SUMMER 1976
I’ve felt that way, too, sometimes. Like how you described. Between things, almost. Here but not here. Isn’t that what you said?
They found him at the mail-sorting tables, or riding up in the elevator, or in the halls outside the partners’ offices. Clerks, bookkeepers, paralegals, even some of the lawyers. The new secretary who sat a few desks from Georgia asked if there was somewhere else they could talk. Standing close in the break room, the heat from the coffeepot and the heat from her hand on his arm.
He thought of Georgia out there at her desk. But then he thought of all the time he had wasted, all those years before he understood what he was capable of.
After work the new secretary drove him back to his apartment. They smoked a joint and Tanner spoke about what he knew, what he believed. She listened in the darkening room, her face rapt in the glow from the security lights hanging outside the building. When he finished, she took off her clothes and stood before him, pale and smooth and perfect. Then she began to undress him. Tanner didn’t feel what he once would have, that familiar shame and embarrassment. Those things were gone now, rats that had jumped ship. Instead he felt such power as she knelt before him, moving her hands over his body.
So beautiful, she said, lifting her mouth to his.
Her name was Juliet. Sometimes she came to Tanner’s apartment with flowers tied into her hair, daisies and posies, multicolored faces looking out through the thick brown waves. Sometimes she brought baggies of weed and tiny pink tabs of acid. They smoked the weed and dropped the acid and Tanner talked and saw his words open windows all around. A revelation. There was another place. He had been right all along. But those windows were still just out of reach. No matter what they did in that room, he couldn’t pass through.
I don’t like what’s happening to you, Georgia said.
I told you it was just one time.
I’m not talking about the girl. I’m talking about how you’re acting.
How am I acting?
Like this. Scary. Shouting at me. Cornering me. I want to leave.
We’re in the middle of a conversation.
This isn’t a conversation. Let go.
I’m not finished talking.
Let go, she said. I want to go.
He was nearly blind with fury and fear. If Georgia left his room he knew she would never come back.
He pushed her down in the corner of the bedroom and walked out, shutting the door, wedging a chair under the knob. Georgia pounded on the door and shouted from the other side. He left the apartment. He needed to clear his head, to find some way to talk to Georgia, to make her understand.
He started up the hill toward the freeway. Evening was settling in; lights blinked on in apartment windows as he passed. The rain that had been gathering all day began falling in soft plaps on the asphalt. When he was a kid he loved lifting his face to the rain; the cool drops on his skin felt like reminders of a better place. He lifted his face and tried to remember that feeling. Cars honked and swerved around like circling dogs, engines snarling. He closed his eyes, willing himself through. There it was—still so far away but visible, like the first glimmer of sunrise on the horizon. He could show her. He could convince Georgia to follow him home.
Back at his apartment, the police were waiting. Neighbors had heard Georgia screaming and pounding on the walls. As the officer pressed his head to lower him into the back of the squad car, Tanner saw her one last time, shivering inside the building’s front door, her hair wet with rain and sweat, a blanket over her shoulders.
Six months in the county jail was nothing. This surprised him. Tanner expected the terror-filled chaos of prison movies: sadistic guards and shower assaults. Instead, the men were afraid of him. It was hard not to laugh. He had a benign skin condition and these men, many twice his size, gave him a wide berth. He realized that he needed to keep his mouth shut for a while so that when he started talking it would carry greater significance. He was right. The men began to gather around him in the gym and the yard. When the guards tried to break it up, he started talking to them, too.
His mother came once. She cried and reached for his hand. Tanner told her that she shouldn’t come back. Her son loved her, he said, but her son was no longer here.
One morning in the gym a new inmate jumped him, pulling him down to the floor and pressing his wide thumbs into Tanner’s windpipe, gritting his teeth and slathering like an animal. Tanner was surprised by how calmly he moved through the moment, his body relaxed and light, before the other men rushed in and pulled the new inmate off and beat him ragged while the guards kept their backs to the room.
