I Swear I'll Make It Up to You

by Mishka Shubaly

  Nothing had changed in ten years. No new construction, no new signs, no new grass off the shoulder. No one had even painted their houses.

  Our house had been rundown, always too cold or too hot. The basement leaked and stank of mildew and cat piss. But right out our back door, there were miles and miles of woods. John Bakie, the old farmer who lived across the way from us, had sworn to me that he’d never sell the land behind our place as long as he lived. I had fled into the woods nearly every single day. One day I taught my black Lab, Katie, how to eat blackberries off the bushes. She got the low ones, and I got the high ones. We must have stayed out there for hours.

  When we rounded the last corner before my old house, I saw that all the woods had been clear-cut and the soil tilled. Nothing grew there at all. Only one tall, lonely tree had been left standing behind our house. It made the barren landscape look more ruined than if there had been no trees at all.

  “This is it,” I said. “Pull over. Here.”

  Shannon pulled the car over so abruptly it skidded in the dirt. She gave me a scared look.

  “Wait here. I’ll be right back,” I said and hopped out.

  I walked out into the dirt where the woods used to be, toward the lone tree. There was nothing else to walk to. A board was still tacked to its base. Jesus, I remembered this tree. I had made a half-assed attempt to build a tree fort off it. That someone had chosen to spare this specific tree . . . it made me so fucking angry. Was someone taunting me?

  Our old house was the only one on the road that had been painted. Not just painted but transformed, from its gloomy, coffee-grounds brown to a sunny daffodil yellow, a perfect contrast to how it made me feel.

  I leaned on the tree and stared at the house, my eyes burning. They say you can’t go home again, and that’s not true. You can, but you will find strangers living there, and they will have changed everything you loved, everything that made the place home to you.

  It’s not unusual for a young man to revisit his childhood home and want to buy it back from the new owner. I had no such desire. We had hated it here, but that hadn’t lessened the humiliation of being exiled. I had no desire to return in triumph, to parade through the streets. I wanted to carpet bomb the entire town. No, too quick. I would finance a meth lab or two and watch the place rot slowly from the inside out. Corpses riddled with sores, soil sown with arsenic, dead livestock poisoning the wells . . . I wanted this backwater as ravaged and ruined in the physical world as it was in my heart.

  The bankers had tricked us. They had told my mother she had to miss a payment before she’d be considered for refinancing, and then they had foreclosed. Which person had made the decision to throw us out of our home? I imagined a small, detail-obsessed man, his life constricted around money, dedicated to stockpiling it as a useless barricade against loneliness. A man whose sole responsibility was to push glaciers of money around with a keystroke or a ballpoint pen. A man with no thought for whom the movement of these glaciers might isolate or starve or trap or mangle or kill. Had he used the money he made from ruining our lives to buy a hot tub? A motorcycle? Were we ejected by something as trivial as a line through a field in a spreadsheet, a checkmark in a tiny box, a zero instead of a one, a clerical error, a typo?

  The paperwork must still exist, filed away in a damp basement somewhere, gnawed by mice, peppered with their droppings. Kingston was a small town. The man probably still lived in the area. I could find his address, track him down. I would illustrate for him how a life could be ruined with a ballpoint pen, a death of a thousand punctures. I would kill him the way he’d killed me, so that he felt the dying in tiny increments. Let the pain mount so he genuinely feared his death until that perfect moment when he was so overwhelmed that he finally prayed for that which he feared most just to be released from pain.

  I was shaking. I forced myself to take a breath. Was this all that was available to me, my response in any situation—rage? We had been happy here, sometimes. Between icy feuds, Tatyana and I had played epic games of badminton as the sun went down, giggling and tumbling into the soft grass until it was so dark we couldn’t see. We’d gone sledding down the steep hill behind the garage, all three of us in a pile on a flimsy plastic saucer, Tashina screaming from the minute we pushed off until the very moment we hit the jump at the bottom, our three bodies separating for a brief, terrifying moment before hammering down on each other and the hard snow. It hurt—it always hurt—but we did it again and again. Nothing felt better than your own blood touching you, even violently. How long had it been since I’d spoken to either of my sisters? A year? Years?

