The Bright Spot Page 23

  Half of them turned out to be members of Los Refugios, several of whom had never made snowmen either. So we made a snow band in the front of the parking lot under the sign. The crew made snow roadies to go with them. Our hosts didn’t mind. We ended up shoveling all the walks and most of the parking lot, with the occasional pancake break. Stan, who said “I like to shovel” with conviction, did half of it himself.

  When the whole snow crowd was made, including several buxom snow sunbathers by the pool that were Wally’s doing, we saw them, and they were good. Lu and I had even made Parson Brown from the song and armed him with the Gideon from our room. I fed him his lines—“Do you, Lu, take this actor to be the spouse in your house?” To which she replied, “This louse? I’d take him anywhere—in a motel or in a cell.” To which I didn’t say anything, which I suppose is just as well. Parson Brown pronounced us “seriously involved in a long-term, committed relationship.”

  Lu suggested a word change. “ ‘Lifetime,’ ” she said. “ ‘Long-term’ is too ...”

  “I agree. Absolutely. ‘Lifetime’ it is.” It was a script we could play beautifully if given the chance. I was sure of it. Parson Brown advised me I could now kiss the bride, and I did. Our guests insisted we dance. Lu asked Marco, the leader of Los Refugios, for something old-fashioned and romantic, and we danced to “The Way You Look Tonight” in Spanish. And even though we were both bundled up in down coats, beneath the fluff she felt like Señorita Rogers in my arms. I felt like Señor Astaire. A feather broke free from her lining as she twirled, and floated in the air. Bailando.

  Some hours later, when the snow had finally stopped and the stars came out, I asked the lead player if I could borrow his guitar and amp and attempted what I could remember of Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “Star-Spangled Banner” in honor of I wasn’t sure what. It was traditional to fuck up the groom, and between the crew and the band, the party had been well provisioned, and I was blitzed. The amp was cranked. Syrups for miles around must have rattled on their lazy Susans. By the time I got to the “home of the brave” line, there were three cruisers full of pissed-off cops just listening and watching and staying up late. What did I care? Until the feds gave up on me, I could piss on the mayor’s lawn in any municipality in the country and still not get to spend the night in jail.

  Eventually, Suzanne came out of the shadows. She’d changed the black blazer for a black bomber jacket and a black beret.

  “Nice hat,” I said.

  “Thanks. Mr. Bainbridge, we know there’s nothing we can do to you, but do you think you could quiet down? Folks are trying to sleep.”

  That did sound like a good idea. Sleep all around. Only a few dollars extra. “Undoubtably-dubitablydutedly. Whatever. How thoughtless of me. I’m too loaded to play anyway.” Untangling myself from the guitar strap was proving more difficult than usual. Suzanne lent a discreet hand, and I came loose. She deftly plucked the guitar from my hands and returned it to its rightful owner, who wasn’t nearly as concerned as he should’ve been. “Thanks,” I said, when I was more or less steady on my feet again. “We thought we might make some snow cops later to keep all the snowfolks in line. Wanna help?”

  “No thanks, Mr. Bainbridge.”

  “Nick.”

  “Nick.”

  I leaned forward confidentially. “Sh-sh-sh!” I said. “Don’t tell the cops, but not a bit of the shit I’m on is legal.” I took a step sideways and stepped into a hole. I struggled to maintain my balance.

  “Let me give you a hand,” Suzanne said. She took my hand, and I immediately sobered up, or at least stumbled in that direction. For inside her cop hand was a small plastic gizmo she smacked up against my palm like she meant me to keep it.

  “Sometimes people require a certain amount of silence, Nick. So they can think their own private thoughts, have a little space. I’m sure you, always in the public eye, can appreciate that. We’re just trying to do our jobs. You can always count on us to be on the job 24/7.”

  “I guess my test results came back positive.”

  She nodded and left me holding the bag, or the heavy little thing, whatever it was, a flattened cylinder with a button on one end. I was guessing it made silences, banished listeners from the forest so trees could fall in peace. It was a portable version of Mr. Henry’s bug zapper. I’d said I wanted to meet my maker. She was handing me the means, and with her “always on the job” line, offering to watch my back.

