Author: Bill Clegg
Category: Fiction
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As fast as I can, I put on my boxer shorts. It is suddenly, urgently, important to have boxers on and for everything to be clean. If the room gets stormed, I don’t want it streaked with residue and mess and I don’t want to be naked. I wipe down the surfaces of the bathroom and the bedroom and gather the glasses with the pills and the crack next to the bed. I set up the bottles of vodka on the floor and bring an empty one to pee into. At some point during the cleaning and gathering I decide that once I lie down on the bed I will not leave it. I sit at its edge and pack a hit. I smoke hit after hit, but it seems I can’t make a dent in the pile of drugs in the glass. I begin to take the pills. One after another, with big mouthfuls of vodka. I hear footsteps on the roof. The sound of ropes, of heavy boots, of cables. Boxes piled with guns scraping the concrete. Surveillance equipment being hauled. More footsteps. More hits. More pills and larger gulps of vodka. This goes on and on in the half-lit room, the late morning sun seeping through the closed curtains. The surfaces that had once seemed to shimmer with the most inviting urban glamour now look cheap and cold and ordinary. I hear a helicopter and imagine the men above fastening the roof with cables lowered from a large, powerful chopper that will—any second now—lift the little cube of a room into the air, away from the city, and behind the walls of a federal prison. The bed feels as if it is rocking, and I cannot tell if it is me, the bed, or the entire room. I down more pills. I smoke more. Drink more. Find a piece of paper and, as Noah wrote so many times on the back of envelopes and left on the bar in our foyer, write Can’t take it, and leave it next to the bed. I can barely move my arms, and my legs begin to ache. My heart feels like it is a rocket taking off from inside my chest, but at the same time a low, dull wave of drowsy energy begins to roll at the back of my neck and head.
The pills are nearly gone. I wonder, for the first time, if I really want to go through with this. There still might be a chance to crawl up and out of this deep well. Do I really want to die? I stop and the sounds on the roof stop, too. Everything is silent but for the roaring of blood behind my eyes and ears and chest. All I can hear is life slamming through my tired, aching body. Do I want to do this? Now? The sound of something snapping comes from the roof and I startle.
Yes, I think as I lean over to pick up the glass with the pills and slide the last ten or so into my mouth. Yes, I say out loud to the men on the roof and the ones in the vans who must be listening. YES, I shout, before I chug the dregs of vodka from the bottle. Yes, I whisper angrily, packing the only clean stem until it bulges. Yes and Yes and Yes as I finish it all and my limbs slow and the great drowsy, long-awaited wave rises, crests and, at last, crashes down. Yes.
For a long time, the next thing I remembered was being in the lobby of One Fifth, holding on to the front desk, telling Luis that I needed the new key. But over time I remember standing on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Washington Square Park. Did a cab leave me here? Did I walk from the hotel? I had no idea then and have no idea now. But I remember standing at the corner, not knowing what to do. Whether to go home or not. I have no money. Nothing. And I can barely stay awake. I can lie down on the sidewalk and sleep so easily. If I can just find a spot, out of the way, where I won’t get arrested or harassed. Sleep is on me like the heaviest blanket, and I can’t stand still without stumbling. I start walking north up Fifth, toward home.
And so Luis—thirty-something, extremely polite, Hispanic, the same doorman I have waved hello to coming in and out of the lobby for years—is telling me that Noah is not at home and that I’m not allowed in the building. He says it nicely, but he says it. I ask him to just please give me the new key. I tell him it will be fine, Noah won’t mind. He tells me he’s been instructed not to give it to me, and I tell him if I don’t lie down somewhere I will die. I can now barely stand up. He calls John, the building manager. John comes down and asks me to follow him. We go to the second floor, where he has a small office, and he suggests I wait with him until Noah gets back. I tell him he has to call Noah. My cell phone is dead. He dials the number and hands me the phone. Noah’s voice mail picks up, and I tell him I’m home and they won’t let me in. At some point during the message I fall down. My legs give out and I’m on the floor in front of John’s desk. He helps me up, but there is nowhere to sit. I hang on to the door frame behind me. I am awake and asleep, alive and dead, and I don’t know how I got here. John is talking, and I’m no longer hearing his words. His phone rings and he puts it to my ear. It’s Noah. Hi, I say. I’m home. Help. Please. I give the phone to John and more sounds happen and then John is walking me downstairs, to Luis’s desk. Give him the key, John says, and Luis opens the cabinet to get it. There is some confusion about old and new keys, but eventually a key ends up in my hand and I start heading for the elevator. When I get in, I can’t remember what floor we lived on. Three? I hit three and know it’s not right. Five? Six? Six. Six. Six W. So I hit six. The doors open and close on three, and for a moment I forget it’s not my floor and move toward the door. I remember, but when I stop, my body buckles again and I’m on the floor. The doors shut and I manage to stand up as the doors open on six. The apartment is to the right of the elevator, the last door on the left. I start toward the door and hang on to the wall the whole way. I finally get there and see the shiny new steel lock where the old copper-colored one had been. I don’t know what I’ve done with the key and as I search my pockets I realize it’s still in my right hand. Now I just need to open the door. But I can’t seem to guide the key into the lock. It must be the wrong one. Maybe we live on the seventh floor. Maybe the fourth. I keep poking at the lock, but my hand is shaking and I can’t make it go in. Now that I’ve stopped walking, the drowsiness hits like a tidal wave. I’m leaning against the wall next to the door, but I can’t stay up. I’m going down and hold on to the knob to keep from falling backwards. I sway in place for a while, and as it all begins to go dark, there are hands at my back, along my arms, taking the key, pulling me up. I see them on my wrists, and they are the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Made of light, not flesh, winging around me with good purpose and grace. Noah. He pulls me against him—he smells like dry cleaning and cigarettes—helps me stay up with one hand and unlocks the door with the other. He is speaking but the words are too far away. He tries to hold me up as the door opens but I’m already down. The light from the apartment streaks toward us. I fall in.
