See You in Paradise Page 2

  Maybe I’m remembering this wrong—you know, piling all our misfortunes together in one place in my mind—but I believe it was in the coming days that the kids began to change, or rather to settle into what we thought (hoped) were temporary patterns of unsavory behavior. Chester’s muttered monologuing, which for a long time we thought was singing, or an effort to memorize something, took on a new intensity—his face would turn red, spittle would gather at the corners of his mouth, and when we interrupted him he would gaze at us with hatred, some residual emotion from his violent fantasy world. As for Luann, the phone began ringing a lot more often, and she would disappear with the receiver into private corners of the house to whisper secrets to her friends. Eventually, of course, the friends turned into boys. Gretchen bought her some makeup, and the tight jeans and tee shirts she craved—because what are you going to do, make the kid wear hoop dresses and bonnets?

  As for Gretchen, well—I don’t know. She started giving me these looks, not exactly pitying, but regretful, maybe. Disappointed. And not even in me, particularly—more like, she had disappointed herself for setting her sights so low. I’m tempted to blame the portal for all this, the way it showed us how pathetic, how circumscribed our lives really were. But I didn’t need a magic portal to tell me I was no Mr. Excitement—I like my creature comforts, and I liked it when my wife and kids didn’t demand too much from me, and when you get down to it, maybe all that, not the portal, is the reason everything started going south. Not that Gretchen’s parents helped matters when they bought Chester the video game for his birthday—an hour in front of that thing and adios, amigo. Whatever demons were battling in his mind all day long found expression through his thumbs—it became the only thing that gave the poor kid any comfort. And eventually we would come to realize that Luann was turning into, forgive me, something of a slut, and that Chester had lost what few social graces we’d managed to teach him. Today his face is riddled with zits, he wanders off from the school grounds two or three times a week, and he still gets skidmarks in his tighty whities. And Luann—we bought her a used car in exchange for a promise to drive Chester where he wanted to go, but she gave him a ride maybe once—it was to, God knows why, the sheet metal fabricating place down behind the supermarket—and then forgot him there for four hours while she did god knows what with god knows who. (“It doesn’t matter what I was doing! Stuff!”)

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. You’d think we would have quit the portal entirely after the robot fog incident, but then you’re probably mistaking us for intelligent people. Instead we went back now and again—it was the only thing we could all agree to do together. Sometimes I went by myself, too. I suspect Gretchen was doing the same—she’d be missing for a couple of hours then would come back flushed and covered with burrs, claiming to have been down on the recreation path, jogging. I don’t think the kids went alone—but then where did Chester get that weird knife?

  In any event, what we saw in there became increasingly disturbing. Crowds of people with no faces, a world where the ground itself seemed to be alive, heaving and sweating. We generally wouldn’t spend more than a few minutes wherever we ended up. The portal, in its decline into senility, seemed to have developed an independent streak, a mind of its own. It was … giving us things. Things it thought we wanted. It showed us a world that was almost all noise and confusion and flashing red light, with a soundtrack of something you could hardly call music made by something you maybe could mistake for guitars. Only Luann had a good time in that one. There was Chester’s world, the one that wheeled around us in pixelated, rainbow 3-D, where every big-eyed armored creature exploded into fountains of glittering blood and coins, and the one that looked like ours, except thinner, everything thinner, the buildings and people and trucks and cars, and from the expression of horror on Gretchen’s face, I could tell where that one was coming from. And there was the one place where all the creatures great and small appeared to have the red hair, thick ankles, and perky little boobs of the new administrative assistant at my office. Gretchen didn’t talk to me for days after that, but it certainly did put me off the new assistant.

  And so before the summer was over, we gave up. The kids were too busy indulging their new selves and quit playing make-believe out in the woods. And Gretchen and I were lost in our private worlds of self-disgust and conjugal disharmony. By Christmas we’d forgotten about the portal, and the clearing began to fill in. We did what people do: we heaved our grim corporeal selves through life.

  I checked back there a couple of times over the next few years—you know, just to see if everything looked all right. Needless to say, last time I checked, it didn’t—the humming was getting pretty loud, and the shimmering oval was all lopsided, with a sort of hernia in the lower left corner, which was actually drooping far enough to touch the ground. When I poked a stick through the opening, there was a pop and a spark and a cloud of smoke, and the portal seemed to emit a kind of hacking cough, followed by the scent of ozone and rot. When I returned to the house and told Gretchen what I’d seen, she didn’t seem to care. And so I decided not to care, either. Like I said before, there were more important things to worry about.

  Just a few weeks ago, though, I started hearing strange noises at night. “Didya hear that?” I’d say out loud, and if I was in bed with Gretchen (as opposed to on the sofa, alone), she would rise up out of half-sleep to tell me no, it was just a dream. But it wasn’t. It was a little like a coyote’s yip, but deeper, more elongated. And sometimes there would be a screech of metal on metal, or a kind of random ticking; and if I got up and looked out the window, sometimes I thought I could see a strange glow coming from the woods.

