Last Last Chance

by Fiona Maazel

  I’d been staring at the chain around her neck for some time. Her name in gold script. I didn’t like the idea of looking out for number one, but I was listening.

  The moment came to announce your clean time. Five years. Ten years. Ten days. Ten days? It was a new guy, and he looked devastated. But the applause he got. And the cheers. He had no idea what was going on. I was in awe of him. Multiple years made no sense. I thought they were great, but really, I had no clue what that was about. But ten days! Ten days was like a week plus a few. Ten days could be me. I was, after all, nearing the close of my benzo wean. It’d been two months of decreasing doses. What I took now accommodated my preference for drugs over no drugs, but the physical effects were nil. Even so, I was scared of the end.

  The meeting pressed on, it was Phil’s turn. He said his baby was due in a month. He said also that when he was a kid, his brother got leukemia and that when it became clear the disease was terminal, he started wishing his brother were dead, too. At the time, Phil was only twelve, but he knew what to do with cocaine and bought a couple lines’ worth right down the block from his house. He’d actually wished his brother dead. From his friends at school, he’d heard cocaine could make it all go away. And it had. His brother got worse and he felt nothing. His brother died, he felt nothing. Now, twelve years later, he was only beginning to mourn. But it was better this way. Much better.

  I was starting to think tonight’s meeting was designed with me in mind, but then that’s what everyone thinks.

  I decided to share about my own mother, thinking I could say something that’d be a help to us all. “I’m just back from rehab,” I said. Clapping. Welcome back. “Please don’t clap, I can’t stand the clapping. I haven’t done anything heroic and I could relapse tomorrow.” Keep coming. “My mother was at rehab with me, though it didn’t take. And right now, she’s probably knocked out in her bathtub. And I’m here. Why am I here and not there? My father’s been dead a year and today I came across a note he wrote my mom ten years ago that makes me think she spent her entire marriage to him longing for someone else. I also just found out my twelve-year-old sister has basically renounced membership in our family. Sound crazy? It’s not. What’s crazy is that I’m not high. I am dealing with all this clean. Sort of clean. I’m still in detox. But basically I’m clean. Sorta.”

  Miles, whose hearing had deteriorated badly in the last two months, rubbed my back and yelled, “You’re doing all right, kid.”

  Allan raised his hand. “I’m feeling really messed up tonight and I wasn’t going to say anything but fuck that. All this shit about ‘looking out for number one’ has got to have its limits, right? I got into a fight with my boss at work today. He called me a gook. I’m from Trinidad, for God’s sake! So what, I should look out for number one to keep my job? What about my dignity? I told him to fuck off. Later I got a visit from a cop saying I beat up on the boss. And I kept saying, ‘Look, if I beat up on him, he’d be dead.’

  “You know what it is, you just can’t escape your past. Once a con, always a con. It’s like, what’s it called, that law where all sex offenders have to announce themselves to the community. What the hell is that? If you let him out of jail, you’re saying the guy’s all right. If you think he’s gonna strike again, why let him out of jail? There’s just no fucking way to move on in this country.”

  One of the people I didn’t know got in Allan’s face so fast, no one saw it coming. He was screaming about how if you don’t like the country, get out. The two men were separated. After, I invited Allan to join me, Fran, Drew, and Frank for a wholesome junket on the town.

  Before we left, I made for the guy with ten days, who was smoking by the gate. I said he amazed me. He said he felt like shit. I said he gave me hope, which was near impossible. He said in that case, his day was worth living. I said mine, too, and I actually meant it.

  I returned to my group, which was debating where to eat. Fran liked to visit places she’d been with a john, hoping someone on staff would recognize her. She proposed the Peninsula Hotel. Allan was still so furious, he didn’t care where we went. Drew said a buddy of his was having a party, like a clean person’s party, which sounded like the biggest yawn ever. What do people do at a clean person’s party? Talk?

  We went to our favorite dessert venue. I ordered the brownie whiplash. Drew went in for flan, flan being the most cloying and repulsive dessert ever. The rest had sorbet.

