Haywire (47 page)

Normal? There was definitely something in the air.

“Stop worrying about it,” said Bill. “Your senses are more acute than usual, that’s all. They’re probably more acute than the average citizen’s, anyway.” He paused. “You’re right. You are a manic-depressive.” He grinned at me. “Join the gang.” He went back to staring at Father’s feet beneath the ghostly bedclothes.

“By our standards,” he said without interrupting his contemplation, “most people don’t know the meaning of the word ‘depression,’ although it’s become fashionable to bandy around. But we had a superb education; our family wrote the textbook. We could probably give courses in it. Carry on the tradition. Those lows. Jesus, I think I know what Hell looks like. I’ve charted it, every square inch of it. I’ve been in states so bad I’ve been paralyzed with fear. Literally couldn’t get out of my bed for
weeks
. Totally wasted time. Pillow over my head. Really rank. No showers, no food, couldn’t talk, couldn’t read—couldn’t even concentrate on the TV. No relating to my life at all. Total stupor. Bad. I
never
want to go through that trip again. But you have to remember one thing: most people don’t spiral down as low as we have, but they sure don’t get up as high, either. No way. They mosey along on relatively level ground, a little happy, a little sad.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said. “I’d like that for a change. Sounds peaceful.”

“Boring,” said Bill. “Boring. You’d get sick of it. We’ve been exposed to too much. Overexposed. Once you’ve been there—those highs!—my God, they’re like Mount Everest. Hard to scale but worth it when you get to the top. Dizzy stuff.” Bill liked challenges. He was a mountain climber. He liked mountains, climbing up them and skiing down them. He’d been up and down the Amazon in a friend’s boat and over the Snake River rapids in a raft. He’d run guns down through Mexico and smuggled cocaine up from Bogotá. Lived off stolen credit cards. Lots of nefarious adventures. He’d wrangled horses, raced motorcycles, had sailed the seven seas.

“On the whole,” continued Bill, so softly that I thought for a moment he was talking to himself, “if I dropped dead tomorrow, and had that moment to look back and decide what more I wished
I’d done in my life, it would be hard. I’ve done an awful lot of the things I’ve fantasized doing. I’ve led a pretty exciting life.”

He stood up and stretched. “Got to keep moving.”

“Not bad for an old man of twenty-nine. Like what fantasies?”

Ping!
went the glass jars as he passed. There was a slight gurgling aftermath as the pale fluids in them trembled.

“Oh, I think the fantasy of being reasonably successful in a fairly competitive business, making a lot of bread without having had a formal education. All kinds of possession fantasies, like being able to travel here and there, being able to do all the inane things you want—not feeling trapped because you can’t afford this or that. The ones you have when you’re a teen-ager, of where you want your life to go in terms of success or material trips. I’ve skated through most of those. I mean I’ve done it. Flashy cars. Being a rich bachelor, marriage, kids. Then the fantasies you have when you’re married, of being a bachelor again. Being in love. It hasn’t been all bad. Can’t really complain. I had the opportunity to make my own mistakes. Made every one.” I loved him dearly.

“But Bill,” I sighed. It was really snowing hard now; we would have trouble getting a taxi to the theatre that night.

As he’d said, he’d had more opportunities to do more things than most people. What he’d chosen to do with those opportunities—that was another matter altogether, a matter of some concern to everyone in his family except me. What was to Father, for instance, patently erratic, if not downright demented, behavior was to me Bill’s saving grace. Literally. He was always moving on. An aberrant knight. He was always disappearing without trace or warning. He was even hard to find when he was around. Once he’d been sighted, he was hard to keep in focus; he kept slipping over the horizon. And he never looked back. Then unexpectedly he’d reappear. “Heard from your no-good crackbrained brother,” Father would say with gruff affection. “Turned up again the other day like a bad penny.” As an escape artist, Bill ranked with Houdini. Father and I argued about it: Father insisted that Bill’s demonic elusiveness was a fatal flaw and I claimed it kept him alive.

“But, Bill, tell me which ones—the fantasies—you
haven’t
lived out.”

