Exclusive Excerpt: "Fugue"
A New Novel by Paul A.Toth

Chapter Eight Continued: That night

That night, I slept in a little motel right off the highway. I've always liked hotels, mansions for travelers complete with maids and a butler at the desk. Motels are temporary ghettos complete with all the grime and dust of home. I would have slept in hotel, but I couldn't with the money in my wallet, not before I knew how long my trip would last. Rosie had made this bed, and now I was sleeping in it. I was glad I had no microscope.
     I climbed under the sheets, and for the first time in years I had more room than I needed. Without Rosie, bed was a first class cabin, unoccupied. Usually I slept with my back to her and had to rest one arm over the side of the mattress, maintaining a gymnast's awareness of gravity. Sometimes she rolled over and knocked me off my balancing beam. I'd head to the couch in the diaspora of the sleepless. But now the bed felt like that couch, a lonely, nation-less place. Like a retired Olympic gymnast, I had no idea what to do with myself.
     I looked at the phone. I knew better than to call Rosie. If I woke her, she would howl with the rage of Job:

                           Climbin' up d' mountain, children,
                           Didn't come here to stay.
                           And if I nevermore see Tom again,
                           Gonna meet him at de judgment day.
                           John Thomas in de fiery furnace,
                           And dey begin to pray.
                           And de good Lawd let dat fire roar.
                           Oh, wasn't dat a mighty day!
                           Goddamn it, Lord, wasn't dat a mighty day!
                           Uncle went in de lions den,
                           And he begin to pray.
                           And de angels of de Lawd opened de lion's jaw.
                           Oh, wasn't dat a mighty day!
                           Goddamn it, Lord, wasn't dat a mighty day!

     I knew those reinvented lyrics well; I'd heard her sing them a hundred times.
     So I became my own drill sergeant, a skill learned in the factory. When the industrial sounds of that black mass under metal skies drew me into its voodoo rhythm, I'd tell myself, "March on, Private, march on, lest you want to feel this boot in your ass." And if that failed, I would bend my mind like a spoon, using all my powers to recall a poem I had memorized from a book at home:

               Ye rigid Plowmen! Bear in mind
                           Your labor is for future hours.
                           Advance! spare not! nor look behind!
                           Plow deep and straight with all your powers!

     I remembered all of those exercises as I battled my desire to call Rosie. I also remembered how I had thought my troubles would be over once I left the factory. Probably everybody dreams of the sunny river down which they'll merrily float once their adolescent siren songs subside. Then they dream of a riverboat upon which they'll marry, drifting in a lagoon. Next, they picture a quiet raft, with no room for spouses, which takes them over rapids back to quiet waters. Finally, they imagine the anchored ship of their retirement, with no challenge aboard greater than shuffleboard. They keep dreaming of that river until the day they die, because no matter how far they travel or how much they suffer, it stays miles ahead, as if fleeing their arrival.
     Should I? I did. Not Rosie; "Mother." She was still in Michigan, way up north, where she'd fled after my father left. She lived in a town with a liquor store and a church. That's all she needed, a church for repentant Sunday mornings and a liquor store for seven nights a week. She would still be awake, thanks to the time difference. So I dialed.
     "Hello?" she said, only it was more like, "Hemmo?" She was drunk, of course. I knew because I had called after sundown, Michigan time, a starting gun she obeyed with such dedication that in summer months she forestalled the first drink until nearly ten o'clock p.m., even if she had the shakes.
For what had I called, solace? None could she offer. Mother lobbied politicians to re-invade Vietnam. She would murder the entire Vietnamese race and probably the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, too, just for kicks. She kept the ashes of the Vietnamese flag in a golden urn.
     "Hemmooooooo?"
     I have slightly Asian eyes. An odd little boy. Left unnamed, to be "cared for" by Mother when Father and Sun abandoned Michigan and disappeared. Father had gone AWOL while stateside. Maybe they were in Vietnam. Maybe they were in California. I could only wonder whether Mother had driven him away, or he had driven Mother insane. But I was just another egg, and both chickens put themselves before me. They knew the answer to one riddle.
     Still, sometimes I worried about this war between us. It seemed to have a secret reason underlying the one I knew, something more than I remembered and more than I cared to discover. I hoped the war was meaningless, along with the larger picture, by which I mean the world. Unlike most folks, what joy it would give me to know life had no reason or rhyme, that all was space and time, meaninglessness an open playing field. One day, I would pass through the geometry and disappear. But until then, I wished somebody would nail my feet to the floor until I was steadfast as a rock.
     "Whooooo issssss thissssss?"
     Was she thinking it might be Father finally come home to make amends? I could only hope so. Or did she think it was me calling to apologize? That would do. Or maybe she thought it was my real mother, Sun, calling to warn that a kung fu typhoon was on the way from the East, finally ready to kick the world clean of Mother's imperialist American aggression.
     "I know who this is," she said. "Is that you --"
     I hung up. Better to leave her question an unopened gift, more valuable for who gave it than what might lay inside. I cherished the wrapping, that old drunken slur of vengeance. "Sleep tight," I would have said had I been able to disguise my voice. "Do let the bedbugs bite."
     But I'd forgotten something I remembered as soon as the phone rang: caller ID. I closed my eyes, imagining the giant fuzzy slippers she always wore when home. I heard her cursing, rifling through her book for a number that matched the motel's. Next, she'd call the operator and check the area code: California. Then she'd know. And so she knew.
     The phone stopped ringing. Then it rang again. It kept ringing, ten times every ten minutes for the rest of the night.
     I couldn't sleep, so I thought about my childhood. As for Sun, I've never been burdened by the ill feelings other children in my position harbor, for she wasn't meant to stay in port. Something had prevented her from mothering me, and it was best she admitted it to herself. I only wish they had left me somewhere else, in a parking lot, behind a dumpster, anywhere but with Mother.
     They must have blamed part of the situation on her. From what I knew, Mother used to do plenty more than drink, and apparently the habit of speed had spread from her to Father to Sun like the flu. Or, as Mother put it in one of her post-sunset monologues, "That Chink bitch comes here clean as a whistle but now she don't think she's so bright." But things never had been too bright for Sun. From what Mother said, she had passed through the edges of a Napalm cloud before my father met her.
     Father and Sun probably disappeared to cure their habits. I could imagine poor Sun, washed out from speed in the rusty Midwest, wondering why anyone dreamed of America. They might have found a place that explained it better to her, or maybe they left the States for good. I knew the Army had lost track of them along the way. They likely lived under false names somewhere. I could understand the attraction of vanishing, submerging oneself in a cover story until even reflections disappeared. But mine remained, and there was a shadow behind it.
     I remembered the bedtime stories Mother used to tell me when I was little, St. John's supposed revelation further scrambled by alcohol and semi-literacy: "One day a fire's gonna burn the world clean of Chinks, Jews and Arabs. And then, my little man, you'll ride through the fire on a white horse, all the way to heaven."
     Somehow, I doubt it.


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