  And now, even in the daytime, there’s a funny odor hanging around the yard. It’s springtime, and Gretchen says it’s just the smell of nature waking up. But I don’t think so. Is springtime supposed to smell like motor oil and dog piss in the morning? To be perfectly honest, I’m beginning to be afraid of what our irresponsibility, our helplessness, has wrought. I mean, we bought this place. We own it, just like we own all our other problems.

  I try to talk to Gretchen about it, but she doesn’t want to hear it. “I’m on a different track right now,” she says. “I can’t be distracted from my healing.” “Healing from what?” I want to know. “My psychic disharmony.” I mean, what can you say to that? Meanwhile, I have no idea where our daughter is half the time, and I haven’t gone up to Chester’s room in three weeks. I can hear him up there, muttering; I can hear the bed squeak as he acts out his violent fantasies; I hear the menacing orchestral strings and explosions and tortured screams that emanate from his favorite games.

  Problems don’t just go away, you know? Problems get bigger and bigger and before you know it they’re bigger than you are, and it’s too late to fix them. Some days, when I’ve gotten a decent night’s sleep and have had a few cups of coffee, I think sure, I’ll just get on the phone, start calling people up and asking for help. A school guidance counselor, a marriage therapist, a pediatrician, a witch or shaman or wizard or physicist or whoever in the hell might know what to do about the portal, or even have the balls to walk down that path and see what’s become of the clearing.

  But on other days, days like today, when I’m too damned tired even to reach for the phone, the only emotion I can summon up is longing, for a time when the world was miraculous, when I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and start living.

  I mean, the magic has to come from someplace, right? It’s out there, bestowing itself on somebody else’s wife, somebody else’s kids, somebody else’s life. All I want is to get just a little of it back. Is that so much to ask?

  No Life

  In the sunblasted park, at the water’s edge, a titan willow shades a circle of grass and lake. Beneath it the children can be seen wearing red tee shirts, white sneakers, and tan shorts. There are about twenty-five of them, from four years old to fourteen. A few brave the heat with a soccer ball; most are engaged in a game that se
ems to involve keeping a bunch of beanbags in the air. The grass is dead: it’s late June and there hasn’t been a day of rain in three weeks. Edward and Alison are watching from their car.

  Edward is thinking that, from here, they all look pretty good. Scrubbed and uniformed, the children glance from time to time at the organizers grilling meat nearby, setting out foil-covered plates on a folding buffet table. The sight gives Edward a magnanimous, fatherly feeling. He thinks he’d better keep this feeling in check: You don’t go hungry to the grocer’s, he likes to say.

  Alison is thinking: I don’t want a white one. I don’t want to be one of those people who has to have the right kind. Give me a black one or a Chinese one or something, they’re all kids, they’ve all got good hearts, it doesn’t matter.

  Neither gets out of the car. Edward says, “Couldn’t have picked a nicer day.”

  Alison sighs. “The grass,” she says.

  Then they notice the other couples. How could they have missed them? They’re so conspicuous, each standing alone, far, far from the other couples, all of them perfectly still, watching. They’re clean, neat, studiously casual: belted shorts and golf shirts for the men, sundresses and summer hats for the women: exactly the way Edward and Alison are dressed.

  The children don’t seem to notice. Some have been passed over a hundred times. Some have no hope at all, Alison is thinking, but they’ve come anyway, just in case. They’re playing, just like normal children. They are normal children, she reminds herself.

  “There,” Edward says, pointing. A couple is making its move, heading for a spot beneath the willow where three children are playing a board game on the grass. As they approach, the man and woman bend over, readying themselves to speak. One child, a black-haired, dark-skinned boy, looks up.

  The couple is intercepted by an organizer.

  “Whoops,” says Edward.

  The organizers are wearing white tee shirts with an insignia on the breast. This organizer, a plump, youngish woman, has her hand stuck straight out to be shaken. The man and woman right themselves to clasp it. They are led to a buffet table and given name tags. The black-haired boy watches until he’s handed the dice. Then he turns back to his game. The woman, narrow-faced, wan, thin-haired, continues to stare at the boy until her husband pulls her away.

  “I can’t do this,” says Alison.

  “It’s a walk in the park,” Edward tells her, then realizes the unintended joke and says, very loudly, “Ha!”

  He gets out of the car; she follows.

  The head organizer is named Greta. Edward misses the name when she introduces herself and ends up having to lean close to read her name tag. But not too close; he doesn’t want her to think he’s checking out her boobs, though of course he is. Consequently he reads it as “Great.” Can that be right? She is tall and unbalanced, like a stack of colorful wooden blocks.

  “I am simply thrilled to see you all here today,” says Great. She has herded the couples onto a patch of grass that is burdened by direct sun, where they have been asked to sit. Behind them the children play, stealing glances. “A few guidelines. One, we have brought no forms to fill out, nothing like that. Today is just for kicks. If you hit it off with a particular child, let us know, and we can arrange a meeting. Two, don’t talk about why you’re here, please. The children already know, and they are a little nervous! So talk about something else—doggies, sports, airplanes, church.”