  Before he ran away, Chuong and I had spent hours and hours in the Kingston House of Pizza in town. It came back to me, blissfully unchanged, the warm air smelling of rising dough and melting cheese. Chuong and I must have pumped hundreds of dollars’ worth of quarters into the Tetris arcade game. The song played in my head, and I could see Chuong dancing, imitating the little Russian dancer on the screen. Sweet, funny, crazy Chuong, the older brother I’d always wished for, ten years gone. I’d made halfhearted attempts to locate him several times over the years but finally had to strangle that hope. Chuong had been lost forever. He was in prison; he had been deported; he was dead. He had come into this world with so much working against him. Not everybody makes it.

  Behind the old house was a crooked apple tree. At its base, my mother had dug a hole and buried our old dog Princess. As a boy, I found dogs as magical as some girls find horses. I had a poster of all the major breeds; I could name their characteristics and identify them by sight. In Canada, I had whined and pled with my mother for a dog till finally she agreed to take me to the animal shelter—not to get a dog, just to play with the dogs there. As soon as we pulled up, I began wheedling anew for one of the puppies barking at our car through the chain-link fence.

  “We already have the cats. Your dad said we can’t get a dog,” she said. “But if we do, we’re getting that one.” She pointed at a narrow dog the size and color of a small deer with huge, emotive amber eyes: Princess. My father was not amused when we brought her home that day.

  God, we had adored her. I thought about Princess’s body—her tufted fur that made her hind legs look like the legs of a faun, the line of longer, thicker hair that ran down her spine, the fine, soft fur on her head that we delighted in standing up in a Mohawk, whiskers like an overgrown mouse’s, her sleek, glossy, dainty ears, her crooked stub of tail, most of it hacked off with an axe or a knife by her previous owner, her thoughtful, pained amber eyes . . . Now just a pile of years-old bones rotting in someone else’s backyard. Her head had been so refined, her forehead sloping gently into her long graceful nose, like the head of some small aquatic horse.

  It was too unfair that a stranger had custody of her remains. But what would I do if I had access to the property and no one else was around, dig her up? I followed that morbid, impossible thought. They could line her skull up against those of twenty other dogs, and I would be able to pick her out, even now, because she was one of a kind, and I had loved her that hard. She was so close. It was all so close. And still irretrievably lost.

  I had wanted nothing more than to leave this place forever, but somehow being exiled had trapped part of me here forever. I stumbled through the wet, useless dirt back to the car, its headlights just a bright smear through my tears.

  In the fall, I started at Columbia. My teachers were brilliant, not just insightful but so full of books that they spoke almost exclusively in quotes. My classmates were roundly disappointing. I had hoped to stumble upon another Simon’s Rock, a school of brilliant lunatics with oversized lives. The Columbia kids were uniformly white, wealthy, and restrained, their dreams as safe as milk—landing a professorship or maybe moving to Connecticut to grow tomatoes, raise children, and write. I had loved writers invested in life, Harry Crews and Flannery O’Connor and Jack Henry Abbott, not language theorists like Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis. They had read more than I had, and maybe they w
ere smarter, but God, they were as dull as dirt.

  Shannon left me in a rage. She was angry enough when she moved out that she paid a couple of my classmates to move the furniture she was abandoning out to the street so I couldn’t use it. A wino helped me move it back in. When I offered him a handful of change, he said, “Nah, that’s all right, big man. You looked like you could use the help.”

  I went to class. I went to practice. I wrote. I blacked out after shows, waking up on the couch at James and Zack’s apartment, waking up in the practice space, waking up on my floor just inches from my mattress. I did sound engineering for NPR at the Radio Foundation, producing sessions with Ed Bradley, Kofi Annan, Stephen Sondheim, Anthony Bourdain, and Judy Blume. I got mistaken for homeless while barely conscious on the sidewalk outside Motor City bar. I did catering gigs; I worked security; I did marketing focus groups; I got paid to take a series of MRIs. I attended every department mixer and collegiate function in order to get blitzed on shitty wine and fill my pockets with hardening cheese cubes and softening grapes.

