“I would,” Chuck said.
“You’re just pissed because he broke your nose.”
“No shit.” He looked at Jack over his plastic ice bag, put his palm against Jack’s head and gave it a disgusted shove. Jack fell forward until his head came to rest on the corner of Lindsey’s seat.
“If it really came to that, I think he’d understand we’re doing this for him,” Alison said.
“Keep telling yourself that,” Chuck said, his voice muffled by the ice pack.
“Music anyone?” Lindsey interjected, hitting the car stereo before anyone could object. 10,000 Maniacs came on, singing “These Are Days” and all conversation came to a stop as we sat back to contemplate the enormity of what we had just done, or rather, whether what we had just done had any enormity to be contemplated. Depending on how you looked at it, we were either five friends heading up to the mountains for a vacation, or four criminals who had just kidnapped a major film star across state lines. Either way, the next few days would certainly be memorable. As I watched Lindsey’s hair fly around her face in my open window’s backdraft, I found myself overcome by a sensation of sweet anticipation that I hadn’t felt in years. Natalie Merchant’s syrupy, full voice filled the car as we drove into the pink-orange shadowlands of the Palisades Parkway at sunset. I decided that, come what may, I could certainly go for a few memorable days.
The Schollings’s vacation home was a lakefront property on the outskirts of a small town called Carmelina, New York. The back of the house faced Crescent Lake, right in the bend of the crescent, which meant that just about every window in the place had a view of the lake. The house itself was a typical example of modern country architecture, a mixture of colonial and ski condo. Its exterior was stained wood, and there were slanted roofs, skylights, and windows everywhere you looked. The back of the house had a deck on stilts that looked out over the lake. The house and the surrounding forest made you feel as if you’d entered a J. Crew catalogue. It was exactly the kind of house I would have wanted to have if I had someone to have it with.
We drove up the long, narrow driveway to the left of the large front yard and parked close to the front door. Alison ran ahead to open the door and turn on some lights while Chuck and I carried Jack, still unconscious, out of the car. Jack had stirred once during the trip, and Chuck had given him another injection, this time Versed, straight into the vein. Chuck was confident that it would keep him out for the rest of the night.
The foyer was filled with our suitcases, which Alison had sent up the day before with Lucy, her parents’ housekeeper, who’d been dispatched to prepare the bedrooms and dust off the house. She had also been charged with stocking the kitchen before she left, which was no mean feat when you considered that it was larger than my entire apartment.
We followed Alison up the stairs and around a short corridor to her father’s study. The house had that slightly musty, pine smell that I always associated with summer camp. The study itself was rectangular with a mahogany desk and matching bookcases that lined three of the walls. A quick glance at the shelves revealed an Oxford English Dictionary, an Encyclopedia Britannica, hard-bound editions of everything from Shakespeare and Milton to more postmodern stuff like Pynchon and Barthelme, what looked like an entire shelf of old New Yorkers and Commentarys, and in between, stacks of papers and manila folders. The room had no windows. The fourth wall was devoted almost exclusively to family pictures. Alison and her sisters in various stages of childhood, always freshly shampooed and suntanned, as if the Schollings were only photographed in the summer. Beneath these photos was a convertible couch that had been opened up into a queen-sized bed. To the left of the sofa bed was a door leading to a small bathroom, also windowless. We laid Jack down on the bed, pulled off his shoes, and covered him with the blue comforter that had been left folded on the floor.
“He’s going to be one unhappy camper when he wakes up,” Chuck observed. His nose was now a misshapen clump, with a nasty purple bruise descending from his forehead to its bridge. He had to be in agony.
“We’ll worry about that then,” Alison said. She ushered us out of the room and from the top desk drawer produced one of those old-fashioned iron keys, the kind that fit into keyholes. Closing the door, she inserted the key and twisted it sharply to the left. I tested the door by turning the knob and leaning into it with my shoulder. It was a strong wood, maybe poplar or maple, and opened into the room, so I was fairly certain Jack wouldn’t be able to break it down.
