Cage's Bend

by Carter Coleman

  Think about it: You’ve felt so bad for so long, even when you were stable, haunted by the humiliating memories of your manic behavior, all the destruction, and then you finally start to feel good. You wake up singing in the morning. You’re hopeful again for the first time in years. Life spreads out before you like a land of dreams. What you should do is run to your shrink and say, Emergency, Doc. I’m feeling too good. Better give me something to take me down before I spin out of control.

  But you don’t. You tell yourself that the lithium is working. You’re productive. You’re happy. You’re fun to be around. What could possibly be wrong? The little fire smoldering in one part of your brain catches flame. There is not enough lithium to put it out. It inflames one hemisphere of your mind, then jumps across the ditch to the other side. In a couple of months your skull is an inferno. All restraint, your very conscience, goes up in smoke.

  Cage broke up with Samantha, said good-bye to little Ray, moved into an apartment in midtown, where he entertained different women—older divorcées, young waitresses, college girls—every night. He was working with his carpenter buddies and dabbling in real estate. He talked our stepuncle Jack into signing a contract that gave him six months to renovate and sell the split-level twenties “airplane bungalow” where Granddad Rutledge’s second wife had lived. Granddad had spent most of his time at the lumber mill in Arkansas away from his second wife, though he came back to die in that house when I was a kid. Jack had just moved his sister, Granddad’s childless wife, who was still beautiful in her eighties, into a nursing home, and agreed to sell the house to Cage for a song. Cage could’ve doubled his money, could’ve pocketed forty grand or more if he pulled it off.

  By the time I came up from Tulane for the summer, Mom and Dad were stressed to the breaking point. Families are powerless now. It’s impossible to put someone away anymore unless you can prove that he is a danger to himself or to other people. Cage was clearly gone, replaced by a fast-talking con man who was bouncing checks all over town, getting in fights in bars, exploding at Mom and Dad whenever they tried to talk sense to him, up all night, jumping up onstage with his guitar. He had stopped making payments on the Jeep, so Dad was covering them. At the house on Carr he had torn out walls and ceilings but hadn’t begun the renovation. There were only a few weeks left on the contract. I tried to help him get the house presentable enough to sell, Sheetrock the walls and the raised cathedral ceilings, get it painted. Cage would work for a couple of hours, say that he was going to the lumber store, and never come back. Turned out that he was tripping on acid while I was slaving away for free, trying to help him salvage the house.

  When the contract was up, we had a conference with Jack, Dad, me, Cage, and some investor who had put up some money for renovations. Jack took the house back. I remember after Cage dashed off somewhere, Jack told Dad, You know I lost Jack Junior when he was eighteen but I think that was easy next to what you’re going through. Jack Junior, Dad told me later, was hit by a bolt of lightning on a baseball field. I remember taking the Jeep away from Cage, punching him out in the street in front of the Carr house after he hit me, but I can’t remember how that manic spree ended. Not in jail, not that time. I remember Mom and me cleaning up his apartment, which was like a hurricane disaster area, Mom saying, A psychologist told me that the state of his room reflects the state of his mind. If that’s true, his mind was like a dump. Sometime after he came down, he ended up in Parthenon Pavilion, terrified again, scared of the Order, watched by the television, the remorse over his manic sins amplified a million times.

  When he got out, he went to Rugby, where Great-Grandmother Cage had given my parents an 1880s Victorian cottage for their wedding. Dad used to drive Cage and Nick up there on weekends from Knoxville in the sixties, while he was renovating it. It had an outhouse, bedpans in the bedroom. It’s called the Owl Nest. All the houses in Rugby have names. Originally it was a utopian experiment for the younger sons of English aristocrats, educated but disinherited by primogeniture, somewhere they could be carpenters or farmers without shame, but they were playboy pioneers long on tennis courts and short on elbow grease, so the colony failed. Cage went to live in the Owl Nest and work for Historic Rugby, the restoration association. He was stable for a year or so, had nice girls coming to visit him from Nashville and Baton Rouge, spent a lot of time riding mountain bikes through the woods and canoeing the white-water rivers. He relaunched the Rugbian, the utopia’s newspaper.

