Imagine Me Gone

by Adam Haslett

  I was younger then than he is now. Which makes the sequence wrong, being at his bedside like that.

  None of the children, Michael least of all, would have wanted to hear that it happened to be almost forty-one years since I had taken the bus to Lambeth to visit their father in another north-facing hospital room. What do the dates matter? I could hear them asking, and I would have had no answer to satisfy them. They think it’s simple of me, to keep track of time this way. I don’t ascribe anything deep to it, I don’t say it means anything in particular, other than that I’m sure I spend too much time thinking about the past. But it is a way to remain connected. Like visiting each of them if they move, so I can picture exactly where they are, which I do every night as I’m going to sleep, the images bridging the distance. Dates do the same. If I measure off the months and years, it is to link me to them, and back to them when they were children, and earlier still to when John and I were together before we were married, when everything was just beginning.

  The reason, it turned out, that Michael was sleeping so much in the hospital was the new drug he had been put on. I don’t remember the name of it; it begins with a Z. Dr. Bennet said it was an antipsychotic, but that I shouldn’t be alarmed. Michael wasn’t at all psychotic, he said, it was just that the medicine happened to be effective for anxiety as well.

  When he first came back to the house, Michael did seem calmer. After a month or so I noticed he’d begun to put on weight. Good, I thought. He’d always been thin as a rake; it seemed a sign of health. But it kept going. He wasn’t eating vast amounts of food—I don’t cook vast amounts of food—but he got bigger by the week. In the last nine months, he’s put on forty pounds, at least. He didn’t remotely have a belly before but he does now. He’s gone from concave to nearly barrel-chested. Even his eyes are set farther back in his head, encased in an extra layer of flesh. It’s not right. His frame was never meant for it. This is the medicine they give to a man trying to regain his confidence? Together with all the other drugs, it’s slowed his mind. When he talks, he pauses and halts, gets lost and trails off.

  I do my best to bring him walking with me, especially if he’s still in the house when I get back from work. Just fifteen or twenty minutes around the neighborhood at a decent pace to get him moving, not for the sake of his weight but because it’s not good to be so sedentary. He usually says he’d rather not, and then I have to convince him. And on top of that persuade him that he doesn’t need to bring his messenger bag, that black sack he can’t be without. He’s got half a pharmacy in there, along with books and papers. He treats it like a survival kit wrapped in a safety blanket. What if I need something while we’re out? he’ll say. On a walk? I ask. In the supermarket? It makes no sense. But each time I bring it up, it’s as if I’ve never mentioned it before, as though he’s never contemplated being without it and has to consider the risk anew. If I press, he relents, but I don’t always, and so sometimes he walks beside me with the overstuffed bag slung over his shoulder like a deliveryman taking a stroll, and I wonder what people think when they see the two of us go by.

  When I arrive back at the house, Michael’s already made the coffee.

  A few weeks after he left the hospital and moved in, I started having heart palpitations. I went to my doctor, assuming they were caused by the strain of his return. But the first question he asked was whether I’d been having more caffeine than usual. Unbeknownst to me, I had—triple the dose—drinking Michael’s brew. So now I take just a third of a mug and add water from the kettle.

  I tell him I’m meeting Suzanne for lunch later. Because my car is in the shop, I need to borrow his. “I could give you a ride,” I add, hoping he’ll want to come into the city. He goes once a week or so, to see friends, I’d like to think, but I don’t interrogate him.

  “Right,” he says, the idea at least registering.

  As we’re finishing breakfast, Dorothy, from next door, appears on her front steps with her dog, Tilly, on the leash, which reminds me of the clippings from the paper I want to give her. She smiles and waves when she sees me coming across the yard with them.

  “These are silly,” I say, “but I’ve been meaning to leave them on your doorstep. I thought they might amuse you.”

  She thanks me, putting them in the pocket of her windbreaker, and we marvel at the glorious weather. I haven’t gotten around to mentioning anything to her about the possibility of my leaving the neighborhood. I don’t want to set everything in motion before I have to.

