Whiskey & Charlie

by Annabel Smith

  The nurse purses her lips. “I’m not really the best person to answer that,” she says carefully. “You’d need to talk to the neurosurgeon.” She hesitates. “But it’s still early days. It’s very difficult to predict things at this stage. We’ll know a little bit more once these tests are done. Would you like me to have someone from neuro come and talk to you, after we get the results?”

  Charlie shakes his head, closes his eyes.

  “Thank you,” he hears Juliet say. “We’ll be fine now. We just had a fright.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” the nurse says softly. Charlie thinks she is gone, but then he hears her speak again. “You’re a good brother,” she says. “He’s lucky to have a family like you.”

  x x x

  It is Aunt Audrey’s idea to start the journal. She comes across the idea on a website she has found, which contains homespun advice for families coping with coma, written by people who’ve experienced it for themselves.

  “We can record what happens each day,” Audrey suggests. “Any changes in Whiskey’s condition, anything the medical staff tell us. That way we don’t have to keep asking them the same questions over and over, and we won’t feel like we’ve missed anything important when we’re not here.”

  Charlie is glad his mother has her sister to support her. He likes the idea of the journal. He likes the idea of anything that will keep him occupied while he sits beside Whiskey, even if it is only the process of writing something down, reading over what someone else has written. He had used something similar when he worked as a seasonal employee in the camera section of a department store while he was still at college. The communications book was designed to allow the whole team to keep abreast of things that happened when they weren’t there, in the interests of providing better customer service. It contained entries such as: Mr. Ecker returned his SY220—lens not retracting again. No longer under warranty but will repair free of charge because same problem as before. Approved by TD. Occasionally, when the store was quiet and the staff was bored, they resorted to the communications book to entertain themselves. Mark, your wife came looking for you. I told her you had gone to lunch with Samantha from the lingerie department, some card might write, or, Josh sent home early due to excessive body odor.

  Charlie cannot imagine anyone writing such jokes in Whiskey’s communications book. For the day on which Charlie went to the hospital and found Whiskey’s bed empty, Elaine has recorded the tests he was sent for. EEG, MRI, she has written, using the acronyms the medical staff must have given her. Later, in a different pen, she has amended the entry with the full names of the tests: electroencephalogram, magnetic resonance imaging scan.

  The very first entry reads, Magdalena says rare for coma to last more than two weeks. Charlie returns to this entry again and again. Of all the information recorded in the book, he finds this the hardest to absorb. In the state that Whiskey’s in, two weeks seems an eternity. Though his brain swelling has gone down and his critical functions have stabilized—albeit with the help of machines—Whiskey seems barely alive. He hasn’t opened his eyes since he was brought in after the accident, has made no response to stimuli of any kind. Charlie can hardly believe that a person can stay alive in this state for two whole weeks. And yet he wants to believe it. He needs to.

  Which of the staff is Magdalena? Charlie wonders. He would like to talk to her about what his mother has written. But in these early days, the medical staff is a blur to Charlie. There seem to be dozens of them coming and going, and he finds it impossible to keep track of them. Many of them know his name long before he even recognizes their faces.

  In the back of Whiskey’s communications book, he starts to make a list, like the list of characters in a play. He begins by writing the names of everyone who comes into Whiskey’s room. Over time, he adds their physical descriptions to jog his memory, and then their various roles in Whiskey’s care. Through this process, he is eventually able to identify Whiskey’s neurosurgeon, the members of the trauma team, to establish which of the staff are nurses, which are specialists of some kind. In making this list, Charlie comes to understand who to approach for different kinds of information. He gets to know which staff are the most patient, who will take the time to answer his questions—even those he has had answered before—to explain things in a language he can understand.

  Charlie’s list doesn’t do Whiskey any good, of course. It doesn’t stop Charlie’s nightmares or the panic that rises in him from time to time when he allows himself to acknowledge the state Whiskey’s in. But it gives Charlie something to do during the interminable hours of waiting for Whiskey to wake up. It gives him a tiny sliver of control in a situation in which almost everything is hopelessly beyond his control. And more importantly, most of the time, it keeps his thoughts from ranging into the territory he is so afraid to explore, from thinking about himself and Whiskey and how things ever went so wrong.

