The Comedown

  Something about the day had made him numb. It was a bad idea to schedule golf for this day. Netta was probably just waking up—she went to bed late and woke late, a habit from her twenties Aaron thought she’d grow out of—and would probably text about how much she missed him and would he mind picking up some pineapple on his way home. She always wanted to buy something new, try something new—it felt as if she couldn’t make it through a day without spending money she didn’t need to spend. His phone buzzed: it wasn’t from her. It was Ted, asking him if he wanted someone from the course to caddy or if he was fine on his own. At a stoplight Aaron texted back: I’m fine on my own, thanks. Ted Schulman had a bright red bulging face and made three-quarters of a million dollars a year before taxes. Aaron made half that. “If you want the commission, you’ve gotta be aggressive, Boy Scout.” He’d been A, Big Fry, Biscuits ’n’ Gravy, Boy Scout. Who the fuck even called him by his real name anymore? Netta.

  He wasn’t looking forward to golf, because he’d get beaten again and Ted would use that to convince him that the public housing didn’t need to keep standing and he’d end up having to personally go down to Lynwood and tell the tenants they were being evicted.

  His vision began flashing white: he blinked and it went back to normal, then flashed white again. By the time he pulled into the golf course parking lot, blinking couldn’t bring it back. Pain ballooned at the front of his head and he gritted his teeth to keep from crying out. He had a flash of Priscilla running around Smitty’s Seaway Barbershop, singing about how she was going to be a doctor someday. He wondered where she was now, if she was happy. He saw Netta turning over on her pillow, opening her almond eyes to smile at him, undoing her ponytail and kissing him. He saw Meeches at school, sucking on the nib of a pen. How many girls just like Meeches had he had to fuck with before he found Netta? But really, deep down—how different was she from Meeches? She had to be. She had to be different from his mother, her stern liar’s face.

  His phone was buzzing on the seat next to him, but he was hurting too hard to look at it. He waited it out, listened to it buzz a second time, a third. Ted was losing his patience. Or Netta had found a spider. He rubbed his eyes and his vision returned, but the migraine was still bulging at the edges of his skull. He flipped open his phone. Three missed calls from Caleb Marshall: 12:57, 12:59, 1:03. Then a text: Dad’s alive. And another: I’m so sorry. You were right.

  LELAND BLOOM-MITTWOCH JR.

  (1971–)

  1977–2009

  Cleveland

  Of the many fist-clenching memories provoked in Leland Jr. by a visit back to Cleveland, the most offensive was one he couldn’t even claim. He had been six years old when his mother had tearfully confessed and the older he got, the better he became at imagining the event (events, if he was being honest) with memory’s width, length, and depth.

  His mom and Leland Sr. in 1970, at home and at parties, dressed in the idiot garb of their times, his mom’s stomach round with him, Leland Sr. doing what he knew how to do best: snorting or smoking whatever was snortable and/or smokable in his immediate reach. Leland Jr. imagined his mom inhaling deep—no doubt at Leland Sr.’s urging—out of one of the eight six-inch glass bongs Leland Sr. had collected in college. Then Leland Jr. followed the smoke down her windpipe and into her bronchial tubes and into (he knew from sleepless hours spent on WebMD), the lungs’ parenchyma, where the alveoli would’ve pumped the corrupted oxygen into her bloodstream and then into his own. Time after time after time she’d done this without thinking, mother and son getting high together, his little fetal self becoming asthmatic and forgetful. His blood and body and amnion foggy with her indulgence, his barely formed eyes bugging, his veins constricting. He didn’t hate her for it—he hated his father.

  She’d made the confession following an incident in 1978, which Leland Jr. wished he could forget, during which he had for some reason thrown a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica across his second-grade classroom and into the fish tank. Even after it had happened he had felt like it’d been someone else, a mediocre kid, one with freckles and a sour smell and stupid eyes. He knew fetuses exposed to marijuana could grow into aggressive kids with low test scores: he’d read at least one, if not two, studies about it.

  Ms. Tarski had treated the whole thing as a code-blue emergency. She had kept Leland Jr. after class and called his mom. His mom was at the school in under fifteen minutes, looking stricken when she walked through the door. Ms. Tarski had preserved the crime scene, and she let his mom look long and hard at the book and the fish tank and Leland Jr., who by then was crying and saying he was sorry and he didn’t know what was wrong with him or why he did it.

  Leland Jr. had sat on the floor and begged his mom not to punish him. Then he begged that if someone had to punish him, at least let it be her and not Leland Sr. His mom, who seemed to care zero whether Ms. Tarski saw her crying or not, began to well up and said of course he would not be punished. It’s all my fault, sweetie—that much is clear as day.

  “Do you know why Dad sleeps so much?” she had asked in the car on the way home.

  Leland Jr. hadn’t thought that much about it because he tried not to think that much about Leland Sr. “He’s tired,” he said.

  She nodded. “Right. He’s trying to make a change. He had a very hard time when you were a baby, but he’s making a change now. And it’s not easy for him.”

