By the time he stops talking, I can barely see his expression. The dusk has turned him into some three-dimensional charcoal drawing. But I can see the top of his figure leaning towards the backpack on the floor. I break the silence with the evening’s simplest question:
“What did you do?”
“I made up my own part, like I already told you.”
“That’s a meaningless response.”
“You’re not at all qualified to say that. You’re not. You’re not the son of James Roarick III. You’re a fucking nobody, in my house, talking to me about my life, trying to get inside my fucking head. You’re not some moral voice here. You’re a fucking nobody.”
He isn’t yelling, but his tone has risen. And his breathing, which earlier had been his best kept secret, is now gruff and labored. What suddenly runs through my head is that Matt and Adam are the only ones who know where I am.
There’s nothing left for us to say to one another. All that remains is written over and over again on page after page in a red spiral notebook. As I walk outside, he kicks the backpack at me, demanding I take it with me. I don’t respond.
The evening is still and awful. Nothing moves. I’m both relieved and surprised when my Jeep starts and takes me down the road, back towards the Hundred Acre School. When the place is within eyesight, I see a crowd of people clustered around the dining hall. As I approach, driving at half speed, I see that they’re mostly students. Dozens of them. Many of whom are simply standing still, gazing up towards the sky. The moon is in the east, on the other side of the dining hall. And the stars are cosmic smears, hidden behind dense layers of humidity. When I roll my window down, I can hear voices. It isn’t until I pass the building that I see, in my rearview mirror, the sudden movement of some figure on the roof.
Parking the Jeep, I make my way over to the spectacle, only to hear the clean, bright sound of guitar chords coming into focus. Mixed throughout the crowd of mostly students are my colleagues. Sandra is there along with Tennille and Amber. Administrators like Reese and Victor are also there. And the Old Man, who is tapping his chin with his phone, is there. And they’re all focused on that guitar sound; it plays quick, inspired bursts of melody before it quits. It’s lovely music, even amid the heat and confusion. As I join the crowd, planting myself next to a girl I recognize from a speech she’d given on recycling a few days earlier, I can now see the source of everyone’s attention.
Dan Hart is on the roof of the dining hall. Sitting just atop the peak, his legs are splayed out in a crooked diamond shape. He holds firmly to his guitar, pressing it into his midsection, strumming minor sounding chords that sound like nervous bird calls. Through the dusk, I can see him clearly. He looks leaner and lonelier than the last time I saw him. That was days ago. Now he’s close to thirty feet from the ground. A small group of girls, who stand directly below him on the concrete, ask him to come down. They’re not bawling or begging; they tell him he needs something to eat and someone to talk to. The Old Man lets them do this. Aside from a few hollers to come down or to play “Free Bird,” most of the crowd just looks on.
Dan’s not interacting. The songs he plays are truncated bits of ragged poetry. They last no more than a few seconds before he stops and then gazes down at his instrument. This goes on for some time. Then, clearing his throat, he speaks, to no one in particular:
“I feel like a melody is sometimes an excuse for a lyric, and that a lyric is sometimes an excuse for a melody. I don’t think either is the case with this song. It’s called ‘Ten Minute Song.’”
At that moment, the Old Man dials 911. Dan, as if sensing his time is limited, begins the song. It has a pleasant mid-tempo melody to it, some major and minor chords played up and down the neck of the guitar. As he sings, he projects his voice well. For someone who’s lazed around for days, and has had little nourishment in that time, he sounds strong. We all watch and listen. Though the verses are tuneful, the lyrics are nearly indecipherable. But not the chorus. For some reason, it rings with such clarity, such pleasing contrast to the rest of the song, that by the time it comes around for the second and final time, I find myself singing along in my head:
There’s barely time
To speak my mind
And let you know where I’m at
So here, my love, is a ten minute song
Sung in three minutes flat
He takes a brief solo and then ends the song. Then applause and cheers. Then the girls telling him to come down from the roof. And more requests for Lynyrd Skynyrd and David Bowie songs. Dan’s impervious to it all. He just sits, the darkening shadows of his posture resembling some gothic artifice. There’s no movement or music coming from the roof. The crowd quiets. The sky darkens. Our wait for something to happen ends abruptly when Dan flings his arms out in front of him, as though offering his guitar in sacrifice. The instrument tumbles away from him, bounces awkwardly on the roof, invoking an awful sounding incantation of sour, tuneless notes, and falls through the air in a dangerous spiral before crashing to pieces on the concrete.
There’s little time to react to this. In the next moment, Dan catapults himself from the peak of the roof with every bit of strength he has. For a moment, he’s airborne just a few steps from where he was sitting. When his body finds the surface again, he’s already out of control, skidding on his rear and his back and his head, turning over as though on fire. The girls below him scream. This helps me find them among the newly minted chaos. They must think gravity is some violent backstabber since I give no warning as I trample them, my arms cradled in front of me like some mad hulk, waiting to accept the crushing weight of sorrow and song and burdens I feel strangely qualified to carry.
