Conner filled a water bottle and set off on the bike, fast enough to make his own breeze. He made a point of avoiding the houses of any of his friends. He didn’t call them anymore and they had given up calling him. They tried too hard to be nice to him, which made everything worse. They’d all graduated, and most of them were headed off to some kind of school in the fall. Which wasn’t their fault, nor was it their fault that they were spending their last free summer going to the beach, or sleeping late and helping themselves to their parents’ refrigerators. They couldn’t have fun with him in the room, couldn’t talk about anything lighthearted with his big drag self sitting there. He’d broken up with his girlfriend because she wanted the two of them to live together in her parents’ basement and he said he couldn’t, he had to stay with his dad. She’d said, “I don’t get it, why can’t he go to a hospital or someplace, why do you have to turn yourself into some kind of giant loser?”
Then she said she didn’t mean that, loser, but it had been the excuse he needed to walk away from her. No one understood what he was up against. He didn’t want anyone to understand.
His dad still talked about Conner signing up for some community college classes. That was just his dad not ever wanting to look a thing in the face. His dad made jokes about them having to sleep in the parking lot at Costco. That meant he’d at least thought about it.
Conner biked a ten-mile loop that took him on a back road west of downtown and its halfhearted tourist attractions, the antiques stores and spas, out past the last scattered houses and the hippie goat farm, through a few acres of orchards and to where the vineyards took over. He climbed enough of a hill so that he could look back and see the town set out like a toy. It had been his home for all the life he could remember, and now there was no place in it for him. Maybe there was no place for him in all the wide world.
That night his dad said, “Buddy, we got to find a new base of operations.”
It meant the bank was finally kicking them out. Conner had been waiting to hear it, but still it sent his heart right down to his shoes. “How soon?”
“Couple of weeks. We can do better than this here ghetto estate, don’t you think?”
“Sure,” Conner said, since that was what his dad wanted him to say.
“You’d think they’d show some charity to an old cripple.”
“Quit calling yourself names.”
“You ever think about the army? Joining up?”
His dad had one of his canny expressions, like he usually did when he came up with something out of left field. “You’re kidding,” Conner said.
“Free room and board. You wouldn’t have to get shot at or anything, a bright guy like you. They’d probably put you into something like computers.”
“No, Dad.”
“Educational benefits,” his dad said, but Conner could tell he was already giving up on the idea.
Conner went into the kitchen. Bojangles followed and thwacked his tail against the wall, food food food. Conner filled his bowl and put it down for him. Whatever else happened, it would be all right as long as he never had to betray his dog with an empty food bowl.
When he went back into the living room, his dad had fallen asleep again. The pills ran him now. It was one more kind of trouble.
For so long his life had been a kid’s life, going along, going along without having to think much about it. There was school, and girls, and games, and anything else had been pretty easy to ignore, since after all he was just a kid. Then his mom had moved out and that had been a lot to deal with, but it was their problem, his mom and dad’s, nothing anybody expected Conner to prevent or fix. The same with money, even when his dad’s work got slow and they’d started losing altitude little by little. Sure Conner had worried, but he hadn’t thought it was going to be that bad, and worse, forever and ever.
Then last October his dad went out one night and didn’t come home. Didn’t answer his phone, and he always checked in, even when he was chasing women. No one had seen him. Three days later the police found him in a hospital in Ukiah. He’d been in a rollover accident on 101, seventy miles from home. His dad was trapped in the passenger seat. Whoever had been driving had disappeared, either unhurt or limping off. The car had been stolen the week before in Truckee. His dad had a broken pelvis, a ruptured spleen, some cracks in his neck. Those were the main things.
There had been a woman, a woman he’d met for drinks, but he’d either never known her name or couldn’t remember it, nor could he remember the accident. He’d spent three weeks in the hospital, running up bills he’d never pay. Conner left the dog with his girlfriend and drove up north. His mom came in from Nevada and the two of them stayed in a motel near the hospital.
Conner’s mom stood at his dad’s hospital bedside and said, “Sean, you need to find yourself a steady girlfriend. This tomcatting around isn’t working out.”
His dad tried to laugh. It came out as a wheeze. “On the to-do list.”
“Aim for one who’s a better driver.”
“Ah, I’ve hurt myself worse having a good time.”
“McDonald, you’re so full of shit your eyes are brown.”
It was funny to see the two of them together again, carrying on the way they used to, all the old banter. The running joke was that his dad was a hopeless but lovable screwup, and his mom saw through him and disapproved, though she couldn’t resist his rapscallion charms.
But when Conner and his mom went back to the motel, she said, “If stupid was a crime, he’d be in jail.” His mom was pretty, with dark gold hair and wide-open eyes. Everybody said Conner looked like her.
“Come on. It was an accident.”
“You take his side because you feel sorry for him.”
“I’m not taking sides,” Conner said.
“Honey, you always try so hard. You shouldn’t have to be the only grown-up in the house.”
