by Will Boast
“We’d better hurry, or we’re not going to get fed before two.”
He looked at me like he didn’t even see me. “But the ambulance isn’t here yet.”
“Come on, the cops are on it. The system works. Everything’s okay in the world.”
He glanced back uncertainly. When we set off again, he trailed a few steps behind. Brunch was packed, but we got stools at the bar. Ollie was quiet, pushed his food around his plate. I thumbed through Interior Life, tried to enjoy my Gruyère-prosciutto-cippolini tartine. We walked back to the Grove. Jeff and his wheelchair were gone. I thought about pointing out that the cops wouldn’t have stopped to check on him either. Some guy nodding out on the street—hardly a rare sight. But now wasn’t the time. We went up to the apartment.
“More coffee?”
Ollie was at the window, staring off over the rooftops.
“Hey,” I said, “espresso or drip?”
“I’m going out.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know, Alameda. The flea market.”
“Okay,” I said cautiously, “text me later. We can order sushi in. On me, okay?”
He grunted okay. Then he was gone. The apartment vibrated with quiet. I switched everything on. TV, radio, computer, phone, everything.
TWENTY-FOUR
ALL THAT WEEK, HE CAME HOME AFTER ELEVEN. I WAS already in bed. He said his job was still going late. I murmured good night, rolled over, tried to fall asleep. He slipped under the covers, lay there a while, then went down and sat on the couch in the dark. I could almost feel him pulsing with uncertainty and fear. The whole place stank of it.
PIN AND I WERE SCRUBBING IN. Not that she needed anyone assisting; for her, this was routine. But I’d insisted on being there.
“Yes?” Pin said, eyeing me curiously. “Everything is okay?”
“Point where you need me.”
Biscuit was splayed on the operating table, tender belly exposed, a patch of fur shaved. The sight of blood never much bothered me, and under anesthetic Biscuit wouldn’t feel a thing. Still, seeing the dogs so vulnerable . . . I started the suction. Pin drew a line with her scalpel, dark red welling up across Biscuit’s downy white chest.
The defibrillator appeared first, that little stainless steel fob that could shock a heart back into rhythm, that saved so many lives. I’d half-hoped to see blackness or fluid around the device, proof of an infection or some mistake on our part, which might now be corrected. But all the pink flesh around the ICD looked normal, healthy. Pin cut deeper, following the two wire leads.
And there it was—the heart. I’d forgotten how tiny a dog’s was, how hypnotic its beating. Somehow circumstance had put me here at this company, helping build devices to regulate the pulsing of this dumb, precious muscle. What had I felt the few other times I’d sat in on a surgery? Despair, disgust, awe?
“Hmm,” Pin said, exploring around the ICD connections, touching the organ with a casualness that ordinarily would’ve made me flutter. “No, this is fine. Everything is fine. The problem is not here.” She looked up at me. “Well?”
I knew what I should’ve said then. It was time, and he was already under. “Nothing else we can do?” I labored to sound analytical, practical. “A different course of antibiotics? Maybe there’s an infection we’re not seeing.”
“Hmm,” Pin said again, hearing something else in my voice. “Yes, okay, a short course. We can always try.”
THAT EVENING I GOT OFF at 16th Street and came up into a dream. Mission was closed. The parade was silent. They wore black. Black suits, black skirts fringed with black lace, broad-brimmed black hats. Their faces were white with deep holes of coal black eyes, their expressions blank and unmoving. Some carried candles. Some danced along in vague, looping steps. Everywhere I looked, the skeletal faces stared back. I stood rooted. I had to hold up my phone like a shield, watch them through the screen. They passed on. The dream dissolved. The whole street was empty and still.
When I came through the door, he was on the couch again, sitting there in the half-dark, staring at the blank TV screen. I mumbled hello, went straight to the fridge for a bottle of Riesling. I heard him get up, come tentatively toward me. When I turned to him, his face had gone cubist. Each of its facets—sorrow, confusion, accusation, gut-sick pain—stood out at once. I quickly turned back to the open fridge, its humming light.
