by Chris Lynch
I only now become aware of standing up and edging toward the door.
“No, no, no,” I say, rushing right back to my spot on his bed. “I do have to get down to the Yurt to meet a tech guy who’s gonna teach me stuff, but I have time.”
“This time I will edit myself down to the essentials. The point where the story gets greater is when I tell you that I stole the book from Gran. Huh? Huh? I told you, right?” he says while pointing and winking in a showy gotcha kind of way.
“Yyyuuup,” I say.
“There’s more to it, of course there is. Papa died, we cried, like it was our one and favorite pastime. And then, after ages, after months, Gran finally stopped weeping. She had flushed it all out. From right then on, every day she was worse than before. Every day she was less than before. She was going, and she was going willingly.
“I took care of her, was the only thing to do. It was no more than she did for me when I needed it. I couldn’t even remember what age they took me in, was how long ago it was. And she took care of me, washed my face and my shit-ass underwear and stretched meals that were skimpy for two old skinnies like them and somehow found more for me and loved me like their own, or even better, I think, than if I was their own. That’s how loved I felt.
“And I felt it even stronger, after a short staggery spell, felt stronger for myself and crazy insane gratitude for them, when in my duties as caretaker of life at the poky little house, pieces of details started accumulating into a suspicion, then into a possibility that these two lovely people were never who I thought they were.
“Sorry, I left out a piece. I thought all along that these old folks were just my very old parents. Yeah. Like life became one giant game of Clue or something. My actual mother, their daughter, fucked off right after I was born. Presumably going after the father-like substance who fucked off just prior to the blessed event.
“Gran told me herself, which makes me happy even today, even after I already knew. She was sinking fast and didn’t recognize me more of the time than she did. But she broke the surface, like a beautiful old silvery fish jumping its way up the river. She saw me, she told me, and she thanked me, before disappearing just that quick again into the river.
“By the next day it was really as far as we could go together. The ambulance came and the paramedics, who were so fantastically great, told me where she would be for the next week or two of tests and stabilizing whatnot and where she was almost certainly going for her long-term care whether or not the term was long or not.
“They would take the house. I knew because I had studied. And they would take the contents, which still wouldn’t come near to paying the bill, and they would kick me out. So I took the content I wanted, took the long-buried records of my long-dead sleazebag biological warfare parents to a hostel, and started the process of getting the orphan to the college in the hills.”
I can’t speak. I can’t tip over sideways on the bed either, because it’s his and I would have no right even if it was mine. That was one hell of an interview I conducted there. If I were one of my listeners, I’d be thinking this job is the easiest gig in show business, just sitting there in a chair across from one true soul who is willing to cut himself wide open and howl as long as anybody cares to listen.
The supposed interviewer himself, on the other hand, is thinking he is not nearly tough enough for this.
“That the kind of stuff you have in mind, for your radio project?” Fabian asks helpfully.
“I can’t imagine anybody has that kind of stuff in mind before you tell it to them.”
“Alas, I’ll have to remain insufficiently famous for a while longer, since that was off the record.”
Now I do move toward the door and my blessed tech appointment. “You can come into the station once I’m up and running. We’ll do it live. Or we could record it any place and play it back later. Could even record it here, maybe.”
“Yeah,” he says, “maybe.”
I almost escape before he catches me, calls me to poke my head back in.
“Did you suppose you could run a bunch of interviews, get people to pour out the bloody stuff for your show while you remained hidden behind them, safe and secret, unharmed and unexposed? It won’t be possible, you know. I mean, it’s a great idea, but you need to know that.”
“Thanks,” I say, and see my permission to flee in the way he turns his body and hovers over the book on the desk. But I don’t flee. “Fabian,” I say, and he looks up. “Thanks. And thanks. And, y’know, thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Now off you go to get sufficiently famous.”
It makes me smile for several seconds after I get out the door. But then it doesn’t. It almost sounds like a curse to me now. And by the time I get to the Yurt and the screaming yellow letters circling and seeing us from every direction, I still cannot get out from under the crush of that awful feeling.
reachable
There is a meditation class, four guys, eighteen or so girls, scattered about on mats while a visiting lecturer stands on the solid wooden oval table built right into the center point in the Yurt’s floor. George has been trying to make some kind of radio out of this man’s soothing and barely audible instructions on how to achieve inner peace, spiritual enlightenment, and excellent posture.
The idea, the broadcast part, is so bad that George gave up on playing it straight and is now doing very quiet sports reporting in a voice that mimics golf commentators but content that hews much closer to a frat-boy film. I nearly fell asleep with the sedation of the first half of the program, but now I’m feeling uncomfortable, disgusted with myself even though I’ve not done anything to trigger anything as vile as what I’m feeling. Every time George makes reference to his new obsession, yoga pants, the tar pit that I swear is drawing me down pulls another six inches toward searing suffocating oblivion. My heart is heaving to the point of actually, certainly bursting even before the shock of the door crashing open and causing screams to swing rings around the room.
