One Last Thing Before I Go (10 page)

He sounds weary; not generally, like it’s been a long day, but specifically, like Silver is sapping his energy.

“Are you mad about the ‘Amazing Grace’ thing?”

“Of course not,” he says, and even grins a little. “But really, what in the world possessed you?”

Silver doesn’t really know how to explain it. It’s like he’s been inexpertly rewired. Signals are being mixed, relays being tripped, power surging and waning, and he’s acting on impulses before he knows he’s had them.

“Me,” he says. “I possessed me.”

“Some might say it was God.”

“Yeah, people are always getting us confused. I’m taller.”

Ruben turns into the driveway of the Versailles, pulls over, and throws the car into park. “I have a plan,” he says.

“Do you?”

“You’re going to come with me to one of every life-cycle event I’ve got on my calendar. A bris, a bar or bat mitzvah, a wedding, a death.”

“And we just covered death.”

“Right.”

“OK.”

He gives Silver a tender look. “You don’t look so good.”

“I’ve been better.”

Ruben smiles sadly, then leans forward and kisses his forehead. Silver can’t remember the last time he did that. He feels his father’s stubble scratching his forehead, can smell his familiar aftershave, and in that instant, he experiences the sense memory of the boy he once was, safe and loved, who somehow managed to grow into this mess anyway.

His father doesn’t seem to be in any rush to go anywhere, so they sit in the car in silence, looking out the window, waiting for it to rain.

C
HAPTER 25

H
e wakes up paralyzed, his arms and legs frozen. For a few minutes he lies there, convinced that he’s died, that this is what death feels like, that the mind stays alive longer than the body, trapped inside, going slowly mad until its life force is completely drained. There was a
Twilight Zone
episode about this. He remembers watching it with his parents in their bed, tucked between them under their comforter, the familiar smell of his mother’s lilac-scented moisturizer filling his nostrils. The man in the episode, unable to move, was pleading in a terrified voice-over as they pronounced him dead.

He hopes that his own brain dies before they put him in the ground, because he has never done well in enclosed spaces. He starts to panic at the prospect, and then gets angry at how unfair it is to have to be scared of anything after you’ve already died. Isn’t that supposed to be one of the perks? No more fear and worrying, no more lugging around all the shit that got tangled up in your mortal coil over the years? That’s kind of what he’s been counting on.

And that’s when he realizes that he’s been scratching his chest. He does the math, a bit slower than one might think, but ultimately reaches the inescapable conclusion that he’s not dead, and not even very paralyzed. He wiggles his toes, bounces his knees, and whistles the theme from
Rocky
, which he mistakenly attributes to
Star Wars
for a few minutes. When they were kids, Chuck and he would play the
Rocky
theme on the living-room turntable and conduct fake boxing matches, hissing out their own sound effects with each blow. He’d forgotten about that, about Chuck, about how it feels to be brothers. It’s been a long time since he’s thought of himself as someone’s brother. He should drop by there like he used to and see how he’s doing. He doesn’t remember when he stopped.

When he stands up, he briefly goes blind. Everything goes white, and he loses his balance, crashing into the wall before he trips over his sneakers and falls on his face. When he rolls over, his vision has returned.

This is getting tricky.

Casey sticks her head into the bedroom, sees him lying on the floor. The alarm that spreads across her face is both validating and heartbreaking, so he clasps his hands behind his head and attempts a look of casual repose.

“What are you doing?” she says.

“I thought I was dead.”

“That’s how it looked for a moment there.”

She comes over and lies down on her back beside him. They stare up at the same cracked ceiling.

“You thought this was what death looked like?”

“Well, I couldn’t see for a little bit.”

She appears a little worried about that, and he hates that he’s enjoying her concern. “Do you want me to call Rich?” she says.

“I absolutely do not want you to call Rich.”

“You sure? If you die in an hour and I didn’t call, I’ll be traumatized.”

“You’re already traumatized.”

“A little,” she admits. “So, what are we doing down here?”

“Just, you know, considering the universe.”

“That isn’t the universe. It’s your ceiling.”

“Don’t be so literal.”

“The universe is one fucked-up place.”

“That seems to be the consensus.”

He watches her as she traces the long cracks in the ceiling with her eyes. Her horizontal profile makes her look much younger, like a little girl.

