19

That night, during dinner, Billy sits with Sameer Sirdesh, Sameer who has brought along an album of photographs which he shares with Billy, the two of them side by side, Sameer occasionally bumping Billy with a wayward elbow, like a sign of boyhood chums if not for the bully of a drug. The album has a single photograph per page, slipped under plastic. All show a beaming Sameer posed near the shoulder of a celebrity—Sameer and Brad Pitt, Sameer and Harvey Keitel, Sameer and Tom Hanks—the movie stars smiling with patience, with the price of fame, with Sameer, who in some cases has managed to slip an arm around unresponsive shoulders. "This is me with Meg Ryan," he tells Billy. "Lovely woman. Great woman. This is me with Jim Carrey. Wonderful man. Very nice. This is me with, uhm, I forgot."

"Jeff Goldblum," Billy says.

"A gentleman," Sameer says. "And this is, oh."

"Meryl Streep."

"More beautiful in person, I can tell you," Sameer says.

He leafs through page after page, Sameer always looking the same, always with a wide warm smile like the day is his, like the sun is his alone, like the American dream is under his arm and it is polite and gracious and much thinner than you'd think. "I have many more back home," he tells Billy. "This is just one book."

"Impressive," Billy says.

"Every night I'm looking for them."

"Must be exhausting."

"Oh no," Sameer says.

"Hey, Judi Dench."

"Who?"

"That woman there."

"Oh yes. Very wonderful, lovely woman," Sameer says, never noticing the tremble in his hands, the dozen missed attempts of fork landing in mouth. He continues showing Billy his full-moon orbit of stars, Billy drifting away from Gwyneth, Julia, toward his fellow normals, toward Ossap, who, while busing his tray, jerks and crashes plates to the ground, toward Stan Shackler, mystery Ph.D. who reads Baudelaire and Baudril-lard in unison, toward all of these superficially afflicted souls who report to work not with a thermos and lunch pail but with whatever ails them. Billy wonders if he's finally feeling something. Small hallucinations seem to have made an appearance. Peripheral vision contains the creepy-crawlies of the woods, where phantom moths flitter near ears and field mouse shadows quicken corners. Freckles and moles resemble blood-sucking ticks—after an hour of contemplation, they pulse ever so slightly. Eyelids, when half-closed, divulge amoebalike forms living inside the lashes. Yes, Billy thinks, maybe something.

"Garth Brooks, very nice, stood for two pictures," Sameer says.

From the table behind Billy overhears a triumvirate of nameless complaint.

A: "Anybody freaked about their nose."

B: "What about your nose?"

A: "Well, like I feel like my nose is in the way. Wherever I look, there's my nose. It's like I'm like a prisoner to my fucking nose,like my nose has eaten my face. Driving me nuts, not least of all making me all cross-eyed."

Sameer alights on Kevin Spacey. "This man, very charming," he tells Billy.

B: "I've been tasting my tongue."

A: "Tasting your tongue?"

B: "Have you been getting that?"

A: "No, just the nose thing."

B: "I swear to God I'm tasting my tongue, and it's making me sick. Even now, talking is like talking with my mouth full, like I have this slab of raw meat in my mouth. And the texture, it's nasty. It might be the worst thing I've ever put in my mouth."

C: "What's it taste like?"

B: "Postage stamps."

A: "Ugh."

B: "But I can't stop tasting it."

"Mary Poppins," Sameer says ofJulie Andrews. "Delightful and kind to me."

C: "You know what I'm getting?"

A: "Is it your nose?"

B: "Your tongue?"

C: "No, but if I tell you, don't think I'm weird?"

A: "Please, it's the drug."

B: "Yeah, the drug's the rucking weirdo."

C: "I've been getting a taste in my mouth, but it's not my tongue, it's my breath. It has this freaky taste, almost like an aftertaste."

B: "What?"

