People encounter death in vastly dissimilar ways. Some see a light in an otherwise dark universe, and they move toward that light or flee from it. Some see the faces of the people they love, and they are filled with joy. Others see the dead they betrayed and belittled scuffling along a narrow corridor, forming a line. For many, though, there is only a slow cessation, which is a source both of despair and of relief. And for everyone, there comes a time when consciousness of every kind evaporates, and the thing that we have thought of as our soul trembles and vanishes, not like a flame, but like the memory of a flame, and it cannot be relit.
This was not the first time Mick Coury had died. Twice among his attempts to kill himself his heart had stopped and he had been revived. And his illness, when it descended—that, too, had been a kind of death. A limited kind of death. There were degrees of death, just as there were degrees of darkness, degrees of love, degrees of knowing. Mick had died a number of times before this night, and he was dead now. His father was born again, and he was dead again. If his body had been capable of laughter, he would have laughed.
He wanted to be revived. He hoped it would happen. This seemed like a contradictory desire, as he could have declined to kill himself and then he would not need reviving. But revival and survival were not the same thing. It’s like a reset button with you, his brother Craig had said after one of Mick’s attempts. You come to all better, straightened out, feeling good. Mick had nodded and said, Maybe I should do it more often. His brother had thrown back his head and laughed.
In death, there is no schizophrenia, and Mick felt his pain at losing Karly with a degree of irony. He understood that she was mentally impaired. He understood that her mind, but not her soul, was diminished, and if he still felt love for her, it was mingled with the understanding that he would be better suited with someone more intellectually compelling for a life partner. If only he had a life . . . and if he could carry over this ruthless sanity into it.
It was cold, being dead, not icy but there was a chill, and the light was not a friendly light, and whatever was going on about him registered as shoves or mechanical noises, like the grating of enormous gears. He would miss light. He would miss the magic of human light. Human light? What the fuck?
He filled with his old old self, and what a glorious feeling to be straight and wickedly handsome and horny and if only he could get the fuck up and out of this place, out into the vivid-ass world out there.
His stomach hurt, which meant he might be brought back. Or it might mean that the pain of dissolution had begun. Each of his organs would fail and fail painfully. Death is not unconsciousness. He would feel it all. The pain of the pieces giving up, giving out, life easing along into the ether.
The guy he had been once upon a time, back in Yuma, the guy he felt once again fully inhabit his body, that guy would have gone about this Karly business differently. He would’ve wanted to get her out of her clothes and onto her back. That guy would have wanted to get some. A ripple of desire moved through his body. But the body could not follow it up.
If he was going to stay dead this time, he had plenty of regrets. Like the beach. He wished to hell he could have gone back to that beach, ripped off his clothes, and strode over the sand like a goddamn god. Gods did what they wanted, took whatever and whomever they pleased. He would have bent Karly over the hood of his Firebird and taken her, and afterward he would have spanked her bare bottom, and he would have walked naked into the sea.
And then what?
PART SIX
Phantom Limb
I paint flowers so they will not die.
—FRIDA KAHLO
11
Same Man stands over the body of the boy who killed himself. The body looks just like Same Man. People are watching. They are barely out of the frame, watching.
Someone says,
WHY DIDN’T YOU
SAVE HIM,
SAME MAN?
Same Man does not have the power to disappear. The hospital room is bright. The dead boy just lies there. Same Man stares out of the frame, as if waiting for directions.
Someone says,
YOU WERE GOING
TOO FAST,
SAME MAN.
Same Man closes his eyes but the people watching do not disappear. He cannot see them, but they are there. His closed eyes look like smooth clamshells.
In the next frame, Same Man’s eyes are squeezed tightly shut, like tiny pursed mouths. There are drops of sweat on Same Man’s forehead.
Same Man’s face fills the whole panel. Sweat runs down his jaw. His eyes are pinched.
The next frame is dark. This is what Same Man sees with his eyes closed. It is not all black. There is the boy who killed himself. You can almost make him out in the dark.
