American Dream Machine (36 page)

“Are you high? Did you shoot up earlier, too?”

“Nope.”

The little Gremlin shot down the hill.
First gear . . . second gear
. . . I couldn’t help it either; the Beach Boys rang inside my head. Day was
just beginning to turn across the flats, and we sped through the flashing yellow light at Fountain, then caught the green at Santa Monica. This was the fastest way to the hospital, the reconstructed Cedars-Sinai over by the Beverly Center. My brother knew what he was doing all along.

“Why did you say Cedars of Lebanon, buddy? How come?”

He shrugged. To him the distinctions were practically moot: the past was the present, the present was the future. Severin knew just how to live. We raced along La Cienega, the moon expensive overhead, the sky’s rich purple now beginning to lighten. A strip club called the Seventh Veil, a wig shop flashed past. Was there anything on this earth that did not involve the donning or removal of our disguises? We turned right on Beverly and then left on George Burns Road, pulling up in front of the
ER
.

“Are you using, Sev?” I jumped out of the backseat and Sev from the front, and we ran around to pull Williams out of the passenger side. “Have you been?”

“A little.” The doors gasped open, their respiratory sound reassuring as we lugged Will into the lobby. “Occasionally.”

“Occasionally
, what”—Will sagged, and we buckled along with him—“what does that mean, Severin,
occasionally?
You don’t do this drug
occasionally
. It fucks you up, as you can see.”

I dropped my half, let Severin ballast Williams—screw them both, really, again—as I ran to the nurses’ station and started jabbering at the woman behind the counter.

“Our friend . . . messed up,
OD
’d, heroin . . . help.”

“What? What’s the problem, heah?”

The woman was in her forties, possibly Jamaican. She was café con leche–colored, with freckles and a big, round face. She seemed to know her part.

“My friend overdosed.” I spoke to the Plexiglas. “An hour, maybe two hours ago. I think he might die.”

Other people concentrate our energies. They make our selves possible, force us to be more than just a shrieking puddle of id. This woman’s calm directed me. She leaned back from her desk, turning her wide face—it was almost as big as Beau’s, but it was more tender in its froggy unhappiness—to an orderly.
Helpdisboy
, I think she said. The orderly, who was big and strapping and dreadlocked himself, came round.

“What happened?”

I told him. My brother was still standing near the door with Williams hanging off him, like King Kong slewing from the side of his skyscraper. There was something funny about stolid Sev waiting there with Will, who lolled and drooled like the world’s worst (or best, I suppose, depending) prom date. But then there is something funny about everything.

“Thanks,” Sev grunted, as the orderly took the burden off his hands.

The orderly carried Will over to a gurney with ease. “When did this happen?”

“An hour or two ago,” Severin said. “We found him like this.”

Over in the
ER
’s waiting area was a corkscrew-curled Hispanic woman with her fever-red baby, an older couple, and a pair of kids—younger than us—who sat on either side of a guy who was obviously having a hard time of his own, a bad drug experience that had him blinking, dazed, palpitating. The orderly lay Williams down on the gurney and was joined by another.

“Wake up,” this new one said, an orange-haired white guy with a vinegar mustache, a little line of fur just like the stoner kids used to grow. “C’mon, Sleeping Beauty. Wake up, wake up!”

“That’s what you’re supposed to do?” I said. The two orderlies shook him and slapped him, cuffing his face as they lifted under his neck to keep him from gagging on his tongue. “We could’ve done that.”

“Shh.” Severin dragged me aside. “Let them do their jobs.”

“Aren’t you supposed to give him an adrenaline shot?” I shouted. “Something?”

They wheeled him through some double doors, taking him away from us. It was the theft of our responsibility, but what could we do? The waiting room was a warm, chalky blue, filled with ficus plants and an encouraging Freon glow. There were televisions in every corner. This place was a friendly and beautiful machine, where it seemed even the scrawny kid who sat blinking in his chair—I could practically feel his seizured pulse from here—was part of the plan.

“How high are you?” I asked Sev. Imagine, that I was still young enough to believe what the hospital signaled, to be lulled by its intimations of safety. “What are you on?”

