The Comedown

  Tarz introduced himself as “Lee’s best friend” and made some small talk with Jocelyn. Lee locked eyes with Leland Jr. and did something he hoped looked like a smirk. Leland Jr., his face receding down a dark tunnel, his eyebrows like a badger’s, crossed his arms and didn’t move. Lee imagined him holding this pose in a coffin: he imagined his eyes still open in mad little scalene triangles. Serves you right, motherfucker, he thought. You don’t just steal from a kid.

  Then Tarz was gone and it was just Jocelyn and Leland Jr., who was rubbing his scalene triangles with his thumb and forefinger.

  “Leland’s really tired,” Jocelyn said to Lee, nervous-smiling. “He was up early this morning. And you know how much he works.”

  Lee nodded. Her words had an evanescent echo.

  Jocelyn started fishing around in her purse. She pulled out a piece of paper on which she’d written something. She held it up, considering it, and beatific rays of light shot out from it.

  “Have you heard of Toscana?” she asked.

  “Yeah, of course,” Lee said.

  “Okay, so you wouldn’t mind eating there?”

  “It’s the only decent-looking place around here,” Leland Jr. said in a weird baritone.

  “You’re looking really nice,” Jocelyn said to Lee. “You clean up well, my friend.”

  They got in the car and Lee realized that the trip had only just begun, that the shrooms were clearly stepped on. Jocelyn was asking him quaint things from the front seat. Stuff like “How was your trimester?” “What classes did you take?”

  Leland Jr.’s eyes were in the rearview mirror. “So you’re going back home this week?” He asked this as if it was a reasonable thing for the two of them to talk about.

  “Yeah,” Lee said, meeting his stare. “They don’t close the dorms down officially until Wednesday. Midterms just ended I think on Sunday. So we have like today to kind of get stuff together. Get stuff arranged for departure.”

  This was a longer answer than Lee had intended to give. He watched Leland Jr. react to it. “Do you talk to your mom a lot during the school year?”

  “Yeah. I mean she calls every so often.”

  “Hm.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” Jocelyn said.

  Leland Jr. did a hard sniff and then said, “Yeah, it is.”

  “She’s still at OfficeMax,” Lee said.

  “Really?” Jocelyn said, leaning over until Lee saw her eyes in the rearview mirror with Leland Jr.’s.

  Leland Jr.’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

  “She likes it there.” This conversation really should’ve been harder to have, but on drugs it felt just like straight-up autobiography. “I mean, she’s really well liked there. She’s working really hard, and it’s really paying off for everyone. It shows in how she talks, too. I can pretty much hear her smiling over the phone.”

  There was a silence, and he knew he’d given a problematic answer. Up until now he’d been doing a brilliant mimic of a sober person. “Well, yeah, the phone smile is immaterial,” he said, unable to stop. “I guess it’s really the work that’s what matters.”

  This was the Fat Man of sentences. The car was funeral-silent. Then Jocelyn said: “Are you doing better? You seemed pretty freaked out when I talked to you earlier today.”

  Then it made sense. Leland Jr.’s gaze. Had been at his pupils. He was suspicious. He was doing some detective work. Of course he was. That e-mail, those heritable assets, were sitting all dense and petty in the air between them.

  “Oh yeah,” Lee said. “Sorry. That was just a really bad connection.”

  At Toscana they went around the table submitting their orders to a Boswellian waiter with no chin and big eyebrows. Lee was no longer capable of the high-level paranoia that would have convinced him the waiter wanted to administer a drug test. He just smiled at everyone. Something great is going to happen, he kept thinking. The setting and the people in Toscana couldn’t have been more perfect. It felt like an exclusive club with its dim lights and red velvet drapes, and Jocelyn and Leland Jr. looked like a viscountess and her creepy viscount after a long day of hunting. The whole thing was very lush and restrained, very bourgeois-European. He felt like he was in Rules of the Game, a movie he’d once watched with Diedre on VHS when, one year, there had been nothing else to do on Christmas Eve. He had the idea to text Tarz about it even though Tarz would never get the reference. Well, but this was older than Rules of the Game, this was like Tolstoy territory. He took out his phone and discovered he had three Tarz-texts awaiting him:

  fuuuckkk amazing visuals

  so, in conclusion, all is dank and to all a good night

  y/n: I will either go to Heaven soon or prob hell?

