Tumbledown

by Robert Boswell

  “You.”

  “Yeah, well, you and I are already married, so the question is, which one of them is most like me?” He poured the last of the pitcher into the two glasses.

  “You are no fucking help.”

  “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe?”

  “You’d marry Lise? Is that what you’re telling me? ’Cause she got us Padres tickets? That’s the deciding factor?”

  “You could stay single.”

  “That’s good advice. That may be the first good advice you’ve ever given me.”

  “I’ve given you a ton of good advice. Who told you to lay off teasing that goon Parsons?”

  “That was seventh grade.”

  “Eighth. And I’m not telling you not to get married. I love being married. Quit thinking so much is what you should do. Use this.” He reached over the table and patted Candler’s chest.

  “Use my rib cage?”

  “The ticker in the cage.” Billy gulped down the last of his beer. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got to be there when my gang gets back.”

  “When am I going to see your place?”

  “I’m studying how to make phylo-topped Moroccan chicken stew. It’s harder than it looks. The first try was not so impressive. Cumin is a dangerous spice when used in large quantities. But I’m working on it. Then I’ll have you and Violet and Lolly and/or Lise over for Moroccan chicken stew. Really, I can’t see entertaining until you drop one or more girl from the menu. For that matter, the thought of cooking for your sister terrifies me.”

  “She wouldn’t come, anyway.”

  “Thanks for lunch,” Billy said, standing.

  “Who says I’m paying?” Candler asked, but Billy merely stepped away from the table and shut off his penlight.

  Rainyday phoned him to say that Mick, his one o’clock appointment, was in. “By the way,” she said, “the scrambling over the corpses has begun.”

  “What are you talking about?” Candler asked. He was cleaning his desk with a Clorox-laden towelette, wishing he was better prepared for his afternoon. He didn’t feel drunk so much as sleepy, but he had no idea what she was referring to.

  “Your clients,” she said. “They’ll have to be divvied up once you’re the head muckety-muck. Patricia has asked for Mick. Seeing him here reminded me.”

  It took him a moment to turn Patricia into the Barnstone. Of course, she’d ask for Mick. The phrase she wanted him in her clutches came to mind but that was ridiculous. The request annoyed him, but there was no argument to make against it. She was a good counselor, and she already had a relationship with Mick.

  “Hey-ey, anybody there?” Rainyday said. “You don’t have any objection, do you?”

  “Let me think about it.” He hung up the phone and took in a big breath, which made him yawn. He recalled one of the exercises that Clay Hao had taught him. Look at your client as he or she walks into your room as if you’d never seen the person before. See who’s actually there, rather than what you expect to see.

  The door swung open. Candler saw a young man of average height and slight build with incisive green eyes, a surprisingly handsome if uncertain face. Candler took a moment to place the uncertainty, which was not that of a person opening the door on what might be a tiger, but of a person wary of looking into a mirror, afraid to see who he might be today. Mick Coury was a good kid, but he did not know it because he could not lay hands on who he was. He walked through life with the distraught manner of someone fretting over imminent catastrophe, and he understood that the source of the devastation was from within. He was not paranoid, did not think the world conspired against him, but understood that his mind conspired against itself. “Come in, Mick. Have a seat. Give me a second to look at your file.” Those stabbing green eyes! How had he never noticed them before? Lustrous and tragic and belonging to a child. He was not a child, but those eyes. They were not an adult’s eyes.

