by Chris White
Waiting for an answer, he slaps unconsciously at his jacket for his old pillbox. Its absence is suddenly palpable, like a veteran’s missing limb when the weather starts to change.
Chapter Two
* * *
In the straight-backed chair in the corner of the master bedroom, Stella sits long-legged in her “I love Paris!” nightgown practicing her fingering on the oboe, still in the wig. Outside, someone shouting runs along the street, while Adrian watches Stella from their bed, messing around distractedly on his phone. It strikes him as odd when she practices like this: her fingers are rushing around, but there’s no music, only a sort of muted typewriter clacking. The nightgown is ironic too, with its floating pink hearts and miniature Eiffel Towers. She’s not the type; they both laughed when she brought it home. He wants her to come and lie down.
Zander and Michaela are fast asleep now, exhausted from their brief stint at nomadic life—the Native American and the hobbit off on adventures far from home, hoping for the blessing of their elders, ambushed by an angry mob. Michaela had decided to dress as one of her “ancestors.” When Adrian reminded her she was only one-eighth American Indian (from the Catawba tribe, his mother’s side) and was mostly French, actually, plus Scottish, English, and God knows what, she was undeterred. But when they got home from trick-or-treating, Zander hunched at the dining table playing Mario Kart on his sister’s DS, and Michaela blew fraying colored feathers aimlessly around the room. No one spoke of the night’s events, as if somebody had died. Later, when Stella went in to say good night to Michaela, she stayed a particularly long time, speaking low. Now she turns off the light and slides in beside him smelling like somebody else’s cosmetics.
“Nice wig.” Adrian smiles, a little aroused, a little bewildered.
She lifts her knee up onto his thigh, moves in closer so her breasts surround his forearm. “You should have seen Zander with the curling iron.”
Adrian chuckles. “I’ll bet.”
Stella chuckles too, and kisses Adrian’s clavicle. “I thought he looked pretty good like that, actually.”
To convince himself that nothing’s wrong, that he’s being superstitious, that he’s making something out of nothing and the phone call from his mother can be safely contained, Adrian regales Stella with an account of the evening’s high-jinks adventure—the sparrow that flew like a heat-seeking missile, him sloshing across the field in his good shoes, sliding into horseshit like it was first base, the bird flitting right into the broken-down house like it was coming home from work. The whole thing was pretty funny.
“Into the house?” she asks, with exaggerated incredulity. “Come on.”
“It was crazy.” He cups the soft weight of one of her breasts in his hand. “You should have seen it.”
She slides her leg up over his hip and says, “So, that’s why you were late.”
He hesitates. Unclear as to whether he’s being chastised, he moves his hand from her breast to her shoulder, just under the foreign blond hair. “I wasn’t that late. Plus I had an emergency C-section this afternoon.”
“Don’t worry about it. They were only bodies.”
She means the pumpkin heads. They were only bodies the children had seen. Adult bodies. In handcuffs.
“It’s nobody’s fault,” she tells him, but she backs away, takes off the wig, and tosses it onto her bedside table. It’s nobody’s fault.
Then she places her head on the edge of his pillow. “Everything okay?” she asks, looking for an answer he’s never been able to deliver.
“Early day tomorrow.”
The years have amassed between Adrian’s mother, June, and him like thick cotton padding around a wound. June had seen her only grandchildren, Zander and Michaela, more often in their early years, on and off, always with Adrian present, watching her, trying not to watch her. He wanted to keep the relationship with his mother alive, in spite of his confusion, but it had slipped away from him, little by little. As the years progressed, he returned fewer of her phone calls, found less time in his schedule to visit with her, claimed they hadn’t room for her in Boulder for more than a day or two. When she asked if the kids might fly out to see her on their own, Adrian said he’d rather they didn’t and, not long after, told her it was probably best for her to stop calling for a while. Maybe he would call her, he said. There was a terrible silence on the other end of the line, then he heard her crying. “I’m so sorry for everything,” she said, pleadingly, and Adrian felt something drop away. “I should have put an end to it all sooner,” she said, then he hung up.
