Cool for America Page 4

  Going to the hospital would be the worst bad thing. It would be bright-lit and filled with terrible Christmas decorations and one sad paper menorah. It would be another unhappy installment of the Christopher kids story: the time they spent Christmas in the hospital from bad drugs. It would take its place next to the time Patricia passed out backstage at one of our father’s speeches, the time we missed our aunt’s funeral because we were too stoned to drive, the time Patricia broke the first-floor windows of our father’s girlfriend’s house, which was also the time she found out that our father had a girlfriend. Couldn’t this be the time that Patricia’s immune system saved the day?

  “My throat is swelling,” she said, and she sounded awfully convincing. I raised an Advil up to her lips but she shook her head and closed her eyes, laid her head back against her headrest in defeat. Fine.

  “Didn’t they move the hospital?” I said.

  “It’s a new one,” Tricia said. “It’s off 95 by the West Trenton exit.”

  “Well, I guess it’d be good to know what the new scene is like,” I said. “The more you know, right?”

  I got out and guided her around to the passenger seat. I clanged the driver’s seat back and jammed out of the lot. She started wheezing in a spooky way so I gunned it to eighty on the highway and rolled down my window to let the cold winter air fill the car and drive out the bad spirits. I thought about calling our father but what was he going to say? Go to the hospital. Then he’d show up there and I’d have to deal with him.

  “Okay, Trish?” I said.

  No answer. I looked over and her eyes were closed, but I could hear her rasping.

  I slowed down to follow the signs guiding the way to the hospital and parked in an emergency parking zone, then dragged Patricia out of the car and shuffle-stepped her to the door. Her face looked like a half-deflated basketball and her breaths had gotten shallow.

  The lady at the front desk—mountainous, sleepy—told me to have a seat.

  “Shit’s on the verge here,” I said. “Look at her.”

  “Sir,” she said. “Everything is on the verge of something.”

  The whole gang of waiting-room people was there— a wild-eyed white guy with a mustache and a chest wound, a half-asleep black man who seemed to be wearing a floral bedsheet, an Asian woman exhaustedly clutching a comatose child. I declined feeling like a part of the cosmic web that contained them. If they were anything like me, they had brought this on themselves. But I was wrong about the Christmas decorations: there weren’t any. Tricia took slow, labored breaths until a nurse came and put her in a wheelchair.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said.

  She wheezed something that sounded like “blood traffic.”

  I sat there and looked at pictures of Melanie on my phone—Melanie holding a pumpkin, Melanie next to a stranger’s miniature husky—until I’d scrolled back to the beginning of our relationship, represented by the dim interior shots of my apartment in Durham before I rented it. Then I turned my phone off, in case my mother woke up and tried to call me.

  * * *

  “Christopher?” the nurse said, an hour later. “Brother? Would you come back with me, please?”

  I followed her through the swinging doors. Patricia was in a bed with railings, hooked up to an IV, eyes closed. A gawky young guy in a white coat was standing next to the bed. A doctor, I guess.

  “So, Steven?” he said. “Your sister’s had a serious allergic reaction, probably to something in the cocaine she was using.”

  “Right,” I said. “How is she?”

  “She’s stable,” the doctor said. “We’ll see how things look in the morning.”

  “Can’t we go sooner?” I said. “Like, now? It’s Christmas.”

  “Are you a drug user, Steven?” the doctor said.

  “On occasion. Recreationally, I mean.”

  “Well, you might want to think about that. If your sister hadn’t come to see us, she could have ended up in a very bad place.”

  “Dead?”

  “Let’s just say it wouldn’t have been good.”

  “No, seriously,” I said. “I’d like to know the full fucking extent of my negligence.”

  The doctor kept a patient smirk on his face.

  “Sure, she could have died,” the doctor said. “Lucky for her she has such a responsible brother.”

  Well, that triggered my despair, which I have a real problem with.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, to Patricia who couldn’t hear me, and to the doctor, who didn’t care. I thought of our mother, asleep at home, soon to be confronted with this. She’d try, with good reason, to get Patricia to quit her show and go back into treatment, which she wouldn’t do. I sat in the padded chair next to her bed and watched her breathe, each breath like an accusation. I fell asleep sitting there.

