not much hey I heard you and Kits were getting married Daddy told me
cool
yeah cool, we can’t come though, Daddy’s got an event at the yacht club
hey that’s too bad
and then we were going somewhere together Andy and me with heavy suitcases we were going by boat, on the canal, only Andy was like no way am I getting in that boat and I was like sure I understand, so I took apart the sailboat screw by screw, and put the pieces in my suitcase, we were carrying it overland, sails and all, this was the plan, all you had to do was follow the canals and they’d take you right where you wanted to go or maybe just right back where you started but it was a bigger job than I’d thought, disassembling a sailboat, it was different than taking apart a table or chair and the pieces were too big to fit in the luggage and there was a huge propeller I was trying to jam in with my clothes and Andy was bored and off to the side playing chess with someone I didn’t like the looks of and he said well if you can’t plan it out ahead of time, you’ll just have to work it out as you go along
xvii.
I WOKE WITH A snap of the head, nauseated and itching all over like ants were crawling under my skin. With the drug leaving my system the panic had roared back twice as strong since clearly I was sick, fever and sweats, no denying it any more. After staggering to the bathroom and throwing up again (this, not a fun junkie throw-up, but the usual misery), I came back in my room and contemplated my suit and scarf in plastic at the foot of the bed and thought, with a shiver, how lucky I was. It had all turned out okay (or had it?) but it mightn’t have.
Awkwardly, I removed suit and scarf from the plastic—the floor underneath me had a drowsy, nautical roll that made me grab for the wall to steady myself—and reached for my glasses and sat on the bed to examine them under the light. The cloth looked worn but otherwise okay. Then again, I couldn’t tell. The cloth was too black. I saw spots, and then I didn’t. My eyes still weren’t working quite right. Maybe it was a trick—maybe if I went down to the lobby I’d find cops waiting for me—but no—beating this thought back—ridiculous. They’d keep the clothes if they’d found anything suspicious on them, wouldn’t they? Certainly they wouldn’t return them pressed and cleaned.
I was still out of the world halfway: not myself. Somehow my dream of the sailboat had bled through and infected the hotel room, so it was a room but also the cabin of a ship: built-in cupboards (over my bed and under the eaves) neatly fitted with countersunk brass and enamelled to a high nautical gloss. Ship’s carpentry; deck swaying, and lapping outside, the black canal water. Delirium: unmoored and drifting. Outside, the fog was thick, not a breath of wind, streetlights burning through with a diffuse, haggard, ashen stillness, softened and blurred to haze.
Itching, itching. Skin on fire. Nausea and splitting headache. The more sumptuous the dope, the deeper the anguish—mental and physical—when it wore off. I was back to the chunk spewing out of Martin’s forehead only on a more intimate level, inside it almost, every pulse and spurt, and—even worse, a deeper freezing point entirely—the painting, gone. Bloodstained coat, the feet of the running-away kid. Blackout. Disaster. For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing—to break bonds stronger than the temporal—was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair.
My dad at the baccarat table, in the air-conditioned midnight. There’s always more to things, a hidden level. Luck in its darker moods and manifestations. Consulting the stars, waiting to make the big bets when Mercury was in retrograde, reaching for a knowledge just beyond the known. Black his lucky color, nine his lucky number. Hit me again pal. There’s a pattern and we’re a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do), you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you’d ever looked at or thought of as light.
Chapter 12.
The Rendezvous Point
i.
THE DAYS LEADING TO Christmas were a blur, since thanks to illness and what amounted to solitary confinement I soon lost track of time. I stayed in the room; the Do Not Disturb sign stayed on the door; and television—instead of providing even a false hum of normalcy—only racketed-up the variform confusion and displacement: no logic, no structure, what was on next, you didn’t know, could be anything, Sesame Street in Dutch, Dutch people talking at a desk, more Dutch people talking at a desk, and though there was Sky News and CNN and BBC none of the local news was in English (nothing that mattered, nothing pertaining to me or the parking garage) though at one point I had a bad start when, flipping through the channels past an old American cop show, I stopped astonished at the sight of my twenty-five-year-old father: one of his many non-speaking roles, a yes-man hovering behind a political candidate at a press conference, nodding at the guy’s campaign promises and for one eerie blink glancing into the camera and straight across the ocean and into the future, at me. The multiple ironies of this were so layered and uncanny that I gaped in horror. Except for his haircut and his heavier build (bulked up from lifting weights: he’d been going to the gym a lot in those days) he might have been my twin. But the biggest shock was how straightforward he looked—my already (circa 1985) criminally dishonest and sliding-into-alcoholism father. None of his character, or his future, was visible in his face. Instead he looked resolute, attentive, a model of certainty and promise.