by Adam Haslett
When the rain lets up to a shower, I turn on the engine and back the car onto the road. By the time we get home, the sky is nearly clear. The early-evening sun is bathing the side of the house, where the storm has soaked the shingles.
Margaret has made the four of us a cold supper. We sit at the dining room table with all the downstairs windows open. There’s a reason I try to be away from here as often as I can. The worst of the fog may have lifted, letting me see again, but it’s in the most familiar objects that the beast still nestles, exuding itself from the caned rocking chair in the corner, the one that Margaret and I bought together in Southampton, and from the fluted-glass lamps on the sideboard that her parents gave us as a wedding gift. It pulses in the watercolor of the old octagonal house that hangs above the sideboard, over Margaret’s shoulder, as she passes Celia the bulgur salad and Alec the plate of bread, and it slinks onto the table between us, its head invisible as always but its body breathing, everyone straining to behave as if there were only four us here, eating supper together on a summer evening.
“Aren’t you going to take some food?” Margaret asks, unable to hide her impatience, holding her knife and fork rigidly against the table, waiting to start, which is when I notice that all the dishes are at my end and my plate is empty. A few months ago, I overheard her describing to a friend on the phone the exhaustion of trying to get me out of bed in the morning, how her energy for the day was spent before breakfast.
“I asked for the raise,” Alec says, interjecting himself to protect me from his mother’s ire. “The manager said she’d think about it.”
I take some salad and bread so they can begin their meal. A moment later, the phone rings. Celia starts up from the table before the first bell has ended and strides into the hall to answer it.
“It’s Michael,” she calls out. “He wants you to call him back on their number.”
“It’s quite late for him,” Margaret says, standing up from the table. She carries the phone into the living room and closes the door behind her as Celia takes her seat again. The two of them miss their older brother—they laugh less without him—but they would never say it because they know he wasn’t happy here, and that he wanted so badly to go back.
They eat quickly and then excuse themselves, bringing their plates into the kitchen. Margaret is still on the phone. I stay at the table for a while, feeling the cooler air drifting in through the screens. Above the hydrant at the foot of the drive, the street lamp flickers on, casting a pale oval of light onto the pavement. Crickets sing in the bushes. Through the wall behind me, I hear Alec leaping up the stairs, then Celia following more slowly, muttering something about him staying out of her room. These sounds don’t grate anymore. They flow back into me now, ordinary once again.
There’s a click of the latch to the living room door, and Margaret calls out my name. “Here,” she says, handing me the phone. “He’s got his literature A level tomorrow, and he can’t sleep. God knows what this call is costing.” She walks away, back to her meal, and I close the door between us.
“Dad?” he says, and I know from the strain in his voice that the words have already been streaming out of him to his mother. It’s been a relief having him gone. Margaret never let up about what I wasn’t doing, how I didn’t make time for him, or speak to him like I should to an eldest son. But it was never what she thought—some hesitancy or lack of nerve on my part about his reaching puberty and adolescence. I wouldn’t have talked to him about that in any case because he wouldn’t have wanted it any more than I did from my father. Our silence wasn’t about that.
“Yes?” I say.
“I can hang up now, if that’s better, I know it’s expensive.”
“You spoke to your mother about your exam.”
“Yeah.”
“No use fretting about it.” I want to say more, to say, You’ll be fine, in the long run, you’ll be fine, but I don’t believe it, not as I do about the other two.
“I know, I know, you’re right, it’s just that I couldn’t read everything in time, not closely enough.”
This is the thing: He isn’t calling about his exam. I don’t want to know this, but I do. He’s calling to be reassured about something he can’t put into words yet. I glimpsed it in him when he was young, but told myself, No, don’t imagine that. Children have stages; he’ll change. Then the words started running out of him in a torrent, and I knew they were being chased out by a force he couldn’t see. What was I supposed to say to Margaret? That I see it in him?
“I’m sure you’ve studied more than I did,” I tell him. It is dark outside now. The light from the kitchen lies square on the unmown grass.
I will leave him more alone than anyone.
“If we don’t get into a university,” he’s saying, hurrying to fill the silence and prolong the conversation, “Simon and I decided we’re going to move to London together. He’s got friends who already have a flat, and he thinks it would be easy for us to get jobs.”
My son in London as a young man. It’s hard for me to picture.
“You should talk to your mother about that.”
“You wouldn’t mind—if I didn’t get in anywhere?”
I tell him that he will. “It’s late,” I say. “You should get some rest.” He agrees, reluctantly, wanting to stay on the phone. “How are Celia and Alec?” he asks. “Are they okay?”
I’m reminded I haven’t answered only when he says, “Dad? Are you there?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
He senses the trouble. He knows it is there. If I could only take that part of him with me, to spare him. But I can’t. And so, unlike the others, it’s as if he is following me, and won’t let me go.
“It really is late with you,” I say. “You’ll be fine—with the exam. You’re a good writer.”
“You think so?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then,” he says. “I guess I’ll go.”
“Good-bye, Michael. Good luck.”
“Okay, Dad,” he says. “Bye.”
