10
Palm of Saint
Gloria had not been sleeping. While looking at women doing yoga poses, balancing on one leg, she had been contemplating what had happened earlier that day. Upon arriving in Fields Corner, she had parked her car by the Planet Fitness, put money in the meter with her disobedient fingers and begun walking the hundred feet or so to the building where she worked. Her route passed in front of houses with bare trees jutting out of yards, silhouetted against the cold pale sky. The morning light was changing, the earth was tilting, the days starting earlier. It was already brighter than December. She had been having this thought when her legs stopped working and she fell.
It was her first fall, and it was utterly disastrous. It happened just outside her job—within grabbing distance of the steel tube railing on the concrete handicap-accessible ramp. But she hadn’t had a prayer of grabbing it. She hadn’t been able to get up, had lain on the sidewalk weeping. Emotional shock, public embarrassment—she had felt slapped by her father, a man long dead. Strangers had helped her up and she had pulled herself together, refusing further assistance.
Now, with her blonde head on the pillow, she remained awake deep into the night with her knees curled up. Her eyes kept opening and she kept closing them. She didn’t drop off until two or three. She woke up again and saw it was four already on the bedside clock, the lamp still on. She was still in her clothes, yesterday’s slacks, and it was nearly time for another day. And in the day that was to come she’d continue to keep her accident a secret. She wouldn’t tell her neurologist, wouldn’t tell her family—her son, that is. She’d keep it a secret, pretending it had never happened out of real fear about what it meant.
But as the month played out, Corey would see his mother’s gait was changing. At the same time, he would become aware of a disquiet that centered on his father.
A few days after Adrian’s visit, Corey was alone with his father after school and Leonard got on the subject of Richard Feynman, the working-class genius of immigrant parents who had contributed both to quantum theory and the atomic bomb, against all odds whether intellectual or economic.
“You have to understand science is a human pursuit, therefore it’s an economic pursuit, therefore it’s subject to competitive economics. Consider capitalism—” If history was a lie, Leonard said, so was the history of science. Real science was done by armies of exploited workers, common folk whose names were never known. Unlike Feynman, a heroic revolutionary, James D. Watson, Bill Gates, Isaac Newton were robber barons who had stood on the shoulders of money.
“Capitalism teaches us to lie, cheat and steal. Those of us without the silver spoon have to lie, cheat and steal more than the competition just to keep up. Just ask Paul Erdős.”
“What did he say?”
“The world is run by women. Paul Erdős was the greatest mind of the twentieth century after Feynman.”
Corey said he had an errand to run. He left the house and walked around the neighborhood, thinking. He returned when dusk was falling and told Leonard he wanted to talk about ALS.
His father had made himself dinner while he was gone and had already finished eating.
“You realize, nothing will stop her from dying.”
“I know that.”
“That’s what terminally ill means.”
“But we can still help her, can’t we? You care about my mother, don’t you?”
“Of course I care about your mother. I go a long way back with her. A lot longer than you do. Before you were born.”
“I was worried for a minute.”
“It’s a difficult situation,” Leonard said.
Corey bowed his head.
“It’s very sad for me,” Leonard sighed. “I remember when she was still in college, when she was really still a girl. I took her around Boston for the first time, the real city—not Cambridge. We went to Santarpio’s. I remember how it opened up her eyes. Her eyes blew up—Italian pizza! Learning about different cultures, getting her outside the narrow framework she was in. I had never been with someone who was so fundamentally narrow before. She was from the sticks. I remember it forced me to take stock. I made the decision to get involved. I mentored her. She was so proud of her education, I remember, and she was actually getting a very bad education at the time, a terrible education, and I had to be the one to tell her: Challenge authority! Question everything! Don’t buy what they’re selling you! And most of all, grow, grow, grow! I watched her grow a huge amount as a person. I put myself on the line to make that happen. I had to be the one to tell her to quit school. How do you think that went down? Sometimes the student turns on the teacher. I took the heat for that.”
“Well, I just want to help her now.”
“I know that no son wants to hear about what his mother did before he was born. It makes you uncomfortable. But I’m telling you this for a reason, Corey. There’s always a reason. It’s because I think you’re old enough to hear. Do you understand?”
“I guess so.”
“I became very good at surviving. There are lots of things I’ve learned. Things most men don’t know. Things I could teach you.”
“Like what?”
“My experience has been very wide.”
Corey asked Leonard to tell him what he meant. Leonard said he’d have to wait. Be patient. He’d tell him when he was ready, a little at a time.
As they were talking, Corey had been getting cold. When he went to the kitchen where Leonard had been cooking, he found the reason why: The window was open as wide as it would go like a gaping hollering mouth. Pots and pans lay everywhere and the room stank. The trash barrel was full. The sour greasy rankness of the smell distressed him psychologically for reasons he could not explain. It didn’t feel like their kitchen anymore. Leonard’s cooking—brown sauce full of chunky stuff in Tupperware containers—had taken over an entire shelf in the refrigerator. Gloria’s food was stuffed on other shelves. An empty can of tomato paste sat on the floor, the razor-sharp lid open like a talking trash can.
