‘What did you make?’
‘Everything as usual – lasagna, salad and garlic bread.’
‘Was it fun?’
‘Fun? I never think of it that way, but yes, it was very intense. Our get-togethers always are. We have to pretend we’re brave, but then one of us explodes, and another one gets weepy, and suddenly we’re all on the same raft. It makes me feel alive. How’s that for irony?’
But she was still lonely, and she wouldn’t discuss this with her daughter or anybody else. To even speak the word would somehow finalize her situation, and she knew there had to be more than just this.
16
Wade first met Beth in the Las Vegas hospital’s diabetes clinic during its off-hours, at his first visit to a Think Positive! seropositivity workshop. The first thing he noticed about Beth was that she was wearing a … muumuu? He wasn’t sure what her garment was – some sort of floral schoolmarm dress fresh from a high-school production of Oklahoma!. And yet the woman inside the dress was anything other than an apple-cheeked farm girl. She was bony and strangely used-up-looking, as if she’d done her share of time strung out on crystal meth. Beth’s out-of-date dress seemed to Wade to be the outer veneer of an inner conversion. She’d been where Wade was, but she’d found a way out.
The first sight of Beth seemed to smash his heart, yet mend it at the same time. He was determined to meet this woman, but decided this might be too important to use his thousand-watt breed-with-me face or his standard come-on line (‘I know what you’re thinking, and there’s only one way to find out.’). Instead he maneuvered himself into the chair beside her. Like a border collie he sat waiting, hoping, praying that she would drop a pen or paper so that he could pounce on it and retrieve it for her. This woman had reduced him to kindergarten devotion, and yet he knew nothing about her.
She dropped a pen. Pounce! He returned it to her desktop in a blink. She looked at him coolly: ‘Thanks.’ She wasn’t playing hard to get; she simply wasn’t playing at all.
The class was asked to share their experiences. Debbie, who ran the workshop, said, ‘We have a new member, Wade. Wade – tell the group members here your story – as much as you want to.’
‘I don’t know if there’s much to tell,’ Wade said. ‘I mean about me and my life and how I got this thing.’
‘Please,’ Debbie said. ‘No euphemisms, Wade. It’s HIV.’
‘Okay then, HIV. I’m straight and I’ve never done it with a guy, or even a three-way.’
Many of the class’s twenty or so members sniggered.
‘Hey, screw you – why would I go so far as to come to a class like this and then lie? The thing is, I used to be a big sleeper-arounder. It was my life. Sleeping around always landed me what I wanted. I know these rich kids who never had to work a day in their lives because they always got what they wanted. Well, instead of money with me it was my – shit – how do I say this without sounding like a jerk – my way with women.’
More sniggers. Debbie asked the class to be quiet. ‘Go on.’
‘Anyway, I found out about the infection by accident. The world’s flukiest fluke.’ Wade told the story of the shooting, and he embellished a bit. The class was silent in the most interested way, rapt at the oddity of the tale. ‘So there you go. I have this virus in my body. It’s never going to go away. I can’t work at the moment – I was going to play hockey at that B-list casino across the highway, but that’s impossible now. The months are ticking by. I just don’t have … any idea what to do.’
Silence.
‘What about your mother?’ asked Beth. ‘What’s she feeling? Have you two talked much?’
‘Some. I feel like the biggest sack-of-shit son in the world. She pretends it’s no big deal, but you know it is.’
The group continued, and discussed various medical problems on the wax and wane. New procedures and medications and regimens were hashed out, and then the group ended, over by the clinic’s kitchen, where everybody ate oatmeal raisin cookies and drank dishwatery coffee. Wade maneuvered close to Beth and asked her how long she’d been living with HIV. ‘Three years. I was a junkie, but I don’t do that any more.’
‘No?’
‘No. I found the Lord. That sounds stuck-up, and I don’t like that. But I did – find Him, I mean. He keeps me sane, a side effect I never would have expected.’ Other group members flocked around Wade; Beth vanished.
The following week passed slowly as Wade waited for the group to meet again. Beth arrived the next Tuesday night looking shaken; something was obviously awry.
