The Comedown

by Rebekah Frumkin

  “I love you,” he said.

  Relieved for some reason, and giddy, she breathed back, “I love you, too.”

  She told him about herself after that. She asked him for reassurance that she was more than a disease, because the problem of her identity was likely to rear its head if she got too high: she would’ve been average or averagely above-average if she hadn’t developed lesions on her brain. But, he reminded her, she would’ve been dead if she hadn’t thought in white and maroon. Those white and maroon shapes were her, not Déphines.

  It was true—and she’d always known this—that she was the complex series of chemical reactions that comprised Maria Timpano, would always be made of ever-changing Maria Timpano phenomena stabilized by the fact of her persistence over time. Her elements may have changed, but she persisted. She endured. Eating breakfast sausage and chocolate pancakes with Diedre and Lee, she endured. Writing, reading, cleaning her flute’s mouthpiece, messying her hands with oil-based paint, touching her bare feet to grass, exposing her face to the winter wind and the distant sun: she endured, she endured, she endured.

  And of course she endured irrespective of the changes in things and people around her—she’d always known this, too, and that’s why she kept her mind at a distance from any attachments she couldn’t help, Amanda and Don being the only attachments she couldn’t help. She experienced a weeklong flinch when she realized she was starting to form an attachment to Lee. She felt droopy if the subject of college came up—he’d only applied to places in the Midwest, meaning they’d have to do long-distance if she got into Princeton—and she hated it when he lost himself in obsession about the wounds of his past. Sometimes it seemed as if his world consisted only of her, securing reparations from his older half brother, and drugs. Drugs smoked and snorted and washed down with liquor filched from Diedre’s kitchen cabinet.

  One night in April (she was about to turn sixteen and he was about to graduate), they had plans to attend a party thrown by her friend Stella from drama club. Stella was, like most of her friends not shared by Lee, a self-identified “nerd” and rule-abiding optimist. The party would likely consist of crudités and the nostalgic viewing of Disney movies. Lee and Max had promised to give her a ride there and bring some beer.

  As she waited for them she’d stretched out on her bed, half reading Adrienne Rich and listening to Don and Amanda discuss a movie they’d watched earlier that night. The movie had been a Western, and Don hadn’t liked the protagonist: too violent, he thought, too angry. Amanda wasn’t exactly trying to defend violence and anger, but she thought the movie called for it, because it was “stylized and hyperbolic.” Don didn’t have anything to say in response to that, and then Amanda laughed; maybe he’d grabbed her around the waist, or kissed her ear like Maria sometimes saw him do. They were happier now, she could tell. Now they had conversations they would’ve considered superfluous five years ago: was this a good movie, did this place or that place have better coffee, would Maria like to come with them to see a show or was her new social life keeping her too busy? Maria felt guilty for whatever her sickness had taken from them that time had finally restored.

  Lee and Max were almost thirty minutes late, which was egregious even for them. She checked her text messages, saw nothing. Then there was a screeching and some abrupt metal-on-metal grinding outside. Maria felt the reverb in her bed, and it dawned on her with a panic that the metal-on-metal could’ve actually been part of their house. Don and Amanda had stopped talking. She went to her window and looked out. Don was running toward the ravine at the edge of their property. There were lights coming from the ravine. A car. Lee’s car.

  She stayed at the window, heart swelling with panic. Soon there was an ambulance in their driveway, Amanda standing outside in her windbreaker. There was a tow truck pulling the ruined car out of the ravine, and there was Max on a stretcher, his face full of weeping welts. And then there Lee was scrambling up the ravine, his left arm hanging uselessly at his side. She looked and looked at him and saw only a parody of someone she knew: his face was blood-drained and ghostly, his front teeth were gone, his left eye was swollen shut. He was stumbling past the EMTs trying to apprehend him, pushing past Don, who finally held him by the shoulders and asked, “Who the fuck are you?” And when he told Don his name and how he knew Maria—she winced hearing it—Don roared, “Stay away from my daughter!” But he ignored Don and turned his damaged face toward her window, opened wide his bloody mouth: “I love you, Maria! I love you!”

