After forty-five minutes, the conductor reappeared to tell Hood and the other sleepers the news.
—Ladies and gentlemen, afraid we still don’t know when the train will be moving. Best thing is to just stay put here in the car and we’ll advise you as soon as we hear anything.
Down to the other end to repeat the announcement.
The next hours, in the deep part of the night, were as slow and ominous as the hours in a hospital waiting room. The emergency lighting dwindled and the sleepers in Paul’s car turned uneasily, cursing under their breaths. He wanted that oblivion of sleep but he couldn’t manage it. He was beginning to shake a little bit from the cold. He could see his own breath. And he was scared.
Then, sometime in the early morning, a large, hulking shape moved down the corridor. Paul was jumpy, he was expecting the kinetic bad guys of comic books. But it was just an older guy from the next car, a grizzled, gin-soaked—looking guy. In the blue glow of the fading emergency lights, the guy looked a little bit like Stan Lee, creator of the F.F. He was part C.I.A. operative, part elementary school teacher. He was fat, sinister, and jovial, and he fell into the seat across the aisle from Paul.
Paul didn’t know what to expect. He figured he was going to be attacked now, or raped, and that he deserved it. After Libbets.
—Seen the John anywhere, young man? the C.I.A. dude said.
—Excelsior, Paul said. Dunno, next car maybe.
The man had a good laugh over something. He hacked up some gunk from deep in himself.
—Hell of a train ride, huh?
Paul nodded. Not wanting to say anything, not wanting to encourage the rapist. But then he did anyway.
—Wish I had a flashlight. Or maybe some lantern, some kinda camping lantern. And some freeze-dried stuff. And a battery-powered record player, a Close-and-Play, and a bunch of forty-fives or something. And comic books.
The man leaned over the aisle.
—And a girl, he said. A little company.
—I wish I was home, Paul said. That’s the truth.
The man nodded. The highway was empty, out the window. Sanding trucks inched along.
—You’re going to New Canaan, I think, he said. I have a feeling about that. I think I have met your parents once or twice. I think I knew you since you were yea-high. Huh? Like they always say? Yep. That’s right.
He told Paul his name. William something.
—Nope, Paul said, I’m … from Stamford. Citizen of Stamford.
Paul was wondering when the conductor might be coming back.
—That so? My mistake. Not Ben’s son then, huh? My mistake. Well, I was going to offer to give you a ride when we get there. If we get there. But if you’re only going right into town, I won’t be much help. Unless you want to share a taxi or—
—No, Paul interrupted him emphatically, my parents will be waiting for me.
—Waiting for you after all this?
—Well, that’s what I’m hoping.
—I see.
The older man heaved himself up into the aisle then, and suddenly Paul could see his baggy eyes, his thick neck, his gray, metallic flesh. Up close. The man loomed over him. He clapped a hand on Paul’s shoulder. Breath like formaldehyde. This guy was an emissary from Dr. Doom. Only way to explain it.
—I’m guessing you don’t want a serious conversation, Paul. That’s my guess. And that’s fine by me. Have to visit the head in any case. But you have a safe journey.
—Hey, I—
—If you want a ride or something when we arrive, you just look me up. Back a car.
—I’ll do that, Paul said.
As the door slammed shut behind the man, Paul gathered himself up and ran back, as far in the opposite direction as he could, past the sleepers and their uncomfortable dreams, waking some as he hurried. Rapist, Paul thought, murderer. He settled two cars back. He buried his head under his tweed jacket. The things that went through his mind were the things he would have tried to put down, the thoughts he would have purged on a better day. He was thinking about the fellowship of modern sex criminals, guys who got off on the sound of women’s screams, elderly men sucking the cocks of little, fat boys, guys who beat up fags and got erections while they did so. Then he was thinking not of Logan Krieg, but of another guy who used to copy from his papers in class, a guy who used to threaten him at Saxe Junior High. Skip Maundy. Maundy used to stop Paul on the way to the cafeteria to demand his lunch money. Since Paul had led his parents to believe that school lunches cost a dollar, though the actual cost was only seventy-five cents, Paul gave Maundy the profit. In order to avoid being beaten up. So Maundy waited for him every day, making jokes like Hey, Paulie, we’ve got to stop meeting like this! HA! HA! HA! HA!