When he went to close the window, the screen was nowhere to be found. It was lying on the ground outside. He leaned out and picked it up and fit it in the sash.
He started putting the pots and pans in the sink. One was an expensive Teflon skillet that was unfamiliar. There was grease on his mother’s protein. The paper towels had been used down to the cardboard tube. Tiny orange grease spores and black cindery dust were spattered in a ring around the stovetop burner, a white hole in the center, corresponding to the skillet, like the hole in the center of a solar eclipse. He took his shirt off and used it as a rag.
The room began to warm, but it was getting darker. He snapped on the light and took the trash out. There was another bag of garbage leaking on the kitchen floor. He ran the bags out to the curb—they were heavy to the point of ripping—and ran back in, barefoot, bare-chested and freezing.
He felt the need to explain himself to Leonard. He said he wanted to get the house in order for his mother: “I know I’m weird.”
When she got back that night, Corey told her in Leonard’s hearing he’d been cleaning up a mess his father had made.
The next day when he came home from school and didn’t see Leonard on the couch, he went to the kitchen to look for him, and he was there. Corey broke into a grin and said, “What are we going to talk about today?”
“How about nothing?” Leonard said.
“Are you mad?”
The man was cutting piles of garlic with a kitchen knife, which appeared to come from the same designer cooking-ware collection as the Teflon skillet. The skillet was green-tea green; the knife’s blade and handle were enameled dandelion yellow and modeled on a samurai sword. Leonard had chopped so much garlic with it the tiny slivers formed a mountain you could have scooped up and molded into a baseball. He wore a gauntlet of sticky white garlic slivers as if he’d dipped his knuckles in glue and then in broken lightbulb shards. Skins lay drifted on the kitchen floor. He broke another head of garlic into cloves. The skins stuck to his fingers like sheets of dandruff. He picked up the knife and continued cutting.
“Corey, let me give you a word of advice.”
“Sure.”
“You can bullshit anybody you want, but you can’t bullshit me.”
“What do you mean?”
Leonard told him to get lost. Out of nowhere, Corey lost control of himself and started crying in the kitchen doorway. Wiping his face, he began making a full confession. “I narked on you to my mother about the mess. I still want to earn your trust.”
Leonard was willing to forgive and forget. “You had a labial moment.”
“A what?”
“A labial moment.”
“Oh, like labia?”
And so Leonard was willing to talk to him again.
“Look, Corey, you have to understand: I grew up different from you. It was a very different time. We had rumbles. I doubt you know what a rumble is. It’s a gang fight where you hit someone with a garbage can lid or a bike chain. Society has changed. If you did half the stuff I did back then, they’d lock you up and throw away the key. You can do anything now of a peaceful nature. You want to do a protest march, they’ll let you. We had the Vietnam War back then, and you did not oppose the Vietnam War—but I did. I got called every name in the book: pinko, commie. I had these kids in my school who were dead set on fighting me. Their dads were construction workers. My dad was a bum unfortunately. So I said we could fight, but we had to go to this place I knew. We had these marshes, these flats where I dug for clams. I knew exactly how far away it was; it was two miles exactly from where we were. I thought they’d say forget it and the fight would be off. But they were willing to walk the whole two miles for the chance to beat up a communist.”
“What happened?”
“The fight didn’t go the way they thought it would.”
“You mean, you beat up two guys?”
“I find that when you know boxing and wrestling, you can do pretty well in most fights, and I knew boxing and wrestling.”
“That’s so awesome,” Corey said.
“A boy could never cry, even a young boy. No matter what was done to me, I could never cry, even when I was four or five years old.”
“That’s great. I have to be more like that.”
“By the time I was your age, it would have been unheard-of, even for a weaker kid. But I didn’t grow up with a mother like you.”
“I thought you had a mother.”
“That’s what it said on the box, but that wasn’t what was inside.”
“She was really psycho?”
“I don’t like that term psycho.”
Corey waited for Leonard to tell him a better term, but he didn’t. Instead, he told Corey, “You want to talk about everyone’s mother but yours.”
“I’ll talk about my mother! I mean, we both care for her, right? We wouldn’t say anything bad about her, right? So of course I’ll talk about her.”
“You’re such a perfect son.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. Gloria got everything she wanted. No, really, you are perfect.”
“She’s just going through a bad time.”
“Yes, and you want people to say, ‘Oh, look at the perfect son helping his mother.’ ”
“No, I just want to help her for real. I don’t care what anyone says.”
“The noble son.”
“Hey, could we talk about something else?”
“Too tough for you?”
