The Comedown

by Rebekah Frumkin

  What did she know about brothers, never having had one? The visit had been tense and nightmarish, Lee not at all the sweet, grinning, Cheeto-fingered dork from the pictures or her memory. He was angular, agitated, clearly high. He had sexually objectified her at dinner and then spent the rest of the time exchanging barbs with Leland, who ended the evening by bribing him to never contact them again. In the car on the way to the hotel, Leland had gloated while her back ached, and she had popped a hydrocodone and wondered if maybe he was right, he and everyone who was always telling her to be more skeptical of everyone, to watch for evil even among the less fortunate, to stop believing everything happened for a reason.

  He had wanted to have sex when they got back to the hotel and she had felt like she owed it to him. She had told him to give her a second and went into the bathroom. She splashed her face with water and then sat on the ground between the sink and the toilet and cried. As she did this, she thought of the past decade of her life—the four-hour board meetings that she clock-watched like a high school kid, the bewildering and frequently alienating sex she and Leland were having, had been having for longer than she cared to admit, the steady evaporation of all the Molière quotes she’d lovingly stockpiled in her memory, the lonely moments on vacation when she woke up to find he’d gone running without her, all the too-human-smelling panhandlers she’d avoided making eye contact with in the Loop, all the excuses she’d given for taking sick and personal days, her father’s aging voice on the phone. She tried to cry quietly but couldn’t: she sobbed instead and couldn’t stop shaking. Then Leland was there with her on the floor in his boxers, holding her by the shoulders and saying her name.

  “Babe,” he said when she didn’t respond. “I’m here.”

  She nodded, put her hands over her eyes.

  “I’m here if you need to talk.”

  “I think I’m just coming down with something,” she said through grunts and sniffles.

  “You’re sick?” He felt her forehead.

  “No, I mean—I just feel nervous.”

  “Anxious?”

  “Yeah.”

  He stood and left the bathroom, came back with an amber pill bottle. He squatted and flashed the label at her.

  “Ativan,” he said. “A friend of mine from work didn’t need the rest of his prescription.”

  Another “friend of mine from work.” He had so many friends of his from work who were willing to let him take their anxiety meds and pain pills: that’s how she’d first gotten hydrocodone. These same friends from work were the guys who went out in a pack to party on JägerThursdays, who made her husband sick with their stamina. She accepted a proffered pill, drank from the metallic-tasting glass he’d filled at the bathroom sink. Without prompting, she asked for and took a second one. They sat there together for a few minutes in silence and she watched him scratch his stubble. She was thankful for him. Here was one reasonable person in a mass of unreasonableness. Here was the man who held the key to her future.

  Later, they had sex on the bathroom floor. She showered and slept, the glow of his laptop sneaking into her dreams.

  She was a little hungover from the Ativan as they drove to Cisco Drugs the next morning. They didn’t talk about the dinner with Lee. Instead, Leland crowed about what a success Dithalmithor/teraflin was, how the trip to Cisco was less a corporate pulse-taking than a confirmation of his wizardry. He’d nudged Jocelyn awake at six o’clock and admitted that he’d been up since four, too excited to get a full night’s sleep.

  “There are a ton of kids out there slitting their wrists because of rapid cycling mood disorders,” he told her with confidence in the car, driving several ticks above the speed limit. “And Cisco somehow got this patent—it was like a German patent, a drug synthesized at the Freie Universität.”

  She nodded, noting that he hadn’t shaved that morning. Was he talking faster than usual? She put on her sunglasses, rubbed her temples.

  “Whatever genius got this patent, congratufuckinglations to him and gravy for Winn Maxwell.”

  “Kids slitting their wrists?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Childhood suicide’s climbing. Kids get thrown in mental hospitals, get stuck on lithium, hate lithium, beg to go off, go off, kill themselves. Really, really sick kids. And then you have anxious bedwetters, you have depressed loners who’ve already made attempts, you have people looking for an atypical antipsychotic that won’t cause their child to gain weight or put them at risk for diabetes, et cetera.”

  “It’s so hard to imagine,” she said. “It feels like something different from when adults do it.”

