Another Broken Wizard (29 page)

“Jim, we’re still going to take acid with our grandchildren, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, we are.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah. You promise?”

“Yeah.”

We had made the plans when we were nineteen—we’d send our children away for the day and take acid with our grandchildren. They’d hear some wild talk out of their grandfathers. And we’d experience the hallucinogenically enhanced satisfaction of fathering a line of offspring, and of a life mostly lived. We liked our absurd plan enough to bring it up every year or so, just to make sure the other wasn’t losing his nerve.

We passed a sign saying we had entered Peru, Massachusetts, which seemed altogether impossible. We looked at each other with our mouths agape and then laughed uncontrollably for having found such an unlikely place. We found the Mass Pike a half hour later. The sun was up and in our eyes the whole way back to Worcester. In Auburn, we stopped for some Egg McMuffins and coffee to dull the pain of our unlikely place in the day.

At Joe’s house, we embraced and parted. I drove with the early rush hour traffic to Westborough. My fellow travelers passionately multitasked their ways to the countless office parks from Shrewsbury to Boston. I dragged my satisfied, unemployed carcass to an inflatable bed.

50.

Thursday, January 15

Three hours of sleep left my skin hot and my brain sluggish. I made it to the rehab place in the early afternoon. Dad had finished his physical therapy for the day. For the first time since the surgery, Dad felt better than me. He was sitting in the armchair by his bed, flipping through a magazine with the TV on.

“Hey Dad, you’re looking good today.”

“Don’t let it fool you. I just can’t take any more time in bed.”

“That’s a good sign. It means you’re getting your energy back.”

“Either that or they’re only giving me half my dose of pain pills and selling the other half out the back door. This one nurse, she’s a sneaky little thing, always on her cell phone, with these long nails …”

“You want me to look into it? You sound crazy. But I’ll look into it.”

“Nah. You’re probably right. I just have too much time on my hands. I’m just fired up because I wiped my own ass today.”

“I like that, Dad—how you didn’t just keep that to yourself. That was good.”

“I thought you’d be concerned. I mean, I didn’t want you going without sleep, wondering how your father’s ass was being wiped,” he said.

Then, with little alterations, we pushed the joke until we were both laughing, he was clutching at his chest and I was nearly dizzy. It was reassuring. With a series of small, practiced maneuvers, Dad got himself out of the chair. Using his walker, we walked down a long wallpapered hallway to a sunroom, where an old lady in a wheelchair listened to headphones and stared at the snow and a young man fiddled with his laptop. They paid us no mind as Dad worked his way into a wicker chair across from me.

“You look like hell. Did your flu come back?” Dad said serenely. He wore his listening face, which he debuted sometime in the last decade.

I mumbled something about Joe having some trouble and me staying up late with him. Perhaps knowing how little he liked answering questions, Dad didn’t ask too many. I appreciated the courtesy. The silence broke when the young man began pounding on his computer’s ‘enter’ key and cursing Microsoft Vista under his breath. He reached for the computer as if to throw it, then calmed himself and just stared off. We sat and talked in the sunroom about politics and sports, about everything except our seventeen years living in the same house, largely at odds. By the time we walked back to his room, Dad was as ready to sleep as I was.

The late afternoon sunset shone through the gaps in the bare trees like a jack-o’-lantern at the end of Route 9. It was my second drive into the sun that day. As I passed her apartment building, I called Mom and told her my flu was back and I’d have to cancel our plans for that night. She sounded a little hurt and I felt a little bad. I said I should feel better tomorrow.

Back in my inflatable bed at the Fountainhead, the sheets and the simple sensation of lying down made me almost too excited to sleep. The scattered sounds coming from the hallway—people coming home from work, school, daycare—detached themselves, like the audio in a movie falling out of sync. I was most of the way gone into the gentle reveries that precede dreams. My phone rang. I answered before it occurred to me not to. It was Serena.