  I graduated from Tulane while he was at Rugby, started writing code for banks. I just picked it up. In Memphis I was broke after college, so I ordered the parts to a computer through a friend who worked for a systems contractor. He was going to show me how to build it and I would save a few hundred bucks. The parts arrived and he was out of town, so I built it by myself. He said I should go talk to his boss. I went into the guy’s office and within five minutes he said, I like the cut of your jib. You’ve got people skills. Most of my programmers are total nerds. Yeah, I want someone who looks like you. I’ll tell you what. I’ve got a system down in Milwaukee. If you can get it up, I’ll give you a job. He called out to his secretary: You know that ticket to Milwaukee? Change it to, uh—he looked at me—what’d you say your name is? I worked for him for about a year, designed programs for FedEx, then found a headhunter and got a job with a bank in Philadelphia.

  Two years later I moved to New York. The most fun I’ve had was six months in Moscow on a team upgrading the Russian stock exchange. I make three times as much as my father, and bishops make over a hundred grand. I want to cash out one day with ten million. I like my toys, my Harley, my Jet Ski that stays out at the place I rent in the Hamptons, my Lexus, my one-bedroom on University Place in Manhattan. Call me shallow but it’s fun to gratify your whims. And I tithe like my daddy does, just not to the church. I give ten percent of my pretax gross to Conservation International, Amnesty International, and Planned Parenthood. After a deprived childhood relative to my peers in the Episcopal schools I attended since kindergarten, I’m still getting used to what it feels like to be rich instead of a poor man in a rich man’s house.

  Cage ended up in jail in a little town twenty miles from Rugby. The last few biweekly issues of the Rugbian were progressively weirder—a strange tribute to Nick, rants against people he had pissed off at Historic Rugby, enemies he had made among the moonshiners and pot growers, American foreign policy, multi- national corporations. Once again he’d left a trail of bounced checks.

  When the deputy sheriffs came, he punched one in the face and disappeared into the woods. A couple of hours later a half dozen deputies and their hunting buddies were on his trail with a pack of hound dogs. Cage was Butch Cassidy. He was having a fine old time. He swam down streams and backtracked and climbed sheer rock faces. The posse broke into three groups and chased him for two days, came very close but never ran him down.

  They got him when he came back to the Owl Nest for his passport. He was hightailing it with the idea of planting trees on the eroded island of Haiti but he ended up in the Fentress County jail. Mom and Dad went up to see him. So are you going to bail me out? Cage asked, smacking on gum. No, son. You’re manic right now and you would just get in more trouble. You’ve got to get back on your medicine. Cage spit out the gum. You’re no father! You son of a bitch. You don’t care about me. You motherfather! Mom and Dad dutifully paid his debts, cleaned up the Owl Nest, and took him back in their home after he spent a month in the county jail and another one in a county hospital chilling out.

  And a couple of months later he was back in Nashville in the Parthenon Pavilion riding out the tortured psychotic hangover, which comes like clockwork after the long manic highs. Back in Memphis he got it back together, built a huge house out in the country with his carpenter-artist pals, moved into another little apartment in midtown, started dating a nice, sexy girl ten years younger than him. Then, ten or twelve months later, it all started again. Dad saw it coming and took the Jeep away again, since it’s in
his name. A few weeks ago Cage took off for California, hitching with his guitar, the return of the High Plains Drifter. I might have left out a complete bipolar cycle, possibly two. It’s hard to keep track. The cycles from mania to depression and back seem to accelerate over time, come with more frequency with a briefer gap of stability in between.

  The locusts shriek in the dark. If you can’t tune it out, it’s maddening. I take a long swallow of iced tea and get my ThinkPad out of its case, set in on my lap, wake it up, click on a file. The other day Cage called me at my office. I recorded the conversation on my laptop and translated it into text:

  Black guys jumped me, took my money and tried to take my guitar, and hit me with a broomstick. Come on, Harper. You’ve got plenty of money. Help out your old brother when he’s down on his luck. I’ve found this hostel. Tomorrow I can sell my guitar and get my plane fare and hit the road, go back to Memphis. First thing I’ll do is see Dr. Fielding. Just wire me some money.

