Tumbledown (53 page)

Candler opened his eyes to the orange indent in the hospital hallway that everyone called
the waiting room,
but it was not a separate room, and the woman beside him was again speaking, softly speaking, the light from the ceiling an unnatural white like bleached teeth, and what was she saying now, this sad and lovely woman in a Neil Young T-shirt, her hair smelling of apples, and who had already forgiven him, what was she saying? He listened and slept, his drowsiness and his attentiveness holding hands as the praying couple had done from their knees.

Genevieve Coury was resigned not to the death of her son but to the frequency with which he would approach it. If he actually died, she would be as shocked and devastated as any parent losing a child, but she had learned that the agony of apprehension was not an obligation she had to keep. She and Tom sold their home in Yuma, abandoned their friends and jobs, moved away from family, and then her marriage, too, was sacrificed to the wrathful god of schizophrenia. She would not surrender her second son to redeem the first, but except for this, she held nothing back and had no regrets. She missed her husband, but the man she loved no longer seemed to exist. He had to glorify their sacrifices by bringing god into the picture, and she could not entirely forgive him for that. Candler heard her and did not hear her, unsure what was real and what was dream, and it did not yet end.

It was Genevieve, he understood, who had thought to grab Craig’s Game Boy and take it to the hospital. It was she who offered her bedroom to her ex-husband and his girlfriend for the night, reminding them that Craig had school in the morning and to set an alarm. It would be she who slept for what was left of this night in the chair beside Mick’s bed. It would be she who wrote letters to Rhine and Maura, thanking them for saving—or trying to save—her boy’s fragile life. And it would be she, standing beside her son’s grave at some point in the future, who would have a clean conscience, who would know she had done everything she could to save him. And it would be she who’d be nonetheless inconsolable. Candler heard her and slept, nodding at the right moments, touching the hand that clutched his arm at the elbow. He wanted to thank her for the way she had greeted him on the phone, but he had been stripped of language and could only listen to the dream of this woman’s life.

When she rattled the arm she held, he saw his brother standing over them, his brother’s big closed face, his brother’s strong grip, and behind him were those paintings lining the walls as they had in the New York gallery. When he opened his eyes, the woman next to him was speaking. “Mick used to make amazing buildings out of his plastic bricks,” she was saying. She lifted her head from Candler’s shoulder, slipping to the edge of the upholstered couch. “He was the most wonderful child and obsessed with those plastic bricks.” She released Candler’s arm and stood. “He’d say,
Mom, I’ve built you a castle.
”

Candler nodded. “I understand,” he said. “I understand what you’re telling me. I’ll leave you two alone.”

Her smile was beatific, and he believed he could love her. He could give up Lolly and Lise and love this woman, adopt her tragic son, and this became part of the waking dream, and by the time a clattering cart pushed by an orderly brought him fully awake, Genevieve Coury was gone, the dream was gone, and Candler was alone.

People encounter death in vastly dissimilar ways. Some see a light in an otherwise dark universe, and they move toward that light or flee from it. Some see the faces of the people they love, and they are filled with joy. Others see the dead they betrayed and belittled scuffling along a narrow corridor, forming a line. For many, though, there is only a slow cessation, which is a source both of despair and of relief. And for everyone, there comes a time when consciousness of every kind evaporates, and the thing that we have thought of as our soul trembles and vanishes, not like a flame, but like the memory of a flame, and it cannot be relit.

This was not the first time Mick Coury had died. Twice among his attempts to kill himself his heart had stopped and he had been revived. And his illness, when it descended—that, too, had been a kind of death. A limited kind of death. There were degrees of death, just as there were degrees of darkness, degrees of love, degrees of knowing. Mick had died a number of times before this night, and he was dead now. His father was born again, and he was dead again. If his body had been capable of laughter, he would have laughed.

He wanted to be revived. He hoped it would happen. This seemed like a contradictory desire, as he could have declined to kill himself and then he would not need reviving. But
revival
and
survival
were not the same thing.
It’s like a reset button with you,
his brother Craig had said after one of Mick’s attempts.
You come to all better, straightened out, feeling good.
Mick had nodded and said,
Maybe I should do it more often.
His brother had thrown back his head and laughed.

In death, there is no schizophrenia, and Mick felt his pain at losing Karly with a degree of irony. He understood that she was mentally impaired. He understood that her mind, but not her soul, was diminished, and if he still felt love for her, it was mingled with the understanding that he would be better suited with someone more intellectually compelling for a life partner. If only he had a life . . . and if he could carry over this ruthless sanity into it.

