Just After Sunset (27 page)

In fact, they have been to a couple of polo matches, because Tom Hope still rides—although, Buddy confided, this was apt to be his last year if he didn’t stop putting on weight. But they have also made love, some of it sweaty and intense. Sometimes, too, he makes her laugh. Less often, now—she has an idea that his capacity to surprise and amuse is far from infinite—but yes, he still does. He’s a lean and narrow-headed boy who breaks the rich-kid-geek mold in interesting and sometimes very unexpected ways. Also he thinks the world of her, and that isn’t entirely bad for a girl’s self-image.

Still, she doesn’t think he will resist the call of his essential nature forever. By the age of thirty-five or so, she guesses he will have lost most or all of his enthusiasm for eating pussy and will be more interested in collecting coins. Or refinishing Colonial rockers, like his father does out in the—ahem—carriage-house.

She walks slowly up the long acre of green grass, looking out toward the blue toys of the city dreaming in the far distance. Closer at hand are the sounds of shouts and splashing from the pool. Inside, Bruce’s mother and father and gran and closest friends will be celebrating the one chick’s high school graduation in their own way, at a formal tea. Tonight the kids will go out and party down in a more righteous mode. Alcohol and not a few tabs of X will be ingested. Club music will throb through big speakers. No one will play the country stuff Janice grew up with, but that’s all right; she still knows where to find it.

When she graduates there will be a much smaller party, probably at Aunt Kay’s restaurant, and of course she is bound for educational halls far less grand or traditional, but she has plans to go farther than she suspects Buddy goes even in his dreams. She will be a journalist. She will begin on the campus newspaper, and then will see where that takes her. One rung at a time, that’s the way to do it. There are plenty of rungs on the ladder. She has talent to go along with her looks and unshowy self-confidence. She doesn’t know how much, but she will find out. And there’s luck. That, too. She knows enough not to count on it, but also enough to know it tends to come down on the side of the young.

She reaches the stone-flagged patio and looks down the rolling acre of lawn to the double tennis court. It all looks very big and very rich, very
special,
but she is wise enough to know she is only eighteen. There may come a time when it all looks quite ordinary to her, even in the eye of her memory. Quite small. It is this sense of perspective before the fact that makes it all right for her to be Janice-Something-Unpronounceable, and a townie, and Bruce’s friend for now. Buddy, with his narrow head and fragile ability to make her laugh at unexpected times.
He
has never made her feel small, probably knows she’d leave him the first time he ever tried.

She can go directly through the house to the pool and the changing rooms on the far side, but first she turns slightly to her left to once again look at the city across all those miles of blue afternoon distance. She has time to think,
It could be my city someday, I could call it home,
before an enormous spark lights up there, as if some God deep in the machinery had suddenly flicked His Bic.

She winces from the brilliance, which is at first like a thick, isolated stroke of lightning. And then the entire southern sky lights up a soundless lurid red. Formless bloodglare obliterates the buildings. Then for a moment they are there again, but ghostlike, as if seen through an interposing lens. A second or a tenth of a second after that they are gone forever, and the red begins to take on the shape of a thousand newsreels, climbing and boiling.

It is silent, silent.

Bruce’s mother comes out on the patio and stands next to her, shading her eyes. She is wearing a new blue dress. A tea-dress. Her shoulder brushes Janice’s and they look south at the crimson mushroom climbing, eating up the blue. Smoke is rising from around the edges—dark purple in the sunshine—and then being pulled back in. The red of the fireball is too intense to look at, it will blind her, but Janice cannot look away. Water is gushing down her cheeks in broad warm streams, but she cannot look away.

“What’s that?” Bruce’s mother asks. “If it’s some kind of advertising, it’s in very poor taste!”

“It’s a bomb,” Janice says. Her voice seems to be coming from somewhere else. On a live feed from Hartford, maybe. Now huge black blisters are erupting in the red mushroom, giving it hideous features that shift and change—now a cat, now a dog, now Bobo the Demon Clown—grimacing across the miles above what used to be New York and is now a smelting furnace. “A nuke. And an almighty big one. No little dirty backpack model, or—”

Whap! Heat spreads upward and downward on the side of her face, and water flies from both of her eyes, and her head rocks. Bruce’s Mom has just slapped her. And hard.

