All Flavors of Fine
Gabriel Welsch
It’s not clear when they started—Andy was watching television, an old movie, something with John Cusack. There are three of them, and they have broken the front window of the fleet car. Papers feather over the pavement around the car, skittering to rest against the tires of cars parked nearby. The thieves are each very skinny and wearing tight jeans and baggy jackets. One might be a woman. Flash of silver thumb drives, and a half-empty plastic vodka bottle bounces and sloshes to a slow-spinning stop. They tear open his garment bag—he hadn’t bothered to bring that in yet.
They chuck one thing, then another. They have discovered nothing worth their effort, and the pamphlets with inspirational stories of scholarship students Andy thinks might just piss them off all the more. A handful of bad old motivational CDs—nothing fit to pirate. They find his suits are cheap. Now, they are wet—lying at the back of the car in a puddle. The big one, with a club, moves toward another car.
Andy calls Gil. “Just letting you know—my car was broken into tonight. They didn’t get anything sensitive, but they trashed some things, did a job on the car. It might be a while before I hit Chicago. Don’t know how long it will take to get a rental, get the report done. Cops are on their way.” After a moment, he adds, “And let Carl know I’m okay. I’ll call him when I can.”
Room phone to front desk. As he hears the ring tone, the big one’s arm arcs back, and the long rod in his hands comes down and through a passenger window—this time to a car with an alarm. As that screeching sound blossoms into lights coming on through the building, he watches the thieves run through the hedge, the car he’d driven from Pittsburgh gutted, dark and silent, promo crap now at rest around it, his suits a gash on the ground. When the front desk answers, the woman’s voice is a rush of I know, we have called the police, someone is on the way before the line is dead.
He takes the stairs. While he wants to look at the car, he doesn’t know if the people have really left or if they are nearby, waiting for somebody actually carrying cash or a decent watch to come out, like him, and do something stupid. So he has fits and starts, energy and then not, all the initiative of a metronome.
The car is in rough shape, the driver side door pushed back so roughly it is bent in the hinge. The passenger window sparkles all over the seat, the floor, the ground. His portfolio, faux leather embossed with his name in modest capitals at one corner, above the university’s seal, is on the back seat, right where he’d left it, untouched. They knew nothing important would be in there.
He hears a humming, then realizes it is vibrating, below him. He bends, slides to kneel, and sees the blue wash of light under the driver’s seat. Though it’s not his phone, he answers.
“Hang up and throw the phone over the bushes.”
“What?”
“Do it. Behind you.” The man growls the word behind.
Andy looks back to the hedge, over the roof of the car. The voice not speaking, as though the phone is holding its breath.
“Do you want to get hurt?”
He holds the phone away from his head, his arm relaxing, maybe into a throw, maybe not. Red light everywhere, sodium lights and winter light, snowless Michigan winter red. Big red HAMPTON INN behind him. Behind it, Quality, Super 8, a vast Kroger. Horizon is red. Only over the hedge, only where the threat is (he realizes, where the guy has to be), is it dark.
He stops the call. Three steps toward the hedge, then five, the phone starts to buzz. More steps and he is at the hedge, the green plasticky soft. He sees a slope of grass, hears water. If he throws well, he might make the stream. But for what? To get back at some guy who broke into a car not his own to break stuff that didn’t matter to delay him in doing a job he hated? Maybe he should throw a medal over the hedge. Some Medal of Valor for Doing Me A Favor.
As he cocks his arm to throw, he hears the last rush of a body cracking through the hedge, before pain and then nothing.
~ ~ ~
When he got into fundraising, Andy’s first boss told him to have a good emergency number on him all the time, somewhere it would be found. A wrist bracelet, like his mother wears around her condo. Or a dog tag, like he wore for a few short months before the Army told him, in essence, that’s okay. You can go now. A tattoo, assuming your emergency contact is real solid. Not in your wallet.
Andy wrote his number on the tags of clothes, inside the heels of shoes, inside his belt, each time with a black Sharpie, the same number, his sister, a woman he’s fairly certain—but not tattoo certain—will never leave the home where they grew up, the home she took over when their father died and their mother decided her lifelong dream to reside by the ocean should become a condo in New Jersey. Now their mother wears flowing beach clothes, worries about hurricanes, drinks cocktails—all things that if his father were some cartoonish angel bent at the waist on a cloud, looking down, would wear a thought bubble of perpetual What the . . . ?
He is on a bed in a hospital, behind a curtain, where he was rolled after a groggy awakening in an ambulance that seemed, by his inexperienced estimation, to be driving too slowly, given it held a moments-before unconscious man. Now, looking at a fluorescent light square, he is aware of a bandage containing the throb in his forehead.
He had been beaten up before, many times, as a kid, when people are mostly cartilage and adrenaline. Hurt for a day, he got over it. But this—this hurt soul-deep. This felt like it informed his marrow of the likelihood of doom. This was proof a man with no friends, no connections, no real life can die brutally in an anonymous way.
The curtain curls back to a man wearing a stethoscope and scrubs. He looks hung over and too young to be anything other than a prankster.
“You’re a pretty methodical guy,” the doctor says.
Andy groans.
“The number everywhere? In the shoes? Helpful,” the doctor continues. “We got hold of your sister.”
“Thank you,” he says. “For that. What did she say?”
“I wasn’t the one who spoke with her,” the doctor says. “But I hear she’s on her way. She can take you home.”
The doctor had no idea what he was talking about.
“What do I do til she gets here?”
“Just sit tight—how long will it be?”
He closed his eyes. “She lives in Pennsylvania. It’ll be a good eight hours.”
The doctor says nothing, and when Andy opens his eyes, he sees the doctor’s face hissing peeved. He waves over a nurse, whom he asks, in a soft voice, though probably meant for Andy to hear: Wasn’t there anybody closer?
