Trouble

by Jesse Kellerman

  Jonah set his mug down. “You’re right,” he said. “It wasn’t an accident.”

  “No, huh?”

  “No.”

  “You want me to call Roberto up? You can tell that directly to him.”

  “Your brother is dead because of Eve Gones.” Jonah paused, licked his lips. “And you know that, but you’re suing me instead.”

  “I see. You’re the Truth and Justice Committee.” Iniguez smiled. “Let me tell you something. You and me? We’re not partners.”

  Jonah said, “I don’t expect anything.”

  “You don’t have the right to.”

  “I don’t.”

  For twenty ticks of the grandfather clock, Iniguez drummed his fingers on his knees. Then he got up and went to the shelves, finding a CD without use of the labels. He raised the volume knob to eight o’clock and dropped in the disc.

  A solo guitar drew a faint, sultry line between jazz and Latin, backed by an upright bass that pulsed on offbeats, like the music’s own heart. The melody took three steps in one direction and one in reverse, unfolding the minor scale.

  Iniguez said, “That’s Raymond on the bass.”

  “I didn’t know he played.”

  “Of course you fucking don’t,” said Iniguez. “That’s why I’m showing you. So you know something about him.”

  The guitar relaxed into a secondary role. Jonah thought of bass solos as lugubrious, but Raymond’s was clear and spare, notes hanging like ornaments, peaking needily in the upper register; then—as though ashamed to have sought attention—slinking, chastened, down the fret-board to resume the original pulse. The guitar regrasped the wheel, and Raymond Iniguez became background.

  Iniguez pressed STOP.

  “Our mother,” he said, after a while, “would leave us alone together when I was seven and he was four. That’s how I learned to cook without cutting off my thumbs, by making him dinner. I taught him to play the bass. He was my baby brother. He was my only brother. Now you know something.”

  Jonah said, “That song is beautiful.”

  “I used to play it for him. It calmed him down.” Iniguez lifted his glasses and rubbed his dead eyes.

  A long silence passed.

  “That lady is bad news.”

  Jonah said nothing.

  “Is she calling you up?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s how it started with us.”

  “She broke into my apartment. She crashed my family’s Thanksgiving dinner.”

  Iniguez nodded. He turned and walked into the hall. “Bring my mug?”

  In the the kitchen he took down a box of Equal packets, took the carton of milk, lifted the coffee pot. The tiniest pause preceded each decision, a microprayer before his fingers closed around an object. He would’ve appeared fluent, had Jonah not been watching closely.

  “She was taping it. The night he was killed.” Jonah felt nervous using the passive voice, but Iniguez either didn’t notice or decided to let it slide. “She knew what was going on but she didn’t say anything.”

  “She told my brother that it was an art project.”

  Silence.

  “She used to call up here. She said she was his girlfriend.” Iniguez smiled sourly. “I was like, news to me. Raymond has a girlfriend, that’s fantastic. He hasn’t had a girlfriend since the eighties. I told my wife, she started to cry she was so happy. She’s more protective of him than me, even after he—This lady, she did classes at the Beacon about a year ago. She starts flirting with him. You imagine what that’s like for a guy like him. She got him to break curfew. He stopped taking his medication cause of her, stopped going to sessions, he was almost on the street again. With meds he had no problems, not for years, and then, pshp, everything up in smoke. They wanted to throw him out. He got into a fight with one of the staff members. That wasn’t him. He fought when he got scared. They told me at the Beacon that he was getting aggressive for no reason. That never happened before.”

  Jonah, remembering the baseball bat, said nothing.

  “I know what you’re thinking, he should’ve been living with us.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that.”

