Everything Solid has a Shadow

by Michael Antman

  But Glennis was a revelation. Their Chicago offices were in a converted loft building, formerly a cannery, in the River North area, and the whole enterprise reeked of confidence and professionalism. I was assigned three accounts in my first hour of my first day of business, and by the end of my second day, I knew what their needs were, what our strategic goals on their behalf were, who my partners were in achieving these strategic goals, and, most important, that all three had been clients for a minimum of three years each.

  What all this meant was that I had very little time for either wakeful dreaming or sleeping dreaming, and no particular interest in fishing for pork on the Volga or playing bumper pool in an Argentine gas station. I stopped visiting Dr. Nemerov and had no time, either, for Bowen, or Diane, or for anyone but MariAngela, whom I’d started visiting every day after work. And I started eating again—lunch with my new colleagues at first, because I didn’t want them to think anything was wrong, and then, after I’d forced a few Thai curries and Italian subs down, I found myself eating dinner again, and breakfast too, and actually enjoying it.

  My irritable bowel symptoms had disappeared.

  About a month after I’d begun the new job, MariAngela walked into my brain again for the last time as a living person. This time, for the first time, there was an actual background: Instead of appearing out of darkness, she walked down the sidewalk. (Which sidewalk? I couldn’t say—it could have been the one outside the rental house, or the one where I once gave the green gumball-machine ring to Willa, or the one outside of MariAngela’s childhood home, or another one entirely. More likely—and needless to say—it was all of them at various instants.)

  MariAngela joined me where I was sitting with my back against the old elm tree with the fantastically gnarled exposed roots that looked like the knobby knees of a kneeling person perched atop another kneeling person. There was just enough space among the complicated roots for a child’s body to squeeze in, back against the broad trunk, and though I was already seated there, MariAngela magically slid in next to me, and we snuggled together for a moment.

  Once again, as with the sidewalk itself, the figure next to me shifted from MariAngela to Willa, and then from Willa to the little girl who actually lived across the street from the rental house, and then to the little girl who’d thrown the eggroll, and finally back to MariAngela herself. As if to prove who she was, MariAngela lifted her light shirt and displayed for me four small moles, or, as we used to call them, “beauty marks,” in a diagonal line on her ribs. They looked like an excerpted portion of a constellation. At this point, she “settled” into MariAngela and did not change again.

  She pulled her shirt back down and said, “I want to remind you of the things we did under this tree. One time when we were really little, we got ahold of a teaspoon, and we each took turns tasting dirt. Remember? It was cold and sweet, but gross, and we decided that that was the flavor of earthworm poop. And then we got a package of Charms candies and buried some of them under the tree, who knows why, maybe we thought it would make the soil even sweeter, but then we ate the rest, and we were talking about if we would be willing to endure the worst possible pain any human being could feel for just one second if it meant we then could eat the most delicious candy ever invented, and we both agreed we would. And then on a different day, we also buried one of your mom’s teapots. And there was another time when I asked you why there had to be money and why everything in the world couldn’t just be free, and you tried to explain it to me.”

  And then she looked at me very intently in my dream.

  And she said, “I need you to stop fighting this.”

  I said, “What?”

  And she said, “The earthworms.”

  And then we found ourselves in the backyard of my childhood home, and it was completely filled, trunk to trunk to trunk, with elm trees. MariAngela lifted her arm, and all of the complicated roots suddenly disentangled from the earth and shot like rockets up to the sky, raining down clumps of sweet (for now we knew that it was sweet) black dirt.

  MariAngela lifted her arm upward again, and I followed her gaze up into the sky, where all of the uprooted trees were floating there, branches and roots trailing in the gentle breeze. And then she said, “Look for me.”

  As I thought about this dream the next day, I realized that all of the memories that MariAngela had related—the tasting of the dirt with teaspoons, the burying of the Charms candies, the naive discussion of money—had been things that occurred between Willa and me when we were very little. And yet, for the first time, I didn’t automatically think that the knowledge and the memory of these events were mine alone, but rather that MariAngela herself had somehow, in her repeated entries into my brain, made these memories hers.

