Carry the One (29 page)

“Or a busload of singing schoolchildren,” Carmen said. “He’s very crafty about getting the club off. So that’s not going to work anymore.”

“Mom could rent him an apartment near stores, farther down on Clark or Broadway so he could manage his business on foot. He wouldn’t have to work. He’d have no money for drugs, but he could drink beer in that way, you know, keep a little buzz going all day. He could be a neighborhood drunk. Do they still have those?”

Coming here was hard, but it was at least possible if she and Carmen did it together, spreading the horror around a little. But Carmen said she was done; this was her last mission.

“Cleaning up his mess just allows him to keep doing this. Plus I can’t find anyone in there worth saving. Basically, he’s gone. All that’s left is a drug-eating, liquor-drinking machine. There are people out there who really want help in changing. I’d rather be doing some actual good for somebody.”

“He saw the girl,” Alice told Carmen now. “He saw her in time to steer the car out of her way. But he thought she was a magical apparition or something. He didn’t want to change the channel. He just watched.”

Carmen didn’t say anything for a long time, then “You know I’m already done with him. This is for you. So let’s go.”

Alice hated the blast of ice she felt coming off Carmen. Like the Good Humor guy opening that little door in the side of his truck.

“Have you seen our brother?” Alice asked the old woman—Mrs. Nolan—who lived on the top floor, just above Nick. She was just coming out the front door. Alice tried to sound casual, by the by. This was made difficult by having to shout over the wind wailing its way around the courtyard.

“He fell. Out in front here the other day,” Mrs. Nolan said. “He was trying to bring in some bottles. My son was over and he helped your brother up the stairs. That was Tuesday, maybe Monday. The walk was icy was the problem, I think.”

Nick’s staircase was depressing even before they got to what was sure to be his stupendously depressing apartment. The carpeting on the stairs was frayed to strings along the sides. The hallway was painted a landlord odd-lot color, a syrupy blue-green Alice called Ukrainian Maternity Hospital, 1952.

“Do you notice,” she said to Carmen when they were on the first-floor landing, stomping the snow off their boots, “how polite people are, how much effort they put into explaining his behavior. Like: he fell. Or: He had the flu. Someone had to help him up. His hat blew off in the wind. It’s like, remember those nice neighbors of Jeffrey Dahmer? How they offered him box fans to help him get rid of the bad smell—”

“It’s going to be very bad up there today,” Carmen said, peering up the staircase. She handed Alice a pair of latex gloves.

A familiar detritus of trouble started to present itself as soon as they got to the second floor. A scattering of beer bottles covered a thick stack of
Tribunes
piled tidily in front of Nick’s door by one of the helpful neighbors. A fair amount of blood had been blotted up by the patch of carpet visible just inside. The smell as they forced themselves forward was a grim version of sweet.

Nick was going on three weeks inside this particular bender, with brief respites in hospitals, where he got put on hold with tranquilizers. The hospitals saw detox as helping someone make the transition from drunk to sober. But Nick was never sincerely on their program. He only went to the hospital when he ran out of the money he needed in order to stay high. When he came out of the tranquilizers they gave him to get through, it was hard for him to stabilize enough to get back to any kind of work, and so he fell again, each time sooner than the last. Sometimes he didn’t care for the hospital they brought him to, and Alice would get a call in the middle of the night from a nurse or an administration person saying he left without being discharged, sometimes
without his shoes. A couple of weeks ago the middle-of-the-night call came from Nick himself.

“Listen,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Three witches came in here tonight and tied me up.” His voice was slurry with whatever they were giving him to bring him down.

“Are they still there?” Alice said.

“One is.”

“Put her on.”

Muffle and thud, bang and clatter, a receiver being passed, dropped, retrieved.

“Yesss?”—a deep, suspicious voice, like the Cheshire Cat.

“Did you tie my brother up?”

“We tied him
real
good.”

“Thanks so much.” Alice crawled back into bed for some peaceful sleep. It was always a good night when Nick was tied up. But then he got out.

“Mmmm,” Carmen said, putting her nose into the air, as if something delicious were baking in the oven. Alice was both looking for Nick and afraid to find him. Each time they came over here like this, she thought it would be the time they’d find him dead. Often it was hard to tell right away. Like today. He lay in bed, absolutely still, naked. The TV roared.
Cagney & Lacey
—Alice spotted a boxed set of DVDs on the floor—were sharing an emotional moment that belied their tough exteriors.