“What would you like to do today?” he says.

She gives him a funny look. “What are my options?”

“Sky’s the limit.”

She considers it for a moment. “Brunch?”

“I say the sky’s the limit and all you can come up with is brunch?”

“I’m just not sure we live under the same sky.”

He gives her a look. She gives it right back. We could have really had something good, he thinks, regret filling his lungs like water.

“Sometimes I think that too,” Casey says, and he realizes that, once again, he’s spoken out loud. “But I try not to, because then I get angry at you.”

He rolls over and pulls himself to his feet, an act that feels like nothing less than an Olympic event, the blood rushing to his face with a dizzying heat that makes him feel fat and old. “We are going to brunch.”

“At Dagmar’s,” Casey says, popping upright like she’s attached to wires.

“Shit, really?”

She gives him a sharp look, one that conveys the many years of shit she is currently setting aside in order to tolerate his presence.

“Dagmar’s it is,” he says, leaning up against the wall.

“You OK?” she says, raising her eyebrows. “You’re teetering.”

He nods and steadies himself against the wall. “Aren’t we all,” he says.

CH
APTER 26

O
ne of two things happens to restaurants in the suburbs: they go out of business, or they remain exactly the same. Dagmar’s has been fortunate enough to remain in the latter category. It’s one of those suburban nooks with unfinished wooden furniture and the condescendingly healthy menu scrawled like a colorful manifesto across three large blackboards above the counter. The words “organic” and “vegan” are sprinkled generously throughout in bright green. This enables the kids behind the counter to feel even more superior in their checkered shirts and ironic tattoos, and it enables the neighborhood patrons to feel good about paying three bucks for a shot glass of orange juice, so everybody wins.

Dagmar’s also happens to be situated in North Point, where Casey and Denise live, and where Silver once lived with them, during that brief hiccup of time when he had his shit together. When he and Denise first split up, he would come every Sunday to have brunch here with Casey, but after a few months of hostile stares from Denise’s girlfriends and indifference from their necessarily catatonic husbands, the men he had once considered his friends, it became clear that Denise was the people’s champion, and he stopped coming. So the last time he was here was actually with Casey, but it was probably six or seven years ago.

The kid behind the counter greets Casey by name. She says hi back. Both of his earlobes are deformed by large-gauge hoops, the kind that stretch out the lobe to form a hole the size of a quarter. One day he will want to have normal earlobes again, and he’ll be shit out of luck.

“You’ll be sorry when you’re older,” Silver tells him, pointing to his ears.

“Shut up, Silver!” Casey says, scandalized.

The kid grins and shrugs. “Like when I’m your age? Odds are I’ll be dead long before that.”

Silver smiles. “Well played.” He likes this kid. Sure he’s a fuck-up—no one properly loved would mutilate himself like that—but who is he to judge? In ten years he might be a fantastic husband and father with fucked-up ears. He grows his hair long, and he’s good to go.

Silver turns to Casey. “What are you having?”

She doesn’t consult the chalkboard menu at all. “I can’t decide between the pancakes and the waffles, so I’ll have both. Also a tomato-cheddar omelet with hash browns, two popovers, a large orange juice, and a coffee.” She smiles wickedly at Silver, daring him.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” he says.

* * *

They end up needing a second table for all of the food. The other diners cast sidelong glances at them, but they go about their feast with reckless abandon, their agenda hazy at best, but no less important. They laugh too loud, eat food off the other’s plate, conduct entire conversations with dabs of whipped cream poised on the tips of their noses. And beneath it all, the sense that they are trying much too hard to prove something, to themselves and to each other, something for which they have no compelling evidence. Or else they are trying in vain to manufacture a memory, something they will be able to point to in the future and say, “Whatever else, we had that.”

The restaurant is filled, and as Casey and Silver play chess with the orgy of food laid out before them, something happens. The room slows down, quiets a little, like the hush before a speech, but no one seems to notice it except Silver. It seems, even as he is fully engaged with Casey, he is able to take note of everyone in the room and, in some superficial but spectacularly clear way, understand them.

The couple at the far table against the wall is ten years younger than him. She was once a beauty, but her age has settled in her cheeks below her eyes, making her look perennially exhausted. He has stayed trim, wears designer sneakers and the jeans of a high school kid, and she quietly hates him for it. Her eyes flit around the room, looking at the other women, measuring herself against them.

