LifeHouse LifeHouse
June Bellamy was walking in the woods,
listening to FM on dedicated headphones and thinking deep thoughts about mortality and
love--or perhaps about love and mortality--the first time she came close to annihilating
upwards of twenty billion people.
It was definitely the mook's fault, not
June's--the whole thing. That is quite clear. All she wanted to do, at the start, was to
grieve, and she had gone out of her way to do so privately. Nonetheless she was--thanks to
the mook, and the headphones--the one who ended up personally endangering some twenty
billion lives. Repeatedly. Whereas he was out of the story almost at once, never had more
than a moment's worry over it, and would not even remember that for nearly a century.
It is almost enough to make one suspect
God of a sense of irony.
* * *
It was a splendid Fall afternoon in
Vancouver. June was thirty-three years old and in excellent health. The woods she walked
through were part of the former University Endowment Lands now called Pacific Spirit
Regional Park, adjoining the sprawling campus of the University of British Columbia: about
the only land on the Vancouver peninsula that had never been settled by white people or
developed, and at least in theory never would be. The trail she had chosen had good
drainage; despite the fact that it had rained for twelve of the past fourteen
days--excessive even for Vancouver--leaves that had been lying in sunshine today crunched
under her walking shoes. There was just enough crispness in the air to encourage activity,
and the trapped ozone of several thunderstorms to add alertness. Traffic and houses and
bustling human activity were no more than a kilometer or so away in any direction--but no
trace of them reached here, into the forest sanctum. There were surely other hikers in the
woods--but not many, and few June was likely to meet. It was a wonderful place in which to
be conflicted.
The only death she knew to be on her
personal horizon was the impending death of her mother, in San Francisco, of colon cancer.
She thought it more than enough reason to be conflicted.
* * *
She had just that day returned from
what she knew would be her last visit with her mother. She had known since the first phone
call from her father, the previous week, that Laura Bellamy had at best a matter of days
left. The cancer had come out of nowhere and gutted her without warning or mercy: by the
time she was symptomatic she was, as June's father put it on the phone, a dead woman
walking.
And by the time June had arrived at her
hospital bedside she was clearly done walking. She had looked shrunken and--the pun made
June tremble the instant it occurred to her, because she could never ever share it with
anyone--and cured, like leather: she had looked like someone who ought to
have that many wires and tubes coming out of her. She was fifty-four, and looked ninety.
June knew exactly the phrase her lover/partner Paul would have used to describe his
almost-mother-in-law's condition if he'd been there: "circling the drain." She'd
looked like a crude, ill-thought-out parody of Laura Bellamy, one that was not intended to
be sustained for long.
But she had also looked--this was the part
June could not get out of her mind, as she walked through the forest--fearless. June's
mother had, to the best of her recollection, always had the usual human allotment of
fears, doubts, and uncertainties. Now she had none. It was clear in her sunken, shining
eyes. June had wanted mightily to ask her about that, to discuss it with her. But it had
proven almost completely impossible.
That had been the very worst part of the
whole depressing experience. Everyone in the room, including the Alzheimer's patient in
the next bed, had known perfectly well that Laura Bellamy was terminal. But June's father,
Frank, suffered from--clutched like a drowner--the illusion that his wife did not suspect
anything of the sort. The notion that even a doctor who was trying to could have concealed
such news from Laura Bellamy was ridiculous, but Frank was in deep denial--and, as always,
needed his wife's help with it. He needed to believe he was protecting her from something,
even if it was only knowledge of her doom. He had met June in the hospital lobby and
explained solemnly that they must be very very careful not to let Laura suspect the Awful
Truth. By the time June had realized he was serious, it was too late to protest; they were
on their way in the door of her mother's room.
Where she found, to her horror, that Laura
Bellamy would rather have died than admit in her husband's presence that she knew she was
dying. Unlike most men of his generation, Frank Bellamy had not often needed his wife to
simulate ignorance or stupidity; she was willing to indulge him, this once.
