Tumbledown

by Robert Boswell

  She still had that fake accent, Violet thought. “We took a tour this morning,” she said. They had strolled the grounds and eaten in the cafeteria. They had not even seen Jimmy’s office. “It was interesting, but we didn’t meet any of the patients. I understand that might be impossible or inappropriate.”

  “Oh, well, it’s not that,” John Egri said, and he seemed to say more, but Violet couldn’t hear him. He was so soft-spoken that she wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake him.

  Lolly, quite sensibly, ignored him. “You were gone so long,” she said to Violet, “I thought maybe the Calamari Cowboys had run you out of town.”

  At some point during their acquaintanceship, Violet had confessed to Lolly her shameful secret: she did not like rock music. The secret had been exposed while she was in high school, and the revelation had led to endless invitations from well-meaning boys to listen to one hateful song or another. I guarantee you’ll like this one, they said, and along came Guns N’ Roses or Beck or Nirvana or Radiohead or “Freebird” or “Cowgirl in the Sand.” She had been a quiet girl, which many of her peers and teachers misinterpreted as shyness. She was actually fairly comfortable with herself, by teenage standards. She was pretty but not popular, and while she was a good student, she had not joined any of the clubs or societies. She had a few friends. She dated. But she never went in for that gushing quality that seemed quintessentially teenage. Much of her senior year, she had dated a boy who was gay—great company and he didn’t mind that she hated U2.

  And yet she went off with one of the boys—just the one. Give it a spin, he said. You don’t have to like it. Robbie Kearns. She tried to remember the song he played for her. Not that it had anything to do with choosing him. She was ready to have a real boyfriend, and he adequately fit the bill. Brave enough to slip his hands beneath her clothing and reasonable enough to accept directions.

  Oh, yes, the Beatles, “I Am the Walrus.” She had not liked the song but it had been an unpredictable choice, at least.

  There was never a long silence when Lolly was around. Violet had told her about her desire to see the Pacific Ocean, and Lolly used it now in the conversation. Here was another annoying trait of Lolly’s, her appropriation of another’s desires, dreams, even words. Not to mention family members.

  “I’d like to see the sun set in the ocean,” Lolly said. “I grew up on the wrong coast for that. And I want to get inside the heads of these patients—the kind James works with. I want to know where he’s putting his energy.”

  “He’d better reserve some of that energy for you.” It was the same fellow who had been speaking all along. The American capacity for crassness was stunning, as was Lolly’s terrible gift for flirtation. She gave the fellow a long look and then smiled, displaying her gleaming bank of white teeth. “Bloody right, he better.”

  Billy’s peyote vision involved creatures from the natural world speaking English, though he could never quite catch their lips moving. “Always behind my back,” he said, “as if they knew I couldn’t handle seeing where the words were coming from.” He inhaled deeply on the joint and passed it to Mick Coury.

  Mick liked the smell of marijuana, especially from a distance. He took in another lungful of smoke and tried to hold it. They had all heard the peyote story before at the sheltered workshop, but they enjoyed listening to Billy Atlas. He had an expressive face, and he loved going over every detail. Mick passed the cigarette to Maura, and immediately coughed smoke in her face.

  “Second hand high,” she said, and laughed before sucking on the joint herself.

  Mick and Maura and Billy Atlas were sitting on the cool concrete floor in the basement of Danker Dormitory, with Vex and Billy Atlas’s girlfriend making it five. Billy and the girl were on their way to the Phantom Limb, and Mick wanted to tell them that he had been there—at least in the parking lot. He considered describing Violet Candler’s complicated smile, but she hadn’t wanted people to know that she could not follow directions, and anyway, he was practicing not saying things that made him sound stupid.

