Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks) Read online

  “Well,” he said, “your dad come out here one morning and waved hello to me—I was workin’ in the garden—and then he did the same thing you did, he got his paper and turned around, and there was a streak of paint—” he pointed to the front porch, “—right in that same spot. Eaves to porch, just like this one. He cussed up a storm and we went to take a look and found out the paint was still wet.” He stood staring for a moment—not at me or the house or the streak, but into the depths of a past that was probably more alive to him than the world he was stuck in now—and suddenly blanched.

  Thinking he might be having a heart attack or something, I went down and put a hand on his arm. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, snapping from his reverie. “It’s just that . . . I remember your dad cussing about the damn kids that’d done it, painting a streak of ‘workman’s gray’ down the front of the house.” He gave a short laugh. “This is gonna sound nuts, but I’d almost swear to you that streak of paint your dad found was the exact same color as the house is now.”

  “I don’t remember him asking me to help him clean it,” I said.

  “That’s just it,” said Mr. Finney. “He didn’t have to clean it. We found it around eight-thirty in the morning, and it was gone when we looked again around ten.”

  “Gone?”

  “Uh-huh.” He looked at his watch, then at me.

  “Guess you think I’m weird, huh?”

  I knew what he was getting at. “We’ll see at ten,” I replied. “Meet you by the curb?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  I always used to wonder where, precisely, the soul is located. If the soul is to be found in space, then where the hell is it? Physicists think of time and space as a sort of four-dimensional sheet with the possibilities of other disconnected sheets. Could the soul reside in between the layers? On the other hand, spacetime could be envisioned as enfolded by, or embedded in, a higher-dimensional space, much as a two-dimensional surface or sheet is embedded in three-dimensional space. So why couldn’t the soul inhabit a location in this higher-dimensional space which is still, geometrically speaking, close to our own physical spacetime, but not actually in it?

  If that’s the case, then could it be that that “smallest, unseen” quantity—the 1.62 x 10-33 at which space and time come apart—is actually the location where the soul physically goes to roost after death?

  3. One Foot In History/The Weight

  Back in the house, I laughed softly to myself. There were a hundred explanations for what had happened—both with Dad and with me—but if Mr. Finney was trying to turn his morning into a short romp through The Twilight Zone, who was I to ruin his fun?

  I poured myself another cup of coffee and went to the refrigerator for an orange.

  I opened the door and discovered the bags of Ayds setting on the top shelf.

  I was still staring at them when my sister Blair came up behind me, pointed at the bags, and said, “Mommy.”

  “Huh?”

  She looked at me as if I were some sort of dim-witted puppy. “Mommy’s candy.”

  “Oh. Thanks for clearing that—”

  Then it hit me. When I was teenager and Blair was barely two (she was a late-in-life baby), our mother went through a phase where, for some reason, she decided she needed to lose weight. Despite that the woman probably weighed 120 pounds soaking wet, she started buying and gobbling Ayds by the bagful, so no matter what, there were always several bags of it—say three pounds’ worth—in our fridge, same shelf, same spot.

  I stared at the bags and whispered, “. . . Jesus . . .”

  I inherited our parents’ house (along with the care of my sister) after Mom’s death. I’ve replaced most of the appliances in the kitchen, except for the refrigerator. It’s the same one my parents bough right after they were married, and soon will celebrate its fiftieth year of operation. The damn thing’s a wonder; it has never, ever broken down.

  I pulled out one of the bags just to look at it. I was holding something that, to the best of my knowledge, had ceased to exist when I was fifteen. Blair stomped her foot and put her hands on her hips, her lower lip jutting out in a pout that would look right at home on a three-year-old’s face. “Thas’ Mommy’s candy,” she said. “Gonna get it if you eat any.”

  Blair has Downs’ Syndrome. She’s creeping up on thirty but has the mental capacity and verbal skills of a five-year-old. The doctors were certain that she wouldn’t live through her teen years, but she’s beaten the odds. Hell, she’ll probably live to bury me. She lives with me because I promised Mom and Dad that I would not put her into any sort of home . . . and because of a certain piece of advice Mom gave me at the end of her life.