Conner didn’t answer. He was always surprised when people made pronouncements about him. He liked to believe that nobody really noticed him, while he observed and judged everyone else.
“I’m not going to come back and take care of him. I know it would solve everybody’s problems but I can’t. I’ve moved on from there.”
“All right,” Conner said.
“But I’ll take care of you. I always will.”
“I don’t need taking care of.”
“You don’t know what you don’t need,” his mom said.
What did he know? He was supposed to be smart, everybody said so. If grades were the same thing as smart, then he guessed he was. Teachers kidded around with him, were fond of him, wished him well. Older people liked him, approved of him because of his seriousness and good manners. They looked at him and sighed and said what a great thing it was to be young, with your whole life ahead of you. As if your life was out there just waiting for you to step into it, like a new car all gassed up and ready to go.
Conner wasn’t as sure as everybody else that he was such a safe bet, all-around great kid and yakkity-yak, whatever they saw in him that made them feel better about themselves. Maybe all along he’d had a low-down, untrustworthy nature that this run of bad luck had only now revealed. Maybe nobody knew who they really were until the world beat them up some.
His dad had one operation and then a second one, and more to come somewhere down the line, and then there was an infection, and the wrong medication, and the orthopedist nobody liked, and everything else it was possible to hate about a hospital. His dad claimed he was getting poor people’s medicine, and that was a thought you didn’t like to think, but you wondered. His dad told a story about an ironworker he knew, another big dumb Irishman, who fell face-first off a fifteen-foot ladder onto pavement, got up and said “Boy, I’m lucky, all I broke was my face!” His dad said he understood that a little better, now that he couldn’t sit, stand, walk, or piss right.
; Finally Conner brought him home, and he crutched around the house hating his own pain. He had to be taken to his doctors’ appointments, and the physical therapy that was supposed to help more than it did, and of course the prescriptions to fetch, and all the while Conner was trying to earn a meager buck any way he could. The school had allowed him to make up his fall course work. He started his classes after Christmas but he kept missing days, and by the end of February he was sitting in the guidance counselor’s office, having one of those conversations where the counselor kept saying “unfortunately.”
“We need to find a way to make this work for you,” the counselor said. “We need to look at all your options.”
“Sure,” Conner said. It was almost funny, to think he had these great things called options.
“Unfortunately”—there it was—“I don’t think we can graduate you by June. Certainly not with the kind of grade-point average you’re capable of earning.”
“Sure,” he said again.
The counselor fixed him with her expression of ineffectual sympathy. “I’m sorry. It’s not like any of this is your fault.”
Conner nodded and pretended to listen as she went on about her ideas of his future, involving loans and scholarships and applications and the different strategies he might use to nudge himself out of an economic dead end and into a more respectable middle-class anxiety. He was still working out the idea of fault, and wondering if the counselor meant it was his dad’s fault for getting himself smashed up. For being in a badly driven stolen car.
His dad said he couldn’t remember getting in the car, or else he had his reasons for not remembering. So it was their fault, this person who was driving or, at least, should not have stolen a car. But maybe fault was like the tail end of a snake, and you had to follow it all the way up to the head to reach the original pure badness that set everything in motion.
“So let’s aim for summer,” the counselor said, and Conner said yes, that would work, and thank you, and walked out of the school for what he figured was the last time. He signed up for online summer courses that were pretty much a joke; he could do the work in his sleep, which was lucky since he needed his waking hours for other things. By the end of summer they would send him his joke diploma.
He and his dad moved out on the hottest day of the year. Global warming, people said, and they were probably right. Him and his dad were moving into one half of a duplex in San Rafael. The other half was vacant, trashed by the previous tenants, and Conner and his dad were supposed to do some work on it in exchange for a few months’ rent. Floyd and another guy came to help them load the beds and the rest of the furniture, and there was some talk of painting pentagrams on the floor for the benefit of the bank that now owned the place, or taking a sledgehammer to the walls, or some other eat shit and die gesture, but in the end they left everything as it was, and drove off, and it was one more place to leave for the last time.
The duplex was smaller than their old house, but at least they each had their own bedrooms, and a roof that didn’t yet look like it was falling in. And it came with a couple of window-unit air conditioners. Once everything was hauled inside, they turned the air up as high as it would go and Conner lay flat on the floor with the sweat turning cold on him but that felt good. His dad got himself settled on the couch. It was a different house but the same old couch and his dad’s same cussing as he tried to get himself into some comfortable position. It was their same clothes and shoes and lamps and kitchen gear and whatnot, all spilling out of cardboard boxes, and nothing had changed except there would now be less of everything.
