The Family Unit and Other Fantasies (26 page)

Isabel walked out and after a few steps began passing others. All were either heading toward Owen’s office or returning from having been there. There was a feeling of people drifting to and from a crime scene or a free outdoor concert at which some were turned away. Isabel could not remember there ever being this kind of purposeful movement in the office, such urgency, concern, and curiosity. Had the company been sold? Owen been fired? One woman was in tears. Isabel heard someone say, “I can’t believe it,” and another, “They found him in his house,” and a third, somewhat snottily, “I would have thought it would have been his wife.”

Isabel began running through the hall, her feeling of fear in action, and soon was nearly flying. She knew that if Owen’s door was closed, it would be bad news—or would it be if his door was open and people were in his office crying the way she was not yet allowing herself to cry?

Now she was running faster than anyone ever should inside, with too much speed to be contained in the office, as if she were about to burst out of it at any instant. And it was true: she would be, in a way, exploded into life by death as soon as she rounded the corner at the end of the hall.

Weeks after he came home from Florida, Ben looked at a picture of his son. He had never thought he would approve of someone being punished, especially in such an extreme way. He had never approved of any kind of punishment, not the corporeal kind certainly, not even spanking, when he had been a young enough parent for it to matter.

Ben’s son Alan, though,
had
seen him as punitive, not physically but emotionally, when he had been young, young
er
, a college student, at the age to be cruel and accusing in order to separate himself from his parents—or so Ben had read in a self-help book, in order to soothe his rattled nerves after twenty-year-old Alan had lashed out at him (“Don’t you see what you’re doing to me?” In public, no less, in a restaurant. “Don’t you see how it fucking makes me feel?”). Ben had driven home, shaken, after the whole horrible evening—driven only with his wife, Miriam, for Alan had escaped into the night on foot, worrying his mother, who was also worried about Ben’s driving. “Alan’s at that age, he doesn’t know what he’s saying,” she said, though she was clearly upset herself. “Watch where you’re going, you won’t solve anything by getting us killed.”

It was all painfully ironic now, of course—the car, the reference to death—because of what had happened: Alan at thirty getting killed in an accident, his car crashed into by a driver making an illegal left turn. Ben had flown to Florida to collect the body, Miriam being unable to accept the event enough to accompany him. The two were old enough now that their emotional characters had coalesced, both totally disoriented by what had occurred.

In truth, while time had shaved away some of Ben’s horror about Alan’s old outburst (he believed he had always loved and encouraged the boy), he was no more knowledgeable about it now, just old enough to close himself off to upsetting events as a way of not confronting them. It was an energy thing, an adjustment to the depletion of his energy with age. He had no more wisdom about it in the airplane flying over Florida, staring out at clouds as if they were his life experiences: amorphous, passing quickly, and helplessly navigated through.

Ben refused to consider how he would respond to seeing the body, as others might have done, and so he wasn’t afraid. The plane even had a rough landing—he heard a few people cry and at least one pray—but he never doubted that he would get there alive, fell asleep in fact as they descended, and was only awakened by the bump as the wheels hit the tarmac. Everything was all right as he had assumed—not even imagined—it would be.

Then there was the cab ride, the air from the open window feeling so pure and warm (so unlike New York) that he found himself smiling as it brushed his face, like his mother’s fingers when he was small. He had even asked the cabbie to please turn off the air conditioning—something he never liked, not even at home in hot weather, it was bad for the environment, which left Miriam miserable in the summer and having to take an Ambien at night; he had never taken a pill to sleep in his life. He was sorry to see the trip end, because the air felt suddenly hot and unhealthy when they stopped at the hospital. The cabbie’s fingers were wet when he handed Ben his change; it had been stifling the whole time, apparently, and Ben had not noticed.

When Ben looked up at the hospital, he thought that his son might still be inside and alive: it was a place for those sick but surviving. Then he remembered he was meant to go to the morgue, which was in the basement, and he tried without success to shake off the last speck of hope inside him, the way people brush leaves from their clothes after sitting on the ground and one little stem or stalk still sticks to them.

Then there was the walk down the basement hall to the morgue, during which Ben diverted himself by remembering the last time he had been to Florida, twenty years earlier with his family. He was able to see in his head the hotel marquee advertising the comic playing there—now world-famous, but then just starting out. The image also included a painful slice of his young son off to the side, dressed as a space robot, a costume he endearingly wore almost everywhere back then (when he and his son were such pals, before Alan had inexplicably screamed at him), and so he stopped thinking of that and concentrated instead on counting the clicks that his and the attendant’s shoes made on the waxed floor before they reached the morgue door.