  Our roots were entangled.

  Not long after this last dream, MariAngela was transferred to a different and much-smaller room. She was no longer able to use a three-pronged cane for more than brief trips to the bathroom and now spent her days in a small wheelchair, though not yet one of the high-tech ones that would be coming later. Along with the new room and new seating arrangements came a new nurse, whom MariAngela was chatting with when I arrived. She seemed to be chipper, and I told her this. She and the nurse laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Hey, Charlie, sorry. This is my new friend Ludmilla.”

  The nurse nodded and said in a lugubrious voice, “Hello, Mr. Alessandro. MariAngela has told me all about you.”

  MariAngela added, “Ludmilla is going to be pretty much my constant companion during the day. She’ll help me eat and go to the bathroom and stuff. Sometime beginning in the next couple of weeks probably, she’s gonna have to start siphoning my spit too.” She laughed. “Sorry about that, Ludmilla! By the way Charlie, did you know I almost was a nurse myself?”

  “You? No.”

  “Yeah, that’s why I first started waitressing at Berto’s and working at the sports bar. I took a year off, before I knew you, to build up some tuition. I was thinking about neonatal intensive care, but I couldn’t handle all that chemistry stuff in my first year, and I just ran out of time and money and energy and everything, so I went back to being a, you know, ‘professional waitress.’ Anyway, we were laughing because we were just talking about ‘doctor talk,’ like ‘sharp as a tack’ means just on the edge of full-blown Alzheimer’s, and ‘out and about’ means shuffling along the corridor attached to an aluminum pole, and ‘chipper’ means you should be suicidally depressed but somehow you manage to be in a good mood anyway.”

  Ludmilla said, “Actually, I don’t think we discussed this word ‘chipper.’ ” She was a tall, middle-aged, rather dour woman with a slight Russian accent. She had a gray knitted shawl wrapped around her even though it was a warm day for March. She cast a worried glance at MariAngela. “We weren’t really talking about it in terms of MariAngela.”

  MariAngela said, “Don’t worry, I’m really fine. And that’s another one, by the way, ‘fine.’ ‘Oh, I’m fine,’ or ‘it’s perfectly fine.’ It just means it’s one step away from being shit.”

  Ludmilla looked slightly stricken, and it was clear that she and MariAngela had been talking about these terms in the context of other patients, not MariAngela. I said to her, “Listen, it’s just fine. I mean, really fine. Listen, would it be okay if MariAngela and I talked privately for a little while?”

  Ludmilla said, “This would be okay. Just ring if you need anything.”

  After she left, I said, “So is the wheelchair…I mean, is it OK?”

  “Yeah, I’m just, you know, rolling with it. So to speak.”

  “I had another one of those dreams last night, and you told me to stop fighting it.”

  MariAngela smiled. “It’s funny. I have a therapist now, along with the new nurse and all the other cool stuff. I mean, a mental-type therapist. And he told me the same thing.
Given the nature of my disease and its course and outcome, he said more or less to stop fighting it too. Just to go with the flow and accept what’s coming, because the panic comes from fighting it, like when you’re drowning and your arms are all flailing and you’re trying to grab the water or the air with your hands but there’s nothing to hold on to, eventually you just realize it’s pointless, and you let the water flow in and then you die. So that’s what I’m going to do, and that reminds me of a favor.”

  “Okay. I have a favor for you too, speaking of coincidences.”

  “Okay, you tell me yours first.”

  “MariAngela, could you lift your shirt for me?”

  She smiled. “You could have had plenty of opportunities to see me naked after our alley encounter. Too late now, Charlie.”

  I knew she meant this more or less lightheartedly, and I tried to answer in the same vein. “Oh man, I never even got to see you in a halter top at the sports club!”

  MariAngela looked puzzled. “ManCave? No, I was never a waitress there. I worked there sometimes as one of the shots girls to pick up some extra cash when I was short on rent.” She shrugged. “So why do you want me to take off my shirt now?”

