Last Last Chance

by Fiona Maazel

  Her collarbone jutted into my thigh. It’s true, right, that touch is always a crossroads? I tried to put my arms around her and make us a family, but it was more like trying to cradle music stands. Totally awkward. And she had gotten very thin.

  I asked if she had more. She nodded at a book on the table, Why England Slept. I thought she was trying to tell me something, so I flipped it open. Title page intact—who knew JFK wrote about WWII?—but the rest was gutted. In the well was about a nose of coke. I rejoiced. Then stopped. Mother was never generous with her stash. Normally she kept it in a cabinet above the sink, way up high behind the pitchers. This way, she’d have to mount a chair and remove the pitchers to get at it. The work of retrieval was supposed to be a deterrent, though I saw her on that chair a lot.

  These days, I’m not so into cocaine or heroin, because they make me feel alive, and who wants that. Sometimes, if that’s all I got, I might even pass, which tonight I did, seeing in the main no reason to alloy the metals of my heart, not with cocaine or anxiety resulting from Isifrid on cocaine. The latter, however, I could not control.

  I asked what was wrong, besides the obvious.

  “Aggie’s sick,” she said.

  “Is not. I just saw her. She’s fine.”

  “Then Hannah’s sick.”

  I shook my head.

  “Are you sick?”

  I said no.

  “Then it’s me. Someone in this house is sick, I can feel it.”

  I nodded. I’d already seen her cough up black sludge that cleaved to the sink. She wheezed. Had chronic sore throat. Fever, sweats, nausea. But that was just because of drug abuse. Not a real illness, just drugs.

  “Do you think maybe you oughta slow it down for tonight?” I tried to put this gently.

  “I’m sorry?” she said, like she had not understood me. “Are you back from rehab? Is that rehab speak I hear?”

  Our dynamic was so convoluted, I didn’t have a name for it. But this emotion of hers, it was not scorn. After all, she intended to pay for rehab down South. She even wanted me to go. And I hardly had much choice. Wanda was not going to keep me on indefinitely and hell if I could hold down a job or find a place to live on my own. I was, on a daily basis, entirely too sleepy for such ventures.

  “How about you switch to something lighter?” I offered.

  But I’d gone too far. She snatched the book from my hand. Looked both ways and fled the room in a crouch.

  The voice-over on TV was saying that the redoubtable heathens assailed the Baltic Coast and founded the Russian state. That as pirates, rogues, and butchers, the Northmen appalled all Western Christendom. That they ruled the seas and annexed territory, only to lose everything in the Middle Ages. They lacked colonial sense. They didn’t have a program. Without a program, the Ostmen in Ireland disappeared, the Scottish isles reverted to Scotland, the Danelaw in England collapsed, the settlers in Iceland and Greenland died of famine, and the Swedish people of the Kievan state in Russia were folded into Slav culture. The voice-over guy, who also does movie trailers, was narrating with gravitas because herein this arc was a cautionary tale.

  TV off, pillows thrown. There was even a pillow moat growing around the TV from how many we kept throwing at it. I called Kam. Her husband answered, none too pleased. His voice made a hatchery of my gut, like little birds pecking away.

  “It’s for you,” he said, and passed the phone to Kam. I’d called before. Mostly at night.

  “It’s four in the morning,” Kam said. She must have had her lips right up against the phone because I could hear her breathe. Her breath stood in for the silence I was supposed to break. I covered the mouthpiece with my palm. I was not going to talk. In no universe was I going to talk.

  “Oh, come on, Lucy. You’ve got to stop this. If you’re going to call, at least you need to talk.”

  Her husband was telling her to hang up. Just hang up, already. But Kam, she wouldn’t do that. My antics had always given her the chance to put up with them. I let her forbear, and how many people could say that of their friends?

  “Okay, what is it that you need to hear? That I forgive you for missing the wedding? Sure. Forgiven. There were four hundred people there, you weren’t that missed. Okay? Can you say something now?”

