The Comedown

  “Why am I here?” she asked back softly. “I got lucky. The better question is why’re you talking to me?”

  Caleb shrugged and blushed warm at the idea that she thought of him as occupying a social register higher than her own. She had the kind of mind that he could feel working from a distance: uncompromising and observant.

  “You’re beautiful,” he offered.

  She shook her head and laughed, snorted a little.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “It’s okay.” She was still laughing. “It’s just really direct.”

  “I like to be direct,” Caleb said, though he didn’t.

  When they began dating, she set herself up as a counterpoint to the Nervousness, insisting that he was a talented critical thinker and should apply to Axel Renfroe with her. But he knew that wasn’t going to be possible—there’d been the whole thing with his moms and his grandpa, plus his grades had gone to shit. She scanned his report cards and said they weren’t that bad, some Bs and Cs, but still plenty of As and A-minuses. He told her the only thing he’d been good at was chess, and that was math, so he’d probably have to major in math and how could he do that if he was making a borderline C-plus/B-minus?

  “I could help you!” she said. “You could have it up to an A-minus by the end of the semester!”

  Whenever she said something like this once they were together, the Nervousness shot a dark, inky substance into his brain that made his stomach clench. He smiled and told her he loved her, started kissing her neck, and soon she was sighing and forgetting—or choosing to forget—about the whole conversation. He managed this for almost three years, long after they’d graduated and she’d started at Axel Renfroe and he’d moved into the house with Aaron, Jamal, and JT, expanded their operation, started working some odd jobs. He’d done it again the night before Lu’s obituary ran, the Nervousness held back by a snorted milligram and some pulls from Aaron’s piece.

  “I want you to meet my parents,” she said, a hand on his chest. “I want you to play my dad in chess.”

  Caleb laughed. “I wanna get married to you,” he said.

  But instead of nodding and kissing him she turned onto her back and looked at the ceiling. “Then you’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  A lot of work to do. Caleb didn’t like remembering that sentence, especially now that they’d all been talking about Lu’s death. The TV still droning, Aaron finished the bag of chips and said he was going to leave them alone, gave Sabrina a hug good-bye—he was already treating her like a sister-in-law—and wandered out the front door. They stayed watching C-SPAN for a few minutes after he left, then she looked up at him and smiled, said, “I’ve been waiting for this all day.”

  With more force than he’d anticipated, she sprang to her feet, straddled him, pulled off his shirt. She was wet as hell through her tights: he could feel it on his leg. But he held it together. Undressed her, held her waist as she enveloped him, shuddered, suppressed a groan as Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell droned on in the background about school vouchers. Soon he lost all hearing, sight, and touch that was not in some way related to her pliant body, forgot that it was nighttime in the fall in Cleveland in the United States on earth, inhabited a world that was just Sabrina, just her uptilted head and her parted lips and her involuntary noises, and then saw the inside of his skull, saw stripes of color, saw his future with her.

  She left two hours later and didn’t call the next day, which was unlike her. She didn’t call for a week and didn’t answer his calls. Several nights in with no call from her, not even four fat benzo rails could put him to sleep, could keep his heart from making a dent in his chest whenever he thought about her. He biked past her parents’ house but didn’t dare knock on the door. He biked past Axel Renfroe at eleven o’clock, two o’clock, five o’clock and never saw her. Aaron said she was fucking with him, testing his loyalty, and that she’d be back. He said he was surprised she hadn’t pulled some shit like this sooner. Sleepless, Caleb called in sick to the drugstore twice. She finally called after ten days, her voice thick.

  “Have you given it any thought?” she asked.

  Relieved to hear her voice, he wanted to say yes, but he had no idea what he’d be agreeing to. “Given what thought?”

  “The work you need to do?”

  “Yes!” And when she remained silent he felt anger closing his throat. “Yes, but what the fuck? You disappear so I’ll do anything for you?”

  She was still silent.

  “What work is it I need to do?” he asked, exasperated. “Be respectable? Go to college? Start making real money?”

  “I missed my period last week,” she said. “I’m gonna take the test tomorrow. You have to promise me you’ll make some changes. Then we can get married.”

