The Life List of Adrian Mandrick

by Chris White

  “Just wanted to show you,” Adrian said, sheepish as an altar boy. He took the book from her hands and set it on the coffee table to put a stop to how much he wanted her.

  Her green eyes liquid, she took his hand and said, “I have something I want to show you too.”

  • • •

  Stella walks into their bedroom with her phone tucked between her cheek and shoulder, carrying a glass of wine and a music stand. “I should go,” she says, and hangs up, setting down the stand in the corner of the room.

  Still lying on the bed, Adrian doesn’t look up from his laptop. “Who was that?”

  “Claire.” Her best friend. Pianist. Lives in Greeley. All Stella’s prior frivolity has evaporated. She nudges closed the closet door on her way by it and says, “It’s dark in here.” All the lights in the room are off but for the glow of Adrian’s computer illuminating his face.

  “We were talking about Matthew’s wedding. Now he says he wants me to play for the ceremony.”

  “Ah,” says Adrian.

  A short silence while she slips off her shoes. “I really am sorry about this morning,” she says, cautiously. “Why didn’t you text me back?”

  “I was driving in the mountains. I didn’t have a signal.” Adrian watches her from under his brow as she settles on the bed and pulls the throw around her shoulders.

  “I shouldn’t ever have pushed you. I’m truly sorry.”

  “Appreciate you saying that.”

  She grimaces, “Do you smell like . . . gasoline?”

  Adrian flips the laptop off his legs. “I’ll wash my hands.” But she tugs him back down.

  “It doesn’t matter. Just . . .” She takes a deep breath but doesn’t say more. Adrian smells the gas now too, wafting from his fingers.

  “How was rehearsal?” he asks, tight-lipped.

  “It was fine.” Life should all be so fine. “Adrian, can we talk for a few minutes?”

  “Sure. We are talking, aren’t we?” All day, in Ward and Nederland, at the reservoir and the gas station, he knew this would come, but it’s spoiled, disingenuous.

  Stella leans against her pillows and rests a forearm on her brow as if protecting her eyes. “Are you unhappy?”

  “Are you?” he asks, petulant.

  “I am unhappy right now, yes. Because I think there’s something going on with you.”

  “I was driving in the mountains.” And he was driving in the mountains.

  “I don’t mean today, Adrian, I mean lately. You know what I mean.”

  What can he say? “I feel bad about the Cascades, I’ve told you that.”

  “No, come on. I know you.”

  “Nobody knows anybody completely, Stella. It’s not even healthy to try,” he says. This is leading, but he doesn’t care.

  “Don’t give me that.”

  “Maybe I’m just fucked up,” he taunts her. “Like you said this morning.”

  “Like you said . . .”

  “Like we agreed.”

  “We’re all fucked up, Adrian. But sure, yes, let’s say you are. Let’s say you’re fucked up.” She watches him intently. “In what way do you mean?” Her eyes narrow.

  “Some things people just don’t say to each other,” he says—again, so leading.

  “Such as?” she asks, quieter.

  If he did tell her about his mother, about her phone call, about his father, about the letter and how, though it’s been so many long years, he’s still weak and anxious though none of it should matter anymore, true or false, she would never look at him the same way again. She’d pity him. Feel betrayed. Fear for her own children. Some things people don’t say to each other, even when they’re still a little high.

  “Such as what?” she repeats, impatient now, almost goading him.

  “I don’t know, Stella. Such as how belittling and banal it is to be a ‘doctor’s wife.’ ”

  Adrian watches the tumblers of her brain click into place, while he inflates himself with indignation.

  “Next time why don’t you just come into the fucking room?” Stella says, throwing off the blanket to stand beside the bed.

  “Like it’s some kind of insult or joke.”

  “Oh my God, Adrian, I’m not a doctor’s wife. I’m a musician.”

  “I know this, I didn’t—”

  “A musician basically functioning as a single parent. Trying to fit in rehearsals and gigs and sessions between dinner and homework, married to somebody who . . .” She shakes her head at what must be the cruel irony of her life. “I didn’t sign up for this.”

  It could end but Adrian haughtily demands, “Married to somebody who’s what?”

