Imagine Me Gone

by Adam Haslett

  Later, in the bathroom, passing the toothpaste, we slunk back toward each other. After turning out the lights, without saying a word, he fucked me quite hard, both of us knowing it would be bad to part for this long without touching. In the morning I promised to call him.

  As I had suspected, we got no cell reception at the cabin. But the Mitchells had a working landline, which is what my mother called us on after supper, saying she just wanted to make sure we’d arrived safely and that the heat worked. She spoke to Michael briefly and then wished us a good night’s sleep.

  Along with the heap of books he’d stuffed in his messenger bag, Michael had brought a bunch of DVDs. We sat through two episodes of 24 together, a distraction I was glad for. He’d lost patience for anything slower than a Bruce Willis movie. It had to be action: car chases, galactic warfare, gangland slaughter. Luckily, next to the supermarket back on Route 1, I’d spotted a place that still rented videos, so I knew we wouldn’t run out.

  Before going to bed I told him he should do what we had discussed. He went upstairs and returned with his toiletry bag to the living room couch, where he rummaged through it and removed the orange prescription bottles, lining them up on the coffee table in what seemed an act of determined resignation. He set down five in all, plus the jar of kratom tea.

  For years he’d insisted, like a child, that eventually a doctor would prescribe a pill which would give him the same relief he’d experienced the first time he had taken a drug. We had chastised him for believing this, for demanding such a purely external fix, and yet all the while we had wished for exactly that, for our sake as much as for his. To make the problem simply go away. That fantasy was over. That cure didn’t exist. Every therapy, every drug, all the help we’d given—none of it had worked. So now there was no other choice. He had to be able to take care of himself. He had to get better. When my mother had called on that Sunday last month and told me she needed to sell the house, she had to have known that I wouldn’t let her do it. Telling me was as good as saying she wanted to be stopped. And so I had stopped her.

  “It’s the right thing,” I said, picking up his bottles with both hands.

  “I’m not sure,” he said, “I’m not sure.”

  For the first couple of days the hardest part for either of us was the lack of Internet. I hadn’t been away from it that long in years. Nor had Michael. The absence of distraction left us irritable and bored. But that had been part of my idea for coming here, to disenthrall him from that constant, goading semi-stimulation which only fed his anxiety. To help bring him back to some kind of present.

  After the countless hours I’d gorged on polling data and campaign gossip, scraping for angles in all that trash of information, I wanted to purge myself of it, too. Still, the first two evenings I couldn’t help walking up the road to the one spot where I got a signal and standing there, shivering, as the headlines loaded. Michael had brought his laptop, but without new messages or updates from his myriad listservs to constantly anticipate and check, he hardly bothered opening it.

  On our third morning I woke more rested than I had in a long time. Michael hadn’t stirred yet. I dressed and went out into the yard, into the freezing air, and walked down the jetty to the dock from which we used to set out for the island.

  Beyond the few boats still on their moorings, a bank of fog was moving in off the sea. I watched it slowly cover the spit of land at the mouth of the inlet, shrouding the fir trees and the granite shore, and then the whole end of the bay, covering the barnacled outcroppings where the cormorants landed and seals basked in summer, rolling slowly toward me over the water until I saw that it wasn’t fog but snow, the flakes tumbling thick and silent out of the encompassing cloud, and I remembered that was how it had been up here when we were kids, seeing weather approach from a distance, a thunderstorm on the horizon, rain sweeping toward us like a curtain across the water, and how it had thrilled me, that enormity and power, how oblivious it was of us. I had an inkling of that again now, of that state of being wide open to time, not as a thing to use or waste, but as a motion of its own, an invisible wholeness made apparent by the motion of the world.

  By the time the snow reached me, I couldn’t see more than twenty yards, the rocks and the water and the boats all gone. When I went back into the cabin and saw my phone on the counter, I powered it off and stowed it in a kitchen drawer.

  After breakfast with Michael, I made him walk the half mile with me to the general store. This became our routine, which he consented to more readily once he knew they sold doughnuts. In the afternoons we spent longer than necessary up on Route 1 restocking our food supplies and browsing every aisle of the video store, and in the evenings we watched one action movie after the next. Still, there were plenty of idle hours, and when Michael started having trouble sleeping, in what seemed the first sign of withdrawal, those hours began to gnaw at him.

  “When is he going to stop that?” he asked me late one afternoon at the end of our first week, standing by the window in the dining room, peering over the embroidered half curtain.

  All morning the lobsterman across the road had been chopping wood in his yard. He worked at a methodical pace, each gap long enough to make you think he was done. Until you heard another thwack of the ax, and the splintering of a log.

  “When he’s through, I guess.”

  “How old do you think he is?”

  A loaded question, coming from Michael, who considered himself so ancient. He’d begun referring to these as “the winter years” of his life. Absurd on its face for a thirty-seven-year-old, droll, even, as a complaint about early middle age, though not the way he said it, with grim conviction.