  Hotel

  Charlie rented the storage space before he moved in with Kristy. They had known each other for only three months, but they were already sleeping together five nights out of seven, and it made no sense to pay rent on two places, especially when Charlie was between jobs. Even with a few creative storage solutions, Charlie could see it was out of the question to cram all his junk into Kristy’s one-bedroom flat. He had fantasized about putting a price sticker on everything he owned and getting rid of it all at once in an “everything must go” garage sale, but he had been talked out of this option not only by his mother, but also Marco.

  “What if things don’t work out?” they said. Charlie couldn’t imagine things not working out. Kristy was sharp and quick-witted, the first girl Charlie had ever gone out with whom he admired, and that made him feel like he was finally having a mature relationship. But he valued Marco’s opinion, so he paid seventy-eight dollars a month to keep all his worldly goods in a glorified garage: a concrete space ten feet deep and eight feet wide, complete with a metal roller door. In fact, when he signed the contract, the larger units were on special, so he got two hundred fifty square feet for the price of one hundred fifty, and all he took with him to Kristy’s was a suitcase full of clothes and a shoe box of CDs.

  It didn’t take Charlie long to work out that almost everything he thought he knew about Kristy was wrong. To begin with, there was only one way to do things, and that was her way, which was always better, neater, and more efficient than any method Charlie might use. Kristy never said this explicitly, but she made it clear by the way she scrutinized Charlie at certain tasks and then silently corrected his mistakes when he had finished. Her rules included:

  • Always rinse clean dishes under a hot tap before leaving them to drain.

  • Peg T-shirts under the arms, not by the shoulders.

  • Make the bed as soon as you get out of it.

  • Replace CDs in their cases immediately after playing.

  In the beginning, Charlie made allowances for Kristy’s behavior. The flat was small, and she wasn’t used to sharing it; that was all. He made an effort to be extra tidy, thinking she’d get used to having him around. But she didn’t get used to it. In fact, she got worse. They started to argue, and it was then that Charlie saw what she had managed to keep hidden before they lived together: Kristy was a sulker. If they disagreed about something, or if Charlie said something she didn’t like, she would give him the silent treatment. She would switch on the television, ignoring his attempts at conversation or answering in monosyllables without looking at him, would go to bed without saying good night. Sometimes Charlie knew what had upset Kristy, but mostly he didn’t. His role, he discovered, was to run through a potentially never-ending list of possible misdemeanors until he hit upon the cause of the sulk, and then to apologize profusely and commit to never making the same mistake again. Once he understood the rules of this game, Charlie made the decision that he didn’t want to play.

  The first time he didn’t act the
role, Charlie had been living with Kristy for a month and a half. It was a Saturday morning; they had read the paper, and Charlie had made an omelet, and then, without anything seeming to have happened, Kristy went into the bedroom and slammed the door. Charlie knew she would be lying on the bed, facing the wall, waiting for him to come in and ask her what was wrong. He finished washing the dishes, without rinsing, and then he grabbed his keys and jacket and went out.

  He didn’t know where he was going exactly; he just knew he needed to get out of the flat. He knew that things weren’t going to work out with Kristy, that he wasn’t in love with her, that he didn’t even like her. He knew he should move out, but he didn’t want to think about that. Breakups were to be avoided at all costs; that was one of Charlie’s policies. It was a poor policy, he knew this, and it had served him badly in the past, in the countless months he had wasted in relationships that had long since shriveled and died. He knew he should have learned something from this, but he couldn’t bear the drama of breakups, the torrent of feelings that were unleashed when relationships ended. They seemed to bring out the worst in people, converting even the consistently rational into the certifiably insane. Charlie had witnessed this transformation countless times, not only in his own relationships, but also in those of his friends. He thought about the Paul Simon song “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” How simple they made it sound. Charlie wished he could do it that easily. Pack up what he came with and leave quietly, dropping the key in the mailbox on the way out. How he loved this fantasy, in which there was no room for the screaming of recriminations or the destruction of property. No crying fits, no counseling, no relationship autopsy, just a quiet exit. But even as he dreamed it, Charlie knew he wouldn’t do it. He would do what he always did, which was to withdraw, bit by bit, until there was barely any part of him left in the relationship, at which point Kristy would break up with him.