Alison placed the key on the top of the door frame and we headed downstairs to the kitchen, where Lindsey was already for-aging through the fridge. “Is anyone else starving?” she asked, her voice echoing strangely from inside the refrigerator.
A half hour later, we had prepared a small feast of pasta in marinara sauce, garlic bread, cheese omelets, frozen egg rolls, and a large garden salad. There was something soothing about the four of us preparing and sitting down to a large, home-cooked meal. It somehow validated what we were doing there to begin with, added a sense of normalcy to the whole affair.
“I feel like someone should say grace or something,” I said.
“I know what you mean,” Alison said, rolling her spaghetti the proper way, with a fork and spoon. “It feels like Thanksgiving.”
“Well, I’m thankful,” Lindsey said. “I’m thankful we pulled off what we did today without anyone getting arrested or getting hurt.”
“I beg your pardon?” Chuck objected, his mouth stuffed with egg roll.
“Oh right,” Lindsey said. “I’m thankful that only Chuck got hurt.”
“Fuck you very much,” Chuck muttered, chugging on a Rolling Rock and then pressing the bottle against his nose.
“Man,” I said. “It feels like forever since we all just sat down together.”
“What are you talking about?” Chuck said. “We go out all the time.”
“This is different,” I said. “We usually get together in a rush, and someone is always coming late or leaving early.”
“Or punching out the waiters,” Alison interjected wryly.
“That’s why we need to eat out,” I continued. “If we spent the time making the meal, half of us would be gone before it was ready. This feels, I don’t know, slower. More personal. More relaxed.”
“You mean it feels like college,” Lindsey said, smiling at me. “All of us together, with no end in sight.”
“Something like that.” I said, spearing an eggroll with my fork.
“You always were the sentimental one, Ben,” Chuck said.
“We’re all sentimental,” Alison said. “Ben just says it out loud.” She flashed me an appreciative smile. Alison’s spirits had been up ever since we left the city. It had been the helplessness, as much as anything else, that had been making her so despondent. After months of lonely agonizing over Jack’s self-destruction, she was now finally doing something about it, and she was no longer alone.
“Well,” Chuck said, finishing off the beer and spooning himself some more pasta, “I don’t think our friend upstairs is going to view this as a happy little college reunion when he wakes up.”
“You never know,” I said. “Jack was always a pretty laid-back guy. Maybe he’ll just say ‘whatever’ and take it all in stride.”
“Yeah,” Chuck said sarcastically. “If you’re planning on seeing a carefree Jack tomorrow, I hope you packed a lot of cocaine, because that’s the only thing that’s going to keep him sane.”
“He’s right,” Alison said. “I remember how crazy Jack got when I flushed his coke down the toilet.”
“What about when he first wakes up?” I asked. “We didn’t really think about this. How’s he even going to know where he is?”
“We should leave him a note or something,” Lindsey said. “Ben, you’re the writer.”
“You say that like it’s a good thing,” Chuck said with a grin. I nailed him in the face with my egg roll.
After dinner we all watched the late new
s, which was devoted to the aftermath of a catastrophic train crash in New Jersey. Thirteen dead. I remembered my comment to Chuck about the news being a glorified body count of the day’s most sensational deaths. The really bad ones, I now noticed, even got their own logos. During the commercials I started to compose what I thought would be a brief note to Jack, but turned into a full-blown epistle. It never fails. When I have to write a thousand words on deadline I lock up after the first paragraph, but for an inconsequential note that will only ever be read by one person, the ink flows like a river.
Dear Jack:
Don’t worry, you’re not in danger. Alison, Lindsey, Chuck, and I have gotten together to form our own private rehab clinic, and you’re our first and only patient. I’m fairly confident that when you wake up you’re going to be very pissed about all of this. You’ll be missing some important preproduction meetings and, no doubt, you’ll be missing your coke, but we’ve been missing you for some time now, Jack.