Then Maundy moved into the academic arena with Paul. Coming down the long hallway that ran along the gym, he would break free from his platoon of handlers and harass Hood over by the water fountain. Pass your test over to me during math. Just do it. Maundy always smiled during these demands, as though he were engaged in an act of philanthropy.
Paul wished, as in after-school specials, that he had lived to see Maundy brought low, or that he would learn of some terrible tragedy in the Maundy family—his father’s cancer, his mother’s alcoholism—that would explain their son, the thug. But Paul never told anyone about the situation. He never turned Maundy in. He just took it.
Wendy also lived with the responsibility of isolation in public school. He had seen public school kids turn away rather than talk to her; he had heard her called whore and freak by the children of judges and social workers. In the dark, under his tweed jacket, Paul got stuck, all over again, on his parents and their chemistry. What kinds of genes gave him a life like this?
And the truth was that the story of Skip Maundy did have a conclusion. Later on, at New Canaan High, Maundy apparently dallied with a retarded girl in one of the lavatories. It was that girl Sarah Joe Holmes. Here’s what they said: that Maundy had pissed on her, held her down and pissed on her. That was the alleged crime. Held her down, exposed himself, pissed on her, and then smoked a cigarette. Maybe it was just a story someone concocted to explain a horrible situation. But maybe, on the other hand, the miracle of inheritance had produced a guy who felt comfortable in this crime. Paul went over the story again and again.
How did Sarah Joe account for that moment, that moment when the urine splashed across her face and smock, puddling around her? Was Skip sad about it, afterward, the way Paul was sad about Libbets? Paul didn’t know.
It was a story that didn’t lead anywhere. Just something that happened. Just something to think about in the locked vault of familial regrets.
III
Okay, the time has come in this account for a characterization of the mind of God. Just briefly, for thematic reasons. Happily there’s no need to concern ourselves with this mind as it has expressed itself directly—because it hasn’t, really. Therefore this story can be content with indirect examples, with metaphor and with evidence from nature. For example: Benjamin Hood, who was on Saturday morning asleep on the floor of the Halfords’ bathroom, had a dream—an uncomfortable dream in the midst of a grueling hangover. Dreams retold are a burden, so this will be brief. In Hood’s dream, a special tax had been levied against him because of fruit-bearing trees growing in his yard on Valley Road. He learned of this tax while taking a drive with Jim Williams (in a station wagon with simulated wood paneling, though Williams actually drove a Cadillac). Hood was trying to explain the presence of government inspectors in his yard, those inspectors in white, lead-lined suits, measuring the size and yield of his plum trees and then blowtorching them.
—The thing I can’t figure out, he told Jim Williams, is whether this is happening in 1973 or in 1991.
—Well, pal, Williams said, the past and the future happen in the present moment. That’s just how it is.
That’s it. That’s the dream. And the amazing thing about this dream is that Benjamin’s son would dream it, too. Ye
ars later. Really. In Hoboken, New Jersey. Paul Hood. With his father as the main character and everything. Benjamin, however, as he lay on the floor of the bathroom dreaming uncomfortably, couldn’t know—would never know—that his son would dream this very dream, that his son would wake and retell it and in the retelling become his father’s imaginer as well as his father’s son. His father’s narrator.
This congruency—between Paul and his dad—is sort of like the congruency between me, the narrator of this story, the imaginer of all these consciousnesses of the past, and God. All these coincidences and lapses of coincidence were set in motion long before Benjamin or Paul was conceived, the way the topography and history of New Canaan—the shifting course of its rivers, the rise and fall of its tax revenues, its past, its future—preceded Benjamin and Paul, preceded all of us.
That’s metaphor. I mentioned an example from nature, too. It follows. Though metaphors of the mind of God are characterized by coincidence and repetition, examples from nature aren’t as tidy. Nature is senseless and violent. So this part of the story is violent, and because it’s senseless, too, it’s not from the point of view of any of the protagonists. It features a minor character. Mike Williams.
