Last Notes

by Tamas Dobozy

  And this is how I gave in to his wish to send the letter to Monk’s estate. I still remember the day we did it, Philip hopping around the kitchen in maniacal glee, then pausing by the rain-flecked window to hold his chin like some incurable nostalgic. I’d gotten us all suited up the previous Saturday, and together we’d gone to the library and copy centre, binding his “report” in Mylar and Cerlox and hunting down the correct mailing address. All there was left to do was slip the report and covering letter into an envelope, address it, lick the tab, and put it into a mailbox.

  Naturally, it was the last of these that most worried me, since I did not want Philip’s package to actually reach its destination. But there was no way Philip would buy my idea that he stay home rather than come to the post office in the rain and risk getting a cold, especially since Philip had a superhuman immune system, and could dance naked in a thunderstorm without getting so much as a sniffle, whereas I was always in bed with a chill, or walking around with my nose raw from tissue paper, or asking him, over and over, whether his prescription of antipsychotics didn’t also confer resistance to viruses and bacteria. “You’re the one who’s always sick,” Philip would say. “Maybe you should stay home.” And, so, feckless as always, I had no choice but to let him accompany me, slipping an extra envelope into my pocket while he went to get his coat, then trying to hit upon all those subjects (well, hats) that would fully distract him, getting him more and more excited about how happy Monk’s beneficiaries would be to finally have the pianist’s madness explained, about all the ways they’d thank Philip for his research findings. By the time we got to the post office he was so hopped up I had no trouble drawing his attention to a poster and then quickly posting what I thought was the wrong envelope.

  It was only when we got home that I realized that, in my own haste and excitement, I had sent off exactly the one I didn’t want sent.

  You can imagine the anxiety that followed. The idea of Thelonious Monk’s descendants and heirs bringing litigation against Philip and me, on top of the stress of having to go to work five days a week while leaving Philip at home with a caregiver, plus the general fatigue of not having anything to listen to, evenings, except his craziness, made me call Lucia again. “Oh, hello, Owen. It’s great to hear your voice!”As usual, she was so pleased to hear from me it was as if we’d never spoken in our lives, though, as usual, her voice dropped from ecstasy to exhaustion when I told her we needed to meet.

  “You did what?” she said, putting her coffee on a table in Mike’s Diner. I repeated what I’d said and she leaned back and tilted her head at the ceiling. “Have you gone crazy, too?” she asked, after a minute, bringing her eyes back level. I told her how I had to hold my cup with both hands to keep the tremors from sloshing the coffee out; how I spent nights walking to the door that led to the basement and Philip and then walking away from it, circling through the upstairs rooms in the hopes that some friend had slipped in for a visit; how I’d taken to recording the pains in my body on a sheet of paper, noting that the headaches outnumbered their nearest competitor, aches in my lower back, by about twenty to one. When I finished, Lucia shook her head and recommended I see her “therapist.”

  “You have a therapist?” I asked. “What would you possibly need a therapist for?” I shouted, ducking my head when the other customers looked our way.

  Lucia pretended to be affronted. “What do you mean?” she asked. “You know how hard it’s been on me, knowing you and Philip are stuck in that house, and that I’m prevented, by circumstance, from doing anything to help you? It affects me, too,” she whispered. “You have no idea how something like that gets to a person. Gnawing at her conscience.”

  And how could I reply to that? A hundred responses flashed through my mind, all of which would have made Lucia stop providing the little assistance she did provide: the occasional warm dinner delivered by one of her sons, the quarterly (it was supposed to be monthly) financial help, her willingness, as she said, to be always “just a phone call away” in case I needed someone to “dump on.” In fact, even telling her that I understood, that I sympathized, didn’t seem right, since agreeing so vehemently would have cast a bit too much light on her performance. So I just nodded and smiled and patted her hand.

  “Here,” she said, reaching into her purse and pulling out a card. “Why not give him a call? Say I recommended him. He’s really helped me deal with the guilt. Most days I don’t feel it at all.” She patted her breastbone, roughly over the spot where the heart would normally be. “He’s pretty radical in his approach. I mean really weird—in an attitude kind of way. But he’s helped me to accept the fact that there’s only so much we can do in this world. He’s really helped me be happy in myself.” I looked at the card again, wondering what dark magic my sister had met with. “He could do the same for you, Owen, if you really open your soul to him. Remember,” she said, “it’s about having faith—faith in yourself.” She stood and checked her watch. “I’ve really got to go,” she said, “Alfred has hockey practice tonight, and Bruce can’t drive him because the Rose Bowl is on TV.” She looked at me, and I couldn’t help but note the waiting in her eyes, as if she were readying to pounce if I said so much as one word about how Alfred was twenty-two and should be driving himself (if he hadn’t crashed his own and then his parents’ cars four and five months ago), and that, for God’s sake, Bruce could miss fifteen minutes of football. But I smiled.

