VALPARAÍSO (8)

11.

After Maddie’s death, Alex returned to high school. He stopped playing music or composing, he refused to talk about what had happened, he went through the motions. I spoke to him once that fall by phone and he sounded like a husk, a phantom. Dad tried to get him into some form of counseling but Alex refused. He was accepted to Colombia that fall, joyless news. 

One night at the dinner table in Boulder, Devi’s boyfriend Ron said, “I mean, karmically speaking, wherever this Maddie Haden is on the chain of being, it’s something she’ll have to handle next time around.” I wanted to strangle this idiot parvenu who knew nothing of Maddie or of my brother, their shining gifts or the wages those might entail. 

Surely Devi, somewhere behind her resolute smile, grieved for her son’s loss and regretted the chance to comfort him. When she invited him to Boulder and he refused, it was seen as further evidence of his blighted state. Devi, who wouldn’t dream of flying to L.A., Ray Garnett’s hotbed of fallen angels, was inclined after further meditation to lay the onus for this catastrophe upon her ex-husband and to see it a cautionary event designed to awaken Alex to a youthful error. She hoped that Columbia, within the limits of a secular education, would at least get Alex away from our blinkered father, dispel the bad energy, and set the stage for his renewed ascent towards the light. 

I felt mixed about it all. After all, Alex was alive, if heartbroken. Maddie Haden, extraordinary canary and an entire summer’s erotic focus, was gone. The idea that Dryden, spirited from the site of the act he’d committed, had gotten away with killing Maddie, or at least serving as the instrument of her death, galled. Would karma call him to account too? He was probably already living under another name somewhere, the rest of his life spreading before him too. What did Dryden Poe feel, if he felt? 

And what of Dryden’s father, alleged spy? It was hard to imagine Russell Poe, who swam in the dark currents of history - and if my father were to be believed, was some sort of malevolent agent daily shaping it - being forced to answer for anything, let alone regret it. 

What saved me that awful fall was entering into love myself. Willowy Leticia Glass, spotting a fellow misfit among the school riffraff, sent a signal by slipping a Leonard Cohen cassette into my backpack. Gentle and wounded, available and new, ripe with insistent poetry and amazingly soft, pliant breasts, she helped inure me from the worst of what had happened. Her mother, a gaunt yoga teacher who marched through downtown Boulder in black leotards, had left her father, an acid casualty, somewhere in the west Texas wastes for her present boyfriend, an I’m OK-You’re OK shrink in nearby Evergreen. Leticia and I, two bruised doves under the eaves of Colorado skies, discovered Hesse and Rimbaud, listened to aging Beat poets rave at Naropa. Our sex, a slow dance of delicate permissions, was far more decorous and satisfying than my raging private inventions, relegating masturbation to the sexual suburbs. 

One afternoon, lying naked together beneath a blanket in my room, watching the first snowfall load the pine branches outside - Mom was in Denver with Ron buying gunny sacks of organic brown rice from his wholesalers - Leticia asked me about my brother. I said he was a musician, wondering if this were still true. 

“He’s going to Columbia in the fall.” Saying this, I realized how proud I’d always been of Alex and how I did love him. 

“Does he have a girlfriend?” 

I went blank. It seemed such a trivial question in the light of things. I hadn’t talked about Maddie and didn’t want to. Even mentioning her name seemed a violation. I had no vocabulary for such a death.

Leticia looked at me. “What’s wrong?”

“No.”

“No what?”

“No, he doesn’t have a girlfriend,” I said.

Leticia wanted to know more about my family, and so we sat on the bed looking through an old photo album of Wilkes-Barre: Dad with muttonchops and flower shirt and bell-bottoms, Mom in tailored teacher’s suit cutting a birthday cake, me a tyke holding a basketball in a back yard, little Alex at the old upright. Pictures of a life impossibly distant and long lost. Riffling the images, I suddenly burst out sobbing. Leticia held me naked there on the bed while I wept my eyes out. It was the last time I’d cry until the plane ride south to Chile, reading the von Kleist earthquake story.

That winter, I flew to LA for the Christmas holidays. Alex picked me up at the airport, looking sallow and deadened, his hair cut severely short like when we were boys in Pennsylvania. Back at Dad’s house, the spirited, loose-limbed ambience had turned numb, taciturn, funereal. Dishes lay unwashed in the sink, clouds of smoke clung to the furniture, curtains were drawn over the den that had been Alex’s music studio, his instruments housed in their cases, his equipment unplugged. 

