The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel (17 page)

“What.”

Charlie shrugged. “Give me some of that scotch and I’ll tell you.”

Anders didn’t move.

“Anyone who abandons his family can never be trusted,”
he said in a pitch-perfect Sophie Ashby.

“Yeah.” Anders pursed his lips and tried to concentrate on his breathing. But there it was, the unspoken indictment. In some ways it was a relief to finally hear it aloud. It was incredible to him that after this, after all of this, he could find himself labeled
irresponsible
.
An abandoner. A deadbeat.
It astounded him how quickly everything in a life could be undone.

“Wait,” said Charlie. “Seriously?
That
gets to you? She’s full of shit, dude. Both of them are—you were the one who told me that. You can’t stand them, remember? You find my parents unbearable.” Anders shrugged. “How can you let someone you don’t even
like
have that much control over you?”

“I don’t.”

“That’s right, you don’t. You
don’t
. And neither do I. I never will. You gotta think about it the way my sister does. She says, ‘Until they accept me for who I am, until they stop seeing my decisions as mistakes and my life as a phase, I will happily live without them in it.’ ”

“Good for her.”

“Yeah, she was kinda homeless for a year, but still—fuck ’em. Fuck. Them. You have the balls to live your life, man, you have the balls to do what you want, and
that
sets you apart in this village of zombies.” He reached for the scotch but Anders pulled it back. “You can’t go halfway; you can’t be you
and
stay in favor. You can’t worry about what other people, stupid people, think.”

“Yeah,” said Anders.

“Now give me some scotch.”

“Actually,” said Anders, thinking of Sophie as a bridesmaid in Hawaii in a flower-print skirt. “You wouldn’t happen to have anything stronger?”

Charlie broke into a grin.

Outside, a mist had rolled in that made concentric circles emanate from the moon and turned the streetlamps into floating yellow orbs. Charlie directed him to the town beach, where they came to a stop on the frozen gravel of the marina between two rows of trailered boats whose big still hulls were wrapped in plastic for the winter. At the end of a row of day sailers and ski boats was a motor cruiser whose brawny hull, out of the water, looked like the nose of a space capsule. Charlie hoisted himself onto the lower deck, where he unlocked the cabin door with a key and disappeared inside. The boat was called
Sophie’s Choice.

Someone had strung Christmas lights from the cabin’s low ceiling and rigged a space heater to the galley counter. The rest was leather cushions and chrome trim and the sort of lacquered wood grain that looked as if it were made of poured marbles. Even in winter, it smelled of salt and sand and little splashes of spilled gin, and he didn’t have to close his eyes to hear the roar of summer nights, all those people in bathing suits and sunblock, their voices carrying across the sound all the way to shore. It was an ingenious clubhouse.

Charlie came out of the bathroom holding a glass pipe and a lighter and several pieces of vaguely scientific equipment.

“I meant to tell you I figured it out,” he said, strolling past Anders and easing himself into a chair. “It was the other reason I came by and I totally forgot.”

He began setting the different pieces on a table, placing them in some sort of order, then he dropped a crumpled ball of tinfoil beside them.

“So, Oleg, the old scientist? He hears the dog’s heartbeat out in space, right?”

“What is all this stuff?”

“Hang on—so he goes to Moscow and tries to convince them they have to go get her. But of course there’s no space program anymore and anyway nobody cares about a dog that symbolized the triumph of a country that no longer exists, right? So they laugh at him. Have a seat.” Charlie gestured to a leather chair.

“So Oleg says screw you and starts building his
own
rocket, you know, out of whatever he can. But it’s basically a suicide mission because there’s no way he’ll be able to reenter the atmosphere—which, by the way, was what they knew would happen with
Laika’s
mission. She wasn’t supposed to make it back.”

Charlie opened the crumpled aluminum and sprinkled a pinch of what looked like sea salt into the big bulbous end of his glass pipe.

“So here he is,” he said, “crazy old Oleg and his junk rocket—and he
does
it, he
shoots himself into space.
” Charlie examined the stuff in the bulb, shook it. “And it’s not until he gets out there that he hears it.”

“Hears what?”

Charlie grinned. “The sound everything makes in orbit.” He raised his eyebrows. “You know what sound that is? Buh-
bum,
buh-
bum,
buh-
bum.
Like a heartbeat.” Charlie struck the trigger on a butane lighter and a blue flame appeared. “
That’s
actual science.”

“Wait, I don’t get it.”