  The thought of this, the inevitability of it, depressed Charlie. He thought about seeing a movie to take his mind off things, but when he got to the Astor on Chapel Street, he kept walking, without stopping to look at the calendar posted on the door. He thought he might go and see Marco, see if he wanted to go to the park and throw the Frisbee around; it had been a while since they’d done that. But then Charlie remembered that his Frisbee was in storage and that Marco had a knockoff Frisbee, a Speedy Flying Disc, which was too light and therefore not speedy at all. He decided to drop into his storage unit and grab the Frisbee on the way to Marco’s house.

  He congratulated himself now on the wisdom of getting a storage unit that was only a ten-minute walk from the flat. When he made the decision, both Kristy and his mother said he would have been better off getting one in the outer suburbs and saving himself twenty dollars a month. But Charlie had thought he might want to pop into the unit now and again, and the last thing he wanted was to drive out to the boondocks just to pick up a book. As it happened, Charlie hadn’t been back to the storage facility once. He’d gotten used to looking at Kristy’s pictures on the wall, drying himself on her towels, drinking out of her chipped Snoopy cups, which she hadn’t replaced because she didn’t drink tea.

  Now Charlie had a sudden hankering for his own things, a feeling of longing for the flat where he had lived quietly and happily on his own. He turned off Chapel onto Union Street, glad he had left the key to the unit on his key ring. Inside the storage facility, he remembered the day he had moved. How Whiskey, who had promised to help, had canceled that morning, so there had been only Marco, who had to leave at three to play soccer. There had been no time to organize the unit, sort things into some kind of logical order. Boxes and bookcases and tables and chairs came off the truck and went straight into the unit, stacked or balanced or wedged wherever they would fit. When the truck was empty, Charlie had rolled down the door and forgotten about the mess that lay behind it.

  Rolling up the door, he remembered it. Switching on the light, he also remembered that he had ignored the golden rule of moving house: LABEL THE BOXES.

  He had packed them carefully, working through a seventy-foot roll of bubble wrap in the process, but he hadn’t written so much as a word on a single box. A detailed inventory was what Charlie was wishing for now, listing the exact contents of each and every box. Failing that, he wished he had at least had the sense to write something generally helpful such as kitchenware or books. Instead, he was faced with the task of picking his way through various items of household furniture and then sifting through twenty or more boxes in search of a plastic toy.

  Charlie knew he ought to give up, that it could not possibly be worth the trouble, that he would be better off going to the toy shop and buying a new Frisbee, or seeing if Marco wanted to get a beer instead. But as his mum had always told him, Charlie had a pigheaded streak, a willful determination to finish what he had started, and that was what drove him to start shunting and shoving at his bed base, dragging and pushing it right out of the unit in order to create the space to go through the boxes.

  In the first box, Charlie found his crockery and, tucked in the top, a lighter and a packet of Marlboro Lights. Charlie was not a smoker, not even a social smoker really, but from time to time he craved a cigarette, and he had always liked to keep a packet on hand for those moments. Charlie’s mother said it was a disgusting habit that Charlie ought to give up, and Whiskey too while they were at it.