  Lee texted back: heaven. Then, before he knew what he meant: ur heaven.

  Here we go. This was going to start off blunt. He turned to Jocelyn, resisted the urge to take her hand in his and kiss it, and said, like Karenin pretending to be a passionate Frenchman: “I hope my brother realizes what a privilege it is to be married to you.”

  Jocelyn put a hand to her blanched bosom.

  “I’m not your brother,” blurted Leland Jr., stroking the demonic beard he’d just sprouted.

  Lee leaned forward. He recalled one of Tarz’s mantras: Life is a series of minibosses and death is the final boss.

  “Death is the final boss,” Lee quipped, and laughed.

  Jocelyn did her best to laugh along. Leland Jr. remained in a stormy humor, stroking his beard, his fist around a diamond cane.

  “I’m sorry—I must’ve read that somewhere,” Lee demurred. “Or made it up entirely. I don’t remember. ‘That person that I was— / And this One—do not feel the same / Could it be Madness—this?’”

  “Oh!” exclaimed Jocelyn-as-viscountess. “Dickinson?”

  “The very same.” Lee felt for the baggie in his left pocket. “Not impressed?” he asked Leland Jr., who leaned forward and glowered across the table. “Am I a thorn in your foot, brother? Is Diedre a thorn in your foot? Is Dad a thorn in your foot?” Leland Jr.’s face hardened. “You’ve got a thorny foot, bro.”

  Leland Jr. breathed in deeply, as he’d likely been instructed to do in whatever anger management seminar Jocelyn probably had him taking.

  “Are you angry about Dad throwing himself off a roof and loving me more?” Lee politely inquired.

  Leland Jr. turned with a neck-snapping motion to his wife and gestured at Lee. The viscountess continued to clutch her pale bosom.

  “I’ve about had it with your fucking antics,” Leland Jr. hiss-whispered. “You are not my brother, and I owe you nothing.”

  “What?” Lee made like he was hard of hearing.

  “He stole my life to build yours, you ungrateful twat. And everything he tried to give you was gonna get snorted up your nose, anyway. Everything in that sad little house of yours. Like father, like son.”

  “Okay, Leland—” Jocelyn started to say. “Not right now. Not like this.”

  “No, no!” protested Lee, the very picture of equanimity. “Do go on, Leland. I’m curious to hear!”

  “Why the fuck are you talking like that?” the viscount asked, rudely breaking the fourth wall. Lee ignored it, maintaining his own gentlemanly composure as the light in the room pulsed in his peripheral vision.

  “Stop swearing,” Jocelyn said.

  “I’m doing it quietly!”

  Scandal, Lee thought.

  “I have no interest in using my mother’s money to fund your drug problem. It’s a miracle you made it to college, Lee.”

  “I’m flattered!”

  Leland Jr. tried to physically brush this sentence off like one would a gnat, rapidly adjusting the front of his still-buttoned waistcoat. “But you’re going to piss this away if you’re anything like your father, and I’m going to do you a favor by not being a party to it.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Jocelyn exclaimed, a distressed and delicate hand across her pale brow.

  “I’ll p
ay you a thousand dollars to never speak to me or my wife again,” he said. “I think that offer’s more than generous, considering what your father owed me.”

  Jocelyn was gesturing nervously in the direction of the waiter. “Please,” Lee said, his hand on her forearm. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  She looked at him a little confused but still smiling. “I was just hoping we could at least get some bread.”

  The viscount was staring darkly at Lee. If he was a miniboss, then he was a huge miniboss. Lee extended his hand and they shook. “So it’s agreed. One thousand dollars for you to stick your pretentious, bitter, ego-swelled head directly up your ass.” Lee smiled and folded his napkin jauntily in his lap.

  Leland Jr. wrested his limp hand away as though he’d touched a furnace and looked incredulously at Jocelyn, who said, head bowed, “I heard it.”

  “Unbelievable,” he said to Lee. “You can’t hold it together for one dinner. We’re treating you, and you can’t even keep your shit together!”

