Sophomores

by Sean Desmond

  The car prowled along the dim alley shrouded by a thicket of leafless trees. She had counted the number of houses from the Raleighs’ to the corner, eight, so she could backtrack like this. An animal darted across the path—it wasn’t a pet but carried itself on its haunches like a raccoon or possum, its pink eyes refracting the headlights like dull crystals before it scuttered below a hole in a fence. Anne pulled up to the driveway in the back. The door to the garage was shut, lights out. The papers reported that Raleigh’s kids had been staying with families from First United and had not returned since that awful night. Nothing to see. The back of the house less revealing than the front. Just the off-whiteness of the garage door and an asphalt drive oil-stained and cracked. Anne sat there, her foot on the brake, staring at that handle on the garage door. Say for a minute it wasn’t Raleigh. The alley is dark but too narrow to hunker down in and not be spotted from a passing car. If it was a neighbor, the fences on either side of the driveway offer no line of sight. Is there another perch to watch the house from? Anne couldn’t find it, and then realized if there were, that person could be watching her. Danger didn’t feel imminent but rather as if it had moved through a while ago.

  And so Anne sat there, focused on the driveway where the minister’s wife had been strangled. Like Peggy, the house offered only silence. As close as Anne now was to the horror of this assault, it felt distant. Strip away the scandal of this case, what’s left? Something fierce and predatory, she thought. An ignorant animal attacking another in the dark. She had to stop ruminating reasons to believe one theory or another. Is he really wrestling with demons? Is there even such a thing? There were plenty of blind alleys that offered no answers, and she had to stop crossing the line in terms of her own research of the case. She knew better, but she couldn’t abide by the evidence presented only in the trial. The trip to Credo Drive was near intentional, as had been the visit to First United, two weeks before. She had sat in the empty winter light of the pews, gaining no insight. Now, in the cold, dark car, she parsed the suicide note. It stopped just short of admission. Why not go for the full absolution? He had a guilty conscience but was too weak to free himself.

  After the trip to First United, Anne flashed her St. Rita educator’s pass at the Perkins School of Theology and got her hands on back issues of the United Methodist Reporter to close-read Raleigh’s sermons. Most were pablum—Life is a journey from darkness to light . . . live in the moment . . . in marriage there is only giving—but then she found a transcript of Raleigh’s Easter sermon, the Sunday of the supposed death threats. He started with a synopsis of a book called The Passover Plot. It rang a faint bell. So Anne went into the Perkins stacks. BT 301.3.S36. Schonfield, Hugh. Nineteen sixty-five. A book about how Jesus orchestrated the crucifixion and resurrection, and the plot was to sell himself as a false messiah. So Raleigh faked the threats to make himself seem persecuted and in danger, Anne theorized. This was his Passover Plot. So why be so obvious? The best explanations here that Anne came up with: He wanted to get caught, or was stupid enough to think himself cunning.

  Anne pulled away, down the dim alley, until it spat her out onto another side street of the subdivision. A sudden gust bansheed through the vents of the Zephyr, but the rain had stopped and the wipers were now chattering on the windshield. Did he look right at Peggy that Sunday? Or his mistress? Both were in the congregation that morning. Anne brooded on this sermon a lot. It was beyond suspicious, but every time she went over it, her understanding of Raleigh tangled.

  Just more evidence that proves nothing.

  [ FEBRUARY ]

  30-DAY CLINICAL TRIAL FOR HYPOVITAMINOSIS CHOLECALCIFEROL

  PATIENT DIARY, PATRICK FRANCIS MALONE

  February 1

  Taken with each meal per instructions, no noticeable effects.

  February 2

  Coffee tasted weird after morning dose, otherwise no effects. Left leg sore, which is normal. Early spring predicted by large rodent.

  February 3

  Nada. Patient, i.e. me, thinks he got the placebo.