  We talked about superplague, which flexed, inevitably, into talk about Bluebonnet and J.C., news of whom had dominated the papers for weeks. As it turned out, though ours was not the only center-turned-compound—across the country spas, hotels, and farming communities had closed ranks and secured their borders—Bluebonnet was the only one to experience death.

  Fran said, “Think it was bad in Texas? You should have seen it here. Totally nuts. I been on the streets a long time and even in seventy-seven, during the blackout, it was nothing like this. I saw a man get punched in the face for a bottle of water.”

  “Punched?” Frank said. “I saw a couple get stabbed for their hospital masks. This little old couple. If it wasn’t for my stupid brain, maybe I could have done something.”

  “Oh, Frank,” I said. “You can’t be responsible for everything.”

  He slurped at his peach sorbet. The traumatizing brain injury, sustained during speedball practice with friends atop a building, retarded the rate at which signals went to and from his brain so that even as his mind was saying, Help these people, his body would not move until several seconds later.

  Allan, who was still smoldering, said, “I bet that fuck at the meeting is our highly patriotic American. I hate those fucks who say you’re unpatriotic because you don’t support the party line. I’m from Trinidad, I know what democracy means.”

  They asked for the scoop on J.C. I said how is it that people were getting beaten and stabbed here, but that the big news item was about some guy whose death was an accident?

  “Because they buried him,” Fran said. “Without telling anyone.”

  “So you’re saying all people care about is ritual and protocol?”

  Drew, who’d gone back to school for history and relished any chance to make it known, said, “It’s what keeps law and order. You think anyone gives a crap what the president says at his inauguration? Unless you got Henry Harrison up there, because he spoke for two hours then caught pneumonia and died, no one cares. All that matters is that he gives a speech.”

  I demurred. “Okay, it’s better to administer proper rites than not, but if we’re choosing the worser sin, I’d say stabbing for a face mask beats out improper burial by a long shot.”

  “Say what you want,” Fran added. “But J.C. is the one making the headlines. I bet they hang him.”

  Frank said, “Can they do that?”

  We thought not, but then who knew what sort of abomination our justice system would mete out next.

  “I feel bad for him,” I said. “He was just really scared. He’s got a pregnant wife. He’s only a kid.”

  Fran stirred her coffee with a straw, which began to melt.

  “I feel the worst for Travis,” Allan said, addressing himself to the marble patterning on the tabletop, and afraid, it seemed, to make eye contact. He was still angry. I think guys who tend to anger are just compensating for inability to moderate feeling, and, owing to a stigma against hysteria in men—depressive unction in men, the sob without cause in men—the extreme of rage is often the only extreme allowed. Not so Allan. He could move from fury to desperation in seconds, and be equally histrionic in his experience of both. “Travis is heartbreaking. Here’s a guy whose blind old uncle might have superplague—who, mind you, will die only a couple years ahead of schedule if he does have it—and who decides the only thing to do is to walk for two days in the desert trying to get help? Help that won’t do a thing if the uncle’s got it, but which might make things a little nicer anyway? To go through all that just to get knocked off by some jerk-off
kid? How many people like Travis you think are out there? I bet he was just as scared as J.C. Isn’t it amazing how different we can act? Or that our lives are so powerful that we are given the chance to make choices that can make of us men or dogs or something like God? It’s crazy. No one gets the chances we do.”

  “Or the remorse,” I said, “when you fuck up. Though maybe that’s not fair. I mean, fear—panic—it’s a chemical agent like anything else. Maybe J.C. just wasn’t born with the strength to hold his liquor. It’s not like you can study in advance and prepare for the test.”

  Fran shook her head. “That’s just lazy. Every day you are alive is like studying. If you’re paying attention, anyway.”

  “Well, la-di-da,” I said. “Professor Fran.”

  She blew me a kiss.

  Drew ran his fingers through his hair. “We’re all scared. That’s what’s so messed up. Having to live with fear all the time. It’s making people crazy. And people like us, we have the added problem of already being crazy.”

