Checker and the Derailleurs

by Lionel Shriver

  She still had her pants down when he pulled the door open, splintering the lock; she hurriedly tugged up her jeans, staring at the guy in the ladies’ room holding this girl with her mouth hanging open, and frantically fastened the snap.

  “Forget the belt,” said Check, kicking open the outside door and pushing her out of the bathroom. He dragged Rachel over to the toilet; she could barely stand now. Holding her up with one arm, he squeezed her jaw to get her mouth open and shoved his fingers as far as he could down her throat. Her tongue lolled and flapped against his hand, more like a pet’s than a woman’s. It was weird how far back in there you could reach. Yet as the throat closed and sucked against his fingers, wet and dark and smaller in the back, all viscous and tight, she felt like a woman, all right. Vomit gorged over his hand.

  Checker kept his fingers out of her throat just enough so she could breathe, but mucked back in there again as soon as her windpipe was clear. He got a little more out of her, but not much, for she was going under and her reflexes weren’t working. Still, man, was it a mess—Check wondered why he’d bothered to kick the girl out of the toilet, since they’d managed to get so little of the stuff in the bowl. All over the porcelain, across the floor, and dribbling down his arm was a thin brown trail, all lumpy with tablets in various stages of dissolve. Noticing the overwhelming dominance of tablets over food, Checker was relieved when paramedics appeared at the door.

  “Wait,” he said as they strapped the girl on the stretcher and he rinsed his arms at the sink. “I’ll go with you.”

  In the back of the ambulance Checker peeled off his T-shirt and tried to clean Rachel’s face. It pained him to see that smoky black hair strung with bits of vomit, her white cheeks smeared with brown like fine china in the sink. It was crazy—she was already subsiding into a coma, and they’d surely just take off her clothes and make her throw up some more once she arrived, but still Check fixed her hair, swabbed her neck, and buttoned her blouse. These funereal reparations completed, she looked peaceful, if a little slack.

  Pacing the hospital waiting room with no shirt on, Checker got looks, of varying sorts since he had a well-muscled torso, but Check himself was fully focused on the bank of pay phones staring him down on the opposite wall. It’s hard enough to call any woman who you’ve just been told dislikes blacks and especially mulattoes when you’re one of them, and who seems to believe you only want to impregnate her daughter. It’s harder still to call this woman and confess that you’ve done far worse than seduce her daughter; you may have killed her.

  “What?”

  Checker closed his eyes and held the receiver away from his ear. “O.D.,” he repeated evenly. “They say the pills are over-the-counter. She took a lot, but they’re not very strong. They give her good odds, but we’ll see.”

  “Dear God, why on earth?”

  “Because of me,” said Checker softly.

  “You? I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t either, Mrs. DeBruin.” Gently he hung up the phone.

  “Checkie.”

  Checker started.

  “What you doing in the waiting room?” asked a black orderly.

  “A friend of mine tried to kill herself. I brought her in.”

  The orderly smiled. “Well, this is rich.”

  “It’s not funny.”

  “I didn’t say it was funny, Secretti. But after a while—well, we get tired of this shit, don’t you figure? All the nineteen-year-olds wheeling in here, and meanwhile, these other chumps trying to stay alive, who’d do anything to be nineteen again, to have the strength left you people use to jump off buildings, to have the brains left you jokers use to buy bulk-rate discount barbs?”

  “Stop it.”

  “How’s it feel?”

  “Like my fault.”

  “You can do better than that. You’re a poet, aren’t you, Secretti? I’ve heard you mouth-off. You’re a whiz kid philosopher, isn’t that right?”

  “Leave me alone.” Checker tried to shake the orderly off down the hall, but the man followed him with a squeaky rolling table piled with clean sheets. Checker ducked into the men’s room, but the orderly stuck his head in and said to Checker’s back, “Feel it, Secretti? Feel it deep down? Man, don’t tell me in life there ain’t no justice.” And then, blessedly, he was gone.