  February 4

  No worse for wear. Did a phone check in with Dr. Landis. I asked him if I had to fill out this diary and he said it was optional. So here’s the tally: Diet good, drinking moderate, exercise bike 20 minutes every morning. Three doses, stools soft past couple of days, but Landis said that’s a possible side effect. Leg feels okay today. All of this comes and goes.

  February 5

  Three doses. Pretty sure these are sugar pills. I have MS. No change there.

  February 6

  Three doses and no flare-ups in past two days. I feel good—I think. Just bored and unemployed.

  February 7

  Took one dose before communion this morning. Prescriptions for mortal and immortal life. Hedging bets all around.

  February 8

  I apologize to the folks at the MS Society for the most boring medical diary ever written.

  February 9

  On the advice of Dr. Landis, I went to an information expo the National MS Society held in Arlington. “You never know,” he says, which is one of the many things doctors say off-handedly and don’t realize how they sound. The expo was more for doctors and specialists, but there were others like me—“the diagnosed,” as we were called a few times. Those of us there ran, or rather limped, the gamut. One guy was a body builder diagnosed in 1974 and there to proselytize some steroid drug. Aside from the Lou Ferrigno wannabe, there were also a lot of folks with aggressive cases, and that depressed the hell out of me. The wheelchair and walker brigade looking for some miracle cure.

  It was held at the Howard Johnson’s across the highway from a water park Dan used to like called Wet ’n Wild. The main ballroom was a sign up for various clinical trials, and this is what Landis recommended I check out. Everything under the sun . . . there was ballroom dancing and ballet, and one Clockwork Orange guy who wanted to monitor how much your eye moved back and forth for a year. I almost registered for water aerobics—but it was all the way down by Parkland and I’m not going to jackass that far—lots of exercise and yoga studies, one was even meditation with a Buddhist monk.

  There was a line out the door for interferon, word having spread quick that it was the most promising trial, but it was already filled by the time the expo had started and people were just signing up for waiting lists. I stayed away from the experimental drugs. Who the hell knows with this stuff, and the side effects could be worse than the disease. One drug called bifuobinase listed loss of bowel control as a possibility. Great, sign me up.

  Someone might go into a room like this and think: Thank God they have so many people working on a cure for MS or trying to figure it out. But after an hour of hobbling around and pretending to be curious, I was left with a very sad realization: They have no idea what causes or cures this illness. It’s all shots in the dark.

  And so this is my shot in the dark, this God forsaken trial where I’m taking heavy doses of vitamin D for thirty days. Truth be told, I signed up to keep my wife off my back, and it didn’t have an age cutoff or sound like something Dr. Frankenstein would suggest.

  February 10

  Three doses and no change in symptoms or temperament. I’ve been going to the Park Forest library to job hunt. I read the want ads in the Times Herald and Aviation Week, but it’s mostly to get away from the loving scrutiny of my wife. Today, I looked up vitamin D in the medical encyclopedia. It has a lot to do with calcium in your bones. My joints do feel like they’re raw, arthritic, but Landis claims it’s the nerves, not the bones.

  I have no idea if I’m even taking vitamin D, but I read the instructions from the MS Society and checked with Landis—I’m allowed to drink, so I’ve set a two-drink limit on myself while undergoing this trial. Two drinks to prove the point. No more and no less. And to be honest, I think it’s doing more good than the vitamin D. Two drinks is a balance I can live w
ith. Moderation in all things.

  February 11

  Slightly nauseous before coffee and stiff getting around this morning. Otherwise right as rain.

  Went to the copy shop and then sent out 100 letters to everyone I know—just a “hello and if you hear anything here’s my résumé.” Dan helped—licking stamps and envelopes. Such a good kid. Anyhow, shaking the tree.

  February 12

  You can feel my wife’s mood from the other room, from the other side of the house. Worry, worry, worry. It’s driving Dan and me crazy. To-do list: get a job, just to escape this woman’s gravitational field.

  No real changes. Three pills. Two with coffee, one with vodka and Seven.