A couple of months ago, without warning (and why would there be one?), she started calling again. Adrian didn’t answer until tonight, didn’t hear her voice again until tonight. She didn’t leave a message, until tonight. He says nothing more to Stella, just pulls on deep breathing like an invisibility cape. Soon she’s curled into an S-curve not six inches away, as blissfully unaware as one of his anesthetized patients under the knife.
Adrian strains for sleep.
He’s got work in the morning. He’s got to talk to patients, review charts, and look for danger signs. He’s got to administer propofol and sevoflurane in appropriate doses, at the appropriate intervals. He’s got to monitor his patients’ journeys like the guy whose name he can’t remember who ferries the newly dead over the River Styx (Charion, Chairon, Clarion?) carrying them over whirlpools of amnesia and hypnosis, bailing the boat, watching for rocks, and, with his oar, pushing away from the shore until it’s time. That’s what he does, stays vigilant. Does no harm.
He’s thinking about the tiny metal balls on the kitchen floor of the abandoned house, and the mud that had leaked in from under the blasted-out kitchen door and dried along the bottom corner cupboard like waves frozen against a shoreline. He’s thinking about the pumpkin heads and how such a mass of people could all be so fucking stupid. He’s thinking about his mother’s voice on the phone when she said, “I want you to know I’m si—,” running his fingers over the gnarled skin of his elbow, considering the possibilities: “I want you to know I’m sincerely sorry.” “I want you to know I’m sick of you.” “I’m sixty-five.” “I’m sinking.” “I’m sick.” He’s thinking about her voicemail blinking in the memory of his phone, which maybe he will listen to in the morning or tomorrow after work. And about how, when he’d finally caught up with Stella and the kids on the street, Zander said, “God, why did we even wait for you?” as though it had been his fault the cavalry had descended on the squash heads in the middle of the marketplace.
He edges back away from Stella, feels for his laptop on the bedside table, then lifts it onto his thighs and flips up the screen.
He skids through passwords and pages and postings. Onto the Cornell Lab of Ornithology site. And North American Rare Bird Alert. To the American Birding Association’s eBird site. Then Backyard Birder’s chat room. His article on thrushes was published here some months ago, and his blog piece on hummingbirds, last week. He’ll check for comments or questions, one in the morning now, and nearly the instant he logs on, some backyard birder’s post blooms onto the page like a parachute opening in a pale sky.
4601 (11/1/09): About 6:20 a.m. I saw a Northern Cardinal out in the yard by the hedges by the mess. They are bright red which everybody knows. When I was trying to think how to describe the color I thought of fruit but I couldn’t think what kind then I thought pomegranits (sp?). Its back wing and tale feathers are also red except like they’re antique. It has a black mask over its eyes and throat and over its beak which is more orange and looks like it was stuck on with glue for Halloween.I almost forgot they have a crest on top of there heads also red. Everybody likes the males but I also like the females because they still have red but most of there body is like this old sweater I had I left somewhere I wish I still had. Which I think everybody has a sweater that faded brownish green color. Its a fucking circus around here today because we’re getting a new batch of boys from Georgia. The north field is like grand c
entral station.
Hah. Pretty hilarious, Adrian thinks, this cardinal posting. Under his breath he says, “Oh, please.”
In the moment that follows, though, somewhere between insomnia and self-declared banishment, he’s plunged into a kind of heartsick melancholy by the naïve passion with which the man described his acquisition, one of the most common birds in the hemisphere, as if it were the most extraordinary find.
The house quiet, Adrian pulls himself from under the covers and steals down the hallway into Zander’s room. In the soft light from the closet, he lowers himself onto his bed. Listens to his steady, gentle snoring. Kisses his hair. Breathes in his smell of sun, dirt, and baked potatoes.