  Checker has to tell Mrs. DeBruin that her daughter has tried to commit suicide

  15 / It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City

  Checker returned to the reception room to await Rachel’s mother. He knew only a few things about her from Rachel: she was divorced, like everyone; she didn’t come listen to her daughter sing because she thought rock music was bad for your hearing, just one of a whole quiver of opinions Ellen DeBruin kept slung over her shoulder to and from her job at an insurance company in Manhattan. She lived in a world of certainty, and it was somehow this characteristic that made her so recognizable when she swung into the hospital that night, the revolving doors flopping a full turn behind her. A trim, effective woman, she moved briskly and without hesitation. In a navy A-line skirt, a white V-neck blouse, low-heeled navy shoes with little perforations in the toes, she dressed for comfort and decency. As her eyes whisked over the contents of the waiting room, she didn’t recognize Checker Secretti because he must not have looked the way she’d already decided he would look.

  “Mrs. DeBruin, I’m Checker Secretti.” Check shook her hand firmly and looked her in the eye.

  She liked him. Instantly she liked him, feeling the queer energetic glow that had enveloped her as he approached, enjoying the dance in his eyes that was so inappropriate considering why they were both here. She had not planned on liking him; in fact, she’d screamed at him the whole way over in the car.

  Ellen DeBruin’s mouth twitched with annoyance. “Well, I’ve certainly heard my fill about you,” she said, with the full brunt of her hostility. She may have liked him, but she didn’t like liking him, not one bit.

  “They poured Rachel full of ipecac. She’s puked up most of the pills. She’s still delirious, and we can’t see her yet. But she’s going to be okay.”

  Mrs. DeBruin took a breath; a wave hit her in the face, and passed. Her skin felt prickly, until the hairs over her arms fell gently back down again. She didn’t have much time for Rachel, and often looked on motherhood as a second job; the strength of her feelings for the child, like her relief at this moment, always took her by surprise. Once more, as with her attraction to this boy here, she immediately felt a backwash of resentment. Rachel’s mother experienced strong emotion as an attack. Ellen DeBruin was one of those inexplicable people whose lives are always getting in the way of their lives. She so valued efficiency that it rarely struck her to wonder: she was efficiently accomplishing what?

  “Well,” she said, wiping her clammy palms on her skirt, “you don’t seem very upset about this.”

  “I’m not. She’ll be okay. But I am pissed off.”

  “Pissed off?”

  “Yeah. Aren’t you?”

  “I am—at a loss!” She threw up her hands. “What possessed her?”

  “I did.”

  “You sound as if you want credit.”

  “Responsibility. She’s in love with me, she says. I failed to return the compliment.”

  “She tried to kill herself over a crush?” Mrs. DeBruin ranged around the ugly plastic chairs. Of course, in some ways this wasn’t a surprise. Rachel was such a quiet, dolorous girl. Where had she gotten that? Ellen had been energetic, popular—well, at least energetic…Anyway, her mother wasn’t sad. “I suppose this wasn’t a serious attempt, is that right?”

  “If suicide isn’t serious, I’m not sure what is.”

  “I mean, this is one of those cries for help, isn’t it?”

  Checker shrugged. “She botched it, if that’s what you’re getting at, and I guess you could say she wanted to. But suicide isn’t exactly in the same category as whining at dinner or refusing to clean your room, even when it’s bungl
ed.”

  Mrs. DeBruin collapsed in a chair, the squalor and sterility of the hospital beginning to get to her. It was the middle of the night; she was exhausted, and this was awful. “Maybe I should have gone to some of those concerts.”

  Checker walked up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder. The moment before, she would have bristled, but exactly now she enjoyed it; she was lonely. Briefly she understood, too, how her daughter might yearn for this big warm hand with such desperation. When Checker removed it, she felt a strange disappointed craving she hadn’t felt since college.

