The Bend of the World: A Novel Read online

  Well, he told me, they can’t exactly uncook it, I suppose. And he tucked in methodically. I glanced toward my mother. Don’t look at me, she said. I never send anything back. Why give them the opportunity to compound what they’ve already fucked up? Give me yours; take mine. I don’t mind blood.

  We exchanged. Well, I said, you’re a surgeon, after all.

  I’m not a cow surgeon, she said.

  During the meal, the conversation turned to my grandmother. I hear you ran into Nanette at the museum, Mom said.

  Yeah. You didn’t tell me that she’d broken her toe.

  She broke her toe? My father was surprised.

  She didn’t break her toe, Mom said. I looked at it, remember. She just bruised it.

  She was in a wheelchair, I told them.

  Oh, good Lord, Mom said. She stared at my father. Peter, honestly, we have to do something.

  That seems a bit precipitous, don’t you think?

  We’ve been talking about it for years. It’s the very opposite of precipitous.

  I’ll talk to her, Dad said.

  If she’s in a wheelchair, Mom said, then she’s doc-shopping again. You know how I feel about all this. How many Dr. Feelgoods does one aging matriarch need?

  Believe it or not, I said, she seemed fine, despite the wheelchair.

  She was very pleased to see you, my dad said, although she did say that you never call unless you need something.

  It’s hard to get off the phone with her.

  Honestly, Mom said.

  I never noticed, my father said. He was finishing his steak. He poured himself more wine. I find that as long as I have something to work on or read, then I don’t mind that she goes on a bit. What did you talk about, buddy?

  Her toe and her failing eyesight. And pedophiles.

  Hm, yes, Dad said. I remember when you were in preschool, she was very concerned about the satanist day cares in California. Do you remember, Suzanne?

  Yes. I remember.

  She wouldn’t believe that it was all a hoax.

  She still doesn’t believe that it was all a hoax, Mom said.

  I laughed. That’s why she always loved Johnny, I told them. They both believe in everything.

  How is your friend Johnny? Mom asked. I can’t remember the last time I saw him. No, that’s not true. It was at your uncle’s Christmas party a few years ago. He and your father were embroiled in a conversation about concentration camps all night long.

  He’s very knowledgeable about the Eastern Front, my dad said.

  Yes, Mom said, but at Christmas?

  He’s good, I told them.

  Before we left to walk to the theater, I excused myself and went to the restroom. The club still used bathroom attendants, and I struggled mightily to pee into the marble urinal while a little old man who looked like a turtle in a tuxedo stared at my back. I managed to dribble something out. I washed my hands. He handed me a towel, then collected it in a little basket. Keep an eye out, he said as I turned to leave.

  I’m sorry? I said.

  Have a nice evening sir, he said.

  I stepped into the hall. The whole place seemed a little down on its heels of late. If those captains of industry and politics had once run a good portion of the world, or at least the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, out of these rooms, anymore it looked like an overgrand B&B, flocked and dusty and a few decades out of date. But what was odd was that I thought I saw my mother at the far end of the corridor, grasping the hands of the fat maître d’ in a weird, cross-armed handshake. It was dim, and they were far away. They saw me looking and swished through a door. I should not have smoked that weed, I thought. I went back downstairs and found my parents, both of them, at the table. So, I said. Yes, said my mother. Let’s, Dad said.

  19

  But Johnny was not good at all, and during a witch’s sabbath scene whose staging was what I imagined a drag show by Hegemonica Preshun would look like, my phone vibrated in my pocket, which, when surreptitiously checked, presented a text from Derek: hey call me asap re jonhy. So I slipped out of the auditorium and through the lobby and lit a cigarette under the marquee.

  Hey, Derek answered. I’m glad you called so quick. Listen. Johnny got picked up by the cops.

  Oh shit.

  Don’t freak out.

  I’m freaking out a little. They arrested him?

  No. It’s nothing like that. Forget what we talked about. Nobody knows about any of that. He’s not in jail. He’s at Presby.

  The hospital? Oh Jesus.

