Before You Go

by Tommy Butler

  How many times can a heart break before it’s, well, broken? If losing the Shipmates was strike one, and losing Amy was strike two, I guess unemployment and moving back in with my parents . . . but I quit baseball years ago. I don’t know how many strikes you get in life. Maybe there is no limit. Maybe you just stop swinging.

  I don’t talk to my family about my heartache, but rather allow them to focus on my lack of gainful employment, which is something they can appreciate as a cause of my melancholy—or “funk,” as my mother calls it. Turns out that colleges do not, in fact, hand out prosperous livelihoods at graduation. The economy is weak and prospects are slim, diploma or no. I briefly considered starting up the advisory business I’d been dreaming about. My family wasn’t exactly supportive—my father told me I didn’t know anything yet, Dean offered me an entry-level position at his accounting firm, and my mother bought me a suit for job interviews.

  On weekdays, I don the suit and take the train into New York. I tell my mother I have interviews, though typically I just walk through Central Park until evening, before boarding the train back home. This afternoon I sat and stared at the Alice in Wonderland statue, thinking I would like to join her among the bronze mushrooms, when I noticed a flyer stuck to the side of the Mad Hatter’s top hat. It was an invitation to a suicide prevention therapy group, the one now gathering before me inside the lighted window.

  I don’t think I can accept. Behind me, the river’s whispered appeal grows deeper, more seductive. I suspect that if I turn to meet it now, the faces in the window may be lost to me. I turn anyway.

  As I do, a yellow taxicab sweeps into the drive, its tires hissing over the sodden asphalt. The beams from its headlights cut across my knees before it lurches to a stop and the rear door pops open. A young woman in a blue suit leaps out into the rain, shielding her head with a large notebook. She slams the door behind her and rushes toward the building, her shoes clicking on the pavement. When she draws even with me, she abruptly stops, pausing to consider me from beneath her makeshift canopy.

  “Something wrong with your umbrella?” she asks.

  I look down at my hand, still clenched around my unopened umbrella. I’d forgotten I was holding one.

  She almost smiles, her dark eyes gleaming with some combination of perplexity and amusement. She lowers the notebook. The rain quickly soaks her suit and flattens her short black hair. For a moment she just stands there, getting wet and almost smiling.

  “Right,” she says, her eyes flashing toward the lighted window. “Let’s do this.”

  Elliot

  (1993)

  I like to think the room was meant for music. The bare walls and ceramic-tiled floor seem built for reverberation, though now the only sounds are the shuffling of feet and the thrumming of the rain. Stacked nimbly along one wall are straight-backed metal chairs that look ready to line up into rows—or, in our case, a circle. Recessed spotlights cast bright beams down from the ceiling, but there are no music stands beneath them. Perhaps the musicians have no need for sheets full of notes. Perhaps they know their songs by heart.

  There are twelve of us in the circle—a ragtag bunch of all sizes, ages, colors, and shapes. Unlike my imaginary ensemble of virtuosos, we are more silence than song, and could probably use a little sheet music. We carry no instruments but our confusion and sorrow and fear—and the rituals we perform to avoid the stillness in which they’re inclined to play. A teenage boy cracks his knuckles. A wizened woman cleans her glasses with a handkerchief. The girl with dark eyes runs her hands through her wet hair.

  Our conductor is the last to arrive. He is a tall, lanky man with red hair and a face full of freckles that proceed to make way for his broad grin.

  “Hello, everyone,” he calls out from the doorway. “Wow, it’s bright in here.” His hand brushes over a bank of light switches, and the room falls into an ominous gloaming. Deftly lifting a chair from one of the stacks, he swings it into the circle, then takes his seat and looks us over.

  “New faces,” he says eagerly. “For those—three—of you who haven’t been with us before . . . welcome to group.” I cringe a bit at the word group. Or at least the way he uses it, like he’s informing us that we’ve caught some form of communicable disease, as in “Welcome to chlamydia.” But no one else seems to mind.

