Before You Go

by Tommy Butler

  “Mom, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that letter.”

  We were in the living room, sharing the newspaper—she worrying over local politics, me scanning the classifieds for employment. The moment I finished speaking, she dropped the paper and stood up.

  “Are you hungry?” she said cheerily.

  It was late afternoon, not yet dinnertime. My father was still at work at the shoe store. “Do you want to wait for Dad?”

  “He won’t mind.” She began to straighten up the loose pages of the newspaper, folding and stacking them neatly at one edge of the table.

  “About the letter—”

  “Water under the bridge,” she said, her voice quickening, her eyes cast downward. She continued to fold the newspaper until its creases looked sharp enough to cut glass. “You don’t have to apologize, Elliot. Your brother will be fine, and we didn’t expect you to stay in that job forever anyway. We know you were grateful for it.” She scuttled toward the kitchen. “So, how about breakfast for dinner? Triple play?”

  In our house, a triple play meant bacon, eggs, and pancakes, which was always my favorite kind of breakfast—or, in this case, breakfast for dinner, which was always my favorite kind of dinner. My mother knew this better than anyone, of course. I’m convinced that she also knew the truth about the letter, and that she would make me a thousand breakfasts for dinner before she would talk about it. If you’re lucky, people will love you in the way they know how.

  “Sure, Mom,” I said. “That sounds great.”

  By the time my father got home, the topic was closed for discussion, and I was halfway through a second helping of bacon. Unfortunately, the open classified pages prompted him to add another uncomfortable item to the agenda.

  “How’s the job hunt coming along?”

  “Poorly,” I said. “The economy’s too shaky. Everyone’s cutting back.”

  He nodded. “It’s a scary time for business owners. I’d say they could use a good advisor. Maybe this is your opportunity.”

  I looked up from my plate to make sure that I was speaking with my father—the same man who, when I had first suggested starting my own advisory firm, told me I didn’t know anything. Though, in fairness, that was years earlier. I’d no doubt learned much since then, even if the Vade Mecum was now a pile of ash.

  “I don’t have any capital.”

  “What capital do you need?” said my father. “It’s an advisory business. You have your brain, your words. We’ve got a computer in the den. No one needs to know you work out of your parents’ house—for now.”

  “Thanks, Dad, but I doubt skittish entrepreneurs will want to part with their money for my brain or my words.”

  “Business owners never think they need advice, even when they do. But they know they need a good accountant.”

  My heart sank. The last of the bacon lost its flavor in my mouth. “I was hoping to be more than that.”

  “You will,” said my father. “As time goes on, you’ll become exactly the trusted advisor you want to be. Just don’t tell them that’s what they’re really paying for. Be their advisor, but pretend that you’re just their accountant.”

  For two reasons, this proposed strategy stopped me cold. First, because I thought it might work. And second, because my father—the most rational, pragmatic, levelheaded human being I had ever known—had just told me to pretend.

  So I did. My first client, Laura, was a woman I knew in high school who had just opened a bakery. She paid me mostly in croissants, but it was a start. (The croissants were delicious.) I kept her books in order, taught her the basics of small-business finance, and impressed upon her the importance of playing by the accounting rules, like the one that required me to report said croissants as taxable income. (I didn’t.)

  Laura the baker was gracious, and grateful, eventually referring me to what would become my second client, then my third. My workflow grew steadily, if slowly, throughout that summer. I spent my free time refining my business approach, or visiting Sasha in the city. On Saturdays I continued to help my father at the shoe store—until that autumn, when, after we finished reshelving the day’s unwanted shoes, he announced that Dean had lost his job.

  “The whole firm shut down,” said my father. “Too many of those dot-com clients, I guess.”

  “Sorry to hear that.” And I was, even though I had seen it coming (or Matt had seen it coming), and even though Dean and I still hadn’t spoken since I quit. I briefly wondered what Dean had decided to do about cooking Satchel’s books, then decided I didn’t care.