Andy’s sister reminds him of his age when he sees her. With her smart and well-fitting clothes, a haircut recommended from the pages of Real Simple, with her knock-off trendy bag full of useful items, she looks like somebody’s mom, basically with it, but in a tired, relaxed form. And because Celia is not the twenty-year-old in his head, is instead a woman who has found comfort in the world, he is maybe older, but far less together, a shell from which all promise of a pearl has fled.
They walk out automatic doors into bright sunlight and cold. She has a Ford Explorer now, with leather seats and a woman’s voice on a computer telling you to buckle your seatbelt and announcing the temperature. When he says they should go to the hotel Celia says they don’t need to.
“I had all your stuff sent to your home,” she says. “I figured you wouldn’t want to go there.” She looks at him with great seriousness. “It could be traumatic.”
His head throbbed. “There’s nothing traumatic there. I suffered no trauma. I looked behind some bushes, and then was whacked out cold. No struggle. I wasn’t even aware enough for a surprise.” He thought about his shoes, comfortable pants, his shower bag, the medicines. The Vivarin.
“When did you speak with them? Maybe it’s not in the mail yet,” he said.
“I don’t think it would be a good idea.”
“At least give me your phone. I can see if they’ve mailed the stuff,” he says. “If it’d make you happy, I can sit in a McDonalds while you drive there, so I can preserve the remaining bits of my fragile and shattered psyche.”
She reaches into her giant bag, her pursed face emoting there’s no need for ridicule this morning, bucko.
The hotel still has his things. They must have cleaned up the room. They took care of the empty vodka bottle, gathered magazines, squared their ends, placed them atop his clothes. They made fun of his clothes. Sure they did. They mocked how he had folded the McDonald’s bag into a tidy square, smoothing wrinkles while watching The Daily Show half buzzo. Bag folded like his clothes. A big bag of get a life.
When they hand him the bag, they hand him his phone separately. It has been silenced, he notes, doubtless because it’s been ringing. The receptionist says, “We comped the room, and you now have something like a million points on there. I mean, I’m sure it’s not, but it’s a lot.” Then silence. Then, “Well, I hope everything’s okay.”
He checks his messages in the parking lot while Celia sits in the car, studiously not watching him. She keeps her sunglasses on, though it is cloudy, and rests one hand on the steering wheel, one finger flicking at her thumb nail, resplendent as Stressed-Out Sister Feigning Repose.
Gil is first unctuous concern. Gil is very much we’re all here for you, personifies you just take it easy, embraces take your time. Later, he veils himself behind, it’ll be here waiting for you. Even later, questions, things Andy ONLY surely would know, just some follow up.
Celia starts the car as he listens to the last message, his mother. He wonders, after so many calls, what people think happens in hospitals? Why so many calls? His head pounds. “We need to find coffee,” he says.
Celia pokes at the radio. Newscasters, commercials, chatty DJs. Andy massages his temples.
“Does being with me really require a soundtrack?” he says.
Stop and go traffic, stoplights, diesel from the trucks that box them in every few minutes. In a McDonald’s parking lot, as he stirs four Splendas into a large coffee, Celia asks, “Where are we going?”
“I’d like to get home.”
“Right. How? Do I need to drive you to an airport? A train station? Another hotel for a day? Are you going to be okay? You haven’t really given me a sense.”
“Can you drive me home?”
Her mouth opens once, closes. “Your home is in State College.”
Here we go. “Yes, and I don’t have a reliable car. I am injured. With no car. There was a mugging? Last night? Me? Headwound? Fragile and traumatized?”
She looks at her watch. Right, he thinks, because it’s a matter of minutes and hours. You live in Scranton. I’m on the way. You live east, I am in the center of Pennsylvania. “You have to drive right by there. I just figured I’d ride with you.”
“I guess—”
“I need you right now, C. I mean, is that okay?”
“What do you mean? Of course it’s okay,” she says, pushing a smile. “I just figured I’d put you on a plane or something. But sure, hey, we can have a road trip.” She relishes it like chewing fruit Rolaids. Fake citrus chalky wonder.
“You don’t need to be full of shit about it,” he says. “I just need the ride.”
She inhales like she will sigh, and then holds it. “Let’s get started then.”
As she puts an arm on the back of his seat and backs out, she says, “Do you have to make any stops? Any business to attend to, anything you need to get done here?”
“There is nothing I am able to do or want to do right now,” he says. “I’ll have my assistant reschedule with people.”
“When’d you get an assistant?”
“I’ve had one for years,” he says. “I guess you’ve never met Carl. You’d remember. Earnest as hell, uglier than sin. Good guy.”
After a minute he adds, “Carl knows I have a sister. Just saying.”
~ ~ ~
Kentucky Fried Chicken, western Pennsylvania, just over the border past Youngstown. Parking lot a reek of breading, dusty snow whipping around as the temperature drops, his hand cold from holding the phone outside. The wind chills the fingers and he imagines blood pooling in his bent elbow.
“I’m going home,” he tells Gil’s voice mail, “and I don’t think I’ll be back this week. The painkillers make it difficult to function.” He continues with the convincing details necessary. “I can’t really even talk about it. You understand. Appointments—” he sees Celia come out from the restroom—“they’ll be, uh, taken care of. I’ll call soon.”
“Have you called Mom yet?” Celia asks once they are back on the road.
“Yeah. That was who I called in the parking lot.” He feels her look over at him. “Among other people.”
Celia Mode—even their mother joked about it. If there is a void of action, she will insist on the corrective. She will supply it or simply will it into being through orders issued like Zeus fully sprung from a Titan. She will influence and cajole, without anything resembling subtlety. He knows she’s pissed and exasperated. She knows there’s just enough chance he could be seriously injured or seriously scarred, despite his protestations to the contrary, and that being herself could very well make things worse. She tries soften it, which comes off much like whacking someone with a two-by-four delicately wrapped with tissue paper.
