CLIMBING TO THE WINDOW, PRETENDING TO DANCE
THREE HOURS on I-5 so far, straight as a tightrope, and every twenty minutes or so he sees one of those birds. Always near the roadside, on bent fenceposts or hopping in the gray flossy grass, they look like crows but with breasts a militant strain of orange. They come with an eerie regularity, ten already, and they are alone. Fish, approaching thirty and driving eighty, doesn’t know what to call these birds. They are wretched birds.
It’s a merciless drive from San Jose to Bakersfield—you’d think it was Iowa or Texas if you couldn’t, faintly, sense the sea air coming over the western hills. Inland like this, it’s hotter and more humid than Fish, who grew up in Illinois, wants California to be. Heat echoes off the road in liquid waves, cars heave with asthma, and Fish’s penis is sticking to his thigh in a way that seems irrevocable. It’s actually a decent drive for a while—all those velour hills by the dropping of a barn-red sun—but then the road just goes, moaning its way south, and it’s so straight you want to kill it all and chop your goddamned head off.
Fish tells himself, audibly, not for the first time, that he would kill his cousin Adam if he had the chance and could get away with it. As children, he and Adam were made to think of each other as brothers, because their mothers were close and neither of them had a male sibling.
They looked nothing alike.
Adam was an only child, while Fish has a younger sister, Mary, married now and with two sets of twins, all of them freckled and insane—they jump on visitors like dogs. Adam lived in Aurora and Fish lived in Galena, so they saw each other only once a month and in the summers went on uneventful canoe trips in lower Wisconsin, passing in their quiet canoe groups of sharp-toothed kids, poor, wearing bandannas and white rope bracelets.
Fish is driving to see Adam—there goes another one of those black birds, with plumage like a chest exploding— because Adam has tried to kill himself again. This is his seventh attempt, and now Fish knows he should have flown. San Jose, he’s almost sure, has a direct flight to Bakersfield, less than an hour in the air. Piss! Every time he finishes this drive he vows never again, and then two months later he’s here, punching the window, back soaked, left arm sunburned, cursing himself.
Five hours at least, this drive, plenty of time to come up with a plan, something to say. He tries to concentrate on Adam but finds himself constantly adrift and onto other subjects, like food and war. Years ago he thought he could have an effect on Adam’s life, but now he knows he’s a spectator, a parent watching a child’s sporting event, hands twisted into fists, unable to influence the outcome.
Fish passes a huge beef-processing plant, where a hundred thousand cows are kept so close they can’t move their tails enough to swat flies. There is no earth visible below their doomed hides. He rolls up the window, the stench vile, punishing. Those stupid cows, he thinks, born to die, born to be eaten, born to walk in their own feces. Jesus! It smells fetid, bloody and sweet, like human innards, if you could open yourself up and bring it all to your nose and inhale.
Adam doesn’t talk to his mom or to Fish’s parents, and he’s never had a job, none that Fish can recall, which in a way is impressive, how he’s been able to get by for so many years without any sort of legitimate income. There are people who do this, who divert just enough energy and funds and goodwill from those close to them to exist without anyone taking much notice; it’s like stealing cable, but on a larger scale. Fish has given Adam about twenty-two hundred dollars over the years, which he has used frugally—he is clever that way. He’s clever in every way, really, even in surviving so many attempts on his own life. Maybe he’s unkillable, Fish thinks, and he suddenly snorts out loud at the thought.
Fish’s other cousin, Chuck, a tax lawyer in Charlotte with the face of a priest, rose-colored and surprised, says that Adam looks about forty now, though he’s only twenty-eight. The drugs do that, Chuck says. Chuck should know.
Fish hasn’t seen Adam in almost a year and now he’s afraid to. If Adam looks old, it means Fish is old and they’re both old, everyone’s old, and— Damn, another one of those birds. There must be a name for those things.
Adam’s hope, Fish is sure, is to be the shape-shifting mystery spot in the life of his family and friends. The problem is that Fish has never had a fascination with people who try to kill themselves. Maybe if he took more of an interest in the concept, Adam wouldn’t keep trying to prove how intriguing it is. With the resources they required of everyone around him, Adam’s life and his attempts on it were a kind of vacuum, into which he pulled the good air around him, and everyone close to him—took their words and possibility for joy. And yet in most ways Adam is nowhere near as strange, for example, as the guy who delivers Fish’s mail, a man named Kojo.