  “I told him he could work at the store,” said my father. “Maybe even manage it someday, assuming he works hard and pays attention. I’m getting too old to be in here every day, especially on Saturdays.”

  I was angry. Of course I was angry. “Don’t be ridiculous,” my father had said when I had asked to come work at the store full-time. Now he was bringing in Dean to take over? Dean thinks brick-and-mortar is dead, I wanted to tell my father. But I didn’t. The truth was that I knew Dean would do a fine job, and my own business was not something I would have walked away from. I would, however, miss spending Saturdays at the shoe store.

  “Sounds like a good move, Dad.”

  “I’m glad you think so,” said my father. “Because I told Dean that if he was going to manage the business, I had one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That he hire you as an advisor.”

  “Well played, Papa Chance. Well played,” said Sasha after I told her. “Way to snatch the wind from the sails of protest.”

  “I don’t think he meant it that way,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I’m just teasing. He believes in you, in your dream. He knows you weren’t meant to run the shoe store.” She took a drag from her cigarette and stretched her legs out in front of her. We were sitting on her fire escape, our backs to the window, a blanket over our laps to ward off the late-autumn chill. “Still, I know it hurts. Sorry, Elliot.”

  “It’s fine. I should focus on my own thing anyway. I’m just about over living with my parents—not that I’m not grateful for them.”

  Sasha nodded. “And I’m just about over fire escapes,” she said, pulling the blanket up. “Not that I’m not grateful for them.”

  “We should move north,” I said, not exactly sure where this came from, but glad it did, all the same. I looked at Sasha. Her dark eyes gleamed with their typical mischief, but also—if I wasn’t mistaken—a hint of vulnerability.

  “Who?” she asked. “Us?”

  “Yeah. Me and you. Somewhere with trees.”

  “And thunderstorms,” added Sasha.

  Thunderstorms. Not many people seek out thunderstorms. (And if you’re really lucky . . . ) I would say that I fell in love with Sasha in that moment, but it wouldn’t be true. Maybe that was when I realized I already loved her. And anyway I wouldn’t call it falling, as if it were some plummet off a cliff, or the consequence of an inadvertent stumble. It was more like rolling down a gentle hill, the way you did in the summertime when you were a kid. The idea that Sasha and I might be together seemed as natural as gravity—and as easy to overlook, though it had been there the whole time.

  “Sure,” I said, meaning it. A smile came to my face, broadening until I started to feel a little silly. “And crickets,” I added.

  Sasha laughed. “Or at least a squeaky radiator.”

  Physicists say that we can never actually touch each other. Each atom that makes up our skin consists of immensely more empty space than physical matter, its central nucleus buried a proportionately vast distance from its outer edge (which isn’t really an edge at all). At most, when we think we touch, it is no more than the energy fields of spinning and indeterminate electrons acknowledging each other from afar. The appearance of solid contact is only an illusion. Be that as it may, I kissed Sasha then, and I kept kissing her, until I could no longer tell where my electrons ended and hers began.

  And if
I vanished for a second or two, so what.

  We did move north, Sasha and I, settling into a little house we affectionately refer to as the cottage. There are trees, and crickets, and a knoll out back from where we can watch the night sky, which sparkles for us in much the same way the lights of Brooklyn always did, albeit from across a wider, darker ocean.

  I keep an office in town, though my clients are farther flung, scattered over New England from New York to Boston. In a virtual world, it’s easy enough to advise and account from a distance, but I occasionally force myself onto the road to meet with clients in person, lest I become too unreal. When these sojourns take me as far as Manhattan, Sasha will sometimes join me, and we make sure to find a vacant fire escape somewhere along the East River, to watch the boats go by for a while.

