The Grand Tour (31 page)

“This is Richard.”

“It's Stan.”

“Oh.”

“Who did you think it was?”

“I don't know. Someone from the
National Enquirer
or something. I was about to yell ‘Fuck off.' ”

“That's my line.”

“I know, I know. Listen, I'm sorry about all this. I was going to call.”

“Were you?”

“I almost died, maybe you heard.”

“You didn't quite kill yourself, but you finished off your career. I'm calling to say good luck. Maybe someone else will be stupid enough to touch you, take advantage of the little bit of publicity. But that's not me.”

“I'm done anyway. There's nothing left.”

“You made me look like a fool, Richard.”

“I know. I'm sorry.” That was all he did these days, apologize. “Hello?”

The line was dead, and that was that.

The phone rang, and he answered it. Over the last few days, he had been talking to anyone who called—reporters, wire agencies, random lunatics—having decided it was better to give them a boring story that would quickly be superseded by something more interesting (literally anything else) than to continue holing up and stoking curiosity. Yes, he had misrepresented his war experience. No, he hadn't really meant to. Yes, he felt bad about it. Yes, he wanted to apologize to the infantrymen from his division. No, he hadn't meant to jump; it had been an accident. That was at least partially true. He still wasn't sure if he'd jumped or fallen, or some combination of the two. In a passing moment, you could make a decision without deciding anything, your choice made for you by the intuitive twitch of a rogue muscle or synapse. Especially after drinking for ten hours. Regardless, even if it qualified as a decision, it was one he'd regretted the instant he'd hit the water. His commitment to suicide, it turned out, had been as steadfast as his commitment to anything else in his life.

“Hello?” he said.

The voice on the other end, a bored female one, said, “Collect call from Rikers Island, do you accept?”

“Who what.”

“Do you accept?”

“Uh. Sure.”

There was a click, and the quality of the background static on the other end changed, from a snowy distance, to a closer thrum. A voice said, “Hello?”

“Vance?”

“Yeah.” There was a muffled shout from the other end, and then the kid returned. “I'm in jail.”

“You're in Rikers Island.”

“Yeah. I tracked down your agent, and he gave me this number.”

“What in the fuck, Vance?”

Vance told him what in the fuck. Like a car driven to empty, he finally lurched his way to a stop and finished by saying, “I didn't want to call you. But my family's not helping me. My mom's been in the hospital, and she's pretty out of it, I guess. My uncle said he'd look into it, but he hasn't done anything. I guess they don't have the money, and I figured I would try to just make it until my court date, but…” From somewhere on the distant end, a man yelled clearly, his voice filled with all the force and freedom of insanity.

“Why didn't you get ahold of me sooner?”

“I was mad. I'm still mad.”

“You can keep being mad once your bail is posted, too, you dumb shit.” Vance didn't say anything to this. Richard said, “Okay. Hold tight, I'm coming to get you. Don't go anywhere.”

Richard and Eileen sat in the visiting room of Rikers Island. They had been sitting there for going on five hours, and due to some outraged lumbar nerve gone rogue, Richard's entire lower body was numb. He wished the same was true of his mental awareness, but his daily course of pain pills and sedatives had done little to alleviate the experience of being there. Visiting was located next to intake. It shared common air with the other room's muffled shouting, the not-so-muffled smells, a fine floating residue of grief, the ambience of human anguish on an almost-molecular level.

The bail bondsman had called around three, saying the bail had been processed and delivered, and the prisoner might be released within the hour. They had hurried into Eileen's car, not wanting to make Vance wait a second longer than necessary; he looked back on the two of them then with an attitude of fond indulgence. How foolish they were this afternoon. They might have learned their lesson from the previous twenty-four hours they'd spent waiting in the various antechambers of New York's labyrinthine justice system: precinct, bondsman, central booking, bondsman again, and finally the jail. The whole thing seemed designed to be as punitive as possible to all parties involved—not just the felon but the families and friends of the felon and even the guards and cops and lawyers and judges.

