Harmonic Convergence

My father never blamed Yoko. "Sometimes two personalities are just too powerful to stay together long," he told me. At one time he'd thought that Lennon and McCartney would save the world, and on days when he was feeling gloomy he wore a pin that said "I want the Beatles to Come Together." They had been separated by forces beyond his ken.

He was a big man, my father. His muscles stretched the cotton of his black t-shirts. I thought that I'd look like him when I finished growing, and that everyone would be a little bit afraid of me the first time they met me. Mom said that his problem was that he got embarrassed too easily, but that wasn't it. He'd pass people on the street, people he'd known his entire life, and it was like they weren't there. He had a veil over him, and in 1987, when people started talking about the Harmonic Convergence on the radio, he hoped that the veil might lift. He stopped crying so much, although he still spent a lot of time in the basement. I went down to check up on him and he arranged eight pool balls on the green nap of the pool table for me, so that he could describe what would happen when the convergence began.

"See," he said, "the sun, moon, and six of the planets will all align. A perfect equilateral triangle."

"What happens when they align, Dad?"

He looked up at the cobwebs on the ceiling beams.

"A five year period of planetary cleansing."

Dad said that when the convergence began, the ancient Mayans would come back and special people would be able to recognize them. He thought that he would, and I hoped so. Or at least I hoped that in trying to recognize them, he'd break through the veil that separated him from other people. One time, he failed to recognize Dan Gross, who had been my best friend before puberty struck. We saw Dan sitting on a bench outside the grocery store and Dad thought that he was Denny Green, another childhood friend of mine who'd moved to Colorado. It's true that Dan and I hadn't played together for a long time. But Dan was dating Larissa Andersen, the girl who lived next door to us, the girl who was Paul McCartney to my John Lennon. That was a weird day, outside the grocery store. A thick layer of fog had obscured the parking lot, and the halogen lights were dim spots of blue on air that seemed like paste. Dad started asking Dan about Denver, and talking about mountain climbing. After awhile Dan looked amused and started answering his questions.

"Yeah, Denver's great, very sunny."

He kept giving me scornful, ironic glances, and I left my father and went to look for the car. Larissa and I didn't write songs together, like Lennon and McCartney. But we were a great creative duo. When we starred together in Arsenic and Old Lace, I felt that her acting was done for me, as a challenge and a gift. I gave her tips in the choir room, which is what the school used for a Green Room. "When you say, 'We made up our minds then and there that if we could help other lonely old men to find that same peace, we would,' try to think of that little bluejay you found in your yard, the one that died after you brought it in and fed it with the dropper all night." When she said the line on stage, I saw her glance towards where I was watching from the wings. We looked out for each other.

Surviving high school was our main collaborative endeavor, and I was always there in the hallway so that Larissa could breathe on me, and I could tell her whether she needed a breath mint. One day, Larissa kissed me in the choir room. It had been a particularly bad day. I wasn't just in choir, I was also in jazz choir, and the night before Mr. Severid, the director, had asked me to sing a high C, and I couldn't. I'd been able to do it that morning, and Mr. Severid made fun of me.

"Have you had an operation?" he asked.

Everybody laughed. But the thing is, it really did feel like an operation. Puberty was as precise and merciless as a surgeon. So the next day in choir there I was, sitting on one of the metal chairs and watching Severid sort music as the other kids came in. Larissa saw me and she came over and sat in my lap, which was a surprising development.

"Are you feeling sad, Paulie?" she asked.

I nodded, because her saying it made me sad, made me want to cry.

"Would it help if I gave you a kiss?"

And she kissed my cheek. Such kindness! That's the way it was between Larissa and me.