“Short for Kojak?” Fish asked when they met. It was a dusty day, windy, the sun like a planet of sand. The mailman laughed. He laughed for about ten minutes over that one. Fish was flattered, then he was scared. Kojo liked to laugh, laughing in a big, unconvincingly expansive way, but he didn’t like to wear the postal pants. He always wore the shorts, no matter how cold it got.
He came into Fish’s house once for a beer, and he drank with his mouth all around the bottle, as if fellating it. Then he unrolled his sleeve and showed Fish a skin graft he’d got—
just
for the wack of it,
he said. “Took some skin from my lower back and put it on my arm.” The pores in the new skin were smaller and the surface was smoother, less weathered. There are doctors, Kojo said, who’ll do anything for the right money.
A week later Kojo brought Fish a collage, the kind junior-high girls assemble, with phrases cut from women’s magazines—“Only Best Friends Know!” “Quiz: Are His Pals the Real Deal?”—pasted over pictures, cut from books, of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet flying kites together, walking through the woods at night, among the trees with muscular trunks.
Fish attracts these people. In high school there was an older guy, a senior when he was a sophomore, tall and bent backward. He had a huge, almost perfectly square head, and he wanted Fish to drive cross-country with him, though they’d talked only once, briefly, while they were watching the girls’ swim team practice.
“I like butterfly,” the guy had said. His name was either Brendan or Brandon or Stuart.
“Butterfly’s good,” Fish had said.
That had been their conversation, all of it, and two months later a breathless Brandon appeared, grinning, forehead wet with concentration, when Fish was walking out to soccer practice. “Don’t say no, Fish. We’re gonna head out and fuck this fucking school and drive to Florida. Fuck this fucking fuck!”
Fish, not wanting to say no, just said “Sorry,” and followed the rest of the team over the hill, to the upper field, rectangular but sloping on every side, like a freshly filled grave.
When Kojo presented the collage to Fish, insisting that he open it there in the doorway, Fish didn’t know what to say. He shook his head in a kind of awe, then thanked Kojo and made plans to see him three weeks hence—they’d have a beer at the end of the month, just
tear it up,
yeah—then, the next morning, Fish got himself a post-office box.
Fish is driving, slapping himself to stay alert, and he’s counting, to be sure it’s been seven times for Adam. One: the wrists (with an small saw on his thin, paper-white arms). Two: poison—he drank floor wax, first pouring it into a tall clear glass. Three: the gunshot to the stomach. Or the side of the stomach—the bullet grazed him and went through his window and into the Episcopal church next door. No one was killed or hurt, but Adam felt so bad about it that, four, he stabbed himself in the leg with a cleaver. Five: he tried bringing a hair dryer into the tub with him, but it was suicide-proof, apparently—it turned itself off, leaving Adam shivering, the water having gone cold while he’d got up the nerve. Six: what was six? A car driven into a tree? There was debate about whether that one had been intentional.
This time, two nights ago, Adam, half drunk—he was always impaired when he tried these things—jumped off a motel roof. At least that’s what Chuck heard from the paramedic who found Adam, unconscious in the parking lot, splayed like a buck on the hood of a truck. It was about forty feet down, Chuck said.
Adam could have jumped into a dry gorge a few blocks from the motel and he would have died for sure—the dropoff there was about a hundred feet. Instead, he fell four stories, into the courtyard, broke his collarbone, cracked his left leg, bent his spine.
The road is quiet. I-5 is split, a narrow valley between the comers and the goers, so Fish, his brain marshy and his eyes glazed, can see only the cars that are heading in his own direction. Fish likes to see the faces of people going the other way, to construct stories about them, wish them well or ill, but this is nothing, this drive—this is sorrow. It makes you want to freeze the world and shatter it with an ax.
This morning Fish’s pillow was soaked and his blanket was halfway out the window; he woke up hearing machine guns and screams. Not unusual, but this time he was on the plane, not watching it. It hadn’t taken off yet. There was something wrong, the air of the world had shrunk in on itself and then the men burst in. They pulled guns from a compartment and started shooting, endlessly, from the front to back, everything moving too slowly. Fish was in one of the last rows, listening to the shrieking, constant but undulating, and he was planning, clenching and unclenching his fists, looking around, between seats behind and in front of him, for a couple of people to come with him and help him end this. The fact that he was alive to hear the suffering meant that he was meant to stop it.
