The Privileges (36 page)

Bright institutional light slanted in from the open doorway; only by looking through the half-closed louvers could she see that it was dawn. Unless that was dusk. Either way, it cast the empty lake and the man-made berm beyond it in shades of the same blue.

“Don’t cry,” her father said. But she wasn’t crying. She even put her fingers to her face to make sure. “I’m not crying, Dad,” she said to him, and smiled.

“There, there,” he said. He was looking right at her. “Take it easy. I’m right here.”

Why should her first reaction, when he would stray like this, be to try to correct him, to bring him back into the moment? What difference did it make anymore, as long as he wasn’t mad or agitated or looking for the goddamn shoes he was never going to put on again?

“Okay, Dad,” she said. “Thanks. I feel better now.”

“Good. We probably have to get to the church pretty soon. Don’t we?”

Cynthia felt his delusion pulling at her like a drowning person might pull at your ankle from under the water. What was it? He couldn’t possibly be talking about his own funeral?

“What time is it?” he asked her.

She shook her head, but she couldn’t be sure he saw, so she cleared her throat and spoke. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Well,” he said, with a bit of a rasp now, “I’m sure we have a few minutes. They can’t very well start without us, can they?”

She held the cup to his mouth and he took a sip of water. Some of it ran down his cheek, and she reached out and stopped it with her fingers before it reached the pillow.

The way to stay with him, if you didn’t understand exactly where he’d gone, was to eliminate the backdrop of time and place, forget about it, let it fade away, so that it was just the two of you standing against a blankness. So that there was only the present. This was what the two of them knew that no one else had ever understood. Everyone always wanted to know how she could forgive him, but forgiveness was a false premise. The whole idea of forgiveness presumed you were locked in the past and trying to let yourself out. She wasn’t going to drag him back in that direction, to make him explain why he’d lived as he’d lived. That wasn’t who they were. Each moment bore only on the next one and if you were going to be successful in this life, that was the plane on which you had to live. If you started going on your knees to the past, demanding something from it that it hadn’t given you the first time around, you were dead. She asked for nothing from it. Neither did he. She was proud of his lifelong refusal to give in to the pathetic narcissism of depression or remorse. He had done what he had done and there was no changing it. There was no going back. She leaned over until her mouth was close to his ear.

“I’m so tired,” she said. “Is it okay if I lie down with you here while we’re waiting?”

He stared at her, every muscle in his face gone slack; his left hand spasmed a bit, and she recognized that what he was trying to do, or thought he was doing, was patting the bed beside him.

She still didn’t know how those rails worked, so she had to climb over as if it were a fence and drop down beside him as gently as she could. She curled up with her back to him on top of the comforter, which didn’t smell that great, and listened to his even, shallow breathing. She didn’t move; he was so frail that she was afraid of hurting him. “This is your day,” she heard him say. “It’s all in front
of you. What a gift to be young.” Some hours later she felt a hand on her shoulder; it was a nurse, one she hadn’t seen before, trying to wake her as gently as possible, and before she had even lifted her head she could tell from the look on the woman’s face that her father, whose weight she could still feel on the bed behind her, was gone.

What had he come here looking for? It was all forgotten now. He had a vision of himself trying to explain all this to someone—what he was doing there in the first place, what he had expected to find, and not to Nikki or Agnew either but to a total stranger who didn’t know who he was—and he felt nothing but that stranger’s disgust for the folly of it. It was all so trumped up. He had invented it for himself. It was like there was no actual heart of darkness anymore and so he had to go and build one up out of nothing, and he had done such a good job of it that maybe now he was really going to die here and wind up as just another element of the overpowering stench in which Novak somehow managed to live.

And where was that Stockholm-syndrome thing you heard about? All he felt for Novak—whom he had romanticized into a figure who suffered for his art and for his noncompliance with the jaded world and its corrosive history—was an instinctive homicidal hatred, as he would for an animal that threatened him. The guy was balls-out insane and that was all there was to it: what difference did it make, to him or to anyone else, if his drawings hung in museums or if he just drew with his own shit on the walls of some madhouse?

Novak mumbled to himself as he worked. The wall was about eight feet by eleven feet. Like a giant piece of paper, was maybe how it presented itself to him. He covered every inch of it.
Horror vacui—
the phrase popped into Jonas’s head, a phrase he’d once had to ID on the final in Agnew’s Art Brut class. The wall was turning into a landscape of sorts, a flat, dimensionless one, full of those same gas stations and dead TVs: whatever it was he was trying to say with those few icons, he was apparently never going to get it said. A river ran across the picture, or maybe more of a canal, since
it flowed straight as a board from one side of the wall to the other. A road made of water. All kinds of people and detritus were borne along in it, some aboard rafts or boats, some swimming or maybe drowning—the ambiguous open mouths of everyone in the picture made it impossible to tell. Novak worked the way a house painter might work, strictly in terms of space, from left to right; no figure seemed more important or more difficult to him than any other. It might have been his masterpiece; at the very least it was going to get him evicted. The strongest feeling Jonas could work up about it was fear of what would happen when it was finished.

A definite knot had formed on the back of his head, right where his skull met his neck. He had touched it so often he couldn’t tell if it was still growing. Maybe it was life-threatening. He was quite sure he’d suffered a concussion at the very least: he felt like sleeping, he was not at all confident that he knew how long he’d been there, he had a headache like he’d never had before, which the blazing lights just made worse. He’d lived his whole life without ever being seriously hurt: that couldn’t be right, it seemed to him, it was too ludicrous, and yet he tried in vain to think of another time in his childhood when anything like this had happened. And just like that, there it was: the Stockholm thing, the point of identification with your captor. His whole life is stunted, Jonas thought; it has not conditioned him to survive even one day outside his own front door. Neither has mine.