  REGGIE MARSHALL

  (1945–)

  May 9, 1973–1985

  Shaker Falls, Ohio, and Independence, Indiana

  His eyes blinked open and he was awake. The first thing he saw was a canopy of trees above him. The first thing he felt was thick mud-sludge around his chest. The first thing he heard was a bird squawking, perched somewhere not too far.

  And then his head hurt. His vision went white, then fuzzed to gray-black. He touched the left side of his head, the source of the pain. It was soft and pulpy and when he pulled his fingers away they were covered with blood. He brought his hand to the wound again and found something hard and round lodged there. When he applied pressure, he felt nothing. But when he tried to pull it out, his head seized with bright, unbearable pain.

  Next to him floating in the sludge was someone he recognized as Sunny. His vision blinked black to white to red like a TV changing channels. When it stayed still for long enough, he saw that Sunny was dead. He screamed and climbed out of the sludge and scrambled up a little leaf-covered hill. Then he sat there, holding his legs close to his chest, looking down at Sunny’s body floating in what he now knew to be the swamp. He vomited, mostly greenish bile. His stomach, emptier than it had ever been, clenched in protest. Nearby (shockingly nearby, now that he’d noticed it) was a road.

  Sometimes walking, sometimes crawling, he followed along the road but didn’t leave the cover of the woods. If a car passed, he stopped moving. He was sure he was hidden but wanted to be safe.

  He followed the road until the woods ended and a bristly thicket began. He stopped, still on his hands and knees, and lowered his head to the ground. The blood rushed to his forehead. It felt good and he stayed there like this for a long time. Finally, he stood up and his vision flashed and settled into a static fuzz bathed in pinkish light. He left the briars and started walking alongside the road.

  As he did this, he realized something: his wife and children were probably dead. He’d come from a bad place, he remembered. From Shondor’s massage parlor. Shondor didn’t play. If he was supposed to be dead, which he assumed he was, there was no way they weren’t. He didn’t have much time to think about why it was he wasn’t dead, so he didn’t. He tried walking faster, but after a few steps, his right leg gave out and he collapsed. He looked up at the sky and saw a fighter plane’s jet trails. When he shifted, his back protested, and he could feel the round, tight knots of new bruises forming. Someplace close to his head it felt like there was a piece of flint between his skin and his spine. He got back up and walked slower than he’d ever walked. Then he started crying, because even if he could run that wouldn’t keep Tasha, Caleb, and Aaron from being dead.

  He was crying and walking slowly like an old man, the stabs in his heart coming from how he was alive and they weren’t, or how much his body wanted him not to be alive, or maybe a piece of flint stuck there like the one it felt like was stuck in his spine—he couldn’t tell. Cars were going past him, a few of them honking for him to get out of the way. One slowed down and a kid shouted something out the window Reggie had heard before but chose not to hear now, because he was tired of the world wanting him dead. He agreed with it finally: Take me. But the world wouldn’t even let him be taken. Fuck that. A red flatbed truck was approaching from the distance. He could stand in the middle of the road. Or jump out right in front of it, though his legs felt too useless to jump. Right as it was about to pass him, he threw himself in the road and the truck screeched, the soun
d just about blowing his ears out, one of the wheels almost crunching his right hand. He could hear the car door opening and someone getting out. He was ready to be beaten, but when he opened his eyes he saw an old white woman with braids that had been pinned to the sides of her head like a crown. She was bending down next to him, blinking at him through glasses that made her eyes huge.

  “Sir?” she asked, shaking his shoulder. “Sir, are you okay?”

  Reggie grunted. It was the best he could do.

  “Sir!” she shouted.

  “I’m not deaf,” he croaked.

  She leaned her arm against the car bumper. She wore the kind of quilted vest white people wore when they called themselves “outdoorsy.” She adjusted her glasses, then crouched closer to him. “You threw yourself in front of my car.” She grabbed his chin, tilted it so she could see the bullet hole. “Oh my God,” she gasped, then stood and staggered away.