Chapter 18
We let our cities beguile us. We want them to. We build them that way, alluring and sexual, stacked with hard metal and glass, heartache and promise, perfect views to the stars and all the neatly scrubbed fantasies that drift through the atmosphere on clouds of ether. I fell for Chicago the moment I arrived twelve years ago. Its architecture is breathtaking. Its winters are unforgettable. Its blues are for real. It took me in, gave me shelter, let me wave its flags and sing its songs.
Though we no longer lived in the city at the time of our separation, Laura and I always saw ourselves as Chicagoans. For better or for worse. And when she left me, the city appeared changed. All its subterranean poetry and wild-eyed nostalgia was gone. A riot had occurred and swept Chicago’s best parts into the gutters.
After the split, I binged on the city I’d once so loved. It was easy to do. Taking some time off of work, I got a room at the Blackstone Renaissance Hotel where I spoiled myself. No one there knew me. So I indulged on room service and shoeshines, on massages and manicures. No one knew what I’d done to my life and my marriage and why I walked around feeling like my guts were on fire. This decadence was in no way celebratory. Little pleasure was involved. I was going through the motions, reconciling with the city I somehow figured I had let down, working my way towards a sort of farewell. I think I knew I was done with the Midwest. But I would first give myself over to some hedonism. It was all I could do to keep away from the kind of melancholy that holds your head under water until you do the kind of begging that’s nearly biblical.
Winter was working up a rather bland farewell during the four days I spent at the Blackstone. And most of what I did there in that time was unhealthy. I ate ribs and cheesecake and pounds of sushi. My room had a mini-bar, which I restocked twice. I drank cold bottled beer and shots of bourbon and tequila and pint glasses of rum and coke. Smoking cigarettes was something I hadn’t done since college, but I found myself buying a pack of Marlboro Lights from the store in the lobby. They were repulsive, yet went wonderfully with the booze. My behavior was depressingly banal. But in the aftermath of adversity, there are
only so many ways a man can occupy himself. I found most of them. The other obvious one, sex, certainly occurred to me. I even researched a few escort services in the area. This was hardly a feat. I asked the concierge, a beatific Asian man who responded to my inquiry with undaunted professionalism, and even printed out three separate sheets for me from his computer. I gave him twenty dollars and thanked him.
On my last night at the hotel, I considered calling one of the services. Yet I resisted. Not out of pride or discipline, but rather out of self-serving vanity. I denied myself the pleasure of sex with a beautiful stranger, then made a solemn declaration that I must’ve been saintly to have done so. I even told myself, aloud, that I was not that kind of man. Almost immediately I had to take a drink and turn on the TV in an effort to drown out such sorry behavior.
The four day jaunt at the Blackstone wasn’t deliberate. It was in no way some type of planned program of iniquity. Things merely ran their course. By the end, I was exhausted. My plan, which materialized on a subconscious level, was something of a success: I no longer felt like myself. Bleary-eyed and miserable, I avoided mirrors as well as eye contact even with strangers.
Going home didn’t seem an option at this point. The thought of setting foot in my own home was terrifying. I couldn’t bear to smell the blackberry candles Laura had been burning all winter, or hear the creak of that one floorboard at the top of the staircase, or admit that I was face-to-face with a $500,000 failure. Home was done for. It was an old, obsolete luxury.
Visiting the concierge for the last time, I asked him to find one more number for me. It was for an ashram just outside of Aurora, about an hour from the city. I’d heard about it from Ben. His wife, Justine, had spent some time there with a girlfriend a year or so ago. It was the girlfriend’s idea, Ben told me, but Justine came back a new woman, renewed and refocused. When I called, I spoke with a man who identified himself as the presiding Swami. He told me there was available space in their facility for overnight guests. Having no idea what to expect, I thanked him and said I’d see him by early evening. Much of that day was spent walking around the city, ducking in and out of stores and restaurants to warm up for a few moments before once again braving the cold. I had some soup in a Jewish deli and I bought a black wool scarf from a street vendor.
By 5:00 p.m., I got in my car and headed towards Aurora. For most of the drive, I imagined what I was getting myself into. Yoga and lectures and gurus. Maybe some exotic Indian instruments. My ignorance didn’t prevent me from fleeting delusions of grandeur. There were moments when I told myself I must’ve been heading for some kind of change. Real change. The kind that brings with it stories you break out to remember the smell of the dirt that helped grow your new roots and the feel of the vitality that brought you to your knees in gratitude.
I arrived at a little past 6:00 p.m. and was greeted by a kind faced Indian man wearing an overflowing orange robe. He told me I must be Grayson and that we spoke on the phone earlier. He showed me to my room, which had a wooden table and two slat-back chairs, a small cot with a sunburst-colored blanket, and two single shelves hanging beside the room’s only window. I washed up in the shared bathroom before being escorted to dinner, which was buffet style, consisting of white rice and yellow peppers, sambar, which looked and tasted like some type of stew, and roti, which is a flatbread.