Eileen read a paper she'd brought with her, something called “Monadic Nomads: Wittgenstein and the Instantiation of Third-Party Inelectives.” She was bent to it, legs crossed, somehow able to tune out their surroundings, and, in doing so, becoming a small island of sanity in a place where none existed. At the moment, she was the only thing preventing him from running outside and doing a gainer back into the cold scum of the East River. She had been a saint through the whole process, helping him at every turn, taking the day off work and driving him around and, most important, imparting a feeling of calm by the simple virtue of her adult presence.

He pointed at the paper in her lap, and said, “Little late in the year for light summer reading, isn't it?”

“Funny.”

“Looks like a page-turner.”

“Potentially revolutionary hermeneutics.” She smiled faintly without taking her eyes off the page. It was an old joke of theirs, something she'd said seriously once and for which he'd relentlessly mocked her, without, of course, knowing what it meant. Thirty years ago, at this point. He was searching his memory for the appropriate retort in this time-worn little skit, when Vance emerged from a nearby corridor. He was wearing what he'd been wearing the last time Richard saw him—jeans and a striped button-up—and the lack of orange prison jumpsuit created a momentary cognitive dissonance, as though the kid had just happened to walk into the same room as them, on Rikers Island.

But a longer look dispelled this impression. His eyes were black hollows. He was even gaunter than he had been before. He looked like an effigy with the stuffing beaten out of it, just a pair of pants and a shirt fluttering in the breeze. His sparse facial hair had grown out into a field of even sparser wisps, completing the meth-addict Halloween ensemble. “Are you ready to go, or do you want to hang out here a little longer,” Richard said.

Vance's face dissolved, and his entire being seemed on the verge of melting away into the cracks and ruts of the concrete slab floor. Richard climbed unsteadily to his feet, his back protesting, and he hugged the kid, whose arms hung limply at his sides. Together, he and Eileen managed to maneuver Vance out through the long metal corridor, past an unsmiling checkpoint guard, and into the comparatively fresh air outside. They got to Eileen's Audi and she got the kid inside. A sneaker still dangled outside the car, and Richard gently pushed it in with the rubber tip of his cane. They drove through the fences and gates and soon were surrounded by the water and its relentless lapping. The smell of the river brought Richard back to the time he'd spent drowning in it. He rolled his window up. Manhattan to the right and Queens ahead exploded with light, festivals of human activity, proof of life in this dark place. Vance sat in the dark of the backseat, quietly weeping and reeking all the way back to Park Slope.

They installed Vance in the guest room. Over the next two days, while Molly and Eileen were at work, Richard would make the kid food in the kitchen and yell up to him, and Vance would come silently downstairs, retrieve the tray, and vanish again. Richard's culinary talents lay mostly in opening cans and putting the contents in the microwave, but if Vance had any complaints, he didn't voice them. He didn't voice anything—he barely seemed capable of stringing five words together, and any effort at communication seemed to leave him completely drained. He gangled like a half-crushed spider, dragging its innards around as it waited for an abrupt, enormous thumb to come out of the sky and finish it off. Richard worried that something traumatic had happened at Rikers, beyond the inherent trauma of being at Rikers.

He mentioned this to Eileen, and she said, “I think probably he just needs some space. He's had very little of that for weeks.”

Molly said, “I know that feeling, too.”

