by Adam Haslett
“Okay with what? What are you talking about?”
I’d come to a halt on the path, watching the three of them and Wendell step off the trail onto the sand and head diagonally toward the water.
“I’m talking about getting him off the drugs,” he said. “Going up there with him. Getting him out of his room, out of that house. Clearing his brain. What else are we going to do? What’s the alternative? Just let her go bankrupt?”
I’d listened to plenty of his tirades about our mother and money, but this was different. His exasperation had a tender edge. More than angry, he sounded upset.
“Besides,” he said, “I miss him. The way he used to be. Don’t you?”
“You can’t do it in a weekend,” I said. “You can’t just yank him off everything. It takes time.”
“I know that. Which is why it has to happen soon. I’m getting this involuntary month of vacation. They’re furloughing half the reporting staff. It’s terrifying, actually. But there it is—time off, plus all the vacation I never took. When am I going to have that kind of time again?”
A handsome couple in Lycra shorts and matching tank tops jogged past me, earbuds in, hair nearly perfectly in place, muscles toned and slick. The kind of people whom Michael, in his bitterness, would despise.
“What if he doesn’t want to?” I asked, beginning to picture it.
“I think he actually does—part of him. He’s just afraid.”
I knew what he meant. And he was right. I wished I had the money to send Michael off to some leafy clinic campus with nurses and massage and gentle yoga. The kind of program I sometimes daydreamed of sending my own clients to. Maine in the off-season was hardly that. But it was time away. A step out of his immediate life, out of the constant emergency.
Maybe it was the looseness from the drinks at lunch, or the unusual course of the day, or even just my desire at that moment to be again with Paul and Kyle and Laura with their pants rolled up, playing in the shallows with the dog, but something allowed me to imagine what Alec was proposing actually coming to pass, and to sense what a relief that would be.
That evening, after we’d folded out the couch in Paul’s office for our guests and said good night, the two of us got into bed, and Paul rolled up behind me, his chest to my back, snuggling as he didn’t often do.
“They enjoyed themselves,” he said. “Don’t you think?”
I rested my neck in the crease of his shoulder and held his arms around me. “It’s good having them here,” I said. “I like how we are with them.”
“As opposed to how we are without them?”
“You know what I mean,” I said, squeezing him closer.
Wendell, the perfectly unconflicted hedonist, detected our affection from across the room and toddled over to get some for himself. He climbed onto the bed and tried to insert himself between us, and we chuckled and squirmed to fend him off with our knees, only to have him breach our defense, force his front legs into Paul’s crotch, and collapse on top of us with a whimper. He settled at last for a spot beside me, where I could pet his flank, and there he quieted down.
“Did you always think you’d get married?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
I waited for him to roll away onto his back, but he didn’t. “Didn’t you just assume it would happen?”
“Are you going to propose to me?”
“Don’t tease.”
“I’m not,” he said, running his hand down onto my thigh.
“Yes you are.”
“You don’t want to get hitched,” he said. “We discuss it every time we go to a wedding, and you talk about your patients’ disastrous relationships, and how we still need to work on things. And then we go to Christmas at your family’s, and Michael quotes us Kafka on marriage.”
“Is that why you never proposed?”
“Says the feminist.”
“Don’t be mean.”
He touched his lips to my neck, and then reached over me to pat Wendell on the snout. “I never thought you’d say yes,” he said. “And I suppose it doesn’t matter as much to me as it does to some people, the way it doesn’t matter as much to you.”
“I love you,” I said.
“Likewise. Do you want to get married?”
“You’re teasing again,” I said.
He burrowed his head further down against my shoulder, burying his face in my back. And then, barely audible, he whispered, “No, I’m not.”
Michael
REQUEST FOR FORBEARANCE
Dear Borrower:
If you are having difficulty making your loan payments and you have exhausted all periods of deferment and grace, you may be able to receive relief through the process of forbearance. In forbearance, your loan payments are temporarily postponed. Please note, however, that all unpaid interest will be capitalized, adding to your outstanding balance. If you are currently past due, submit this form as soon as possible, understanding that submission alone is no guarantee of approval.
Part I. Borrower
I request a forbearance to cover my outstanding balance of:
$68,281.11
To begin:
twelve years ago
To end:
upon the death of my successors
I am temporarily unable to make payments because:
“I had learned that a death had occurred that day which distressed me greatly—that of Bergotte. It was known that he had been ill for a long time past. Not, of course, with the illness from which he had suffered originally and which was natural. Nature scarcely seems capable of giving us any but quite short illnesses. But medicine has developed the art of prolonging them. Remedies, the respite that they procure, the relapses that a temporary cessation of them provokes, produce a simulacrum of illness to which the patient grows so accustomed that he ends by stabilising it, stylising it, just as children have regular fits of coughing long after they have been cured of the whooping cough. Then the remedies begin to have less effect, the doses are increased, they cease to do any good, but they have begun to do harm thanks to this lasting indisposition. Nature would not have offered them so long a tenure. It is a great wonder that medicine can almost rival nature in forcing a man to remain in bed, to continue taking some drug on pain of death. From then on, the artificially grafted illness has taken root, has become a secondary but a genuine illness, with this difference only, that natural illnesses are cured, but never those which medicine creates, for it does not know the secret of their cure.”