She buys him cheese curds and another coffee, and while she protests a little, she does it anyway. He eats quickly, stomach groaning. Much as he doesn’t want to, he thinks about work. Thinks about the condition of his desk, how he left it. He knows there are three folders near the lamp—red, yellow, green—to reflect prospects and their status: Wait, Push, Ask. He has a paper calendar, blotter style, appointments and tallies in pencil all through, the only real mark of character on the desk, a holdover from his lo-tech training. No pictures, no games, no little zen gardens with small rakes and sand getting everywhere, no coasters from taprooms. No cup full of pencils. Because his slim middle desk drawer, above his lap, is not crammed with napkins and takeout menus and other useless flotsam, he actually keeps pencils and pens there.
In the weeks to come, he knows people will come into his office, at his direction or at Gil’s, and dig into those files, seek ways to pick up slack and fill the voids he knows he will create. He doesn’t yet know how. He says to Celia, slowly, sounding out the words as he says them, “I am not sure if I will return to work.”
Near Dubois, more than an hour from home, she asks him what he will do. He muses on alternatives--sell firewood, teach Lamazze, learn a dead language, write about tae kwon do for specialty magazines, invent a cough remedy that works, count the hairs on my head--and ends up not saying anything, a fact he doesn’t realize until another exit passes and she asks him again. His eyes sting and he rubs at them with the heel of his hand. As kids, he would talk to her, always. And she would listen.
They drop into Happy Valley at sunset, shadows heavier and more dense on the rolling ridges, where the trees have lost almost all of their leaves. The lights from the retail strip and the stadium make the sky red. College kids zip past Celia’s Ford as she clings to the speed limit, and he recalls that his radar detector was gone from the dash of the fleet car, one thing of value he did lose.
Cold hits him when he wonders if anything gave away where he lived. He imagines climbing the stairs, finding the apartment door hanging half-splintered on bent hinges, or worse, men waiting inside to beat him unconscious again.
“Celia,” he says, “is there any chance—” but when she turns to look at him, he can see her thinking about a home still hours away, about children doing homework or annoying their father or whatever else it is children do with the onset of evening, thinking about people in her full and overstuffed life, and he wants her to go there so he will not have to look at her wanting to be away from him.
~ ~ ~
He receives cards. Two from the university: co-workers affixed their signatures to a card with blowing grasses and script on the front, urging him to get well. He can imagine the red folder that routed it through the office, a card like dozens he has signed himself. Central development sent another festival of signatures. Three others are from long-term donors for whom he alone has been their connection to their alma mater. The messages are short and professionally sweet. He wonders what story is being told.
For three days, he slouches on his couch, watches TV, moves only for the bathroom or to attack his dwindling reserves of food. Once he has eaten three consecutive meals of instant oatmeal, he decides he should go out. He stops at Wal Mart for a few bags of food and a pack of Vivarin. The cashier grins so hard he worries her dentures will pop out. As he mopes through the Men’s Wearhouse, worrying about having to buy new clothes, a young man he is sure is named Ashley or Trevor or Chad asks him if he needs help before chirping the usual nice day. Andy signatures his way through a forest of legalities so many times his own name becomes illegible to him, his hand a meaty stamp at the end of his bureaucratic corpus.
At the state store, he leaves the car running. The yellow light gives him a headache almost immediately. He passes his usual brand—Vladimir, plastic bottle, vaguely Russian peasant in a large fur hat on the front—and reaches for Absolut. He looks at Grey Goose, at Ketel One, at the prices. Thinks, I might not even have a job next week, the way this is going. He grabs another bottle. They weigh a ton, feel good in his grip, feel like the most substantial things he has held in weeks.
Celia is somewhere preparing a dinner she read about in a magazine, with ingredients she probably bought at Whole Foods. His mother is pretending to be a beach goddess having cocktails with other people lying about their past. His coworkers—he knows it’s just after five, if only from the way the liquor store is filling with men in overcoats and women in heels—are making a profession out of the illusion of care. Somewhere a carjacker is googling his address and no one in his life has any idea he is about to die a horrible death by beating.
He tucks both bottles under an arm where they clunk against each other. Reaching for the third, he has to go up on his toes, and he sways into the shelf. One of the bottles slips from his grip. It does not shatter so much as pop. He feels the wet, feels the floor slick beneath him. A hush in the store.
“Mr. Lang?”
Of course. This is where I am recognized buying a half a case of vodka while on mental trauma leave. He straightens and turns toward the voice, just as it says, again, “Mr. Lang—are you okay?”
It is Carl—aggressive acne, unlikely stoner eyes, ridiculously strict part in his hair. He is a short-sleeve Oxford and cuffed khakis cinched in with a belt no doubt missing a loop. But his voice—it’s authority, it’s credibility. It’s the voice that secures Andy lunches and dinners with doctors, lawyers, inventors, and titans of industry, the voice of success—as long as he never enters a room.
“Are you okay?”
Andy glances at the pool of vodka, the glass, his wet pants. Muttering has returned to the store. A guy in a tie clipped in a gold bar pushes a mop bucket toward him.
“I’m fine,” Andy says. “Just a mishap.”
“You look like hell, sir.” Carl blinks, as surprised as Andy is. “I’m sorry—but you do. Is anybody . . . looking in on you?”
Andy looks at Carl as if suddenly realizing the man has a life.
“No, Carl. No one is looking in on me. Not sure if ‘looking in’ is a necessity in this situation.”
He sees Carl catch himself glancing toward the vodka and back at his boss.
“Things are fine, Carl.”
Carl looks like he wants to shake his head.
Andy places his bottles back on the shelves. They clatter as his arms and hands shake.
“Things are fine, Carl. They are all flavors of fine,” he says before leaving.
~ ~ ~
“I am not sure why you called,” Celia says. He can see her holding her head now, half an hour into an aimless conversation with her suddenly-a-pain-in-the-ass brother. Andy wants to scream and cry, but not necessarily at her.
“Just tell me something good,” he says.
She sings, “Tell me that you liked it!”
She stays silent, as does he. “I don’t—that was my attempt at humor,” she says.
“I said something good,” he says. “I did not say try to be fucking hilarious.”
