It was on the sixth day of a planned nineteen (days one through nine in Sydney, nine through thirteen shuttling between Alice Springs and Ayers Rock, fourteen through nineteen in Cairns, which was probably too much time in Cairns but this was the first vacation he had ever planned and he was by himself so who cared? then a flight back to Los Angeles to arrive, courtesy of the international dateline, eleven hours before he left), that Drew Becker, our young American on holiday, saw, sitting in a coffee house off Oxford Street in Paddington, drinking tea and reading the Sydney Morning Herald, Peter, his brother, who had been dead for five years.
‘Well,’ said Drew, stuck to the spot on the sidewalk, looking through the plate glass at Peter, who continued to read his paper, oblivious. And why shouldn’t he? He obviously thought he would never have to answer the questions currently pending in Drew’s brain (an incorrect assumption, Drew would remember). Five years. Even in his calm shock, even through the impasse the brain reaches when faced with something that, despite all physical evidence to the contrary, just was not possible (like Jesus on a tortilla, like the moon), Drew could realize that Peter would have long lost the need to feel furtive.
‘Well,’ he said again. Well, indeed.
* * *
To be honest, from where we’re standing, running into Peter is a bit of a shame. Up until now, things had been going so fluidly well. It was October, the first blooming of the Australian spring. The weather had not cooperated on the first two days, but no matter. Drew walked the city in the rain. Southern Hemisphere Rain, he thought, falling up towards the ground. The euphoria left him a little dopey (obviously), but he had never been anywhere, not even Mexico. (Can you believe it? Living in Los Angeles? Strange, but it happens.) Here he was, halfway ‘round the world in the one country that all Americans say they want to visit and never do. Even more amazingly for an American, he had done it himself: saving money eternally, working a full-time job through the last couple of years of college, not buying compact discs or books (well, charging them, which wasn’t really money), not buying a microwave, not going skiing, then dropping the entire wad for nineteen days in Australia. He deserved it, he told himself, and who are we to question?
On that rainy first day, arriving at the unholy half hour of six thirty a.m. Sunday after the taxi had dropped him off in the wrong suburb, which Drew discovered had an entirely different meaning here, and he’d had to walk a mile in the rain with his suitcase, he still smiled. He smiled at the girl at the desk who cheerfully told him that she was terribly sorry but his room wouldn’t be ready until noon and of course he could leave his bag there while he got himself some breakfast and welcome to Australia by the way and there’s a McDonald’s just down the street.
‘Okay, I’ll be back in a few hours,’ Drew smiled.
‘No worries,’ she lobbed right back.
The wattage of Drew’s smile upped (it’s all right to look briefly away); he hadn’t believed they actually said that.
An aggressive atomizer of rain misted down. Drew drifted through it like an expensive yet tasteful scent. He ate breakfast at the McDonald’s, felt a twitch of guilt, then wondered if there was such a thing as Australian cuisine. His hotel was in Paddington on Oxford Street (a scant three blocks from the café where, in six days’ time, he would see his dead brother). Sydney’s own Hyde Park was just ten or so blocks away in the neighboring suburb of Darlinghurst, and it was here that Drew wound up that first morning after satisfying himself with a Southern Hemisphere Egg McMuffin.
A wide lawn led to a walkway between two rows of giant trees which had grown together some twenty feet up, making a towering, natural hallway. It wasn’t quite an escape from the rain - there were now random large drops of water instead of the steady mist - but it was momentary respite. Sydney was all but deserted at this hour, all good Sydneysiders at church or at home or at leisure far away from downtown, and Drew had the park nearly to himself. A man in an overcoat on a bench nearly thirty yards away and a female jogger with her Great Danes were his only company. Scratch that, there were also the ibises: fat, squat, dirty birds with long curved beaks. Drew saw at least five stalking around the park, looking for scraps. They played the role of the pigeon, Drew supposed, except they were alarmingly large, a good two feet tall. No matter, on that morning (and on that morning alone; Drew eventually made the discovery that the birds were a widely berated irritant) they were as glistening as the rain.
Apart from the obvious large-scale, forefront (and currently still imminent) memory of seeing his brother and the actions that followed, it was this moment, sitting in Hyde Park in the taffeta rain, watching the ibises, and just soaking that Drew would remember most clearly. He had landed in a foreign country and been given the courtesy of a few minutes to himself. The sense of displacement was as intoxicating as it was profound. He could not believe he was here yet here he was. He could not believe he was here yet here he was. He could not believe he was here yet here he was in the rain in Hyde Park in Darlinghurst, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Here he was. Here he was.
That night he went to a movie. No judgments, please, at least not here; most everything was closed and Drew was exhausted. He made sure it was an Australian movie, though, one that wouldn’t reach the United States for months or maybe not at all. By chance, it turned out to be wonderful, but it was still day one, and it would have been wonderful even if it wasn’t.
