by Rob Roberge
Your teacher sends you home with a note that you figure out from overhearing your parents is about how your obsession with death is disturbing the other students. But she’s wrong. You are not obsessed with death. You are obsessed by the fear of being alone.
—
1992: Your friend Linda comes from New York, where she’s now living, to visit you at your dead grandmother’s farmhouse in Connecticut, which you are cleaning out in exchange for living there. Linda was one of your roommates in Boston when you lived in Southie—the one who used to joke that if it weren’t for you, she never would have met every pierced and tattooed slutty bartender in Boston at her breakfast table.
You are making Linda dinner. Your grandmother’s hoarder house is still pretty disgusting, even though you have been living there for months and have already cleaned out what would be seven or eight lifetimes’ worth of shit in any ordinary house. Here, though, this has done little more than create actual walkways between rooms and some empty spots on the furniture so that you can sit down. By this point, there aren’t rodent carcasses littering the floors anymore, but it smells like there are still some around, hidden under the remaining junk. Linda manages million-dollar apartments in New York. She has actually flown first class. You can hardly believe she is even willing to set foot in this disaster, much less eat and sleep here, so you are trying to make it as nice for her as possible. You go grocery shopping together, buying things you know she likes, and when it comes time to check out, you pay like a host is supposed to, writing the third check you have ever written in your life.
You are twenty-six years old. This is your first checking account. You ask Linda what the date is.
“The eighteenth,” she says.
You stand there holding the pen. “What month?”
She looks at you incredulously. “Wow. What I’d give to live in your weird little world,” she says.
You’ve been a drunk the whole time you’ve known Linda, but you haven’t seen her in a while, and your addiction has progressed more than you want to admit to yourself. You are calling yourself a writer, but the truth is you have written three pages in six months. You drink until you pass out every night and you paint houses and factories as your main job. Your second job is one night a week at a microbrewery where you work the bottling line. Every twelfth bottle is what’s known as a “short”—it only fills up eleven instead of twelve ounces—and so you get to take home four cases of eleven-ounce beers every Thursday night. You tell yourself you will never run out of beer, but you are frequently out by Sunday afternoon.
Although you and Linda were always platonic in Boston, alone in the hoarder house, you end up sleeping together. Before you get very far, Linda takes a deep breath and says, “I promised myself if I did this, I’d really do it.” Her voice is more shy than you’ve ever heard it. “Would you tie me up and spank me?” She’s the first woman who’s ever asked you to do this. You say, “Of course,” because she asked, which you know took nerve, even if it isn’t the sort of thing you fantasize about. It isn’t that you don’t enjoy it—you’ve always thought Linda was beautiful, and you’re turned on by the chance to make her happy, but also, privately, as you belt her pale ass, watching the welts rise, you’re really imagining that it’s you tied up and she is using the belt on you.
Later, when Linda’s hands are untied and you’re holding each other, she says, “Thank you. I was so afraid to ask for that.” And you will feel a moment briefly opening—the opportunity to be as brave as she was and ask if she will do the same thing to you. But instead you just hold her, you can’t find the words, and the moment passes, and soon she is heading back to New York, and you never ask.
—
1997: Gayle gets the news that she’s had an irregular Pap smear. You go with her to the gynecologist and he tells her that he doesn’t like what he sees. He says it’s no big deal and in a calm voice says he wants to do surgery the next morning.
“Tomorrow?” Gayle says.
You don’t know what to say. You sit up in your chair and lean toward his desk like you’re going to ask a question, but you can’t speak. The room spins.
The doctor says, “I don’t want you to sit around worrying. It’s best for everyone if we do this right off.” He’s a white guy from South Africa, and you will always remember his accent when he says “right off” instead of “right away.”
He tells you both that it’s not cancer but something called carcinoma in situ—something that will lead to cancer if left untreated. He shows you diagrams and pictures while you’re in his office. All of this is almost impossible to follow. His voice sounds like it’s underwater.
You say, “How serious is this?”
“Again,” he says, “it’s nothing we can’t take care of. And we’ll do that right off.”
You and Gayle spend most of the car ride to see her parents reassuring each other. Repeating what he said about it not being a big deal—just something that needs to be taken care of. She seems calmer than you are. You want to scream. Or run. You feel trapped in the car as she drives. You crack the window and wish you still smoked, but you quit together earlier in the year.
You are broke, and her parents offer to pay for the surgery. You don’t like your father-in-law—he’s the angriest drunk you have ever met—but you are enormously grateful and feel guilty for how much you complain about him.
You don’t sleep that night. The next morning, when they are getting ready to wheel Gayle into surgery, you hold her hand while the nurses sedate her, only letting go when they bring in yet another piece of paper for her to sign. More nurses come in. The anesthesiologist. Finally, the surgeon. He tells you both again how this isn’t anything to worry about. It’s not a major procedure. She’ll be in and out in a couple of hours.
