by Jake Wolff
The day Sammy died, I’d shown him the results of my dad’s latest round of blood work—results my father had texted to me, as he always did, with some sarcastic, cynical message. Sammy had somehow remembered these numbers, and he’d used them to calculate what’s called a MELD score: Model for End-Stage Liver Disease. MELD scores are used to prioritize patients in need of liver transplants based on their three-month risk of death. I ran my finger along the formula, checking Sammy’s work. MELD scores are typically capped at 40: a 71 percent chance of death within the next three months. There’s no clinical need to calculate a higher score; all patients at 40 are already extremely unlikely to survive their stay on the transplant list. But Sammy had uncapped the formula, revealing my father’s true score and emphasizing just how certain he was to die before he even left rehab: 90 percent, at least. I understood the math, but not the motive. Why had he written out this formula? What good did it do?
The phone number was just as much of a mystery, and while I was aware of the storage facility—it was only fifteen minutes away—Sammy had never mentioned it. That simple phrase if trouble sat in my stomach like spoiled milk. Yes, there was trouble—Sammy was dead.
With trembling hands, I removed the notebooks one by one, spread them out on the floor like tarot cards. I counted them as I went: twenty-two in total, each a few hundred pages long. I opened one at random, and it said, “The Journal of Samuel Tampari, 2002–2003.” Every notebook I opened said the same, for another year. The earliest was dated 1988, when Sammy was eight years old. His entire life story, and he’d left it to me.
At the bottom of the box, I found another book—a cheaper thing, spiral-bound. My late grandma Ela had one just like it and passed it down to my mother, and now it was lost, probably, since her death. It was a recipe book, the kind with separate, delineated spaces for lists of ingredients and instructions. The front cover showed a black-ink drawing of a mixing bowl and wooden spoon, the art folksy, the image fading from time. There were no words on the cover, but inside, on the first blank page, Sammy had provided a title: “The Elixir of Life.”
3
Model Boy
Sammy Tampari lies on his stomach on the floor of the living room, pretending to read. He is eight years old, and it is Saturday, early afternoon. He turns the pages of the book, licking his fingers, keeping a steady rhythm (too steady, if anyone paid attention), but what he’s really doing is observing his father, a man he calls Don. Don is actually reading. He’s a psychiatrist. When he comes home from work, he talks about his patients into a tape recorder, and then a transcription service turns these recordings into huge towers of paper, which Don can read silently, for hours, with no breaks to pee. Sammy likes to watch him, to study his face as he reads, but Don has said, repeatedly, “Stop spying on me, Samuel.” This is one of his father’s Traps, which is the best word Sammy has for it. Because Sammy wasn’t spying, not at first; he was just watching, right out in the open, not knowing it was wrong. But now that his father has told him to stop spying, Sammy has no choice but to spy, to watch his father secretly, to feel the shame of this disobedience.
Once, in reference to an important painting—six flowers surrounding a tomato—his father said, “Don’t even think about touching this,” and then it was all Sammy could think about, for that day and the next.
Sammy turns another page, sighing as he does it, and this makes Don look up from his papers. “Are you bored?” he asks.
“No, sir,” Sammy says.
Don grunts and returns to reading. He is a small man but handsome, even very handsome, with thick honey-blond hair and a broad dimpled chin that seems to lead Don from place to place, that seems to have—if this is possible for a chin—an awareness of its effect on people. On weekdays Don wears black suits, gray suits, or black-and-gray suits, but on Saturday, he dresses in a sweater and slacks. Sammy only sees his father in a T-shirt at bedtime, and it is hard to see him this way, like a turtle without its shell.