“Hello stranger,” Serena said.

“Oh, hello. I was just napping.”

“Oh,” she said, disappointment weighing her voice. “Should I call back later or something?”

“No. No, I’m fine. Just resting my eyes.”

“Are you still sick? I was going to send you some herbs my mother recommended. But I figured you’d be better by the time they got to you. Did you get my e-mail?”

“No. I’ve been off the computer lately. Things’ve been hectic. They moved Dad to a rehab place and, Joe who I told you about, was arrested,” I said.

It took me a second to realize I was telling the truth, and to stop. From there on, I sanitized my story, toning Joe’s arrest down to some marijuana and omitting things like Dad wiping his own ass, and my nights with Olive. Serena’s recap sprawled reassuringly into arcane issues of office courtesy, minor dilemmas and problems that belonged to people I’d never met. But a lot of her stories did seem to take place in bars after work, with her friends, of whom I would always be a little suspicious.

“Sounds like you’ve been going out a lot.”

“Yeah, I know. Davida just broke up with her boyfriend. So she wants to go out like every night. And, do you remember Eric?”

“No.”

“Well, I used to work with him. He was a graphic designer. But he got laid off about a month ago and now he’s a bartender at this lounge on the Upper East Side and he gives us drinks for free. So we’ve been going out there a lot. It’s a really cool place. We’ll have to go when you get back.”

“Sure. Just behave yourself up there.”

“You know I’m being good. I miss you.”

“It’s only a few more weeks. What’s the story with next weekend? Dad will be back, but I’ll get us a hotel room.”

“I’m not so sure about next weekend now. At work, we have a big project due that Tuesday and my boss said we might have to work over the weekend. I’ll let you know next week, after …”

My ears filled with the sounds of rushing blood. I could feel that I had lost focus and she was slipping away. Maybe not that week or the next, but sometime before March grew warm, she would want to have a talk that ended with us as the strangers we’d started out at as. As we said our syrupy, overlong good-byes, it seemed that we said them not because we meant them, but because we didn’t.

I tried to put off my sense of foreboding to sleep deprivation. And I had almost reached the replenishing waters of oblivion when my cell phone, by then my goddamned cell phone, rang again. It was Olive and I answered.

“Hey, I can only talk for a second because I’m at work. But do you want to get a drink later tonight?”

“I would absolutely love to do nothing more, well almost nothing. But I’m operating on three hours of sleep. There’s been some crazy shit happening lately that I’ll tell you about later. But now, I can’t hold my eyes open another minute. How about Saturday?”

“I think I can do that. Did your Dad go to rehab?”

“Yeah, yours?”

“They’re taking him to some place in Newton next week. What is your Dad’s place like?”

“It’s nice, a lot of dried flowers and oil paintings and not so many dying people. Can I call you tomorrow?”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

“Good night.”

“Bye,” Olive said and waited, like I waited for the sound of the phone on the other end clicking off. I clicked first, but not immediately.

With that, I had gone three for three on disappointing phone calls with the three women who mattered most in my life. That’s hardly a good sign, I thought. I silenced my phone, for fear of what else it held. Making my final saunter into the deep caves and rushing waves of sleep, I wondered what was wrong with me.

51.

Friday, January 16

I woke just after dawn, with nothing but morning before me. The morning was a hateful kingdom. Its pale yellow sunlight stung like the taste of orange juice two days too old. Its TV shows were psychotic show trials of forced enthusiasm for things that no sane person could love. Its roads and corridors were crowded with muttering zombies hurrying off to joyless obligations. Its silence wasn’t pregnant with inspiration or mystery, but with nameless recriminations. Its promise was a long, healthy life that smells like a new car and tastes like Styrofoam.

