The Grand Tour

by Adam O'Fallon Price

  Something did flash above him, however: red light and a barrage of muffled noise. It was the world—he wished it away. Having depleted his already depleted reserves of energy, he floated down into the verdant murk of the water. He seemed to watch himself there, arms and legs splayed forward in a semicircle, like some giant, mutant prawn. It was quiet now. His white hair waved back and forth in the water, and he suddenly felt an intense, fond sadness for himself. Goodbye me, I’ll miss me. It surprised him that he felt this way.

  ———

  When he woke up there was no sound, and he seemed to still be underwater. There was a woman, some kind of frantic commotion. No need to make a stink about it, he wanted to say. Someone stuck something in his arm. To his right, he thought he saw Eileen, but that couldn’t be. Then the dark rolled in again, like a summer storm rushing in overhead.

  ———

  Everything in the room was white—white bare walls, white ceiling, white sheets on the white bed on which he lay. White light streamed in from a distant skylight, which framed a small patch of white cloud. For a few moments, he couldn’t shake the certainty that he’d been wrong his entire life: there was, in fact, a heaven, and moreover, heaven had taken him in. How embarrassing to discover all of those dumb Christians he’d always mocked had been completely right. And, of course, he’d been wrong about it—why should the afterlife be any different than anything else?

  But slowly small, human details of the room emerged. A picture of children on the bedside table. The faint sound of music issuing from somewhere. A door to the immediate left of the bed, through which he could see a toilet and the red rubber of a plunger. These details didn’t, in themselves, preclude the possibility that this was the afterlife, but taken together they imparted a much more terrestrial feel to the room.

  “Hello,” he shouted, but his voice was reedy and weak, and there was no reply. He lay there for another few minutes, already exhausted by consciousness, but curiosity finally got the better of fatigue. Pulling himself upright against the iron bars of the headboard, he managed to throw his left leg over the side of the bed, but he was tangled in the sheets and couldn’t get the right one over. He managed to get the sheets off and saw, around his abdomen, the unmistakable puff and pucker of a diaper. This knowledge sapped whatever remaining will he might have possessed. He curled back into himself and pulled the sheets up and sank back into the snowy white of the mattress, the prison, the crib.

  ———

  When he woke again, the room was mostly dark. The skylight was an indigo stamp on the high ceiling. He was hungry and terribly thirsty, and his diaper felt wet against his skin. Again he shouted, but this time his voice came out in a rough whisper. Again, he pulled back the covers, and spent a tremendous amount of energy getting his legs over the edge. He leveraged himself up woozily, then stood, which was a mistake. It wasn’t that bad actually: the wood floor smelled of lemon polish and felt cool against the side of his face. He crawled to the door.

  Outside was a small landing with a staircase leading down. “Hello,” he whispered again, uselessly, and to no reply. The staircase was walled on both sides, with a door to the right at the very bottom, so it was impossible to see what waited below. Holding on to the wooden banister with both hands, he swiveled around on his ass and began working his way down, step by step. He would achieve a stair, pause and catch his breath, and attempt to summon the will to conquer the next one. He remembered the time he and Eileen watched two-year-old Cindy climb the three stairs leading up to their apartment in Fresno. Much the same as this, it had been long and arduous, a real nail-biter. Halfway down, his arms began to quiver. Two-thirds of the way down, his arms gave out and could no longer support his weight. Unable to go down or up, he straightened himself out and slid down the remaining stairs, coming to a rest at the base of the stairs in a sprawl.

  When his heart had calmed to a mere hammering, he turned over and crawled through the door into an empty living room. Some kind of percussive, fluty number jazzed its way out of two tall wooden speakers that stood on opposite sides of the room like sentinels. The Oriental rugs he crawled over looked and felt as though they were from the actual Orient, and not just a store with “Oriental” in the name. With the last bit of energy at his disposal, he managed to pull himself most of the way up onto a crushed-leather sofa, on which someone had been thoughtful enough to leave a tartan wool blanket out for him. He wrapped it around himself and promptly passed out again.

