One Last Thing Before I Go

by Jonathan Tropper

  “Do you want to die?” Ruben asks, not challenging, just wanting to know.

  “No. Not really.”

  “So what then?”

  He doesn’t want to answer, but he hears the words come anyway. “I’m just not sure I want to live.”

  Ruben closes his eyes as he absorbs this, then pats his son’s leg as he stands. “Fair enough,” he says. “I’ll leave you to it, then.” He moves slowly toward the door, then turns back around. “If my vote counts, I just want to be on record as saying you should have the surgery.”

  Silver watches him leave, feeling a fresh wave of shame and guilt wash over him. He is a good man and a good father, and I am neither, Silver thinks, wondering, not for the first time, what sort of quiet death his father dies every time he looks at him.

  * * *

  For the record, he only ever attempted suicide once. And it wasn’t really an attempt, as far as these things go, more of a flirtation really, a brief dalliance with the concept. This was not long after Denise had kicked him out, and a year or so after Pat had quit the Bent Daisies and gone on to fame and fortune without them. He had no family, no home, no money, and in desperation had just crossed a line he swore he would never cross, and played a bar mitzvah with the Scott Key Orchestra. During the band’s scheduled breaks, he drank heavily from the open bar, and then somewhere between the Electric Slide and the reprehensible butchering of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” it became clear to him that he had fucked up his life beyond repair.

  He considered jumping from a bridge or slitting his wrists, but neither method seemed foolproof, and both carried the risk of painful failure, and he’d had just about enough of that, thank you very much. And even if he owned a gun, he wouldn’t have trusted himself with it.

  So, that night, after the gig, he sat on the floor of his still unfurnished apartment, put the Bent Daisies on his iPod, and began washing down over-the-counter sleeping pills with a half-finished bottle of Hennessy. At some point, he heard himself singing along loudly to “Rest in Pieces,” and that’s the last thing he remembered until he woke up thirty hours later, his face glued to the wood floor with congealed puke that had hardened like cement. When he finally managed to sit up, he discovered two things: he had shit his pants while he slept, and he had lost the urge to kill himself. It took him a half hour to crawl to the bathroom and get into a shower. Suicide is difficult, but it’s nothing compared to the morning after.

  * * *

  You lie in a hospital bed for long enough, you start to feel unqualified to walk. Not being qualified for much else, he’s not about to let that one go. The linoleum floor is jarringly cold against the soles of his feet, but the air-conditioning feels like a cool breeze on his thighs and ass, exposed where the ends of his flimsy hospital gown don’t quite meet. He stands still for a moment, taking stock. Everything feels creaky, but no more than it does when he climbs out of his own bed every morning.

  His blood catches him off guard by spurting out of his wrist in a graceful arc when he pulls out the IV needle, painting a small red slash across his hospital gown before he can clamp his other hand onto the hole. Who knew there was so much life in him? He pulls a piece of gauze from a drawer and presses it against his wrist. After a moment, it sticks there.

  He pokes his head out of the room and peers down the corridor. They are all gathered in a waiting area at the end of the hall, sitting and standing around two long couches and an easy chair. His perfect brother Chuck’s perfect wife, Ruby, has arrived, and is now waiting on Elaine as if there’s an inheritance at stake. It’s an ungenerous thought. Ruby has never been anything but kind to him, and it’s not her fault that kindness is just a different category of poison to him.

  “The gang’s all here, huh?”

  “Hey, Jack.”

  He has come up quietly behind Silver, waiting to be noticed, a favorite maneuver of his. “What a clusterfuck.”

  They look down the hall at Silver’s ex-wife and her fiancé, his pregnant daughter, his perfect brother and sister-in-law, and his aging parents. They are all here because of him, but they all seem to be getting along just fine without him. History has shown that people generally do.

  “Oliver’s parking the car,” Jack says.

  “Tell him to keep it running.”

  Jack raises his eyebrows and looks Silver over in his hospital gown.

