10

Ava felt that her house hadn’t changed all that much, except for the debilitated landscaping. It had been a short walk from the bus stop where we had been let off. The going on the bus had been slower than taxi, but calmer. This was in spite of the high school kids on the bus, most of whom looked a lot older than me, tossing an ill-chosen classmate around most of the ride. And how bad could it have been if none of the spit had actually landed on us?

The imitation stucco was a bit cracked here and there, but most of the damage was hair-line. This neighborhood near the newer cemeteries seemed a bit more run down than what she had left, but all in all it was still a fairly peaceful suburban setting. All of the underground wiring was now above ground, but this was not obtrusive as it was well hidden among the oaks.

She seemed relieved that her cut glass door was still intact, running her fingers affectionately along the mahogany that framed it. She tried a key, but it didn’t work. It went in but wouldn’t turn. Kind of like us: we came into this world but couldn’t seem to get the tumblers lined up.

“I know a trick, if it still works,” she said anxiously. She walked around the side of the house and stopped at a window.

“This is Leslie’s window,” she said to me, smiling and excited. She cupped her hands over her brow to deglare her voyeurism and peered in. The smile quickly left her face. She straightened up her hunched self and walked back over to me hurriedly.

“There’s nothing in his room,” she blurted, grabbing my arm.

“Or course not. He’s not going to be there,” I reassured her. “Even here, you’re the replacement for the pop-up. She would have arranged for someone to watch him.” I spoke quickly, because she would soon see the holes in my reasoning. Sure the pop-up would make these arrangements if she were to be going off on a big magnet mission like Ava did, but she wouldn’t have been set up for a scan because she was a pop-up.

“So let’s see,” I figured out loud, “who would it be? John, I mean Jim’s out...”

“No, you don’t understand. It’s a completely different room. It’s a study. There’s nothing of his there.” The tone of her voice was still insisting the worst.

“Well here,” I told her, “I’m sure he occupies another room. That’s not that far-fetched where we’ve seen hundreds of changes.”

“We’ll see,” she said as she walked back down the side of the house. She continued past the window she had looked into and walked around a corner to the back of the house. She brushed away some dead rosebush branches that guarded the worn unofficial path, at one point getting snagged on a thorn.

“Ouch,” she yelled, and then it was forgotten, paling in her purpose. I followed without an invitation.

She fumbled with a little stick that was jammed into the tracking in the outside sill of a back window. Removing it allowed her to open it easily since it wasn’t locked. It was one of two aluminum windows that flanked a glass door, the whole wing a plated glass design that faced the back yard.

“This is the trick I was talking about,” she said, feeling lucky about how easily the window opened for her. As she stepped in halfway, she reached out for my hand for steadying. “This window never had a lock to begin with in my world—it carried through here.”

I followed her in, and we found ourselves in a sunlit solarium, heavily furnished with plants which sat on a pink ceramic tile floor.

“Ralph had always meant to get around to installing a lock,” she mused to herself, but out loud for my benefit. She snapped her reverie and began roaming the house, first like she had misplaced her keys, then like a pooch who had heard a suspicious noise. “There’s no evidence of him,” she asserted, beginning to panic. “It’s like he never existed. No pictures—nothing!”

She entered the bathroom in the hall and slammed the door behind her. After a moment, I knocked on the door to see if she was alright. My knock was dull, indicating that it was a solid door, but still I could hear through it that she was brushing her teeth. After a few minutes she came back out with the final distaste of her motion sickness gone.

“I’ll bet you feel better now,” I said, and I knew she did, having been to my share of fraternity parties.

“Really,” she agreed, but I could still see she was plenty worried. “Just kind of weird using someone else’s toothbrush that’s mine,” she muttered as she resumed her search. She walked quickly down the hall until she disappeared into a bedroom. I followed behind her and stopped at the door. She saw a news clipping on a dresser in this, the master bedroom, which listed an obituary of her late husband. I could tell she felt comfortable in this room, but there were also a few distrustful glances indicating that a few of the things were different here and there.

She read the obituary thoughtfully and then made one of those crooked-ended smiles. Next she turned to me and then walked over to hug me, his replacement, and I didn’t feel all that uneasy about it. She hugged me like my Abby might.

“Looks like he didn’t make it here, either,” she said softly in my ear. “I was kind of hoping, since we saw a version of him back with the hats.”

“I’m so sorry, Ava.”

“Don’t apologize. I know he’s somewhere down the line, I just know it.” She dropped her hold and began once again her house-searching frenzy for Les. (I wondered just how the man had died here, since Ava’s Ralph had died at the hands of a true exister sliding accident.)

