Stay Awake Stories Part 14

All of this fairly much ruined and rendered meaningless, now. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura che la diritta via era smarrita.

Et cetera, et cetera.

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things-the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

As time has acc.u.mulated-one year since his heart attack, two years since his children went away, went to live with his sister in Mankato, three years since his wife's death-he has been aware of a certain degree of suicidal ideation. He will fly out on these trips under the auspices of Saunders, Dearman & Dorr, he'll arrive at the hotel, keep his receipts with an awareness of his per diem, and yet there is also the thought that he might not return. There is a round-trip ticket, but what if he doesn't appear at the airport on the day he is supposed to go home? What if he is never seen or heard from again?

What would remain?

He can't help but think of the Hobblers. When his wife was sick, when she was in her last days, he used to see them moving down the sidewalk past his house, the dreadful old couple out for their evening const.i.tutional. They must have been in their eighties or nineties, easily forty years older than Deagle and his wife, and by the time they made it past the neighbor's driveway to the Deagles', some of the leaves on the trees had turned from green to red.

"You're so mean," Deagle's wife said. "Don't make fun," she said. "I think they're sweet."

Deagle didn't say anything. Maybe they were sweet: inspirational in their way. But he still didn't like them. That Hobbler wife with her bowed, osteoporotic back, staring downward loomingly; the Hobbler husband, dazed and batty-looking in his tweed jacket over a pajama shirt, his hand on his wife's elbow as if escorting her to a formal dance. Deagle's wife had heard that he was an emeritus professor. Physics? Psychology? She couldn't remember.

You could say that they were sweet, or you could say that they were something out of a horror movie.

This was September, and his wife was dying pretty rapidly. She had about a month or so to go. The cancer had started in her ovaries, but now it was everywhere, and she had reached the stage where her lungs kept filling up with fluid, a kind of slow-motion drowning, and every few days Deagle and his wife would go in for a lung tap, which provided a little short-term relief. Deagle's wife could still make it up and down the stairs, though it took a while.

They were having a lot of quiet time together. Deagle had taken time away from work, and their children were spending the fall at his sister's house, and in some ways it was like a kind of vacation for both of them. The days had begun to waver and lose their shape. Looking out the window, reading books aloud. He drove down the hill to buy her some lemon gelato. He cooked a chicken in a pot and brought the broth to her in a small bowl. Here was one of those wonderful spoons that they had stolen from a Chinese restaurant, and he lifted it to her lips.

She didn't make it long enough to see the first snowfall, and by that time the Hobblers had vanished as well. The sidewalks were probably too slick for them, too treacherous, the cold air too hard on their old bones; it would run right through them and they'd feel as if they would never be warm again.

Sitting there, Deagle thought that perhaps they'd emerge again in spring.

Late April.

Early May.

Tulips and daffodils and lilacs and budding trees.

He wondered if that would make her happy, to know that the Hobblers were still around. Down the block and back, down the block and back, getting a little exercise. Maybe-probably-she would like it. "Sweet," she would say.

As for Deagle, he didn't know what he would prefer. He would sit at the window, peering out, and he didn't know whether he wanted to see them, or if he hoped that they would never come again.

Outside the pathetic bar, under an awning, Deagle lights a cigarette and takes out his notepad, examining his notes. "Beefeater," he has written, and "keep-on-truckin' West Coast vibe" and "punk???" and "history of American pharmacy" and now he takes out his special pen and writes "Hobblers?" and circles it. Was there a way to make sense of it? he wondered. Or was it, like so many of the things he thought about, just another random flight of fancy?

A fat raindrop falls from above and makes a splattered Rorschach out of the word "punk," and so he is compelled to quickly close the notepad and tuck it into the pocket of his suit jacket. He focuses again on the cigarette. He'd forgotten the way that the filters of Marlboro Lights would adhere to the skin of your lips, but the smoke itself is a pleasant sensation and it expels itself into the Portland air, which is as heavy and dewy as fog.

