Thanks for the Trouble

  “Good,” Zelda said.

  But now I’ve got about a million questions.

  “Can they wait until morning? I think I should stay here tonight.”

  Okay.

  “You can stay too, if you want. It’s not very comfy, but I’ve slept in these chairs before, and it’s survivable.”

  I pointed at Nathaniel and raised an eyebrow.

  “He wouldn’t mind. There’s no jealousy between us. It’s been years since we were . . . like that. He told me a million times I ought to find someone else. I just didn’t see the point. I decided a long time ago that my life would end with his.”

  So I dragged a chair from the empty waiting room down the hall and set it up in front of the window, next to Zelda’s. We sat facing the ocean, wrapped up in blankets, with our legs up on the sill. The valley below the hospital swirled with fog, like a bowl of dry ice. I was just nodding off when Zelda spoke.

  “I’m sorry about before,” she said. “I know why you did what you did. You were trying to save me.”

  My journal was across the room, so I put up a hand and slowly finger spelled my question.

  W-h-y h-i-m?

  “Why Nathaniel? As in why did I fall in love with him?” I nodded. “Oh, I don’t know. Why does anyone fall in love with anyone? I don’t believe we each have some single special person waiting for us out there, if that’s what you’re getting at. I’ve been in love too many times over the years to buy into that old canard. It’s more a question of timing, you know? As if we all have these elaborate locks inside our hearts that are constantly changing shape, and every once in a while, someone happens along with the perfect key. Love is nothing more than a fortuitous collision of circumstances. And then you discover you’ve ended up spending fifty years with someone.”

  She reached under my thin blanket and squeezed my arm. “Now get some sleep, Parker Santé.”

  She got up and went back to sit at Nathaniel’s bedside. I stared at the fog rolling off the water and listened to the beep of the EKG, picturing the peaks of Nathaniel’s pulse, and I fell asleep imagining the interminable mountain range of Zelda’s heartbeat, stretching back across the centuries and disappearing into the unknowable future.

  SUNDAY,

  NOVEMBER

  2

  GOOD MORNING, SAN FRANCISCO

  DON’T YOU HATE IT WHEN you have a dream and it’s totally obvious what it means? I’ve always preferred the super random ones—like where you’re riding around some futuristic Tokyo on your hoverbike, but then you realize the hoverbike is a rhinoceros, except no, it’s actually a robot rhinoceros being piloted by Prince, and he starts to sing “Purple Rain” as he flips a switch to activate the robo-rhino ejector seat, and you’re launched up into the sky, watching as Prince’s purple crushed-velvet suit and fluffy white cravat get smaller and smaller, and you should be falling by now but you’re not, because you’ve become a balloon, and you just go on floating out into space until the world disappears and you can hardly breathe because of the lack of oxygen, and then you wake up and you’re like: What the fuck was that?

  But the dream I had that night in Nathaniel’s hospital room was so easy to interpret it was almost embarrassing. I was chasing Zelda down these narrow city streets, and even though I’ve never been to Germany, I knew somehow that that’s where we were. And even though Zelda didn’t seem to be going very fast, I couldn’t seem to catch up with her. My legs felt weak, and my heart was pounding like it was about to explode all over my rib cage. It wasn’t until I caught sight of my reflection in a shop window that I understood why: I’d become an old man. The dream-past burst open in my mind, and all at once I remembered that Zelda and I had spent our entire lives together—or my life, technically—and now I was dying of some nameless illness and she was planning to kill herself, to jump off some Gothic German bridge into some icy German river. I would never catch up with her, but somehow I knew there was a way to make her stop running. So I hummed and hummed, the way Dr. Joondeph had taught me to all those years ago, and because it was a dream, a word came.

  “Zelda!” I shouted. My voice was weak and quavery and ancient, but she’d heard it, and it had stopped her in her tracks. She turned around to look at me.

  “Beep,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Beep,” she said again. “Beep. Beep.”

