I Swear I'll Make It Up to You

by Mishka Shubaly

  For someone who was maniacally well-spoken, his last words were maddeningly banal. I replayed his message over and over, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking straight from the bottle, straining to hear some clue, a hidden message, any bit of overlooked information that might explain how he could have so quickly and irrevocably disappeared. His was a near-constant presence in my unconscious and semiconscious hours. Allison found me in my basement apartment one morning, one shoe on and one shoe off, clutching the jean jacket Jacob’s mother had given me that still smelled like him.

  I stopped writing. I quit COME ON. I drank. A sailboat I was crewing on shipwrecked, and I narrowly escaped with my life. You may recall that something occurred in New York on the eleventh day of September in 2001. When the wind blew a certain way, you could smell the ruins in the air outside Don Hill’s: burnt concrete and steel, like you were grinding the form nails down inside a concrete cistern and had let the coarse wheel of the disc sander hit the concrete wall. Under that was another smell, a note of something organic decaying—the sickly sweet scent of rotting meat. Was that how it had smelled outside Auschwitz?

  I had tried to keep Allison at arm’s length, even as our lives grew entwined. To protect her, I told myself. But that dark winter, she needed me as I much as I needed her. She had been laid off shortly before 9/11, and finding a job after that cataclysm was impossible. Every year, she had treated herself to a Christmas wreath to hang on her wall, but as Christmas approached, she said aloud, mournfully, that she couldn’t justify it. I picked a wreath up the next day, the biggest, fluffiest one I could find. When she saw it hanging on the wall, she said, “Baby! It’s a Christmas miracle,” then burst into tears and fell into my arms.

  Allison and I labored through the winter to record an album with my old friend James, an album I was sure would bring my breakthrough. When we finished it . . . what, press up a thousand copies? No way, I probably still had nine hundred copies of the EP I’d made. I shelved it.

  I worked at the bar. I drank my wages. I had no plan, not even a fantasy. I had banked everything on graduate school transforming me. Nothing had changed. I was as broke, starving, and helpless as I had been when I’d entered school, but now crushed with $70,000 in debt. It was like that line from Jurassic Park: I was so preoccupied with whether I could go to Columbia that I never considered whether I should. Yes, the most insightful line about the hole I was in was from a fucking dinosaur movie.

  Writing? I hadn’t written a word since Jacob’s death. What for? Writing was just another hopeless bulwark against the darkness slavering to claim us. Your precious fancy words, your Salman Rushdie, your David Foster Wallace, your Edmund Wilson . . . when the world narrowed to a pinhole, the smartest thing you could say was just “Badeep badeep badeep, that’s all folks.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Are We Going to Be Judged on These Lonely Deeds?

  Jacob had completed his coursework days before he died. He had gotten through enough of a novel to satisfy the writing requirement for the fiction MFA. I petitioned the university to allow Jacob to graduate posthumously. It wasn’t a small ask, the dean made clear. I told him I would edit Jacob’s thesis as if it were my own. After a couple of days’ deliberation, I got word back. If I delivered his thesis in satisfactory condition, Jacob would receive his MFA posthumously, the first time the school had made such an arrangement. It was sad, to be there with him on the page, but I dug in. Something was at stake.

  I lost four days in February celebrating my twenty-fifth birthday. I cried in Allison’s bed when I realized I had missed a crucial meeting regarding Jacob’s thesis. I was so fucked up, I couldn’t come through for my dead friend.

  I would take a year off drinking. Alcoholics couldn’t quit drinking for a year, right? My sister Tatyana’s first baby arrived three days after my decision to start anew. When she told me his name over the phone, I jumped and threw a fist in the air, denting the low tin ceiling in my kitchen in Brooklyn: Mika.

  When I was one, Tatyana, two years older, had dragged me around, calling me “my Mika.” When she decided to name her child after me a quarter century later, her gesture touched me and unsettled me. In a way, I would have the child I had wondered about, the child I had yearned for and feared, the child I had taken grim measures not to have. Later, I wondered cynically if she intended him as a do-over for the first Mika, whom she had been unable to retain control over. No, I couldn’t let this go dark. Mika was a being the same age as my sobriety. Mika was a fresh start.