Afterward, a muscle-bound, baby-faced Latino kid asked if he could touch the thumbprint at Tanner’s neck. Tanner nodded and the kid placed his fingertip on the sore red circle. Tanner watched the kid’s face, the flawless skin that once would have burned him alive with envy, and saw, instead, that same ache in this kid’s eyes as they moved across the bumps on Tanner’s throat. The kid wishing, Tanner knew, that the craggy shell was contagious, that he would give up his own perfection for something more.
Out of jail, he took a room at the Y downtown. There was a bookstore on the other side of Flower Street called the Rising Lotus that catered to New Age space cadets. The owner was an angular, middle-aged hippie named Lynch, who had a long neck and a vulture-beak nose. The front of the store was filled with books and pamphlets on meditation and natural healing and Eastern religions, but the real action was in the back room where Lynch sold a variety of illicit substances. After a week or so of Tanner hanging around, Lynch asked if he wanted a job keeping an eye on the front of the store, like a security guard or bouncer. If the cops showed up, Lynch said, Tanner could either hand over some cash or raise his voice to warn everyone in the back, depending on the cop in question. If a junkie or rival dealer barged in, Tanner should kick them out of the store. Tanner said that he wasn’t much of a fighter and Lynch looked him up and down and laughed and said, You don’t really need to be.
Most of the time, though, the store was quiet, so Tanner spoke to customers about the truths he had uncovered. Certain nights some of the women who hung around the store brought him home with them. Lynch marveled at this. You’re like some kind of fertility god, he said. I should rub the top of your head for luck.
No, Tanner said, but you could let me speak in the store. Every night for an hour or so. People would come to listen.
They sat in a half circle of folding chairs, two and then three and four rows deep. Tanner spoke about this world and the other, the phase between the two. He spoke about his childhood, his new mother and that first day of first grade. He talked about growing up in this skin, about his job at the law firm and Georgia and jail. The more honest he was, the more rows of chairs surrounded him at the back of the store.
One night he saw a familiar face in the crowd. Tanner worked his way through the parting bodies to the baby-faced kid from the county jail. They embraced. The kid was strong and held on for a long time. His name was Danny. He had gotten out a couple of weeks before and had come by on an errand for the guys who ran his block. Old habits, he said with a shy smile. But what else can you do?
How many bodies did you step over to get here tonight? How many people sleeping on the sidewalk? How many times did you gag from the smog choking the air? What violence and cruelty did you see in the news that made you feel helpless or afraid? High school kids rioting in Florida. Someone stabbing a famous actor in an alley just a couple of miles from here.
I don’t care what you believe in—whoever or whatever you think made this world. This can’t have been their intention. There’s been a mistake. We’re all afraid to say this, but we know that it’s true.
He looked out into the surrounding crowd, the seated rows and then those standing between the bookshelves. He needed to make eye contact with every single one, creating the connections that fueled him as he spoke. He felt the phase opening. With enough of this energy he could push all the way through.
Have you ever gone somewhere—you’re waiting for a meeting or an appointment—and realized you’re in the wrong place? Or as a kid you walked into a classroom and everyone looked at you like you had two heads and you were shaken by the understanding that you were supposed to be somewhere else. That’s what’s happened here. We’re in the wrong place. You know this. And you’re waiting for someone to show up and tell you where you’re supposed to be.
Face to face to face, each pair of eyes, holding until he felt all of them at once.
You can stop waiting. I’ve seen it—the world where we belong.
Mei Sheng was a grad student working toward a master’s in journalism when she was diagnosed with lymphoma. She came by the bookshop on the days she went to Good Samaritan for radiation. Looking for hope, she said. Usually, I don’t believe in all this stuff, but I don’t know what else to do.
At first, she told Tanner, she had been afraid of him. Not because of his appearance. It was your intensity, she said, the first night she brought him back to her apartment after one of his talks. Your confidence scared me, but I think I need to be around it now.
Tanner was drawn to her, too. Another pure soul trying to leave her shell.
She had lost most of her hair and covered her head with a series of pastel bandanas. That first night at her apartment, Tanner told her to stop wearing them. She untied the pale green cloth and let it fall away, revealing the short, rough patches of hair that sprang from her scalp like weeds in an otherwise vacant lot. She looked at him and raised her eyebrows as if she had made an irrefutable point. She started to retie the bandana and Tanner said, What do I see?
