Carry The One

by Carol Anshaw

  “Listen,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Three witches came in here tonight and tied me up.” His voice was slurry with whatever they were giving him to bring him down.

  “Are they still there?” Alice said.

  “One is.”

  “Put her on.”

  Muffle and thud, bang and clatter, a receiver being passed, dropped, retrieved.

  “Yesss?”—a deep, suspicious voice, like the Cheshire Cat.

  “Did you tie my brother up?”

  “We tied him real good.”

  “Thanks so much.” Alice crawled back into bed for some peaceful sleep. It was always a good night when Nick was tied up. But then he got out.

  “Mmmm,” Carmen said, putting her nose into the air, as if something delicious were baking in the oven. Alice was both looking for Nick and afraid to find him. Each time they came over here like this, she thought it would be the time they’d find him dead. Often it was hard to tell right away. Like today. He lay in bed, absolutely still, naked. The TV roared. Cagney & Lacey—Alice spotted a boxed set of DVDs on the floor—were sharing an emotional moment that belied their tough exteriors.

  His head was pretty badly banged up, a couple of deep cuts on his forehead, probably from a day or two ago, the blood now black and caked over. His body was stained with large, wine-colored bruises, his chest dotted with small, black rubber suction stickers left over from whatever monitoring machine he was hooked up to in the last hospital, which he left in an impromptu way. That was a week ago. The other thing that was hard to not notice was his penis, which was dark purple and, even folded up, huge. They had noticed this on previous visits. Also in the Polaroids that were usually lying around, souvenirs of festive activities between him and one or another of the hookers. Startling the first time, by now his dick was just another aspect of him that seemed beside the point. Carmen pulled the comforter over him, picked up a handful of Polaroids and started humming Memories … light the corners of my mind, then bent down over him and shouted “Hey!” into his ear.

  Alice started to get scared. “Boocs?” she said, taking his hand, which was deadweight, but not cold. “Come on and get up.” He finally stirred—slowly, carefully, as though he were in quicksand. He rolled over to the edge of the bed and started feeling around the carpet until he found a beer bottle with something left in it, drained it, then started looking for another.

  Carmen grabbed him by one arm and pulled him up again.

  “Not so fast, mister.”

  This time he grinned, impersonating sociability. His teeth were yellow and disturbingly furry. “You know—” he said, waggling his index finger at her, then lost the thought.

  “You want to go to the hospital?” Alice said in a sparkly tone, as if he had a wealth of options and this was just the first one up for consideration.

  A long wait, and then, “Maybe.”

  “See if you can get ready then,” Carmen said.

  He peered at her, then at Alice. As though neither of them was to be trusted, and he was coming up with a code for them to decipher, a password to stump them.

  “Do you think you can manage a shower?” Carmen asked.

  He got out of bed and wove toward the john, then turned around, and headed back to them.

  “Hugs,” he said, opening his arms.

  “Uh—” Carmen said.

  “We’ll get back to you on that,” Alice said. “We’ll have our people call your people.”

  He turned toward the bathroom again. His butt hung like a small, empty sack behind him as he negotiated the hallway by bumping off its walls.

  Alice looked into one of the pulled-out drawers of Nick’s dresser. “Well, at least it’s not total chaos. He does have systems of organization. Like, this would be the socks, pencil, and vomit drawer.” What she was thinking was how will she be able to do this alone when Carmen drops out? Coming in here by herself would be a new level of aloneness, like falling out of a boat and being left to the sea.

  Alice wandered out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. Inside the refrigerator a half-eaten (gnaw marks along one side), congealed steak was draped over one of the wire shelves. She did a quick scan of the apartment. A small end table had been toppled and smashed. She recognized this as one of the pieces of furniture Nick refinished so long ago, for when Olivia would get out of jail and come to him. A hundred bottles’ worth of broken glass was strewn like sparkly green and brown gravel across the carpet. Two of her paintings from the prostitute series hung askew but didn’t appear damaged. Even though the show was unpopular, the paintings were by now worth a fair amount. It was as she thought this that she noticed a blank space where a third one used to hang.

