by Chris Lynch
I was just talking to a rock, and naturally your name came up.”
“Oh, rocks will talk. Go back and tell them hello for me.”
“You look great, Joyce. It’s always a better day when I get to see your face. I’m a better me, when I get to see your face.”
“That’s a lot of pressure to put on one face.”
“Is that why the face has been avoiding me?”
“What? Come on, I saw you on date night with Fabian.”
I don’t even have time to be horrified over the date-night crack.
“Yeah, and the more I think about that night and the more you stay away from me now, the more that night looks like some combination of pity and good-bye.”
“Oh, now, I did not tell you good-bye. And I certainly don’t pity you.”
That’s fine, since as of this minute I can do it myself.
“I didn’t mean it to sound like that, Keir. Please, look at me.”
Even when that face is all she is showing me through her narrowly opened door, I feel lucky.
“Would you like to come on out for a while? Just for a bit, for a walk? It’s a perfect night out.”
“Keir, it’s freezing outside.”
“Yeah, you’re right. It is, I guess. I never minded the cold, though. Doesn’t bother me like it does most people.”
“Keir, you’re shivering so hard I’m surprised all your joints don’t just let go and leave your bones flopping around on the ground.”
“I am?” I look at some of my bones and joints to check. “Wow, look at that. See, I was right, I’m not bothered by the cold, and my shivering proves it.”
“That’s quite a case you make there. Hon, I think you have a rare gift for taking the basic realities of a situation and arranging them into a whole different reality that you can believe and like better. If you are still uncertain about what degree to pursue, I recommend you give serious consideration to law, or theology.”
“Okay,” I say, as if it is the most obvious thing in the world that a deal is being struck between parties. “I will give your suggestion very serious consideration, and now I hope you will do me the same courtesy and come for a walk.”
“No. Sorry, but no. It’s cold, I have work to do, and frankly, I just don’t want to. I need to tell you, you seem kind of off. Are you feeling all right?”
I stand there, smiling at her bright star of a face all pinched into that narrow door space. I feel the shape of my smile, aware of doing just like before, trying to match the dimensions of the perfection of her smile. Even if she’s not showing me that. Even while I feel myself going crooked and lopsided with the attempt, the failure, the humiliation of trying.
I feel the cold now. I damn do feel the cold now.
“I’ve had a difficult time of it today,” I say, summing up with some dignity at least.
“You should go home to bed. That’s the best thing. Before you make yourself sick. Go get tucked in, have a nice sleep for yourself, and then see what tomorrow brings for you. I bet it will be better things.”
“Sleeping’s not so great lately either. But maybe, if you would just go for a short walk with me, we’ll hang our legs over, like remember? Through the bars and dangling off the bridge over the duck pond? That was one of the best times I ever had, and I’m absolutely convinced that if we can just reverse, reverse ourselves back to the pond and that time and then take it slower motion back to forward gear again, everything would get right as righteous this time. The plan could get back on track, and all the results, about us, about football, and tuition, and everything, will go like they’re supposed to go. And, Joyce, believe me, the plan and the results are like wildest dream stuff the way I picture it, if things just go like they’re supposed to go.”
She is giving me a questioning, penetrating glare that is hurting my feelings, scaring me some, and making me angry all at once. It causes me to look away, pretending to notice a bird or a ghost or a blazing meteor that simply must be observed this second.
“That’s what happens if I go for a walk with you? All that Shangri-la business will come of that one walk?”
“If everything goes the way it should,” I say, encouraged by the progress.
“Go home, Keir. For your own sake, please just take yourself home.”
“I don’t have a home. I’m an orphan.”
“That’s very sad, hon, and I’m sorry for you. You still need to go.”
“I was wondering, though, Joyce, if you had any more of that wine. Like before. Remember that? What a nice time. I didn’t even think I really liked wine. That was delicious, though. We laughed, too. You said you found me funny, which I loved. I’ve kept that in mind ever since, and I’m making more of an effort to be funny.”
“And it shows,” she says, closing, then latching, her door before the dust can settle on sarcasm or support or even if she’d left the conversation open.
My face becomes the only warm surface of my body. I stand for just about as long as it takes a refrigerated brain to consider that it might be time to turn back before any more humiliation can take hold.
I am backing away when the latch snaps back in the other direction and Joyce reappears.
“Sorry I took so long,” she says. She holds a bottle of red wine high in one hand, while her other hand brandishes a pair of black knit gloves. “I had to find these. Here’s the deal. You can have the bottle, but not until you put the gloves on first. They’re the cheapo one-dollar-one-size kind, but they’ll do you for now.”
I pull them on so quickly, half my fingers just about tear through the flimsy stitching at the ends. I raise my hands, wiggle the fingers as proof. Then I reach eagerly, both arms outstretched, for my reward, for the only thing I really want.
“The only thing I can give you is the wine,” she says sadly, looking disapprovingly at my grasping. I drop one arm to my side, keeping the other one out to accept the bottle. “And only if you promise you will take it and go straight back to your room with it. Have some wine with Fabian, or have it alone if you must, but sip, and unwind, and let go, and sleep. Promise me that.”
