“I’m sorry, Junior,” she says. She stares at me, searching my face. Then she grasps my wrist and says, “Listen, you look terrible. You know that, right? Whatever you’re doing to yourself, stop it. You should know better. You should be smarter than this.”
“And you should know smart’s got nothing to do with it.”
I know it was a mistake the moment the words are out of my mouth. Amy holds my gaze a moment longer, then gives a resigned little nod. “Okay,” she says. “Well. Call me sometime.”
She lets go of my arm and walks away. And I’m left standing here, alone in the light from the awning, clutching the scrap of paper in my fist like it contains the secret to saving the world.
Chicago
Chicago is not the ideal place to go to when you’ve recently lost your mind and plan to curl up in the bottom of a bottle and wait for the feeling of having your insides ripped repeatedly from your body to subside. There are at least half a dozen North American cities better suited to such a pursuit.
Topping the list is Miami. Perfect weather and bright pastels contrast nicely with suicidal ideation, bring the misery into sharp relief. For those like you, who prefer slow suicide, this hub of the illicit drug trade offers plentiful, varied, and cheap options. Everything can be had and you needn’t know anyone. If you took a stroll through the side streets of South Beach at night, you’d inevitably hear, from the shadows, unsolicited: “Pssst, meeho. You want cocaína? Ecstas? Trips?” Given your pharmaceutical preferences you’d most likely say no, you’re not in the market for stimulants, but something on the opposite end of the spectrum would probably interest you. “I got just the thing, meeho,” would be the response. “You stay here. I know a guy. He got Special K, real cheap.”
But you are in Chicago, because your rich and famous brother, who is oblivious to both his riches and his fame, lives in Chicago, and because your options are dramatically limited by finances and ambition.
Your brother lives in the upscale Streeterville neighborhood, in a gray-stone on North LaSalle that is worth $4.6 million but for which he paid $5.3 just to get it over with and have a place to store his stuff. You’ve got the run of the house. It’s late summer, and with your brother on road trips for a week or two at a stretch, most often it’s just you and the Help. The Help don’t care what you do. They’re practiced at serving the wealthy, making themselves fade until their presence is no more noteworthy than that of the oaken banister or the ubiquitous fireplaces. A number of them have, at previous jobs, overlooked sins of tremendous violence and perversion, so having to sop up your vomit and return your misplaced pill bottles hardly registers. If you’re found lying on the floor in the master bathroom, they wait until you return to shattered-glass consciousness and stagger off to the guest room shower before they come back to scrub the basins and buff the chrome. You could, if inclined, probably literally get away with murder here, and so long as there were no interruption in pay your brother’s servants wouldn’t mention it to anyone or even speak about it amongst themselves.
The one potential exception to this rule is Rodney’s live-in therapist /attendant, a pear-shaped, surly woman named Hilda Begin. Begin disliked you on first sight, and time has done nothing to improve this impression. She believes you are taking advantage of Rodney, which she considers all the more reprehensible given his inability to realize he’s being used. In fact, she has serious doubts about whether you care for your brother at all, except as a source of income. Fortunately you have the good sense to tone down, however slightly, your drunken, erratic, and otherwise bad behavior when Rodney and Begin are in town. Still, you often catch her eyeballing you suspiciously, and she makes no effort to hide her disdain and distrust.
The reason we bring this up is to disabuse you of the notion that your early-morning phone calls are private. You are not nearly as slick or stealthy as you think. The Help hear almost everything—they just don’t care. When at three a.m. you pick up and dial the campus of Stanford University, specifically room 117 of Wilbur Hall, a room shared by Anne McCutcheon, whose sleepy, irritated falsetto has greeted you several times, and Amy Benoit, who has returned for her sophomore year, the Help are listening.
