There's Something I Want You to Do (14 page)

One night around one a.m., I was walking through one of the darkest sections along the river, shadowed even during the day by canopies of maple trees, when I saw in the deep obscurity a solitary man sitting on a park bench. I could make him out from the pinpoint reflected light from buildings on the other bank. He was barely discernible there, hardly a man at all, he had grown so thin.

Approaching him, I saw that this wreck was my beloved Matty Quinn, or what remained of him. I called his name. He turned his head toward me, and gave me a look of recognition colored over with indifference. He did not rise to greet me, so I could not hug him. He emanated an odor of the river, as if he had been living in it. After I sat down next to him, I tenderly took him into my arms as if he would break. But he had already been broken. I kissed his cheek. Something terrible had happened to him, but he recognized me; he knew me.

“I was afraid it was you, Harry,” he said. “I was afraid you would find me.”

“Of course I would find you. I went searching.”

He lifted up his head as if listening for something. “Do you think we’re all being watched? Do you think anything is watching us?” At first I thought he meant surveillance cameras, and then I understood that he was referring to the gods.

“No,” I said. “Nothing is ever watching us, Matty. We’re all unwatched.” Then I said, “I want you to come back with me. I have a hotel room. Let me feed you and clean you up and clothe you. I should never have left you alone, goddamn it. I shouldn’t have let you end up back here. Come with me. Look at you. You’re shivering.”

“This is very sweet of you,” he said. “You’re admirable. But the thing is, I keep waiting for him.” He did not elaborate.

“Who?”

“I keep waiting for that boy. Remember? That mother’s boy? And then when he shows up, I always hit him with a baseball bat.” This was pure dissociation.

“You’re not making any sense,” I said. “Let’s go. Let’s get you in the shower and wash you down and order a big steak from room service.”

“No, he’s coming,” he insisted. “He’ll be here any minute, propelled by thorns.” And then, out of nowhere, he said, “I love you, but I’m not here now. And I won’t be. Harry, give it up. Let’s say goodbye.”

I’m a businessman, very goal- and task-oriented, and I won’t stand for talk like that. “Come on,” I said. “Matty. Enough of this shit. Let’s go. Let’s get out of here.” I stood before him and raised him by his shoulders as if he were a huge rag doll, and together, with my arm supporting him, we walked along the river road until by some miracle a taxi approached us. I hailed it, and the man drove us back to my hotel. In the lobby, the sight we presented—of a successful well-groomed gentleman holding up a shambling, smelly wreck—raised an eyebrow at the check-in desk from the night clerk, but eyebrows have never inflicted a moment of pain on me.

I bathed him that night, and I shaved him, and I ordered a cheeseburger from room service, from which he ate two bites fed from my hand to his mouth. I put him to bed in clean sheets, and all night he jabbered and shivered and cried out and tried to fight me and to escape. He actually thought he could defeat me physically, that’s how deluded he was. The next day, after a few phone calls, I checked him in to a rehab facility—they are everywhere in this region, and he was quite willing to go—and I promised to return in ten days for a visit. They don’t want you sooner than that.

Matty Quinn was right: he was now a different man, his soul ruined by his dealings with Black Bird, or Blackburn, or whatever that scholar of Shakespeare was calling himself these days, and I did not love him anymore. I felt fairly certain that I had gone through a one-way gate and would not be able to love him again. I can be fickle, I admit. Yet I would not abandon him until he was ready for it. In the meantime, out of the love I had once felt for him, and which it had been my honor to possess, I resolved to kill his enabler.

—

The next night, I lured Black Bird outside The Lower Depths. I informed him that I had brought with me a bulging packet of cash, and that I would give it to him for the sake of my friend Quinn’s painkilling drugs. But the cash was outside, I said, and only I could show him where. I did my best to look like a sucker.

Once in the shadows, I worked quickly and efficiently on him, and then after some minutes I left Black Bird battered on the brick pavement out of sight of the bar’s alley entryway. The man was a drug dealer, and I had administered to him the hard professional beating I thought he deserved. I would have beaten Matty’s doctor too, the one who first prescribed the painkillers, but they don’t let you do that; you can’t assault our medical professionals. Black Bird had gotten the brunt of it. But the angel of justice calls for retribution in kind, and since Matty Quinn was still alive, so, in his way, was Black Bird.

When Matty was ready to be discharged, I returned to Minneapolis and picked him up. Imagine this: the sun was blazing, and in broad daylight the man I had once loved folded himself up into my slate-gray rental car, and we drove like any old couple to the basement where he had been staying. We picked up his worldly possessions, the ones he wished to keep and to take with him to Seattle. Remnants: a high school yearbook, photographs of the village where he had worked in Ethiopia, a pair of cuff links, a clock radio, a laptop computer, a few books, and clothes, including a dark blue ascot. Not loving him, I helped him pack, and, not loving him, I bought him a ticket back to Seattle.

