by Adam Haslett
Driving back to the apartment, I wondered if it was the anxiolytics that had padded my longing with enough cotton wool to allow for a bit of glancing human contact without injury or fever, or if letting go a bit of the truth is what had helped me to reach that clearing.
What do you fear when you fear everything? Time passing and not passing. Death and life. I could say my lungs never filled with enough air, no matter how many puffs of my inhaler I took. Or that my thoughts moved too quickly to complete, severed by a perpetual vigilance. But even to say this would abet the lie that terror can be described, when anyone who’s ever known it knows that it has no components but is instead everywhere inside you all the time, until you can recognize yourself only by the tensions that string one minute to the next. And yet I keep lying, by describing, because how else can I avoid this second, and the one after it? This being the condition itself: the relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.
I woke the next morning at five in soaked sheets and a panic. With water from the bedside table, I took my last Klonopin and went straight to the stove to put the kettle on for kratom. I did the yoga stretches Celia had taught me, and after that I sat upright in a hard-backed chair for five minutes trying to breathe intentionally, as it said to do in the pamphlet she’d given me on self-soothing. For some reason, when I finished I was still thirty-six, single, and about to die. I called Dr. Greenman for a refill but the secretary in Mental Hygiene said she was out for the day. I had run the morning routine but still the terror reigned. It was then that I checked my e-mail and read the message from the university saying that pursuant to a letter from the Department of Education about a previously undisclosed episode of default, they were putting a hold on the loan disbursement I needed for my rent and food.
When I managed to focus again on the screen, I looked up Dr. Greenman’s home address, and drove to her house. It was a black-and-white Victorian with gingerbread trim and a bevy of shrubs clipped to the nines. She answered the door in a University of Wisconsin sweatshirt and a pair of burnt-orange wide-wales. The lenses of her glasses were big enough to serve demitasse off. Michael, she said, I don’t see patients at home. You need to make an appointment through the clinic. I just need a refill, I told her, then I can get through the weekend and come in next week. We’ve talked about this, she said. I can’t write prescriptions on demand, certainly not from my house. And if I’d taken a bullet to the groin, I wanted to say, you’d tell me to reschedule? Why don’t I just bleed out on your hedge, and we’ll call it a breakdown? But I couldn’t be rude or unkind to her. Her affect remained warm, even as she sawed at the rope I was hanging from. Are you thinking of hurting yourself? she asked. Because if you are you need to go to the ER and tell them that I sent you. It was thirty degrees out, but I might as well have been weight training in Lagos for the river of sweat running down my back. Michael, she said, putting her hand on my forearm, as if I were a person at that moment, rather than a nerve, I want to help you, but I can’t do it like this. If things get bad, she said. They are very bad, I said. I understand, she said. If things get worse, and you think you’re in danger, you need to go to the hospital. I can’t give you more of the drug, but I can meet you on Monday morning to discuss all this. We can come up with a plan. Right now I have my daughter with me, and I need to go back inside.
Caleigh was at work, and after half an hour of imploring me to just get in bed and watch X-Files reruns, she said she really, really had to get off the phone. Celia didn’t pick up. Nor did Alec. I got my mother’s machine but didn’t want to leave a message that might upset her.
I don’t know how long I stared at the picture of Bethany on my desktop screen before dialing her number. It might have been an hour. I examined the pixels of her teeth as I listened to her phone ring. Miraculously, after all her years of silence, she answered. She was saying hello, I was saying it’s Michael and asking how she was, we were conversing. At long, long last. She had moved to Houston and finished college there. She had a job at a health club. I couldn’t see her working at a health club, but she didn’t sound as if she were dissembling. She asked about me and I said things were going okay, that I’d finally got into grad school and was trying to write. Are you going out with anyone? I asked, which of course I shouldn’t have, period, let alone almost right away, but I had to know because if she was single and she had picked up the phone, then the vicious little engine in my chest idling at breakneck speeds might shut down long enough to let my eyes rest. You didn’t call to ask that, did you? she said. No, no, I said, I’m just curious, I just want to know how you’re doing. Okay, then, she said, if you say so. I’m engaged, actually. I think you’d like her.