  I’ll get you a hostel for one night with a credit card and then you should go check yourself into a hospital. Dad pays your medical insurance.

  Hostels don’t take credit cards. I checked about thirty places. My face is bleeding so I guess I’m going to go to an emergency room and spend the night there.

  All right, Cage. I’m sorry. Tell them to dose you up on lithium.

  It just makes me so angry.

  Well, you shouldn’t have gone out there. You’re manic. The whole family thinks you should go into a hospital.

  A little mania never hurt anything. We’ve got a problem. We’ll fix it. Hear this (rattle of pills)? I’ve got my lithium. I’ve got my cotton sweater. I’ve got my suit, fuck the family. Who are you to talk? You’re a sex addict.

  I think we’re both promiscuous. So was Nick. I’m not sure if I’m a sex addict but if I am, there are a lot worse things today.

  I’ve got no money. I was mugged. I’ve got nothing to eat.

  Go to a homeless shelter. Go to a soup kitchen. Check yourself into a hospital.

  Fuck you . . . fuck you . . . fuck you . . . suck my dick.

  I’m sorry, Cage. You should go to a hospital.

  I shouldn’t. Harper, you are a cunt-sucking pussy.

  You chose to hitch across the country.

  It was an instructional ride.

  He hung up. In a few days he turns thirty-nine. Maybe I should fly out to San Francisco for his birthday on another pointless rescue mission. Over the years I’ve been to two family weeks at the end of two drug rehab programs, visited him in two jails and several hospitals, given him money when he was stable or depressed. Each time he emerges from black suicidal months and starts pulling himself up by his bootstraps, I believe that he is going to finally Keep It Together. Maybe now is the time to really practice Tough Love. Stop Enabling him. Let him Bottom Out.

  “Isn’t it a lovely evening?” Nanny interrupts my thoughts, coming out on the porch.

  “Except for the cicadas.” I stand up automatically.

  “The infernal racket. But the birds are happy. Feasting every day.” Nanny moves slowly toward a rocking chair. She’s ninety now, outlived her husband by twenty-five years. She has a leaky heart and two strangers’ corneas and she still lives alone. “Everything is so green. We had so much rain this spring. There was flooding across the county but we’re up on a hill. We’re always okay.”

  “I forget how green the South is.” I take her arm.

  She shakes it off gently and continues across the porch. “I hope your cousins understood that I really wanted to go to Edmund’s funeral. He was a gentle man.”

  “Of course, Nanny.” She is the soul of Christian charity, always kind, always optimistic. Only once as a kid did I glimpse Granddad on a binge, slugging down bourbon until he became a raving beast. She hung in there for forty-five years. I try to picture a young Poppy belting a young Nanny with the back of his hand but I can’t clearly. I wonder if one day someone will invent a device to watch people’s memories like video. Record their dreams. I’d like to write software for that.

  Nanny’s voice is high and soft. I have to listen hard to hear her over the cacophony of insects. She was always a good storyteller. Nick used to follow her around asking for stories. “Tell me a story, Nanny.”

  “I don’t have any news. I called some people from church today who don’t have anyone to look in on them.” Slowly she brushes a locust from her sleeve. “I talked to Grace Adel for two hours. She enjoys my calls. I could call her more often. She has nothing left to talk about but old Thebes. She’s ninety-five. Everyone we talked about today is dead. I’m not scared of dying. There’s a lot of things worse than dying. I don’t want to be a burden.”

  I plug a mic into my laptop, aim it at her, watch her words appear on the screen.

  “After your mother was born, just above us in the room with the dormer windows, I began to run a very, very high temperature. They took me to St. Thomas hospital in Nashville and there were no antibiotics, no sulfa drugs, nothing. They could give you blood transfusions but at that point they hooked you to somebody else and they didn’t type the blood. They didn’t know what they were giving you. I would go into convulsions after the transfusions. I was very ill for a very long time, was down to about eighty pounds. My mother could even pick me up and she was a little sparrow of a woman.”