  For the past few weeks, with Karly, he had been hinting about engagement rings. She wouldn’t give him a clue about the type she preferred, and he’d made several idiotic comments about rings and gold and diamonds. He had visited a dozen jewelry stores and listened to strangers tell him about Karly. “A diamond will thrill her,” said one. “Every woman longs for a big rock,” said another. “She’ll want gold,” a young woman in a black jacket said, “even if she preferred silver in the past—gold means forever.” One of the clerks told a joke. “Heard this on the radio,” he said. “A standup guy doing jewelry humor. So the new diamond slogan is Diamonds, they’ll take her breath away. And last year’s was Diamonds, they’ll leave her speechless. You get the message they’re trying to tell you? Diamonds, that oughta shut her up.” Mick had laughed hard and then escaped. Stoned, he could not recall exactly why he had been in such a hurry to get away from the guy. How long had he been thinking about all this? Was everybody in the basement staring at him?

  “Gold means forever,” he said aloud.

  “Not even close,” Vex said. “Diamonds are forever.” He had supplied the pot, a ziplock baggie, like the kind Mick had kept in his glove box back when he was his real self. He tried to think what else was in the glove box back then. Not gloves, he knew that much for sure.

  “James effing Bond,” Billy said.

  “Dope used to make me cry,” Vex said. “I know you won’t believe that. It was embarrassing.” He looked like he might break down while he was admitting his tendency to break down. “Makes me think of my dad, how we’d get high together.”

  “Your dad dead?” Maura asked.

  “Almost,” he said, nodding. “He’s like sixty and he has a mole on his neck.” He pointed to his own neck.

  Maura pretended to bite his neck. Vex had blown the lid off the assembly scores—135 boxes in an hour—but there was no way they’d send him to the factory. Two or three times a day he got furious and terrorized people, especially poor Billy. She loved his threats. “I’ll rip off your foot and stick it up your nose,” he’d said. When Maura laughed, Vex turned on her. “You think I won’t beat the shade out of you just because you’ve got a motherfucking vagina?” That had made her laugh harder. Billy had said, “It’s time-out time,” and Vex had hung his head and trudged to the time-out chair.

  “This is primo leaf,” Billy said. Anything he said made everyone laugh.

  “Generalissimo Atlas,” Maura said, “tell us, please, kind sir, what’s in our files.”

  Billy made like zipping his lips, but they cajoled him into it. “Officially,” Billy said to Maura, “you’re a major depressive disorder, single episode, severe without psychotic features.” High, he could not hide his pride at having memorized this. “In my opinion, my professional opinion . . .” He took another toke and spoke the remainder while holding his breath. “. . . the better diagnosis is rebel with no effing clue whatsoever.”

  “I like that a lot better,” Maura said. She did a rebel yell. “Do him.”

  “Mick?” Billy said and exhaled.

  “Not the official one,” Mick said. He hated that word.

  Billy shrugged. “Okey doke. My diagnosis is . . . thoughtfulitis.”

  “Oh god, did he nail you,” Maura said. When the laughter subsided, she demanded to know all the others: Rhine was a kindly geek, Alonso a moron with erotic tendencies, Cecil a squeezebox retard, and Karly? He hesitated and smoked to cover his caution.

  “You can skip her,” Maura said.

  Billy had seen Karly’s records. He knew she was officially mildly mentally impaired, which meant retarded and made him think that a lot of the people he’d known were likely mildly retarded. Karly was one of the sweetest people he’d ever met, and she wasn’t dumb about everything. She was on Facebook, posting jokes she had heard and commenting on videos. She often got the jokes wrong, and the
posts were simple, but Facebook intimidated Billy—the busyness of the page made him feel itchy and overwhelmed. Karly was also on the fifth level of an online video game that he had looked into on Candler’s home computer. It had to do with farming on alien planets, which sounded interesting, but the movement of the characters through the world made Billy carsick. Was it carsick if you weren’t in a car? “If my dad didn’t die,” Karly had said to Billy, “I’d still live at home. He couldn’t help dying, and my mom couldn’t help if it was all too much for her with me there without him.” They had been talking during the lunch break. He had taken her and Alonso to the KFC. After a moment she added, “Everybody can’t help something.” That had stuck with him, and he could hear her voice whenever he recollected it. He said, “I think Karly’s got some complicated stuff in her past that she’s working through, is what I think.”