  February 13

  Dilemma for V day tomorrow: get her flowers and get yelled at for wasting money on flowers, or just go with a card and come up short that way? I understand now why they named the holiday after a martyr. I should dragoon Dan into this—if it comes from both of us, A. Mulligan will like it.

  February 14

  My legs, knees, joints, plantar f all feel fine for the first time in weeks. Promising. Will stick with the three doses. Dan and I got the Mrs. a black forest cake from Tom Thumb—too much chocolate, but it averted another Valentine’s Day massacre.

  February 15

  Two weeks in and this might be working.

  February 16

  My family hates me. Last night, I’m sitting in the den after dinner watching Bob Newhart run his inn in Vermont. I have two fingers of vodka left on my second drink but I’m lucid and everything’s in evening susurrus. The phone rings. Anne answers and it’s her sister. Now, my wife had a couple drinks too, and I can tell she’s tired, so maybe that set her off. But it doesn’t take but two minutes before she spirals into this full Cassandra routine. I can only hear her half of the conversation but I’m instantly annoyed because it’s clear they spoke recently and she told her sister that I lost my job at American. The thought of Anne’s jackass brother-in-law nodding gravely at that news started to burn me. Then he would say “to be expected” or some other self-righteous bullshit.

  So I can hear all this coming in from the kitchen and my better half starts broadcasting this tale of woe about how we are running out of money, and she’ll let Catherine know if they need a loan, but thank you, thank you for your prayers and your offers to help, and all this other horseshit like we’re completely broke. She’s making no sense and has this panicked, worked-up tone and is ignoring the fact that I’m ten feet away and can hear her throw out possibilities like having to send Dan to go live with the Hurleys because I’m at death’s door. I turn off the TV and escape to the back room. But now I can’t hear her and I’m just replaying the tape—why did she have to go and tell those assholes our business? Suddenly I’m so furious I find myself in the garage taking pops off a fifth of vodka and I’m just so fucking sick of it.

  And so half an hour later she finds me shitfaced in the garage and starts screaming at me because I’m just proving her point now. I don’t say a word. I’m too tired to argue. Sure, this is all my fault, just go with that and leave me alone. She starts sobbing and slamming doors and Dan peeks into the garage and sees we’re back to square one and he starts slamming doors too and I’m fucking alone now.

  February 17

  Throbbing pain in my leg now. I took all my doses but feel like crap. I drank way past the lighthouse last night. I woke up on the couch and Dan was off at school and Anne was out, and the house was empty and silent, and I just lay there like I was shipwrecked and washed up on the beach of a desert island.

  A couple thoughts kept occurring to me. The first was: Stop doing stupid shit. The second was: Is this it? Is this all there is?

  I think I have a problem with booze. One becomes too many too often. And maybe it’s the MS but the hangovers and comebacks are torture and practically forcing me to go with hair of the dog. Something—my liver maybe—ain’t right, and I drink like it’s going out of style, and I’m always thirsty, always thinking about it, even though there’s no pleasure in it anymore and there’s seemingly no end to it.

  When I drink, all I want to do is quit, and when I quit, all I want to do is drink.

  February 18

  Took doses, nothing bad or good to report—stiff and hobbled as usual. Since no one in the house is talking to me, I made a baloney sandwich for dinner and got good and drunk on the dregs of an old handle of Clan MacGregor, which, let me tell you, will burn a hole through your tartan. So I’m officially off my two drinks a night regimen and not sure I care—I feel like this has to run its course like it always does. That sounds like I have a fever, and that’s funny because last night while gagging on shots of Clan MacGregor paint thinner I came across a body snatcher movie on channel 39. The old one from the 50s. And it’s weird but that’s what it’s like now with the drinking. Like I’m contaminated, and it takes over and I become this different person. And I’m strangely removed from it, like it’s no longer part of me, but then I wake up and I don’t know what happened and start thinking about drinking again.