Then her mother died. Our street went right up a steep hill, and all of our lawns slanted, but Larissa's parents had fixed this problem by putting in terraces, long porches full of earth for her mother to garden in. I wouldn't have called Larissa's mother fragile, despite her smallness, but when she was stung by a bee, that was all it took. Or maybe there were medical terms involved, reasons why she was predisposed to having the bee kill her. I don't know, I'm bad with those things. She was the first person I knew who had died, and I couldn't make sense of it. I sat on the couch in the TV room and tried to write a poem about it, jotting down all of the images that came into my head. "Cats on the windshield," I wrote, "playing with the dead." I saw the cut-outs of skeletons that we hung in the windows on Halloween, and the brass braids that connected their joints. "Mortuary puppets," I wrote, "the troubadours of loss." And bees, I saw bees, but against a blank space that could have been the sky on a cloudy day, and I saw fingers - Larissa's - stained with mulberry juice, and heard a little music box that she'd had when we were kids playing "Day Tripper." I wrote all of this down and when I was done I felt that I had created the perfect expression of grief, and I went to read it to my father. But somehow I didn't want to when I found him in the basement throwing darts at a dartboard. I could see from his eyes that the veil was across him, and that he was feeling Larissa’s mother’s death deeply. I thought that I might break him if I read the poem out loud.

In the weeks that followed I wished that Larissa's bedroom faced my own across our two yards. Both of us had bedrooms on the north sides of our respective houses, but if we hadn't we could have had one of those telephones made of tin cans and a piece of string. I imagined that phone as I lay on my bed. I imagined it stretching taut around the corner of my house as she pulled the can to her ear and I, from my end, whispered reassurances. I sometimes even said them out loud, into the dim, empty air of my bedroom. "You can use this someday, when you're a great actress," I'd say, and then I'd imagine her on the screen, tears in her eyes, and I'd be the only one who would know what she was really thinking about.

Dad, Mom, and I went to the memorial service and sat on the funeral home's tasteful wooden chairs. Larissa sat at the front with her father, who was dignified and gray, but so small that he looked like a boy in his Sunday suit. Dan Gross was there, sitting next to Larissa and holding her hand. He kept looking up into the corners of the room, as if he were inspecting the edges of the wallpaper. The minister made his speech and I wanted to walk up to the front and push Dan out of the way and sit down in Larissa's lap. I wanted to return the kiss she'd given me, to make things right for her. After the funeral she just stayed in her house. She wasn't in the summer play, which was The Pirates of Penzance, and at the dress rehearsal I looked at all of the girls in their white peasant blouses, all of Mabel's singing sisters, and none of them seemed real and urgent, like Larissa would have. Towards the middle of July, Larissa and Dan broke up. He stopped parking in her driveway and I didn't miss his brown pinto with the bumper sticker that said "swimmers do it with goggles on." About a month after that, her father remarried.

I first learned about it on August 16th, the day of the Harmonic Convergence. Mr. Johnson, my gym teacher, had been on the radio the night before, saying that he had Mayan blood and telling people what to expect when the convergence started. My father had listened avidly. He asked me a lot of questions about Mr. Johnson, who was thin and wore glasses and liked to make us play badminton. Then Dad said that he was going to sleep, and he lay down with "Let it Be" playing on the stereo, and Mom stayed up to watch TV and play solitaire, like she usually did.

I got up with Dad at dawn and we went out in the yard and faced the rising sun. Dad was shirtless, and the sunlight turned his skin as pale and yellow as an egg yolk. He began to sing, his stubbled jaw moving up and down. "Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup / they slither while they pass, they slip away across the universe." Something rustled behind me, and I turned and saw Larissa digging through the trash cans that had been set out in the alley next to her family's garage. She was still in her sleeping outfit, gym shorts and a tie-dyed t-shirt, and I wondered for a moment if her scrabbling in the trash was some ritual, some way in which she'd decided to observe the Harmonic Convergence herself. She saw me and she waved me over. She didn't seem to see my father, or maybe it was just that she had no time to notice him, to process his ritual pose, to wonder about what he was doing. She was urgent when I came up to her. She gripped my arm and pulled me into the alley, so that the garage was between us and her house.

"Paul," she said, "you have to help me! You have to help me get Queenie out of the house!"