  As my year of sobriety progressed, I worked to distance myself from the man I had been. I landed a job booking the bands at Luxx, a hip club in Williamsburg. The owner, Eben, was sober and decided to give me a shot when he heard I’d recently stopped drinking. I built a reputation for being tough, fair, and endlessly supportive of the bands. I opened a checking account, then a savings account. I made Mika the prime beneficiary, should something happen to me. I forced myself not to obsess about Riley. Once, I capitulated and googled her name in the middle of the night. It kicked up a picture of her smiling wanly next to a midget dressed as a leprechaun. That could only be interpreted as a warning.

  I finally began to relax into being Allison’s man. She’d seemed sweet but bland when I’d first met her, with her long denim skirts, her conservative haircut, her passive silence. But she was sharp and funny and fun, and as she grew more comfortable with me, her wit came out more often, usually when I least expected it. As I hesitated in front of the chips rack at the bodega one day, she called me out.

  “Everything okay over here? You look like you’re puzzling over a Scrabble word. Too many consonants?”

  “No. I just . . . I can’t decide if I want Cool Ranch Doritos or the regular kind. Look, it’s says they’re now Nacho Cheesier.”

  “A real Sophie’s Choice, isn’t it?” She patted my hand and walked away.

  Allison was so gifted musically—how was it that people thought of me as the musician? It was miraculous to watch the transformation that came over her when she sat at the piano, the unassuming girl become instrument, music gushing forth from her. I tried to encourage her to come out of her shell, to be more invested in her artistic life, to pursue the music that was clearly so important to her. I bought her an acoustic guitar and encouraged her songwriting efforts, even recording and producing an EP of her songs. It felt good.

  As the spring wore on, Allison and I rubbed up against each other, in desire and frustration. In the great constriction that followed 9/11, Allison had been unable to find a new job. Unemployment checks had gotten her through the winter, but she was running out of options, out of money, and out of hope. She lost it one night, weeping helplessly as I tried to console her. The next day, I forced her to accept a loan of $500. I called my boss at Luxx, and he made some calls. The next day, she had a job. I had come through again, like I had with Jacob’s thesis. It felt great.

  But the job—waiting tables at a new soul food restaurant in Williamsburg—didn’t provide a lot of hours. Allison wanted to make music together; she wanted to go to the beach together; she wanted to just hang out and do nothing together. I couldn’t—we couldn’t—because I had to work.

  Was the job that demanding, or did it provide me a distraction from a life I didn’t know how to live? Sobriety had alienated me from the songs I’d written without quelling the urge to make music. I felt like a reporter with nothing to report. Staring at my schoolbooks, my neglected notebooks, I felt fear and shame. I was trapped in the space between, not quite one thing and not quite the other, anxious and irritable and easily angered.

  God, if I was this bad when I was sober, I must have been a nightmare for Allison to be around when I was drinking. How lucky was I that she had stuck it out, propping me up nights, nursing me in the mornings. Riding the bus together one day, I apologized to her again for how I had treated her when I was drinking.

  “Mishka, stop,” she said.

  “You’re too forgiving. I just . . . I feel really
horrible for how I was for so long. But I swear, I will find a way to make it up to you.”

  “Mishka, I’m not letting you off the hook. There’s nothing for me to forgive.”

  “But, I mean, all those times I was so shitfaced . . .”

  Allison shrugged.

  “It was fine. You were never mean. When you were drunk, you were sweet. You would say the most romantic things to me. You tipped the girl at Burger King one day. And then, the next morning . . . you needed me. I wouldn’t change a minute of it.”

  “Wait. Are you saying I treated you better when I was drinking than I do now?”

  Again, she shrugged.

  “Maybe.”

  That stuck in my head. I didn’t drink, but we smoked weed one night. Then we did ecstasy. Then I started taking pills on my own.

  The first time I held Mika, my miracle son, my ghost made flesh, I was high on cough syrup and Adderall, and I’d been up for two days. I’d made no travel plans for the winter holidays. Christmas had been irredeemably ruined for me by that rotten twenty-four hours of the shooting and the divorce. I intended to spend it alone, as I had many before. But under increasing pressure from my family, I bought a last-second ticket to California, departing on Christmas Day.