  “I don’t like that word relationship,” Lise had told him. When was that? The last night they spent together? The night before Lolly arrived? “We’re lovers,” she had said. “Temporary lovers. At least we’re honest about it. A lot of people keep their eyes shut to avoid looking at their connections with other people. They pretend and lie and blind themselves.” Lise and Lolly; Lolly and Lise. That night at Petco Park? It was like the best time I’ve had in maybe ten years. And last night, after dinner, he and Lolly had excused themselves and slipped off to bed. He heard his cell ring while they were making love. He was having a humiliating time, his penis as soft and floppy as a puppy’s ear, which had made Lolly high strung. She tried to joke about it but she was too upset to be funny and couldn’t smile even when Candler forced himself to laugh. She decided instead to become extra sexy, which quickly turned preposterous, and Candler made her stop. He pulled her close and ran his hands over her body. After a few moments, he got hard—partway there, anyway—and she offered her warm hands to hurry him along. It was while she was helping him thus that his cell rang. He had the urge to answer, thinking it was Lise, and this stray, suspect, disloyal thought coincided with the thickening of his cock. The sex, once they got going, was fine, and Lolly seemed to feel that they had crossed some bridge.

  “Established couples know how to handle these things,” she said, and she wasn’t trying to be funny.

  Still naked and in bed, Candler dialed his voicemail. The message was from Karly’s mother. “I was in Europe when you phoned. Karly should have told you about my trip, but we both know she can be a bit unreliable.” It took him a moment to recall why he’d called Mrs. Hopper—the evidence that Karly was living alone. He assumed that had been taken care of. She had come to her last counseling session in clean clothing, and Billy Atlas no longer noted anything in his reports. He missed part of the message. “. . . to reach Karly, but her phone was cut off. I got hold of a neighbor today, and she told Karly to call. I just finished talking to her, and I can see that you worked out a solution. I’m grateful for that, even though, well, I have to keep making adjustments, don’t I? She is a full-grown woman, and . . . I’m going on and on. I’ll call your office next week.” He had no idea what she meant by solution, but he guessed Karly was once more living with the trucker. Probably, her mother had not known about him before.

  “Very solid performance at the workshop, Mick,” he said, as if he had been examining the file. He had to question the boy about his relationship with Karly Hopper. He should have done it days ago, weeks ago. Had his reluctance to do with the promotion? Had he worried about making waves? He didn’t want to leave this task for the Barnstone. “So . . . tell me what’s going on with you and Karly.”

  Mick blinked in the slow manner associated with the taking of his medication.

  “We’re getting married,” he said.

  “I’m surprised to hear that. Have you set a date?”

  “Am I supposed to? Do you need that?”

  Candler told him that he didn’t require the date. “Have you met Karly’s family yet? Have you discussed this with your parents?”

  Mick took a long time to reply. His eyes wandered the room while his mouth remained set to speak. “I asked my parents if what I’ve got is something that can be passed to children. They said no. That’s as close as I’ve come. Marriage is . . . big news. My mother still thinks of me as her son. Her little son, I mean. It’s the way they are. I don’t want to hurt or surprise them.”

  “There’s an interest inventory I’d like you to take.” He buzzed Rainyday and asked for the new behavioral profile. It would require Mick to answer one hundred multiple-choice questions, which should keep him busy, Candler reasoned, until he could get the van driver to fetch Karly Hopper. Mick would not believe anything that did not come directly from her. Sooner or later, he had to understand that Karly had no intention of marrying him and better for it to be supervised than for Mick to stumble upon it. (It did not occur to Candler that he had not met or even spoken wit
h Lolly’s family. He had not told his parents that he was engaged—though he imagined that his sister had. Everything had happened quickly, the world—that intensely vivid world—zooming by.) “This is a test you can’t flunk,” he told Mick, smiling and spreading the booklet out on the desk. “It measures your interests, your likes. It’ll let us know what keeps you tuned in. Maybe give us a clue about what makes you happy.”

  Mick nodded seriously. “That’s something I’d like to know.”

  Because he had skipped or skimmed his meds too many days in a row, Maura had suggested that Mick shave one of his pills and snort it up his nose. It had been a dumb move, Mick decided now. He felt both sluggish and confused, the worst of both worlds. Yet he liked the test Mr. James Candler had given him. It was designed to figure out what, of all the things in the world, he liked most, which meant it was mainly about Karly. It didn’t surprise him then when she walked through the office door, as if his heartfelt answers had conjured her.