“There was no Laika out there after all. He was just hearing his conscience. His broken heart or whatever. And without knowing it, he gave himself the exact same end as that beautiful animal. It’s
irony.
Or something. But I think how I draw it, you’ll know he also felt closer to her out there, or like released from his guilt.”

He ran the flame along the bottom of the bulb.

“You don’t like it?”

“I think it’s really sad.”

“I thought it was pretty good.”

“Charlie,” Anders said. “What is that?”

“This? We call it Peruvian salt, but that’s just because the kid I know who makes it is from Peru.”

“But what
is
it?”

“Oh,” he said. The bulb had begun to sizzle, filling the boat with a terrible chemical smell along with the aroma of something sweet, like Glade. “I have no idea.”

He leaned forward and inhaled from the end of the pipe, sucking the smoke in and holding it for what felt like an hour. The fumes were already making Anders woozy.

“All right,” Charlie said when he exhaled. “It won’t take much. Usually one hit will do it. Also, I recommend removing your shoes.”

“Why?”

“Because the carpet will basically feel like the greatest thing in the history of the world. Like kinda orgasmy.”

“I’ll keep them on.”

“Suit yourself,” said Charlie. “When this thing starts sizzling, put your mouth to the spout.”

This one, it turned out, was a lot harsher than the last. At first it felt like sniffing the fumes from a bottle of bleach, but as soon as he tasted it, it permeated the roof of his mouth, passed through the gray folds of his brain, and exited directly through the top of his head.

“Also,” said Charlie, already with that absent stoner’s glow, “I should warn you that it makes you really horny.”

“What?”

“Yeah. That can be weird. But if you just surrender to it, it’s actually kinda nice.”

Anders sat for a while in a state of joyful paralysis while Charlie talked, briefly holding forth on disjointed topics—wind farms, open-source code, a kind of lizard that could run on its hind legs across the surface of the water—until, exhausted, he fell back on the banquette and squinted up at the Christmas lights as though they were stars.

“Helene’s tits are kind of weird,” said Anders.

“Dude.”

“But I mean I like them. They’re big now. And have these scars. A lot of scars.”

“Seriously.”

“And sometimes they’re all I can think about. Like for hours.”

“Jesus. Stop it.”

“It’s unusual.”

“My mom has these veiny yoga arms,” said Charlie, as if finding a corollary. “Something about them totally makes me want to cry.”

“I wish my son would call me,” said Anders. “I call him. Even though he never picks up. I don’t know. Maybe I just like hearing his voice on the message.”

“Have you ever wondered what would happen if you disappeared?” said Charlie. “Not like died, where everyone cries at your funeral, but like an alien abduction or whatever—just poof? Gone?”

“No.”

“Like, what would change, you know?”

“Probably more than you think.”

“Like sometimes I have this vision of my life as this web, just this giant network of needs and wants and desires and dependence connecting me to other people, right? And I always thought the more threads I had coming to me and from me, the more, like, important I would be in the world. The harder it was to replace me. The people with like a million threads—you know, like a teacher who teaches a whole bunch of people to read or, I don’t know, maybe a minister who gives comfort to sick kids or whatever—they were the ones who mattered. They had like a million threads coming off them. It wasn’t about influence or power or any of that—it was about the web, you know?”

“I think so.”

“But the truth is that’s not really the case. The web is being remade every second of every day—it’s like constantly revising itself. It’s not this static thing. If you vanished, it’s just like other parts of it get stronger. The threads just remake the hole you left. Because the web is always there—it’s the
threads,
not the people, that are important.”

“My feet feel incredibly weird.”

“Dude,” said Charlie, looking back at him. “I’m telling you—take off your shoes.”

Anders did as he was told, and the carpet became intensely interesting. He sat for a moment clenching and unclenching his toes with the sudden awareness of his own body. It felt tiny and fragile. It felt like a shell that he could discard. He thought about how nice it would be to just step out of it and leave it all behind, and as soon as he thought about that, he was overcome with sadness for himself and for his family and for all the people he would leave with it. He thought about his wife and his grandkids and the day his emaciated son had resurfaced on his doorstep in a tie, a Giacometti in a cheap suit, buzzcut and loafered with his hands clasped before him like a church person with bad news, and how all he wanted to do in that moment was hold him and tell him it was okay, how all of the anger and worry was nothing compared to his need to take him back in, and how this was always the great mystery, how his need to reject was surpassed only by his capacity to forgive.

“Come on,” Anders said, putting his shoes back on. “I’m taking you home.”

Charlie squinted at him. “You serious? Like, to my
parents?
”

“Yeah, get your things.”

