Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  …know what they’re gonna’ say. ‘Cause they’ve said it before and, believe me, these people are nothing if not predictable. What I’m gonna hear all day long for the next week is ‘Mike O’Donnell is a cold-hearted, unsympathetic, uncaring individual.’ Okay? Dat’s what I’m gonna hear all day long from the New York Times and, God help us all, the mainstream liberal media, okay? They’ll all say it because they’re all out to get me. But you know what? I don’t care. I just don’t.

  Hollis suddenly felt the gnaw of hunger and rolled forward off the front of the sofa far enough so that he could stand. He clicked the volume up a notch and padded off to the kitchen for a snack. In less than a minute he was back, collapsing back down into the sofa, literally an uncontrolled fall this time, using two fingers to fish an Oreo cookie out of the bag. He crunched slowly, enjoying the sensory experience of snapping and then crushing the dark chocolate wafers and the squish of white paste.

  …And the third group of people that are not gonna make it in this country are the mentally ill. Okay? The mentally ill. And dat’s it. Anybody else can make a ton-a money. A ton. It’s not about your race or your religion or your ethnicity or how poor your parents were. None-a-dat is holdin’ you back. Okay? Okay, Senator? Look at me. I’m a perfect example. I grew up dirt poor. I didn’t particularly …

  Hollis changed to the History Channel, silencing the man that, for two days in a row, Bethany Koan had so wanted hear on his radio, today searching up and down the dial as they glided back towards Columbus from Ohio Wesleyan, asking him incredulously how it could be possible that he had never listened to Mike O’Donnell’s Radio Fixture. Hollis, at least from this small sampling, did not entirely grasp the appeal.

  But then, Hollis had never really grasped the cult of personality that seemed to so enthrall the younger generations, such a poor substitute for actual wisdom and understanding. It inhibited the refinement of thought and perception. It dulled the senses.

  He fished another Oreo out of the bag and popped it into his mouth, crunching with slow and deliberate abandon. He changed the channel, trading a documentary on the life of Helen Keller for a woman demonstrating the miracle of carpet stain remover.

  Yes, this O’Donnell character was beneath Bethany. Not necessarily in and of himself – Hollis did not actually know anything about the man personally – but more because he was obviously iconic of a generally base and destructive popular culture. Hollis understood in his bones what Bethany perhaps had yet to learn: that to follow popular culture, to turn to it in times of crisis, to consult it for information, to lean upon it for support, to hide behind it – to depend upon it like Tilly or like Susan – would, in time, reduce a person to a soulless automaton, following rather than leading, responding only to baser instincts, incapable of attaining a higher consciousness, congealing with the rest of the masses into an undifferentiated blob of disgusting impulse.

  With a twitch of his thumb, Hollis left the woman who was extracting spaghetti sauce from a crème colored carpet. He sped past eight or nine channels until he found what he knew was waiting: two women enjoying poolside sunshine, the legs of one wrapped firmly around the head of the other, a short-haired blonde whose arms blindly, frantically groped for the bouncing fleshy buoys of her dark-haired companion like she was drowning in pleasure.

  Hollis popped two Oreo’s into his mouth at once.

  In twenty minutes, cradled in the arms of his day, warmed by his own compassion for the poor, hapless souls living unexamined lives … and sprinkled in dark crumbs, he drifted off to sleep.

  CHAPTER 18 – David

  The receptionist at Chaney, Baker, Smith & Lyons tells me that Mae is out of the office. I have never precisely understood what paralegals actually do every day, except, vaguely speaking, assist lawyers do whatever lawyers do every day. I know laws – the Constitution, the Civil Rights Act, the 18th Amendment, like I know other mileposts of history. But, beyond the billion or so jury trial vignettes I have seen on television, the daily practice of law is a mystery to me. Like medicine. Like politics. It is all a kind of dark art to me; an impenetrable voodoo involving heavy drums and dances at night in the deep belly of the jungle on the other side of the river where I never, ever go.