C: "I'm not queer, okay, but I've been getting a taste of semen in my mouth. I don't why. I don't even know what semen tastes like. I don't. I mean, I know what it smells like—"

B: "Maybe you should just stop talking."

C: "No, seriously, I have an idea of its taste, you know, kind of salty, right, and that's the taste I have in my mouth. It has a definite comey quality. I can't explain it, it's just there all the time."

A: "I can't smell it."

C: "I'm brushing my teeth all the time."

B: "Maybe your roommates are doing awful things to you while you sleep."

C: "Here, smell my breath."

B: "No fucking chance."

Sameer Sirdesh arrives upon the last photo, him with a smirking Harrison Ford. "He was very difficult," he tells Billy. "Five different times I tried, always no or nothing, just kept walking, but he's a busy man. Then this night, a beautiful night, he said yes. See, his arm is around me. He even asked my name. 'Sameer,' he said, 'you are one persistent bastard.' And I said, 'Yes, Mr. Ford, I must be persistent for a person of your stature.' " Sameer beams on the beaming Sameer in the photograph, beam on beam, beaming and twitching upon the slightly crooked composition, Billy realizing Sameer must've held the camera himself, pointing and shooting from the crane of an outstretched arm, Sameer now lowering his head for a closer view of Indiana Jones, Han Solo, Sameer clicking his eyes as if recapturing the image in the palsied fist of his face—Sameer on a magical night in Manhattan, when Harrison Ford finally relented and gave him the minimum of his embrace, which must've been everything.

Huddled in bed, Do no longer reads comics but his Bible instead. Billy is always amazed by people who casually read the Bible, on subways or airplanes, like the Bible is the latest thriller. He's curious if they read the book through and through and then over again, if they have favorite parts, applicable sections, assignments for the day. What do the words do for them? Or is their presence alone enough, like a sense of security, a gas mask of devotion? Billy finds their belief admirable, even comforting—piety as trickle-down theory—but he can't help an aside of condescension, a patronizing Oh, one of those, that he despises in himself. After all, faith is a beautiful thing. And he's glad his roommate has something to fall back on since, by all appearances, his spirits need bolstering. Do is tucked within a sarcophagus of sheets.

Billy watches him flip through his Bible and check pages like an accountant. Do glances up, examines the clock, then glances back down. Every minute another glance up, his finger tracing down the page, eleven minutes in all before Billy asks what's up.

"Nothing," Do says.

"You seem to be timing yourself."

"I just noticed something."

"What's that?"

"The Gospel of Luke has twenty-four chapters."

"So?"

"Well, the clock kind of gives you chapter and verse. I've never noticed that before. And just when I noticed it, it was three-oh-seven in the afternoon, or fifteen-oh-seven, which in Luke is: 'Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.' Interesting, huh?"

"I guess."

"And right now is: 'And the son said to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son."

"So," Billy says.

"Time is telling us something."

"Does every chapter have sixty verses?" Billy asks.

"No."

"So how about all that other time where there is no corresponding verse?"

"Silence can say something, too," Do says.

Stage left, Lannigan storms into the room. He's pleased with himself.

He's just met with Honeysack and he's convinced the man that his teeth were feeling wobbly. "You should have seen me," he tells them, wired with performance. "It was genius. I played it very subtle, like I wasn't really sure but I thought they were loose, like I could pull them from their roots. 'Gums bleeding?' he asked, and I said yep, though I wish I had flossed beforehand because then they would've been bleeding for real. Maybe next time. But he was interested. Oh, man. The teeth thing was new to him." Lannigan taps his incisors like a wolf checking for tone. "I told him I was scared to bite into a grape, that I was convinced I was going to wake up choking on my own teeth. I totally sold the side effect. I was Brando on Novocain. Almost convinced myself, which can happen when you're immersed in a role, when you're emotionally dedicated. He was writing down everything. I told him how I was nervous because being an actor my smile is everything and he seemed concerned. I almost started crying."

