The Comedown

  Maybe the other shoe had already dropped.

  No, no. That was paranoid thinking. That was Cleveland talking, not him. The young man hadn’t fucked his wife, his mother’s belongings were still in his house, the locked-shut briefcase could contain whatever he wanted as long as he didn’t open it.

  Leland Jr. jogged faster, the first fartlek of his run, leaving the golf course behind him. It wasn’t Jocelyn’s fault, that much was true. Or at least it wasn’t completely her fault. Even though they’d agreed not to have children (a sore point for his mom; for her mom, too), she still sometimes acted like a mother. He’d catch her casting recklessly about for something to stanch her bleeding heart. She settled on ridiculous causes. Dangerous ones, sometimes. Like once she’d suggested to him that they go on Craigslist and pretend to “order” prostitutes who—she claimed she could tell from the photos—were trafficked children, and then they’d sequester those children in their house and call the police before the pimps could murder them. Another time she’d announced that they needed to halve their carbon footprint, and had started biking to the train station, using only the library computer, reading by candlelight. But her most depressing cause by far was Lee.

  If anyone’s a cause for compassion, he allowed himself to think, it’s me. He hadn’t asked to be born to a liar and drug addict, a “father” who since Leland Jr. could first remember was either furiously mercurial or self-righteously “clean.” Whenever Leland Jr.’s mom had forced Leland Sr. into an NA meeting via final ultimatum, he’d whiningly dragged his ass there only to lie through the first meeting and skip out on the second, privately confessing to Leland Jr.—as if they had the kind of relationship where they confessed things to each other—that a whole army of pathetic ex-junkies couldn’t keep him away from his medicine. Leland Jr. had taken up the mantle of manhood very early on and he’d fought like hell. And on the morning when his mom woke him up crying and showed him the note Leland Sr. had left them—“This became too impossible for me to withstand; I cannot live like an automaton any longer”—Leland Jr. knew he’d won. Well, almost: he would’ve truly won if he got his mother that divorce he knew she wanted, or at least convinced law enforcement that they’d been robbed.

  Lee was very different from Leland Jr. He was a Kool-Aid drinker: the way he cried in his shitty child’s suit at the funeral, the way he gave his little eulogy—“He was the best dad I coulda asked for, he did the best job he could [sniffle, sniffle]”—the end of which Leland Jr. could scarcely hear over the sound of his own grinding teeth.

  When he had arrived at the stepwitch’s trailer-bungalow after the funeral, he had seen what he’d expected to see: the stepwitch, heavy-lidded and made up, looking like she was late for third-period algebra. She was holding a cat that smelled as if it had recently and messily evacuated its bowels; the kitchen still bore significant evidence of the previous night’s dinner and possibly even the dinner before that; the living room was littered with dirty plastic toys that were too young for the nine-year-old boy who sat, in order to avoid everything, with his face glued to the TV. If it had been possible to live worse than Leland Jr.’s family had, this family was doing it.

  “Don’t disturb him while he’s watching TV,” was all she said as she let Leland Jr. in.

  Leland Jr. nodded, confident that he owed this woman absolutely nothing and that after today, he’d never need to speak to her again. He turned his attention to Lee. The boy’s skin was thin and yellowish. He wanted to say, “So you’re the son he loved more?” but he didn’t. Instead he walked past him and felt the glare on his back and then, unable to resist, turned around and said: “I’m just gonna run upstairs to grab a few things.”

  The boy turned, and out of his mouth came the words “Fuck you,” quiet enough for only the two of them to hear. Leland Jr. smiled and said, “I’ll be finished very quickly,” and then proceeded to retrieve his and his mother’s life from the house’s smoke-filled, shaggy crawlspace.

  He could remember wishing Jocelyn had been there with him at that moment. What little kid is warped enough to say something as megalomaniacally sophisticated as “Fuck you” when his stolen things are being repossessed? “Please don’t take anything,” maybe, or, “Who are you?” But “Fuck you”—those are the words of a proper son of Leland Sr., and such a son couldn’t be a person deserving of compassion. Lee had already been beyond reform then, he was cast in his father’s mold, and so would probably inherit his father’s taste for shitty behavior and nose candy. That had been a good day—Leland Jr. had been smiling the whole time during the drive back to the hotel.