Drew shifted from foot to foot. He crossed his arms and uncrossed them. Australians moved politely around him on the sidewalk. He stared and considered. It had become a tableau.
We apparently have time for another story.
* * *
As the sighting of his brother colors Drew’s hindsight for much of the first days of his vacation, we, in an effort to show those days objectively, present them to you as they happen …
Day #2, Monday and still dreary and wet: Spitefully, Drew spends most of the day on a walking tour of Sydney. Down Oxford Street with its cafes, restaurants, bookstores, and scores of homosexuals; past Hyde Park again, and on into downtown. He stops at Victoria Station Mall, buying the Australia Tourist Troika: an opal, a boomerang, and a T-shirt, before making his way to Circular Quay and buying a three-day pass for public transport. He takes a picture of the Opera House from across the Quay. On the advice of his tour book, it’s up onto the Sydney Harbour Bridge and into the viewing tower. From here, he takes another picture of the Opera House. Back down from the Bridge, back towards downtown, through The Rocks, crossing Circular Quay again and actually going into the Opera House itself (but not before taking another picture from the front). There seem to be operas running continuously, so he purchases a ticket for a Thursday performance of Don Giovanni, because it is the only one he has heard of. By now, Drew has walked about six miles and is still a good three miles from his hotel. He could take the bus, but presses on valiantly by foot through the Royal Botanical Gardens, snapping a quite wonderful picture of a grouping of birds-of-paradise he will forget about completely until the film is developed. And then the world’s worst jet lag, which has been lurching behind, out of breath but dogged, catches up with a vengeance. Drew takes a bus back to Oxford Street, eats dinner and is asleep by six-thirty.
Day #3, Tuesday: Sunshine for the first time (and rain will turn out to have disappeared completely). Drew loves zoos and so is off to Taronga Park. After waking up at 3:30 a.m. and killing time until breakfast, he takes a bus to Circular Quay and a ferry across the harbor to the zoo. As zoos go, it is a very good one, but still a zoo and so the day passes pleasantly without much detail required. He decides to make it a completely zoological day and takes another ferry to the Sydney Aquarium. It is an incomprehensibly depressing experience. The aquarium is nice enough, but the underwater viewing conveyor belt trip seems only to offer morose sharks in harshly lit pools. The lighting in the rest of the aquarium is intended to be dramatic, but succeeds only in being dark. Drew leaves feeling frankly horrible. He takes a complete-loop ride on the Sydney monorail and is surprised to see that it doesn’t seem to stop anywhere useful. An Australian rider tells him he is not the first person to notice this. Drew manages to stay awake until eight.
Day #4, Wednesday: Bright sunshine today and Drew decides to go to Manly and North Harbour. Another bus ride to Circular Quay (he is becoming an expert), then a hydrofoil to Manly. Manly, wonderful Manly, gives Drew his first beach-sitting opportunity. After taking a very brief dip in the Harbour (even though he’s within the shark net, he still feels a little nervous, and more importantly, the water is still post-winter temperatures), Drew tans for an hour. A quick trip to the much smaller, but much happier, Manly Aquarium, then a long, long walk up to the cliffs at North Head, the entrance to Sydney Harbour. It’s beautiful and huge. On the way back, something pulls in his knee, and he limps the last half mile to the hydrofoil. Dinner, shopping, and a beer in a bar on Oxford Street. He is feeling less of a stranger to his surroundings, and so far, if he may say so, he feels he has been the best kind of sponge: experiencing and gathering. No interpretation, not yet.
Day #5, Thursday, in which Drew does a series of naughty things that would be unthinkable 12,000 miles away: The sun is so beautiful that Drew decides to really throw off the shackles and go to a nude beach. There is only a single official one left in Sydney (so Drew reads in a guidebook for such things), Lady Jane Beach by South Head. He takes a bus in the opposite direction from Circular Quay and manages to make himself feel historic by walking past the marker at the spot where Captain Phillips first set foot on Australian soil (it was actually the prisoner upon whose shoulders he was riding whose feet were first, but history is full of such glossedover truths, yes?). After a tentative stay at Camp Cove Beach, Drew sucks in his gut and walks the path to Lady Jane. It all turns out to be easy. He removes his clothing in pieces, conscientiously covering with sunblock as he goes, until he is down to his Speedos. With a shrug, off they come. The world continues to spin.
‘Excuse me, do you know what time it is?’ a smiling young man asks, naked as a starling.
Drew draws his watch out of his bag, ‘Uh, it’s 12:15,’ he says.
The young man’s eyebrows shuffle. ‘You’re not Australian.’
‘No. American. Don’t hate me.’
‘Oh, far from it, mate. Hope you got a strong sunblock on. We’re really not even supposed to be out in the sun between eleven and three, but no one listens.’
He smiles again.
