CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE FALCON ARRANGED WITH THE PRIEST TO FLY ME HOME IN a private plane, accompanied by a Catholic aid worker who was scheduled to come back to the United States around the same time. I don’t remember much about the return journey. I couldn’t hear a thing. I was back at Cassowary for two weeks before I heard another sound.
“They don’t call it hysterical deafness anymore—too stigmatizing, apparently.” The Falcon was sitting beside me, writing on a long yellow pad of paper. “It’s a conversion disorder. The doctors insist it happened as a result of the trauma. I tried to tell them as far as I’m concerned you’ve suffered from a conversion disorder all your life. It won’t affect our relationship at all.”
The aid worker delivered me personally to Cassowary. He brought me home and dumped me onto the living room floor like so much sand from an upturned shoe. For weeks after there was sand everywhere I looked and wherever I turned, and there were grains of sand in my eyes, in my hair, beneath my fingernails. There was sand in my food and in the sheets of my bed. I went to draw my bath and I turned on the tap and sand flowed like water from the faucet.
This wasn’t sand from Squibnocket Beach—this was drought.
Sometimes you don’t need to hear to know what’s being said.
“My best guess is post-traumatic stress,” the aid worker was saying to Ingrid. “I know a bit about what he’s going through. It’s rough. He deserves a lot of credit. You must be proud of him.”
“Yes, we are very proud of him,” Ingrid said. “Why, I couldn’t be more proud of Collie than if he—”
The Falcon, elusive main attraction, appeared without warning, slicing through the nebulae, stepping up and extending his hand in greeting. The aid worker’s face flushed in sporadic crimson patches, physiological acknowledgment of a certain nectarous kind of star power.
“Oh, hello . . . ,” he stammered, so nonplussed that he introduced himself as Peregrine Lowell.
“It’s all right,” the Falcon reassured him, smiling and gracious, visibly pleased at wielding such a disconcerting effect. “I know who I am. Most of the time, anyway . . . and yes, Brian, yes, Ingrid is quite right. Allow me to finish the thought—we couldn’t be more proud of Collie than if you told us he had drug-resistant gonorrhea.”
“I beg your pardon?” The aid worker was confused. “I’m sorry. I must be missing something. Presumably there are things about which I am unaware.” Resorting to tact, he continued:
“Collie has been through a terrible time. It’s perfectly natural to feel and react the way that he has. I don’t think he needs a psychiatrist. He needs some time and the love and support of his family.”
“And that’s what he shall have—in abundance.”
The Falcon was taking over.
“I appreciate your efforts and your input. You’ve provided marvelous assistance when your help was really needed. And I intend to take your recommendations under serious advisement. I’ll think things over, and I’ll make the best decision for Collie.”
“Well, I think that’s wonderful. I’m sure whatever decision you make will be the right one. Collie is very lucky to have such a devoted grandfather. . . .” Brian was nervously applying obsequies like a poultice.
The Falcon laughed as he ushered the aid worker out of the room. “Our dear Ingrid will see you out. Thanks so much for your expertise. We’ll be in touch. . . .”
“Presumptuous son of a bitch,” the Falcon said, watching as my escort disappeared into the hallway with Ingrid at his arm.
I got quite a jolt the first time I looked into a mirror. My skin was the color and texture of ancient newsprint. My eyes were dark and recessed. My hair was dull and wild, so indiscriminately chopped up and sun-bleached—short, long, dark, light, shaved in spots, plucked in others—I looked like a man with a thousand frantic haircuts.
I was always pacing, trying to walk it off, needed a cane to walk, would always need a cane to walk, according to doctors, couldn’t sit still, the pounding of mortars sneaking up behind me, I was scrambling in and out of devastated buildings, and jumping aside for careening pickup trucks.
My sleep disrupted daily by nightmares, I had picked up some nuisance virus of unknown origin—my guts, soggy and bitter, felt as if they were marinating in bleach.
My hearing came back, returning as mysteriously as it had disappeared. Deafness kind of agreed with me—I actually pretended deafness for a couple of weeks after my hearing was restored. I wasn’t trying to be a jerk—I just needed a little more time, needed to get stronger to face the barrage of words I knew was coming my way.
School was out of the question; the second semester was pretty much a write-off. Pop was bugging me to come home for a visit, so he could take care of me, he said. Finally I agreed. I always liked the Vineyard in winter. In the winter, the beach was deserted, made up of crystal and craters, remote as a moonscape.
Pop was so worked up about what happened that he was ready to sue the Catholic Church and the governments of the United States and El Salvador.
Uncle Tom had smaller goals—he was lying in wait for me. We were alone near the pigeon loft. Sneaking up alongside me, he blew a whistle next to my ear to confirm his theory that I was a fraud.
“Jesus, Uncle Tom . . .” I covered my ear against the blast.
“I knew it, you conniving bastard. I never took you for a professional victim, but here you are playing us like a saxophone.”
“It’s not like that, Uncle Tom.” I felt my shoulders sag and decline into an inverted Y shape.
“No, well, so you say. Look here, Noodle, it takes a certain type to do what you set out to do, and that’s not you. God knows you tried, and that means something. But it’s no good. . . . Time for some plain talk—you’re too soft. I knew you weren’t up to much right from the start. When you were six you were crying in the garden, begging me not to kill the potato bugs. No one cares about potato bugs. No one, that is, except you. Do you understand?”
The whole time Uncle Tom was speaking, I was sitting on the edge of an empty limestone urn, freezing, wind whistling through my torn jeans, my head down and fiddling with a ballpoint pen, twisting off the plastic cap, clicking it back on again.
“Here, here, stop that distraction,” Uncle Tom ordered. “You’re acting like a child. Now, are you listening to me? Have you heard a word I’ve said?”
“I hear you.”
“But are you taking it in? Are you paying attention?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, have you learned anything?”
“Maybe I’m trying to make the world a safer place for potato bugs.”
“That’s enough smart talk. Being a wise aleck is what got you into this mess in the first place. You come inside before you expire out here in the cold. And quit thinking so much about yourself and how you’re feeling.”
“I’ll be there in a minute,” I said, watching as he headed into the house, my finger running along the rough topography of the urn.
I kept thinking about the little boy in El Salvador, the one the French doctor brought back to life. I couldn’t get him out of my head. I thought about the French doctor, too. I wanted to learn his language, wanted to absorb its magic.
It should have been a grown-up decision, my way of being useful—my first meaningful formal step on the road to manhood—but it was freighted with delusion and wishful thinking.
Does anyone ever actually make a sensible decision? Do the stories we present to the world ever correspond to the stories we tell ourselves?
How could I tell Pop or Uncle Tom or anyone else, for that matter, what I was up to? The truth was, I was trying to make some Fantastic Flanagan magic.
How could I admit even to myself that by deciding to become a doctor, I was trying to pull the ultimate rabbit from a hat and return my brother from the dead?