You’re always saying that I live too much in the past, that I’m always thinking that things were better back in college. “Live in the moment, Ben,” you always used to say. “You’ll never get it back.” I remember how you once gave me a tape that just had one line from that Billy Joel song taped over and over again in a continuous loop. Ninety minutes of “. . . The good old days weren’t always good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.” You told me to play it on my Walkman every night before I went to sleep, so that it would sink in. You always had an easier time with the present than I did, and I always envied you for it. Until now. Maybe I’m wrong when I think that the good old days were always good, but one thing I know I’m right about is this: The good old Jack was always good, and much better off than this one.
You were the most laid-back guy I knew. Cool as the other side of your pillow. Nothing could rattle you or shake your confidence. It was so easy for you to live in the moment because your moments were always so much better than everyone else’s. You had your pick of the women, and everyone seemed to like you. You were the best kind of popular; you made no effort and couldn’t have cared less. I felt lucky to be your friend.
And now, for the first time since I’ve known you, I feel better off than you. My life might not be where I want it to be, but it isn’t literally dissolving right under my nose. You’re constantly strung out, and your daily outings have become escapades, fodder for the tabloids. You’re now the proud owner of your very own police record, and you’re spending the majority of your time with people who don’t give a shit what happens to you as long as they get their piece of the pie. Despite all of your success, the moment you’re living in is killing you.
Somewhere in you is still the relaxed and happy Jack, the guy who lives life at his own pace, with his own rules. Don’t you miss that guy? I know I do. We’ve brought you here to find that person again, for you and for us. We loved you when you were just a nobody, and we loved you when you became a famous nobody, which is why we can’t sit idly by and watch you poison yourself.
Remember how we used to stay up late watching those nature documentaries in college? Well, I still watch them, and I recently saw one about a monkey called the bamboo lemur, so named because it safely feeds on poisonous bamboo stalks that no other animal can eat. The enzymes it secretes are specifically adapted to digest the poison. The problem is that the enzymes are so specialized that the bamboo lemur quickly loses its ability to eat anything else. It becomes completely dependent on the poisonous stalks. When the stalks are gone, the lemur dies. That’s the price it pays Mother Nature for a steady diet of poison. What price will you have to pay?
I don’t remember who first came up with the idea of this intervention, but we all agreed that we had to do something to get you off the poison. Chuck says it will take two to three days to get the coke out of your system, and another few days to get you to stop craving it. That means you’re going to be our prisoner for at least a week, so get comfortable, and let us know if there’s anything you need.
Every time I start to think we’re crazy for doing this, I ask myself if you would do this for one of us, and I always come up with yes. In a minute.
Yours truly,
Ben
P.S. If it’s of any comfort, you broke Chuck’s nose in a spectacular fashion.
Somewhere around 5:30 in the morning, Jack began smashing things. I was jolted awake by the crash of a heavy object hitting the floor, followed by a cacophony of glass breaking against the walls. I staggered out into the hallway, where I found Alison and Lindsey already standing, ashen-faced in their shorts and tank tops, consciousness slowly bleeding into their eyes.
“What the hell is he doing?” I asked.
“Let me the fuck out of here!” Jack bellowed from behind the locked door. Alison began to approach the door, but jumped back when it shook with a resounding crash.
“That sounded like a television,” Lindsey observed.
“I don’t believe this shit,” Chuck said hoarsely as he emerged from his bedroom in purple boxers and a ratty Springsteen T-shirt. The swelling around his nose had gone down slightly overnight, but the purple bruising had spread underneath his eyes. He looked like the Hamburglar from those old McDonald’s commercials. From inside the study we now heard small flapping noises followed by lesser thuds, as Jack began throwing books across the room. It sounded like a squadron of kamikaze pigeons. Alison sat down on the floor, her back to the study door, and pulled her arms up over her ears.
“I guess we should have thought to clear the breakables out of there before we locked him up,” Lindsey said, looking sympathetically at Alison.
“You think?” Alison muttered, rubbing her bloodshot eyes.