  I interned reading the slush pile at the New Yorker. I got hustled for gay porn. I built myself a tent in the living room and rented out the bedroom to bring my rent down to $200 a month and still had to borrow $1,000 from James’s parents in order to stay solvent (a loan they were too kind to let me repay). I chewed ice cubes to curb my hunger, and I recall wondering if I could eat my own hair. At semester’s end, I retrieved dry goods that departing undergrads had thrown in the trash.

  With great shame, I accepted money from my mother, who had gotten a job working at one of the resorts on St. John. She was happy to give it, she said. Great things were just around the corner for me, she knew it.

  Mom was right. Almost weekly, I got tantalizing encouragement. An editor at Harper’s magazine said my short story was promising despite its flaws. An editor at the New Yorker said another story contained “masterful lines,” but it went without saying that they wouldn’t publish it. And Mom was wrong. My drinking brought on bizarre afflictions; heat rash, a mouth full of boils, lips so swollen I couldn’t leave the house, aching and blotchy hands and feet. I smashed a whiskey bottle with my right hand, and when I woke up, my apartment looked like a scene out of a slasher movie. It cost my school insurance $5,000 to get my hand stitched back together by a plastic surgeon. Everywhere I went—trying hard not to ralph in the Condé Nast building, reading Virginia Woolf on the way to band practice, locking myself in the bathroom with the DTs before my literature seminar with Pulitzer Prize–winning MacArthur Fellow Richard Howard—I felt crushed between my good self and my bad self, as they collided and strained against each other.

  At my summer job licking envelopes for mailers for a DVD production house, I developed a crush on the receptionist, Allison. I talked to her whenever I could screw up the courage. We had nothing in common. She had perfect posture, perfect carriage, perfect hair. As she walked to the photocopier with unassuming grace, she smelled of shampoo and hope. I slumped, I slouched, I shuffled, I stank. She had gotten her master’s in opera and was a gifted pianist, singer, and songwriter. I could barely play guitar, and my voice was an amusical groan, a bull walrus in mourning. Her father was an English professor; her mother was a mom; her parents still lived together in the house where she had grown up; her best friend was the girl next door. I didn’t just want Allison, I wanted her entire life.

  The vibe during band practice that summer oscillated between resignation and desperation as we failed to make any headway. I had begun to chafe under James’s leadership. As my ideas for the band were rejected with increasing frequency, I invested more in the songs I was writing on my own. I four-tracked an EP of boozy rants in my room, Thanks for Letting Me Crash, and used student loan money to press a thousand CDs. I was still grimly obsessed with Riley, and I fantasized about taking a bus to DC and leaving CDs everywhere in hopes that one would find her and she would hear the songs I’d written for her. Would she take me back? Would she reach out to me so I could spurn her? I didn’t know. The fantasy ended with her hearing the songs and knowing how deeply she had hurt me.

  I booked a CD release party at a tiny bar in Brooklyn in January and ran copies of the CD to the Village Voice and New York Press with no hope of them writing about or even listening to it. The show was a mess. The band I’d put together was drunk and ill rehearsed, and we were plagued with sound problems, but I sang every song to Allison, standing quietly in the back. After we had broken our gear down, she came and found me.

  “I have to go, but I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed your show.”

  “You’re leaving? You can’t leave.”

  People were packed in tightly at the tables around us, and they immediately started rooting for me.

  “Stay! He wants you to stay!”

  “I want to stay, but I have to go all the way back up to the Upper West Side, and I have to get up early tomorrow to go to Rochester.”

  “He likes you! You know he likes you!”

  “Just stay for one more drink. C’mon, I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “A free drink! That’s true love!”

  “I can’t, I’ve already stayed too late. I’m sorry.”

  Fuck it, then. I grabbed her and dipped her back and kissed her hard. The bar roared.