“Look, Ava,” I explained optimistically, “Les is probably at your mother-in-law’s. After all, that’s who has him where we left.”

“Of course!” she exclaimed, feeling relief for the first time since our unnerving cab ride had ended in front of Last Word National Bank. We walked out of the mahogany-framed, leaded-glass front door and stood on the front brick porch that faced a circular drive. A woman neighbor surprised us both with a “Hi.”

“Oh, hi,” Ava said back, the neighbor several feet away. “That’s Rita,” she whispered to me. Rita walked up the driveway and sincerely smiled in greeting. It was the moment of truth, introduction time, for I was convinced that “Rita” was not her name here. I tried to make the first move, the safest move. So did Ava, unfortunately.

“I’m Rocky,” from me was said simultaneously with, “He’s Ralph,” from her.

This Rita person just looked back and forth, from me to her, and then back to me again. She exhaled a laugh.

“I’m Ralph, but my friends call me Rocky,” I explained. And you?”

“I’m Nita,” she said, sticking out her hand, delighted.

“Nita?” Ava asked.

“Yes?” answered the petite neighbor, assuming Ava sought a favor.

“Uh, Nita, could you give me a ride to Ralph’s mother’s house?” I eyed Ava’s perfectly good car sitting in her carport. It wasn’t a Mercedes anymore, but it was still at least a BMW.

“Rocky’s mother?” she asked, referring to me.

“No, my Ralph’s mother’s,” she clarified. Uh-oh, I thought; invoking a dead person to the widow made Nita nervous.

“Sure, sure, sure,” she oversaid. “Get in my car.”

No Zs. We must have slid again somewhere.

We piled into Nita’s car, a compact that had us crammed into the back seat, as she had the passenger seat filled with racquetball paraphernalia.

“Sorry about the front seat. So your car, what’s the matter with it? Broken down?” she asked Ava as we drove off.

“I’m afraid so,” she answered, obviously not willing to take her perfectly good car out on possibly sliding streets. Not that I was offered the chance to drive, thank goodness.

Now this Nita seemed like a nice girl. She was a newlywed I learned from the ensuing conversation, complete with a few sentence inversions here and there, but still no Zs. She studied Art History at the University of New Orleans. She was married to a Maitre D’ at a fancy French Quarter restaurant and, like I said, seemed very nice. She supposed, and we did nothing to discourage it, that I was a close relative to the late Mr. Ebe, what with the same name and certainly with the resemblance.

“You know where they live, don’t you, Nita?” Ava asked her.

“Oh, sure. A ride I had to give them home the day of the...” she paused with maudlin respect, “funeral.”

“Well, I must say,” I had to say, “you’re a lot nicer than our last driver.”

“Oh?” she responded.

“Yes, a cabby.”

“Oh, the worst they are, huh?” she agreed.

“You’re telling me,” Ava further agreed.

And then nice Nita swerved out of her way to hit someone’s nice little pet—a dog, I think. I couldn’t really turn that quickly to see for sure, with my neck still stiff. Ava screamed.

“Nita!” she shouted to her. “We’ve got to stop and help him—find the owner!”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Nita laughed, turning around briefly to look at Ava. “Oh I tell you, Ava,” (apparently still her name here,) “sometimes you’re such a clown. You act like some of these bleeding hearts who would do the same for the run-over homeless. Don’t you follow Greer?”

Ava and I shared a worried glance. All at once our attention snapped back to the road ahead. We were getting off of the Ponchartrain expressway heading toward Robert E. Lee when some guy in an old brown and rusting pick-up sounded his horn as he swerved in front to cut Nita off. Nita honked repeatedly, heatedly, back at him. By this time he was directly in front of us, and we saw him through his back window raise a middle finger. He sped up, bouncing along the sinking asphalt of West End Boulevard. To my horror, and I saw by Ava’s face that she noticed it, too, there was a young girl, about eight or nine, bouncing around in the bed of the truck.

“You large, sweaty anal cavity, you!” cute little Nita hurled at her tormentor. She raced the engine, nosing up to and dropping back from the man’s apparent daughter, Nita’s closest victim. She placed her car, I know, inches from the downed open hatch which would provide no barrier for the child should the right bump jostle her into the space between truck and preying car. And at this narrow distance she dropped the car into a lower gear so as to frighten the young girl out of her wits. She slammed her thin back against the back of the truck’s cab, plastered there with terror. Her eyes were roaring for forgiveness for whatever infraction her father may have committed. Ava clutched my arm, tightening her grip more and more. I myself went rigid for the little girl. Her father took evasive maneuvers, changing lanes back and forth, tossing his daughter, like loose baggage, onto whatever metal clutch she could find purchase. Nita matched his lane changes, stroke for stroke.