  No. No I could not. The night our friend got stabbed after we left that party? It was Kam’s boyfriend at the time. Thing is, the knifer had been after me because I owed 12K to my dealer and who cared if I was a girl, it was time to pay up. I never told Kam, but she knew. A week later, she wrote me a check, saying her mom would never notice. Only her mom did notice and Kam had to spend every weekend after that helping her pitch celebrity wear on the Home Shopping Network. Mrs. Yalamanchilli had PIs on retainer who’d photograph the outfits the stars were wearing. She’d buy a thousand of same and address herself to the vulnerable women of America. As the logic went, you couldn’t be unattractive while wearing the vintage fichu Kate Hudson wore at Cannes.

  I’d been silent on the phone for ten minutes. A fight was brewing between Kam and the husband. He had to get up for work in three hours. This thing with me was getting out of hand. “Fine,” Kam said, and then, into the phone, “Get some help, Lucy. I mean it. So you’ve tried before, try again.”

  I heard the husband say so long as I wasn’t in trouble, Kam should hang up. And Kam say, “Eric, be nice.”

  Then the line went dead.

  I put the phone to my temple like a gun.

  As if on cue, Stanley came trotting in with dropper in one hand, plastic strip in the other. He was waving it like a foam finger. “Above twenty million,” he said. “Way above.” He was almost dancing.

  So Stanley has live sperm. No small feat when you consider the stats. Just a few decades ago, guys had counts like 150 million per milliliter. Now they average 50 million. Then there’s the alphabet thing, which has A sperm swimming forward, fast and in a straight line; B sperm, which zigzag and meander; C sperm, which move their tails but get nowhere; and D sperm, which are dumbstruck. Some sperm like to fertilize in groups, which is like trying to thread a needle with the spool. Some of them look like hammerheads and some have no heads at all. I think laptop technology is to blame but Stanley says it’s PCBs. And heavy metal.

  “So what now?” I said. “And why are you awake?”

  He threw himself on the couch and flung his legs over the arm. The couches in the yellow room were upholstered with tapestry of squires in the grass, sipping tea. If you sat on them too long, you’d get sore.

  “I have them tested for speed and movement,” he said.

  “You can do that at home?”

  “No, I need a lab.”

  “Sounds expensive.”

  “Very. But I was thinking—”

  “Me, too.”

  “About what?”

  “I’m still hurting. Pretty bad, in fact.”

  “Say more.”

  And I did.

  Eric and I met on a train platform in Speonk. We were both waiting for the 6:15, which never arrived. He had eyes like wet gravel. He wore a black ring on his index. He was also barefoot. Later, he said what made him like me was that I didn’t ask about his feet. As if it never even crossed my mind. And I suppose it hadn’t. He said he’d been out taking photos of a homeless guy named Shoes who collected footwear in a shopping cart. Eric said he’d given his flip-flops away as payment. So this guy with the pristine feet, he also took photos. And he was generous.

  Later I told him I knew it was love when he didn’t ask about my hospital gown or giant slippers. He said he’d thought it was cute. I said, Hospital breakout. He said, Well, yeah.

  When we met, he had a fiancée in Berlin. Kam would tell me it was a bad scene. I’d agree and as soon as she’d leave my house, I’d call him. We’d joke about depression. We’d say: How long is this premature-death joke gonna last us? Eh, just a couple hours more.

  But after a few months, it was pretty much like this: I am unreachably in love. I have no
emotional life outside the one I live for him.

  Me and Eric, we shared. Or I shared. I told him about Isifrid, who used to sell hats on the streets of a little town in Norway to feed her six younger sisters. How she fought for everything she has, in stark contrast to her daughter, who is lazy and useless. How in the mornings before school, I used to sit outside her door with a bowl of cereal and wait for her to get up.

  Nights, I said, were like this: I sit in the bathroom and sob, but am afraid to wake her because a multimillion-dollar hat company needs a CEO who’s well rested.

  Growing up, I said, was a minor improvement: At school, I study only if the other kids are doing it. Mostly I pay them to write my essays. I work at the Gap and have my first real kiss with a boy named Al. We are in a stall in the dressing room. The store is closed, we’re cleaning up. Security tags arrayed on the floor are evidence of theft, which loss will come out of my paycheck since where was I? Wasn’t I looking? I bend down to fetch the tags. I am wearing a skirt and Wal-Mart briefs, which color is sky, which appeal is grandma. Al is seventeen, I am fifteen. This makes him unassailable, so that when he divests me of the grandma blues, I do not resist. He uses his fingers to probe for the hiatus in my skin. I think: Ow, and: I have no hiatus! After, he kisses me bye.