  “Are we cutting out?”

  “We are.”

  “Is that wise?”

  “No.”

  Jack shakes his head, then smiles and pulls out his cell phone. “Cool.”

  CHAPTER 16

  In the car, on the way home, Denise cries softly in the front seat. Casey wishes like hell she would stop. She loves her, but Denise’s years of being a single mother have forged in her a finely honed martyr complex, and she tends to view everyone else’s problems as being there simply to increase her own immeasurable burden.

  “Jesus, Mom, will you give it a rest?”

  “I’m sorry that my teenage daughter’s pregnancy is upsetting to me.”

  “Have you considered the possibility that it’s upsetting to me, too?”

  “Of course. I just . . . How could you do this? You know better.”

  “It was an accident, obviously.”

  “You accidentally had unprotected sex?”

  “Would it make you feel better if I said I was raped?”

  “Don’t even talk like that.”

  “I’m just trying to figure out at what point you might start feeling sorry for me and not yourself.”

  “I think we all need to take a beat here,” Rich says.

  “Trust me, I feel very sorry for you,” Denise says in a tone that never fails to make Casey contemplate homicide by fire.

  “Denise,” Rich says quietly.

  “Dad handled this much better than you,” Casey says, watching as the remark lands like a grenade.

  Denise turns around in the front seat to face Casey, her red-rimmed eyes wide with anger. “I’m sure he did. Fucking up is Silver’s superpower. He must have been thrilled to see you’re a chip off the old block.”

  “Well, he didn’t make it about him, unlike some other people.”

  “So go live with him. I’m sure the two of you—I’m sorry, the three of you—will be very happy.”

  Casey presses her forehead against the window and draws a heart with an arrow through it in the fog left by her breath. The people on the sidewalk look impossibly, obnoxiously happy, like they’re about to break into a spontaneous musical number.

  “We’re all upset . . .” Rich tries again.

  “Rich!” Denise shouts at him. “For Christ’s sake, just shut up and drive!”

  CHAPTER 17

  He is dying. Maybe. It’s a gray area. He spends a few minutes trying to sort through the tangled morass of his crossed thoughts, trying to ascertain how he feels. He doesn’t seem to be scared, or even terribly upset. He has regrets, certainly, but he had those when he wasn’t dying, too. More than anything, the prevailing emotion seems to be one of relief.

  He sits at his desk, surveying his shitty apartment, which consists of two bedrooms, an L-shaped living/dining area, and an exposed kitchen. The dirt-brown area rug is threadbare and stained, the exposed wood in desperate need of scraping and refinishing. The couch facing the television is permanently bowed from where he has spent the majority of the last seven years feeling sorry for himself and self-medicating with beer and television. The only decorations on the walls are a large painting of an oceanic vista in the living room that was left there by the previous tenant for obvious reasons, and a framed photo of him and Casey, taken when she was six years old. She is sitting on his lap, laughing—he’d been tickling her just before Denise shot the picture—and she’s small and perfect in her shorts and tank top, and he is slim an
d still daring to be hopeful and hasn’t let her down yet, and it hurts him to look at it so he tends not to. The second bedroom was supposed to be hers. He had painted it pink and bought a Tinker Bell bedspread, but Casey never got into the habit of staying over, and the room eventually became a depository for discarded drum equipment: old stands, cymbals, skins, drum frames, and pedals for which he no longer has any use. He finds it hard to part with these possessions, certain that he will miss them when he’s gone. And yes, he’s painfully aware of the irony.