  As for the guy across the street, I’d noticed him a few times coming home in the late afternoons, and had watched him switch out the damaged lobster traps in the bed of his truck with replacements from the stack in the yard. He was some fisherman’s son, not the old man himself. Thirty, maybe, with a build you could see through his thermal work shirts, and a dirty-blond crew cut. In the absence of Seth and pornography, I’d closed my eyes the night before and imagined him bending me over the hood of his Ford.

  “I don’t know, forty?” I said, for Michael’s sake.

  “No, no. He’s not that old.”

  “Thirty-eight?”

  Michael shook his head dismissively. “I always imagined I was younger than men like him. The way you imagine you’re younger than your dentist. But I’m not anymore. He’s married to that woman who drives the Bronco. She could be in her late twenties. They live in that house. It’s amazing.”

  “It’s a pretty ordinary house, actually.”

  “I don’t mean the building. I mean he lives here in this polar vortex, surrounded by nothing but deer and a smattering of white people, and he’s found a sexually attractive woman to live with him year-round. I find that shocking.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. His voice was back. The speed of it, the acumen. He hadn’t noticed it. But his halting forgetfulness was gone. He sounded almost like himself again. He even seemed to have more color in his face.

  “I do give him credit for the bumper sticker, though,” he said. “‘They call it tourist season. So why can’t we shoot them?’ I like that. No doubt he spends his spare time lobbying for an expansion of the welfare state, as well he should. But I wish he’d put a stop to that manual labor. The sound is harrowing.”

  He paced back into the living room, where I was reading an old copy of Vanity Fair, and scanned the room as if for intruders.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Wretched,” he said.

  With no private clinic spa to help take the edge off, I started driving us to a gym I’d seen a little ways past the supermarket. It occupied a defunct car dealership, three walls of glass and a concrete backdrop enclosing a small field of secondhand Nautilus equipment. Up here in the off season it was as close as we were going to get to a regimen of something other than television.

  S
urveying the scene on our first visit—a woman in a terry-cloth tracksuit reading US Weekly on a StairMaster and a teen waif loitering by the free weights—Michael asked, “Where are all the muscle queens?”

  Through music he had learned gay culture long before I had. The meaning of the Village People may have eluded me as a child, but it had never eluded him. I hadn’t delayed coming out to him from any fear of rejection. If anything, being gay improved me in his eyes, placing me at least one step off the throne of patriarchy that he himself had so effectively abdicated. I just hadn’t wanted to face the awkwardness of discussing sex with my brother.

  Back then he had dressed so immaculately. All those English designer shirts of his, and the peg-legged trousers, and the dark suit jackets that hung so well on him, like a young Jeremy Irons done up to New Wave perfection. Once he returned from London, I’d never been able to keep up.

  Now here he was on the treadmill in ancient gym shorts and a V-neck undershirt stained at the pits, straining under the weight he’d put on. He hadn’t complained about his weight to me. He’d just commented in a way he never had before about how thin I looked, and I sensed his embarrassment at having had one kind of body his whole life, worrying he was too thin, and then suddenly having another, heavy not with muscle but fat. There was a perversity to it. Watching him struggle on the machine seemed like watching myself age in a sickly fashion. But at least here we could burn off a few calories, and another hour of the otherwise empty days.

  Michael, however, was resolute that the workouts did him no good.

  “No,” he said flatly, when I asked him on the way back from one of our outings if he didn’t feel just a bit more relaxed.

  “Okay,” I said. “But what is true is that you’re taking one pill, not six. And you’re not drinking the tea. The fact is, you’re better than when we got here. You’re more alive.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know. Everything’s shaky.”

  “Sure it is. You’re waking up.”

  “You know it’s not that simple. It doesn’t change my situation.”

  “You don’t have to think about that right now. We’re stepping out of that for a while. Things’ll look different when your mind’s clearer. Which is why I think you should come off the Klonopin, too.”

  “I can’t do that,” he said.

  “Yes you can.”

  “It’s not what we agreed.”

  “It’s what you want, though. When it comes down to it, right? You’ve said so yourself.”

  “Coming off that’s what put me in the hospital.”

  “You were alone then. You’re not now.”

  We were doing the right thing. He just needed to take off the last bandage. Like Celia said, the sedatives had walled his feelings in. And the higher the walls got, the more he feared what they protected him from.

  But I didn’t press the idea further right then. I needed to let it settle. I waited, instead, until we were eating supper that evening.

  “It would take months,” he said.

  “I get that it’s frightening—the idea of not having that particular drug anymore.”

  “It’s not the idea, it’s the chemistry.”

  When we’d arrived, he wouldn’t have been able to even consider this. But here he was, considering it.

  “Are you better now than the day you first took it?”

  “Of course not,” he said. His face was rigid with apprehension. But there was a pleading in his eyes. “You really think I could do it?”

  “Yes. I think you can.”

  I’d bought us ice cream for dessert. We ate it in front of The Bourne Identity. In the final sequence, Matt Damon hunted snipers in the woods and fields around the country house where he’d fled with the woman from Run Lola Run. The Mitchells had installed a flat-screen television with excellent speakers, and the crack of the rifle as Damon shot his attackers satisfied us both. Michael even smiled.

