by Homes, A. M.
Hobbling back to the main building, I am looking at Gerwin, expecting something. “I am at a loss for words,” he finally says.
“Minimally, if you can’t protect me from physical harm, I cannot be part of your process. You’ll be damned lucky if I don’t sue you for not having your patient under control. And some ice, I need ice packs.”
Someone brings me several ice packs—black trash bags filled with ice, knotted at the top.
“Would you like a doctor to take a look at you?” Gerwin asks.
“No,” I say, “I want the dog and I want to go home.”
“I don’t suppose you want to say goodbye to George?” Gerwin asks.
“Very funny,” I say. “So he can deliver the knockout punch?” And while I’m waiting for them to get the car, I overhear one of them say, “We’re actually very pleased. It was a good visit, we saw a side of George that we’ve not seen before. It’ll give us something to work with.”
Tessie is already in the car when they bring it around, as is my bag, and Tessie’s, all packed. I am in incredible pain, and it’s only getting worse—every part of me, the parts that bend and the parts that don’t. I lower myself into the driver’s seat, wincing. As I adjust the seat, I notice a brown paper bag with my name on it—two bottles of water, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and a Ziploc filled with carrot sticks. Who the hell serves an adult peanut butter and jelly? I eat the sandwiches, wondering if it’s meant to be patronizing.
At a rest stop along the way, I go into the men’s room, lift my shirt, and in the chipped mirror look at my side—it’s the color of raw meat. Annoyed with myself for not pushing back, not putting up a better fight, I go into the convenience store and grab some Advil. When some woman tries to cut in front of me I say, “Hey, I was first,” and she says, “Clearly you weren’t or I wouldn’t be here now.” Tired of being the wimp, I throw her an elbow, I literally push her out of the way. The man behind the counter whips out some kind of enormous long black umbrella, pops it open in my face, and tells me to leave the store, using the metal end to poke at me.
“I’m injured,” I shout, “I’m trying to pay you for this Advil.”
“You are a bully,” the man shouts from behind the umbrella with a strong Indian accent. “I sell nothing to bullies. You go away now and don’t come back.”
“I am taking the Advil,” I say. “And I am leaving ten bucks here on top of the Fig Newtons.”
I back out of the store, tripping over a step and falling into a pool of grease and gasoline. Stinking, I get back to the car, take my shirt off in the parking lot, put my shirt from yesterday back on, swallow four Advil, and start the car. As I’m barreling towards home, thinking that it’s all too weird and that I’m never going back to that place, my cell phone rings. It’s George’s lawyer.
“The hospital asked me to inform you that you are not to visit again; they said you were threatening to the patient and the staff.”
“I was physically attacked by George.”
“They saw things differently. In their eyes you provoked him, you wouldn’t throw the ball to him, you spoke only to the doctors and not to him, you belittled him and made him feel left out and like there is something wrong with him.”
“Oh my God, that is so crazy. They’re nuts. It’s a freak show up there; I’ve never seen a crazier group of mental-health professionals. Do you know that one of them is planning on doing brain surgery on George, but hasn’t told him yet? It’s like a horror movie. How did you find that place anyway?”
“My brother-in-law,” the lawyer says.
“He was a patient?”
“The medical director,” the lawyer says. As he’s speaking, the reception gets crackly, and then the connection crumbles out from under before becoming a void.
“Hello?” I say. There is nothing. “Hello.”
It’s Monday, and I’m back at the house, the literal scene of the crime. I have this horrible sinking sensation; the house has some kind of force or electromagnetic charge, it’s an incredible weight taking me down.
Returning from the visit to George, as I approach the door, I lose power. I come in and cease to function. Like in Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, my bone marrow has turned to dust. I imagine being found days from now dead on the floor, my blood reduced to a fine green powder that pours on the floor like Lik-M-Aid when they inexplicably slit my wrist. Inexplicable because why would someone slit a person’s wrist? The cat will be sitting next to me, unfazed, cleaning herself, rubbing her eyes, licking. I imagine the men in the white suits trying to pick her up as a specimen of what survived.