  ———

  A large person stood over him, and he was a small person, obscurely ashamed. He’d done something—it was his mother. No, it was his wife. No, that was a long time ago. The vaporous figure of Eileen finished coalescing in front of him, smoke made flesh in a tailored houndstooth blazer and black jeans. “Back from the dead. How are you feeling?”

  “I need to go to the bathroom.”

  “I bet you already have.”

  “You’re enjoying this.”

  “Oh God, no, not at all.”

  It took a great deal of time and energy, but she managed to get him to the bathroom, and he managed to get his diaper down and lower himself onto the toilet, which he pissed into for another long stretch of time. Drained, in all senses, he hobbled with her the ten feet or so back to the sofa. She sat down beside him and covered him back up with the afghan. He said, “What the fuck happened?”

  “You fell into the East River and got pulled out by someone nearby. They said you were dead for a couple of minutes, but the paramedics revived you. It made the evening news; a friend told me what had happened. You were in New York Methodist ICU in a coma for four days, then you woke up, but they kept you asleep with drugs, so you could heal faster, I guess. That went on for a few more days, and they moved you to a regular bed, at which time I pulled some strings and got you released to home care. Some paramedics carried you up to the guest room. They’d wanted to keep you there for another week of observation, but I figured at seven thousand a day you’d prefer to stay here. I’m only charging you five.”

  “Thanks,” he croaked.

  “Were you trying to kill yourself?”

  “No. Yeah, I guess. I don’t know.”

  “Oh, Richard.”

  He lay back and looked up at her, feeling for all the world like a wayward child awaiting parental judgment. She stroked his plastered hair back from his forehead.

  “How did all this happen?”

  “I don’t know.” He was going to elaborate on this, then realized there was no further elaboration possible, although it was certainly necessary. He didn’t know—that would have to work for now.

  She thought about that for a minute, then sighed and pressed up from the sofa. “I can’t get you back upstairs by myself. Maybe Molly can help me. You’ll have to stay on the couch for now.”

  “Thanks,” he said again.

  “Sleep,” she said, and he did.

  ———

  The next day, with the help of the estimable Molly, a rotund person with an orotund voice, whom he immediately feared upsetting, he was reinstalled in the guest room. He slept more. Later, Eileen stood over him holding a Formica tray that supported a bowl containing canned chicken noodle soup and a stack of soda crackers, plus a small plastic pill container. She set it beside him on the bed and regarded him, then nodded at the food. “You haven’t had anything solid in almost two weeks. You should eat, if you can.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “That doesn’t matter. Here, take these and then get a little food in your stomach.” She took the pillbox from the tray and emptied the contents of a compartment marked MONDAY—two large speckled horse pills and three smaller ones—into his palm. He washed them down with a swig of orange juice. She said, “I’ll be back for the tray later. We’re going to a movie. Don’t come back downstairs, okay? Stay put.”

  “Okay.”

  She left. He ate the soup and stared at the whiteness of the wall. He was reminded of staying home from school sick when
he was a kid. His mother had always forced him to stay in bed, reasoning if he was too sick to go to school, he was too sick to walk around. She would even confiscate his books, saying he needed to rest, not read. It was a clever strategy and one that prevented him from feigning illness in all but the most dire moments of paper incompletion or test unreadiness. For a person whose being craved stimulation and distraction at almost all moments, staying in bed with nothing to do was a real kind of torture. He needed entertainment, food, TV, and alcohol. Alcohol—despite everything that had happened, the dull craving for it persisted somewhere between his spine and stomach. It was like the abusive boyfriend he kept crawling back to—He loves me, he really does, he didn’t mean to push me into the East River, you just don’t see all the times he’s nice to me.