“Nothing, now.”

“Then why? Severin, why are you doing that shit, ever?”

“I like it.”

We were such children, and so you might forgive the lunkheadedness of this response. Still, such raging, idiotic self-centeredness made me seethe.

“You fucking like it? Who’s the asshole romantic now, Sev? You’re always on me about my Chandler thing, but who’s
your
model? Thomas De Quincey?”

“I’m not shooting it.”

The older couple nearby watched us. Perhaps they were just looking for an out, a distraction from their own trauma. They clung to each other as if for dear life, their bodies blending in a mass of tan clothes, walnut skin, dirty sneakers, and gray hair. I hope to die just so some day, in some smashed-up, transhuman calamity.

“I’m only smoking it. And not very often, Nate. Once a month, if that.”

“That’s a relief.”

“Williams and I have done it a few times, that’s all. I didn’t know he was shooting it.”

“Oh, excuse you.”

“No, really. I mean it.” We sat down in a pair of black-pleather seats beside a plastic table with magazines, sports pages, newspapers abandoned by last night’s sufferers. “There’s a difference between experimenting and being strung out.”

“Really? Why don’t you explain that difference, huh? When exactly does an interest become a need?”

I wondered, not for the first time, what was really going on in my brother’s head. What Will had done wasn’t
truly
a surprise. It was in character. He’d been a mad dog since early childhood, and for him to slip off in the afternoon to cop on Bonnie Brae—now I could guess where he’d been—was just another dunderheaded act of self-destruction in a lifelong series of the same. But what about Severin? Wherever he went he presented the face of mastery, a mellow intellectual calm. He’d done this since we were teenagers. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t troubled. Far from it. Right now he just shook his head.

“He always needed to be first,” he murmured. “Will has always wanted to be first with everything.”

“He might be the first one to die.”

He stood up and went out to move his car. I watched him go, still wondering a bit what made him tick. He certainly had the trauma to back up all sorts of emotional disturbance, a history no less ruinous than Will’s. But I’d never seen him act on it. He loped down the emergency room drive and vanished, for a moment, into the day. The air had lightened, shifted from rich dark to anxious gray. We’d gone from nighttime emergency to near daylight, to a place where our disasters were suddenly unromantic. There was no grand design here, no idea that our Will was either a hero or a victim. He was just a statistic, if that.

“What d’you think happens when we die?” I said when Severin came back, after he’d nestled down in one of the plastic chairs with the paper.

“You wanna get metaphysical?” Severin lowered the sports section, which was two days old but which—unsurprisingly, given his bent—seemed to interest him as much as tomorrow’s. More. “Is this really the time?”

“When is it
not
the time?”

Severin watched me. He looked wry, amused, the way you were supposed to look when you’d been up all night after going to a rock concert and were now enjoying the paper with a friend.

“Does Williams have a soul?” I said.

“Williams? No.”

Severin was leaning back in his chair, his hair once more grown out and classically mussed, his jaw stubbled and his eyes alert behind his horn-rims. He looked like himself, like the self that would multiply over the years—in the newspapers, on YouTube—until he achieved whatever degree of celebrity was attainable for an American writer in the twenty-first century. Just then he was still my brother the bullshit screenwriter and failing novelist, whose future successes were as unimaginable as his current despairs.

“Williams is going to make it,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Because you don’t die when you’re not ready. Because Williams is too much of a doofus to go out like this. He hasn’t learned enough.”

“We have?”

Severin flapped his newspaper. This world-as-vale-of-soul-making stuff was probably sophistical also—the idea that Williams
mightn’t die because he was insufficiently wise—but in truth, I didn’t think our friend was going to die either. There was no neo-Keatsian idea behind that; I just didn’t think so.

“We’re a little better off than he is,” Sev said.

I doubted it. But then, I was ready to doubt so many things. We’d been young and born to such privilege there had never been a reason for any of us to suspect we weren’t going to prosper. Until now. I got up and went to the window to deal with paperwork, offering up a patchwork of credit cards and Williams’s basic information until all this got straightened out. No one said,
The son of the agent?
No one said anything.