"I told the doctor the truth," Do says.

"What?" Lannigan says. "That you've developed an irrational fear of showers."

"Give it a break," Billy says.

"I'll shower soon," Do promises.

Lannigan opens the bathroom door. "How about now?"

The bedsheet coffin remains sealed. "Now is not the time, but soon."

"Isn't the Bible filled with hygiene tips? Thou shalt bathe regularly."

"Shut up," Billy says.

"Sor-ry." Lannigan shadowboxes. It's obvious he's never boxed before; he's a dance-floor pugilist. "Oh man, I was on fuego with Honeysack. for the good doctor. I can cry on cue like nobody's business. It's one of my greatest strengths as an actor, turning on the old waterworks. My specialty ever since I was a kid on the monkey bars. I'd fake fall, cry cry cry, and everyone would hover over me and think about taking me to the hospital. At that point I'd hop up on my feet and laugh and go on playing. Ouchie, they called me. I don't need glycerin drops or a sliced onion or any sense memory. No Stanislavski, Meisner, Strasberg for me. I can just cry, anytime, anywhere. I mean gut-wrenching stuff. Oscar caliber. And I can cry any style. I can give you the welling up, the single tear, the uncontrollable sob, the joyous dissolve, the angry howl, whatever you might want. I tell you, if the movie business had body doubles for crying, I'd be a rich man, because I can cry perfect tits and tight little asses." Lannigan points to his forehead, where a farmer will shoot a pig. "It's a breeze. All I need to do is flex this muscle right here, and tense my jaw so my ears pop, and this feeling of sadness comes over me. It's almost like a yawn, a stifled yawn that builds and builds behind my eyes, not because I'm thinking about my dead sister or my dead cat or all my dead friends, but because I'm stretching my face into a weepy position."

As Lannigan talks, he begins tearing up. His throat smothers speech. Words seek breath through the nose. "I get into this spot and my eyes follow suit." His vocal cords tighten. "And I'm crying for no reason, and whatever I say sounds like it's coming from the bottom of my heart." He's keening now, high-pitched and awful, chest wracked with hyperventilation, like his lungs can only stand small sips of air. He presses his palms into his temple, rocks back and forth. Tears choke him. Even his snot seems poignant. All the energy in the room gravitates toward Lannigan. He's magnetized with grief.

Billy would rather see him having sex or being ripped apart by bullets.

"Whatever I say," Lannigan continues, composure recovering, "sounds so real, so weighted because my tears are a hundred percent true. This is where my acting becomes untouchable. If only they made movies or plays where the lead is constantly crying." He wipes his eyes, pinches his nose clean, takes a deep shaky breath. "Sometimes I cry in public and wait for somebody to come and comfort me, which they always do."

"How charming," Billy says.

"My family is not big into crying," Do says, more to the ceiling than to Lannigan or Billy. "I saw my father cry once. It was when my grandfather died. Not like my father was so crazy about my grandfather, not like any of us really liked him. My grandfather would slap us hello thinking it funny. He'd slap my cheek, not hard but hard enough, and he'd laugh and say, 'Try convincing me you deserved otherwise.' I think he thought my father was soft on me or something, on all of his sons, which is a joke if you knew my father. He could get into the most Incredible Hulk-like rages. But I guess my grandfather only saw that Bruce Banner side. He never hit us, my father. He'd come close but he always stopped, at that last second, stopped"—Do imitates a hand frozen in midair—"and we'd wait for the follow-through. I swear you could see him considering one little smack, like what's the big deal, and just when you were ready for it, thinking this is it, today is the day he's going to hit me, he'd pull back and smash up something in the house. It was like, I don't know, like he was battling his . . . instinct." Do's mouth makes instinct sound deceitful, as if lips should be wary of teeth.

"You're losing me," Lannigan says, playing a movie executive hearing a pitch.

"What?"

"Your little story about papa crying."