  Mrs. DeBruin turned to watch him, and saw something happen, though she’d never be able to describe it, since he didn’t precisely do anything. Checker stood looking around the room, his weight on the balls of his feet, his chin raised, his fingers lifted lightly away from his jeans. The muscles in his chest subtly expanded, indenting here, there; his stomach sucked in. That was all, really, but there was a feeling—something rose in the room where he stood, and she, too, looked around, down the hospital halls, for a moment, she was sure, seeing them as he did: everything gleaming, the chrome railings, the instruments on trolleys, the wire rims of passing doctors; the pale greens and yellows suddenly mild, pretty; what was once sterile now simply clean. The idea that there was a place to bring sick people suddenly itself appealing, disgust at poor and expensive medical care in this country giving way to relief that even without money, if you were bleeding, these people would help you. Rather than be fatigued by the illness and injury stacked for floors above them, Checker and Mrs. DeBruin felt healthier than before, strong and resilient and full of spring; Mrs. DeBruin thought about taking up swimming again, and Checker thought of basketball, the bicycle. Turning to her, Checker said, “I think I have to go outside,” but because she’d been watching and he’d taken her with him, she wasn’t insulted when he turned on his tennis shoe with a squeak and loped out the door.

  Checker started toward Twenty-first Street, feeling odd without Zefal, but those rare times a cyclist finds himself on foot can have an exhilaration of their own—to be relieved of the taxi and bus exhaust, no longer watching for drain grates and metal plates, free from the tyrannies of wind. Stray patches of grass were spongy, and the blades ticked rapidly against his rubber soles, loud in the wide quiet of five in the morning. On a whim Checker detoured to the Roosevelt Island tramway, feeling the jolt and sway of its lift-off and the tremor when its pulleys crossed their supports, listening to the wind sing over the top of the car. He was the only passenger on the tram, and there were few cars on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge beside him; on the Manhattan shore a helicopter was landing, splaying the East River in a wide circular wake as it barely missed the water. Citicorp Center caught the red rising sun in its windows, and in the sway of the tram Checker felt the pleasant weavy lightheadedness of having stayed up all night.

  On the other side, he surveyed Second Avenue from the platform. The air was unusually clean and cool, and all the lines of the buildings were crisp; in Astoria General, Rachel was still alive. The breeze felt good against his throat; breathing, breathing, he was glad to have had an adventure, too sleepy to feel guilty for enjoying this. He rehearsed the new word “ipecac” and meeting Rachel’s mother. All right, there was a lot to come, a lot of shit. But just now it was a brassy early morning in New York City, and he would ride the tram back and stroll giddily up Twenty-first, watching people with puffy eyes grope into delicatessens for takeout coffee.

  When he did make it back to Astoria, though, a small but insidious bereftness had worked its way into his elation, and Checker paused at the park, trying to decide which direction to go. He envied Rachel having a mother. His didn’t count, not on mornings like this one. The only times his family had ever had breakfast, Checker had fixed it. She’d never tucked him in bed as a child, and now it was Checker who tiptoed into the room to pull a blanket to his mother’s chin. And she still slept with a stuffed sheep. You did not go home to confide in a woman who slept with a sheep.

  Resolutely he turned right and let himself into Vesuvius. The furnace breathed quietly on low; he felt a warm nostalgic rush of familiarity, the way it ought to feel when you come home. He noted Syria had cleaned up. She’d be angry he’d disappeared again, but Checker was getting good at riding through her fury, the way experienced seamen keep their balance through a storm. In fact, he looked forward to her tirade; with a smile he let himself down on a bench and fell instantly into that black dreamless oblivion which borders on death.

  When he woke it was dark except for the furnace, and he was covered in a light sheet with a pillow under his head. His watch read 11:00; he’d slept for fifteen hours. Checker jerked upright.