Back in Minnesota, when he was an undergraduate student, Deagle had taken a cla.s.s in poetry writing. The teacher was an evil, judgmental old hippie with a long neck that she swathed in scarves, and her lessons were disconnected rambles that usually ended with some liberal parable about the plight of women, people of color, etc., and her comments about his poems had been vaguely rude and dismissive. Nevertheless, he had enjoyed the semester-long a.s.signment she had given, which required them to carry a notebook with them everywhere. "Record your observations," she said. "Nothing is small enough to escape the poet's notice!"

And here he was: still carrying his notepad, after all these years. His wife used to like reading the notepads, once upon a time, though sometimes she would shake her head over a particularly acidic observation. "You shouldn't be so cynical and morbid," she told him once. "It's not good for your health."

Though of course her optimism had done her little good-no wise or hopeful thoughts came to her at the end, only a kind of pained, puzzled, childlike mumbling, last words that even he can't bring himself to write down.

Maybe someday, he thinks, he might eventually expound on these little notes; and maybe someday after his death his heirs will uncover this cache of unwritten poems and somehow interpret the jotted fragments, the raindropped blurs, somehow finding buried within the essence of Deagle. The stubbed-out nub of himself.

Such maudlin thoughts are not his usual mode.

That is the Deagle of the past, he reminds himself. The former Deagle used to read sad poetry at night, drinking Scotch and weeping distractedly and accidentally dropping lit cigarettes on the carpet of his study, luckily not burning the house down; the former Deagle would buy canisters of cake frosting and eat them while sitting alone in his car in a parking lot; the former Deagle popped little ten-milligram Desoxyn pills in between meetings with clients and then drove home and faced his unnerved Uruguayan housekeeper and then broke down while reading The Runaway Bunny to his children at bedtime, tears rolling down his face while the kids sat frightened in their pajamas. Falling down the stairs a couple of times in the night, drunkenly peeing on people's flowers as he walked home from the bar, once nearly running a slow driver off the road and giving her the middle finger as he roared past. Smoking his way steadily toward his heart attack, toward the grim, pharisaic face of his sister in his hospital room. "Those children can't be living with you," she was saying. "My G.o.d, David, there's a difference between grief and monstrous selfishness," she said, and he agreed with her. "Absolutely," he said. "You should take them-that's a great idea!"

"Just until you get your act together," she said. "You've got responsibilities," she said. "Do you think this is how Laura would have wanted you to behave?" she said. "Don't you think she would have expected more out of you? I think she believed she married a decent human being."

"Yes," he said. Obviously, he had to remake himself. Obviously, a new Deagle had to be born; his life and his pathway through it had to be rethought and reimagined and rewired.

There are little wisps of jelly in a living brain. Deagle knows this well: neurons, transmitting signals-and the soul, so to speak, is somewhere in those flashes. He heard once on a science program that the spindle cell-present in humans, whales, some apes, elephants-may be at the heart of what we call our "selves."

What we recognize in the mirror-that thread we follow through time that we call "me"? It's just a diatom, a paramecium, a bit of ganglia that branches and shudders a.s.sertively. A brief brain o.r.g.a.s.m, like lightning.

In short, it's all chemicals. You can regiment it easily enough: fluoxetine, sertraline, paroxetine, escitalopram, citalopram-the brain can be washed clean, and you can reset yourself, Ctrl+Alt+Del. You don't have to be a prisoner of your memories and emotions.

Vials of such curatives can be found back in the Heathman Hotel, in a room, in a suitcase, in a zippered plastic bag, though that seems very far away at this point. In a distant alternate universe, there is a good Deagle who takes his medication with a gla.s.s of water, who slips between crisp, bleached sheets and rests his head on an ergonomic pillow, who sets his alarm in preparation for the next morning's arbitration hearing, and awakens bright-eyed.

