Wichita (9781609458904) Page 8
Then Seth flew to New York for his annual one-week visit to see Virgil. The night before he left, Seth came into Lewis’s room. He wondered aloud about what it was going to be like, flying on a plane when you’re dead. Lewis studied him. The kid still believed he was dead. It was the strangest thing. He referred to it in everyone’s presence. Abby was out with Rennie, “lifetime companion” du jour, and when Seth lit a one-hit pipe, Lewis had a small social puff. But it was strong and he found himself thinking harder than he had about Seth’s claim: he’s dead, my little brother. Lewis had always lived in dread of Seth’s dying—in a car crash, drowning at the beach, cancer. Now, in this strange, Alice-in-Wonderland fashion and under his nose it had happened anyway: Seth was dead. He turned to contemplating his own death, that beast of legend. Seth was dead, ergo Lewis too was going to die, one day the hour would actually come. The beast was real. He could make it out in the farthest distance, like a grainy photo of Bigfoot. But suddenly it turned and flew across that vast space and pressed itself against him and Lewis couldn’t breathe, he broke down gasping out sobs of terror. “It’s OK,” Seth said, soothing him. But Lewis knew he was gloating too: breaking Lewis the doubter was a victory. He would do the same with Virgil.
And the minute he got off the plane in New York he was pestering Virgil to acknowledge the astonishing and quite possibly unprecedented nature of what had occurred. Ask Lewis, Dad! Once in ten thousand lifetimes an event of this magnitude occurred! But what Abby saw as a worrisome but in the end legitimate instance of “spiritual drunkenness,” Virgil decided was a psychotic break triggered by the morning-glory trip, which Seth happily told him all about. Having lured him down to a clinic run by a colleague on the pretence of measuring his surely exceptional brainwave function, Virgil had Seth subjected to a battery of tests then kept there for observation for several days against Seth’s will and without informing Abby. The test results were inconclusive but Seth was so furious at the betrayal and traumatized by the clinic discipline that he refused to speak to or visit Virgil afterward, with the estrangement lasting right up until Seth decided he wanted to become an actor and the Van Sant auditions were announced.
When he returned from New York, he spoke less and less about the morning-glory trip, less and less in general. When he did speak, it was to Abby alone. They spent a lot of time in her room, the door closed. And what he said frightened her: he wanted to finish the job; he wanted to die the rest of the way.
11
On the cutting-board island in the kitchen, breakfast has been laid out on white platters—over-easy eggs, white membrane sealing in the yolks, crisp bacon, hashed brown potatoes, bagels. Not that anyone else would go to the bother, but Lewis can tell at a glance that it was made by Abby. She could so easily run a successful restaurant or catering business. But that would be too—what? Easy? Hard? Predictable, he decides. It would bore her.
He fixes a plate, sits down at the table and opens the Mac. At the tap of a key, the screen fills with an image of a smiling Abby at the wheel of the Escalade driving through Great Plains country. The window is down, her arm is hanging over the side and a sheer white scarf trails. Below the image is text, which Lewis reads while eating.
Grateful Gaia Storm Tours
You’re probably well aware of the basics: from late March to late August of each year, tornado-spawning supercells are created in the area known as “tornado alley.” According to conventional meteorological accounts, it’s all due to the collision of warm, moist air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico, with dry cold air blowing in from the Rockies. But what do these terms really mean? What is “air,” “warm,” “cold,” and, above all, “collision”? Is it merely a matter of agitated atoms, as per the dominant scientific view? Hardly.
The Broken Heart of Gaia
Dissatisfied with enthusiastic but essentially (offensively?—B.) empty and wrongheaded scientistic-thinking characteristic of typical storm-chase outfits, you’re ready for an advanced, spiritually evolved experience of the skies, what we call Gaia Consciousness. This is not a quest for a photo-trophy of a funnel cloud or lightning strike. We do not have a “passion for severe weather,” and we are not interested in helping you “achieve your chasing goals.” This is a journey into the broken heart of Gaia, she who has been hubristically taken for granted, pumped with pollutants and plumped with antibiotics, scorned by agribusiness and the self-destructive actions of an out-of-control patriarchy, capitalism, petrol, the relentless desacralization of the world that has been in full swing since the Industrial Revolution a scant two hundred years ago but really began four millennia ago with what has been variously represented in human myths as the Fall. This is the grieving, violent energy that fills the skies of the Great Plains in the spring months and through the summer. If you are prepared to feel the full force of that energy, please join us.
We Are Not Luddites But
While we deploy such state-of-the-art devices as Mobile Threat Radar, cameras and video recorders are not permitted on Grateful Gaia journeys, since there is abundant and obvious evidence that such mediations prevent participants from being deeply present to the lived experience of divinity. Again, we are not interested in trophy-hunting.
Range
We will be exploring storms in, near, or within a day’s drive of Wichita, Kansas. We are not going to be driving all over the Great Plains in a desperate quest for “experience.” Weather is everywhere. Simply to be here at this time of the yearly cycle is to know Her. We let Gaia come to us. Rather, we do not pretend to be able to do otherwise.
