Dark Specter

4

I never expected to see any of them again, and when I did it was pure coincidence. I was passing through O’Hare on the way back from Boston, having visited my parents on the occasion of my father’s sixtieth birthday. He had recently retired, and they had moved to a house on Cape Cod. Because of my mother’s poor health they had been forced to cancel a planned trip to come to see us, and since Rachael hadn’t wanted to travel so far with David, I ended up going there alone. On the way back my connection in Chicago was delayed, and I was killing time in the bar when someone walked up to me and said, “Phil?”

The face looked vaguely familiar, but it was only when the man noticed my blank expression and said his own name that I realized who it was. Recognition came tainted with a sense of unease. Of the whole group, Vince was the one I had been least close to. His interests-sex, drugs and rock-and-roll-were also ours, but the single-mindedness with which he pursued them set him apart. To Vince, time not spent balling, tripping or bopping, preferably all at once, was time wasted. We admired his purity, but even then it seemed a little extreme. I had never forgotten the time I’d unguardedly mentioned some novel I was currently enthusiastic about, and Vince had remarked crushingly, “You still read books? I’m too busy living.” After that I’d never quite known what to say to him. What on earth would we have to say now?

It immediately became clear that Vince was no longer Vince. The former acidhead, sack artist and lead guitar manque was now a highly paid sound technician for a TV station in Chicago with a profitable sideline in freelance assignments. He looked fit, tanned and relaxed, and sipped a Perrier while I slurped my scotch. The duds he had on looked like they cost more than my car, and instead of a commuter plane to St. Paul he was catching a direct flight to Tokyo, club class, to film a documentary on sumo wrestling.

Worst of all, he was nice about it. He made no attempt to cold-cock me with a blow-by-blow account of his glamorous lifestyle, and even showed some polite interest when I filled him in on the banal data of my own. I told him that I was teaching English at a community college, that I was married, that we had a child. What more could I say? That I liked my work? That I loved my son to distraction? That I was happier than I had ever been in my life? It would have sounded false and forced. I let the lame facts speak for themselves with no attempt to explain or excuse. Vince was very kind and correct.

“Boy or girl?” he asked.

“A boy. David.”

“How old is he?”

“Going on seven.”

“Great. I’d love to have kids one day. Right now, though, a family life’s kind of impossible.”

He even managed to sound slightly envious! I started to warm to him.

Having exhausted every other topic we had in common, we began to talk about the others. Vince had lost touch with Greg, who had last been heard of working on the Alaska pipeline, but he had news of Sam and Larry. It was bizarre and a little disturbing.

“When they got drafted, we all figured Sam would get some cushy desk job while Larry ended up as a grunt, right? Wrong! The army found out that Larry had worked as a painter, and he got to stay right here fixing up the mess and recreational facilities at the base. Never even went to Vietnam.”

I laughed.

“Good for him.”

Vince shook his head.

“Two days before he was due to go home, he got hit by a truck. Some guy had been drinking, came around the corner with no lights on, didn’t even see him. Larry didn’t stand a chance.”

I was shocked. I’d read about the war, of course, and seen the familiar, horrific pictures on TV, but it had all seemed as remote from my own existence as gangland killings in Miami or race riots in Los Angeles. But Larry was someone I’d known. He’d painted our house in his spare time, using up leftovers from whatever job he happened to be working on. The results were quite spectacular: strips and patches of every hue, shade and finish, some matt, others shimmering satin, a few in high gloss. I’d joked and smoked with Larry, eaten and drunk with him. Once in a while we even talked. I suddenly remembered that last time, down at the Commercial Hotel, when he’d clashed with Sam over the existence of God.

As so often in the past, when the joint had passed and the vibes were good, Vince must have been having the same thought.

“Well, I guess Larry knows the answer to all the big questions now,” he said. “Shame he can’t come back and have the last word.”

“Sam made it OK, then?” I asked, glad to change the subject.

“Uh huh. Which is almost as weird as Larry getting killed.”

“How do you mean?”

Vince looked at me.