"Okay," I said, and she kissed me.

Just like that. I felt the skin on the side of her hand brush my brow as she lifted my hair, and then her lips were on my lips. They felt a little too big for me, too rounded and lush. It was a quick kiss, just a peck, but I didn't know what to do with my mouth.

Okay," she said, "I'll sneak back into my room and you go knock on the door. Tell her anything. Tell her there's a gas leak. No! Tell her you're collecting rummage, for the church bazaar! Get her to help you carry it out to the curb. And then I'll sneak out of my room and lock the door."

"But who's Queenie?" I asked.

"My stepmother. Never mind, I'll explain later."

I might not have gone through with it if she hadn't kissed me. That kiss seemed to require something of me, and as I walked around the house I touched my lips with my fingers and then held them in front of my face, as if I could see the kiss on them.

The Andersen's porch looked strange, and I realized that two big pots of geraniums had been replaced with concrete trolls, two small, squat shapes with long noses and ears that hung down to the stoop. The wreath of red berries was gone from the door, so that the green-painted wood looked naked. I pressed the doorbell and Queenie answered it. She had two long braids that were a color between blond and gray, like driftwood or old fences. She was tall but thin, and she folded herself downwards, which was condescending, somehow, and accusatory, as if my shortness forced her to warp her stature. She didn't say anything and I was so surprised by her that I said my line loudly and without much feeling.

"I'm collecting rummage for the church bazaar!"

She was eating a piece of toast, which she lifted from a porcelain plate and chewed as she stared at me. Then she shut the door in my face.

I went back around the house to Larissa's window. Behind me I could hear my father singing. "I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me." The sunlight was shining more fully and brightly on him. He was holding both hands out to it, either inviting or beseeching it. Larissa slid her window open and stared out at me.

"Sorry," I said.

"She didn't buy it?"

"She didn't say anything. She just shut the door. Is she really your stepmother?"

"That's what my dad says. I'd like to see a marriage license."

"You weren't at the wedding?"

"No. She just appeared. Last night."

"But it’s only been three months."

She reached through the window and kissed me again. Her lips were robust. "You should come in."

I crawled through the window with Larissa tugging at my armpits, and I almost fell on her, but I was glad that I didn't. She moved away and stood by her dresser, fingering glass knickknacks. Her hair looked wonderfully uncombed, tangled in layers, but I could see that her fingers were shaking.

"What were you doing out by the trashcans?" I asked.

"She's been throwing it all away. All the stuff from my childhood. All the stuff that was my mother's. Or it's disappearing, at least. It wasn't in the trash. It's ruinous. I brought some of it in here," she waved at the knickknacks, "but the bowl's gone, the one I made her in sixth grade, and the sand painting of the sailboat from the bathroom."

"But who is she?"

"I don't know, Paul. Just someone he married."

She turned squarely to look at me and her hair hung down over her face. She stamped her foot on the floor.

"How could he do it, Paul, how could he just come home and tell me he's taken another wife, just like that, like he'd bought her at a store?"

I wanted to comfort her but her posture was both inviting and forbidding, and I could see that she couldn't decide on her mood.

"She's really weird," I said.

"Queenie! What kind of a name is Queenie?"

"I don't know."

"You think she's bad, though, right? I mean, she's obviously bad."

"Do you...do you think she might be a Mayan?"

“A what?”

"Nothing. It's just something my dad is doing. You know, trying to see the Mayans."

She didn't know what I was talking about, I could see that. She shook her head, once, as if trying to clear it, and took my hand.

"Come on."

Queenie was in the corner of the living room rummaging through a built-in cabinet. She was emptying it out onto the floor into an ever-widening circle of small objects. There were old packs of playing cards, seed catalogs, watercolor paints, frayed brushes, carved letter openers, soapstone figurines, embroidered pin cushions, an ivory comb, tin boxes with painted lids - all the objects that Larissa's mother had touched and held and oiled with her fingers. As Queenie dug in the cabinet she made a little snuffling noise.

