Barefoot to Avalon

  It is, though. It’s in me. The engine that once whirred in my father whirs in me now. How did it come to be there? It seems unfair that, being hurt, the hurtful thing should come to be inside me. There it is, though. And what do you do then? What next and how now?

  Overhead, the sunlight coming through the pines is so intense it’s turned the needles into blackened crisps, and the contrail of a jet might be a meteorite burning up in the primordial atmosphere of Earth or whatever planet this is.

  The marching band is playing in the stadium; I hear the snare drums and the whistle and think of Central Park: the clock, the animals, the carillon. As the monkey strikes the bell, the elephant, the bear, the goat are visible, and then the carousel begins to turn and the hippopotamus, the kangaroo, the penguin come forward as the others disappear around the pavilion—two triangles, one in sunlight, one in shadow, one visible, one hidden, one past, one present, one advancing, one retreating; as the platter turns the present becomes the past, the past becomes the future. The animals are us, now David, Sal, the girl . . . .now David, Bill, and Margaret . . . now David, George A., Margaret . . . Their joyless dance is our dance, the fixed postures and expressions ours, the order of their presentation, the intervals between them, all us, all me, we play the roles in turn, winner, loser, giver, taker, pursued, pursuer, Abel, Cain, victim, criminal, detective.

  The surface iterations are all different but underneath the one great wheel turns unseen in the pavilion, and what is the machine that drives the axle, what is its purpose, its principle of operation and of perpetuity, what is the energy it runs on? What is it that made me in the initial revolution of the carousel my father’s victim, and in the second turning made me be my father?

  Poetry—my project of personal reinvention—has failed me. I’ve become like the very thing I set out not to be like.

  I am like him . . . I am like my father . . .

  So I lie there thinking, and suddenly something’s different. The pressure I felt mounting like steam behind a closed valve . . . where is that now? Vanished. The valve has opened, vented, I’m no longer suffering. I stand up and brush off, I feel relaxed, at peace, a sense of wonder, even awe steals over me and overhead the wind is rising and the pines are swaying and the hair has risen on my forearms—not from the roar; the stadium is quiet—and all around me from the treetops is a sound like laughter, the leaves are trembling and it’s as if there are children hidden in them, laughing.

  And now I write my poem, in which I’m the detective and the victim in the backseat of the sunken car and finally the murderer. It takes me weeks, and there’s a golden light over this time in memory. I run and put in my hours in the carrel, parsing out my stanzas, and I’m happy as I write them and I finish.

  Seeing that I’m like my father has stopped the clock and released me from the mechanism’s whirring. The penguin with his drum has stepped down off the platter. So I think then. Looking back, I’m like the child in Central Park who cried and saw the clock stop and assumed his crying stopped it. But the clock has merely told the hour and returned to stillness.

  And one day I come back to Avery and find a note from the RA: Call home.

  From the pay phone in the corridor, I dial and Margaret picks up.

  –David, honey, your brother’s sick.

  –What do you mean, sick? What’s the matter with him?

  –He’s had some kind of breakdown. We need you to come home. We need you here as soon as possible.

  5

  I’m on 40 now, heading west toward the hospital in Winston, hugging the slow lane in my white, nine-year-old Austin-Healey Sprite. As cars pass by me on the left, the drivers give me curious stares, wondering at my geriatric pace and why I have the top down on an autumn day like this.

  Margaret bought the Sprite for me four years ago, for my sixteenth, not long after we left Henderson for Greensboro and made landfall at the Sans Souci Apartments off the Lee Street exit, just down there. There’s the BP station under its green sign. Five years old when she acquired it, the Sprite, for that first year, was one sweet ride, and I recall zipping down Cone Boulevard with the top down and the radio blasting, George A. riding shotgun, Bennett standing up in back, his Canelope hairpiece flying. By this afternoon four years later, time has turned its rag top, literally, to rags, and a cob-job carb repair I paid for at the beach last summer leaves me chugging westward on two cylinders in the slow lane, top speed forty miles an hour. After Margaret’s urgent summons, I tried to start it in the UNC lot and it refused for twenty minutes. I imagined driving off the pier at Avalon, crashing through the rail and entering the Atlantic like the Greek boy on his dolphin, or Dr. Strangelove on the bomb. So quick, bright things come to confusion . . .

  And here I am on Stratford Road in Winston, and there’s the hospital. Big, industrial, nondescript, Forsyth looms in my memory like a cubist tower in Futureworld with lightning striking in the sky around it. Mandala Clinic is on an upper floor, and as the elevator dings Margaret and Jack, her new husband, stand to greet me.

  –Son, Jack says, subdued and circumspect, like a politician at the funeral of a constituent he barely knows; as he shakes, he adds a second hand. In his clear face, an inflection of sympathy vies with animal spirits. His jewel-tone golf shirt says he came here from or is headed shortly to the links, where he and his buddies throw down two, three hundred bucks for kicks on any given weekday and tell jokes so blue they make an English major feel light-headed. When he steps aside, my mother smiles and spreads her arms and bursts out crying.