Later, lying next to Margaret as she sleeps, I sense a tingling in my feet and ankles and up into my calves. It is the opposite of numbness. My muscles are awake, my blood moves freely. This halo of warmth creeps over my knees, easing space into the joints, letting the bones of my thighs settle into the mattress. It lingers over my belly, and my gut goes slack, unclenching the muscles at the base of my spine. My lower ribs rise with my breath up off my stomach, stretching the skin from navel to sternum, arching my back. It feels as if my lungs have doubled in size, allowing me to swallow air in great gulp-fulls. My shoulders fall back, my throat opens, the tingling warms my jaw and scalp and then moves through into the folds of my brain, releasing it away from my forehead, letting it rest against the back of my skull. Thus it is that the beast passes out of me, to hover in the darkness above, faceless still, but quarry now, its hours numbered.
I get up before dawn, rousing no one but Kelsey, who lifts her head from her blanket in anticipation of her walk, and then scampers toward where the leash hangs by the back door. I pat her on the head, and leave her there, getting what I need from the tool drawer, and going out the other way, through the front door, closing it quietly behind me. Outside, in the charcoal light, it is blessedly cool, as if the fever of summer has broken. It’s still too dark to make out the far side of the sloping meadow at the end of the street. The dew-covered grass blends into the trees silhouetted against the barely brightening sky.
It is the fallow field next to my parents’ cottage, where I played in the tall grass; and the field behind the octagonal house, where I cut paths for the children to ride on; and the hillside in Scotland where I walked with Margaret; and the woodland meadow on the island in Maine. All of these are given back to me now, the landscapes of my happiness, returning in this damp calm, limpid and flooded with life.
I cross the street and walk into those fields. There is just a tinge of blue emerging between the branches. The shadows at the
edge of the woods are retreating. At last, I have the beast out in front of me, out in the open. I sense it trying to run, to flee ahead of me into the woods. But the long night is ending, and there is nowhere left for it to hide. Not in my children’s faces. Not in Margaret’s stubborn love. Not in all my failures. There is no cover left for it on this terrain. I know its paths too well. Through the tall pines and down along the riverbank. Across the footbridge, and up through the spruce trees to where the ground levels out. I’ve come here so often trying to escape this monster. But now it is the one sapped, and limping. And I am the hunter. In the clearing overlooking the bend in the river, we come to a halt. The first rays of dawn pierce the gray light of the forest. I sit on the pine needles, up against a fallen trunk.
Invisibility. That is its last defense. That I won’t have the courage to look it in the eye. You wretch! it cries, desperate for its life. You selfish wretch! Leaving them with nothing! But it is no good. It is my prey now.
The razor opens the skin of my wrist almost painlessly. Blood runs down my palm, and along the length of my fingers. My head rolls back, and I gaze upward.
And there it is: the face of the beast—my face—human after all.
II
Michael
HAROLD J. BUTTERWORTHY, MD (psychiatry)
PhD (neuroscience), MPhil (geology)
MFA (metallurgy), BFA (dance)
BA (algebra)*
Patient Intake
Name: Michael
Date of Birth: January
Primary Care Physician: Mass General
Current Therapist: Walter Benjamin
Therapist’s Phone: No longer in service
What are the problem(s) you are seeking help for?
1. Fear
2. Trembling
3. Individualism
4. White supremacy
* board certified
What are your treatment goals?
1. Ordinary unhappiness
2. Racial justice
Current Symptoms:
Yes
Personal Medical History:
Yes
Family Medical History:
Let’s not pretend either of us has time for a complete answer here. In brief, Dad didn’t make it; Mom’s never taken a pill in her life; Alec had an ulcer early on, when they were still fashionable, but has since transitioned into the back-pain industry; and I’d guestimate Celia’s chronic fatigue peaked out around ’94 somewhere in the Bay Area, though she still has Persistent Annual Lupus Scare Syndrome (PALSS) and Cryptogenic Abdominal Rash Syndrome (CARS). As for my grandparents, all four suffered from Eventual Death Syndrome (EDS).
Have you ever been hospitalized for nonpsychiatric care or surgery?
On Christmas Eve 1992, I came down with a self-diagnosis of esophageal cancer requiring what amounted to an overnight stay in the decongestant aisle of a twenty-four-hour CVS in Medford.
Please briefly describe your educational background:
The usual grade-school misery. Though a boy named Ralph eventually befriended me over Star Trek and the music I played him. Funkadelic’s “America Eats Its Young,” for instance. When I heard George Clinton ask, Who would sacrifice the great grandsons and daughters of her jealous mother by sucking their brain until their ability to think was amputated by pimping their instincts until they were fat, horny, and strung-out in her neurotic attempt to be queen of the universe? Who is this bitch? (read: America), it struck me that our fifth-grade curriculum was somehow incomplete. I thereafter spent every nickel of my allowance on funk. This being 1978, there was a lot to catch up on: Curtis Mayfield, Gil Scott-Heron, everything by James Brown. I listened to records in every spare hour, including while I did my homework, and on my headset after I’d “gone to bed.” I couldn’t be certain what it meant to “Give Up the Funk” or “Tear the Roof Off the Sucker” or why Parliament would title an album Mothership Connection. But I had my first secret joy at knowing that beyond the veil of the apparent, meaning ached in the grain of music. A joy accompanied by my first intuition that black people might know a thing or two about the need for that meaning—history being the culprit. The only affective correlative of such history I had thus far experienced being the queasy feeling I’d get in my stomach watching my grandmother show extra politeness to black people on the rare occasions she encountered them, in order to make very clear that she was not affiliated with those terrible, other white people who hated and mistreated them, success being when a black person smiled back at her, acknowledging her politeness and her goodness, thus completing the blameless circle of liberalism.
