Imperfect Solo

by Steven Boykey Sidley

  “OF COURSE I AM NOT THE FIRST PERSON. YOU THINK THAT MAKES IT EASIER?”

  “Why are you shouting at me?”

  “Because it’s your fault.”

  “Grace’s death is my fault?”

  “No, your inability to make me feel better is your fault.”

  “I am a psychologist. We love loss. It is 62 percent of our revenue.”

  “I am going to hit you.”

  “You are not going to hit me.”

  “Of course I’m not, but the fact that I want to should give you pause.”

  “You want my advice?”

  “Not if you are going to—”

  “Shut up, I’m not finished. Again, I can tell you stories of Iran. Stories of loss and pain and grief that would make even your Holocaust stories nod in empathy. Just what happens when we live upon this earth and deal with randomness, unpredictability, arbitrariness.” There’s a nanosecond of silence, a silence I choose not to break for I know now how it will end. “Take earthquakes. Do you know how many earthquakes we have in Iran? Many. Poor areas and mud structures mean that there’s death everywhere. And dead kids—especially, dead kids. I was sent to one of these places to help once. Dead children, grieving and maimed parents, siblings—just an awful, writhing, keening maelstrom of loss. And for what? Why? We cannot understand these things. Some people know how to do a trick, passing on responsibility to God and then thanking him for his wise plan, but I suspect that that’s not your bag. So what do we, the human race, do? We nod our collective heads in empathy. As I nod mine toward you, my little friend.

  “You have lost an ex-wife, the mother of your child, perhaps somebody in whom you placed expectations of your own salvation. So I tell you this, my friend. You must grieve. You must not listen to people who tell you that time will heal all. You must grieve with titanic energy, with explosive anger. You must punch walls, you must rail against the universe, you must be impolite to strangers, you must kick the dog, you must abuse drink, drugs. And then one day when you think it cannot get any worse, you must think of this. You must think of the small child I found in the village where I went, spine crushed, limbs useless forever. She was perhaps two. Crying incomprehensibly for her mother, who was dead—along with her father, eleven siblings and all of her known cousins. She was also horribly burned, her face a melted monstrosity.

  “And when that time comes, when you wake up hungover, wishing you were dead, consider her. She is now fifteen years old and begging on the street. She would swap her life for yours in a heartbeat. In a heartbeat.”

  “But—”

  “Not finished. Loss is measured on a spectrum. All loss brings pain, also on its own spectrum. Measure yours on that spectrum and feel grateful. Now we shall get drunk and talk about women.”

  I stare at him.

  “You done?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Someone else has it worse, so I should feel better?”

  “Indeed.”

  “And how long did you study for?”

  “Sorry, that is all I have got.”

  “We will get drunk but we won’t talk about women. You will tell me every fucking detail about every loss in that earthquake. In graphic detail. Spare me naught.”

  But at the end of the night, drunk and numbed, I am left with this. It simply cannot be, under any reasonable statistical analysis, that these blows keep coming. Surely it must end now and allow me to grieve in peace.

  CHAPTER 38

  AH, REBBE, YOU come back to me now, features clear, force strong. Those pale eyes into which I used to gaze, always seeing the better part of me reflected in brighter hue. Color me now, I plead you.

  How would you protect me now as I crouch from the brutal nonchalance of happenstance? What would you say? What would you do? Against whom would you yield a child’s tennis racket with such terrible vengeance?

  Do you remember a conversation we had, on the school bus? We were what, seven? You looked at me strangely for a long while and then spoke.

  “If only we could marry each other.”

  I was appalled. I knew it to be a shocking thing, even then. You went on.

  “I mean, not for real. I know we can’t marry each other. But if we could pretend we were, so that we could always be together. Even if we were married to other people.”

  I knew what you meant then. You learn the lessons of affection and safety at home. Mom and Dad fussed and coddled and enthused and encouraged each other and us. And through frictionless osmosis, this was how we related to each other.

