Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

  Without any apparent surprise he looked up, slowly, as if people were always calling to him from the empty balconies.

  “Oh, hey, Professor Tripp,” he said.

  “Sam,” I asked him. “Do you get high?”

  “Only when I’m working.”

  I leaned out over the balcony, aimed the Baggie toward him, and tried to toss it, like a dart or a paper plane. It caught in a pleat of one of the velvet swags that draped the balconies of Thaw Hall. I leaned out farther, bracing my legs against the seat behind me, and gave the stiff drapery a tug. The Baggie shook loose and went fluttering earthward like a leaf. Sam came across the hall, bent over, and picked it up. Now I had nothing at all.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “Are you serious?”

  I assured him that I was, and then I smelled blood in my nose, and the air around me filled with winking diodes and strands of luminous pearls. There was a submarine roaring in both my ears as if someone had clamped a pair of conch shells over them.

  “Oh,” I said, balanced there on my belly like a Steinway on a second-story window ledge. Then I felt the block and tackle, as it were, give way. To be honest, I’m not really sure what tipped me. A body the size of mine is subject to the play of the mysterious gravitons that influence oceans and mountainsides. When I fell I would have broken across all those empty seats below me like the Monongahela River in flood. And in the interest of full disclosure I feel compelled to add that for one suspended instant, just before I lost consciousness, I truly relished the prospect. Then I pitched forward, grabbed a couple dusty handfuls of velvet, and started down.

  I felt a sharp jerk on my collar. The top button of my shirt sprang loose and winged me on the cheekbone. I felt myself being hauled slowly back over the balcony, then pitched onto my back. Smooth hands pressed against my forehead. Just before I closed my eyes for good I had a momentary vision of Sara’s face. It seemed to be looking down at me from some indeterminate height.

  “Grady?” she said, wondering. “What are you doing, you idiot?”

  I opened my mouth, and tried to answer her question, but I couldn’t manage it. The furrow of tenderness in her voice gave me reason to hope, and I felt a sharp pain in my chest at the sudden expansion of the last hopeful muscle in my body.

  I ROSE LIKE A KITE, in fits, tethered to the mortal husk of Grady Tripp by a thin pearly string. Below me Pittsburgh lay spread, brick and blacktop and iron bridges, fog in its hollows, half hidden by rain. The wind snapped at the flaps of my jacket and rang in my ears like blood. There were birds in my hair. A jagged beard of ice grew from my chin. I’m not making this up. I heard Sara Gaskell calling my name, and looked down, way down into the fog and rain of my life on earth, and saw her kneeling beside my body, blowing her breath into my lungs. It was hot and sour and frantic with life and tobacco. I swallowed great mouthfuls of it. I grabbed hold of the opalescent thread and reeled myself in.

  WHEN I WOKE I FOUND myself in a dim hospital room, lying naked under a powder blue paper gown, taking my evening glucose through a neat little hole in my left arm. It was a nice semiprivate room, with cheerful Bloomsbury print wallpaper, a whisk broom of everlasting in a vase on the windowsill, and a view of an impressive old black stone church across the street. A faint banner of blue sky flew from the steeple and stretched across the top of the evening. The curtain was drawn between us but I could see the foot of my neighbor’s bed and beyond it the cool blue corridor of the ward.

  “Hello?” I called out to the other side of the curtain. “Excuse me? Could you tell me what hospital this is?”

  There was no immediate reply and I imagined the person in the next bed lying with his jaw wired shut, comatose, aphasic, somehow unable to respond. But I knew the room was simply empty. I watched the last strands of blue fade from the evening sky outside the window with the feeling that a great loneliness was descending upon me.

  “Sara?” I said.

  I was aware of a vague irritation at my right wrist and I rubbed my arm against the sheets for an idle minute before I looked down and saw the plastic ID bracelet with my name and a legend of numerals that encoded all the particulars of my collapse. Above this in neat black script was printed the name of the hospital. It was a well-known and expensive hospital with a less than spotless local reputation, fifteen minutes by taxi from Thaw Hall. I looked at the clock radio on the table beside my head. It was seven twenty-four. I’d only been out for two hours.

