Caperton’s stepmother, Stell, called.
‘Your father,’ Stell said.
‘Larry?’ Caperton said.
‘He’s dying. You can say Dad.’
‘He’s done deathbed before.’
‘It’s different,’ Stell said. ‘The doctors agree now. And your father, well, no grand speeches about not going gentle, for one thing. For another, he looks out of it, pushed down. He shops online. He watches TV. I think you should be here.’
‘Command performance?’
‘Don’t be a crumbum.’
Caperton took the short flight from O’Hare to Newark on one of the new boutique lines. Shortbread, cappuccinos, and sea-salted nuts in great jars sated travellers, gratis, at the gate. The in-flight magazine resembled an avant-garde culture journal Caperton once read with fervour. The cover depicted the airline’s female pilots as cockpit kittens with tapered blazers and tilted caps. It was blunted wit, but startling for a commercial carrier. Caperton took note. Among other things, he consulted for a living. That morning, he’d been in meetings about a redo for a small chunk of lakefront. They’d discussed the placement of a Dutch-designed information kiosk; one of the city-council guys kept calling it ‘the koisk.’
‘The koisk should be closer to the embankment,’ the guy, a boy, bony in his dark suit, said.
‘We can work on that,’ a rival consultant Caperton had not known would be present said. ‘The main thing is we’re trying to tell a story here. A lakefront narrative.’
Were they supposed to make bids in the room together?
‘My opinions are vaguely aligned with that,’ Caperton said.
‘But what colour will the koisk be?’
Caperton felt the surge of a strange desire to shelter this apprentice politician from future displays of idiocy, as you might a defective son, though Caperton had no children. He liked kids, just not what they represented. He wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but it sounded significant, even if Daphne had finally left him over it, had a baby by herself with some Princeton-rower sperm.
Aloft in coach, Caperton found himself squeezed up against the trunk of a human sequoia. The man’s white t-shirt stretched to near-transparency over his twitch-prone pecs. His hair shone aerosol gold. His cheek pulsed with each chew of a gum wad he occasionally spat into his palm and sculpted. He winked at Caperton, pressed the pink bolus flat, and slit a crude face in it with his thumbnail.
‘I’m doing voodoo on the pilot.’
‘A good time for it,’ Caperton said.
‘Don’t be scared. The plane flies itself. I’ll cure him before we land.’
‘I’d appreciate that.’
‘What brings you up into the sky today?’
‘A personal matter.’
‘Fuck, I should hope so. Can you imagine wasting a minute of your life on something that wasn’t personal? Something that didn’t mean anything to you? And, I mean, especially if you’re helping other people. Like a mission of mercy. That should always be personal. Otherwise you’re just doing it for the likes. What’s your line of work?’
‘It’s tricky,’ Caperton said. ‘It’s kind of conceptual marketing, kind of design. I’m a free-range cultural consultant. But my passion is public space.’
‘Wow. Do you have all that bullshit on one business card?’
The man’s enormous biceps jumped.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘That comment was a little aggro of me. The juice does that sometimes.’
‘The juice?’
‘I don’t hide it. In my field, I don’t have to. We’re entertainers.’
‘What’s your field?’ Caperton asked.
‘Dude, I’m a pro wrestler. What the fuck else would I be?’
‘A bodybuilder?’
‘Jesus, no! Those guys are pathetic narcissists. They were all abused by their fathers. Every one of them. Don’t you know me? I’m the Rough Beast of Bethlehem. I wrestle on the Internet. You don’t watch, I take it?’
‘No,’ Caperton said.
‘You think it’s stupid.’
‘Not at all.’
‘You think that, now that we’re post-kayfabe, it’s ultra-moronic, right?’
‘Post-kayfabe?’
‘Kayfabe was the code we followed. Don’t break character. Pretend it’s not staged. Now we wink at the audience and they wink back.’
‘Oh, when did that go into effect?’ Caperton said.
The Rough Beast snorted. ‘You don’t get it at all, buddy. It’s not about wrestling. It’s about stories. We’re storytellers.’
Caperton studied him. ‘Somebody at my job just said that.’
