Trust No One (10 page)

The days are racing past and you haven’t been able to write as much as you’d have liked. Life, just like it often does when you’re writing, gets in the way. There is still day eleven to catch up on, which is when Eva came around for dinner. Of course she’s been around a lot since then, and a lot has happened. First of all, let me tell you that Sandra has removed all the alcohol from the house. It’s a real shame because at night the G&Ts actually help. They calm you, and a guy in your condition deserves to be calm. Other people get sick, and other people die at much younger ages, but this is you me us we. You’re allowed to be upset for yourself—that’s your right, and you have to admit you’re a little angry at Sandra for getting rid of the one thing that can bring you comfort when nothing else can. She has also taken away your credit card after the whole cat food thing. You’ve lost count how many times she’s said over the last week
You can’t do that, Jerry,
or
You should be doing that, Jerry.

The good news is that you called Hans. Hans has been a pretty big help to you over the years. He’s what you would call . . . source material. You met him in university. He was the first out of all your friends to start losing his hair, and he decided early to shave it completely off, which made him the only bald twenty-year-old on campus. He was taking a whole bunch of classes, including the same psychology class as you and Sandra, but for him it was more like he was trying to find the key to unlock not just the mind, but the world. He likes knowing how things tick. You used to go to his flat to study, and often the TV or the computer or the toaster would be in pieces, and once he figured out how all that stuff ticked, he moved on to bigger things, like the car. He’s a little like Rain Man when it comes to numbers too. He can’t look at a spilled jar of toothpicks on the floor and tell you how many there are, but he can perform all sorts of complex arithmetic in his head. He also has this trick where he can guess somebody’s age and weight, though he’d always deduct between twenty-five and thirty-five percent for women over twenty, more if he was attracted to them. Sometimes you’d take a break from studying and sit out on the back porch and he’d be smoking a joint and you’d be drinking a beer, and you’d have a Rubik’s Cube he was always fiddling with, using the layer method to solve it in a few minutes, trying to learn a way to solve it in under a minute, which he eventually did, before cutting it down to thirty seconds. He taught himself to speak three languages, and once he spent two weeks doing nothing but origami, making swans and roses and panda bears before moving on and trying to figure out how to make the perfect paper plane. When he was nineteen, he read a dozen books on how to fly a Cessna, then snuck onto an airstrip at night and stole one. He put everything he had learned to the test, flying a mile radius around the runway before returning safely. Once you were at his flat studying and he was practicing how to pick a lock, not because he needed to break into a house, but to see if he could, then he spent hours trying to teach you what he had learned, not for your benefit, but just to see if teaching was another one of his abilities.

The problem, with Hans, was the weed. He probably smoked it just to quiet his brain. Then he started growing it, just to see if he could. Then he started selling it. When he was twenty-one he did four months in jail, and when he came out he wasn’t the same Hans that went in—though by then something was changing inside him anyway, and prison just helped advance it, as it would when he served three more years for distribution when he was twenty-five. The friendship became tenuous after his first prison visit, but Christchurch being a small place meant you would always run into him every now and then, and your relationship was based on who he used to be. We all have friends like that, Future Jerry, where it’s hard to know whether you’d be friends with them now if you met for the first time (I have to be honest here and tell you I wonder this about you, about whether I’d like the person you are in the future, just as I have no idea whether you will like the person you used to be).

Hans got more heavily into drugs after that first prison stint. He started hitting the gym and he bulked up. He got tattoos. Yet whenever you ran into him, he was the warmest guy. When the first book came out, he came around to see you. He was so excited. The friendship started to grow again—though Sandra always makes herself scarce whenever he drops by, then after he leaves asks you what in the hell you’re doing spending time with a guy like that. You’ve never based any characters on him, but if you wanted to know how to smuggle a baby out of the country or buy a pound of cocaine, he’s the guy you’d ask. People often think that crime writers would know how to get away with murder, but you’ve always thought if anybody could, it’d be Hans. Some of the bad shit in your books, that’s all you, Jerry; but the way some of that bad shit unfolds, the little details, some of that is his. From how to create a stolen identity to putting the living fear of God into somebody, Hans is an all-sorts kind of guy in the sense that he can do all sorts of things. Bad things. You probably should know he scares you a little. In fact, he’s the guy you thought you bought the gun from.