I am sitting on the floor weeping. What happened? What is happening now? I sit on the floor hating everything, hating myself most of all—that’s the truth of it, more than anything else I am so fucking disappointed in me. How’s that for the Me Generation coming to a crashing halt?
It’s as though I’ve been waiting for my life to rev up and get going for years. Sometimes I thought I was making progress, getting closer; other times it was like I was simply waiting to be discovered—by who? Looking at myself, my half-spent life, I find it unbearable that this is where I have ended up. Is my life over? Did it ever begin?
I have done nothing—or, more specifically, the one thing I have done, the one big thing of consequence, was essentially a crime that led to Jane’s murder. My accomplishment is as an adulterer, an accomplice to murder, like that’s something to be proud of.…
My mind leaps to my theory about presidents—that there are two kinds, ones who have a lot of sex and the others who start wars. In short—and don’t quote me, because this is an incomplete expression of a more complex premise—I believe blow jobs prevent war.
And I can’t help but wonder, did George want to kill me too? I have no doubt that the only thing that stopped him was narcissism—to kill me was also to kill some part of himself, which might also explain why Nate and Ashley survived.
I urge myself to gather my green-and-blue Lik-M-Aid veins and leave the house and see what is outside. Things are only odd by comparison; in the absence of anything else, the odd can seem normal. My mind hops to John Ehrlichman, a Jew, a Christian Scientist, and the only figure from Watergate to serve jail time. Ehrlichman went to jail before his appeal process was completed. He offered himself up.
Like a drunk who has stumbled into the wrong house, I go back outside, reminding myself that the prior weekend, Field Day with Nate, was good, it was filled with promise, hopes for the future—it was a thousand times better than the horrific visit with George.
In the backyard, I open George’s garden cabinet and take out the trowel and split-fork weeder and get down on my hands and knees. It’s like a goddamned premature spring awakening. The yard is heavily planted, everything is thriving. I dig in the dirt. I think about my class this afternoon. I’ve told no one about being fired—who would I tell? What the hell kind of job could I get now? I’m digging, hurling clumps of weedy earth over my shoulder, and imagining the faces of my students, idiots who sit there waiting for me to spoon-feed it to them, waiting for me to inform them that there is such a thing as history and that it matters.
I crawl on my hands and knees, obsessively plucking errant growth, weed stumps, clover, various things that seed, blow, spread. I am diddling in the dirt looking like every other asshole who mucks in the backyard as though we can rekindle our ancient energy by sinking our hands into the soil.
The pet minder appears at the edge of the yard. “Are you okay?” he asks. “Should you be bent over like that? Isn’t it too much pressure on your head?”
“No one mentioned not bending.”
“Might be too much,” the minder says. “My aunt had a stroke and they told her no forward bending.”
I lift my head. “No longer bent,” I say.
“Perhaps take a rest,” he says. “I got Tessie a pizzle stick. And I gave the cat a catnip mouse—she loves them.”
“I never thought of giving the pe
ts toys,” I mumble.
“They get bored and need something new—same as us,” he says, walking down the drive. “Call me if you need me. I’m fish-sitting not far from here.”
Tessie smells the overturned dirt. She lies on her back in the center of the yard and rolls on my pile of fresh-plucked weeds.
A minute after the minder is gone, I accidentally flip a massive clot of rich black dirt into my eye, blinding myself. I paw at my face, trying to clear it. I use my shirt, get up too fast, and step on the trowel, throwing myself off balance. I crash into the barbecue and rebound—mentally writing the headline: Idiot Kills Self in Garden Accident. It’s Tessie who guides me to the stair, with me holding on to her collar, saying, “Cookie, cookie, let’s go find a cookie.” In the downstairs half-bath I let myself have it. “Shit face,” I say, looking at myself in the mirror, thinking it is really possible that I didn’t flip dirt into my eye but shit of some sort: Tessie shit, kitty shit, raccoon or deer shit—whatever it is has a funky smell, like fancy cheese, cheese so rare and ripe that they keep it in its own cave and bring it out only for royal holidays. I have one eye open and am looking at myself in the mirror, giving myself a talking to, remembering another time when I looked in the mirror, I literally dissolved—the stroke.