  My buddy Ethan invited me over for Christmas Eve dinner with his family. Leery as I was of holidays, strangers, grown-ups, and socializing without alcohol, I forced myself to be gracious and accept.

  Dinner was fine, good even. Ethan and his family were welcoming, and the food was delicious. Dessert was a thick, sugary trifle, and I felt a tiny squirm of pleasure in the back of my head. I didn’t notice what I was enjoying so much until my second piece. The layers of cake were soaked in brandy. Carefully not thinking, I ate a third piece.

  While driving my roommate’s truck home, I could almost hear a buzzing at the base of my skull, something alive in there, alive and hungry. It had been a mistake to eat the trifle. It had been a mistake to accept the invitation to dinner. It had been a mistake to even leave the house at this time of year.

  My phone rang. Armand, my connection. I picked up. Whoops.

  “Yo, Merry Christmas, man.”

  “Watup, son, Happy Hanukah and all that jizz. What you doing?”

  “Just ate with Ethan and rolling home.”

  “I got some of that shit you like in.”

  Adderall.

  “Armand, it’s Christmas Eve.”

  “. . .”

  I had money.

  “Ahmn. Fuck, I’ll be over in a minute.”

  Back at my Bushwick apartment, I cut pill after deep blue pill of Adderall into fine lines and snorted them off a CD case while brutally chafing my cock to hardcore porn on my computer. Not great, I knew, but at least I wasn’t drinking.

  Tremors of pleasure ran through my body, like a woman was lightly raking her nails over my skin. More exciting, though, was the feeling of pleasure to come. Some amazing thing was about to take place. An epiphany. It got closer and closer and closer . . . until finally the feeling began to dwindle without The Amazing Thing ever happening.

  The room began to gray. Was something happening to my vision? I glanced over at my windows, covered with thick black curtains Allison had sewn. I stood up from my chair and almost fell over. I had been sitting so long my legs had fallen asleep. I stumbled over to the window in my boxers and pulled the corner of a curtain back: morning. Fuck. I went back to my desk and snorted another bright blue line. I’d sleep on the plane.

  After I packed, I crept out to the Duane Reade and bought a four-ounce bottle of generic maximum-strength cough syrup. I felt good, rebellious, subhuman. Everyone was desperate for the shitty drugs that dealers deigned to sell you for too much money if you were lucky enough to know somebody. Nothing like the pushers forcing it on you I’d seen in the movies. You had to scramble, you had to plead, you had to crawl. Fuck them all—the thuggy, condescending dealers, the skittish indie-rock kids lecturing me to “be chill,” my idiotic friends who thought coke was cool, my idiotic friends who thought it wasn’t. Fuck them all. I was scoring from the drugstore.

  I hadn’t done cough syrup in a while, but, hey, it was Christmas. This would be my present to myself. It’s not like I was drinking. I would be down by the time I got to California. Or down-ish. Or I’d figure it out when I got there.

  I pounded the bottle of cough syrup in the back of the car service on the way to JFK. Clouds cinematically darkened the sky. By the time I’d made it through security, the cough syrup was coming on strong. I glanced at a floor-to-ceiling window and noticed I was walking sideways like a crab. If I could make it onto my plane, I would be okay.

  When I got to my gate, I ducked into a bathroom. I shuffled into a stall, locked the door, and sat down on the toilet. Could I really be this fucked up?

  Between my feet, a huge drill bit at least four inches in diameter chewed its way up through the floor, giving off sparks and tattered wafts of green vapor. That can’t be right, I thought. The bit reversed itself and ground its way back into the floor, leaving no trace. Get on the plane, just get on the plane.

  When I emerged from the sanctuary of the bathroom, I had to close one eye in order to read the flashing red display over the gate. My flight had been delayed indefinitely.

  I tried to discreetly look around for a place to sit down. I felt like I was tossing my head wildly back and forth like a drowning horse, my eyes bulging.

