“Charlie, I kind of hate to say it, but I’m really sick to my stomach. Can you come to see me again another time?”
“Sure.”
“And tell me in detail about Hawaii and all that other stuff.”
“I mean, you’re not mad at me? Do you want me to?”
“You’d better leave now.” She rolled out of bed and limped over to her cane and then began to hobble toward the bathroom. “God, I hate throwing up.” I grabbed her around the waist to steady her as she staggered into the bathroom, and suddenly I found myself on my knees with her, holding her as she vomited in the darkness.
I was very glad that I had waited instead of leaving when she had asked me to. I moistened a washcloth and wiped her mouth, gave her a sip of water—she and I fumbled a little bit in the pitch-black bathroom until I could guide the glass to her hand—and then I walked her back to her bed and tucked her in. She replaced the pillow over her eyes and took a deep, ragged breath.
“Do you feel another wave?”
“No, I think it’s okay for now. On the way out, you can stop at the nurses’ station if you wouldn’t mind and tell them I need another painkiller. Thanks for coming.”
I leaned over to kiss her on the cheek, but of course the pillow was in the way. I wanted to see her eyes in the deep darkness, to see them as she saw me, but I couldn’t, and she couldn’t. So I squeezed her shoulder and departed. She was what I had forgotten. And those other two women, the one in Galena who was so damaged and the one on the train who kept on taking out and putting back in those little objects, had reminded me of the one I could not remember because they, too, like MariAngela, were trying to reassemble themselves even as they fell to pieces.
But now that I’d remembered—not quite too late—I promised myself I would not forget again.
2
I came back again that Saturday, and this time I brought with me a big fruit basket filled with shiny Fuji apples and Honey Belle pears and little jars of jam and marmalade and fancy packages of dates and dried apricots. I thought it’d be a nice late-winter treat.
Once again, MariAngela met me in the family waiting area. This time, she wasn’t wearing sunglasses.
“You feeling better?”
“Head-wise, yeah. I actually feel fine. Now that I’ve had one for real, I’m actually kind of grateful that I never had ’em when I was younger. It would’ve sucked to have lived through all that kind of pain and puking in my twenties when I was out partying, but I guess I got off scot-free in that department. But now I’m paying for it, huh? That roller-coaster ride? I’m starting on the swoosh, down, piss-in-your-pants part.”
And indeed, as I accompanied her back to her room, her rolling gait was more pronounced than just a couple of days ago, and she seemed to be leaning more heavily than before on her cane. As we entered her room, I happened to glance at the doorframe, where there were two small horizontal aluminum slots for the patients’ name cards. One, for her missing roommate, was empty. The other one read “M. Halloran.”
I hadn’t known her last name was Halloran. As an occasional performer, I didn’t clock in like the regular employees at Berto’s and so I wouldn’t have seen her time card, but I still wasn’t quite sure how I hadn’t known.
This time she sat down in the easy chair at the foot of her bed, and I dragged over the other easy chair from the foot of her absent roommate’s bed. I sat with my back to the window—the curtains were open today—and that allowed me to look into MariAngela’s eyes for the first time since that time on the street when they’d been tinted orange with the sunset.
“It’s funny,” she said. “When I was a kid, I literally could not stand roller coasters, and when someone’d talk me into going on one at Great America or something, I’d immediately regret it and kind of pray that I could turn back time and not get on or I’d think about yelling to get off, and then I’d just grit my teeth until it was over. And that’s my only choice now, too. So, Hawaii. You were just starting to tell me about it.”
“Are you still okay with that?”
“I told you, Charlie, what else are we gonna talk about? You have to understand, from here on in, if I don’t live, whaddya call it, viscerally, I won’t live at all.”
“Do you mean vicariously?”
“I guess, yeah.”
“Because, I don’t know, I kind of hesitate to bring this up, but you could have actually come to Hawaii this past summer when I asked you.”
“I’d rather not talk about that.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I mean, why don’t you want to talk about it?”
“Because I don’t want to talk about it, Charlie. Drop it, okay? Besides, if I had gone, you probably wouldn’t have had your little adventure with your childhood friend and all that other cool stuff like getting socked in the eye.”
“I keep picking up on this hostility you have, and I don’t understand why. Okay, I understand about the not visiting you part, and I’m sorry, but I didn’t cause your illness, you know.”
MariAngela laughed. “You just hate it when women are mad at you, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“And why is that, do you suppose?”
“I’m not sure, but I think it’s because I was once accused of being responsible for the death of an infant, and her mother said some negative things to me that I didn’t really realize but they’ve stuck with me all this time.”
“Because you made it seem the other day like my being upset with you for not coming to visit me was a reason why I didn’t want you to come visit me again, whereas it was just the opposite, I mean, why would I be upset at all about your not visiting to begin with unless, you know, I wanted you to visit?”
“Well, I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Yeah, you’re here. But you need to see beneath the surface of what people say. Sometimes people say things because they’re under the influence of something or other, or they have a migraine, or a stupid fucking illness, you know?”