  “I’m Gareth,” he continues. “While I’m technically your leader, we like to keep things informal. Tonight I’d like to invite our newcomers to tell us a little about themselves. You can tell us where you’re from, or why you’re here, or anything at all that you feel like sharing. First, though, let me just say that I’m not a doctor, and we don’t prescribe medication—either one of which you may or may not find helpful in this battle you’re fighting. What I think you’ll find here is a gathering of people like you, and not like you, who are ready to listen, and who are grateful that you’re here.” He looks around the circle. “Okay, who’s first?”

  I stare at the floor, wishing myself invisible. I’m still not convinced I want to be here, and I’m certain I don’t want to be the first of the newbies to spill his guts in front of a bunch of strangers. There is a short, pregnant pause before someone else finally volunteers. His voice is rich and resonant. I immediately recognize it as the source of the incongruous guffaw I heard from outside.

  “Good evening,” he says politely. “My name’s Bannor. I suppose the first thing I’d like to tell you is that I’ve been to the future.”

  I lift my head to look at him—a middle-aged black man with steeply arched eyebrows and deep creases in his forehead that give him a bemused air. His beard and mustache are black but for a silver band along his jawline. His hair, too, is silver, and so closely cropped that you can just see his scalp. He wears a tweed suit and vest, with a burgundy tie that matches his shoes. Resting on his lap is a brown homburg hat, with a band of even darker brown. The single crease of its gutter crown seems to have deepened with age.

  Bannor’s formal bearing and dapper attire seem more relics of the past than testaments to the future, yet from the ensuing silence and the looks on everyone’s faces, I can see that I’ve heard him correctly.

  “You mean you feel like you’ve seen your future?” asks Gareth. “It can seem that way sometimes. When we lose hope, we can lose our sense of the possible, and we get fooled into thinking that there’s only one path forward.”

  Bannor nods. “I don’t doubt the truth in that,” he says. “But, no, I mean to say that I’ve traveled to the future. Not my body, you understand—that would be ludicrous. But my mind, my consciousness.”

  There is a long pause during which I’m certain each of us is sizing Bannor up, trying to determine if his particular brand of crazy is the dangerous kind. Yet, in addition to being courteous, he appears calm and lucid. It’s hard not to take an instant liking to him.

  “Wicked,” says the knuckle-cracking teenager. “What year did you travel to?”

  “The first time, 2162.”

  “You’ve been more than once?”

  “Eleven times,” says Bannor. “So far.”

  “What’s it like?” asks the teenager.

  “The future?” says Bannor, shrugging. “It’s a mixed bag.”

  The teenager’s mouth hangs open, but he appears out of questions. The room falls into a hush, broken only by the patter of the rain. The group seems unsure what to do with Bannor’s revelation. Gareth himself appears befuddled, his composure as group leader shaken. I guess the suicide therapy handbook doesn’t cover reports of time travel.

  “So why are you here?” asks the girl with dark eyes.

  Bannor chuckles, a deep sound from his chest that gently fills the room. “Cut to the chase, and no mistake,” he says. “As it happens, during one of my sojourns, I learned that I end up killing myself.”

  Gareth nods, almost too earnestly, his balance apparently restored by the fact that the discussion has returned to the topic of suicide. I half expect him to exclaim “Aha!” and shrewdly ta
p his fingers together, but he only looks at Bannor with compassion. “Would you like to talk about that?” he asks.

  Bannor’s forehead crinkles a little more deeply, and then relaxes. “No,” he says, abruptly ending his narration. “Thank you.”

  “Of course,” says Gareth. Clearly more accustomed to reticence, he doesn’t push Bannor further, but instead scans the circle for a new secret sharer. “Who would like to go next?”

  Before he can focus on me, another hand is raised. It belongs to the elderly woman with the glasses, which have now been thoroughly polished and perch on the bridge of her nose. The thick lenses and wide, circular frames make her eyes seem a bit too large for her face, like those of an owl. Her birdlike semblance is enhanced by her delicate frame and a colorful scarf that enshrouds her neck like plumage.