These are the times when the anxiety is strongest, when the past comes rattling at the door. Anything can happen at any time. When the children were young, it was the fear of hot pots on the stove. Hotel windows. Rabid dogs. Flying rocks. Steep stairs. Thin ice. Sharp-cornered tables. Swimming pools. Pointy sticks. Fast-flowing creeks. Certain nightmare scenarios got stuck in his head on replay: he’s bathing an infant Michaela when the phone rings. He looks away, starts reaching for the phone, she sinks down into the water centimeter by centimeter as he’s trying to nudge the phone down from the sink, her lips wet then submerged. When he looks around again? She’s bloated and still. Like that. Now that they’re older, it’s bullies. Apathy. Terrorism. Meth, heroin, crack, shooters, twisted Internet porn. Shame, failure, belittlement. The limp-dicked, pig-headed government. Incurable illness. The dark. And Adrian’s own accountability, that too—for leaving them where maybe he shouldn’t have, for ignoring his instincts, for trusting his instincts, for the unpredictability of even he, himself, how he could be a danger to them in ways he only imagines in some narrow, hurtling shard of consciousness. How do children live to become adults? Who the hell knows.
“Dad? What are you doing?” Zander turns to squint up at him. “What time is it?”
“Hey, buddy. It’s late. Just checking in.” His heart palpitates, a little startled too, to find himself here.
Zander looks up at him a minute.
“What were they going to do to us?”
Adrian is at a loss. “What was who going to do?”
“The people with the pumpkin heads. If the police didn’t come, what were they going to do?”
“They weren’t going to do anything, buddy. They already did it. Took off their clothes. That’s why the police came.”
“Oh.” Zander twists his mouth over to one side then moves something around under his blankets.
“Didn’t mean to wake you up,” Adrian says, and the boy turns back over to close his eyes again.
“ ’Night, Dad . . . Go to sleep.”
• • •
Adrian makes his way down the stairs, across the dining room, and into his office. Clicks on his desk lamp, pulls out the shoebox-sized safe lying on its side behind the bottom row of books. He finds the key hanging on a pushpin on the underside of his desk and unlocks the safe.
Here is what remains from his difficult days with pills—the caramel-colored cylinders, the odds and ends.
• A snack baggie of Vicodin—10 mg / 325 mg tabs
• An original bottle of Klonopin he’d abandoned after finding he preferred Xanax—about half full
• A few Thorazine from the time he had hiccups for seventy-two hours—useless
• About twenty 2 mg tabs of Lunesta in a bottle along with about the same count of 2 mg Xanax bars
• A sticky bottle of codeine cough syrup—half full (prescribed for Zander)
• His old wood and metal pillbox with the hummingbird carved on top
This was the comfort. The liquid honey. This was the way alienation was obliterated and the fire started in the damp cave. This was how, for nearly a decade, he had protected his family from his own jaggedness and endured. Or so he told himself.
Stella and the kids never knew. Which is, he likes to think, what separates the men from the boys. Take your medicine if you must, but avoid impacting the ones who depend on you, avoid going off the rails, avoid losing your job and becoming a homeless person under the overpass, huddling under a piece of plywood. Because Adrian has seen it all. Once, just a couple of years ago, a man threatened a doctor with a raised metal stool, demanding a prescription. Every day, desperate patients of every stripe sob and beg, faces contorted, bent over their bellies in anguish. Every day, they roll in on gurneys with their eyes facing backward in their heads, skin and bones, shivering, brain-dead, or DOA. Controlled quantities, that’s how Adrian accomplished what he had—never fully losing hold but enlarging himself with a little optimism and peace. Science. And magic. He would take a series of generous doses over the course of a couple of weeks, titrate down a bit for two or three more to keep dependence from seizing him, then edge his way back up, etc. In this way, he tried to keep the process clean and, mostly, manageable.
The fact is, he came to believe Stella liked him better when he was on Vicodin (and maybe a little Xanax). He was often more talkative (sometimes too talkative), more easygoing, less controlling, less irritable, less socially anxious. Sexually, not so much. He could last forever but couldn’t ejaculate. Or he couldn’t get hard. Or he got hard but couldn’t stay hard.