  Then you left, Rebbe. You left me alone, without farewell, without pomp. I was left gaping, eyes wide, confounded, uncomprehending. Life was one thing and then it was another. It was good and rich, and then colorless and impoverished. Can you imagine the damage, Rebbe? Can you imagine that certain part of me that lost its center, leaving me insect-like, on my back, pathetic limbs pivoting and grasping for traction and finding only the cold, odorless air.

  So, Rebbe, you know I do not cleave to optimistic visions of afterlives, and in which one of those you may have found your peace (we talked about heaven and hell, even as little children, and found the whole idea silly). But the texture of what life should be, should have been, is imprinted on my memory, which is painted with my memory of us. Our early experiences, they tell us, are everything. The man becomes the simulacrum of his first few years. Violence, smarts, trust, kindness, rage, discipline, calm—all wired concrete and impenetrable early on. We wired each other, with Mom and Dad as a soft-lit backdrop, gazing at the strength of our interplay, the certainty of our gestalt.

  So you see, Rebbe, I was set adrift, and in the tumult of recent events I feel that since that awful phone call I have forever lost sight of the shore.

  I have learned to cope, I suppose. Our circumstances were a long shot. Separated by biology, joined in time, we were a rare breed. Not quite joined by the mandates of a single strand of DNA, but thrown together by the odds into a life of welcome proximity, causing me to escape the certainty of aloneness we are all supposed to feel, the isolation of identity as a necessary step to becoming an adult.

  I buried you deep when you left, Rebbe. You surfaced occasionally, first every minute, then every hour, then every day, then at longer intervals. And as I grew into a bewildered adult you hardly surfaced at all. I could have maintained our severed relationship forever, Rebbe.

  But not under these circumstances. Come back, Rebbe. I need your guidance, your fealty, and your protection.

  CHAPTER 39

  INNOCENT WILL ACCOMPANY his mother’s body to Zimbabwe. I am profoundly anxious about him. He is frail and silent, either about to implode or explode. I don’t know whether he is using—I suspect not, because he does not go out. But half my life has been spent around musos who stick shit up their noses, in their mouths, in their veins, in their lungs, and they are a wily bunch, able to score under even the most constrained of conditions. But he is consumed with grief, dulled, hooded. One line of coke will open up someone like that, start the engines, open the valves between consciousness and mouth. There is no sign of that.

  “Let’s go for a drive.”

  Innocent is sitting in front of my TV set, the Hollywood sign rearing up behind him in the plate-glass window.

  “Why?” He doesn’t bother to look at me.

  “To see your sister. She’s been sick.”

  He whips around to look at me.

  “What d’you mean, sick?”

  “It was nothing, she’s fine.”

  Innocent and Isobel. He took to her like a big brother when she was nothing more than a gurgle with little feet and brown eyes. The age gap was too big for them to be playmates, but Innocent, even as a seven-year-old, was imbued with protective big-brotherness, attending to her every need on the occasions where family arrangements overlapped. Both being only children, they lapped each other up, celebrating their stepsiblingness, clinging to the hal
f-blood that they shared. Spoke on the phone and, later, a secret life shared on Facebook and other recesses of the new world. I never pried, so relieved was I at the bonding of this relationship. It somehow seemed to absolve me of the guilt of two failed marriages. They shone a light on my genes and let me hide from the stern gaze of wasted time and poor judgment.

  Bunny has held the news of Grace’s death from Isobel. Although she is now out of danger, and improving fast, Bunny has decided, rightly, that the Grace tragedy is a step too far. We will tell her soon.

  Innocent and I head out in my battered Prius, my sop to environmental concerns, notwithstanding my skepticism about the sucking of electricity out of sockets being all that superior to sucking petroleum out of hoses. Just five minutes on the Internet will disabuse one of any easy answers in that department.

  “So, how you doing?”

  Innocent doesn’t answer. He stares out of the window as we head down the steep slope of Beachwood Drive, houses on either side of the road giving way to cheaper apartment blocks lower down, erected in the fading shadow of the great sign, and housing residents scrabbling in the alleyways of the entertainment industry, hopeful that the sun will emerge from those shadows and shine on them. The road is bordered by palm trees, a foreign import to LA, semiotic in their mocking symbolism.