  He finished the soup, lay back, and let his various cravings clamor like traders on the stock exchange floor. Gradually they quieted, and he was just lying in bed looking at dark city air through the skylight. Maybe the trick was to just allow yourself to want things. To accept the wanting without attempting to gratify it. Fighting the want did no good, because it was impossible to make yourself not want things. Furthermore, fighting the want somehow promoted it, legitimized it, made the desire for booze or women or whatever else terribly strong and potent.

  He’d spent his whole life looking for consolation and had wound up unconsoled, inconsolable. Drink, food, women, TV, and sometimes writing had succeeded in distracting him, but from what, and why? The what was easy—life. The great, gentle backdrop of minor feeling and small event and day-to-day effort, victory, and failure. Why he needed relief from that, he didn’t know. Because life was boring, because his brain chemistry was all wrong, because his father had been the same way he was. Because life reminded him too much of death. That was a big part of it. For decades, going back to the war—before the war—one of his main goals had been ignoring the fact of his own mortality; if it required anesthetizing himself, so much the better. And after a while, the damage he’d done to achieve this primary goal had to be ignored in its own right, which of course required more consolation, more evasions, more anesthesia. And so on.

  An easier way to put it is that you’re a coward.

  He sprawled out on the bed, staring down at the snow-covered landscape of his own body under the sheet. The hill of his paunch, the parallel ridgelines of his legs, the valley in between. He felt old, weak—and he didn’t feel himself getting any better. Those two minutes in the poisoned water had changed him, aged him, sapped his hideous vitality. And maybe that was a good thing. In an increasingly thick Demerol drowse, he imagined a child tramping joyously across the snowy field in front of him. An undisturbed vista of white, every footprint a new footprint. You can make no more footprints, for now you are the field.

  ———

  Molly stomped from the office to the kitchen and answered the cordless, which was ringing for the fifteenth time this morning. Richard muted the TV as she charged into the living room, wielding the phone like a blackjack. He cringed in half-anticipation of a bludgeoning. She had tolerated his presence well enough to this point—she had been, as they say, a good sport—but after two weeks in the apartment, the strain of his presence was beginning to show in the small muscles of her jawline, bunched up with the skin pulled taut and shiny over them.

  “Make it stop,” she said, covering the receiver. “Talk to them, okay?” It had become clear in recent days that the press had somehow figured out where Richard was and gotten the landline number, but it was the number Molly used for her dog-care business, so turning the ringer off wasn’t an option. They had agreed it would be best for him to ignore the interview requests, but they hadn’t anticipated the callers’ persistence or the journalistic interest in the story. He had made page 8 of the Times and page 1 of USA Today and the New York Post. Nobody really knew who he was, since nobody read anymore, but the spectacle of a quasi-known writer discrediting himself before jumping into the East River had a lurid interest disproportionate to his celebrity or lack thereof. Molly extended the phone to him. “And answer it yourself next time.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Are you crippled?”

  “Yeah, kind of.” The physical therapist who made a house call two days ago had urged him to move around as much as possible, saying that the episode had damaged his already damaged heart and possibly also some neuromotor functions of his brain. Heart and brain damaged, he said—yes, that sounded about right; that sounded like him. Walking to the bathroom, to say nothing of actually using it, left him panting for a full minute.

  “This is Richard.”

  “It’s Stan.”

  “Oh.”

  “Who did you think it was?”

  “I don’t know. Someone from the National Enquirer or something. I was about to yell ‘Fuck off.’ ”

  “That’s my line.”

  “I know, I know. Listen, I’m sorry about all this. I was going to call.”

  “Were you?”

  “I almost died, maybe you heard.”

  “You didn’t quite kill yourself, but you finished off your career. I’m calling to say good luck. Maybe someone else will be stupid enough to touch you, take advantage of the little bit of publicity. But that’s not me.”

  “I’m done anyway. There’s nothing left.”

  “You made me look like a fool, Richard.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” That was all he did these days, apologize. “Hello?”