  We laughed. Nothing seemed to please us more than to acknowledge our own insanity

  “Well, maybe it’s over,” I said. “No new reports in a month.”

  Fran knuckled her forehead. Drew, for lack of salt, tossed a sugar substitute over his shoulder.

  Allan turned to me. “That’s fucked up about your dad’s note. Can I ask what it said?”

  “Just that my mom should return to this guy who was her fiancé a million years ago. He worked for her company for a long time after that. I guess maybe they stayed in love? I have no idea.”

  Fran asked what I was going to do.

  “Do? What’s there to do? I have to do something?”

  “No. But I mean, now that you’re back from rehab, just if you had any plans or anything. Get a job or go back to school. I don’t know. I was just talking. Ignore me.”

  But this was not to be ignored. “No, really, I’m supposed to do something? With my life or about Dag Bersvendsen?”

  “Is that his name? That’s ridiculous.” This from Allan, Allan from Trinidad whose parents were Gayatre and Doodon Ramsaroop.

  Fran said, “I just thought maybe you’d talk to your mother. Or, um, Dag, if you can. Tying up loose ends, isn’t that what you call it?”

  Conversation stalled, the bill came. We forked over money, I covered Allan. While we were waiting for change, he said, “You know Mark skipped town? Moved upstate. I thought maybe you had something to do with it.” He was looking at me intensely. “I thought maybe he went to that chicken farm.”

  I laughed. I could not even remember who Mark was. “Not me,” I said. “Why, did a lot of people leave? And where’s Ben, by the way?”

  Expressions around the table said this was a touchy subject. Because the people who fled the city, they were scorned. They were craven.

  I pressed. “Did Ben leave town, too?”

  Fran said yes. He and his wife had bought a house and whelping dog in Maine.

  Wait, what? Dirty Ben in Maine? With brindled collie and puppies?

  “Christ,” I said, and sunk low in my chair. “I don’t have any plans for the future. I’m not doing anything.”

  Drew said, “Sure you are. You’re seeing friends and trying out your life clean. That’s plenty.”

  How nice. Like I was testing a new bra.

  Frank had been quiet for some time. He’d get quiet a lot. You couldn’t tell if brain injury or mood was responsible, so mostly you just waited for him to perk up, which he did, saying, “Good for Ben. Smart move. It’s been a month since plague, yeah, but until they catch the guy, it’s not over. It’ll be back.”

  I went outside. We were three weeks into March, but the wind said otherwise, and the damp seemed to cleave to your bones. Frank was right, of course. The plague would be back. And this meant I had a very small window in which to address matters of the heart, chief among them Eric. I had decided to let him go, though not in any traditional sense. I was not going to grand-gesture him out of my life, there was just no way. What I could do, however, was to invite Kam back in. She was the solution. Our history conduced to friendship, and friendship was estimable and I was needing to do estimable things. First thing tomorrow: estimable things. Seeing my friends, testing my life.

  Thirty-eight

  I had put Aggie in a giant hangetsu bento box. A bamboo case in which to present sushi. An urn seemed too austere and I imagined Agneth would enjoy the sight of her remains in a Japanese serving dish. Likewise the Japanese garden in Brooklyn, which is where I told Eric to be. I’d actually never been, so there was novelty in just about every aspect of our venture. My plan was to free Agneth and then to talk.

  The garden had just opened, and everything in it appeared to be yawning. On the opposite side of the pond was a wooden gateway shaped like pi, whose persimmon gloss struck out against the greenery so that you couldn’t look anywhere else. I gathered the pi announced a shrine in the grove behind, which might make for a good place to deposit Agneth. I’d heard enough stories where a breeze sends Grandma Del into everyone’s hair and eyes, down a throat or several, to want to avoid this outcome at all costs.