He hangs up.
~ ~ ~
Another call, dark apartment, endless episodes of Family Guy.
“Why didn’t you want to drive me home?”
“Andy—what time is it?”
He slurs, “Remember the hospital—you so did not want to drive me. Back. You know.”
Long sigh. She must be in bed. What time is it? That’s an excellent question. “Can you try to keep your calls to daylight?”
“Sure, sis. I’ll do that. I’ll be sure to ask future attackers to make sure shit happens when it’s convenient for you. Just give me your fucking schedule.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake—goodbye.”
~ ~ ~
A morning call: “Look—I know I’ve been difficult. It’s just—”
After a moment, she said, “What?” Voice softer, almost tender. “Go ahead—say what you need to say.”
“It’s just—this is really difficult. Hard. And I—well.”
“What?”
“I think you’re being impatient.”
“What?” The shrapnel is back in her voice. “Here I thought you were going to maybe apologize for the bullshit calls in the middle of the night, or . . . or . . . the guilt trips, or maybe just acknowledge that I might be with you on this. But you are calling to criticize me? After all of this?”
“You know what? Fuck you. This is what I’m talking about.”
Cell phones are lame. He thinks of all the times on TV when he’s seen someone slam the phone hard, several times, before smashing it. Not the same, Apple. He throws the phone at the wall and the protective case pops off. Not as dramatic, he thinks.
~ ~ ~
How many times can he apologize to the bright voice she has used for strangers, for the unknown, the greeting she recorded to be just enough of herself for everybody?
If he could play back the messages, it’d be a quick drinking game: sip every time you hear sorry. Two sips every time you say come on. Chug when you hear I was an ass. If she ever answers, make someone else drink. Call Carl and tell him to chug.
She says hello one day. Then stutters. She forgot to screen. He hears in her voice that she crosses her arms.
“I have no one else,” he says.
“Really?” she says. “No friends? No one else? No coworkers? Really? I hope that’s not true, because I hope someone else is taking the shit you give me when you call me for help.”
He starts to cry.
“Seriously?” Then, after a while, “Are you even still on the line?”
Then, “Get some help, Andy.”
~ ~ ~
He never answers his door on the first knock—a habit he picked up traveling, after reading that drunk people run through hotels and rob people who answer their doors. But the knocks come again, and a woman says “delivery.”
Her face tells him how bad he must smell. She hands him a mug of flowers with what looks like an over-caffeinated bear clinging to the handle. He mutters what the fuck and the woman walks briskly, perhaps jogs, away. The tag says, Give me a call, bro! Celia.
He is not, nor would he ever be, a bro.
Perhaps a day later he finishes the last of his peanut butter, scraping each last smear out of the can with a butter knife. Pickles and olives are gone. Tuna is gone. He mixed ketchup and parmesan cheese into a paste and tried to eat it, vomited, and threw it away. The TV emanates heat—he doesn’t think he has shut it off for over a week. His phone is dead. It has actually collected dust sitting on the table.
The attackers he sometimes thinks about. They sit in Burger King sipping coffee. They listen to the motivational recordings before breaking windows. They consider pledge forms and charitable gift annuities and offer useful giving tools to those they attack. And when they are hauling ass in another stolen rental car, they avoid police cars because they wear his radar detector as a lapel pin on his suits.
He pours vodka into the flower mug. The flowers rot in the sink. The bear lives in the toilet just inside the condo door. At first, the vodka tastes odd, and he realizes he should have rinsed the mug. He pours. He sets the bottle down and it makes an awful thud. Then it thuds again—without him moving it. His ears ring and the thud comes again. He realizes someone is knocking. Celia sent another ridiculous mug and animal.
He yells at the door--go the fuck away.
“It’s Carl,” the door says.
The door is quiet for a long time.
“Sir, let me in.”
Andy doesn’t move.
Later, he is shaken awake, Carl over him, unshaven and out of breath, hissing his name at him, the door wide and ferocious with the hall’s white fluorescent glow. Keys jangle and a body shuffles away. The roar of the hall’s heater shivers. And then he is being washed, rough cloth on his face, rasp of Carl breathing, the other man’s arms a force around him, lifting, pushing.
He is left to lay on the couch. Carl becomes a clatter of dishes, some running water, the smell of the burners scorching off a long forgotten spill.
“Do you like eggs?” Carl says.
There is a rule, Andy knows, about eggs and liquor. He knows he can come up with it if he can just think long enough. Eggs are good for a hangover, or not, or not good to eat before drinking, or they are protein.
“Yes or no?” Carl says. “Wave a hand if you want eggs. Something?”
Andy used to throw an egg at Celia on Halloween, every year for years. He never thought his mother knew, always thought he got away with something. Celia never saw it coming, must have thought her luck hit some reset button that put it all back, knit the shell, stuffed the chicken back up, whatever—to mean it wasn’t happening. They could all pretend so well. Like they were a show family. A damned living nativity scene like the ones outside the tackiest churches in town.
“Scrambled?”
Andy says sure. Butter sizzle, burble of a fork quick through yolks, the clack of a plastic spatula. Carl says, “Your sister is terrified, sir. Says she was calling for days.”
The eggs stop sizzling. Plate hits the counter, spatula bangs the plate.
“She called me at work,” Carl says. “She’s on her way. I said I was coming here.”
Andy’s chest heaves, his eyes sting and well. Carl blurs as he appears in front of him and sits on the coffee table. “You gotta eat, sir,” he says.
Carl lifts a spoonful, wavering, eggs falling off, his face knit in concentration. His hand shakes. Andy groans and sits up.
“I can do it,” Carl says. “Just open your mouth. Your sister is almost here.”
Andy reaches for the spoon and Carl jerks. The eggs drop. With the deliberation of a nun, Carl digs in again, lifts the eggs, and comes toward Andy. Andy’s cheeks are wet, the tears warm. He blinks fast, then closes his eyes, and opens.
“Ask her to hurry. Please,” he says.
