The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac

by Kris D'Agostino

  “Our options are getting fewer and fewer,” Chip says.

  “We’re together,” I say. “We’ll be okay.”

  They all just look at me.

  << 32 >>

  The cold weather is here to stay.

  He will never fly again. It is a time of great loss. Of expectations dashed. And all of it on the eve of Elissa’s delivery. The baby whose arrival now carries possibly the last vestiges of hope for us all.

  My father is visited by Thurston Krants, CFO of Transcontinental Air, as well as the head of the flight department, a man they call “Tig.” Arthur Tiglowski. The men sit in the dining room of our house and offer my father the terms of early retirement they have drawn up. He is out. Someone has already been hired in his absence. They saw it coming, maybe, long before any of us. Continuing 40 percent till he turns sixty-five. Medicare and Social Security for the rest of it. Health coverage for my mother stops the day he dies.

  He doesn’t make a fuss. He signs their papers. He shakes their hands and accepts their condolences. If he is upset, he doesn’t show it. After they’re gone, he mails his old medical certificate back to the FAA in the self-addressed stamped envelope they provided for just this purpose.

  I wait for the baby steps he has taken—the cleaning out of the garage, the retiring of the bathrobe, the selling of the guns—I wait for them to abruptly reverse. It doesn’t happen. My father retreats to the sanctuary he has established in Elissa’s hospital room. He watches over her with conviction. My mother buries herself in the bills, scouring over them for anything she may have missed, any way to connect the dots, now that all the numbers have been laid before her.

  It takes a lot of self-motivation, but I steel my nerves and stop by Ceci’s office Friday morning. I drop the envelope onto her desk.

  “I’ll do it,” I say.

  “You sure?” she says.

  “I don’t know if I have a choice at this point,” I say.

  “I’m sure you can start classes spring semester.”

  “Great,” I say.

  I still haven’t spent more than a few moments visiting my sister. She’s still angry about the notebook and I don’t want to make her angrier. Dr. Fine said relaxation and calm. I want to give her that. I plan to apologize at the appropriate time.

  HAVING RESIGNED MYSELF to a lifetime with children, I feel I’ve earned a little indiscretion. It’s all become too much for me. I am the one who reverses the baby steps. Never before have I wanted so badly to obliterate my mind.

  I seek solace in the friends I’m positive I’ve outgrown. I tell myself it’s just for one night, then back to the quest for adulthood. I need to turn my brain off. For a little while.

  David Liebman is mobile again. I hardly saw him all summer, but here he is again, limping around, dragging his feet, and talking about how great it is to be moving again, to be able to go wherever he pleases.

  “I’m a hostage set free from months of captivity,” he says. He is wearing blue spandex knee supports.

  “We’re proud of you,” I tell him.

  “You walk like a gimp,” Wally says.

  “Mobility factor isn’t a hundred percent,” David says.

  “Have you taken up volleyball?” Wally asks.

  David nods. He produces a small metal tin from his pocket and holds it aloft. “You should be nice to me,” he says. “I bring gifts.”

  “Praise,” I say.

  David opens the tin. Inside is a black, flaky mound of dried, crushed leaves. It looks like coal, shattered into a thousand tiny pieces.

  Salvia. Over the years, it has become a rare treat for us. Wally and I are both too unmotivated to track it down, but David knows a place online. Salvia is a completely legal herb that can be bought over the counter in some states. When vaporized with a high-temperature flame and smoked out of a bong, it induces anywhere from five to thirty minutes’ worth of monstrously intense visual hallucinations. Like taking LSD without the eight-hour commitment. I hate psychedelic drugs for that very reason: I don’t like surrendering so much control. I enjoy prescription meds to numb the senses and relax major motor muscles. I blow the occasional line. Once, I freebased Special K in college and spent the better part of a night yelling at furniture.

  Aficionados claim the Mazatec Indians in Oaxaca chewed salvia leaves to facilitate shamanic divination visions. I like to pretend I am part of this grand tradition. Lost in our woodland suburbia, divining my own future, interpreting omens thrust upon me by circumstances out of my control. Omens consisting of illness and genetics.