The ice had built up on every surface, on roofs and shrubs and avenues and cars and waterways. It formed a glittering and immense cocoon on tree limbs and power lines, a cocoon of impossible mass. The sound of tree limbs giving out under this weight was like the crackling of gunfire. Mike Williams, who was wandering around in the earliest part of dawn, heard these explosions in the stillness and laughed giddily at them. He was up really late. The threat of heavy weather impelled him out into the elements. To watch.
Danny Spofford’s had been his first destination, up on Mill Road; Mike walked up Silvermine. When the occasional vehicle skidded past, he hid. The Conrads’ AMC Gremlin went by. Somebody in a Corvette. It took a while to get to the Spoffords’ on foot. When he got there, though, he and Danny stayed up watching television—Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert—until the electricity went off. Then they became inventive, resourceful and inventive, as though the storm could in some way end all conversation, all teenaged fraternity. As though they only had a little time left. They began to counsel one another on what sexual intercourse would really be like. Fucking. At one point, Danny went into the kitchen and fetched a jar of strawberry jam out of the dormant refrigerator, Shopwell brand jam, into which he slid his middle finger. In an effort to simulate the velvet interior of a woman’s reproductive apparatus. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, licking the jam from his fuck finger, Danny Spofford said that if it was going to be like that he wanted to do it right away.
—Pop the cherry, Charles.
Mike, of course, had experienced more of this than he was letting on. He was a Casanova. But since Danny Spofford was homely, since he was a kid with a big beak and a sloping forehead, ears that stuck out too far, Mike didn’t want to insult him with too much experience. Not right away. But then as the night got deeper and colder and they wrapped themselves tighter in the blankets and quilts that Danny’s dad had piled up on the old couch in the basement, Mike started to tell Danny about Wendy Hood.
—That slut? Danny Spofford said.
—Hey, you don’t know her. Don’t say that.
—A harlot, Charles. She’s a lesbee. You’re not gonna tell me—
—You don’t get it, Spud. Let me finish.
But Mike was powerless to render the intricacies of unconsummated teen lust, the way it flattened out differences and made everyone compatible and everything tolerable. He couldn’t explain how Wendy’s dad had caught them with their pants down, because it was too embarrassing, and how this entrapment (kind of like that other arrest, in which Frank Wills stumbled upon Egil Krogh’s men: James McCord, Bernard L. Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, and Frank Sturgis) had only deepened his feelings for her. In the flickering candlelight, in the riot of competing flashlight beams, he couldn’t say why he was always thinking about her, how he doodled her name and her initials in his ring binder, how he concealed it in english assignments, how he searched out songs in which her name appeared in the title or lyrics, how even words like wind and when had become pleasant because they were phonetically near to her name. Mike couldn’t think of a way to tell Danny about any of this without sounding like a sap, a moe, a fag, a homo, a feeb. And anyway, he wasn’t too good with words. What he liked to do was wander around.
—Forget it, he said. I’m gonna walk down to Silver Meadow. Wanna come?
—Nah. Let’s toast some weenies. On these candles. Weenies, awesome.
Mike knew Danny wouldn’t come with him. Danny’s dad would probably show up from the party soon and would probably have some woman with him, and before he went upstairs with her, he would come down into the basement to see Danny. Maybe even the woman would come down and plant a single, moist kiss on Danny’s forehead. Danny told Mike all this. His dad would check to make sure he had enough candles, that the batteries in the flashlights were fresh. His dad would tuck in an errant corner of his blanket and smooth back his cowlick. Because his dad had sued for custody and won. It was a rare thing and Danny wanted all the benefits of it, Mike figured. He was a kid blessed with a dad.
Mike’s dad was okay, too, really—when he was home. But here Mike was: out in the cold. One of the unsupervised kids of New Canaan. The Spoffords’ front door locked behind him. The creaking of the trees was like the sound track of some haunting. He thought about the blackout at Silver Meadow, about how the orderlies would be trying to keep all the loonies in line, in the dark, with the gunfire of trees snapping all around them. The loonies would be breaking out of the padded cells, breaking out onto the shuffleboard courts to conduct silent competitions with one another, they would be breaking into the medicine cabinets looking for opiates and tranquilizers, huddling with one another to give loony reassurances; they would be going out for booze, raiding adjacent homes for scotch and rye and gin and vodka and bourbon or Lavoris or Skin Bracer or Old Spice or Hai Karate.