  His living room windows face Route 9, where at any time of day he can watch the suburban mothers pulling in and out in their minivans, picking up their dry cleaning, shopping at the Korean fruit stores, picking up Chinese or Japanese or Pad Thai. Would the suburbs even be possible without the Asians? And who’s going to do it in twenty years, when all of their kids are doctors and hedge-fund managers? The mothers are gone by nightfall, home to serve dinner and do homework and pick up their husbands from the train, and there’s always a lull in the action right around sunset, a moment of silence to mark the death of another day. Then Route 9 gets busy again, this time with bands of roving teenagers flipping their skateboards in parking lots and trying to score some beer from the supermarkets and convenience stores, and college kids hitting the garish chain restaurants and bars that come alive at night. He can spend hours just looking out the window, numbing his brain by watching these snatches of quotidian human drama being played out on sidewalks and in parking lots, people relentlessly going about the business of living even as his own life has ground to a complete halt.

  He rubs the puncture on his wrist where he pulled out the IV needle and realizes that he is still wearing the plastic hospital bracelet. He tears it off and turns to drop it on the worn oak desk he bought at a yard sale a few years ago from an older couple who were selling their house to move closer to their grown kids and grandchildren. The wife, a petite wisp of a woman, had showed him how each corner of the desk bore a set of initials from each of her four children, who had carved them in themselves years ago. In her mind, this added value. Silver thought it was cause for a discount. They’d settled on seventy-five dollars, and a ride home for the desk and Silver in her husband’s pickup truck.

  He opens up the top drawer and pulls out a folded piece of paper. It is a printed e-mail, addressed to him.

  FROM: Siobhan S.

  TO: Silver

  RE: Miss you

  Just landed back in Galway, and I’m already missing you terribly. I miss your smile, your calm low voice, your skin against mine. The last few weeks were like a dream I wished would never end. I didn’t think it was possible to fall in love like this anymore, but I have, and it fills me with joy, and, of course, a deep sorrow that I can’t simply pack up and move to the United States to be with you. Between Mum and Isabelle, my place is here right now, just as yours is there. So there’s nothing to be done but live for these annual trips, and pray that the time comes soon when our respective situations can allow for something more. Thank you for the best month of my life.

  All my love,

  Siobhan

  He knows the letter by heart. He should; he wrote it. When you live alone, you take certain precautions. He could get hit by a bus, or drown in the pool, or have a sudden heart attack, or, let’s say, an aneurysm. It will then fall to his parents to sift through his pitiful belongings, and should that happen, he feels a certain responsibility to make them feel that he wasn’t quite as alone as he seemed.

  * * *

  He pulls out a notepad and a pen, then another pen that actually works. He thinks for a moment and then composes a small to-do list for himself.

  1. Be a better father.

  2. Be a better man.

  3. Fall in love.

  4. Die.

  It seems simple enough, and maybe even noble in its simplicity. But it is not without its obstacles. He can devote himself to Casey, and he’s pretty sure that dying will take care of itself. It is number two and three that give him pause. They sound good in theory, but with no practical experience, he has no idea where to even begin.

  CHAPTER 18

  When you know you’re dying, everything comes into focus in a way it never has before. It’s like the grimy world has been polished to a sparkling shine, and everything stands out, latching onto your stream of consciousness and sending it in every direction at once, and your brain becomes a puddle of free associations.

  He lies in bed, studying his fingernails. He’s always assumed they were smooth, but now sees that they’re scored with a slew of vertical lines, each forming its own tiny shelf along the face of the nail, like the facet of a diamond. He’s been biting them for years, never once noticing how much dimension they have.