“Are you family?” At last, the dreadlocked orderly came back.

“Close enough,” I said. “We’ve known each other since we were kids.”

“I’m only supposed to release information to family.” This guy had an impressive baritone. His hair massed, snakelike, around his collarbone.

“They’re not here,” Severin said. “His dad is dead, and his mom lives out in the desert somewhere, up north.”

We hadn’t called Marnie yet. We’d put her name on the forms, and I roughly remembered her municipality—she lived up in Madera County somewhere, a rural isolation that suited her rugged temperament—so they could track her down, but I wasn’t going to call her at five in the morning. Not for this.

“All right,” the orderly said after a moment. “Shouldn’t do this, but come with me.”

“Is he alive?” I said. “Is he conscious?”

The orderly nodded. But was there a difference? I felt there was.
I think, therefore I am
. It takes more than thought to ratify being. Or less, much less. We passed through security doors and Severin folded his hands across his Peckinpah T to hide its gory scene. The orderly just swung his arms by his sides, kept the easy rolling gait of a sailor on shore leave.

“This way,” he said. “He’s awake.”

Will was in bed, adrift in a sea of medicinal greens and blues. The back was cranked up so he reclined at forty-five degrees. His eyes
were open, but he wore a dull, stunned expression, his lips bent in an empty kiss.

“Will,” Severin said. “Hey, man.”

His head swiveled toward us without recognition.

“Will?”

It was like
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. The strict nullity of his gaze, the sheer vacancy with which he watched us.

“What did you do to him?” I looked at the dreadlocked orderly. He shook his head.

“We just woke him up.”

A doctor came into the room now, a woman in cat’s-eye glasses. A brunette, with her hair pulled up in a bun. She would’ve been sexy if she weren’t so efficient. The room was sultry, dark except for the flickering tubes behind Williams’s bed.

“We gave him a very mild stimulant,” the doctor said. “He should sleep.”

Will was breathing. I suppose I ought to have been grateful he was able to sit upright, that his eyes were open and he was not, instead, heaving and choking upon throatfuls of vomit.

“He needs to recover. We don’t know yet what that’ll look like.”

“How so?”

She approached. Up close she was Jewish and freckled and less conventionally pretty than I wanted her to be, than the movies, at least, would’ve made her. Her eyes were brown and her nose was narrow, her hair was ratty and pinned up carelessly, with little wisps straying down along her cheeks. I wanted to fuck her desperately.

“He might have memory problems,” she said. “That sometimes happens when the brain’s been deprived of oxygen.”

“His brain’s been deprived?”

“He shot a tremendous amount of heroin. It’s amazing he’s alive.”

“Alive?” I thought. “Amazing?” He’d never looked so stupid, and quite frankly, Williams had been looking pretty stupid to me for some time. His hair dangled, limp and cruddy around that blunt and supercilious face.

“What kind of memory problems?” Sev stepped forward.

“Short-term,” she said.
Remember, Sev? Remember?
“Sometimes long-term, sometimes not at all. Sometimes people have trouble
moving things from short-term memory to long-term for a while, so they experience a kind of recurring loop. I’ve seen that too, but it varies. Your friend needs to recover.”

A kind of recurring loop
. I’d seen that myself. I’d lived it. Still, I yearned for her in a way that was disproportionate: the presence of death made sex come first, gave urgency to my most idle dreaming. I went down the hall and washed my hands. The doctor was gone when I came back in, and Sev was sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Williams just said something.”

“Yeah? What?”

Little Will followed Sev’s gaze to where I stood. Some dumb flicker of recognition seemed to wash through him.

“Duuude.”

His voice sounded strange. This wasn’t our friend, not any version of him that I knew.

“Will, man, are you all right? Are you here?”

He just smiled weirdly. Not his usual smug, bullying smile, but something strange, twisted. The various smells of urine, trace vomit, and sterilizing alcohol clutched me and seemed to make pretense impossible. Cautiously, I approached the bed. I thought I might vomit, myself.

“Will.”

“Nate,” he said. Still smiling. “Naaate.”

But then he lay back, slowly, and shut his eyes like someone performing a ritual.