“Nita!” Ava shouted. “Stop! You’re going to kill her.”

“The little twat I’m just scaring, Ava. For not sitting up front and wearing a seat belt, that’s what she gets.”

“Yes, but if anything happens, anything!—she’s going to be tossed out. Please stop.” There was some gravel or rocky debris at the girl’s feet. Desperate, she scooped some up in both her hands and threw it on Nita’s windshield.

“Oh you little pizza-shit!” Nita yelled and gave the accelerator a push. Her car bumped the truck this time, the physics of forty miles an hour affecting the whole interaction of the two such that the girl tumbled our way. Before all kinds of screams could escape from our back seat, we saw the child catch a rope that had been flapping along the side of the truck. Once I realized she was safe, I was coherent enough to plan my jump into the front seat to commandeer the car. Abruptly, however, Nita swerved right onto a quiet residential street, but never slowing during the turn. I saw ahead a pretty collie, lazy-as-can-be lounging in the middle of the road. I shut my eyes.

“Oh, no,” I heard Ava say in anticipation to the upcoming thump. It never came. I opened my eyes and turned as best as I could to see the dog scamper away. It must have been one of those perfect synchronizations, him slipping out after the first set of wheels but before the second set. Ava and I just held hands in the back, each putting nail marks into the other. We rode quietly in fear for any further victims of Nita’s vigilante vehicle, going the few remaining miles after turning onto Robert E. Lee Boulevard. Ultimately, we turned left toward the lake after crossing Bayou St. John and bounced up a steep driveway of Ava’s in-laws. The neighborhood was called Lake Terrace, and it wasn’t very far from the area Abby’s aunt lived in layers before.

“Well, here we are,” Nita said, pulling to a stop. The house was a blond brick ranch style, contemporary for a couple of decades ago, or for now, here.

“Yes, well, I guess we are,” Ava agreed, still bothered. We got out of the car. If all of our adventures had ended right here, it would have been plenty enough exciting for the both of us.

“Hey, girl, whatcha here doing anyway?” she asked Ava. “The old hag I know you never liked.”

“I came to see if my son was here,” she told Nita, avoiding eye contact with her.

“Another child you didn’t tell me you had,” she said. “Well, bye.” And then she pulled off. She rounded the corner out of sight, and a moment later we heard the squeal of car tires, announcing what we were sure was another ridding from society of some sort of burden. Ava grabbed my arm at the sound and then quickly let go. She turned to me at the foot of the walk which led up to the front door.

“Another child?” Ava asked herself while facing me. “What could she have meant by that? Could I have two children?” I could see that this thought excited her.

“No, can’t be. She didn’t know of any second child.”

“I suppose so,” she said, “but…that means there really is at least one, right?”

“I guess,” I agreed. “You have a Les here.” She smiled.

We walked to the front door, and I pushed the button. We heard a dong-ding. There was the sudden sound of a small chirping dog, the kind grannies carry on their bosom to shopping malls. Next was heard the click clack of shoes on a hard floor. It invisibly approached the door and finally stopped.

“Who is it?” a singsong voice behind the door asked.

“Ava,” Ava said to the door. And to me she whispered, “Ol’ lady Ebe wasn’t crazy about me where we came from. No telling what she’d think of me here.”

The door opened slowly and ol’ lady Ebe’s glare gave us our answer. The woman was a seventy-ish gray-haired biddy, thin, with enough hair spray—well, I knew she had done some real damage to the ozone layer that day. She held in her hand a small white box that had a single red button, obviously a remote panic button for the burglar alarm. She stared straight at Ava with that disapproving look only a mother-in-law could give. She didn’t even regard me. Not yet.

“Yes?” she asked sternly. “And what do you want?”

“Is Leslie here?” Ava asked.

“Leslie? Leslie who?” ol’ lady Ebe inquired.

“Ralph’s and my son, Leslie. Your grandchild.”

“We know he had problems,” I suddenly remembered Ava saying to John and me about Les the evening of the funeral, before our journey had begun, “but we were glad to get what we got.”

If anguishing her daily had been wondering what life would’ve been with him normal, the way it should’ve been, his oblivion would blow her away. She halfway would have expected perhaps worsening of his handicaps, but she was unprepared for his absence. This would be the loss of her husband and their only child (the last relic, a sacred re-incarnation of her loved one)—all in one week. Ol’ lady Ebe inadvertently broke the news in her puzzlement.

“Batty, have you gone, Ava? Your son Leslie, the little tiny baby right after birth who out of Intensive Care never made it? So premature…” she trailed off as she noted Ava’s face. “Well, what’d ya expect? Dead he is, really.”