‘It’s true! You have to be able to tell the story to get people on board for anything. A soft drink, a suck sesh, elective surgery, gardening, even your thing – public space? I prefer private space, but that’s cool. Anyway, nobody cares about anything if there isn’t a story attached. Ask the team that wrote the Bible. Ask Vincent Allan Poe.’
‘But doesn’t it seem kind of creepy?’ Caperton said. ‘All of us just going around calling ourselves storytellers?’
The Rough Beast shrugged. ‘Well, you can be negative. That’s the easy way out.’
Caperton thought it might be the hard way out. The Beast slipped his gum into his mouth.
‘Gardening?’ Caperton said, after a moment, but by then the Beast had his earbuds in.
Stell met Caperton in front of his childhood house, in Nearmont. She leaned against the doorway the way his mother once did. They were not quite the same type, but ballpark, as his father would say. Larry preferred tall, semi-controlling women with light, wavy hair. Stell preferred to smoke pot, laugh, cook, yell at Larry, read good novels, and watch her shows. She’d proved a perfect stepmother, and she and Caperton flourished in their family roles, except for the deal with the refrigerator – or, rather, Stell’s deal with Caperton rummaging freely in the refrigerator. ‘Deal’ was weak wording for it. ‘Nearly unassuageable rage’ seemed more accurate. Stell just thought it would be better if Caperton waited outside the kitchen area. She’d be more than happy to get him whatever he wanted. It would just be better, it really would, if he waited over there at the edge or even beyond the edge of the kitchen area.
Caperton harboured a secret ancestral claim to what his forebears had known as the icebox. There had been only so much depredation and madness an American child could endure in the past century. That’s why the government had invented the after-school snack. But he supposed he’d evolved. This was Stell’s house now, and, whatever her idiosyncrasies about the accessibility of chilled provisions, she’d kept his father’s energy up for years, saved him from a fatal spiral when Caperton’s mother died, even, or especially, if she’d been his mistress at the time.
For his part, Caperton’s father called Stell the Bossman. Whenever she left the room he would twinkle his snow-blue eyes at Caperton and, his throat choked with affection, say, ‘What a goddam cunt, huh?’
Larry had been married three times, cancered twice. Now the liver, as he put it, was negotiating a severance package. Larry had spent decades on the road, and Caperton used to picture a bawdy shadow life for his father, whiskey sours at a sleek, cushioned bar, a woman with his tie in her teeth. These were bitter visions, but he knew, guiltily, that the anger wasn’t really for his mother’s sake. He just didn’t understand why the man seemed so antsy at home, as though he couldn’t enjoy even a few moments of family life, drinking hot cocoa and overpraising young Caperton’s tediously improvised puppet shows or the lumpy space soldiers he pinched without talent from bright clay. Why were there so few trips to the toy store, or the zoo, or the toy store at the zoo, or, better yet, the snack stand beside the toy store at the zoo?
‘First World problems,’ Daphne once told him.
‘That’s why they’re so painful.’
Caperton had wanted to be, with his father, a team. But Larry had a team, his work buddies, gruff chums whose cruel whinnies carried through the house those Sundays they came to watch football or smoke cigars on the patio. Like Larry, these hard cases were not gangsters but grade-school-textbook salesmen. Larry worked his regions year-round, his returns heralded by the appearance of the exquisite red-and-gold Jade Dragon takeout cartons. Every business trip ended with egg rolls and spareribs and enough monosodium glutamate to goon them all into an animate diorama of menu item No. 14: Happy Family.
His father would debrief them, long, duck-sauced fingers curled around a frosted stein. He’d sing of the specialty foods of the nation – the Cincinnati chillies, avocado-and-sprout sandwiches, and spice-rubbed hams of the culinary mosaic – or describe the historic hotels he’d slept in, name the ones with the tastiest pillow mints, the fluffiest towels, the most impressive water pressure. Caperton had found receipts in his father’s overcoat, though, and they all said Howard Johnson. Larry hardly mentioned the people he’d seen or what he and the other salesmen had done, unless they’d scored big on a sale. Many schools, he explained, still taught from textbooks that conjectured a moon shot. Once, he said, he told a school board in Delaware that he’d be delighted to inform Commander Neil Armstrong himself what passed for scientific knowledge in their district. Caperton and his mother whooped, and Larry grinned into his stein. A triumph for Enlightenment values, plus commission.