  The receptionist asks if she can help me. I am a friend of Mae Chang’s I tell her. I do not offer the more complicated truth of that friendship, because this is my one phone call and I do not have the time to explain complicated truths about myself that even I do not understand. I tell her that I am in jail. I need to speak to a lawyer. A criminal lawyer.

  God, I actually need a criminal lawyer.

  The receptionist puts me on hold and I listen patiently to Guantanamera as she descends into the jungle for help. Suddenly I am speaking with a woman named Glenda Laveau. She does not actually tell me she is from Brooklyn, but she may as well have.

  “You say you are a friend of Mae’s?” Glenda asks, as though confirming some sort of password. I confirm and we speak briefly about my predicament.

  “David. Listen to me,” she says. “This is very important. Are you listening?”

  “Yes, Glenda. I’m listening.”

  “Do… not… say… anything… to… anybody… about… ANYTHING. Not a fuckin’ word. Understand?”

  “Yes,” I say, thinking ashamedly of my open house party for Detective North.

  “They really will use everything you say against you. I’ll be there in an hour.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Glenda.”

  “Fogedaboudit. Mae’s in a meeting but I’ll get someone to bring her up to speed.”

  There is something both hopeful and dreadful in my chest when she says this, but I keep it to myself and hang up the phone. I sit at the little table staring at the piss-yellow phone, hoping for a few extra minutes in this small, empty room that is not a cell.

  But somewhere in the Westerville Police Station a switchboard light has winked off and they know my call is over. The door opens and the officer who escorted me in jerks his head to escort me out. He does not take me to a jail cell, but to an interrogation room only three or four doors down the hallway.

  We pass a man in handcuffs, one officer on each arm. He is disheveled, a streak of dried blood beneath his left eye. We give each other looks of commiseration and I realize that this is how it – the downslide, the process of personal corruption – all begins. I do not know this man or what he did. Assault. Hit and run. Maybe armed robbery. It doesn’t matter. We are in the same boat. We share the same expression. I assume he has done something criminal and he assumes the same about me and yet these assumed transgressions are unimportant and instantly forgiven. We are both here, in the system. Busted. We are brothers; poor, busted bastards, closer to each other in this instant than to anyone else in the world. My actual innocence is far less powerful than the look of solidarity in his eyes and I know that if my world really fell apart – if I had no one in my life to believe something better about me, something truer and more noble – I would ache for someone to look at me in this way that said, I know who you are, brother, even if I had to become a criminal to prove him right. That is how the downslide begins, and in identifying with this man, I have just taken the first step. It is a far worse fate to be alone in virtue than to be loved in depravity. If no one said that, someone should have.

  Passing within inches of one of the man’s escorts, I cannot help but consider suddenly doubling back, pulling guns from holsters, tossing one to my brother in captivity, and shooting our way out, the two of us, guns blazing, out into the streets and into a new life that pays far greater emotional dividends than that of a single, sexually frustrated, under-achieving, law-abiding public school teacher.

  But, of course, though I do size up the guns, I do not actually take advantage of this golden opportunity. Partly because guns secretly terrify me and partly because I can still hear in my head the voice of the woman in the ambulance that wasn’t really an ambulance. It’s gotta get better sometime.

 
I cling desperately to what is left of my optimism and answer her telepathically that yes, it simply has to get better.

  The interrogation room is just a larger cousin of the telephone room. Bigger table, more chairs. No windows. Also missing is the large mirror, which I know is really a one-way window where attractive cops and prosecutors listen to everything I say. I am left to imagine attractive cops and prosecutors pressing their ears to the other side of the wall.

  “Have a seat, Dave.”

  It’s Detective North leaning up against the far wall. I sit, but don’t look at him. “Did’ja make your call?”

  I say nothing.

  “Look, Dave,” he says, coming over to lean on the table, “I gotta know where we go from here. Are we gonna talk? Do you have a lawyer? Is he coming over? If not…”

  “I have a lawyer,” I snap at him. “She’s on her way.”