His head was pretty badly banged up, a couple of deep cuts on his forehead, probably from a day or two ago, the blood now black and caked over. His body was stained with large, wine-colored bruises, his chest dotted with small, black rubber suction stickers left over from whatever monitoring machine he was hooked up to in the last hospital, which he left in an impromptu way. That was a week ago. The
other thing that was hard to not notice was his penis, which was dark purple and, even folded up, huge. They had noticed this on previous visits. Also in the Polaroids that were usually lying around, souvenirs of festive activities between him and one or another of the hookers. Startling the first time, by now his dick was just another aspect of him that seemed beside the point. Carmen pulled the comforter over him, picked up a handful of Polaroids and started humming
Memories … light the corners of my mind,
then bent down over him and shouted “Hey!” into his ear.

Alice started to get scared. “Boocs?” she said, taking his hand, which was deadweight, but not cold. “Come on and get up.” He finally stirred—slowly, carefully, as though he were in quicksand. He rolled over to the edge of the bed and started feeling around the carpet until he found a beer bottle with something left in it, drained it, then started looking for another.

Carmen grabbed him by one arm and pulled him up again.

“Not so fast, mister.”

This time he grinned, impersonating sociability. His teeth were yellow and disturbingly furry. “You know—” he said, waggling his index finger at her, then lost the thought.

“You want to go to the hospital?” Alice said in a sparkly tone, as if he had a wealth of options and this was just the first one up for consideration.

A long wait, and then, “Maybe.”

“See if you can get ready then,” Carmen said.

He peered at her, then at Alice. As though neither of them was to be trusted, and he was coming up with a code for them to decipher, a password to stump them.

“Do you think you can manage a shower?” Carmen asked.

He got out of bed and wove toward the john, then turned around, and headed back to them.

“Hugs,” he said, opening his arms.

“Uh—” Carmen said.

“We’ll get back to you on that,” Alice said. “We’ll have our people call your people.”

He turned toward the bathroom again. His butt hung like a small, empty sack behind him as he negotiated the hallway by bumping off its walls.

Alice looked into one of the pulled-out drawers of Nick’s dresser. “Well, at least it’s not total chaos. He does have systems of organization. Like, this would be the socks, pencil, and vomit drawer.” What she was thinking was how will she be able to do this alone when Carmen drops out? Coming in here by herself would be a new level of aloneness, like falling out of a boat and being left to the sea.

Alice wandered out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. Inside the refrigerator a half-eaten (gnaw marks along one side), congealed steak was draped over one of the wire shelves. She did a quick scan of the apartment. A small end table had been toppled and smashed. She recognized this as one of the pieces of furniture Nick refinished so long ago, for when Olivia would get out of jail and come to him. A hundred bottles’ worth of broken glass was strewn like sparkly green and brown gravel across the carpet. Two of her paintings from the prostitute series hung askew but didn’t appear damaged. Even though the show was unpopular, the paintings were by now worth a fair amount. It was as she thought this that she noticed a blank space where a third one used to hang.

Each wave of destruction had further depleted the apartment. Stuff got broken or soiled beyond saving, or stolen by whoever came around while he was like this. This time she noticed his old telescope was gone. Nothing ever got replaced or fixed in here—just tossed out or set upright, wiped down maybe. Here and there were little swatches of his life, or of their childhood in common. Today Alice recognized a dishtowel on the kitchen counter that had drifted in from Loretta’s kitchen, from that kitchen as it was thirty years ago. In the living room, maple bookcases he had made himself still held physics texts
and astronomy journals, some with articles written by an earlier version of himself. His music was mostly “Best Of” compilations from the mainstream rock of his adolescence. Bad Company. Bob Seger. Earth, Wind & Fire.

On the top shelf of the bookcase was a framed photo of Nick and Olivia in shorts and polo shirts, laughing, standing in front of their Teardrop trailer—an image from the period when Nick seemed almost regular, close to happy. He had since moved so far from regular that the photo might as well be one of those old carnival tourist boards where you stick your head through and show up as a mermaid or hula dancer.

Maybe half an hour later, they had him out of the tub, where he had fallen. Dried and into some clothes—grimy khakis, a clean T-shirt and penny loafers, a parka. No socks, forget socks; his feet were too swollen. In the car he leaned against the passenger door like a sack of ball bearings.