“You remember how the system worked? After induction you did two months basic training, and then you got to find out what classification they’d assigned you. The one no one wanted was Eleven Bravo. That meant you did two more months training as a rifleman, then got shipped to Nam to replace the guys who were coming home in body bags. But there were eight support personnel for every man at the front, so if you had any kind of qualifications or education your chances of avoiding combat were pretty good.”

“Like Sam,” I prompted.

“Yeah. Except Sam volunteered.”

“Volunteered?”

Vince nodded.

“Doesn’t make sense, right? Anyone that crazy to see action had already joined up, and they’d mostly all been in ROTC at college and were into all that military bullshit. But for someone to wait to get drafted and then deliberately lay his life on the line when he could walk away with a job as a filing clerk! And a guy like Sam!”

I shook my head.

“I don’t get it.”

“Me neither. But that’s what he did, and he spent his whole tour of duty under fire. The company he was in took eighty percent casualties in one firefight. He was out there the full year, and he came back without a scratch on him.”

“You met him, then?”

“He wrote me. We talked about getting together, but nothing ever came of it.”

We chatted some more about this and that, and then my flight was called. Vince and I hurriedly exchanged addresses, phone numbers and formulaic promises to keep in touch. By the time my plane was airborne, the whole encounter seemed unreal. I didn’t bother to mention it to Rachael when I got home.

It must have been almost a year after that when Sam called me at home one evening. It was not a good moment. David had recently developed chronic asthma, and although the medication normally kept the symptoms in check, he was still liable to have periodic crises. This was one. He had caught a heavy cold the week before, and this had precipitated an asthma attack which kept him-and us-awake for hours every night while he coughed and cried and struggled for breath.

As a result, Rachael and I were both ragged from lack of sleep, and oppressed not just with a rational anxiety for our son’s health but with something neither of us could mention, even to each other-a sense of failure, of inadequacy, of what I might once have called “bad karma.” However much you reject the idea rationally, a child becomes a symbol of the relationship which brought it into being. Any congenital weakness in the former inevitably reflects on the latter.

As well as nursing David, Rachael and I had our jobs to deal with. Her work for the Children’s Protective Service continually brought her into contact with stressful situations involving, as she once said, people who shouldn’t be allowed to keep a cat, never mind a child. There was no solution to the problems she dealt with, only damage control and the least harmful option. Sometimes, as that evening, this knowledge left her feeling depressed and vulnerable.

When the phone rang, she was telling me about the case she was currently working on, a ghastly affair involving systematic physical abuse over a period of years. Just hearing about it brought me down-I was exhausted myself, and had my own, less dramatic problems at work-but I knew that sharing these horrors with me was therapeutic for her, and forced myself to listen. David was running around screaming his head off in a desperate attempt to attract our attention. Before us loomed another sleepless night.

So I may have sounded slightly abrupt when I answered the phone. I thought it might be someone trying to sell me a home improvement scam or a carpet-cleaning service. This was the time they usually called. Instead, I heard a hazily familiar voice.

“Phil? How you doing, man? This is Sam. Remember me?”

It took me a moment to work it out.

“Oh, hi,” I replied flatly. “How are you?”

“Good! Vince wrote me with your number. So what are you doing?”

“I’m a teacher.”

Sam’s laugh made him real for me again. How often I had heard it ring out as we cracked up helplessly over some nonsense which tickled our drug-fused synapses!

“No, man! Like what are you doing now? Tonight?”

“Tonight?”

I frowned.

“Where are you calling from, Sam?”

“Right here in town.”

“In St. Paul?”

“Other side of the river. Where are you at? Vince gave me the street address. Maplewood, right? Can I get a cab out there?”

There was no way I wanted Sam to come to our modest tract house, identical to all the others in our neat, convenient suburb. The distance between my present lifestyle and the one I had shared with Sam and the others could not be measured in years. I had become the kind of person we all despised then, myself included. I was faithful to my wife, my strongest drug was whisky, and although some of my rock albums were still lined up beneath the stereo, I never played them any more. But part of my new persona was a concern for the feelings of others, and although I had no desire to see Sam again, neither did I want to seem rude. So after conferring with Rachael, I eventually agreed to meet him for a drink.