“I’m not going to tell you all of them. But they are almost all related to being outdoors. Never got to be a commercial airplane pilot—that was always one. Let’s see, what others do I have? Actually, what I’ve always wanted to own and be able to operate properly is a commercial tuna-fishing boat. I’ve always had a thing about boats and working on them; fishermen—I don’t know—the ocean, independence, the whole thing, whatever it is. I’ve had that one for fifteen years. I still flash on it from time to time. The only thing that stops me is that I really wouldn’t know how to find a school of tuna.” And he laughed, carrying me with him. “But I still hang on.”

Father moved in his sleep. It was getting very dark. Bill turned on another light.

“Pop,” he said. “Are you okay?”

If I’d had to distill my feelings about Bill into a single image, it would have been rooted in the mythology I’d loved as a child. Jason and the Argonauts, Odysseus sailing on. And Hermes, with winged sandals, who was, from the day he was born, the shrewdest and most cunning of all.

Father opened his eyes and looked at us for a minute, then closed them again.

“Do you realize we’re going to be orphans?” Bill asked me, his hands clenching the iron footboard of Father’s bed. “That’ll be a new one.”

He’d read my mind.

“Aren’t we too old to be orphans?” Past the statute of limitations. But we still thought of ourselves as children. Bill’s question was interesting. Would we ever grow up? It didn’t seem likely, at the rate we were going. Hansel and Gretel without a father any more, just a stepmother. Ridiculous. Why was it that we—and all my friends, the ones I liked the most—had remained, at the core, children? Why did we all seem so much less mature than our parents—as we remembered them—had been at the same ages? Why, when our prime ambition as children had always been to grow up, were we now so protective and appreciative—in ourselves and each other—of our most childlike characteristics?

Maybe it was how we’d managed to survive. Protective coloration, like a permanent case of Bambi’s spots.

“How did we survive, anyway? How did we get this far? Don’t you ever wonder about that?”

Bill smiled ruefully. “Just lucky, I guess. The old whatchamacallit. Pioneer spirit. Staying power. We must have inherited something from the Colonel and Grandsarah, after all. In a renegade form, a mutation; may be troublesome to our public and even to our near and dear, God bless them, but—here we are. Fit as a fiddle.”

“What do you mean? Crazy as a coot is more like it. Look at the whites of your eyes. Here, I’ll get out my compact if you like.”

“Crazy is
bueno, muy bueno
,” chuckled Bill, rolling his eyes in their sockets.

“Come on, Bill, cut it out. They’ll get stuck like that, as Mother used to say.” As
Mother used to say
. Not a single day of the last eleven years had gone by that I didn’t wonder what Mother would have been doing right that very minute.

“Crazy keeps us young.” He thumbed through the pile of notes and telegrams on the table.

“In that case, we’ll live forever.”

“God, I hope so. Ah. Look. Here’s one from Kate Hepburn.”

The nurse had just come back in and was looking at us both strangely. “He’s still asleep, I see,” she announced briskly.

“Superior deductive reasoning,” muttered Bill under his breath, his face buried in the latest flower arrangement. “Keenly observed. Look where sanity can get you—”

I stuck my elbow in his ribs. “Bill.” I could feel hysterical laughter coming on. “Be serious. I want to ask you a serious question.”

“What?”

I’d never dared ask him, perhaps because I was afraid of the answer. There was no telling why I was curious enough now.

“Well, have you ever been so depressed you wanted to kill yourself? I mean, have you ever thought about what would make you …”

“Hmm,” replied Bill, becoming serious very quickly. “Let me take you away from all this, my dear.” He extended his arm to me.

“Hold down the fort for us,” he said to the nurse; “we’ll be back.” He winked at her.

We walked down the corridor and around the corner to the elevator.

“I must be going stir-crazy,” I said. “It’s awfully nice to be out here, hideous as it is.”

“Let’s chow down,” said Bill. “I’m starving. I see a double Bloody Mary in my immediate future.”

“What about Father?”

“We’ll check on him after the play. Tell him what we think.”

“They won’t let us back in.”

“Private room. Different rules.” He snapped his fingers. The elevator doors opened.

I felt very gay (as if we were playing hooky) and, at the same time, guilty. Unfairly privileged. Charmed. And running the risk of missing something.

“Well, have you?”

“What?”

“Ever thought about committing suicide?”

“Often.” He ignored the riveted gaze of the other occupants of the elevator. “I’ve always held on to it as an alternative. If things got really screwed up—the idea of having another choice. I’ve never tried it, although I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. But thinking about it is a way of recognizing there is a choice. I’d like to think that my affairs would be in order. But, of course, if my affairs
were
in order, I wouldn’t be thinking about suicide.”