“Don’t stare,” I say to myself. “You have that dumb look like you don’t even know what I’m talking about, like it’s all a big surprise. How could it be? Just because you’re hearing this out loud for the first time doesn’t mean it’s new information. I’ve been talking to you for weeks, really more like years, or the entirety of your whole goddamned life, you fucking idiot.”
“Why are you talking to me this way?” I ask.
“Because you don’t hear it any other way, you want it to be all touchy-feely. You fucked up, your sister-in-law is dead, your brother is in an insane asylum, and you want me to make you feel good about yourself? Wake the fuck up—you are a disaster. You’re even more dangerous than your brother; the fact that he’s in there and you’re out here, on the loose, proves it.”
My head slams into the wall. Slam. As though somehow it is just happening, as though someone else is doing it. Slam. Slam.
“Why did Jane call me when she wanted to know where the light bulbs were, why was I like the other half, the functional half of my brother?”
“Are you blaming her?”
“No,” I say.
And now my head is not in the sink anymore, not slamming into the wall, it’s in the toilet, and there is pressure at the back of my neck; at first I think it’s a hand pushing me down, but then I realize my head is stuck under the rim of the seat.
“Are you going to throw up? Are you sick of yourself now?”
I don’t answer.
The toilet flushes, soaking me, drowning me. I am waterboarding myself.
Coughing, sputtering, I pull my head out of the toilet. I vomit. I am on the floor of the bathroom, wet, sour—silent.
“Pouting?”
I don’t answer.
“Not talking to me? Should I stop?”
“Say whatever you want, give me what you’ve got, bring it on. Clearly you’ve been sitting on it for a long time.”
“Okay. Number one—how could you spend so many years writing a book on Nixon? It’s boring, it’s beyond boring, and it’s pathetic. I wouldn’t even care if you fucking failed, it’s the fact that you’ve done nothing that’s sent me over the edge.”
“Is my book really that bad?”
“It’s shit. You are shit. Your personality is necrotic, dying; it eats away at everything. Look at me, would I lie to you? I’m like a ghost from within trying to knock some sense into you.”
“What do you want from me?” I ask, fearing this is all hurtling towards some inevitable end.
“I want your life,” he says.
And there is nothing more to say.
The telephone is ringing.
“Hello,” I say.
“Is this you?”
“Yes,” I say.
“It’s me,” she says.
“Claire?”
“Who’s Claire?” she asks, her voice suddenly strict, as though insulted, as though I should have known.
I go deeper into my own darkness, “Jane?”
“How many are there?” she wants to know.
“How many of what?”
“Girls,” she says, “women, fuck buddies.”
“Who is this?” I ask, frightened.
“Why don’t you run down your list, and when you get to me I’ll call out, ‘Bingo.’”
“You have the wrong number.”
“Oh no,” she says. “I have the right number. I double-checked before I dialed.”
“Maybe it’s my brother you’re looking for,” I suggest.
“Does he have a heart-shaped mole over his left nipple?” she asks.
Deep silence. “Who is this?”
“Crap,” she says, sighing. “You don’t remember me. I fed you lunch and then some.” She pauses. “Look, I didn’t mean to catch you off guard. Can we roll back and try this again? Push the restart button.”
“Sure,” I say, still not knowing who I am talking to.
The line goes dead. I hang up. Immediately the phone rings again.
“Hi, it’s Cheryl calling. Is Harry there?”
“Speaking,” I say.
“How are you?” she asks.
“Good,” I say. “And you?”