Mei Sheng lowered her hands.
A body, Tanner said, trying to fall away. Nothing more. What are you fighting?
The group that gathered for his talks grew. They nodded and clapped and called out when he spoke, coming alive as he came alive, repeating some of his phrases for emphasis. Many of them used the word sermon to describe what they had come to hear.
Lynch began accepting donations at the door. He offered Tanner half of what he collected and Tanner laughed and said, How about I give you twenty-five percent? Lynch told him to go fuck himself and Tanner said that if he did go fuck himself it would be in somebody else’s store. From then on, Danny collected the donations while Lynch stood behind the counter, shooting hostile looks.
Back in college, Mei Sheng had gone on a road trip with a boyfriend. He was studying philosophy, she told Tanner, and liked to take these long soul-searching hikes. He had heard about this trail that cut across northern New Mexico, right through an old army base where they once tested an atomic bomb. At least, that was the story. A few of his professors walked this trail every year. He wanted to go and asked her to come along.
Spring break, she said, managing a weak smile. Pretty sexy stuff, walking for days through the dust.
She’d had a radiation session that morning and now sat on the floor beside the toilet in her bathroom, resting her head on the plastic seat. The afternoon was sullen and overcast, but all the shades were drawn. After a session, almost any light bothered her eyes.
Tanner stood in the bathroom doorway, listening.
I haven’t thought about that hike in a long time, she said. But this morning when I was lying on the table and they started the machine I pictured a bomb blast. The flash, the mushroom cloud. Then I thought of the story of the test site.
And you’re wondering, Tanner said, if one thing follows the other.
Mei Sheng shook her head, rolling it a little on the seat.
I don’t think anyone has ever become sick from that hike, she said. My old boyfriend is fine. The thought wasn’t so much cause and effect as a kind of echo, maybe. A reverberation across time. I thought I could almost hear it, like a gong, sounding years ago at an explosion in the desert and then again this morning when they turned on the machine.
She smiled, the slightest upturn at the corners of her mouth.
I sound like you now, she said.
Tanner had tried to convince her to stop the radiation, but she was stubborn and scared. Her parents met her at the hospital for every treatment but despite their appeals, she refused to move back home. She was caught in the middle. Tanner understood. He had spent his entire life that way. She didn’t yet realize that fighting against the body was useless, that the body was useless. The only way to be free was to leave it behind.
He absorbed so much energy from the crowds at the bookstore, but he couldn’t quite find a way to move through the phase. Mei Sheng was the key. The gift of disease had brought her halfway there. He imagined her letting go, allowing the cancer to take her body completely. He would be with her in that final moment, that first moment, holding on to her essence as it fled its shell, pulling him through the phase like a string in his hand.
Mei Sheng turned her head and heaved, her thin frame convulsing with the reflex. Nothing came up and so she spit feebly into the bowl. She lifted her head and ran her palm across her scalp, now completely barren.
I haven’t worn anything on my head in weeks, she said. People don’t look at me anymore. Not even my parents. They look to the side.
He waited for her to turn her head again, for her eyes to reach up to his.
I look at you, he said. I see you. You’re almost there.
In the back office, Lynch began harping again about his cut of the donations. He needed at least half, he said. The sermons or whatever the hell they were brought a lot of people in, but those people didn’t buy much and were in fact cutting down on the other product he was trying to move. His other customers didn’t like coming into a place that was so busy. So we can either agree on fifty percent, he said, or you can indeed go fuck yourself in someone else’s store.
Tanner was only half listening. He looked around the room. Lynch’s desk was a riot of cassettes and 8-tracks and receipts, as well as a couple of tell-tale clues from his other business—a small spread of rolling papers and a bare razor blade, grains of white powder still clinging to its edge. Metal shelves of pamphlets and books lined the walls. The title of an oversize paperback caught his eye: Modern Pilgrimages. The cover photo showed a wide trail leading back across a flat, arid landscape.