“No, I just feel strongly about it.” Silence held between them for a moment. Then Corey said, “You know, I tried to call you back in November. She needed help and you weren’t around. You never answered my phone call.”
“Oh, Corey, I am so sorry for not getting right back to you. Please give me another chance, it’ll never happen again. Would you like me to call you right now and apologize? Maybe I should apologize for creating you in the first place.”
“I care about my mother. What do you want?”
“Not much. Not much.”
“Did I offend you?”
“Corey, you couldn’t offend me if you tried.”
“Well, that’s good. Look, we started off with you telling me about your childhood. Why don’t we go back to that?”
“How ’bout I tell you about your childhood, Corey?”
“Okay. Fine.”
“Okay, fine. You were an accident.”
“It worked out for me.”
“Yeah, and you want to hear the kicker? I talked a certain somebody out of flushing you.”
“Your parents didn’t like you either, so I guess we’re the same,” Corey blurted. He was upset and didn’t want to talk anymore. He claimed not to be upset and left the room, saying he had homework.
After this, he began to look back at everything Leonard had said to him and question if it was true.
For instance, they’d had a recent conversation about the police. It had started when Leonard had been taking off his trousers because, he said, he didn’t want to wrinkle them for work. They were black polyester uniform trousers with a double blue line of piping down the legs. He folded them and laid them on his cop bag. He took out another pair of trousers and put them on. They were almost exactly the same as the original pair except they had a different style of piping: a single crimson line. Corey asked, “Why do you have two different kinds of cop pants?”
Leonard ignored the question, and Corey thought, Did I annoy him?
“I didn’t mean to pry.”
“Cops! They’re a bunch of pigs,” Leonard snarled. “The worst are the Cambridge Police Department. They’re some of the most despicable people in the world.”
Corey was astonished. Leonard told him not to be naïve. “I know certain pigs I’d kill without a second thought.”
“In Cambridge?”
“Without hesitation. I’m talking worthless people. Real human slime. The kind where you’d be doing the world a favor by blowing them away.”
“But what did they do?”
“They’re a corrupt organization. I began independently investigating them for racially profiling minority women. We have a lot of minority women on campus, and when they were going out into Cambridge, they were getting harassed. My investigation found the problem started with Chief Scumbag Joe LaFleur, who was basically giving days off in exchange for traffic stops. This is the caliber of man who thinks that Karl Marx was one of the Marx Brothers. Most of his officers wouldn’t understand the concept of being a capitalist stooge if you drew them a picture. So, doing my job as a peace officer working for one of the leading universities in America, I forward my investigation to my commanding officer. I tell him, we’ve got a problem here. We have a highly diverse campus. Many of our students are off-white girls. They’re getting clobbered out there. Let’s handle this diplomatically with the higher level of the Cambridge PD. Translation: Get off your ass and tell your golf buddy, LaFleur Fuckface, to quit coming down on these women of color. Next thing you know, I’m facing a disciplinary hearing, loss of pay, loss of rank. I guess I must’ve struck a nerve. They’re coming after the whistleblower. Now, I know where the battle lines are drawn; I’m a lifelong socialist in the line of Chomsky, in that lineage. I’m prepared to plant a bug in the chief’s office. I’m prepared to be a dirty trickster. Because these women were innocent! They were girls! And I said to my union rep, I’ll go all the way with this. I want to speak the truth, and if I get fired, I’ll take that. I begged him, ‘Do not muzzle me.’ But he said, ‘Lenny, forget it. These guys are all best friends, and if you take them down, you’re gonna take down a lot of good people with them.’ So I walked into that hearing and didn’t say a word in my own defense.”
“But I don’t get it. What was the hearing for? What did they say you’d done?”
“They had me on a whole trumped-up case of stalking these coeds. All my investigation notes, my log, where my car had been—they took everything and creatively interpreted it to say that I was following them. I was actually impressed at their creativity. They must have taken a lot of time building this trumped-up case against me instead of keeping the people of Cambridge safe.”
Corey had assured Leonard he completely appreciated that a given thing could look two utterly different ways depending on how you looked at it. At the time, he had taken Leonard’s story at face value, as evidence of his colorful life and embattled individualism, and as an eye-opening account of how the world really worked—of how contemptibly misguided and narrow-minded even supposedly good people could be.
But now, he wondered why did Leonard have two different sets of uniform trousers?
Corey took his troubles to his friend.
“Just a week ago he was a great scientist. What could happen in one week that would make you turn against him? Think hard.” Adrian leaned forward, frowning, wearing glasses. “What are you really worried about?” He pressed the first two fingers of his hand against his lower lip and prepared to listen. “Try and be specific.” Adrian knew how to ask these questions. He’d been seeing a psychiatrist for years.
“I don’t trust him,” Corey said.
Adrian tapped his lower lip, said “Hm,” and betrayed the hint of a smile. “That’s interesting.”