  “That more than makes up for everything you took from me, brother! And if I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re actually enjoying our little back-and-forth here.”

  “That’s it!” Leland balled up his napkin and left the table, and Jocelyn (now more baroness than viscountess) gave Lee an apologetic but angry glance and followed her husband.

  Happily, the food arrived before the viscount and viscountess did. Happily still, Lee mixed the EDM into the viscount’s fettuccine, praying that Tarz had been right about it not tasting like anything. With the surety that comes with the successful commission of a wholly justified crime, Lee texted Tarz the following three texts:

  the ants r in the soup

  no visuals for me just nine centurion Europe

  *ninteenth century Europe fuckin autocorrect

  Seconds later, Tarz texted back: did u mean “you’re heaven” or “your heaven”

  The viscount and viscountess returned to the table, the viscount in a determined huff. He withdrew his checkbook from his snakeskin purse and then gestured, palm open, to his now blushing wife for a pen, which she provided. Lee smiled at her, but even his charm was insufficient to calm her vaporous anxiety. The viscount scribbled a check, tore it off, and thrust it in Lee’s direction.

  “One grand, you cretin,” he said.

  Lee didn’t take it, just smiled.

  “Of course,” Leland Jr. huffed in a tone of hypothesis-confirmation.

  “What?” Jocelyn queried.

  “He’s high! Look at him!” He pointed to Lee’s pupils.

  “I took mushrooms,” Lee confirmed.

  “Jocelyn!” Leland Jr. roared. “Is this proving my point? Have I proven my fucking point?”

  “Let’s just eat,” Jocelyn said.

  And they did, Lee watching in pleasure as Leland Jr. slurped his meal. “You,” he snorted through his wet, noodled mouth. “You little shit. You couldn’t even show up sober to your own arraignment if you had one.”

  Lee tossed up his hands. “I plead not guilty, Your Honor!”

  “This isn’t an arraignment,” Jocelyn said, evidently near tears. “This was supposed to be an opportunity to make peace.”

  Leland Jr. turned to her on his elbow, smiling for the first time since the evening had begun. “You thought it could all be solved over dinner, didn’t you?”

  “That’s never what I said.”

  “You assumed we’d hug and make nice?”

  “I never said that, Leland! Keep your voice down.”

  “This is who I’m dealing with, Jocelyn.” He flung a broad hand in Lee’s direction. “This is my ‘family.’ Do you understand?”

  “Has he proven it to you, my leggy baroness?” Lee said, whatever filter he’d had completely vanished. “Or will he prove it to you later tonight?” He made a soft thrusting motion, smiling at the horrified viscountess. He was feeling more pleasant than he had in a long while, his eyes departing from her gaze and lolling across the beige-white tablecloth, fixing pleasantly on the bread basket: the bread, its shape, its flakes, its ridges.

  Lee was instructed to wait in the restaurant’s foyer while the royalty took their leave. He dug his hands in the pockets of his corduroys and smiled. “I can’t say it’s been a delight,” he said, waving the check instead of his hand.

  “Neither can I,” Leland Jr. shouted back, hurrying his wife to their SUV. “This is the last we’ll be seeing of each other, ever. I’ll take out a restraining order if I need to.”

  Lee watched them drive off, sated. He withdrew his phone and texted Tarz:

  mission accomplished

  I now have the means to woo Baroness Maria von Timpano

  Tarz: wtf

  I’m rich, Lee keyed in, so im getting Maria back.

  TARZAN/TWEETY/NEW PERSON (EDWARD JONATHAN PHILLIPS)

  (1990–)

  2007–2008

  Mississippi

  Edward Jonathan Phillips was spending the morning slumped over the screen of the Hackintosh he’d recently built, darkening once again the e-door of a Reddit Ask Me Anything whose URL he could’ve typed from memory. The AMA read: “I am a gay man who was married to a straight woman for twenty-eight years. Ask me anything.” The question Edward Jonathan Phillips wanted to ask was: “Did you ever play house with your male friends in grade school and suggest that you be the mom and/or that there be two moms?” But the question didn’t seem relevant to the AMA and asking something that personal would, he was sure, humiliate him unspeakably.