The liquor store took my credit card with flying colors. Mostly the light amber of Cutty Sark and the shaking blue script of my signature. When I could be sure no one was looking, I sipped from the bottle in the parking lot, turning up the volume on Norma Fraser’s “The First Cut Is the Deepest” (is it self-pity when it provides no comfort?). Somehow I’d never become an alcoholic. Luck of the draw. But as a major CNS depressant, liquor has its advantages. It struck my reptile brain square on its diamond head. Booze—the ancient dimmer of fear and sorrow. The granny of all psychoactive meds, a blunt old hag toddling down out of the mountains with a demented smile and a club. World? she sneers. What world? And swings her cudgel at your skull.
Eventually a détente was achieved. The awful precision of things drifted off to one side. I drove around for a while, walled up in sound. About the music I had listened to since I was a child, my father had never said much. His own tastes were a mixed bag, baroque numbers he’d picked up in the Church of England, Elgar and the grand imperial fade-out, tossed in with Sinatra and Frankie Laine. But whenever “Bridge Over Troubled Water” came on the radio in the car, my mother would remind us that it had been one of his favorite songs, and it had often occurred to me that he had done something like that, laying himself down over the trouble he himself had become, so that we could pass on. I wondered how any of them—Celia or Alec or my mother—managed to live anywhere but on the lip of his grave, eyes pinned open, trying to look away. How were they not cold to the touch of anyone but those, like my father, like Bethany, who ended who you were by making you over again in their image?
There is just the one sequence: Stepping from the terminal at Logan into that furnace heat on the afternoon I arrived home from England with Peter Lorian, my undershirt soaking through before we crossed the parking lot, the glint of the sun on those car roofs, the blue sky and molten asphalt, all perfectly unreal and incredibly precise. Arriving at the house, seeing my mother with her arms open to hug me, her hugging me, my being impervious to her touch. Then watching the three of them cry in the living room, wanting to comfort them but not knowing how, sealed off and sure only of this: I left them here to suffer and now he is gone. The one sequence. Like a groove on a record cut too deep for the needle to climb out of. No matter what else is playing, this is always playing. That is the point of volume—to play something louder than this groove. The volume of speakers, or of obsession. The power of the sufficient dose.
The drizzle and headlights, the storefronts and street signs—they all ran into one another, softening things up. When I knocked on the front door of the house, it was Jaylen who answered. Hey, he said. We don’t have the program today, do we? No, we don’t, I said. And then, realizing I needed to say something more, I added, I just wanted to thank you for the meal last night, I was so glad to be here. No problem, he said, peering at me with some concern. My mom isn’t home yet, if that’s who you came for. No, no, I said, I just thought I’d drop by. Maybe it was true after all that I would never be with anyone romantically. That my anguish, which for a time had specialized in love, had once more become indivisible from the rest of life. In which case relief might come from elsewhere. Standing in front of me in the entrance, Jaylen was uncertain how to proceed. I’m sorry I don’t have any records for you today, I said. That’s all righ
t, he said, you’ve given me a bunch. I can give you more, I said, many more. You need some kind of hood, he said. I looked up and felt the rain on my face. You’re right, I said, I do. Is it okay if I come in?
He had a Technics turntable in his room set up on milk crates filled with vinyl. There was the requisite Tupac poster, and the one that I’d given him from Run-D.M.C.’s first album, with Simmons and Smith in fedoras and tracksuits up against a brick wall. The bedsheets were still red Mickey Mouse. His schoolwork was piled on his dresser, his clothing on a beanbag, which he cleared for me to sit on. I picked something up yesterday you might like, you want to hear it? he asked. Please, I said, carry on. It was an Indochina remix of Kaci Brown’s “Unbelievable.” The original (hardly the right word) was a catchy, overproduced bit of Nashville hit-making, the kind of track that still gets called R&B though it’s sung by a white teen from Sulphur Springs, Texas, and has neither. But Indochina (aka Brian Morse and A. Fiend) had stripped away the lip-gloss piano and session-music guitar, laying the vocals down over a four-to-the-floor beat straight out of 1979, but quickened to the pace of a Rotterdam gay night. I couldn’t help but nod my head up and down, as Jaylen did, listening to this thoroughly unremarkable voice engineered to the vanishing point, and yet, when driven by the drum machine and lofted on waves of synth, still reaching the note that the heart pines for.