  I dropped it into my coat pocket, and I felt it there, like someone tugging at my hem, hand thrust out, Help me, please, mister. Help me, please.

  Don’t beg, I learned early. Sing, dance, lie, juggle, do magic tricks. Act. But don’t beg. It never worked out.

  Buck’s hysterical barking interrupted my thoughts. His belly heavily encrusted with icicles, he stood atop a snow mountain and yapped with wild-eyed delight. Lu and Dee and Stan had taught him the joys of belly sledding, had even built him a ramp that wound around the mountain. Buck threw himself onto it once again, slid down like the stripe on a barber’s pole, gurgling and snorting with joy. He was my hero. He was my role model. A happy Sisyphus. He raced back up the mountain. Like Jack, like Jill.

  I stood there awhile, just watching him, then Lu— watching her laugh, listening to the sound, remembering the way she looked tonight. No hay nada para mi, sino amarte. There is nothing for me but to love you. I wished I could tell her what I was going to do, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell her a thing.

  I turned to Wally, working on his fourth or fifth Irish coffee with extra whipped cream and cherries and chocolate sprinkles. “Tomorrow. Leave Buck out of it.”

  “But we need Patriot, for when Galatea is kidnapped, and—”

  “No, Wally. You don’t understand. No Buck tomorrow.”

  “Okay, Nick. If you say so.”

  “I say so.”

  I wandered over to the crew’s bus. Inside, Martha was either having or remembering really great sex with ... Keith, it sounded like. No one noticed or cared I got another device out of the prop chest for my other coat pocket, to balance the weight. Its purpose was less mysterious. You pointed the barrel and pulled the trigger. People died. Or in this case, one particular person. Once I was alone, I figured he’d find me soon enough. Then all I had to do was point and shoot.

  THE RIME OF THE ALDEBRIAN MARINER

  20

  “Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?”

  —ANGELA LANSBURY IN The Manchurian Candidate

  IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL MORNING FOR A SAIL—SNOW and sun and bright blue sky and water—and I was wishing I’d worn my sunglasses, when I realized I had them on and cranked to near opacity. They just weren’t up to the task. All the way to Jamestown Settlement, we seemed to be heading ever deeper into the heart of an incredible brightness. It was enough to make you miss the Congo.

  Now we were gathered around Wally and Brenda in the empty white parking lot, in the midst of the great white world. I stared into my black coffee, and gave my eyes a rest.

  There would be a wait before we could get started. For some reason, Lofton hadn’t expected us to show, and wasn’t quite prepared. Maybe he wanted to talk to a lawyer. He had it in his head I was the one not to be trusted and eyed me with special suspicion. The trouble-maker. He knew the type. He was sure I had something to do with Martha calling in sick this morning. (She was actually asleep in the back of the crew’s bus, due to show up anytime now.) But Lofton was Gary’s problem.

  While they sorted things out, Brenda and Wally filled the rest of us in on their vision for BG. They actually said “vision.” I swear I did not groan audibly. I tried to make allowances. They were excited, they were giggly even. I didn’t know how they did it. Not after all that whipped cream, not after all those maraschino cherries. But there you had it, the magic of love or art or both. They thought they had a great idea—call it Pocahontas Meets Frankenstein—and maybe they did. I wasn’t the one to ask this morning. I kept a stoic silence. I wasn
’t up for any loud noises.

  They told the story in a happy tag-team singsong I won’t try to duplicate. Here it is, more or less untangled:

  Victor and the She-Creature—noting Billy’s departure on a walking tour of the Alps (where he’ll soon be buried beneath an avalanche)—kidnap Galatea in hopes of luring BG into some as-yet-unwritten trap. But the ship becomes icebound, and BG catches them unawares on a dogsled pulled by a pack of local dogs recruited by Patriot, who, after an effects-laden sweat-lodge peyote vision sure to make him sick as a dog, has switched his allegiance to the Indians. BG sleds home with Galatea in his arms, and they pledge their eternal love and have great sex in the yehakin. Impressed with BG’s daring rescue of his daughter, Chief Seems-to-Have-Several-Names-Because-Wally-and-Brenda-Can’t-Decide— played by the Los Refugios lead singer, Marco, even though he’s about five-six and five years younger than Dee, his daughter—gives his blessing to their union, and asks BG to act as his representative to form a coalition among all the Indian tribes to run the English out before those greedy land-grabbing developers Washington and Jefferson carve up the Kentucky hunting grounds and put their slaves to work turning it all into tobacco fields, golf courses, and outlet malls—

  “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” I said. (I wasn’t that hungover.) “I sense us headed over the falls in a barrel here. The Washington, Jefferson thing might be ... unwise.”