  Edward Jonathan Phillips (Fucken Eddie to his enemies, EJP to friends) had the unique daily pleasure of being exactly like himself. Whereas someone more normal could probably go to high school in Braxton, Mississippi, and float by relatively unnoticed, any under-the-radar deformities (big teeth, Judaism, lack of a gun license, liberal parents, fascination with Satan) earning him at most a nickname and some light ostracism, there was something about EJP’s battleship board that was embarrassingly conspicuous. Today, December 15, was the day Joey Gipson had very solemnly warned him not to come to gym class, but EJP had to go to school and he had to show his face at every period because last week he’d been truant for the last time he could be before the school district (and then his parents) would have to get involved.

  It was five forty-three in the morning, which was a good time for it to be. He began pulling on a few strands in the gray patch of hair just above his right ear. He was starting to gray on his left side, too, and he’d overheard his mother asking his father—who was Alexander to everyone but EJP’s mother, who called him Father—about it one night while EJP was walking stoned past their bedroom to the bathroom on the other side of the hall. It wasn’t really a time to eavesdrop (he had messy, load-blown hands, the fingers of which he couldn’t really feel because of the rare California medical in his bloodstream), but his mother was saying, “Maybe we should move,” to which Alexander said in response, “I think the hair’s genetic. There’s no way he’s graying from school.” And then his mother hiss-whispered, “Of course he is! You’re not even gray now.” “But,” said Alexander, “my dad was completely gray by the time he was forty. That’s pretty unusual.”

  Now EJP’s strategy was to just try and pull the gray hairs out before they became too noticeable. But he couldn’t do it fast enough. Andy Stockton had started calling him Snowbird, and EJP was unsure of the meaning of this insult until Dennis Delpiere accused him of loving to eat snow. “Don’t eat the yellow snow,” Dennis told him one day at lunch. “You’ll get the clap, Snowbird.” It could’ve been his imagination, but the gray hairs came out a little more easily than the other ones. He’d had ample time to do a study of this. Time needed for removal of six gray hairs = time needed for removal of two normal hairs.

  The first question on the AMA was the most obvious one: “Why did you stay with her for so long if you are not physically attracted to women?” The answer began: “She was my best friend since childhood and I thought I could change my�
��” EJP stood up and walked to the other side of the room. He checked to make sure the crack at the bottom of the door had been sealed (it had been since last night, with a beach towel) and then went to his closet and got the pipe he’d made out of his broken N64 controller. He packed the bowl where the joystick should’ve been with some gummy mids he kept in his desktop drawer. Then he did a long hit while reading the rest of the answer: “—orientation because I knew that no one I loved would understand or approve of who I really was. Ironically, I think my wife was the only person who was able to accept that I was gay. You have to keep in mind that I’m talking about Alabama in 1979; we live in a world that’s a lot more progressive than it was back then.”

  Before taking his second hit, EJP looked up at the disabled smoke detector on his ceiling. He scrolled back up to the top of the AMA and reread the first question and the response. He didn’t want to scroll down in case a troll had ruined the thread by linking to photos of a horse’s dick or something. But the second question seemed legitimate, and so did the third, even though it dissolved into a tangential thread about marriage licenses in Vermont. Maybe this Addled_Astrolabe dude once had a shot at stopping it. As in maybe his wife knew and cared enough to help him, and that was how she loved him. This woman is a hero. There should be a whole forum for her: r/thiswoman.

  He took another hit and tilted his chair back as far as it would go. He tried to think of another question for Addled_Astrolabe. This one would have to be on the nose. “Is this something you thought would actually work?” What was the “something”? The question sounded accusatory, which was exactly how he didn’t want it to sound. “Did you think you could change your sexuality by marrying her?” Sexuality is fluid. He’d seen those words on the Internet somewhere and in that combination they’d produced a weird reaction in him, like the sudden addition of warm water to a cold bath. “Would you actually recommend doing this?” To who? Another hiccup; it was getting to the point where grammar errors produced system-wide stutters if he was high enough, as if English were as finicky as Java and wouldn’t give him results unless he thought in it correctly. To whom? Who was asking for the recommendation? He stared hard at the Eye and could almost see a heavy, wrinkled lid, a furrowed eyebrow. A saggy nexus of Old Testament judgment: Who wants to know?