And therefore June, who had abandoned her
partner in the middle of an important project and traveled thirteen hundred kilometers for
the specific purpose of having her Last Conversation with her mother, who had rehearsed it
in her mind for several tight-lipped dry-eyed days because she knew this was her one and
only window, had been unable to have it . . . had been forced to smile and chatter cheery
inanities about how everything was back home in Canada these days and even help, herself,
to shore up the grotesque illusion that her mother was soon going to recover and resume
her interrupted life.
Horror.
They'd held a wordless conversation with
their eyes, of course, while the rest of their faces spoke hollow lines for Frank's
benefit. But eye contact lacks bandwidth; the communication had been ambiguous,
fragmentary, profoundly unsatisfactory for June.
Once--once--she had succeeded in inventing
an errand that would require her father to leave the room for five minutes. And then she
had gone and dithered away three of them, finishing up the useless surface conversational
thread they'd been chewing when he left, too nervous to begin. Finally she'd said,
"Mom--we have to talk."
"Yes, dear," her mother had said
at once. "But if we take it out of the box now, there's no way we can have it all
tucked back in again in two minutes . . . and that's when he'll be back."
She'd made the words come out calmly.
"There probably isn't going to be another chance. I've gotta get back to Canada, and
I can't risk coming back."
"Yes, there will."
"Phone? He can't stay here
twenty-four hours a day--"
Her mother had smiled at that. They had
never had the clichéd mother-daughter phone relationship; Laura Bellamy felt that talking
on the telephone was unsatisfactory, and that talking long-distance was like hemorrhaging:
something to be done in brief bursts if absolutely necessary. "They won't let you
have a cell phone around all this medical gear, and I'm afraid I'm just too lazy to hobble
down the hall these days. Don't worry, dear: we'll talk."
"When? How?" Her voice
had risen in pitch, and she was furious with herself for losing control. She was not
here to add her own emotional burdens to her mother's obviously overfull agenda.
But her mother's serenity had only
increased. "Do you know, I don't have the faintest idea? And I don't know how I know.
But I'm quite certain--so don't worry, June. All the things we need to say to each other
will be said . . . in time."
June's eyes had narrowed suspiciously.
"What, are you going religious on me, Ma? Now?"
Laura had smiled. "I don't think so.
I'm still just as fundamentally ignorant as I ever was, about all the important things. I
have no Answers; I've had no revelations. But somehow . . ." Her face had changed
subtly, in a way June could not classify. "Somehow, I'm not . . . not quite as clueless
as I was. Just . . . just trust me. All right? We will get it all said, one
day--and we'll probably find out that we already knew most of it. And meanwhile, it's all
going to be alright."
And with theatrical timing, her father had
reentered the room just then.
The next hour or so of their discourse had
been transmitted by eye contact, with its terrible signal-to-noise ratio (was that a
punctuation mark? or just a blink?), and hampered by the need to keep a plausible surface
conversation going with an inarticulate man. Shortly June had found herself unable to
decide whom she resented more: her father, who had the nerve to find his beloved wife's
brutal dying too much to bear, or her mother, who, faced with a choice between her
daughter's needs and her husband's, had the nerve to make the only choice she possibly
could. And of course, awareness of her own irrational selfish resentment had made June
despise herself, so she had resented them both for that, too.
And then, as visiting hours were drawing
to a close, her mother had said, "You know, I read a book once, I forget who wrote
it, but he said the most beautiful thing. He said--let me see if I can get this right--he
said, 'There is really only one sense. It is the sense of touch. All of the other senses
are merely other ways of touching."
And she had held out her hand--her
shrunken, IV-trailing hand--and of course June had taken it, and--
* * *
--and something had happened. Even now,
walking through the woods of Pacific Spirit Park back home in British Columbia with
Coltrane whispering in her ears, June was not sure just what. But information exchange had
taken place. Data of some kind had come surging up her arm from her mother's feeble grip,
and data of some other and different kind had flowed in the other direction.