  “It doesn’t work. We’ve tried. The kids…But I wasn’t gonna let him be homeless. Do you know what I had to do to get him into that place? They require more paperwork than the IRS. I had to sign waivers”—a hand at chin level. “He was doing better. A lot better. They got him a job, he made friends. Then he met her, and things changed.” He paused. “One time he called me up real late. He couldn’ve been calling me from the Beacon, they lock down the phones at midnight. I didn’t ask where he was. With her, probably. He’s going crazy. Calling me names. I don’t deserve that. Ungrateful shithead. My wife is asking, ‘Who is it, who’s calling at three in the morning.’ And I don’t want to hang up on him, because he could be standing on the top of the GWB. So I listen, and finally he starts to talk instead of shout. He tells me he’s angry, nobody ever lets him be angry. I say, ‘Yeah, Ramón, cause you have to behave yourself.’” Iniguez was ashen. “He hung up on me.”

  “Was this before he got in the fight at the Beacon?”

  “That was February. The fight was in April, right around my son’s birthday. I remember, cause I’m on the phone with the balloon-animal guy, who’s saying under no circumstances can he stay an extra half-hour, dealing with that, and then the other line rings and it’s the Beacon people. You need to come pick him up, he’s being evicted.”

  “What happened?”

  “He trashed the TV room. I had to pay to have the wall replastered. He hit some guy, who was fine, but Raymond broke a bone in his hand.” Iniguez faced Jonah. “It was like she pulled a cork out in him.”

  “Did you talk to her?”

  “Not then. I made Raymond promise he would stop seeing her. He didn’t get in any trouble during the summer. It was behind us. He came over for the Fourth of July, we had a barbeque. But I guess he didn’t stop. He just got better at sneaking out.”

  Jonah understood Simón Iniguez’s purpose in hitting back: to hit. Eve hadn’t pulled a trigger; her crime wasn’t on any book. Who else but him to blame. He said, “Do you think you’re going to win the lawsuit?”

  “I don’t know.” Iniguez smiled faintly. “What do you think?”

  “Our lawyers seem to get a kick out of shooting at each other.”

  “That’s cause they’re lawyers.” He walked to the fridge. “Sure you don’t want some pumpkin pie.”

  “I’ll have a piece. Thanks.”

  As he cut them: “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “Raymond got sick when he was twenty-seven.”

  “He was a teacher.”

  “He coached at PS One Seventy-five and ran Little League. There was nobody like my brother. Huge Yankees fan. You should’ve seen his room at the Beacon, posters everywhere. The worst thing about him getting sick was it happened right when my first son was born. My kids never got to meet the real him. His friends forgot him, our parents are dead. The only people who know the truth are me and my wife.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jonah said. He remembered he wasn’t supposed to apologize.

  Iniguez said, “Me too.”

  They ate in silence. The crust was soggy.

  “I’d say get her out of your life, but I know it’s easier said than done.”

  “I’m trying to get a restraining order.”

  “You think that’ll work?”

  “Probably not.”

  Iniguez nodded, rinsed his plate in the sink.

  “The thing is,” Jonah said, “I don’t have her address or her phone number, which they need.” He cleared his throat. “Did Raymond have them?”

  Iniguez stood the plate on the drainer board. “He might’ve.”

  THE GARAGE HAD been converted into a recording studio. Foam-covered walls made the place feel more cramped than it was—which was very cramped, a paella of instruments, speakers, cables, microphone
stands, computers; milk crates of analog tape; wavy, silvery columns of CDs. A single forty-five-watt bulb burned. Iniguez stepped past a nylon-string guitar on a stand, stopping to pluck the low E.

  “My wife brought this back from the Beacon,” he said, hefting a cardboard box.

  While Jonah sorted through its contents, Iniguez picked up the guitar and sat in the chair by his workstation, playing a tune recognizable as a slower, more elemental version of the song they’d listened to upstairs. Jonah took out a few shirts, refolded them, set them aside on the steps. Some bed linens. A handful of fliers; the Beacon House News; a Post sports section talking about the pennant race.

  “When we were kids, me and Raymond made money playing in a Mexican restaurant in Brooklyn. This was our, you know. Signature song.”

  Jonah didn’t know what to say. “What’s it called?”

  “It doesn’t have a name. Raymond called it ‘The Song.’ ‘Let’s play “The Song.” ’ Playing live we made it last a quarter of an hour. When I set up my first studio—I used to live near the zoo, before I got married—and we did that version I played you upstairs as an audition piece. It was mostly to test the equipment.”