White Plains
An ambulance will wait by the service entrance at One Fifth to take me to Lenox Hill Hospital. Unlike the ride to the hospital when I am twelve, this one won’t be remembered—there will be no surfacing between awake and unawake, no comforting voices. I won’t remember the emergency room, won’t remember the elevator to the psych ward, won’t remember anything beyond falling through the apartment door, Noah behind me, the light.
I wake in a room, alone, strapped to a bed, with no idea where I am. It takes several minutes to register that I am alive, and when it does, I am furious. Nurses come. A doctor. People—my family, Noah—are outside the door, but I tell the nurses not to let anyone in. I stay frozen, in the room, with only one thought: What now?
Julia, a friend from Los Angeles, keeps calling. Nurses come in many times a day to say she is either waiting on the pay phone line or has left another message that I should call her. She does this for days and finally, before I speak to or see anyone else, I go to the phone. I leave the bed and room for the first time and wander toward the pay phone by the nurses’ station. Hi, I say, and she fills my ears with her words. For a while, hers are the only words I can hear and she will say them over and over and keep saying them for weeks, then months.
I am given another room. It is small, with two beds, and looks out onto a church on 77th Street. When I get to the room it is empty and there is no sign of a roommate. An enormous white orchid is sitting on the dresser. It has two tall bamboo stakes with sharp, pointy ends to support the plant. It’s from Jean and there is a note that asks me to be on the board of her lit
erary magazine—I keep meaning to ask you, it says as if nothing has gone on, and it closes with So much love. I stare at the orchid, her scrawled handwriting, the thick, creamy stationery, and wonder who it was she thought she knew, who she thought she loved. I take one of the bamboo stakes, snap it in half, and go into the bright blue-tiled bathroom and start jamming it into my wrist. I keep jamming, harder and harder, until the skin breaks and blood comes, and I look down at my fist pumping the little weapon into my arm, see how dreadful what I am doing is, and register, in that instant, that I don’t want to die. Suddenly and for the first time, dying seems like the last thing I want. I stop, grateful not to have caused more damage, put my arm under cold water, rinse the wound, wrap it in paper towels, and sit on the small bed facing the window. I sit there for a long time. I look at the church steeple and wait.
Before I see anyone, most of my family return to their lives in New England. My mother stays in a friend’s apartment on the Upper West Side, but I ask not to see her. Noah comes a few times and looks more handsome than I have ever seen him. He sits across a cafeteria table from me and I am both shamed and dazzled by him. I weigh just over 130 pounds, almost 40 pounds less than my usual weight, swimming in pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt, and he glows in an elegant agnès b. shirt, collared English sweater, and chic gray city coat. I remember his buying each of these things. It is never said, but it is clear that it is over, that our lives, bound together for so long, will now be lived apart. Everything that we were, the whole magical, horrible opera, is now over. We are only a table apart but we’re in different worlds. He seems less like a person and more like a figment from a dream I once had, some nocturnal wonder I cannot revive after sleep, only remember.
And then Katherine appears. After waking from a nightmare where she sees me wandering in city traffic, careening between cabs and buses, she calls her father, who has just heard from someone in our small town that there is trouble. Katherine hangs up the phone, drives to the airport in Lubbock, Texas, where she is living, catches the next plane to New York, and arrives the day before I stumble home, before the ambulance comes. She sits through two weeks of visiting hours, in the hall, mostly alone, always with a book. When people come to see me, she returns to the hall, and when they leave and I am on my own, she comes back.