It was cold, being dead, not icy but there was a chill, and the light was not a friendly light, and whatever was going on about him registered as shoves or mechanical noises, like the grating of enormous gears. He would miss light. He would miss the magic of human light. Human light?
What the fuck?

He filled with his old old self, and what a glorious feeling to be straight and wickedly handsome and horny and if only he could get the fuck up and out of this place, out into the vivid-ass world out there.

His stomach hurt, which meant he might be brought back. Or it might mean that the pain of dissolution had begun. Each of his organs would fail and fail painfully. Death is not unconsciousness. He would feel it all. The pain of the pieces giving up, giving out, life easing along into the ether.

The guy he had been once upon a time, back in Yuma, the guy he felt once again fully inhabit his body, that guy would have gone about this Karly business differently. He would’ve wanted to get her out of her clothes and onto her back. That guy would have wanted to
get some.
A ripple of desire moved through his body. But the body could not follow it up.

If he was going to stay dead this time, he had plenty of regrets. Like the beach. He wished to hell he could have gone back to that beach, ripped off his clothes, and strode over the sand like a goddamn god. Gods did what they wanted, took whatever and whomever they pleased. He would have bent Karly over the hood of his Firebird and taken her, and afterward he would have spanked her bare bottom, and he would have walked naked into the sea.

And then what?

I paint flowers so they will not die.

—FRIDA KAHLO

Same Man stands over the body of the boy who killed himself. The body looks just like Same Man. People are watching. They are barely out of the frame, watching.

Someone says,

WHY DIDN’T YOU

SAVE HIM,

SAME MAN?

Same Man does not have the power to disappear. The hospital room is bright. The dead boy just lies there. Same Man stares out of the frame, as if waiting for directions.

Someone says,

YOU WERE GOING

TOO FAST,

SAME MAN.

Same Man closes his eyes but the people watching do not disappear. He cannot see them, but they are there. His closed eyes look like smooth clamshells.

In the next frame, Same Man’s eyes are squeezed tightly shut, like tiny pursed mouths. There are drops of sweat on Same Man’s forehead.

Same Man’s face fills the whole panel. Sweat runs down his jaw. His eyes are pinched.

The next frame is dark. This is what Same Man sees with his eyes closed. It is not all black. There is the boy who killed himself. You can almost make him out in the dark.

More dim frames follow, each with more patchy light. The boy becomes clearer. He is no longer on the hospital bed. He is kneeling. He looks just like Same Man.

He says,

IF I’M ON MY KNEES,

I MUST BE PRAYING.

The image in the frame is so close that only the crease in the bridge of Same Man’s nose and the indentations that are the corners of his shut eyes are visible. The crease looks like a black bridge connecting the sockets.

AS LONG AS

SAME MAN

CONCENTRATES

THE BOY IS ALIVE.

A doctor in a white lab coat stands in the bright room beside Same Man, who has his eyes hard shut. The doctor wears a headband that holds a metallic mirror, which is cocked over one eye. A hole in the mirror reveals the doctor’s eye. He holds a needle and thread. The mirror obscures his face, but the careful reader can tell he looks just like Same Man.

In the next panel: nothing but Same Man’s shut eyes, the stitches like the hide of a baseball.

The final frame is dim with dark patches. The boy is rising from his knees. He is almost standing. He looks just like Same Man.

RECALCULATING.

The window of Mick Coury’s bedroom is illuminated. It is not especially late, but the remainder of the house is dark.

Genevieve Coury is asleep, on top of the covers, wearing the gray sweatpants and Neil Young T-shirt that she changed into after arriving home. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep, just wished to rest her eyes for one moment, one moment, one . . . A dreamless sleep, or almost so, only a vague sense of churning inhabits her mind, a churning that may be the ocean, that may be the rhythm of her heart, that may capture the convolutions of her complicated life. Stray, disloyal thoughts attempt to stand up to the churning—
Did I turn off the lights downstairs? I haven’t made Craig’s lunch for tomorrow. I should check on Mick one last time before going down for the count.
The churning swallows up the unhappy lines and they disappear beneath the beating waves. She sleeps.

Craig is awake in his room, the lights off, music playing on his computer. He reclines on the bed, wearing only his underpants, head propped up by a tumble of pillows, texting with a girl who is at a slumber party, and all the girls there, she writes to him, want to know what he’s wearing, why he doesn’t let his hair grow out again like he did in eighth grade, and if he thinks Lady Gaga is a tramp ha ha. The tiny cloud of light created by his cell phone haloes his head.