The pallor did not compliment Ava. But whiter was the old woman when she finally, not through courtesy but through curiosity, noticed me. This old mother, having seen all of the stages of her son’s development, apparently saw in me a snapshot of her son in his twenties.

I found this very strange, because she certainly didn’t look like the mother I had had. Then, I had slid so much, and my parents had subtly altered so many times, that I had no valid visage of my folks.

So here we were, Ava blank-faced at ol’ lady Ebe, ol’ lady Ebe blank-faced at me, and me, the only one with any color, looking any which way.

“He is alive,” Ava finally firmly told her, perhaps out of her own defiant motherhood, just to outrank the persnickety grandmotherhood. “Maybe not here, but where I was—a place you’ve never been. And I’ve known that joy, and you haven’t.”

Now the old woman turned to Ava, adding an expression of being overwhelmed to a face that already qualified to exhaust a thesaurus’s whole category of astonishment. Ava’s announcement and my appearance caused her to waver, whereupon she collapsed on her rear, clutching her chest—just gave up the fight against gravity.

We started shouting into the house for help. An elderly man came running, saw the fiasco, and went running back in. He looked enough like a face I knew to probably be Ralph’s father. And I guess mine, in an interdimensionally twisted sort of way.

“Do you know CPR?” Ava asked me with urgency.

“Don’t you sort of beat on her chest?” was my response, fearing I had killed another one.

“Great!” was her response to my response. It was comical. We each crouched down to do anything that might seem the obvious thing to do. We accomplished nothing, of course. I tried to support her head, which tossed itself to and fro, while Ava fanned her with the palm of her hand.

Just then, ol’ man Ebe came running back with some pills and shoved one in her mouth and fiddled with it to get it under her tongue. She was still conscious, but certainly not because of us. She finally came around enough to groan and roll her eyes back into position straight ahead. She cast all of us off, including the old man, and melodramatically faltered as she attempted to stand. She finally succeeded, but used her husband for support.

“Ava,” ol’ man Ebe asked, “who is this?” referring to me. “He looks just like Ralph.”

Nita had given Ava an idea, apparently, and Ava answered, but more directly to the old woman, spite intended. By now she was again alert enough to understand what Ava had in store for her.

“He’s our other child, our secret child—your grandson, the one who made it,” she said scornfully, to get back at them, gypping them out of a hidden grandson all of these years. Ol’ lady Ebe’s comments about Les’ whereabouts had snatched Les away from Ava, and her misdirected anger had targeted the speaker of those cruel words with knee-jerk revenge.

Well, she hurt these old folks badly, I could tell. It made me wonder if she, in fact, was the original Ava who had followed me into the magnet, doing a mean and senseless thing like that; or was she a meaner switcheroo, flipped into her place by a ripple in the magnet’s wake.

We went back to my place. We took an un-air-conditioned bus that we boarded on Robert E. Lee and which we had pretty much to ourselves, except when it had gotten all the way to Canal Street. It was a silent ride on her part, and I didn’t offer any idle chatter, either. We got off when it became crowded, and then we walked the rest of the way. Two miles. For me, it was very hard, but for her it was therapeutic. We walked on and on, our only communication being my grabbing her hand when time to take a turn. There were no slides, no distractions. We were both thinking like crazy.

She wasn’t getting back at those old people for popping her bubble, I realized; she was replacing Les with me and punishing them for her loss at the same time.

Consider this: First I replaced her dead husband. I was able to handle that. Now I was to replace her dead son. Now that was something I really wasn’t keen on, especially because there were some recent signs more than just motherly affection, if you know what I mean. At the time I handled being her husband’s replacement O.K., because to tell you the truth, I was replacing my own Abby, sort of—or at least showing Abby affection through a very qualified surrogate. Anyway, it felt good; and in a real healthy way.

But now it was beginning to smell Oedipal around here, and that made sense, too—even more sense with Ava being twice my age. And I knew she felt these thoughts, too, or versions of them.

Ultimately, we both found ourselves plopping on my living room sofa in my apartment six floors above the street we had walked to get there. We had taken the only working elevator which really wasn’t in such good health. My key had worked, culminating in the door swinging wide to reveal my habitat of this layer. My, how the decor sucked! French provincial had swelled into the general living area, and the furniture was mottled with a bad imitation faux marble paint streak effect.

“There’s no accounting for taste,” I told her. As if summoned there, we both sat back on the sofa, slouched, heads laid back as we officially put to rest our first full day in the wake of the magnet. We rested. At some point, still laid back, we each rotated our heads toward each other, she better than me as I was still stiff and slow to accomplish any type of head movement. She saw my pain as I finally succeeded, and she smiled a sympathetic smile.