  I don’t keep Blair closed off from the rest of the world; she attends a sheltered workshop five days a week where they teach her basic social and personal skills—what they refer to as “habilitation training”—and she has many friends. Hers is as fine a life as I can provide for her on what little is left from my parents’ insurance (after final medical bills and burial expenses) and what I make as day manager and co-owner of Cedar Hill’s largest and most successful used bookstore. Believe me when I tell you that “successful” is a bit of a euphemism when applied here, but the store’s got a sufficiently large enough clientele and a good enough reputation that business is steady. Steady enough. Thank God the house is paid for.

  Blair came over and yanked the bag from my hand, tearing it open and scattering dozens of wrapped pieces all over the kitchen floor. She stepped back, dropped the mangled remains of the bag, and gasped. “Oh . . . lookee what you made me do.”

  “I didn’t make you do anything,” I snapped, with a bit too much irritation under the surface. “You did this all by yourself. If you wanted to see it, I would have given it to you, but you didn’t ask. Did you?”

  She glared at me, hands fisting at her sides. She chewed on her lower lip, took a deep breath, and then spit on the floor. “Pancakes!” she growled.

  Caring for Blair takes up nearly all of my non-work and sleeping time. Most days she’s well-behaved, but she has these episodes, usually lasting two or three days at a time once they start, where she hates the world as well as everyone and everything in it. I’ve often wondered if these “spells” (as Dad used to call them) are triggered by some complex realization somewhere in her mind that she’s different from a lot of people, and this realization makes her angry and hateful. And hateful is definitely the word for it.

  I pointed to the candy and the spit. “I’m not cleaning that up.”

  “Don’t care.”

  “I think you should apologize for what you said.”

  “No.”

  “Blair. . . .” The warning in my voice was clear.

  She glowered at me for a few seconds longer, then stomped over to the kitchen counter, picked up the sugar canister, and dumped its contents on top of the spit and candy. Then she slammed the canister down so hard it bounced a foot into the air and came back down with half of it dented in.

  “Stop it,” I said.

  Her response was to spit again—this time at me.

  Like I said: hateful.

  She was hating me, hating that it was Saturday and there was no workshop to attend, hating that I never let her go anywhere alone, not even to the little market at the end of the street, and most of all hating that I would make her clean up this mess. So she spit on the floor and growled her version of “Fuck you!” at me. (Blair has her own special meanings for several words: Pancakes is Fuck You, Mama-Frog—one word, two caps—is My Period Has Started, Sakteboard is Time To Watch Television, and Kahoutek—one she learned from me during my brief but infamous Astronomy Craze of 1974—is what she says instead of Gesundheit. That one gets weird looks and big laughs from people every time.)

  I grabbed the broom from its place beside the pantry and held it out. Blair stomped her feet and released one of her patented tantrum screams, then wrenched the broom from my hand and did a Babe Rut
h with it right upside my head, snapping the handle in half, bloodying my nose, and leaving most of the bristles stuck in my hair, beard, and face.

  I reached up and wiped away some of the blood, then sat on the floor looking up at her. Blair has a very powerful swing, and an even worse right cross. I’ve been on the receiving end of both more times than I care to remember.

  “Do you feel better now?”

  “Pancakes! Pancakes! PANCAKES!”

  I shook my head and continued to sit there, too tired to get mad about it. In a little while she’d start feeling really awful about what she’d done, come to me all hugs and apologies, and things would go on as they had before until she had another “spell” later tonight, or tomorrow. This was always the pattern. For the next seventy-two hours, life would be a miserable proposition.

  There followed several moments of silence. Blair would either blow up again, go to her room to listen to records or the radio, or scribble on one of her dozens of sketch pads. (Blair loves to draw and waterpaint.)