  I start smoking cigarettes with brown filters because the white ones are for girls who think they’ve got a shot at being pretty.

  I have friends whose only sustenance for days is cum.

  I kiss girls in front of other girls. Two men fall for me, maybe three. I am comically and wrenchingly obsessed with a guy I work with. If he likes pig brawn steeped in wine, I like it, too. He belittles hair gel, wears socks with sandals, but I do not care. I follow him around all summer until I know his schedule well enough to arrange a meeting I can parlay into an extemporaneous date. Outside Leeanne’s Bakery it goes like this—Girl in whose mind love is an option: Hey, what a coincidence! You like Leeanne’s, too? Don’t they just have the best pie? Lemme buy you some pie! Guy in whose forging from the goop of nature her life began: Actually, I just come here to read and catch up on my alone time, you know?

  I am crushed, I recover. I become a pothead. I don’t date anyone. I am frequently sad, though I do not know why. Diary entries are maudlin.

  I drop acid. My parents send me to another boarding school in the country. I have an affair with the cook. We fuck on a drainboard. He teaches me how to make crème brûlée, I torch the sugar scrim and then, by accident, I torch him. Somewhere in Connecticut is a man whose eyebrows never grew back.

  I learn nothing all year, and I am afraid of the cafeteria food. I am sad, very sad.

  A doctor tells me I lack for potassium and electrolytes. Another tells me that’s not it at all. I think of what I can do to make hurt go away. Options usually include doing violence to myself, the way people in the Middle Ages thought that plague was caused by BAD AIR and that the only antidote to BAD AIR was MORE BAD AIR, which is why back then you might have seen hundreds of people sniffing shit on a sewer bank. Guess it didn’t work for them, either.

  I get myself up to six lines an hour. I sit in restaurant patios and tap ash into my own purse by mistake.

  I finally make the switch from coke to heroin, though the love does not last. I blow through every vein I can find.

  I date a man who wants to marry me. He says: I love your voice, your touch, your tenderness and grace, your snatches of melody, your fingers interlaced with mine. This kindness is withering. We break up. Later, I am told that I killed off the good part of him.

  I meet Dirty Ben. His bisexuality is a turn-on. His diseased genitals are not.

  I do horse tranquilizer. I fall apart. I am sleepy. I am longing. I am depressed. I get MORE depressed. I meet Eric. I fall in love. And love is good. Only it’s not enough. Not even close, which is what finally does me in. We go to a concert in the park. The music kindles a familiar sensation of loneliness and hurt and need that nearly drives me crazy. I can’t take it. I am in pain. I look back and see nothing but THIS. I look ahead and see more. I am besieged by self-disgust. I am blanched and without hope. I cry in his lap. I plead with him to help me. Please help me. Take care of me. Please.

  “And that was Eric,” I say.

  Stanley’s mouth is half open. “Jesus Lord Almighty. You are one depressing woman.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “So he got married?”

  I nod. “But not to the fiancée. He left her.”

  “Huh?”

  “He met someone else.”

  “I’m confused.”

  I shrug and say my love for him is dismantling. That making him laugh, which I did often, gave me the most joy I’d ever had. And yes, that he got married. To my oldest friend, Kam.

  Four

  Stanley is answering a questionnaire about his ejaculate history for the andrology lab at Cornell. He’s looking to me for help. Is it clear and watery? Does it coagulate? He reads from the brochure: ejaculatory duct obstruction; prostatic dysfunction; severe ipsilateral abnormality. I stop him at the hidden testis. “What the hell is that?”

  “No idea. But it sounds bad, right?”

  Hannah says he should just take matters into his own hands. That an Integrated Visual Optical System for sperm analysis can be bought online. Windows-based. Plus, she adds, it comes with swine software.

  Isifrid says fertility is no joke. That she had a hell of a time conceiving me. I suggest maybe her drug use was to blame. She says, Probably.