Whatever Alex was doing with what had happened - and I knew he was doing something in there - remained mute. He’d become someone I didn’t recognize and it frightened me. All that Christmas vacation, the grad students in the duplex next door kept booming The Doors’ Riders on the Storm, its snaky, insistent portent rattling the walls - a too-fitting soundtrack just then. I missed Leticia Glass desperately, and for once wished I were out of LA and back in Colorado.

My father, who’d early sensed an unholy bond among Alex, Maddie and Dryden, had felt at first that this misfortune had saved his son from worse. But as he came to see the pieces of damage embedded in Alex like so much shrapnel, something collapsed inside Ray Garnett too. This began to activate him in the strangest way. “So Russell Poe wants to pull off a deus ex machina here? Play god?” he’d say. “We’ll see about that.” 

My father began to spend his weekends unshaven in his bathrobe, engaged in a quixotic search into the heart of American darkness. Already a lifelong, principled foe of the American imperium, Dad’s political rage gathered new force, the old lefty in him resurfacing with a vengeance. The bad guys were at it again, and Ray Garnett began dogging their trail with all the paranoid absorption of a cabalist. Alongside the volumes of classics he taught, a sizable new literature began to swell his bookshelves: James Jesus Angelton and the postwar Dulles cabal, the Kennedy assassination, the CIA’s covert MKULTRA drug programs, Amnesty International reports on tortures and killings. Somewhere in the shadowy interstices of covert postwar politics, according to Dad, flitted the elusive specter of Russell Poe and his new protégé in evil, son Dryden. 

My father became one of those guys you see hunkered over public Xerox machines, copying off papers covered with hand-scribbled notes, their significance known only to him. Connecting, finding patterns, sifting crumbs of information. Ray Garnett was determined to establish accountability, bring his son the gift of closure. There needed to be a reckoning here, injustice faced down. 

This travesty must not lie.

On New Year’s Day of 1974, Alex and I took a car ride through West Los Angeles, a sort of unspoken valedictory tour across the ruins of our youths. Alex had come of age here, and me in his wake, and now it was over and it was ending badly. The streets were as empty as LA ever gets by day, and as we drove Pico Boulevard towards the ocean, I asked Alex about Harry Winter, whose benign presence I missed just then. Harry, soon to graduate mid-term with Alex, was on a Christmas tour with the California Youth Symphony. Already contracted to an orchestra in Moscow, he was poised to begin the grand concert career we were certain awaited him. 

Alex pulled the Ford into a beachfront parking lot at the foot of Pico. We stepped out into the sharp winter air. An offshore breeze whipped a tangle of trash about our feet. On the boardwalk, within view of the pier, where the summer before my father had revealed his fears about Alex and Maddie, we stood before a tall, crumbling Art Deco edifice I recalled from our early LA rambles. The Hotel Monica, built by Fairbanks and Pickford in a balmier age, now housed artists, drunks, hookers and welfare cases - such jetsam as washed up at land’s end and could pay by the week or month. The sign atop its roof read from the freeway at night HOT** MONICA, in pink neon letters, the missing two permanently on the blink. It was in this building, later semi-refurbished and renamed The Sea Castle, that I’d later come to reside, and indeed where I live to this day. 

The Hotel Monica housed a bar then, known simply as Jack’s, a waterfront dive right off detective Henry Orlowe’s beat. It was where Alex had first met Maddie, I knew. Jack’s had closed for New Year’s Day, the boardwalk empty but for a few bicyclists. Gazing at it, Alex began to talk, so softly I had to lean close to hear him.

“Jack’s had live music weekends. I was playing there one Saturday afternoon with some jazz guys who go back to the Chet Baker era. Fog started rolling in, as it does in early June, and the place had emptied out and we were playing pretty much for ourselves. I noticed this girl standing in the doorway in chinos and a jeans jacket, smoking and listening. She asked if she could sit in. She knew all the tunes, knew how to sing them, And she had that voice. The old jazz cats thought they’d died and gone to heaven. Afterwards we sat at a table talking about Etta James and Maria Callas, Lee Wiley and Lotte Lenya and Ornette Coleman, Zappa and Stockhausen and Ali Akbar Khan. And that was it. She said she’d come out from Georgia to stay the summer with her cousin’s family. Her uncle worked at a research institute up the street and she was waiting around to get a ride home with him.”

We crossed the sand in the flat winter sun and sat near the water. Wind ruffled the low swells, bearing odors of kelp, salt and oil. Alex looked down, sifting sand through his fingers. I’d never found him difficult to read - like our dad, he wore his emotions on his sleeve - but still I couldn’t measure how he felt about what had happened. Pale and hollowed, he looked like a monk who’d been in prayer for days and hadn’t slept. 