More dim frames follow, each with more patchy light. The boy becomes clearer. He is no longer on the hospital bed. He is kneeling. He looks just like Same Man.
He says,
IF I’M ON MY KNEES,
I MUST BE PRAYING.
The image in the frame is so close that only the crease in the bridge of Same Man’s nose and the indentations that are the corners of his shut eyes are visible. The crease looks like a black bridge connecting the sockets.
AS LONG AS
SAME MAN
CONCENTRATES
THE BOY IS ALIVE.
A doctor in a white lab coat stands in the bright room beside Same Man, who has his eyes hard shut. The doctor wears a headband that holds a metallic mirror, which is cocked over one eye. A hole in the mirror reveals the doctor’s eye. He holds a needle and thread. The mirror obscures his face, but the careful reader can tell he looks just like Same Man.
In the next panel: nothing but Same Man’s shut eyes, the stitches like the hide of a baseball.
The final frame is dim with dark patches. The boy is rising from his knees. He is almost standing. He looks just like Same Man.
RECALCULATING.
12
The window of Mick Coury’s bedroom is illuminated. It is not especially late, but the remainder of the house is dark.
Genevieve Coury is asleep, on top of the covers, wearing the gray sweatpants and Neil Young T-shirt that she changed into after arriving home. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep, just wished to rest her eyes for one moment, one moment, one . . . A dreamless sleep, or almost so, only a vague sense of churning inhabits her mind, a churning that may be the ocean, that may be the rhythm of her heart, that may capture the convolutions of her complicated life. Stray, disloyal thoughts attempt to stand up to the churning—Did I turn off the lights downstairs? I haven’t made Craig’s lunch for tomorrow. I should check on Mick one last time before going down for the count. The churning swallows up the unhappy lines and they disappear beneath the beating waves. She sleeps.
Craig is awake in his room, the lights off, music playing on his computer. He reclines on the bed, wearing only his underpants, head propped up by a tumble of pillows, texting with a girl who is at a slumber party, and all the girls there, she writes to him, want to know what he’s wearing, why he doesn’t let his hair grow out again like he did in eighth grade, and if he thinks Lady Gaga is a tramp ha ha. The tiny cloud of light created by his cell phone haloes his head.
Across the narrow hall, in his bright tidy room, Mick Coury stands beside his faithful bed, holding pills in his hand, the meds that have failed to help him, failed to repair him, failed to mend his broken mind. They make a mound on his palm. He intends to swallow the handful and end his confusing misery once and for all. He intends to wash the handful down with the glass of water on his nightstand. He intends to eat the meds and then lie on his bed, his hands clasped at his waist or behind his head—the only decision he will have to make after he takes the pills is what to do with his hands. He has been through this before. The key to killing yourself is to make up your mind and then quit thinking. The key to killing you
rself is to make up your mind and follow through. He has made up his mind, his woeful, muddled, worthless, pain-ridden mind that the drugs failed to restore and now he will neutralize, will rub out, will do in, will murder himself. Mind-murdering drugs.
It’s a melodramatic business, is suicide.
Q: What are the pills?
A: Thorazine.
Q: Why isn’t he taking one of the new generation of antipsychotics?
A: Client developed a facial tic with one drug and experienced sleeplessness with another. With Thorazine he seems especially fortunate, as he has not gained weight or shown any signs of nervous system disorders. Thorazine is the best available drug for him.
Q: Why hasn’t the Center’s psychologist lowered his dosage to permit him to find the precise balance he needs?
A: Client’s dosage has been adjusted up or down five times in three years. The psychologist has been responsive to the client’s self-reports. What appears to be the perfect dosage from external observation—confirmed by his counselor and sheltered workshop supervisor—nonetheless seems to the client to steal from him his mental quickness and lower his intelligence. Client’s subjective analysis and the contrary professional reports leave the psychologist with the following dilemma: should she permit her client to be a little slow or a little irrational? Few therapists would choose the latter.
Q: Why hasn’t the psychologist made an appearance in these pages?