One afternoon, she tells me the story of a plane we planned to steal the summer between our graduating from grammar school and entering high school. It was called The Alaskan Express, she reminds me, and describes how we had hatched an exhaustive plan—with maps and diagrams and budgets—to fly it to a deserted island in the Caribbean. Our friend Michael, who knew how to fly from his father, who was a pilot, was part of the scheme, too. She reminds me all about it—how we planned to pack seeds to plant elaborate gardens and find equipment to convert salt water to fresh; how the three of us had figured out a way to not have to leave one another, not have to move on. I had forgotten about the plane, the whole story, how possible it all seemed then. I listen to her and feel as I did when I was ten—awed by what she knows and grateful for her attention. But mostly we don’t talk. She holds my hand and we sit, in a hospital again, just as we were at the beginning, together and without words.
Two weeks later, Noah, Katherine, and I meet with the psychiatrist I’ve been assigned and discuss rehabs. We pick one. Katherine goes to One Fifth and packs up some of my clothes and a few books. She helps me to the street with my bags, hugs me good-bye, and returns to Texas. We will drift apart again, she will go to Belize and for months I won’t hear anything, but she will resurface—a phone call, an e-mail—and the fabric will mend again, for a little while.
David, whom I haven’t seen since our breakfast at Marquet, is waiting outside Lenox Hill, on the corner of 77th and Park Avenue, with his Jeep. He is both warm and cautious, and we drive, mostly in silence, to White Plains, N.Y., to the grounds of an old asylum turned into a psychiatric hospital, with a small rehab center tucked in the back. We stop at a large drugstore near the rehab, and I look at the people wandering the aisles and wonder how they live their lives, how anyone does. He walks me through the store like a father taking his son to camp, asks me if I want toothpaste, candy, notebooks. He buys me two notebooks. I will fill them.
During those first nights in White Plains, I wonder about the boy who is assigned to the room across the hall—and his worried mother, setting his things down, eyeing him as if he will take flight or disappear in a flash if she turns her back. She reminds me of Noah. And when the boy looks at me, briefly, with eyes that are two black marbles, drained of hope and color and life, I see myself.
In the evenings, I walk in a gentle, sloping field, much like the one in Oregon, and wonder what will happen next. There is one late afternoon, a few days before I return to New York, when anxiety and despair overwhelm me and I get on my knees at the top of the field. It’s wet from rain earlier in the day and the sky is lightless and gray with fog. I lie down in the damp and muddy grass and whisper into the soil for help. I do this for a long time and at some point stand up, pants soaked at the knees and thighs, hands and elbows caked with mud. When I stand, I see a small break in the wall of cloud and through it a faint streak of light. It is pale and pink and the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. The cloud opens wider, the light grows, and as it does, I feel an easing. I know, if only for that moment, that my worry will change nothing and that everything is as it’s supposed to be. That I will be okay.
I walk down the field as night falls. When I reach the bottom, the large maple tree anchoring the corner of the field erupts with a racket of birds. The entire tree is covered with them, and they scream and caw and flap as loudly as a roaring stadium. I stand and watch them for a long time, mesmerized by the great movement and sound. Then, all at once, the tree rushes with wings and the flock takes off, sailing out over the field, banking left, then right, and off behind the church, gone. When I return to my room, the phone is ringing. It’s Julia, who asks me to be the godfather of her first child, Kate, who will be born just after I return to New York.
At night I hear the wind scream between the buildings and rattle the windows. I hear shouting down the hall and wonder whether my door will burst open, as it did on the first night, when a dark-haired girl dropped to her knees in the doorway and asked if I was God. I watch the space under my door and see light happen from the other side. Sometimes it is faint, other times bright, then nothing.
In that room, I sit in a chair and feel lighter than I have ever felt—relieved, an impossible weight lifted—until faces begin to appear like fireworks. They keep coming, one after the other—they belonged to my life once, I think—and I feel, sharply, the anger and grief and disappointment and scorn I imagine they hold. I feel heavy again in that chair and sometimes I sit there for hours. I pace my room and leave messages on cell phones and voice mails. Some call back, some never do. I crouch on my knees and pray. For help. For a way through this. For forgiveness. I think of one of my favorite poems and see the predictions it held. I remember my life, how it all mattered so much once, and then not at all. I remember the last lines of a book I believed I understood. When it feels like the end of the world, it never is. I knead these words like a rosary and write them in letters and speak them over the phone and into the wind in that field. I lose faith in them, but pray they are true. They are.
I remember all the cabdrivers and hotel employees, dealers, and addicts. The ones who prickled with disgust, fear, or ecstasy, and the ones who said in the same gentle tone that everything would work out, that it would all be okay. I wonder who they thought they were talking to, who it was they saw, who they were. There are things that will always puzzle me—the conversations, the great ballet of taxis and cars, government agents and cops, the JCPenneys—that I will never be able to see clearly enough to distinguish truth from delusion. With these things, these memories, I am only able to remember what they looked like, how they sounded, how it felt. I remember looking out from the balcony of the Gansevoort H
otel that morning. All those people strolling, impossibly, at five a.m.; the Town Cars and the words written on cards that I will always wonder about and often think I should look up to find some meaning in but never do. I remember the seagulls wheeling in great arcs above the river. There were so many.