  I waited, hoping it would go no further than this—which was mild in comparison to some of her fits. She once broke my nose with a punch when I forgot to pick up microwave popcorn for our Friday Night Movie. (Blair has broken my nose twice.) Another time she came out of the bathroom and threw a very used, very bloody tampon right in my face. I never did find out what that had been about.

  One of the things I hate about myself is those times—usually post-fit—when I think about how much easier my life would be if: A) Blair were living in a group home, or B) If she’d never been born.

  I know—that second one is unforgivable. But it’s there, and eventually I’d have to deal with it. Just not now, not then, not that morning.

  I reached up and pulled the paper towel roll from a nearby counter and used about a thousand sheets to wipe away the blood from my nose and hands—some of the bristles had managed to scrape my fingers enough to draw blood.

  I finished, then sat back against the wall and—my nostrils stuffed full of tom paper towel—leaned my head back and swallowed.

  I was surprised to feel tears in my eyes. I quickly wiped them away before they spilled down my face. Christ, what was the point sometimes? I’d had such dreams in this house, in this kitchen, when I was growing up: I was going to be an astronaut (a ruptured spleen at age six had killed that one), then I was going to be a rock ’n’ roll star (had to hock my guitars and amplifier when I was fifteen to help out with money when Dad was laid off from the plant for a while), and then, in college, I was going to be either a great writer or a great scientist (I minored in English and Physics and never got around to doing a damn thing with either degree).

  I used to laugh at the part of myself that thought black light posters were cool and that I was going to take on the world and win, but at times like this I realized that something of that teenaged soul lived on and watched me, like a child ashamed of its parents. Only now I was my own parent and my own child. No part gets left by the side of the road; each ghost of yourself at ten, or thirteen, or sixteen, sits in judgment of what the others did, and what they have become.

  I pulled in a deep breath that hurt more than I’d expected.

  “Don’t cry, Danny,” said Blair.

  “I’m not,” I lied.

  “Yes, you are.” Her voice was thin and scared. She’d only seen me cry twice before this; once at Dad’s funeral, once at Mom’s. Blaire equated my tears with death. In a way, I guess she was right to make that connection this time.

  “Danny?” She sounded on the verge of tears herself. I waved my hand at her, a sign for her to be quiet and leave me alone for a minute.

  Sometimes, when the past sneaks up behind you, it’s hard to shake it off right away.