  At seven-thirty the attending physician came in. He was a resident, a young man with overlong hair, a pointed nose, and blue eyes as cold and disturbing as Doctor Dee’s. He needed a shave, and he wore the sad, swollen mien of a doctor at the end of a shift, like a traveler walking off an airplane after thirty hours in the air. His name tag said GREENHUT. He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.

  “So,” he said.

  “I passed out.” I decided not to tell him that I had also, as nearly as I could determine, died.

  “You did.”

  “I’ve been doing that a lot lately,” I said.

  “Uh huh,” he said. “You’ve also been smoking a lot of marijuana, I understand.”

  “Kind of a lot. Do you think that’s why I’ve been having these spells?”

  “Do you?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “How long have you been having them?”

  “My spells?” I said, sounding a little too much like Blanche DuBois for my own comfort. “About the last month, I guess.”

  “See if you can stand up. Just watch your tube, there.”

  I tugged myself tender as a dance partner to my feet.

  “How’s that feel?”

  “Pretty good,” I said. As a matter of fact I felt steadier on my feet and clearer of head than I had in a long time, quite possibly several years. The pain in my ankle was almost gone.

  “How long have you been smoking marijuana, Grady?”

  “Awhile,” I said.

  “How long?”

  “Spiro T. Agnew was our vice president, I believe.”

  “That’s probably not the problem, then. Any major changes in your lifestyle over the last month?”

  “One or two.” Immediately I thought of Wonder Boys. It was almost exactly one month since I’d begun my ill-advised attempt to slap an ending onto it. Thinking it over, I saw that the spells had increased in both frequency and intensity as the effort went awry and Crabtree’s arrival drew near. “I haven’t been eating as much. I’ve been drinking a lot the past couple of days, which isn’t good for me, I know.”

  “And your wife left you.”

  I sat back down on the edge of the bed. My blue paper dress crinkled loudly.

  “Is that in my chart?” I said.

  “I spoke with the woman who saved your life,” he said, his voice flat and free from melodrama, as though everyone had such a woman, or knew, at the very least, where one could be hired.

  “Uh huh.” I touched my fingers to my lips, still tender and sore from the repeated pressure of Sara’s lifesaving kiss.

  “She’s worried about you,” said Dr. Greenhut. Surreptitiously he glanced at his watch. To make this gesture less apparent he wore the watch turned around, with the face strapped to the inner part of his wrist. He was a nice kid, and trying to take an interest in my case, but I could see that I was only a minor knot of turbulence in the laminar flow of exhaustion across his life. “You ought to see a doctor, Mr. Tripp. An internist.”

  “I’ll do that,” I said.

  There was a pause. Dr. Greenhut looked down at the clipboard in his hands, then back at me. “I think you really ought to consider seeing a therapist, too.”

  “You heard about the dog,” I said.

  He nodded. He grabbed a leather armchair behind him, dragged it over to the foot of my bed, and cautiously lowered himself into it, as if he feared he might not be able to get back out.

  “You have a drug problem, Grady, all rig
ht?” He said this without any particular gentleness or disdain. “And it seems clear that you haven’t been caring for yourself. You’re malnourished. Okay? That dog bite on your ankle? It’s infected. You’re lucky they brought you in when they did. Another day or two and you might have lost the foot. We had to pump you with a massive dose of antibiotics.”

  “Thank you,” I said, in a weak little whisper.

  “As for your spells, I don’t know. You’ve been experiencing a good deal of anxiety, lately, I understand. That may explain them.”

  “They’re anxiety attacks?”

  “Possibly.”

  “That’s a little disappointing.”

  He rubbed lightly at the corner of his mouth with a knuckle. I supposed that he was too tired to smile.

  “So is my friend—Sara—is she still here?”

  “No,” he said, allowing a faint flicker of pity into his eyes. “She said she had a houseful of party guests.”

  “I have to see her,” I said. “Are you going to give me a hard time if I want to check out?”

  “Mmm.” He reviewed my case carefully for a few seconds, without recourse to the notes on the aluminum clipboard under his arm. In the end I believe he based his decision on a certain look of desperation in my eyes.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll let you walk, on one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That it’s the last stupid thing you ever do.”