  Mr. James Candler trailed her in, smiling and talking with her. He was carrying a chair, which he situated next to Mick. Karly sat in it and smiled at him.

  “Hi, Mick.” She was always excited to see him. “We’re both here, aren’t we?”

  Mick was delighted by her arrival, and the room, too, brightened. He didn’t speak, though, as if his words were still caught up in the test sheet that lay on the desk.

  Candler took his seat, studying the way the two interacted. Such broad, delighted smiles. Mick seemed to expect her arrival. She didn’t seem surprised to see him, either. They both looked happy and unsurprised. Mick took her hand and she looked at their hands and god, what a smile she had. Such beautiful creatures. A stranger gazing in would find it impossible to believe there could be anything seriously wrong with them.

  Karly’s clothes were clean. Someone was helping her through the day, and if it was the truck driver—or some other man—Mick needed to know. As much as Candler hated to spoil this moment, Mick had to know.

  “I wonder if we could talk about your plans together,” Candler said.

  “That test,” Mick said, glancing at the white sheet on the desk, “it’ll show we should be married, won’t it? It’s just what we need. Evidence.”

  “I can’t talk about the profile until I score it,” Candler said, “and no test can tell you whether you should marry one person or another.” He shifted his gaze to Karly. He asked her to talk about her plans.

  “Me?” she said, and he had to ask again. “Plans are what you make with them.” Her manner today was an imitation of the smiling, flip manner of a television actress.

  Candler cut to the chase. “Have you spoken with Mick about your recent living arrangements?”

  The puff of exasperation lifted her bangs, and then she smiled and wagged her head: she didn’t understand the question.

  “Have you told Mick that for a while there you were living with a man? That perhaps you’re once again living with him?”

  Mick dropped her hand and slowly got up. He raised his arm and extended it, pointing at Candler as the final part of the gesture. “You’re saying things without looking at the test, without thinking about our marriage.”

  “I understand this upsets you. Let’s stay calm. Take your seat again.” He waited until Mick seated himself. “I am thinking about your happiness. I want to make cert—”

  “We love each other,” Mick said. He sounded utterly calm now, though his arms were shaking. He took Karly’s hand once more.

  “I just . . . I want to be sure that the two of you are speaking, you know, openly before you make major plans.”

  “This isn’t fair,” Karly said. “I don’t have to marry anyone I don’t want to. And even if I want to, I don’t have to.”

  “Okay,” said Candler. “But let’s get this out of the way: who lives in your house with you?”

  “I don’t get what you mean,” she said.

  “Do you live with your parents?”

  She shrugged, smiled, winced. She ran through her brief emotional repertoire.

  Candler repeated the question.

  “I’m twenty,” she said.

  “One,” Mick interjected. “You’re twenty-one.”

  “I’m twenty-one,” she said. “I don’t have to live with my parents.”

  Mick nodded in agreement, but Candler could see his face clouding. There was no way out of this conversation now. Better to get to the heart of the matter. “Don’t you live with someone, Karly? A man? Don’t you have Mick drop you off and pick you up at the end of the block to keep your relationship a secret?”

  She opened her mouth a few times to speak but didn’t say anything. Then she adopted a new tack. “Everyone knows that. I told Mick all about that.” She waved a flaccid, dismissive hand, as if Candler’s questions were humorous. “We just don’t want the others talking—that’s what he says and me, too. And he can make pizza without even calling the pizza guys, and when we folded sheets together, he was on that end and I was on the other end, and it was so fun.”

  Mick kept his eyes on Mr. James Candler and his hand in Karly’s grip, but he became aware of the air—the breathing air—how it was different in this office from the hallway and the lobby, how the air at the Center was different from the air at the workshop. Mr. James Candler was gazing at him, the air around them taking on light. He was waiting for Mick to speak. “We’re get-getting married,” he said, the lucid swimming light shooting past him in the unsullied nothing like tiny incandescent fish.