As for high school, moving overseas and returning less than three years later didn’t much help. Nor the premonition I had that second autumn we were back in Massachusetts, in the woods where my father later disposed of himself. My family has an unfortunate habit of taking walks: my father by upbringing, my mother by faith in the medicinal quality of fresh air, Celia because of an idiopathic athletic streak, and Alec, as ever, in affectation, dolled up like some child earl, all tweed and Wellingtons. My mother was the one who nettled me into compliance, nagging me to abandon my station at the turntable and accompany, on that particular day, Celia and my father on a walk with the deracinator, who scurried off her leash like a giant swamp rat in heat. It was a Sunday afternoon in November (don’t ask me for a nature description; there were trees, a path, etc.). We got to some kind of clearing. I was bored and hoped we would turn around soon. The fornicator had vanished down a landscape feature. Celia had gone after her. My father sat on a fallen tree. A general pause set in.
The horror was brief, a few seconds. Flayed bodies swarmed in front of me in a bloody, contorted mass. I looked up and away trying to evade the menace, but it was pressing down from above, filling the circle, thriving on its own gore. Years later, when I came across the paintings of Francis Bacon, and saw those innards turned outward but still alive, it struck me that the man understood. As in his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, with those mouths agape at the end of nearly human limbs, testifying not to physical suffering but the bleeding of the mind. At the time, however, I just went cold, my mouth dry as chalk. And I knew evil was seeded in that place, waiting to bloom.
I don’t particularly believe in a spiritual world, other than music. I’m a materialist to the bone. But I had the overwhelming sense of needing to escape whatever it was that dwelt there. I hoofed it home like a ghost from its enchanter fleeing. I couldn’t sleep that night or the next. I watched my father and Celia for signs that they had sensed it too, but they behaved as if nothing had happened.
For months, I’d been pleading to be allowed to go back to England to finish my schooling with my friends. Now I had no choice. I had to get away. I stopped asking about it and just called my friend Simon, who said I could live at his house, and then I told my mother and father I would be leaving after Christmas. To my surprise, they no longer protested. In fact, they seemed relieved. I realized their previous resistance had had nothing to do with me. They just didn’t have the organizational wherewithal to cope with my demand. As soon as I lifted that burden from them, they folded like a cheap umbrella. And so I left them there, my family, without ever warning them, without ever telling them what I’d seen. Left them to face it on their own. An act for which I’ve never been able to forgive myself.
To go and live with Simon and his family in a damp stone house back in Oxfordshire, just up the road from Fairford Air Base. I was given a spare bedroom overlooking a paved courtyard. The return to the States had put me behind on my A levels. On Saturdays, Simon and I went record shopping in Oxford, but otherwise we mostly slept, went to class, and studied. I found no pleasure in speed-reading Thackeray, but there you have it. I had to fly through those ballroom scenes on jet skis.
It wasn’t until spring that I went to get my hair cut in the village and met Angie. She worked in a little salon next to the greengrocer, just two chairs, a wall of mirrors, and a waiting bench, wit
h a sink at the back and photos of soft-punk hair models in the window, like head shots for the Human League. The day I went she was the only stylist there. We had the place to ourselves. As soon as she put on Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” and began singing along with it, I knew we had things to discuss. That track may have started as a monster gay-club hit, but Angie sang it as though it were a personal anthem, nothing camp about it. She was beautiful. Right away. A slight, African-American woman between the hopelessly sophisticated ages of twenty-five and I don’t know what, with freckles under her eyes and across the bridge of her nose. She had three earrings in each lobe and a metallic blue bandanna wrapped around a cascade of Jheri curls. I asked question after question, and she answered them freely, her hands cupping my head, tilting it this way and that as she clipped. She’d grown up and gone to school in Cleveland. That’s where she’d met her husband, who was a jet mechanic at the air base. They’d been stationed in Turkey, then Germany, and now Fairford. This was the first place she’d been able to get a job of her own, which was a good thing too, she said, because her husband was in the habit of cheating on her with what she called “native women,” and she’d asked him for a divorce.
Was it the Sister Sledge / New Order mix tape that I brought her on my second visit that transformed me in her eyes from a client into a living subjectivity? Maybe. All I know is she didn’t complain about my returning every three or four days to get my bangs trimmed, with ever deeper and more challenging compilations in hand. She didn’t know Kraftwerk, or for that matter any German industrial music. It was when I suggested she give Einstürzende Neubauten a whirl that she said, “You’re cute.” That evening, Simon insisted she must have meant it in the diminutive sense, as you would speak to a child, not a prospective lover. But he hadn’t been there. He hadn’t seen her smile.