“I need to tell you a few things, Garth. In case anything happens.” 

“Happen? Like what?” Clusters of tiny gray terns skittered to the ebbing surf line and back. 

“Maddie and I and were going to leave LA after the demo sessions were done. Drive across the country, play in bars and roadhouses along the way, just voice and keyboards, work out the material. It would have been a chance to get away from Dryden, break the grip, change the equation. Maddie had an appointment with a surgeon in Savannah to operate on her leg. I’d fly back here and finish up high school. Then we’d meet in New York or LA in the spring and make the band happen. We just needed to make it to the end of that third session.” 

A stand of white gulls perched on the sand suddenly lifted, with a beating of wings, as if someone had just shaken out a canvas tarp, and began to circle overhead. 

“We recorded your song, Garth,” Alex said. 

“You what?” I looked at him, not understanding. 

“’Rima.’ I transcribed the words off your phone message and adapted them to the melody we had. Maddie and I worked through it that last afternoon.” 

Maddie Haden had sung my words! I couldn’t believe my ears.

“It was the last song we did. At the end of the first two sessions, the engineer mixed off cassette listening copies. The third night he didn’t because of what happened. The next day the master tapes were stolen. So I don’t even have a cassette to give you.” Alex nodded. “But I can tell it was good. Maddie loved your words.” 

The wind picked up, blowing sand in our faces. We stood and trudged back to the car. Inside we sat in silence, gazing out at the pale sun silvering the waters. I felt both dazed and desolate, yet in possession of a strange invisible gift. 

“Who stole the tapes?” 

“People sent by Dryden’s father. It had to have been them.” 

“But why?”

“Dryden had paid for the sessions so it was his property. He didn’t know much about music but he knew something special had happened there and he didn’t want to leave the tapes behind for me to do something with.” Alex’s voice sounded barren, remote. “They probably destroyed them. They don’t give a shit about music.” 

Alex fished the car keys out of his pocket. Outside, the lowering sun tinted the water orange, the sand pink. 

“The week after it happened, I drove back up to Dryden’s house one night. I wanted to see if there was anything left up there, some trace of Maddie or of the tapes. The gate was open and I took the driveway up. The house was locked but there were no curtains and I could see into the bare rooms. It was dark and there was no electricity, only a little moonlight. Outside by the pool, that ridiculous tiki torch Dryden had stuck in the ground was still lying there. I picked it up and threw it through the plate glass window of the living room. Then I started kicking in the rest of the glass. I climbed through and ran through the house shouting. There was nothing in there, not a speck of dust. Then I began to worry that the neighbors had heard me. I ran back to the car and drove fast back down the canyon.”

Alex started up the Ford, turned it around and drove up the slope to Ocean Avenue. He drove a block then pulled over to the curb. He pointed up at a pale contemporary office building. “That’s RAND,” he said. “Where Maddie’s uncle worked on some government project.” 

I had no idea what this might signify to Alex or anyone else. Or maybe I did but I didn’t want to. I looked up at the five-story building whose nondescript appearance - exterior metal window blinds deflecting the sun, hiding the views within – I’d come to read later, a neighbor driving past daily, as part of its intent. 

I looked over at Alex. He was gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles had whitened. His lips stretched back over his teeth in a grimace and his body had begun to tremble. This was much worse than when our parents had split up, I thought. I feared for Alex, and what he might do if he ever found Dryden Poe.

12.

Maddie dead, Dryden fled. The aftershock of this double event would surge outward in sharp, resonating waves before inverting to become a void where Fate’s Angels had been, lodging a mystery at the center of our lives. Maddie Haden had ceased to exist, and Dryden Poe might as well have. 

Only he was alive somewhere.

That spring break, five months after Maddie’s death, I visited Alex in New York - an emissary from both my parents, who after some haggling had split the plane fare. I found him in a tiny sixth-floor apartment on 110^th Street, a few buildings west of Broadway, hunkered among piles of books, a sink full of unwashed dishes, a single mattress, a scurry of roaches and rats. No instruments, not even a stereo, only the silence of the room and traffic sounds outside. Alex spent his days and nights reading and studying, attending classes, walking the streets. He had no friends as far as I could see, yet he seemed, in his fierce solitude, engaged, intent, concentrated. Taller yet, gaunt in his black chinos and sneakers and hooded sweatshirt, he’d become one of those silent, spectral youths you see on campuses around whom allure gathers, menace even. 