"What are you doing?" Larissa screamed at her.

Queenie turned, the skin tight across her face, her sharp nose quivering.

"Making a place for myself, your new mother," she said in a voice that was practical and chastising and sweet.

Larissa tugged my hand and led me back down the hall, quickly, tersely, panting little sobs beneath her breath. She slammed the door of her bedroom behind us and threw herself down on the bed. She began to cry. I sat on the edge of the bed and patted her shoulder. After a moment she stopped crying and lay very still, paying attention to my pats as if trying to find some message in them, some kind of Morse Code. She turned on her side and grabbed the front of my shirt. She pulled me down to her. Her lips were covered with a layer of phlegm and tears. I tasted saltiness. She kissed me for a long time. Every time a sob rose along the ridge of her back she kissed me harder. When she stopped she lay against me, exhausted. I could feel her heart beating.

"Paulie," she said, and her voice sounded brined from the kissing, "we have to kill Queenie. She has to die. I know you think so. I know you think so, too."

"I...but...how?"

"How?" she asked herself.

She kissed me again, as if it helped her think. "We could be really filthy," she whispered to me.

"What would Queenie think of that, if she heard us groaning and moaning?"

Now I was afraid. "I don't have a condom," I said.

"It's all right."

She lifted my hand and put it on the outside of her shirt, over her breast. She kissed me again and I could hear my own breaths coming loudly through my nose.

"Come on."

I was frightened of her. I wanted to encourage her towards some other expression. This wasn't the thing we'd been making together, the thing we'd been collaborating on. I imagined Queenie standing right outside the door, maybe eating her piece of toast, maybe grinding it softly with her teeth. This was a drama that Larissa and Queenie were making between themselves, and I was...what? A prop? A bit part? But then, of course, there was that kiss in the choir room. We had always helped each other. Who was I to renege on our collaboration now, in her hour of need? I pushed her off of me and stood up.

"Okay," I said. "Okay, but I need a condom."

"Well, go get one. The convenience store on Ridge has a machine in the men's bathroom. That's where Dan used to get them."

I don't know why that made me feel ashamed. I looked down at the carpet.

"Okay. Will you stay here?"

She laughed. "I can't go anywhere, or Queenie will move the house."

I crossed the grass from her yard into my own. I knew what would happen next. We'd have sex and we'd kill Queenie. I even knew how we'd do it. We'd poison her with a mixture of arsenic, strychnine, and cyanide in elderberry wine, which is what the old ladies used in Arsenic and Old Lace. My father was still standing half-naked in the yard. He was trembling from having held his arms out for so long, and his voice was a little ragged. "Living is easy with eyes closed," he sang, "misunderstanding all you see." I went into the house to get some coins from my bedroom and passed my mother in the kitchen. She was standing at the counter, looking out at him through the window above the sink.

"He's glowing," she said.

She sounded worried. I looked out and saw that she was right. The egg yolk color of early dawn had intensified and deepened on his skin. I blinked my eyes to see if I could make the brightness go away.

"Mom..." I said.

"I don't know, Paulie. Is it the Harmonic Convergence?"

But then a cloud moved across the sun and we saw that it was just a trick of the light. Only, in that moment, I'd thought that maybe he was a Mayan himself, and a thought struck me all of a sudden - what if we were all, ourselves, the thing that we were looking for? I mean, Dad was the strangest person I knew. If he couldn't be a Mayan, then who could be? And maybe he was the only Mayan around. And if he really wanted to see one in another person, he never would. The sadness of it overwhelmed me. But Mom had already gone back to washing the dishes.