One table over sit Dave and Laney Potter. Silver and Denise used to have a standing weekly movie date with them. Now they steal glances at him and whisper to each other, wondering what he’s doing here, making him wish he looked a little bit better than he does. Laney is ten years younger than Dave, and a decade ago that didn’t matter, but now he’s starting to stoop and bend, and she looks young and spry and she must work hard to banish thoughts of younger men and Dave’s ample life-insurance policy every time she sees his naked, sagging chest or he farts in bed.

There’s a young couple feeding their messy, high-chair-bound two-year-old girl, both parents overly invested in their daughter’s meal, loudly micromanaging her, and each other, as they cast wary glances around the room, daring anyone to have a problem with the noise they’re making.

At one of the high round tables in the center of the room sit Craig and Ross, Elmsbrook’s first openly gay couple. They were fabulous for a while, but now they’re just another quietly fading couple melting into the graying tableau.

And off to their left, four women, all friends or acquaintances of Denise’s, watching him and Casey, holding high-level discussions about what his presence here might mean, what actions, if any, should be taken. They consult their iPhones, send urgent texts to their commanding officers, await orders. He makes deliberate eye contact with each one of them, and they shy away, feigning obliviousness, as if he’s caught them on the one day they aren’t going to mentally catalogue and discuss every other person in the place.

He processes these and every other diner simultaneously, at genius speed. And he thinks, I used to be one of them, I used to belong here—and the thought fills him with both relief and regret. There’s a modulated numbness to these carefully executed lives, the very numbness that was instrumental in his shameful flight years earlier. And it still scares him now, the muted sameness of everyone. And yet, he wonders, what if he had stayed? What if Denise, Casey, and he were still coming here every week for Sunday brunch? Maybe he’d be looking around, feeling trapped by it all, but maybe not. Maybe it wears you down, like Stockholm syndrome, and then fills you up. Is there really any difference between being fulfilled or just thinking you are? Such questions probably matter less when you wake up next to your wife and the two of you take your beautiful daughter to brunch. He looks around Dagmar’s and understands that somewhere he missed a step; he fell behind, and never caught up again. And his life now is every bit as numb as the ones here, except for those moments when the piercing loneliness cuts like a blade right through it.

A small commotion at the entrance; a group of teenage boys walking in like teenage boys do, announcing their arrival with self-conscious bonhomie, rolling their shoulders, swiveling their athletic torsos as they make their way to a table. Silver sees Casey’s expression suddenly fall. He follows her gaze, and somehow he can immediately discern which of the boys she’s looking at, and in his stroked-out haze of clarity, he immediately knows why.

The boy in question looks familiar, tall and slim and fairly nondescript, your standard-issue college kid, dressed down in jeans and a vintage T-shirt, cracking up at his buddies’ jokes. He waits for the urge to throttle the kid to set in, and when it doesn’t, he is vaguely disappointed in himself.

When the kid sees Casey, he flashes a broad smile and waves. He has no idea, Silver thinks. She hasn’t told him. She waves back, and Silver can tell she’s hoping the kid won’t come over. But he does.

“Hey.”

“Hey, Jeremy.”

Jeremy Lockwood, the neighbors’ kid. That’s why he looked so familiar. Of course, the last time Silver saw him he was a scrawny prepubescent. He has a sudden mental flash of a young boy wearing a cape and a hat, doing magic tricks for them in their living room, something with metal hoops.

“Hey, Mr. Silver.”

“You were the magician.”

“What?”

“You used to do magic tricks.”

The kid thinks about it for a moment then smiles. “That’s right. I did. Wow! You have a good memory.”

“Sometimes.”

“Hey, you know, my roommate was a huge Bent Daisies fan. He played that album almost nonstop. I think I know it by heart.”

“College kids are listening to us to be retro. Kill me now.”

Jeremy smiles nervously, not sure how serious he is. Silver’s not sure himself. So, having paid his lip service to respect, Casey’s impregnator turns back to her.

“Have you been getting my texts?” he says.

“Yeah, I’m sorry. We had a bit of a family emergency, and I kind of went off the grid for a few days.”

“Is everything OK?”