  “Not off. Just lift it up, halfway. I want to look at your ribcage.”

  She shrugged again and lifted her blue cotton shirt. There, on the left side of her body, were four little moles arrayed diagonally across her ribs like an excerpted portion of a constellation.

  “I saw those marks last night in my dream. You were a little girl at the time, and I wasn’t 100 percent sure if it was you or another little girl, but then you told me it was you and you lifted your shirt to show me those exact same beauty marks, in exactly the same pattern.”

  MariAngela just stared at me.

  Then, after a moment, she said, “Even if you ever came to the sports bar, you couldn’t have seen this there. We shots girls wore these spangly T-shirts. I’m not the bare-belly type anyway, too much, in public.”

  Of course, she was right. The shots girls wore midriff-covering T-shirts to distinguish them from the waitresses in their halter tops. I remembered that quite clearly from the night I’d been there, and I recalled the segmented trays of rattling test tubes they carried in front of them with straps around their shoulders. The tubes were filled with brightly colored schnapps and liqueurs and vodkas that looked like fluorescent lime and cherry Fla-Vor-Ices. When a patron called one of the shots girls over, she’d do a little “shimmy” and then tilt the guy’s head back and pour the test tube full of alcohol down his throat. This was what MariAngela had done—a moderately humiliating job, I suppose, but whether more so for the patron or the server, I couldn’t say.

  We were both silent for a long time. I wished for a moment that I was one of those clueless tourists freezing in the winter wind as they waited to get into the deep-dish pizza place down the street, but then I pushed that out of my mind and focused on MariAngela.

  “So what happens now?”

  “Look, I’m on thin water here, and I need you to help me.”

  “Thin ice.”

  “No, I meant exactly what I said. I’m in desperate need, and whether you asked for it or not, and whether I asked for it or not, I need something from you.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Well, before I get to that, let me tell how it’s going to happen. I’m moving back to my apartment soon, but not for a particularly good reason. Basically, as long as I have nursing care, there’s nothing more they can do for me in a ‘facility,’ for lack of a better term, so I might as well be comfortable for the next eight months or a year or however long it takes.”

  “Well, at least you’ll be at home.”

  “Yeah, and with Ludmilla. So anyway, at some point later this year, after the suctioning-the-spit part gets underway, I’m not going to be able to talk to you anymore, not with actual words. And I’ll be in a high-tech wheelchair, and what they’ll do is, they implant a chip in my forehead so I can tell the computer where I want to move and stuff. Okay? But then later, even the high-tech shit isn’t going to help, because I won’t be able to breathe any more. That’s the point where I gotta make the decision if I wanna be put on a ventilator, which really does nothing but allow me to exist, period. I’ll never be off it again and I’ll die soon enough anyway. So let’s say I don’t want the ventilator, I’m gonna start having trouble breathing at night, and then trouble sleeping at night because I’m gasping for air, and then I probably have only a few weeks to live at that point, and Ludmilla’s great and all, but at some point I’m gonna swallow something into my lungs, they call it ‘aspirate,’ and then I’ll get pneumonia and die anyway.”

  “Can’t you get antibiotics for the pneumonia?”

  “Of course, but antibiotics”—she pronounced it auntie-bee-otics—“and ventilators will just put it off for a few days or weeks, and then I’ll be right back where I started from, and then the next go-round will be even worse with the choking.”

  “So once you’re in the wheelchair and you have the chip implanted, there’s no real treatment?”

  “Well, there’s one. At some point, after the first or second bout of pneumonia, or when I am gasping for breath in my sleep and shit, the doctor slips me a nice, healthy dose of morphine. But that’s only if I decide to go the hospital and time it right, it won’t really work if I want to die at home.”

  “Shit. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Charlie, I want you to help me to die. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. I don’t ‘want’ you to help me to die. You will. At this point, you will help me die. You have no choice because I have no one else and you have no one else, and I promise you I’ll haunt you for real this time if you don’t.”