  “Oh, before I forget,” she said, reaching into her purse. “Here’s the money you asked for. Sorry it’s so late.” And just then, as Lucia leaned over to snap her purse shut—perhaps as a result of the harsh overhead light—I saw, for a second, how terribly old she’d become, though I would not say this was something she wore on her skin, not the effect of the wrinkles around her eyes, the blemishes on her cheeks, the grey hairs poking out from under her mass of dyed hair. Rather, it was in the movement itself, the way she bent, making so little effort to peer into her purse that it was less an action than a lessening of resistance, as if there was a vast weight pressing on her from above, one that grew more apparent when she walked out of the café, the tendons of her neck straining to achieve the attitude she wanted to project.

  I spent at least five weeks taking out the therapist’s card and putting it away again; five weeks while my headache swelled to the point where its boundaries seemed to exceed the confines of my skull; five weeks while every nerve in my body prepared itself for the response to our letter, and the inevitable trauma it would cause Philip.

  Finally, unable to take it, I dialed the number for Franklin B.M. Manchester, registered therapist, Ph.D. in psychiatry, etc. The secretary who picked up the phone had a slight lisp that sounded so much like my own I thought she was making fun of me, and it was some time before I could decide whether to respond to her questions or to point out that I had no interest in “humiliation therapy.” By the time we got around to fixing the date of the appointment the only slot available was “three months from last Tuesday,” so I agreed to go on standby, which meant working my way up the list and being willing to come in whenever time became available, or lose my place and have to start from the bottom again.

  When I did eventually get in, Dr. Manchester was not at all what I expected: one of those tall, wiry intellectuals who have about them a manner of practised calm; who look as if they’ve spent years in front of a mirror, learning how to sit so that their bodies betray not one single mannerism. Neutral as ducks.

  Instead, Dr. Manchester was more of a monkey. He was that animated, nearly jumping out of his seat when I came through the door, grabbing me by the hand and leading me to one of two barstools that sat in his office alongside a raised counter, while he went over to an espresso machine and made us some coffees. “Sugar?” he asked. “Cream?” And when I told him who my sister was he nodded and said, “Oh, God, I’m so glad to meet you. What a gem of a person she is!”

  Despite this forcibly sunny disposition, I got to know as much about Dr. Manch
ester over the weeks of my treatment as he got to know about me. And I was always astonished to find him a little sadder each time we met, so that by the end of the period it felt, in meeting him, as though I’d run into someone on a park bench, one of those unfortunates who have lost so much they’ve abandoned all need for pretense, not caring whether you like them or not. Naturally, this wasn’t an immediate observation, but one that developed over time, and maybe he simply realized, through careful questioning and observation, that this was the right tone to take with me, realized from that first introduction that too much exuberance was exactly what I didn’t want. So maybe it was still an act after all, though the only thing I can say for sure is that his advice was, without a doubt, the worst I’ve ever received.

  “Some days,” he would say, “I have a hard time just getting out of bed in the morning.” This was six weeks in, long after he’d memorized the fact that I took two sugars in my coffee, and milk if there was any, but never, under any circumstances, cream. I always had this odd sense when I walked into his office that he’d just stepped out of the demeanour I expected from psychiatrists (see above) and that his meeting with me was in fact his “break,” a chance to let down his guard and just relax (which is why it was always such a shock to get the rather huge bill his secretary sent at the end of the week). Near the end of treatment it was me fixing the coffees, while he just sat there, doling out advice in a voice so melancholy his sentences were mere shadows of assertion.

  “The trick, I keep telling myself,” he would say, “is to think a lot less about what the exterior world is doing, and concentrate a lot more on the interior.” He tapped his chest as though he were recalling a homeland from which he was forever barred. “Because it’s inside where the drama lies,” he snorted. “You know what the difference is between seeing the parade pass you by and seeing the parade coming at you?” I stopped in the middle of stirring three sugar cubes and two ounces of cream into his coffee, thought for a moment, muttered something about optimism and cynicism, realized they weren’t really opposites, and was about to speak again when he interrupted. “The difference is in whether you’ve arrived on their time or your time. You know what the difference is between standing on a street looking up at the windows of an apartment where there’s a party going on and actually being up there?” I muttered something about being outside, in the first case, and inside, in the second, and he rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger and nodded solemnly, saying, “Exactly, exactly,” then, “Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  I brought him his coffee, which he thanked me for with a nod of the head, then settled on one of the barstools and began sipping. “I think so,” I said. “Are you telling me your problem is that you are always putting yourself in the wrong place?”

  “Exactly!” he responded. “You know, I’ve been looking for a way to phrase it for a long time. So succinct.” He muttered this last comment almost below the level of a whisper, and whistled softly afterwards, then repeated it to himself with a tick-tocking of his head to either side. “If I’m feeling like shit,” he continued, “if I approach everything like a chore, if I see only disaster around me, then that’s what there’s going to be. Get it? The inside becomes the outside which only amplifies the inside.”

  “You’ve got to change your attitude,” I said, almost getting off the stool. “But I’ve been telling you that for weeks,” I said. “Weeks!”

  “I know. But you know how hard it is.”