  “That’s not a diagnosis,” Mick said.

  “What about Mr. Psycho?” Maura asked, indicating Vex. She wanted to ditch the subject of Karly Hopper.

  Billy looked directly at Vex. “That’s easy,” he said. “You’re a dick.” The laughter resumed.

  “Good thing I’m on the reserve tank from this kickass weed,” Vex said. He was crying and laughing both. “Hate to spoil the party by bashing in your fat face.”

  Billy cautioned them against mentioning the dope to others. “It’s only legal in this state if you’ve got glaucoma or cancer or something,” he said, “and I’d hate to have to give you a tumor.”

  “Ha ha,” Maura said and then actually laughed, something about forming her lips into the ha shape forcing real laughter out of her. “Your jokes are so dumb it’s funny that you think they’re funny.”

  Billy Atlas nodded. “So you tell me some funny smart stuff. Jokes about quarks and black holes and deconstruction and symbiosis.”

  Vex doubled over laughing. He had the joint and smoke came from his mouth in place of language. Mick could almost read the smoke.

  Billy Atlas’s girlfriend wasn’t smoking. She was sort of pretty and seemed content to be there, smiling and moving her head, but she wasn’t getting high or making jokes. The room held a stack of metal chairs against one wall, and there was a single grimy window over which they’d draped Billy Atlas’s dark shirt. Billy had a belly that wiggled when he laughed and changed shape when he inhaled. It wasn’t a huge stomach, but it filled his undershirt in a lively way.

  “That old car of yours,” Maura told Billy, “needs a quark of oil.”

  They all laughed, which told Mick the pot was working. He had smoked pot before his illness but this was the first time since. He was pretty sure he was enjoying himself.

  “That proves my point,” Billy said. “It’s funny because it’s dumb. But did you see the car I’m driving tonight?”

  “A smart-looking car?” Mick asked.

  “Okay, all right, look,” Maura said, still burping up an occasional giggle as she continued. “Here’s something incredibly smart that’s also funny. Hysterical. When I was in high school, back about an hour ago, I had a physics class at the cross town high school because there were only enough brainiacs in the whole town for one physics class, and I had to ride the bus with these completely genius boys who were hopeless to comprehend the idea of sex, and I was the only girl, and one day when we were riding the school bus to the class, I told one of the boys that I’d show him my tits if he’d tear up his homework.”

  Laughter in the basement ricocheted off the walls, and Mick caught himself trying to see the echoes. He lost track of Maura’s story while he was trying to identify which of the many things that seemed to be bouncing about in the nether regions were echoes. He heard them all laugh again, but he didn’t know whether Maura had displayed herself to the dumb geniuses or not.

  “You didn’t think that was funny?” Maura asked, her elbow whacking his ribs.

  Mick explained about watching the echoes, and they all joined him.

  “I saw a thought once,” Billy Atlas said, “a whole string of thoughts, actually. They were spilling out of this guy’s ear and circling his head. I mean, sure, I was doing acid, but that doesn’t mean thoughts can’t sometimes be seen.”

  More laughter and echo hunting ensued. Whenever the hilarity slowed, either Maura or Billy would bring up something else they had seen or done, and another round of laughter would start. Even Billy’s girlfriend was laughing. Maura told about shoplifting a monkey wrench, and Billy said he made a witticism during a party in junior high and some bruiser held his head down in a punchbowl until he almost drowned, and Maura said she once slipped on the concrete around a public swimming pool and knocked herself out, and Billy revealed that he once peed in the open window of a car in a parking lot and then realized it was his car. When the two of them wearied of carrying the weight for the whole crowd, Mick felt he had to say something.

  “When I got my mental illness, I drove my car into another car that was parked in a Burger King parking lot because I thought the other car was also my car and the two had separated and needed to be rejoined.” No one laughed. After a second, he said, “No, not Burger King, Taco Bell!”

  Laughter ricocheted about the basement again.

  It had never been a common occurrence and it hardly ever happened anymore, but there were moments in Candler’s life when the flesh of the world evaporated and he became privy to the bones of things.