  It’s okay. I don’t know that much, but he’s okay. High and paranoid, but okay. Mine was the last number called on his phone, and apparently he’s got me listed as Brother Derek, so they thought I was actually his brother. They called me from the hospital and sort of gave me the rundown.

  Which is what?

  Well, they’re not sure exactly what he’s on. Some kind of dissociative, or dissociatives. So apparently he went down to the museum dressed in some kind of Nazi costume and was pacing around the sculpture garden telling people that the tide was turning. You may remember that turn of phrase.

  Fuck.

  Yeah. Anyway, the guards called the cops, but no one wanted to press charges, and the cops didn’t want to throw some highed-up wack job in county, so they took him to the hospital. I figured maybe you’d know how to get in touch with his family.

  Yeah, I said. Well, his parents are down in Florida and they’re completely estranged, and his brother died years ago, and so did his grandparents.

  Does he have insurance?

  Does he seem like he’d have insurance?

  Point taken.

  Oy, I said. I’d better go over there.

  Are you sure?

  Yeah. I’m wearing a suit. I look like an upstanding citizen. If someone has to talk to cops and doctors, it might as well be me.

  Let me know if you need anything?

  I will, I said. Thanks for calling me.

  Sure, he said. What are friends for but to deliver bad news?

  20

  There were two police at the hospital, Officers Bild and Granson, the former thin, black, and wearing dark shades; the latter large, white, and with the suggestion of muscle below his fat that implied a former military man. After they clarified our relationship—No, not a relative, a friend; he hasn’t got any family; we grew up together—Bild said, We aren’t going to charge him. He resisted arrest a little, but I think your buddy must’ve been strung out for a few days now, because once we snatched him up, he pretty much collapsed.

  Yeah, I said. I’m sorry about the inconvenience.

  That ain’t your fault, sir, said Granson.

  True, I said.

  We do have to file a report, though, said Bild. And we’ll need you to sign saying we released him into your custody.

  Isn’t he in the hospital’s custody?

  Technically? Bild said.

  You know what, I said. I don’t care. Yes, I’ll sign.

  I signed their report.

  I really am sorry, I said. He can be a handful.

  He was docile enough once we got him in the squad car, said Granson. The cop laughed. He told me I looked like Volstagg.

  Who? I said.

  That’s what I said, Granson told me. Apparently he’s a fat guy in comic books.

  He’s Thor’s friend, Bild said. He laughed, too. My kid’s into comics. He asked me what I thought about them putting a black guy in the Thor.

  Oh man, I said. I’m really, really sorry.

  No, Bild said, and he patted my shoulder. Don’t worry about it. He didn’t mean nothing by it. I told him I didn’t give it a lot of thought, and he told me that if America can put a black man in the White House, Kenneth Branagh can put a black man in Asgard.

  21

  They’d sedated Johnny, and I fell asleep in a chair beside a nurses’ station down the hall from his room. I dreamed of Helen. We were standing in a familiar round room, featureless but for the pale lumi
nescence of the walls. There was a sound like the sound of the hospitals in Oakland, although, it occurred to me, it might also be an engine. If he dies, she said, we’re in the hospital. A timing issue, I said. I’ve heard that before, she said. Is it true, I asked her, that you were the youngest artist-in-residence ever at artPace? Because even in my dreams, apparently, I’d been Googling the shit out of her. Everything is true, she said. I’ve heard that before, I told her. V’ayn kal hadash tachat ha’shamesh, she said. Huh? I said. Shh, she said, and she touched my face with her hand.

  I woke up. A nurse had her hand on my shoulder. Hon, she said. Your friend is awake.

  What time is it?

  About five.

  In the morning?

  Yeah, sweetie. It’s the morning.

  He was in a private room, a single IV dripping into his arm. He was staring into the middle distance, but when he saw me, his eyes focused on my face, and when they did, when he smiled, although I’d resolved to be angry, to be firm, to ask him just what the fuck he thought he was doing, I found that I had tears in my eyes. How did they get there? I touched them away with the back of my hand. You fucker, I said.