  Beep.

  Beep.

  I opened my eyes. The hospital. I tried to sit up, and my body immediately and painfully informed me that I’d just spent six and a half hours asleep in a poorly designed hospital chair. It felt like my bones had been replaced with gravel.

  I emitted my silent version of a groan and managed to get to my feet. Zelda was gone, her blankets balled up on the chair next to mine. Nathaniel was just where he’d been last night, of course. I opened the shade. Mist lay thick over the Sunset, like a quilt pulled all the way up to the ocean, where it broke apart to reveal the sparkling water beneath. The sky was one enormous cloud. My mom said the air was always bumpier inside clouds, which was funny, because they looked so peaceful from the outside. They were a little like people that way. I wondered what kinda crazy shit was going on inside Nathaniel’s head right now.

  “Room service!”

  Zelda arrived with two cups of coffee and an assortment of individually wrapped pastries on a tray. She placed it all on the windowsill, and we gazed out at the whiteness while we ate. “My God, my neck is killing me,” she said, mouth half-full of cinnamon bun. “When I think of that beautiful suite we let go to waste last night, I almost want to cry.”

  I could have cried to think about what I’d missed last night too (and I’m not talking about the suite). I opened up my journal and noticed I was down to the last couple of pages; I’d done more writing in the past twenty-four hours than I usually did in a month.

  So do I get to ask you all my questions now?

  “Didn’t you do that yesterday?”

  I was just messing around yesterday. Now I actually—

  I stopped myself midsentence, but it was already too late.

  “Believe you,” Zelda finished.

  I nodded.

  “Fine. Go ahead. What do you want to know?”

  I asked the first question that had occurred to me last night, when my faithometer finally hit 100 percent.

  Are there others like you?

  “Do you mean others like me in terms of my general flair and joie de vivre? Or other immortals?” She waited a second, then spoke again before I could write anything. “Either way, the answer is no. Or not as far as I know, at any rate.”

  Isn’t that lonely?

  “Life is lonely. But less lonely for pretty teenage girls than for others. Next question.”

  So you lived through a lot of stuff.

  “I did. Is that your question?”

  No. I mean . . . hold on.

  I tried to put myself in the shoes of one of my history teachers. How jealous would they have been to know I was talking to someone who’d seen all the shit they were always droning on about?

  What was your favorite, like, time in history?

  “Today,” Zelda said.

  No, I mean, when was the best time to be alive?

  “Today.”

  Today? A random Sunday in November is the best time ever in history?

  “Absolutely. In my opinion, the best time to be alive is always right now. People are always whining about how they were born in the wrong century, but they really haven’t thought things through. They picture the old castle they wish they could live in, but they don’t think about the drafts in the winter, or the pitch darkness at night, or all the spiders and the lice. They can’t imagine the everyday pain of a life without antibiotics or anesthetics. The tedium of a world without movies or recorded music or . . . or . . . Internet videos about cats. And don’t even get me started on women who idealize the past. Do you have any idea what it was like to be a woman even a hundred years ago? Horrible! And a hundred
years before that, the situation practically defies description. We might as well have been slaves. Trussed up in hoop skirts and corsets, married off like racehorses. Good riddance to history, I say!”

  Zelda turned her head and spat onto the tile floor.

  “I probably shouldn’t do that in a hospital,” she said quietly.

  Forget I asked, I wrote.

  “I will.”

  So can you tell me the best place you’ve ever lived? Or is that question no good either?

  “No, I like that one. Only there are so many good answers.”

  Paris? People always say Paris is the shit.

  “Yes, I’ve never understood the American obsession with that city. The food is actually quite terrible on the whole, and the people can be rather awful if you don’t speak the language. Of course, I first visited before Haussmann’s redesign, back when it was just another dank medieval city, and I can’t seem to get that image of it out of my head. No, I think my favorite city is still Berlin, in spite of all its flaws.”