  I went over to her narrow wheelchair, and she managed to shift her body to one side so that I could get my arms around her upper thighs and waist and I lifted her up and then I collapsed into her chair with her seated on my lap. It had taken a lot of work; there wasn’t really room for two people, even two people as skinny as us, in that one chair, so I had to do a lot of twisting and arranging of her legs to get her to face me. We were as crammed together as we were in my dream, in the roots of that ancient tree.

  I held MariAngela around the waist, and then around her buttocks, and I could feel how terribly frail she was by how sharply the bones stuck out. They stuck out as much as my collarbones did, and that made me feel that we were brother and sister under the skin.

  I had never told Alisa that what I was afraid of was bones, and I didn’t tell MariAngela now, because I wasn’t afraid anymore.

  MariAngela’s skin was warm, like the skin of someone very much healthy and alive. There was no thin film of cellophane between us, nothing between us at all except, here and there at various points of our bodies, the pulsing of my blood pressed against the pulsing of hers.

  I stroked her hair a bit and said, “You know, I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that we can only be one person. I used to say to myself, ‘I am the person I have been given to live my life with.’ But I think now that that was wrong. MariAngela, you are the one I have been given to live my life with.”

  She looked delighted. “Thank you! That’s exactly right.”

  The next day at work, I got a call from Diane.

  “Hey, Charlie, you’ll never guess where I’m calling from.”

  “You’re right. I can’t guess.”

  “Phoenix! I’m in Phoenix!”

  “Lucky you. I’ll bet you can use a vacation, the way you work.”

  “Oh, no, no, Charlie. No, no. This is no vacation. I’ve left him.”

  “You’re kidding, you left Frank? Finally? Why? How?”

  “Well, it’s probably not exactly what you’re expecting. I came to visit an old college friend here in Phoenix in February for vacation, and while I
was here, I also talked to a former colleague that works for a big labor law firm here, and bottom line, after I got back to Chicago, he offered me a job!”

  “That’s wonderful! I just got a new job too, and it’s one of Gilbert’s competitors, I mean, if he’s still in business at all.”

  “Then you have to come out to Phoenix and we’ll celebrate! So anyway, I was so happy, but Frank was furious and refused to consider moving out to Phoenix, which I kind of don’t blame him because I sprung it on him, but I only sprung it on him because I guess subconsciously I was thinking of leaving him anyway or else why would I even have considered the job offer, much less take a vacation by myself to Phoenix, right? I mean my friend wasn’t even that close. Can I tell you something intimate, Charlie?”

  “Of course.”

  “It makes me a little ashamed, but I’ll tell you anyway. My friend is a he, and he is only a friend—I’d never have cheated on Frank the way he did with me and you. But when I got to Phoenix, I don’t know, both of us must’ve had something on our minds, because we ended up getting together, you know? Am I a terrible person?”

  “Were you doing this to get back at Frank?”

  “I wasn’t, honestly! My friend and I just sort of, you know, fell together, though I have to ask myself why it was him that I decided to visit out of the blue. Maybe I was trying to force the issue because I needed out from under Frank. So, this is the weird part, I don’t know how to explain it exactly, but the whole week, you know, we were doing it. And for some reason, it was just an inside joke, don’t ask me to explain it, but every time we had sex that week, we’d put a little tab of Scotch tape on the inner frame of the door of my hotel room in Phoenix. You know, like we were keeping score.”

  “Okay, weird, but I sort of get it.”

  “It ended up being a lot of Scotch tape! So Frank comes the same weekend I was originally scheduled to return, and I’m already doing interviews with the new firm, so I told Frank I’d be delayed in coming back and we’re already arguing about whether I should take the job if it’s offered to me, so anyway he comes to my hotel where I’m staying to try to force me to come back to Chicago, and the instant, I swear, the instant he sees those strips of tape on the hotel door, he says to me, ‘That’s how many times you’ve had sex with some guy, isn’t it?’ I was mortified, but that’s the way he is, Charlie, he’s amazing. I couldn’t say anything, I was just paralyzed, and I knew that even if I didn’t get that job offer I’d stay in Phoenix until I got another. He just knew. Like you and that girl.”