  –He’s going to be all right—he is, we’re going to make him be, Margaret says, holding me a little closer than I’m comfortable with, a little closer than I can really stand.

  Over her shoulder, I see a nurse punching numbers into a keypad on the wall. Shouldering a tray of little paper cups with pills in them, she backs through the ward door like a waiter at a restaurant so exclusive you can only enter with a secret code. Inside, an old woman in a hospital gown with her head tilted almost to her shoulder wanders the hallway, deep in conversation with herself. As the door shuts with a metal click, I see the wire mesh embedded in the window glass.

  –How is he?

  –Not good, sweetie.

  –What is it, Mom?

  –They don’t know. Go on in and see him. We’ll talk when you come out.

  Buzzed in, a few steps down the corridor and to the right I find George A. standing at attention by a neatly made single bed like a camper waiting for inspection. In white-socked feet and beltless Levi’s, he’s wearing a jean shirt with the pockets crumpled up the way they get if you aren’t vigilant enough to catch them when the dryer buzzes. In the two months since I’ve seen him, he’s lost forty-five or fifty pounds, from a lean 215 to a frightful 165, 170. The rich, olive skin he shares with Margaret, that summer skin that seldom burns like mine, is the pallid gray of fish the second day on ice. Near his jawline there are scaly patches, bits of stubble the razor missed, and his hair looks as if it was cut with hedge shears while he fought and someone held him. He looks like someone in the nightmare where you come to in a black room and the spotlight hits you and suddenly you’re on stage in a play you don’t know the name of or any of your lines or the character you’re playing.

  –Hey, George A.

  –Hey, David, he says, and his eyes say, Tell me this is better than I think it is, DP, and also, Don’t bother lying, I already get it.

  I put everything I’ve got into a look of unconditional acceptance, a look meant to show that what’s gone is transitory, unimportant, what remains all that matters. George A. takes one look and starts to sob, covering his face with those big hands—Pa’s signet on the right one—and the sound is like an animal that’s been run over in the road, whimpering as you lift it, and I don’t know my brother’s heart, but those sobs seem to me to mean, My beautiful mind, my beautiful life—what happened to me, David?

>   –I’m sorry, he keeps saying, over and over, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, David.

  –For what? There’s nothing to be sorry for. Don’t cry, buddy, okay? Don’t cry, I say, crying now myself. Sinking beside him on the bed, I put my arm around his bony, still-massive shoulder.

  –It’s going to be okay, I tell him the way I used to when the Heels went down.

  And he looks at me and his blurry, bloodshot eyes come to pinpoint focus. In their black depths briefly shines a pitiless and undeluded knowledge.

  –It won’t, he says, it won’t.

  And George A.’s right, more right than I am.

  And what of my beautiful new religion? What of the sense of transport I felt lying in the pine straw outside Kenan and the golden light in which, all fall, I’ve been filling notebook after notebook?

  When I endured these assaults of the unconscious I had an unswerving conviction that I was obeying a higher will.

  So Jung wrote of his dark period in Küsnacht.

  Others have been shattered by them—Nietzsche, and Hölderlin, and many others. But there was a demonic strength in me, and from the beginning there was no doubt that I must find the meaning of what I was experiencing in these fantasies.

  Swept up in his triumphal narrative, I gave little thought to those “many others,” those in wheelchairs on asylum lawns with lap blankets, with spittle on their lips and tremors, for whom the “confrontation with the unconscious” isn’t educative, but ruinous. If the world’s a vale of soul-making, if to make one’s soul means to wrest consciousness from unconsciousness, what happens when consciousness is wrested back, the jewel rendered into mud, a soul unmade, cast down and permanently blighted? Jung’s scheme makes such beautiful sense for the victors—for him in his great, groundbreaking way, and for me in my small one, following the blazes he left behind him on the stars and planets. But what about my brother? What does the “higher will” intend for George A.?

  If our family story first broke for me in Boston, it breaks again here, seeing George A. sick in the locked ward at Mandala.

  Once upon a time, in the Official Version, we were blessed and happy, our parents young, privileged and good-looking, we, their children, bound for special destinies like they’d had. In Boston, our ship struck the iceberg and went down in an hour, but all hands appeared to make it to the lifeboats. The trip to shore proves long, and only when we finally muster do we realize one of us is missing.

  –What happened to him? I ask Margaret in the elevator going down. What fucking happened to George A.? He looks like he’s been in a concentration camp.

  The impulse to cry has swiftly given way to one to shout and break things. I want blood and perp walks, handcuffs, prosecutions, show trials with kangaroo courts, public executions.

  –He’s so thin, isn’t he? He got mono and really had no business going back to practice, but his heart was set on playing.

  She tells the story . . .