The details of what follow are not terribly necessary. Suffice it to say, there are appropriate nooks in nearby rocks; the young man’s name is Marcus; he is a brunette; and Drew will never speak to him again. Drew leaves the beach a little sunburnt, a little shaky, and a few ounces lighter, smelling of exertion and suntan lotion. He is someone else down here, he thinks with a dazed smile, someone with dangers and edges.
He is (he is ashamed to admit) bored by Don Giovanni that evening and, to be honest, left with a terrible vertigo from his seat in the precipitous Opera House balcony. Still, through most of the evening he smiles slyly, trying himself on for size.
Drew was surprised at his calm. Really, he thought, I should be shaking, my stomach should have fallen, my mouth should be hanging open. Instead, he was furrowing his brow as if considering an inscrutable French film. Peter would be thirty-two now, five years older. Unless, of course, he had actually been literally dead and had only recently been resurrected in this faraway place. He certainly looked younger than thirty-two. Twenty-five maybe. Maybe the air down here was doing him good …
Drew derailed this train of thought like Godzilla might. Who cares about the air? he thought. I’m worried about his age and how he looks and not about just how and why the hell he’s here? Is that weird?
Peter had grown a goatee which suited him rather well. Maybe that was what made him look younger. He was wearing a black wool blazer and wire glasses. His hair folded back, lanky but not long. His posture was remarkably poised, like a lifelong piano player, relaxed but at the ready.
My God, Drew thought, he looks just like …
For those last few months, Australia was a mantra Drew used to get through a period that was both boring and trying. The last three years of college he had worked a full-time job and was going to classes full-time as well. It wasn’t as hard as people thought, but still, it was boring and trying. He worked for the Defense Department, of all things, in contracts. Like every other part of the government, it was run by religious folk and homosexuals; an odd, tense combination which somehow resulted in office parties where everyone smoked. Drew was Contract Modification Special Assistant which was even less interesting than it sounded: he filed contract modifications; he entered contract modifications into the computer; he xeroxed contract modifications; he faxed contract modifications; he proofread contract modifications. It paid the rent, it was close to school, and they didn’t mind that he took classes.
College had taken five years, which was not so unusual. In Drew’s case, it was due less to indecision than to the full-time job and an insistence on not taking help from his parents. It was a purchased freedom and he knew it, but it did allow that conversation with the mater and pater without fear of financial recourse. This arrangement made college less of the social hullabaloo than Drew suspected it was supposed to be. He only managed any real fun by proxy, through his friend Karen who was making up for a dull childhood with a force unmatched in nature. She and her red, red hair forced Drew to tag along to unacceptable and sometimes dangerous parties, introduced him to several brief romances, and generally performed the friend function of life absorption and radiance.
It hadn’t been Karen who had first thought of Australia, but she whipped the batter into an irresistible soufflé.
‘Think of it this way,’ she had said during that first period when Drew still doubted the possibility. ‘You’ll be as far away from yourself as you can possibly be and you’ll wake up and discover that, what do you know? You came along after all.’
The obsession commenced. With the last semester of college paid for from his savings and scholarships, Drew misered the money month after month, dragging his social life even lower (‘I am not going to rent another movie,’ Karen always said, just before they did). School ended, the job did not, and life got even more tedious, but Drew still held out. He even forsook looking for a ‘career opportunity’ (Were there any for a B.A. in Hungarian Art History?) and just worked.
Australia was the undressed courtesan waiting on the bed, the first wish on the monkey’s paw, the new nose at the end of the surgery. There was the possibility of disaster, but it was worth the risk. Australia got him through a particularly dry summer in which he met no new friends (certainly not any new men), went to one social event (a birthday gathering that could not even be called a party), and got a new boss, an ex-marine who wanted the office run ‘smooth as a military strike.’ Drew had absolutely no idea what that meant except maybe that it all ended in fiery death.
Would he phrase it as a question? Would he preface it with a greeting? Or would he just say,
‘Peter,’ calmly, like that.
Peter looked up from his paper. Was there surprise anywhere? Drew looked. Yes, there it was, in a small fold around his eyes. There, but only there.
‘Drew?’
Peter folded his paper slowly and placed it on the table.
‘Drew.’
Their eyes remained locked, but the tension was of a different variety than Drew expected. It wasn’t like the thief being caught; it wasn’t like a secret being uncovered. It was pure, simple expectation.
‘Well,’ said Peter.
‘Well, indeed,’ said Drew.
Peter had joined the military when Drew was ten. After a self-proclaimed ‘shiftless and disinterested’ year and a half in college, Peter had enlisted more for the change of scenery than anything else. The parents had been ambivalent at first: ‘The navy!? Don’t you want a career?’ ‘I can have a career in the navy.’ ‘But, the navy?!’ Soon enough, in an act that felt (to them) like generosity, they eventually gave their blessing. It wouldn’t have mattered if they hadn’t, he was already packed and waiting to go. He shipped off almost immediately for Guam: ‘Guam?! What’s in Guam?’ ‘Lots of Guamanians and a naval base.’ ‘But, Guam?!’ And thus Peter became the Beckers’ personal Link of Need in the church prayer chain.