After Caperton’s mother died, his father retired and built birdhouses for a while. He meant well, but to a grown Caperton these designs were rather Cabrini-Green-ish, huge and institutional, as though Larry meant to warehouse the local jays and sparrows in balsa-wood towers of utter marginalisation. It troubled Caperton to the point that he considered talking to his father about it, but then construction halted. Crises of the body beckoned. Lung inflammations, nano-strokes, mystery cysts, myeloma scares. Caperton raced home for it all. But Larry couldn’t deliver, until, apparently, now.
Caperton kissed Stell and followed her into the house, past the foyer bench and ancient wall hooks. He saw the mauve sofa where he and his father watched movies while his mother died upstairs – Westerns and sports sagas, mostly. Larry loved the one about the ancient, pretty baseball player who steps out of some Hooverville limbo to lead his club in a pennant race. Bad fuckers bribe him to tank the big game, but the hero jacks one, as Larry liked to say, into the stadium lights. Sparks shower down. The republic is renewed.
‘In the book, he strikes out,’ Caperton once told his father.
‘I know. That’s why it’s a stupid book. Why go through all that trouble to make a great story and then give it an ending like that? That takes real bitterness.’
Caperton had said nothing, but thought there might be something brave about the bitterness.
‘Your father’s sleeping now,’ Stell said. ‘Would you like some coffee? Maybe a sandwich?’
He noticed a new strain in Stell’s face. Her hands nipped at each other like little animals. Could he stop himself even if he wanted to?
‘I can make one later,’ Caperton said.
‘I don’t think that’ll work. I can make one now.’
‘I can make it. I’ll just look around in the fridge.’
‘I don’t … that can’t …’
‘It’s no problem,’ Caperton said.
‘Just let me make you a sandwich now. No big deal.’
‘Exactly. I can make it, no biggie.’
‘But you don’t know what’s there.’
‘I can look.’
‘No, honey, please don’t do this. It’s hard to see what’s in the fridge. The bulb is out. But I know what’s there. Tell me what you want.’
‘I want a turkey-pastrami sandwich with capers and spicy pickles and sharp English mustard on a fresh-baked croissant.’
‘What?’
‘Stell, just let me look in the fridge. I have a right. I was looking in that fridge when you were just an old hippie in Jersey City.’
Stell stared at the carpet. She looked widowed already. Caperton agreed to let her make him a turkey on wheat, which she would store until he was ready.
‘I just hope there’s room in the fridge,’ Stell said.
‘Hope is what we have,’ Caperton said, because he was a crumbum.
Caperton stood in his old bedroom, now Stell’s study. Photographs of her family – nieces, cousins, a stern, tanned uncle – covered the bookshelves. Her people were much comelier than the dough-nosed Capertons. He recognised a few of his old textbooks behind the photographs, but most of the library was Stell’s, an odd mix of self-help and hard science. He pulled out one on the human genome and flipped through it, pulled out another called ‘Narrative Medicine: How Stories Save Lives.’ Stell had a master’s in this discipline. She counselled doctors not to be arrogant jerks, to listen to their patients, or clients, or consumers, or whatever doctors called the people they often helped and occasionally killed. She taught patients how to craft their personal tales. It seemed both noble and, perhaps, a lot of bullshit on one card.
Now a pain sliced along his upper torso. He’d felt it before, like being cinched in a hot metal belt. Sometimes the pangs brought him to his knees, left him breathless, but they always faded. Caperton wheezed and clung to a bookshelf for a moment. He was stressed, the doctor had said, because he was anxious. Or maybe the other way around.
A lakefront, he wished he’d said at the meeting, was a place where you could stroll and enjoy the sunshine and the lake. Wasn’t that enough? Why bring history into it? History was slaughter and slaves. Stories were devices for deluding ourselves and others, like Larry’s pillow mints.
Was this pretentious? Caperton had worried about being pretentious since college, when somebody told him he was pretentious. He knew he was just naïve. Why did he continue to struggle for perspective when others had moved on? A secret dunce gene? A genome? Maybe the scary belt that squeezed him was a warning: stop thinking your shallow thoughts.
Stay in the story, moron.
