We had a tour, my mother showing us their setup with pride and overt fear that I might not approve. Here was the mini-storage, here a typical unit. A tour of the trailer, the garden I’d heard so much about, staked tomato plants ripe in the sun. And gifts for me, books Mom thought I might like. Clothing she hoped Darcy would find worthwhile.
She introduced us to her boss, who told us what a fine woman she was. Then the firemen, the owners of the deli, the bookstore, the antique store. When people drove by in pickup trucks, she waved them down to introduce them to me, her son, Glen, the writer, here’s Darcy, his girlfriend, she’s involved in film.
At a certain moment, Mom took Darcy somewhere to show her something that didn’t actually matter. Daniel and I had some time alone. He told me how happy my mother looked today. He talked about how the cure for AIDS was coming. He showed me the lottery ticket he’d bought that said “spin-spin-spin,” meaning he’d get to be on TV and might get a chance to spin the big wheel for millions. “If anyone’s gonna win the Big Spin, it’s me. I’ve got that kind of luck.”
He was sober. He was chatty but not in his old drugged, hostile way. He loped through words and sentences and paragraphs in a monotone, slurring through details to get to the punch line about what good deals he’d gotten or how much he loved my mother. Love is the Answer. I can’t claim I liked him but I could at least start to see him. He did love my mother. He was trying to be better.
“All that speed, that was me trying to self-medicate. The first time I took what the doctors gave me for the bipolar, I could understand people for the first time, like everything in my brain slowed down enough to make sense.”
When exactly fifteen minutes had passed, my mother reappeared with Darcy. We all stood outside the trailer, my mother pointing out the unusual things Daniel had brought to decorate. Daniel said, “I keep telling her, ‘Babe, with me every day is Christmas.’ I told her that when we met. She didn’t believe me.”
This reminded me. I’d brought a gift. I gave him a tiny geode I’d bought for his rock collection. He looked at it with interest. Then he tossed it over his shoulder. It bounced into the gravel. “Yeah,” he said, “thanks, but I don’t collect those anymore.”
* * *
—
The next day my mother wanted to go for a drive in the countryside. Because it was so hot, we stopped for drinks every hour or so at a gas station, where Daniel would each time buy a fistful of lottery tickets. He wanted to pan for gold. As my mother drove along the blacktop, Daniel turned backward, cigarette in hand, to tell me stories of friends who had struck it rich. One of them had some family heirlooms he would never sell, but Daniel thought this was a lie, because he was “really, really Jewish.” He knew to the ounce the weight of the major nuggets dug out of the hills, and as he continued to talk, repeating whole phrases, whole paragraphs, whole speeches, whole statements of how the world was and how it should be, how he was going to win and win big, I stopped being able to follow what he was saying.
My mother had been maintaining a fiction, that Daniel, off drugs, was a different person than Daniel on drugs. But there, in the car, cigarette smoke stinging my eyes, I was feeling the effort of pretending he’d become normal.
Daniel was focusing his flat brown eyes on me, and it was like someone had adjusted the knob on a radio, and the signal was coming in clear: he was angry. “You have this way of staring at people. It makes ’em seem stupid.”
This hung in the air. I couldn’t remember what he’d been saying before. My mother drove. I didn’t dare break eye contact with Daniel.
“It’s like you’re trying to intimidate people, like you think you’re smarter than them. You make people feel stupid.”
His fists were balled on the backrest. I thought of all the times he’d beaten guys up, or been beaten himself. He laid into me, repeating himself until something else caught his attention—another gas station with lottery tickets, something—and he forgot about me.
An hour later, we were walking on the banks of a broad, slow-moving river. Chest-high weeds burned brown were on either side of the path and insects made a humming sound like electricity. Daniel was telling the funniest joke he knew. It was about an old black couple packing for their second honeymoon, and Daniel did all the voices, in all octaves from deep bass sharecropper to shrieking pickaninny. The joke ended, and the punch line was so nightmarishly racist I had no response. Daniel said, “You want to be a writer, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You want to write screenplays?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve got a screenplay idea for you.”
My mother lodged a feeble protest. She knew what was coming. If she has seemed absent, I’ve captured it just right. Weeks later, when I told her I wasn’t visiting again, I said, “Daniel is dangerous, Mom. He was going to hit me when he said I made him feel stupid.”
“He was just feeling threatened.”
“He’s still a religious fanatic.”
“What do you mean?”
“When he talked about hell?”
“I don’t remember that.”
We were pushing through weeds, back toward the car, as Daniel told me the greatest screenplay ever written would be about an angel who blows one note on a trumpet, and it knocks down a house. Just one note, so loud it makes all the houses of the world cave in. It’s Gabriel’s trumpet and it means the end of the world is coming and Jesus will return to the earth and all the sinners will go to hell and paradise will come. Revelation was Daniel’s favorite book of the Bible. He hadn’t read it but knew what was in it.
He said he’d fasted when he was a tour guide at the Grand Canyon. He’d fasted to have religious experiences and he had fasted so long he had seen hell. “I saw the lake of fire. I saw hell, I really did! It wasn’t just a vision, it was the truth, God showed it to me! You know what they have in hell? I saw it! In one place there’s one guy just punching another guy in the face over and over again”—he smashed one fist into his open palm, bam bam bam—“just beating him for all of eternity! And that’s not the worst part of it.”
