New W-I-P, Part 5

[mbranesf]

Another installment of current work-in-progress, a probably novella-length fiction (it stands at 11K words so far and has a while to go yet) set in a altered version of my homeland. This item also appears as parts 9 and 10 on my Facebook wall. This experiment of writing something fictional more or less online and posting the draft without revision as soon as its done has been useful. It creates some artificial schedule pressure on it and shuts off the internal editor for a while.

A sort of turning point is reached in this segment, with the narrator's relationships with other characters. The reliability of this narrator remains somewhat in question. A few segments ago, I was contemplating having him get really unreliable, but I am so closely aligned with his POV that it's hard for me to not believe what he's saying. But we'll see. Previous segments are found by way of the "personal writing" tag.



 "Love Me," He Said, and Turned Away Forever (Part 5)

 

Deliberately I avoided talking about myself, and instead steered the dinner conversation toward Ledger as much as possible. He said that he had been graduated from the local high school the year before but had not settled on any further educational or vocational plan. He said that he liked physics, but that he wasn’t smart enough to get into a good college to study it. He said that he understood “temporal mechanics” but that he couldn’t perform well enough on standardized tests to prove it to anyone. He said that his mother was dead and that he was semi-estranged from his father. “He used to hit me a lot,” Ledger said of his father. When I reacted, he added with a raised hand, “But that was before I got too big for him to get away with it. He hasn’t done that in a long time.” He said that he liked the TV show Doctor Who, and that he liked to go fishing in the river that cut the town in half. “But you probably think that’s dumb,” he said.

          

 “Boring maybe,” I admitted. “But dumb? Why would I think that’s dumb? What’s dumb about it if it’s what you enjoy doing?”

            He looked down at his plate and concentrated on a blob of beans, all that was left of his second portion. “You seem really smart,” he said. “Sophisticated. Not like the people around here.”

            “You know that I’m from here, right?”

            He nodded, but seemed to doubt it. “Your friend who hired me to work here said that this was your dad’s house. And I know that was all your stuff in that bedroom, but I can't really picture you really living here.”

            “I was younger than you are now when I did.”

            We were silent for a couple minutes, and the Ledger said, “He died, too, didn’t he?”

            “Who?” I asked, knowing full well whom he meant, wanting to delay the answer for a second or two.

            “Your friend. The one who hired me.”

            “Brace.”

            “Yeah.”

            I said, “My spouse.”

            Ledger breathed. “What?”

            “We couldn't be married legally, but we were the same thing as a married couple.”

            I was astounded that Ledger somehow did not know this. The expression upon his face told me that he was genuinely nonplussed by this information. It was a revelation. The way he had been calling Brace my “friend”—he really meant it that way, no clue at all that we had been a couple. This promised to blight our whole conversation: he was surprised to learn an important fact about me while I was placed in the spot of having just come out as gay to someone whom I’d assumed to have been aware of that fact the whole time.

            But Ledger recovered from this shock quickly, or at least readily switched to another topic. He returned to fishing for a couple minutes, told me how he knew how to clean and pan fry bluegill. I suggested that we might the next day see if we could do that. “I’ll probably be hungry again tomorrow,” he said. “But it’s hard to imagine it right now.” He pointed to his empty plate. “It’s dark out now,” he said. “I think you should see something about the kudzu, what it does at night.”

            I suspected that I already knew what he was talking about, but I agreed that we should go outside and examine the situation. But first I thought we ought to drink more. I opened beers for us both and then decided, in a flush of conviviality, that I liked Ledger well enough to share most anything with him. I opened that bottle of absinthe that he had wondered about earlier and poured tiny shots of it into the bottoms of tumblers. “Drink,” I said, and handed him his taste. He swallowed it and grimaced. “I think I hate that,” he said.

            “Are you sure?”

            “No.”

            I poured him another little taste, and that one he seemed to enjoy much more.

            For his third shot, I lifted the bent-necked bottle directly to his mouth, tipped it a tiny bit, and he sipped. “What were we doing?” he wondered after a couple of minutes.

            “You were going to show me something about the kudzu.”

            “Kudzu!” he said, and grabbed my free hand, the one not clutching the absinthe bottle. “Come out here.” He led me outside.

“The kudzu grows at night,” Ledger said. As if to support his statement, a stray vine, animal-like, wrapped around the legs of a deck chair. Last night I’d seen this, but then it had seemed less real, more like a dream image because I had been dozing in that chair right before I’d seen it. Now, fully awake if a bit drunk, it was more apparent what was happening. The vines grew inches per minute and seemed able to direct themselves. In the way a normal plant might tend to very slowly trellis itself around objects in its vicinity, as it climbed away from the ground, this stuff that the locals insisted on calling kudzu appeared to choose its own direction, and quickly. A warm breeze passed over us. The kudzu’s wide leaves whispered in it. Insect noises its depths blared in the night quiet. “Look at the flowers,” Ledger whispered. The more mature vines that still choked the garage had flowered spectacularly. Their broad petals opened and clenched and opened again. Huge, bulbous stigma protruded and I imagined that they glowed, silver and yellow.

            “Doesn’t it scare you?” I’m not sure why I asked him that since he seemed perfectly contented with it all. But he said it did a little bit, but that it was very pretty in its frightfulness. Somehow I found myself standing behind Ledger, close. He leaned back a bit, his shoulder blades pressed into my chest, and he talked more about the flowers. He said he liked the salsa that I’d made from the kudzu fruit that I’d bought at Circus of Foods. “No one ever makes anything good out of that.” I reached around him, clasped an arm across his chest. He said he wanted to fish for bluegill the next day. I told him that we’d fry fish. He said he’d like that. I bent my face down toward his left ear, toward his neck as if I were going to kiss it. I’m not sure why I did this or even if that was what I intended to do. It was more like a reflex, because he was so close.