I tried to think of something to say or do, but my mind was still fuzzy with sleep. We’d been too wired about the abduction to get to sleep at a decent hour the night before, and even after we’d retired to our separate bedrooms—Alison and Lindsey sharing one while Chuck and I each had our own—I had lain awake for hours. I couldn’t stop thinking that my bed and Lindsey’s were separated only by a wall. It was unnerving to realize that for the first time in five years we were lying less than a foot apart from each other. I tried to feel her presence through the wall, and wondered if she was sensing my proximity on her side. It was past three when I finally nodded off.
“Get me the fuck out of here!” came Jack’s voice, hoarse from screaming, punctuated by the sound of splintering wood. I remembered Mr. Scholling’s mahogany desk and winced.
“He can’t go on like that forever,” Lindsey said.
“I should have thought to empty the room.” Alison berated herself.
“You can’t think of everything, Alison,” I said. “We’re all beginners here.”
“Yeah,” Chuck said. “And while we’re on the subject, does anyone have any idea how we’re going to bring him his food?”
“Oh shit,” I said. We all looked at each other, last night’s elation a distant memory. We were in uncharted territory here, and every minute seemed to yield one more glaring example of just how out of our depth we were.
In the study, Jack’s tantrum seemed to have peaked. We heard something skitter across the floor, and then there was silence.
“Jack?” Alison asked tentatively. There was no response. “Jack?”
Suddenly, it was deathly quiet in the study. “Jack?” Alison called again, alarm in her voice. “You don’t think he hurt himself, do you?”
“He’s ignoring you, that’s all,” Chuck said.
“All that broken glass,” Alison murmured. “He could cut himself, he could have fallen down . . . Jack!”
There was no response from behind the door. Alison suddenly reached up to the top of the doorjamb and pulled down the key. She was about to insert it when Chuck grabbed her wrist. “Don’t,” he said.
“He could be unconscious, or bleeding,” Alison said, struggling to free her arm.
“He’s playing possum,” Chuck said. “You unlock that door and
he’ll tear out of there so fast you won’t know what hit you.”
She turned to look at Lindsey and me, her hand still on the doorknob, uncertainty etched into her face. “What should we do?”
“I agree with Chuck,” Lindsey said. “He’s just trying to scare you.
“It’s working,” she said, turning back to the door. “Jack, will you just answer me,” she pleaded.
I bent down next to Alison and took a quick look through the old fashioned keyhole. There was darkness and then a sudden burst of light as Jack jerked his head away on the other side. “I saw you, Jack,” I said, feeling a childish burst of triumph. “I saw him,” I said, straightening up. “He’s fine.”
“Ben, you shit! Let me out of here!” Jack screamed.
“Not a chance,” I said. “I’m going back to bed.”
“Come on! Chuck! Alison! I’m hurt,” Jack called. “I’m bleeding.”
“We’ll slide some Band-Aids under the door,” Chuck said, rubbing his nose tenderly.
“Let me the fuck out of here!” Jack screamed, pounding on the door fiercely. “I’ll get you all! You’re all fucking dead!”
“Calm down, Jack,” Alison said.
“Alison! Let me out of here now!”
“I’m sorry, Jack.”
“Don’t be sorry, be smart,” Jack called. “You want me to go into a clinic? You let me out of here and you and I will go together. This isn’t the way to handle this.”
“I don’t believe you,” Alison said, pressing her palms against the sides of her head.
“I promise you, I’ll do it,” Jack said. “Come on. I’m hungry and I’m cut.”
“I’m sorry, Jack,” she said again.
“Alison, you stupid bitch!” Jack shouted. “Let me out of here right now you . . . cunt!”
Alison gasped, her eyes brimming with tears. Lindsey put her arm around her and gently steered her back towards their bedroom. “Ignore him,” Lindsey said. “Remember that he’s not well right now.” Jack began pounding steadily on the door. “I suggest we all try to get a little more sleep,” Lindsey whispered. “It’s looking like today’s going to be a long one.”
Plan B: A Novel Page 11