  “I remember her.”

  “Of course you do. When I left here, there was snow on the ground. When I came back, the leaves were on the trees, the flowers were blooming. During that time, Mary Frances Washington, who was a tall wonderful black woman who lived here on the place, came and stayed here in the house and took care of Margaret.” Nanny stopped gliding and sank in thought for a minute. “During the six months I was in the hospital . . . I never told anybody this until after I had heard that other people had similar experiences, because I didn’t think that anyone would believe me. They were all standing—there were three doctors on the case, they were all friends of mine and contemporaries of my grandfather and they were wonderful doctors. They were doing everything they could for me. The day I remember is the day they gave up. There was nothing else they could do for me. They were standing around the bed with my mother and Morgan and they were looking at me and I was hovering over them looking at them with the most wonderful feeling of peace and I thought I’ll just go on now. Then I decided no, I can’t leave that baby behind. She needs a mother. I’ve got to go back. I didn’t want to. I felt so good. It was so wonderful, it was just . . . a feeling of having everything just right.” Nanny laughs. “I can still feel myself over that bed, looking down at myself. They thought I was gone. I didn’t hear what they were saying. They were just very somber. I was looking down on this woman who was me. I remember it so plainly.”

  “So you believe in life after death?”

  “Oh, yes, I know there is something wonderful waiting for us.”

  I hit the keys to save the document.

  Cage

  I came out here to return to the scene of the crime twelve years ago. Something keeps me from going the last little way, across the Oakland Bay Bridge and up into the Berkeley Hills to stand outside his old house where I spent spring break in ’87 and fucked his girlfriend—the two-backed beast that killed Nick. He wouldn’t have been out driving all night if I hadn’t told him. And I can’t get myself across the Golden Gate either. Nick died just about in the middle, on the side heading back to the city. Every day I have stood in Golden Gate Park and studied the bridge, the parapets and superstructure. I wonder when I get my nerve up to catch a bus across the bridge if I will feel Nick’s ghost when I pass over the spot. I’m not sure he really visited me in the place I never name. I doubt that he has forgiven me.

  After four days back in San Francisco I know the city from the Golden Gate to Lake Merced, from the Pacific Ocean Esplanade to China Basin on the Bay, the whole seven-square-mile nail of the thumb-shaped peninsula on which the city perches uneasily, straddling the tectonic fault.
I’ve crisscrossed the city on foot, bus, and trolley. I know where to busk. I know where to cadge free meals. I know where to buy pot. I know where to sell pot for street dealers. I know where to score heroin. I know two dozen people to hang out with.

  The Great American Manic-Depressive Novel—how’s that for the title of a third-person memoir? I’m out here exploring the San Francisco underworld on an anthropological expedition, gathering anecdotal info about survival on a freaky, urban scale. I’ve got chapters from Mexico eleven years ago and childhood sketches I wrote to remember Nick and make sense of the past when I was incarcerated and when I was inspired on the road. On the Greyhounds between Memphis and Denver, I just wrote one about Harper in junior high. I always keep a spiral notebook handy, got twenty-three full ones in Memphis. I’ve got an eye for detail, an ear for dialogue, and plenty of empathy. All my travels, the loony bin sojourns, all the stories from the damaged and the damned have given me a well of empathy as deep as any saint’s. And I’ve got a substance abuse problem, another hallmark of a great writer.

  The sun breaks through the rolling fog, illuminates a row of pastel Victorian frame houses on Haight Street. San Francisco is the most beautiful city in America and the city with the highest suicide rate. The jumpers from the Golden Gate all leap from the Bay side, looking back at the city, never out into the emptiness of the ocean. I stop on the corner of Haight and Ashbury and climb up on a streetlamp, one leg on the base, one arm holding the pole. Swinging above the passing heads, I yell, “Out of some subway scuttle, cell, or loft, a bedlamite scales thy parapets.”