  Holy shit, said the Nervousness, upset for the first time in its life. You fucked up. Caleb’s brain found a way to speak more clearly than he had in a long time.

  “I love you,” he said. “I’ll make whatever changes you want.”

  She came over the next day red-eyed, the pregnancy test in her purse (negative). She told him her mother had seen the test and ordered her to break up with him or else she’d stop paying for college. She held him and said she loved him and would always love him and that she’d send letters. She told him please not to cry and left.

  The Nervousness had never been happier. I fucking told you, man! What did I tell you? What did I tell you? You shoulda listened to me, because you’re in some deep shit now. But Caleb had listened to the Nervousness, had followed its rules, and the one good thing about his life had gone away. Well, good point, the Nervousness said. Maybe it’s just that you didn’t follow the rules right. The rules in your own motherfucking head. Maybe now you gotta die.

  Tall, quiet Jamal was the one who’d found him sobbing powder-nosed on the floor and went upstairs to get JT, who, upon seeing his sad state, made him a banana-and-peanut-butter sandwich and poured him a shot of whiskey. Aaron got home and said, “What the fuck happened here?” Caleb listened to the gulps and warbles of their conversation like it was coming at him through a lead wall. Aaron sat down at Caleb’s feet and said he needed to get fucked up, pulled Caleb into a sitting position, and poured four more shots.

  Some time passed—too much, according to the Nervousness—and Aaron announced they were going down to the flats by the river. Someone got Caleb’s arms into his coat and said, “Shit, man, just stand up.” Caleb stood, and the room rotated a few inches ahead of his vision. That’s all right, the Nervousness said, voice sharp through the fog. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

  JT said he was the least drunk so he drove and blasted P-Funk in the deck, parents’ music. They parked and Caleb got out, buoyed by the car’s momentum, running up the side of a giant pile of gravel above which was poised the yawning mouth of a hydraulic excavator. Pebbles at his hands and feet came dislodged, rolled away from him. You need to get higher up, the Nervousness said.

  He turned around and slid down the side of the pile, everyone on the ground asking what the fuck he was doing. Then he ran ahead of them toward the Innerbelt Bridge. Yes, the Nervousness said. Now you’re thinking right for once. He was starting to sober up as he ran but that didn’t matter—it was useful, even. Climb up that motherfucking sand, it said. If you’re good for one thing in the world, it’s to climb up that motherfucking sand and get on top of that bridge.

  Caleb climbed, the world around him silenced except for the blunt, deep sound of Aaron’s shouting. He jumped from the top of the sand pile to the top of the bridge leg and began climbing up the steel gridwork. He felt like Spider-Man. He was Spider-Man. This is gonna be the greatest moment of your pathetic life, promised the Nervousness. And it won’t even be downhill after this, it’ll just be nothing. He climbed.

  He was almost on top of the bridge, looking down and behind him at the Cuyahoga, cars rattling the pavement above him, seeing for the first time in what felt like a year the desperate-looking
ant faces of Jamal and JT jumping and waving. Aaron’s voice from somewhere closer: “I’m gonna kill you, you stupid motherfucker! You jump, you dead!” He put his head to the steel like he was praying, hearing the Nervousness say Too late to back out now. This has to be it. If you don’t go through with this, I don’t know what I’ll do. “Probably something bad,” Caleb whispered. “Something really bad.” And there surged from the depths of his memory his father’s funeral, six-year-old Aaron punching him in the jaw, Moms cooking sweet potatoes. He pushed himself from the gridwork and fell.

  Until he snagged. His hand snagged on something, his wrist popped and strained. He looked up and there was Aaron clinging to the gridwork, heaving and sweating, grabbing him by the hand. From behind gritted teeth he hissed “Asshole” and “Crazy motherfucker.” Then he swung Caleb toward the gridwork and yelled at him to grab on or they’d both die, and did his crazy ass really want to be responsible for killing himself and his brother? Caleb hit the gridwork once, twice, his nose bloodied, his brain cleared, and the Nervousness said, Well, what the fuck is it gonna be? And Caleb grabbed on.