He pulled a faded red sneaker box from under the bed. Here resided all the junk, the objets d’crap of his years in this room: buttons, paper clips, lozenge tins, cassette tapes, rolling papers, a tiny airport brandy bottle, the watchband from his uncle’s Seiko, guitar picks and toothpicks and a photograph of his mother leaning on the birch tree in the yard. Probably a box in Daphne’s parents’ house brimmed with similar detritus. A rabbit’s-foot key chain, the fur dyed electric blue. A comic-book version of The Waves. Desiccated lip balm and a plastic ruby ring.
They’d met at an office party not that many years before, traded a few catchphrases from the sitcoms of their youth. That and the sex seemed enough. But then came the dumb baby question. People thought they could work on you. Wear you down. They assumed you didn’t really mean what you said.
Caperton found a condom in the shoebox, the wrapper worn and crinkled, the expiration date three or four Presidents ago, a Herbert Walker rubber, a forgotten land mine that required defusing before some innocents got maimed, or had a baby too early, led stunted lives with little chance for either of them or their issue to someday stand in a room and listen to an elected official say ‘koisk.’
Caperton unbent a paper clip and pricked at the wrapper. He noticed something gunked on the tip of the paper clip, like tar or bong resin. How could that shit stay gooey for so long? The universe was an unanswered question. Had Caperton read that? Heard it on public radio? He couldn’t track what spoke through him anymore. He moaned and held the condom up to the window. Daylight poured through the constellation of holes.
Stell stuck her head in.
‘He’s up,’ she said.
Larry sat in bed with a tablet in his lap. Caperton noticed the device first, then his father’s freckled stick arms and ashy cheeks.
‘I’m ordering tons of garbage. Stuff for the house. Gadgets. Why not? I should get some congressional shopping medal.’
‘I’ll make it my life’s work that you get one,’ Caperton said.
‘What is your life’s work, anyway?’
‘Stell says it’s serious this time.’
Larry looked down at the tablet, swiped the screen with a long, chapped finger.
‘It’s always been serious,’ he said. ‘Since you get born it’s serious. I mean, I have a greater understanding now. Dying is natural. We’re built to do it. We discuss this in my six-months-and-under group.’
‘Your what?’
‘It’s online. No pity parties. Death is just a part of the story.’
‘I thought it was the end of the story.’
‘Mr Doom-and-Gloom.’
‘Jesus, Dad, you’re the one in bed. What do the doctors say?’
‘Have you met my doctors? They have pimples. Peach fuzz. They’re all virgins.’
‘How do you know?’
‘My tumours know.’
‘OK,’ Caperton said.
‘The way you kids say OK,’ Larry said. ‘Sounds like it’s not OK.’
‘It’s nice to be called a kid.’
‘I’m indulging you,’ Larry said. ‘Sit down.’
Caperton took the rocker near the window.
‘How long can you be here?’ Larry said.
‘I’ll be back and forth. I’ll be here.’
‘I realise I was the boy who cried death. I’m sorry to put you out. But I think I need you. Or Stell will need you.’
‘I’ll be around,’ Caperton said. ‘I’ll be there and back again.’
‘Guess you’ve seen all of this before.’
‘In this very room,’ Caperton said.
‘I know,’ Larry said. ‘In this very bed.’
The painting above the headboard was new, and Caperton couldn’t quite tell what it depicted, with its fat swirls of white and grey. It was some kind of ship, or the spume of a whale, or a spiral-whipped wave in a storm.
Maybe it had been on the wall for a long time, but certainly not when his mother died. Or had it? He’d once been proud of the precision with which he recalled his mother’s final weeks: the order of familial arrivals, their withered utterances, the last four things his mother ate (mashed potatoes, applesauce, cinnamon oatmeal, cherry ice cream, in that order), the exact position of the water pitcher on the walnut table. But now he couldn’t remember if that painting had been there.
‘You know,’ Larry said, ‘I had this English professor who used to talk about the death of the individual. “The death of the individual,” he’d say. I had no idea if he was for it or against it. But at least now I know what he was talking about.’
‘I don’t think he was talking about this.’
‘The hell you say,’ Larry said.
Back in his room, Caperton checked up on the lakefront. There were no new developments, just as after all these meetings there would be no new development. It was all a joke. Most of his working hours he spent tracking down his pay cheques.