“Don’t you even joke about that!” Bruce’s mother commands. “There’s nothing funny about that!”

Other people are joining them on the patio now, but they are little more than shades; Janice’s vision has either been stolen by the brightness of the fireball, or the cloud has blotted out the sun. Maybe both.

“That’s in very…poor…
TASTE
!” Each word rising.
Taste
comes out in a scream.

Someone says, “It’s some kind of special effect, it has to be, or else we’d hear—”

But then the sound reaches them. It’s like a boulder running down an endless stone flume. It shivers the glass along the south side of the house and sends birds up from the trees in whirling squadrons. It fills the day. And it doesn’t stop. It’s like an endless sonic boom. Janice sees Bruce’s gran go walking slowly down the path that leads to the multi-car garage with her hands to her ears. She walks with her head down and her back bent and her butt sticking out, like a dispossessed warhag starting down a long refugee road. Something hangs down on the back of her dress, swinging from side to side, and Janice isn’t surprised to note (with what vision she has left) that it’s Gran’s hearing aid.

“I want to wake up,” a man says from behind Janice. He speaks in a querulous, pestering tone. “I want to wake up. Enough is enough.”

Now the red cloud has grown to its full height and stands in boiling triumph where New York was ninety seconds ago, a dark red and purple toadstool that has burned a hole straight through this afternoon and all the afternoons to follow.

A breeze begins to push through. It is a hot breeze. It lifts the hair from the sides of her head, freeing her ears to hear that endless grinding boom even better. Janice stands watching, and thinks about hitting tennis balls, one after the other, all of them landing so close together you could have caught them in a roasting pan. That is pretty much how she writes. It is her talent. Or was.

She thinks about the hike Bruce and his friends won’t be taking. She thinks about the party at Holy Now! they won’t be attending tonight. She thinks about the records by Jay-Z and Beyoncé and The Fray they won’t be listening to—no loss there. And she thinks of the country music her dad listens to in his pickup truck on his way to and from work. That’s better, somehow. She will think of Patsy Cline or Skeeter Davis and in a little while she may be able to teach what is left of her eyes not to look.

N.

1. The Letter

May 28, 2008

Dear Charlie,

It seems both strange and perfectly natural to call you that, although when I last saw you I was nearly half the age I am now. I was sixteen and had a terrible crush on you. (Did you know? Of course you did.) Now I’m a happily married woman with a little boy, and I see you all the time on CNN, talking about Things Medical. You are as handsome now (well, almost!) as you were “back in the day,” when the three of us used to go fishing and to movies at The Railroad in Freeport.

Those summers seem like a long time ago—you and Johnny inseparable, me tagging along whenever you’d let me. Which was probably more often than I deserved! Yet your note of condolence brought it all back to me, and how I cried. Not just for Johnny, but for all three of us. And, I suppose, for how simple and uncomplicated life seemed. How golden we were!

You saw his obituary, of course. “Accidental death” can cover such a multitude of sins, can’t it? In the news story, Johnny’s death was reported as the result of a fall, and of course he
did
fall—at a spot we all knew well, one he had asked me about only last Christmas—but it was no accident. There was a good deal of sedative in his bloodstream. Not nearly enough to kill him, but according to the coroner it could have been enough to disorient him, especially if he was looking over the railing. Hence, “accidental death.”

But I know it was suicide.

There was no note at home or on his body, but that might have been Johnny’s idea of a kindness. And you, as a doctor yourself, will know that psychiatrists have an extremely high rate of suicide. It’s as if the patients’ woes are a kind of acid, eating away at the psychic defenses of their therapists. In the majority of cases, those defenses are thick enough to remain intact. In Johnny’s? I think not…thanks to one unusual patient. And he wasn’t sleeping much during the last two or three months of his life; such terrible dark circles under his eyes! Also, he was canceling appointments right & left. Going on long drives. He would not say where, but I think I may know.