With no other siblings, Drew was put in an unsatisfactory position. He naturally missed the company and the shared family history, but nine years was too large an age difference for them to be truly close. Too much height difference to play catch, too much interest difference to want to bother, Peter was more like a high-intensity uncle than a brother. He was always there and always family but family at a remove. Drew missed Peter when he left, but it was like missing a hole.
Life hobbled on and, contrary to widely held expectations, Peter stayed in the navy past his initial three years, signing up for another five. What’s more, he actually prospered and moved up the ranks at a fair clip, even joining NCO training and winding up as a first lieutenant. He visited home once every year or two with gifts and gab. It was an arrangement that was completely accepted, hardly warranting comment.
Then, at the tail end of his initial eight-year term, when Peter was serving tour in the Persian Gulf, their mother opened the front door to two men in navy uniforms. They were holding their hats. Drew’s mother covered her mouth and chin with her left hand. It was two days before Drew was to leave for college. He waited an additional three days for the funeral, missing a few orientation meetings, but nothing that caused too great of an inconvenience.
They said Peter had been killed accidentally by a grenade in training exercises. They were vague but insinuating. It was never supposed to happen. He should never have had a live grenade, and he definitely should never have been so reckless with it. This is not exactly what the two men in uniform said, but it was the impression they left. A day later, a casket arrived at the airport. It was locked because Peter’s face, shoulder and arm had been blown off.
‘You don’t want to see him, ma’am,’ the first officer had said. ‘Trust me.’
Naturally, the funeral was somber but also strange in that most of the attendees hadn’t known Peter well or at all and were only present for the family. Having no personal point of reference, no one knew what to say and winced silent apologies at the family. Drew suffered through a preacher dispensing the usual ‘he-was-a-wonderful-man-with-such-potential’ even though he’d never actually met Peter. It didn’t matter. Drew was barely there. He bounced his knees up and down, he tapped his fingers on his palms, he hummed. He was longing to get away, away from the relentless perfumed religion of his parents’ home, to some sort of freedom, any sort as long as it was one. Oh, that feeling …
He left the instant it was no longer improper to do
‘You’re the only one I’ve got left,’ his mother cried at his departure. ‘I’ll leave you in the hands of God.’ Not much flair but a dedicated energy, you had to hand her that. ‘Be good.’
She had quoted herself verbatim on the last phone call before Drew left for Australia, but there it had carried a double meaning: Don’t die, and don’t do any of those, you know, things. Too late.
And so again, here he was. And here he was.
‘Um,’ Peter said, ‘have a seat.’ Scooting back, halfstanding, motioning a hand.
Drew sat. Peter seemed to think he was angry.
‘I’m not angry,’ Drew said, his speech quickening as he went along, ‘if that’s what you’re wondering. Surprised, yes, a little, well, a lot, but not as much as I would have imagined if I had in fact ever imagined this moment which of course I hadn’t since this moment was unimaginable since you are in fact dead.’
He paused.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I guess I am getting angry, because suddenly I’m feeling like a dupe, and the feeling only seems to be amplifying.’
‘Please,’ Peter said, ‘you really and truly do have a right to be angry, although I would have expected you to be surprised a while longer, since I, unlike you, have had ample opportunity to imagine this moment. But I would be a fool to ask you to feel otherwise. You must, of course, hear me out.’
Drew thought, I’m reeling. This is what people mean when they say they were sent reeling. I’ve been catapulted over the castle wall. Damn.
‘Hold up a minute,’ he said and looked at the table. He took a deep breath. He focused on a wayward meadow of sugar granules on the table. Peter respected the silence and said nothing, only took a drink from his coffee.
‘How are you so calm?’ Drew asked. ‘Aren’t you agitated or nervous or surprised or something? Anything?’
Peter shrugged. ‘Again, I’ve had opportunity to envision this moment. The placement of the moment is surprising, yes, but the moment itself is not. Not really.’
Another pause. Peter seemed to be waiting for Drew to take the lead. Probably to see which of the imagined scenarios he would have to play. Making the mountain come to him. Now, why did that feel typical?
‘Oddly enough,’ Drew said, ‘I really do want to know why, but it seems that I am so much more interested in knowing how you did it. I mean, people don’t just fake a death just like that. They just don’t. Did the military have a hand in this? Did they make you top secret or something?’
‘Oh, God, no,’ Peter said. ‘I was out of the navy long before I …’ He pursed his lips in thought for a second, ‘checked out, so to speak.’
Drew protested, ‘But there were letters and two men in uniforms came to the door. There was a casket and a death certificate. What the hell?’
‘Just because someone wears a uniform doesn’t mean they’re in the navy.’
‘… ‘
‘I didn’t say it was cheap.’