“Dude, you’re blazed out of your mind right now.” Charlie reached into his sweatshirt pocket and tossed a prescription bottle at him. “Take the edge off.”

“I’m not kidding. Come with me or I’ll call the police to come get you.”

Charlie held up his hands. “Relax, all right? Just let me clean this crap up.”

He started gathering his things, almost none of which they had used. “What was that for?” said Anders, pointing at the orange plastic barrel of what looked like a flare gun.

“Oh,” said Charlie. “It was a stupid idea. I just thought we might want to shoot it off.”

Anders shook his head. “I’ll be in the car.”

Across the marina a halyard was pinging against its flagpole, a distant lonely music. The mist had passed and in its place was a clear, biting cold. He started his car and cranked the heat, feeling the texture of his steering wheel with newfound appreciation. Eventually, he beeped the horn; Charlie was taking his time. He was probably running his hand along the cabinets and marveling at the many tiny cracks of its wood grain.

Anders got out of the car and went back to the boat. It was dark in there, the air still burned with the medicinal smell from the pipe.

“Charlie?” he said. He knocked on the bathroom door.

He should have known there would be nobody there. When he opened the door, the hatch on the ceiling was popped open, and all that remained of Charlie was his turtle, sitting alone on the closed lid of the toilet.

Anders ran out to the deck and shouted Charlie’s name, squinting into the dark, but there was nothing. He listened to the breeze, looking at the silhouetted eaves of silent homes, an entire town asleep, early risers and their productive rest, offspring tucked into warm beds, grandfather clocks and the hiss of radiators and dreams of security and comfort, until high above the rooftops, at the edge of the horizon, a magnificent orange streak flared across the sky.

Preston Simms Hill
had debated, at nearly every stage of his life, getting in his car, pointing it west, and disappearing completely from the big judgmental eye of society. At first this was normal adolescent stuff—he’d grown up in a world so fiercely dedicated to maintaining its own privilege that it practically begged any thinking creature to disrupt it (or, in the case of his former best friend Addy, to torch the gymnasium of their country day school). But as his twenties had become his thirties and the injustices of prep school had receded into the background hum of the rest of childhood, he began to suspect that his desire to vanish from every situation that had expectations of him might be rooted in something other than rebellion. And now that he’d been booted, at thirty-three, from even his childhood home, he could finally understand what all those recovery speakers had been going on about: namely, that waking up for the third morning in a row in the igloo of your own uninsured car probably meant it was time to make a change.

He’d been parked at the back of a gravel carpool lot off exit 18 with a handful of other rusted station cars that had been there since the nineties. He had told his mother, when she’d called to extend her guilt-assuaging invitation to Christmas Eve dinner, that he was crashing with a friend, a lie that was one hundred percent pride. The truth was that the last of his friends had left town after college, making the great migration to Brooklyn or Boulder, and he couldn’t bear to show up on Tommy’s doorstep and give his brother another reason to congratulate himself on his extraordinary responsibility. So that left him here, on a sort of road trip without a road, in a hometown without a home, ninety bucks to his name and no winter coat and the troubling sense that he had run out of people to blame.

He sat up in his sleeping bag and felt the creak of his old car’s suspension. His breath had frosted the windows, bathing the car in blank white light. He cleared a patch with his palm and looked out at the train tracks and the dead marsh grass of the estuary beyond, where a flock of geese were waddling around, preening. His skin was hot with sleep. Three days without a shower was about the time you began to notice it. He pushed his sleeping bag into the foot well and stumbled into the harsh low light of the morning.

Leaning against his front bumper, shivering in the cold, he Purelled his hands and forearms and brushed his teeth with what was left in his water bottle, trying not to concentrate on the fact that he was once again living out of his car. He could mark each incongruous section of his life with a period in which he had woken up in this car, on this backseat, one bare leg sticking out of his sleeping bag and a bruise on his ribs from the seat-belt buckle. Early on, all his unannounced nights away from home were a reaction to his parents’ insistence on squash and Latin and schools that required him to wear a navy blazer with big brass buttons, but by the time he disappeared from his first semester at BU (a school his father had to practically beg to get him into), his little tantrums of independence (his father’s words) had grown into something a bit more significant. What that was, at least at first, was a girl named Lizzie Greenleaf—the only good thing to come out of his stay at the expensive rehab in the Arizona desert—who was always going on about road-tripping and troubadouring and the wild freedoms underlying our national mythology. She was the smartest girl he had ever met and after rehab she had made it through only a week at Reed College before she shoved her belongings in a backpack and caught a lift to the Gorge, a field at the edge of a cliff in Washington State, where she camped alone until the Phish tour showed up and swept her down the West Coast to Santa Barbara. Which was when she called Preston from a pay phone and told him he should join her.