  I thread my way through the commercial district of Hollywood, at once run down and renewed, depending on which side road one chooses to avoid the tourists and buses and grand old buildings on Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue and Vine, all still bearing witness to dreams.

  As we turn right onto Santa Monica Boulevard, my chosen artery for this journey, which along with its equally well-traveled neighbors, Sunset and Beverly and Olympic and Venice boulevards, will carry us for forty-five minutes to Bunny’s place nearer the coast.

  Innocent is mute, so I turn on the radio and scan for distraction. There are hundreds of stations, none tuned to my mood, so I turn it off.

  I try again. “So, how are you doing?”

  Innocent looks at me. His handsome face is drawn and still.

  “Dad, what happened with you and Mom?”

  “Now or then?”

  “Both.”

  “I didn’t appreciate her when I had the chance. Twenty years on I began to realize that. That is why I gate-crashed San Francisco.”

  “Did she know?”

  “I think so.”

  “Was she going to take you back?”

  “Maybe. I would have had to work at it. But maybe.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  “Yeah. But I’ll get over it because I can convince myself it was just a fool’s errand. How are you doing?”

  “She was too young to die. She was my mom. I am not old enough to lose my mom.”

  His voice cracks as he says this.

  “Innocent, she did good with you and with herself. And you still have me.”

  “Yes, I do. But you know what they say?”

  “What?”

  “Nobody will ever love you as much as your mother.”

  I don’t answer because I am trying to hold it together. Beverly Hills flashes by on the left, streets and stores of impossible ostentation. Even the police station dazzles.

  “So what d’you think about going to Zimbabwe?”

  “Would prefer it if I wasn’t going to a funeral.”

  Innocent has always been curious about his mother’s homeland. Pestering questions about Africa. Why is it at the bottom of everything, he asked. Poverty, corruption, brutality, discrimination against gays and refugees and albinos and every l’autre. I demurred. Pointed to other countries in other continents where it is worse to be gay, female, different, outspoken. But he hammered on. Colonialism. Exploitation. Slavery. Racial stereotypes inbred for hundreds of years. Resource stripping. Is this why, he asked. I tread lightly here, trying to be a useful liberal and a wise pragmatist. Jazz, I argue. Botswana. Mandela. Democracy sprouting everywhere. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Joyce Banda. Writers and artists. Wole Soyinka, Wally Serote. Landscapes, mountains, Serengeti. Kenyan long-distance runners. The diaspora. Usain Bolt. James Baldwin. Obama, for Christ’s sake. Mobile cash technologies in Kenya, Square Kilometer Array.

  Bodies down the Congo River, he counters. Starvation. Heart of Darkness. Muti murders.

  No, I counter. Institutional rape and torture in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia. Forced starvation in North Korea. Rape camps in Serbia. Buffoonery in Venezuela. Kleptocracy in Eastern Europe. Autocracy in Russia. Nefarious Haliburtons right here.

  No, he counters. Africa, a special case of awfulness, no-hopers. Why?

  I have no answer. These sorts of discussions tread on the quicksand of culture and race and blame and victimhood and oppression, and these days I steer clear. Besides, the fire in the belly has flickered of late, so I am thankful this looming debate has become buried under the tragedy of the moment.

  We arrive at Bunny’s house; she answers that door and throws herself into Innocent’s arms, sobbing. I move past them trying to avoiding the contagion of grief and head into Isobel’s room. She is propped up, reading.

  “Hello, kiddo.”

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  I do a little kiss smother on her head. She smells like baked apples.

  “What are you reading?”

  “Catcher in the Rye.”

  “Of course you are. Rite of passage for burgeoning young intellectuals.” But my pride knows no bounds. A book. A great book. A real book. No power supply in sight. Hundreds of white pages covered in black ink. There is hope yet for our blighted youth.

