Come With Me

by Helen Schulman

  “He’s a runner. You’re a runner,” said Donny. “I know Dan’s got a gym membership, but Dan’s a sitter. His wife throws pots. She’s nutty for Pinterest.” Donny rolled his eyes.

  “That doesn’t mean it would have worked.”

  “It didn’t work,” said Donny. “The question is, would it have worked if the kid had lived? Would you have married him or done it on your own? Gotten a divorce? Or would it work now? IRL or in cyberspace? I’m a little confused myself.”

  “Nothing works now,” said Amy, rising. “Including me. Which is why I am now going back to my desk.”

  As she turned to go, she noticed her hands were shaking. Amy looked from her hands to the floor and said: “It’s not nice to spy on people, Donny. Don’t ever do it to me again.”

  “Invisible Spy?” said Donny, the permanently installed lightbulb above his head brightening and dimming. He looked at his phone. “Ugh, I have to take a French test.”

  That night when Amy walked home from work, it was already dark outside, there was a chill in the air, and a handful of stars were thrown scattershot across the sky. From the street, she could see lights on in every room in the front of her house, a little diorama of suburban life. Dan, her Dan, the one she’d built her life around, was a depressed, unemployed man, upstairs, lying with his computer on his belly on their bed. He never pulled the curtains. The Things were in the family room playing PlayStation 4, rotting out their brains. She could tell at a glance that Thing One was torturing Thing Two and they were on the verge of a major brawl, just from the body language. Theo tended to fold in at the torso just before he exploded. Poor kid. A bad day.

  She opened the mailbox, packed with junk and a padded manila envelope addressed to Jack—he was the only one who got snail mail anymore; Lily baked him brownies and sent him paperback books of poems. She had good taste: Rilke, Neruda, Keats. Whatever she sent, Jack read. “She’s so amazing, Mom,” Jack said, when she found him squirreled away in his room reading Dickinson. “Where does she find this stuff?” Where did she find Dickinson? Amy held her tongue. Their correspondence was so romantic. They were like the land that time forgot. The rest of the mail was mostly just catalogs and bills. She headed through the carport and walked around back, where all was blessedly dark and unilluminated, and entered the house through the kitchen. She put the mail down on the breakfast bar. God give me strength, thought Amy. There’s so much left to do! But she wasn’t ready.

  Instead she veered into the laundry room, picking up the socks and tights she’d discarded that morning—no little elf had miraculously done the wash in her absence—and after stripping off her work slacks and blouse, slipped her running gear back on. She fished one of Jack’s dirty T-shirts out of the laundry pile and pulled it on over her head. It smelled like him, like a crowded Metro in Paris in August where she and Dan had gone for a last hurrah just before he was born. It smelled like the human equivalent of skunk—it was a stink that woke her up. She tied her hair into a ponytail with the rubber band she always wore around her left wrist. Then she walked back outside and put on her sneakers where she’d left them on the steps. She did a little ballet stretch, using the handrail as a barre, and then bounced up and down on her toes some, listening to her ankles crack, trying to psych herself up.

  It was a relief to be swallowed whole by the darkness, and to be alone that way, no kids, no husband, no job, no Donny, no dog, just Amy, a girl again, suspended in space, ready to take off. If her daughter had lived, Amy wondered, would they be friends now? Would she possibly be this lonely?

  Her idyll was interrupted when Squidward erupted out of the solid wall of night and instantly loped right past her.

  “Whoa,” said Amy.

  From down the block she saw the glow of Jack’s phone. He and Lily walked the dog together, using FaceTime most school nights, or whenever both had too much homework to go out with flesh-and-blood friends on the weekends.

  “Hey, Mom,” said Jack. He was inarguably the best-looking person in their household, with his olive skin, green eyes, longish dirty blond surfer hair. Behind his back, Amy referred to him as “the lifeguard.” She and Dan had made him.

  “Is Lily joining us for dinner?” said Amy. “We can time our pizza delivery around hers.”

  “We had pizza yesterday.”

  “Then Mexican. I don’t care. She likes that taco place at the mall near her apartment. . . . She could order a taco-free taco salad.”

  Jack gave a little salute and walked into the house.

  “Our treat. But you be in charge of it,” Amy called after him. “You can put her dinner on my credit card. Use Seamless.”