Actually, what she had done was ask him about college, and when he said it was pretty cool, that he had a class about
Heart of Darkness
that traced the journeying-upriver theme from Dante all the way to that super eighties Robert Downey Jr. movie about strung-out rich kids in LA, she had seemed bored and quiet until he asked how she was doing and she went off about how she had realized that the greatest education was already living and breathing all around her and that the greatest teacher was already beating inside her ribs. “We happen to have been born at the most peaceful and prosperous time in the history of the world,” she said. “Do you really think the payoff for all that sacrifice is the privilege of choosing what cubicle to sit in? Preston, we’re beneficiaries of something that until now has only been a fantasy:
We can do whatever we want.
”

It wasn’t like her arguments were particularly new, but they were passionate and peppered with references to writers he had never read, and, perhaps most persuasive, they were coming from her. They lived out of the back of his car and ran a small baked-goods business—shroom blondies and hash muffins and, when no oven was available (which turned out to be most of the time), uncooked lumps of dough and stems she carried around the parking lot on sheets of wax paper. Lizzie was from Indian Hill, Ohio, an enclave of Procter and Gamble executives that was a lot like his hometown except everyone there had gotten rich off toothpaste instead of something incomprehensible with stocks, and she was beautiful. She had a boyfriend back in Indian Hill to whom she was disappointingly loyal, which meant she referred to Preston as her friend or her best friend and often held his hand and draped her arm across his chest while they were sleeping, a position that made him feel safer than any seat belt in the world and that meant he frequently had to wait for his boner to chill before he climbed out of his sleeping bag in the morning. She had fine brown hair she had to re-dread every couple of weeks with surfboard wax and a stadium-light smile and a pair of cruelly perfect breasts that were perpetually braless and remained suspended by some miraculous force beneath the gossamer cotton of a vintage T-shirt. All this, no doubt, gave her a tremendous advantage in the baked-goods market, particularly with the backward-hat boys, and they were still to this day his go-to jack-off image, which was weird because he had never actually seen them, and also because she was dead.

Looking back on it all, while it had lasted only a month and a half, it was still the most formative time of his life, despite being an easy joke for pretty much everyone else. Even now, when it came up, his older brother would swirl his hands in the air above his head in a caricature of a moronic noodle dance that Preston wished weren’t so accurate and say, “How’s the too-ur, bro?” in a sort of developmentally disabled Santa Barbara drawl, to which Preston would nod—
Yes, yes, some people sounded like that
—while his brother kept twirling and tucking his imaginary hair behind his ears. “It’s pretty sweet,” Preston would have to say eventually to get him to stop.

Lizzie had died in a field. It was a bad dose that did it, which was ironic because she was always harping on about organics, how if it didn’t come from the earth, it didn’t go into her body, and she basically lived on these steel-cut-oat bars that you could find only at absurdly high-end health-food stores, but that’s what happened. And it’s not like what followed was a logical progression—he hated that “if this, then that” shit, how it oversimplified everything. The one psychologist his mom had forced him to see had been obsessed with Lizzie—Why did he think he skipped her funeral? Why didn’t he go home? Why did he think he never told his parents? Why couldn’t he talk about what happened?—on and on, and it’s not like he had answers for her. It’s not like what happened answered anything. It was the third night at Alpine Valley and it was mid-October in Wisconsin, a little too chilly to be camping but people did anyway, so the grounds had swollen to the size of a medieval city. He and Lizzie had only one ticket that night, which they flipped for because the band had a reputation for playing insane, historically significant sets on the third night at Alpine, and she said he’d won, though Lizzie would never show the flip. She would keep the coin tight in her fist and look at it with one eye as though peering into a microscope, and she would come back with this huge smile, a smile that said
You’re never going to believe this,
which was basically her look all the time, like something enormous and wonderful had happened and she was about to share the news. This time she said he won so he went in alone, and the amazing thing was that it
was
a historically significant show. His ticket was for the lawn but he was able to push his way to the front so he was leaning against the guardrail and was close enough to the soles of Trey’s Pumas that he could have licked them, and though he was sober as a newborn he was directly under the storm of the band’s lights, which gave every movement of the set a kind of full-body experience, one that was topped only by the second set, which he spent on the back of the lawn under the green sky of an actual storm that had gathered and electrified everything down to the hair on his toes. He felt the dense warships of clouds collect above him, and during the soaring end of a song that had started some twenty minutes before, the sky opened into fat sheets of rain and thunder while people on the lawn went bananas dancing, and he lay there, sinking into the mud and having a semimystical experience that he could never find the words to explain.