So I did what people do in the morning. I did what I was supposed to. I checked my e-mail, replied to friends and Serena. I planned my responses to the few e-mails back from possible employers. I checked my calendar and checked the news, soaking it all in as though the consumer price index, the new president’s cabinet, the success of a Midwestern bank robber, the progress of the war, each needed my close attention. With nine a.m. safely past, I went to the Fountainhead fitness center and climbed onto the elliptical machine. After a week of sickness and so forth, the first five minutes hurt. But I kept at it almost an hour, pushing and pulling like the hamster of the month, trying to sweat some of the hateful confusion out of my system. Showering and shaving, I felt like a full-fledged, qualified adult for the first time in more than a week.

At the rehab center, I waited for Dad to finish his physical therapy and watched Dad’s little TV. I eyed the stock ticker and the disaster ticker stream below the manicured faces of the anchors, watching for a clue, an opening in the double-dutch where I could jump back in. After an hour and a half, an orderly walked with Dad back to his room. I freed up the armchair, but Dad went straight for the bed. He said it was his first day of a new stage of physical therapy. His hand shook as he gestured for the remote. I tried commenting on the cable news, but he had zoned out. We watched TV until he fell asleep.

Still high from my encounter with competence, I drove back to the Fountainhead and sent off a few dozen more resumes for jobs I was only remotely capable of tolerating or performing. I dug through scattered piles of clothes for a clean shirt and killed the two hours before I met Mom. It took a little driving around to find the restaurant—a homey, little Italian place in downtown Natick, just off of the main drag. Mom was early. She was always early. It was one more way she was polite, one more thing she could pull out in an argument, I thought. That’s where my head was at.

I sat across from her and ordered a glass of wine. The place was like a thousand other middling Italian places up and down the East Coast. It was dark, with rustic touches like old paintings of gondolas and villages on the walls, and straw-wrapped Chianti bottles on the tables. Its menu was a succession of piccattas, marsalas and parmigianas. Mom talked about my cousins, then mothered, suggesting jobs I could apply to, asking me about my cover letters. The food was good, solid food. Mom asked about Serena, and I said I guessed she was fine.

“Do you think things would be going better if you were still in New York?”

“Probably. Sitting there with a staticky piece of plastic jammed up against my ear isn’t my favorite thing to do. Then I get aggravated on the phone and I think that aggravation shows up as aggravation with her.”

“Your father was the same way. He never liked being on the phone.”

“I remember. Anyway, I don’t mean to say that Serena isn’t a good conversationalist because she is. It’s just that being out of touch makes it easy to forget about things like that. And then it’s just natural. You respond to what’s in front of you. Your eye starts to wander.”

“Do you think she’s seeing someone?”

“I don’t think so. She’s just out drinking with her friends. But neither of us is living in Medieval Europe.”

“What does that mean?”

“I mean that there aren’t great, heartrending romances any more, with noble sacrifices and long love letters. Being with someone has a lot to do with convenience—with intersecting situations. But what happens when the situations stop intersecting is anyone’s guess.”

We each looked down at our plates after my near miss of that particular nerve. Mom was eating neatly, and I could see the strategy playing out on her plate. It would leave a whole meatball and a neat tangle of spaghetti for her doggy bag, which she would give me whether I wanted it or not. It was almost enough to make me cry. But the beat goes on.

“So, how about Joe? How is he?”

“Yeah, he got arrested. I went out with him to blow off some steam and talk over his options the other night. We were up late.”

“What was he arrested for?”

“The police broke into his house and found some drugs.”

Mom’s eyes widened in shock and curiosity.

“What kind of drugs?”

“Marijuana,” I lied.

“Was it serious, is he going to jail?”

“That’s what everyone is trying to figure out. I’m going to make some calls either tonight or tomorrow to get a better idea.”

“You and your friends. Even in preschool, if there was an impulsive, troublemaking kid—you’d be his best friend by the end of the day.”

“I think the crazy ones are your only chance. Most people are so boring that they’re barely even there. You’re never going to get anywhere with them,” I said, knowing how Mom loved when I said terrible things she not-so-secretly agreed with. She smiled.