Still, he has to admit, being this drunk is a pleasant treat. It's been well over a year since the last time he was this loaded, but he slips into it easily, like a nice pair of galoshes and an overcoat. He had always been something of a lush, for most of his adult life, and his wife hadn't minded it, really-had tolerated it, at least, in the way she tolerated his smoking, and had even sometimes found him endearing or amusing when he was a little lit up.

Of course now things are different. Now, drinking is a private activity-Deagle, party of one!-and when he's drunk or high it seems as if he expands somehow, there is a kind of self-communion, as if he's grown a second head, a Siamese twin who will laugh at his jokes and commiserate with his sorrows and chat agreeably about his cynical and morbid observations.

Or else it's the opposite. Maybe it's simply that drunkenness reduces some unwanted piece of himself-irradiates it, like a malignant growth.

In either case, Deagle eases down the sidewalk, enjoying the gloam of long-absent alcohol through his blood and visiting another unfriendly bar and then moving along-ever hopeful-toward the next.

Which, irritatingly, does not appear.

He walks a little farther, and then after a few more blocks he pauses.

G.o.d! How long has he been out here on the street? In the rain. Talking to himself.

It actually seems as if he has been walking for a while. His shoes and socks are full of rain, and his hair drips in tendrils down his face, and cl.u.s.ters of wet humanity regard him as he goes. "Back," says Deagle, when a shambling pile of rags rises up on two legs from out of the shadows to ask him for a cigarette. "Back," he says, and makes a cross with his two index fingers.

And in the meantime, he has no idea where he is. On his BlackBerry cellphone, he has a program with a Global Positioning System and satellite-guided maps, but it appears that the battery on the phone is dead. When he tries to turn it on, it plays a sweetly melancholic bar of notes, the sound of polite regret. Then it goes black.

When he looks over his shoulder, the landscape is utterly unfamiliar. How far in the distance is the Heathman Hotel? In what direction? He has no clue.

"This is a predicament," says Deagle to Deagle, and he stands there, frowning, cursing his reliance on technology and his own poor sense of direction. He scopes the dark street for signs of a common pay phone. He can't recall the last time he actually used one, and they may, in fact, be extinct-he's not sure. Certainly there is no sign of one on this block-where the darkened buildings have the blank, unwelcoming faces of people on a subway train. No lights but the street lamps, spotlighting the tangled lines of rain.

"h.e.l.lo?" he calls, the way you might call into a canyon to hear your echo. Would it be possible, he wonders, to backtrack, to rediscover the bar-which, he suspects bitterly, is now closed, in any case? He looks over his shoulder.

"h.e.l.lo?" he calls again, and it is a bit startling-even alarming-when a female voice responds.

"h.e.l.lo," the female voice says from somewhere in the darkness beyond. Casually-the way a shopkeeper will greet you when you enter his store.

As much as he's wished for it, the ghost of his wife has never appeared to him. He has never even, despite all the drinking and drugs and medications, been the victim of a hallucination-her face bending down to kiss his forehead? Shaking her head in disappointment? No, nothing-not the barest phantasm.

So now he walks toward the sound of the voice with hopeful trepidation. It has occurred to him that the ghost of his wife might be rightfully p.i.s.sed off at his behavior since her death.

The figure appears at the mouth of an alleyway. It is a woman with long hair and a long raincoat that reaches almost to her ankles, like a gown. Spread open above her head is a large and ancient black umbrella.

"Hey there, Drunk Man," she says, in a clear, girlish voice-she might be nineteen or twenty. "What're you looking for?" she says, and gives him a musing smile. "Whatever it is, you're in the wrong neighborhood."

She doesn't resemble Deagle's late wife in any significant way. Still, there's the lingering of suggestion, and he stumbles toward her as if he recognizes her.

"I beg your pardon," Deagle says. "You wouldn't happen to have a cellphone that I could borrow, would you?"

She lets out a little laugh, as if he's told her a charming joke, and Deagle chuckles, too-though he's not sure, exactly, what is funny. Still, it's the first time all night that someone has been amused by something he's said.