It was the perfect time to sneak in.
So he did. He passed the Hoods’ house, without so much as a look—he was denying himself—and then he snuck onto the grounds. It was a cinch, as usual. It was so easy that when he came to the Silver Meadow bowling alley, Mike tested the door. Impulsively. It opened! These guys were ridiculously casual! In the glow of emergency lighting he surveyed the two lanes. Since they were automated, the reset button obviously wasn’t gonna work. And there were no balls to be found. Mike violated the first rule of bowling—proper foot attire—as he paced up and down the lanes. He had always wanted to walk right down to the pins. With a deft kick he tipped them over. And then set them up again. Knocked them over, set them up. It was too easy. Then he heard voices, the voices of authority, and took off.
He slipped back out onto the grounds. This went on for a long while, this trespassing. He imagined himself and Wendy in a wood-paneled station wagon with two children in the way back, puking from motion sickness. He walked from building to building, was chased off by a security guard—waving an impressive flashlight—and returned to trespass some more. Everywhere New Canaan was sheathed in this ice, in this coating that seemed to render the stuff of his everyday life beautiful again—magic, dangerous, and new. He recognized trees in a way he never had, recognized the vast, arterial movement of roads in his neighborhood, recognized the gallant and stalward quality of telephone poles, recognized even the warm support, in the occasional candlelit window, of community. Man against the elements, man. Everything was repackaged, sealed into a cellophane wrap that assured singularity and quality control. Mike was happy.
And then he saw his first live wire. It was in the middle of the night, the very center of night, in the darkest part before dawn. The sound of a maple coming down was familiar enough now. Mike laughed as the branch tumbled to earth and with it the telephone pole, the wires, a couple of shrubs. These things fell across Valley Road in a cons
iderable impasse. He roared with laughter, coyote of the suburbs. The severed wire was anything but still. It hissed, of course, and there was the gold-dusting of electrical sparks. And it danced. The jig of the dervish, of delirious and religious mad persons, of hyperactive children and their weary parents. The dance of the charmed snake. The electrical line hopped and skipped and nothing could stop it that Mike knew of. It was just one of the hazards of life now. Cool!
Look, he was not a brilliant kid. He had not scored well on standardized tests or on any other tests. He was a little lazy, in fact. Mostly he tried to sit next to Mona Henderson and copy answers. But he knew about live wires, about the lore of live wires. So he made a wide berth several hundred feet around the moiling electrical field and then back onto that thoroughfare, Valley Road, back onto his trail. He wasn’t lonely now. He was full of life. He wished Wendy Hood were here to see all this. As he climbed carefully over the cable guardrail, he checked the icy sheen on the incline there, where Valley Road started down toward Silvermine. He checked the surface and found it to his liking. It could be burnished into a fine sliding surface. He cleared away any chunky, crusty stuff on a good twelve or fourteen feet of the roadway. With his sneakers he brushed this surface clean, as carefully and lovingly as if he were going to sign his name to it. And then he positioned himself ten feet or so from the beginning of this runway to get up speed.
Oh, the solitude of that moment! Mike could hear his breath as he chugged up to the ice, and then the sharp intake as he held in the chilly air and careened down the hill. It was good. Cool. He cleared a few more feet. No one was up, but he thought he could make out the glimmerings of dawn in the east. There were stars and moonlight and the intimation of dawn, and these occasionally illumined his solitary competition. No cars would be coming, because the road was sealed off now by the splendid devastation of the elements. Mike was like the hockey stars so prized by New Canaan high schoolers. He was like Ken “The Snake” Stabler, quarterback for his favorite football team, the unforgiving Oakland Raiders. He was like the intrepid skiers at the beginning of The Wide World of Sports. He was like Dave Wottle or Mark Spitz or Tug McGraw or O. J. Simpson. He was a citizen of the physical world.