  “How’s Michael?” she asks in her usual cheerful tone, giving me a chance to say whatever I want, but keeping it light enough that I don’t have to go into anything I’d rather not. I’ve always appreciated this about her, from the time she first moved into the neighborhood with her two children, soon after John died. She’s not afraid to talk about anything, but she isn’t insistent either.

  After I tell her we’re going into the city for the afternoon, she asks if we’d like to come over for stew later. I’ve eaten at her house umpteen times, and she in mine, but for some reason this morning her offer of dinner thrills me.

  “That sounds wonderful,” I say.

  “Just knock, I’ll be here.”

  As I turn back up the driveway, Michael’s dreadful bumper sticker confronts me: I HATE MY LIFE, printed in big black letters on a white rectangle. He has no other bumper stickers—no flags or political slogans—just the rusted Pontiac emblem and I HATE MY LIFE, ludicrous and stark, there for Dorothy and anyone else who passes by to cringe at. I sometimes reverse the direction of the car, so that the sticker faces the garage, which Michael never seems to notice, but I can’t do it every night.

  I had to drive his car through the middle of town yesterday with that plastered on the back of it, everyone assuming the sentiment was mine. In the grocery-store lot, the bag boy could barely keep himself from laughing. It’s absurd. And now I’m supposed to drive all the way to Boston.

  I’ve had it. I walk into the garage, find the least ancient ice scraper on the shelf, and set to work. It’s hard going, and I have to lean my weight into it, but the plastic edge does raise the sticker, bit by bit. I’m just about done with HATE when Michael sees me through the dining room window and steps out the front door to ask what I’m doing.

  “What does it look like? I’m getting rid of this awful thing.”

  “But it’s my car.”

  “That may be, but I have to drive it. And I’m not driving it with this on it. It’s ridiculous, Michael. It’s so negative.”

  “It’s a song. From the Pernice Brothers.”

  “It’s perverse, that’s what it is. Why in the world would you want to advertise such a thing?”

  “You’re worried about who’s going to see it?” he asks, as if that were a bizarre concern.

  “You don’t hate your life, Michael. No one hates their entire life. It’s juvenile.”

  He steps closer and glances down at the crinkled paper that hangs from the MY LIFE still adhered to the metal. Then, without a word, he takes the scraper from my hand.

  I’m amazed by the assertion of his move. Shocked, even. I can barely believe it. He never does such things. I’m almost thankful. So what can I do but keep my sudden disappointment to myself when he steps past me and begins scraping away at what’s left.

  Driving along the pike, he stays in the right-hand lane behind a Hood Milk truck going fifty miles an hour. Alec would be whipping along, as if enacting some espionage fantasy, leaving me to grip the door; Celia would be in the middle lane; and Michael a decade ago wouldn’t have realized how fast he was going, but now we remain stolidly behind the truck, and I say nothing.

  We park on Boylston, near Copley, and he hands me the keys, saying he’ll take the T back and get a bus home from the station. I tell him that if he lets me know where he’s going to be, I can swing by when I’m through and give him a ride, if he’s ready. He says maybe the record shop on Mass. Ave., but that I shouldn’t worry about it, and then h
e walks off, the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head despite the plentiful sun.

  At the restaurant, Suzanne is already installed in a booth, enjoying a glass of white wine. She’s wearing a scoop-neck blouse and her red jade necklace, with her voluminous, dyed-black hair down over her shoulders. In all the years we’ve worked together, she’s changed remarkably little. She’s still forever on the make.

  She hands me the wine list as soon as I’m in my chair. “What are you having?” she says. “It’s on me today. I’m celebrating. Don’t ask me what, I’m just celebrating.”

  The waiter, a conventionally handsome boy in his twenties, approaches.

  “Do you ever do that?” she asks him. “Celebrate for no reason.”