  Kristy had been of the same school of thought. She said that even if Charlie didn’t smoke inside the flat, when he smoked outside, he would bring it in on his clothes. So Charlie had given it up. In the weeks that he had lived with her, he hadn’t missed it, but once he had the packet in his hand, he found himself wanting a cigarette, needing one. He was sure there must be a rule against smoking in a storage facility, thought he might have even seen a sign on the way in, but he lit the cigarette anyway, drew on it deeply. After six weeks without it, the nicotine made his head spin. He pictured his storage unit on fire, thought of the smoke and flames destroying not only his own belongings, but also those of other people, other families. He wondered if he should get insurance or if insurance was included in his rental fee. He made a mental note to find this out, knowing at the same time that he never would. He stubbed the cigarette out, ground it into the concrete floor to make sure it was dead.

  The second box Charlie looked in held his cooking utensils—pots and pans, whisks and ladles and spatulas. Charlie loved cooking. He thought of Kristy’s kitchen—the gas stove on which only two burners worked, the cramped workbench, the blunt knives and thin-bottomed pans to which everything stuck. Charlie realized he hated cooking in Kristy’s flat; he hadn’t cooked a good meal since he moved in.

  In the third box, Charlie found his notebooks and pens, his Stanley knife and a roll of tape, a handful of markers held together with a rubber band. He forgot about the Frisbee. He decided to do what he should have done in the first place and label the boxes. It was cold in the unit, but Charlie was soon warm, shifting white goods and lamp stands and coffee tables to reach the boxes. He slit them open, made a rough inventory, taped them up, and wrote the contents on the side before stacking them against one wall of the unit. By the time he finished, it was five o’clock. Charlie had been in the unit for almost four hours. He felt sweaty and elated.

  When he arrived home, Kristy was out of her sulk. She did not ask where Charlie had been, and Charlie did not tell her. Somehow in his absence, the conflict had been resolved, and Charlie felt ashamed of his earlier thoughts. He didn’t want to leave her; that was foolish. He had to give it more time, allow things to settle, that was all.

  x x x

  The next time they fought, Charlie went again to the storage unit, and by the third time, it had already become a habit. In the beginning, he went there on the pretext of looking for something, but he never brought anything back with him. Eventually he gave up the pretext. He just liked being there, found that the cold, concrete box felt like his own space in a way that Kri
sty’s flat did not.

  Over time, he made it more comfortable, dug his transistor radio out of a box and unwrapped the cushions for the couch so he had somewhere to sit. On his fifth or sixth visit, Charlie discovered that as well as a single lightbulb, the storage unit was fitted with an electrical outlet. He unwrapped his record player, his speakers, and his amp, and after a long search for a power strip, he plugged them in. He listened to the records he had loved as a child, seven-inch singles by Duran Duran, Adam and the Ants, and Michael Jackson that he had saved up his pocket money to buy. He listened to the records he had inherited from his mother’s childhood—Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, and the Everly Brothers. Then he listened to the albums he had bought in his late teens, when he should have moved on to CDs. He lay on his couch, inside a storage unit, listening to the Pixies and the Stone Roses and a dozen other bands who had long since disappeared into obscurity, and Charlie felt happy.

  When Kristy nagged him, when she sulked and cried, ranted and raved, Charlie pictured himself in his storage unit, alone and at peace. He didn’t always listen to records. He read books and flicked through his journals, spent an evening looking at old photos; sometimes he played his guitar. He had moved the fridge closer to the electrical outlet, and when he wasn’t there, he left it plugged in so he could have a cold beer when he felt like it. When the weather got cooler, he plugged in his fan heater to warm up the space. He never told Kristy where he spent his time. He did not know what she thought, and he did not care.

  When he was angry, he made a mental list of all the things he disliked about her. Then, when he had convinced himself he would have to leave, he backpedaled, made excuses for her by reminding himself of her difficult childhood, her sister’s death, her father’s drinking. He forced himself to remember what had attracted him to her in the beginning, the way she made him laugh with her sharp wit, the fact that she was so decisive, so certain about what she wanted from life. Eventually, when all the things he had liked about her became things he couldn’t stand—when he finally admitted to himself that she was not just well organized but controlling, not emotional but neurotic, Charlie gave up, tried not to think about it at all.