You tell Gayle you love her as they wheel her into the operating room. She’s nodding in and out from the drugs but tells you she loves you, too. She tells you she’ll be fine, though she looks a little scared, and you remember thinking that you are the one who’s supposed to be comforting her, not the other way around.
Two hours pass. Three. Four. And you start to think something has gone terribly wrong. Sitting helpless in the waiting room, you think about Gayle dying. You feel guilty for even thinking this, but you can’t help it. You think about losing her. About being alone again. You don’t think you can live without her. The minutes tick by slower. You calmly decide that you will kill yourself if she doesn’t make it through this—the surgery or after it. Losing Gayle feels like it would be losing everything, and you don’t want to face the world again without her.
—
2013: You are afraid of losing your mind.
You write yourself notes, lists:
• Pugilistic dementia (CTE)
• Worsening bipolar
• Post-concussive syndrome
• Frontal lobe…impulse control and decision making
• Dr. says there’s no cure.
• MRIs inconclusive. May have the early signs. They don’t know if or when it will get worse.
• Eventually, might forget how to get home. Won’t be able to drive. Will have to be watched at all times. Won’t have the luxury of being alone again. Can’t imagine anything that could make you feel more alone.
• Everybody’s entire existence will be determined by watching you to make sure you’re safe.
• Can live like this as it is now.
• Can’t live if this gets worse.
—
1982: Mary—who seven years from now will be your fiancée—is absolutely in love with R.E.M. You go to high school together, though she’s two years behind you. You are just close friends at this point—she’s dating some college guy from out of town who you hate. Her best friend is dating one of your best friends. You are always together.
She plays R.E.M. for you every chance she gets. You are not nearly as taken with them as she is, and one night you are drinking beer on her father’s porch and you
tell her that you like certain parts of a lot of their songs but never the whole song, it seems. You will later end up loving some of their songs, but that’s how you feel at the time.
You specifically mention “Radio Free Europe.” The verses are dull and unmemorable, but the chorus is amazing. Their songs just never seem to be great all the way through—there’s always something that doesn’t work.
“But don’t you get it?” she says. “It’s the bad parts that make you realize how good the great parts are.”
You will live many more years. Many more, in fact, than anyone would have predicted for you. You will read—and sometimes even understand—Nietzsche and Heidegger and Aristotle and Confucius and a bunch of other great thinkers, trying to make some sense out of your world. But you often think that you have never heard a better philosophy than what Mary says that night, drunk on her back porch: It’s the bad parts that make you realize how good the great parts are.
1995: The night you and Gayle get married while driving cross-country, you stay in what passes for a posh hotel in Salt Lake City.
You stay on the eleventh floor—the highest up you have ever slept in your life.
In bed, you ask her why she has two pillows and you have one.
“Because they only gave us three,” she says.
And you know you are in love.
—
SEPTEMBER 1, 1914: Martha, the last known passenger pigeon in the world, dies at the Cincinnati Zoo. The cause is old age, and Martha has spent her last four years as the last of her kind. Various estimates put her age at anywhere from seventeen to twenty-nine, with twenty-nine being the consensus.
—
2009: You’ve relapsed for a year, after nearly fifteen years clean. After your relapse, after you decide not to kill yourself, you start over with AA. You go through the dreadful shame of taking a newcomer chip. You try to be humble about it. You try to make ninety meetings in ninety days like you’re supposed to. You follow all of your new sponsor’s directions. You make gratitude lists. You do affirmations—your sponsor tells you to list good qualities you have, even if you haven’t always lived up to them. You wince when you write things like:
• Good friend
• Kind
• Smart
• Funny
• Reliable (?)
• Can be honest. Have been honest
Some days you get stuck after two or three items and you have to check what you wrote the day before to see what good qualities you might have, or have had.
You admit you are powerless in the face of your addiction and you need help. You try hard to admit you’re no better or smarter than anyone else there, though you cringe every time someone mentions their religion and thanks “Jesus Christ as my lord and savior.” Your friend Patrick, who’s been to San Quentin and turned his life around totally and is the person whose recovery you respect most, tells you to just do the steps.
“The program is harder for smart people and skeptics,” he says. “Stick with it, bro.”
You listen. You have no choices left.
—
2010: A year after quitting opiates a second time, you slowly teach yourself to write again. At first, you can barely write a sentence.
The last two years are something that would kill you to repeat. You’re not as fragile as people think. But you know your limits.
One night you delete all your suicide notes from your computer.
If things go bad again, it’s not like you can’t write a new one.
—
1996: Nine-year-old Amber Hagerman is abducted. Four days later, her body is found, throat slit. Her murder inspires the AMBER Alert System. The case remains unsolved.
—
JULY 1977: One night, at sunset, you sit against the outside wall of your garage and chain-smoke some cigarettes you’ve stolen from your father. Nicole has been dead less than a month. The cigarettes make your throat raw, and you love it. Anything that makes you feel different than the way you normally feel is always welcome. You’re spending hours with a sharp piece of gravel, rubbing off the skin on the back of your left hand until it wells with blood from the deep abrasion. The air lets out of your chest and you feel a tension leave your body.