  “Relax,” said Syria. “She’s fine.” Syria went back to marvering quietly, and Checker rubbed his eyes. He pulled on one of her musty green work shirts and fixed himself a cup of coffee. They didn’t talk. Later, when he was more awake, she taught him to blow a bowl. The pipe was smooth and warm; her motions were liquid. Though with glass you had to move fast, she did so soundlessly and without abrupt changes of direction; when he failed to warm the piece or flash the punty she didn’t shout, for once. At last someone who knew just what he needed—a hand to guide the roll back at the bench, support for his pipe when he expanded the bubble, simple admiration for his competence with a strange material: “You have a good sense of glass,” the most generous thing she’d ever told him. It was a relief to concentrate on something physical, without feelings, for once an object that wouldn’t misinterpret you or hold you accountable or demand that you love it with any particular devotion, though that was your choice. Just now he understood Syria’s preference for form and color over people, if it came to that. The glass gave him heat and change and beauty, and he wondered whether in the end you needed more. He knew retreat to objects was a cheat, but he could see the seduction; the furnace called and churned so much like something live, you could put one over on yourself if you liked.

  “Ordinarily I like the hot colors,” said Syria. “But this will cool to ice blue. I think that’s more your speed just now. I think you’ll like it.”

  At about three she demanded, “When was the last time you ate?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re losing weight. That’s like leaving good liquor open and letting it evaporate.” She dragged him to Mike’s Diner, where the late-night waiters knew her well, and ordered him steak and pancakes and apple pie with cheese.

  He needed it. He’d burned up the meal at Mike’s by late morning, so that by the time he showed up for visiting hours his stomach was yowling again. This time the hospital didn’t exhilarate him with his own good health but made him feel pasty and tired. The ride up in the elevator, the lurch at her floor, made him a little sick.

  Rachel was in a room with two other people, and at first he couldn’t tell which bed, since the third seemed to contain a child. Looking again, he’d never realized how small she was. Her pallor blended with the sheets, so that all he saw at first was a tuft of black fur and two tiny eyes that shot open when they saw him. Kissing her on her cold forehead, he was amazed at the small circumference of her throat, the narrowness of her wrists under the taped IV. Her skin was translucent in the blue neon; her veins trickled in delicate tributaries over her arms. Smallest of all was her face itself, buried in the straggles of her hair. Checker was suspicious of comparing women with weak, helpless animals, but she was so bony and tremulous that the image of a kitten was unavoidable—the runt of the litter, undernourished and scared.

  “I brought you a present,” said Checker. As she tore away the tissue paper, having a hard time with the tape, as if even this much binding was too much to overcome, Checker felt a twinge; there was something a little warped about giving Rachel a goblet Syria had made. But his blue bowl was still in the annealer, and he knew very well he didn’t want to give it to Rachel anyway. Couldn’t he keep something? Besides, watching Rachel glow and shiver as she held the glass up to
the ugly light, Checker decided giving her anything was probably warped. Whatever he brought her would unavoidably mean far too much. He wished he could have handed the goblet to her, saying, “Here, this is a gesture of guilt and obligation, nothing more.” Maybe he could manage to break it on his way out.

  “It’s beautiful!” She clenched it over the sheet the whole time he was there.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I’ve missed you! I’ve waited all morning. Caldwell was here, and Howard, and someone said Carl sat with me all afternoon yesterday, but I was delirious…I was waiting for you, though. I didn’t care about anyone else.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t come yesterday, Rache, but I had to sleep, I had to.” Checker turned away. He was apologizing already, and for sleeping. “So what’s it like, Rache, being delirious?”

  “Like—having a nightmare, but you can talk.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I don’t remember everything. For a while I wanted to go to the bathroom.” She played with the goblet, smearing pale fingerprints over the glass, embarrassed. “They wanted me to use a bedpan, and I think I was strapped in. I kept saying, Just let me go down the hall! Somehow I’d gotten the idea I knew where the ladies’ room was and they wouldn’t let me go…And I yelled for you. You weren’t here, but I kept calling…” The goblet was now opaque with prints; the IV rattled on its hanger. “It’s like watching a movie. You hear your own voice like someone else’s far away. A little tiny buzzing sound, like David Hedison in The Fly.”