Alongside Columbia’s beefy core curriculum readings - Virgil, Augustine, Dante, Hamlet, Dostoevsky - Alex was entertaining various maudits and nihilists: Rimbaud, Celine, Burroughs. His spring break hadn’t yet begun, and some days I’d follow him to classes and wait on the building steps, ogling coeds in their black leotards. Other days I’d rock downtown on the subway to mine Manhattan’s cultural troves, book bins overflowing with cool musty finds, underground clubs throbbing with new music. How rich it would have been to excavate New York with Alex as we had LA once, but Alex had gone into deep, unreadable cover somewhere inside himself.

At fifteen, I’d dimly grasped what had transpired in that San Fernando Valley studio that night, its climax delivered at a distance, the news arriving to me as hearsay. Only the night at Dryden’s house in the canyon, seared into memory, supplied me with an indelible reference. Maddie had been Alex’s, after all, mine only in fantasy, and for crudely selfish reasons I missed her less than the chance to hear “Rima” on the hijacked tape, their lost performance that night. Trying to imbue the death with sense, I tended to think it secreted some message I couldn’t quite extract but would get later. 

The books thronging Alex’s apartment surely contained the moral and philosophical solutions to the situation, if only I could read them. Should Alex want to enact vengeance upon Dryden? Should he even care about him? Dryden had been Maddie’s procurer and provider - but murderer? And what did Alex owe a lover and collaborator of a mere three months, both of them still adolescents? These questions must have haunted Alex’s readings and studies, his insomniac walks, his hollow-eyed gaze as we sat in the Orange Julius on Broadway one night, staring out at the rain-slicked streets past midnight. 

Suddenly he said to me, “I went to Savannah.” 

I looked at him in utter surprise. “When?” 

“A month after I got here. I took a bus down on a Friday. I got there the next day and found Maddie’s house, this old southern white wood frame with a sagging porch and wisteria and magnolias. A woman in a house dress answered the door with a drink in her hand. Behind her, a man in suspenders was watching television in an armchair, a cane propped against it. The woman asked me what I wanted. She had an accent like Maddie’s but none of the music in her voice. I said, ‘I’m Alex Garnett and I loved your daughter.’ We both stood there bawling. Still she wouldn’t open the screen door. I asked her where Maddie was buried and she told me where the cemetery was. Then I asked her if she knew where I could find Dryden Poe. She said, ‘They’re my ex-husband’s people. I never did much take to them. They used to live in Bethesda. He worked in Washington for the Defense Department, I think. Then they moved to California. After the accident happened they sent back Maddie’s ashes and disappeared.’” 

“Accident?” 

“That’s the word she used,” Alex said. “The cemetery was a long walk from that house, near the water. I found a wall crypt with Maddie’s ashes. There were wilted flowers, a few messages from friends and family in Savannah.” Alex turned and gazed at me. “Then I saw something weird, Garth. A fresh bouquet with a ribbon around it that said, ‘To Rima.’”

I gazed out at the rainy street, my mind darting in a thousand directions. “But you said nobody knows about ‘Rima’."

Alex remained motionless beside me, his face hidden now deep inside his sweatshirt hood. “There was writing beneath it, in what looked like Chinese characters.” 

 We sat for a while, wordless, the mystery hanging in the desolate night. Then we left the Orange Julius, and walked back to Alex’s apartment. 

The next morning, as I was packing to leave, Alex said, “You need to put this aside now, Garth, get on with things. It’s not something that happened to you.”

As if it were that simple. 

He lifted my backpack on my shoulders. “What are you thinking about doing after high school?”

“Maybe travel,” I said, though I didn’t really mean that. What I wanted was anywhere but Boulder. California, in fact. I planned to apply to Berkeley and UCLA the following year, study literature, become a writer like Orwell or Raymond Chandler or Henry Miller.

The day before, browsing in a used bookstall at the Strand, I’d come across an old paperback of Kenneth Rexroth’s writings in which the poet had said: Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense: the creative act. I’d loved the way that sounded, its cadences seeming to house some truth, or enough of it to urge me forward. I’d bought the book to bring back to Boulder, a revealed treasure to share with Leticia Glass.

Alex walked with me to the 96^th Street subway station. Waving to him from inside the car, watching him recede into his black solitude there on the platform, I probably loved my brother more than I ever had. 

And it was that image of him, recollected at the pension window as Marimar slept, that reminded me as much as anything why I’d followed him to Valparaíso.