There was no way to stop him. He was too excited, he was on a topic he knew more about than we did, and with the weeds so tall, the day so hot, the cigarette smell so choking, I felt claustrophobic as he continued.
“The worst part is for perverts. I saw it. There’s a place God showed me for the perverts, where one guy buttfucks another guy”—here he put his hands out as if gripping a saddle, and he thrust his hips back and forth—“for eternity. One guy buttfucking another forever, for all of eternity.”
* * *
—
A couple of hours later, in the late afternoon, we were back at the mini-storage. Daniel’s mood had blackened since the drive. He chain-smoked now, every gesture with his cigarette furious. He was ignoring Darcy. He was telling me the same stories for the second, or the third, or the fourth time, but he seemed to be squinting more while he talked, eyes searching my face. I had taken stock of all that he said, and all that he was, and found it lacking. He talked as if his best stories could make me see the real him, the one that was worthwhile, if only I took another look. And then when the stories came around the last time, they did so with force, a list of all the things I had ignored. They were his complaint against me.
I gave our regrets. We had to leave. I blamed allergies and no one was fooled. What did I feel inside? Nothing.
Before we left, Daniel wanted me to help him with an errand. He had to carry a table from the mini-storage to the antique store owned by an old woman nearby. It would take five minutes. Now I started to feel something creeping up. I was afraid to be alone with him again.
He and I walked to the mini-storage together. I was quiet. He told me he didn’t believe I had allergies, that sickness was all in the mind. He said that when I was little I’d soiled myself and that when I’d
learned to speak, I’d told my mother her brain was slow. “You’re a real put-down artist, aren’t you,” he said, and I knew my mother had shared this with him, a story between lovers. I was their enemy in common.
A glass tabletop, thick and heavy, was stored under blankets. We picked it up together and carried it out of storage, down a flight of stairs outside, and we crossed the street with it, bringing it up a wooden walkway that led to the antique store. The store was three or four rooms packed with furniture, shelves of Depression glass, stacks of Collier’s magazines and sheet music, walls of framed landscape prints. The proprietress, about seventy-five years old, sat in an easy chair that had long ago molded to her shape. Daniel knew where she wanted the table, and after we set it down, I dusted off my hands, ready to leave.
“Before you go, say hello to Dennis,” Daniel said. He pointed to a doorway leading to another room.
I had no idea who Dennis was. There was a sign over the doorway, “Dennis’s Room,” and I could hear odd noises, like applause, and I heard a quick chirp or two as if in response. I wondered if Dennis was a bird.
Beyond the doorway was another room of antiques and bargains, and in the center was a hospital bed, and next to the bed was a television tuned to an afternoon talk show. Dennis was in the bed, positioned to see the TV and any visitors who came in. He was so deformed it was hard to tell where the different parts of his body were. My impression was of a misshapen head, almost hairless, eyes unfocused, and a lump of a body concealed by pajamas with cowboys on them. His arms were like broken twigs, shiny and dark in places like cooked chicken.
A hand-lettered sign next to the bed read, “Hi, My Name Is Dennis and I Like Visitors.” It went on to list his favorite programs (Wheel of Fortune and The Price Is Right) and said that although he was probably blind and deaf (no one really knew), you should always come in and say “Hi.” I don’t remember my reaction. I hope I at least said “Hi.” But I was mostly dumbfounded. Who expects to find this when browsing for antiques? I have a memory of his caretaker coming in and making me put my fingers into Dennis’s moist fist and feeling his grip.
But that didn’t happen. The memory is something my mind created. It’s like a dream that I forced into being, a metaphor. Mother, the good broken son, and me.
* * *
—
A few weeks after our visit, Daniel began to lose weight. He had skin problems. Digestion problems. He was taking seventeen pills a day. At one point he was so constipated he could not walk. He had CAT scans, MRIs, blood tests, psychiatric workups, experimental therapies. He was not the crystal-wearing, positive-thinking, relaxing-technique kind of sick man. He chain-smoked. He ate meat and potatoes, drank two or three six-packs of Coca-Cola a day. He ran up over a hundred thousand dollars in medical bills.
My mother reported these developments in phone calls of waxing and waning dread, for no matter the prognosis, Daniel always recovered from whatever was about to kill him, the way a cartoon character gets up after being hit by an anvil. He was indestructible.
* * *
—
Darcy had progressed as far as she could in local film production. She wanted to move to Los Angeles with me. I reacted to this the way I did when she said she wanted to marry me, with enthusiastic statements that sounded almost exactly like agreement. We always argued after I agreed with her, and I told her she was unfair, et cetera. I was the same person I’d been with Noelle, only older and more depressed.