  Eric was late. I was nervous about seeing him, and then when I thought he wasn’t coming, I started to worry, and then to get angry, like: How dare he deny Nana? When I saw him strolling past the giant stone lantern at the entrance, I was still mad. He waved. I folded my arms across my chest. He noticed just in time, else he might have hugged me, which I wanted so much I was even more furious when he pulled up short and said, “Hey,” followed by the shoulder squeeze. The shoulder squeeze!

  “You look really great,” he said. “How are you feeling? Is it good to be back?”

  “I can rope a steer.”

  It was finally warm out and he was in a jeans jacket, which I always found too femme on guys, except that Eric was beautiful in anything. His hair had grown out so that it came down the sides of his face. He’d also filled out his sideburns and gotten a new tattoo on the inset of his arm, which appeared to depict an Australian postage stamp of two large red-and-green flowers superimposed on a city by the water. It was quite delicate. And his mom, who was from Sydney, I bet she loved it.

  “Okay,” he said, “but can you ride?”

  “Of course. My inner thighs can kill a man.”

  He laughed.

  “I’m doing fine,” I said. “World’s going to shit, but why complain.”

  I looked at my shoe. This was not how I had meant to act, all tough and abradant. In my mind, we were to embrace with real joy because a lot had happened since last we met and we’d survived and grown stronger and more committed to the people we loved and less committed to all the shit in between and hey, by the way, let’s you, me, and Kam go have dinner next week because I need you people to stay alive.

  He said, “Amazing, isn’t it? I can hardly believe the chaos of the last few months. It’s really brought out the best and worst in people.”

  I could tell he was not feeling comfortable, either. When anxious, he tended to platitude. Me, I got combative.

  “Best? Where? From everything I’ve heard, we’re one case away from that movie, what’s it called, where those schoolkids get put on an island and the only way to survive is to kill each other off.”

  He smiled and gestured at the path. I doubt he knew the garden any better than I did, but walking seemed in order.

  “So contentious,” he said.

  “I prefer feisty.”

  “So feisty,” he said.

  I laughed, which had an unfurling effect on my mood. “I’m glad to see you,” I said. “It was scary out there.”

  “Here, too. But you really do look good. I can see a difference.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. I hated the idea of looking improved. I didn’t want him to expect anything of me, least of all a successful experience of life now that I was clean.

  “Now really,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

  “
Okay.”

  “Are you lying?”

  “I don’t know. Today is my first full day off drugs. The wean is over.

  “That’s terrific! Really great. No wonder you’re looking so well.”

  “I feel a little woozy. Just a little, though.”

  “Yeah, but that’ll pass.”

  We came to a bridge and a small island shaped like a turtle. “This island is ridiculous,” I said.

  “It’s supposed to symbolize longevity.”

  I stopped walking. “Is there an irony here? Because I can’t scatter ashes in the presence of irony.”

  “None whatsoever.” He sat in the grass, Indian style. “I’ve seen that movie, by the way. Battle Royale. My favorite are the ninthgrade girls who commit suicide rather than kill each other. No survival instinct at all.”

  “I know. But you think their behavior makes them better or worse people?”

  “I’m not sure it’s a moral issue. The will to live can’t be qualified.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. That’s like saying all the Nazi collaborators were just acting out a survival instinct. Like it’s okay to mass murder if it means saving yourself.”

  “That’s an extreme case. But think about a father of three who can hide a Jew in the basement and risk all their lives or refuse to help. Say he refuses, you gonna call that immoral?”

  “In that case, how are you feeling about Kam’s parents? I still can’t believe they wouldn’t let you stay at their house.”

  “I wouldn’t call it immoral.”

  “But you’d call it something bad.”

  “Understandable. That’s what I’d say.”

  “Bullshit. And anyway, you would not have done the same to them.”

  “How do you know? We all think we’ll act a certain way, hope to, in any case, but when the time comes, instinct can override anything. Just look at your guy at Bluebonnet.”

  “So you’re saying it’s okay that he killed Travis?”

  “I’m not saying it’s okay or not. I’m just saying he acted with no regard for these things. That a good man, a really good man, went down as a result is beside the point.”