  The lightbulbs in the standard-issue fixture in the center of his bedroom ceiling actually emit a soft, audible hum that sounds like the first note of the kids singing “We don’t need no education” in Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall.” When he was a boy his parents were out and the babysitter, some high school girl from around the corner, was playing that record downstairs on his father’s stereo. Lying awake long after he should have been asleep, he imagined that she’d invited over a crowd of friends, that there was a gang of teenagers sitting downstairs in the living room, singing along to the record. He was too young to realize that it was a recording, that the singing kids had English accents . . . The babysitter—he can’t remember her name—she had strawberry-blond hair, a smattering of freckles across her nose, and her calves never failed to generate what may have been his very first impure thoughts. . . . He can recall exactly what it felt like to lie in that bed, in his childhood home, the blue-and-red-striped comforter pulled up to his chin, the smell of his freshly vacuumed carpet filling the air with a warmly pleasant mustiness, the Morse code knocks of the radiator, the reassuring creaks of the downstairs hallway as his parents moved around, the soft, comforting hum of their voices, the whippoorwills that woke him in the morning with their plaintive cries of “Theodore,” over and over again, the white plastic globe-shaped light fixture that hung in the center of his bedroom, which he was always accidentally hitting with his spinning nunchucks during an extended Bruce Lee phase. . . . Victor Corolla, his next-door neighbor, had taught him how to use the nunchucks. He was three years older, with a speech impediment, a porn collection, and knotty, muscular arms that Silver would have given anything to possess. Vic spun a mean nunchuck, shoplifted baseball cards from the five and dime, and had the first VCR in the neighborhood. He only had two movies, Star Wars and Grease, and to this day, Silver still knows them both by heart. . . . And, speaking of hearts, he can feel his beating softly against the clasped hands on his chest. He taps out a series of jazz fills on the off beats, and imagines his frayed aorta, tearing microscopically with each beat, its swelled walls slowly expanding to their breaking point like a water balloon.

  He rolls out of bed with a new energy—not happy or sad, but attuned to the universe in a way he’s never been before.

  In the shower, he celebrates the spray of water against his scalp, the winding paths it takes down his chest. He gets lost in the scented lather of his shampoo, in the smoothness of his shoulders, in the logo carved into the Irish Spring soap bar. He watches fondly as his morning erection grudgingly deflates, then closes his eyes and concentrates, the steaming spray penetrating his pores until, after an indeterminate amount of time, the water goes cold.

  * * *

  “There’s something wrong with you,” Oliver tells him. “Just have the damn operation.”

  “Take it easy on him,” Jack says. “He just got out of the hospital.”

  “He had no business leaving that hospital.”

  “You drove him home, dipshit.”

  “I’d have never done that if you’d told me his condition.”

  “That was on a need-to-know basis.”

  �
�Asshole.”

  “Shithead.”

  And around they go. It’s a cloudless morning, and they’re sitting in their usual spot at the pool, just like always, just as if everything hasn’t been turned completely upside down. The inertia of this place has always been disconcerting. Time lurches to a halt, even as they continue to grow older at an alarming rate.

  A few chairs over, Ben Eisner, a laid-off investment banker, is rubbing suntan oil across his chest. He was briefly legendary for assaulting his ex-wife’s boyfriend with a beer stein when they happened to end up in the same bar one night. But then her lawyers ran with it, and now he’s gone into debt trying to regain some measure of custody of his three children, and he’s not so legendary anymore. He spends his days either in court or looking for work in an industry that no longer has any, and it’s hard to say what gets him out of bed in the morning.

  “So,” Jack says. “What’s your plan?”

  “I’m going to go see Casey,” he says.

  “She mad at you?”

  Silver doesn’t actually know. He hasn’t heard from Casey, or Denise, since he snuck out of the hospital, but that’s not indicative of anything since they never call him anyway.

  “She’s got bigger problems,” he says.

  “Like what?”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  That gets Oliver’s attention. “Since when?” he says, sitting up in his chair, his belly fat folding in on itself, becoming a series of smaller, infinity-shaped bellies. We are meat, Silver thinks to himself, that no one wants to eat.

  “I don’t know. She told me a few days ago.”

  To their left are Eddie Banks and Jon Kessler, both still licking the wounds of fresh divorces. Eddie receives alimony from his wife, who is a stockbroker, and Jon still works for his father-in-law, which is its own unique bite of this shit sandwich the men of the Versailles share. Both men spend an inordinate amount of time on their smart phones, checking their various online dating sites and getting excited about women who have made contact based on the enhanced versions of themselves they’ve created online.