On day seventeen you rang him and told him about the dementia. He said he would come over. You told him not to worry, but he did worry, and Sandra worried herself into work to catch up on some things that needed looking in on, just so she wouldn’t have to face him. You sat on the deck outside and drank one of the beers he brought over while he smoked his joint and you talked about how unfair the world was. He asked you to explain the Alzheimer’s to him, he wanted every detail, and he kept asking questions, as if it were a problem for which he could provide a solution. If he thought it would have helped, he probably would have taken you apart on that deck and tried to make right all the bits he thought were defective.

When you told him Sandra had gotten rid of all the gin, he got into his car and disappeared for twenty minutes, and when he returned he had five bottles, all of which you have hidden, and he told you to call him in a week when you’d run out. A week! You weren’t sure if he was kidding, but you told him it’d be more like a month. Maybe even two. You miss the way Hans used to be, but the old Hans wouldn’t have driven off and returned with all that Bombay Sapphire.

By the way, you have a hiding place in your office—no, not under the desk—and that’s not a hiding place anymore since Sandra knows about it, but there’s another one at the back of the cupboard. There’s a false wall in there. You used those renovation skills of yours to build one when you moved in—it’s where you hide your writing backups. Far easier than moving a desk out of the way every day. Some of the things you’ve written way back in the past, you’d die of embarrassment if anybody ever found them. You could only fit three bottles in there, and the other two you hid in the garage. Sandra didn’t object to the tonic staying in the house.

That’s day seventeen summed up. Let’s give you a good news and bad news summation. Bad news first. You ran out of alcohol. Good news next. You’re restocked with alcohol. More good news—Hans confirmed you never bought a gun. When asked, he said,
So the dementia, that means you’re going to start saying all sorts of shit to people, right?

You told him that was so.

I never gave you a gun. I’
ve never given anybody a gun.

Now back to day eleven. Hard to believe that was over a week ago now. In fact, why don’t you go ahead and add that to your
I can’t believe it
list, F.J., a list that is getting pretty full if you must know. Things are moving quickly now. Not the Big A (though that time bomb is still tick, tick, ticking—actually, strike that, the Big A is a bomb that’s already gone off, and this is the fallout we’re dealing with). You had visited your lawyer during the week, and your accountant—all these preparations for the future—it’s like you’re taking a trip to the moon and never coming back. They each shook your hand at the appointments and said how sorry they were, but they weren’t really sorry. Why would they be? You’re dying and they’re buying new cars and boats and it’s billable hours, baby, billable all the way.

You cooked dinner on day eleven. Eva brought Rick over. You’re actually a pretty good cook. It’s one of your things—and you don’t have many things. You can write, you can play pool, you know some card tricks, you can catch Alzheimer’s like catching a cold, and you can cook. What you cooked that day has slipped your mind, but if you really need to know, then send a letter and address it Jerry Grey, care of the past, and I’ll get back to you.

They showed up, and they were all smiles, and Eva brought her guitar and you all sat in the lounge and she explained how she’s been writing music and, get this, she’s just sold her first song! She said she started writing during her three years in Europe. She traveled with a journal and she’d see things that would inspire her—people, sunsets, landscapes—and she’d write. She never said anything. She said it was something she wanted to do on her own, that if you knew you’d probably try to give her advice, or try to help with her lyrics. The singer who bought her song is planning on recording and releasing it soon. Eva played it, and it was beautiful, but it made the discussion that was coming up so much harder. You sat in the lounge with your arm around Sandra and listened to Eva sing, and Rick sat watching her and he was mesmerized, and you don’t think you’ve ever seen a guy as in love as good ol’ Rick.