Billy wishes Do would give up on the story, wishes Do would shut up for his own sake. There is danger in such sincerity, especially with Lannigan in the audience. Keep this to yourself, Billy thinks, do not reveal yourself to the likes of us.

But Do is unaffected by the interruption. He seems determined to tell the story, like the ceiling might tumble from above if the words fail. "When my father cried, we were coming back from my grandfather's funeral. I was the only son joining him because my brothers were working and whatnot, and being older they already had their fights with dad and they were no longer talking to him. It was just me and him. I was twelve, maybe, and we were driving home from the cemetery on the outskirts of where my father grew up about forty miles from where I grew up. I guess he was feeling nostalgic or something because he was talking more than he ever talked, normally being a pretty quiet guy. He was also dying, not that he knew it then, not that any of us knew it, but he had cancer in the pancreas, and he must've been feeling pretty lousy because in less than six months he was dead, and I remember him driving like every bump scraped his knees. Most of the people at the funeral probably figured he was hungover, which he probably was, because he was a fierce drinker, but I think it was the cancer that was making him look so bad."

"The fucking pancreas," Lannigan mutters. "What does it do anyway but get cancer? You go through your whole life never hearing about your pancreas until the doctor mentions it one day and tells you, oh, by the way, it's going to kill you."

"Produces insulin," Billy explains.

"Still a stupid organ," Lannigan says.

The words continue from Do's mouth. "During the trip back from the funeral my father told me how much he hated his father, he told me how my grandfather was a primo jerk. And however you feel about me multiply that by a million and you've got him, he said. So I asked him if he was feeling even a little sad and he told me, no, his grave had been dug long ago, and it just needed the dirt to be kicked in. Then he got quiet, spooky quiet, like he was going to scream and scare you, which he did sometimes, thinking this was hilarious. Instead he started telling me about the only time he ever saw his father cry, years ago, when he was a boy. My grandfather took him deer hunting, and I guess they hiked in and camped so they could get an early start on the day, and I guess this put my grandfather in mind of his own father, my great-grandfather, one hard turd, my father remembered my grandfather telling him, viscious, mean, drunk on sacramental wine meaning self-righteous, my father told me. He told me how my great-grandfather was kind of infamous north of here, near Vermont, where he was the enforcer for the largest apple grower in the state. He'd convince the competition to sell their orchards by killing their dogs and brutalizing their migrant workers and setting suspicious fires. Not a nice guy. Eventually he ended up hanging from a tree. The police said suicide even though his hands were tied behind his back. Or legend goes. My father never believed this. The Ramis have that impulse, he told me on that trip home, and he mentioned a half dozen Rami uncles and cousins and how they killed themselves with a rope. Fail-safe method, he said. If it doesn't break your neck, it'll close your throat. Two deaths in one, he said, because we were mean enough to say screw you to the first, and then my father got quiet, like the story was finished, and that made sense. We're not a family who talks about family, especially dead family. I thought that he was done, that he had talked himself out, but ten minutes later he picked up again."

"Too bad," Lannigan says.

"About how they were camping, he and his father, the night before they hunted. My grandfather began telling him about his own father, about the time he was roughly his age, my father's age, maybe ten years old, when his father showed him how to fix something, I can't remember what it was, or my father couldn't remember what it was, some toy or something. My grandfather took this toy to his father and his father showed him how to fix the toy. Something along those lines. And after he fixed the toy, his father, my grandfather, he said thanks and began playing with the toy right there, a car I think, if cars existed back then. Maybe a cart, a toy cart, something with wheels. And seeing my grandfather play made my great-grandfather cry for no good reason. Just cry. That's what my grandfather told my father. He wondered what was so sad? A son playing with his toy? How could that make you cry? And as he was remembering this, my grandfather started crying, trying to figure out what could've been so goddamn sad about a boy playing with a toy. And that's when my father started crying. Right there in the car with me after the funeral. He teared up remembering his father crying. That's the only time I ever saw him cry." Do stops. He looks as if he's woken up from being hypnotized and perhaps has acted foolish.