I know you think you’re hot shit, Lynch said, with your groupies and your meathead flunky. But we both know better. You don’t believe that garbage you’re spouting. So let’s deal with this like businessmen.
Tanner took the copy of Modern Pilgrimages from the shelf and walked past Lynch, their shoulders brushing in the tight space. He lifted the razor from the desk and saw the quick fear in Lynch’s eyes. Tanner walked out into the store and as he heard Lynch’s relieved sigh Tanner drew the razor down the side of his own neck, pushing hard into the bumps, through the skin, ear to trapezius. By the time he reached Danny, the razor was away in his pocket. With his wet, red hand he pointed toward the back room where Lynch stood openmouthed in the doorway, as Danny, huge with wrath, followed that silent order, crashing back through the store.
He convinced Mei Sheng to cancel the day’s treatment, and instead they drove to Venice and walked along the canals, stopping every few yards so she could catch her breath. She spoke again about that walk across the edge of the desert a couple of years before. She thought about it all the time now, she said, dreamed about it, as if she hadn’t understood the significance of the experience while it was happening. Or maybe the experience worked in a delayed fashion, like some kind of seed finally sprouting, watered with time and distance and illness.
Her dreams about that walk were so vivid, she said. She could see each stone and footprint on the path, could taste the dust and sweat, feel the heat of the naked sun. Then she woke in her apartment and looked around the familiar room that now seemed foreign and false. Even here, she said, walking with you doesn’t seem real.
They stopped on a narrow wooden footbridge spanning one of the canals. She turned to Tanner and touched the long cut running down the side of his neck. She asked him what had happened. He smiled and told her he didn’t know, that he woke up that morning and it was there, tender to the touch, red and livid in the bathroom mirror.
He showed her the book from the store. She looked at the pages on the New Mexico trail and shook her head, disappointed. This is nothing, she said. Pictures, descriptions. Dead on the page. I can’t tell you how alive it is in my dreams. I wish I could pull you in with me.
As she spoke, she held him by the arm and he could see her distress, the desperation in her eyes.
This sounds crazy, she said, but if it wasn’t for the cancer and the radiation, I wouldn’t have remembered. I wouldn’t have these dreams. I wouldn’t have met you.
She pressed the book back into his hands, then squeezed his arms, her strength surprising, fingertips pushing bumps into bone.
You need to take that walk, she said. I think if you started, you would finish in a very different place.
He woke to hands grabbing his arms, his hair, dragging him up from the floor. He slept on the floor because Mei Sheng could no longer tolerate another body in the bed. Any touch was like a blow. These were blows now, kicks to his stomach and ribs, folding him back down. One of the men attacking him was Mei Sheng’s brother. Tanner recognized him from a picture on her desk. The men pulled him into a corner while Mei Sheng’s parents and two paramedics rushed into the room. Mei Sheng was too weak to scream, so Tanner screamed for her. The men held him while the paramedics lifted Mei Sheng onto the stretcher. Her mother was crying and speaking in rapid Chinese, what sounded like a prayer. Her father stood in front of Tanner, his face wrenched with disgust. He looked like he wanted to spit. Then he did, onto Tanner’s bare feet. As the stretcher passed, Mei Sheng turned her head and looked at Tanner and he could see that she was leaving, this would be the day. He struggled to reach her, to hold on to what remained of the presence dimming in her eyes, but her brother and his friends were there, pinning Tanner’s arms, covering his mouth, stomping, punching, kicking.
The room was not in any of Mei Sheng’s recollections of the path. It was not in the guidebook. He and Danny walked for two days and then this astonishment simply appeared, revealed after the rise of a low hill. Stark, preternatural, a small concrete building in the middle of the trail. It robbed Tanner of breath, pulled at the mercury in his blood.
Oh, Tanner said. A sigh of recognition. He had no knowledge of how it had come to be, of what was inside, but he knew that this was the room, this was all rooms. He was inside, dumping toys from his backpack. He was inside, pushing Georgia into the corner. He was inside, holding on to Mei Sheng as she led him through the phase.
Here it was, finally. He walked toward the open door.