I went to the convenience store and locked myself in the men's bathroom so that I could study the condom machine. There were labels for the different types of condoms above the slots where they came out, and I saw that one of them depicted a condom as a rocket ship, shooting through the solar system. For some reason it was banded with rainbow stripes. But the picture on the cardboard was so faded that you could only just make out the different colors, and it looked so depleted of its original cheerfulness that I couldn't imagine buying it or any other condom. I went back to Larissa's and climbed through the window. Larissa was lying on her back, staring up into space. A dull, steady look had come over her, like she was in shock. I touched her shoulder and she grabbed my hand and started kissing it, rabid little kisses that stun my skin.

"I didn't get it," I told her.

She looked up at me. The fast, animal decision of those kisses was reversed. Her eyes turned hard.

"Look," I said, and tried to sit down on the bed.

She moved her body to block me.

"Look, we can't kill anybody. I mean, she's awfully bad, but she's a human being, right?"

"No she's not. She's a troll."

"Larissa..."

"A troll, a troll, a troll!"

Her hair was tangled across her head, like it was knotting itself with fury. She pushed up out of bed and went to a black boom box on her bookcase. She fumbled a cassette into it and turned the volume up. Then she came over to me and stood, poking me in the chest.

"You listen to me, Paul Whin, she's a troll, and don't you dare apologize for her. Don't you dare!"

"I'm not..."

"I always knew you were like a dumb kitten, but I thought I could depend on you. You're just a weirdo, like your father."

"Larissa..."

"It's over between us, whatever it is. Don't expect any more favors from me. Don't expect me to even talk to you. You disgust me."

I had my dignity. I drew myself up and said,

"Larissa, I'm sorry you feel that way."

But here's the truth. It broke my heart. Larissa was the only friend I really had. I climbed out the window and was halfway across the yard when I looked to the right, out towards the street, and saw Dan's pinto sitting there. He was staring at me out of the open window. When our eyes met he jumped out of the car and sprinted across the yard towards me.

This was the friend of my youth. This was the boy I'd played James Bond with and who had chewed the little plastic plugs on his squirt guns. This was the boy I'd accidentally hit with a baseball bat on a backswing when he'd been playing catcher and who had a scar across one eyebrow to show for it. This was the boy who I'd drawn comic books with, comic books that we'd sold for a nickel a piece so that we could blow our earnings on Kool Aid packets which we ate while sitting in a tree, licking the Kool Aid off of our wet fingers. As he came towards me, I saw that he was going to hit me.

"Dan?" my father said, "Dan Gross?"

Dan was so startled that he stopped abruptly, like a dog pointing. Dad was walking towards us across the lawn, still half-naked, still wearing only his pajama bottoms. The sun was out and playing its tricks again, so that it seemed to shine through him and make his clear eyes a startling blue.

"Dan," Dad said, "you look unhappy. Are you unhappy? What's wrong?"

I watched as Dad put his arms around Dan, who looked terrified. Then Dan gave a beaky, squawking sound, and started to cry.

"Larissa!" he cried. "Oh, Larissa!"

I looked back at Larissa's window, but it was empty. Music blared through it. Pink Floyd. I wondered how long Dan had been watching, how often he'd seen me come and go through that window that morning. Maybe he'd even followed me to the convenience store and guessed what my errand was. I wanted to tell him that we didn't do it, but Dad was walking with him, gently moving him towards our house.

He sat Dan down at the kitchen table and Mom gave him a water in the plastic beaker with the Beatles on it that Dad always drank from. Dan couldn't stop crying. He said that he'd been driving by her house every day, letting the pinto glide slowly in neutral, looking at the blank windows, the shuttered, stale darkness of the house, and knowing that Larissa was in there and that she didn't need him.

"She said her love was dead," he sobbed. "She said that to me. But shouldn't she need me now? I mean, I could comfort her. Who knows her better than I do?"

He let his shoulders do most of the crying for him. They shivered and shook.

"You poor boy," Dad said.

I watched him, and I could see that he was sad, but he wasn’t crying. His sadness wasn’t confused, but assured, like he knew what it was there for, and he sat next to Dan and folded his muscled hands on the table, and he said,

“That’s right, cry it all out. This is what is meant by planetary cleansing.”