It had not been the "getting
it all said" that her mother had spoken of earlier. The questions June had walked
into that hospital room with were still unanswered; the words she had gone there to say
were yet unspoken. But some kind of profound communication had taken place,
something just as far beyond talking as talking was beyond eye contact. (And
something, therefore, just as unsatisfying as eye contact had been--if for different
reasons.) June did not have a mystical bone in her body . . . but she was quite certain
that her mother had taken something from her in that brief physical contact, and imparted
something important to her in return. Something almost tangible, in the form of an energy
almost palpable. Some kind of change had occurred in June. She just wished she knew what,
so she could explain it to Paul when she finally saw him again.
She was still trying to analyze it, as she
wandered heedless through the woods, jazz saxophone playing softly in her FM headphones. How,
she thought, am I different?
I am different in some way that I
cannot define. Changed. I sense that the change is, or probably will be, temporary.
Nonetheless it is important. And it reminds me of something . . .
The memory surfaced. It had taken awhile
because it was a memory not of a real event but of an imagined one.
This is what I used to imagine it was
like to have a magic spell put on you!
When she was a little girl, a voracious
consumer of Tolkien and his disciples, she had often acted out fantasy scenarios of her
own devising in her solitary play hours. This was what it had felt like just after the
wizard had placed his enchantment upon her, and just before it was fully activated by the
inevitable appearance of the handsome warrior. It had something to do with the
inevitability of that appearance, and the certainty that they would recognize each other
at once. It was, now that she thought of it, probably one of her earliest gropings, in
imagination, toward the concept of empowerment.
Well, she already had a handsome warrior
in inventory, thank you very much. She had recognized her Tall Paul on sight . . .
and had basically won him in combat and directed that he be scrubbed and brought to her
tent. Even better, he had a tent of his own now. She was as empowered in that area as she
felt any need to be.
But she did, now that she thought of it,
feel more than usually empowered today, in a strange sort of way. Usually when she was in
raw nature like this, she felt like a stranger, who must be careful not to offend through
thoughtlessness; like a visitor to the zoo, whose gawking curiosity is a kind of
impertinence; like a tourist. Today she felt, for once, at home here in the woods. And the
woods seemed to agree.
She saw more wildlife than usual, for
instance. Several squirrels. A raccoon. Something she took to be a weasel, that browsed
her with his eyes, like a penny-pinching shopper, and decided she was too expensive.
Birds--June never saw birds in the woods, even when she was right underneath the
chirping things and the branches were bare, but so far she had seen at least half a dozen,
without even thinking about it. All of these wild things noticed her in return, and were
wary of her--but none of them seemed to feel any need to flee. Perhaps they were all under
the influence of the magic spell.
Between her light head and her heavy
heart, she felt no alarm at all when she became aware of the man ahead of her on the
trail, even though he was clearly a sleazebag.
She reached up to switch off her radio
headphones, succeeded only in turning the volume all the way off, and settled for that.
She did not even momentarily wish she had
her handsome warrior with her for backup. She was armed and competent--and more than that:
somehow she knew that on this day of days, she could face down a mugger with impunity,
calm a psycho with her gaze, unman any rapist. Death--not the concept but the grim
reality, up close and personal, ravaging one of her loved ones--had in some odd way given
her power, and she could sense it. She mistook an electric tingling in her earlobes for a
symptom of it. She studied the sleazebag carefully, but her pulse remained steady.
Caucasian male, about her age. He looked
like when he was five Santa had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he'd
chirped, "A perpetrator." In the distant neighborhood where her lover had grown
up, in a country adjoining America called The Bronx, he would have been termed a mook. He
could not possibly have passed within a thousand meters of a cop in thick fog without
instant radar lock taking place. At the moment, even in the middle of nowhere and
believing himself unobserved, he was managing to skulk, mope, loiter, creep and look
furtive, all at the same time--a virtuoso performance. He reminded her of a man she knew
called Hopeless Harry.
He was well over two meters tall, and
seemed to mass well under fifty kilos. He wore clothes meant for other people, who unless
they were color-blind were not missing them, and a jailhouse haircut. On his back was a
large designer backpack. Its designers had intended it to say behold me: I am rich,
stylish and fit but on him it had the look of a false mustache, making him look,
impossibly, even more suspicious.
