Something Is Out There (9 page)

He was ranged above her. “My sweet angel,” he said.

They left at seven, plenty of time to go four miles, even with all the traffic lights in the city blank and dead. Everything was down, the whole region blacked out, because of the heat wave. And this was only the last week of June. Nobody could get any sleep. There were people up at all hours, walking around in the streets, trying to cool off. For Lyndhurst and his roomie, even when there had been power, the little air conditioner in the apartment window coughed and sputtered and sighed, a waste of electricity. It had been a hot spring, without rain. Miserable. But these past few days things had gotten scary. It was like the world was being cooked by the sun, the universe changing badly. All the frightening predictions of the scientists were easier to believe, having to go through the hours of each day under the enormous airless bell that had settled over everything: a photochemical inversion, the news people called it; an unhealthy mist made of diesel exhaust, carbon monoxide, and smoke.

Lyndhurst had been having bad premonitions.

He’d come along anyway, for the ride, crossing the bridge into Virginia. On Memorial Bridge, there was the slim relief of the air moving over him in the front seat of Grant’s red 1965 Mustang convertible. That lightened his mood a little, until
they got embroiled in the traffic in Rosslyn. The world was burning.

They had a thousand dollars, and they were going to score a supply of coke, to relieve the boredom, Grant said. Lyndhurst just wanted motion.

He hadn’t been that interested in the drug. He’d begun doing it as an exploration. He told people it wasn’t much different from Flonase; it cleared his sinuses. Once, when he was wine drunk, it sobered him up. But he never felt the rush people talked about, or the sense of power—the invincibility, Grant called it. But now, in this scorching heat wave that had become a season of its own, he thought of it as a way out of the unnerving minutes of the smoldering week.

He was twenty-seven years old, and as of that birthday, almost nine months ago, his father had stopped all support of him. According to his father, he had curled up in his life like a bug in a cocoon. Lyndhurst wouldn’t deny it. He hadn’t spoken to either of his parents since the day the money stopped, though they lived only a couple of miles down M Street. The old man was president of District College.

When Lyndhurst was nine, at a gathering in the house for the college’s faculty, he saw his father kiss one of the faculty wives out in the backyard. The shadows of the house and trees on the lawn hid them from the people on the patio and in the windows of the crowded house, but Lyndhurst saw them, saw how long the kiss lasted, and later he saw the looks they gave each other as the party was breaking up—avid, hungry, gluttonous looks. Nothing was ever said about it, and the boy told no one, not even friends, what he had seen. But it made him sick in the nights, and for a long time he had trouble going to sleep. It was as if the first part of something momentous had
been accomplished, and the rest of it was waiting to happen. Something awful was coming. But things went on as they always had. There were other parties, other gatherings where the woman was present, and neither she nor Lyndhurst senior gave any sign of what had taken place between them. And the boy’s parents went on in their studied portrayal of a perfectly happy couple, with their exceptional son. At night, there were whisper fights that grew louder, silences that lasted days, or weeks. They began using the boy as a go-between. “Tell your mother we’re expected at the alumni dinner on Friday.”

“Tell your father I’m planning a headache for Friday.”

“Tell her she’s going. The house we live in and the pleasant life we lead at the expense of the college demands that we be present. She’s going. Or else. Tell her that for me.”

“I can’t remember all that, Daddy.”

“I’ll write it down for you.” He wrote it on a small spiral notepad, and tore the page out for the boy to take to his mother. She read it, then crumpled it and handed it back.

“Take this to him,” she said.

And he did so. And his father wrote another note. “Take that to her,” he said.

The boy did as he was told. His mother wept reading the note, and did not give it back to him. That fight lasted almost three months.

They passed each other in the halls of the house without speaking. They sat across from each other at dinner without uttering a word.

They would go to things like the alumni dinner, and force the boy to accompany them, and at these events their public affection for each other was impressive; people said it was heartening. They actually remarked about it. The shining couple.

