Gray (21 page)

She goes to leave, but I grab Her arm. I pull Her close, just as I did the first night we met. I feel Her body against mine for the first time in months. It’s not the same, but I’ll take what I can get. I am out of my mind again. I want to ravage Her. I want to hit Her. Her eyes are wide. She is afraid.

“Look . . .” I trail off, not knowing what to say next. “Meet me later.”

She pulls Herself away, leaves the room. I imagine Robert greeting Her on the other side of the door, asking Her, “What’s
wrong
?” Being tender and supportive and weak. He probably wants to break down the door and break my neck, but he knows he can’t. Not because he’s too weak, but because my security guard is standing in his way. I wonder if they’ll even stay for the show. I decide I don’t care. Instead, I concentrate on getting incredibly, incongruously
drunk
. This is easier to do than you’d imagine, especially when you’re the headliner on an arena tour. By the time we take the stage, I’m out of my head. I shimmy around the stage like an idiot. I climb my stack of amplifiers and leap down, crashing hard on the stage. I probably break something, only I don’t feel it. The kids squeal and shout my name. My parents are watching from the side of the stage, backstage passes
hanging around their necks, stupid smiles on their faces. I grab the microphone and dedicate the last song to Robert. The guys look at me like I’m insane. I am a terrible drunk, especially in Chicago.

That night, we have an after-party, at the same place we had our record-release party. The same place I got drunk and passed out in the bathroom and went home with that chick. She’s probably here tonight, probably looking for one more opportunity with me. She won’t get a chance this time because I am behaving myself tonight. Or at least trying. I keep calling Her phone because I want to hear Her voice, because I want to hear Her lips curl around the receiver. I want to tell Her about my plans of destruction. I want to be with Her. She doesn’t answer, so I call back again. She says she’s on the phone with Her aunt, and that she’ll call me back, but I know she’s actually talking to Robert. Nobody’s aunt is awake at this time of night. I call back to confront Her with this fact, but it goes straight to voice mail. I leave Her a rambling message that’s part accusation, part apology. Midway through, it occurs to me that I am still plenty drunk. I don’t expect Her to call back—not ever—but, to my surprise, she does. She agrees to see me. I take a cab back to my parents’ place, sneak my brother’s car out of the garage again, and head over, even though I shouldn’t be driving. I blast the radio and close one eye to keep the lines in the road from crossing. They do anyway, but I aim for the middle of the
X
.

I am too drunk to wonder why she’s agreed to meet me, and I don’t care. I just want to see Her. I pick Her up
at Her apartment and we drive around the city for a bit, mostly because I don’t want to take Her back to my place. It seems a bit forward of me. But I probably could because we both know exactly what this is. In the meantime, I try my best to keep the car on the road. I don’t think I’m fooling Her. She is smoking cigarettes out the window. I ask Her what happened to Robert, the booze wafting out of my mouth in noxious purple fumes. She exhales and says, “It’s just . . . he’s . . . I don’t want to talk about it.” We don’t.

We go back to my apartment, make more small talk (“You unpacked”), have meaningless, hopeless sex. Fake panting. She is thinking about me fucking you-know-who. So am I. We are both disappointed, both wanted more from this. But too much has happened now. We are too far gone. After, we lie in bed and I run my finger down the scar along Her spine. She is smoking and thinking about Robert. And what a terrible mistake she’s made tonight. She falls asleep, and I lie there, staring at the ceiling. Eventually it gets too hot in my room, so I pull on clothes and leave. I think I hear Her wake up, but I don’t stop. I walk around for what feels like hours, nowhere to go but only one place I don’t want to be: next to Her. This was a mistake. I should never have called. I should never have ruined Her life again. Eventually, I call Her and she tells me she went home. Says the door is unlocked. Asks me what the hell is wrong with me? I tell Her I don’t know, and she hangs up. When I get back, all traces of Her are gone. She even took Her toothbrush. But she’s left a pack of cigarettes on the kitchen counter,
next to my old medication. I stare at both for a while, decide to leave them where they are, perfectly placed, in memoriam. A few hours later our road manager picks me up, and we head back out onto the road. I didn’t even get to say good-bye.