  He looked up at her and she seemed mountainous, and he didn’t think it made sense that kids were supposed to grow bigger than their parents. (And when he finally did outgrow them, he vowed he would accept no sum of money to be seven again, when he was under the thumb of the detoxing and retoxing Leland Sr., when Dad Needed the Apartment to Rest after Work, and no matter how strung-out and exhausted he seemed he could still catch you making noise in your room or in the hall and throw you hard up against the wall if chances were Mom wouldn’t hear.)

  “Well”—and his mom started crying, and she had done a miniswerve that made Leland Jr. grab the edges of his seat and crane to see over the dashboard—“I had a few difficulties, too. Not as bad as your dad, but a few.”

  And then she explained to him how, had she known then what she did now, she would not have smoked grass back when she was pregnant with him, and how he had to understand that it was not uncommon with her and Dad’s friends, that a lot of people were doing it, and a lot of them didn’t know what kind of effect doctors were suggesting it had on children. (How miraculous, he told himself after every session of self-righteous Googling, that I wasn’t born with a hole in the heart or neonatal retinopathy or an incapacitated brain.) She was so sorry, and when they got home she let him have ice cream before dinner. And he understood the reason she was doing this was that there was something wrong with him.

  The day after he’d thrown the encyclopedia had been a Saturday, and when he woke up at eight thirty, he still didn’t know what grass was, unless it was the greenish-brownish kind you occasionally saw outside, which he found hard to believe. He knew only that it was something punishably bad and kids couldn’t be around it, so he figured he might find it on Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, where Rudy was always doing something kids weren’t supposed to be doing. But that morning’s episode was useless, because it was just about Heywood being too nervous to admit he needed glasses, and the only thing Rudy really did was play on the baseball team and make fun of Heywood for being such a lousy hitter. His mom had let Leland Jr. eat just bacon for breakfast and told him she had to leave to see a client early but to please try and not wake Daddy and when she got home they’d talk about school. He ate the bacon out of a bowl by himself on the couch and watched the Jackson 5ive, which was even less capable than Fat Albert of offering him an answer to the grass question, and by nine thirty, when on TV it was just two men in sport coats saying they’d predicted how the Browns would do against the Jets tomorrow and it was Under Lock, So Gentlemen Start Your Betting, Leland Jr. could hear Leland Sr. moving around in the big bedroom.r />
  Leland Jr. got up quickly and shut off the TV and then went back to the couch. He heard Leland Sr. say “What the hell?” and call out Melinda twice. Leland Jr. thought about going to his room, but there were fewer escape options there. The best thing to do was leave the house but that would involve opening the front door, which always made noise. He pulled his knees to his chin and his stomach constricted and went sour. He counted out one hundred and twelve seconds during which all he did was imagine he’d gone deaf, and he did a hopeful projection of his deafness onto the entire house. Nothing made any noise because nothing could hear the noise anything else was making, and he imagined that the deafness hit Leland Sr. so hard he couldn’t even remember what it was like to hear at all. He took a bite of bacon and shuddered.

  But just a few seconds later, there was Leland Sr. walking around in the kitchen, skinnier than a normal man should be, wearing just briefs and a T-shirt. All Leland Jr. heard in his head was a weird soft ringing, and he focused his eyes hopefully on his kneecaps.

  “Where’s your mother?” Leland Sr.’s voice broke Leland Jr.’s illusion to pieces. “Where is she?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Showing houses.”

  Leland Sr. turned on the TV and then sat down next to him. “When will she be back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The answer obviously hadn’t satisfied him. “How’re you doing?”

  “Fine.”

  “Mom told me you got mad in school.”

  He froze, terrified. How would he know about this? Did he care?

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Leland Jr. said. “I’m gonna go outside.”

  Leland Sr. laughed. “I don’t think so.” On TV now they were talking about another car bomb.

  “I think I’m going to go outside,” Leland Jr. tried again.

  It seemed like Leland Sr. wasn’t listening. Leland Jr. started to get off the couch. “Don’t go outside,” he said, still looking at the TV. Leland Jr. sat back down.

  “How do you think Danny Greene stayed alive so long?” Leland Sr. asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know. You’ve been saying that this whole time. Make a guess.”

  “He was smart.”

  “That’s right.” Leland Sr. smiled. “He was a real modern-day Robin Hood. You know why you can’t go outside?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll get blown up, that’s why. They’ll kill you like they did Danny Greene—you saw that on TV. Or like they killed your dad’s friend Reggie.”

  Leland Jr. nodded.

  “You know who’s really murdering everyone?”

  Leland Jr. shook his head, which made Leland Sr. snort.

  “Of course you don’t. It’s cops. Crooked cops. There’s actually no such thing as a straight cop. They’re a gang. A violent gang.”

  Leland Jr. nodded.

  “Tell me why you got mad in school.”

  If Leland Jr. hadn’t understood his reasons in the blind and furious moment he had flung the book, he understood them even less now.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know isn’t an option.”

  Leland Jr. knew he had to make something up. But he was a horrible liar, having been taught by his mom and Ms. Tarski never to lie. But would they allow him to lie if not lying meant he said I don’t know again, which wasn’t an option? He rooted around in his brain for something that was not a lie.

