Nerve Damage

by Peter Abrahams

  “Totally confidential?” he said.

  “Goes without saying,” Turk said. “But I’ll say it anyway.”

  Someone had to know. Otherwise: potential chaos. So, standing right there by the door—both of them on their feet—Roy told Turk everything. That turned out to be hard, speaking it aloud, somehow making it more real. Roy couldn’t imagine doing it again.

  Turk didn’t interrupt, didn’t make a sound, just went a little pale around his lips. When Roy was done, he said, “God help us.” Turk put his hand on Roy’s shoulder. Roy didn’t really want that, certainly didn’t want hugging or anything of the kind, and none happened.

  “What’s this Hopkins thing?” Turk said.

  “Waiting to hear,” said Roy.

  “Meaning there’s some hope.”

  Always.

  They sat down. Out on the green, a little kid was throwing snowballs at Neanderthal Number Nineteen.

  “Anything in the bottom drawer?” Roy said.

  “Read my mind,” said Turk. He opened the bottom drawer, took out a bottle of single malt and two glasses, poured an inch or so in each one. That was gone right away. He poured more. An expensive single malt, but for some reason it had no taste, not to Roy.

  “What I want is pretty simple,” he said. “Jen gets one half, the rest goes to my mom.”

  Turk wrote on the pad; he had neat, small writing, kind of strange given those fingers, twisted and thick. “The house?” he said, not looking up.

  “Sell it.”

  “And your inventory?”

  “Sell that, too.”

  “What about the effect on prices?”

  Roy didn’t care. But why not maximize what Jen and his mother ended up with? “Krishna will know what to do.”

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “No.”

  “Jen?”

  “No.”

  Turk opened his mouth to say something, closed it. Roy slid his glass across the desk. Turk poured more, paused, and poured more for himself. He put down his pen, drank, leaned back in his chair. Silence fell over the room, thick, as though it had a physical dimension, seeming to block the passage of time.

  “Remember that goal you scored against Harvard?” Turk said. “I was thinking of it the other night at Waldo’s.”

  Roy hadn’t scored enough in college to forget any of them, but that had been the biggest, maybe the only big one, an overtime gamewinner in the national semifinal; they’d lost to Minnesota in the championship game. He had a crazy thought: I wonder if it’ll be in my obituary? Not so crazy—he understood at once where it must have come from: Krishna’s remark about Delia. This one will be in the first paragraph of your obituary, my friend. The cold feeling came again.

  “What was that thought?” Turk said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Totally confidential.”

  Roy laughed, a normal laugh this time. “It’s stupid,” he said. But with all the blurting he’d been doing in this office, why stop now? “I was just wondering whether that goal would make it into my obituary.”

  “They’ll probably just stick to the art, don’t you think?” Turk said.

  That struck Roy as funny, too. He drank more, made himself really taste it this time and found he could; it tasted great. His head buzzed a little. Why the hell not?

  “Maybe we could find out,” Turk said.

  “Find out what?” Roy said.

  “What’s in your obituary. Aren’t they written way ahead of time, all set to go except for the last little…?” Turk abandoned the rest of the sentence.

  Roy hadn’t known that, hadn’t thought much about obituaries, didn’t spend any time on that page of the paper. But some reporter, or maybe more than one, had already gone over his life, got all the pluses and minuses in black-and-white. How did it add up?

  “Didn’t Mark Twain get to see his own obituary?” Turk said.

  “How did that happen?”

  “His death was falsely reported,” Turk said. “He wrote something funny about it. But in this case I was thinking along the lines of one of those kids.”

  “What kids?” Roy said, struggling all of a sudden with a complex thought based on the notion that only the living read obituaries and therefore reading your own was somehow cheating death.

  “The kind that knows how to get past all that Internet security,” Turk said, “root around behind the scenes at some big newspaper. Aren’t kids like that a dime a dozen these days?”

  Roy knew of one. Cheating death: that sounded pretty good.