He chuckled to himself. Bill tended to communicate information in a way that was meant less for other people’s enlightenment than for his own private entertainment.

The elevator let us out into the lobby. Now he was lost in thought.

“Where do you want to eat?” I tugged at his arm. We moved toward the night.

“Shit, I don’t have any of the right clothes. I left Los Angeles too—uh—precipitously, you might say. It was seventy degrees there. I didn’t have a chance to unpack my ski gear. I need warm gloves desperately.”

“Russian Tea Room, please,” I told the cabdriver. “I wonder where Pamela was this afternoon.”

“Legal crap,” said Bill, rubbing his hands together. “Once I got frostbite skiing, and that screws your hands up whenever they hit the chill winds afterwards. Wanted to be a surgeon, too, oddly enough.”

“How would you do it?” I asked, staring out the window.

“What?” Bill glanced at me. “Kill myself? You do persist in these morbid notions.”

But I knew he was secretly pleased to be asked.

“I’ve always thought if I did it I would shoot myself with a pistol,” he replied matter-of-factly.

I wasn’t so sure about that. “What, shoot yourself in the head? Terribly gory.”

“No, I figure I can find my heart.” He laughed. “
Quick
. That’s the trick. Bang. Whatever pain there was would be so instantaneous it wouldn’t count. I decided a long time ago—back in the Menninger years—that if I did it, it would have to be one hundred percent for real. No false attempts. Pills would probably be the most pleasant way, except so many people fuck up and leave clues and get saved. Another thing about pills is if you do get discovered, the recovery period in the hospital is extremely unpleasant—I mean from the stomach pump to all kinds of crummy aftereffects. If a strong enough barbiturate like Amytal is in your system for any length of time, you’re futzing around with brain damage, kidney damage. Ideally, what you get is the spy pill. You just bite down on it—”

“Cyanide?” I could feel him opening up, relaxing.

“Yeah. Potassium cyanide. You’re dead instantly. No pain, all that shit. It’s funny, I have a thing about disfiguring my body. I suppose that’s why I’d rather shoot myself in the heart than in the head. I guess anybody’s who’s really serious just goes and jumps off a bridge. Which I don’t think I’ve ever had the urge to do.”

The experience of Menninger’s, I was convinced, had burned a small hole right through the center of his mind just the way a laser would, neat and clean. He’d spent the most formative years of his adolescence there. Wasted years, untold damage. A small hole in his brain that went right through his forehead and out the back. It wasn’t that he was crazy now—he certainly hadn’t been when he went in—but that empty spot explained a lot. It had been fashionable to send your children to places like Menninger’s in those days, if you didn’t have the time but did have the money. It took a lot of money. Bill had been sent up when he was sixteen. Two and a half, three years. I went to visit him once, flew to Topeka. Walked
around the grounds. It looked like a country club, lawns as far as the eye could see. From the moment he’d arrived, he’d tried to escape. He’d broken out several times, stolen getaway cars, crossed state lines in them, landed in jail. Father had said, “This time I’ve had it with the kid. He’s really loco. Let him rot there.” And wouldn’t bail him out. Nine days in jail. Bill knew better than I about emotional detachment, although we’d all been given an equal head start.

He sighed and fished through his overcoat pockets for a cigarette and matches. “I always thought I’d check into a hotel with some creepy desk clerk to find me. You know, to be the wife or husband—I never wanted anyone to find me, it’s a bummer to be around. Notes can be very irritating, but I have always thought there should be a few instructions. I wrote the note once—I hadn’t figured out how to do myself in, but I did write the note.”

“What did it say?”

“Well, most people who commit suicide are trying to inflict some kind of pain on other people, which I’ve always felt was immoral. I think anybody’s got the right to do it, to me it’s not a mortal sin, but you ought to be kind of clean about it and not hassle too many other people. I’ve always felt you ought to check out with a little.”

“Style?”

“Yeah. But to try and blame it on somebody else is wrong, especially if you are successful. [We both grinned at that absurd bit of sophistry.] So I tried to make it clear, in my note, that there was absolutely nobody to blame, that I didn’t feel there was any way to continue on my present road and couldn’t see any way to get off it, either.”