  There. Seated on a bench ten feet away was Francesca, a bartender from Mars Bar, the open sore of a bar where Zack worked as a barback. Francesca had taken care of us more than once after a night had devolved into chaos.

  “Francesca,” I whispered urgently and fell into the seat next to her.

  “Oh my God, Mishka,” she said and hugged me.

  “I am so fucking glad to see you. I’ve been up all night, and I’m so fucked up.”

  “Me too,” she hissed in my ear.

  We hugged each other tightly, then couldn’t bring ourselves to let go, as if we were the only thing anchoring each other to the earth. We sat there together for a long time.

  Hours later, I made it onto my plane, peaking on cough syrup, barely able to parse language or stand upright. Sleep was impossible. Every time I closed my eyes, my vision exploded into painfully vivid colors. I put my headphones on with no music, just so no one would talk to me, and stared at the gray nubbin on the back of the plane seat holding the dinner tray in place. Tatyana was going to freak out if I was this fucked up when we landed.

  Jesus, could two children be more different than Tatyana and I? I must have been a nightmare for her, ending her reign as only child, then suddenly bigger and louder than she, the Second Who Would Be First. I skipped a grade, so she was pushed to do two years in one. The year she was graduating high school for college, I stole her thunder by leaving high school early for Simon’s Rock. By the time of the shooting and the divorce, we had already been strangers to each other for years. What had happened, and when?

  Trapped on the airplane, staring at the back of the seat in front of me, I saw her without even closing my eyes, maybe five years old, a pretty little girl in the back yard in a long dress of white fabric printed with hibiscus blossoms, smiling shyly, a real hibiscus flower from my mom’s garden tucked into her hair. Was there already nervousness behind her smile then, or had the years just inserted it into my memory?

  Tatyana had been able to do something I could not. She could play quietly. She could behave. Tatyana could be good. That was beyond me. I wanted to—I would have done anything to be good—but it was impossible. I could not control myself. To see her doing it so effortlessly, well, I think that just drove me insane.

  But it hadn’t been effortless. She put herself under incredible pressure to be good, to not disappoint anyone, and because of that, she was ready to snap at you for the slightest thing. That summer in the Virgin Islands when I was twenty, I remember bitching about her to Mom. What Tatyana and I were fighting about, I can’t
even remember.

  “Mom, she’s impossible! You know that! Don’t ask me to be a well of patience.”

  “Mishka, don’t you understand? That is exactly what I’m asking of you. She’s your sister, for God’s sake.”

  Well, shit, Mom, don’t you ever get sick of being right all the time?

  The divide between Tatyana and I had only deepened over the years. Tatyana got excellent grades, excellent comments, excellent test scores. I killed the standardized tests, as I understood that they were important, but my greatest concern in school was exerting the least amount of effort possible. When I did get good grades, I did it only as a raised middle finger to my classmates, either thick or spineless, and my teachers. They could give me study hall, detention, inside suspension, outside suspension, talk shit on my report card—call me “juvenile,” “immature,” “disruptive,” “hyperactive”—but I would force them to give me that A.

  Now here I was, with a master’s degree from a fancy-schmancy Ivy League school . . . running a rock club. So not necessarily kicking ass, but at least I was trying. Tatyana lived on a military base, married and popping out kids with a marine who had proposed to her in a Denny’s. She was a normal. Jesus, Tatyana, the world has more to offer you than Toby Keith, and you have more to offer it than scrapbooking!

  What was worse, she had been better than me. Whenever we had gone head-to-head, she’d won. I finished the test first, but she got every single question right. I got to the bottom of the ski hill first, but the instructor complimented her on her “perfect form” in front of our ski class. She’d fulfilled Dad’s wishes by becoming an electrical engineer like him, pulling down a fat salary. I had changed my major from theater to film to creative writing and finally wound up flipping burgers or answering phones for beer money. An overpriced master’s I could never pay for had only upgraded me to grubbing in bars. I disdained the life Tatyana had chosen, but, once again, she had won. She had made Mom and Dad proud. She had found a partner, and she’d found her place. Tatyana had even named her child after me, for Christ’s sake, and I had no fucking idea who I was.