By the second week of July they had unpacked as much as they felt like. They didn’t talk about it, but there was a sense they might not be staying all that long. They ripped up the old vinyl floor and the subfloor in the empty half of the duplex, and started in replacing it. “Every job needs a boss,” his dad remarked at least once each day, since he couldn’t really get down on the ground, only drag things in and out or pass tools to Conner. The rest of the time his dad spent on the phone to the Department of Social Services, who were just about as helpful as you might imagine, and to Social Security, trying to file for disability. Conner’s mom sent him some cash, with a note to not let his dad get his hands on it. The father of a kid Conner knew from school hired him to work some shifts at a grocery warehouse he owned, filling in for people on vacation. Once he put three cases of frozen steaks in the dumpster, retrieved them later, and sold them at the flea market. He cruised the nighttime streets in fancy neighborhoods and twice he found unlocked cars and stole a phone and a GPS system.
There was a rhythm to it, this getting-by life, and every so often Conner got scared at how used to it he was growing, like an animal gone wild.
After they had parted company, his old girlfriend called and texted him for some time, not willing to let things end. She was anxious to prove herself in this adult crisis and to stand by his side and offer him her sympathy and support, and in doing so, make it all about her. He knew that he was being unfair to her, and that if she had been the one to put distance between them when his troubles began, he would have accused her of being fickle and shallow. He had a confusion of feelings toward her. He wanted to be hurt, he wanted to be hurtful.
He hadn’t heard from her at all for a couple of weeks. It gave him an ugly kind of satisfaction to think she’d given up on him. And if she had kept pursuing him, he would have felt scornful. In the same way, he both was and was not hoping to see her when he drove out of his way after work to go past her house.
It was nearly dark. There was a zone of heat and lavender-blue air in the west that seemed to fizz or strobe when his eyes tried to make anything out. He guessed if she was home she might see his truck and draw some wrong conclusion about his being there, like he was a stalker. What he really wanted was to revisit his old life so he could remind himself of what he’d lost.
Conner cruised her block, medium slow. Both her family’s cars were in the drive, but that didn’t mean she was home. Times when she’d had the house to herself they had made love in her narrow bed, and she had cried a little because it hurt her but told him not to stop, and he couldn’t have stopped for the world. All that had been taken from him, as if it had never happened.
He turned and headed back toward the freeway. At the entrance ramp he pulled into an Exxon station to get gas, and then crossed the parking lot to the coffee shop to get a ham sandwich to go, dinner. He ordered at the cash register and waited there, looking out through the expanse of glass windows to the traffic queuing up on the highway.
Someone called his name. He turned and saw people waving at him, a table of five stoned-looking kids. He knew a couple of them from school, and as he walked toward them, his old girlfriend emerged from the restrooms and made her way to her seat at the table.
Conner made a point of not breaking his stride, but she stopped and seemed to look around for some other destination before she gave up and sat. She ducked her head in a nod, and Conner said Hi, without putting much into it either way. There were four boys and the two girls, and the other girl said, “You look hot, Con. I mean, all sweaty.” She laughed at that.
“And you look totally wasted.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“Sit down, man,” one of the boys said, and Conner was ready to tell them he couldn’t, but instead he hiked an empty chair over to the table. His girlfriend was sitting between two boys, and he couldn’t tell if either of them was anyone he should concern himself about. The other girl and one guy were a longtime couple, and the boy who had invited Conner to join them never had girlfriends. They had already eaten, and the plates were scattered with leftover food. It was all the things Conner wished he’d ordered for himself: french fries, bacon, pizza.
The girl who wasn’t his girlfriend said, “We drove up to Forest Knolls looking for the place Jerry Garcia died.”
“Yeah?” Conner said. A waitress came out of the kitchen with his sandwich. Conner stood to intercept her, then sat again. “You find it?”
“We couldn’t tell. It looked like kind of a nice place to die. All woodsy, and there were these wild turkeys running around.”
“Living on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine,” one of the boys sang, and somebody else said that hadn’t worked out so well for old Jerry, and Yeah, but that was rock and roll, baby.
Conner was just as glad they weren’t paying any attention to him. He watched his girlfriend without looking at her, keeping his face impassive, wishing he hadn’t ordered the stupid sandwich that he now had to keep track of. The paper bag kept slipping off his lap and he had to shift his knees around, juggling it. Finally he put it on the floor. His girlfriend didn’t look pleased. He guessed that he had something to do with that. The guy to her right was staring at Conner, sending him little hate Valentines. So that’s the way it was.
The boy who never had girlfriends was named Kenny. He was Korean and had black hair in a scrub-brush cut, and wore the button-down oxford shirts his parents bought him with the sleeves ripped off. He was talking about another weird thing he’d pulled off a website. Because there were websites out there designed for guys like Kenny, the deeply bored and the deeply lonely, and not just porn sites. Conner wasn’t paying attention at first, preoccupied with the effort it took him to sit still in his chair. Then he said, “What?”
“The universe is going to end.”
“Come on.”
“It expanded for, what, a hundred billion billion years, that’s from the Big Bang point. Then it’s gonna start contracting, and fall in on itself and, whoosh. No more universe.” Kenny looked happy, explaining the upcoming total death of everything.
“No way.” This from the guy who’d been staring at Conner. The new, designated stud. “You mean there would just be this big blank sky?”
The Humanity Project Page 9