Gabriel Welsch
It’s not clear when they started—Andy was watching television, an old movie, something with John Cusack. There are three of them, and they have broken the front window of the fleet car. Papers feather over the pavement around the car, skittering to rest against the tires of cars parked nearby. The thieves are each very skinny and wearing tight jeans and baggy jackets. One might be a woman. Flash of silver thumb drives, and a half-empty plastic vodka bottle bounces and sloshes to a slow-spinning stop. They tear open his garment bag—he hadn’t bothered to bring that in yet.
They chuck one thing, then another. They have discovered nothing worth their effort, and the pamphlets with inspirational stories of scholarship students Andy thinks might just piss them off all the more. A handful of bad old motivational CDs—nothing fit to pirate. They find his suits are cheap. Now, they are wet—lying at the back of the car in a puddle. The big one, with a club, moves toward another car.
Andy calls Gil. “Just letting you know—my car was broken into tonight. They didn’t get anything sensitive, but they trashed some things, did a job on the car. It might be a while before I hit Chicago. Don’t know how long it will take to get a rental, get the report done. Cops are on their way.” After a moment, he adds, “And let Carl know I’m okay. I’ll call him when I can.”
Room phone to front desk. As he hears the ring tone, the big one’s arm arcs back, and the long rod in his hands comes down and through a passenger window—this time to a car with an alarm. As that screeching sound blossoms into lights coming on through the building, he watches the thieves run through the hedge, the car he’d driven from Pittsburgh gutted, dark and silent, promo crap now at rest around it, his suits a gash on the ground. When the front desk answers, the woman’s voice is a rush of I know, we have called the police, someone is on the way before the line is dead.
He takes the stairs. While he wants to look at the car, he doesn’t know if the people have really left or if they are nearby, waiting for somebody actually carrying cash or a decent watch to come out, like him, and do something stupid. So he has fits and starts, energy and then not, all the initiative of a metronome.
The car is in rough shape, the driver side door pushed back so roughly it is bent in the hinge. The passenger window sparkles all over the seat, the floor, the ground. His portfolio, faux leather embossed with his name in modest capitals at one corner, above the university’s seal, is on the back seat, right where he’d left it, untouched. They knew nothing important would be in there.
He hears a humming, then realizes it is vibrating, below him. He bends, slides to kneel, and sees the blue wash of light under the driver’s seat. Though it’s not his phone, he answers.
“Hang up and throw the phone over the bushes.”
“What?”
“Do it. Behind you.” The man growls the word behind.
Andy looks back to the hedge, over the roof of the car. The voice not speaking, as though the phone is holding its breath.
“Do you want to get hurt?”
He holds the phone away from his head, his arm relaxing, maybe into a throw, maybe not. Red light everywhere, sodium lights and winter light, snowless Michigan winter red. Big red HAMPTON INN behind him. Behind it, Quality, Super 8, a vast Kroger. Horizon is red. Only over the hedge, only where the threat is (he realizes, where the guy has to be), is it dark.
He stops the call. Three steps toward the hedge, then five, the phone starts to buzz. More steps and he is at the hedge, the green plasticky soft. He sees a slope of grass, hears water. If he throws well, he might make the stream. But for what? To get back at some guy who broke into a car not his own to break stuff that didn’t matter to delay him in doing a job he hated? Maybe he should throw a medal over the hedge. Some Medal of Valor for Doing Me A Favor.
As he cocks his arm to throw, he hears the last rush of a body cracking through the hedge, before pain and then nothing.
~ ~ ~
When he got into fundraising, Andy’s first boss told him to have a good emergency number on him all the time, somewhere it would be found. A wrist bracelet, like his mother wears around her condo. Or a dog tag, like he wore for a few short months before the Army told him, in essence, that’s okay. You can go now. A tattoo, assuming your emergency contact is real solid. Not in your wallet.
Andy wrote his number on the tags of clothes, inside the heels of shoes, inside his belt, each time with a black Sharpie, the same number, his sister, a woman he’s fairly certain—but not tattoo certain—will never leave the home where they grew up, the home she took over when their father died and their mother decided her lifelong dream to reside by the ocean should become a condo in New Jersey. Now their mother wears flowing beach clothes, worries about hurricanes, drinks cocktails—all things that if his father were some cartoonish angel bent at the waist on a cloud, looking down, would wear a thought bubble of perpetual What the . . . ?
He is on a bed in a hospital, behind a curtain, where he was rolled after a groggy awakening in an ambulance that seemed, by his inexperienced estimation, to be driving too slowly, given it held a moments-before unconscious man. Now, looking at a fluorescent light square, he is aware of a bandage containing the throb in his forehead.
He had been beaten up before, many times, as a kid, when people are mostly cartilage and adrenaline. Hurt for a day, he got over it. But this—this hurt soul-deep. This felt like it informed his marrow of the likelihood of doom. This was proof a man with no friends, no connections, no real life can die brutally in an anonymous way.
The curtain curls back to a man wearing a stethoscope and scrubs. He looks hung over and too young to be anything other than a prankster.
“You’re a pretty methodical guy,” the doctor says.
Andy groans.
“The number everywhere? In the shoes? Helpful,” the doctor continues. “We got hold of your sister.”
“Thank you,” he says. “For that. What did she say?”
“I wasn’t the one who spoke with her,” the doctor says. “But I hear she’s on her way. She can take you home.”
The doctor had no idea what he was talking about.
“What do I do til she gets here?”
“Just sit tight—how long will it be?”
He closed his eyes. “She lives in Pennsylvania. It’ll be a good eight hours.”
The doctor says nothing, and when Andy opens his eyes, he sees the doctor’s face hissing peeved. He waves over a nurse, whom he asks, in a soft voice, though probably meant for Andy to hear: Wasn’t there anybody closer?