  He broke stride under a streetlamp and paused the timer on his watch. He wasn’t exactly sure where he was. His pacer said four miles. Four miles was usually nothing for him, but something about tonight was making things difficult. It was the idea of Jocelyn and the e-mail—the idea of a problem that should’ve been solved a long time ago, a bunch of nasty backwash still sluicing around in his brain.

  He’d explain to Jocelyn about the “Fuck you” he’d heard that day. He’d tell her things Leland Sr. had done to the family that he’d been too embarrassed to tell anyone; he’d tell her in plaintive, pity-seeking detail how Melinda had built herself back up after being destroyed by Leland Sr.’s abandonment. Jocelyn had gotten all this in piecemeal fashion, and clearly she hadn’t understood. He’d tell her as many times as she needed to hear it.

  It’s Lee’s fault, he thought, his mind clamping conclusively around the idea. He imagined the jaundiced boy’s face and aged it until he was staring into the sad, skinny eyes of a teenaged burnout. Leland Jr. had known kids like Lee in school: ur-nerds and wannabe thugs. The nerdier faction had some enthusiasm for books involving trolls and wizards and proudly congregated at the fringes of the playground. The fifteen-year-old thugs were patient observers, often stoned out of their minds on cough syrup. The mediocrity of those kids had always made Leland Jr., who’d run track all throughout high school, bounced between the first- and second-tier popular groups, and gone to Northwestern University on scholarship, extremely angry. It made him even angrier to think that he was related by blood to such a person, and that this person had risen from the anonymity of his putrid, narrow, meaningless life—a life Leland Sr. had spent a good chunk of his time on earth trying to condemn Leland Jr. to—to demand money from Leland Jr. now. It was pathetic. Was this supposed to intimidate him? Was this supposed to take him down?

  Of course it would never take him down.

  He looked up at the moon, which was fingernail clipping–thin. He smiled angrily. If this is the other shoe dropping, Dad, then this is nothing.

  “You hear me?” he barked to the sky. “This is fucking nothing!”

  CALEB MARSHALL

  (1970–)

  1985–1990

  Cleveland

  Caleb and his moms fulfilled their destinies around the same time, at least in his opinion. Within a week of his turning fifteen, he won the 1985 Cleveland Chess Championship in the fourteen-to-sixteen division and then his moms left to teach American literature at Dover College in Ontario. His trophy, fought for by hours of studying old strategy books and busing to a library fifteen miles away to squint over microfiche of Bobby Fischer interviews, went under glass in his school’s hallway. His moms’s position—fought for by Dr. Ellyn Marmeloy, who had told the Dover faculty that she’d resign in protest if they focused on his moms’s background and ignored her “dexterous and brilliant critical mind”—was tenure track and well paid. That week, watching her cook breakfast for himself and Aaron, her pumps clicking, her skin clear and eyes bright, Caleb had the distinct feeling that he and his moms could have conquered the world together.

  The final round of the championship took place in the Tower City Center. He was facing off against Magdalene Pyari, who lived in the south suburbs and was the only girl in the league. She’d beaten him in round three last year and had then been ousted in round four—now they’d both clawed their way to round s
ix and the reporters (two of them—more than last year) were eating it up, snapping photos every time one of them hit the clock. Magdalene had always been aggressive with her offense—Caleb once watched her sacrifice both bishops and her queen in order to lure a weaker player into an improbable-looking checkmate—and she was no different in this game, incinerating half her pawns in the first ten minutes and then swiping at Caleb’s power pieces with a rook-knight combo that Caleb had nicknamed Starsky and Hutch in his head. Starsky came galloping across the board G8 to F6, F6 to G4, Hutch crawling along next to him, the two of them staying what appeared to be one to one and a half moves ahead of Caleb’s creeping pawn defense. Caleb was an extremely defensive player—he knew this about himself, had spent far more time than he’d cared to getting chewed up and spit out by offensive nutjobs—and he knew Magdalene knew this about him as well. This was how she’d beaten him last year. But in that great year 1985 he brought new sleight of hand to the table: something Dr. Loren Barsfield of Chess for the 20th Century called “compartmentalization.” It was a strategy that required the patience and tedium-endurance of a true defensive player, and it basically involved playing two games. By the time he’d set up the fianchetto that beat Magdalene, she’d left all the royalty on her side of the board vulnerable, assuming she was a few moves away from a checkmate. And she was: if Caleb had whipped his bishops into position one move slower, she would’ve crushed him the same as last year. But instead it was Caleb slamming the clock as his stomach dropped with excitement and the judge shouting “Checkmate!” and Magdalene standing up to shake his hand, the announcer guy with the microphone onstage belting, “A victory for Marshall, who really stole the show this year!”

