At the Bottom of Everything (16 page)

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To:

Date:
Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 5:01 AM

Subject:
re: (no subject)

 … Here’s something I don’t think you know, I kept her obituary in the locked drawer of my desk, I would look at it, alone at night, she smiled like someone had made an old joke, she wore glasses, someone outside the frame had his arm around her, I would imagine I knew her, it was my arm, sometimes I could hear her voice, I could feel her sweater against my cheek, I’d shake like a tuning fork. To my parents I must have looked like I was doing nothing, lying on the couch, turning to face away from the sun, I could have been paralyzed, I could have been a house-plant, inside I was screaming, the fear was worse, when your mind turns against you, the felt experience, I didn’t know, was that the world turns against you. I wanted to see her parents, wanted to ask were they all right, had they lived their lives, I wondered if I’d taken their suffering (matter is neither created nor destroyed). I knew I was
evil, I’d been a mistake, if I lived as I was, continued to live, I was a spinning blade, a driverless car. Not sleeping for days, I would have conversations with Mira, see her sitting with me on the couch, whispering to me, the back of her head was missing, she didn’t know, I would sit up sobbing, tell R I didn’t know why, must have been a nightmare, he would hold my head in his lap, I’d never known my parents, something had gone cold, these people I’d loved were strangers, obstacles, I needed to stop feeling the way I felt, endless planning. I would try, sometimes, to test whether parts were still OK, I would take down a book from the shelf, the sentences would close up as I read them, I would forget the meaning by each period. I would turn on the TV, daytime movies, I couldn’t follow plots, what plots I could understand had to do with terror, death, exposure. Sometimes I needed a blanket, I became cold, much colder than the temperature. Other days the floor, the couch was too soft, I would need my face against wood, I would quietly moan, feel the buzz, I would ask the floor, Did I deserve to live, if I did, please tell me how, please tell me how Adam manages. This lasted months. I started to walk sometimes at night to their house, 3409 Ordway, leaving my front door like walking into a fire, such terror, I would stare at my feet, every step, fifteen minutes, a street just like yours, red brick, shingle roof, the lights were off, island in the ocean, I thought of her parents asleep in their beds, I thought of her childhood room untouched, I would lie on the lawn by their brick path, imagine she was buried underneath, flesh turned sod, I would think, How will I get home, will I be found here, will I be buried here. I saw myself, clear as a photograph, locked away somewhere, white walls, blue skin, life as a disease that must run its course, and I decided if I wasn’t going to end up there, I needed to be punished, killed or forgiven, otherwise the world would do it, otherwise nights of fear, worse than death.
I started to sleep, sometimes, outside their house, praying for courage, imagining pressing the bell, moving closer each night to their front door. Grass is wet even when it doesn’t rain, I’d forgotten, one night, walking close to the window, I tripped, made a sound, I saw lights come on, my legs were burning, my moment had come, I heard doors unlocking, it was four in the morning. The man in the door was white, he wore a green robe, white beard, he said what the hell was I doing, I just stared, mind blank as paper, he said get away or he’d call the police, I said, Is this the Batras’ house? He stared, squinting, What? I said, The Batras, do the Batras live here? Who? he said, I said the name again, his face changed, the porch light was golden, there was a basket of soccer balls, he said, They moved, they moved away, now get out of here, and slammed the door, I walked home, wet socks, cold hands, I tried to run, couldn’t think, could hardly stand, cats crossed my path, it didn’t matter, my luck couldn’t get worse, I needed to find out where the Batras had gone, I couldn’t rest until I knew.

From:

To:

Date:
Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 9:19 PM

Subject:
re: greetings

Those first couple of years when he was back home, we lived at doctors’ offices. My dreams were full of waiting rooms, insurance forms, jars of tongue depressors. Nothing quite as disillusioning as those appointments—you could die of hope, just the way one of those clever quotable people said about Hollywood. His GP—overmatched pink-faced man—did a thousand dollars of tests and told us Thomas should drink Ensure to regain some weight. A Bethesda shrink—office full of tribal masks and tissue boxes—spent six months finding out that Thomas didn’t talk until he was two. One great coup of Sally’s was an appointment with an NIH neurologist—pompous whisperer in a lab coat, Nobel craver—who ran tests, found nothing, then recommended that we see the shrink he’d stopped seeing months before.

Daily mechanics felt like we’d slipped fifteen years backward—elementary school sick days, stacks of books, untouched toast on a plate. The living-room couch was his alpha and omega. He’d lie there, beatific, Christ thin, not moving. Getting him anywhere—the doctor, the shower, the kitchen table—was like reeling in a marlin. I’d forgotten, since my mother—she had MS, before anyone knew what it was—the time signature of sickness, how each day is endless but you look up and a year’s passed, suddenly your son has been on the couch for two winters.

He and I would do these Pinter plays—me on the edge of the couch, him staring at the ceiling fan.

“What’s up? What’re you feeling?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right, so what’s that like?”

“It’s unpleasant. I would like to be left alone, please.”

“We can do that, but look, here’s the deal. You’re in our house, you’re getting fed, you’ve got a roof …” My father’s words, my lips. Then I’d go weep in the bathroom until it was time to start on dinner.

At some point every leaf-blowing neighbor, concerned cousin, FedEx man had given us their “take”—overlapping soliloquies of advice. I became a good nodder.

“It’s because of the expectations he’s had on him, this is just his way of saying, Whoa, let’s make sure I’m doing what I’m doing for myself and not my parents.”

“So often when this kind of thing happens you dig and dig, thinking there’s something psychological or medical at the bottom of it, and actually it turns out to just be some cute brunette …”

“You must know, but this is the age … Men between nineteen and twenty-five. My nephew’s roommate in Boston …”

Sally and I strapped on horse blinders: small victories, days not worse than the day before—OK, he drank half a smoothie. He asked me to hand him the computer. I haven’t heard him going out for walks at night. And then, just when we’d started to think, you know, this may be it, the life of our son, Thomas announced he’d applied for a job—I had to actually hold myself up on the back of the chair. He wanted money of his own, he said. Independence. He’d been printing out applications, making calls. And so now Thomas—reader of Kant, Most Likely to …—got a job behind the counter at the Subway on MacArthur, $6.75 an hour. And we were weak with joy.

Again, a slip back in time—this time to first days of school, nervous bus-watching. He refused to be driven to work, so he walked forty minutes each morning, already in his green uniform—he’d had to get one for women, the men’s small hung on him like a tarp. I went a couple of times for lunch, half spy, half customer, he’d be there turning on the ovens, pouring the chopped pickles, stacking the coffee lids. No hello. I’d watch him make a sandwich, slow as folding a flag. Watch him watching “chicken” rotate in the microwave, his head cocked. And after six weeks he got fired. Or maybe quit—not clear, wouldn’t explain. Something to do with a customer he didn’t like, or with refusing to change his gloves. This was the first of the jobs—Blockbuster, Papa John’s, Kate’s Paperie—which got to have a feeling of … slipping even further back, watching him cross a room, eighteen months old, knowing he’s going to fall, knowing I’ve got to let him … He needed money, he kept saying. Something of his own.