“I’m not upset,” he said behind me.
“But you’re disappointed.” I reached for a glass, filled it with an improbably steady hand, sipped. “Look, I know what you’re going to say—I saw him lying there, and I stepped over him. I stepped right over him.”
“Disappointed . . . ?” Ollie said, as if he’d never encountered the word.
“He was high out of his mind. There was nothing we could do.”
“He’s your friend!” Ollie’s voice leapt up like he was being strangled. “You stepped right over him and went on to your brunch!”
“I said that already. Look, be upset. Go for it.”
“I’m not upset!”
“You don’t have to try so hard, Ollie. Really. You can’t save everyone.”
He stalked back and forth in front of the window, his fists balled up, trying to pull it all back inside him. “He’s not everyone. You see him practically every day.”
“He’s just some junkie who lies to make me feel guilty and give him money. You can’t stop for every fucked-up case in this city.”
“Look who’s talking! A month ago you were in the exact same—” His face crumpled into another shape: regret. “Daphne, I’m sorry, it’s just—”
“I can’t get involved in every tragic life story.” The willows. “I can’t be this person you want me to be. You can’t fix me.”
“You think I’m that fucking obvious?”
“If you’re sticking around for some other Daphne to show up—”
“This is your narrative? Please, stop.”
“The condition isn’t separate from me,” I said. “It is me.”
“Don’t, don’t . . .” Ollie turned in a tight circle, fists beating against his thighs, his whole body trembling. Then he stopped, looked at me straight on, his rage and pain and anguish all slotted together—the face I knew so intimately, every facet now joined against me. “It’s not an excuse!” he shouted. “The goddamn condition is not an excuse!”
The buzzing, there it finally was. He went on: Was I ever going to stop pretending to be hardhearted, pretending I didn’t give a shit, hiding behind some bullshit tragic persona? He paced and beat his fists and told me how exhausting it was, how completely fucking exhausting, my gentle Ollie, finally losing it there in front of me, the whole room shuddering with everything coming off him, shuddering through me, the buzzing under every thought, about to boil, tremble over, overflow, flood me completely . . .
“The willows shaking their heads,” I whispered. “The cattails.”
“Fuck, Daphne, are you even fucking listening?”
I crossed my arms over my chest and looked away. “The yellow grass.”
“What? What’s that?”
“The picnic tables.”
“Look, you don’t need to make excuses.” Even in his fury and bewilderment, he was trying to be kind. “Please, I’m trying to tell you. I never want you to—”
“The river, the raft, the raft.”
“What the fuck are you even saying right now?”
Clattering my wineglass into the sink, I crossed the room, slumped on the couch, put a pillow behind my head, stiffened in anticipation. I could already feel it trembling down my spine. “A man waving from the lip of a raft,” I whispered. “A man waving to me.” A man standing on the edge of a raft, a man crumpling. My strings were pulled so tight I felt I could barely talk, yet the words came out, so even and measured they terrified me. “Calm down,” I told Ollie. “If you can’t calm down, I need you to leave.” I lay there, praying to be taken away from this, praying to be frozen hard as wood. “
Please, leave. Just leave.”
He didn’t answer, just kept stalking around the apartment in thrumming silence, gone subterranean, though I could feel everything churning inside him, his pacing circles going wider and wider—I knew he wanted to leave; God, he was ready to be free of all of this—as if trying to fling himself out of my orbit. Or maybe he thought he was waiting for me to come out of an episode. I didn’t speak either, just closed my eyes until, finally, I heard the door slam behind him. On hands and knees, I crawled to the bathroom. With my clothes on, I pulled myself into the empty bath, the only place I couldn’t fall.
HE DIDN’T RETURN THAT NIGHT. He called four times, texted that he’d left his key in the apartment—he’d stormed out without it—but didn’t plead to come home. I didn’t reply. I went to work, let the hours pass. At the gym I climbed endless stairs, one weary step after another, until I stepped off the top of the escalator at 16th Street, up from the underground into the late evening fog, and floated past the stringless violinist screeching away, the men sleeping in storefront entries and burning their brains out on front stoops, the ends of all those tiny glass pipes flickering in the gloom.
