by Alan Ryker
I didn’t like them being in my house, and while my mother worked in the kitchen, I sat silently, not attempting to alleviate their discomfort. Instead, I examined my anger at their intrusion. They could look down on me now. Going into their environment, I felt perfectly comfortable. I knew I was smarter, smoother and better looking than 99% of people in their world so that no one ever questioned my place among them. But here our different castes couldn’t be avoided, and it infuriated me that they had breeched my world. Maybe I should have been ashamed, but I wasn’t. We had an unspoken agreement. The disparity had always been there, but when they approved of me dating their daughter, they had tacitly given me the leeway to follow the old maxim, fake it until you make it.
But what did it matter now? Sitting there, staring blankly, I realized it might be the last time I’d see them.
“Degas,” Mr. Barrington said, gesturing to a poster-framed print of a blurry ballerina. “Your parents have good taste.”
“I’ve been a burden on them for the past few months, but once my disability checks start coming in they’ll be able to fix the place up,” I said, staring him in the face with my one eye.
He made the strangest series of gestures and noises I’d ever seen, not able to settle on a proper response, and so smiling, frowning, guffawing, clearing his throat, turning red, but finally saying, “We still have a place for you at Sanders & Stevens. Your mind is still good.”
Mrs. Barrington put a hand on his knee, suggesting he’d made a faux pas, and he blurted, “And it looks like your making a good physical recovery, too.”
My laugh pressed through the square mouth slot of my mask as a cross between a cough and a bark. “Well, thank you very much.”
We sat silently until my mother came in bearing a TV tray of coffee cups and a glass of soda with a straw so that I wouldn’t be left without something with which to keep my hands busy. For some reason, this consideration hit me hard, and I wanted to give her a hug and apologize for everything, but it wasn’t the time, and by the time it was the time, the feeling would have passed. But I gave her shoulders a squeeze when she sat beside me on the couch, and she gave me a surprised look.
Holding the cup of soda in my left hand, I pinched the straw between my thumb and the nub of my forefinger, inserted it into the mask’s mouth slot and took a sip.
“Is Carl still working second shift?” Susan asked.
“Yes, but only until they can get his schedule changed back. Cody doesn’t need anyone around during the day anymore.” She patted my knee.
“I’m sure he’ll be glad to get back on his normal schedule.”
“He’s looking forward to it. I worked second shift a few times when I was younger, but my body says the day is done at 8 PM.”
“I imagine so,” Susan said, sipping her coffee and possibly imagining very hard since she’d never worked a single day in her life, second shift or any other.
We were all silent as she imagined, allowing for the appropriate amount of time to pass for the Barrington’s to jump to the point of their visit.
Finally, after everyone had acknowledged and declined the opportunity for small talk, Mr. Barrington spoke. “We’re sorry to interrupt your day like this, but it seemed that what we have to talk about would best be discussed in person. Madison hasn’t come home for weeks now, and we were worried about her long before that.” He looked at me, perhaps expecting me to say something, to interject once I understood what he wanted so that he didn’t need to air all of his family’s dirty laundry. Seeing the worry in his face for this person we both loved, most of my irrational anger passed, but I honestly didn’t know what to say.
So he continued. “Even people who are very close don’t know everything about each others’ pasts, so I don’t know how much you know about the problems Madison had in high school.”
“Are you talking about rehab?”
He nodded, and I saw both him and Mrs. Barrington quickly glance at my mother to gauge her reaction. She’d had no idea, and unlike these blue bloods wasn’t adept at presenting a completely blank front. So Mr. Barrington seemed compelled to say, “Madison fell in with the wrong crowd and developed a problem with prescription pills. She was well beyond that by the time she and your son met. At least we thought she was.” He sighed, shook his head, leaned forward and stared at the ground. “I guess it was the stress of the situation. I don’t know exactly what caused her to slip back, because she wouldn’t talk to me. Still won’t. But it started then. At first, I thought she was just avoiding us because we’d had an argument about her not going to see you once you’d woken up, but then we started noticing old patterns. We confronted her. Things went badly. Now we can’t get her to respond to our calls or texts.”
I still didn’t know what to say, still hadn’t interjected, so Mr. Barrington heaved one more big sigh and said, “What we want to know is if you can help us help her. Are you in contact with her?”
“Yes. We text.”
“Does she come to see you?” he asked, looking mortified immediately after uttering the words.
“No.”
Silence then. Silence thick as oil waiting for a spark.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re both so sorry that she’s putting you through this while you’re already dealing with so much. But she’s not herself right now, and if we can get her help, maybe she’ll come to her senses and…” He trailed off. I thought over the possible endings to his sentences. Maybe she’ll come to her senses and realize she wanted to marry a hideous freak? Maybe she’ll come to her senses and realize that she wants to spend the rest of her life caring for a useless, angry cripple? Or maybe, and most likely, once she’s off drugs she’ll realize that she can land someone as good as I used to be in a heartbeat, and she’ll get on with her life without a backwards glance.