The conversations that follow vary wildly in temperament and tempo, depending mostly on your level of intoxication and overall mood. Like most emotionally distraught people, especially those with substance abuse issues, you experience daily swings of mood that at their most dramatic resemble bipolar disorder. You can be having a drooling roofies-and-Beefeater kind of night, and do nothing but dial Amy’s number and sit on the end of the line with your chin against your chest, and for the entire forty-five minutes it takes for the telephone to slip slowly from your fingers she will sit on the other end, listening in the darkness of her dorm room to your shallow respirations, gazing out the window at the gang of black oaks lining the walkway as they wave faintly in a night breeze. Sometimes, when your breathing is particularly shallow and she’s feeling sad rather than annoyed, she will put her hand up to the window and wave back. Other nights, blurry PCP and-Wild-Turkey evenings, you’ll begin talking almost before she answers the phone, and you may start off friendly and exuberant and even display a sort of teeth-grinding charm, but Amy will eventually say something fairly benign and obvious to everyone but you, e.g., “Jesus Junior, you need to stop this, look at your mother for God’s sake, is that how you want to end up?” and this will be all you need to fly into a rage so quick and violent it’s as though you were just waiting for an excuse, which, in fact, is the case. “What the fuck does it matter, Amy,” you’ll say, leaving implicit the reason it matters so little because you’re afraid if you mention the Destroyer of Worlds again, you’ll lose what little of her you’ve gained back. Short of that, though, there seems to be nothing you can say that will make her change her phone number, or not answer when you call, or just tell you to fuck off. When all the loud brawling shamelessness of the authentic drunk comes pouring forth she sits and takes it, suffers like Jesus. Enraged further by her patience, you go completely unreasonable, call her a bitch, a cunt, a spoiled child, a fucking bitch. You catalogue, as the pain in your chest tears and burns, every one of her shortcomings, from toenail fungus to sociopathy. With a verbal flourish you imagine is dramatic, but which in fact is merely unintelligible, you hang up on her. And you wake in the morning on top of the covers, fully clothed, the hard leather corner of your wallet poking a dent in your hip, filled with the creeping feeling of having done something for which you should be ashamed, but no solid idea what that something is.
You are pursued by this feeling all day, as if by a ghost, or a super-spy, until you return, drunk once more, from O’Toole’s, and call Amy again, calm and contrite because even though we’ve refused to help you piece together the details of last night’s call, there is some tiny, primitive part of your mind that is impervious to alcohol, the brain’s black box, and it has recorded every word from the previous evening and is sending clear if nonspecific signals indicating that contrition is very much in order.
Though you consider the situation with Amy to be the biggest problem in your life at the moment, there are other issues you ought to be paying more attention to. We’re referring, of course, to your state of mind. While we’re willing to accept our portion of the responsibility for your general pessimism, we would be remiss if we didn’t point out that you are also undergoing dramatic changes in brain chemistry brought on by heavy, prolonged alcohol and drug consumption. This is beyond feeling blue. This is four hours of inexplicable panic that reduced you to a mute, paralytic state similar to the episode you had as a child after watching The Prophesies of Nostradamus, except this time you were not a toddler but a twenty-year-old man, lying on a bench near the Dearborn Street bridge, staring straight up to where the stars would have been were they not obscured by the megawatt towers, your head resting on the lap of a young woman you’d met a few times at O’Toole’s but whose name to this day you can’t recall, a woman who stayed wi
th you the full four hours, her butt numb and legs knotted with cramps, because she was genuinely afraid that you would die from fright if left alone. This is staying inside your brother’s home for four days at a time, dispatching the Help for beer and burritos, and peering out from behind the shades at people on the sidewalk below like you’re Quasimodo. This is butting cigarettes out on your own arms and legs and crying at diet pill commercials.
Again: we accept our portion of the responsibility for your despair. It’s understandable you would question the relevance of human actions, moral systems, even existence itself in the context of la fin du monde, but honestly. Don’t fool yourself into believing it’s everything to do with the Destroyer of Worlds and nothing to do with the damage being wreaked on your nervous system by drugs and booze. Not to mention suppressed fury over Amy having left you. But mostly the drugs and booze.