  He wiped his nose on his windbreaker. “I know.”

  Cisco was headquartered in a dome-like building made of highly reflective green glass in the city center—it hurt her eyes to look at it. Most of the PR department was composed of fresh-pressed, neatly bearded kids who Jocelyn guessed were all very recent liberal arts graduates. The kid who met them in the lobby was blond and chiseled, the kind of boy Jocelyn’s mother would’ve approved of instantly. She forgot his name right after he said it, flashed instead on Leland’s sleep-puffed and compassionate face last night. When she paid attention again, she saw the kid was wearing a Harvard Crimson pin. It shone as he spoke.

  “As you can see, Cisco is committed to recruiting the best and the brightest.” Harvard was now leading them across an observation deck, below which were men and women in lab coats and goggles, most of them sitting on high swivel chairs and flipping through dense texts. Only one of them was actually working with scientific equipment of any sort—a beaker and some kind of stand.

  “This is the very lab in which teraflin was synthesized after we purchased the patent,” Harvard said. “Dr. Hommeyer tweaked one hydroxy chain and—boom!—Dithalmithor.”

  “Amazing,” Leland said, and put his arm around Jocelyn.

  “Mr. Campbell will be meeting with you in the boardroom,” Harvard said to Leland. He looked at Jocelyn. “Your wife is welcome to attend.”

  “Do you want to, Joss? You can wait outside if you’d like.”

  A numb cog, Jocelyn told him she’d like to attend. She watched the technician remove the beaker from the stand, rearrange it, replace it. “Which receptors does Dithalmithor act on?” she asked Harvard.

  Harvard seemed taken aback. “That’s a great question, Mrs. Bloom-Mittwoch.”

  “I’m Ms. Woodward.”

  “Right! Sorry.” He followed her gaze downward to the struggling technician, who seemed to have gotten things in place, and was now adding what looked like grainy salt to the beaker under the supervision of another technician. “So it’s not really something we know for certain. I mean, we know for certain that it doesn’t work like normal SSRIs and SARIs, and that it does actually tend to block dopamine pathways, like clozapine, which you may know as Clorazil.”

  She nodded, though she was certainly out of her depth.

  “Right. So those dopamine blockers can have a lot of negative side effects: tardive dyskinesia, cardiac difficulties, stroke, et cetera. Dithalmithor’s got none of that—we know because we’ve been testing it for years now. That’s why we think it’s doing something else besides dopamine inhibition.”

  He paused, and she sensed a cockiness in his gaze.

  “It’s a magic bullet,” she said.

  “That’s right, Ms. Woodward. Everyone’s prescribing it.” He touched a slim Bluetooth that she just now realized he’d been wearing. “Looks like Mr. Campbell will be seeing you both. Right this way.”

  They rode up in the elevator, Leland making small talk with Harvard about his education, his clubs, his sports. Right as they were getting out, Harvard turned to her and asked, “I’m sorry, but have we met before?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just—your name, your face—maybe our families have met before?”

  “Our families? Where would our families have met?”

  He backed off, stung. “I don’t know—you just seem so fam
iliar, and I remember the name Woodward.”

  “Maybe you guys are distant cousins!” Leland offered, and she couldn’t tell if he was joking.

  Harvard didn’t acknowledge this, just nodded politely and left them with the CFO’s secretary. The wait was long enough for Jocelyn to turn pointedly to Leland and say, “When I was a kid, he was probably in diapers. Or not even born.”

  Leland bark-laughed. “Seriously? We’re not that old.”

  She said nothing.

  “Are you feeling better?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you still agitated from last night?” He squeezed her arm—too tight. “Lee seems to have a really awful effect on people.”

  The secretary told them they could head in. Dean Campbell, CFO of Cisco Drugs, big-bellied and pink skinned, was sitting at the head of a giant conference table. Leland shook his hand enthusiastically.

  “And this is my wife, Jocelyn. She’s an ad executive at Lefébvre in Chicago. I hope you don’t mind if she sits in. I brought her along for good luck.”

  “Ah, good!” Campbell said. “Pleased to meet you!”