‘Beth,’ said Debbie. ‘You look stressed. Having a tough day?’
‘I’m not sure what to call my day.’
‘How so?’
Beth hesitated. ‘I’ve been having these tests done over the past two weeks. But the full results didn’t arrive until this morning. It turns out—’ She bit her lip. ‘I don’t have aids. I’ve never even been exposed to HIV. Nobody ever checked up on what turns out was a false positive three years ago. I’m … negative.’
There was a long silence.
Debbie said, ‘Well, congratulations, Beth.’
‘No – you don’t understand,’ Beth said. ‘This disease is my life. I got off smack because of it. I stopped drinking. I found the Lord because of it. And I have all of you people as my friends because of it – and it is gone now. And I don’t know what to do. There’s nothing else in my life. I work as a croupier at Harrah’s, and that’s all there is to my life. Suddenly it’s so small and I feel invisible. Last week I was fifty-foot tall brave survivor, and now I’m … a mosquito.’
Debbie said, ‘Well, we’re hardly going to kick you out of the group, and I can’t think of anybody better suited than you to be a counselor.’ The group made supportive noises, but Wade saw Beth leaving his life, almost as soon as she’d entered. ‘For starters,’ Debbie continued, ‘maybe you can meet with Wade here and give him the drill on what’s available to him here in Clark County.’
Ting! Debbie could only have been an angel. Afterwards over by the coffee maker, fellow group members swamped Beth; Wade waited. When at last she came over to him, she said, ‘Let’s go to a Denny’s. I’m starved.’
At the restaurant Wade tried making small talk, but failed. Instead Beth asked him, ‘What’s the sickest you’ve ever been yet?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You know – PCP pneumonia? Viral meningitis?’
Wade couldn’t believe the unromantic route the meal was taking. ‘I’ve been pretty much asymptomatic’ Wade was glad he was able to respond with a medical term.
‘Sorry to jump into symptoms like that. It’s rude, but it’s a habit I got into. I might as well ask for your T-cell count.’ She looked at the menu. ‘The chicken fingers here are good.’
They ordered, and then the waitress put their chicken fingers on the table. Wade went to reach for one, but Beth snapped, ‘Grace.’
She made him hold hands with her. Wade could feel the skeleton inside her flesh; holding hands with her was like holding hands with Casper the Friendly Ghost, smooth and dry and almost not even there.
She said, ‘Dear Lord, who gave us this day and who will give us all our tomorrows and eternity after that, we thank you for giving us our trials so that You may test our will, and we thank You for the days in which to make our wills manifest. This meal is Your bounty. We are Your servants, for forever and a day. Amen.’
Wade felt holy. He felt he was at home with a person he would choose to be his family. He ate a bite of chicken finger and burnt his tongue.
Three weeks after the dinner at Denny’s, Wade moved in with Beth, whose religiosity had a blank spot when it came to shacking up. After the move, Wade was embarrassed by how few things he had, and by their overall shabbiness. When his possessions merged with Beth’s possessions, his were all but erased, and this suited him fine. Beth’s taste ran towards the slightly girly, the slightly wacky: pink sunflowers and a cow-shaped footstool – it was a pleasu
re to be absorbed into a kinder, less desperate world.
Beth’s apartment complex was a run-down 1960s quickie, its superintendent a vagrant keno addict. Consequently, Wade was asked by Beth to do a fair number of household repairs. In all his years of smuggling and roguery, he’d never had to deal with such drab tasks as rewiring a lamp.
‘Rewire the lamp?’
‘Rewire the lamp.’
It crept up on Wade that whenever he picked up a screwdriver or putty knife, he automatically tensed his shoulders, waiting for his father’s voice to call him useless or hopeless or a waste. Once he realized that the voice wasn’t going to happen, he surprised himself with his own handiness. Beth had a long list of repairs, which suited Wade well – immediate and gratifying results: a freshly painted wall; a door that no longer jammed; a properly wired stereo.