“You have to carry this thing with you, goddamn it!” Fabian says as he rushes at me, brandishing my phone. His voice is high volume, high pitch, and when he gets close enough, I can see him fighting tears and losing. He pounds me hard on the collarbone with the phone, then again on the jaw and finally in the middle of my chest. I take it then, and he starts yanking my arm, hauling me straight across the room full of petrified innocent students, who won’t be likely to find peace again for some time.
“Call your sister!” he shouts, letting me go but leading the way back to our place.
“My sister? Call my sister?”
“Fran. Fran called. Your sister Fran called, and she sounds like a nice person and I talked to her for only a couple of minutes, but you have to call her right now, Keir.”
I follow obediently as Fabian continues to berate me for not carrying the stupid phone, but aside from thinking Fran’s calling was odd, and aside from the meditation class sick-feeling like I was ramping up on a post-traumatic seizure from some war I was never in, my main thought right now is if Fabian is all right, because this is a crazy he’s never even hinted at—
“Is it Ray?” I say when I come out of the density of my personal fog. “Fabian!” I yell, though he’s just a few feet ahead of me and we’re both sprinting toward the dorms. “What is it? What’s wrong with Ray?”
• • •
“Does it make me insensitive if I say that I might find this easier to get through if you weren’t crying so much?” I’m speaking to Fabian, who is sitting on my bed, hugging his knees and indulging in my sky view while he prematurely mourns my father. I am occupying myself with stuffing dirty and wrinkled and inappropriate items into my travel bag. Fran has arranged a flight for me. I have to hurry if I’m going to make the only plane that’ll give me a chance to say good-bye.
“No,” he says. “Of course that doesn’t make you insensitive. It’s the complete lack of any emotional response at all that makes you insensitive.”
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nbsp; “I’m sorry about that, Fabian. Still, I have to get moving.” I zip the bag, pick it up by the fraying cloth handles, and already I cannot picture one single item that wound up in there.
I turn toward the door, leaving him staring up out the window at the big-sky view that can surely mend anybody’s broken self if he looks at it for long enough.
“I should be going too,” he blurts out, and pulls me back.
I go to where he is at the window. “I wish that was possible,” I say. “If my sister didn’t come up with the money as quick as that, I wouldn’t be able to make it on time myself.”
He nods fanatically. He’s actually gotten himself up into the windowsill, taken that same knee-hugging pose, and with the added turbo-nod he looks like a big version of one of those wind-up monkeys that bash the cymbals together really fast.
“Ray was my friend, Keir. I know how stupid it sounds—”
“Not to me it doesn’t. I know exactly the how and the why of how you feel, and you’re completely right to feel it.”
“Like, one of the best friends I ever had. Maybe the nicest guy I ever talked to. The realest, that’s for sure. Jesus, I never even laid eyes on the man and I’m falling to pieces over not saying good-bye to him.”
“I will absolutely tell him good-bye from you,” I say, checking my watch. “That is, if I get the chance to say it for anybody.”
“Right, go, get out of here.”
“If it’s any consolation, not that you won’t be missed, but there will be a big crowd of people there to send Ray Sarafian off. Every person who ever met my dad became a close friend forever. It will be nice to see that, at least.”
“It should be a consolation, might eventually be a consolation, but right now it’s nothing. Go, Keir. Just go.”
I go.
• • •
At the airport I have to wait twenty minutes for the gate to open. I don’t feel like I can sit down, so I just walk. I walk the complete circuit of the sleepy quiet airport three times and find that leaves another ten minutes still to go. I don’t feel like eating anything, drinking anything, reading, or listening to any goddamn thing at all. There is a card shop.
What is a person supposed to do? What does he do with himself? What are all these horrible sticky slow minutes for, anyway? What are they doing? What am I doing? What should I be doing?
What should I have done?
What shouldn’t I have done?
Card shops exist for the purpose of telling us how we’re supposed to behave, that much I know. It’s with a sickly kind of hope that I walk into the card shop fifty yards from my departure gate. I stride through the door expecting instantaneous divine clarity to come to me. I even sense, powerfully, that the envelope will be kelly green.
“Hello, sir,” says the strawberry-blond girl, who looks young and cheerful enough that she must not have been stuck in here for too many hours, months, or grievings yet. I’m glad I get to see her now, with her freckles still stars, and not after.
“Hello,” I say, standing cluelessly just inside the door.
“Can I help you find something?” she says, and it sounds like a person who really, really does want to know if she can help another person.
“Thank you,” I say, “but I’m just browsing.”
“Oh,” she says, mentally regrouping after a customer said something the training day definitely did not prepare her for. “Don’t hear that very often in here. With, y’know, most of the kind of things we sell being aligned to specific dates, birthdays, anniversaries . . .”
She is being sweet and extraordinary, and I make sure to repay her consideration by being at the far corner of the shop and looking elsewhere when she gets to the grimmer end of the inventory in her mind.
Sorry for Your Loss has always bothered me. There is simply a frigid, soulless, stiff detachment in those words, in that arrangement that seems to practically make a joke out of how not sorry they are to not be you, you poor sad bastard.