Across the narrow hall, in his bright tidy room, Mick Coury stands beside his faithful bed, holding pills in his hand, the meds that have failed to help him, failed to repair him, failed to mend his broken mind. They make a mound on his palm. He intends to swallow the handful and end his confusing misery once and for all. He intends to wash the handful down with the glass of water on his nightstand. He intends to eat the meds and then lie on his bed, his hands clasped at his waist or behind his head—the only decision he will have to make after he takes the pills is what to do with his hands. He has been through this before. The key to killing yourself is to make up your mind and then quit thinking. The key to killing yourself is to make up your mind and follow through. He has made up his mind, his woeful, muddled, worthless, pain-ridden mind that the drugs failed to restore and now he will neutralize, will rub out, will do in, will murder himself. Mind-murdering drugs.

It’s a melodramatic business, is suicide.

Mick’s heart hurts more than he can bear. He is hot and sweating. He has blocked off the floor vents by covering each with T-shirts and stacking books on top. He’s not sure now why he did that, but the room is hot and his skin glistens. He has put on his best pajamas, the striped ones that his father gave him. He believes his father will understand what Mick is saying by wearing these pajamas, but he doesn’t want to think himself about what they mean—
forgiveness
or something along those lines. He clicks off the overhead light and stands in the middle of the darkened room, still holding the pills in his palm. Moonlight enters and carries off the darkness—not all of it, a partial expulsion, the room dark and light at the same time. Sweat from his forehead gathers on the bridge of his nose, trickles down to the tip, and just as he raises his hand to stuff his mouth with Thorazine, a drop of sweat falls from his nose to the jumble of pills.

This gives him pause. From his brother’s room comes the sound of a satellite radio station played through the speakers of a laptop. It’s the seventies channel, and the song is one that was recorded long before Mick was born—approximately seventeen years before. Yet he has a history with the song dating back to the other side of the mountain, to when he was that other boy. It is a simple history: he
hated
the song. It played at a wedding he attended, a shotgun wedding of classmates, the girl just beginning to show beneath her off-white dress, the boy with a barbed-wire tattoo circling his neck, and from a gunmetal gray ghetto blaster came the recording of the woman’s voice, all syrup:
We’ve only just begun
. . .

Mick doesn’t merely recall disliking the song, he actively hates the song in the moment, as it pours under and around and through his door and rises up to his ears.
What a sentimental piece of Nutrasweetened garbage! Of all the songs . . .
He can’t see himself dying to this hateful tune, which means he’ll have to wait a few minutes and hope for Creedence Clearwater or David Bowie or . . . what is the best seventies music to die to, anyway? Styx? He supposes he could ask his brother to change the station, but to what? And if . . . and if . . . and if he hates this awful song, isn’t that evidence that he’s getting better? More like his old self, all opinionated about tunes?

It’s not too late to change his mind. He can still go to the beach. They set a tentative date for the trip—this coming Saturday. He can still attempt to make the journey to the ocean and lead the others on an adventure.
I’ve got an itch for adventure
—who had said that to him. Karly? No, it was Maura. His friend Maura. He could do that much for her, couldn’t he? With his free hand, he flips on the overhead light, which erases the moonlight and the residual darkness, both at once.

He steps from his room to the hall, the sound of the dreadful song rising in volume:
white lace and promises, a kiss for luck and we’re on our way . . .
No one is in the bathroom. He locks the door behind him. He bends to drop the pills into the toilet without making a big splash. He pisses on them, which is so pleasurable that he imagines pissing every day on his meds. He flushes. The pills chase one another in a circle and dive into the opening, vanishing, vanishing, gone.

Mick does not attempt to kill himself after all. He is dead in the hospital morgue and he is not dead, returning now to his room, the repugnant Carpenters song giving way to “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”
Why do people like ’70s music?
he wonders, covering his ears. He shuts the door to his room to muffle the sound of the song. It feels terribly selfish to him, this decision to continue living. And possibly incompetent. Rude. He is ashamed and crawls into bed. Spiraling through his regret and remorse and self-hatred is a thought:
The beach.
Other thoughts trail it.
I can find the beach. I can be somebody’s guide for a change.
This swirl of thoughts forces the others out of the frame, and he drifts off into sleep.