One night, after Wade had spent twelve hours stripping and refinishing a small writing desk Beth had found at a garage sale, he was energized as though he’d awakened from a long and delicious sleep. His energy was contagious, and in bed Beth became playful and whimsical; normally in bed she was at her most serious, if not downright sad.
‘You’re my Superman, Wade.’
‘Tell me again.’
‘You’re my handsome, dedicated Superman.’
‘What are my superpowers?’
‘You tell me. If you could have only one superpower, what would you choose?’
This question made Wade think. The strength of a thousand men? X-ray vision? Superimmunity that would allow him to crawl through all the raw sewage of Mexico with no ill effects?
‘Hey, take your time, why don’t you, honey.’
‘I’m thinking, Beth. This is serious. I want to give the right answer.’
A minute passed. ‘Wade?’
‘OK, I know – my superpower – I’d be able to shoot lightning bolts out from my finger tips – great big Knowledge Network documentary bolts – and when a person was zapped by one of these bolts, they’d fall down on their knees and once on their knees, they’d be underwater, in this place I saw once off the east coast of the Bahamas, a place where a billion electric blue fish swam up to me and made me a part of their school – and then they’d be up in the air, up in Manhattan, above the World Trade Center, with a flock of pigeons, flying amid the skyscrapers, and then – and then what? And then they’d go blind, and then they’d be taken away – they’d feel homesick – more homesick than they’d felt in their entire life – so homesick they were throwing up – and they’d be abandoned, I don’t know … in the middle of a harvested corn field in Missouri. And then they’d be able to see again, and from the edges of the field people would appear – everybody they’d known – and they’d be carrying Black Forest cakes and burning tiki lamps and boom boxes playing the same song, and the sky would turn into a sunset, the way it does in Walt Disney World brochures, and the person I zapped would never be alone or isolated again.’
He and Beth made love that night, separated by latex membranes in all the right places, minimizing saliva, but with an intimacy new to their relationship. Afterwards, Wade couldn’t sleep, because he kept thinking about the people who’d show up on the edge of his own Missouri wheat field, and he thought of his family – about how messed-up they were – mentally and physically and emotionally. And Wade thought about all the other families he’d known and how they’d been messed-up as well: autism, lupus, schizophrenia, arthritis, alcoholism, too many secrets, words unspoken, bad choices, money problems … the list was infinite. Nobody escaped. With that thought, he realized that his fortieth birthday had passed, that he was no longer young, and that he didn’t mind.
Wade stared at the cracks in the gas station’s tarmac, soft and chewy, like a brownie, ants crawling in and out like in a crazy art film. I’m not alert enough; I’m not paying close enough attention. Dammit, I spend my whole life looking and looking and looking at the world, but I guarantee it, the moment I move my head away from this patch of tar will be the exact moment the earth cracks open – and if I’d been watching, for just that one second, I’d have seen the core of the planet, molten and white—
Ted booted Wade in the rump. ‘Hey, Lord Byron, go be a poet some other time. We’ve gotta haul ourselves out of here.’
Wade vomited. Again. Not much left to come up. What did I eat today? Yogurt, a banana, trail mix—
‘Aw, Jesus, Wade—’ Ted hosed him off.
Wade turned over and looked at his father’s bright red face; Bryan was rubbing his shoulders, sunburnt and chewed-up by fire ants, and just recently scraped by Shw’s having bounced him against the concrete. Bryan asked, ‘Wade, are you OK?’
Wade sucked air in. ‘No. I’m not OK. I’m actually busy sitting here dying.’
‘Don’t be such a melodramatic pussy,’ said Ted.
‘I’m not being melodramatic, Dad. As it turns out, yes, I’m dying – a slow, painful, ugly and frankly quite boring kind of death.’
‘Bullcrap. Stand up. Bryan’s nutcase girlfriend just drove away with my chance at money.’
Wade rolled up his pants, revealing lesioned skin that resembled a tablecloth covered in spilled red wine. Ted saw this and his face puckered up. ‘OK already. Roll your pants legs down. Jesus. People will see.’
Wade was too tired to battle further. ‘Bryan, where would Shw be driving – any ideas?’
Bryan asked, ‘Where are we right now?’
