Stay Awake (23 page)

She does not answer. She just looks off to the side, peers around over Deagle’s shoulder, and he is aware that if there were someone behind him in line, they would have been beckoned forward, he would have simply lost his place.

But there is no one else in line, and so they stand there for a moment. Impasse! Who will be the first to blink?

“I guess,” says Deagle, finally, “I’ll just have a pack of Marlboro Lights. That’s what I used to smoke when I was human.”

The girl doesn’t respond to this, either. She merely turns and lifts a pack of cigarettes from the rack behind her. She sets the pack upon the counter and recites a mind-boggling price.

“For one pack?!” exclaims Deagle.

“Yes,” the girl says.

“I’m outraged,” says Deagle.

“Do you want the cigarettes or not?” the girl asks.

“Yes,” Deagle says. “Yes, I do.”

He should have bought an umbrella in the drugstore, he realizes when he gets outside, for now the rain is coming down more determinedly. But he doesn’t want to give any more of his money to the unfriendly drugstore and their sour employees.

He undoes the cellophane wrapper on the cigarettes and then has a terrible realization. No lighter. No matches.

“Aargh!” he cries aloud, and his anguished cry echoes against the sides of the buildings, the sound bouncing back and forth and shrinking at last to a whisper imperceptible to human ears.

Down the block the road dips downward from the Heathman Hotel toward some neon signs that are very likely to be bars.

A good place to find matches.

And so Deagle begins a kind of lumbering run in this direction, down the hill, very undignified, his large shiny black oxford shoes slapping through puddles on the sidewalk, his heart quickening. How many years since he actually
ran
—now there’s a question. By the time he gets to the door of the bar, his glasses have steamed up from heavy breathing.

Inside it’s surprisingly empty, but does the bartender turn to look at Deagle with an expression of welcome, a cheerful countenance? Shockingly, no. The bartender turns to Deagle with a face as blank as a thumb.

“Beautiful weather you people are having,” Deagle says. He tries to smile, though he is sopping wet.

“Yeah,” the bartender says. He observes as Deagle approaches a barstool, as Deagle struggles heavily onto the perch. Out of breath. God, he’s so overweight, it’s very unfair.

“Is this a way to treat visitors to your city?” Deagle complains. “Torrential rain?”

“Sorry,” the bartender says. “I actually don’t make the weather.” He regards Deagle with his neckless, thumblike head, a balding young man perhaps thirty years of age.

“Well,” Deagle says, “how about a free drink, then?” He is
trying to get a comic sort of banter started with this person, though already he sees it is likely to be pointless. “I’m a dying man. I don’t have long to live.”

“That’s too bad,” the bartender says. “But, um—we don’t serve free drinks.”

“Of course you don’t,” Deagle says. He takes out his wallet and puts a damp twenty on the surface of the bar. “How about a local beer,” he says. “And maybe a glass of Scotch on the side.”

He glances around. Besides himself are perhaps five other patrons. All men. He imagines briefly the possibility of a lady, a kindly, haggardly woman with a drinking problem sitting there smoking and hoping for a guy to come by and purchase a beverage for her, but there is no such person.

My God, he is lonely! Even a woman with a harelip or other deformity would be suitable. Anyone with an ounce of kindness, an ounce of compassion, such is all he asks. Is that so much?

He sits there humbly upon the barstool and watches the hand of the bartender deliver a drink before him. He raises it to his mouth. Closes his eyes. Swallows.

Cheers
.

“A shot,” Deagle says. “Bartender? May I have a shot of tequila, please?”

He lifts his head and some time has passed and the bartender has distributed a few more shots. For a time Deagle was moodily engaged in some memories. His frugal childhood in rural Minnesota, his growth as an intelligent and ambitious high school student, triumphant college years, top 25 percent of his class at law school, his wedding and the birth of his two beautiful children,
his career sort of taking off and advancing at an acceptable pace.

All of this fairly much ruined and rendered meaningless, now.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché 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 accumulated—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 constitutional. 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 class 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 assignment 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 God, 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 assertively. A brief brain orgasm, 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 glass 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.