It was as if they were acting scenes in an improvisational play about a successful college president and his charming wife and son. The boy resented the dishonesty of it, even before he had words to express it. He thought of his life in the mansion as a struggle against pretense. There was a kind of desperation in the will to break the pretty facade down. And he had done that, all right. It used to be pleasant imagining his father explaining his son’s bad history to a prospective donor.

The college president’s only son had been expelled from three different universities and also had washed out of basic training for the army. The years since were a blur of different jobs—delivering phone books, lifeguarding, manning the counter in a liquor store, working construction, waiting tables.

He had drifted through several relationships, too, young women with troubles of their own. Life was puzzling and mostly too big to consider beyond the present. And in some inexplicable and unexpressed way it was all intuitively in defiance of expectations—his parents’ ambitions for him—and of the falsity he had grown up with.

He never thought of the future, or worried about it much, either. He had taken to considering himself an observer of phenomena, and if now and then he felt the lack of some solidness to depend on, he was interested in what he did see and feel. He was not depressed, as his father said, nor bipolar, like his mother, who wore the term like a badge. He was waiting, really—hoping for some way out of the swirl of requirements, the alarm-clock-driven, phony, professionally societal life of his parents. He believed that something eventually would occur to him, some hint of a great thing in store. Whatever it was, it would seize him, and settle forever the question of where he should be in the scheme of things. Sometimes he
entertained fantasies of going to Hollywood and making it big. He had looks. Everyone said that.

Last fall, in what turned out to be the last conversation he had with his father, the old man said, “I want you to know, I’m not taking the blame for you.”

“I’m not blaming you for anything. What are you talking about blame for?”

“You’re going to want to blame somebody or
something
. It’s human nature. When life comes down on you, you’ll want to point at something.”

“Maybe I won’t want to point at anything.”

“I want you to understand me,” his father said. “I’m cutting you off because you’re a grown man now and should be on your own. This has nothing to do with your childhood, which has been way too long in ending.”

“I understand,” Lyndhurst said to him.

“I hope you do. You’re welcome here anytime as a man. But never again as a child.”

“Okay. Whatever.”

“That’s an entirely typical response.”

Lyndhurst took his glasses off and wiped them against the tail of his shirt.

“Here’s five hundred dollars to get a start somewhere,” his father said. “But that’s it. I’m doing that much at your mother’s insistence.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We both wanted you to have something to start with,” said the college president’s wife.

“Just so we understand each other,” the president added.

Lyndhurst nodded, already planning to disappear from their lives forever, not out of anger but simple avoidance; they repelled him.

•  •  •

It was Grant, his apartment mate, who got him into waiting tables at Cassimino Grill, where you could pull down three hundred dollars in a night. Grant was five years older, and the perfect apartment mate. He, too, resisted the idea of planning for some future life. He wanted only to get to the next good time. He had a thing for classic cars, and this Mustang was his latest. Its engine sounded like a big train.

The arrangements for the night were his. He’d used the connection before. “I can’t believe the fucking traffic,” he said. “If we’re two minutes late, man, won’t be nobody there.”

“Rush hour, in an electric disaster, man. Chaos.”

“The infrastructure’s fucked,” Grant said. “It’s like we just fell into the third world.”

Lyndhurst put his head on the seat back. “I can’t breathe.” Lately it had been hard to speak about anything but the weather, the situation.

It was almost eight o’clock. The air that flowed over the car when it moved was like somebody’s bad breath. In the SUV in front of them, several kids were pressing against the windows, cool in the air-conditioning. People were driving around in their cars to cool off. Of course, there was no air-conditioning in the Mustang.