‘Don’t sweat it,’ Ted replied. ‘Women always leave a clue. Wait – “clue” is the wrong word. What’s one notch more obvious than a clue?’
Bryan suggested, ‘A hint?’
Ted sprayed him with the hose. ‘A hint is less obvious than a clue, stupid.’
‘Call a taxi,’ said Wade.
‘To go where?’ asked Ted.
‘I know where we can find a car,’ Wade said.
A cab was phoned while Wade went to the men’s room to wash up. He was shivering, white and pink-eyed. The cab arrived and the driver asked where to go. Ted was in the front, Wade and Bryan in the back. Wade gave him the Brunswicks’ address.
‘Why there?’ Bryan asked.
‘That’s where Howie’s staying,’ said Wade. ‘Over at the Space Family Robinson’s.’
Ted became brittle. ‘I want Howie in my life right now like I want a hole in the head. The little suckhole.’
Bryan added, ‘He always acts like he’s so perfect. In high school he’d have been one of those guys who always smiles at you because he can’t imagine somebody not liking him, except people did hate him.’
Ted said, ‘Bryan, Jesus, stop festering over high school. You left the gee-dee place almost two decades ago.’
Bryan proved fierce: ‘You always sided with the principal whenever I got caught doing stuff. Just leave me alone, OK? My body feels like I’ve been barbecued and I thought for once we could just be nice to one another and be like a real family.’
Ted bit his lip and made eyes with Wade, who said, ‘I don’t think it works that way, Bryan.’
‘Why can’t it?’
Ted snapped, ‘Because your knocked-up girlfriend has my future inside a Ziploc bag in her trunk is why.’
‘Bryan, I don’t think she’s going to abort.’
Bryan turned on Wade. ‘How would you know?’
Wade told him about the episode the day before, about Shw showering to remove all traces of thalidomide from her body. Bryan’s face became a living, morphing before-and-after photo. The cabbie, Wade noticed, couldn’t help but listen in.
Ted asked, ‘So what’s the deal with this Florian guy in the Bahamas?’
‘Here’s the deal,’ said Wade, ‘I used to work for him a few years ago. He’s the heir to a Swiss pharmaceutical fortune. He makes half the painkillers and pesticides on earth, but he’s a total “I worship England” freak – his gardener told me his nanny used to diddle him every Sunday after church – so he lives in the Bahamas now, which is very English and also the shadiest place on earth
– like a theme park of shade. People become caught up in the scene, but when they try to rejoin the rest of the world, it always looks so boring that they end up staying in the Bahamas. The place is like a drug. That, and from the Bahamas he can fly anywhere in the States any time he wants. Oh – there’s also no taxes in the Bahamas.’
‘There’s always the tax thing,’ said Ted.
‘Yeah, Dad, like you’re a high-flyer,’ Wade said.
‘Lay off me.’
‘Do you want to know about Florian or not?’
Ted was quiet.
‘Anyway, he’s big on science. He really gets turned on by all this stuff his company cranks out, so he’s not piddling away the company. He’s actually a wicked businessman. If I had money, I’d invest in him.’
‘How do you know him?’
‘I used to do deliveries for him.’
‘Deliveries? What – drugs and shit?’
The cabbie lurched to a halt at the side of the road, before a gang of prisoners on labor duty stripping the roadway sides of crushed pop tins, dead socks and crumpled-up cardboard french-fry containers. The lurch caused Bryan’s right side to rub against the door, and he wailed in pain. The cabbie turned around, livid. ‘If you people talk about drugs even once in this car, you’re out on your butts. Got it?’
‘Christ – yeah, we’ve got it. No need to foam.’
‘Stop taking the name of the Lord in vain.’
‘My back’s hurting really bad,’ said Bryan.
‘We’ll find you some ointment at Howie’s house,’ said Wade. The cabbie pulled onto the road and Wade then turned to Ted. ‘No, Dad, I wasn’t shipping drugs. It was plant specimens. Endangered and semi-endangered things from all over the States. For molecular studies. Or so I was told.’
All Families Are Psychotic Page 12