  He was seated in a wooden chair at a wooden table in the Phantom Limb, his friends’ band spanking through “The Shape I’m In,” a cold beer sweating circles on the round table, but he was also stepping onto the porch of his personal silence to look out through its screen. He understood that the bass line of the music was meant to beat along with the listener’s heart, so that the fast songs made one lively and the slow songs brought on tender feelings. This was not a profound thought, and yet its arrival at a loud bar that smelled of beer and feet seemed profound, and memory fed the feeling—not episodes from his life, but the body’s recollection of how those episodes felt, coursing through him in 6/8 time.

  The substance of his working day was spent listening to other people. In moments such as this, he felt he was listening to himself—not to what he had to say, exactly, but to the rhythm of who he was. When he stepped out of himself, the world seemed to shuttle back, and he might gaze through that screen from a safe distance or he might consider the space between himself and the remainder of the human landscape, that hazy mystical trough. He was aware that he was in a bar with a concrete floor, and his work for the evening—parading his fiancée around for the board members, dancing with her long enough to make her happy—was done. He was waiting for Billy Atlas to show up. Billy not only knew about Candler’s moments of separation but claimed they were petit mal seizures. Billy had briefly majored in psychology in an attempt to prove as much, but he had never been much of a student.

  Candler felt he knew better. The spells were not a disability but the distinctive thing he identified as his own. He had tried to explain this to Billy before, and in a moment of weakness, he’d called it his deeper self. He still hadn’t heard the end of that.

  “If that’s your deeper self,” Billy had said, “then Pook was the deepest guy we ever met.”

  Candler’s deeper self examined the women at the next table, how furtively they moved, women with ponytails, one two three of them, their golden beer in glasses gilded with frost. Like spies, they signaled with cigarettes, engraving the air with the secret text of the female. Smoky characters from the forbidden alphabet dawdled above their table, curling from their cigarettes, from their painted mouths, announcing themselves and vanishing in the same moment, like almost any act of beauty. It was so rare, these days, to see smoke in a bar, he thought, and yet it did so much for the atmosphere. It was a private party and smoking was permitted; his spells sometimes seemed to him like exactly that: a private party.

  Thinking this took him off the porch and he was
back in the bar once more. It sounded to him like that old Gene Autry song: I’m back in the tavern again.

  God, he thought, I’m drunk as a skunk. He was drinking scotch. He had introduced his fiancée to so many people that Lolly Powell had begun to sound strange to him. He spotted Billy out on the floor, doing the crude, jiggling bounce that was supposed to pass for dancing. How many times had he tried to teach Billy how to dance? “You don’t have to be talented,” Candler had told him, “just confident.” He looked for Billy’s mystery date, but the crowd had closed around them. Candler had traded cars with Billy so Mr. Atlas could impress this woman, his first date since moving to California, the first since the divorce.

  It was already clear that Billy was an improvement over Crews. His weekly reports—Candler had seen three by this time—were thorough and detailed, if also presumptuous and flowery. The clients liked him, and production rates were up. He had noted a few things that surprised Candler, including a detail that was undoubtedly important: Karly Hopper had come to the workshop in soiled jeans and a bulky sweater even though it was ninety degrees out. That meant the trucker was gone for good, and no one had moved in to help with things like laundry. When Karly came for her counseling appointment, she wore a clean white shirt with creases from packaging, but her pants were a mess. He asked her if she was living alone. She did not want to answer, seeming to think she might be in trouble. He had not pressed her; the evasive maneuvers were answer enough. After she left, he phoned her mother in L.A. and left a message, saying that he was concerned about Karly’s living arrangements. He was proud of Billy for noticing something most supervisors would have missed.

  The song ended and Candler thought Billy might bring his date over to the table, but a new song began—a slow one—and Candler let out a laugh. Billy would seize this opportunity to hold the woman in his arms. The floor emptied out a bit for the slow song, and James was sure he would spot them. A hand touched his shoulder and Lolly spun into view. She knelt theatrically before him.