  The dog was a dark shadow waiting for her on the corner.

  Maybe she should quit her job, Amy thought, although she needed her job. Maybe she should call up that bitch Lauren and ream her out. Maybe she could get one of those little nanobots to shoot a gamma ray into the recollection zone of her brain and obliterate the endlessly rolling arpeggio of grief and regret and mourning. Fuck you, Donny! It was the selective excising of memory that she craved. But it was too late. He’d awakened the beast inside her.

  Amy took a step and then another. She would text Donny when she got home. She would meet him off campus, on campus, in the morning. Squidward’s eyes glinted an unholy red as he galloped back to join her. Her lungs expanded with each stride. She could smell the eucalyptus, the gorgeous creature moving effortlessly by her side.

  This is what I have instead of heroin, Amy thought.

  So she ran.

  * * *

  If anyone ever asked, Dan would say he met Maryam online. That’s where he spent most of his time, days like today anyway, at home, lying on his bed, laptop on his lap, fingertips to keyboard, indulging any random passing brain wave bothering to dress up as an idea—even the tiniest little hiccup of an inquiry. He tended to google a lot, when he wasn’t actively job searching or reading his blogs and news sites or chatting with other out-of-work journos and publishers. One semisuicidal type he’d known who’d been a lifer at the L.A. Times had just posted “the future holds blank” on Twitter. Dan immediately filled in “TK,” feeling clever. That spurred a whole twenty-five-minute data transfer at #shitouttaluck and then a couple of Facebook chats: What was the origin of the term “TK”? Who cared, except people like Dan and his underemployed cronies, still nerdy in an era where geeks reigned supreme?

  He should have left already. Jack, his eldest boy, had ordered their dinner and texted Dan to pick it up, even though Jack had his driver’s license. I ordered it, Jack texted. Dan had wanted to write back a rebuttal, entitled brat. But, in fact, he relished the opportunity to get out of the house. This time of evening had a perfect chill to it, and if he was lucky and it was an odd day pollution-wise, he would be able to smell wood smoke.

  After all these years of writing and editing, Dan had momentarily forgotten what the letters TK stood for, a symptom of typical age-related memory loss, he supposed, but consoled himself as he strapped on his Chacos with the thought that the domino effect of dead neurons could probably be reversed—as posted on Digg.com at 2:00 a.m. that very morning, which came via an article in yesterday’s Guardian. If he increased the blood flow to his brain by ingesting intense amounts of high-flavanol cocoa, which Dan could ostensibly obtain by drowning himself in buckets of hot chocolate or taking some as-yet-unproduced magic pill, he could obliterate a couple decades of neurological cell damage. He thought “a couple decades” instead of “a couple of decades” because the former had become an American standard in informal speech, and it was imperative that he keep up to compete, although his third grade teacher, Mrs. Rini, had done a hell of a job ingraining that rule into his thick skull.

  “Unless we are referring to two people, as in ‘the couple is getting a divorce,’ couple requires the word of after it.” (It had been the 1970s; all the couples actually were getting a divorce, including Dan’s parents.)

  At this age, only repeated acts of will
ful cognition could beat the old standards out of him.

  He picked up his phone and his car keys and headed down the stairs, yelling as he went.

  “Milo and Theo, no blood while I’m gone. Jack, keep an eye on them.”

  “‘Live long and prosper, Dad,’” Jack said. They were both Star Trek fans—the original series. “That means I’m in charge,” Jack yelled to the Things from the doorway to his room, and then Jack firmly shut his door behind him.

  “You can’t check on them with the door closed,” Dan muttered, but he did nothing to reverse his descent. He’d text Jack from the car, reminding him. Instead, lightning-thumbed Dan quickly searched for a definition, as he poked his head into the family room.

  “‘To come’ is a printing and journalism reference,” stated the polycephalic Wikipedia. Having that lost reserve of knowledge now actively restored into the language-recovery file located God knows where in his cerebellum (he’d have to look it up) was a miniblast of relief. God love the Internet! He knew “TK”; he’d always known it. Verbal amnesia had a beige elasticity to it, like a psychic ACE bandage. As he strained to find the words, Dan could feel it stretching gummily across his intelligence. But instead of worrying the panic—“What is TK? What is TK again?”—only to have it creep in later and unexpectedly through some neural cat-door, he now, with a visit to a search engine and a click of a return key, could instantly replace that painful, stretchy, mushroom-hued lack with a Technicolor waterfall.