            Perhaps also a reflex: Ledger pulled away from me, spun around to face me and then backed away a few feet. “No!” he shouted. “No. Fuck you. That’s not happening. I’m not like you. I’m not a fag.”

            He stepped back a few more feet, trampling writhing kudzu vines. “Not like you!”

            “I didn’t say you were.” That was my whole feeble response, and I didn’t say it very loudly. Ledger stepped in a wide semi-circle around me and went back into the house. A moment later, with his backpack retrieved and slung over one shoulder, he ran off, through the fence gate and down the street into the breezy kudzu night. I stood there for a while, not quite sure what had happened, but quite sure that I would be angry about it. As if avoiding me, the vines trailed off in other directions.

 

            Though I will put myself forward readily, I think that I do not deal well with embarrassment. This is a conclusion that I reached relatively recently, many years after these events that I have been describing. After Ledger’s departure that night, I swallowed another drink or two and decided that I was glad to be shut of him. Finally I could have the time alone that I imagined I had come here for.

            Since my arrival a couple days before, I hadn't bothered setting up my usual web of electronic gadgetry. The house had net access, so I started by turning on my laptop and deleting several hundred items of email. Before I’d left for Wisconsin, I’d been maintaining and curating the remains of Brace’s vast online persona by way of his Updator and Facebook accounts, acknowledging and thanking people for their condolences and well-wishes and their many makeshift memorials, but this had all fallen into neglect. A project just as huge and hopeless and pointless as the backyard kudzu remediation, I abandoned it finally. By deleting all recent communications unread, I felt that I had released him at last into the aether, a thing I had not been able to contemplate just a few days earlier. But now I did it more or less dispassionately, and maybe even with a small feeling of relief.

            It was a useful displacement activity to connect more devices. I rigged my laptop, my tablet and my phone to display on my father’s big flatscreen TV. I’d brought with me the cameras from home. Brace had made us live some of our lives on camera: our restaurant kitchen had been live-streamed, and later our home kitchen was, too. I considered recreating this surveillance for my sojourn in Wisconsin, a weird, lonely parody of how things had been. I remembered that another very good use for the cams was epic-length online masturbation sessions with random guys. I thought of Ledger as I remembered this, and I considered doing it, but it somehow held little appeal this night, an annoying episode of having a hard-on but no real desire to enjoy it.

            I checked the phone, also neglected for a few days. My call log displayed itself on the giant TV screen. Scores of missed calls and voicemails, and I dismissed all of them. Pleased with this, I set the phone down on the kitchen island, and just as I released it, it began ringing in the low, red-alert klaxon tone that announced only two possible callers, and only one who still lived. On the giant TV screen, words in a blocky font appeared: “Call from DISAGREEABLE WHELP,” superimposed over his picture, my son. And, “Request for video link from DISAGREEABLE WHELP.”

            Fuck, I said to myself. He would not be calling me unless he had some kind of problem with which I needed to deal. He never called just to chat. I answered the call and allowed the vid link. I had forgotten that it was not summer in January in Argos-Bellona. Arthur was outside somewhere, his neck wrapped in a purple scarf. His breath was a visible fog. “You’re smoking,” I said.

            He sucked in another drag of a mostly-spent cigarette and said, “Well, you’re drunk.”

            “Touché.” I stepped closer to the big monitor. I felt like Captain Kirk addressing an alien on a screen from the bridge of my starship. “What’s going on, Arthur?”

            “I have been trying to call you for days! What's going on with you?”

            “Days?” I didn’t think so. “I have been here for two full days. Or maybe this is day three.” I actually wasn’t quite certain of that.

            “Chris,” he said, sort of breathed it. “Dad. You have been gone for two weeks.”

             I remember stepping back away from the screen, as if he were in the room with me and had assaulted me. I knew that wasn’t possible. “What are you talking about?” I knew it wasn’t possible. “I left on Tuesday. It’s Thursday—no, Friday night now.”

            Arthur leaned into the cam. His face warped a bit, and his voice echoed. “They say that there is some kind of time dilation going on where you are, that people under the heat bubble are being thrown out of temporal synch with the rest of the planet.”

            “Arthur. That makes no sense.” I couldn’t believe that I was even discussing such an outré idea with him. “If you and I were out of synch temporally, then how are we even able to talk on the phone like this?” I half-remembered Ledger claiming to understand temporal mechanics. “I’m no scientist, but I know that makes no sense.”

            “I don’t know!” He suddenly looked frightened, stricken. His lower lip trembled. “Shut the fuck up, Chris! Just listen for once! I need to you to leave there. Come home! You can sell the house from here.”

            “How am I going to sell a house to people who are out of temporal phase with me?” I laughed. “That really makes no sense at all.”

            “Dad,” he whispered. “You need to come home. You need to stop this right now and come home.”

            I knew that I was not going to be heading home right then, and maybe not anytime soon. I wondered if the gulf of time between Arthur and me would widen by the day. If we were several days out of synch now, could it end up being months or years if I stayed here long enough? It made no sense. He made no sense. I knew I would leave here in a week or two, go back to Argos-Bellona and all would normal. But I was just uncertain enough of all of this that I said something to Arthur that night that I had only ever said to him in daydreams: “I love you, Arthur-Rimbaud. Many times I told Brace—your real dad—how much I loved you, as if you were really my son, too. But I don’t think I ever told you.”

            His face filled the screen. He smiled wistfully. “You did tell me. But I always pretended I was asleep.”

            I reached toward the screen, as if to touch his face, but then the signal degraded and was lost. Pixels of him lingered for a long time.

 

[to be continued]