My choice of venue was Shaunessey’s, a self-styled “Irish pub” located in a new shopping precinct in downtown Minneapolis. It was snowing lightly, and I drove with care. The Mississippi was frozen over, as bleak and bare as the concrete freeway. I left our sensible Chevy Nova in a multilevel parking garage and walked the three blocks to the bar, trying to figure out how to fill a decent amount of time with someone I would never have chosen to see again. Still, it was no big deal. A couple of hours, a couple of drinks, and Sam would be history.

The first thing that struck me was how relaxed he seemed, how serene. Unlike Vince, or for that matter me, he didn’t seem to have changed one iota from the person I remembered. He had aged, of course, but his lean, bony frame and ferrety features had taken it well, merely tautening up a little, shrinking to a sinewy, leathery essence. His straight mousy hair was as long as ever, tied back in a ponytail, and his clothes-jeans, denim jacket, checked shirt and boots-epitomized the no-bullshit, low-maintenance look we all used to strive for. By comparison, I felt staid and conventional in my V-neck sweater, tweed slacks and moccasin-style loafers bought at sale prices from a department store in our local mall.

Sam didn’t seem to notice, though, or maybe didn’t care. In fact he showed almost no interest in me at all. He didn’t ask any questions about my life, and when I mentioned a few details he didn’t bother to conceal his indifference. References to my work, my marriage and my child elicited only a nod, a grunt and a slightly contemptuous smile. It was as if all that was irrelevant, and he was faintly amused that I hadn’t realized this.

Nor was he any more forthcoming about his own life. He didn’t volunteer any information, and when I asked what he’d been doing the smug smile stayed right in place.

“I’ve been through a lot of changes, man.”

There was no hint of irony in his voice. I nodded warily.

“We all have.”

Sam’s smile grew broader than ever.

“Some more than others.”

I was beginning to get annoyed. This kind of supercilious, cooler-than-thou posturing had been standard operating procedure in our former life, but it had not worn well.

“So where are you living?” I asked shortly.

He hesitated before answering, as though this was a difficult question. At the time I dismissed this as just another mannerism, an attempt to make himself look deep and mysterious.

“Out on the coast,” he said eventually.

“Any particular coast?”

I was no longer bothering to hide my irritation. But he wouldn’t be drawn.

“There’s a bunch of us,” he said. “We’ve got a place out there.”

He looked me in the eye suddenly.

“Why don’t you come out and visit us some time, Phil? See for yourself.”

For the first time, it sounded like what he was saying mattered to him. This made his complete lack of interest in my actual circumstances all the more maddening.

“I’ve got a job, Sam. I’ve got a wife and child. We go to see my parents once in a while and go camping in the summer. Vacation-wise, that’s about it.”

He didn’t seem to hear.

“Do you remember that night we went down to the Commercial Hotel and Larry and I got into that argument about God?”

He was speaking in a quiet, intense tone, leaning across the table as though he didn’t want to be overheard. I was afraid he was going to lay the whole story on me with some pseudophilosophical spin about Fate and Chance.

“Sure I do,” I replied. “It happened right here.”

Sam looked around at the Guinness posters, the Irish flags, the leprechaun figurines and all the other laboriously inauthentic decor, contrasting with the bustling team of attractive young waitpersons and the well-heeled, well-groomed clientele.

“Here?” he echoed.

I had the advantage for the first time, thanks to local knowledge, and I seized it.

“The Commercial’s long gone, of course, but this is what they put up on the same spot. That’s why I suggested we meet here.”

Sam nodded intently, as though I’d said something profound.

“That’s good, Phil. I’m real glad. Because this is where it all started.”

“Where what started?”

He looked down at his beer, which he’d hardly touched, and then back at me.

“You remember we scored all that shit, and then the cops stopped us on the way home and I ate the whole stash?”

“How could I ever forget?”

“Something happened to me that night. Something I’ve never told anyone.”

I groaned inwardly. Surely to God he wasn’t about to lay some wacko acid insight on me after all these years? Sam was still staring at me unblinkingly.

“You’re someone I could tell.”

Not if I can help it, I thought. Some hint of my feelings must have showed in my expression, because he suddenly backed off, drank some beer and went on in a normal tone of voice.

“I always really respected you, Phil. You were different than the others. You’d been in Europe and all. Plus there was that class we took together. That makes a big difference, the fact that you’ve read Blake.”