Rates
$165 per person per day plus food, accommodations, and a per diem. On a Grateful Gaia Tour you will be in a vehicle with at most two other guests. You will in effect be part of a Goddess-loving family, not just another paid-up body shoehorned into a twelve-passenger van, as with other tour companies. You will be in a vehicle with vehicles of Gaia as vehicles of Her.
Accommodations
One option is to reserve a room at one of the many fine and inexpensive hotels on the eastside of Wichita. We recommend the Marriot on Douglas. Another is to stay in one of the guest rooms at our home in Forest Hills. Health food breakfast prepared by Abby, massage, attunement, readings. [need more here—Bishop]
Store
Grateful Gaia does not commodify the experience of Gaia, hence there are no photos or videos or sweatshirts or coffee mugs to “add to cart.” There is no cart; there is only the Earth, only Goddess: lay your head on the arms of the Earth.
Contact
Email abby@gratefulgaia.com mailto:abby@gratefulgaia.com or call at 917 668 9234
He’s closing the laptop as Abby comes into the kitchen. She’s wearing a semi-transparent orange floral blouse, white slacks, white flats and has the refreshed air of having just returned from a spa. She sings out “Good morning!,” pours a cup of coffee and sits across from him at the round table in the breakfast nook.
He slides the laptop toward her. “Bishop asked me to give this to you.”
“My website?” she says, clapping her hands. “Goody!” She taps a key and her image blooms on the screen. “I love it!” she says.
Lewis goes to the cabinet for a glass, gets ice and water. He sits back down at the table, watches Abby reading over the text.
“I’m not crazy about ‘Grateful Gaia Storm-Chasers,’” she says, looking up. “That was always Bishop’s thing—‘Goddess,’ ‘Gaia’: it all sounds so nineties now, doesn’t it?”
Reading on, she chuckles, shakes her head. “No swag, I can understand, I guess. But no photos or videos? He’s out of his mind! No one will sign up! The whole point is photo trophies.” She hits the “delete” key, types a phrase. “When did Bishop turn into such a purist? Like he doesn’t have a thousand photos from his precious Burning Man trips.” She types something more, goes on reading.
Finally, wondering whether she would ever bother explaining if he never asked, he says, “So what’s Bishop doing living in a tent in the yar
d?”
She looks at him like a parent about to explain something to a child who may not be old enough to understand. “Have you heard of polyamory?”
Many loves? Lewis thinks. Much luvin’? Probably too literal again. Feeling a low-grade dread, he shakes his head.
“Well, it’s basically just a movement to get past monogamy,” Abby says off-handedly, as if describing a software upgrade. “People have more than one partner, all very out in the open and negotiated.”
“Like swinging?” he asks, screwing up his face.
“God, no, not at all!” she says, waving away the comparison. “Polyamory is just multi-partner relationships, long-term and stable for the most part. Swinging—or the ‘lifestyle,’ as they call it—is really just organized promiscuity.”
He’s maybe slightly relieved. “And Donald’s down with this?”
“That’s the agreement we have,” she says letter-of-the-lawishly. Donald strikes Lewis as the last person to get involved in polyamory. She wrinkles her forehead in imitation of the anxious expression he must be wearing. “It’s just something I’m exploring, Lewis,” she says, reaching over to pat his hand.
He nods his head slowly as if taking this in as merely a “lifestyle” choice while inwardly feeling disoriented and a bit nauseous. “And that’s why Bishop’s living in a tent in the yard?”
“Oh, Bishop just likes to shake up his life sometimes. Which is fine. He’s welcome to camp out and think of me as a —Goddess’ or whatever if that does the trick. I’m flattered!”
She goes back to poring over the website text and Lewis sits in silence digesting this new information about his mother along with his heavy breakfast. He’s feeling distinctly queasy. He’s feeling in fact like packing his bags and getting on the next plane out. Seth was one sort of surprise; this is another.
“He may have a yurt installed out there,” Abby says now, glancing up, “when it gets colder.”
“He told me.”
“That could be neat, actually,” she says, waving over the top of the laptop at the backyard. “That house behind, which belonged to the Robertson’s (they got laid off), is in foreclosure. We could buy it and extend the property . . . have a sort of yurt family compound.”
She often comes back to this idea of a “family compound.” Maybe it’s something about the region—the Mormons, the nuts in Texas Cody comes from. Some deep distrust of the government, the state.
“The irony,” she adds in a confidential tone after a moment, looking up from the screen, “is that I’d just as soon be alone—”
It’s what she usually says when a relationship breaks up: alone at last! She often goes farther: that man was in fact the last, because she’s really had it with partnership and the whole compulsive need for companionship as it’s currently structured. She’s finally, truly, deeply moved past it and is so looking forward to being just wonderfully alone and autonomous, the pleasures of celibacy and solitude, the simplicity of acting on her desires without having to consult and consider someone else, prop them up as well usually, wipe the psychic crumbs from their face. But in a matter of weeks she’s met someone else and the Buddhist-nun talk is forgotten. Lewis is therefore less and less apt to take these moments of renunciation seriously; she’s too much like an alcoholic swearing off booze mid-hangover. At the same time, she speaks so convincingly that he finds himself wanting to believe. Since the divorce from Virgil, Abby’s had a new, usually live-in boyfriend, on average, what—every two years? How great, what a relief it would be not to have to meet and, at her tacit behest, believe in another “lifetime companion,” not to hear about and see photos of his fucking children (the Navy Seal son, the Born-Again daughter) and ex-wives (the retired Broadway actress; a “published poet”), his hunting dogs or pottery studio, the horse farm or antique car collection.