‘…’
‘Or legal, to be frank. Really, the less you know about the details, the better it is for me.’
‘But how did you know Mom and Dad wouldn’t pursue it? If you weren’t actually in the navy, it would have been so easy for them to find out that, maybe not that you weren’t dead, but that something strange was up.’
‘How long was Dad in the navy?’
A rhetorical question. Drew thought, He’s rehearsed this.
‘Thirty years, thirty days.’
‘And you know how rah-rah God and Country and all that crap that Mom and Dad are, yes?’
‘Well, yeah, but …’
‘I was counting on the fact that if it looked official enough, they would accept it as fact, no questions asked. Judging by our conversation so far, this whole thing seems like rather astounding coincidence rather than planned attack, so it seems I was right. People believe what they want to believe.’
‘They wouldn’t want to believe you were dead.’
‘But they also wouldn’t want to believe something as omnipresent as the government would lie to them. You know how they think. You know how they vote.’
Drew had to admit this was true. His parents had been grief-stricken, but not exactly angry. Thinking back, their acceptance was almost shockingly tacit. But wait.
‘But wait.’
‘Drew,’ Peter said, sounding for all the world like the big brother, ‘it’s really not as difficult as you might think. It’s certainly not easy, but neither is it impossible.’
For the first time, Drew noticed the slight antipodal tinge in Peter’s speech, noithah is it impossible. Peter had been here a while. Drew sat, attempting to order this somehow. No go, it was just too big, too sudden.
‘But why?’
‘Ah, why,’ Peter leaned back in his chair, looking at the ceiling. ‘In all the times that I’ve pictured being found or discovered, I’ve gone over and over again how I would explain why. And I’ve decided,’ he glanced at Drew, ‘you’re not going to like this, I’ve decided not to give an explanation.’
‘What?! Don’t you think I deserve one?’ Drew rose slightly from his chair.
‘Of course you do,’ Peter said and, surprisingly, looked genuinely sorry, ‘but I honestly can’t give one. I can tell you there was no foul play. I’m not in any legal trouble. There’s no cloak and dagger to any of it. But any true explanation would only come off as unsatisfying for both of us. You’d think I was having you on. I can only say to you, imagine if you had the opportunity to completely reinvent yourself. If you didn’t like who you were and there was a chance at hand to completely become someone new, would you consider the opportunity? If someone said, wanna go?, would you?’
Drew, having had some experience in that matter and also having had experience on, he felt, a more healthy path by becoming happy with who he was rather than unhappy with who he was not blah blah blah, said, without much hesitation at all, ‘No.’
‘Well, that’s you. I can only answer for me.’
‘You don’t even seem willing to do that.’
Peter again looked sorry. ‘What can I say to you to make you not upset? Nothing. A better question is, what happens now?’
And there, at the table, was a clear glass dome of silence.
Sydney is a city of jaywalkers. Drew was constantly left alone at crossings waiting for the walk signal. Perhaps as a reaction, each signal emitted an emphatically loud series of chirps and beeps when it was time to walk, as if to say, Where the hell are you all going? Here, he stood alone as men, women, children, an old lady with a walker, all crossed the street against the light. Drew stared at the opposite curb and took no notice. He had left the cafe five minutes ago. The five-and-a-half blissful days of the vacation so far were temporarily obliterated. Drew was trying to convince himself that what had happened, had happened. He was failing.
What was that all about?
Both brothers had become unable to really say anything further than nothing. They agreed to meet later. Drew gave Peter his hotel name, room and phone number. Peter gave Drew his home phone. Drew had not been without suspicion.
‘How do I know this is real?’ he had asked. ‘How do I know you’re not going to skip out on me? I shouldn’t let you out of my sight, if you want to know my honest opinion.’
‘No,’ Peter said, ‘I understand, but I might as well face this now. It’s as good a time as any to face the music, pay the piper, et cetera.’ He had even said, et cetera.
‘All right,’ said Drew, warily.
‘But there’s a price,’ Peter said.
‘What price?’
‘I only agree to meet you again on the condition you keep this information to yourself. I am not willing to make a re-emergence into my past life. And I don’t mean not yet. I mean not at all. If you tell Mom and Dad, there’s no way I’m going to give you anything more, and I’ll just disappear again. You know I can do it.’
‘You have no way of knowing whether I’ll tell them or not.’
‘Yes, I do,’ Peter said and smiled. ‘Mom and Dad were always blind to your lies, but I could always tell. Do they know you’re queer yet, by the way?’
He smiled, but not unkindly. Drew decided to take it in stride.
‘But even if I did tell them, they’d know you were alive which is a lot different than thinking you were dead.’
Peter frowned. ‘What would they do? Come looking for me? They wouldn’t find me. They wouldn’t find any trace. They would end up either thinking you were lying or resenting you for taking their peace of mind away. Either way, you lose.’