She really was beautiful. She was also, well, mature, but not unlike my Abby. Gazing at her, I found enjoyment in embarking on a fantasy. I fantasized a scenario that life had straightened out, that I had found my young, nubile Abby, had married her, had had a wonderful life with her, and that this would be the connubial loveliness I’d be gazing at years from now, united with her, with all of that good living behind us, between us, and in us.

I don’t know what Ava was feeling, but my frame of mind was receptive to an outstretched hand that stroked my red, swollen cheek. I would not resist any caresses. I could not.

“He was a lot like you,” she said softly.

“Your husband?” I asked. “Yes, of course, your husband.” I closed my eyes to receive her flattery.

“He was funny and quick and generous. He loved me like I know you love your Abby. He was good to me my whole married life, like I know you will be good to Abby. And he was pretty, too, like you. I loved him so...I love him. He was a lot like you.” I opened my eyes to accept her kindly expression. “He was a lot of you.”

Her hand still cradled my cheek and, unresisted, moved its stroking down my neck to my chest and finally groped me. I basked in this petting, feelings welling up, brewing, and spilling over.

God, I wanted my Abby, and sitting here was the picture, the feel, the embodiment of my whole life with her to be (having been had). If I could have her, I would have my whole life yet to come with my Abby—the years, the maturing, the striving together, the growing older together, the works. I could have my whole fulfilled yet-to-come life flash before my eyes.

Ava wanted her Ralph. I wondered if she wanted to relive their youth together, driving her lust in the opposite temporal direction from mine. And she wanted Les, too, but this didn’t distort her desire. After all, from her husband she had had her child, and there was sex involved, and here all of these aspects were smeared into one intermingling impetus.

Now I’m not one to graphically describe personal sexual athletics, but this was a session. We had drives that were cosmic which fueled mere physical copulation. Many Earths shook, but no sliding, thank goodness.

Most sex is so inundated with grunts, moans, and whimpering expressions of surrender, that this lovemaking marked it’s uniqueness with exclamations and facial exhilarations of pure happiness. I mean usually you just don’t have time to look happy and smiley during sex. But we grinned and laughed like fools the whole way, finding fulfillment by satisfying needs that had never been satisfied before by anybody; or for that matter involving needs that had never been needed before by anybody.

As you know, she was a lot older. Twice my age, and that was kind of strange. It wasn’t a turn-off for my smooth-skinned, unwrinkled self, mind you. I remembered that once as a young teenager I had a time with a girl in her late twenties, and I thought, Boy! this is great! For you see, this was not just a slip of a girl—this was a woman! A full-bodied, solid, and mature woman. All over post-pubescent, sinewy, stringy me. Well this thrill was back, but multiplied exponentially in all of those aspects. It is true: she was not just older, she was better.

Better than my Abby? Don’t ask me that, because I can’t solve a paradox. And I could never understand fully any guilt I should be feeling. To me, this was my Abby; this was lovemaking with my Abby that I’d still be in love with twenty years from now.

We were spent, limbs draped every which way over conservative oak bed and mattress, our third tryst. This was our guaranteed destination on a trip that had begun on the sofa, made stops at the multi-colored room and the imperialistic French provincial and which had gotten to my conservative room via the ride of our lives. Destination guaranteed.

“Do you still love your Abby after twenty years?” she asked me, knowing precisely how I had used her.

“God, yes,” I replied.

“Good,” she said. “Good. I’m glad I was able to give you that.”

“And what did I give you?” I asked in return.

“You gave me back my Ralph,” she said. After a moment, she added, “And my Leslie.” My thoughts earlier had warned me about this. “Please don’t be upset,” she said. “It’s not a perversion, under the circumstances.”

“What is it, then?” I asked, but not threateningly, for I was still holding some part of her body, a part unknown to my closed eyes.

“That’s what Les was—my love for Ralph. Isn’t that what children are supposed to be, the fruition of love-making with one’s spouse? The expression of love, embodied? When that old hag gave me the news, she not only killed my son, she killed the only thing I had left of Ralph. So I gave them back another grandson to give me back my son, and with it I regained a part of my Ralph, a part as good as the whole Ralph.

“And I made love to you and had my Ralph back and my son, too. I made love to both, because they are together, joined by procreation, forever. Even though they’re both dead here.”

And then she cried, and I comforted her; as did her Ralph comfort her, and she felt that; as also did her Les—not the crippled, blind little boy, but the whole Les from somewhere. She felt his comfort also. And I had the deified honor to do that for her.