  February 19

  Ten o’clock news reports: American Eagle flight 3378, scheduled domestic from Raleigh/Durham to Richmond, departed during low ceiling, low visibility, and night conditions. The aircraft ascended to about 300 feet but shortly thereafter crashed into a nearby reservoir. Both crew members and all ten passengers were killed.

  I morbidly expected the phone to ring. I was the one who liaised with the NTSB. Instead I’m lying on this couch, imagining how the Pharaoh Crandall is taking all of this.

  Fuck you, Bob. With your cigarette gloom, your snaggleteeth, your gnawed fingernails, your coffee breath, your frat row haircut. Fuck your operating profit. Fuck your 12,000-square-foot house with marble floors, an indoor swimming pool, a moat—a fucking moat—around the dinner table, and a pink toilet you flush by stepping on a button in the floor.

  And to think of every spreadsheet I pulled and every hour of overtime I slaved for this bastard. Every marathon meeting that turned into the Spanish Inquisition. Why was this plane six minutes late? Why four no-shows on this flight? Who the hell approved this yield on the Nashville routes? And when the answers didn’t present themselves, he would just bang on the table like a child. This—POUND—is—POUND—simply—POUND—factually—POUND—wrong—POUND POUND POUND. This one time, he throws his tantrum and tires himself out, so now he’s chain-smoking and sitting there silently in his black suit, suffocating the room with his gray smoke, unable to look at us, just staring at the table in front of him, and ten fucking minutes go by this way before he snaps out of it, and out of nowhere, he starts lecturing us about how we shouldn’t offer bereavement fares. Like going into a department store and asking for a discount on a black dress because your relative died. And then like some bloodless reaper, like Nero at his most dour and fatalistic, he stabs out the cigarette. Nobody lives forever. We’re all just ants on a marble. Meeting over.

  February 20

  No side effects from the vitamin, but this has to be it for the booze. God help me—I’ve had enough. And what’s the point now—by the time I drink enough to feel it, I make myself sick. No more. Enough.

  February 21

  Escaping the dreary purview of Anne “The Scowler” Mulligan, I went back to the library today. I looked up MS in the medical encyclopedia. No new information. Not hereditary, possibly environmental. To look at the South Bronx now you’d think I grew up in Beirut, but it wasn’t that bad. We had milk and vitamin D. The sun occasionally shined on Willis Avenue.

  Then I looked up dipsomania. A bad business. And I must admit, I have some of the maladies—drinking alone, drinking to forget, maintaining a level of comfort by drinking. So new plan: no alcohol except on the rarest of occasions. No drinking in bars, no stumbling around the house. If I get a new job: one celebratory Johnnie Black. If Dan gets a scholarship to Georgetown
, make it a Chivas. Only drink with the good news, not the bad.

  February 22

  I have fever dreams when I come off the drink. Weird nightmares waking in cold sweats. Last night I dreamt of Anne’s father in a dim corner booth of the old IRT, like the Greek riverman who you pay your token to get to the underworld. I pass him unnoticed, and then I’m down there on a platform somewhere in the Bronx. The punks have put out all the lights, and it smells God awful and the train is nowhere to be found. There’s laughter and screams bouncing off the walls. When I look down the platform, the columns recede and I feel sick. And then the train comes and it’s on fire, and I can feel the heat off it, and the doors open and there are Anne and Dan and I don’t know what to do. Do I take them off the train? Do I get on? The car is molten hot and it’s burning my eyes, and the two of them are just staring at me as the doors close, and I realize too late it’s a purifying fire and I’m stuck in this dark and wretched place. And I wake up on that and there are all these birds chattering and twitching and carrying on outside the window but it’s dark out, dawn an hour away still.

  February 23

  Haven’t touched the sauce in four days, which is something. If I can make it a week, then a month, then we’ll see.

  Dan has been such a trooper. This morning he was reading the paper and he found an article in the business section about American opening their new HQ in Fort Worth. “If they’re expanding, maybe you can get your old job back.” It was said with such love and hope and I kissed him on the forehead and wanted to cry and now I’m completely crushed and empty inside.