  Five

  Roy awoke with a new shape in his mind. He didn’t have a crisp image of this new shape, just knew it was attenuated, thin, delicate, more delicate than anything he’d ever done—although that wouldn’t be hard; delicate, and related somehow to silence. The shape—or one of the shapes—of silence. His hand was moving toward the sketch pad he kept on the bedside table when the phone rang.

  He picked it up. “Hello.”

  “Oh, sorry, Roy, didn’t mean to wake you,” Jen said.

  “You didn’t.”

  “Can’t fool me,” she said. “I know that sleepyhead voice.”

  Roy lay back on the pillow. “Guilty as charged,” he said.

  “Good thing,” she said. “Because I happen to be in the neighborhood.”

  Roy glanced at the clock. “Not working today?”

  “It’s Thursday, Roy. My day off.”

  “Oh.”

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah, fine.”

  A long pause.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me over?” she said. “I’ve got muffins.”

  Roy laughed, and asked her over.

  There’d been other day-off muffin deliveries like this, Roy always staying in bed, waiting for the sound of the opening front door. But now he rose, brushed his teeth, washed his face, threw on clothes; had coffee brewing by the time Jen came in, snow on her knitted hat, a bag from Muffins Etc. in her hand.

  “You’re up,” she said.

  “Thought you might want coffee.”

  She came over, put her arm around him. “After,” she said, and gave his ear a little lick. At that moment the sun came out and bright light shone through the tall windows of the barn, casting a long shadow of Delia across the floor and up the far wall. Roy and Jen went into the bedroom.

  Dark in the bedroom, the blinds still drawn. They got into bed, undressing; except for Roy’s T-shirt—he left that on.

  “Come here, stranger,” she said.

  “Stranger?” he said.

  “I hardly see you anymore.”

  “That’s not true.”

  He pulled her close. A little later, she rolled on top, took hold of him, stuck him inside and sat up—something they both loved; Roy because he liked watching her face from down there, Jen for reasons he didn’t know, only felt grateful for. Jen leaned forward, sliding her hands under his T-shirt, up his chest. She paused.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  “Nothing,” Roy said, taking her hand, guiding it away from the bandages.

  “Did you hurt yourself?” she said.

  “A little nick,” said Roy. “Nothing.”

  “You’re sure? I—”

  He reached up for her, drew her head down, quieted her with a kiss. Then he rubbed the underside of one of her breasts in a way she liked. That made her twist down on him in a way he liked—only this time, for the first time, he started to go soft inside her. Oh, no. He knew the meaning, the implication, almost before he was aware of what was going on. A whole cascade of black thoughts got released in his mind, came pouring in and overwhelmed him. He thrust harder, moved faster, tried to drive out the black thoughts with others—sexy, pornographic, dirty—forcing up memories of wild nights from his past, crazy-over-the-top things, some with Jen.

  No good. He and Jen finished in a haphazard way.

  After, they lay together, not touching. Roy could feel her thinking, but his mind w
as going blank and sleep was coming fast. He welcomed it; so tired. He was almost there, almost gone, when Jen said, “I can’t compete with a dead woman, Roy.”

  Roy tried to open his eyes, but the lids were so heavy. “It’s not that,” he said.

  “I think it is.”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “Nothing.”

  Jen sat up. Roy got his eyes open. Jen was looking down at him, sheet pulled up over her chest, eyes angry.

  “Just be honest about it,” she said. “I understand. She was this great lady and you can’t let her go.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “No? Then what about that thing out there?”

  “Thing?”

  “Sculpture. Art. Whatever. You’re telling me that’s letting go?”

  Whatever: he couldn’t help getting annoyed at that, heard the annoyance in his response. “You’re reading too much into it.”

  “Am I?” Jen said. “Did you know you sometimes say her name in your sleep?”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Believe what you want,” she said. “And look at you now—you can hardly get up the energy to have this conversation. Am I that boring?”