You press ahead with the getting clobbered nightly for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the centipede. You wake in late morning with your eyes popping out of their sockets and a pain in your gut like you swallowed hot coals, anxiety already scuttling about your skull as though a centipede has crawled into your ear while you slept. You limp to the bathroom, hunched over so you don’t piss yourself. A cup of black coffee and the resolution that enough’s enough and you will take today off, give your head and your liver a break. The centipede twitches, scurries, and suggests otherwise, because now it’s not just moving around in there, it’s also growing—whereas when you first awoke it was maybe an inch or so long, now it’s the length of a pencil. The interior of your skull is too small for it to turn without bending itself, and you can feel it twisting its body segment by segment. One hundred needle legs prick your brain, which actually physically recoils, or such is the sensation. You attempt to distract yourself with television, or the Tribune, but it is difficult to concentrate on anything but what’s going on in your head. Finally, foolishly, you amend your resolution to read that you will not drink today, leaving the implication that pills are acceptable, and you shake a handful of tablets out of your bottle, separate two of the light-green ones from the rest, and wash them down with a couple swallows of orange juice. The aftertaste of the juice is like vomit wafting up from your throat, but you fight to keep the pills down and after fifteen minutes the centipede’s scurrying slows and its growth is halted altogether. Its presence in your head becomes tolerable, just so, and you even manage to smile once or twice and mean it. Soon enough, though, the frenzied laps around the circumference of your brain resume. As daylight fades, your mind, centipede-harried, spits out dozens of rationalizations for reneging on that whole not-drinking-tonight thing, the most transparent of which is the need for some sort of transition from the really heavy drinking of the night before to not drinking at all. You’re just too sick to go without a few medicinal shots, is the rationale. Again you negotiate a deal with yourself: instead of the usual twelve beers and six or seven mixed drinks, you’ll limit yourself to half that, and then tomorrow, always, always tomorrow, you will stay completely dry.
Though we understand the manner in which addiction works, we’re still surprised at how easily you, of all people, can lie to yourself.
In any event, having made a decision you’re down in the streets, negotiating sidewalk traffic like Mary Tyler Moore with a crack habit. O’Toole’s is crowded as always; the regulars know enough to get here early and can all be found at their usual spots at the bar itself. This includes Reggie Fox, who most often is the only black person in O’Toole’s, and who is always the only person in O’Toole’s, of any color, who is missing both legs at the hip, an arm above the elbow, and most of one ear.
Reggie reaches up to put his drink on the bar, and uses the joystick on his wheelchair to shimmy to the side and make room for you. You give him a perfunctory high-five and mime your desperation to Wade, the bartender, who responds with a shot glass and a bottle of SoCo. You pour and drink two quick shots, then hand Reggie his Crown Royal and cola to save him the effort of reaching for it.
Reggie says something you can’t make out.
“Huh?” O’Toole’s hums and buzzes as one large unruly organism, and you have to lean down to hear him.
“I said I been thinkin’,” Reggie says again. “About what you and I been discussin’.”
“The banks?” you ask. A few weeks ago Reggie—who is kind and funny but also insane—hatched this idea to turn his wheelchair into a rolling bomb and use it to rob banks. The two of you were hitting Reggie’s custom one-handed bong and discussing his ridiculously inadequate Social Security disability payment. The idea was your job would be to drive the getaway wheelchair van. The one problem being that you, of course, have no motivation to rob banks. But it’s been fun to discuss and flesh out, like any other fantasy you’d never have the balls to try and pull off.
Reggie shushes you, as if anyone could hear what you were saying, and as if it would matter if they could. “Keep it down, now,” he says, looking this way and that. “And forget the banks. The Fox got a better idea.”
You straighten up and take a sip of the draft that Wade has placed on the bar for you. You wait for Reggie to continue with his big idea, but he says nothing further, just sucks his Crown and cola through a pair of those super-narrow bar straws. He’s sucking so hard, in fact, that his cheeks have imploded, but if his effort produces a change in the fluid level in his glass it’s not visible to the naked eye.