  “Oh,” Karly said, “I can’t do that. I’m already married. Don’t be silly. Mick’s so silly.”

  The air altered its disposition, thickening and deepening, less air than sound, less sound than vibration, and Mick was expected to breathe this? He stared through it all at Karly, nodding now, he realized, as if this were news he had expected.

  The other one, Mr. James, was speaking. “I don’t think you mean literally married, but you’re living together and sleeping together and . . .” His voice kept on until it was Karly’s voice. “I already told you that a hundred times,” she said. “It doesn’t mean I won’t eat your fried chicken or anything.”

  “I’m sorry, Mick,” Candler said, and the scene locked back into place, his counselor leaning toward him, Karly’s hand no longer in his own. Voices like traffic now, without words but moving sensibly about, meaningless but sensible. Mick climbed back into his senses much the way a pilot—that pilot in his brother’s video game—returns to the cockpit of the malfunctioning plane that had almost crashed, having no confidence that the mechanics repaired the craft, but having no other choice but to strap himself in or give up the heavens altogether.

  “I thought you needed to know,” Mr. Counselor was saying.

  “I can change all of this,” Mick said. “But not like this. Not in this way.”

  “You made him cry, Mr. James Candler.” Karly put her arms around Mick and held him close. “Mick is always nice to me.”

  He was crying? How could he be crying and not know it? The counselor was suddenly standing, impossibly tall, blocking the light. “Karly, if you’ll come with me, I’ll show you a fun activity I’d like you to do.”

  “Wow,” she said, smiling. “Good-bye, Mick.”

  The door made its noise. He heard a car somewhere far away abruptly quicken, like a drowning boy breaking the liquid membrane and sucking air. And in this moment, a particle of time within the drama of his ongoing breakdown, his body recalled its sure locomotion, felt the confident way that he slapped the clutch and slammed the gear shift. Like a bubble of air in a river of blood, he had a moment when he recalled who he was, and then it passed, and the thick obscurity that filled the office swept his recollection out of the room, and he understood that he had never wondered who he was back then, back when he was the person he really was. If he had tried to understand himself back then, he would have lost his mind. Or at least his co
nfidence. At this moment, sanity seemed to him like the ultimate distraction, the best of all dodges, the safe, self-righteous way to keep from recognizing the abyss within, the deep, vast, endless black nothing of being alive and having no purpose but the measly things rationality might invent.

  From his knees, he watched a crowd of figures in the near distance, their shapes muted by the light, but they seemed to move purposefully, like a posse, a green posse, just beyond the desk, and then they were inside him, moving within the parts of his body that were neither organ nor bone, not blood and not skin, the unnameable regions of the soul where love and anger and beauty and fear took turns ruining his sanity. They were leaves, these forms, waxy leaves on a city of trees just within and just beyond the domestic glass.

  Among the gloom-laden currents appeared a human face, bloated by the belching upheaval of air: Mr. James Candler, pretending not to be himself by slipping his face long, a stretching that was not fatigue but something richer, like the beginning of a beautifully awful story. Mr. James Candler was in a door frame, air and light sweeping out, and Mick’s lungs were empty, and he understood that madness was water and he could not swim in it and could not drown. And then he had the upsetting impression that Mr. James Candler’s mouth was filled with a huge viscous eye, and when he spoke, the words stared unrelentingly at him, his head the cliff from which the sadness waterfalls down.

  No, not sadness, words. He said something to Mick.

  Mick replied, “I’m feeling like no driver can straighten out this curve.”

  Candler had set Karly up on the assembly station. He had meant to do that anyway, to see if her speed had increased since she had been working in the sheltered workshop, but now he just needed her out of his office. He had not expected to find Mick on the floor. “Mick,” he said, but the boy didn’t look up. Candler sank to the floor and put his hands on Mick’s shoulders. “Mick, what are you doing? You’re kneeling.”

  The boy looked in Candler’s eyes several seconds before speaking. “If I’m on my knees, I must be praying.”