I’d prepared for this, I told myself. I’d known it was coming. So I only took half-pills. I thought I didn’t need more than that; the numbness came from inside. The knot was not string but wood, deep in the heartwood. At the lab I could barely hold on to the numbers and printouts and people passing before me. I closed my office door, dozed in my chair, the office clamor, whirring hard drives, and ceaseless barking all churning under my fractured thoughts.
When I texted him back, it hardly felt real. Come get your stuff I’ll pack it up for you. I pressed SEND. The words went off into the air, into the atmosphere, meaningless, weightless, wisps of electrons. I got boxes from the produce market, filled them with his things. My apartment smelled like carrots and bananas.
When he arrived, I had to buzz him in. I left the door open, got myself on the couch. He came in. “It’s all ready for you,” I said in a hollow voice.
He looked at his stuff, his face drawn, jaw held stiff, an expression somewhere between reluctance and defiance. “This is really how you want this to go?”
“It is.” My words just floated away. “It has to be.”
“You know I can’t fight with you,” he said. “But Daphne, I—”
“Please. Just get this over with.”
It took him three trips to take most of it down. I couldn’t help getting up and going to the window. I told myself I could watch from a distance. One of his old roommates was helping him load an ancient Volvo station wagon but didn’t come up for anything. He must have thought Ollie and I were going to talk it through. Ollie came in for the last box, his dusty old records. I stayed at the window. “This is it,” he said to my back. “Everything.”
“Okay.”
“It smells like fruit in here,” he said, trying to prolong the moment.
“You’d better go quick.”
I watched as he hefted the last box out of the front entry to the building. He tripped on the front step and scattered his old records across the sidewalk. Then he knelt there, a full two minutes. Even from four stories up, I could see his shoulders shaking.
After his friend’s Volvo pulled away in a rumble of exhaust, the apartment clanged with silence. I took off my clothes, left them on the bathroom floor, got into the bath, turned the hot tap on. When it was nearly full, I left the tap running, just a thread of water to keep it scalding. I leaned back, stretched out, got as low as I could. Pale white smoke dissolving, noon light.
Steam rose from the bath, shimmered into mist. My feet blanched white. I let my legs go. They slowly rose. The tips of my toes poked above the water, blanched white. Picnic tables. Yellow, patchy grass running down to the river. My little finger and ring finger throbbed. The bandage around the splint loosened, floated to the surface. Willows shaking their heads. Fluttering, I watched the steam sway and eddy, curtain and snake. The world turned gauzy, sifted away, the water at my collarbone, rising up my—
I let go, just caved in, let the buzzing surge forward, a huge, tumbling wave. My image slid forward yet again—cattails, dissolving smoke, the willows, the willows, the—but my anger tore right through. And right behind it, a trough of sorrow, like slipping off into open air, the hollow jolt of freefall. My jaw went slack. My head lolled. Water gurgled in my ear. The spike of fear—I didn’t try to stop it. My arms floated up.
Cattails and pale white smoke and sun bleached picnic tables.
I let the joy in: Ollie laughing. Ollie tumbling down in bed, wrapping his arms around me, staring at me with his sly, boyish grin, quiet and intent in the half-light of morning. Love? Of course. But love is quicksilver. It quickens us in sudden, unexpected moments, then glimmers away. It just wasn’t heavy enough for me then.
Pain—that was the unbearable weight, the thing that would sink me forever. The pain I saw every day: the ravaged faces of the mad and the addicted, the cautious, haunted faces in group, the thinly hidden worries of my coworkers, the loyal suffering of the dogs. Ollie kneeling on the sidewalk, his shoulders shaking. And, finally, my own pain, fifteen stifled years—all of it buzzing, electric-cold, snapping with current, every muscle about to go.
The water was halfway up my neck. The barest friction kept me from slipping further. Under the stream from the hot tap, I heard a high whine—the singing of my own blood. I let it reverberate with my panic. A trickle of soapy water slipped between my lips. My body tried to make me gag. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t let it.