June had been moving quietly, one with the
forest, even before she saw him; now she became a Shao-Lin monk walking the rice paper,
leaving no trace. Her first instinct had been to change course and avoid him . . . but
that backpack intrigued her. An instinct only slightly younger on the evolutionary scale
told her it contained treasure. June Bellamy liked treasure. And she was in the mood for a
distraction from her thoughts.
She left the path and shadowed him for a
little less than a hundred meters, paralleling the meandering trail. He was the kind of
mook who could have been tailed through the French Quarter during Mardi Gras; for someone
with a magic spell on her in a forest this damp he was candy. Twice, he spun craftily on
his heel in the hope of surprising someone following him; both times his gaze passed right
over her without stopping. Call me Chingachcook, she thought smugly.
He kept staring from side to side as he
walked, looking for something. Occasionally he would leave the path, pick a spot at
apparent random, paw at the earth briefly with his sneakered foot (it was probably the
name that had first attracted him to sneakers), and then move on.
Finally his eye was caught by a large,
freshly toppled tree about twenty meters from the trail. The bank on which it stood had
been undercut by centuries of Vancouver rain, and the days of sustained downpour just
ended had finished the job. The huge elm had fallen to a 45-degree angle before being
caught like a drunk by its neighbors; roots clawed at the sky like tentacles frozen in
spasm, bearded with brown glistening tendrils that made her think of shit tinsel. He
looked around one last time, failed again to see her fifty meters away, and unslung his
stylish backpack.
She began to understand when he removed a
collapsible entrenching tool and assembled it. The earth the tree had lately protected was
freshly turned, easy to dig. There was indeed treasure in that bag, and Captain Kidd there
proposed to bury it. June smiled.
And almost instantly felt a stab of
sadness. A week ago, such a gift from God would have been a blessing and a pure joy. Now
it was a consolation prize. A prize booby.
Still, she was forced to admit to some
interest in just how much consolation; she took a position of vantage and dropped
into a squat as the mook began digging.
The longer he dug, the better she felt.
The deeper he wanted his plunder buried, the more likely it was to console her. But when
he began approaching a depth and dimensions which would have served for the grave of a
child, nearly waist-deep in the hole he was making, she entertained a brief Pythonesque
fantasy in which, having buried his treasure, he would protect its secret by shooting the
guy who'd dug the hole. That way she wouldn't have to wait for him to pass out of earshot
to uncover the swag, and there'd be that nice handy entrenching tool.
Come to think of it, digging up a grave
wasn't something she was really in the mood for, just now--even one with treasure in it.
She'd settle for marking the spot, and coming back with Paul sometime. Let him do the
grunt work; that was what handsome warriors were for. Well, one of the things.
The mook's shovel, which had been saying chuff--shrrrp
. . . chuff--shrrrp . . . chuff--shrrrp with decreasing rhythm like an asthmatic
slowly recovering from an attack, suddenly said chuff--shrrrp . . . clack!
Not clank! as if it had hit a rock.
Not chup! as if it had hit a root. Clack! As if it had struck . . . she
didn't know, plastic or plexiglass or formica or something. Something manmade.
He made a muttered sound of irritation
that, if it had become a word, would have been "Naturally," set that shovelful
of dirt aside carefully, without any shrrp, then offset his point of attack
slightly and tried again.
Clack!
"Aw, fuck!" he groaned.
No, no, she wanted to say. "Fuck!"
is the sound of an axe sinking into a tree. That was "Clack!"
As if insisting on his point of view, he
said "Fuck!" again, louder. But this time, the way he said it was so different,
and so incongruous, so full of an almost religious awe, that it caused her to focus her
attention on him. Because of that--remarkably--she actually recognized what happened to
him next. It was a thing she had never expected to see in quite that context, but if you
were looking right at it and paying close attention, it was unmistakable.
Standing up, hip-deep in an unfinished
grave, fully dressed, shovel still held in both hands, the mook threw back his head,
keened like a forlorn kitten, and had an orgasm.