It’s unbelievable but I believed you
Unforgivable but I forgave you
Insane what love can do
That keeps me coming back to you.
It’s kind of gay, he said. I wouldn’t play it at school, but it’s got a kick, huh? Kind of gay? I wanted to say. Do you have any notion how many homosexuals sweated their asses off on the dance floor to make this soaring bit of derivative trash possible? How many died of AIDS, OD’d, or went broke on the way to that girl from Texas cutting a deal with Interscope to record a track that achieved its own unwitting ideal only when most of it was torn away by the people who really needed it? Any idea of how much eloquence was borrowed to pay that royalty? But it seemed like a lot to go into just now, and I felt as at rest as I had in a very long while, sitting in Jaylen’s room with him, with the turntable and the records, talking about music. As if he were my friend and I was his. Yeah, was all I said, it’s definitely got a kick.
He put on the Darqwan twelve-inch I’d suggested to him the day we met, “Rob One 7,” a cavern of distorted bass filled with an assaultive drum line and haunted now and then by a laserlike phrase of keyboard. As good a sonic portrait of postindustrialism—or at least of unemployment in Sheffield—as one was likely to come across. Knowing his speakers weren’t up to the task, Jaylen plugged in his headset and handed it to me while he flipped through a crate looking for what to play next. I slipped into the cavern and disappeared.
Here at last I could track the ghosts by ear, listening to them dance in the cut, the lost coming alive again in the vibrations of my skull, and through my whole body, which was free now to be nothing more than a tunnel, a passageway for the missing to travel back along, the music bringing them home.
Can I ask you a question? Jaylen said, when the track had ended. Sure, I replied. How come you told my mom you have kids? You don’t have kids, do you? No, I don’t, I said. I guess I just didn’t want to disappoint her, she seemed to like the idea. But don’t worry, I said, it’s nothing romantic toward your mom, I just felt at home. I’m sorry if I let you down. The wall of the booze was beginning to disintegrate. I could feel it washing away and the dread rolling in behind it, lapping at the tips of my nerves.
You’re strange, he said, cueing up another dubstep record, this one on a lower volume. He took a seat at his desk and scrolled through something on his phone. I should go, I thought. But the idea of getting up and leaving the house was terrifying. If I stayed here, in his company, I might knuckle through. They would cook dinner, I could eat with them. The overhead light, the grated cheese. It could be ordinary. My eyes started to twitch, as if I were caught in a waking dream. At the ER, they would think I was just a drug seeker.
The door opened and Jaylen’s mother appeared. She looked across the room at me, prone on the beanbag, my body beginning to shake, and I could tell by the alarm on her face that it was getting late, that things were already far along, and that I would need their help.
Margaret
It’s terrible how dry the ground has become. The brook is down to a trickle and the thistle and ferns along its banks look almost wintry. All of July and August it hardly rained, not even on the muggy days when thunderheads came through in the afternoon and lightning flashed in the distance. I had to water most evenings. It's the middle of October now and I’m still watering to keep the soil of the beds damp and the bushes from withering. Yet for all this, these last few weeks have been the most glorious weather, cloudless skies and temperate days, perfect for being out like this in the morning, and in the early evenings during the week, when I get home from work. The light is so clear in autumn.