Drew’s stomach sank.
‘I hate to be like this,’ Peter said, ‘but I can’t compromise here. I’ll see you, but you can’t tell. Not anyone, not ever. Okay?’
Bewildered and, it seemed now, bewilderingly, Drew accepted the offer and meant it. Peter wrote down his phone number and told Drew to call him at seven. They parted and that was that. It was only the paper on which the number was written that gave Drew any hard proof that their meeting had occurred at all.
Damn, he thought, damn, damn, damn. Drew moved down Oxford Street. Lies, he thought.
There had been Thandie, around whom Drew managed to produce enough ambiguous smoke to throw his parents off the Happy Trail during his adolescence. They would ask with hungry eyes, ‘Why don’t you ask that Thandie out on a regular date instead of all this “friends” stuff?’ Drew would answer truthfully, ‘I prefer her as a friend. She’s a great friend.’ But he would very slightly double the meaning, sparkling his eyes a bit. His parents would smile to themselves knowingly (hopefully) and leave the subject be. So Drew managed to become quite good at equivocation, which was less brave and less defensible than lying, but give the guy a break. The truth (‘Mom, Dad, I’m fucking Mark Walters from down the street right under your noses.’) was an amusing but completely untenable option.
The fact that Thandie was black helped. The parents could never really extend their approval, old teachings dying hard, but neither, in their relief at a female in their son’s life and in their Christian wish to be colorblind, could they object. About and around Thandie, they were effectively paralyzed. Check and checkmate. Drew couldn’t have been more fortunate had he gotten married.
It takes two parties for a lie, doesn’t it? Drew thought under the day’s cold, white sun. The liar and the believer. Damn, I think I just made a huge mistake.
He ran back to the cafe, pushing Australian pedestrians aside and experiencing his first rudeness. He reached the cafe door and looked around. Of course Peter was gone. Of course he was. The meeting was over, he would have gone home or wherever, he would be expecting Drew to call him tonight.
Shit. The next five and a half hours lay before him like staticky white noise.
He killed time in the worst way: television. He watched Australian news and tried to figure out the temperature conversions (Was thirty-one hot or merely warm?). He watched a documentary on art and was surprised to see full-frontal male nudity at five in the afternoon (although still not quite as surprising as seeing a documentary on at five in the afternoon). He watched a rerun of The Jeffersons (George is put under hypnosis). He watched the Australian version of Wheel of Fortune in horrified awe. There wasn’t enough tension in the clicker that slowed the wheel down, so a contestant would spin and the wheel would go and go and go and go while everyone smiled and clapped and said ‘Big Money!’ in Australian accents.
It was all boring enough to keep his mind off what he was sure was a fumble about Peter. Although at commercials: He’s not going to be there. The number is made-up. He said just enough to get away from me and now he’s gone again. He knows no one would believe me and that it would just upset them. Worst of all, he knows that if I never see him again, I’ll convince myself that it was all some imagined thing. I hate it that he knows that about me. Shit shit shit shit. Et cetera. Drew is not much help to us at this moment. He is mostly incoherent, and when he’s not, he’s saying ‘United States President Gerald Ford’ to the television screen.
Ring. Skepticism. Ring. Self-flagellation (‘You fucking imbecile.’). Ring. More obscenities, tut tut (‘Godammit.’). Ring. ‘Hello.’ Redemption.
‘Peter?’
‘No, hold on.’ A shout to the back of the room. ‘Peter! Phone!’
A tupperware party of milliseconds.
‘Hello?’
‘Peter? It’s Drew.’
‘Drew. You’re half an hour early.’
‘Yeah, well.’
‘No problem. We should meet.’
‘Where?’
‘I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.’
‘Great. Terrific.’
‘Bye.’
‘Bye.’
A black hole, an airless, dustless, thoughtless vacuum of nothing. Nineteen minutes to go. It briefly occurred to Drew that this was ruining his vacation.
The car was a brick-brown Honda. Peter got out as Drew walked up.
‘Hey,’ Peter greeted.
‘Hi,’ Drew said, ‘glad you came.’
‘Uh, listen,’ Peter said, ‘I brought a few friends along. Hope you don’t mind.’
Getting in the car, ‘Drew, this is Dan and Arthur. Guys, this is my friend Drew from America.’
Drew locked eyes with Peter. Peter raised his eyebrows, and the car sped off into Sydney traffic.
Well.
At dinner:
‘So,’ Dan asked, ‘how long have you two Yanks known each other?’
Drew had no response to this.
‘Since we were kids,’ Peter said. ‘Our parents were mutual friends.’
He glanced over to Drew, forcibly passing the baton. Hand it back? or …
‘The age difference was a little much for us to be really close, but our families kept kind of intertwining,’ Drew sighed complicitly.
Peter didn’t smile or offer any overt thanks, but his body settled in a satisfied way.
‘So when I was planning my trip, I thought I’d look Peter up.’