"You're soaking wet-do you know that?" she says. "How much have you had to drink tonight? A lot, I'll bet."

"Do I know you from somewhere?" Deagle murmurs, and she c.o.c.ks her head.

"I don't know," she says. "Do you?"

The girl's name, she says, is Chloe, and she has lived in this city for six years, and she has never heard of the Heathman Hotel.

"It's the one with the guy in front of it," Deagle tries to explain. "He's dressed in a costume? A Beefeater-you know, like the ones that watch the Tower of London?"

"You realize that you're in Portland, right?" she says. She smiles softly, puts her gentle, thin-fingered, skeletal hand on his shoulder. "Maybe you should come with me."

Were Deagle not so drunk, and so melancholy, this might give him pause. He peers uncertainly into the alley she has emerged from: a dim and narrow brick corridor, the walls decorated in brightly colored, uninterpretable graffiti. The rain spatters thickly against black plastic garbage bags and rusting Dumpsters. A puddle contains a discarded hypodermic needle and an oozing packet of fast-food mustard. Is that a doorway in the distance?

"Do you want to get out of the rain, or not?" Chloe says, as Deagle tries to make the wobbly alley shadows come into focus.

"I ..." Deagle wavers. Then he sighs. He accepts the s.p.a.ce she offers him under her umbrella, huddling close enough to her that he can smell her scent of dry gra.s.s and copper pennies. "You're a good Samaritan," he says.

"Not really," she says.

He follows along unsteadily until they reach a doorway. He stumbles when they come to a stop and she reaches out to keep him from falling, a hand on the small of his back, and my G.o.d, it is startling, such a simple kindness-Deagle is quite moved.

"Is this," he says-indicating the filthy, rusted door she is wedging open-"is this your home? You're very generous to invite me into your home."

"It's my office," she says.

"Ah," he says. "Are you a lawyer?"

"No," she says. She regards him. "Are you?"

"Yes," Deagle says. "Unbelievably." And he pauses, realizing after a moment that this exchange is a bit non-sequitur, that his hold on the train of thought isn't very firm. He gives his swimmy head a shake.

"What is it that you do?" he inquires politely.

"I'm a psychic," Chloe says. "I also practice tarot and palmistry." She pulls the umbrella closed with an athletic, javelin thrower's thrust, and the metal door makes an exclamation as she pushes against it.

"Sorry about the mess," she says.

The s.p.a.ce that opens before them appears to be a small abandoned warehouse. It might, at one point, have held some shabby office cubicles; it might, at another point, have been a sweatshop of some kind. Now, though, it is more or less an indoor junkyard, piled with stacks of sc.r.a.p metal, some ancient broken computers, fax machines, dot-matrix printers, old filing cabinets, loops of copper wire, rotting furniture.

In the center, a fire is flickering in a metal barrel. Some wheeled office chairs are arranged around it, and Chloe gestures him forward.

"Have a seat," she says. "It's warm and dry, at least," she says, and Deagle wavers over a cardboard box filled with cobwebbed 35 floppy disks. It is the sort of place that he should describe in his notebook, he thinks, and he fingers his pockets uncertainly. He finds a damp packet of Marlboro Lights, and his dead BlackBerry, and a pen.

"Do you have a phone in here?" Deagle says. "I'd like to call a taxi."

Chloe says nothing. She shakes the rain from her long hair and walks toward the firelight, which exudes translucent undulations of heat and greasy smoke.

Deagle realizes then that there is another person in the room, a silhouette sitting in a chair near the burning barrel, and when the figure lifts its head Deagle sees that it is a male Caucasian, wiry and shirtless, sporting a kudzu of dreadlocked hair. Deagle's heart sinks a little, he intuits that things may begin to go badly, and Chloe, psychic that she is, gives him a look as if to apologize.

