Chapter Fifteen

I couldn’t wait to see Charlene, especially now that we knew the truth. So it had been Joe Holliday the whole time. I shuddered at how close we’d been to him, his boot brushing my foot at the convenience store, his eyes glowing at me on Halloween. At last, he was gone.

The week of finals went past in a blur of calculus equations, historical dates of medieval France, and Buddhist koans. I was reading my history notes one morning when Lisa came knocking at my bedroom door, closed to the sound of Peter’s stereo. They were going to a demonstration in Golden Gate Park that afternoon. On the roof, Andy sent his vibrating chants into the morning sky, competing with Peter’s music.

“Come with us,” said Lisa. “You’ve studied plenty for that history exam, and this is important.”

“But I have a test tomorrow,” I said.

“Life is full of tests,” she said. “And most of them aren’t on paper. What’s happening in San Francisco today is history, too.”

Andy came off the roof and frowned at me, pointing to his wrist watch. He was the only one in the house who wore one. “Time to study. Your next exam is tomorrow,” he said.

That was enough. I closed my book and we climbed into Peter’s van and headed across the Bay Bridge. Near Geary Street, we parked and joined the long march to Golden Gate Park. As we got closer, the Jefferson Airplane’s music reached us in fragments, the soaring of Jorma Kaukonen’s guitar like a beacon in fog. The music pervaded the air in the park like the floating incense of marijuana smoke, intoxicating and euphoric. In the street, throngs of people still marched in a cacophony of color and noise. We had walked the length of Geary, from near the Bay all the way to the Golden Gate Park. Though my feet ached in the heavy hiking boots Andy had given me, my body felt as though as it was detached from the earth. It was that kind of day: gravity-defying.

We followed a path Peter made through the crowd to a spot near the stage and settled in. It wasn’t at all like hearing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 or watching Elvis movies. The Jefferson Airplane wasn’t a collection of god-like stars we worshipped from afar. The Beatles were four human beings totally separate from ourselves, and the Airplane was us. Grace Slick was singing for us rather than to us.

But listening to the music was still about finding freedom, and I’d just been set free from a nightmare that had lasted years. Levi Litvak’s face wasn’t going to appear in my dreams anymore, I hoped, or show up in the audience at baseball games on television.

For a second, as I watched Grace Slick’s face contort and then ease with the flow of the words, I saw Mama’s face instead, singing, and she was looking at me, peace glowing from her blue eyes. The guitars and drums receded, and Mama’s voice seemed to soar across the acres of people in the Park. Then that strange indigo wave came over me again, that stillness that had been just Mama and me when she died, inside a bubble with all other sound and movement suspended.

“Mama,” I mouthed the word, but as soon as I did, her face was gone. It was Grace Slick again. People danced and stripped off their shirts and passed joints. A man with a gray ponytail handed me one, but I passed it along. The bubble had been enough, a secret place of peace, something so mysterious and beautiful I couldn’t even tell Lisa. It was just for Mama and me.

We sat cross-legged on the damp grass of Golden Gate Park as the morning fog lifted, and light made prisms out of the drops of water still clinging to the oak trees in the distance behind the stage. Lisa pointed at the branches.

“Looks like somebody put Christmas lights on them,” she said, watching the drops flickering randomly. Nearby, a woman with pink day-glo paint on her face swirled about in bare feet, making her thin dress swell up like a tent.

The light made you want to breathe deeply, to hold the crystal air in your lungs as long as you could. Across from us, the San Francisco Mime Troupe had found a small clearing to perform their scenarios in faces painted white. Helium balloons floated up from strings attached to their shoe laces. They were giving out the telephone credit card codes for major corporations so we could call our friends all across the country, courtesy of Gulf Oil or Pepsi-Cola. Peter inked in a number on the worn rubber sole of his shoe. I didn’t write anything down. Brother Beeker’s sermons about hell were still in me somewhere, and besides, there weren’t that many people I wanted to call long-distance anyway.

Today in the Golden Gate Park, with thousands of people gathered and the music soaring, the magic was back. When the Airplane stepped offstage, someone leaped up onto the platform, dressed in what looked like a parachuter’s jumpsuit, billowing out around him in green silk. His hair, streaked with glitter, blew in a curly circle around his head, and green paint covered his face and hands.