It will not leave a tremendous scar, but you will be able to see it for the rest of your life. You watch the sun set, smoking your father’s cigarettes as you draw your own blood and start to breathe easier.
Pain becomes one of the most complicated things in your life. Some pain that comes at you in waves feels like it can destroy you. Emotional pain from outside, especially from men, makes you feel weak and small and never good enough. Pain you inflict on yourself—and later, pain inflicted by women who care about you—is calming and settling. You learn early that pain is as complex and wide-ranging as love itself.
—
1984: You are having sex with Donna, your friend’s mother.
For years, when you tell this story, you’ll say you lost your virginity to your friend’s mom—which, while it is the emotional truth, only echoes the factual truth. But I lost my virginity to my friend’s mom is a good shorthand for how you spent your senior year.
You and Donna have a secret affair for more than six months. You make out like kids, hiding behind corners of buildings and hoping no one sees. She kisses aggressively, sucking your tongue with a force that makes you feel she could tear it out and swallow it. She’s the first woman to bite your nipples. The first to intentionally make you feel pain and you float with the realization that you love it. Someone else hurting you feels better—even more calming—than when you hurt yourself.
You meet her at commuter train station parking lots and she looks over her shoulder every time a car pulls in. Her mouth tastes like Virginia Slims and Tab when you meet her after work, and like Virginia Slims and some bitter white wine later in the day. She teaches you where to touch her and how to go down on her in her bedroom after she and her husband have separated and you are, on occasion, alone in her house. Even though she is the first woman you make orgasm, you will never actually have an orgasm with her. The closest you get is once when the two of you are alone in the house on a Saturday and she is giving you your first blow job in the upstairs hallway when the garage door starts to open. Your friend has come home when he’d said he’d be gone all day. You have just closed your eyes and felt lips and a tongue and teeth on your cock for the first time. You have never felt this good without being loaded. It may be even slightly better than being loaded. When she hears the garage door, Donna stops going down on you and rushes into the bathroom as you zip up your pants and wonder what room you should race to be in when your friend gets upstairs. Standing in the hallway with an obvious hard-on seems the wrong place to be. You hurry toward the kitchen and you hear Donna brushing her teeth in the bathroom. She never goes down on you again.
You love your friend and feel terribly guilty about being with his mother. You also despise him for coming home in the middle of your first blow job. You could, you realize, punch him. You’re an emotional mess. You’re in love with a woman twice your age and you are such a rube, you think that you will be together forever. You wonder how it’s going to work when your friend is your stepson. You actually try to get your head around this and more troubling situations. You are mugged by guilt every day. Your friend is the person you would tell about this if it was anyone else’s mother. Instead, you have no one to talk to and you realize for the first time that being in love is not something that makes everything all right. Sometimes everything that’s wonderful with her is shadowed with a cold feeling that you are, on some foundational level, a bad person.
You love—or at least think you love—Donna. But that doesn’t stop you from drinking her liquor and stealing pills out of her medicine cabinet. She takes a lot of Valium. Now you take a lot of Valium. She has Percocet and you promise yourself you won’t take enough for her to notice, but you go through her whole script in a week. If she notices, she doesn’
t say anything. You fall asleep a lot at school. The assistant principal takes you into his office and talks about potential that you’re not living up to, and he tells you that you’re selling the sizzle and not the steak and that he needs to see more steak and less sizzle out of you and you are loaded and you wonder what the fuck he is talking about.
One night, Donna takes you to a cemetery two towns over. She doesn’t talk in the car—doesn’t even kiss you when you get in. She stares straight ahead and you count four Virginia Slims with coral lipstick on their filters piled in the ashtray by the time she parks.
She starts up a hill and then waits for you. She takes your hand when you get to her and she starts walking uphill again. You will still feel bad about this years later, feel awful that you are so clueless as to miss how serious she is, but climbing that hill the only thought in your head is that you are getting fucked in a cemetery. Great plan. Who would find you there?
She takes her hand out of yours and lights a cigarette. You feel nervous and unsure of what to do, and you light one as well.
You are standing in between some headstones and she points to the one next to you.
“That’s my sister,” she says.
It becomes clear you are almost certainly not going to fuck in this cemetery. That doesn’t seem to matter because she brought you here. Not anyone else. That has to mean something. But you have no idea what to say.
You manage, “I’m sorry.” Your friend has told you about the aunt he barely remembers who died in a car accident.
You both stand there for a while. She tells you that you are not allowed to tell anyone what she’s about to tell you.
“I just need someone to hear this, okay?”
“Of course,” you say.
She tells you there was no car accident. Their mother found her hanging in the basement ten years ago. You think of your friend’s doting grandmother. You never would have guessed that she’d dealt with shit this major. But she’s sixty-five years old. Of course she has—everyone does.