When the drawer was pulled out and the blue sheet pulled down, Ben closed his eyes—discreetly, so the attendant wouldn’t notice. He told himself it was unnecessary, the ritual was archaic (why make it “official”? Who needed to know?), and said, “Yes, that’s him,” quickly, though not so quickly that it would seem perfunctory. Then he heard the sheet being replaced and the drawer closed, squeaking, he noticed—it needed oiling, the hospital should look into that—and opened his eyes again.

Suddenly panicked, he realized it could have been
anyone
he had identified as Alan. For a second, Ben thought that it might have all been a mistake—it wasn’t Alan, Alan was still alive. (And so wasn’t it irresponsible to misidentify the young man really there? He probably had parents, too.) Then he stopped thinking that, for it was part of the hope still stuck to him that he had wished to forget.

And it didn’t matter anyway, for soon he was handed a plastic bag of his son’s belongings—wallet, keys, and cell phone—with a label containing Alan’s name visible on it. Unless this was another mistake—if the hospital couldn’t oil its own drawers, maybe it could mislabel its—then he stopped thinking that, too. (These ideas seemed to have come from someone else’s voice in his head—Miriam’s voice, for she was the one always saying foolishly hopeful things, and now that she wasn’t there he was creating her comments himself, having grown used to them and needing them now. So he turned down the other voice but didn’t silence it, the way he merely lowered the volume but didn’t mute the television when Miriam kept talking during baseball games.)

When Ben looked down at the plastic bag, he was surprised by the quality of Alan’s possessions—the actual leather of his wallet, the best and most up-to-date phone. He wondered: had the cops been tempted to steal what they found on him, the way cops sometimes screwed hookers when they arrested them? As a kid, Ben remembered having little respect for cops, secretly felt
less
safe when he saw them on the bad-part-of Brooklyn streets—thought they
caused
trouble by their presence, that their swaggering power was a provocation. But maybe he was only remembering this now because he was being transported to the police station in the back of a squad car, and so suddenly he was thinking like a criminal or a “perp.”

He was surprised by how hostile he felt about the tree stump-like head of the cop in the front seat. When he found himself using the words “fuck you” in his fantasy, he stopped, deciding he’d had enough—“fun” wasn’t the right word—whatever it was, for the day.

“Air conditioning okay?” the cop asked, after he turned it on.

“Sure,” Ben lied, feeling a little self-conscious about his secret, aggressive emotions.

He looked out the window, at nondescript malls and patches of scrubby, unsold lots of land—and at gated communities, too, at developments where you had to have money to move in—and he thought of his son, who could apparently afford to use this state as a hideaway or weekend getaway from New York or whatever he had considered it, who had done better than his old man. But wasn’t that the way it was supposed to go? Ben had only heard inklings of this through other family members, because Alan had never shared any of it with him—not money, of course, which Ben wouldn’t have accepted even if he’d needed it, but his pleasure at
making
money, at accomplishing anything. Alan acted as if his achieving whatever he had and keeping his distance had been a way of avenging himself on Ben—but for what? For whatever Alan had yelled at him about in that restaurant so long ago, that’s what. Alan had never
stopped
yelling, in a sense, by never coming around (only keeping up with Miriam, occasionally), not even to flaunt himself, to say, I can afford to go to Florida every weekend now, what do you think about
that
?

Suddenly the air conditioning reminded Ben of the morgue, of being trapped in a box, still conscious, alone with thoughts he didn’t want to have, and he found himself pushing desperately at the button on the car door to lower the window. Warm air rushed in like water that didn’t drown but allowed you to escape. It was as if he were trapped in the car underwater with the windows closed (something he feared so much that he always read articles about it when it happened to someone, learning you were supposed to open the windows as your car flew off a bridge into a river
before
you landed and went under, so you could swim out and survive. But who would ever have the wherewithal to do that, he wondered. Would
he
?), fat tears upon his face as if that water were splashed all over him.

“Okay, here we are,” the cop said, glancing in his rear view at Ben.

He was taken into the station and sat before a second cop, one with a crew cut who spoke in a funny, somewhat southern accent (Ben hadn’t been aware there was such a thing in Florida). He privately translated the odd pronunciations (“Flahida” for “Florida,” “fand” for “find,” and “tahmes” for “times”) so he would not feel hostile toward him, still feeling weird about pretending to buck the first cop in his mind and eager for this one’s help. So he could say that Alan was still alive? Would showing him respect cause that to happen? There were fewer gaps now between the arrival of troubling thoughts, like stacked-up planes or birds—no, bugs, he had to bat more of them away like it was an infestation—and it made Ben feel small and helpless, which he hated more than anything else.