‘Well, that’s great,’ said Arthur. ‘It’s always nice to have friends overseas.’
‘Yeah,’ Dan continued, ‘we’ve got a friend in Germany we always stay with when we go …’
And off they all went to Europe, and the tapestry for the evening began to be woven, until it got thick enough to smother. The rest of the dinner conversation was the same charade with only one noteworthy exchange. Arthur was speaking: ‘And then out of the record store walks Nathan, this guy Peter used to date, and he …’ Drew looked across at Peter. Peter smiled and shrugged. Drew sighed. Uncle, he thought and surrendered.
Drew looked back over the years and it seemed absurdly impossible that he could have missed it. Missing Dan and Arthur was one thing, his mind had been on other things entirely. But not once in the admittedly staccato times that Drew and Peter had spent together had Drew sensed anything. At all. Peter hadn’t even mentioned it at lunch, even after he had pretty much nailed Drew’s own private truths to his forehead. Maybe it was because Drew had never expected it, had never gone looking.
What’s going on? Drew thought. Have I lost every one of my bearings?
Loud. And loud. And loud. They had gone to a club.
‘What?!’
‘This is hopeless!’
It was all crash, clamor and silence.
And then of course it was late. And of course Peter was tired. And of course the evening was over. The drive to Drew’s hotel passed in the same silence that had muffled the past two hours. Drew accepted that he’d been defeated and tried to be gracious. As they approached, he said, ‘I’ve got another day here in Sydney, want to try to get together tomorrow?’
Peter made a half-wince of apology. Drew was surprised when he said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ There was a contradiction there somewhere.
‘I’ll call you in the morning,’ Peter said.
‘Oh,’ Drew said, getting out of the car.
‘I will,’ Peter insisted, but only slightly. ‘We’ll go to the beach. Or something.’
Drew smiled to mask the importance of this to Dan and Arthur. ‘Nice meeting you both; it was fun.’ And to Peter: ‘If I don’t hear from you by ten, you’ll know I’ll have given up.’
He shut the car door, turned, and went into the hotel, shellshocked.
What happened just there?
Up by six. Showered and groomed by six-thirty. Body clenched tight as a fist by 6:45. The jetlag had dwindled to the point of making Drew simply an early-rising Sydneysider. He breakfasted at the hotel café after explaining in quite annoying detail just how important it was for him to be retrieved if anyone called. He forced his way through his coffee, purposely black, and therefore undrinkable, to encourage deliberation. After nearly two hours, he looked at his watch. It was 7:25. Fucking hell, he thought.
His overwhelming impression of the previous night was of sudden entropy. As if, after blithely running through dandelion seeds, he had suddenly found himself immersed in salt, only able to move millimeters although not really at all. If you know what he means. Drew is clearly becoming useless to us again but fortunately, there is a phone call:
‘It’s Mom,’ smiled the hotel counter girl who, up until now, had seemed so kind.
For a moment, Drew considered excuses. (Tell her I’m out. Tell her I’m sleeping. Tell her I hate her, for Christ’s sake.) Then Malevolent Counter Girl said into the receiver, ‘He’s right here.’ She offered the phone to Drew.
Deep breath. Another. Swallow.
‘Mom?’
‘Hi, son! How’s it going? Are you having a good time?’
‘Hi, mom.’
‘How’s the weather? We got your postcard! Can’t believe it got here so fast!’
‘Six days isn’t long plus remember -’
‘Yes, the dateline, I know. Isn’t that just the weirdest thing?’
‘Did you get to the opera like you planned?’
‘Yeah, Don Giovanni.’
‘Means nothing to me. Is the opera house as neat as it looks on TV?’
Drew saw the girl pick up Line 2 out of the corner of his eye.
‘Mom …’
‘Your father’s in the hospital again.’
(‘Powell Sydney Hotel, can I help you?’)
‘What?’
(‘Actually, he’s standing right here on another line. Isn’t that funny? Can I take a message and have him call you?’)
‘His toe again. He’ll be okay, but it’s sure got him down.’
(’Six o’clock. Sure.’)
‘Look, Mom, I’ve …,’ frantically waving his hands.
(‘I’ll give him the message.’)
‘Yeah, I know, this is costing me a fortune. Call us when you get back.’
(‘Bye.’)
‘Bye, Mom.’ He hung up before he heard her reply. ‘Wait!’ He lunged at the girl as she hung up the phone.
‘Shit!’ he said, too loudly. Heads turned in the lobby.
‘Oh, sorry,’ she smiled at him, oblivious to all despair inflicted. ‘Well, he seemed in quite a hurry anyway. Here’s the message. He’ll pick you up at six, something’s come up.’
Drew took the message. It said, Peter says he’ll pick you up at six, something’s come up.
‘Pick me up here?’ Drew asked.