  At seven she woke up.

  “Oh fuck,” she said.

  “How do you feel?” I said.

  “Terrible. I feel terrible.”

  “God, I’m so glad you’re all right.”

  “Well, I’m a junkie,” she said. “Have you talked to Mom?”

  “I thought that could be your job,” I said.

  “Jesus, she’s probably out of her mind. Give me my bag.”

  She pulled her phone out and dialed.

  “Hi, Mom? I’m okay. Yes, I’m okay, I promise…”

  I walked to the waiting room and chugged a Diet Coke from the vending machine. Christmas morning.

  My mother arrived a half hour later. She had dark circles under her eyes and she was wearing a bright red sweater with an enormous green bow on the front, a joke Christmas present from last year that had apparently been appropriated into unironic holiday wear. The doctors told us they wanted Tricia to stay in the hospital for a few more hours. I got my mother some coffee from a machine and sat down next to her.

  “Do you ever think about how I’m going to feel when you finally kill yourselves?” she said.

  “It was just bad luck,” I said. “This is the last time for this. We’re done now.”

  “Why do you even come home?” she said.

  “For you?” I said.

  “Well, thanks, Steven. Really.”

  “I’ll be gone soon enough,” I said. I was trying for ominous but I didn’t make it past petulant.

  At noon I told my mother I was going home and instead drove into town blasting Wu-Tang’s 36 Chambers with my windows down, drawing glances of pitying forbearance from the strolling families of Princeton. I did this until the album started over for the third time, at which point my hands were so numb that it was a struggle just to turn the music off. I pulled into the empty parking lot by the bad sushi place.

  There were so many choices: I could ask my father for money, drive west, change my life. Stick to weed. Send cards on birthdays and holidays. Learn to love myself and, eventually, someone nice and low-pressure. Raise chickens. Forgo procreation. Show up secretly to the premiere of Tricia’s first Broadway show and sit in the back, waiting until after the standing ovation to reveal myself. Be forgiven.

  * * *

  An hour later I sat in the living room with Patricia and my mother, unwrapping presents. I gave my mother the shell I’d found in the house.

  “I remember this trip,” my mother said. “This is a weird present, Steven.”

  “Patricia and I can’t remember it,” I said. “We wanted you to remind us.”

  I tried to catch my sister’s eye but she was looking at her lap.

  “You didn’t go,” my mother said. “Your father and I went for our anniversary. It was nice. Pretty sunsets. You know, a Caribbean island.”

  Well, it was better to have never been there, maybe, than to have forgotten it.

  Patricia handed my mother her next present and she unwrapped it.

  “A rock,” she said. “How thoughtful.”

  An hour later, I knocked on the door of what used to be Tricia’s bedroom. She was sitting on her bed, cross-legged, reading a Jerry Lee Lewis biography.

  “I’m heading out,” I said. “Gonna stay with Sam in D.C. for a while.”

  “Now, there’s a good influence,” she said.

  “Is there somewhere you’d rather I fuck off to and die?”

  She went back to looking at her book.

  “You’re not going to die.”

  Tricia’s walls had once been covered in ugly magazine ads, drunken Polaroids, Clash posters. Not even the ceiling had been spared her chaos. My mother had turned it into a guest room years ago, so now bland flower prints were our only witnesses.

  “I guess we’ll see,” I said.

  She put the book facedown on the bed and hugged her legs to her chest.

  “Don’t die, though,” she said. “Really.”

  * * *

  And I didn’t. After getting kicked out of Sam’s house, I sublet a dirty furnished apartment across the street from the University for the Deaf. I got a nearly full-time job working on a janky local-politics show, splicing together sound bites from city council members into unconvincing denials of corruption. Funny: it made me feel better about my life, and gave me less time to drink. I even handled a few objectively harrowing OkCupid dates without spiraling into the void.

  One night, while I was having some whiskey—out of a glass, okay, with ice—and watching an incomprehensible late-night talk show, there was a knock on my door. I knew it was Patricia before I opened it. She was skeletal and green, her eyes unfocused and deep in her skull. She wore a huge camping backpack that hulked around the edges of her torso.