He composed a text to Daphne, which he still did sometimes, though she never responded, even when he lied and said that Gates Mandela McAdoo was a wonderful name for her child. Now he wrote, ‘Here with Larry and Stell. Not good.’ He erased ‘Not good’ and replaced it with ‘More soon.’ The moment he sent it an email zipped in from the airline, a survey about his flight. He was about to answer the questions when he remembered the purpose of his trip. Still, he’d rather not be rude. ‘Flight was great,’ he replied, ‘but I’m dealing with some difficult personal matters.’ Probably only robots would read the message, but sometimes it was crucial to clear the emotional desk.
He lay down on his old bed, a narrow, thin-mattressed cheapo he’d once cherished as a snuggle palace. He closed his eyes and had one of those mini-dreams he sometimes had before falling asleep. His teasers. This one featured the Rough Beast. They trudged through the rubble of a ruined city. Before them rose a bangled tower, a high, corroded structure made of pig iron, tiles, beach glass, and bottle caps. The Rough Beast paused after each step.
‘Public or private?’ he whispered. ‘Public or private?’
Caperton flew at the Beast, bashed him to the ground.
‘That’s it, baby!’ the Beast cried. ‘Hurt my shit!’
Now there were different voices, and Caperton woke. A man who looked familiar but unplaceable stood just outside the open door.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘This must seem strange. But don’t be alarmed. Stell told me to rouse you.’
Stell brought out tea and joined the man on the sofa in the living room. Caperton sat down on an ottoman. The man had stiff white hair, a velvet black unibrow. He jiggled Stell’s hand in his lap.
‘It’s such a joy for me to see you again. I wish it were under better circumstances. Do you remember me?’
‘You’re Burt,’ Caperton said. ‘You used to come over with the other guys.’
‘That’s right. Last time I saw you, you were yay high.’ Burt lifted his boot off the carpet.
‘Really? That’s very tiny. I must have been a barely viable foetus then.’
Burt chuckled, nudged Stell.
‘Larry said he was a tough cookie. Your father loves you, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘Do you?’ Burt said.
‘Maybe you know better.’
‘Your father’s from a different generation, that’s all. We weren’t allowed to show our emotions.’
‘I’ve met men your age who overcame that.’
‘Outliers,’ Burt said. ‘Or possibly fags. I always liked you, you know. Even when you were a little kid and I could tell you were judging us.’
‘Us?’
‘The gang.’
Burt pulled Stell’s knuckles to his lips.
‘Hey, pal, my father’s not dead yet.’
‘Cool it, Omelette,’ Burt said. ‘Stell and I go back. I introduced your father to her. We’re like family. Anyway, I hear you’re a consultant.’
‘It’s a very worthy path. I retired from the sales department about ten years after your father. Since then, I’ve taken up a new calling.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Burt’s a storyteller,’ Stell said.
‘No shit.’
‘I must admit it’s true,’ Burt said. ‘Every Saturday I go down to the library and tell stories to the children. I’m sure I bore the pants off them, but I get a thrill.’
‘Tell me a story.’
‘Well, I don’t know if this is really a good time for –’
‘Just tell me a story.’
Burt told Caperton a story. It had a boy in it, an eagle feather, a shiny blue turtle. There was an ogre in a cave. Rivers were crossed on flimsy ropes, wise witches sought for counsel, bandits hunted and rehabilitated. The blue turtle led the boy to a princess. The princess fought the ogre and saved the boy. Caperton soaked up every word and couldn’t take his eyes off Burt’s brow, which lifted at the close of the tale.
‘Bravo,’ Stell said.
‘Pulled that one out of my butt,’ Burt said.
‘That’s why you’re a genius,’ Stell said. ‘Am I right?’
Caperton shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Seemed a little cheesy to me.’
‘Helps if you’re five,’ Burt said. ‘Not some snide turd turning forty.’
Caperton stood.
‘You’re right, Burt. What can I say? I’m feeling peckish.’
Stell shrieked. ‘Please, don’t go in there! What do you want? I’ll get your sandwich! Or do you want something else? Just tell me what you want! Let me make it for you!’