  Wally’s parents, Polish immigrants with an insatiable thirst for family history, have gone away to attend a genealogy conference in Tampa, where Victor, Wally’s father, is to deliver a lecture about the origins of his ancestry and the exhausting Czerkowski migration over the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, across the Kraków-Cze˛stochowa Uplands, coming, finally, to plant roots in the foothills of the Sudety. As a clan, the Czerkowskis had led an arduous existence before braving the Atlantic to prosper as fur coat salesmen. I have listened to both Victor and Wally go on and on about what life for their grandfathers and great-grandfathers was like. What struggles they overcame, how they survived.

  “Kogo to obchodzi,” I’d say. The only Polish I know. It translates roughly to, “I don’t care.”

  We rendezvous with Doug M. and the enigmatic Gabby, who I secretly hoped would be in attendance. We try our luck at the Public House, one of Tarrytown’s two bars. A large group of rowdy fraternity brothers begin to pantomime various athletic stances. We grow paranoid and self-conscious. We leave.

  We arrive at Wally’s around midnight. The house is empty and silent.

  The five of us settle into a large room in the basement.

  “I’m making this the entertainment center of the house,” Wally tells us.

  “The vibe here is interesting,” Doug M. says, surveying the room with a grand sweep of his hands.

  “This is a dungeon,” David says.

  A large TV on a wooden base, decrepit couches scattered about. A warped Ping-Pong table. A stereo system. Washer-dryer in the far corner. All of Wally’s records are on the floor, arranged in small stacks, occupying most of the open wall space. David hobbles to the record player. He selects and plays a series of old 45s. “Denise” by Randy and the Rainbows, “Then He Kissed Me” by the Crystals, “Walk Away Renee” by the Left Banke, “Gee” by the Crows. “Get a Job” by the Silhouettes. Others.

  Wally is in the middle of the room, legs crossed in the lotus position. Pretending to meditate.

  “I’m ready,” he says. He seems to think his mind is capable of achieving a higher level of functioning. I am in no position to tell him otherwise.

  “Bong’s in my bag,” David says, pointing to the knapsack he’s been carrying with him all night.

  “Nice,” Doug M. says. He presides over the room like a king. His throne, the couch.

  “Trumpets should announce your arrival,” I tell him.

  “They’re playing as we speak,” he says.

  Gabby is admiring the glasswork on David’s fifteen-inch bong, its red and blue designs swirling like webbing. I have to admit I hate bongs, always have. They fall too firmly into the realm of weed culture for my liking. I don’t really consider myself a stoner. In fact, I dislike the subculture of people whose identity revolves around their obsession with weed. They hang posters of Bob Marley and make sure to announce whenever the clock strikes 4:20. They wear hemp necklaces. They tout articles about the health benefits of marijuana and advocate its legalization. I don’t care about any of that. I just like to get stoned.

  “We need ice,” Wally says, springing to his feet. He darts off into another room and returns with his hands full of ice cubes, which he deposits in the chamber of the bong.

  “Excellent,” David says. He seats himself between Wally and Gabby on the rug. Doug M. and I join. A cultish-looking circle. David draws the tin of salvia from his pocket and stuffs a heapi
ng pinch into the bowl. He holds the butane flame to the stem. The flaky black leaves ignite, turn to glowing orange embers. The cylinder fills with smoke, and David yanks the stem, sucks the smoke up, and holds it for what seems like forever before expelling it into our faces. He coughs violently.

  “Harsh,” he manages to say.

  The bong makes its way around to everyone. We keep the burning smoke in our lungs for as long as we can. When we finish, Doug M. sets the bong down on the carpet and turns the TV on. PBS is showing a special about the usefulness of speed bumps.

  “Speed bumps,” Wally says. He erupts in a fit of laughter so vicious his eyes water and his face reddens. I join him, unable to keep myself from laughing, although I’m not exactly sure what we’re laughing at.