“So why not just be alone?” he asks.
“Well, I can’t seem to manage it—so—”she says helplessly.
“You double down?”
“Exactly!”
“So let’s see,” he says, beginning to count on his fingers, “There’s Donald . . . Bishop . . . ”
“Not at the same time,” she interjects blandly, her attention drifting back to the laptop screen.
“Right, okay,” Lewis says, blushing. “Anyone else?”
“Bishop has a girlfriend he sees,” she says, hitting the delete key several times. “A former student who lives in the old downtown section. Speaking of trophies from Burning Man. He’s sometimes over at her place for a few days.”
“And this doesn’t bother you—the girlfriend?”
“There are moments of jealously, sure, but we talk it through.” She takes a sip of coffee and slaps her thigh as if remembering something, turning away from the laptop screen to face him with wide eyes. “That’s actually the main drawback—having to negotiate everything! It can get a little exhausting, especially with Bishop, who loves to talk, as you know.”
“What about Donald?” Lewis asks. “Does Donald have other ‘partners’?” It sounds very sex-ed class, “partners,” falsely or wishfully neutral in that tradition: business partners, dance partners, sex partners.
“Not at the moment,” she says.
Lewis gets up and goes to the sink to rinse his plate. “But you’re open to it,” he says.
“Openness is the whole point.”
He concentrates on scouring clean a skillet, dries it, then rinses toast crumbs and a streak of egg yolk from what he suspects is a plate used by Seth, who leaves such petty tasks to fools willing to do them, like Donald and Abby. And now Lewis apparently.
His cell phone buzzes on the breakfast table where he left it, turning a half-circle like a new-fangled Ouija Board stylus. He picks it up and checks the screen: his father’s office number. “It’s Virgil,” he says.
“Don’t answer,” Abby says simply, reading his pinched expression.
He flips it open. “Hello?”
“Hello, Lewis!” Lewis holds the cell away from his ear: Virgil speaks into the phone like an invention he’s startled to find actually works, a manner he inherited from Cyrus, from what Lewis can tell. It’s like they’re dictating telegrams. “Listen, the reason I’m calling is I thought we agreed you would write Grandpa a thank-you note for his Musil book he was kind enough to send you a copy of.”
“No, we didn’t,” Lewis says, squinting with irritation at Abby, who is all ears. He’s annoyed to be pestered about this but oddly happy to be plunged into a controversy out of Miss Manners on the back of the polyamory.
“I sent a note,” Lewis says, shaking his head at Abby with deadpan incredulity. “And I said ‘Thank you,’ at the table that night. You were there. You heard me.”
“Well, be that as it may,” Virgil says with quickly rising irritation, as if he’s anticipated just such mulishness, “there’s still a feeling that you need to officially thank your grandfather, Lewis. And since he never received the first thank-you note you say you sent—”
“Did send,” Lewis insists. “Did send.”
“Noted: did send,” Virgil says skeptically.
“I just resent the implication—”
Virgil sighs. Lewis can see him very clearly in the small, book-lined office: the blocky desk chair reclined at a forty-five degree angle, the expression of refined irritation; the three narrow stained-glass windows with their view of the quad; the language dictionaries on the shelf beside the desk in their sacrosanct ranks (Bruno would rearrange them as a prank). Even during the worst of things with Sylvie, Virgil arrived there every morning at 9:30, kept on schedule with the book. Lewis admires it despite himself. When Lewis was a boy, before the split, Virgil worked in a spare bedroom of their small faculty house. A story Abby tells about the marriage turns on this point: she meets an older woman at a party, mentions that she and Virgil just got divorced. “How long were you married?” the woman asks. “A long time,” Abby tells her, “eight years.” “Eight years isn’t so long,
” says the woman. “But he barely left the house!” Abby cries. “Compared to how much most couples see of each other, it was more like twenty-eight years!”
It was only recently that Lewis saw this story from Virgil’s perspective: it was by teaching as little as possible and staying at home that he finished two books. That’s how Virgil wrote his way out of UT Austin—and out of Lewis’s life, and Seth’s—and back to the Ivy League whence he’d come. Though whether he works at home or at his office on campus, he’s having the same luck with women: they leave.
“In any case, since he never received it,” Virgil is saying, “would it be too much trouble for you to take a moment to sit down and write another one?”
“Fine,” Lewis says. They’ll never let this go; they’ll follow him to the ends of the earth with this thank-you note in their teeth. He’ll die in Sumatra of encephalitis and the last thing they’ll say over his grave, or rather to each other over the phone (since they wouldn’t bother making the trip to Sumatra): he never did send that thank-you note to Grandpa.