“And then, what, if the lights are turned back on and the migraine is over, that’s when the real person is speaking? Or is it the other way around? Is the real person the one who’s speaking in the dark?”
“God, Charlie, you just have to accept that people go through moods. Especially if they’re fucking dying, you know? Ask me, I’ve been doing pretty well, considering. God knows that a lot of my friends are freaked out and won’t even visit me. Like my I-guess-former girlfriend, Dani, when we first started going out, she told me this story about a friend of hers who’d been in a terrible accident, stepped out of a taxi in the middle of Michigan Avenue and a car swerved into him and he ended up losing both legs. So he’s sitting in the hospital with no legs anymore at age twenty-six, can you imagine, Dani says, ‘You know, I just couldn’t bring myself to visit him.’” She shook her head. “And guess who hasn’t visited me either?”
“But weren’t you saying you just have to accept?”
“Yeah, but in her case it isn’t just a mood, she’s an unfeeling bitch. I’ve adjusted alright. I’ve been reading a ton, all these books I’d never had a chance to read before. You wanna hear my favorite new quote? It’s from Emily Dickinson. Let me see if I remember this:
Either the Darkness alters—
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight—
And Life steps almost straight.
“Not bad, huh? So that’s my thing, Charlie: I’ve adjusted myself to midnight.”
“I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, but anyway, I guess that’s what you have to do.”
“So this woman, the mother, back when you were a kid, she’d just lost a baby, right?”
“More or less, yeah.”
“And I assume you weren’t actually responsible for the death, right?”
“No, not really. I wasn’t.”
“Well, maybe she was just operating under the influence of extreme emotions, have you thought about that? Maybe you should just forgive her.”
“You say I need to see beneath the surface of what people say, and yet I’m the one who had those weird dreams about you that are true.”
“My point precisely. Why did you have those two dreams? Because you were like utterly oblivious and that was the only way for a thought to get past your defenses.”
“I know, that’s what everyone says. I actually had a third dream about you. Not that long ago. You said something like ‘you still haven’t figured it out,’ and then you curled up into a ball and blew away in the wind.”
“Well, you got the curling up in a ball and blowing away part right. I feel like an orange that rolls under the refrigerator or something and you find it six months later.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop with the fucking sorrys. My illness is not your fault, and I never said it was.”
“Yeah, but somehow it is my fault that I had dreams about you.”
“I never said that either.”
“Sure you did. You did, you blamed me, and that’s why you didn’t want to go to Hawaii with me.”
“You don’t understand.”
“And that’s exactly what you told me in my dream.”
“I know.”
“You know? You mean you know because I just told you that’s what you said, or you know because you were actually trying to communicate with me?”
“Because you told me, Charlie.”
“Because just a minute ago, you said something like it was just a way of getting past my defenses.”
“I meant that in a figurative way, Charlie. More like in the sense of you getting past your own defenses. No, I’m not actually walking into your brain and consciously delivering messages to you, I thought I’d explained that to you before.” She paused and took a deep breath. “But I think what I said, or I should say what you imagined I’d said, is right—that you just don’t understand. I mean, I agree with what my dream version of me is telling you. Maybe you should just listen to what you’re telling yourself, so you don’t have to have dreams with other people telling you or people having to tell you in person.”
“Yeah, God forbid someone should tell me straight out in person. To be honest, I’m sick of understanding, or trying to understand, especially when women won’t communicate directly with me and tell me what they’re actually thinking. So, let’s say I leave now and ask you if it’s okay if I come and visit you again, and you say, ‘Don’t bother.’ Am I supposed to know if that really means ‘don’t bother’ because it’s not that important to you, or whether it’s just you being petulant because you’re a woman, or angry because of your illness, or what?”
She laughed. “I don’t think other guys in my experience, or other chicks for that matter, have as much trouble as you do figuring out that kind of stuff, but whatever. Please come again. I kind of enjoy our wrangling, and I want you to come again, okay?”
“Okay, I will.”
“And thanks for the fruit basket. Next time bring me a chocolate malt instead, okay? I love those.”
“Shit.”
“No, that’s okay. I’m just getting to the point where an apple or a pear is kind of a challenge. Malt’s not gonna last long either. Few months from now, it’ll be juice and water.”
3
The basement of my rental house, unlike Alisa’s basement, is a dank, crowded, spiky, and tangled cave. The house was once a farmhouse, after all. On one side of the basement, with its sloping, water- and iron-stained floor, was an old coal chute and bin; a 1920s-era, octopus-style, gravity-fed Holland coal furnace with multiple, massive, silver-duct-tape-covered pipe arms that plunged upward into the ceiling; a white mangle and an ancient icebox; a Federal Brand mechanical washing machine and, bolted into the top of it, an Anchor Brand (Pat. May 1, 1928) hand-cranked wringer; and a couple of shoulder-height crawl spaces that led to the area underneath the covered porches that abutted the house, with glass windows that swung up and out to reveal impossible clumps of rusted barbed wire, harrows, hoes, oxidized and raggedly perforated cans of rat and ant poison, lengths of lumber, jelly jars filled with screws, watering cans, spades, ice picks, encrusted paint rollers, rusted hose fittings, and other dark things that covered the dirt floor and were too far back in the space to discern. And everywhere in the dirt and among the objects that rested on the dirt were earthworms and other grubby pale things that squirmed and slithered and crawled.