  They never spoke about that happening—the way Aaron acted, it was like it never happened. Caleb bandaged up his nose and did his night shift at the drugstore the next day, threw himself into his other work the day after. Caleb wrote a letter to his moms—he resolved to write at least once a week. She wrote back: I miss you both and am looking forward to Christmas. She always was. Each year it seems the faculty gets more progressive—my eyes are further opened to social issues of great importance. I can easily see you teaching here, or at some other fine college, one day in your future. Cowed by recent events, the Nervousness didn’t dare speak, but Caleb still kept the benzos coming in the event that it did.

  One day, in addition to the usual lavender-scented letter from his moms, he got a package. There was no return address, and the sender had shaky handwriting. He cut the box open and under the flaps of cardboard was a note balanced on top of layers of tissue paper. The note said You have great potential. Go to college. Leland Bloom-Mittwoch Sr. Caleb smirked. He never forgot a name. That white guy his moms used to sleep with.

  Aaron hated him, but Caleb mostly pitied him—he was an aging addict who was clearly losing his mind. What the hell would this guy want with him now? Leland Bloom-Mittwoch was supposed to be in California or some shit, someplace crazy people with no money went to pretend they could “make it.” He snorted laughter through his damaged nose, quietly thanked this clown for intruding in his life again, providing some much-needed levity. Then he dug beneath the tissue paper and found ten thousand dollars in unmarked bills.

  May 8, 2009

  Chicago

  At eight forty-five in the morning Caleb Marshall had just debarked a bus on Chicago’s West Side, having recently flown in from Cleveland to meet with an unusual client. Now he was looking at the blind kid who stood across the street from him. The blind kid—midteens, head-twitchy—seemed to be watching the traffic with his ears. He was unaccompanied. He was too young to drive, which—that was stupid, Caleb knew. He was obviously younger than sixteen and he was alone and unsupervised. Caleb produced a bottle of Xanax from his pocket, shook out a pill, swallowed it, and watched him.

  The lights changed and the crosswalk man lit up and there came a rhythmic beeping from overhead that Caleb had heard before but had never bothered to contextualize. The blind kid heard it and produced a retractable white cane from his pocket, which he magicked open with a flick of his wrist. He began to cross. Caleb crossed as well. He watched the kid approach him. It was clear by the way the kid moved (semifluid, confident, with only some hesitation) and his reluctant use of the cane that he had not been blind since birth. The kid tapped past Caleb and Caleb craned his head to look behind him. He watched the kid find his way onto the curb and retract his cane.

  Caleb crossed the street and re-rechecked his watch. It was now eight forty-nine and he was standing in front of the Rush University Medical Center, where, inside, Leland Bloom-Mittwoch Jr. was waiting in the psychiatric ward. Caleb hated Chicago, its segregationist North-South binary, the mirrored surfaces of its well-oiled downtown, its permanently fucked criminal justice system. He’d won none of the cases he’d taken on in the city, and all of them had been about the wrongful conviction of black juveniles in South Side shootings. He regarded the steel face of the university and thought about places he’d rather live if he didn’t live in Cleveland. The Bay Area was his first choice: one of his biggest regrets was that he hadn’t stayed longer when he had the chance. His second choice was a Massachusetts island near the Cape Cod Bay, someplace where he could wear dyed sheep’s wool sweaters and learn how to fish. The only thing keeping him in the Midwest was inertia. Inertia and what psychotherapists would probably call a savior complex. He wasn’t afraid of admitting to it. Better to be a savior than a sociopath. He should have that embroidered on a throw pillow someday. He laughed and then hung his head as he approached the hospital.

  He pushed through the front doors and was greeted by a smiling receptionist at a wide desk. She was young—early twenties, unplucked eyebrows—with glasses and rosy cheeks. She’d been writing something with a pen that appeared to be made of the same material as the building’s facade, and now she stood at attention, holding the pen with both hands, nodding pleasantly as he approached.

  At the front desk of the Adult Psychiatric Unit, Caleb was told Leland Jr. was in group therapy and that he could wait in the waiting area. He assented, surrendered his briefcase and cell phone, and followed a nurse to the waiting area. And there she was, sitting in the chair closest to the single, trapezoidal window. Unchanged since the funeral, mostly. She’d gotten bangs—that was the biggest difference. Her eyes didn’t bear even the suggestion of crow’s feet. Her mouth was unlined. When she saw him, she sprung up from her chair and hugged him. He shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was. Was this okay?