“What’s Blake got to do with it?”

It occurred to me for the first time that Sam might be slightly crazy. Maybe that year in Vietnam had taken its toll after all.

His next words seemed to confirm my suspicions.

“Blake is very important,” he whispered, as though confiding a great truth.

I shrugged.

“Try telling that to my students. Most of them don’t read anything except the funnies.”

Sam nodded.

“Do you ever get the feeling that some of them aren’t exactly real?”

I frowned. Once again he’d thrown me for a loop.

“What?”

“Don’t you ever feel that there are some of them who just don’t get it? Who never will get it? I’m sure you’re a great teacher, Phil. An inspirational teacher. But I’ll bet that when you look around the class, you see maybe five or ten people out there who just aren’t picking up the signals you’re sending. You know? They don’t get it, because they don’t have it.”

“Don’t have what?”

Sam gave me his meaningful look again.

“Soul,” he said.

It was the first time for years I had heard the word except in a religious context. “Soul” was one of those loose, capacious words we used so much, into which we could pour our feelings without having to analyze them at all. If you liked something, it had soul. If you didn’t, it hadn’t. A neat way of not thinking, but one which had also worn badly with the passing years. I felt slightly sickened by Sam’s hippie one-upmanship, with its unearned suggestions of superior insight and more radical consciousness.

“Some of my students are more gifted than others, of course,” I replied stiffly. “Some are going to get the credits they need to get into a four-year college, others will wind up delivering mail or driving a bus. My job is to educate them up to the level of their abilities, not pick out the brightest and best and stroke their egos.”

Sam smiled and shook his head.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?” I shot back.

He tossed his head slightly. The smile disappeared.

“It’s not something you can discuss over a beer. Words are such little things, Phil. You should know that.”

“Words happen to be my business,” I replied huffily.

Again he didn’t seem to hear me.

“All those nights we sat up tripping together,” he said, gazing dreamily at the tabletop. “What happened then was real, wasn’t it? Realer than anything you’d ever felt before. But you could never talk about it after, never describe what you’d seen and heard. You had to have been there. You had to have lived through it.”

I eyed him coldly.

“I don’t do drugs any more, Sam.”

“Neither do I,” he said. “I haven’t touched them since that night we were just talking about.”

Given what I’d heard about the dope intake of our boys in Vietnam, I found this hard to believe. But it was none of my business.

“OK,” I said, “so what was it that happened that night? You didn’t make a big deal of it at the time. In fact you hardly said anything about it.”

Sam smiled and nodded.

“Sure, I know. It took me months to come to terms with it at all. I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t accept it. It was all too new, too overwhelming. It wasn’t till I got back from the war that I really mastered it.”

Our eyes met.

“Is that why you volunteered to become a rifleman?” I asked.

Sam grinned delightedly.

“That’s right, man! You understand!”

He spoke with such feeling that I was almost reluctant to disappoint him.

“I just figured that since you’d done two oddball things, they might be linked.”

He nodded, still grinning.

“I had to put it to the test.”

I stared at him.

“By risking your life?”

He nodded.

“If what I learned that night was true, you see, then I possessed a secret which would give me the power of life and death over every single person on the planet.”

So he was crazy after all. I felt slightly disappointed, but also relieved.

“That’s why it was important to make sure,” he went on in the same conversational tone, “and the only way to do that was to lay my own life on the line. If I survived, against all the odds, that would prove I was right.”

My only wish was to get the hell out of there, but I controlled myself. If I walked out now, leaving him with a sense of unfinished business, I might never hear the end of this. Better to let him get it off his chest now.

“So what’s this all about, Sam?”

He didn’t reply for a moment.

“Remember that argument I had with Larry?” he murmured. “I said that God either wasn’t omnipotent or He wasn’t loving, but you couldn’t have it both ways? Well, I was wrong. You can have it both ways. And that night I was shown how.”

“Uh huh,” I prompted.

He sat looking at me.

“Well, are you going to tell me?” I asked.

He laughed.

“It’s not something that can be told, man.”

“But you said I was someone you could tell,” I retorted, childishly pleased to have caught him out.

Sam turned over the bar tab and wrote a phone number on the back. He pushed it across the table toward me.