“Do you know where she is?” Mrs. Barrington blurted. Already upright, the tension had been building in her posture as she waited for her husband to cut to the chase, to stop tiptoeing about.
“No. I’m sorry.”
“Can you find out?”
“I’ll try.”
She nodded, but her body hadn’t relaxed. She still sat like a lit stick of dynamite. “Did you—”
“Dear,” Mr. Barrington said, putting a hand on her knee.
“Did you know? Did you know what was going on with her?” she said, pushing away his hand in a surprising display of frustration.
Susan Barrington had never liked me as much as David had. He’d made most of his fortune, while she’d come from old money. He believed that ability, drive and intelligence counted for something, and would rather have someone like me for a son-in-law than a wealthy but dimwitted noble. He believed the United States was a meritocracy. Her thoughts were more aristocratic.
I didn’t answer her, and I didn’t look away.
“That’s enough,” Mr. Barrington said, cupping her elbow and standing, bringing her up with him. She didn’t struggle. She wasn’t as far gone as that. “You have my number. Please call me if you learn anything useful.”
I nodded. “I will.” At the door I said, “I want what’s best for her, too.”
“Of course you do, son,” he said. He put a big mitt on my shoulder and gave a gentle squeeze and a pat. “You’re a good young man.”
Mrs. Barrington didn’t say anything, but the thin line she’d pressed her lips into told me she wasn’t sure about that.
* * *
Your parents came by. Asked about you.
Jesus. Sorry. What’d you tell them?
Nothing. I don’t know anything.
I wish they’d give it up.
They care about you. They don’t want to see you hurting yourself.
That’s why I don’t let them see it.
I want you to stop, too.
My hand shook. I was putting too much out there, making myself too vulnerable, and at the same time risking scaring her away completely.
I found something, Cody. I have to
follow it.
What do you mean?
I can’t explain. I fell back into this to escape, but now I think I can fix things.
I hadn’t thought her this far gone. She was out of her mind. It was hard to tell through texts, but she must be crazy high to be talking such nonsense.
She was going to die. The one bright point still out there was snuffing itself out, and I was lounging there in my bedroom letting it happen. I had one more card to play, but preferred to drag out this ridiculous excuse for a relationship than play my card and risk it all ending.
But the longer I waited, the closer she got to death.
Please come see me. I still love you.
My thumb hovered over Delete, but I suddenly hit Send. As I watched it processing, I wished I could take it back and was glad I couldn’t.
My phone buzzed in my hand. I’d thought my heart was beating as fast and hard as it could, but it redoubled its attack on my ribs, smashed my lungs so that I couldn’t breathe, bounced up and squeezed my throat down to nothing.
Fuck. I didn’t want to read this response. I wanted to close my eyes and refuse to move, refuse to speak, maybe fall back into my coma, live in this suspended moment, this last moment of potentiality. This was my final, tiny spark in the ash pile of my life. It would either flare up, or it would go out, and there was nothing there left to ignite again if it did.
It took me fifteen minutes to build up the courage or whatever you want to call it to look at that text.
I can’t. I love you too. Goodbye.
Of course. Of course there was nothing good left for me. I knew that. I’d known it since I woke up. Lying on my back, I dropped my phone off the side of the bed onto the floor. I didn’t need it anymore. I went limp. I cried. I didn’t sob. Tears leaked out of my eye, filled it, had nowhere to go with the silicon of my mask pressed tightly to my face, trying to smash my scar tissue smooth but now creating a pool over my left eye.
But there were no sobs. I was too tired to sob. I was too resigned. Too prepared. It made too much sense.
* * *
I let Mr. Barrington know that I was now also cut off from Madison. He thanked me, again expressed his sorrow and his hope for the future, those two emotions following one after the other like the wounded dragging the dead.
A few days later, I awoke and headed for the kitchen to get a glass of milk, and found my parents sitting at the table drinking coffee and ignoring the paper. They talked low. They turned and looked at me, my mom smiling.
I became suspicious.
“Good morning, hun,” she said. My dad nodded to me, lifted his cup of coffee a bit in my direction.
“Morning.” I hadn’t expected to find the both of them, and for just a second I was confused, knocked off track by the unexpected. Then I put it together. “It must be Saturday.”
“You don’t know what day it is?” my mom asked.
It irked me. It felt like a judgment, though I had to admit that everything felt like a judgment. I was a sullen teen again. I lashed back, though I suspected I hadn’t been lashed at, and said, “I lose track. Not much difference between my days anymore.”
I’d expected a hurt expression. Instead, my parents shared some sort of conspiratorial glance.
I took out a glass, poured a little French vanilla coffee creamer into it and then poured in milk. I dropped in a straw. Turning to half sit on the counter, I stared at them as I slipped the straw through my mouth and took a sweet sip.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Nothing,” my mom said. “What’s going on with you?”
I shook my head, not willing to play that game. “Dad, why are you two acting so strange?”