  “Okay, I’m here,” she said.

  “What happened?” I said.

  She stepped into the apartment. Her eyes lingered on the ratty plaid-upholstered armchairs and the wood-p
aneled entertainment system.

  “This place is pretty sweet,” she said.

  “There’s a little bit of a mold thing,” I said modestly.

  I gave her a hug, felt how frail her limbs and shoulders were.

  “I know I look like shit,” she said. “But it’s because I’m actually not drinking now and my body’s, like, really not reacting well to that.”

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  “About which part?”

  “Any of it,” I said. “You look like you should be in a fucking hospital.”

  “Can I put my bag down?” she said.

  “What am I going to do, kick you out?” I said it like I was furious with her, though I wasn’t. I was trying to wake her up, maybe, or keep myself from falling back into the old dream. She sloughed off her bag and sat down gently in one of the chairs, crossing her legs like she was waiting to be served tea. She stared at the sweating glass of whiskey on the coffee table.

  “I’m working on a lot of things,” she said. “I think, maybe, we need to exercise some collective willpower.”

  “What’s going on with your show?” I said. “What are you doing with yourself?”

  “Everything,” she said evenly. “Is on. Hold.”

  She was still fixated on the whiskey. I carried it into the bathroom, drank down half of it, and poured the rest in the sink. The ice bunched around the drain and I knew, obviously, that it was just a symbolic gesture. But so was a peace treaty, right? So was a funeral.

  I set the empty glass on the coffee table and sat down in the wooden chair across from my sister.

  “How about something to eat?” I said.

  She rolled her eyes, a slow, glitchy process, and shuddered.

  “Give me a second,” she said.

  I leaned back in my chair. There was no rush. I mean, it wasn’t like I had any food.

  Childhood, Boyhood, Youth

  They had finished reading War and Peace, and now they were celebrating their triumph at a Russian supper club in Brighton Beach. There were twelve of them seated at the long table (“Just like what’s-his-name, minus what’s-his-name,” Kyla said brightly), and, well, Derek assumed that at least half of them had probably finished War and Peace. Or, fine: he imagined it was safe to say that, on the whole, the table had at least started reading War and Peace.

  Derek had made it to within a hundred pages of the end, though he had admittedly skimmed a little down the stretch. He knew that Pierre and Natasha got together, which had begun to seem structurally inevitable at some point—in approximately ten thousand pages there were only about five characters—though it was somewhat psychologically improbable. He also wasn’t totally clear on what a samovar was.

  He’d been proven wrong in his interpretations of the text at every turn over the eight months they’d spent reading and discussing the book, his theories and analyses shot down by better, or at least more confidently, educated members of the group. Some of them had gone to Yale and others to Harvard, and he’d developed a handy cheat to remember which was which. The Harvard kids acted mildly embarrassed when he said something dumb, sometimes even waiting until after the session to correct him on his political or geographical ignorance. The ones from Yale made sure to keep the humiliation public and, if possible, prolonged.

  In one of their first meetings, Derek had suggested that Tolstoy showed a grudging respect for Napoleon, or was at least willing to acknowledge his world-historic importance, even though he was the enemy.

  “That’s completely the opposite of true,” a tall, dark-haired man named Jonathan said. “Tolstoy despised Napoleon, and thought the whole idea of historical significance was nonsense. Do you have any examples?”

  Derek had glanced around the room for support, but even Thomas, his roommate, whom he had invited specifically to back him up in moments like this, only stared down at the massive open book in his lap.

  “Just … in the prose itself, I guess,” Derek said. “The prose about Napoleon just feels like it has an air of respect to it.”

  “Well, does his prose ever seem disrespectful to you?” Jonathan said, peering down his nose through invisible reading glasses.

  “To be fair, it is translated,” Violet said. “I don’t imagine any of us can really comment on the prose style very accurately.”

  They all, consciously or not, transferred their gazes toward Pyotr, who had moved to the States when he was seven and was ostentatiously reading the book in his Russian parents’ Soviet-era multivolume set.

