Lunar Park

7. robby’s room

Marta was in the kitchen making dinner, stir-frying vegetables in an aluminum wok, while the kids were upstairs getting dressed for trick-or-treating. It was dark out now but on the drive from Dr. Kim’s back to the house I noticed parents were already walking their costumed children through the town’s neighborhoods as dusk approached, which I took as a sinister reminder of the missing boys and which moved me to stop at a liquor store and buy a bottle of Groth Sauvignon Blanc and a magnum of Ketel One, and once I was safely ensconced in my office I poured half the wine into an oversized coffee cup and hid both bottles beneath my desk (my furniture was still rearranged). I wandered around the house with nothing to do. Passing the bowl of mini Nutri-Grain bars on a table by the front door, I went outside. Someone had already lit the jack-o’-lanterns. Victor was lying on the lawn. When he gave me a cursory look I gave one back and then picked up a Frisbee and threw it at the dog. It landed near where he was lying. He glanced at it contemptuously, then lifted his head and looked over at me as if I were a fool before nudging the orange disc away with his snout.

Back in the house I moved through the living room and noticed that the furniture had been placed back in its original position. Yet I still felt like I was viewing the room from an unfamiliar angle. The carpet looked darker, shaggier, the pale beige now morphing into something that bordered on teal or green—and the morning’s vacuuming still hadn’t cleaned up the footprints that were embedded in it. I kicked lightly at one of them—it was large and ash-colored—and was trying to smooth out the carpeting with the toe of my loafer when from upstairs I suddenly heard Jayne shout, “You’re not going as Eminem!” and a door slammed. I took a Klonopin, finished my wine, poured myself the rest of the bottle and carefully walked upstairs to Robby’s room to see if he was okay.

As I approached his door I saw the scratches he had mentioned that morning. They were clustered near the bottom of the door, and though they weren’t the deep grooves I had anticipated, the paint had been clawed off and I thought it was probably just Victor trying to gain entry. No one from the party had been upstairs, but then I flashed on Sarah’s torn pillow and fleetingly thought that maybe Robby had made the scratches himself—a hostile gesture, something to garner attention, whatever—until I realized that this didn’t seem like something Robby would ever do; he was far too passive and enervated to pull off a stunt like that. And then I flashed back on the Terby and the ripped pillow again. The kids were unreliable—their meds were proof of that. Plus Robby had recently switched antidepressants. Luvox had now been added for the anxiety attacks that had plagued him since he was six, and which had increased in intensity since I arrived—and who really knew what the side effects were? His physician had assured us that except for mild gastrointestinal problems there weren’t any, but that’s what they always say, and anyway, without the drugs Robby couldn’t sit still. Without the meds he wouldn’t have been able to visit the planetarium. Without the Ritalin he couldn’t have cruised the mall earlier in the week for a costume. I almost tripped over a skateboard as I entered his room, but the TV’s volume was so high that Robby, who was sitting on the bed, didn’t notice.

Robby’s room had a space-age theme: planet and comet and moon decals were pasted all over the walls suggesting that you were now floating within a night black sky somewhere deep in space. The carpet revealed itself to be a Martian landscape, impressively detailed with canyons and fissures and craters. Spheres made of glass beads dangled from a glittering, savage-looking asteroid that hung from the ceiling above a king-sized art deco bed fitted with a stylish comforter. Along with the ubiquitous Beastie Boys and Limp Bizkit posters were those of various moons: Jupiter’s Io and Saturn’s Titan and the massive rifts of Uranus’s Miranda. The room also contained a minifridge, brightly colored lamps, a leather sofa and a stereo, and one entire wall was a stark black-and-white photo mural of a deserted skate park. Video game cartridges were scattered across the floor in front of the wide-screen TV, now hooked up to PlayStation 2 amid a pile of Simpsons and South Park DVDs. There was a stack of new Tommy Hilfiger shirts on his bed. Japanese action figures lined the bookshelves, which contained mostly wrestling magazines and the entire Harry Potter series, and above the shelves was a large bronze painting of the zodiac. The remains of a Starbucks iced chai sat next to a giant translucent moon that glowed from the computer—Robby’s screensaver.