  “I’m Pearl,” she says. “I haven’t been to the future, though I’m afraid I can’t seem to get out of the past.” She attempts a smile. “It was wonderful, my past. Just wonderful. Oh, I know it wasn’t perfect, but I guess I miss it. My husband died in June. We’d been married forty-nine years. Can you imagine? I can.” Her eyes drift past the faces in the circle, toward the benighted windows and the rain beyond. “It’s this world that doesn’t seem real now. This world without him . . .”

  She trails off, eyes glazing over. Her hands rest uneasily in her lap, worrying at her handkerchief. Gareth nods, but doesn’t try to fill the silence, as if he knows that she has more to say.

  “I have this dream,” says Pearl. “Not a goal. I mean an actual dream, at night, when I’m sleeping. I have it all the time now. I’m walking by a river, and I come upon all these moments from my life, glistening memories hanging from the trees or just lying in the grass. There are so many—big ones, like our wedding day, and stupid little ones, like the way the floorboards squeaked in our first apartment when we danced to the radio. I walk along and gather them up, one by one, filling up the pockets of my long coat. Then the river rises, and I’m in the water. When I look down, the memories have all turned into stones. They are so heavy. My pockets are full of them . . .”

  Her gaze breaks away from the windows and she blinks at us, as if she’d forgotten we were there. She takes off her glasses and begins cleaning them again with her handkerchief. “My, but I can’t seem to shut up about it,” she says. “Please, let the next person go.”

  “There’s no rush,” says Gareth. “Do you want to continue?”

  “Oh, no,” says Pearl. “For goodness’ sake.”

  Gareth smiles kindly at her. He’s still smiling when he finally turns to me. The others follow his lead, their faces swiveling in my direction.

  I introduce myself. Unlike in my clichéd imagining of a group therapy session, there is no responding chorus of “Hello, Elliot!” A few heads nod. Bannor squints at me strangely. I hesitate, suddenly feeling like a fraud. What can I say to justify my presence? To convince the others that I have any right to be here? I’m not crazy, like Bannor. Nor has the love of my life for the past fifty years just died, as for Pearl. I’m not sick or starving or destitute (yet). My life is fine. Isn’t it? I don’t know how to explain this ache in my chest, or why tears come to my eyes out of nowhere, or why I find myself involuntarily drawing a little too close to the edges of subway platforms.

  “I’m not sure I have a good reason . . .”

  “Reason’s got nothing to do with it,” says the girl with dark eyes.

  I might disagree, but I don’t feel I’m in a position to argue. I clear my throat, stalling for time, unsure how to begin.

  “I guess it started with the monsters,” I finally say.

  I brace for laughter, or jeers, or the rolling of eyes, but the group doesn’t blink. Maybe their stillness unnerves me, or maybe my initial confession provokes in me the need for more. Regardless, once my mouth starts moving, it doesn’t want to stop. The words pour out in a breathless rush—secrets I haven’t shared with anyone since my unhappy session with that doctor years ago. I tell the group about the monsters, and my mother nearly drowning, and the pitchback, and striking out my brother. I speak of Neverene and the giant with the giant heart. Of the shed that was meant to be a fort. Of Esther and the anthracite and the twins. Of breaking my leg by jumping from a high branch onto a tree stump I hoped was a door. Of the Shipmates, and friendships so fleeting you question whether they existed at all. And of Amy, and love that wasn’t so much love as the idea of love, which makes you question that too.

  And all the while, as my oration threatens to degenerate into babble, a smaller voice in my head asks why I’m still talking. When this voice grows loud enough, I stop. My mouth shuts. My senses return. I hear the quiet drip of water. I see the room and the shimmering circle of faces.

  Gareth waits a breath to make sure I’m done. “Thank you, Elliot,” he says. “And Pearl, and Bannor.” He leans forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “What wonderful introductions! We’ll talk more, about all of this. For now I’d just like to say that a common theme I’m hearing tonight is one of submission. And I want to remind all of us that we have choices. For example, Bannor can choose not to travel to the future, but to stay here instead, in the present. Pearl can choose to turn her memories not into rocks that weigh her down but into stepping-stones that lift her up.”

  “Oh,” says Pearl. “I’m not sure I like the idea of stepping on my memories.”

  “You can turn them into something else,” says Gareth. “Like birds.”