“Come out and see us some time,” he said. “It’s very quiet, very peaceful. A good place to kick back and get your head together.”

I tried to keep a straight face.

“So what’s the deal on this place? Is it some kind of commune?”

“Kind of. We’ve got some land, all the basic stuff you need for survival. There’s about twenty of us hanging out there. They’re nice folks. You’d like them. Some great-looking chicks, too.”

I imagined a rag-taggle group of aging hippies camping out in some clearing in the woods, their hand-knit clothes reeking of woodsmoke, a pack of grimy children crawling around their feet while they strummed out-of-tune guitars and cultivated a cozy sense of moral superiority.

“I’d really like for you to join us, Phil,” Sam continued seriously “That would complete the circle. And for you it would mean a whole new life, something you can’t even begin to imagine now. But first you have to change. That’s the key to the whole thing. The old must pass away before the new can be born. First you change, then you are changed.”

I had had enough.

“I have changed,” I replied calmly. “I’ve changed a lot. Not in the twinkling of an eye, after ODing on acid, but day in, day out. That’s the kind of change I believe in, the kind that lasts.”

“My kind of change outlasts everything,” Sam said softly. “Even death.”

This was intended as a challenge, but I wasn’t going to rise to the bait. I had made my point. Now it was time to throw in the sweetener and get this guy out of my life forever.

“I really admire you, Sam,” I said. “I like it that you’re still tackling the big questions, the big issues. We were all like that once, but most of us have lost it somewhere along the way. I think it’s great that you’re still out there on the edge, but personally I can’t live like that. It turns out I work best with my feet on the ground. I’m neither proud nor ashamed of that. Maybe you’re more flexible. All I know is the kind of change you’re talking about would break me.”

Sam looked at me solemnly a long moment. Then he smiled, as if dismissing the whole matter.

“Well, it’s been good to talk to you, Phil.”

“Sure has,” I agreed heartily. “If you’re ever in town again, give me a call.”

The idea was to reduce everything that had been said to the level of a banal social encounter. I knew he wasn’t likely to pass through the Twin Cities again.

Sam shook his head decisively.

“Next time, you’ll call me.”

I edged out of the booth, gathering my things around me, asserting my separate existence.

“What are you doing here anyway?” I asked.

“I came to see you, Phil.”

This time I couldn’t ignore him.

“You came all this way just to have a beer with me in a bar?”

He said nothing. Never underestimate the power of silence. It made me lose it completely.

“You should have told me you were coming! We could have had dinner, gone out somewhere … You should have let me know.”

His supercilious smile reappeared.

“That’s not the way I operate.”

And with that he walked away, across the bar, out the door. I left some money on the table and went after him, feeling resentful that he had somehow managed to gain the upper hand, despite all my efforts. But when I got outside, the street was empty. Downtown Minneapolis had changed since the old days. The street life which had flourished then had been exterminated, but nothing had replaced it. Consumers drove in from the suburbs, like me, had their fun and went home. The sidewalks were empty, the concrete slabs decorated with a faint flurry of snow.

I got my car from the parking lot, jammed a tape of the Brandenburg Concertos in the stereo and drove home, seething internally. I felt intolerably nauseous, as though I might throw up not just the beer I had drunk and the pretzels I had nibbled but my very brains and being. The whole weight of my misspent youth rose in my throat like a greasy, undigested feast. The evening had been a disaster from start to finish, a farcical misalignment of intentions and personalities. It was futile to try to revive old friendships.

I had tried to be polite and positive to Sam, praising his refusal to compromise and apologizing for having settled for less. This was hypocrisy, a strategy for sending him away happy, for getting him off my back. The fact was that I had come to terms with life. I had accepted its conditions, signed the contract and was now enjoying the modest but solid rewards. Nothing else was real, and anyone who went on trying to pretend that it was would end up like Sam, marginalized and crazy, someone people shied away from in bars.

The whole episode seemed an irrelevance, a freak occurrence of no relevance to my present circumstances. If it hadn’t been for that chance meeting with Vince, it would never have happened. As I drove up to our modest tract house, identical to all the others in our neat, convenient suburb, I made a vow never to let chance interfere in my arrangements again.