  We also stop at one of the now six locations of Laura the baker, where her staff has standing orders to provision us with complimentary croissants (though Laura now pays her invoices in dollars). Dean, too, is still a client, with three more stores of his own. Since our father’s retirement, Dean has done an admirable job of running the business, though he still seeks my advice more than I would have predicted, calling once a week or so with a question about inventory or advertising or some such. Or maybe he just wants to talk to his brother. He’s married now, with two young sons who love their uncle more than I have any right to expect. One is a born outdoorsman, the other a budding musician, proving that the apples can indeed fall far from the tree.

  Sasha still writes copy for advertising campaigns, though on a part-time basis from the cottage, and only for products that she believes in, or at least doesn’t actively disdain. She has earned this selectiveness by the excellence of her work, which her employers have recognized many times over. As yet unbeknownst to them is the fact that she continues to drop coded messages into their advertisements, though these days the ciphers are rarely subversive—unless “love” is subversive, which maybe it is, a little. She also teaches language arts to sixth-graders on a substitute basis, where the first lesson she imparts is that substitute does not mean inferior.

  Despite my numerous attempts to change her mind, Sasha never published her novel. I finally had a single copy printed and bound, elegantly enough that she found it in her heart to forgive the transgression. The slim volume occupies an inconspicuous spot on the bookshelf in our living room, next to the photograph of Bannor and his family, which I had framed so that I could get a look at him once in a while. As it turns out, Sasha’s readership of one is a true fan. Her book rests on the shelf uneasily, as more than an occasional evening will find it open in my lap, competing with Henri for real estate and attention.

  It was on one such evening that I asked Sasha to marry me. A prodigious sneeze from Henri had startled me from my reading, and I looked up to see Sasha nestled into a corner of the couch with a crossword puzzle. She had recently cut her hair, and a rare sunburn colored her features, so that—for just an instant—I saw a stranger there. When I recognized her again, a flush ran through my skin, which I initially presumed to be exhaustion from a daylong hike in the hills. It took a moment, somehow, for me to recognize the feeling as happiness. It took not a moment more to know that I wanted to keep it.

  Sasha crinkled her brow at my proposal. “Why?” she asked.

  “I don’t want to lose you.”

  “We lose everything,” she said softly. “Eventually. Or it loses us.”

  She wasn’t threatening me, or dropping a hint. Nor was she arguing. She was proposing an idea and inviting me to explore it with her, like a path through the forest that we hadn’t yet taken together. I didn’t know what to say, except to agree. I thought of Esther, and Bannor, and the Shipmates from high school, and Amy from college, and everyone else that had drifted into—and then out of—my life. Nevertheless, Sasha’s response was not really an answer.

  “Is that a no?” I asked.

  “Sasha Chance,” she said aloud, as if trying it on for size. “It just sounds a little funny, don’t you think?”

  “You don’t have to change your name.”

  She looked at me earnestly. “I don’t want to bind you.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Not for your sake,” she said. “For mine. Every time you come home to me of your own free will, for no reason except that you want to—in that moment, I feel lucky, and honored, and happy. I don’t want to give that up.”

  Way to snatch the wind from the sails of protest. “Fair enough,” I said.

  “I’m being selfish,” she admitted.

  “No, I get it. I feel lucky and honored and happy, too.”

  And I do . . . sometimes. Often, even. It’s good, this life. Right? Anyone can see that it’s good. It is a life full of love and companionship, laughter and purpose.

  Yet it’s not. Full, that is. The emptiness persists, sometimes so slight that I can barely perceive it, other times expanding like a chasm in my chest, sucking at my rib cage, threatening to swallow me from the inside out. I don’t know why. I’m not sure if there is a why. Not that life doesn’t give you innumerable reasons to want out of it, but are they really the why? Does life not also give you innumerable reasons to want in? The calculus is beyond me—or else is undertaken by some part of me I can’t access, which periodically spits out an answer without revealing its work, an answer that is not always the same.