“I would promise you anything.”
“Yeah, see, that there is a problem. Bad thing, Keir, not good thing. Bad.”
“But I mean it. I would promise you anything, and I would not be lying.”
She doesn’t wait for what I might have expected, for the very specific promise about the wine and straight home. She jabs it into my gloved hand as if she doesn’t care at all what I do once she closes her door.
“I know,” she says. “I know you would mean it, and I know you wouldn’t say something to me if you didn’t believe it. But I don’t think it ever even crosses your mind that just because something’s not a lie doesn’t mean it’s not wrong.”
“I don’t understand. But thanks for the wine and gloves.”
“You’re welcome. I hope you have a nice, straight walk back, and a peaceful night.”
She closes the door and latches it.
• • •
“What is wrong with you, you idiot?”
He slaps my face just before and then again just after inquiring about what my flaws might be. I open my eyes to see Fabian’s face, upside down, over mine.
“I guess I don’t know,” I say, “so it’s gotta be quicker if you just tell me.”
He grabs me from under my arms and starts dragging me, until my feet get caught in the metal rails of the fence on the bridge over the duck pond.
“Hold on,” I say, wriggling out of his grip and the railing’s at once.
I stand up, look at him looking at me, then figure I’d better look at me. I have on my shoes, pants, and Fabian’s blue shirt from the meeting with the AD, and a pair of stretch gloves. But I’m fine until I look at him once more and see him all bundled up like it’s winter. He rips off his ski hat as if he’s angry at his own head, then jams it down on mine even more aggressively. He gives my arm a wicked yank, pulling me in the direction of our
dorm.
“You know it’s a miracle the campus cops didn’t find you. You’d really be in the shit then. Are you trying to kill yourself or something? Sleeping on the ground, in this cold, the damp cold, that’s just what will happen. You’ll catch something serious that you could die from. Oh, and you’d take your father with you, which is also very nice.”
“Don’t talk about my father,” I say.
“I will,” he says. “I will talk about him, talk to him, talk for him, and I’ll call him Ray, and I will not have you telling me to do anything otherwise. I called Ray when I knew you wouldn’t, ya big coward.”
“You called him?”
“I told you I would.”
“Yeah, but just because a person says something like that doesn’t mean they’re actually going to—”
“It does when this person says it.”
“God, Fabian, what did you tell him?”
“I told him the truth, of course.”
“Yes, but what is that?”
“That is that you lost your scholarship. That you suffered gross psychological failure, attacked another player, and got yourself banished from the world’s most psychotic organized activity for antisocial behavior. That there is no financing in place for you as of the last day of this semester. That you don’t have the remotest idea how to respond to this situation in any meaningful way. I told him that you were lost. I told him that you need your dad.”
I only realize how profoundly the numbness had taken over my body as the motion of walking replaces it with a bone-coldness that already feels permanent.
“Why did you do that?” I say, breaking into a jog as I see the residence halls come into view.
“Because it’s the truth,” he says, keeping up. “And I don’t know anywhere else to turn with you except Ray. And because even though you may very well not deserve his help, he deserves the chance to offer it.”
We hop it into the reception area of the halls and don’t stop running as we hit the stairs.
“You know what he’s gonna do now, don’t you? He’s probably gonna come racing all the way out here himself. To fix me and fix everything else and take care of me . . .”
“Yeah, and who the hell would want that?” he says, unlocking the door and letting us in.
“Not me,” I say. “Don’t you understand? I set him free from all this shit. I set him free from me.”
“He doesn’t want to be free.”
“Shut up, Fabian,” I snap. “I mean it. Stop talking like you know him, because you don’t.”
“Well, I know him a lot better than I did four hours—and six phone calls—ago. And I definitely know what lonely sounds like.”
He frustrates me to the point of madness, but right now the cold is doing the same.
“Seriously, Fabian,” I say. “I don’t know whether to punch you in the head or take a hot shower.”
“Do what you want. I don’t care if you punch me or not, but my advice is you need the shower a lot more.” I’m already headed that way when he adds, “And try to somehow wash the booze out of your voice before you talk to him.”
• • •
The water is coming up off my skin in thick, foggy steam. If I could get it to a temperature that would melt me and take me down the drain for good, that would seem to be a pleasurable exit to me. But that is neither reality nor right, as I hear my phone ring, and I hear it answered and I feel the good man’s presence closer than at any time since I left him alone in that lovely warm confusion that was our home.
When I step out of the shower, I have just about stopped shivering. I dress in underwear, then sweats, then my bathrobe. Fabian is lying on his bed when I walk over to deliver one ski hat, one thank you, and one apology.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “I already forgot the whole thing. Until you brought the hat over. Then that called it all back again. Ray’ll be phoning any minute. When he realized he had finally gotten through to the same room where the young prince was dwelling at that very moment, he was kind of overcome, so I wouldn’t expect him to hold off much longer. And hey, at least you know he isn’t already on his way here.”