Caperton opened the fridge and in the darkness saw what he wanted. What he could make. He scooped up a bag of bread, a tomato, a hard-boiled egg. Stell charged him, crumpled against his hip, wrapped up his knees. The egg flew away. Caperton slit the bread bag open with his thumbnail, balled up a soft slice of seven-grain and shoved it in his mouth. He bit into the tomato and seeds ran down his wrists, pulp splotched the wall.
‘Stop!’ Stell said. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m having an after-school snack,’ Caperton snarled, and fisted up another bread ball, licked the tomato’s bright wound.
‘You’re sick!’ Stell said, and from her knees tried to shove him clear of the kitchen.
Caperton bent over her, whispered, ‘Thanks for the medical narrative.’
He ripped open his shirt and crushed the mutilated tomato against his chest. Juice glistened in dark burls of hair. He thought that maybe he was about to make a serious declaration, or even try to laugh the whole thing off, when he felt a twinge, a test cinch for another spell of nervous woe. The Belt of Intermittent Sorrow, which he somehow now named the moment it went tight, squeezed him to the kitchen floor.
That night he texted Daphne: ‘Can’t sleep in this bed. It’s crazy here. Creepy. Like a bad play. Or a bad production of a good play. How is little Gates? I’m sure you’re a wonderful mother. Maybe if mine hadn’t died I would have felt differently. Who knows? You know I’ll always love you. More later. Talk soon.’
Minutes later Caperton heard his text tone: shod hooves on cobblestones.
‘Let me introduce myself. My name is Miles and I’m the nanny. I was a Division II nose tackle not very long ago. If you keep texting Daphne I’ll come to your house and feed you your phone. Daphne does not wish to receive messages from you, now or in the future. Good day.’
Good day?
Caperton shivered in his shoddy childhood cot. ‘Let the sobbing begin’, he texted to himself, and sank into hard slumber beneath his dank duvet.
The next morning Caperton stood beside a taxi in the driveway. Stell gathered him in for a hug.
‘I’m sorry,’ Caperton said, fingering the pierced condom in his pocket.
‘Stop saying that. Just go see a doctor. And a therapist.’
‘I will. I’ll be back for the weekend. I’ll be back and forth.’
‘I know,’ Stell said.
Burt stood on the lawn in cop shades.
Was he protecting Stell from her hair-trigger stepson? Standing vigil for his dying amigo?
Just before coming outside, Caperton had checked on his father. Larry had maybe taken a little bit of a bad turn. He looked pretty damn sick.
‘Work beckons, huh?’ Larry nodded at Caperton’s coat.
‘Afraid so. Be here Saturday.’
Caperton took his father’s hand.
‘Listen,’ Caperton said. ‘I realise I’ve been an idiot, Dad. All my pointless rage. I’ve wasted so much time trying to get a certain feeling back. But it’s a child’s feeling, and I can’t have it anymore. But I love you. I really do. Know that. And let’s not hold back. With the time we have, let’s say everything to each other. That’s all I want.’
Something like a ship’s light, far away, began to glow, stately and forlorn, in Larry’s eyes. He gripped his son’s hand harder.
‘I know you’re strapped for time,’ Larry said, his voice raspier in just the past day. ‘But there’s this new show on cable, you really should watch it. It’s amazing.’
‘A show?’
‘No, really,’ Larry said, strained upward, and coughed in Caperton’s ear the name of the showrunner, and how this fellow had also created another hit series.
‘The character arcs are ground-breaking,’ Larry said. ‘It’s a golden age of cable television.’
‘Sounds great.’
‘I’d wait to watch it with you,’ Larry said. ‘But, well, you know …’
‘I’ll be back,’ Caperton said.
‘And forth.’ Larry said. ‘I’m glad. I need you, son.’
Caperton was not surprised to see the Rough Beast in the terminal. The Internet wrestler sipped from a demitasse at a granite countertop near the gate. Caperton thought to approach him, but the quest for symmetry seemed a mistake. Besides, the Beast wouldn’t remember a snide turd like him.
Caperton had two seats to himself on the plane. He wished he could relish the boon, but it made him anxious. A free seat meant that anybody could take it at any time, lumber up from the back rows looking for relief – a fatty, a talker, the ghost of his mother, Death itself, Burt.
Caperton took the aisle seat, the better to defend the window and, about twenty minutes into the flight, heard a loud grunt, felt a hard pinch on his earlobe.