  “Good. So maybe we can talk when she gets here. Who’s your lawyer.”

  “Glenda,” I have already forgotten her name. “Glenda something.”

  “Glenda Laveau?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Chaney, Baker, Somebody & Somebody?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Terrific.” Detective North is not happy. “We’ll talk when she gets here,” he says and leaves the room, locking the door behind him.

  I wait. I spend most of the time imagining how the sequential revelations of my arrest, conviction and incarceration will play out over the faces of my parents, my brother, my sister, and Mae. Invariably, their faces melt like warm wax from shock to concern to disappointment because, ultimately, this will all boil down to my own bad judgment, and there are always consequences to bad judgment, aren’t there, David?

  I am sitting at the table. Waiting.

  Sitting at the table. Listening.

  I am seventeen years old and I am sitting at the table in the dining room. My father is sitting across from me, my mother pacing behind him, wanting to express the emotion he will not express and never quite does. But she is holding her tongue, rubbing her enormous seventh-month belly in a deliberate clockwise motion, letting him do the talking. Tilly is crouching on the stairs off the living room. I can see her in the background. They do not know she is there, believing she is in her room where she has been banished. If they find her there, listening on the stairs, there will be trouble.

  But this is the dawning of the days in which Tilly always won, beating my father down, indomitable in the wars of attrition for control. We are hard-wired to care, and to care desperately, what our parents think of us, and this concern lies at the very heart of parental authority. Tilly had stopped recognizing that authority – or at least had begun fighting it with all of her might – by the time she was ten. I, on the other hand, have never stopped recognizing my parents’ claim to judge me.

  “The Van Susterens have been good friends to me and your mother for many years, David,” he is telling me, his voice calm and controlled, but controlled like something that must be controlled lest there be some dreaded emotional rupture. “Heinrich is a long-time client of my bank. Inga brokered the sale of this house. I hope you can understand that breaking into their home…”

  “I didn’t break into her home.”

  “You will let me finish and you will not interrupt. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope you can understand that breaking into their home has caused a lot of damage. The least of that damage, David, is to the fish and the floor and the carpet, which is bad enough. The real damage is to trust. Our trust in you. Their trust in us and you and Tilly. You have seriously angered friends of ours and you have greatly embarrassed us. They could press charges and have you arrested. You understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “They thought they had been burgled. Or vandalized. I went over there tonight and looked at the damage with Heinrich and the police. That was a twenty-gallon salt-water tank. They lost all of their fish, which Inga has been collecting for years.”

  “Years, David,” adds my mother. “She’s collected them from everywhere!”

  “Okay, Susan,” he tells her. “Okay. Let me, just…”

  “Okay. Sorry.” The clockwise caress has now become a frenetic polishing – wax-on, wax-off – sort of motion.

  “Thank you,” says my father, turning away from her. “The carpet is ruined. The tank is shattered. The coffee table is shattered. Glass is everywhere.”

  “It was an accident, Dad, Tilly didn’t see…”

  “They called the police, David. The police showed up. The police conducted an investigation. I mean, you get all of that, don’t you?”

  “I do now. I didn’t then. But, yeah… yeah… I do now. I do.”

  “And you understand that, if the Van Susterens were so inclined, they could sue me and your mother for damage to their home?”

  “Yes.”

  “They have assured me that they are not going to do either of those things.”

  “That’s nice of them, Dad. I…”

  “Yes, David, it is nice of them. They’re nice people. They don’t deserve this.”

  “No, they don’t. I wasn’t trying to… sorry.”

  “You understand that every dollar of damage to that place is coming out of your pocket? However long it takes. Every dollar.”