Directly behind Don’s office sits a smaller room, cavelike and cold, where Don stores his coin collection. For Sammy, this collection is twice over a source of consternation. First of all, the coins are used, again and again, as example par excellence of a hobby, which Sammy’s parents feel he most urgently lacks. It’s true: Sammy does not have hobbies. He takes no pleasure in them. Second, despite its use as a rhetorical device, Sammy isn’t even permitted inside the collection room. He has been allowed, only once, to see the collection from the doorway. When he did, he was surprised to find the room filled not only with coins but also a very many books, which he presumed (incorrectly, it would turn out) to be about coins. Indeed (his father had used that word), it was the books, and their preservation, that rendered the room off-limits. Coins, his father explained, were very hard to destroy, even by children, and this was part of their appeal. With surprisingly little effort, Don said, you could find a coin that would be the oldest thing in your house, oldest by several hundred years. But books. Oh, no. Children, especially boys, must not be allowed to handle old books.
As for the coins themselves, they came in sizes large and small, bronze, silver, and gold, mostly circular, some more square. Sammy would admit that the sheer number of them was impressive—two whole walls full, plus several smaller displays—and he would admit that there was a certain magnetism to seeing, this close together, so many objects alike in size and shape and yet, in a profound way, completely foreign to one another. And it’s true, this nearness without exactness produced an interesting visual effect, so that when he tilted his head, a kind of shimmer passed over the coins, like the sun traveling quickly over a river, like a wink, a raise of the eyebrows, the promise of a secret.
Don grunts again, this time to himself, and Sammy thinks, What’s wrong with me?
From across the house, the long, empty hallways report the sound of the front door opening. His mother is home. The Tamparis live in a Manhattan brownstone, a building so old that Sammy can’t re-create it with LEGOs; he’s found the right colors, even a plastic door with a fake stained-glass window, but the shiny plastic simply can’t reproduce the history of the place. He hears his mother drop keys into her purse and kick off her shoes in the landing. He hears the sound of her bare feet in the hallway. The entryway is rich with windows, and the house is bright, but as you proceed, the rooms darken, so that coming home is, for Sammy, like falling asleep.
His mother, Leena, sweeps into the room, patting his head, inspecting the wall hangings—she’s an art appraiser—as though she hasn’t been home in years. Leena is plainer in the face than her husband but much taller and thinner; from behind, Sammy can see the beginning of her spine form below her neck and disappear into the low back of a cotton dress. Sammy knows he has inherited the best of them both, at least physically; he will be tall, thin, and pretty, and everywhere he goes, people will look at him. They already do.
“SonAndHusband,” Leena says, acknowledging them. She bends almost in half at the waist to kiss Don’s head, and when he looks up at her, there is warmth between them. Sammy can recognize these feelings in others, which he thinks must be good, must be a sign that he is not totally, irreversibly broken.
Leena adjusts the slider for the ceiling lights, which are recessed like the eyes of a doll, and the room brightens. Her hair is curly and red—last week it was brown—and she grabs a strand of it now, examines its color in this new light.
When she’s done, she catches Sammy’s eye. “Your friends are outside. The sun is there, too. Go play and be free.”
Sammy closes his book. This is his mother’s version of a Trap, except it’s not a Trap really, just a Sadness: she tells Sammy to do the things that she’d like to be doing, but never does. His mother dreams of playing basketball for the New York Knicks. He knows this because when she naps on the couch, she updates the score in her sleep and sometimes, like a peaceful sigh, says, “Swoosh.”
He has accepted that his parents don’t love him.
Those boys
outside, whichever boys she’s seen, are not his friends. They’re just neighborhood boys. To Leena, all young people know and admire one another. Sammy wonders if this assumption comes from some great happiness in her own childhood or whether, instead, it has formed in response to some unhappiness, some old wound. Sammy does not have any friends. At school, he is so much smarter than his classmates that he feels the weight of their stupidity on his chest—even after the bell rings, like waking up from a nightmare to find yourself suffocating, still, under the heart-crushing burden of your fear.
Nonetheless, he stands and stretches. With Leena home, Don will read in the bedroom, away from the noise of the television (which Leena is turning on now, checking the TV Guide for schedules) and away from spying eyes. Sammy might as well go outside if it will make Leena happy.