  Hey, he said. His voice sounded like an engine with a bad starter. He smiled. His lips were cracked. Nice tie, he said.

  1

  By the middle of March the city had forgotten about flying saucers; Mary Tremone had reneged on her deal with Kantsky and announced her intention to contest the mayoral primary; the head of the local Blue Cross/Blue Shield turned up drunk and belligerent at the home of his wife’s lover and proceeded to smash all of the first-floor windows with a tire iron before the cops arrived. The Trib had done a person-of-interest interview with Helen Witold, a New York artist who now called Pittsburgh home. What’s your biggest phobia? Reptiles. Favorite food? Bad coffee, embarrassingly. Artist? Hogarth, or Rothko. One thing you can’t live without? A mirror. I’d pretty much decided that whatever I’d seen that night on Mount Washington had largely been the effect of too much drinking and an ill-advised cocktail of drugs. Lauren Sara was still pissed at me for blowing her off after the opera. It had been an emergency, I’d argued, but she’d only grudgingly accepted. Not for the first time in my life, I felt that I’d serially overindulged and let myself be caught in the undertow of my best friend’s weirdness. And all I wanted was to swim parallel to the shore until the outrushing current released me and let the waves bear me back onto the sand. But it’s hard, you know, to do what you know you’re supposed to do when it would be so easy to float away.

  2

  When we were about fourteen—I could pretend to remember exactly, but memory is the most statistical of all our senses and sentiments; that is to say, the greater the specificity, the lesser the confidence level—my father acquired, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, one of the early Sony Handycams. He may have brought it to the beach that year, but I doubt it. It sat in his study, perpetually charging for a few months, before Johnny noticed it and decided that we should make a movie.

  We dutifully set out to write a script, but discovered that writing scripts was boring, and decided that we would rely on improvisation within the confines of the hazy story we’d talked out. Johnny had two classic, full-head rubber masks: Tor Johnson and a gorilla. I don’t know where he got them; they weren’t relics of Halloweens past or anything like that; he dug them out of a closetful of his and his brother Ben’s old toys and kid’s books, but the masks were too big and too real to realistically date from that earlier epoch of childhood. Ben had gone off to college that year or the year before and couldn’t be consulted. We suspected they might have belonged to Johnny’s Pap, who was an indiscriminate collector of odd things, although not, to our knowledge, of costumes.

  In any case, we had these two masks, and that seemed sufficient for a movie, and we knew that the movie would be called Hunting for Headless and would follow a man on his quest for a deranged mutant killer named Headless. In retrospect it’s hard to say exactly what we were thinking: Headless, as a character, was defined by nothing so much as the fact that he was a rubber Tor Johnson head; he was the opposite of headless; but that sort of error of logic and continuity didn’t really trouble us at the time.

  We needed only a forest and at least one other member in our cast and crew, so we recruited our friend Billy Drake, who’d overheard us planning principal photography in the cafeteria and bought his way into the picture with the promise of extensive camping gear and expertise. All that remained was to convince my parents to let me go, which I did by eliding the fact that, while Johnny’s Pap was going to drive us up to the mountains, near Ligonier, he was only planning to drop us off. My parents had met Pap a few times, and since he dipped and spoke with a southwestern PA accent and wore a camouflage army jacket, I suppose they assumed he was an outdoorsman and a hunter and all that. It’s worth mentioning that my mother was originally from Cambria County and should have known better, but college and medical school and marriage to my father and self-will had almost entirely eradicated her Appalachian good sense, and she and my dad both thought Pap was 100 percent authentic. He was 100 percent authentic, all right, just not authentically what they thought he was. I don’t think he’d touched a gun since Korea, and the closest he came to camping was falling asleep in his shed while working late on his invention.

  Nevertheless, Pap took the essentially anarchic view of childhood that still prevailed in the woodier parts of the state, beyond its enclaves of money and urbanity. He saw nothing wrong with dropping us off on a state route roadside somewhere on Chestnut Ridge. We had some maps, and he told us to meet him at the Main Square in Ligonier at eleven the next morning. He also told us that the state had been reintroducing mountain lions into the woods around. They don’t like fire, apparently, he told us, and they smell like piss. He was hunched over the wheel of his old Bronco. Johnny rode shotgun.