Andy’s sister reminds him of his age when he sees her. With her smart and well-fitting clothes, a haircut recommended from the pages of Real Simple, with her knock-off trendy bag full of useful items, she looks like somebody’s mom, basically with it, but in a tired, relaxed form. And because Celia is not the twenty-year-old in his head, is instead a woman who has found comfort in the world, he is maybe older, but far less together, a shell from which all promise of a pearl has fled.
They walk out automatic doors into bright sunlight and cold. She has a Ford Explorer now, with leather seats and a woman’s voice on a computer telling you to buckle your seatbelt and announcing the temperature. When he says they should go to the hotel Celia says they don’t need to.
“I had all your stuff sent to your home,” she says. “I figured you wouldn’t want to go there.” She looks at him with great seriousness. “It could be traumatic.”
His head throbbed. “There’s nothing traumatic there. I suffered no trauma. I looked behind some bushes, and then was whacked out cold. No struggle. I wasn’t even aware enough for a surprise.” He thought about his shoes, comfortable pants, his shower bag, the medicines. The Vivarin.
“When did you speak with them? Maybe it’s not in the mail yet,” he said.
“I don’t think it would be a good idea.”
“At least give me your phone. I can see if they’ve mailed the stuff,” he says. “If it’d make you happy, I can sit in a McDonalds while you drive there, so I can preserve the remaining bits of my fragile and shattered psyche.”
She reaches into her giant bag, her pursed face emoting there’s no need for ridicule this morning, bucko.
The hotel still has his things. They must have cleaned up the room. They took care of the empty vodka bottle, gathered magazines, squared their ends, placed them atop his clothes. They made fun of his clothes. Sure they did. They mocked how he had folded the McDonald’s bag into a tidy square, smoothing wrinkles while watching The Daily Show half buzzo. Bag folded like his clothes. A big bag of get a life.
When they hand him the bag, they hand him his phone separately. It has been silenced, he notes, doubtless because it’s been ringing. The receptionist says, “We comped the room, and you now have something like a million points on there. I mean, I’m sure it’s not, but it’s a lot.” Then silence. Then, “Well, I hope everything’s okay.”
He checks his messages in the parking lot while Celia sits in the car, studiously not watching him. She keeps her sunglasses on, though it is cloudy, and rests one hand on the steering wheel, one finger flicking at her thumb nail, resplendent as Stressed-Out Sister Feigning Repose.
Gil is first unctuous concern. Gil is very much we’re all here for you, personifies you just take it easy, embraces take your time. Later, he veils himself behind, it’ll be here waiting for you. Even later, questions, things Andy ONLY surely would know, just some follow up.
Celia starts the car as he listens to the last message, his mother. He wonders, after so many calls, what people think happens in hospitals? Why so many calls? His head pounds. “We need to find coffee,” he says.
Celia pokes at the radio. Newscasters, commercials, chatty DJs. Andy massages his temples.
“Does being with me really require a soundtrack?” he says.
Stop and go traffic, stoplights, diesel from the trucks that box them in every few minutes. In a McDonald’s parking lot, as he stirs four Splendas into a large coffee, Celia asks, “Where are we going?”
“I’d like to get home.”
“Right. How? Do I need to drive you to an airport? A train station? Another hotel for a day? Are you going to be okay? You haven’t really given me a sense.”
“Can you drive me home?”
Her mouth opens once, closes. “Your home is in State College.”
Here we go. “Yes, and I don’t have a reliable car. I am injured. With no car. There was a mugging? Last night? Me? Headwound? Fragile and traumatized?”
She looks at her watch. Right, he thinks, because it’s a matter of minutes and hours. You live in Scranton. I’m on the way. You live east, I am in the center of Pennsylvania. “You have to drive right by there. I just figured I’d ride with you.”
“I guess—”
“I need you right now, C. I mean, is that okay?”
“What do you mean? Of course it’s okay,” she says, pushing a smile. “I just figured I’d put you on a plane or something. But sure, hey, we can have a road trip.” She relishes it like chewing fruit Rolaids. Fake citrus chalky wonder.
“You don’t need to be full of shit about it,” he says. “I just need the ride.”
She inhales like she will sigh, and then holds it. “Let’s get started then.”
As she puts an arm on the back of his seat and backs out, she says, “Do you have to make any stops? Any business to attend to, anything you need to get done here?”
“There is nothing I am able to do or want to do right now,” he says. “I’ll have my assistant reschedule with people.”
“When’d you get an assistant?”
“I’ve had one for years,” he says. “I guess you’ve never met Carl. You’d remember. Earnest as hell, uglier than sin. Good guy.”
After a minute he adds, “Carl knows I have a sister. Just saying.”
~ ~ ~
Kentucky Fried Chicken, western Pennsylvania, just over the border past Youngstown. Parking lot a reek of breading, dusty snow whipping around as the temperature drops, his hand cold from holding the phone outside. The wind chills the fingers and he imagines blood pooling in his bent elbow.
“I’m going home,” he tells Gil’s voice mail, “and I don’t think I’ll be back this week. The painkillers make it difficult to function.” He continues with the convincing details necessary. “I can’t really even talk about it. You understand. Appointments—” he sees Celia come out from the restroom—“they’ll be, uh, taken care of. I’ll call soon.”
“Have you called Mom yet?” Celia asks once they are back on the road.
“Yeah. That was who I called in the parking lot.” He feels her look over at him. “Among other people.”
Celia Mode—even their mother joked about it. If there is a void of action, she will insist on the corrective. She will supply it or simply will it into being through orders issued like Zeus fully sprung from a Titan. She will influence and cajole, without anything resembling subtlety. He knows she’s pissed and exasperated. She knows there’s just enough chance he could be seriously injured or seriously scarred, despite his protestations to the contrary, and that being herself could very well make things worse. She tries soften it, which comes off much like whacking someone with a two-by-four delicately wrapped with tissue paper.