The song is called “The Broken Man,” and is about a guy who breaks the hearts of every woman who falls in love with him, until one day his own heart is broken by the woman he can never have because she’s already married. You asked her to play it again, and she did, and Sandra asked for a third time and she said no, maybe later, and smiled as if she were a little embarrassed at how proud you and Sandra were. Sandra took a photograph of you sitting next to Eva with a big smile on your face. (She had the photograph printed the following day, and on the back she wrote
Proudest dad in the world.
The photo is now on the fridge door.)

Later in the evening came dinner. You and Sandra gave them the news as soon as dinner was over. Eva cried, and Rick put his arm around her and she asked the same question over and over, the
How long do you have
question that nobody can rightly put their finger on, and you kept thinking, you kept thinking, if Eva’s music is in the world, no matter what happens you’re going to be okay.

Eva cried, and she hugged you to make you feel better, but for her own comfort she turned to Rick. You can’t quite put into words how you felt then. It wasn’t jealousy, but more of a sense of redundancy. You were the person who used to check under her bed for dragons. You were there for her when she thought her world was falling apart after she backed the car into the garage wall. You hugged her until her tears dried up after the cat died. Now you’re the Broken Man, not the broken man of Eva’s song, but broken nonetheless. Eva has Rick now, and she is going to need him. And really, you should be thankful for that.

It was Rick’s idea to bring the wedding forward. Rick, who you didn’t like so much when you first met him because he pulled up in his car with that god-awful hip-hop music playing, which reminds me, J-Man (that’s my hip-hop name for you, and my hip-hop name for the Madness Journal is Maddy J.), reminds me that you hate, absolutely hate hip-hop music and if you’re listening to it in the future with your jeans halfway down your ass then you really are too far gone to be helped. You’re a Springsteen kind of guy. And the Stones. The Doors. You once wrote a whole novel listening to nothing but Pink Floyd. The music you listen to is immortal.

Rick. Rick and his damn hip-hop, blaring from the stereo like he was DJing the whole neighborhood. Eva in the passenger seat making goo-goo eyes at him, and you did good, J-Man, you didn’t tell him to turn it off otherwise you’d get your gun (nonexistent, mind you) and put a bullet into his stereo. He did not make a great first impression, and all you could think was that if this guy married your daughter and they had kids, that’s where your estate was going. Things got better after that—either the hip-hop was a phase, or Eva said something to him, because he kept the music low and started pulling up his jeans, and now—well, now you like him. He’s a good guy. They’ve been living together for the last two years, and now the wedding. Maybe it was Eva’s music that changed him.

Bringing the wedding forward is for you. Hard to walk Eva down the aisle and give her away if you can’t even remember her name. So your daughter, the most amazing girl, is shifting the biggest day of her life so you can enjoy it. It was going to be in a year or so, but now it’s going to be in a few months. A man more suspicious than you might think Rick wants to get a ring on her before your trip to the moon so he gets a cut of what you leave behind. He may as well—in a year’s time you’re not going to care either way.

So there you have it—already your wife and daughter are spending their evenings planning things, sometimes with Rick, sometimes without him, and sometimes Rick will come over and the two of you will watch whatever game is on TV, or play darts in the garage, just shooting the breeze. They’re struggling to find somewhere on short notice for the ceremony but are still hopeful.

Good news—Eva is getting married. You can’t believe how grown up she is now. Walking her down the aisle is going to be one of the proudest days of your life.

Bad news—Sandra mentioned selling the house. She’s trying to be practical. She wants to find somewhere smaller. You’ve added it to the
I can’t believe it
list. You told her no, that you want to stay here as long as you can. You told her you don’t want to go into a home, that there’s enough money and enough insurance to hire home care. She said okay, and that these things would be reassessed further down the line. You know what further down the line means—it’s going to be just like when she read the journal. She’s going to tell you that you’ve agreed all along to selling the place and that you’ve forgotten.