  Nor even predictably inconsistent. I’ve spent my share of days staring at the nadir of my emotional sine wave, looking for patterns. As far as I can tell, there are none. At times the emptiness seems to hail from the very core of my being. Other times it seems to lurk in the spaces between people, inextricably linked with our essential separateness—perceived or otherwise. When you leap sideways off the starting line, you can’t always expect others to do the same. (Sasha, for example, would no sooner lie in the snow than poke herself in the eye.)

  I have this dream.

  I am a character in Sasha’s novel—the main character, actually, along with Merriam and Jollis, two well-intentioned if somewhat bumbling sprites. The three of us are in the “Before,” in the sweeping, endless plaza of the Auction, where travelers bid so passionately for their future lives. I have just won the bidding on my own life. It hovers there before me—this brilliant curio—shining and throbbing and aching and bright.

  “It’s so beautiful,” I say to Merriam and Jollis.

  “Great!” exclaims Merriam, always the more exuberant of the two. “We’re glad you think so. You should be quite happy, with that attitude.”

  “Yes,” I say. “And I can’t wait to share it with everyone, all of it, step for step, so they, too, can see all of this beauty in exactly the same way.”

  “Oh dear,” says Jollis, more prone to reason than Merriam. “That may not work out so well.”

  Ultimately it seems to me that they’re both right. As Merriam might say, there’s nothing for it. Whether in me or in the spaces between us, the chasm abides. When it grows particularly wide, when I struggle to shore up the begirding edge of my existence, to keep it from crumbling into the maw, I climb down the rickety staircase to the basement of our cottage and, from a locked box on a high shelf, take out my stolen gun.

  I think of it as mine now, though I suppose it technically still belongs to Bannor’s old neighbors. The revolver hasn’t aged a day, owing in large part to the fact that it hasn’t been used, at least not in the manner for which it was intended. Rather than set my finger on the trigger, I drop to the concrete floor of the basement and rest the gun in my lap. Then I stare at it, feeling the weight of it against my legs, watching as it becomes heavier, more concrete, more real. I grow calm. It’s a relief, to be reminded that I don’t have to stay, that I can leave whenever I want.

  From within this narrow measure of peace, I can see that the chasm isn’t truly empty after all. There is sadness there, typically—or anger, or fear, or some other misery. No sooner do these emotions reveal themselves, however, than they begin to fade a
nd disappear. Starved for attention, perhaps, as I am by now wholly fixated on the revolver in my lap. I begin to shed other ephemera, too, and not just the undesirable. Joy dissolves as well as sorrow. Judgments and philosophies, thoughts of this or that, even the future and the past—all fall away until there is nothing but the gun and the emptiness. Then just the emptiness. Finally, even that disappears.

  I don’t know how long I stay like that, in the nothingness that is not nothingness. A second? A minute? A lifetime? It might be death, except that it’s not the end. From the absolute stillness, something inevitably seems to arise, often something almost comically trivial—if any bit of life can be considered so. Maybe I’ll have a sandwich, I’ll think. Or feed Henri. Or walk down to the creek and listen to the frogs, or check the paper for Sasha’s latest cipher. Some simple thing, usually. Just a moment.

  Which is all this really is, this life. A moment.

  This one, to be exact.

  And this one.

  And this one.

  Before

  In a room that is not a room, with walls that are not walls and a window that is not a window, Merriam reminds herself that she meant well. She recalls the ache with which she first beheld the fearsome beauty of the earth, how it overwhelmed her, so that she scarcely knew what she did next. But, no, that wasn’t entirely true. She knew what she was doing, what she did. Sort of.

  Besides, it doesn’t matter that she meant well, or that she now encourages the travelers to train for their lives, or that the travelers themselves bid so ardently for them, and line up at the compliment counter afterward. No number of excuses or mitigations can change the fact that the empty space, along with its attendant misery, is her fault. Nor is there reason to believe that the brass will see it any other way.

  By the time Jollis arrives, she is spinning with dread. “Where have you been?” she asks him. “I’ve been searching all over for you.”