Besides myself and the Swami, there were four others. Three of them were women, all of whom knew one another. They lived in the city and were married and had young children and jobs at the same hospital. Laughing, they told me they did everything together. This visit to the ashram was their second. The man, who looked to be in his mid-twenties, had driven out from his hometown of La Grange. He was well built and had a doughy baby face that somehow managed to be serious looking. His Texas accent was as sharp and comical a contrast to the Swami’s as I could imagine. When they spoke with one another, I half expected them to break into a skit of some sort. His name was Steve Sweeney and it was his first time at an ashram. He worked on motorcycles, he said, and sometimes raced them.
When the meal ended, Swami offered us a cold drink called Thandai. We were told it was a festive drink, but was appropriate anytime. The only ingredients I recognized were almonds, sugar, and milk. Drinking it like some desperate cultist, I waited for it to have a profound effect. It did little more than help ease the spicy taste of sambar. Swami moved us into a common room off of the dining area. It was a large space with a cathedral wood beam ceiling and two enormous octagonal windows that each took up an entire wall. The room was empty of furniture, so we sat on the floor in front of a mural painting depicting many of the Hindu Gods. For the next hour or so, we drank and listened to stories about the Hindu Gods and Goddesses. Then we listened to one another’s stories. The women, whose names I found out were Claire, Doreen, and Nina, talked about their kids and jobs and bosses and lives back in the city. Steve talked about traveling cross-country by himself. He said it was scarier than he thought it would be. As I listened to these strangers’ stories, I waited to be moved. I searched for a trace of wisdom I could use, something relatable and devastating in its generosity. The truth is, by the time it came for me to talk - all I revealed was my job and my address - I was bored.
Before turning in for the evening, I thought about calling Laura. Part of me wanted her to know where I was, and that I was in search of self-improvement. Knowing she was too smart to be taken in by this, I settled on reading a book I found in my room entitled Lighting the Lamp of Wisdom. It proved to be exactly what I needed; I fell asleep within minutes of opening it.
The following morning saw nearly a dozen new arrivals. Most were there for the day, but a few would be staying overnight. We all ate breakfast together before attending the morning’s first session, teachings from a middle-aged white woman named Olivia. It was about recreating yourself. She talked about freeing yourself from the bondage of everyday life. The attendees nodded along or looked knowingly at one another as she spoke. I tried to embrace her words and let them rouse me, but I couldn’t get past the notion of her being a white woman named Olivia. From there, I tried yoga, taught by a man named Burt who liked to call everyone his “favorite.” He referred to me as his “favorite man with the black sweatshirt.” This was when he announced aloud that my half moon pose was approaching eclipse.
For the next two days, I took Sanskrit courses and meditation workshops; I listened to a man play spirituals on a sitar and I ate a lot of yellow-colored foods. The people I met were kind. They asked a lot of questions and told a lot of stories about themselves. They all seemed to want to be nowhere but at an ashram in Aurora, Illinois. All I did, all I said, all I tried to think, was positive. But it wasn’t enough. Nothing worked. This must’ve been apparent during my last day when it seemed that all I could do was roll my eyes every few minutes before looking at my watch.
It was during my last evening that I considered calling Glenn. I found his number and even prepared a brief script on the back of a split pea soup recipe a woman had given me when I feigned enthusiasm for the dish. The script was a bulleted list. It had three points to it. One was how I didn’t blame him for what had happened. Another was how I felt everything in our strange threesome had developed far too quickly. The last was that I was hopeful it could all be sorted out with as little strife as possible. Even as I made my list, I knew I had no real intention of making the call. We would speak, sure, but it would be face-to-face, him playing the calm, confident doctor with wisdom and charm to spare, and me pretending I had to strain to see what Laura saw in him, yet all the while knowing for sure.
To my own surprise, I ended up calling the Old Man. He answered on the first ring. It took a few moments of convincing to assure him that I was actually calling from an ashram.
“C’mon,” he continued to say.
“I’m serious.”
My fat
her and I hardly have the prank pulling kind of relationship. We can be sarcastic and arrogant with one another, but never whimsical.
“Is Laura with you?”
“I’m alone.”
He paused for a bit before telling me all he knew about ashrams. Which was not much. A professor he had at Cornell would spend much of his summers at ashrams in New York and throughout New England.
“How long have you been there?”
In his voice was still a trace of the initial disbelief. It had fused with what I recognized as concern. Together, they made a sound that brought me a strange sense of comfort. We talked infrequently, and had little if anything in common, but he knew me.
I told him about Swami and Olivia and Burt. The food, I mentioned, was decent. Yoga, however, was definitely not for me. He listened. And he asked questions that allowed me to talk some more. Then he talked about his school. Things were running smoothly, he said.
“I’m glad winter is over. You remember what winters are like here, don’t you?”
Of course I did. They were torturous. Drab and colorless landscapes. Sore throats and snotty noses. Countless days of inertia and coffee breath. Not exactly what the therapist ordered. The kids would no doubt capitalize on this, morphing further into their grizzled moodiness. The holidays were past and their vacation time was over.
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