  Hannah wants to bring me to Identity Camp. The summer’s over, but Good-Time Living does a family thing one weekend every fall. She says it’s like a workshop, and that she doesn’t have a whole lotta options. The sleeves on Aggie’s kimono taper at the wrist. A yarn kimono with cuffs and gussets. No way she’s getting in with the Japanese next life, and no way is she bonding with the parents at Good-Time Living. As for Mother, she’s just not up for Christian Identity Camp. So I tell Hannah okay, but ask if I can bring Stanley.

  “Only if you say he’s our uncle.”

  “Thanks,” Stanley says. “I’m working through my virility over here and you’re not helping.”

  “She’s twelve,” I say, like that’s some kind of defense.

  “I know what ejaculate is,” she says. “More than you, anyway.”

  I hear the elevator open in the vestibule, which means it’s mail time. I used to love mail time during years in which I was oversubscribed to print media whose niche content gave me hope. Like: I know, I’ll fix cars when I grow up; I want to collect, hone, and brandish arcane weaponry; I want to blow glass. Finally, though, all I wanted was to do drugs, and since magazine paper does not smoke well, me and print media broke up.

  Today’s delivery includes a letter with a clipping about my dad, circled in red wax marker. We are always getting hate mail, now more than ever. I guess people hate us. Even though the Feds and press absolved Dad retroactively—no one thought a man likely to pinch vials would also commit suicide—people hate us.

  Hannah grabs the letter. She’s been making a scrapbook. I do not find this funny in the least, though she seems to think it’s a hoot.

  “Oh, look,” she says. “This guy writes that we’re all going to hell. That he can’t wait to see us in hell.”

  Izzy wants to know if he’s writing from jail. The answer is yes, yes he is.

  “You know,” Hannah says, “those guys in jail will be better off than us if superplague comes. Fuck.”

  “Can you not call it that?” I say.

  “Language!” Mother yells.

  But Hannah is not having it. “Hello? Is anyone noticing that everywhere you turn, someone says he’ll see us in hell? That there’s nothing out there but a million ways to die?”

  As if we don’t know. As if she ever talks about anything else. She is obsessed. And now she has to itemize the possibilities. If not the plague, then how about this: Three guys show up at Dodger Stadium with inhalers full of smallpox. One guy c
ontracts untreatable staph in an ICU and spreads it to everyone in his ward, followed by everyone in the world. Mad cow, SARS, Lyme. Terminal strep and Ebola. E. coli. Definitive type 104 salmonella. Each has the potential to kill millions, and the CDC is not prepared. Consider smallpox. If you inhale just a single particle, you’re dead. Fever, headache, rash. Ulcers clustered in the lining of your throat and mouth. Abscesses congregated on your skin, parsing skin from muscle. On the inside, a meltdown. The virus invades healthy cells to reproduce. The immune system fights back. The result is organ soup. Patients often die fighting for breath. Heart failure or toxic shock. Lucid till the end and, in the case of hemorrhagic pox, alive while the whites of their eyeballs turn livid and the membranes in their bodies dissolve. All within two weeks.

  Hannah is flushed. I worry she’s more excited than anxious. But probably not. Probably anxiety has so clotted her brain, the blood has to go somewhere. I am feeling a little pink, myself.

  “Remember Dad’s simulation project?” she says. “It’s all coming true.” And with that, she flees to her room. I can hear the lock click from here.

  “Poor girl,” Aggie says. “So tortured.”

  I suggest that maybe Hannah was a Vietnam vet. That in a former life, she was a miserable war veteran whose family abjured the government not two weeks after the draft, whose friends were hippies, and whose wheelchair was found in San Francisco Bay, but whose body was not found at all. Aggie shakes her head and says, gravely, “That would be better. She’d suffer less.”

  I ask what does that mean. I ask who was Hannah. But Aggie’s done talking. She says it’s time to retire and when none of us moves, she seems appalled. It’s seven in the evening.

  Stanley wonders how we can understand anything through that surgical mask. I say it’s an acquired skill, though even without the mask she’s hard to follow. Imagine a Norwegian with sticky lips and no teeth, then imagine this person speaking a foreign tongue, and you’ve got Nana.