  “Mom said it was a behavior problem because she smoked grass when I was still in her stomach,” he said.

  This had been a horrible thing to say, and he knew it as soon as he said it. Leland Sr. went very stiff and stood up. He went to the front door, which he dead-bolted. Leland Jr. imagined the hallway outside the door, the pink-and-white carpet and the walls that always smelled like paint, and beyond them the big glass door that let you outside. The front yard. The street.

  “We’re going to have a conversation and we’re going to make sure no one can sneak up on us while we have it,” Leland Sr. said. “We’re gonna make sure no one can spy on us.”

  Leland Jr. felt an electric feeling, like his brain was trying to show him one last good time before he died. He jumped over the back of the couch.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Leland Sr. said. He picked Leland Jr. up under the arms and brought him back to the couch cushions. He smiled, which was more disturbing to Leland Jr. than if he’d been sneering. “My dad, your grandpa, who you never met, he was not very nice to me when I misbehaved, but he did not get physical with me. He did not hit me, he was just silent to me. I would rather that he had hit me a little. Wouldn’t you?” He gave Leland Jr. a gentle smack on the cheek. “That’s better than the silent treatment, isn’t it? Why are you shaking?”

  “I’m not shaking.”

  “Yes you are. I’ll explain why Mom said what she said. She doesn’t understand how the world works. You’re lucky I do. You’re lucky you’ve got me to explain it to you. Grass is what people call marijuana, and the police and the government made it illegal. Did you know that?”

  Leland Jr. shook his head.

  “It’s not bad for you, but they think it is. It’s harmless.” He sighed and stared ahead of him, and Leland Jr. thought for a second that he’d forgotten about the conversation. “I haven’t had a drop of anything in two weeks, not even coffee, and you think I’m happy about it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The answer is I’m not. I’m very unhappy about it. A normal man doesn’t sleep fifteen hours a day. A normal man is gainfully employed. I need medicine to function as a normal man, but the kind of medicine I need is outlawed. A society in which this happens is not one that’s right. Do you understand? Mom thinks I have no right to medicine. This is a well-meaning idea, but it’s very foolish.”

  Leland Jr. felt suddenly very ill.

  “Just don’t do it again.” Leland Sr. smacked him on the other cheek, and it stung more this time. “See? That’s better than the silent treatment. That’s all you’ve earned, okay? You can do it to me if you like.”

  Leland Sr. offered his cheek and scrunched up his eyes. It remained one of Leland Jr.’s biggest regrets that he had been shaking too hard to hit his father back.

  Early April 2009

  Cleveland

  Piloting his mother’s Town & Country across Shaker Heights to Woodward’s Foods, his regret that he hadn’t smacked Leland Sr. was stronger than ever. Fists tight around the wheel, he was only half listening as she read aloud her list of necessary items. They were at the stoplight before the Woodward’s when she got to sauerkraut and Leland Jr. said, half to stop the word stream, “If the special occasion is just my visit, then you shouldn’t be getting all this.” It seemed like she was trying to impress him. Which, he thought, regarding her sitting next to him in the car (flowered sweater, triple chin, the smile of a child in blissful transit), was in itself miles from being impressive.

  “The occasion isn’t just you,” his mom told him. “I haven’t made something nice in a while.”

  Inside the store they drew the kind of polite stares rich white people give when they’re disgusted by something. His mom was not a disgusting person, and she did not deserve stares. She was just large. She was Rubenesque. She carried approximately 313 pounds on a five-four frame—they had remeasured this morning, to her protest. She had to waddle sometimes—she was waddling a little now, using the shopping cart as a sort of walker—but she should never be the object of anyone’s disgust.

  Seriously? Leland Jr.’s cinched face inquired of a man looking at her with zero social decorum.

  The man, spooked, turned his brushed steel frames toward the melons.

  “What are we going to get first?” Leland Jr. asked.

  But she was quiet; she’d felt the man’s eyes, too. “I don’t know,” she said blandly.

  “What’s first on the list?”

  “Yogurt,” she said.

  “Okay.” He
began to steer the cart. “Dairy aisle.”

  His phone registered a text with a soft chime. It was from Jocelyn. Are you home yet, babe? She wanted to talk. He repocketed his phone and looked up. A woman had stopped to watch his mom’s graceless passage down the dairy aisle.

  His mom passed her and began to lower her upper half into the dairy case to grab a yogurt. Plain, as Leland Jr. had insisted. He approached the gawking woman.

  “Excuse me. Ma’am?”

  She registered his words with shock.

  “I’m talking to you,” he said.

  “Yes?” she managed.

  “Do you see that woman?” He pointed to his mom.

  She nodded.

  “Were you staring at her?”

  She tried to shake her head but it came out like a tremor.

  “That woman is my mother,” Leland Jr. said. “Do you think she’s blind?”

  She shook her head more thoroughly.

  “Correct. She’s not. And she can see you staring. So stop.”

  He didn’t wait for the woman to acknowledge what he’d said. He turned around and grabbed the side of his mom’s shopping cart, into which she’d placed two cartons of maple yogurt. He removed them and exchanged them for two cartons of plain.