Final boarding call. Final boarding call. How did I miss any incremental boarding calls? Is this a joke?
Right in front of me, as it has been for too many minutes, is the “Sympathy” row of cards, right next to the “Sorry” row. I don’t even read, but instead pluck every green card I can find out of each category, race to the counter, and run off before the nice girl still intact with her niceness calls after me about my change.
“Thank you,” I call as I sprint toward the gate that is now seven hundred and fifty yards away, so I turn on whatever jets I have left and I get there just in time. Just in time to see the woman and the man in their forest-green regional airline uniform jackets slam the door closed to any more passengers.
“How could this be? How could this ever, possibly be happening?”
“I am very sorry, sir,” the lady with the lemon shade of blond hair says with her head tilted to the two o’clock sympathy position.
“But it’s right there,” I say. “People are still walking along that tunnel thing, I can hear them. I’m not arguing, there is no question that this was my fault, my responsibility. But it can’t be a problem for one single person, anywhere in the world, for you to let me onto that plane right now.”
“Sir, there is another—”
“No,” I snap, making my task all the harder, “there is no other one. That one”—I point—“is the only one there’s ever gonna be.”
“We really are sorry, sir,” the slim and serious gent says.
“Okay then,” I say. “In that case, everything’s good. As long as you’re sorry. I must have missed that part before. What kind of sorry was that, anyway? Sorry for your loss, I imagine? It’s got to be sorry-for-your-loss sorry. Which is cool, all set now. You have a good day.”
It is not their fault, and I know that as I berate them over the whole mess. The more I bark at them, the more I know that I have nobody to blame for what I did, and the more I know that, the louder I bark at them. I stand, holding my duffel bag in one hand and the bunch of sorry sad sympathetic cards in the other. I stand in front of these two perfectly innocent polyester rule books who are possibly just holograms who don’t even comprehend why people keep getting onto these planes, plane after plane until that moment when they have to stop letting them on. So they can’t be expected to comprehend why this one solitary, careless, cowardly shit of a man should be so upset with having not gotten onto the plane, even though he had every chance to get on it earlier and he clearly simply fucking just didn’t. It is logic-defying, and utterly, utterly inexcusable.
“Well, I won’t have any use for these now, so happy anniversary, you two,” I say, and heave the stack of cards straight up into the air. They flutter and flap their way to the floor as I walk to the nearest row of padded waiting area seats and lay myself down. This is where I should have been from the minute I entered the terminal building.
I am staring at the floor, allowing my arm to dangle, and my fingers make contact with the pleasant cool of the tile floor. It is an especially quiet time at this quiet airport, but I hear murmurings and the distant business of maintenance and a midsize passenger plane starting up its engines.
I am startled crazy by a hand squeezing my arm, and I almost take a swing. When I hesitate, the woman gets suddenly muscular. She pulls me up out of my lie-down, hands me my bag and the collection of misery cards she picked up off the floor. The man waits until I am right there before popping the door open and waving me quickly inside like some life-or-death commando operation is happening right this minute.
Too stunned, too slow, I turn around to thank them just as the door bangs, shut and locked.
• • •
Finally I am flying home. During the time it takes to get me back over my endless sneaky switchbacking escape route away from home, I write. It takes all of seven sad, sorry, sorry, sad cards before I manage to say it. Finally.
The front of the card is mostly plain, pale flowers in a bunch, looking like they are surging toward the reader
. The shiny green lettering says only, Words cannot express . . . Under that I wrote as neatly as I could, But they have to try.
In the event that she might actually open the card to read beyond that, I tried.
I know you don’t want to hear from me. But the option to receive certain words should be available to you in any case. You deserved that long before this.
Life has been far more difficult to manage than I ever dreamed it could be. So I tried to snuff it out altogether and invent a new one. It came for me, though. And by the time it did, I had destroyed whatever good was still lingering right up till the day I ran.
I’m learning now, what I never did before it was too late. I know that there are truths and there are lies and there are different ways of interpreting them. Especially if your mind can’t live with one horrible interpretation that changes every last molecule of your life, including your whole future and even your whole past.
It’s a blessing if you’ve read this far, and I won’t test your patience further. But I have to tell you that I see now. The way I could not see before.
Two people telling opposite stories is pure wickedness to try to get right. I felt all along that in our hearts it was possible we could both not be lying. But in our hearts or in the dark or in the full bright light, what we can’t both be is, we can’t both be right.
I’ve already seen more of myself than I want to see, but I plan to keep on looking. I still can’t see me ever doing anything to hurt you.
But I have seen enough to feel like I can believe you and whatever you say, more than I can believe myself.
I’m sorry for what I did to you. I will be forever sorry, forever knowing it.
Whatever you want, whatever you say, I will do that. I will come back, now, a year from now, a hundred years from now. I will surrender, confess, plead guilty, keep it out of public sight as much as possible. Then you can be done with it, and I can get what I’m due.
Good-bye. You are a fine person and I hope life manages to tell you that, in some way, every day, forever.