“How so?”
“You’re paranoid.”
“Really?”
Adrian smiled openly. “I’m paranoid too.” He spread his legs and rapped his crotch. “Why do you think I wear a cup all the time?”
“I didn’t know you wore it all the time.”
“Oh but I do.” Adrian said he wore it all the time—not just during wrestling practice, but after practice when his cup was reeking and all day long without washing, and not just during wrestling season either, but year-round. Adrian admitted that it made him stink, but far from minding it, he delighted in it; he was proud of smelling bad.
“But why do you do that?”
“I’m afraid of getting castrated.”
“Yeah, but why?”
“It’s related to my mother. Freud describes it.” Adrian touched the Freud on his desk, a thick chunk of a book that brought together the thinker’s major writings—a portable edition like the Nietzsche, which he had finished.
“Can you explain it?”
“It’s simple really. Let’s say a boy has a certain amount of self-esteem, but it makes his mother jealous. She has penis envy. She wants those feelings of love and esteem for herself.”
Even if he couldn’t explain it to the satisfaction of his psychoanalytically inclined friend, by the end of January, Corey felt he had gone full circle: from not knowing his father, to thinking he knew him a little, and back to not knowing him at all.
The energy of their relationship changed, but it didn’t dissolve right away. Corey still had an appetite for Leonard’s stories. Then one sunny day, Leonard gave him a drug without warning, something that wasn’t pot. He gave him what appeared to be a joint from his cop bag. Corey lit the joint and the smoke tasted bitter, almost like burning plastic, right away; not like an herb, but like something you shouldn’t put inside you.
“Do you want a hit?” he asked his father.
“No, that’s for you.”
Everything else in the room—the splintered wooden flooring lit by the sun, the battered coffee table, the dust on the books, the beige futon, the woven wall hanging of Buddha Gautama floating joyfully in the center of a flower, Leonard’s cheap black trousers, his undershirt and the gray-white meat of his large bare arms, his Jesuit face in spectacles—all was opaque and no light passed through it; it all absorbed the sun, thought Corey. He realized that he didn’t feel normal.
“Pot is the drug of the counterculture,” Leonard said. “You know who turned me on to pot? I had a girlfriend who used Jamaican marijuana as an aphrodisiac. She’d feel like making love for hours. To please a woman, you stay inside her. You can’t go slow enough. You enter her and very gently start to move. You don’t go in and out. You stay in and move in a circle. Most men have no idea what they’re doing. She taught me all that. Do you know who she was?”
“I feel sick in the head,” Corey said.
“Go get yourself a glass of water.” Leonard took the joint out of his hand, extinguished it on the table, swept up the ashes, and put it in a plastic bag.
That night, Corey dreamed that he was driving through the desert with his mother. They rode in a beat-up white car with dirt ground into the paint, as if they had been driving for days. They were living in the car and the metallic strip along the door had been broken off. He didn’t know why they were in the desert. For some reason, he knew it had to do with San Francisco.
The sky was radiant. There was an ache behind his eyes. Something was tightening protectively inside his head to stop him from seeing so much sunlight all at once.
His blonde-haired mother was showing him the giant saguaro cactus. She wore sunglasses, and he could see the giant cactus in her eyes like the figure of a man.
Saguaro, he knew, meant “palm of saint.”
Someone else was there, someone he believed to be the man he knew as Leonard. He saw a building that was a trailer or a gas station. The man came out carrying an armload of food cans. The man was putting a bottle of black oil in the car. He thought they must have been at someone’s house, a trailer or a cabin in the woods.
All of them were working, doing some kind of landscaping. To Corey, it was a game of watching out for thorns. The man, whoever he was, was cutting branches using a chainsaw, wearing leather gloves.
They threw down mesquite and bright green creosote boughs that the man had cut, and started a fire, a little quiet flame that began seeping through the branches. The fire caught on and started crackling. When the creosote ignited, the wood made a sound like a blowtorch and a thick unreal-looking curtain of orange flame lifted up ten or twelve feet high.
The fire made him think of a giant genie dancing and flapping an orange rug over his mother.
Corey was fascinated by the churning, bloody-looking fire, licking and billowing. But his mother was upset. She asked Leonard not to burn anything else.
But Leonard wouldn’t listen. He told Corey to help him drag more brush on the fire, and Corey did what he was told, but felt guilty about it.
An American Indian woman wearing a cowboy hat came directly up the road to them and asked, “Do you know what you’re doing? Ten years ago this entire desert burned up from a campfire. All it takes is a little wind and everything here is going to burn, all these people’s houses.”
“You see?” his mother cried. “Don’t you see, Leonard?”
But the man ignored both women and set fire to the rest of the brush.
There was something in the dream that Corey’s mind was hiding from himself, much like the inner mechanism of his eyes shutting out the sun.