She buys him cheese curds and another coffee, and while she protests a little, she does it anyway. He eats quickly, stomach groaning. Much as he doesn’t want to, he thinks about work. Thinks about the condition of his desk, how he left it. He knows there are three folders near the lamp—red, yellow, green—to reflect prospects and their status: Wait, Push, Ask. He has a paper calendar, blotter style, appointments and tallies in pencil all through, the only real mark of character on the desk, a holdover from his lo-tech training. No pictures, no games, no little zen gardens with small rakes and sand getting everywhere, no coasters from taprooms. No cup full of pencils. Because his slim middle desk drawer, above his lap, is not crammed with napkins and takeout menus and other useless flotsam, he actually keeps pencils and pens there.
In the weeks to come, he knows people will come into his office, at his direction or at Gil’s, and dig into those files, seek ways to pick up slack and fill the voids he knows he will create. He doesn’t yet know how. He says to Celia, slowly, sounding out the words as he says them, “I am not sure if I will return to work.”
Near Dubois, more than an hour from home, she asks him what he will do. He muses on alternatives--sell firewood, teach Lamazze, learn a dead language, write about tae kwon do for specialty magazines, invent a cough remedy that works, count the hairs on my head--and ends up not saying anything, a fact he doesn’t realize until another exit passes and she asks him again. His eyes sting and he rubs at them with the heel of his hand. As kids, he would talk to her, always. And she would listen.
They drop into Happy Valley at sunset, shadows heavier and more dense on the rolling ridges, where the trees have lost almost all of their leaves. The lights from the retail strip and the stadium make the sky red. College kids zip past Celia’s Ford as she clings to the speed limit, and he recalls that his radar detector was gone from the dash of the fleet car, one thing of value he did lose.
Cold hits him when he wonders if anything gave away where he lived. He imagines climbing the stairs, finding the apartment door hanging half-splintered on bent hinges, or worse, men waiting inside to beat him unconscious again.
“Celia,” he says, “is there any chance—” but when she turns to look at him, he can see her thinking about a home still hours away, about children doing homework or annoying their father or whatever else it is children do with the onset of evening, thinking about people in her full and overstuffed life, and he wants her to go there so he will not have to look at her wanting to be away from him.
~ ~ ~
He receives cards. Two from the university: co-workers affixed their signatures to a card with blowing grasses and script on the front, urging him to get well. He can imagine the red folder that routed it through the office, a card like dozens he has signed himself. Central development sent another festival of signatures. Three others are from long-term donors for whom he alone has been their connection to their alma mater. The messages are short and professionally sweet. He wonders what story is being told.
For three days, he slouches on his couch, watches TV, moves only for the bathroom or to attack his dwindling reserves of food. Once he has eaten three consecutive meals of instant oatmeal, he decides he should go out. He stops at Wal Mart for a few bags of food and a pack of Vivarin. The cashier grins so hard he worries her dentures will pop out. As he mopes through the Men’s Wearhouse, worrying about having to buy new clothes, a young man he is sure is named Ashley or Trevor or Chad asks him if he needs help before chirping the usual nice day. Andy signatures his way through a forest of legalities so many times his own name becomes illegible to him, his hand a meaty stamp at the end of his bureaucratic corpus.
At the state store, he leaves the car running. The yellow light gives him a headache almost immediately. He passes his usual brand—Vladimir, plastic bottle, vaguely Russian peasant in a large fur hat on the front—and reaches for Absolut. He looks at Grey Goose, at Ketel One, at the prices. Thinks, I might not even have a job next week, the way this is going. He grabs another bottle. They weigh a ton, feel good in his grip, feel like the most substantial things he has held in weeks.
Celia is somewhere preparing a dinner she read about in a magazine, with ingredients she probably bought at Whole Foods. His mother is pretending to be a beach goddess having cocktails with other people lying about their past. His coworkers—he knows it’s just after five, if only from the way the liquor store is filling with men in overcoats and women in heels—are making a profession out of the illusion of care. Somewhere a carjacker is googling his address and no one in his life has any idea he is about to die a horrible death by beating.
He tucks both bottles under an arm where they clunk against each other. Reaching for the third, he has to go up on his toes, and he sways into the shelf. One of the bottles slips from his grip. It does not shatter so much as pop. He feels the wet, feels the floor slick beneath him. A hush in the store.
“Mr. Lang?”
Of course. This is where I am recognized buying a half a case of vodka while on mental trauma leave. He straightens and turns toward the voice, just as it says, again, “Mr. Lang—are you okay?”
It is Carl—aggressive acne, unlikely stoner eyes, ridiculously strict part in his hair. He is a short-sleeve Oxford and cuffed khakis cinched in with a belt no doubt missing a loop. But his voice—it’s authority, it’s credibility. It’s the voice that secures Andy lunches and dinners with doctors, lawyers, inventors, and titans of industry, the voice of success—as long as he never enters a room.
“Are you okay?”
Andy glances at the pool of vodka, the glass, his wet pants. Muttering has returned to the store. A guy in a tie clipped in a gold bar pushes a mop bucket toward him.
“I’m fine,” Andy says. “Just a mishap.”
“You look like hell, sir.” Carl blinks, as surprised as Andy is. “I’m sorry—but you do. Is anybody . . . looking in on you?”
Andy looks at Carl as if suddenly realizing the man has a life.
“No, Carl. No one is looking in on me. Not sure if ‘looking in’ is a necessity in this situation.”
He sees Carl catch himself glancing toward the vodka and back at his boss.
“Things are fine, Carl.”
Carl looks like he wants to shake his head.
Andy places his bottles back on the shelves. They clatter as his arms and hands shake.
“Things are fine, Carl. They are all flavors of fine,” he says before leaving.
~ ~ ~
“I am not sure why you called,” Celia says. He can see her holding her head now, half an hour into an aimless conversation with her suddenly-a-pain-in-the-ass brother. Andy wants to scream and cry, but not necessarily at her.
“Just tell me something good,” he says.
She sings, “Tell me that you liked it!”
She stays silent, as does he. “I don’t—that was my attempt at humor,” she says.
“I said something good,” he says. “I did not say try to be fucking hilarious.”