His mind drifted a bit and then suddenly he was aware that Novak was lying prone on the floor, working on the last bit of white space on the wall, the lower right corner. Except he didn’t seem to be working at the moment. There was a green Sharpie still between his fingers, and Jonas waited and waited, trying to quiet his own breath, until finally the Sharpie rolled out of Novak’s hand onto the floor.

“Joseph?” he said softly. Jonas couldn’t see his face, but it made sense, certainly, that he might have been asleep. As far as Jonas knew, he hadn’t slept the whole time they’d been together, however long that was. Nor had he seen Novak take any kind of pill. Pills must have been a significant part of his regular, solitary life. Who
knew how that would affect him physically. “Joseph,” he said again.

Is this really how it ends? Jonas thought. He felt like a coward and an idiot and still somehow closer to death than ever. As slowly as he could—in part because it turned out to be far more painful than he’d been ready for—he stood up from the couch. The glare from the lights was such that he cast no shadow anywhere. He took a step, and then another, at which point the floor cracked beneath him. Novak didn’t budge. It was maybe ten more steps to the door; Jonas paused a second or two between each step, telling himself not to blow it by panicking, but poised to run for it if Novak so much as rolled over. Then he was sliding the deadbolt slowly, with two hands, and then he was outside on the landing, closing the door behind him to muffle the sound of him tiptoeing down the steps, holding both railings as he did so because he was so dizzy he thought he might pitch forward and descend the hard way.

His whole head was pulsing. The car was still parked right there, just a few steps away; somehow just by tailing the car in front of him he made it back onto the highway again. When he realized his cell phone was still in Novak’s toilet, he was not all that displeased, because even though he knew Nikki would be out of her mind by now and had probably called the police, he wasn’t ready to talk to her, or to anyone. Nikki herself didn’t seem quite real to him yet. He supposed that feeling would come back, maybe when he saw her, but right now, when he tried to summon up anything more than just the image of her, he couldn’t do it.

Maybe he could have left Novak’s apartment hours ago and just didn’t realize it. Maybe Novak had forgotten he was even there. A feeling of epic embarrassment began to press down on him. He hadn’t eaten in so long he wasn’t even all that hungry anymore; when he saw a McDonald’s off the highway, he ordered a burger from the drive-thru, but a couple of miles later he pulled over to the shoulder, opened his door, and threw it up all over the side of the road.

It would have made a lot of sense to get off the highway and find a phone, or find a cop, or even just go to sleep; but he remembered
hearing somewhere, maybe in a movie, that concussion victims weren’t supposed to go to sleep, and anyway all he cared about was getting home. Cars were honking at him constantly, or flashing their lights, and he didn’t know why, but they weren’t helping. Somehow he got things turned around in his mind and he thought that the home at the end of this drive was not the one he shared with Nikki but the home he had grown up in, or one of them anyway, that penthouse that overlooked the planetarium, and he was pretty sure that his parents were expecting him there. He didn’t want them to worry. He had something he needed to tell them, which was that he had finally figured them out. They had more money than anyone could ever spend—so much money that they had to hire people just to help them figure out how to give it away—and yet, rather than stop, his father worked harder than ever, making insane amounts of it, obscene amounts of it, out of thin air. It was like when people used to ask, do we really need all those nuclear missiles? How many is too many? The correct answer was that there was no such thing as too many, because it wasn’t about need, it was about feeling safe in the world, and were you ever going to feel as safe as you needed to feel? No. No. Success was a fortress at which fear constantly ate away. Whatever you might have done yesterday meant nothing: the moment you stopped to assess what you’d built, the decay set in. What you wanted most of all, from a strictly evolutionary point of view, was a short memory. And Jonas was getting there: he had already pretty well forgotten everything other than his desire to recover his rightful place in that world that was deep inside the world—the more inaccessible the better. That was his real home. He couldn’t wait. He planned on asking his parents for as much money as they would give him. The first thing he would do with it would be to get Nikki out of that dump they lived in and into some place that offered them all the advantages that were at his disposal, that had been at his disposal all along only he was too stupid and childish to appreciate it. But in order for that to work, he knew, he was first going to have to come up with some decent explanation, something more convincing than the humiliating truth, to offer Nikki when she demanded to know where the hell he had been.

I went looking for this artist but I never found him. I had the wrong address. I had an address for him but I waited and waited and he never came home. I decided to see some of the countryside. America’s Dairyland. I drive so rarely. On the way home I got into an accident. Feel this knot on my head? On the way home I stopped in Joliet to see the house where my mother was born. On the way home I went to Pittsburgh to see my grandmother. You wouldn’t like her. I didn’t want you to feel obligated. I didn’t particularly want to go myself, but family is family. On the way home I got into an accident and decided to check into a hotel. I got carjacked. I got kidnapped and my parents paid my ransom. I checked into one of those monasteries where they won’t let you communicate with the outside world. Because I just needed some time to myself. On the way home I worried that we were getting too close. I’m leaving you. I left you but then I changed my mind and came back. Will you marry me? On the way home I drove into a ditch. I was mugged. I got lost. I went blind. I went to a bluegrass festival and shacked up with this woman I met but it was a huge mistake and I want you to forgive me. On the way home I was mugged and hit my head and got amnesia. I don’t remember anything that happened before yesterday. I found your address in my wallet. I couldn’t remember my name. I couldn’t remember your name. I still can’t. Let’s go out and get new ones. My treat.