  “Somebody who’s emotionally absent, Adrian. Who forgets. Who thinks only of himself and his precious list.”

  “I help constantly with the kids, you just don’t see it. I worry constantly about their well-being, you just don’t know it, and Jesus, Stella, of course your career matters, I just don’t fucking . . . say it all the time.”

  Stella bites her lip, shakes her head. “I think we should see someone. I know you don’t approve of that sort of thing—”

  “What sort of thing?” It’s like she’s not listening to a word he says.

  “Therapy, counseling. Have you been drinking?”

  Michaela eases open the door. “It’s really dark in here.”

  Stella claws her hair back off her face. She nods bitterly. “Yeah, it is.”

  “I was supposed to go to bed early, so . . .” It’s after nine. Even Michaela wants it to end.

  • • •

  Stella and Adrian gather themselves quickly and see to the rest of the evening, walking in and out of rooms like Sims, little tornadoes in the air over their heads, moving computers and phones and hairbrushes and keys and book bags around, holding their mouths closed and eyes averted. In bed, Stella listens back to a recording of the rehearsal on her headphones, teeth gleaming in the light, and falls asleep.

  Adrian swims in a shallow pool of fading Vicodin, dipping in and out of wakefulness—through slips of color, mild nausea, and the repetitive jingling of a sound he can’t identify. The itching’s gone. He wants more. Maybe he should take more. He wants deeper, warmer, richer, because by now it’s only the dim memory of an event, it’s only the shadow of a shape. It’s an echo. An echo of a previous sound. Like the creaking of the massive planks against the waves. And the uneven rustling of the great sails. Shrieking gulls circling high overhead. Legs wide apart, knees bent, he stands on deck with his comrades, whose voices are virtually lost in the wind, when all at once he realizes: he has to get off that ship. He is going to change. The ship is coming into port—on dry land, oxygen rises from huge swaths of hardwoods in visible waves. Adrian thunders down the swaying gangplank into the forest. And as he runs, he turns easily, simply, into a wolf, nothing painful or frightening in it; now he’s off the ship. He lopes on all fours, the ground secure in his hands like a rope. All he knows is hunger. Pure purpose. Scent of dark earth, wet leaves. Night. The air.

  • • •

  Adrian had promised himself to never write a dummy script again.

  Four years ago, he tried the super-opiate fentanyl, in lollipop form at the hospital—it had been ordered for a patient who died before using it—and he was pretty damned keen on it. But he knew he shouldn’t mess with fentanyl (which skyrockets your tolerance for all opiates and is way too readily available at the hospital), so in an effort to get a little bit closer to its unforgettable high, he wrote a dummy script for morphine, which is the closest thing. He wrote the prescription for his brother, using Evan’s birth date and name, then picked it up at the pharmacy, showing his own ID. Just picking up meds for a family member, thank you. So simple, it was ridiculous. He liked the morphine, of course, too much. But it wasn’t like the fentanyl: nothing is. So one day, walking with a syringe of fentanyl on the way to a cancer patient, Adrian veered into the men’s lounge prepared to take a little off the top. He glanced at hims
elf in the mirror—the syringe in his hand and desperate gleam in his eye—and couldn’t do it. He went back to Vicodin. He chooses it because it’s imperfect. Because it’s not easy or uncorrupted, because the acetaminophen in it will make dog meat of your liver if you go too far. He believes this awareness is partly what’s kept him from increasing dosages enough to develop an extremely high opioid tolerance—this, and the subtle titration. But Vicodin’s not that easy to get, not even for doctors. Missing pills must be accounted for, and you can’t write a script for yourself. The easy thing is what Adrian avoided in the men’s room, and that’s a step he found himself unwilling to take. He once had a genuine prescription for Vicodin, however, from when he tore a ligament in his wrist playing racquet ball, and for years a doctor friend from med school liberally refilled it for him. It wasn’t exactly morally upright, but Adrian felt it was a lesser crime, and it flowed like a well. Then the guy moved to Saudi Arabia.