  She watched him eye her ass as he pulled a chair from the table to seat her.

  “Mr. Campbell,” Leland began. “Winn Maxwell is more than excited to capitalize on this investment. We’re so thrilled with Dithalmithor. I for one could barely pay attention on the tour, I was so dazzled by your facilities.”

  Campbell chuckled wetly. “Well, I hope you paid some attention—we’ve got state-of-the-art equipment here.”

  “Oh! Haha! Of course!”

  “I paid attention,” Jocelyn said, and for some reason this made both men laugh.

  Leland leaned toward Campbell conspiratorially. “We’ve got something golden here, don’t we?” He began drumming his fingers on the table.

  “Yes,” Campbell said. “Absolutely. It’s remarkable, isn’t it?”

  Leland said nothing but continued drumming his fingers. A few seconds went by. The drumming grew louder, more noticeable. Campbell looked at Jocelyn. She looked at Leland. Leland was still looking at Campbell, drumming his fingers.

  “Mr. Bloom-Mittwoch?” Campbell asked.

  “Leland?” Jocelyn said. A surge of guilt shot through her. She leaned forward and tried to catch her husband’s eye. But his face was vacant, she could see that his pupils almost entirely covered his irises. “Babe?”

  Campbell looked at her, obviously embarrassed by the shift in the room. “Is he broken?” he joked. He leaned forward and spoke to Leland as if he were deaf. “Mr. Bloom-Mittwoch? Are you all right?”

  Jocelyn pressed herself to Leland’s side and whispered in his ear: “Leland. Babe? What’s wrong?”

  Leland jumped momentarily in his seat, which made both Jocelyn and Campbell jump as well. And before they knew what was happening, they heard a low growl, a sound that seemed subhuman. He leaned back far in his chair and released one loud bark and then another.

  “Leland!” Jocelyn screamed.

  His chair tipped over and the back of his head hit the ground with a terrifying smack, and now something was coming out of his mouth, foaming saliva, and then his face went slack, and then the rest of him, and he shook like there was a high-voltage current going through him.

  “He’s having a seizure!” Campbell shouted, halfway out of his seat. “Get his tongue!”

  Jocelyn wrestled Leland’s wallet out of his back pocket—slim enough, Italian leather—and stuck it in his mouth. His pupils expanded further. She turned to Campbell.

  “Get someone in here!” she yelled at him. “Call the police!”

  Campbell sped from the room, shouting for his secretary. Jocelyn held Leland’s shaking, sputtering head in her lap. She whispered to him, “Help will come, babe. We’ll get through this. We’ll get past this. I’m really sorry. I’m sorry about last night. Please try and stay still.”

  And then he locked eyes with her. He let out a wallet-choked scream and punched her in the jaw.

  NETTA MARSHALL, NÉE BAROCHIN

  (1980–)

  1985–1990

  Chicago

  When Netta was ten, an old man’s pocket watch fell off its fob and onto the street and Netta picked it up, said excuse me excuse me and ran to him. He took it from her, looked at it and thanked her, hooked it onto the fat, snaky chain again, and walked away from her, and she watched from behind him as it swung back and forth, back and forth with every step, swung until it snapped right off the chain and fell on its face and cracked. Netta called hey so the old man would hear and he turned around and looked down. He was old enough that it showed all over his face—the corners of his eyes and mouth, his flappy ears, his lumpy nose—and she felt bad for him. He was the kind of person she was supposed to respect, but she probably already knew more than he did about the way the world was.

  He stooped down low to pick up the watch, and when he stood he wobbled a little and had to take a step back. From the side, he was skinny but still strong, she could tell. The man’s suit was black-gray, or black-blue—it bothered her that she couldn’t tell the color, that never happened. The old man turned the broken watch over in his hands, pushed the little pieces of glass on the ground with his foot. Then he tilted his head up to the sky and wailed, wailed so hard and loud as he shouted a name—Marissa. Or Melissa? She couldn’t tell. Netta ran away.