One of my caveats was brilliant. Moving to Los Angeles was automatically good for her career, but not necessarily mine. I’d written a script that had about as much ambiguous traction as my novels did—basically none—but the idea of being a screenwriter wasn’t bad. Still, I didn’t want to be yet another guy moving to Los Angeles in hopes of getting the attention of Tim Burton’s personal trainer. I wanted to have a good reason to be there. I would move down if I was accepted into the UC Irvine Creative Writing MFA program. Darcy agreed—I should definitely apply, and I did, not emphasizing that roughly three hundred people applied every year for one of their six spaces.
I had a job at a nonprofit. It was a commune of PhDs with government grants. I was the worst kind of office staff, the unacknowledged writer with four novels in my desk drawer who answered phones with a “May I help you?” that made each of those four words sound like its own snap judgment. There was little work to do (we had multiple NIH contracts with overlapping sums designated for office support). My supervisor, a sweet and tiny French woman, self-published chapbooks of poetry. She sprayed one with lavender before giving me a copy, and every day, she asked if I’d yet been accepted to UC Irvine.
My many bosses were scared of me. When I look at photographs, I understand why. I was thirty-one, and I’d won one local fiction contest about two years beforehand. When my supervisor walked by and whispered, “I hope you’re using our quiet time to work on your novels,” it broke my heart a little. The troubles on my face read like confidence, and I think that to her I looked like someone who would succeed.
The phone rang one afternoon. It was Darcy. “You got in,” she said. By this, she meant I’d gotten into UC Irvine. They’d called the house, and she’d talked to them. I asked her to repeat the conversation, which was pretty simple. They wanted to know if I’d come be a student there.
This didn’t seem likely. I wasn’t even excited, as I was sure there was a caveat. I’d had so many almost-but-not-quites from agents and editors that I asked her for their phone number. I called and asked the department secretary if I’d really gotten in, or if this was some kind of cruel hoax. She laughed and said that was the best response she’d heard yet.
We had a very brief conversation in which I said that of course I accepted, and she told me the names and locations of the students who had already confirmed. I wrote them down. Aimee Bender (Los Angeles). Phil Hay (Los Angeles). Alice Sebold (New York). Brando Skyhorse (Los Angeles).
After I got off the phone, I looked at the names. Long ago, I’d mythologized the potential in my friends at Thacher or the bookstore or Rose Street. I tried not to imbue those names with extra grace or lightning. But I put a star next to Alice Sebold’s name. It looked special to me, like we might be friends, but I’d been burned before by believing such things. To cover up, I wrote beside it, “I think she wears Agnes B,” which was a code to me—I liked agnès b. clothing. I also felt a mild disappointment and embarrassment, sorry to learn the program had fallen into such straits that they were admitting me.
CHRISTMAS
DANIEL HAD AN ANEURYSM and went into a coma. The doctors said that even if he survived, there had been so much brain damage that everything you’d call “consciousness” was wiped out, along with all chance of voluntary movement. At least, that’s what they thought for now. They’d been wrong about him before.
The reports happened so rapidly I had trouble believing the situation was real. It didn’t seem possible he could go from functioning to incapacitated with a snap of the fingers. I was fairly sure this was a false alarm. Still, I visited.
* * *
—
It was 106 degrees. The few streets in Mom’s town were all deserted. I walked from the trailer to the general store to buy a soda. I saw, two streets away, the town minister—jeans, boots, straw hat—walking slowly toward the fire station. To pay the bills, he also did something for the railroad that involved standing by the tracks for hours with a walkie-talkie, waiting.
When we ran into each other, we said hello and then he took on a thousand-yard stare. He was going to tell me something instructive. Fixing me with watery blue eyes, he said he’d talked with Daniel many times. He said Daniel got riled up about the Book of Revelation, and he used to tell him, “Easy, Daniel, easy.” He said the whole town was praying for him, and he looked at me as if testing whether I believed him.
There were many awkward pauses in a conversation that couldn’
t have lasted more than two minutes.
“God has a plan,” the minister said to me. “It’s not for us to question it. He won’t take Daniel one second too early or too late.”
I do not have a poker face. It was obvious I was just tolerating this sympathy, and that I held different opinions about God and Daniel. So the minister told me a story. His own mother had Parkinson’s disease and had been in a hospital bed for five years. For the last two, she had been fed through a tube in her stomach. But God hadn’t taken her away yet.
I asked, “Does she know what’s going on?”
“It’s hard to say. She has Alzheimer’s, too. But the important part is, it’s brought the rest of us much closer to God.”
He said it sincerely, openly, and he waited for his story to soothe me. When he realized I was not soothed, he poked his tongue into his lower lip.
“Glen, are you a Christian?”
“Jew.”
He jerked—literally jerked—like I’d given him an electric shock. He’d thought he’d had me in a theological corner and now he didn’t. Then he recovered, slowly put on a grin and offered me his hand.
“Well,” he said, “eventually, we’ll both see what’s what.”
* * *
—
I walked up the dusty street. I was disturbed. Maybe Daniel’s religion meant he was truly struggling with being a good man. Coming the opposite way was my mother’s closest neighbor, a woman who had steely eyes and a short, efficient way of laughing. I told her about the minister’s comments about praying.
She said, “Sure, a lot of us are praying for Daniel.” She whispered, “We’re praying for him to die.”
* * *
—
I Will Be Complete Page 48