‘Presumably,’ she said with enough good cheer to blind. Drew looked at his watch. Ten hours, twenty-two minutes to go. He grabbed his hair with both hands.
‘Oh, man,’ he said.
And there it sat. The day. Having made no real itinerary from the beginning, he was faced with the common mistake of novices on vacation: nothing to do. His only formulated plan from a few days ago was ‘the beach or something, it’s Australia for Christ’s sake, someone will come up and offer me things.’
Instead, he walked.
There was a sort of path, not more than an undeveloped block really, near where Drew lived as a child called the Cherry Tree Trail. A purely functional title; simple, nothing haunted. Drew wouldn’t have known a cherry tree from a telephone pole, so he had no idea of the accuracy of the name, but it was a place to go on those rare occasions when enough children in the neighborhood coalesced to do something as a group. If pressed, Drew could only have actually recalled a single time that this happened, but whole childhoods are built around less. It suffices.
This is the memory: No common enemy, no bully from which to hide, and no common goal either, no hunt. Just four or five (or seven or eight) children slowly moving through waxy underbrush and the thick wholesome dirt smell of towering conifers that successfully blotted out signs of suburbia. There is an attention-needer in the group, as always, but he is satisfied by an audience of only two, leaving the others to keep to their own conversations (so there must be more than four, but certainly not more than ten or one group would become two). Weaving under and over tree branches, not everyone always speaks to everyone else but no one leaves the gravitational pull of the group. There is no point to the group, really, except to exist together like water molecules pulled into a drop. The key here is not individuality, because in the burn-and-rest lives of the very young, the different one always remains the different one. After a time, the group bivouacs, and whole bolts of nothing occur. Then splinters of two and the quick wait for sunset. Then each goes home alone, whittled down into exhaustion.
Drew could only remember the names of two friends from this far back in childhood: Angela, whose father was black and mother was white, and Jeremy, who lived in an A-frame house that, if nothing else, was singular. Drew turned around. He half-expected to see one of them getting out of a cab. There was only a man and his young son playing chess on a park bench.
Where was he? The Royal Botanical Gardens again. It was a crisp October spring day, pulled taut by its own length. The sky was a gorgeous asphyxiated-child blue with some saliva foam clouds spat here and there. It was like a really bright and lovely funeral. Drew could have cried. Odd. He hadn’t cried at his brother’s funeral. Looking back on it again, Drew could see the closed coffin, a (pseudo-, it’s turned out) military-issue dark brown, some flowers, a few relatives, scads of just people who felt they should show up. And all the while Drew sitting, itching, craving, dying to leave, to get out, to flee. So now he finally had, only his brother had beaten him to it.
There it was. Well, goddamn it, there it was.
‘Hold on a minute, let me check.’
A pause.
‘There’s no answer in his room. Can I take a message?’
‘Yeah, tell him Peter called, and I’m sorry but I won’t be able to make it.’
‘All righty.’
She wrote the message and scrawled 314 at its top. The other girl behind the counter watched her put it in the message box.
‘314?’ the second girl said.
‘Yeh.’
‘The American fellow?’
‘Yeh?’
‘He checked out half an hour ago. You were at lunch.’
‘Really? But he was real keen on seeing this Peter fellow earlier.’
‘Guess he isn’t now. He took a cab to the airport. Then it’s off to Alice, I think he said.’
‘Hm.’ She crumpled the note and tossed it in the garbage.
And we race through them because, although lovely, they’re nothing exceptional (well, to anyone but Drew) …
Alice Springs and Uluru were heat-blasted, blinding, and thrumming with purpose. At sunrise, it really and truly did change colors. Cairns was lots of rowdy, touristy fun: kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, and wombats; a Great Barrier Reef dive off a sailboat chartered especially for a group of homos; a chance for another smiling indiscretion. Then to Brisbane for the international flight and a seat next to a young Australian man who would not stop bouncing.
‘First time out of Australia,’ he said without prompting, rubbing his hands on his pant legs.
‘Oh, really?’ Drew said, feeling genuinely good. ‘How exciting. Just a holiday?’
‘Yeh, off on an adventure, I guess.’ He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial level, ‘I’m so excited, I’m about to piss my pants.’ He snorted, embarrassed, and bounced some more unconsciously.
‘Just out of college?’ Drew asked.
‘Yup, just done, well, not quite done. Didn’t actually finish. Didn’t really actually start. Not really. Wasn’t real good at it, you know? At uni? Trip’s a present from my folks. Reckon they think I’ll get my head in line or find myself or something.’
He laughed again.
‘And what would you do if you found yourself?’ Drew asked.
‘Dunno,’ he said, and stopped moving for the first time. He smiled again. ‘Buy myself a beer, maybe? Kick my ass for being such a layabout?’
They laughed easily, warmly.
‘You?’ the young man asked back.
‘If I found myself?’
Drew exhaled through his nose and considered. The plane roared forward and upward. Away and away and away.