  “Don’t patronize me, Daddy.”

  “OK. You feeling better?”

  “Yup.”

  She puts down her book as her smartphone vibrates, grabbing it and glancing at the screen. Actually, there is no hope for our blighted youth at all.

  “When are you going back to school?”

  “Doctor says soon.”

  “That narrows it down then.”

  She is looking perky given that vengeful and unknown microorganisms have had their way with her. Ah, the resilience of youth.

  “Where’s my brother?”

  On cue, Innocent walks in. He beams when he sees her, the first smile since Grace died. She bounds out of bed and throws herself around him, coltish limbs enveloping his torso. My DNA step into the spotlight and do a merry jig.

  “Big brother. I’ve missed you.” She has her head burrowed in his neck. The words come out muffled and warm.

  “Someone said you were sick. I don’t believe them.”

  “Only a little. How’s Berkeley? Do you have a girlfriend yet?”

  His eye catches mine for a nanosecond.

  “Hundreds of girlfriends. Waves of girlfriends. Can’t study for all the girlfriends. How about you? Got a boyfriend?”

  “I’ll tell you when Dad’s not around.”

  I pout exaggeratedly. “Innocent will report back to me.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “No, he won’t.”

  Isobel slithers back into bed and her brother slumps down next to her. Bunny is at the door and I motion for her to follow me into the living room.

  “She doesn’t know, right?”

  She shakes her head.

  “We have to tell her sometime.”

  “Maybe Innocent can tell her? It’ll be better coming from him.”

  This strikes me as an odd concept. Does the information change shape depending from whence it comes? Are facts not objective entities? Perhaps not. That’s another problem with death. You have to tell people. It is like a viral expansion of sadness, upsetting all sorts of people in a widening ripple, at least until the fading amplitude robs it of power. I am done telling people. It has emptied me out. Let Innocent tell her; I will be a secondary comfort. Which suits me because I am a fragile thing now, holding on for all I’m worth, fingernails torn and bleeding from the downward slide from dread to this. Grasping for straws, I find myself arguing
that there is an upside. Innocent smiled. Isobel has emerged intact from dread’s maw. My father won’t join an Aryan gang in prison. My boss is not only not my boss anymore, but has been vanquished by my mighty sword.

  Farzad was off the mark this time. He asked me to imagine someone else, worse off, and in comparison, to rejoice in my good fortune. But this was asking for an etiolation of empathy beyond my skills. But to imagine myself worse off, that I can do. Things could be much worse and they are not.

  Right?

  CHAPTER 40

  UP NEAR THE Hollywood sign, obscured from view until you have threaded your way along some skinny and snaky canyon streets, is a well-hidden geographic treasure: a lake. Actually, a large reservoir, given that my city is in a coastal desert, but it appears so unexpectedly as the last corner is turned that it seems to be a massive special-effects trick, with shimmering water, dam wall and the entire city dropping down below it. I know longtime LA residents who have never heard of it, let alone seen it. I have never found out who built it and where along the great chain of water engineering it nestles, but those residents in the know quietly revel in strolling, dog walking, and jogging opportunities along its perimeter. It fosters an elite camaraderie among its admirers, who nod at each other like Freemasons as they pass.

  Innocent and I are on one of its trails as the day wears down. He is due to leave in the morning, boarding a series of aircraft that will ferry a coffin in their holds until touching down in Zimbabwe. It will be an exhausting and macabre trip, with Innocent bouncing from airport to airport, across the longest of journeys, knowing that his dead mother is on a similar trajectory, in a dark and cooled recess among other biodegradable goods, most of which are being kept fresh for human consumption, while his mother is being preserved for consumption of another sort.

  Innocent is ill prepared for this. As would anyone be, I suppose, but I suspect that his dance with drugs indicates an incompatibility between life’s sterner demands and the abilities of what is, to be fair, a very young man just beyond adolescence. Still, perhaps this sad experience will add some mortar to his young life. Then again, it may collapse it completely.