  This is the hateful part of it all—the scheming, the counting, the scheduling, the fear of loss—but he’s determined, this time, to stay completely within the law. He will dole out four, maybe five tabs at the most per day (plus a Xanax or two) to get him through until they’re all gone, then that will be that.

  • • •

  He begins rousing himself at six instead of six thirty and going to the gym: that’s helped in the past. Sometimes his body just needs the extra attention, the extra burn. He says yes to coffee with Chip from the lab and Claudia from oncology to try and take the edge off the alienation and anxiety. Nights he lingers at his desk at the hospital until seven thirty or eight, avoiding the discomfort and frustration of his dynamic with Stella. He pours over the ABA website and the North American Rare Bird Alert for current sightings, reading birding blogs and tweets, listening to Tom Waits on his headphones, praying for his next chance at a bird, checking and rechecking his phone to be sure his mother hasn’t called again.

  Meanwhile, scenes from his youth begin sinking into his awareness like flashing lures floating noiselessly down into a lake—choosing a woman on a whim, fondling in inappropriate places, entering in wee hours and backing onto a couch or bed with musky hands, sprawling into late, hot mornings. He finds himself fantasizing about women he sees on the street, in the used book store, in the Trident coffee shop—the young waif wandering the Pearl Street Mall with a clove cigarette in her hand, the older woman with short graying hair who teaches at the university, the woman with honeyed skin and black glasses typing in the public library. He identifies a whole species of woman with muscled shoulders and thick waists who lift weights at his gym, another with pale skin and prominent veins who swim at the pool, and another with furry boots and backpacks crossing the lawn in front of Old Main.

  When he’s home, the children are more difficult to deal with. Not because they actually are more difficult to deal with, but because his wandering thoughts seem related to them somehow and the juxtaposition makes him a little ill. When he watches them playing together, wide-eyed, consuming How I Met Your Mother or zigzagging around the basement, knocking into the Ping-Pong table, and laughing and teasing, his heart shudders. Their innocent expectations of happiness and safety seem inevitable and right, but so dangerous, like crossing a four-lane highway. He doesn’t want to be the semi that mows them down.

  Deborah begins stopping by to talk when only his desk lamp is burning at the end of the hallway. Why should he stop her, when she is so kind? There is an exoticism in her “every woman” sensibility that appeals to him in ways he can’t explain. She attends to her own joy, for one thing. And he’s compelled by the fact that she spends her days sitting with people who are dying. Caring for them when no one else will.

  It must be strange to work for someone you know will be dead soon. That someone is often in a morphine dream or sick with dementia or fear or regret; perhaps they’ve achieved a measure of acceptance, but they can’t hold you accountable for your current mistakes or weaknesses in the future. Certain people might take unfair advantage of a situation like that. Though Adrian doesn’t believe in God, the phrase “with God as our witness” comes to mind: sometimes it’s only Deborah and the walls who know if she is kind, if she changes the bedpan when it needs to be changed, or listens, quietly attentive, to the story that must be told before it is too late, when everything that had once seemed so important has dropped away (the mail and the debt and the headlines and the parties, the drink and the pills and the tools and the mirrors). He envisions Deborah sitting quietly supportive in an uncomfortable plastic chair, her hand cupping his, listening to his own deathbed narrative: the story he’s never told about the thing he can’t remember that may not have even happened.

  One evening, when they’ve talked and joked like the friends they’re becoming, and she’s left, he’s checking his email, wading through his Twitter feed, scanning the week in weather, reading through Orion, logging onto Backyard Birder, curious. And there’s the guy.

  4601 (11/11/09): I saw a duck this after noon but wasn’t sure which one at first. Pretty sure from the book now it is a Ring Necked Duck. Didn’t look real it was so much like a decoy. They are a black and grey color with a little white. The head looks like its got a black light shining on it kind of a purple velvet look. I got up pretty close and saw the grey black and white stripped bill also great. It was floating around in a pond while I was clearing brush. Eye looks painted on!

  Adrian laughs out loud. He’s got the duck ID’ed right, at least. It’s true about the purple velvet look, and, yes, it does look like a decoy. (That’s why decoys work.)

  Then, just as he’s about to pack up and go home, he logs on to the Rare Bird Alert.