  Recollections, connotations, tumbled forth—a cover story particularly riddled with the proofreader’s mark, TK, on the number of dead and injured when he was pushing copy on 9/11 (after the first wild-eyed projections, the count of the surviving injured plummeted to a crushing statistical insignificance). And he had an oddly visceral association that he assumed had to do with aging and forgetting in the first place: the lavender scent of Mrs. Rini’s embroidered linen hankie, the whiter-than-white down on her sloping chin, the geometry of lines on the skin of her soft wrinkled cheek, which had been as frightening at the time as it was comforting.

  The twins were playing PlayStation 4. Miles was sort of dashing in the screen’s blue light. His red curls made him look like a boy in a Ralph Lauren ad—Waspy, a kid who would grow up to play rugby, maybe ride horses, someday own a humidor. On Theo, the same bright corona made him look like a sad and strange clown. His polo shirt fit less well than Miles’s did. They were of matching weight and size, but Miles already had the swagger of a miniman, straight shoulders and tapered waist, athletic somehow. Theo hunched and managed to look both gaunt and slightly paunchy, though he was by far the stronger of the two, powered at times by a lit gas jet of pure burning emotion; he was also sweeter. A lot of people could tell them apart, teachers, even some guests upon first meeting them, although they were identical. They wore the DNA differently.

  “No blood,” said Dan.

  “Right, Dad,” said Miles, without looking up from the screen.

  Dan hesitated for a second. It was times like this, when the twins were getting along, that often turned catastrophic. If they were bickering or giving each other the cold shoulder, there would be momentary blasts of steam that relieved the pressure. If things were going well, a volcanic eruption might soon follow. And even though he’d let Theo have some “Theo time” where he “went into his imagination,” for most of the afternoon, Dan bet he was still pretty wrecked from another damaging day at school.

  He looked down at his phone.

  Wikipedia again. “TK is used to signify that additional information will be added at a later date,” although the page itself read: “This article has multiple issues.”

  “TK is one of a series of deliberate journalistic misspellings, like ‘lede’ for ‘lead,’ ‘graf’ for ‘paragraph’ and ‘sked’ for ‘schedule,’” wrote two women who authored a useful blog called the Renegade Writer for those “embracing the freelance life.” These purposeful spelling errors made them stand out on copy so that they would be deleted, fixed, or filled in before the article made it to the printers. Answers to his questions, large or small, gave Dan an instantaneous release of anxiety, sort of like taking a drag on a cigarette had done when he was a young reporter, the first inhale focusing the mind. Or the endorphin-induced chill in his veins that followed the sound of a source picking up the phone back when such a noise was still audible. Or even how jerking off had made him feel when he was young and horny.

  “You’re still here?” Miles looked over his shoulder at his father staring at his device. “Dan, you need rehab,” he said, echoing his mother. He turned back to Call of Duty, Advanced Warfare, Exo-Survival. An Xmas present from Amy’s psychotic brother, Michael, arriving via FedEx. They had not seen him in person for five or six years, thank God.

  The problem with search engines was that they were more addictive than even smoking/beating off had been—after exhausting those two vices Dan had still wanted, eventually, to do something else. Not this depravity. Alone, on a sailboat, sitting out on deck, a laptop on his lap, the midnight-blue silvery water (like mercury, he dreamed, like mercury) taking him somewhere new, living online would have been a great way to spend retirement—but Dan was nowhere near ready for retirement. In fact, he never wanted to retire. He was just pushing fifty, he had a family, mouths to feed and all that. He had drive and hunger somewhere, like a phantom limb, agitating faintly away in his gut. He’d been an ambitious young man, he’d gotten drunk just looking at the constantly changing face of the churning, radiant world. He was simply interested in everything. But print had kicked the shit out of him. He felt so defeated and unemployable. So, he allowed himself these harmless hits of web vacations—but that wasn’t how Dan met Maryam.

  He’d met her at a bar. The same bar where he might run into her tonight. Just the thought of that, seeing her, not merely thinking about her, made him want to shout, but also curl into a ball in the back of his closet. He did neither but Snapchatted her. Then he exited the family room and walked to the front door. He picked a fleece up off the bench where all their jackets and shoes seemed to migrate. Was it his or Jack’s? These days it was difficult to tell. Dark green. X-large. He pulled it over his head. He guessed it was his. He’d paid for it.