—M. Proust, vol. 5, The Captive
My plan for the resumption of payments is:
As you well know from our correspondence, after years of training in the ’90s, I was selected by the Department of Education to voyage on their first Student Loan Probe to Jupiter, as one of four debitnauts. We traveled for years, passing through nebulae of internships and retail, through the wake of an imploding technology boom, and on through the outer rings of bankruptcy, before finally reaching the planet’s gaseous surface. Our hope was to make contact with the lost colony of the underemployed. What we found was distressing. In the early years, they had kept up their bonhomie, relying on peer counseling and the nostalgic rebranding of American canned beer. But their birthrate had dropped, and a persistent anxiety storm beginning in the early aughts had killed off the slackers, their priestly class, leaving them without a cosmology. Hopes of ever getting off-planet had dwindled, and the colony had renamed itself Fools of the Humanities. Our greatest surprise, however, concerned their weight. We’d expected a diet of burritos and helium. But to our astonishment, one provisioner, Eli Lilly, had remained in radio contact with them all along, and had been sending pallets of the atypical antipsychotic Zyprexa from a rocket pad in Kazakhstan. The colonists had been taking the drug for years. Their average weight was up to 280. Diabetes and dyskinesia were endemic. As one art history BA put it to me, When Christ asked for water on the cross, they gave him vinegar (whereupon, she might have added, he gave up the
ghost). But really, another colonist asked, who wouldn’t want major weight gain and a facial tic while aging and single? He spoke, I must confess, with some anger. He had been thin once, and even then had struggled to see himself as attractive. There seemed little hope of that now. Apparently, the company’s shipments of the drug had ramped up not long before its patent was due to expire. Their representatives had begun pressing it on doctors as an off-label cure for everything from war trauma to stuttering, and it wasn’t until several years later that its disastrous side effects were fully appreciated. Several colonists wanted to join the class-action lawsuit, but the rocket traffic was one-way. Empathizing with them as I did, I wished I could do something to help, yet all we had been given to distribute to them were forbearance request forms, which they quickly burned for heat. I returned an unchanged man.
In addition to the above-referenced loans, I owe:
The inalienable privilege of my race to the victims of the Middle Passage, a debt whose repayment has proven tricky to schedule, given the endless deferments, if not forbearances, and the way that the blood of slavery tends to run clear in the tears of liberals.
The sum total of my current assets is:
The knowledge that the psychotic violence of making black people black so that white people can be white runs through me as surely as it does through the bodies of all the jailers and the jailed.
Part II. Terms & Conditions
I understand (1) that I live with my mother; (2) that she is on the verge of selling her home to pay my debts; and (3) that my request for forbearance will never be approved.
I further understand: (a) That in the fall of 1803, along the coast of Mozambique, a Portuguese frigate named the Joaquin loaded 300 abducted Africans into its hold and headed south toward the Cape of Good Hope. (b) That a few days after departure, the people held belowdecks began to die. They died slowly at first, at an unremarkable rate of one a day, but after a month and a half, as the ship rounded the tip of the continent and began its Atlantic crossing, death became more frequent. For the next four months, the captives lay shackled in an airless dark, pressed against one another on a bed of their own excrement, vomit, pus, and blood, their bodies slick with waste putrefying in the equatorial heat as they woke chained to the corpses of strangers or parents or children, whom the crew eventually removed and threw overboard to the trailing sharks. (c) That by the time the Joaquin reached the Spanish port of Montevideo, 270 of the original 300 had died. Fearing contagion, the city surgeon ordered the ship back out to sea. With a storm blowing in off the pampas, the captain at first refused. But when the harbormaster threatened him with arrest and seizure of his ship, he relented and made for open water. Fierce winds quickly shattered the frigate’s three masts and the ship nearly sank. Attempting to make it back to port, it was beached in the shallows of the Río de la Plata, where it remained for several more weeks while its fate was decided. (d) That the Spanish merchant who owned the ship wanted to auction the survivors to offset his losses, and sued the port surgeon for incompetence, demanding that his cargo be allowed to disembark. To resolve the dispute, city officials set up a commission of inquiry, and appointed five doctors experienced in the treatment of ailing slaves. (e) That observing that none of the officers or sailors of the Joaquin had died, the commission concluded, to most everyone’s surprise, that the slaves had not died of infection. They had died from dehydration, and from what the doctors called melancolía. In the words of Carlos Joseph Guezzi, a Swiss-Italian physician, the loss of their homes and families, together with the conditions of their transit, had induced a “total indifference to life,” “a cisma,” or schism, that amounted to “an abandonment of the self.” (f) That because this condition was deemed noncommunicable, the merchant was free to bring his chattel ashore and sell them on the open market. And finally, (g) that during their passage, the captives aboard the Joaquin were often heard to sing.