To an outsider, it might seem much more of the sort of place for subterranean discoveries than Alisa’s sterile laundry room. The other side of the basement was more contemporary—a modern hot-water heater; cabinets filled with painting supplies and cans of paint that had dried to solid lumps; a big box filled with Star Trek: The Next Generation action figurines; a gigantic carton holding old, warped and waterlogged board games from the ’60s and ’70s; and many other cartons filled with flaking, water-stained magazines—Christian Century, Sports Illustrated, Harper’s. Here, too, there were papery little moths and minuscule worms. I felt sick.
Is that why I went down there after visiting MariAngela? Was I hoping to discover something, seeing as how Alisa and I had discovered exactly nothing in her laundry room? And yet Alisa’s laundry room had served its purpose, because those visions I’d had about the laundry-folding table had led me away from Alisa and, later, to Willa, if only for a short time. Maybe I was hoping to find something in this wormy, rusted, entangled mess, on a clammy winter day, no less, when the basement was cold and gloomy, that would bring me closer to MariAngela before she died, or at least help me to understand what she was hinting at but could not say. But I came upstairs feeling as if the rental house’s basement and its crawl spaces were not even as complicated as my own brain, and when I stepped into the bathroom to take a hot shower, I looked in the mirror and discovered long, undulant strands of gray and white cobwebs festooning my hair and ears.
But as I showered off that basement dust and rust and cold and mess, I started to think: Hadn’t I already discovered everything I needed in my house? The Felix cartoon, with that sweater that was unraveling the way MariAngela’s nerve endings were unraveling, and, as in Felix’s universe, her whole world would unravel soon enough? And the dollhouse, with its little shutters that opened out into the street and let in a tiny puff of frigid air?
That night I had another walk-in dream, though this one was a little different: I, myself, walked into a version of the dormer room—which then shifted into something resembling one of the basement crawl spaces and then back into a version of the dormer room—and opened up the tiny shutters.
There was a gigantic eye staring back at me.
It was MariAngela’s eye.
It didn’t blink at all. It looked at me steadily. I shouted, “Leave me alone!” in my dream, and then I woke up and realized I had actually shouted those words in my sleep, though no one was around to hear.
It was 3:30 a.m. I shuffled downstairs, took a Xanax from a bottle that Alisa had left in my medicine cabinet, and managed, after another hour or so, to fall asleep.
The next morning, at 9:00, I phoned Dr. Nemerov.
His next available appointment was not for three weeks. I was starting to feel like I was on the edge of losing my mind, and, somehow, that losing my mind was the direction I was meant to go in, like MariAngela’s roller coaster screaming downhill.
I buried myself in freelance work for the next three weeks and visited MariAngela every third day or so. I went to the movies in the evening to distract myself, and I ate hardly anything, either at lunch with MariAngela or before the movie started. I’d gone hunting in t
he cabinets one day for the old bottle of McCormick black pepper the missionaries had left behind for me and had discovered that some of their boxes of leftover pancake mix and bags of flour were infested with the same mealy worms Kathleen had discovered at Berto’s. So I cleaned out everything that wasn’t canned, and when I looked a few days later, the mealy worms were all gone, but so was my appetite. Skinny to begin with, I now looked at myself in the mirror and saw with horror that my ribs were visible. This I could not stand, and yet the thought of choking down a bowl of chili, with or without mealy worms, was just as repellent to me. I looked ahead to my next appointment with Dr. Nemerov as if he would be some sort of lifesaving savant.
My Glennis deposition took an entire afternoon at a law firm on Monroe. Gilbert was there, with his attorney, and so was the owner of Glennis and two of her attorneys. Jason wasn’t there, probably because Glennis was suing Gilbert, and Gilbert was suing Jason, so the two were separate cases. I kept my head down, figuratively, and just plowed through what I knew to be the truth—that the ClickEver account had been hanging by a thread by the time I’d been fired, that the people at ClickEver had been sticking with us only because of Jason, and that once he decided to walk, there would have been no way that Gilbert, whether with me or with anyone else at the agency, would have been able to salvage the account. I told them this, and I told them that Gilbert must have known this when he sold the agency to Glennis. I knew that Bowen, and a couple of my other colleagues, would be telling the lawyers pretty much the same thing when their turns came. Gilbert refused to look at me while I was giving my deposition, which I could tell because I looked at him more than I looked at the lawyers as I spoke. His jaw muscles rippled the entire time, as if he were rehearsing the act of ripping out and masticating my esophagus. Afterward, as we were walking out, he said, with clenched teeth, “You’ll find out that I don’t take betrayal lightly.”
I tried mightily to say something devastating in response, but all I could come up with was, “So what?”
Everything Solid has a Shadow Page 21