The image rose unbidden, stubborn. Picnic tables, yellowing grass, white smoke, cattails, willows, the glinting river. And on the river, a raft. A raft lashed to four blue barrels, a man, a shirtless man . . . My chest burned. The steam swirled, made tiny, swirling lanterns. I thought of my mother finding me this way, floating in tepid bathwater. She’d known this was coming. She’d been right all along. For a wide, luxurious moment, I found the inevitability comforting.
Then the burning in my chest chewed up those thoughts. The man waving, his arm drooping, shirtless, pale, his whole body slumping. My eyes closed, but I could still see the tiny lanterns. They drew me up into a flood of light. The water slid down my nose and throat and into my lungs. The light bloomed all around me.
But the image only grew clearer. Pale white smoke drifting. Picnic tables, initials carved in the wood, KC ♥ JA. The grass running down to the water, yellow, patchy, cattails bobbing, the big willows making their slow whishing sound, shaking their shaggy heads. I wavered over the line of consciousness. The light pulsed forward, the haze of noon sun, a crudely made raft, sheet metal lashed to old blue rain barrels. The bathwater gurgled and whined in my ears. The water in my throat and lungs made me retch. Only a feeble hiccup, but some tiny, mechanical part of me was working, pushing up against the weight. I saw the figure standing on the edge of the raft, waving, shirtless, pale, waving, trying to call out, trying—
The slow shiver, my body coming back—oh, God, my chest was going to explode. My fingers prickled and stung from the electricity shooting through me. I reached for the sides of the tub, hardly enough strength to pull myself an inch above the water. Shirtless, pale, waving to me, trying to call out to me. Then, with one huge pull, I hauled myself over the side. The bathwater flooded out, sluiced across the floor. I hung there, half in, half out, coughing up water, heaving in air that made me cough even harder. I fell over the side of the tub, dropped hard to the tile floor. The bathwater pooled around me, the trickle from the hot tap steadily filling the tub, spilling over me. The light receded, drew up into the ceiling, telescoped to an impossible height. The man in the light drew away. I reached for him and couldn’t reach him.
TWENTY-FIVE
ALARM, SNOOZE. ALARM, SNOOZE. ALARM, SNOOZE . . . Shower if I can be bothered, oatmeal if I can stomach it. Out on the street, dodge the hypodermics, the human shit, the human wreckage. BART to Milbrae to Caltrain, the 8:16, the 8:39, the
9:02, whatever, don’t care if I’m late, stare into the armpits of commuters hanging off the grips like apes. Company shuttle, coffee, email, data, dogs, reports, skip lunch, bitter chalk of the drug on my tongue, coffee, skip gym, back on the train, cold leftovers, wine, TV, radio, white noise, rearrange the apartment, fill the spaces left by his books, records, clothes, pill, sleep, pill, sleep, strip the days down, stay low, stay numb, let the drug take over, get through, always got through before.
But I fell. I kept on falling.
Late in the day, when the drug wore off, I’d think of the fight, go down on my knees, on my ass. I dropped a glass of wine. I stumbled, glanced my forehead against the kitchen counter. An awful welt came up. At work they stared but didn’t ask. Thanksgiving came, went. Pin and Staci hung Christmas decorations, a holiday party. I hung back, sipped hot apple cider, only tasted chalk. A plastic Santa on the microwave blinked red. Blinked off. Blinked on. Blinked—I reached out, touched it, made sure it was really there.
Get used to it, a shadow world. Get used to falling. Fall so many times, get up so many times, just automatic. Just the dim, gray present, down, up, down, up, a little harder, a little darker every time. Alarm, snooze, get up. Fall, get up, fall. Repeat.
DID HE CALL? I don’t know. First I blocked his number, then I deleted it, thought that would help. One afternoon at work an email from his address popped into my inbox. “Hello Just Need 2 Share This With U.” I immediately opened it. Stupid. I thought about writing, to say his account had been hacked. But he almost never checked his email. Anyway, the effort it would take . . . And I still needed to check on the dogs. Then a chat window opened. Fuck.