  Sitting onstage in the fourteen-to-sixteen division champion chair while the head judge talked about their bright futures, he could see the two of them in the audience: his moms waving from the third row of folding chairs and his brother on her left with his arms crossed, one leg out in the aisle, wearing the blank, mirror-eyed look he always did when he was about to fall asleep. Caleb waved back at his moms a little so it wouldn’t look like he was ignoring her, then he scanned the audience for anyone else he knew. Almost all the kids were white and from other schools—faces he’d seen across the room during district championships, meets, and drills. None of the kids from the Central Chess Club had turned up, nor had Coach Allman. Allman didn’t like losing and Caleb didn’t like his strategy, so no love lost there.

  But down in the front row was a face from so long ago it could’ve come out of his dreams: Lu. The big guy he’d gone to school with since fourth grade, who’d stolen his lunchbox twice, whom Aaron had beaten up once—how Aaron had managed that was beyond everyone’s imagination. Everyone had been terrified of him because he had been a foot taller than anyone in the grade the minute he turned ten. He had a girlfriend when he was twelve. But then Aaron had whooped his ass, left him on the floor crying. Then, days later, he puked at an assembly. All the kids were sitting cross-legged in that ratty old gym while Principal Clemens talked about violence, how the school was a peaceful community and didn’t need any more violence than they’d already had, and when he said “violence” for the sixteenth time Lu grabbed his gut, looked across the floor at Aaron and Caleb, and puked everything in his stomach up onto his lap. Clemens sighed something into the microphone like “This is a mess right here” and as soon as all the kids started laughing and pointing, Aaron was on his feet, shouting, “This motherfucker just PUKED all over the gym!” After that, Lu was Pukeboy in Caleb’s mind, tall and stupid instead of tall and threatening.

  Caleb went up to get his trophy still thinking about all that, watching Lu watch him, and when they all posed to take the photo, Lu just sat on his massive hands and stared straight ahead. Caleb jumped down from the stage and landed directly in front of Lu. Caleb smiled, offered his hand to shake. Lu stood up: still massive, still vacant-faced.

  “Thanks for coming, man,” Caleb said. “I don’t really know anyone else here.”

  Over Lu’s shoulder, he could see his moms and Aaron making their way to him. Lu’s features now bore a look of incomprehension, and he shook his head a little, stuck his hand out, too. Caleb thought about apologizing for the Pukeboy shit but decided he’d wait for Lu to say something. Something about the lunchbox would be good. Or just “congratulations.” The head judge came over and gave Caleb a warm squeeze on the shoulder. Caleb looked up, thanked him, looked back at Lu, who seemed angry now. He grabbed Caleb’s hand and squeezed so hard that Caleb felt a pop.

  “Fuck you,” he said, and walked away.

  Caleb didn’t think of Lu again until five years later, when he read his obituary. Lu’s death had been a shooting death, the perpetrators “unknown,” and he was survived by his father (a mechanic) and his grandmother. By then Caleb and Aaron were living in the house with Jamal and JT—two levels, paint flaking off, growling heater. They were sitting smoking hand-rolled squares in front of the TV, Sabrina in Caleb’s lap and a bag of chips in Aaron’s, C-SPAN, which Sabrina was obsessed with, glowing bluish in front of them.

  Caleb threw the obituaries on Aaron’s lap and told him to read the one on the bottom right. Aaron did and then rolled his eyes and asked, “Are you surprised?”