“First of all, my condolences,” said the cop (“Braun” was the name on his, well, brawny chest). Ben was appreciative of that, because the cop seemed discreet about expressing emotion, as opposed to being gushy. He told Ben about the accident tactfully, but not sparing him any details: how the other driver had hit Alan’s car probably while he was texting, something which Ben didn’t do and didn’t understand why anyone would do—especially while driving. It was an assessment Braun seemed to share, or so the disapproving tone he used on the word “texting” implied, which drew the men closer; Braun even leaned in, conspiratorially.

“He was driving a Toyota,” the cop said, offering information but also passing judgment: he knew the kind of car that Alan was driving (a Lexus) and thought it was “Ironic that his car was hit by the other car, because they hardly belonged on the same road—one car cost so much more and handled so much better than the other it was like a bum accidentally knocked a tycoon off a curb into a street and he—the tycoon—was then run over by a bus. Why were they even walking on the same block, you know?”

It was a rhetorical question. Then Braun pulled out a page that contained two digital mug shots. Seeing the other driver’s face confirmed the unfairness of it all to the cop, confirmed that the two men had had no business being together on the same stretch of street. No wonder it had ended in disaster.

“This is the guy,” the cop said with disbelief. “Mel Tremaine.”

It was true: Mel Tremaine was, well, there were no other words for what he was but white trash: a pony-tailed, pock-marked, sad-eyed example of lower-class, biker-style American man, with one of those patches of blond hair pocketed beneath his lip, in a place that seemed vaguely pubic and—threatening, Ben thought. It was a little way to say, “I’m the underside of the world, but you don’t have to turn something over to see me—I’m looking right at you.” This kind of person had killed his son? Negligently, while texting—who? His girlfriend who was also his “baby mama”? (Ben sometimes couldn’t help seeing the awful reality shows that Miriam inexplicably liked, and like it or not, this was one of the insensitive expressions they had introduced him to.) This realization was so disorienting that Ben felt literally unsteady in his seat. The cop reached out to keep him from falling, but at the same time handed him the printout of the pictures as a keepsake—and why would any parent want them, for God’s sake? Wasn’t he being clueless and inconsiderate?

“I’m okay,” Ben said, grasping to keep a page falling from his fingers onto the floor.

The cop appeared shaken after seeing Ben go pale. He aggressively assured the older man that “The book will be thrown at this guy,” with charges ranging from texting while operating a motor vehicle to misdemeanour death by motor vehicle, and maybe even involuntary manslaughter.

“Because your son,” Braun said with what he meant to be solicitousness, “was a very successful man. He contributed. He wasn’t like this—character that killed him. He still had many things to achieve. He was far from finished. If only it had been the other way around, there would have been a lot less . . . loss.”

Ben was trying to listen over the new voice that he was hearing now, which was Alan’s in that restaurant so long ago (his head felt like a North Korean home where propaganda was on the radio twenty-four hours a day and couldn’t be turned off). He remembered now that Alan had accused Ben that night of hiding behind “judgmental decency” and “self-righteous sanctimonious liberalism” in order to discourage his son’s ambitions; he’d acted as if Alan wanting to achieve so much was immoral, might hurt others, was a question of fairness, when it was really only him—Ben—being competitive, not wanting to be out-shone by his son, wanting to keep Alan at his—Ben’s—own second-rate and mediocre level of life (which was a middle-class Long Island existence as opposed to being
really
rich). Braun’s voice grew louder as Alan’s grew just as loud inside Ben’s head: “Your son was who the country was made for, not this—freeloader. How’d this guy even afford the phone he was texting on? There should be a higher penalty for killing someone better than you, for taking a person of great accomplishment out of the world and leaving yourself in his place with absolutely nothing to offer.” Ben realized that, years before, he might have
defended
such a person as Tremaine to Alan, seen him as worthy not just of sympathy but help,
his
help, just the kind of “liberal” judgment that had infuriated Alan, that he had equated with Ben’s discouragement of him—and being discouraged by his father, Alan had said that night and Ben now remembered, felt like he was eliminating him, killing him, his own son! “
His
father should be ashamed. But
you
, my friend, have got a lot to be proud of.” Alan’s voice and the cop’s were merging now, saying the same things, the things that Alan had said in the restaurant, and now there was only one voice: Braun’s had become Alan’s, though the cop didn’t seem to know it, was starting to tidy up as if making to move on. Had he been mortified by what he had been saying, even screaming? Now that he had had finished and fallen silent, Ben wasn’t sure if Braun had said anything at all: maybe it had been Alan’s voice in his head the whole time.