Through breakfast Fish was still operating under the blurry assumption the attack had been real, but CNN said nothing about it. Still, he was down, foggy, feeling remorse. He was crushing aluminum cans in the driveway, distracted, nerves shot, when Chuck called from Charlotte and described what Adam had done.
“I’m not going this time,” Fish said.
“I can get there four days from now,” Chuck said. “Do one day before I come. Make sure he’s not paralyzed. Check that they have him in a real room and everything.” Two years ago, after No. 3, Chuck arranged insurance for Adam, an expensive plan, and was frequently checking to make sure he was getting his money’s worth.
Chuck doesn’t know Adam as well as he pretends, and thus his benevolence can be less complicated than Fish’s. He never shared a bedroom with Adam. He never found Adam’s crusty tissues stuffed, like brains displayed in a jar, in a curvy blue bottle he’d won at a carnival. He never caught Adam rubbing down Mary’s legs after track, his hands wrapped like tentacles around her calves.
Fish is driving a rental car. He called the place where they pick you up in a sedan wrapped in brown paper. He called at about noon and they said they’d send the car over at two. Between twelve and two, he waited in his house. He watched baseball on TV. He put in a videotape of him and his father running in a Chicago marathon. His dad was wearing the brace he wore during those years, and he has a mustache. When he sees the camera, he turns around and runs backward. Then Fish’s mom drops the camera and the tape ends. Adam was no athlete. There was a game Fish played with him—it was Adam’s only good toy—where tiny metal football players move around on a field vibrating below them. It was a strange device, because you couldn’t really control the little bastards—you just watched as the field sent them jerking around, crowding together or falling alone.
Fish watched some of the national aerobics championship. He closed all the cabinets in his house and, using his new drill, tightened all the hinges. He walked to the stationery shop to see if he could buy Adam anything. They didn’t have much. He got a card congratulating him on his Bat Mitzvah, thinking that it was funny, knowing that Adam, who had to be told when to laugh, wouldn’t get the joke.
Outside, it was summer. He bought a glass-blue Sno-Kone, wrapped in the same weak waxy paper they’ve been using for a hundred years, from a tiny man with a cart. He held it gingerly between his fingers. It was glorious, really too perfect to change. He didn’t want to eat that ice—it was so right, that blue dome, like a tiny lost moon he could hold in his hand.
It began to melt, so he ate it in gulps.
He returned home, thinking maybe he should wait another day, or even two. The sooner he got there, really, the sooner Adam would feel well enough to leave the hospital, and the sooner he’d try it again. The longer Adam was in the hospital, probably restrained in some effective way, the better. He was content, Fish was sure. Adam was always content in a hospital.
At two-thirty, Fish called the rental place and they said they were on their way and could he give them his address again. He did, and waited.
At three o’clock, he called the place again and it was a new guy on the phone. New guy said he had no record of Fish’s reservation. “You know,” Fish said, “that’s messed up. I’ve been waiting forever and I have to get down to goddamned Bakersfield.” New guy sighed and said he’d look again. Then he got back on the phone and said that he was sorry, that he’d found the reservation posted on the bulletin board.
“
Someone,
” he said, “put it up on the board without telling anyone else.” He was directing this to some nameless offscreen coworker.
“Sure,” Fish said, “but isn’t that what the goddamned board is for, so you don’t have to tell everyone about it?” Fish wanted a look at that office. “Jesus,” he added. “That’s really fucked.”
“Well, I am sorry,” new guy said.
“I have a friend in the hospital, motherfucker.” Fish was surprised; he hadn’t contemplated that sentence. He realized that this was one of those moments when one’s impatience— or was the word
rage
?—was being misdirected. All the same, he thought he’d very much like to beat the new guy till he whispered.
New guy told Fish someone would come get him soon, and then hung up. Fish went into the tiny yellow yard in front of his house and took the croquet wickets out of the grass. They’d been sitting there for three months, since Mary’s kids had been over. They couldn’t play to save their lives, those kids. They didn’t care about the rules, either. They just hit the balls like monkeys, squawking and swinging and running into the street.