  “What is with those things?” I say through the tears streaming down my cheeks. I stumble to my feet and walk a few paces before falling to my knees in front of an end table. My eyes perceive a patterned layer of shimmering Day-Glo blobs on top of its lacquered surface. I see an ant, moving slowly, heading toward a ceramic lamp. The ant just inches its way along, beautiful and awe inspiring—the simplicity of unfettered travel. This ant is going somewhere. This ant has an objective, a purpose, like everything else in the world. The ant seems completely unfazed by the vastness around it, oblivious. I laugh even harder at this, roar with laughter, and suddenly, almost at the same moment, I realize how horrifying it is. I stand. My body tingles everywhere. All my appendages feel like they’ve fallen asleep. I see a pattern of golden spades across my skin. They pulse with a sunspottish intensity that keeps moving and changing. I am in a dream. My own dream about death and Wally’s basement. I can hear the dryer in the corner going and going. I am in a dream. I have died. This is what being dead is like. Death means you have no control over your body, it means your mind pulls you in the direction it wants to go and you have no choice but to follow it. My body wants to go to the right. Unseen forces in the room are pulling me to the right, toward the wall. I try to fight. It is impossible.

  “I can’t turn left,” I say. “Something’s wrong. I can’t turn left.”

  “You’re turning now,” Wally says.

  “You’re doing it,” Gabby says.

  “Something’s not right,” I say.

  I spin in a circle in the middle of the room, convinced I’m not moving at all.

  “Everything’s fine,” Doug M. says. He is lying facedown on the floor.

  “My eyes have a mind of their own,” I say.

  David comes over and puts his arms around me. “It’s cool, man,” he tells me. “Calm down.”

  I stumble in his embrace and together we slide to the floor. I try to remember what just happened, but my short-term memory has gone out the window. My face keeps pulling itself to the right and my eyes keep pulling themselves to the right. I rub my hands over my face, but I can’t feel a thing. I start to cry. I slap the ground. I am a child again, throwing a tantrum.

  “Cal,” Gabby says, “you’re fine. There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  She starts laughing while she is saying this and it scares me even more.

  “Don’t do that,” I say through my tears.

  “I’m not laughing at you,” she says. “I’m just . . .” She trails off, lost in a thought she doesn’t feel it’s necessary to explain. I want to see the hole in her head, but I’m afraid of what might happen if I take her hat off. I touch her shoulder. I squeeze her cheek.

  “Quit it,” she says. She pushes me away.

  “I want it to stop,” I say. “I want to go to the hospital.”

  “We can’t go to the hospital,” Wally says. He shakes his head. He stands up and goes to the wall. He sways in front of the dryer. He lowers his head to the metal, rests his face against it.

  “This is where it all happens,” he says.

  “I need medical attention,” I say, throwing my hands up in the air. “I can’t turn around and I’m dead. My heart stopped beating.”

  David is slouched in the La-Z-Boy. He seems so far away, completely unreachable. His legs in their shiny spandex knee supports are propped on the footrest. His eyes are falling from his head. He lifts a hand and waves it like a conductor’s baton. He looks up at the ceiling.

  “The roof is coming off,” he says.

  “Everything’s changing,” Wally says.

  Everyone seems to be traversing new landscapes of the mind, venturing to places larger than this basement room.

  I stumble to a standing position and do my best to exit. I head upstairs to the living room. There are no lights here and I bump into many things on my way to the couch. I fall to pieces, swallowed up by the cushions. I wipe tears from my face and curl into a ball. My eyes adjust to the moonlight. I can hear someone nearby. Gabby comes out of the shadows. She kneels down in front of my face, her eyes so green, so deep. Her baseball cap is pushed up off her forehead. The scar is visible, small and pinkish, round like a quarter, but her hair is falling across it in such a way that it seems completely natural. She was born to wear the scar. It is part of her DNA, her soul. The scar makes all the sense in the world right now, and through the tears, through the short-term memory loss and the needling sensation still plaguing my extremities, I focus on that one thing.

  “I’m dying,” I tell her.

  “You’re not dying,” she says. She touches my face, pushes my hair back with her hand.

  “Just rest,” she says. “Forget it. Try to sleep.”