“You know those aren’t really functional straws, right?” you say. “They’re swizzle sticks. You stir with them.”
Reggie narrows his eyes to slits, releasing the straws with an audible pop. “How the fuck am I supposed to swizzle anything when the only hand I got is holding the glass? And what do you know, anyway? You ain’t even old enough to be in here.”
“Sure I am,” you say. “What are you talking about, anyway? What’s this idea?”
“Ain’t sayin’ in here.”
“Reggie, come on.” You pour another drink of SoCo, and since you’ve already forgotten we’ll remind you that this is your third and final shot of the evening, according to the terms of the agreement you made with yourself an hour ago. “I can’t even hear you. How will anyone else?”
But Reggie shakes his head. “This is serious,” he says. “You want to talk about this, you got to come with me to my place.”
You consider. The bar is rowdier than you care for. A large contingent of Northwestern greeks has annexed the back third of the place, including the pool and Foosball tables, and they’re beginning to exude that loose, dangerous energy peculiar to groups of college-age boys when they begin traversing the threshold between tipsy and hammered. We can tell you your concern is well founded; if you stay here much longer there will be trouble.
“Got anything to drink?” you ask Reggie.
“Whole bottle’a Wild Turkey,” he says. “Plus an ounce of skunk.”
“Let’s go,” you say, grabbing the handles on the back of his chair and wheeling him toward the cargo elevator in the back.
Reggie lives in a subdivision in Washington Park, south of Sixty-third. It probably goes without saying, but given your perpetually addled state we feel we should advise you never to come into this neighborhood without Reggie as an escort. Merely being in the presence of a black person does not necessarily convey safety, but being in Reggie’s presence does, because he is The Fox, and because he’s wheelchair-bound, and because he’s funny and well liked and known by everyone, including the many people who would otherwise be keenly interested in discovering what your insides look like.
Reggie’s efficiency, when added up, is exactly six square feet smaller than your brother’s master bathroom. The two of you sit in Reggie’s living room, which is just large enough to hold his wheelchair, a Canadian rocker that doesn’t really rock all that well, and a TV stand with a small black-and-white set on it.
“Pour me a shot’a that Turkey,” Reggie says to you.
“Hold on a second,
” you say as you load the bong. “I’m busy, here. I’ve only got two hands, you know.”
“That’s one-and-one-half more than I got,” he says. “So don’t cry to me.”
“Would you take this and shut up.” You give Reggie the bong, and he uses his gnarled half-hand to light, carb, and hit a huge column of smoke.
You hear men arguing outside, an unintelligible chorus of angry voices directly below the living room window. You pour two shots and hand one to Reggie. “So what about the banks?”
“Forget the banks,” Reggie says. He gets demon-red eyes from dope, and already his scleras are pinkish, as though they’d been washed accidentally with a brand-new red shirt. “This ain’t about money. This is about the government treatin’ disabled people better.”
“So if not the banks,” you say, “then what?”
“The Social Security building,” he says. “Over on West Madison.”
“What about it?”
Reggie downs his shot, then leans as far forward as he can and fixes you with a moist gaze. “I’m-a blow that motherfucker up,” he says.
And because nothing seems to alarm you much these days, least of all the wholesale loss of human life, you have pretty much the most inappropriate response possible when someone has just threatened to commit suicide and take a thousand other people with him: you laugh and hit the bong.
“Ain’t no joke,” Reggie says. “I can get enough C-4 on my chair to blow that place to bits. Won’t be nothing left but dust.”
This isn’t strictly true. The Harold Washington SSA building is twenty-two stories high, and with an average detonation velocity of 8750 m/s it would take over six hundred pounds of C-4 to level the place. Reggie’s chair is heavy-duty, but it isn’t a half-ton pickup. That said, it certainly could carry enough explosives to damage the building beyond repair, not to mention kill a lot of people.