  My “coming of age” happened between 1971 and 1976. I was too young to “relate” (that word!) to the World War I generation and not old enough to be accepted by the Woodstock Nation; D-Day happened long before I took my first breath, and by the time I understood that the Kent State shootings were related to some war in a place called Vietnam, President Nixon was beginning the process of pulling U.S. troops out of the sad and ravaged country while thousands of ragged Cambodian refugees traversed the endless Killing Fields in hopes of being air-lifted by the U.N. to a safer land. So there I was, like others my age, dismissed by the ones who’d fought the Nazi Terror and mocked by those who wore flowers in their hair and made the “peace” sign and quoted people with names like Leary and Hoffman and Dylan and Baez. Abandoned to our own devices, my generation inherited a Teenage Wasteland and grew up in front of the television set with the Bradys and Fred Sanford and the eminently-quotable Flip Wilson while looking for our niche. I spent a lot of time listening to Yes and King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer and other denizens of the short-lived “art rock” era: From the Beginning they sang of being Close to the Edge, of seeing All Good People going Roundabout in the Court of the Crimson King. Mysticism abounded in their lyrics, and even though it wasn’t easy to fully understand their sometimes nebulous concepts, their music nonetheless planted a notion in my mind that maybe, just maybe, we of the Brushed Aside Age could strive toward some new level of universal understanding (aided by the smoke of Hawaiian Seedless, natch) and salvage Purpose from the labyrinthine chaos left by one Depression, four wars, an energy crisis, and the “Generation Gap.” Yeah, we were full of shit, I know that now—but then, then it felt good to believe in that, to be a young anarchist who could lay waste to the establishment during the day and still get home in time for supper and Night Gallery; it felt good to be full of piss and vinegar and passion, knowing there was a reason for being alive, there was such Promise for us to fulfill . . . then four buffoons broke into a suite at the Watergate Hotel and before you could say “Woodward and Bernstein” our unbeknownst-to-us fragile idealism crumpled into a heap on the floor. By the time we were able to stand again, it was 1977; a little-known movie called Star Wars had just opened, Menachem Begin was the leader of Israel, four different buffoons tried to steal Elvis Presley’s body, and Studio 54 opened its doors. We took our cue from this latter event: dressed in polyester leisure suits with open collars and gold chains dangling around our neck, possessed by a Saturday Night Fever that jackhammered under mirror-ball lights, we boogied across the disco floor in revealing dresses, flared pants, fuck-me pumps, and platform shoes. We were the selfish, hedonistic “Me” generation, sexually liberated and not giving a rat’s ass about anything that did not directly affect us. Our so-called values were the supreme embarrassment of the last half-century—c’mon, already, we thought Jonathan Livingston Seagull was deep and were proud of ourselves for inventing the Pet Rock, the Mood Ring, and Space Food Sticks. We were blissfully ignorant of any ugliness in the world . . . then the Reverend Jim Jones led his followers to mass suicide in Guyana, Mark David Chapman walked up to John Lennon outside the Dakota in New York and splattered the former Beatle’s brains all over the pavement, someone decided to check John Wayne Gacy’s basement after he was arrested, and those of us left standing realized that no amount of selfindulgence or blind loyalty to false ideals was going to protect us from the Big Dark Eventuality; so the leisure suits and plats and pumps were stored far away in the backs of closets where no one would ever have to look upon them again, a thing called AIDS (definitely not spelled with a “y”) came to collect for our careless promiscuity, and we stood before the looking glass of our conscience wondering why we felt so empty. How romantic to be so disillusioned at such an early age.

  Some of us never got over it. Some of us didn’t even survive it. The rest of us . . . well, we managed to get out alive and grew up to become uncomfortable anachronisms. And co-owners of used bookstores.

  My little stroll down Amnesia Lane over, I looked up at my sister and said, “Why don’t you go watch some cartoons? I’ll be along in a few minutes.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “But you did.”

  She looked like she was going t
o break down any second. “I’m sorry I said that, Blair. I know you didn’t mean to. It’s okay.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “I love you lots, Danny.”

  “I love you, too.” And I did. But at times like this, I wished I didn’t. So sue me.

  Blair exhaled and folded her arms across her chest, the unsteadiness gone from her voice. Now it was her turn to sound like an adult and make me feel better. “I made a mess.”

  “I noticed.”

  “An’ I hit you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “An’ I busted the broom.”

  “You’ll get my bill in the mail.”

  She laughed. When I looked at her, she quickly covered her mouth with her hands so I wouldn’t see the grin.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You. You’re goofy!”

  “No, I am not goofy. I am bleeding. Do you think that’s funny?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it isn’t,” I said, rising to my feet. As I was doing so, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the big silver toaster: My hair was a mess, my shirt was speckled with paint dust and drops of blood, and the pieces of paper towel I’d stuffed into my nose—pieces which I thought had been about the size of a fingernail—looked like the tusks on a sick walrus.

  I couldn’t help it—I laughed, too. Then Blair laughed louder. Then I really let fly, guffawing so hard that I blew one of the walrus tusks out of my nose.

  “All right,” I said. “I guess this makes me goofy.”

  Blair found the dustpan and grabbed my still-folded newspaper. “I clean up my mess now.” She knelt down and started to use the paper for a sweeping device.

  “I haven’t read that yet,” I said, taking it from her.

  “But I gotta—”

  “I know, I know.” I looked around and spotted the remains of a pizza box in the recycling bin. I tore off the lid, folded it in half, and handed it to her. “Use this.”