  * * *

  Jack picked up the envelope addressed to him from the breakfast bar when he entered the house, the lettering of his name, Jack Messinger, all curvy and round. Just seeing her handwriting gave him a hard-on.

  “It’s here,” he said to Lily over FaceTime. “Now I got to get rid of my dad.”

  Conveniently, a text had come in from said parental—asking him to pick up the Mexican food. No fucking way. Jack had just placed their order, along with Lily’s, he wasn’t lifting another fucking finger. Plus, the timing was sweet. Dad might actually leave the house. Jack messaged his father back: I ordered it.

  Not that Dad would have knocked or barged in, like his mom might. Dad pretty much stayed in his own room these days, unless he suddenly got all freaked out looking in the mirror at his gut and asked Jack to go with him to the gym, or to flip a Frisbee on campus and bond or something, or he’d cajole Jack into walking with him to California Ave for some fro-yo, Jack then being his excuse to pig out. It was his mom, most likely, who would be the one to burst in with the laundry folded or with a nag she was just dying to nag in person. But Mom was out running; she’d be gone for at least forty-five, maybe an hour, plus then she’d want to shower. A Thing might be stupid enough to come in without knocking, a Thing at loose ends or in the middle of a fight with another Thing, but not a Thing mentally handcuffed to the PlayStation 4, which was the same as a Thing heavily narcotized and in a straitjacket, strapped down onto a stretcher. Jack knew; he was young once, too. Still, he would lock his door, out of respect for Lily. It was the right thing to do.

  “Baby, I can’t wait to be alone with you,” Lily said from the screen in his hand. His boner got bigger just listening to her voice. Somewhere between little girl and a purr. His dic
k had a life of its own; it was both inside and outside his body, its electric vibrato drowning whatever sensation every other appendage and organ could possibly muster. Each month, Lily sounded more southern. Word-honey oozed from her mouth.

  He looked down at the screen. She’d turned her head, probably to pet the cat; it had been sitting sleepily on her bed next to her, like another one of her stuffed animals. Jack called it “the dead cat,” even though it wasn’t dead and its name was Coconut, but because it never seemed to move. It always magically appeared by Lily’s side, silent and immobile, like a fluffy white bit of stuffed upholstery, and at the flat end of all that fur, it had a heart-shaped velvet-tipped leathery nose in its smashed-in face, both queenly and prizefighterish.

  In the two years Jack and Lily had been going out, he’d given her a plush narwhal and an endangered snow leopard stuffie, which came as a gift with a donation to the World Wildlife Fund and had been suggested to him by his mother; also, a CVS teddy bear with Larry Astrichan’s face pasted on it—he’d cut it out from a campus newspaper and used superglue. Astrichan was a middle-aged post-dad fanboy (his kid had already graduated high school a few years back) and the closest thing to a mascot that the Vikings had; he broke out into push-ups whenever Paly scored—which struck Lily as endearing and always made her laugh. Jack had given her the bear for their first Valentine’s Day. Jack always made sure to catch Astrichan doing push-ups on his iPhone at football games because Lily thought Astrichan was so cute. Her own dad had walked out on her, so she was touched, she said, by “his cartoony loyalty and devotion.”

  Astrichan’s kid was living in Philly now—Lily Facebook stalked them both, father and son. She was the only girl in the whole world who would Facebook-stalk Larry Astrichan, and it made Jack fall even more deeply in love with her. Someone else with a dad like hers might feel bitter. Someone else might think Astrichan too pathetic or dumb or mentally challenged to add up to anything more than a joke. Nobody else Jack had ever met would see the ineffable beauty of Astrichan, his enduring fatherly enthusiasms long after his active role as a parent was over, the way he threw his potbellied body full-throttle into the game in homage to a time when his appreciation and support were all that mattered, when the physical embodiment of his investment in li’l Lar (yes he named his offspring after himself) was enough to assuage the pain of any skin lost in the game. Astrichan’s body was his testament; shaking it to his own rhythm was like a rapper barking out his love. Or so said Lily in her Lily way. “He’s the sweetest,” said Lily. No one in the world was as pure of heart as she was.