  “I’m not surprised,” Caleb said. “Why would I be surprised?”

  “Surprised about what?” Sabrina asked, and then she grabbed the obituary, read it, too, and said, “That’s sad.” Caleb felt her warmth shift on his legs—she was lying with her head against the sofa’s arm—her ass teasing the inside of his thigh, and he bit his lower lip and shook his head, unwilling to make a scene about it. He put his hand over her stomach and felt her breathe. She was back to watching C-SPAN, the obituary on the floor beside her. Whatever desire he’d had to keep the Lu conversation going was erased by the rhythm of her breath, her little groans of disagreement whenever a Republican senator spoke.

  He would marry her, he was sure. He’d met her at their new school between Fairfax and Shaker. She was the top student in their grade, fine-featured with dreams of being a marine biologist. He wouldn’t have met her if he and Aaron hadn’t gone to live with Aunt Debbie and Dennis after their mom left for Dover, which he’d hated at first: the four of them crammed into that shitty condo in the weird Italian neighborhood, the whole place stinking of Dennis (combination tar, sweat, and rotten sour cream), having to say grace before dinner every night, the paint-smelling new school where neither of them knew anyone. Aaron had taken the move as an opportunity to start “building an empire,” drafting Caleb to help him sell fifteen-dollar dime bags to underclassmen who didn’t know what they were paying for. They pulled in two hundred dollars a week, they got reputations, Aaron got locs and dyed some of them gold, asked people to start calling him Hammer—he never explained the nickname, and Caleb let it go.

  The worst part about that time before Sabrina was the Nervousness, which Caleb told no one about. The Nervousness had come one day when he woke up before school, a feeling like a charley horse but in his mind, like one part of his thoughts strained and ached whenever accessed, but it was relentlessly accessed, and so his brain had no choice but to limp along struggling despite the straining and aching. The charley horse part of the thoughts was about him, who he’d been before, and how he was doomed to fail now. He’d once been the little kid who stood up onstage in the Tower City Center and claimed a division champ trophy, but that had been when Moms was around. Something like that wasn’t supposed to happen in the first place, the Nervousness told him. You were always worthless in that department. You know that, right? Just look around and the world will tell you that. And the world did: it’d been a fluke, he could see that. Maybe he’d studied some strategy books but he didn’t have the game in his blood, not like Magdalene, not like any of the others who won after him, white and suburban and described as “gifted” by the reporters who interviewed them. His math grades weren’t even that good. He needed to work his ass off to make anything
halfway decent happen—the world wasn’t built for him, and it was exhausting to push against that, like that Greek myth where Sisyphus had to roll the boulder up the hill. It was endless, it was heavy. The Nervousness assured him that he was still smart, but his confidence had just been misplaced. He was his father’s son. He was his brother’s brother. The best thing he could do would be to follow their lead. Follow their lead, stay in your lane, it told him. And though it ached to hear, Caleb began to see how it might be true.

  Then they had expanded from dime bags to benzos, which, he found, were an effective way to quell the Nervousness. Pop one and he felt the same but better and better, the kind of high you didn’t think existed until you were thinking about it, and the Nervousness was done messing with him for the next few hours. Pop two in the space of four hours and he could make that last half a day. It was a nice trick, although it did fuck with his grades. He spent his junior year happy like this, upping his dosage as necessary, ignoring Aaron’s weak threats to cut him off. And risk losing a business partner? Caleb had to laugh about that.

  He met her in the spring of their junior year, at a party where he was dropping some shit off. It was crowded and he could tell she didn’t belong there, had only come because she knew she needed to have some “fun,” was sitting bored on the ledge of a big, burnt-out fireplace with the grate missing while some guy talked to her and she tried to drink a beer. The guy throwing the party paid Caleb and invited him in, told him to play whatever he wanted on the stereo, and asked him when his brother was coming. Caleb pushed past the kid and dug through his music until he’d found something serviceable—Critical Beatdown by the Ultramagnetic MCs; because of this he still broke out in an excited sweat whenever he heard “Watch Me Now”—and waited until the talking asshole got up to get another beer before sitting down next to Sabrina.

  “Why you here?” he asked.