow of a weeping oak tree on the far side of the compound. The rest of the cars are parked and I rejoin Tara and Hajime. They don’t say much other than asking the obligatory questions about my mother, about Cindy, and about me. A moment of guilt passes when I answer, “We’re all fine.”
The friends, old business partners, and drinking buddies are gone now, as the burial is meant for relatives only. The twenty-five or so family members line up on three sides of the coffin, which is suspended over a hole in the earth by two green straps and a lowering apparatus. Pastor Robbins stands at the head of the box, scratching at his forehead with his left hand and wielding a Bible in his right.
Hajime keeps trying to peer into the earth beneath the coffin once the preacher begins talking. Tara looks at me, waiting for a reaction. When she receives none, she smoothes out the fabric of her black skirt.