“Hey,” Leena says to him. “How many three-pointers did Trent Tucker make in 1986?”
“Sixty-eight.”
She laughs with delight. This is the one thing he knows can make his mother happy: his memory. Words, faces, field goal percentages, he can just … remember things.
“How about you teach him something useful,” Don says.
Sammy trudges down the hall, Leena calling to him to take his skateboard, so he does, though he’s never actually used it. On good days, he would confess that it does bring him pleasure to carry the board around, to be seen with it. He thinks it suggests to strangers some hidden swiftness, which he has chosen not to show them.
Outside, the sun is high and hot, the sky a distant river blue. There are boys, yes, four of them, playing four square in the street. This is a relief to Sammy: they will have no use for a fifth. He tucks his skateboard under his arm and sits on the shaded bricks of the stoop. His mother likes to say Manhattan is changing—she likes to say it even though it pains her—but to Sammy, everything looks the same as it always has, except maybe for the coffee trees planted along the sidewalk, which for some reason, this summer, have not grown leaves and now sit naked under the sun like skeletons. The cars in front of his house are parked very close together, their bumpers nearly kissing, and it gives Sammy a sick, shuddering feeling, as he imagines the drivers trying to extract these cars from their spaces.
Three stupid pigeons—one white, almost dovelike, the others as dirty and gray as the street—land near the neighborhood boys, who are hurling a spongy red ball across the chalk lines of the playing field. The pigeons line up in single file, as though they are waiting to play, and this distracts the tallest, oldest boy—who is not wearing a shirt, who has a thin line of hair emerging from his nylon shorts and rising to his belly button, it’s really something—and so he loses the point and throws the red ball at the pigeons, who scatter. Sammy looks away from the boy’s hair and follows the white pigeon as it flaps—in the inelegant way of pigeons—toward his house. He worries it might fly directly into his bedroom window, but at the last moment it thrusts upward, into the camouflage of some fast-moving clouds.
How high above the street is my bedroom? Sammy wonders, and the urgency of this question frightens him. He’s always being struck by thoughts like this, that arrive seemingly out of nowhere but desperately, with an insistence that reminds him of his father’s chin. He stacks imaginary versions of himself on top of each other until his hypothetical head has reached the window. His bedroom, he decides, is four and a half Sammies off the ground.
When he returns his attention to the street, there is a man standing in front of him, blocking his view of the boys. The man is wearing dark jeans and a green collared shirt. Wiry tufts of chest hair sprout from the neckline of this shirt, and it is not like the hair of the neighborhood boy—Sammy does not want to look at this.
“Hey, kid,” the guy says. “Got a minute?”
* * *
Here is why Sammy spies on his father.
Every Wednesday Don receives the package from the transcription service—delivered in person, it must be signed for, “And not by a kid, please,” said the delivery boy, once, when Sammy opened the door—with a box full of patient files. Every Thursday evening Don meets with the New York Society of Numismatics, i.e., coin collectors, and of course Sammy is not invited, while Leena goes to something she calls Fun Club. This Sammy has seen, and it’s just women smoking cigarettes. The babysitter hired to watch Sammy—a college girl with polychromatic eyes—doesn’t care what he does so long as he doesn’t go “out of sight,” the mere thought of which makes the girl breathe so frantically that Sammy can map the shape of her breasts.
This means that every Thursday evening, for four hours, Sammy can read his father’s files. The coin cave Don locks, but the files, miraculously, he leaves unprotected, perhaps assuming they’re too dry, or too complex, to attract Sammy’s interest. The first time, he read them out of boredom. Sammy really doesn’t have anything, not one thing, he particularly likes to do. He plays with LEGOs when ordered, but they make his mind anxious and his fingers feel raw. Reading books is okay, but only when they’re about science, and even then he could take them or leave them. In bed each night, he cries from 10:00 to 10:15 (he sets the timer on his bedside clock). It’s almost a relief, this crying, though he can’t explain from what. To use a phrase of his mother’s, “It’s just one of those things.” Why did the pigeons land near those boys, and not some other place? Why did they arrange themselves in a line?