  “I sure do,” I grumbled, settling back down and sipping my coffee.

  We sat there for a while longer in silence, Dr. Manchester hunkered on the couch so that his big knees were almost up at the level of his ears, and he finally sighed and rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. Finally, he looked up, bleary-eyed. “Geez, here I am, talking about myself when we should be talking about you. How’s life?”

  “It’s actually getting better,” I said. “I think coming here takes my mind off my problems, and I actually go back with a fresh perspective.”

  “Well,” he said, softly. “I’m glad one of us is getting something out of this.”

  At first, the thought of a return letter from Monk’s estate became something I decided to face up to with stoic reserve. Then, slowly, it became something I could think about from a cold, fatalistic remove. But I still couldn’t quite get to the next stage, the one where I would become mad enough to just take Dr. Manchester’s advice and switch over, change perspectives, join in.

  Then, one day, I found myself sitting on the back porch with Philip while he went on and on about what the letter might say. Once again, his words were building to a crescendo beneath me, until I seemed to be rising with them, carried up as if strapped to a spinning rocket, with no idea what I’d find once I tore through the sky. But instead of reverting to my usual state—reeling from vertigo—I found myself speaking words of my own, and not like before, when I’d played along, humouring Philip, adding my ideas to his while actually using sarcasm and condescension to keep myself grounded. This time I actually joined him in earnest, at first as a kind of test, to see whether I could keep up to him, but then in all seriousness, greeting everything Philip said with equal abandon, including his screed on the many ways he’d console Monk’s family when they realized their patriarch had not gone, but rather been driven, insane. The things he would say and do to make them feel better: like repeating how good Monk had looked in those hats even if they had made him crazy; or that maybe the madness was what let him compose such “finger-snappin’” music in the first place; or that maybe they wouldn’t have had such a loving relationship if he hadn’t depended on them so much to keep him straight; or that, at the very least, they must have had some “weird and whacky” conversations together, including some real “gut-busting” laughs at the things he got up to when he was at his “nuttiest.” By the time Philip had hit his maximum speed, that breakneck rush where he could hardly keep up to the words necessary to convey his thoughts, instead of slowing him down I was right there, adding my own stream of words, hoping the two of us could attain a vocabulary that would exceed his frenzy, breach the stratosphere, let us both float, quietly, in the silence of space.

  Philip looked at me in panic as the two of us went on, spewing words at a rate no untrained listener could have followed. We kept at it for one full hour, the many conversations with Dr. Manchester giving me the endurance to match Philip’s monologue. And by the end of it the two of us were jumping around the porch, near-hysterical with the ideas bursting from us. Then, finally, just as I was on the point of swooning, I caught Philip as he collapsed into a sweaty mass. His mouth was frozen in a smile but he continued murmuring while I carried him from the porch to his bed. For the first time in as long as I could remember, he slept through the night.

  Later, in the kitchen, drinking brandy to ease the dryness of my throat, the tightness at the hasp of my jaw, I reflected on the strange and improbable things Philip and I had come up with regarding Monk’s hats. It was the richest conversation I’d had in years, and it occurred to me that all along it had been here, these fantastical things Philip routinely came up with, and which I’d exhausted myself trying to ignore. With only a slight shift in my disposition things that once irritated could now revive me, as if talking to Philip could resurrect parts of my mind long gone out of use—my imagination, to be exact.

  I looked around the kitchen, then at the stairs down which I’d just carried my brother. I had always enjoyed descending to Philip’s basement suite, though I had concealed this from myself by acting the part of the outraged landlord. Philip’s rooms were never the same rooms twice. Never. They were a mess, a swirling chaos of overturned furniture, mismatched lampshades, magazines, books, and papers arranged in oddly symmetrical shapes that shifted by the day, piled and laid along the floor between rooms as though he were using them to build and rebuild that view of the horizon his underground rooms denied him.

  And I went downstairs that night and lay down
on the ground, as Philip did, and traced with my eyes the undulations of the line made by those books and magazines and toys and shoes and bits of careful garbage, wondering how it would read tomorrow. I looked around the place and saw how different it was from the way I arranged things upstairs, always with an eye to efficiency. Here, things came and went, shifted around, in through the window, out through the door, so that you not only didn’t know where anything was but also didn’t know what you owned in the first place. And I wondered if that arrangement suited Philip, because it seemed that each day for him was something of a mystery, demanding, because nothing could be found, that he make his plans on the spot, that he confront time in unforeseen ways. My days, on the other hand, were the same, the same, the same—planned and prepared for weeks and months and years in advance.

  When I told Dr. Manchester about this epiphany, he only smirked and took out a handkerchief and wiped the corners of his eyes. “Well, that’s it, then,” he said. “Shit.” I glanced up from my coffee. “I don’t mean that in a bad way,” he murmured, lightly wringing his hands. Then he looked at me directly. “You remember I told you when you came in here that I’m not one for ‘interminable therapy.’ I’m here to help people get to the point where they don’t need me anymore.” And I understood. “I’m going to miss you,” he said.