  “I think I got shot,” he said.

  She nodded and made her lips tight. She was small but strong, lifting him like she would an infant and loading him into the passenger seat of her station wagon. She said her name was May.

  “What’s yours?”

  Eyes closed, Reggie could only think of two first names. “Richard Edwards,” he said.

  “I’ll call you Rich for now, how’s that?”

  He grunted, turned his head to the side, and murmured, “I don’t care.”

  “What’s that?”

  He didn’t hear her because he’d fallen asleep. When he awoke, it was out of what felt like the deepest sleep of his life: he was still in the passenger seat of May’s truck, May was still driving them somewhere, listening to what sounded like AM radio. The voice on the radio was saying that if God saw you sinning and didn’t see fit to punish you right then and there, your punishment would come later. Homosexuals, for instance, may appear to be living happy lives in cities across America, but many of them end up dying of AIDS. “And those who don’t will die of cancer or heart disease, let me tell you,” the voice went on gathering steam.

  May looked over and saw that he was awake. “How’re things, Rich?”

  It took Reggie a moment to understand that she was talking to him. He felt a cloth around his head and realized she’d dressed his wound.

  “I always keep some first-aid things with me,” May said. “Doing the kind of work I do.”

  Reggie didn’t care what kind of work it was she did. He wanted to die. He was thinking of his days on the block with Cookie, those January afternoons when they were standing out there in their Browns jackets and their boots talking about anything—the fuckability of girls, the dainty way Cookie ate chips, how Nixon was like Hitler without the mustache—the buyers lighting up on the corner, basically asking for a beatdown from the cops. Why had he been so stupid? Why had he thought he could do the same thing he always had but on a bigger scale, with a real family? He was born to die quickly and brutally and he wanted it over with already.

  “I want to die,” he said out loud. “I think my family got killed and they tried to kill me, too, and my worthless ass survived.”

  He looked at May, who was staring hard at the road.

  “I said I want to die,” he repeated. “Stop the car, let me out, and let me take care of it.”

  “No.”

  He slammed his fists into his thighs, surprised he was suddenly capable of such strength. “Let me do it or I’ll open the door myself.”

  “Go ahead.”

  The door was locked. He unlocked it, opened it partway. May was still staring at the road. He slammed it shut.

  “Please will you stop the car.”

  “I’m just trying to get where I’m going,” May said.

  Reggie sighed. “Where are you going?”

  “Someplace you can rest.”

  They drove in silence then, Reggie’s mind wandering in and out of sleep. When they finally stopped, it was in front of a steel barn surrounded on all sides by trucks exactly like May’s. It looked like something from the future. He thought that maybe it was the future and he’d been asleep for years.

  She shut off the truck’s ignition, got out, and started walking toward the barn. Reggie didn’t know if that meant he was supposed to stay in the car or follow her, but he did know it meant he could escape if he wanted to. There were woods around the barn, what looked like a pond to the left of it from where he was sitting. The woods looked dense, but they had to lead somewhere. He could walk into the pond thinking about Natasha and Caleb and Aaron as he’d last seen them, at home. The boys running around in their pajamas. When he was dead he wouldn’t be able to think about that anymore. The way Aaron had pouted whenever Tasha tried to feed him applesauce. The way Caleb sometimes tried to wear Reggie’s shoes.

  He got out of the car and followed May into the barn.

  The barn was lined with cots, rows and rows of them. Some of the cots were filled with sleeping people, some were empty. Some people gathered in a corner, talking quietly. They all wore white T-shirts and blue overalls, just like May, except she wore a red flannel shirt, too. At the back of the barn someone had built what looked like two little plywood rooms with flimsy doors, and a man wearing a white doctor’s coat came out of one. May turned around to look at Reggie looking at the place.

  “This is what we call the Stay,” she said. “It’s a place for troubled folks.”

  The doctor walked past May, waving, and ignored Reggie. Most of the people there were white. A few were black, a few brownish. Reggie both wanted to leave and to lie down and fall asleep for hours. May grabbed his hand. “You can get better here,” she said. “We know what brought you here, and we know how to fix you.”