It might even have been the orgasm of his
life. As she stared, marveling but never doubting, June was impressed. Thanks to her
mother, she had been confident in her own sexuality since the age of fourteen, but she had
to admit that in a varied life she had never received applause quite as enthusiastic and
sincere as the mook was now awarding to . . . no one at all. It was more than vocal: his
body language was so emphatic and so explicit that she decided he might well have found
work as a male erotic dancer, even with that body.
I've heard the expression "Fuck
the world" countless times, of course, she thought, but I'd never actually
seen it done before.
He was not even rubbing his groin against
the wall of the pit in which he stood, though he could have. Instead he simply thrust,
violently, at the air itself, and seemed to find it a more than adequate lover.
For all its intensity, the event seemed to
take somewhat less time than usual, at least in her experience, and when it was over, he
simply let go of the shovel and sat down in the hole, his head disappearing almost
completely from view. As the top of it bobbed up and down with his slowing respiration,
its coconut-husk hair made it resemble a hedgehog trying to frighten off an intruder with
a display of puffing bristles.
Something in that hole, June thought,
causes men to have instant orgasms, of higher than usual quality. I might just find a use
for such a thing. God help me: I am starting to feel consoled. . . .
* * *
She waited, and watched, her vision so
narrowed and focused that she seemed to see him in the crosshairs of a periscope, her
hearing so acute she became aware of a mosquito hovering near her left wrist (the silenced
headphones passed ambient sound so well, she had forgotten she was wearing them), her
attention so concentrated she ignored the mosquito.
"Angel Gerhardt," he said aloud,
his voice hoarse but happy.
Of course. After you have sex with the
universe, it is polite to offer your name. He must be a nonsmoker.
"Heinz," he said, "but
everybody calls me Angel."
I see, she thought. And your
address?
"Nine four seven four Williams
Street. Two two two, fourteen hundred. Frosty at eWorld dot com." Despite their
prosaic nature, he spoke each of these factoids blissfully, as though they were special
joys to be shared in afterglow. "No, there's my old lady and another couple and a dog
and three cats. Linda Wu. Tony Solideri and Mary Carry-the-Kettle."
There were short pauses between each
sentence. By now she understood that something silent in that hole was interrogating him,
somehow, and she memorized every syllable. Whatever it was, was a potential enemy, and she
did not want it better informed than her.
"I was looking to bury a couple o's
of flake till it cooled off a little," he said, still lazily ecstatic. "Yeah.
No. Yeah, they do. No, they don't. Yeah, I'm sure. I don't trust them. Well, Linda, a
little." Even those last two sentences sounded happy.
The next pause was long enough to give her
time to work that out. Yes, his lover and housemates knew he was out burying cocaine. No,
they didn't know, or even suspect, just where. This suited June. She was much less
interested in even two ounces of coke than in whatever the hell was in that hole .
. . but either way it would be nice never to have to meet anyone who would have Angel
Gerhardt for a friend.
Then she caught herself, remembering the
e-mail handle he had revealed: Frosty. Admittedly, it was more energy-efficient than
walking around wearing a sandwich sign that read, "I deal cocaine in felony
weight"--but not much smarter. Angel could not be considered a reliable judge of what
his lover and housemates did or didn't know. Worse, all the neighborhoods that bordered on
Pacific Spirit Park were upscale: he had probably attracted attention on his way into the
woods. She did not believe anyone could have tailed her the way she had tailed him;
nonetheless it came to her that it might be well to complete her business here and be gone
quickly.
Angel seemed to agree. He said only one
more word--"Okay"--then stood up in the hole, set down the shovel and began
taking off his pants. A strange dread clutched at her, though she could not have explained
why undressing was weirder than having a spontaneous orgasm dressed--but all he did was
remove his threadbare boxer shorts, wipe himself off with them, drop them into the hole
and put his pants back on. He was so skinny that he seemed to have no difficulty getting
the pants off and on without removing his sneakers. Then he hoisted himself out of the
hole and began hastily filling it back in. He did it more intelligently than she would
have expected. When he was done, he collected underbrush and sprinkled it over the
fresh-turned earth--again, more artistically than she'd have predicted. Then he put his
backpack back on, picked up his shovel and walked away.