  Edward begins thinking about how he might incorporate all these subjects into a single sentence.

  Alison thinks that the other couples look better qualified, wealthier, tougher than she and Edward. They probably have connections: she always believes all other people know one another. What if our child turns out to be religious? she wonders. A Baha’i? A Jain? There would be time to get books out of the library.

  “And third, and this is most important, please: do not, under any circumstances, ask a child if he or she wants to come home with you, okay? Okay! Terrific!” Great claps her hands. The couples stand up.

  Edward heads straight for the tallest child, an ugly, pale boy with stretched features: a long nose; narrow, slanted, almost Asian eyes; a pointed chin. He is sitting in the shade watching the other kids. Edward sits beside him.

  “You don’t want me, man,” the kid says.

  “Thanks for the tip,” Edward tells him, and the kid looks surprised. “Why, what’s wrong with you?”

  “My folks were no good. Also people tried me out before and it didn’t work.”

  “You were bad?”

  The kid laughs. “Uh-huh.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Smoked weed.”

  “Mmm,” says Edward.

  “I never did it before. Their freakin’ real son gave it to me, except they didn’t believe me when I told them.”

  Edward reads the kid’s name tag in an ironic, obvious way. Nate. “Oh, I believe that. Kids have no boundaries, Nate.”

  Nate stares at Edward for a moment. He says, “What’s your name?”

  “Ed.”

  “Do you let kids call you Ed or do they have to call you Mister something?”

  “It’s just Ed,” Edward says. “Like Cher.”

  Edward thinks maybe he’s gone too far. Nate is squinting at him like he’s mad.

  “Like who?” Nate says.

  Alison watches Edward take off alone and feels sick to her stomach. They’re in this together, she thinks. But she imagines what Edward would tell her if she said so: “We can cover more ground split up,” he’d say, as if it were a scavenger hunt. And then she hears him say, “It is a scavenger hunt, Al.” He calls her Al. Most of her boyfriends called her Allie, and the worst of them, a long-lashed pec-pumper named Lou, called her Alison, as if this formalized respect would fool her. Edward calls her Al and she calls him Edward. That happened on the first date. Al and Edward: it went through her head all night long. Then they got married and tried to have a kid for nine years. She didn’t want the drugs; she was afraid of octuplets, and then what? Aborting some, but not others: that wasn’t for her, it seemed so arbitrary. What if they killed the wrong ones? So adoption is it. It’s the right thing to do. They read about the picnic in the paper.

  A child comes to her, a tiny white boy. “Fow me dis!” he says, “fow it to me!” He thrusts a frisbee at her. She draws back, horrified, and it tumbles to the ground. The child picks it up and hands it to her again.

  “Oh! I don’t know …” It’s a test! she thinks, taking the frisbee. It’s a test and I’m flunking!

  The child runs away to a small group of older boys. They are grinning with apparent mischief. “All right!” she calls out. “Get ready! Here it comes!”

  She throws the frisbee, and it wallows in the air and falls ten feet short. “No!” the child says. “Wike dis! Wike dis!” He grabs the frisbee and flings it away, over the heads of the other children, and they chase it and are gone.

  She wanders, watching Edward out of the corner of her eye. He is talking to exactly the wrong kid. She’s done research. Adolescents and teens may already have developed beyond your ability to control them. Sometimes she suspects that Edward doesn’t really want a child at all, and that this secret truth has rendered them infertile. She’s not sure of the mechanics of the thing, but it is as easy to believe as what the doctor has told them.

  At first their desire for children was as passionate and straightforward as a Labrador retriever, and as thoughtless. They liked each other and wanted to make more of themselves. They screwed with delightful abandon. Once it was clear things weren’t working, though, sex became perfunctory. It seemed absurd and implausible, like Twister. They still have it, of course. Sex. They call it “it.” “We should do it.” Neither ever refuses, no matter how unappealing the prospect, because then there would be somebody to blame for their never doing it anymore.

  They are most successful at it when he wears a condom.

  Alison has been thinking these thoughts for a while b
efore she realizes how she must look: slumped, agape, alone. She looks up, startled, at the scene around her. Predatory adults kneeling, touching, telling jokes. I don’t know any jokes! she thinks.

  Then she sees her child.

  Really. He looks like her. He has her long fingers (curled around a plastic bat), her high forehead (sweating, like hers!), her coarse, raccoon-colored hair (though on him, tousled, gently curled, it looks charming). He is so obviously the one that it takes her several seconds to realize that he is already talking to some adults, older adults. Mature adults. The man wears boots and a bolo tie; narrow and bent, he looks like a hick. A rich hick. The woman is freckled and tan. It’s over; the child has been claimed.

  Still, her legs carry her toward the three of them.