The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [58]
Yet even as all of this seemed to compound the shock and grief, his mind kept turning over the image of the rain, the way all the drops seemed to bounce off the pavement in an infinite number of perfect little explosions. It tugged at him, so that he could feel the drawers of his mind slamming open and shut as he desperately looked through them for an explanation; then, miraculously, he found what he was looking for: again he was at the beach with his family, this time literally in the ocean, in a churning surf that crashed over him with furious insistence as the rain smacked down hard around him, each drop bouncing off the roiling sheen of the salt water, almost as reflective as an asphalt highway. In this memory, Martin was not sobbing but yelling with a hoarse, adolescent glee; it was a hurricane day at the beach—not to the point of evacuation but one of those days when you weren’t supposed to go in the water—but he and Hank didn’t care; they went in anyway, and Martin loved every second because, even if it was macho and stupid, it was wild and uninhibited and violent, and he knew how to handle the rough surf.
He knew why this memory had come back to him, and why it allowed him to confront the scenes of the accident as never before; it was as if, he realized, rather than escape—detach himself—he had dived under the turbulence, where for a few seconds he could surrender to the larger currents—i.e., of life and death—before resurfacing to confront the aftermath; and though he was flailing as he was pulled and thrown by forces so much larger and more powerful than himself, to swim through like this, however feebly, gave him a flicker of hope and strength, so that when he looked down at his fingers, he was almost surprised to find they had not been stained with the color of these new tears.
HE REACHED AROUND to turn up the volume on his stereo, where Donovan sang as seductively as he had on the radio more than twenty years earlier; the song was the last thing Martin heard before leaving the car, moments after Suzie had found it on the radio and declared it worth listening to. He knew that, just as it had done outside, a tower had given way in his soul; it had been there for him to behold but then shuddered and collapsed and now was gone, leaving an empty space marked by an intense but purposeful sorrow and a vague longing for something that he still couldn’t quite see but that nevertheless resonated with a beauty he could only describe as defiant. Far from disturbing him, the diagnosis of this condition—this gap, this void, this chasm, this HIV of the psyche that without exception afflicted everyone—made him strangely optimistic. He felt a rush of understanding as he stared simultaneously at his reflection and at the dusty cloud in the distance beyond it.
“Wear your love like heaven,” he whispered to the unfamiliar man in front of him, who stared back with silent but knowing eyes.
17
Dial M for Motherfucker
PITTSBURGH, 1977. From the backseat of her airport taxi, Anna admired the pale green fringe of the ancient hills of Western Pennsylvania, which rippled past her in the April sun. She was here to serve as a judge for a state high school singing competition and, despite some minor qualms about the hotel she had booked, was looking forward to it. Having retired from