  Where do you put San Francisco on your list?

  “Above Zurich, but below Cape Town.”

  I have no idea what that means.

  “Then you should travel more. Like Nathaniel and I did.”

  She looked over at her—it was still hard to think about him this way—husband. I realized there’d be time to ask Zelda more questions later. For now, I just wanted to get out of this hospital room.

  Well, I could go on asking you stuff forever, but like you said, fuck history.

  “I don’t think that’s exactly what I said.”

  Whatever. The point is let’s go out and do something, yeah?

  “Parker . . .” Zelda hesitated. “Parker, I think this has to be the end.”

  What?

  She closed her eyes, as if she could find more resolve that way. “It’s time for us to say goodbye.”

  MANDATORY PARTINGS

  “I’VE HAD A LOVELY TIME with you,” she said, still not looking at me. “Really I have. But it seems to me I should be on my own now, to figure out what I’m going to do about Nathaniel. Can you understand that?”

  Sure, I wrote, though I didn’t really mean it.

  She opened her eyes again, exhaled. “Good. I’m glad.”

  We ate the rest of the meal in the beepy, respiratory silence of the hospital. I felt like someone getting kicked out of the house after a one-night stand, except this was worse, because Zelda and I hadn’t even slept together. When the food was gone, I stood up and Zelda stood up and we hugged for a long time. I wanted to kiss her, but it felt weird to do it in front of Nathaniel, even if he was comatose.

  “Goodbye, Parker,” she said. “Thank you for the most fun I’ve had in a long time.”

  I made the sign for “goodbye,” which I assumed she could understand from the context, and then the signs for “I love you,” which I assumed she couldn’t.

  My steps sounded weirdly loud as I walked down the tiled corridor, away from Nathaniel’s room. I didn’t bother to wipe my eyes. If anybody saw me, they’d just assume someone I cared about was dying. And in a way, someone was.

  If the elevator had taken me straight to the ground floor, that probably would’ve been the end of things between Zelda and me. But by some twist of fate, the doors opened on the fourth floor, and I saw the sign for the Center for the Deaf.

  I haven’t spent much time around deaf people, or not since back when my condition was first diagnosed, anyway. At twelve, I was still young enough that my mom could force me to go to these “mixers,” where people with hearing impairments got together and played board games and practiced signing and making friends and stuff. I can still remember being surprised at how happy and normal everyone seemed. I mean, it wasn’t like I’d expected all of them to stand around crying or something, but I also hadn’t expected that the subject of having a disability would almost never come up. And the crazy thing is that I think I stopped going to those events because everyone seemed so well adjusted. All those happy, normal people made me feel even more like a fuckup, and I didn’t want to bring everyone down with my fucked-up-ness.

  It had been years since I’d been in a room made up primarily of deaf people, and I was curious to see what it was like. So I got off the elevator and found a seat in the waiting room. A little girl with cochlear implants was reading Highlights. An old man in a natty brown suit sat next to an old woman in a pink dress. Neither of them said anything—in sign or in speech—but they looked perfectly content doing nothing together. The only people signing were the couple in the corner. They had a stroller in front of them, and the baby boy inside it was looking around the room with your standard babyish curiosity, each glance asking some super-important baby question: What the hell’s that thing?! or Where the hell did my mom go?! (Oh, there she is) or Why the hell is that toy I just threw on the ground still on the ground?!

  I “listened” in to what the couple was saying. (As you can imagine, it’s basically impossible to have a private conversation in sign.)

  Tell them no. Say we’re going to be exhausted, the woman signed.

  They’re my parents. They want to spend the holiday with their grandchild.

  Well, they can’t. There isn’t space.

  They can stay in a hotel.

  And they’ll be at our house ten hours a day.

  So what?