These things could not be explained: the behavior of pigeons, the crying, his lack of pleasure in activities that drive other boys into frenzies of excitement (video games, cap guns), that his parents loved each other (proving they were capable of love) but not him, that if he listened carefully, in a quiet place, he could hear something rattling in the space between his shoulder and neck, as if a part of him had broken off. He did want to touch the babysitter’s breasts, and he did want to do … something with that neighborhood boy, but even these things he wanted vaguely, indifferently—he wouldn’t give up anything to have them. Or was it that he had nothing to give up? That there was nothing in life he valued?
All of these, he had thought, were questions without answers. But then he read his father’s files, and he found stacks upon stacks of pages of his father trying to answer them … for other people. He read about someone named Edna, who cried so much in public she lost her job, which made her cry even more, so then she lost her kids. He read about William, who felt unloved by his parents (this was Don writing this!), and for whom Don had prescribed medication. Sammy read about Christina, who told Sammy’s father—and these were her actual words, though Sammy could barely believe it—that she had always felt broken. To solve these people’s problems, Don had to take a cross-sectional view, plus a longitudinal view, to create a working hypothesis.
Sammy, too, would do this. He would read the files. He would watch Don read the files. He would figure out, once and for all, what was wrong with him.
* * *
“Seriously,” the guy with the chest hair is saying, “you’re a real beautiful kid.”
Sammy clutches his skateboard. He wonders how tall the man is, how many of him it would take to reach Sammy’s bedroom from the street.
“This is your house?” the guy says, responding to Sammy’s glance back at the window. The man has bad teeth, but his clothes look expensive, or at least they seem to have been chosen carefully. “Are your parents home?”
Like all children, Sammy has been instructed not to talk to strangers. But one of his thoughts comes to him, and he can’t help himself. “Are you a patient of Don’s?” he asks.
The man’s eyebrows narrow. “A patient I am not,” he says, very seriously, but then he smiles his crooked smile. “In fact, I’ve been told I’m rather impatient.” This makes him laugh. Behind him, the red ball escapes the playing field and goes bump-bump-bump down the street.
Sammy has lost his curiosity and stands to go inside. He tries to turn his back to the man, but the man has his arm.
“Wait,” the guy says. “Do you want to make a lot of mone
y?”
Sammy considers this. It’s not a question he’s ever been asked before. “I think I already have a lot of money.”
The guy casts his eyes over Sammy’s house. “That’s probably true,” he admits. “But there’s more to it than money.”
“No, thank you,” Sammy says. “Goodbye.”
“So polite!” The guy still has Sammy’s arm. “Let me give you something.” The man fishes in his pocket with his other arm and produces a small business card, the kind Don keeps in his wallet. “I photograph kids. Beautiful kids.”
Sammy’s right arm is holding the skateboard, so the man has no choice but to release Sammy’s left and press the card into his hand. Sammy grips it tight, bending the paper, and the man grimaces. “Just show it to your folks.”
Sammy climbs the steps to his door. It has not occurred to him before now to meet one of his father’s patients, but now he wants to, badly. He imagines meeting all of them in a warm, public place—there are coins, and there is four square, and there is the smoking of cigarettes. It would be their own Fun Club.
“Hey, model boy!” the man yells from the street as Sammy opens the door. “Tell your folks to call that number. The world needs beauty.”
Sammy says nothing and enters the bright foyer of his house. The sound of televised basketball wafts like a smell from the living room, and Leena has often dragged him to live games, so he really can smell it: the popcorn, the beer, the sweat from the players, which runs and runs down their muscled arms until the ball is slick with it and they start missing shots. Sammy wonders if athletes would ever need a psychiatrist or if their minds are too simple. He has heard his mother call Patrick Ewing a “head case.”