  The line was dead, and that was that.

  ———

  The phone rang, and he answered it. Over the last few days, he had been talking to anyone who called—reporters, wire agencies, random lunatics—having decided it was better to give them a boring story that would quickly be superseded by something more interesting (literally anything else) than to continue holing up and stoking curiosity. Yes, he had misrepresented his war experience. No, he hadn’t really meant to. Yes, he felt bad about it. Yes, he wanted to apologize to the infantrymen from his division. No, he hadn’t meant to jump; it had been an accident. That was at least partially true. He still wasn’t sure if he’d jumped or fallen, or some combination of the two. In a passing moment, you could make a decision without deciding anything, your choice made for you by the intuitive twitch of a rogue muscle or synapse. Especially after drinking for ten hours. Regardless, even if it qualified as a decision, it was one he’d regretted the instant he’d hit the water. His commitment to suicide, it turned out, had been as steadfast as his commitment to anything else in his life.

  “Hello?” he said.

  The voice on the other end, a bored female one, said, “Collect call from Rikers Island, do you accept?”

  “Who what.”

  “Do you accept?”

  “Uh. Sure.”

  There was a click, and the quality of the background static on the other end changed, from a snowy distance, to a closer thrum. A voice said, “Hello?”

  “Vance?”

  “Yeah.” There was a muffled shout from the other end, and then the kid returned. “I’m in jail.”

  “You’re in Rikers Island.”

  “Yeah. I tracked down your agent, and he gave me this number.”

  “What in the fuck, Vance?”

  Vance told him what in the fuck. Like a car driven to empty, he finally lurched his way to a stop and finished by saying, “I didn’t want to call you. But my family’s not helping me. My mom’s been in the hospital, and she’s pretty out of it, I guess. My uncle said he’d look into it, but he hasn’t done anything. I guess they don’t have the money, and I figured I would try to just make it until my court date, but…” From somewhere on the distant end, a man yelled clearly, his voice filled with all the force and freedom of insanity.

  “Why didn’t you get ahold of me sooner?”

  “I was mad. I’m still mad.”

  “You can keep being mad once your bail is posted, too, you dumb shit.” Vance didn’t say anything to this. Richard
said, “Okay. Hold tight, I’m coming to get you. Don’t go anywhere.”

  ———

  Richard and Eileen sat in the visiting room of Rikers Island. They had been sitting there for going on five hours, and due to some outraged lumbar nerve gone rogue, Richard’s entire lower body was numb. He wished the same was true of his mental awareness, but his daily course of pain pills and sedatives had done little to alleviate the experience of being there. Visiting was located next to intake. It shared common air with the other room’s muffled shouting, the not-so-muffled smells, a fine floating residue of grief, the ambience of human anguish on an almost-molecular level.

  The bail bondsman had called around three, saying the bail had been processed and delivered, and the prisoner might be released within the hour. They had hurried into Eileen’s car, not wanting to make Vance wait a second longer than necessary; he looked back on the two of them then with an attitude of fond indulgence. How foolish they were this afternoon. They might have learned their lesson from the previous twenty-four hours they’d spent waiting in the various antechambers of New York’s labyrinthine justice system: precinct, bondsman, central booking, bondsman again, and finally the jail. The whole thing seemed designed to be as punitive as possible to all parties involved—not just the felon but the families and friends of the felon and even the guards and cops and lawyers and judges.

  Eileen read a paper she’d brought with her, something called “Monadic Nomads: Wittgenstein and the Instantiation of Third-Party Inelectives.” She was bent to it, legs crossed, somehow able to tune out their surroundings, and, in doing so, becoming a small island of sanity in a place where none existed. At the moment, she was the only thing preventing him from running outside and doing a gainer back into the cold scum of the East River. She had been a saint through the whole process, helping him at every turn, taking the day off work and driving him around and, most important, imparting a feeling of calm by the simple virtue of her adult presence.