“We need better equipment for this,” Alice said, making a left turn to head south. “A winch. A tarp. A couple of burly helper guys.”

“No,” Carmen said from the backseat. “We need to stop doing this.” From there she went into silent, full hard-ass mode.

“Do you want to try to get well?” Alice asked Nick.

“YES I DO,” Nick said in a super-loud, robotic voice, then took the half can of flat Coke from her drink caddy and chugged most of it. “HERE,” he shouted. He apparently hadn’t got around to brushing his teeth; they were still encased in the yellow fur. “YOU CAN HAVE THE REST.”

“Hey. Thanks,” Alice said, putting the can back in its socket.

“This time,” Carmen piped up from the backseat, “just try to go with the program, whatever it is.”

It was easy to get a bad attitude at the hospital, though. Alice and Carmen both knew this. Triage did not favor drunks and addicts.
First, they took the guy with the ax in his head, then the baby with the fever, then the old man with the shooting pain in his arm, then the teenage girl having a psychotic break. Then, about ten more cases down the line, they took Nick. At Northwestern, if the wait got too long, he went across the street to Benihana and had a few beers to tide him over. Alice thought they must be really happy over there to see him come through the door.

In the past, Alice and Carmen used to go into the emergency room with him. More recently, they at least waited until he was admitted. By now, though, he had worn out his welcome at the nearby hospitals, and so tonight Alice pulled up in front of Haymarket, which wasn’t a hospital; it was the hoboes’ detox, the detox of last resort. This was the only place Carmen could find that would take him, and only because they took anyone. This time the sisters just stayed in the car and watched him teeter through the door.

“This makes me feel like such a terrible person,” Alice said as they drove away.

“Hey,” Carmen said. “Give us credit. We stopped the car. We didn’t roll him out while we were driving by.”

Their night wasn’t over yet. They went back to where his car was parked. They came up with an alternative to locking his steering wheel with the Club. They would hide the car. Alice followed in her car as Carmen drove Nick’s, its passenger-side mirror hanging by a wire and bouncing against the door as she went, its backseat littered with empties. Also the battered manila folders of X-rays he used to get pain pills out of sketchy doctors. They drove up to Carmen’s neighborhood and parked Nick’s car at the end of a street by a small factory.

By the time Alice dropped Carmen off, then got back to her own place, it was near four in the morning. The phone was ringing. It was Nick, of course. He was back at his apartment.

“No drugs. No Valium,” he told her, no longer shouting. “Nothing at all at that crap-ass place. It’s a punishment place. You’re supposed
to tough it out. Bite on a stick.” In the background was the click and fizz of a beer can being opened, followed by what sounded like a water bubbler. Then another click and fizz.

“Do you think you could stop? Just for a while? You know, just give it a break?”

“Not really,” he said.

port difficulties

The small pop of a cork being worked out of yet another bottle of wine sank Carmen’s spirits. She and Rob were having dinner at the home of some friends, a meal that was going on forever. Actually, it had hit the forever mark about an hour ago. By now they had entered some further zone on the space/time continuum. Carmen wished these were friends of Rob’s. That way she could enjoy how ridiculous they were instead of being mortified that they were friends of hers. Carmen had gone to Jane Addams for her MSW with Abby, now a grant writer, successful in a hands-off corner of social work where she would never have to touch a poor or crazy person. (Carmen had tried this herself, spending two years as the liaison for the homeless out of the mayor’s office, but she’d hated the endless meetings with clean, fresh-smelling people, and the avalanche of paperwork, so she was back running a shelter, this time on the West Side, in a neighborhood that scared her anew every single day.) Abby’s husband, Jeff, had recently become majorly rich in the PVC pipe business—innovative materials, rebuilding the infrastructure, blahblahblah, Carmen eventually ran out to the end of actually listening. She got away with a certain amount of inattention on account of her partial deafness. She didn’t let everyone know that
she now wore an in-ear, digital aid that had retrieved a bit of hearing in her bad ear that she’d assumed was dead and gone. Technology had jumped a little ahead of her in a nice way. When she tuned back in, she saw the subject had shifted, onto the sufferings Abby and Jeff endured in the cause of remodeling their kitchen and bathroom. Abby seemed a little embarrassed about this line of complaint, but Jeff was into it. He talked about it as though they were bombed, or victims of a landslide.