“Yeah, my dad, he, uh, he was in the hospital.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” He turns back to Silver. “You look OK now.”

“I’m not.”

“Silver,” Casey says in a low voice.

“I’m bleeding internally. I could die at any moment.”

Jeremy is not sure what to make of that. He’s now officially out of his depth, and Silver likes it. It occurs to him, watching the kid squirm, that he feels like a father.

Casey rolls her eyes. “Ignore him.”

Jeremy nods, relieved at the direction. “We should get together.”

“Sure,” Casey says. “I’ll text you.”

“Great,” Jeremy says. “I’ll let you get back to your . . .” He sees the piles of food and leaves the rest of the sentence unfinished as he backs away slowly. They both watch him until he’s out of range.

“So, that’s him,” Silver says.

Casey looks instantly alarmed. “What? Who?”

“Casey.”

She considers her options. “Not now, Dad, OK?” she says softly. It’s the first time today she’s called him Dad, either because she’s feeling vulnerable or else it’s a calculated attempt to distract him with something shiny. If so, it works.

“You OK there, Silver?” Casey says, looking him over.

“You ask me that a lot,” he says.

“Well, you are dying—on purpose.”

“And you’re pregnant—by accident.”

“A fine pair we make,” she says, thoughtfully licking some whipped cream off her spoon. Then she puts the spoon down with great ceremony and straightens up, becoming deadly serious. “Maybe it happened like this for a reason.”

“Yeah? How’s that?”

“Maybe we’re supposed to save each other.”

He considers his beautiful, complicated daughter. How did he ever consider anything to be worth losing her? “Do you believe in God?” he says.

She smiles, like she’s the parent and he’s the child, and makes a gesture designed to incorporate herself, him, and the world at large. “Who else could throw together such an insane shit show?”

* * *

He used to believe in God. When you grow up in a rabbi’s house, God is part of the package, an amiable resident ghost, floating about in corners, sitting in the empty dinner chair, peering in through your curtains after you get tucked into bed. He would pepper his father with endless questions:
Does God have teeth? Does He eat? Does He sneeze? Does He watch
The A-Team
?
His father never tired of the exercise, was always ready to engage in his juvenile theology.

Is He here right now?

Yes.

Where?

Everywhere.

He’s in my hand?

Yes. And you’re in His.

Silver would hold up his fist, wide-eyed at the notion that the same God who created the world and split the Red Sea could be holed up in his grubby little hand. Then he would open it quickly, like releasing a captured fly.

Does God know everything we think?

Yes.

Does He get angry when we’re bad?

He understands humans, because He made them. He knows we’re not perfect.

Why didn’t He make us perfect?

Because then we’d never try.

Even to his seven-year-old brain, this had the ring of religious propaganda. Unable to confront the idea that his father might be lying or, worse, deceived, he would quickly move them to safer ground.

Does God have other worlds?

He might. We don’t know of any.

Does God have a god that He prays to? And does that god have a god?

I don’t think so.

Can God die?

No.

And round and round they went.

He would lie in his bed at night and picture God, moving about the house like a breeze, making sure they were all tucked in and safe. He can remember talking to Him from his bed, always in a whisper, always with the faintest trace of self-consciousness, finding God’s features—His smile, His furrowed brow—in the sand-swirl finish of his ceiling. When the radiator knocked, he imagined God straightening out an errant brick. He saw Him less as a deity than as an omnipotent butler/handyman.

As he got older, God’s presence became more intrusive. Silver didn’t want Him listening in on his calls, could imagine God’s chiding expression when his thoughts turned vaguely and then very specifically impure. You would think having God around would have put a crimp in his burgeoning autoerotic sex life, but somehow, even He wasn’t a match for the hormones of a fourteen-year-old boy. You invented this stuff, Silver would remind him on those occasions when he felt himself caught wet-handed.

And then, one day, in his later teens, he looked up at the sand-swirled ceiling and recalled with fond nostalgia how he used to see the face of God up there, and only then did he realize that God was gone, that he’d lost track of Him a few years back. It was like hearing about the death of a great uncle you hadn’t thought about in years. You attempt to mourn, settle for nostalgia, and then move on, willfully ignoring the vague sense of unsettlement that lingers, until it gradually fades into one more thread in the tapestry of loss and regret we all weave as we grow up.