  “I better get back in bed then,” I said. He didn’t reach for his mouth this time. “Just kidding.”

  “Look,” he said, openly consulting his wristwatch now. “I can’t really keep you in here if you want to leave. I’ll speak to the nurse. I’m going to write you a prescription for a course of ampicillin, for that bite of yours, all right? Have it filled on your way out, and make sure you follow it all the way to the end.”

  “To the end,” I said. “Hey, thank you.”

  But he was already out the door, the tails of his jacket billowing out behind him. A minute later a nurse came in and unhooked me from my dinner. I put on the mud-stained jeans and the shirt that smelled of flopsweat and the corduroy jacket with the torn pocket. It was as I started out of the room that I learned the identity of my silent neighbor in the next bed.

  “Don’t forget your snare drum, Mr. Tripp,” said the nurse. “Or whatever that thing is.”

  It was, of course, that black, hulking shadow, that brass Alecto, the Tuba of August Van Zorn. It rode down in the elevator with me, and followed me across the lobby to the doors of the hospital, and watched while I stood there reckoning the walking distance to Sara’s house and struggling with the unfamiliar exercise of forming a resolve. If my repaired ankle held up, I could make it in half an hour, but then what was I going to say to her when I got there? The past weekend had made two things clear to me: first, that as I presently lived it, mine was not a life into which a baby ought responsibly to be introduced, and second, that when this pregnancy was terminated, my relationship with Sara would not survive the procedure. She had—understandably, I guessed—chosen to view this as a definitive moment in the hitherto imprecise history of our love: from this point on we would be either the conjoint parents of our child, or else a couple of embittered ex-lovers, looking back on five wasted years. It was awful luck that my pot-hobbled spermatozoa had managed to rally themselves for one last mad fallopian adventure, and that five years’ worth of love, good companionship, and the exhilaration of sneaking around should come in the end to a referendum on my fitness as a father, but there it was.

  I switched the tuba to my other hand. I tried to picture myself eight months hence, holding to my shaggy breast that sweet freakling, that tiny chimera, part Sara, part Grady, part some random efflorescence of the genes. I pictured a big-headed, hollow-eyed Edward Gorey baby, in an antique nightdress, with tight-clenched little fists and a vandalistic nature. Let’s say, I said to myself, just for the sake of argument, that bringing another beastly mutant Tripp into the world was not by definition a bad idea. How did one generally know if one wanted a baby or not? In all the time Emily and I had supposedly been trying to knock her up, it had never occurred to me to ask myself if I wanted our effort to succeed—maybe because in my heart I’d never believed that any relationship long exposed to the malign radiations of my character was actually capable of bearing any such fruit. Did one really feel the need for a child—as a craving in the nerves, a spiritual yearning, the haunting prickle of a lost limb?

  I dragged the tuba back into the lobby and over to the information booth, which was staffed this evening by an elegant old volunteer in a striped smock. Her hair was silver and her nails were French-polished and she was wearing an emerald brooch. She was reading Q.’s third novel—the one about the sex-mad coroner—with a look of distasteful absorption.

  “Do you have any babies in this hospital, by any chance?” I said, when she looked up. “You know, where you can look at them behind the glass?”

  “Well,” she said, laying down the book, “yes, we have a nursery, but I don’t know—”

  “It’s for a book I’m writing.”

  “Oh? Are you a writer?” she said, interested now but eyeing the tuba suspiciously.

  “I’m trying,” I said. I hoisted the tuba. “The symphony keeps me awfully busy.”

  “Really! My husband and I went just last Friday night, how do you like that? Harold in Italy. Oh, we have regular tickets, I’m sure we must have seen—”

  “Actually, it’s an orchestra in Ohio,” I said. “The, uh, Steubenville Philharmonic.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’re very small. We play a lot of weddings.”

  She looked me over more carefully now. I gripped the front of my shirt where the button was missing and tried to look like I had a musical soul.

  “Fifth floor,” she said at last.