Richard also knew that feeling. Despite moments of intense depression over his infirmity, not to mention a natural predisposition to avoid doing things, he finally became so bored and stir-crazy that he attempted a solo walk. Cane in hand, he exited the duplex, boldly humped into the elevator area, and rested for ten exhausted minutes on a decorative settee. In the lobby, he leaned against a row of golden mailboxes as a woman in yoga pants approached from the outside. She unlocked the door, an impossibly heavy oak-and-brass-filigreed portal, and nodded gravely at him as he shuffled through, out into the surprising cold of late November. Retrieving Vance was the only other time he'd been outside in the last month. The building's long burgundy awning stretched out over the sidewalk, and for a minute or two, he stood under it, like a long-distance runner awaiting the starting gun's report. He moved west on Garfield, then north on Seventh Avenue—past a drugstore that called itself a chemist, a grocery store that called itself an urban green market, a liquor store that sold artisanal spirits, and an eye shoppe. It was no wonder people hate the rich, he thought. Even their words for things have to be nicer. Turning the corner and heading east on Carroll Street, he walked past a limousine waiting silently at the curb like a well-trained dog in front of its master—a white building that took up half the block. The delicate black bars on the first-floor windows imprisoned the entire outside world and protected the precious freedom inside. Doormen moodily loomed. As he crutched south again on Eighth, his face was slick with freezing sweat. His poor legs vibrated as he lurched along, and by the time he made the burgundy awning's finish line, he was completely spent, just a shell of his former self. Old, he thought, you're old now. He was still bent over his cane minutes later, when the door opened and, awkwardly enough, the same woman emerged. She sighed and held the door, and he entered, vowing never again.

But like most of the vows he'd made during his life, he didn't keep it. He began going on walks around the block two or three times a day, then over to the park and once even all the way down to Midtown. It wasn't exactly that he was getting stronger—his entire body felt the way a clenched fist feels in the morning, ghostly and drained. But though his strength was gone, in its place he found he could get by with a makeshift combination of stupid vanity and sheer plodding force of will.

During these slow rambles, he couldn't decide what he thought about New York, whether it was a place suitable for human existence. The bad aspects of city life were obvious and included things like muggings and subway suicides and diapers filled with shit lying on the sidewalk and emboldened sewer rats that went about their business in broad daylight as though they were just another part of the city's vast citizenry, which, in a way, they were. The good parts were less obvious, but they were there. The life, of course, and the strange beauty of the city. Also, the way the multitudinousness of the population and the population's collective personality pressed on all sides against his own personality and made him smaller. Twenty years ago—ten or even five years ago—this would have struck him as an unequivocally bad thing. Now it felt healthy. The vast space of the desert, far from humbling him, had allowed him the space for his personality to grow unchecked. His ego, his grudges, his desires, lacking any counterbalancing force or presence, had stretched out over the empty landscape like Phoenix's exurban sprawl.

He missed it, too: he missed himself. The hardest habit to break was the habit of selfishness, and he wondered if it was even possible.
Don't surround yourself with yourself,
as the man sang. But did anyone really not do that, really not surround themselves with themselves? Or was the point more that everyone was inclined to crawl up their own assholes, but good people at least made the effort not to, and that effort was what mattered? He wanted to be good, or better, at least. When he'd had similar thoughts before in his life, which hadn't been very often, it had been more that he wanted to want it; he'd felt the lack of moral desire as a void deep inside of himself, in which thoughts of doing good echoed around and quickly dispersed. This intermittent desire to desire unselfishness was, of course, in itself entirely selfish.

But now he really felt different. This difference was small, perhaps, but it was something. He worried about Vance, for instance. He'd expected Vance to pull out of it, but very quickly the kid transitioned from emotional illness to actual illness. He spiked a fever of 103 degrees, and his glands stood out on the sides of his throat like Frankenstein's neck bolts. A doctor came by—the surest sign Richard had yet seen of Eileen's towering personal prestige—diagnosed a pernicious bacterial infection, and couriered over a prescription bottle of enormous white horse pills. Over the next few days, Richard climbed the stairs, dripping sweat onto endless trays of food and water.

The upside to all of this exercise after nearly dying was that he was the thinnest he'd been in at least ten years. His belly had deflated like an air mattress with the stopper out. In the bathroom mirror, his real face—the face he envisioned himself having—emerged from the mask of jowly fat that had covered it for so long. There was even a hint of his teenage self in there somewhere, and it reminded him of being young and looking in the mirror, wondering what his grown-up self would look like. If it was true that you got the face you deserved, he thought, he should have just retained the face of himself at eighteen: evasive, spooked, and ignorant.