  At home in her room she drew him. She put knobs at his elbows and knees and made his beard a little longer. She drew a second version of him where he wore a bowler hat. She made his nose smoother than it had been. Under the drawing she gave him a name—Marlon—and his birthdate according to the angle of his stoop: 2/15/30. Behind him she drew a little far-off square of blue that was supposed to be Lake Michigan. In his hands the watch became a toy, then a baby doll, then a limp-looking baby body, and he arched his mantis back and howled, and she wrote Marissa Melissa! coming out of his mouth.

  The last and best picture she drew of him was so gross and sad that she jammed it in the sliding drawer in her desk so she wouldn’t have to look at it. She thought she’d probably get in trouble if her mother found it, would be made to say one of her poems: “No evil thoughts in my mind, no wicked bindings in my heart, no intentions ill-devised, a pure home awaits a world apart,” or “Speak not for the dead in me, the time to heal is long since passed; mine is the tongue of righteousness, mine is heaven’s soul alone, at last.” If Netta asked her where the poems came from, her mother’s lower lip swelled and her eyes got mean and she said, “From me! Where else?”

  Her grandma had died when Netta was four and her mother got sick right after. Before she got sick her mother had been a nurse and made good money. Netta’s father was a Spanish teacher and a translator and made less money than her mother. He told Netta he had no idea where her mother had gotten the nurse gene, especially considering her own mother’s hatred of modern medicine. That had been how Netta’s grandma died: denying a big knot of cancer in her brain, refusing to see doctors, ignoring everyone’s insistence that she check herself into a hospital.

  She had shaken her head, her eyes weak and wandering, and said she’d leave as she was intended to leave. For the last few weeks of her life she sat in a big chair in the corner of their TV room, singing to herself and praising Netta’s baby crayon drawings and sipping rumless cremas through a plastic straw. She died in that chair, Netta’s mother watching from the opposite side of the room as she took her last breath. That day, by the time Netta woke from her afternoon nap, the men had already come to take her grandma’s body away.

  Netta believed her grandma’s spirit was in the water, in the sea somewhere, or in a glossy puddle, or in the faucet’s cough-cough-gush. Her grandma being in the water made her mother very sick. When her grandma’s body was taken away, Netta’s mother sat in a corner on the ground and didn’t move for two days. After that she moved into the bedroom, where she stayed for a week. Netta listened to her talk with her father, their low adult tones,
sounds that swelled and contracted in her ears like a frog’s throat. After a week, her mother came out of the bedroom and sat for almost a whole day in the big chair, then called Netta’s uncle to help her move it out of the house.

  The next day she went back to work and held Netta in her lap like she always did and made up little stories and rhymes for her about a dragon whose mouth the fire on the stove came from or the tiny wind fairies who turned the blades of the fan. During the stories, Netta leaned back as she always did and closed her eyes and saw the colors that described her mother: her voice was peach, though her personality was more yellow, and now she was saying “dare,” whose first letter was cocoa brown, and now she was saying “baby,” which would be pale green if not for the y on the end, which made it turquoise. Her mother’s heaving breath—the breath of a busy woman, an important woman—had no color to it, but the feeling of it on her cheek was a deep mauve, a color she’d learned about from a book Grandma bought her called All the Colors in the World. Deep mauve in, deep mauve out. Netta dozed while her mother told the stories, seeing the colors and feeling comforted by the way her mother flipped through magazines when she held her in her lap—not bored, just capable.

  Then one day her mother was telling a story when her body went stiff, which made Netta go stiff, too. It was a Saturday morning, which meant her father was giving Spanish lessons. Her story that day had been about talking flowers, so when she said, “Did you hear that?” Netta had laughed with relief and said, “It’s a dandelion saying hello!” But her mother had said nothing in response.

  “Listen!” she said, and Netta sensed something wild in her voice, something her mother clearly couldn’t control. “Stop it!”

  Netta stopped moving in hopes that she was the one her mother had been speaking to, but she knew with a white-hot dread that this wasn’t true. Her mother pushed her off her lap and began walking toward the window, batting her hand in front of her face and shouting, “Stop!” She turned and looked at Netta and her eyes were dark and flat and gray. Netta screamed and ran to her room.