  So the tuba and I went to take a look at the babies. There were only two on display at the moment, lying there in their glass crates like a couple of large squirming turnips. A man I presumed to be the father of one of them was leaning against the observation window, an old guy like me, sawdust on his trousers, hair Brylcreemed, his shop foreman’s face beefy and half asleep. He kept looking from one to the other of the babies, biting his lip, as if trying to decide which one to spend his hard-earned dollars on. Neither of them, his face seemed to say, was exactly a bargain, head dented, skin purple and crazy with veins, spastic limbs struggling as if against some invisible medium or foe.

  “Boy,” I said, “would I like to have me one of those.” The man caught the irony in my tone but misunderstood it. He looked at me, then jerked a thumb in the direction of the baby that must not have been his. His lips made a tight little smile.

  “I got news for you, buddy,” he said. “You already do.”

  SOMEWHAT MORE THAN half an hour later, I turned into the leafy street at the heart of Point Breeze where in vanished days the heirs to great fortunes in steel and condiments had disported in the grass, knocking balls through silver wickets with gold mallets. I walked down to the Gaskells’ house along the sinister iron fence. It was a cool spring evening in a river town at the foot of the mountains. A fine mist hung in the air. All the lights in the street looked haloed and soft, as if rubbed up by the thumb of a sentimental pastelist. I was still carrying the tuba, for no reason other than that, in my current circumstances, it passed for good company. That’s another way of saying it was all I had. The Gaskells’ house was lit from every window, and as I came up the walk I heard the suave tinkling of a vibraphone. I didn’t hear any raised voices or other sounds of human merrymaking, but this didn’t surprise me, because the last party of the WordFest weekend, wherever it was held, was generally a survivors’ ball, low-key and hungover and poorly attended. I set the tuba down beside me and rang the doorbell.

  I waited. All the leaves in the trees began to clatter and shake. Two seconds later it was pouring down rain. I knocked. I tried the heavy latch w
ith my thumb, and it gave. I pushed through the door, feeling a sharp thrill of dread.

  “Hello?” I said.

  The place was deserted. I circled the ground floor from the living room, into the kitchen, and through the swinging saloon doors into the dining room. Everywhere I saw the signs of recent habitation: plastic cups kissed by women, cigarette butts in ashtrays, abandoned hats and sweatshirts, even an empty pair of shoes. An air of eerie, postdisaster calm hung over the whole scene, as in the wake of a death ray or sparkling toxic cloud.

  “Anybody home?” I called out to the second floor, then started to follow the tentative course of my voice up the stairs. There was no reply. A drop of rain ran down the back of my neck and produced a vibraphone shiver along my spine. The front door was still open and the whispery laughter of the rain in the trees and puddles outside harmonized weirdly with the skeleton tap dance of the vibes. An empty house, a reckless and foolish man climbing to his doom, the ghostly music of an orchestra of imps and bonedaddies: I had become the hero of a story by August Van Zorn. Maybe, I thought, I had never been anything else. At this, there was a loud thump right behind me, as of a body hitting the floor, and I jumped, whirled around, prepared to be swallowed by the slavering maw of the Eldest Black Nothingness itself; but it was only the tuba. It had fallen over sideways onto the porch—either that, or it was attempting to locomote.

  “I can’t turn my back on you for a second,” I told it, not quite not joking.

  I backed quickly down the stairs and stood very still in the foyer, keeping an eye on the tuba and trying to think what could have happened, and where everyone had gone. I had a view down the hallway into the kitchen, and I could see through the back windows that there was a light burning out in the yard. So I went into the kitchen again and pressed my face against the glass. Inside Sara’s greenhouse one of the cool violet GroLites was aglow. There was no reason not to suppose that she must sometimes leave a light burning out there, and it was hard to believe she would have chosen this moment to see how her sweet peas were coming along. Nevertheless I pulled the collar of my jacket up over my head and ran splashing across the yard. I knocked on the door a couple of times, then pulled it open and allowed myself to be inhaled into that strange glass house with its stink of fish emulsion and flowers and rot. I’d never been inside at night before. There was only the one light on, off in one of the other rooms, and I stood there, trying to adjust to the dim light and the heavy air, wild with a smell of rank vanilla and sweet decay that I presently identified as narcissus. It was overpowering; you could almost hear it humming in your ears like bees.