  The baby began to cry in an exploratory sort of way, like he was using the sound to measure the size of the room, or the size of his parents’ love. They couldn’t hear him, though, either because they were both deaf, or because they were too caught up in their argument, so after a minute, I crossed the room and knelt down in front of the stroller. I can’t make any of the sounds that people usually make for babies, so I just twisted up my face into a monster scowl and offered the kid my finger. He stopped crying and grabbed on to it. I looked up at his parents, who had stopped arguing.

  Cute kid, I signed, after gently recovering my finger.

  You want him? the boy’s father signed back, and his wife gave him a little fake punch in the shoulder.

  How old?

  Eighteen months, the mother signed.

  He’s here for surgery?

  She nodded.

  A nurse came out from the office behind the reception desk. We’re ready now, she signed to the baby’s parents.

  We all stood up. The baby had given up crying, content now that the world had recognized his existence. I didn’t leave right away, but stood in the doorway to watch the parents kiss their baby on the forehead and hand him over to the nurse. Though she’d seemed perfectly fine a minute ago, the baby’s mother started to cry. After her son was gone, she turned and buried her face in the father’s shoulder.

  I’ve heard of people who like to hang out at the arrivals gate at the airport, because it’s such a uniformly happy place. All these people reuniting with their loved ones, over and over again, 24-7-365. WELCOME HOME signs and little kids being lifted up into the air and deep, shameless kisses. Hospitals are basically the opposite of that. Everywhere around me, people were being forced apart by circumstance: illness and infirmity and death. Life would take everything from you eventually. So who would be so stupid as to leave someone they loved by choice?

  I rode the elevator back up to the seventh floor. Zelda was still sitting at Nathaniel’s side, watching some sitcom on mute. She didn’t notice me come in until I reached up and turned the TV off.

  “Parker, what are you doing?”

  I sat down on the floor with my journal in front of me. He doesn’t need you anymore, I wrote. But I do.

  I watched a million possible responses flit across her face. She glanced down at Nathaniel.

  “You’ll look like him someday,” she said. “I’m not going through it all again.”

  I’ll never look like that. Colombian men age very gracefully.

  Zelda laughed, and I could tell by the way she squeezed Nathaniel’s arm that she’d made up her mind, at leas
t for the moment.

  “How terribly vain.”

  It’s just the truth, I wrote.

  “My, my. You’ve almost filled that whole notebook out, haven’t you?”

  I drew a smiley face in the last open corner.

  “Do you have another one?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, I still have some money left, and I’ve allowed this spiral-ring abomination to go on long enough. Let’s go buy you a present, shall we?”

  APPLY YOURSELF

  “THIS IS A MOLESKINE,” ZELDA said, holding up a large black notebook. “It’s basically the most famous paper product on the planet. Hemingway wrote in one of these. Now, you will.”

  We were at FLAX on Market Street, just a half mile or so from the Castro. It was one of those fancy art stores full of colored paper and paint smell and hipster art students. I’d always done all my journaling in the sort of notebooks you can get for ninety-nine cents at Kmart. They worked just fine, as far as I was concerned, but Zelda seemed excited to get me something more “professional.”

  “We should buy a few of them, considering how quickly you tear through the things.”

  We also picked out a couple of ultra-fancy pens. They were as thick as my thumb, with shiny, diamond-shaped nibs and leather cases.

  “A good pen makes it look like you have better handwriting than you really do,” Zelda said. “It’s a kind of cheating.”

  Altogether, the notebooks and pens cost more than three hundred dollars. Zelda’s wad of cash was now a sad shadow of its former self—probably no more than six or seven hundred bucks left. When we were outside again, I uncapped one of the pens and wrote on the first page of a fresh journal. And straightaway, I saw that Zelda was right. My handwriting did look better.

  Your money’s almost gone.

  “That’s true.”

  We’re going to have to be a little more careful from here on out. No more shopping sprees.

  “Actually, I’m glad you brought that up,” Zelda said. “I seem to remember that our agreement didn’t simply involve my giving you loads of money for nothing. You were going to apply to college in exchange.”