In the meadow at the end of the street, the late-blooming asters have flourished despite the drought. The last snowy clusters run all the way up the slope to the verge of the woods. With your back to the road you get just a hint of wilderness, of what it would be like if none of us had ever come here. I used to avoid this section of my loop, it being the path John likely took. But eventually the avoidance became the reminder, and so for a long time now it has all been one, this place where he was, and I still am, the street and the field, alive with the change of seasons.
Around the yard lately I’ve been clipping back the red flowering branches of the euonymus, which was threatening to take over the driveway. There are bulbs to be planted, and beds to be re-soiled, along with the raking and mowing, which Michael has been such a help with. I don’t have to ask him, he offers. We’ve taken all sorts of things to the dump which I wouldn’t have been able to carry out of the bulkhead on my own: the tea chests in which we shipped our books back and forth across the Atlantic, full of old magazines; Alec’s and Celia’s high school belongings; a dorm room’s worth of furniture Caleigh left with us ages ago. All of it good to be clearing out, given the situation.
We have breakfast together most days. He goes upstairs to his computer while I’m at work, and he’s there at the house to greet me when I get home. I make supper, he does the dishes, often we watch a film before bed. The truth is I quite like having him with me again. He’s a considerate person and always has been. He does talk about his predicament and his ideas at never-ending length, which means he’s not always the best listener, but still, we’re company for each other.
It was my friend Suzanne who recommended the real estate agent. She said Veronica was very pleasant and down to earth, unlike most of them, and that if I wanted, she would come by and have a look, just to see what the possibilities might be. I wouldn’t be considering it if everything else I owe now didn’t make it so hard to keep up the mortgage. The hospital’s bill collectors are relentless. They call at all hours. They can be so unpleasant on the phone, as if we were criminals. And then with Michael not enrolled in his program, the loans I signed for him have come due, and there are those calls as well. I wish they would simply write. Then I could organize all the papers and take stock of them. I do hate not wanting to pick up my own phone when it rings.
I can’t tell Alec about Veronica, or about the listing contract on my desk that she’s waiting for me to sign. He’d stop me. And I don’t want to bother Celia with all of it, not yet. It seems there might be seventy thousand or so left after everything’s paid off, which is certainly more money than I’ve ever had at one time, and plenty to rent us an apartment. I would miss the garden, of course. That I can’t pretend.
It was almost ten months ago that I got a call from Michael’s doctor at the university. Michael had mentioned her to me, Dr. Greenman, and said that he found her sympathetic, which she certainly sounded on the phone. She said he had stopped a medicine too quickly, and that he’d bee
n admitted to the hospital out there. It would be best if he took a leave of absence from school, she told me, and got transferred to a facility nearer home. Celia was the one who called her back and made the arrangements. Alec instructed me not to sign anything at the hospital here until he looked at the papers, but it all happened quickly, picking Michael up at the airport and driving him to that fortress of a building up on the North Shore. They wouldn’t admit him unless I signed, so I did, which is why the bills now come addressed to me.
I drove up there to visit him almost every day, bringing him bags of pistachios, which he’s always loved, and music magazines, and whatever toiletries he needed. His roommate was younger, in his early twenties, and pale as a sheet. He didn’t seem to have any visitors of his own, so I brought nuts for him too, and pears, which he thanked me for in a whisper. Where his parents were, I have no idea.
At times Michael would be asleep when I arrived, and I would sit by the window with the paper, not wanting to disturb his rest. He lay on his stomach and side, his shoulder rising slightly with each breath. I hadn’t watched him sleep since he was a boy. His hands and feet still had their little twitches about them, and he swallowed with a motion of his whole neck, and burrowed into his pillow. Before Celia and Alec were born, I used to stand over his bed and wonder at him: the mystery of his sleep, of his having a life separate from my own, sequestered in the privacy of dreams. A warm feeling, but lonely, too, because I loved him with more need than anyone I’d loved before, and when he slept I understood that he could leave me, and that eventually he would. At least in sleep he had a respite from bodily tension, the kind that had been with him from the very beginning, and which I had only ever been able to assuage briefly and in small measure.