"Too many fathers," Lannigan critiques. "And I would've liked some tears at the end. That would've been a nice touch, you crying."

Billy looks up toward the ceiling and its punch holes of acoustic tile that beg for a scream. He won't add anything to this conversation. No. He won't tell Do and Lannigan about his own father, a man who seems on the constant verge of tears. He won't tell them about the last time he himself cried in front of his father, when Dad and Mom were gardening in that small backyard they treated like a farm, no lawn, just seasons of soil into vegetables into soil again. Abe and Doris were preparing against a late spring frost, a large tarpaulin being spread over the dirt, the two of them on either side of the plot, unrolling the blue plastic like an artificial pool. Billy was fourteen. He watched them from the narrow strip of grass that bordered the garden, a sketchpad and pencil in hand. His assignment for art class was to draw a tree—that's all, a tree—and there was a tree in the backyard, in the corner, a maple, an oak, an elm, Billy had no idea. But he won't tell Do and Lannigan how the day was beautiful, cool and sunny, a day where runners would run a couple of miles beyond their normal distance. The idea of frost seemed ridiculous, but the local weatherman was convinced, so here were Abe and Doris, and Billy, too. The trunk of the tree was easy to draw, though he spent too much time on the bark's fingerprint, particularly the whorl of a knothole, until finally the trunk looked right, and the pencil could sketch upward. Abe and Doris began pegging down the corners of the tarp while Billy tackled boughs, limbs, branches, twigs, leaves, a tangle of perspective, branches crossing branches, like fingers intertwined. He won't tell Do and Lannigan how difficult it was to get right, to get really right, so that the space came alive. He took out his eraser, erased a whole section, leaving behind bits of rubber dust, while Abe and Doris finished securing the tarp and moved on to the tomatoes. Billy tried again, but once again the drawing frustrated him. His tree was flat. There was no bend, no attenuation, no sense of dimension. He erased again, determined to eliminate any trace of a line. The paper became worn, and he thought about a fresh sheet but his trunk was so good, so perfect, he was determined to save it. Abe and Doris covered the tomatoes in burlap, carefully bagging each vine that grew along a green stake. Billy lightly penciled in a limb, but already the curve was wrong and looked nothing like the real thing. He erased again. Abe and Doris, side by side, moved down the row of tomatoes, never talking, their hands simpatico, their shoulders bumping without apology. His perfectly drawn trunk survived the eraser, a stump haunted by a ghost. Billy floated his pencil over the paper and glanced up at the tree then down at the lineaments of failure while Abe and Doris took on the last plant, tying the burlap around the base. He won't tell them about disappointment and defeat and failure and how Billy felt so lonely that he started crying, how he shook his head, feeling foolish for crying over a ridiculous tree, for crying at all. He had no preconceptions about being an artist and could've cared less about the assignment, yet here he was, crying. His palms covered his face. His head lowered down into the safe house of elbows on knees. His parents progressed toward the smaller shade garden, near the back fence and that untamable tree. He won't tell them how he was bawling now like a silly child, how Abe picked away fresh weeds and Doris joined him, how their gloves dug together into the dirt, how neither one seemed to notice their son for they had things to do, how Billy waited for a hand to fall on his shoulder, how they eased up the unwanted shoots until the roots gave way, how a little pile had grown by the time Billy gave up and retreated inside.

There's no way he will tell his roommates any of this. Instead, Billy watches Do glance up at the clock and back down to his Bible and the corresponding verse in Luke. Billy imagines fathers falling in a forever descent, Rami men extending backward from Do, Rami unbegetting Rami, back to the old country (wherever that might be), back to the old old country, to Palestine, to Eden, back to the beginning where Adam tells Cain and Abel about the only time he ever saw his father cry.