  Jonah wanted to know how Simón had met his wife, how he had come to his profession, how he managed to navigate this morass without sight. But too many questions were too many questions.

  “Not much here except clothes.”

  “I bought him a computer,” Simón said. “That’s not there?”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Then it’s back in the corner. Have a look.”

  Jonah parted a picket fence of boom stands and knocked into a low metal table covered with a checked tablecloth and a half-dozen green-blinking devices, all plugged into the same overloaded surge protector. Lifting that, he found a slim, dusty ThinkPad.

  He brought it back to Iniguez, who said, “I got him this so he could look for jobs or, you know, write a résumé. I don’t know what’s on here, but it’s private.”

  “I’ll look for the number,” Jonah said.

  “I don’t want my wife coming and find you here. Take it home.”

  Jonah hesitated. “Are y—”

  “Don’t tell me what you find, I don’t want to know. Call before you bring it back. It’s listed under Cross-Bronx Studios. Call first.”

  “I will.”

  Iniguez started back up the stairs. “You can let yourself out.”

  Jonah said, “The rest of the stuff—”

  “I’ll take care of it. Unless you want something. You want a shirt?”

  “No. Thanks.”

  Iniguez stopped at the top of the steps, his big body outlined in yellow light. “You can take it all,” he said. “I don’t want it around the house.”

  • 27 •

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2004.

  ADOLESCENT AND CHILD PSYCHIATRY, WEEK ONE.

  ADULTS GOT DISEASES; children got sick. A thirty-year-old had epilepsy; a nine-year-old had Seizure Disorder NOS (Not Otherwise Specified)—as though by avoiding a label you could delay a lifetime of grief.

  The practical reason for NOSing kids was that they frequently failed to fit familiar diagnostic patterns. Nowhere was this truer than on ped psych, where the first order of business was to identify where normal childhood flightiness ended and illness began. All five-year-olds are a little bit psychotic.

  Matched one-on-one with a softhearted shrink named Shervan Soleimani, Jonah walked the floor on consults. The patients they saw that morning were inadvertently hilarious, popping with off-the-wall ideas, mimicking the doctor’s soft Persian lilt. Most were Wacky Kid Not Otherwise Specified. Others suffered from externals—violent homes, severe neglect—such that their imaginations seemed to have been pulverized; they looked at Jonah with cold pity, as though he still had a lot of growing up to do.

  One such girl, a sickly six-year-old from Spanish Harlem, had been at the hospital for two days because Social Services couldn’t decide where to send her. Her mother had brought her in to shelter her from an abusive father, then had an MI in the middle of the peds ward and died. Dad had drifted into the ether, although general consensus held that to be for the best.

  The girl had been crying so hard that she’d given herself a nosebleed, which Jonah attempted to stanch. She gnawed at her uneven braids, hiccupping sorrow and swinging her feet.

  “DeShonna?” Soleimani said.

  The girl sniffled and squirmed away. “Stop touching me.”

  Soleimani indicated for Jonah not to be offended. Jonah nodded, dropped the bloody cotton balls in the trash.

  “We talked to your aunt today,” said Soleimani. “She is going to come take care of you for a while.”

  This piece of news caused DeShonna to cry even harder.

  “I don’t want her, I want my mama.”

  “I know you do,” said Soleimani. “It must hurt a lot. Sometimes talking about it can make you feel better. If she was here right now, what would you say to her?”

  She dropped the pigtail and gave him a businesslike stare.

  “I’d say, Fuck you, bitch.”

  THAT NIGHT LANCE returned home bearing boxed panettone and an improbably intense tan.

  “UV beds, dude. A European favorite. The Count keeps one in his basement. I was on it like an hour a day. Do you think I damaged my reproductive capabilities?”

  “One can only hope.”

  Lance handed him the panettone. “It’s traditionally a Christmas delicacy, but in the age of mass tourism, you can get it all year round. The EU legislates production.”

  Starved, grateful, Jonah put out paper plates. “How was the trip?”

  “Fuckin waste of time. All I did was smoke and tan.”

  “How about the Count?”