Saying very little, we sat together on the plane, touching hands occasionally. Not loving him, I moved him temporarily into my condo, and took him around Seattle and showed him how to use its public transportation system, and located a job for him in a deli. Together we found him a twelve-step program for drug addicts in recovery.

He lives nearby in an apartment I hunted down for him, and we have gone on with our lives. I call him almost every night, whether I am here or away on business.

—

Slowly, he is taking charge of his life. It seems a shame to say so, but because the light in his soul is diminished, the one in mine, out of sympathy, is diminished too. I cry occasionally, but unsentimen
tally, and we still take pleasure in bickering, as we always have. His inflammations still cause him pain, and he moves now with small steps like an old man, but when I am in town I bring him dinners from Trader Joe’s and magazines from the drugstore, and, one night, he brought home a sandwich for me that he himself had made at the deli. As I bit into the rye bread and corned beef, he watched me. “You like it?” he asked.

“It’s fine,” I said, shrugging. “Sauerkraut’s a bit thick.”

“That’s how I do it,” he said crossly, full of rehab righteousness.

“And I like more Russian dressing than this.” I glanced out the window. “Moon’s out,” I said. “Full, I think. Werewolf weather.”

He looked at it. “You never see the moon,” he said, “until you sit all night watching it and you see how blindly stupid and oafish it is. I used to talk to it. My whole autobiography. Looked like the same moon I saw in Africa, but it wasn’t. Never said a damn word in return once I was here. Over there, it wouldn’t shut up.”

“Well, it doesn’t have anything to say to Americans,” I remarked, my mouth full. “We’re beyond that. Anything on TV?”

“Yeah,” he said, “junkie TV, where people are about to die from their failings. Then they’re rescued by Dr. Phil and put on the boat to that enchanted island they have.” He waited. I got the feeling that he didn’t believe in his own recovery. Or in the American project. Maybe we weren’t really out of the woods.

“Okay, here’s what I want you to do,” he said. “I want you to call up this Benjamin Takemitsu person and tell him that I owe him some money.” He laughed at the joke. Even his eyes lit up at the prankster aspect of making amends and its bourgeois comforts. “Tell him I’ll pay him eventually. I’ll pay him ten cents on the dollar.”

“That’s a good one.”

“Hey, even Plato was disappointed by the material world. Me too.”

“Gotcha.”

“Pour me a drink,” he commanded. I thought I knew what he was going to do, so I gave him what he wanted, some Scotch with ice, despite my misgivings.

“Here’s how you do it,” he said, when he had the Scotch in his hand. “Remember what they did in Ethiopia, that ceremonial thing?” He slowly upended the drink and emptied it out on my floor, where it puddled on the dining room tile. “In memory of those who are gone. In memory of those down below us.”

It felt like a toast to our former selves. You’re supposed to do it outside, on the ground, not in a building, but I followed along, inverting my beer bottle. The beer gurgled out onto the dining room floor, and I smiled as if something true and actual had happened, this imported ritual, imagining that he would probably be all right after all. Quinn smiled back, triumphant.

Forbearance

Whenever Amelia gazed at the olive trees outside, she could momentarily distract herself from the murderous poetry on the page in front of her.

Esto lavá çaso, metlichose çantolet íbsefelt sed syrt

Int çantolet ya élosete stnyt en, alardóowet arenti myrt.

Getting these lines into English was like trying to paint the sun blue. In several years as a translator, she’d never found another text so unmanageable. The poem was titled “Impossibi
lity,” and that’s what it was. Each time she looked at the words, she felt as if she were having a stroke; she could feel her face getting numb and sagging on one side. Meanwhile, the ironic ticking of the wall clock marked the unproductive seconds as they shuffled past. The clock loved its job, even though the time it told was wildly inaccurate. The owner of this villa, a charming old Italian woman, had informed Amelia that the clock was senile and delusional like everyone else in the village and must never be adjusted. Adjusting it would hurt its feelings.

“That clock thinks it’s on Mars,” the old woman had told Amelia in a conspiratorial whisper. “It tells you what time it is there. And
you,
an American, want to argue with it?”

The poem in front of Amelia on the desk had been written near the beginning of the nineteenth century, in an obscure Botho-Ugaric dialect combining the language of courtly love with warfare, with an additional admixture of
liebestod,
called
mordmutt
in this dialect. The idioms of love and war should have blended together but didn’t. In some not-so-subtle manner, the poet seemed to be threatening his beloved with mayhem if she refused to knuckle under to him. The language of these threats (
Int çantolet ya élosete,
for example: “I could murder you with longing,” or, more accurately, “My longing longs to murder”), inflated with metaphors and similes of baroque complication, was as gorgeous as an operatic aria sung by a charming baritone addressing a woman who was being flung around onstage and who wasn’t allowed to open her mouth.
And it was all untranslat
able!
You couldn’t heat up soggy English verbs and nouns to a boil the way you could in this dialect, which actually had a word for love bites,
muttzemp.