He hangs up.
~ ~ ~
Another call, dark apartment, endless episodes of Family Guy.
“Why didn’t you want to drive me home?”
“Andy—what time is it?”
He slurs, “Remember the hospital—you so did not want to drive me. Back. You know.”
Long sigh. She must be in bed. What time is it? That’s an excellent question. “Can you try to keep your calls to daylight?”
“Sure, sis. I’ll do that. I’ll be sure to ask future attackers to make sure shit happens when it’s convenient for you. Just give me your fucking schedule.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake—goodbye.”
~ ~ ~
A morning call: “Look—I know I’ve been difficult. It’s just—”
After a moment, she said, “What?” Voice softer, almost tender. “Go ahead—say what you need to say.”
“It’s just—this is really difficult. Hard. And I—well.”
“What?”
“I think you’re being impatient.”
“What?” The shrapnel is back in her voice. “Here I thought you were going to maybe apologize for the bullshit calls in the middle of the night, or . . . or . . . the guilt trips, or maybe just acknowledge that I might be with you on this. But you are calling to criticize me? After all of this?”
“You know what? Fuck you. This is what I’m talking about.”
Cell phones are lame. He thinks of all the times on TV when he’s seen someone slam the phone hard, several times, before smashing it. Not the same, Apple. He throws the phone at the wall and the protective case pops off. Not as dramatic, he thinks.
~ ~ ~
How many times can he apologize to the bright voice she has used for strangers, for the unknown, the greeting she recorded to be just enough of herself for everybody?
If he could play back the messages, it’d be a quick drinking game: sip every time you hear sorry. Two sips every time you say come on. Chug when you hear I was an ass. If she ever answers, make someone else drink. Call Carl and tell him to chug.
She says hello one day. Then stutters. She forgot to screen. He hears in her voice that she crosses her arms.
“I have no one else,” he says.
“Really?” she says. “No friends? No one else? No coworkers? Really? I hope that’s not true, because I hope someone else is taking the shit you give me when you call me for help.”
He starts to cry.
“Seriously?” Then, after a while, “Are you even still on the line?”
Then, “Get some help, Andy.”
~ ~ ~
He never answers his door on the first knock—a habit he picked up traveling, after reading that drunk people run through hotels and rob people who answer their doors. But the knocks come again, and a woman says “delivery.”
Her face tells him how bad he must smell. She hands him a mug of flowers with what looks like an over-caffeinated bear clinging to the handle. He mutters what the fuck and the woman walks briskly, perhaps jogs, away. The tag says, Give me a call, bro! Celia.
He is not, nor would he ever be, a bro.
Perhaps a day later he finishes the last of his peanut butter, scraping each last smear out of the can with a butter knife. Pickles and olives are gone. Tuna is gone. He mixed ketchup and parmesan cheese into a paste and tried to eat it, vomited, and threw it away. The TV emanates heat—he doesn’t think he has shut it off for over a week. His phone is dead. It has actually collected dust sitting on the table.
The attackers he sometimes thinks about. They sit in Burger King sipping coffee. They listen to the motivational recordings before breaking windows. They consider pledge forms and charitable gift annuities and offer useful giving tools to those they attack. And when they are hauling ass in another stolen rental car, they avoid police cars because they wear his radar detector as a lapel pin on his suits.
He pours vodka into the flower mug. The flowers rot in the sink. The bear lives in the toilet just inside the condo door. At first, the vodka tastes odd, and he realizes he should have rinsed the mug. He pours. He sets the bottle down and it makes an awful thud. Then it thuds again—without him moving it. His ears ring and the thud comes again. He realizes someone is knocking. Celia sent another ridiculous mug and animal.
He yells at the door--go the fuck away.
“It’s Carl,” the door says.
The door is quiet for a long time.
“Sir, let me in.”
Andy doesn’t move.
Later, he is shaken awake, Carl over him, unshaven and out of breath, hissing his name at him, the door wide and ferocious with the hall’s white fluorescent glow. Keys jangle and a body shuffles away. The roar of the hall’s heater shivers. And then he is being washed, rough cloth on his face, rasp of Carl breathing, the other man’s arms a force around him, lifting, pushing.
He is left to lay on the couch. Carl becomes a clatter of dishes, some running water, the smell of the burners scorching off a long forgotten spill.
“Do you like eggs?” Carl says.
There is a rule, Andy knows, about eggs and liquor. He knows he can come up with it if he can just think long enough. Eggs are good for a hangover, or not, or not good to eat before drinking, or they are protein.
“Yes or no?” Carl says. “Wave a hand if you want eggs. Something?”
Andy used to throw an egg at Celia on Halloween, every year for years. He never thought his mother knew, always thought he got away with something. Celia never saw it coming, must have thought her luck hit some reset button that put it all back, knit the shell, stuffed the chicken back up, whatever—to mean it wasn’t happening. They could all pretend so well. Like they were a show family. A damned living nativity scene like the ones outside the tackiest churches in town.
“Scrambled?”
Andy says sure. Butter sizzle, burble of a fork quick through yolks, the clack of a plastic spatula. Carl says, “Your sister is terrified, sir. Says she was calling for days.”
The eggs stop sizzling. Plate hits the counter, spatula bangs the plate.
“She called me at work,” Carl says. “She’s on her way. I said I was coming here.”
Andy’s chest heaves, his eyes sting and well. Carl blurs as he appears in front of him and sits on the coffee table. “You gotta eat, sir,” he says.
Carl lifts a spoonful, wavering, eggs falling off, his face knit in concentration. His hand shakes. Andy groans and sits up.
“I can do it,” Carl says. “Just open your mouth. Your sister is almost here.”
Andy reaches for the spoon and Carl jerks. The eggs drop. With the deliberation of a nun, Carl digs in again, lifts the eggs, and comes toward Andy. Andy’s cheeks are wet, the tears warm. He blinks fast, then closes his eyes, and opens.
“Ask her to hurry. Please,” he says.