“I’m sorry I never called you,” she says. “I mean before now, I mean after we had our moment and before now.”
“Oh,” I say, still unable to make sense of it, “that’s okay.”
“I want to be honest with you about the whole Internet thing.”
“Sure,” I say; the pieces are coming together.
“I thought I was okay, doing really well, so I stopped taking my medication and I was working in a friend’s catering company and then business got slow and I had all this extra time and I started surfing and then making these ‘dates’ like the one I had with you. It got out of control and I crashed,” she says. “Hard landing. I had to be hospitalized—briefly.”
We are silent. I take my shirt off and let it fall to the floor. Stripped down wet, stinking of vomit, I sit at the kitchen table.
“Actually,” she says, “I’m not being entirely honest. I stopped taking my medication and then I started self-medicating. I was completely out of control; our meeting was one of many. I put myself and my family at risk. My son, you may recall, he came home when we were in the middle of…Well, it wasn’t good.”
It’s suddenly clear to me. “Of course,” I say, enthusiastically.
“And you,” she says, unnerved by my burst of enthusiasm and needing to change the subject, “what have you been up to?”
“If we’re doing full disclosure,” I say, “I was hospitalized as well. I had a stroke.”
“Perfect,” she says.
“What do you mean, ‘perfect’?”
“I mean, I’m glad we both had something happen, some sort of event interrupted us.”
“I suspect it was the Viagra,” I say. “I was taking too much of it.”
“Amazing, isn’t it,” she says, “how easily we slip right off the rails. Are you okay now?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “Really good. And you?” I am looking around the room; everything is blurry. I am at least half blind and have no idea if it’s permanent or not.
“You’ve been on my mind,” she says. “A lot. But I needed to wait to call you. I needed to be in better shape.”
I make an agreeable if innocuous sound.
“Forgive me if now I’ve forgotten the details. But who was it you’re interested in, Richard Nixon or Larry Flynt?”
“Nixon,” I say. “Nixon died of a stroke, and I don’t know why, but when I was having mine I kept thinking of him, feeling like I always knew we had something in common but was never quite sure what until that moment; it was like a psychic connect
ion. It wasn’t about belief or political philosophy, but on a human, emotional level. I think the guy got a raw deal.”
“I’m wondering if I might run an idea past you,” she says, cutting me off.
“I’m all ears,” I say—and it might be true, considering the condition of my eye.
“You should talk with Julie,” she says with enthusiasm, like it’s a done deal.
“Julie?”
“Julie Eisenhower.”
“Julie Nixon Eisenhower?” I ask, vaguely skeptical.
“Yes,” she says.
“Really?” I say, suddenly gleeful, as though an entire tide could turn on three names, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, as Humbert Humbert once liltingly tripped over three syllables in Lo-lee-ta.
“Yes,” she says.
I laugh out loud and then, coming to my senses, ask, “How is that possible?”
“Don’t ask,” she says. And then pauses. “Okay, full disclosure, she’s my husband’s cousin by marriage. Can I have her call you?”
“Please,” I say.
“I don’t know how current you are, but in recent years there were some issues with the library.”
“Yes,” I say, recalling various articles detailing Bebe Rebozo’s nineteen-million-dollar bequest and tension between Julie and Trisha with regard to how the library would be run.
“So now here’s the other thing.” She pauses. “I want to see you. I want to talk to you, to have lunch.”
“Sure,” I say. “I don’t see why not.”
“Just lunch,” she says.
“Of course,” I say.
“When?” she says.
“Whenever works for you; I have nothing on my plate.”
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s give it a couple of days, in case you change your mind, or in case it turns out I’ve gone off again.”
“How about Friday?” I suggest.
“Friday,” she says. “And, not just because I like the name, there’s Jerk Q’zine—it’s crazy cheap.”
“Think of someplace nice,” I say, “someplace you actually want to go.”
“Have you ever been to Quarry Tavern?”