Earlier that day, looking for some kind of relief, Lyndhurst had walked down to the edge of the river and put his legs in, though there were signs warning people off. He experienced the familiar sense that the signs were not meant for him. He was aware of this without wanting to change it. He understood it as though it were a condition or an ailment he had acquired. It was as if he could turn in himself and measure how far he had
gone from the world in which everyone else lived. Moving his feet in the muddy cool water, he examined the idea. He was reminded unpleasantly of the boy he had been only five years ago, who would not recognize the man sitting by the river with his pants legs rolled up and his feet in the water. This heat wave, this photochemical inversion with its attendant blackout, had undermined him in some way he couldn’t understand. It was a major catastrophe, the power failure, but people were dealing with it;
he
, himself, was dealing with it. Still, there was something at the pit of his stomach that kept gripping him. The fact of it, the going on of it, a whole region sweltering, powerless for four days now, and you couldn’t even look at the television news to find out what was keeping everything down.

Looking at the whiteness of his own toes in the water, he felt a sudden wave of disgust.

It caused him to stand, and move off, back toward the glare of the street. People went by him bent on their own attempts to find a cool place to stop, or rest; there were some young men tossing a baseball on the ellipse. It was too hot even for that, though they persisted, and a man with a cart was offering them cold drinks, standing under the shade of a sycamore tree with a white bandanna covering his head, and a T-shirt that stuck to him from the sweat of his upper body. Emblazoned in fire-colors across the front of the T-shirt, in letters shaped like licking flames, were the words
TURN IT UP
.

“Jesus,” he said now to Grant. “I’m fried.”

He had called the power company a dozen times at least.
“If you have an emergency outage to report, please leave your telephone number. We are working around the clock to correct the problem.”
The voice sounded bright and bouncy, as if the speaker had already found the answer to everything.

“I went swimming today at the park,” Grant said. “Too crowded. Packed. Pool was like bathwater.”

“I sat in the freaking river for an hour.”

“God. You sat in the river. You’re toxic.”

“I’m suffocating.”

“Quit whining.”

“I’m describing the territory.”

A moment later, Grant said, “I used to think the most terrifying realization is that we live in history.” This was just the kind of offhand comment he liked to make.

Lyndhurst usually ignored him. But the word
history
got under his skin. “You sound like my father,” he said.

“Well, I like history.”

“Since when? You?”

“The real most terrifying realization, though, is that we live in
nature.”

Lyndhurst said nothing.

They came past a lot of children playing in the brown gush from a fire hydrant. The children were running around after a beach ball that kept getting knocked back by the force of the water. “Talk about toxic,” Grant said.

In some of the yards in front of the houses, other children were running through sprinklers. One heavy black man sat in a little folding chair in a wide fan of spray. He wore sunglasses, and had his arms folded across his chest, the posture of someone quite happy with the way things had turned out. Several women stood on the street corner, watching the kids frolic in the dirty-looking water. One of the women looked right at Lyndhurst. He smiled. Her expression didn’t change. She seemed to glide out of his view, Grant speeding up now, entering a side street, a neighborhood, the houses set back among shrubs and
trees, more substantial than those on the main drag. Lyndhurst thought of dinners on Sunday afternoons at his mother’s family home in Raleigh. A house like these. At times, lately, he had to admit to himself that he missed something about those afternoons. Or he wondered at his own sense of surprised longing for it. The experience was like discovering a cut in the skin, that in the rush of the day you hadn’t known you’d received. He looked over at Grant, who appeared completely relaxed. But then Grant never seemed to get rattled by anything. The blackout had actually made him cheerful; it was a change, he said. It killed the routine. That was his phrase, and he used it a lot: he was always seeking ways to kill the routine, and nothing ever seemed to get through the cool exterior.

“I just thought of a way we could make some money,” he said now. “We could start a lottery about when the lights will come back on.”

“We’d spend a fortune getting it started and before we could collect a penny the lights would come on.”

“A risk, I admit. Should’ve thought of it yesterday.”

The street wound toward sunlight, then dipped and widened, and here there were brick bungalows with little flower beds lining the sidewalks, and stone sculptures flanking the entrances.