That brings me to the enclosure, which I hope you will look at when you finish this letter. I know you are busy, but—if it will help!—think of me as the love-struck girl I was, with my hair tied back in a ponytail that was always coming loose, forever tagging along!

Although Johnny was on his own, he had formed a loose affiliation with two other “shrinks” in the last four years of his life. His current case files (not many, due to his cutting back) went to one of these Drs. following his death. Those files were in his office. But when I was cleaning out his study at home, I came upon the little manuscript I have enclosed. They are case notes for a patient he calls “N.,” but I have seen his more formal case notes on a few occasions (not to snoop, but only because a folder happened to be open on his desk), and I know this is not like those. For one thing, they weren’t done in his office, because there is no heading, as on the other case notes I have seen, and there is no red CONFIDENTIAL stamp at the bottom. Also, you will notice a faint vertical line on the pages. His home printer does this.

But there was something else, which you will see when you unwrap the box. He has printed two words on the cover in thick black strokes: BURN THIS. I almost did, without looking inside. I thought, God help me, it might be his private stash of drugs or print-outs of some weird strain of Internet pornography. In the end, daughter of Pandora that I am, my curiosity got the best of me. I wish it hadn’t.

Charlie, I have an idea my brother may have been planning a book, something popular in the style of Oliver Sacks. Judging by this piece of manuscript, it was obsessive-compulsive behavior he was initially focused on, and when I add in his suicide (if it
was
suicide!), I wonder if his interest didn’t spring from that old adage “Physician, Heal Thyself!”

In any case, I found the account of N., and my brother’s increasingly fragmentary notes, disturbing. How disturbing? Enough so I’m forwarding the manuscript—which I have not copied, by the way, this is the only one—to a friend he hadn’t seen in ten years and I haven’t seen in fourteen. Originally I thought, “Perhaps this could be published. It could serve as a kind of living memorial to my brother.”

But I no longer think that. The thing is, the manuscript seems
alive,
and not in a good way. I know the places that are mentioned, you see (I’ll bet you know some of them, too—the field N. speaks of, as Johnny notes, must have been close to where we went to school as children), and since reading the pages, I feel a strong desire to see if I can find it. Not in spite of the manuscript’s disturbing nature but because of it—and if
that
isn’t obsessional, what is?!?

I don’t think finding it would be a good idea.

But Johnny’s death haunts me, and not just because he was my brother. So does the enclosed manuscript. Would you read it? Read it and tell me what you think? Thank you, Charlie. I hope this isn’t too much of an intrusion. And…if
you
should decide to honor Johnny’s request and burn it, you would never hear a murmur of protest from me.

Fondly,
From Johnny Bonsaint’s “little sis,”

Sheila Bonsaint LeClaire
964 Lisbon Street
Lewiston, Maine 04240

PS—Oy, such a crush I had on you!

2. The Case Notes

June 1, 2007

N. is 48 years old, a partner in a large Portland accounting firm, divorced, the father of two daughters. One is doing postgraduate work in California, the other is a junior at a college here in Maine. He describes his current relationship with his ex-wife as “distant but amicable.”

He says, “I know I look older than 48. It’s because I haven’t been sleeping. I’ve tried Ambien and the other one, the green moth one, but they only make me feel groggy.”

When I ask how long he’s been suffering from insomnia, he needs no time to think it over.

“Ten months.”

I ask him if it’s the insomnia that brought him to me. He smiles up at the ceiling. Most patients choose the chair, at least on their first visit—one woman told me that lying on the couch would make her feel like “a joke neurotic in a
New Yorker
cartoon”—but N. has gone directly to the couch. He lies there with his hands laced tightly together on his chest.

“I think we both know better than that, Dr. Bonsaint,” he says.

I ask him what he means.

“If I only wanted to get rid of the bags under my eyes, I’d either see a plastic surgeon or go to my family doctor—who recommended you, by the way, he says you’re very good—and ask for something stronger than Ambien or the green moth pills. There must be stronger stuff, right?”