I don’t have any chance to speak before my phone lets out that jingling awfulness that Fabian somehow trained it to do. I become instantly as nervous as the first day of first grade, which he walked me to. He was every bit as scared of that big step up as I was. I knew this to be true because he said as much, right there stepping with me through those big school gates.
He could not help himself, big dopey bear that he was. He couldn’t bottle up his worries for me even if his worries only served to make me worry that I hadn’t been worrying enough up till then. What kind of horrors did he already know were waiting for me inside once he had to surrender me to them?
I didn’t quite get it right away, but that was my first experience with the possibility that people could do dumb and messed-up things to you just because of loving you beyond their brain’s capacity to deal with it.
It was not a help to me on that day. It was an incalculable help to me on the thousand different days I recalled it.
“Hiya, Dad,” I say, trying to be measured, to be a man.
“Hiya, Son,” he says, not trying to be anything, just being it. “You sound a little drunk,” he says with great pained weariness.
“Nah,” I say. “But you definitely do.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I suppose so.”
At the best of times, at the very highly functioning, maximum simpatico peak times in our relationship, Ray and I had a phone manner that sucked beyond belief. There was just such a gulf between what we somehow managed to convey when we shared the same space, and the knotty embarrassment of when our verbal skills alone had to carry the day.
And that was at our peak of understanding. This right here feels like somebody is gradually shutting off the valve that supplies oxygen to us.
“It felt, to me, like you had died, Keir.”
And so now it’s to be my turn. He’s earned it, though. He’s earned it and then some.
“I am as sorry as I have ever been, Ray. I should have contacted you. I should have at least tried to explain some things before this. But now, I can explain.”
“No,” he says, and follows it with a big sweep of a sigh. “You can’t. I think I figured so much of it out myself by now, and I’d be afraid if you tried it would get all worse, and I cannot possibly have worse.” He does that sigh again, something I never heard before, like the air is being forced out of him by some pressure hose stuck in his back.
“Stop sighing like that,” I insist the way I have no business insisting.
“I’m not sighing, I’m breathing. Anyway, I’m not going to keep you long. I just originally wanted to hear your voice, that was all. Just to hear you and know, in your voice, that you’re doing well.”
I hold back. Just because there is a pause in the conversation does not mean it’s my turn to speak.
“And I’m not hearing it, Keir.”
“Oh, that’s just because you’ve been talking to my roommate, Grandma here. He’s the anxious type, blows everything all out of proportion.”
Fabian points a finger at me, indicating a threat of some sort, though I cannot possibly imagine what it could be. I raise a less ambiguous fist in response.
“Yeah, well, that grandma of yours is a wonderful kid, and I hope you know that. He’s a top guy, a true friend to you, and a great piece of luck to get for a roommate. If you’re too stupid to appreciate all that, then maybe you should just thank him for the fact that he’s the only reason I’m not in my car and driving out there to see for myself what kind of state you’re in.”
I don’t even save it for after the phone call.
“Fabian, thank you. I’m serious and I really mean it. Thank you.”
He smiles broadly and continues to pretend he’s doing something on his laptop other than monitoring this conversation.
“How did that sound?” I ask R
ay.
“It’s helped me a little, knowing you two had each other to lean on.”
“It’s helped me, too, to know you two had each other to lean on.”
He possibly chuckles, probably sighs, and I struggle to ignore this one but just about manage it. “You shouldn’t drink, Keir.”
“Dad, jeez. I’m fine.”
“I thought you didn’t want to drink anymore, now that you were starting all fresh at college and everything.”
“Well, I think I recall you saying something very similar.”
“No, you don’t. Because I never said anything like that. In fact, it was my intention all along to increase my drinking right around that same time. Guess that makes me the only one who can make a pledge and keep to it.”
I knew this. I knew somewhere in me, the place where all the sound sensibility hides from the light, that this was only ever going to hurt. Maybe family can be too tight. Maybe a father can be too great. Maybe there’s an equation out there that determines that the power bond you enjoy when you live right inside each other has to be paid for with the agony of the bloody slicing away when it’s time.
When we were, all four of us, the intensely great thing we were, it was still going to be tough when my time came to leave. But then when Mary left, then Fran left, and Ray and I had each other, it was bound to fuse into something indestructible.
And then when the girls didn’t come back for the regular visits as promised, and when they just had to start picking and pulling at the thing we all shared, they started reversing something that should have been irreversible. That only went and made my becoming melded to Ray, and him to me, that much more absolute.
Which made the severing of us, back into separate beings for good, a long and brutal operation. And unlike when the girls left him, I left him alone.
Guilt floods me now, circulating burning and thick throughout my body as if I’ve been tapped into and injected with hot mercury.
“Can I come home, Dad?” I say in a panting, desperate whisper. The whisper itself is just absurd, since the only two people with any interest can obviously hear me anyway, and every last other inhabitant of planet Earth couldn’t give a shit what I say, whether I go home or go to hell.