A: The psychologist adds nothing new to the story, and the narrative is quite long enough as it is, don’t you think? She is neither culpable in any manner nor particularly interesting as a character. She is happily married with two well-adjusted children. She reads Regency romances and subscribes to two journals on antique furniture. She scrapbooks.
Q: Given Mick’s history, why hasn’t his mother controlled his access to the medication?
A: She has done exactly that. The pills in the client’s hand are the ones that he has pretended to take, the pills that accumulated from the client skipping days in order to be fresh, bright, alert, at the ready. While it is a consequential pile, it is not reasonable to expect his mother to have insisted on watching each pill traverse his throat, or to suggest that a more diligent parent would have searched his room and discovered the cache of untaken pills. Any reasonable observer would offer an extremely positive assessment of the client’s mother regarding care for her son—or, for that matter, in terms of any aspect of her life. She is an exemplary human.
Q: How can you know all of this?
A: Psychology is a science, and the practice of this science follows certain time-tested traditions. The experienced practitioner combines objective observation and subjective intuition with the principles, practices, and traditions of the science to create a holistic approach to every individual.
Q: Which can be boiled down to?
A: My brain told me.
Mick’s heart hurts more than he can bear. He is hot and sweating. He has blocked off the floor vents by covering each with T-shirts and stacking books on top. He’s not sure now why he did that, but the room is hot and his skin glistens. He has put on his best pajamas, the striped ones that his father gave him. He believes his father will understand what Mick is saying by wearing these pajamas, but he doesn’t want to think himself about what they mean—forgiveness or something along those lines. He clicks off the overhead light and stands in the middle of the darkened room, still holding the pills in his palm. Moonlight enters and carries off the darkness—not all of it, a partial expulsion, the room dark and light at the same time. Sweat from his forehead gathers on the bridge of his nose, trickles down to the tip, and just as he raises his hand to stuff his mouth with Thorazine, a drop of sweat falls from his nose to the jumble of pills.
This gives him pause. From his brother’s room comes the sound of a satellite radio station played through the speakers of a laptop. It’s the seventies channel, and the song is one that was recorded long before Mick was born—approximately seventeen years before. Yet he has a history with the song dating back to the other side of the mountain, to when he was that other boy. It is a simple history: he hated the song. It played at a wedding he attended, a shotgun wedding of classmates, the girl just beginning to show beneath her off-white dress, the boy with a barbed-wire tattoo circling his neck, and from a gunmetal gray ghetto blaster came the recording of the woman’s voice, all syrup: We’ve only just begun . . .
Mick doesn’t merely recall disliking the song, he actively hates the song in the moment, as it pours under and around and through his door and rises up to his ears. What a sentimental piece of Nutrasweetened garbage! Of all the songs . . . He can’t see himself dying to this hateful tune, which means he’ll have to wait a few minutes and hope for Creedence Clearwater or David Bowie or . . . what is the best seventies music to die to, anyway? Styx? He supposes he could ask his brother to change the station, but to what? And if . . . and if . . . and if he hates this awful song, isn’t that evidence that he’s getting better? More like his old self, all opinionated about tunes?
It’s not too late to change his mind. He can still go to the beach. They set a tentative date for the trip—this coming Saturday. He can still attempt to make the journey to the ocean and lead the others on an adventure. I’ve got an itch for adventure—who had said that to him. Karly? No, it was Maura. His friend Maura. He could do that much for her, couldn’t he? With his free hand, he flips on the overhead light, which erases the moonlight and the residual darkness, both at once.
He steps from his room to the hall, the sound of the dreadful song rising in volume: white lace and promises, a kiss for luck and we’re on our way . . . No one is in the bathroom. He locks the door behind him. He bends to drop the pills into the toilet without making a big splash. He pisses on them, which is so pleasurable that he imagines pissing every day on his meds. He flushes. The pills chase one another in a circle and dive into the opening, vanishing, vanishing, gone.