"Have a seat," she says again, and the dreadlocked male leans forward and rests his eyes on Deagle. Deagle imagines that this cavemanlike being will probably use a blunt weapon when the time comes; he imagines that it will hurt to be bludgeoned.

"What's up?" the male says.

Chloe says, "This is Boomer."

"How're you doing, Customer?" says Boomer, and Deagle nods.

"I've been better," he says.

"Haven't we all," says Boomer.

Deagle guesses that shortly there will be a robbery, or other crime committed against his person, but he is still drunk enough that the thought disturbs him only vaguely, like that ticklish, heebiejeebie sensation in the small of the back, the monitory intuition that something is creeping up behind you. Is there a scientific word for that? Deagle wonders. Something like deja vu? He considers writing this in his notebook, pats his pocket. But the notebook is not on his person. He feels a little zing of loss, a distant firework arching into the night sky, but what can be done at this point?

It's better, perhaps, to just sit still. He folds his hands, as he sometimes does at the many arbitration tables he finds himself at-flying here and there across the country to arbitrate labor disputes for his clients, usually pointless, but it has made him an expert at folding his hands in a peaceable and significant way, and it has also allowed him to perfect a certain kind of measured and expectant breathing.

Boomer regards his performance with some interest. The two of them sit there in silence for a time, while Chloe busies herself in some corridor of dismantled office furniture. Presently, Boomer withdraws a hand-rolled cigarette and lights it.

"Are you here to get your fortune told?" Boomer asks. "Chloe, she's pretty accurate, pretty accurate."

"That's good to hear," Deagle says, and stares at his hands. When you are a widower, you're supposed to move your wedding band from the left ring finger to the right. This is etiquette, or something. An old tradition, and when Deagle had removed his own ring, about a year after she died, there was a crease in the flesh below his knuckle, a little belt that didn't go away, though he ma.s.saged it and rubbed it with lotion; it seemed for a while that it would be more or less permanent. Now, however, the mark is gone.

Deagle clears his throat. "Actually," Deagle says, "I just got lost. Lost in Portland. That's all."

"Word," says Boomer. "Right on."

When Chloe appears at last, she is no longer wearing her raincoat or her boots. She has on a ta.s.seled shawl, and a long, vaguely ethnic skirt, and her feet are bare. She does not wear a turban, Deagle is relieved to see, though her dark hair has a Gypsy-ish kink to it.

"I thought we might have some of those cheap cellphones," she says to Boomer. "Those pre-paid, no-contract ones, you remember? What happened to those?"

"I dunno," Boomer says. "Did we sell them?"

"Maybe," Chloe says, and then she shrugs her shoulders at Deagle regretfully. "Sorry," she says. "I think you're out of luck, Mr. Drunk Man," and Deagle watches as she settles herself into Boomer's lap, leaning back against him, that thin hand brushing along the length of his bare arm, an absently tender gesture.

"You got fifty dollars?" she says to Deagle. "I'll read your palm for you."

a a a Most people would not believe this, but once there were happier times, a territory of years in which Deagle was surprisingly satisfied. He didn't even know it at the time, but there was an entire period in which it seemed he was going to have a nice life.

He loved coming up behind his wife while she was washing dishes, and putting his hands underneath her shirt, to touch her warm back.

He loved to ride in the car together, the ordinary drives to a cheap restaurant or a park, the four of them listening to children's music, or speaking brightly about the things you talk to children about-his wife in the driver's seat, and him beside her, the kids snug in their car seats- Or to find her in bed, absorbed in a book, her head bent and a small private smile on her face, marking some comment in the margin-a remark to the author? To a future reader? But now indecipherable, a message only to her missing self.

Or the little basket of stones and sh.e.l.ls and flotsam she had collected; they had spent hours walking along beaches and riverbeds and hiking trails, and he loved the sweet, dreamy attention she paid to these little objects-because they were "pretty," or "interesting"-choosing one over the other, using some unfathomably subtle calculation- As mysterious as the part of himself that was chosen and loved by her, the part of himself that was there only when they were together.