  Roy reached for her. She moved away, to the edge of the bed. “You never bore me,” he said.

  She shook her head. “You don’t care that much, Roy. That’s what I’m starting to see. To see and feel.”

  “It’s not true.”

  She didn’t seem to hear. “Take that job offer I told you about—what was your reaction? You didn’t say stay. You didn’t say go. Then you kiss me like that, like…like nothing matters more. What is it you want from me?”

  Roy forced himself to meet her gaze. What did he want? That was easy: to marry her and live happily ever after; or maybe in the other order. Roy said—made himself say, and tried to say it gently, although that harsh raggedness got into his throat again, at the worst possible moment, nothing he could do about it—he said: “Go.”

  She was shocked. He could see it. But he didn’t say another word. Once he started, there’d be no control, and what ended up being said would cause a lot more pain in the long run, the kind of loss-pain that never goes away completely. Roy knew something about it. Delia was the proof. And therefore: Jen wasn’t all wrong when it came to what made him tick.

  Her expression changed. The shock wore off, replaced by anger, a cold anger he wouldn’t have thought her capable of. “I wondered about this once or twice,” she said. “Now I know.”

  “Know what?” said Roy.

  “That you got damaged, too,” she said. “In the crash.”

  Roy shook his head.

  “Like it deadened some nerves,” she said. “Deep inside.”

  He stopped shaking his head, said nothing.

  Her anger faded. She patted his arm when she said good-bye.

  “Some weird stuff turned up in the yard the other day,” Skippy said. “Mr…. um, Roy?”

  Roy glanced up. He was working on a pencil sketch of the new idea, this attenuated silent thing, and getting nowhere. “Sorry,” he said. “Missed that.”

  “Weird stuff,” said Skippy, hooking up a new tank of acetylene. “In the yard. Uncle Murph says it’s from a nuclear power plant.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “Hard to describe,” said Skippy. “All bent up. Shiny. Wanna see it?”

  “Yes,” said Roy. “But later. Right now, I’m hoping you can help me with something on the computer.”

  “The free phone service?”

  Roy shook his head. How to make this sound sensible? “It’s one of those places where you’re not supposed to go.”

  Skippy perked up. “Oh, yeah?”

  “But I’m not planning to do any harm,” Roy said. “Just looking for a piece of information, to…to settle a bet.”

  “What kind of information?” said Skippy, already moving toward the computer.

  “It’s a little complicated,” Roy said, launching into a long and disorganized story about college hockey, the satisfaction of beating—and beating up on—the Harvard boys, the preparation of obituaries, the eminence of the New York Times. Skippy had all sorts of questions—why the teams in the Kegger league had the names they did, how much the bet was for, whether college was fun—but none about the legality or difficulty of hacking the New York Times. It took him ten minutes.

  “Here you go, Mr…. uh.” The printer made its chugging sound. Skippy handed Roy his obituary.

  ROY VALOIS, SCULPTOR, DIES AT [INSERT]

  by Richard Gold

  ROY VALOIS, a sculptor whose large works are displayed in many public spaces around the United States and at several prominent museums, died yesterday at [INSERT]. He was [INSERT].

  The cause was [INSERT], according to [INSERT].

  The self-taught Mr. Valois worked almost exclusively with recovered materials, usually scrap metal, but he was “no primitive,” according to Kurt Palmateer, former head of the Mass MoCA Museum in North Adams, Mass., where the first sculpture in what became Mr. Valois’s Neanderthal series is part of the permanent collection. “There is a sense of refinement and a deep formal concern that, if anything, connects him to Henry Moore and even to neoclassicists of the nineteenth century,” said Mr. Palmateer.