Robby was staring at Nintendo Power Monthly while slipping on a pair of Puma socks and then he was tying his Nikes. The TV was turned to the WB channel and as I stood in the doorway I watched a raunchy cartoon zap into one of the many commercials pitched toward the kids—one in a series of ads that I hated. A scruffy, gorgeous youth, hands on his skinny-boy hips, stared defiantly into the camera and made the following statements in a blank voice, subtitled beneath him in a blood red scroll: “Why haven’t you become a millionaire yet?” followed by “There is not more to life than money” followed by “You do need to own an island” followed by “You should never sleep because there are no second chances” followed by “It is important to be slick and evocative” followed by “Come with us and make a bundle” followed by “If you aren’t rich you deserve to be humiliated.” And then the commercial ended. That was it. I’d seen this ad numerous times and had yet to figure out what it meant or even what product it was trying to sell.

Robby’s shoulders were slumped and the Hilfiger sweater tied around his waist fell to the floor as he stood up and stretched. There was a young adult book on his pillow called What Once Had Been Earth. My son was eleven and had a Prada wallet and a Stussy camouflage eye patch and a Lacoste sweatband clung to his wrist and he had wanted to start an astronomy club but due to lack of interest among his peers it never materialized and his favorite songs had the word flying in the title, and all of this saddened me. He sprayed Hugo Boss cologne on the back of his hand and didn’t smell it. He still hadn’t noticed that I was standing in the doorway.

“So, Mom wouldn’t let you go as the rap star, huh?” I said.

He whirled around and gasped. And then he regained his composure.

“No,” he said sullenly. He looked shameful, handcuffed.

Something in me broke. I swallowed another mouthful of wine and walked into the room.

“Well, you need platinum blond hair and a wife to beat, and since you don’t have either . . .” I had no idea what my point was; all I wanted to do was make him feel better, but every time I tried, it just seemed to add to his general confusion.

“Yeah, but Sarah’s going as Posh Spice,” he grumbled as I turned down the volume on the television.

“Well, your mom has a problem with the whole rap thing . . .” I drifted off, then caught myself. “So what are you gonna go as?”

“Um, nothing. Nothing, I guess.” A pause. “Maybe an astronaut.”

“Just an astronaut?” I asked. “Can’t you think up something a little more . . . entertaining? Mom said that’s what you were last year.”

He said nothing.

I just shuffled amiably around the vast room and pretended to be interested in a variety of things.

“Is there something wrong?” I heard him ask worriedly. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No, no, no, Robby,” I said. “Of course not. I was just admiring your room.”

“But, um, why?”

“You’re very . . . lucky.”

“I am?”

I hated the way he asked that. “Yeah, I mean, you should be grateful for all the things you have,” I said. “You’re a fortunate kid.”

Wearily, slumped over, his arms at his sides, he looked around the room, unimpressed. “They’re just things, Bret.”

“I mean all I ever wanted was a TV and a lock on my door.” I made a superficial gesture with my hand. “All I wanted to do was play with Legos.”

I stared at the mobile of planets hanging in the middle of the room—the universe floating below the star-studded ceiling. The satellites in orbit, the rockets and astronauts, the spaceships and moon rocks and Mars and the fiery meteorite heading toward Earth and the concerns about extraterrestrial sightings and the need to establish colonies throughout the solar system. It all seemed horribly useless to me because the sky was always black in space and there was no sound on the moon and it was another world where you would always be lost. But I knew that Robby would argue that far beneath its freezing craters and treacherous sand-blown surfaces lay a warm and yielding heart. It took only two and a half seconds for a laser to flash from Earth to the moon and back again, as Robby had told me at that wedding in Nashville so many years ago.

“Yeah, I guess an astronaut,” he said.

“Okay, that’s cool,” I said. “I think that’s a cool costume.”

I finally noticed the helmet on the bed and the accompanying orange NASA suit hanging on a hook in the closet. “I’ll see you downstairs, bud.”

Robby kept staring at me until I left the room and closed the door behind me. I flinched when I heard it lock. A sconce flickered as I walked past it.