  “Dad, I didn’t even go in… I… Tilly…”

  “David, I don’t want to hear it!” He slaps the table with his palm so hard everybody jumps. His face is red with genuine anger. “I do not want to hear that from you. The fact that you put your little sister up to this is despicable. Despicable. I mean that really burns me up. Tilly is ten. Your mother plucked a shard of glass out of her forehead! She could have been blinded. She’s a little girl with all the judgment of a houseplant. She’s ten!”

  “I am not a little girl!” My sister is shrieking from the staircase and for a moment my parents are terrified at the sudden explosion of sound from behind them. “You leave him alone! I wanted to go in! I wanted to!”

  She is wearing her blue rainbow nighty and her white legs hanging off the staircase flow into the same pure feet that none of us had been able to resist tickling when she was just a little younger. Her hair is pulled back from her face in a ponytail and her eyes are wet and green and lovely. She has a small bandage on her forehead. Her countenance is one of red-cheeked, resolute fury. She is pointing directly, condemningly at my father. It is the first time I can remember envying my sister’s strength.

  “I wanted to!”

  “Tilly!”

  “You leave him alone!”

  “Damn it, Tilly! You get in that room like I told you to or I will tan that hide but good. Right now! Susan, will you please just…”

  “Leave him alone! He didn’t do anything to that bitch!”

  My mother, surprisingly agile for her condition, is all over her and there is crying and shrieking and cussing that recedes up the stairs like a tornado full of barnyard animals being sucked back up into the clouds. My father closes his eyes for a second.

  “She’s ten,” he says. “She’s a child. You’re almost seventeen. You’ll be a junior in high school. You have a job. Thinking about college. You’re supposed to be responsible. When you and Tilly are together, out in the world, out in the neighborhood, you are responsible for her. Got it? You are responsible. You should know better than to get your little sister to break into somebody’s home for a stupid football.”

  “It’s signed by Dan Marino and it doesn’t even belong to me. It belongs to Peter.”

  “David, I don’t care if it was signed by the Pope and belongs to President George H.W. Bush. It was rotten judgment.”

  “Heinrich wouldn’t give it back. Every time it goes in their yard they keep it. And this time I threw it, Dad. It was my bad pass. I’m responsible for that ball. What? I am. Peter will hardly even talk to me.”

  “Did you think of just asking for it?”

  “Peter’s asked Mr. Van Susteren for
it like ten times. I’ve asked like five times. Like every day for two weeks.”

  “So it’s okay to send your ten year old sister in through the basement window?”

  “No.”

  He leans back in the dining room chair – his chair, with the creak of distressed oak that I associate with my father’s contemplation and with the weight of words yet unspoken. He drinks from his glass of wine and looks at me, sizing up the lesson for the proper flourish. I torture my leather bracelet with a finger. Waiting.

  “Trust is a precious thing, David. Maybe one of the most important things. You have to guard it with your life. Once you lose it…well, it doesn’t come back easily. What do you think would happen to me if, as a banker, I just decided to treat other people’s money as if it were my own? If I just abused people’s trust? Hmm? Well, okay, shrug your shoulders if you want, but I think you get my drift here, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know that there are always consequences to the things we do, even if we don’t specifically intend those consequences. There are always consequences. That’s why we have to exercise judgment. Good judgment, David. And you have certainly shown none of that today. I would have hoped that getting tossed out of the Vanguard Academy on your ear would have taught you something about responsibility and consequences. Have you already forgotten that humiliatingly close brush with criminal prosecution?”

  “No sir.”

  “Really? I’m beginning to think the humiliation was all mine.”

  “No sir.”

  “Well, you had better shape up or I promise you that one day you will end up sitting in a police station. And when that day comes, you will wish…”

  The door unlocks and opens. I jerk my head up to see Detective North followed by a heavy-set, well-dressed woman, fifty or so, carrying a legal pad and a pen. She is walking beneath a pile of jet-black hair the size and shape of a small wedding cake. Half a dozen thick corkscrew tendrils escape in all directions, bouncing as she walks, almost orbiting her head like some sort of mobile. Her lipstick makes it to the table well before she does; a bright coral pink to match the nails.