He liked to think that Lizzie was also lying in the storm, though he didn’t really know that for sure. He didn’t really know anything, considering that by the time he reached her at the end of the show, it was all emergency vehicles and gawking lot rats and a whole host of stupid rumors. He tried not to listen to any of them, though the weird thing, besides the fact that she had put straight chemicals into her body, was that people kept saying she was with this guy Kendal, who was famous for cheap tabs and methy coke and who was like forty years old and wore SoCal skate shorts and flat-brimmed hats and socks pulled up to his knees—a guy who was pretty much the definition of sketchy. People were saying all kinds of crap, about how he’d killed her, about how she had gone to him asking for an adventure and he had given it to her—but it didn’t matter. Once, years later, on a bad night at Northwestern, he had Googled the guy but there was nothing and it occurred to him that of course Kendal wasn’t the guy’s real name, and anyway, if he had found him, what could he do?

He couldn’t go back to school because it was bullshit and also because the attendance policy wouldn’t allow it, and he didn’t know what else to do, so he stayed on tour selling Lizzie’s goo balls and sleeping in her bag, and, when the tour was over, he kept on with other bands, bands with terrible names but respectable followings, like the Disco Biscuits and Leftover Salmon and the String Cheese Incident, whose music Preston didn’t much like but who were great for business, particularly when selling baked goods gave way to selling plain drugs, at which point he began forgoing the shows altogether. When everyone had gone inside, he would lean his seat back in the 4Runner and close his eyes and listen to one of Lizzie’s many books on tape—Ginsberg and Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson and, when those were exhausted, Paul Bowles, Philip K. Dick, even Carl Sagan’s lectures on the universe—all of which helped to justify the newly lowered expectations of his life.

Time, in its way, became liquid. At some point he gave up on the jam bands and discovered the trance kids, who had warehouse parties nearly every night on the outskirts of places like Topeka and Spokane and who bought the chemical stuff by the fistful. At another point he decided it was time to get straight so he buzzed his dreads and talked his parents into writing him a check for culinary school, which it turned out was highly demanding and full of stupid people, so he talked them into writing another check for an organic-farming program in New Zealand—
Get away,
he remembered thinking,
far, far away
—but that was also demanding, even though he was paying
them,
so he skipped out of that and hitchhiked to the very bottom of the South Island, where there were penguins and rocks and nothing but water until Antarctica. Also, there was speed. After several months, he made it back to Auckland, twenty-five pounds lighter and dead broke, so he hopped his return flight to LA and crashed with a girl he had known from the trance scene who was kind enough to introduce him to the many pleasures of West Coast opiates.

Addiction narratives are dreadfully repetitive, which was another reason why he disliked recovery, but suffice it to say that at some point after LA he found himself marooned without friends in the exurbs of Phoenix, unclear on exactly how he had gotten there, and for a period, owing to what he could describe only as temporary insanity, he had shared a trailer with three skateboarders who were cooking meth in the same kitchen where he was sleeping. He had awoken one evening with the desert sun coming through the one curtained window over the sink setting the whole place ablaze. The other guys were off videotaping one another skinning their faces on public handrails, and as he looked around their long tin box, with its tubes and pots, its terrible chemical air, a couch and a PlayStation and one shitty watercolor of the desert nailed to the wall, he knew he had made it about as far from home as he could.

To say that he arrived at Northwestern a changed man was an understatement. He didn’t so much as drink a beer the whole three years he was in school, spending his evenings consuming books and volunteering at two different crisis centers, where he was mostly asked to help stuff envelopes and laminate signs about their many stringent policies. He finished with a somewhat absurd GPA (which for once correlated with his standardized test scores) but after graduation, once he had papered the city with his scattershot résumé, the downtime grew and grew until he picked up a few shifts, just to make rent, with another old friend’s pot-delivery service. This meant he rode around town on a borrowed Vespa with a big bulbous helmet and the many pockets of his backpack lined with neat baggies of weed, which he would deliver, it seemed, exclusively to lawyers, who wouldn’t look at him as he stood in the doorways of their high, glass apartments. He couldn’t blame them—during this period, he couldn’t look at himself either—and as another month ground by and his very old friend offered him many more shifts, he did the only thing he knew to do. He called his mother.