  Each wave of destruction had further depleted the apartment. Stuff got broken or soiled beyond saving, or stolen by whoever came around while he was like this. This time she noticed his old telescope was gone. Nothing ever got replaced or fixed in here—just tossed out or set upright, wiped down maybe. Here and there were little swatches of his life, or of their childhood in common. Today Alice recognized a dishtowel on the kitchen counter that had drifted in from Loretta’s kitchen, from that kitchen as it was thirty years ago. In the living room, maple bookcases he had made himself still held physics texts and astronomy journals, some with articles written by an earlier version of himself. His music was mostly “Best Of” compilations from the mainstream rock of his adolescence. Bad Company. Bob Seger. Earth, Wind & Fire.

  On the top shelf of the bookcase was a framed photo of Nick and Olivia in shorts and polo shirts, laughing, standing in front of their Teardrop trailer—an image from the period when Nick seemed almost regular, close to happy. He had since moved so far from regular that the photo might as well be one of those old carnival tourist boards where you stick your head through and show up as a mermaid or hula dancer.

  Maybe half an hour later, they had him out of the tub, where he had fallen. Dried and into some clothes—grimy khakis, a clean T-shirt and penny loafers, a parka. No socks, forget socks; his feet were too swollen. In the car he leaned against the passenger door like a sack of ball bearings.

  “We need better equipment for this,” Alice said, making a left turn to head south. “A winch. A tarp. A couple of burly helper guys.”

  “No,” Carmen said from the backseat. “We need to stop doing this.” From there she went into silent, full hard-ass mode.

  “Do you want to try to get well?” Alice asked Nick.

  “YES I DO,” Nick said in a super-loud, robotic voice, then took the half can of flat Coke from her drink caddy and chugged most of it. “HERE,” he shouted. He apparently hadn’t got around to brushing his teeth; they were still encased in the yellow fur. “YOU CAN HAVE THE REST.”

  “Hey. Thanks,” Alice said, putting the can back in its socket.

  “This time,” Carmen piped up from the backseat, “just try to go with the program, whatever it is.”

  It was easy to get a bad attitude at the hospital, though. Alice and Carmen both knew this. Triage did not favor drunks and addicts. First, they took the guy with the ax in his head, then the baby with the fever, then the old man with the shooting pain in his arm, then the teenage girl having a psychotic break. Then, about ten more cases down the line, they took Nick. At Northwestern, if the wait got too long, he went across the street to Benihana and had a few beers to tide him over. Alice thought they must be really happy over there to see him come through the door.

  In the past, Alice and Carmen used to go into the emergency room with him. More recently, they at least waited until he was admitted. By now, though, he had worn out his welcome at the nearby hospitals, and so tonight Alice pulled up in front of Haymarket, which wasn’t a hospital; it was the hoboes’ detox, the detox of last resort. This was the only place Carmen could find that would take him, and only because they took anyone. This time the sisters just stayed in the car and watched him teeter through the door.

  “This makes me feel like such a
terrible person,” Alice said as they drove away.

  “Hey,” Carmen said. “Give us credit. We stopped the car. We didn’t roll him out while we were driving by.”

  Their night wasn’t over yet. They went back to where his car was parked. They came up with an alternative to locking his steering wheel with the Club. They would hide the car. Alice followed in her car as Carmen drove Nick’s, its passenger-side mirror hanging by a wire and bouncing against the door as she went, its backseat littered with empties. Also the battered manila folders of X-rays he used to get pain pills out of sketchy doctors. They drove up to Carmen’s neighborhood and parked Nick’s car at the end of a street by a small factory.

  By the time Alice dropped Carmen off, then got back to her own place, it was near four in the morning. The phone was ringing. It was Nick, of course. He was back at his apartment.

  “No drugs. No Valium,” he told her, no longer shouting. “Nothing at all at that crap-ass place. It’s a punishment place. You’re supposed to tough it out. Bite on a stick.” In the background was the click and fizz of a beer can being opened, followed by what sounded like a water bubbler. Then another click and fizz.