Mick does not attempt to kill himself after all. He is dead in the hospital morgue and he is not dead, returning now to his room, the repugnant Carpenters song giving way to “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Why do people like ’70s music? he wonders, covering his ears. He shuts the door to his room to muffle the sound of the song. It feels terribly selfish to him, this decision to continue living. And possibly incompetent. Rude. He is ashamed and crawls into bed. Spiraling through his regret and remorse and self-hatred is a thought: The beach. Other thoughts trail it. I can find the beach. I can be somebody’s guide for a change. This swirl of thoughts forces the others out of the frame, and he drifts off into sleep.
Readers encounter the impossible in vastly dissimilar ways. Some throw the goddamn book across the room and curse the author by name. Others imagine the snide comments they’ll post on a book review website. Still others keep the faith, shaken yet willing to continue. But every reader wants the impossible acts addressed: a big brother’s sudden and permanent and utterly inexplicable disappearance—how is that possible? A son’s baffling descent into madness? A husband who one day cannot lift his coffee cup? A woman who discovers she has put a price tag on some part of her soul? A young man who finds himself in uniform and firing a lethal weapon at other human beings? Or a tiny swimming mishap in the neighbor’s pool—a few seconds too many beneath the surface—and the child’s ability to function in the world is forever diminished? And now a boy who died has also not died? Every sane person has to find every day some manner of accommodating the impossible, some way of covering up for the failures of the rational world. This might actually be a reasonable definition of sanity.
The lead car in the beach caravan is Mick Coury’s Firebird, which he has washed and waxed. He spends an hour vacuuming the interior to ensure that his passengers will be comfortable. As things turn out, Maura Wood is his only passenger, sitting in the Firebird’s bucket seat in her sunglasses, a man’s white shirt, and cutoff jeans. U
nderneath, she wears a black one-piece bathing suit that has a tiny skirt. Mick is fully dressed, including his brown loafers and a long-sleeved striped shirt. He is much more concerned with the drive than with the swim, and he dresses as he imagines a successful driver would outfit himself, including a tie until his brother tells him the tie is overboard. His swim trunks, a towel, a second towel, and sunscreen are in a cloth bag in the trunk, along with two boogie boards and a huge cooler packed with sodas, sandwiches, and ice.
Barnstone and Andujar drive one of the Center’s vans. Barnstone drives for the first leg, wearing dark shorts and a white blouse, arriving at James Candler’s house in the Corners at nine twenty a.m. to pick up Lolly and Violet. She is relieved to discover that Candler is not at home, and she no longer feels obliged to drive. She turns the wheel over to Andujar, who is utterly competent behind the wheel despite his many and significant mental problems. He wears a white T-shirt, Lakers shorts, and sandals. He will not drive unless he has another person in the front alongside him, but otherwise his disorder does not show itself.
Violet’s bathing suit is a flowery one-piece, six years old, and was not terribly fashionable when it was new. She and Arthur went to the south of France, which was the only time she wore it. She regrets not trying it on before the trip, as it is tighter than she expects. She prefers the idea that it has shrunk to the obvious alternative. Over it, she wears a smart terrycloth beach dress, which she is fairly certain she will not remove. Her flip-flops are newly purchased at the grocery around the corner. Lolly wears a diaphanous beach dress over a black thong bikini. Her sandals have heels and elaborate wraps of string that climb her legs. If being stunning means that the men cannot move their eyes from her naked behind as if a hammer has been applied to the back of their heads, then she is stunning.
The third car in the short parade is a Dodge Dart, with Alonso Duran, Bellamy Rhine, and Vex in the backseat, Billy Atlas behind the wheel, and Karly Atlas née Hopper in the seat beside him. No one in any of the vehicles knows that Billy and Karly are husband and wife, except for Billy. Even Karly does not fully understand since she did not wear a white dress to the justice of the peace, which creates a tiny doubt in her mind. On this day, she wears a white bikini beneath a yellow halter top and short green skirt. It is not a modest bathing suit but tame compared to Lolly’s gear. Billy’s trunks advertise Corona beer, and he wears a white short-sleeved shirt, unbuttoned. They have forgotten shoes and towels, but Billy has packed a cooler full of beer and a dozen burritos wrapped in tin foil from the taco stand near the sheltered workshop.
Tumbledown Page 46