  Then he was in the plywood room getting examined by the doctor, who was—just like May—a thin and white farmer-type who looked as if he never slept or ate but could still lift a cow. The doctor peeled off Reggie’s bandages and made a hissing sound as if he were looking at roadkill.

  “Sir—”

  “Richard,” May corrected him.

  “Richard, um, you seem to have a bullet lodged right in here. I can actually see it, right here in the left temporal lobe.”

  Reggie nodded, his eyelids heavy. The doctor moved to stand in front of him. “Richard, you survived a bullet to the head. At what appears to be fairly close range. That bullet should have traveled through your head. You should’ve been dead instantly.”

  “I’m sure he realizes,” May snapped.

  The doctor withdrew apologetically. “I’m sorry, of course you probably do. I’m just saying this is, um, this is nothing short of miraculous.”

  Reggie sighed. “It happened in Cleveland.”

  “I picked him up in Ohio,” May said.

  The doctor made his lips tight. “We’re in Independence, Indiana, now. So it’s better that you leave Cleveland behind. Leave all that behind, Richard, and get better.”

  He was rebandaged, allowed to shower (the doctor offering him soap from behind the curtain), and given a pair of overalls and a white shirt, which he wore. He wanted to die but something he couldn’t name was keeping him alive.

  He slept on his cot, woke up, helped the other people on cots plant vegetables in a garden and milk cows in another, smaller barn. He helped sow a field with soybeans. He ate breakfast (oatmeal), then he ate lunch (ground turkey and mashed potatoes), and then he ate dinner (ground beef, green beans, and mashed potatoes). He held hands with them as they said prayers. They prayed that God would assume them into heaven and punish vengefully those who did not see His light and follow His way. After a few days, Reggie learned the prayers and started saying them with them. He couldn’t do it without smiling at first, because it was some of the stupidest bullshit he’d ever heard in his life. But then the words stopped meaning so much. He said them syllable by syllable until it didn’t sound to him like he was saying anything.

  After this had gone on for a little while, May took him aside and told him that he could take a day off from
the farm because the doctor was ready for him. She brought Reggie back into the plywood room and sat him down on the old barber’s chair he’d sat in before, but this time they’d rigged it to tip so far back it was almost like he was lying down. She asked him if he could lie on his right side, so he did. Then the doctor was back, wearing a paper mask, a flannel shirt, and latex gloves. He sat down on a stool next to the chair and said, “I’m going to get that bullet out of you, Richard,” some of the best words Reggie had heard in a while. In this makeshift clinic, with this pretend doctor at his side, he was pretty sure he’d die. Then the doctor put a plastic mask attached to a big metal canister on Reggie’s face and he took one big gulp, two, and was asleep.

  Just his luck, he woke up. He was still in the chair and his head was throbbing so hard his vision was fading again. He tried to sit up but the pain made him want to vomit, so he didn’t. His left eye blinked on and off and his right eye saw pink, red, white. He could hear the voice of the doctor, who was saying to someone else, a man going “Mhm,” how incredible it was that Reggie had survived.

  The chute of his mind narrowed and dumped him at a specific point: the night with Sunny. Sunny in the room talking about the bomb that killed his family. The briefcase full of money. And that was it. Nothing else. Reggie began to sweat. Was it Sunny who shot him or Shondor or one of the other thugs? Was it really night or had it been early morning or the middle of the day? He could remember everything before then, every single detail of his doomed life, but the night of his death was out of reach.

  The doctor wanted him to stay in bed for the next two weeks and said they’d give him something called “first induction rights” while he was asleep. He showed Reggie the bullet he’d pulled from his head and offered to let Reggie keep it; Reggie didn’t want it. The doctor said he’d bury it somewhere around the farm and Reggie ignored him and tried to think about the night he’d been meant to die. The doctor told him not to think too hard or strain to remember things he couldn’t remember, and then he smiled with his thin lips and cracked eyes as Reggie asked how the doctor was capable of reading minds.