  “Do you think you could stop? Just for a while? You know, just give it a break?”

  “Not really,” he said.

  port difficulties

  The small pop of a cork being worked out of yet another bottle of wine sank Carmen’s spirits. She and Rob were having dinner at the home of some friends, a meal that was going on forever. Actually, it had hit the forever mark about an hour ago. By now they had entered some further zone on the space/time continuum. Carmen wished these were friends of Rob’s. That way she could enjoy how ridiculous they were instead of being mortified that they were friends of hers. Carmen had gone to Jane Addams for her MSW with Abby, now a grant writer, successful in a hands-off corner of social work where she would never have to touch a poor or crazy person. (Carmen had tried this herself, spending two years as the liaison for the homeless out of the mayor’s office, but she’d hated the endless meetings with clean, fresh-smelling people, and the avalanche of paperwork, so she was back running a shelter, this time on the West Side, in a neighborhood that scared her anew every single day.) Abby’s husband, Jeff, had recently become majorly rich in the PVC pipe business—innovative materials, rebuilding the infrastructure, blahblahblah, Carmen eventually ran out to the end of actually listening. She got away with a certain amount of inattention on account of her partial deafness. She didn’t let everyone know that she now wore an in-ear, digital aid that had retrieved a bit of hearing in her bad ear that she’d assumed was dead and gone. Technology had jumped a little ahead of her in a nice way. When she tuned back in, she saw the subject had shifted, onto the sufferings Abby and Jeff endured in the cause of remodeling their kitchen and bathroom. Abby seemed a little embarrassed about this line of complaint, but Jeff was into it. He talked about it as though they were bombed, or victims of a landslide.

  “Everything that could have gone wrong, did,” he said.

  Fortunately, their courage had seen them through the grim weeks when the granite for the counters was held up in Forti dei Marmi, the wood for the cabinets stuck in some port difficulties in Africa. Then the bread drawer arrived two inches too short to accommodate the particular baguette Abby gets in Wicker Park (at a small bakery that had no sign; you just had to know where it was). Then the carpenters disappeared completely on an unscheduled Florida vacation. But now, finally, the dust had settled and the drawer was remade and the unbearable standard chrome knobs were replaced with nickel.

  Now that all was said and done, though, they were pleased, Abby told them, trying to bring the subject to a close. But there was no stopping Jeff. Abby eventually gave up, like a sufferer of Stockholm syndrome, in thrall to her captor. Jeff moved on to the artisans who were able to find time for Abby and Jeff in their busy schedules. These were specialists who were booked solid; no one could get them. Abby and Jeff got them, though. Jeff subscribed to a merit-badge view of life. His sash was filling up.

  Carmen felt shackled to the evening. (Back on the chain gang! Chrissie Hynde sang in her head.) They hadn’t even gotten to dessert. She had noticed a built-in espresso maker so there would surely be an elaborate cappuccino ceremony. As it turned out there was also a dessert ceremony. A soufflé was slowly on its way. Carmen had been tired coming into this social evening. She was phone banking for John Kerry in a ghostly town in western Michigan. Buchanan. Spirits ran high there. They already had their Kerry re-election voter list. She told Jeff and Abby a little about the hard-working, small-town effort. The continuous transfusion of doughnuts and coffee, the separate room for the smoking volunteers.

  “Too bad he listened to some image enhancer or whatever. Saluting off the prow of that boat,” Jeff said. “That was where he lost my vote.”

  Until this moment, Carmen thought she didn’t personally know anyone who had voted for Bush. Not to mention voting for him for a second term. The table talk hit a vacuum, like the startling thwup made by a hurtling train as it enters a tunnel. Abby turned the conversation toward the two years they recently spent in Guatemala, which PVC piping was bringing into the modern age.

  “It must’ve been something,” Carmen tried, “having all that voluptuous nature everywhere you turned.”