Readers encounter the impossible in vastly dissimilar ways. Some throw the goddamn book across the room and curse the author by name. Others imagine the snide comments they’ll post on a book review website. Still others keep the faith, shaken yet willing to continue. But every reader wants the impossible acts addressed: a big brother’s sudden and permanent and utterly inexplicable disappearance—how is
that
possible? A son’s baffling descent into madness? A husband who one day cannot lift his coffee cup? A woman who discovers she has put a price tag on some part of her soul? A young man who finds himself in uniform and firing a lethal weapon at other human beings? Or a tiny swimming mishap in the neighbor’s pool—a few seconds too many beneath the surface—and the child’s ability to function in the world is forever diminished? And now a boy who died has also not died? Every sane person has to find every day some manner of accommodating the impossible, some way of covering up for the failures of the rational world. This might actually be a reasonable definition of
sanity.

The lead car in the beach caravan is Mick Coury’s Firebird, which he has washed and waxed. He spends an hour vacuuming the interior to ensure that his passengers will be comfortable. As things turn out, Maura Wood is his only passenger, sitting in the Firebird’s bucket seat in her sunglasses, a man’s white shirt, and cutoff jeans. Underneath, she wears a black one-piece bathing suit that has a tiny skirt. Mick is fully dressed, including his brown loafers and a long-sleeved striped shirt. He is much more concerned with the drive than with the swim, and he dresses as he imagines a successful driver would outfit himself, including a tie until his brother tells him the tie is overboard. His swim trunks, a towel, a second towel, and sunscreen are in a cloth bag in the trunk, along with two boogie boards and a huge cooler packed with sodas, sandwiches, and ice.

Barnstone and Andujar drive one of the Center’s vans. Barnstone drives for the first leg, wearing dark shorts and a white blouse, arriving at James Candler’s house in the Corners at nine twenty a.m. to pick up Lolly and Violet. She is relieved to discover that Candler is not at home, and she no longer feels obliged to drive. She turns the wheel over to Andujar, who is utterly competent behind the wheel despite his many and significant mental problems. He wears a white T-shirt, Lakers shorts, and sandals. He will not drive unless he has another person in the front alongside him, but otherwise his disorder does not show itself.

Violet’s bathing suit is a flowery one-piece, six years old, and was not terribly fashionable when it was new. She and Arthur went to the south of France, which was the only time she wore it. She regrets not trying it on before the trip, as it is tighter than she expects. She prefers the idea that it has shrunk to the obvious alternative. Over it, she wears a smart terrycloth beach dress, which she is fairly certain she will not remove. Her flip-flops are newly purchased at the grocery around the corner. Lolly wears a diaphanous beach dress over a black thong bikini. Her sandals have heels and elaborate wraps of string that climb her legs. If being
stunning
means that the men cannot move their eyes from her naked behind as if a hammer has been applied to the back of their heads, then she is stunning.

The third car in the short parade is a Dodge Dart, with Alonso Duran, Bellamy Rhine, and Vex in the backseat, Billy Atlas behind the wheel, and Karly Atlas née Hopper in the seat beside him. No one in any of the vehicles knows that Billy and Karly are husband and wife, except for Billy. Even Karly does not fully understand since she did not wear a white dress to the justice of the peace, which creates a tiny doubt in her mind. On this day, she wears a white bikini beneath a yellow halter top and short green skirt. It is not a modest bathing suit but tame compared to Lolly’s gear. Billy’s trunks advertise Corona beer, and he wears a white short-sleeved shirt, unbuttoned. They have forgotten shoes and towels, but Billy has packed a cooler full of beer and a dozen burritos wrapped in tin foil from the taco stand near the sheltered workshop.

Alonso’s mother dresses him in beach sandals, loose trunks, and an oversized Padres shirt, clothing that will permit him to masturbate without disrobing. Rhine wears a swimsuit ordered from a special website for sun-sensitive people. It is long-sleeved and has leggings that reach his ankles. It is one piece and basketball orange, except for the trunks, which show a blue sky filled with white clouds. Rhine cannot wear flip-flops due to the unhappy post that separates the big toe from the remainder. He opts for black rubber boots. Vex wears jeans, motorcycle boots, and the butt-faced elk T-shirt. He has only agreed to come in case there is a breakdown on the road and repairs are needed. His tools are in the trunk.

Barnstone has described the outing as a personal expedition, which means she has to pay for the gas herself but permits her to avoid the Center’s guidelines for field trips. There is no way she could have gotten permission for an official trip to the beach, and yet she cannot understand a facility near the ocean that allows no provision for such excursions. It makes no damn sense. She naps while Andujar drives, and she does not understand they are crossing into Mexico until Mick and Maura are already on the other side and there is nothing to do but follow.