  “Sure,” he says, smiling gamely.

  Right away, she starts in on gossip. The new library director’s salary is apparently out of all proportion to what the rest of the staff earns; a member of the board is suspected of philandering with the wife of an Argentinian businessman; and the boy caught vandalizing the men’s room turns out to be the younger brother of the previous vandal, which I’d already heard, but it serves up anew the question of the boys’ stupendously wealthy and neglectful parents. I’ve never had Suzanne’s talent for being scandalized. To be able to entertain oneself so fully is a skill of sorts. Particularly given the material at hand.

  She’s on her second glass of wine by the time we finish our salads, while I’ve barely touched my first. At work she’s always whispering, her facial expressions tightly controlled, but in this half-empty restaurant, she gestures broadly, her eyes widening at the news she herself reports.

  Eventually, in the lull of attending to her trout, she manages to inquire about Michael and the house sale, like small talk at an intermission. “What do his doctors say?”

  “They hear about John, and that’s it. They’re convinced it’s in the genes. Which I’m sure is part of it. But they didn’t know them both. Michael’s not his father. His father didn’t spend so much of his time caught up with other people’s suffering, the way Michael does with everything he reads.”

  “Misery loves company.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I’m an alcoholic,” Suzanne says. “I suppose I’ve never said it to you flat out like that before, but it’s not a surprise, right? Some people take pills. Some people go to church. I drink. Everybody’s got something. I’ve known Michael a long time now. He’s a tense guy. Doesn’t have a lot of outlets. He suffers. What I’m saying is, it’s identification, all that reading he does. It’s what we tell the school groups when they read novels—see yourself in someone else’s shoes. Right? There’s nothing ambiguous about slavery. Plenty of misery there.”

  And with that, she shrugs, as if to say, C’est la vie.

  When the waiter appears to check on us, she puts her hand on his forearm and says, “Be a darling, won’t you, this Sancerre is just delicious.”

  I was hungry when I sat down, but I’m not anymore. “The fact is,” I say, “I don’t need that whole house, and if we moved closer in it would be easier to get to things. And better than shouting with Alec about money, and Alec shouting at Michael, which is all some families do.”

  “You’re a good mother,” she says. “Better than mine ever was. You’re devoted to those kids.”

  “I’m not sure they see it that way.”

  “They should. Are you kidding? You could have been a train wreck, and who would have blamed you?”

  Despite my protest, she won’t let me split the bill. I’m still trying to give her cash as we walk back onto Dartmouth, where the wind has picked up.

  “Don’t give me any money,” she says. “Just shop with me for a bit.”

  I can hardly decline, and it will give Michael longer before I go looking for him. I have to fight off her suggestions for a half dozen dresses and little bits of jewelry, after which she finally settles down and shops for herself. When we eventually say good-bye at her car, she makes me swear she hasn’t been a bore, and that we’ll do it again.

  “About all that other stuff, I always thought your house was a little drab,” she says, displaying her usual tact, her mouth still loose with wine. I shouldn’t be letting her drive. “So don’t worry about it. You’ll do the right thing.”

  Leaves rain down across the wide path that stretches along the middle of Commonwealth Avenue. I pass women with strollers, and joggers out in the fine fall weather. Whenever it was pleasant out, this is where I came to read while John had his appointments with Dr. Gregory on Marlborough Street. In the cold or the rain, I would stay in the car, and wait. For someone else, besides me, to tell him that things couldn’t go on the way they were.

  I ran into him once, Dr. Gregory. At the cinema with his wife, a few months after John died. I wanted to hurt him. But we shook hands and he asked politely how I had been. It wasn’t until much later that Michael began seeing him. I imagine he’s still there, in that grand office of his.