  Jocelyn held him at arm’s length and smiled. She told him he looked good. He shrugged and said he tried his best. He twitched out of her grasp and held her hands in his, then let go of them as if expecting a reprimand. He asked how she was doing. Now he could see the shadow of a massive bruise on the left side of her chin, blooming up ugly and fearsome beneath her concealer. Watching his eyes, she touched it and nodded. She said she was doing as well as she could be given the circumstances.

  “He got a diagnosis of bipolar when we were in college,” she said, looking out the window behind her, “but he didn’t tell anyone except for me, and he never took the medication, and he’s never had an episode since.”

  Caleb sighed. This would’ve been helpful information to know a week ago when he’d agreed to take the case. He looked back at Jocelyn, who now seemed shrunken and unappealing to him, inexperienced in defending herself in court. Or anywhere, really. He was reminded of Maggie, a girl he’d dated during his first year at the firm: she was small, like Jocelyn, an Oberlin graduate, nonprofit employee, child of professionals. The kind of white girl social justice princess he, a few years earlier, would’ve tortured with requests to say the N-word “for him” (he himself had written it out of his vocabulary years ago, a move he doubted Aaron would respect), delighting in her guilty squeamishness. Whenever he had spent holidays with her, the entire family used to crow about how good they looked together. Maggie had been fond of saying, “Everything happens for a reason.” Which, he should’ve pointed out, was patently false. There was no reason for a six-year-old girl to be raped by her father or a fourteen-year-old boy to be shot by a twenty-five-year-old man: shit like that just happened, needed to happen, in fact, so the system could remain intact and smooth-running, so Maggie could go to a good school and “explore her interests,” could get a nice, “impactful” job. If all Maggie’s things happened for a reason, then all of Jocelyn’s things certainly did, too.

  “What caused the diagnosis?” he asked.

  She looked back at the window, still hedging.

 
“What was it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “One night in the dorm—well, he came to my dorm, which was actually on the other side of campus from his.”

  Caleb let out a sharp exhale of breath, tried far too late to soften it.

  “Keep on going,” he said.

  She looked at him.

  “Joss, you know I told you to tell me everything potentially injurious to your case.”

  She nodded energetically. “Yes, I know,” she said. “But it’s honestly such a small thing that I really didn’t see it even being a part of whatever came up with the lawsuit. The doctors said this is paranoid schizophrenia, not a trace of bipolar.”

  “This constitutes a history of mental illness, though. It means he should’ve been taking meds and Lee had nothing to do with it.”

  She waved her hand at him as if at a bad smell. “He came to my dorm, I remember it was in the middle of the night, and it was on a Thursday his senior year at the beginning of the winter quarter. So I hadn’t seen him for two days, which makes sense, because he was working on his senior thesis that quarter and always worked straight through the middle of the week. Oh, I forgot to say this—his roommate called me and told me Leland hadn’t been asleep in two nights—”

  Caleb shook his head and snorted. It was almost a little funny how much this fucked things up. He’d been talking with her for a week about Leland and his case and she just remembered all this now? She probably expected him to absorb the information and bury it. He imagined himself a gardener in her front yard, tossing dirt on her evidence while she looked on through the bay window.

  “—he hadn’t been asleep for a while, I guess, but I guess I just assumed he was working really hard, forgoing sleep for work, and the roommate made this little noise like ‘mmh’ and said if I knew anything that calmed him down, I should speak up. Like he was trying to get advice out of me, because Leland was walking around his room.”

  “Pacing?”

  Jocelyn swung to the side, hugged her shoulders, and shrugged, all of which left her looking cranelike. She was obviously still dedicated to keeping herself thin, hadn’t changed at all since he’d first seen her at Leland’s funeral ten years ago. She was someone who had spent, as he had, a lifetime contorting herself to meet the expectations of a dominant culture. To him, the pattern of worry on her face was recognizable: he’d also worn the purple smudges he now saw under her eyes, the active culture of blackheads circling her chin, her inflamed and bleeding gums.