  The next morning he asked if we should get rid of the booze in the house. He was afraid that he would resort to it if he tried coming off his last medication.

  Without answering, I emptied the fridge of the beer and wine we had brought with us and poured each bottle down the kitchen sink as he watched. I rinsed them and took them out to the bins, and then I found a cardboard box and loaded the Mitchells’ own liquor cabinet into it, and brought that to the sink as well. I was about to start pouring their bottles down the drain when it occurred to me it would probably be several hundred dollars’ worth of alcohol to replace. Michael was still at the kitchen table, watching me.

  “I’ll take care of the rest of this,” I said. “You should go listen to some music. You haven’t been doing much of that.”

  I waited until I heard him open his laptop, followed by the tinny sound of synthesizers coming from his headset. Then I carried the box of bottles out to the shed and set it down behind the folded lawn chairs.

  “We’re clear,” I said when I came back in. “You can give me the pills.”

  “You know I take them for a reason,” he said. “I’m not an addict. It’s not like I was fine before.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s an illness,” he said. “I’m not malingering.”

  “I never said you were.”

  “Dr. Bennet said he thinks I’d qualify for disability. He said he doesn’t support it for most of his patients, but that he would for me—that my condition is that severe.”

  “That’s what you want? To make it permanent like that? To get a subsidy for it? If you wanted that, why come this far? If it’s all insulin for the diabetic, why even agree to come up here?”

  “You told me I had to.”

  “No. I offered. And you agreed.”

  “You don’t want Mom to sell the house. You think she should stop supporting me.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “But do you really think I don’t want to help you? You always say talking about the anxiety takes the edge off, and that’s why you’re on the phone with Caleigh so much. Well, I’m here. You don’t need a phone, you can talk as much as you need to. I’m not going anywhere.”

  He was trying his best to believe me.

  My mother had promised to refrain from calling too often, but when the phone rang just then I knew it would be her.

  “It’s very cold up there,” she said. “And you’re getting another four inches of snow tonight.”

  Wherever I went, she knew more about the weather than I did.

  “I’m mailing you some cranberry bread today, and I’m going to put in some cranberry sauce as well. I know you said you weren’t doing a whole Thanksgiving dinner, but just in case. You might change your mind. How much longer do you think you’ll be?”

  She wanted me to assure her that Michael was all right. Whatever the content of her questions that was their purpose. I told her, as I had from the beginning, that I didn’t know how much time it would take, but that she could go ahead and send her package.

  Michael stayed on the line with her longer, describing his fitful sleep and his morning nausea, but telling her not to worry. He’d been freer of her at nineteen, living in Britain, than ever since. Sharing every step of this with her wasn’t going to help, but I couldn’t control them both.

  Before Michael went to bed that night, I gave him three-quarters of his usual evening dose of Klonopin, which was two pills. I knew this drug was different. To come off it too quickly could be dangerous. It would take time. But we didn’t have months to work with, which meant we just had to do the best that we could.

  “It’s all right if you need to wake me up,” I said. “Just knock on my door.”

  He swallowed the tablet and a half in front of me and held his hand flat against his sternum, as if monitoring his breath.

  I half expected him to revolt right away and demand the pills back, but his sleep didn’t worsen that night, or the next few nights, through the end of our second week in the cabin, and so he agreed reluctantly to my suggestion that we
cut back his morning dose, too. I kept the medicine bottle in my room and doled the tablets out to him like a nurse.

  Usually when I traveled, Seth and I spoke every evening, but I had called him only twice thus far, which had pissed him off. Given how we’d parted, though, he wasn’t going to offer me the satisfaction of showing it. The third time I called him, the night before he flew to Denver for Thanksgiving, he was as remote as ever, asking me civil questions and listening to my civil replies. And yet even this much contact with him made me bristle. I’d sequestered Michael and myself for a reason. It’s how it had to be.

  “I just need time,” I said. “It won’t last forever.”

  “You’re the one who called,” he said.

  “I want to go away with you, and I want to meet your family. But I have to do this first.”

  “I know.”

  I couldn’t blame him for his flat tone, or his disappointment. I asked dutifully about his week and who else would be coming for the holiday, but when our conversation petered out neither of us tried to revive it.

  That night I heard Michael get up to use the bathroom several times, and when I went myself, the light was on under his door. He had to have heard me, to have known I was awake, but he didn’t call out and I didn’t knock. The next morning he was in a panic. He’d barely slept, and said his heart was beating like a jackrabbit’s.

  “You need to give me the pills,” he said.

  I didn’t shout at him, I didn’t tell him he was being irrational, I just said that the beginning would be the toughest, mentally, and that if he didn’t sleep at night he could take as many naps during the day as he needed. He wasn’t listening to me, though. He was too far inside himself. I handed him his coat and told him to come with me out of the cabin right away, before breakfast, knowing the cold would at least distract him.

  It was on that walk that I noticed I didn’t have to slow down anymore for him to keep up. I was the one trying to keep up with him.