One summer night, maybe three or four years into all this, when he had only recently stepped into the deep, soft water of Vicodin, he spent an hour in the sweaty darkness with his wife. His penis was a Nerf Dart version of its former self. His ejaculation was ten steps ahead of him. Stella had taken him in her mouth a full fifteen minutes before, sucking and circling him as if cleansing a wound—to no avail. All Adrian wanted was to fill her mouth as he always had, to push out his fluid onto her tongue with a full-throated cry (sometimes that happened). She just curled away from him, a victim of chemistry. She slid her hand between his legs and gathered him in her palm like something dying she’d found on the shoreline. Then she sobbed. He wasn’t attracted to her anymore, she said. What was she doing wrong?
“Nothing, Stella, please,” he whispered. “I’m coming down with something. I’m sorry . . .”
That was the moment he came closest to ending the bullshit (before it had even fully begun). It wasn’t her fault at all, he wanted to say. It had nothing to do with her, only with him. He’d always desired her, always wanted to please her. It’s just he was weak and selfish and steadily going off the rails. Instead, within twenty-four hours, he obtained a script for Viagra, which pretty effectively solved the problem, if he thought to take it ahead of time. He came to live with it, all of it—the benefits and the inconsistencies, the dreams and the cravings, the occasional sickness from going too far and the process of weaning back off, only to begin again.
Then, two years ago, he fell asleep in the middle of jury duty, drooling all over the halls of justice. When the DA nudged him awake with a file folder and a lifted eyebrow, Adrian promised himself nevermore.
Now, he doesn’t touch any of it. Just recalls the grueling afternoon he stood here at his desk and made the choice to keep the pills but bury them like treasure he’d find years later. If he’s honest, he had hoped it would be a lot more years than this. Even to him, it sounds like some juvenile deception; already his heart is higher in his chest, closer to the skin, and the sense of his body as something in precarious balance gives way to the sharp, one-pointed craving. He doesn’t want to start the whole cycle over; of course he doesn’t.
He will not take the pillbox. That would indicate a full recommitment, a lifestyle reversal, and he’s not doing that. He’ll only take a couple of pills with him back to bed and a few to tuck into his wallet, to short-circuit the anxiety and the sleeplessness, then he’s palming the lid off the Xanax and tapping one into his hand. He’s unscrewing the top from the cough syrup to take a deep, cherry-flavored swig.
• • •
Adrian finds himself on his back in the weak morning light, eyes open to the high window across the room, the shimmering red and
yellow leaves floating noiselessly as confetti.
He hears the clank of plates downstairs, Michaela announcing something about muffin tops, chanting, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” and Stella responding in a stage whisper he can’t make out. He’s groggy, heavy-lidded; there are several seconds in which he doesn’t recall the events of the previous day—the pumpkin runners or the call from his mother or her voicemail—but the moment he does, he’s surprised to arrive at a sort of clarity.
If he hadn’t decided to abandon his search for the sparrow in the old house, Stella and the kids would have gone on trick-or-treating without him. If they’d gone on without him, they would never have been waiting for him at the corner of Disaster and Idiocy. If he hadn’t been searching for them there, he would never have been so distracted as to answer the call and hear the long-ago voice in his ear, consequently landing both him and Zander knee-deep in cocks and balls, then descending, himself, into an irrational state of paranoiac dread.
June’s voicemail, her insistence, will wait. He should never have stopped pursuing the bird.
Chapter Three
* * *
Twenty-four hours later, Adrian’s killing time, blowing a few short, hard breaths through his nose like a fighter circling his opponent in the ring.
Perched at the edge of his ergonomically brilliant black mesh chair, he inspects the objects on his desk, making order of them in his head: a leaning tower of (twenty-three) unread copies of Anesthesiology; a box of envelopes with little plastic windows (bought by mistake, never used); November’s (twenty-one) bills; two empty grande-sized Starbucks cups; a set of (six) antique ornithological tomes (a gift from Stella); and dozens of postage stamps in a heap—antique cars, ruby-throated hummingbirds, Navajo jewelry, Christmas trees, flags, the Wildlife Conservation Society wild-turkey stamp, the Lewis and Clark Expedition stamp, the Booker T. Washington log-cabin stamp, and Adrian’s personal favorite, Atoms for Peace, which shows two globes circling like particles within an atom and reads: “To find the way by which the inventiveness of man shall be consecrated to his life.”