  An Ivory Gull has shown up in Cape May Harbor (he got his on St. Lawrence Island in the early nineties); there is also a Pink-footed Goose (which he ticked in Pennsylvania in ’99); but on the Texas Rare Bird Alert, he finds notice of a bird he’s never seen—a Ruddy Quail-Dove flown over from Mexico. Bentsen–Rio Grande State Park. Now.

  Chapter Six

  * * *

  Tapping neatly on a hollow door of an apartment building just off Walnut, Adrian is conscious of the soft tissue on the insides of his cheeks and of the harder ridges just behind his teeth. If he presses his tongue into any one spot too long, he discerns a tinny taste. Saliva is building up in his mouth.

  The husky voice sings, “Washing my hands!”

  Adrian steps back to wait. He clears his throat. Dabs at his brow with the sleeve of his jacket. And swallows.

  After a long moment, Deborah opens the door a crack so the smell of fresh coffee seeps out to him like steam from a hot shower.

  “Hey!” she says.

  Adrian strains a little toward the opening in the door then steps back again.

  “Come on in.”

  He enters but doesn’t take off his jacket.

  “When did you get so quiet?” she teases.

  He shrugs and chuckles, “Sorry.” Nothing else comes out.

  “Why don’t you take a load off?” Deborah suggests, gesturing to the armchair. “I didn’t think you’d take me up on it. You want regular or decaf? It’s French press, so no problem either way.”

  Adrian scans the apartment, a studio, her futon bed where the living room should be. It looks like a place someone’s grandmother would live, if that grandmother were a graduate student—a lacy doily on the end table, a no-nonsense mini dining table with a plastic covering, three six-packs of Red Bull stacked on the kitchen counter, the only chair, a recliner.

  “Nah, I uh . . . I probably shouldn’t. How’s work?” he asks, still standing.

  “People are dying every day, I can tell you that much. Check out my fish,” she says, gesturing to a ten-gallon Wal-Mart special on a corner table containing a half dozen orange-and-blue neon tetras.

  “I’m going birding in Texas,” he says bluntly.

  She crosses her arms and nods. “Oh, very cool.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  She smirks. “J
ust what is it about those birds?”

  He nods a bit gravely, then the words spew out of him. He tells her humans have always watched birds and that it’s a deep, primal impulse, more than just the sum of its parts. That detailed observations of birds and their characteristics show up in the illustrations and writings of all ancient societies, from Greece to China, Japan to Persia, Assyria to Mesopotamia and Egypt. Drawings and paintings of birds as old as the late Paleolithic period, some 45,000 years old, have been discovered on rocks and cave walls around the world. Birds are the direct descendants of the dinosaurs, he says, mummified in ancient Egypt as representatives for the gods, where their images came to represent letters and words. They have hunted our game, fought to the death for our amusement, fed and adorned us, delivered our most urgent messages. They herald our mornings, alert us to the presence of dead things, announce the change of seasons, and predict the weather.

  She had said she was interested in birding, and it’s a time-honored tradition for experienced birders to mentor those who genuinely want to learn. He’s mentored several people in the past, including his friend Jeff, who didn’t know a cockatoo from a peacock when they started, so she is absolutely welcome to come along. If she’d like to.

  “I . . . ,” she begins.

  “But you’d have to be ready to go to the airport in an hour and a half.”

  She is silent another moment, as Adrian looks down at the floor again, shaking his head at himself, for so many reasons: the robust sheen of her hair, the generous swell of her hips, her good-natured throaty laugh, the terror and inevitability.

  She’s off for the next couple of days, she finally says, and she’d love to come if he can pay—which he can, he says, and he will.

  • • •

  While Deborah packs, Adrian drives home to find the Range Rover gone. This could mean any number of things, including the distinct possibility that he won’t have to face Stella and the kids. He parks the Saab on the street and steals up the eastern edge of his lawn past the juniper shrubs.

  Once inside, he finds no one in the kitchen, no one in the dining room, no one in the living room—just the sanitizing hum of domestic, upper-middle-class silence. He takes the stairs and creeps along the upstairs hallway and peers through the cracked door of Zander’s room.