  Bill was coming to the game with Letty and Bill Sr. On game week, one afternoon the team finished up their practice and George A. sat down by his locker. None of his teammates noticed till they came back from the showers and found him still there, staring at the floor, elbows on knees, head hung. When they called, George A. didn’t respond or even appear to hear them. Someone went to get the coach, who took George A. to the infirmary. The nurse called Margaret. It was 9 or 10 P.M. by the time she and Jack arrived, and George A. was manic by then, so agitated the nurse refused to keep him. They went to a hotel. In the room, Margaret told me, George A. kept going to the window, pulling back the sheer and asking her if she could see Bill in the parking lot. No, sugar, your daddy isn’t here, she told him, and George A. said, He is, he’s hiding in the trees . . . behind the lamppost . . . and he’d look at her and grin or burst out crying.

  In the elevator, Margaret starts to hyperventilate, fanning her face with both hands.

  I touch her shoulder.

  –Are you all right?

  –No, I’m not all right. Are you all right? George A. told them he smoked marijuana with some friend the night before. The doctor says it may just be a bad reaction.

  –To smoking pot?

  She seems scalded by my skepticism.

  I clinch my jaw and stare two degrees to port.

  When her face settles, I sense she doubts the doctor’s theory just as much as I do.

  –So where’s Dad? Where are the Paynes?

  –Your father came yesterday, she answers. I wasn’t here, but he dropped off some religious materials.

  –Religious materials . . .

  –A Bible, some pamphlets . . . I don’t know what it was. The doctors told him George A. wasn’t ready to receive visitors.

  –They didn’t let him in?

  She shakes her head.

  We hold each other’s eyes like veterans of an old campaign we didn’t win.

  –The doctors told me if Bill Payne ever realized his responsibility, he couldn’t live with it.

  The elevator dings. We’ve reached the bottom. Someone must answer for George A. There’s no dispute on who the central suspect is.

  –Are you coming home for supper? Margaret asks me in the echo chamber of the hospital garage.

  –I’ll see you out there.

  “Home” I can no longer give her.

  In the Sprite again now, I’m heading westward on 158, the back way toward Jack and Margaret’s house in Clemmons, passing silos, fields and barns, as night descends. The sunset is like a hemorrhage. Driving into it, I’m fifteen again, my first summer back from Exeter, when I came home not to Henderson but to Greensboro and the Sans Souci Apartments . . .

  Margaret was out somewhere and had left George A. to babysit for Bennett. When I entered from the stairwell, I heard George A. crying at the back of the apartment.

  –Don’t go, Daddy, please don’t leave, okay?

  As I walked into the bedroom, he looked up with streaming eyes. Bennett, beside him, picking at his scarf’s fringe, looked scared and somber.

  –Daddy’s going away, George A. said.

  –What? Where’s he going?

  –To Mexico. He’s never coming back.

  –What the hell, Dad? I said, taking the receiver.

  Between the beds, George A. sank and drew his knees up, going fetal. Bennett stroked his shoulder, four years old and trying to offer comfort. How old was George A.? Twelve? No, it was summer, he wouldn’t be twelve until September.

  Bill was somewhere in Underground Atlanta. I recall the bar noise, his unmodulated, roaring tone, the music playing in the background.

  –You’re drunk. You’re drunk out of your mind. Do you know George A. is up here sobbing on the carpet?

  –So, what, I don’t have a right to call my son to say goodbye?

  –Don’t call here like this. I’m serious, Dad. Don’t ever call here like this again.

  –Or what?

  –Or I’ll kill you, I told him in a breathy tone, the way you tell a girl you like her, the first girl you ever tell the first time you ever tell her.

  –You’ll kill me?

  –That’s what I said.

  –Not if I kill you first.

  –I will kill you, motherfucker.

  –I’ll kill you, Bill said.

  –You motherfucking piece of shit, I will kill you, I’ll fucking kill you!

  Now I was screaming, and Bill returned it, basso.

  –Motherfucker!

  –Motherfucker!

  George A., between the bunks, looked up, his black eyes wide and solemn. Now that he’d stopped crying, Bennett had started.

  After the cloudburst, silence. What now? Quo vadis? Bill began to laugh and I laughed, too, not much, though, not in solidarity, not forgiveness, I don’t know what that laughter was, no, I do, it was relief, spitti
ng out the burning coal. We were finally saying it, the truth; what joy, what dark joy.

  –I will kill you, motherfucker!

  –Not if I kill you first.

  –Motherfucker!

  –Motherfucker!

  That’s what it had come down to, and George A. between the bunk beds, knees drawn to chest, eyes closed, lips moving, whispering to himself in order not to hear us. Six months before it had been Christmas, Mattamuskeet, the special trip, the guns with sterling trigger guards, the private guide, the sip of whiskey from the flask and father-son communion. Now the call from Underground where Bill let George A. know he meant to abandon him forever.

  What happened to George A.? The same thing that happened to me in Boston. Don’t measure out your life with coffee spoons, Bill said, and when I took him at his word and reached for Exeter, he smashed me up and ruined me in that hotel room the night before I went there.

  When you want good things and reach to take them, bad things happen. Do you read me now, George A.? Do you feel me, little brother?

  And the Paynes, Letty and Bill Sr., the Principal, where are they? In the five years since the divorce, they’ve never attended an event, a game, a graduation, never visited to take us out to lunch or to a movie. They were all set to attend George A.’s big game against Episcopal, but today? Missing in action.