“Cat Heller,” Lisa yelled over the noise of the crowd. “He’s about to get drafted. He’s going to turn his physical into a theater of the absurd.”

“What an ego,” Peter muttered.

“I’ve met him,” I said, but they couldn’t hear me.

“Why are you green?” a girl called up from the crowd. Cat shrugged. “My father was blue and my mother was yellow.” He smiled when she laughed, as applause scattered up to the stage. “I’m green because I’m sick of this war. I’m not going to go fight their war! I’m going to the draft board to tell them why! Will you be there? Will you help me?”

Lisa looked over at me. “Ego. This guy’s nothing but ego.” Then her eyes sparkled, and she cupped one hand around her mouth. “Most heroes have big egos.”

It was the first time I’d heard anyone criticize Cat Heller, and I couldn’t believe it was coming from Lisa and Peter. On stage, two tall, thin guys appeared with guitars and started to tune up as Cat stepped away and the Airplane began to play again, but this time as I watched the crowd, I began feeling strangely lonely.

We begin life in such solitude, I thought, thinking of baby Lonnie, the nephew I hadn’t yet seen. I looked around at the people, rapt in the music, the faces a mask with seven holes connecting to the world, with nothing but love to make us human; love and a little imagination.

We left with the rest of the people, now a stream of tired individuals rather than the single face that chanted in unison on the march to the park. The Mime Troupe untied the balloons from their feet and they floated into the sky. We filed out with a group of other quiet marchers, first over a green hill, then past a Greek monument and a small fountain with water tumbling over the marble in a constant stream, a tinkling sound like wind chimes. We entered a pedestrian tunnel and, in an instant, the bright light of the park became shadows and cool air.

Maybe it was the peace of the crowd, dispersing the massive energy that had welled up earlier in the day, that had sustained us all for the long hours of the afternoon. Or maybe it was my own fatigue. Somehow, the boundaries of my body felt released, and my eyes seemed to hover above my body, watching the movements of my arms and legs. It seemed as though I could see my footsteps pushing myself forward through the tunnel, see myself there with hordes of others, feeling a singularity of purpose, a oneness with every other soul I happened to be caught with in that concrete tunnel, the light from late afternoon slanting yellow at the end, the sense of the limits of my own physical being giving way to something larger that I couldn’t name.

Even my fingertips began to tingle, and my body felt larger, as if it were swelling to allow the rising of whatever it was inside that joined me with everyone, all drawn toward the oblique slant of sun in the same slice of time and light where I walked.

I glanced at Lisa. She was adjusting the strap of her tapestry shoulder bag, looking disgruntled at the buckle that refused to catch. She was bound in her own constraints, as most of us always were. From the speakers, the sound of Cat Heller’s voice still came, urging people to support him. Beside me, Peter zipped his jean jacket and rubbed his hands together for warmth.

At home, Andy would be either meditating or cooking dinner for us, gently stirring ingredients while the smells of foreign spices filled the kitchen, saffron and turmeric, coriander and mint.

That, too, didn’t matter, that division of who we were by what we needed at a particular moment. I loved them all, including Andy, for being who he was. I felt ecstatic, exhilarated, feeling my own silence like a fullness swelling around me. And back home in Biloxi, there was little Lonnie. The uncertainty of the future seemed a grand adventure, one we all shared, where all our stories would become one.

Someone ahead lit a candle in the tunnel, a flame that flickered with the movement of its bearer, and then another appeared, and another, lots of tiny white fires. I remembered how Mama used to tell Charlene and me, when we were little kids, that, when fireflies flashed their secret codes on summer nights, it was the sign language of ghosts. She would fill the lawn with dead ancestors: an Irish preacher, an Indian princess from long ago, and her own grandfather, the riverboat gambler, their stories flickering in the darkness of the back yard on Mossy Point Drive. Though it was now California, they were here with all of us, still telling their endless tales, weaving the past into the present, to ease their constant parting.

The dark coolness of the tunnel suddenly lifted as we came onto the sidewalk, but the specter of the fireflies in the quiet Mississippi night remained, reminding me of how our stories are all bound together.