  “I’m going to sleep,” I say. “I’m going to sleep forever.”

  And I close my eyes.

  When I wake, Gabby is in my arms. I’m not sure how this happened, but she’s there nonetheless. I am holding her. Her head is resting on my chest. We are fully clothed and the room is cast in shadows and pools of moonlight spilling in from the windows. Everything is blue. The grandfather clock ticks loudly. Carefully, so as not to wake her, I slide out of our embrace and stand. My head is swirling, the events of the night foggy and sticky and moving into the past. My crying episode seems a memory. The color spots are gone and I feel slightly normal again. I touch my chest, run my fingers down my arms, feel my legs, my calves. I check that my dick has not fallen off. As far as I can tell, I did not die. I am whole. I am happy about this discovery. There is still hope. I walk into the kitchen, go down the wooden steps, and follow the glow of the TV back to the room where everything started. David is asleep in the La-Z-Boy, reclined in the same position I had last seen him in. Doug M. is sprawled out on the floor, facedown, snoring loudly. An infomercial boasts a clothing steamer that can be owned for three easy payments of $29.95. Wally is nowhere to be found. I imagine at some point he made it to his bedroom.

  I return to the living room. I sit on the couch, not really knowing what to do. Gabby’s hat is on the floor. Her hair spills across her face. She stirs in her sleep and reaches out. Touches me. She gropes around and pulls me down into her arms. It happens very quickly, and before I know it, we are kissing. Wet, middle-of-the-night kisses caught in shadow worlds between waking and sleeping. Somewhere in pleasant limbo. She guides my hand to her breasts. Her T-shirt is off, and I have my mouth on her nipple, firm under my tongue. I brush my cheeks against her chest and yank her pants off with a fluid motion even I am startled by. It’s been a long time since I tasted a girl, but I haven’t forgotten how much I enjoy it. For a while, there seems to be no sound except our breathing. I run my hands over her ass. I explore every curve I encounter in the dark. When I finally put myself inside her, it seems like hours have gone by. She breathes so heavily into my ear that it feels like she’s trying to tell me something.

  “What?” I ask her, my voice flushed and throaty.

  “Fuck me harder,” she says. I consent. I fuck her harder and then I come.

  “Did I just come inside you?”

  “I’m on birth control.”

  “Thank God.”

  We dress slowly and fall asleep again in each other’s arms. There is only the f
aintest trace of pain from the scar on my shoulder.

  As I drift off, I wonder if the whole thing was a product of the salvia, of drugs. A mirage that will be gone by morning. Something done by ghosts. I wonder if either of us will remember it at all.

  TWO DAYS LATER, I call Doug M. on my lunch break and ask him how I can get ahold of Gabby.

  “I heard what you two did,” he says.

  “Just give me her number.”

  “Your girlfriend is a sensitive subject.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” I say. “It was just a onetime thing.”

  “You had a bad trip, my friend,” he says.

  “What’s the number?”

  “Get it yourself,” he says. “She’s at work as we speak.”

  “Oh, really,” I say.

  “Café Tarrytown,” Doug M. says.

  I hang up.

  I make the ten-minute drive down Route 9 from the John W. Manley School. I park in front of the café.

  “Be cool,” I tell myself before getting out.

  There are a few people scattered around at the tables, drinking lattes, eating sandwiches. Gabby is coming out from behind the counter with a soda in her hands when she sees me. Her baseball cap is pulled down over her eyes.

  “Hey,” she says. She stops, just stands there with the soda.

  “How are things?” I ask

  “Okay, I guess.”

  She brings the drink to an old man sitting alone near the windows. She goes back behind the counter. I follow her.

  “I never come to this place,” I tell her. I can’t really think of anything in the way of conversation.

  “I know,” she says.

  “I guess you would,” I say.

  “Want some food?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.” I look at the menu, written on a large chalkboard behind the cash register. “Veggie burger,” I tell her, “with fries.”

  She writes my order down and goes into the kitchen to put it through. I sit at an empty table, and when she comes back she sits across from me.

  “Wally’s in here all the time,” she says, wiping her hands on her apron.