  “You think so?” Brenda asked guiltily. Knocking Saints Tom and George had clearly been her idea. She had hidden depths, did Brenda—perhaps a degree in social theory or some equally dark secret—before she discovered her gift for herding data and shepherding feedback beside the still but shallow waters of commerce. Maybe that explained her attraction to Wally, though I didn’t see how anything explained that. But I liked the direction their collaboration was taking them. I just wasn’t crazy about doing a cannonball for our first dive off the high board.

  “Go easy on any presidents with their own monuments and coins,” I suggested as a rule of thumb.

  “What about folding money, tombs, and libraries?” Wally inquired earnestly.

  Sometimes Wally was quick, I’ll give him that. “No problem. Libraries are practically an invitation to work them over.”

  “Anything else?” Brenda asked anxiously.

  This was beginning to feel like a workshop. Death by comment. Nick, perhaps you’d like to comment on Patrick’s performance? Perhaps I wouldn’t. I’d heard enough of me. I was ready to move on. “Otherwise, it sounds great, better than great. Goofy and heartwarming and edgy and whatever. If Lucky Lucifer’s the biggest star in the country, I don’t see why BG and the Indian Nation can’t win the war.”

  I had to bite my tongue on the sweat-lodge business. I’ve always hated those vision things. But it was a break for Buck, so I let it pass. Still. I got to say, watching someone else’s enlightenment is like watching humor dry. Give me a pratfall anytime. Hold the special effects, please. I imagined Buck in a spacesuit like Keir Dullea in 2001, whizzing through psychedelic tedium until he finally morphs into a space puppy. That made me smile. Smiling didn’t come so easy this morning.

  “There’s more,” Wally said. “The first slaves come in 1609, and there’s bunches by the Revolution. I say they rise up too!” He made it sound like they just showed up to party. He danced his fingers as if slaves revolting were just so many champagne bubbles.

  I could feel them bubbling up through my aching sinuses. I imagined Charlie Chan, Tonto, and Amos and Andy, armed with lead pipes, following Wally down a long, dark alley. “We’re doing all this today?”

  “Oh no. Just some of the boat stuff. We wanted to give you the big concept first.”

  “The big concept. Jesus. What about lines, Wally? Have you got any of those yet?”

  “You don’t have to be such a grouch,” Wally said.

  He smelled faintly of boysenberry syrup and sex. Like Tom Hanks in Big had finally scored. Of course he was happy. Why shouldn’t he be? “You’re right. I’m sorry. Too many snowpeople last night. We done here until the boat’s ready? I need some aspirin. This sun’s killing me.”

  “Sure, Nick, sure. You just take it easy. We’ll blow a whistle or something.” He giggled again. “That’s what you use with boats, isn’t it? A little whistle?”

  “A boatswain’s pipe,” Brenda informed him affectionately.

  “Aye, aye,” I said.

  I headed toward the gift shop without a word. I’d been such an asshole all morning, they must’ve been glad to see me go. I didn’t want anyone following me. My plan consisted almost entirely of making myself truly alone. If I survived, we could all make up later. For now, I had to focus on getting myself abducted.

  There was a kid I grew up with who read Whitley Streiber’s Communion, an alleged first-person account of alien abduction, and it changed his life. It was a jacket-less copy donated to the school library and mistakenly shelved in Religion by a librarian who would’ve burned the book if he’d known what it was really about. My friend saved him the trouble by stealing it, hiding it under his mattress. He underlined passages, read them to me after lights-out. He read that book until it crumbled, basing his whole life on his longing to be abducted by aliens.

  I understood. Anyplace was better than where we were.