  What kind of piss? I asked. Time around Pap was a license to swear and talk a language that was thoroughly discouraged in my home.

  How the hell should I know what kind of piss? he said. Panther piss. I don’t imagine you get a lot of other animals pissing on a panther.

  He also told us to keep an eye out for any bigfoots. Billy laughed, and Pappy said, What’s so goddamn funny? and Billy said, There’s no such thing as bigfoot.

  I’ve seen bigfoots as surely as you see me right now. They used to get in my trash when me and Mona lived down in Fayette County back when I worked for the coke company. Rootin around in there and making a mess. Plus I’ve done extensive research on the subject. They are highly prevalent in this area. They smell like rotten eggs, and sometimes—he raised an eye to the rearview mirror—they will attempt to mate with a human female. His eye wandered toward Billy, who had long blond hair and the features of a Grecian youth. So keep an eye out, hot dogs, Pappy said.

  Billy had claimed to know of a bat cave in the area. His family, like mine, was from the rich part of Sewickley, and they had a cottage in Ligonier. This cottage had six bedrooms, but never mind. In his telling, he knew the wild terrain of the area like back of his hand; he’d actually used that cliché, which should have been a clue to the truth. Close your eyes and describe the back of your hand. The closest you’ll get is that it looks like a hand. We tromped around in the woods for a while, with Johnny occasionally pulling out the camera to shoot randomly through the trees. What the fuck are you doing? I asked him. Establishing shots, he told me. This was before Steadicam and all that. I told him that shooting while we walked was stupid. It’s going to look like shit, I said. It’s going to be all shaky.

  Don’t worry, he told me. I have a very steady camera hand.

  We never found the cave, but we eventually found a little rock outcrop beside a small creek that seemed a promising spot to set up camp. Billy’s tent, which belonged on the side of Everest, proved too complicated for us to set up, so we left it in a heap of struts and blue fabric. Johnny had snuck a couple of bottles of whiskey into his bag, and Billy ha
d something that he said was weed. The weed was doubtful, but the Jack Daniel’s was real, and after taking a few slugs each, we filmed some scenes. Headless (me), running through the woods. Johnny, dressed in camouflage, examining broken twigs and footprints. This creature, he said, this monster must be stopped before it rapes again.

  What do you mean, rapes? I asked him between shots. I thought he was a murderer. We had already filmed several scenes of me killing Billy with, I thought, professional-level conviction.

  He rapes before he kills, Johnny said. Like in Deliverance.

  I’d never seen Deliverance, but it was the sort of movie that every teenage boy had heard about. Johnny had seen everything, because of Ben.

  That’s stupid, I said. That’s fucking dumb. Why would he even want to have sex with a person? He’s not even supposed to be human.

  Bigfoots haves sex with people according to Johnny’s crazy granddad, Billy said.

  Shut up, Billy, Johnny told him. If bigfoot rapes anyone, it’s going to be you.

  Whatever, Billy said.

  The climactic scene was supposed to be a clifftop fight between Headless and Johnny, with both ultimately plunging to their doom. Billy, who’d been stuck on camera duty but for his death scenes, got pissed that he wasn’t getting more screen time. You’ll get producer credit, Johnny told him.

  Fuck you, Johnny. I want to be in the movie.

  There’s no role for you, Johnny said. What would you even do?

  I don’t know. Maybe I could, like, put on the ape mask and become the hunter’s sidekick.

  That’s fucking stupid. He doesn’t have a sidekick.

  Then I could be, like, a wise forest creature who helps the hunter track down Headless.

  We could do that, I said, mostly because I was getting sick of the movie. Also, guys, it’s getting dark, and we should get back to the camp and build a fire before it does.

  First of all, you’re not going to play Targivad, the Wise Monkey of the Forest, or whatever, Johnny said. And second of all, Morrison, don’t worry. I have excellent night vision.

  Targivad, I said. Where’d you come up with that?