  Lance picked a raisin out of the cake and balanced it on his thumb before darting his tongue out, toadlike, to eat it. “Bad teeth, good clothes. He owns a gondola. His house is attached to the hotel, right on the Grand Canal, with its own slip in back. It’s pretty cool. In the morning you go out there and it’s all foggy. Molto mysterioso.”

  “The craziest part of that story is that you were up in the morning.”

  “They’re six hours ahead, so when you think about my schedule here, it’s like I’m living their time zone, dude. Like, their nine A.M. is our three A.M. So that means I’m getting up when they’re going to—Uh. That doesn’t make any fucking sense. Whatever, dude, I was jet. Lagged. The three of us went out in his gondola. You remember Zeke from Alpha Sig? With the Steven Tyler lips? Dead ringer for the gondolier. Scary.” Lance grimaced and pushed his cake away. “I have to say, though, it was an unfortunately overt vacation.”

  Jonah raised his eyebrows.

  “The place is old, dude. The walls…I could hear them going at it. All fucking night. My footage is tainted. I’m going to have to redub everything.”

  “It’s your Oedipus Rex.”

  “My mom and I are close, but this was evil. Plus I think they were having a threesome. One morning I went for a walk at like six A.M. Our noon. Or—whatever, point is, when I come back there’s this chick coming downstairs with her hair all whhhraang, wearing a mink stole and I’m pretty sure nothing else.”

  “That’s messed up.”

  “Whatever.” Lance shrugged. “He’s coming for Christmas.”

  Jonah sensed hurt—and a kind of puritanical contempt—behind this show of indifference, but he did not want to probe uninvitedly. He nodded.

  They ate in silence. Finally, as though noticing it for the first time, Lance waved at the huge pile of furniture blocking their fire escape. “It looks like Les Mis in here, what the shit is going on?”

  Jonah sighed. “Don’t unpack just yet.”

  HE TOLD LANCE everything, concluding, “it’s not safe to stay here. I called Vik, I’m staying with him.”

  “This is beyond wack.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Are you going to turn yourself in?”


  “What for?”

  Lance pondered this. “True dat. Do you still have the DVD?”

  Jonah got it from his desk. “Turn the volume down,” he warned.

  The screen filled with snow. The DVD player made unhealthy shifting noises and regurgitated the disc upon its tongue.

  ERROR MEDIA NOT READABLE

  IT MAY BE DIRTY OR DAMAGED (MESSAGE–7.9)

  Jonah turned the disc over to blow on its underside, and saw that its surface had gone cloudy gray. He rubbed at it with the corner of his shirt to no effect. “When I first got it, the bottom was red.”

  He handed it to Lance, who looked at it and said, “It’s a self-destructing disc. They go bad after they’re exposed to oxygen.”

  Jonah felt the blood drain from his face. “Is there any way to recover it?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  They stood looking at the now useless piece of plastic.

  Jonah said, “Get your bag.”

  Before clearing out of the apartment, he left a note for Eve taped to the door, in which he informed her that he was leaving town for a few days, apologized for betraying her trust, and again expressed a desire to end their relationship peaceably. This bunch of platitudes he didn’t expect to achieve much, save to prevent her from breaking in.

  Lance was gracefully accommodating. “As long as we’re taking proactive steps, dude. Don’t let the cops search our pad. It’s like a class-C felony in there.”

  They parted ways at Union Square, where Lance headed to Ruby’s in Park Slope, and Jonah—hoisting a large duffel containing books, clothes, and both his and Raymond Iniguez’s laptops—went uptown. He changed trains and buses at random, ending up in Columbus Circle, where he sank into the posh bowels of the Time Warner Center. Whole Foods bubbled with neo-yuppies ogling lustrous produce. The odor of ripe cheese set off notes of damp cashmere and shoe rubber. He spent time examining Fontinas and Parmesans and sheep’s-milk blues (I got the sheep’s-milk blues he sang in his head) before selecting a pomelo and stepping into a line fifty strong. The first snow of the year had come down that morning, and although it hadn’t stuck, folks looked despondent.