  He had all sorts of theories about what would attract them. Mushrooms, he decided once. They liked mushrooms. He ate them out of the yard, threw them up on the front steps. Purging impurities, he said. He adamantly refused to have his hair cut, and had his rebellious head shaved for his insolence—his secret intention all along, he confided in me. Hair, hats, hoods blocked the signal. No matter how cold it was, his hairless head was always bare, always waiting, hoping. Praying. I don’t know what else to call it. He carried dead batteries in his pockets, claimed they would heat up if aliens were close and act as a beacon for their tractor beams. I carried them too, in solidarity with my friend.

  But most important, he said, if you hoped to be abducted by aliens, was you had to be alone. It was more than a mere physical fact, a matter between you and other creatures, but a matter between you and yourself—like one of Dee’s disciplines. The alone inside the loneliest aloneness. The Honeymoon Suite in the Heartbreak Hotel. The vast prairie of the Lone Ranger’s soul. He tried to explain it to me repeatedly, though words always failed him. I confess I resisted the idea. If I was alone, who would be my audience? Who would laugh at my jokes? Who would applaud? Not that dopey one-hand clapping, I hoped. I tried to kid him out of it, but the older I got, the more I understood what he meant.

  And then my friend was abducted by something, his mind at least, and he passed from weird to crazy. He frequently broke into gibberish he claimed was Aldebrian, a language, as he rendered it, sounding like a cross between African Bushman and Portuguese. The effect was mesmerizing and utterly convincing. You believed it was a language. You believed he was fluent. He became increasingly bolder in these outbursts, until he was regularly disrupting meals, and then one Sunday, before us all, during the blessing of the sacrament. The translation he offered up when the fathers demanded one was thrillingly blasphemous and obscene. These episodes soon earned him the change of residence he longed for.

  Years later, the Bright Spot borrowed his Aldebrian dialect to play an alien in a stinker sci-fi saga, radical only in that the universe didn’t speak English. The Bright Spot’s linguistic turn was the sole subject of praise in the scathing reviews, so maybe my friend knew what he was talking about. Last I heard he was running serious antipsychotic ’ware so he’d be no harm to self or others and said nothing, not a word—the same in every language—to anyone, ever.

  I always liked his name, thought it made the perfect actor’s name. He wasn’t making much use of it, so the Bright Spot abducted it, took it as his own, my own, when I needed a new one. It was cheaper and easier, I was told, to steal someone else’s languishing identity instead of whipping up one from scratch. So that’s where my name came from. Who my name came
from: Nicholas Bainbridge, Aldebrian abductee.

  I told myself, when I took it, that I’d do the name proud. Today might be my chance. I hoped I didn’t blow it.

  I veered away from the gift shop and headed into the museum hall, a gauntlet of display cases to prep you for the fun stuff outside. I was ticketless, but nobody was at the entrance to stop me, and I plunged into the artifacts. The roof leaked, and the place smelled like colonial-era mildew, given fresh life by the thawing snow. From somewhere behind the scenes came the familiar plunk of water in bucket. Several buckets. Most folks would be wearing an interpretive headset to tell them what to think and wouldn’t hear it. In this place, the thing should hold your nose too.

  I turned the first bend and stopped, taking a few deep breaths in spite of the mold, searching out alone. I was surrounded by the personal effects of people who’d been dead for four hundred years. I had no parents. My childhood gave me nightmares. I’d discarded one phony identity for another stolen from a madman. I was, by conviction, a devout nothing, dedicated to a dying craft. I confessed to the cops and lied to those I loved. I had a loaded gun in my pocket. After today, I might be dead. After today, I might never work again. I could feel it creeping over me, like the shadow of Poe’s raven croaking “Nevermore.”

  Alone.

  I was almost there.

  Showtime.

  I slipped my left hand into my coat pocket and wrapped it around the device Suzanne had given me, firmly pushed the button with my thumb. The display-case lights flickered, brightened, buzzed, then returned to normal.

  There was a noise like a handful of sand hitting glass, and I knelt to see the carpet littered with little drones. They’d crashed into a display case of diaries and letters. If Mr. Henry was right, and they could still see, they’d have something to read until the vacuum cleaner or the mold got them. Their favorite too. Other people’s business. I saluted the fallen soldiers with my middle finger and rose to meet my maker.