  Roy Valois was born in the western Maine town of North Grafton on [TO COME]. He went to local schools, where he excelled at sports, eventually entering the University of Maine on a hockey scholarship. But it was while working at a summer job that involved welding and other metalwork that Mr. Valois found his true calling. His first piece, now standing in front of the public library in North Grafton, was built in his off-hours during the summer of his junior year in college. Made from brass fixtures salvaged from a sunken freighter and titled Finback, the piece attracted the attention of Professor Anna Cohen of the University of Maine art department, and led eventually to a two-year fellowship at Georgetown University.

  It was there that Mr. Valois began to attract the attention of collectors. Prices for several works in the Neanderthal series—“a tragic epic in scrap steel,” in the words of the critic Hilton Kramer—have topped $100,000. It was also at Georgetown that Mr. Valois met his wife, Delia Stern, an economist later employed by the United Nations. She died in an airplane crash off Venezuela in [TO COME]. They had no children and Mr. Valois never remarried [VERIFY]. He is survived by his mother [VERIFY], Edna Valois, of Sarasota, Florida.

  Roy read his obituary twice, his hands a little shaky the first time, steady the second. A tragic epic in scrap steel—he could live with that. That crazy juxtaposition made Roy laugh out loud; looking up, he saw Skippy staring at him.

  “They have humor in obituaries?” Skippy said.

  “Maybe not intentionally,” said Roy.

  Skippy nodded as though that made sense. “Win your bet?” he said.

  Roy didn’t answer. His attention was suddenly drawn back to the last part of that last paragraph: his wife, Delia Stern, an economist later employed by the United Nations. That was a mistake. Delia had worked for the Hobbes Institute, not the United Nations. Not a big mistake, in no way central to the story, but Roy didn’t like the idea of a mistake appearing in his obituary. Plus he remembered that Delia had written a very negative analysis of UN budgetary practices, an analysis that had provoked a condescending letter from some bureaucrat in New York. Letting the mistake go seemed disloyal.

  He grew aware of Skippy, still watching him, a funny look on his face. “Something wrong, Skippy?”

  “Your nose is, like, bleeding, Roy.”

  A drop of red fell and blotted the obituary. “It’s nothing,” Roy said. He went over to the kitchen area, held paper towel to his face.

  “You okay?” said Skippy from the other side of the counter.

  Roy nodded. He removed the paper towel. Another red drop fell, this one landing on the pine floor.

  “That’ll do it for today, Skippy,” he said. “Thanks fo
r the help.”

  “Hey, you’re welcome,” said Skippy. “But what about the nuclear thing I was telling you about?”

  “I’ll come over tomorrow,” Roy said. “And let’s keep this little computer adventure to ourselves.”

  “Adventure, yeah, sure,” said Skippy. “I already forgot.”

  When Roy got the bleeding stopped, he called the New York Times, asked for Richard Gold, was put through.

  “Mr. Gold? It’s Roy Valois.”

  “How can I help you?”

  Had he not recognized the name? “I believe you wrote a piece about me,” Roy said.

  “Your name again?”

  Roy repeated it.

  “Doesn’t ring a bell,” said Gold. “When was this?”

  “I’m not sure when you wrote it,” Roy said. “It hasn’t been published yet.”

  Pause, a long one. Roy thought he heard soft tapping at a keyboard. When Gold spoke again, his tone was harder. “You’re the sculptor?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re referring to your obituary?”

  “I am.”

  “Did Palmateer tell you?”

  “Palmateer?”

  “The museum guy I got quotes from,” said Gold. “They’re supposed to keep those interviews confidential.”

  “I haven’t spoken to him in years,” Roy said. Then he had a sudden thought: This could end with Skippy in trouble. “I found out by accident.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “It’s not important,” Roy said.

  “I disagree,” said Gold. “If it involved any—”

  Roy talked over him. “The reason I’m calling is that there’s an error in your story.”

  Gold swallowed what he’d been saying. “Error?”

  “Have you got it on your screen right now?”

  “Of course.”

  “The third last sentence, about my wife,” Roy said. “She didn’t work for the UN. The only job she ever had was with the Hobbes Institute.”