Finally, I hereby certify that I don’t pretend to know with any certainty why it is that I keep coming back to these scenes, to imagining these men and women and children chained in the rocking dark. While it would be most legible, and even palatable, to chalk it up to the theft of four hundred years of labor, to the profits of the trade that extend by corporate succession right up through to the bank that lent me the money to study the history of their own barbarism, it isn’t economic reasoning or public justice that won’t let me go. It’s the withered bodies, the cries of the dying, the blood-soaked decks, that carnival of evil that each morning I try to medicate into the floor. The fact is that when I read the story of the Joaquin, I feel understood. Not in any literal sense—the comparison of my dread to theirs would be grotesque—but in the unrelenting terror, in that schism of the mind. Which is how I know now that the dead generations don’t haunt down tidy racial lines, as if there were such a thing. The psychosis is shared. I was born into the fantasy of its supremacy. Others are born into the fantasy’s cost. But the source of the violence is the same. The work I do is for no one’s sake but my own.
Alec
The Mitchells’ cabin overlooked an inlet at the bottom of St. George a half mile past Port Clyde, the last village on the peninsula. My brother couldn’t believe I remembered how to get there without a map: right at the Baptist church, then out the little road that hugged the shoreline, dipping alongside a rocky beach and rising again onto higher ground, where the houses thinned out.
It wasn’t the blue I remembered, but a light gray with white trim. The rest appeared more or less as I’d pictured it: the sloping yard, snow-covered now, the mound of boulders by the path, the aluminum gangplank that led down to the little dock, the flagpole and the blueberry bushes.
Across the street, farther up the slope from the water, stood a white Cape with a stack of lobster traps in the yard. There were a few more houses up ahead in the distance before the road vanished into the woods.
In the quickly fading light we carried the groceries we’d bought on the way up into the kitchen along with our luggage. Michael stood in the middle of the room, holding his messenger bag to his chest, while I went looking for the valves to turn on the water and gas. When I returned he hadn’t moved, as if we were here on an errand, to drop a few things off, and would be getting back into the car. Asking him if he’d mind putting the food in the fridge seemed to break the spell, and he unpacked the bags while I carried wood in from the shed.
“You know how to light a fire?” he asked.
“Yeah, so do you. You’ve done it a hundred times.”
“Have I?”
On the drive up I’d made a passing reference to some future point when it would be just the three of us, once Mom was gone, and he had looked at me in shock, as if the idea that he might survive her had never occurred to him. I nearly stopped the car to yell at him for being so out of it, for clinging to such a distorted view of reality, but I didn’t want to start things out that way and I held my tongue, as I did now.
The cabin hadn’t been renovated as far as I could tell, just well maintained. The dark wood floors were uneven but polished, the old floral-print furniture replaced with solid whites and tans. On the bookcases on either side of the fireplace were Mitchell family photographs: their two daughters at the ages we had been when we first came here, in bathing suits and life preservers, squinting in the sun, and later as teenagers and adults with boyfriends or husbands.
I told Michael to take the largest of the three eaved bedrooms upstairs, the one Mom and Dad had used, to give him the extra space, and I said he should go ahead and unpack his things, to settle in.
Over the last few weeks, Michael had agreed, reluctantly, to try what I’d suggested, but he drew the line at stopping the Klonopin, saying he would go off everything except that. Caleigh had encouraged him, which helped. So had my mother, who more than anyone else wanted for this to work but feared the difficulty of it for Michael. She had baked ginger cookies for our trip, and sent us off with apples and peanut butter and a bag of Michael’s
favorite potato chips, which he finished off with a beer as I made us dinner.
The night before, Seth and I had got into our first serious argument. We’d been seeing each other for a year and a half and through all that time had remained polite with each other, careful not to offend or disturb. It seemed like mutual care, mostly, a desire to protect what we’d begun.
He had put up with my travel schedule, right through to the election’s dismal end. I’d been gone for weeks at a time and he hadn’t complained. And when he needed to work on projects over the weekends that I did make it back, I didn’t get after him about it. He even took in stride the news of my being furloughed by the magazine, hinting that we should talk about moving in together. And when my mother had called and told me about the real estate agent and the listing contract, and I said to Seth almost as soon as I hung up with her that Michael and I needed to go away, he said, Of course, I get it.
But when I was gathering my things in the apartment, getting ready to leave once more, and asked if he would do me a favor by booking me a ticket online for the train to Boston, he looked up from his computer, incredulous.
In a tone I’d never heard before, he said, “Do you have any memory at all how many times you said we’d take a trip together this week? After you were finally done. Does it even matter to you that you’re going to use practically your whole time off with Michael, and none of it with me?”
“You think I should just cancel,” I said. “After I arranged the place and persuaded him to do it?” He slammed his computer shut and walked into the bedroom. But I followed him, demanding an answer. “Is that really what you think? That I should just call Michael and tell him I decided to go on vacation with my boyfriend instead?”
“God forbid,” he said. “But don’t worry, I get it—no one has problems more important than yours. You’ve made that clear. And now you’re going up there into the woods, all Robert Bly, to save him all by yourself. You’re not as smart as you think you are.”