  “Sorry friends, my literary analysis isn’t strong enough in either language to gauge, ah, respectfulness,” he said amiably. “Plus, I didn’t even know Napoleon was in this section. I was too busy the last couple of weeks to keep up.”

  Pyotr was in law school at Columbia, a sudden turn he’d taken after two years of working on a comp lit Ph.D. in which he’d planned to focus on Italo Svevo and Joseph Roth. Derek assumed that Pyotr must have been extremely intelligent, given these pursuits, but at that point he had yet to contribute anything to the reading group other than encouraging nods and smiles. Now, after what felt like nearly a lifetime later, Pyotr sat kitty-corner from Derek at the supper club, bantering with their bald, sinister waiter in, presumably, Russian. Pyotr had attended maybe half of the group’s sessions, and Derek guessed that he might have read the least amount of War and Peace of anyone, with the likely exception of Leslie, who argued fiercely and cheerfully about the book month after month despite clearly having only the most glancing familiarity with its contents. She had apparently read enough to draw a faint mustache on her upper lip upon arrival at the restaurant, in honor, she said, of the Little Princess.

  Derek mostly admired her impudence, though sometimes he wished she would admit analytical defeat a little bit sooner in the group’s exchanges so that they could all move on to something more, well, reality-based. Vivek, clearly at least half in love with Leslie (most clearly when his partner Nell was not in attendance), indulged even her most scattershot theories—maybe Prince Andrei was gay—with what seemed to be the moral authority bestowed on him by the group. He’d had a local organizational role of some import, apparently, in the Obama campaign, and, though now only in his second year of medical school, he’d apparently contributed not insignificantly, in his telling at least, to “strategy and messaging” around the Affordable Care Act. Which, given what a clusterfuck that was, shouldn’t necessarily have accrued such favor to him, Derek thought. Like a jerk.

  The reading group (not book club) had begun meeting in January, two months after the midterm elections that had, as they could not yet know, swept the Democrats out of congressional power for the next almost-decade, and Vivek was treated with the mild deference of someone who had recently suffered the death of a somewhat important relative, a great-uncle, maybe, or adult cousin. There were no Republicans among them, of course, but there was some range in the degree to which politics was central to their lives, running the gamut from the socialists associate-editing a newish journal of “literature and ideas” to Thomas, who voted for Democrats, presumably, if he voted, but also went to church, exercised regularly, and worked for an international bank. Derek had felt in himself a recent, emerging desire for political commitment (like Larkin in the abandoned church, but for economic justice?), though he hadn’t acted on it. He didn’t enjoy going to protests, and he didn’t want to be in one of the Marxist reading groups whose membership overlapped significantly with this one. Maybe he would ask Vivek if there was anything he could do for 2012, though he feared that would prove less than life-changing. Hope had pulled off the big win once; what could the next election be but a crowd-pleasing but redundant sequel?

  Violet, who had invited him into the group in the first place, was directly across the table from him. She had been, until quite recently, a fellow assistant of his at the august, maybe dying small magazine where he still worked. Now she had a job as a web editor at a more prestigious, definitely not dying, publication, and Derek saw her mostly at parties or at book club (reading group), though she did text him sometimes, often five or six messages in a row, to complain about some obstinate writer who wouldn’t take edits or, more pointedly, at least in Derek’s mind, about the ridiculousness of the date she’d been on the night before. Sometimes—good days, as he thought of them, with some embarrassment—this would lead to hours of nearly unbroken texting between them, during which Derek’s work, to put it lightly, suffered. He’d carry out his tasks in a haze of composition, mentally rearranging the punctuation in his responses until they had achieved a perfect balance of intelligence and spontaneity. He could hardly remember what they’d been discussing even minutes after the flurries ended—the editor who’d gotten fired over an ill-judged headline, the Arab Spring, the inadequacy of birth-control options—but the exchanges left him humming with pleasure and immediately starving for more. Most times, the conversation would go cold after one or two volleys, with Derek feeling phantom buzzes against his hip, checking his phone every few minutes for the rest of the day hoping she might have decided, after a few hours of serious contemplation, to reply to, “Ha, crazy! What do you think he meant???”