  And of course it was. Also the fruit was magnificent. And the two of them took up snorkeling, which changed their lives. And on and on in such a lulling way that Carmen was snapped to by Jeff’s reference to a slowdown in pipe-laying on account of the lassitude of the “teeth-sucking natives.” She felt chilled by this piece of code. She understood that if she or Rob picked up on this complaint, they would fall into a soft conversational circle of shared assumptions. She felt like Eddie Murphy in the old sketch from Saturday Night Live where he disguises himself as a white man to see what happens when the last black person gets off the bus, and finds they start mixing martinis and fox trotting.

  Carmen looked to Rob, but he sat silent as a monk. At first she flared a little with anger, then saw that he wasn’t being indifferent or cowardly, he was just totally tuned out. She could read him by now, the way he could sit and smile and nod, even inject little prompts into the conversation while he was in fact totally absorbed in his own thoughts. Sometimes she could even make a pretty good guess at what these thoughts were. In this particular moment she was almost certain he was thinking about a new promotion at MarcAntony—Revision—a section at the front of every salon where no appointment was necessary, only the impulse for immediate change.

  Without backup, Carmen was on her own in the task of stopping Jeff in his tracks.

  “What were you paying the workers?” she asked. “I’m just wondering if it might be easier to stop sucking your teeth and find your inner ambition if you’re being paid something that might get you out of the hole of your life.”

  His expression lost its social composition as he saw the enemy approach.

  “Right,” he said. Slowly, as though the word had a dozen syllables.

  “Free, free, good God Almighty—free at last!” She clutched Rob’s arm to her side when they were out on the sidewalk, walking to the car through the pungent, wet-metal night air of autumn.

  “Oh, he’s not so bad.” Rob avoided summary judgments. She usually counted this as one of his best qualities, but tonight it just made her feel totally alone. “I mean, I’ve heard worse. You hear everything in beauty shops. You learn to turn a deaf ear.”

  Then, “Oh, I’m sorry.” His expression was so sincerely pained she had to laugh.

  “Oh honey,” she said. “Oh honey.”

  The night had been long and arduous. And pointless. She had not moved Jeff to think in a larger way about the world. She only pissed him off and put some final punctuation on an already run-on friendship. She was losing her belief in the possibility of changing people. It wasn’t so much that they were in opposition to her, or that they held their own beliefs so strongly. Rath
er, they appeared to have lost interest in belief itself, as though belief were tennis, or French film. And this was so discouraging Carmen had to put a lid over the abyss or risk falling in.

  “Hey,” Rob said later, slipping under the covers next to her, trying to lift her spirits. “Tomorrow let’s have big sex when we wake up. Read the paper in bed. Make pancakes. Not answer the phone. Let the rest of the world get along without us.” He brushed her cheek with his knuckles, then sat her up, got her out of her bra and into one of his T-shirts.

  “Alice called. Before. You were in the shower. I forgot to tell you. You were supposed to call her back. About your mother. I’m a terrible secretary.” He turned out the light. “You should fire me.”

  touch and go

  Loretta was not going without a fight, or at least a small scuffle. In her living will, she had checked the box saying she wanted all those extreme and heroic measures everyone else forgoes. She did not, she made clear, want her plug pulled.

  And so Alice used connections and did some research and was trying to give her mother a death that was state-of-the-art. She had her hooked up with the best oncology department in the city. She had three specialists, was on a protocol so experimental that so far it had only been tried on mice and Loretta. Something like that. In the hospital, she had a private room with mahogany furniture, indirect lighting, maroon drapes, a window seat striped like a rep tie, the window itself affording a view of the lake.

  Bags of thick, transparent plastic hung above the bed, also dangled beneath it. There was an industrial cast to this, as though Loretta was part of some manufacturing process, filtering the plentiful clear and pastel fluids dripping from the bags above the bed into the meager, viscous yellow and dark-green liquids filling the bags below. While she was at work in this way, resisting the firm pull of death, her progress and regress were chronicled by the orange numbers on one small black screen next to her bed, the blipping green line on another, accompanied by a thin, high-pitched beeping. Alice and Nick watched the numbers and the lines, listened to the beeps. They were waiting this out together.