I
sleep
it off in my bunk. When I wake up, we’re still driving, on Interstate 90, jumping off onto 94 toward Minneapolis. We play a show there that night, then follow the interstate up into the great stretches of nowhere, past Fargo, across North Dakota and Montana, where the country just becomes horizon for days on end. A succession of sunrises and sunsets with no obstructed views. God’s country. You meet the mountains just past Bozeman, climb up into the clouds, your cell phone merely an afterthought at this point, a stop in Missoula, Wild West Cowboy College Town, then through Idaho within hours, into Washington, down into the valley, Spokane on a Saturday night. Across the great green expanses of the state, barreling down on Seattle, the glimmering emerald in the bosom of the mountains. Mount Rainier over our left shoulders. Then 90 expires, and we head down 5, along the coast, Tacoma, on toward Portland. Trees for miles, patches of bright red clay, God’s dirt, the best there is. So clean and fresh, I almost consider shipping some back to
the kids in the skyscrapers of Chicago, because they don’t know what they’re missing. Because words will never do it justice.

I love the long stretches between conversations best. The quiet is like blue waves running between screaming, tourist-filled islands. It doesn’t feel forced; it feels okay to just be breathing, to just be riding up front with the guys, our little family band. I cool my cheek against the window, watch my breath fog the glass. At night the sky is lit with a million jumbled stars, scattered across sheets of velvet. The stars out West are jokes on city kids like me. They make you feel insignificant, they put you in your place. The rain and the fog are almost invitations to slip this bus off the road, into the trees, the sounds of glass shattering and metal bending, one wheel still spinning and the smell of pine cutting so hard. I’d be okay with dying in the woods just off Interstate 5.

There is nothing but days of driving now, a lull in the schedule. Oregon at a leisurely pace, National Forests around every turn. Into California, like another world up north, just redwood trees and mountain peaks. We are bound for Sacramento, the odd-fitting capital city, like Albany, only more depressing. It seems like an afterthought, something they decided to give the people there because all the good stuff had already been handed out to LA and San Fran and San Diego. A consolation prize. A show there and then two by the Bay and then home again for a few days, then flying out East to begin another tour, different bus, different driver, the same eternally shifting world. Our video is in the top five of
TRL
; we will be
doing appearances in Times Square. Our album is selling more and more copies every week, and the label thinks that, with a second single, it will go platinum. We are a
priority
now. The shareholders have freed up more funds; we will be shooting another video, going to the UK and the rest of Europe. But all of that is still months away. Right now, we are stopped at a rest area outside Willows, California, sitting on the picnic tables out by the pine trees. Right now I look out at the traffic headed north, feeling the fleeting summer breeze on my neck, almost like a kiss or a caress. A wave good-bye. Right now I get a call on my cell phone, from a Chicago number I don’t recognize. I answer. It’s Her roommate. Right now she is crying on the other end of the line. Right now I hit the ground.

T
here
was an accident. She was apparently driving drunk, hit a guardrail. No one knows where she was going. No one knows where she was beforehand. None of that matters much. She’s in the hospital, a tube going into Her mouth, helping Her breathe. Tubes in Her arms are keeping Her alive. The remaining dates of the tour are canceled. I am on a plane bound for Chicago.

She’s in the same hospital that Her mother was in, only a different wing. The bad wing. I tell the nurse at the desk that I’m here to see Her, and she looks at me with sad eyes. I take the elevator up with an orderly and a kid in a wheelchair. His stomach is distended with cancer. They get off on a different floor. I walk down the hallway to Her room, feel the sickly warmth of illness, the slightly sweet odor of feces. Hospitals always smell the same. I am numb. When I get to Her room, Her mother and father are there, Her sister too. They all look up at me, and you can tell they haven’t slept, have been keeping vigil by Her bedside. Her parents are wondering why I am here, but
they don’t say it. Her sister asks if maybe they’d like to go get some coffee, and they begrudgingly say yes. Her father wheels Her mother past me, and she looks up at me with tired, angry eyes.