  “Or bubbles,” says Bannor.

  Pearl wrings her handkerchief. “Bubbles are so fragile.”

  “So are memories,” says Bannor.

  The girl with dark eyes raises her hand. “What about Elliot?” she asks. “What can he choose?”

  Gareth looks at me and smiles, his freckles bunching together at the edges of his grin. “Elliot can choose not to submit to the caprice of an indifferent universe. He can choose not to look to other places or other people to provide him with bliss, but to seize it for himself. Right here, right now. Elliot—all of us—can choose to go out there, grab happiness by the balls, and squeeze!”

  Laughter ripples through the circle, but the girl raises her hand again. “Are you sure happiness would be into that?” she asks. “Because a lot of guys aren’t.”

  After the session, I stay behind to help Gareth stack the chairs along the wall. We work in silence, his initial vigor apparently spent. I wonder what he does for a living, and why he would spend his spare time listening to people like Bannor—or me, for that matter. Perhaps he lost someone, or was once lost himself. We finish clearing the chairs, and I thank him. He encourages me to come again.

  Outside, the rain has passed, and the girl with dark eyes is waiting for me.

  “You’re Elliot,” she says, reaching out to shake my hand. “I’m Sasha.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “Is it?” she asks. “C’mon, I want to show you something.”

  We follow the river south, passing a series of older high-rises. Sasha’s pace is brisk but unhurried. The fabric of her long skirt swishes back and forth against her legs. Though she can’t be much older than me, she seems more at ease in her corporate garb. Her heels click along the pavement until we stand outside an apartment building facing the water. Above us, a fire escape inches its iron way up the brick facade. Sasha eyes the bottom of the ladder, then takes off her shoes and drops them to the sidewalk along with her soggy notebook. She hikes her skirt above her knees. “Cup your hands together,” she says.

  I lace my fingers and lower my arms to form a step. Sasha is tall but slender, and I’m able to boost her high enough for her to grab the lowest rung and hoist herself onto the first platform. Once there, she pulls a lever, and the ladder drops noisily down to the sidewalk.

  “Don’t forget my stuff,” she says.

  We climb ten stories before Sasha stops and sits down on the wet metal slats of the platform, resting her back against a darkened window. I join her, wonderin
g if I’ll have to dry-clean my suit, and what it will cost. The East River stretches like a black moat between us and the distant glow of Long Island. Beacons from the two bridges—the Manhattan to our left and the Brooklyn to our right—cast smudged reflections off the water. Between them, a more diminutive, truncated string of lights ticks silently down the river toward the sea.

  “There,” says Sasha. “That’s what I wanted to show you.”

  “What is it? A tour boat?”

  “Is that what you see?” she says. “I’m surprised. I always think of them as ghost ships, phantoms, sailing off to some far-off place from which they never return. Like your Neverene.” I turn to face her, expecting a smirk, but she looks at me earnestly. “Do you believe in your Neverene?” she asks. When I don’t respond, she poses an easier question. “Where did you grow up?”

  “Connecticut.”

  “Do they have crickets there in summer?”

  “Tons.”

  “South Dakota, too,” she says. “I used to sleep with the window open so I could listen to them. Summers were lovely. People just seemed happier, and for some reason I associated it with the crickets. It’s soothing, you know? That sound?” She looks over to see me nod in agreement, then turns her gaze back to the river. “Winters sucked,” she continues. “My father couldn’t find work, so he’d get angry, and my mom would get angry, and they’d fight like jackals. We’d be buried in snow and freezing our butts off because they didn’t want to waste money on heat. They’d only turn it up when it got dangerously cold, and then the radiator in my room would make this chirping noise, just like the crickets. On those nights, I chose not to hear my parents scream at each other, and instead just listened to the radiator. As far as I was concerned, it was the sound of the crickets, and it was summer, and everything was okay.”

  The soft hum of traffic rises up from the city. Out on the water, the drifting lights of the ghost ship disappear under the Brooklyn Bridge. The night is still and solemn, as if we ourselves were perched in the lookout of a great vessel that had left the mainland behind and set sail into the vast unknown.