‘How are you, man?’ the Beast said. ‘What’s the story?’
A pill from Stell had introduced Caperton to a new flippancy.
‘The story, Mr Beast? It’s ongoing. Arcing hard. It’s an arcing savage, an astonishment machine.’
‘Booyah! And how’s your personal matter?’
‘Everything’s going to be OK, my man, within the context of nothing ever being OK.’
‘Brother has been on a philosophical fact-finding mission, come back with the news.’ The Beast proffered five, belly-high.
‘Please,’ a flight attendant said, approaching from business. ‘No congregating.’
‘Nobody’s congregating,’ the Beast said.
‘We can’t allow congregating for security reasons.’
‘Just shooting the breeze here, sweetness. No box cutters.’
‘Sir.’
‘Maybe you’re too young for that reference.’
‘Please sit down.’
‘OK, fine,’ the Beast said, and walked back to his row.
When the plane landed, Caperton lifted his half-unzipped bag from under the seat and noticed a sandwich tucked under some socks. Pastrami and capers. On a croissant. Caperton chewed and waited for the plane to reach the gate. It would be an odd time now. Larry, the Fates willing, might hold on for a while. They would have a chance to grow close again. Caperton knew he would not run from this. Even if his father doubted him, he knew he would be there when it counted.
He checked his phone and saw the messages stack up in comforting fashion. Life might be looking down, but at least coms were up. It took just the briefest skim of his messages for all comfort to vanish. Now he could only ponder how strange it was that you could move at these outrageous speeds through the air and know everything known and still control nothing. For example, during this one quick flight his father had died, and the bony young councilman, the Prince of Koisks, had kicked him off the project. Also, there was an email from the airline he’d just flown explaining how much they respected his time and offering consolation for his current difficulties. Worse than robots, really.
Caperton called the only person he could call. Daphne answered and told him to hold on. Another voice came on the line.
‘This is Miles.’
‘Jesus, I thought she made you up.’
‘No, I’m very much an entity of your dimension. Somebody who could find you and stomp on your urethra in what we foolishly call real time. Did you not receive the text message?’
‘I did,’ Caperton said.
‘But you thought calling was OK?’
‘Did you say you were the nanny?’
‘Goodbye, Mr –’
‘No, Miles, please don’t hang up. Just stay on the line for a minute. For sixty seconds. That’s all. I’m having a bad moment. I don’t need Daphne. You’ll do fine. My father just died. Please just … I just …’
‘Why don’t you emulate your old man,’ Miles said, hung up.
Caperton groaned, shook, curled up in his seats, and watched people stand and grope at the overhead bins. He heard the Beast barrel through the throng behind him. Here he loomed again.
‘Caught the end of your call.’
‘Yeah,’ Caperton said.
‘We’ll be here awhile, waiting for all these people. Shove over.’
Caperton slid toward the window and the Rough Beast sat down. He patted Caperton’s knee.
‘Terrible about your pops. Mine went easy. Keeled over on his city snowplow up in Rochester. But that doesn’t make it any better for you.’
‘No.’
‘It’s OK. You’re with me now. Everything will be OK. Cry for your father. What man doesn’t cry for his father? Let it out.’
Caperton cooled his forehead on the window. The Beast stroked his back.
‘They say it’s a cycle, but there is no cycle. You get jerked in and reamed out. That’s all.’
Caperton could not cry again. Also, he thought he might be onto a new phase. Lumped nullity. Drool drooped from his lip. He looked up and saw that the plane was empty.
‘I’m sorry,’ one of the flight attendants said. ‘But it’s time to leave.’
‘We’ll leave soon,’ the Beast said. ‘When it’s time.’
‘But it’s time now.’
‘No, it’s not!’ the Rough Beast shouted, cocked his hand for a karate chop. ‘This man’s in the middle of a fucking hinge moment! I’ll waste you all!’
One of the flight attendants called security on her walkie-talkie. The others dashed for the door.
Caperton, who now felt a wider and more fiery belt of perhaps increasingly frequent sorrow begin to singe him, slid to his knees and crushed his face into the seat back. The underside of the locked and upright tray, cool and vaguely pebbled, was heaven on his skin.