She was on the interstate when it happened, Her sister tells me. She has a lacerated liver and a punctured lung, massive head trauma. The doctors don’t know if she’ll ever wake up. Her head is battered and bandaged, turned to the left. Her eyes are both black. Dark red cuts peek out from beneath the gauze. The tube in Her mouth is held in place by tape. She looks so small and broken in the bed, Her thin arms resting at Her sides, black nail polish still on the tips of Her fingers. Machines surround the bed, whirring, hushed things, helping Her breathe. The dainty drip of the saline in the plastic bag. The chart hanging by Her feet. The thick hospital blanket tucked into the mattress. She is never going to wake up. She is going to die. Everyone knows it.

Her parents are gone for a long time, so I sit in a chair in the corner of the room, looking at Her bashed-in face, Her wondrous eyes tightly shut. Occasionally Her lashes flutter, but Her sister says that’s just how these things go. She’s probably gone already, she says, and we’re looking at Her body. Her sister is brave. Braver than me when I was her age. Braver than me now too. A doctor comes into the room and looks at Her chart. We both stand up to greet him, and Her sister introduces me to him as “Her friend.” I shake his hand because that’s what you do in situations like this. Eventually, Her parents come back into the room, and Her father wheels Her mother next to the bed.
I give him my chair and stand by the window. No one says anything. The hours drag on. The curtains flutter slightly. Eventually, visiting hours are over, and I leave because I am just a visitor. I cannot offer these people any comfort. I cannot change the situation. I feel stupid and small. I can tell I’m not welcome.

I go back to my apartment and the Disaster is already there. The room is filled with awful silence. The kind of silence that only happens when someone dies. He leaves and comes back with a bottle of Jameson, sets it on the table, and we drink it in silence. Nothing can possibly be said. I wonder if this is what he did when his baby died. I don’t say it because I already know the answer.

The next morning I am back at the hospital, sitting in the cafeteria. The room is full, but no one looks up from their table. I drink coffee from a paper cup. I wander the hallways, wondering how many ghosts are walking alongside me. I am putting off going to see Her because I don’t want to see Her like this. For the first time, the thought occurs to me that perhaps this is all my fault. That she was coming to find me. I remember our last night together, how awful I was to Her. I cry in the chapel, say a prayer to God, who decided two nights ago that Her number was up. I go up to Her room, and Her family is still sitting there, only now they’ve multiplied to include grave-faced aunts and uncles and weeping grandmothers. I don’t know any of them, and they do not acknowledge my presence. Because I have no place here.

The day goes on. Her sister and I have hushed conversations in the hallway about a funeral because Her
mother doesn’t want Her to hear us talking about death. We don’t bother telling her that she can’t hear us anymore. Her sister tells me that she always knew she loved me, and that she would be happy that I am here. Later, as Her family is down in the cafeteria, I sit with Her and tell Her how sorry I am for letting Her down, for hurting Her. She can’t hear me. I watch Her chest rise and fall softly. Sometimes there are long gaps between breaths, and my heart pauses and a lump grows in my throat, and I’m begging Her to breathe again, and then she does, and everything returns to the way it was.

That night, as visiting hours are coming to an end, she is surrounded by doctors. Her family is crying and holding hands, telling Her they love Her and it’s okay if she wants to go. She dies at 9:50 p.m. Wednesday, the seventeenth. No trumpets sound or angels descend. She just stopped breathing, and the machines went silent. She is already up in heaven or wherever, turning in Her time card. Maybe she is trying out Her new wings right now, afraid at first, but after a few tries mastering barrel rolls and graceful loops. That night, she doesn’t come to me in my dreams, probably because she is too busy getting used to Her new accommodations.

The next few days are a blur. I tell Her father to call me if they need any help with any of the arrangements, but he never does. My parents send flowers. She is buried on a Saturday, but I can’t bring myself to go to the funeral. In the morning, I had got dressed in my only black suit, but when I looked at myself in the mirror, I couldn’t help but think that I looked like a giant phony. I couldn’t imagine
going through the motions, sitting in some church with my head bowed, listening to some priest talk about “the infinite wisdom of His ways” and “calling His flock home” and shit like that. So I didn’t go. It’s okay though, I don’t think Her parents would’ve wanted me there anyway. My mom said it was a lovely service.