His course, apparently randomly chosen,
brought him rather near to June before he reached the path again, but somehow she knew he
was going to walk right by without seeing her, and he did. He wore a vague, fatuous smile,
and his eyes were unfocused.
She glanced briefly toward the huge
drunken tree. Whatever was down there under its uprooted base would probably stay there
awhile. In any case she was not ready to confront it. She followed the backpack.
She was tempted at first to just stroll
along beside Angel, since he seemed oblivious, but she resisted, and took up stealthy
station fifty meters behind him again. She was glad when, a few hundred meters later, he
stopped and shook himself like a man coming out of a deep reverie. She had plenty of time
to become invisible before he turned and scanned his surroundings. His expression was
inhabited now, but still serene. For an instant he reminded her absurdly of her mother in
her hospital bed. He checked his watch then, muttered something she couldn't hear, and
resumed walking.
Shortly he found another exposed bank,
took out his shovel and began digging again.
As she watched, she noticed something
subtle. He was not digging like a man who had already dug one hole this size this
afternoon. Something seemed to have returned to him the energy he had expended earlier.
This time his task was accomplished
without incident. She was not much surprised when he buried the entire backpack: now
anyone who had noticed him enter the woods and saw him leave would know he had left
something behind. The trick in finding it would then be to go to the only dry trail in the
forest, and proceed as far as the second easy place to dig. The world had lost a
great rocket scientist when Angel Gerhardt decided to go into the crystal trade. Sure
enough, when he was done he left the shovel about five meters away (concealed by a mound
of leaves that would stay there for at least an hour, unless a breeze came up), both to
mark the spot and to make it easy for anyone who found the stash to dig it up.
Then he went away. He no longer looked
serene; now he looked pooped. He dragged his feet. But he moved.
After she was certain he was out of
earshot, June took her cell phone from her hip holster and dialed Paul's number, irritably
removing her forgotten FM headphones when she hit them with the phone. Self-contained,
with no wires to a Walkman or CD player on her person, they fell to the forest floor. She
expected to get his machine and did; she suffered through the outgoing message with even
more than her usual impatience, wishing for the thousandth time that he'd get a modern
machine, which allowed your friends to cut off the message by pushing the proper key. The
moment she heard the beep she began talking quickly and quietly.
"Honey, I'm into something heavy
here. I'm walking in the Endowment Lands, and I ran across a mook looking to bury
something nice just off the Lowrie Trail, Dorothy twice, but that's not the good part. He
was digging away at the base of a huge old toppled elm tree, and he hit something with his
shovel that made a sound like clack, something like plywood or plastic. And
then--" She knew how all this was going to sound, but didn't want to edit it.
"--I know this is nuts, but then he had an orgasm, all by himself, standing up. And
then he started to talk out loud, as if somebody was grilling him--only I was only fifty
meters away and I swear there was no one else there. He said his name was Angel Gerhardt
and he lived over in the East End on William Street and his e-mail handle, God help us
all, was 'Frosty,' and he named his girlfriend Linda Wu and his two housemates and said
none of them knew where he planned to bury the . . . the thing . . . and the weird part
was, he didn't say any of this like a mope giving information to the heat, he said it like
a guy opening his soul to his new lover, happy as a clam. Then he filled the hole back in
and buried the package in another spot. He's gone now. I'm going to put the package
somewhere else--but I'm not going near that goddam fallen elm without you, and maybe
Rosco. I don't know what we've got ahold of here, but whatever it is is very very big.
Call me as soon as you get in, okay? I hope everything went okay."
She put the phone away and squatted there
in the woods, thinking hard, for a minute--almost but not quite long enough. Then she got
to her feet, went to the shovel and picked it up.
If she had thought just a little longer,
it might have occurred to her that in fantasy stories, it is generally unwise to tamper
with the belongings of one on whom a geas has been placed. The moment her fingers touched
the shovel, she came.