He didn’t say anything, just picked up a section of the paper and opened it up, not exactly hiding behind it, but almost. What confused me was that he didn’t do it with any hostility. I was getting the silent treatment, but not the cold shoulder. In fact, when he peaked up at me, there was sadness in his eyes as he shook his head, a covert plea to me to not pursue this any further.
Taking another sip of my milk, I let my dad off the hook and looked back to my mother, who’d also decided that being preoccupied by the paper they hadn’t been reading seemed like a good idea.
What the hell was going on?
I thought back to the one unguarded thing she’d said. You don’t know what day it is?
No, I often didn’t know the day of the week or the month. Hell, at some point I’d probably start losing track of the years. I went to the calendar that hung over the trash.
“It’s July already?”
But then it hit me. It wasn’t July. I saw the bits of paper caught in the spiral from where a month had been torn away. June had been torn away, even though it was still June, because my mother had encircled one of those Saturday squares with a big heart, and a doodle of a wedding cake topper.
It was my wedding day.
I didn’t say anything. I don’t think I had a visible reaction, and besides, I wore a semi-opaque mask of silicon and a red mask of scars. I took my glass of milk and walked out of the kitchen and back to my bedroom.
Sitting in my desk chair, I realized that I wasn’t going to have an emotional meltdown. Judging by the impossible weight pressing me down, I’d already melted. I should have spilled through the arm rests of the chair in a puddle.
It felt as if I’d inhaled lead shot, but there were no tears.
It surprised me, the way I kept thinking I’d hit bottom, and then I’d step off a cliff and go weightless right before smashing myself against the floor of a new low. I don’t know if that idea of “this must be the worst” was pessimism or optimism, or some weird combination of the worst traits of the two.
But this, this had to be it. What else could happen? I could die? I would have laughed at the thought if a semi-truck hadn’t just parked on my chest.
I should have been starting my life, my real life, the life I’d been waiting for, working towards, putting off so that I could get it just perfect. I should have been settled into my job at Sanders & Stevens, working for my father-in-law. I should be getting married to the only girl I’d never gotten bored with, the one who had seemed so loyal that I didn’t know if I could be good enough to warrant that sort of love. That day should have been the start of everything, almost a birth. But there had been that phone call, and that little switch, that tiny little unflipped switch.
There couldn’t be lower.
I still had painkillers, because I still had pain, pain which I would have at one time thought unbearable, before I had the sensation of roasting alive to compare it with.
Sitting on my bed, I opened the drawer of my nightstand and took out the prescription bottle. My tolerance was still high. Not nearly as high as it had been, but high, requiring that I take an amount that would knock most people out just to dull the sharpest edge of my pain.
I took off my mask, but then felt a sudden wave of panic and put it back on, which meant I had to feed in only a couple of pills at a time and then wash it down with a mouthful of sweet, vanilla milk taken through the straw. Eventually, the small handful of pills disappeared.
I wasn’t trying to hurt myself. Right? I just needed to sleep. I just needed to disappear for awhile.
It was my wedding day.
I fell back on the bed and waited, distracted myself by finding the old familiar faces in the texture of the sprayed ceiling.
It was my wedding day.
* * *
The next thing I remembered was trying to awaken, not being able to, not being able to figure out that I was asleep, that waking up was something that happened.
A ringing and buzzing finally cut through. I’d fallen—no plunged—into dreamless sleep that morning and now it was dark. I moved my hand to the buzzing. It seemed to weigh a hundred pounds, and I let it flop to the ground beside my bed. Pawing around, I finally found the object creating the horrible sound. My phone.
It was ringing.
&
nbsp; That was strange. People had given up calling me weeks ago, because I refused to answer except with a text saying, What? I didn’t want to talk to anyone, didn’t want to carry all the weight in repetitive conversations about how I was doing. So eventually people stopped calling.
I picked up the phone from where I’d dropped it after the goodbye text from Madison, held it a couple of inches from my face and tried to get my eye to focus on the small screen.
Madison. This was her sixth call. I hit several other buttons before I managed to answer.
“Madison,” I said, and though my body still refused to believe I was awake, my voice was solid.
“I didn’t think you’d answer. I was afraid I wouldn’t get to talk to you again.”
“What do you mean? I was just asleep. I…Are you…” Too many thoughts were jostling for a place in line.
Madison cut me short. “Cody, I think I’ve found a way to fix everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ouroboros. The serpent eats its tail. Nietzsche was being literal when…I can’t explain it. It doesn’t matter. I need to ask you something. I know I’ve treated you badly, so I don’t deserve to ask you this, but I have to know before…Cody, do you still love me?”
“Yes. Yes I still love you.”
“I love you, too. I love you so much. I’m sorry I have to go.”
“Have to go where?”
“I have to go, now. Goodbye.”
“Wait—”
But she hung up. The screen of the phone went black, and I lay in total darkness, trying to figure out what was going on. The pills hadn’t let go of me. My limbs were numb, seemed not there at all in the darkness, like my brain floated free of my crippled body, but also from my senses.
I tried to think about what Madison said, but every moment carried it further away, made it more dreamlike, until the darkness took me completely.