  When I reach Mass. Ave., I turn left, looking for the door that opens onto the staircase to the little record shop. I’ve been here once but forget which entryway it is. Up the block is the Virgin Store at the top of Newbury, and there in front of it, to my surprise, is Michael. He’s standing on the corner, his messenger bag slung over his shoulder, handing out flyers to the people rushing by. He holds the papers out, forcing them to decline before passing. As if he’s been paid to advertise some suit sale, or attract converts to a religious cult. The sight of it makes me flinch. Something is the matter. He’s become confused somehow, unmoored.

  I’m less than half a block away but still he hasn’t seen me. I start walking toward him, to help him out of whatever trouble this is, and then I remember the pamphlets—the ones he keeps in his bag, with the picture of the black farmer tilling a field. That’s what he’s doing. He is handing out his pamphlets on reparations. Little booklets on the history of the slave trade for these Saturday-afternoon shoppers, who think they’re being offered coupons and freely ignore him.

  He’s smiling as he does it, at each person, trying to establish a second of rapport. It’s that deliberate, nodding politeness of his, apologizing for the inconvenience he’s putting them through while imposing himself nonetheless.

  I can’t move. I want to stop him, to save him from being judged a kook, reduced to proselytizing on a street corner. But I’m the last person he wants to see. To be embarrassed by his mother fretting over him in public would only make it worse. I’m about to go, but he’s seen me now and appears frozen, his hands down at his sides, his smile suddenly gone. He looks fixedly at me, as if suddenly there were no one on the street but the two of us. I must not cry. It isn’t fair to him. I wave, and smile, and call out, “I’ll see you later, then, I’m off,” and I turn my back to him and retreat up the block.

  Later, in the evening, after he has returned, the rain comes. It begins as a shower but soon the skies open and the drops drum fast against the roof and slap the windowpanes. I hurry around closing windows before the sills get soaked. Warm air floats through the screens of the vestibule and the back porch on this October night, as if carried in by a belated summer thunderstorm, one of those that never delivered its moisture back in August. On the dry ground, the water will run straight to the gutters, wasted. We need a soak, not a torrent. Twenty minutes later it is gone, swept away to the east, and there is only the sound of dripping branches, and the dark shining in the porch light.

  One of the cable channels is showing The Philadelphia Story, which I haven’t seen in years. I ask Michael if he’d like to watch it with me but he declines, saying he’s going to head upstairs. It is such a pleasure of a movie, so stylish and light. You can’t help but cheer for the drunken Cary Grant to get Hepburn back. They are meant for each other. I watch a bit, then a bit more, and soon it has carried me off into its gentle absurdity. It’s already midnight when it ends. On my way to bed, I see Michael’s light on under his door. Best to leave him be, I think, which
is what I do, walking past without saying good night, in case he’s fallen asleep reading.

  It’s in the small hours of the morning that I’m startled awake by a knocking at my door, and then the door opens and Michael stands there silhouetted by the sudden glare of the hall bulb.

  “What is it, what is it?”

  “I can’t breathe,” he says. “I’m suffocating.”

  My bedside lamp reveals a look of pure terror on his face. He comes to the foot of my bed, clutching his chest.

  “Are you choking?”

  “No, no, I just can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.”

  “Well, sit down,” I tell him. Which he does, perching by my legs, his whole torso heaving. “Is it the asthma? Do you have your inhaler?”

  “I’m not wheezing. I have to go to the hospital, you have to call an ambulance.”

  I get out of bed and put on my bathrobe. “It’s all right,” I say. “You’re having an attack, isn’t that right? You’re worried. It’s okay. Just keep breathing. Did you have a bath? I can run you a bath.”

  “No!” he says. “You have to call an ambulance.”

  “Michael! Come on now. You need to calm down. We’re not calling an ambulance in the middle of the night. We can try Dr. Bennet in the morning. You’re not going to the hospital.”

  He stares at me as if I’m casting him adrift in a storm. But what in God’s name am I supposed to do? Drive him through the night? Or have sirens and lights in front of the house at four in the morning?

  “There must be one of those pills that makes you sleep, surely. I can get it for you.”