  After Allison left, a reporter showed up from the New York Press. She had heard my CD, really wanted to write about it, and was heartbroken that she had missed the show. I went home with her, but I was too drunk to get it up. In the morning, I couldn’t come. The reporter apologized as she was showing me out—she couldn’t write about the CD now as it would compromise her journalistic integrity—but she wanted me to know that she really had loved it. Yes, I had potential—potential to ruin anything.

  Allison and I started hanging out, then sleeping together, then dating. Sex with her, even filthy sex, felt fresh and clean, health giving, like eating a nectarine. There was no obstacle between her and her pleasure, nothing blocking her tenderness for me. The term “making love” angered me because it was such a deceitful euphemism for the seedy, manipulative grinding I’d experienced. But with Allison, that genteel phrase almost made sense. When we finished, I felt only gratitude and a strange good feeling radiating outward: happiness? I couldn’t get used to it.

  Nearly all the girls I’d ever slept with had something broken inside. They’d been raped or molested or beaten up or, at the very least, betrayed, taught to hate their bodies, their desires. Shannon had been belittled by a boyfriend as “dirty” because she wasn’t a virgin. A girl at Simon’s Rock had had long, thick scars across her breasts where a boyfriend had slashed her. I’d had a crush on a girl with scoliosis in a poetry class in Colorado, a crush she’d shared, but her father had raped her for years. We could only get shitfaced and stare at each other.

  I couldn’t understand Allison and her uncomplicated relationship with her history, her life, her self. We had all been the victims of some evil—hadn’t she? After a couple of weeks, I tried to withdraw. She laughed it off. A month later, I tried again.

  Allison was singing as she washed the dishes. I loved it when she did that. I felt terrible for what I was about to do. I waited till she finished her song, savoring our last moment together.

  “So . . . I think we should probably stop doing what we’ve been doing.”

  Allison dried her hands on a dishtowel, then draped it over one shoulder. She turned around, leaned up against the tiny wedge of counter in her apartment, folded her arms, and looked at me.

  “You like me. I like you. Why do you keep trying to do this?”

  “I just . . . I don’t know. I . . . I feel bad.”

  “Why do you feel bad?”

  “You’re so nice and so good. And I’m . . . well, not nice or good.”

  “You’re nice to me. I don’t want to be good all the time. You’re fun. Face it, dude. We get along. Quit trying to fight it.”

  “I just . . . I don’t want to ruin your life.”
>
  She smiled.

  “What makes you so sure I’m not going to ruin yours?”

  She shook her head, then turned back to the dishes.

  In early 2001, I ran into Jacob, one of the few friends I had made in the writing program, in the university library.

  “Hey, man, how’s it going? How was your break?” I said.

  “Well . . . the social mores of casual New York City interactions dictate that it is gauche to answer that question with any dour or depressing or even specific personal information. So I am fine, and my break was also fine.”

  Jacob always spoke that way. He could not have made it any clearer that he had a secret he desperately needed to tell. With little prompting, he confessed. He had gotten hooked on speedballs, a combination of intravenous heroin and cocaine. He’d spent his winter break in rehab in Minnesota.

  Jacob had shared his secret with me because he needed help, and he knew he could trust me. Though I was barely keeping my own head above water, I tried to repay his faith in me by helping him stay clean. We grabbed lunch twice a week and got together some weekends. When he fucked up, I’d drag him into an empty classroom to yell at him and spell out exactly what he was headed for. If you fuck up when you’re quitting drinking, you lose the progress you’ve made and have to start over. If you fuck up when you’re quitting heroin, you die. He made it a week clean, then two weeks, then a month. We were going to be okay.

  When our classes ended at the beginning of May, I celebrated to the point of oblivion nearly every night at Don Hill’s, a rock club where I worked as a barback. For two weeks, Jacob and I played phone tag. Without my continual harping, Jacob backslid one night and got high. The day after he died, my pager beeped and delivered a message from the other side: “Hey, what’s up man, this is Jake. Just calling . . . so we should definitely get together soon.”