The Family Unit and Other Fantasies (9 page)

In earlier days, Michelle had dismissed George as an amiable dork, whose company she endured because he was Joe’s old friend. Now she seemed to actually like this new George, one who, as Joe saw it, had stopped physical time and, during its suspension, become an accomplished person who had kept living while everyone else was doing the normal thing and passing away.

George didn’t stop during dinner—which was an okay pot roast and potatoes; Michelle made no claims of being a great cook—reacting with giddy disbelief that they still ate red meat, a choice he thought “brave” and “bold” given all the evidence against it. The whole time he served himself only one thin fat-free sliver of the main course while filling up on salad, vegetables, and (unbuttered) bread.

George sat next to young Tad, whose plate held food in exactly opposite proportions: 80 percent meat versus 20 percent (heavily buttered) baked potato and (even more heavily buttered) bread. While it had taken Joe and Michelle twenty years to officially join the fat club, Tad had done so in a mere eight years, seeming to start energetically applying right after birth, with no tactic by his parents—discouragement, admonishment, encouragement, threats, doctors’ visits, strategically placed diet books, sports playing (with Joe pulling every muscle he had after throwing and catching a football for the first time in his life), love—succeeding in slowing him down. Add to that his difficulties reading, writing, making friends, or even having any actual relationships with people not imaginary and existing only in a video game, and Tad was a large and obvious next target for George’s enthusiastic applause. Busy eating his low-calorie meal, however, their guest restricted himself just to giving him glances, complete with approving head nods and smiles.

Joe saw all this through a new haze, one caused by his fourth glass of wine, which effectively emptied the bottle. Although no one asked for more, Joe volunteered to get a new one from the basement, secretly vowing he’d make it one of the cheaper kind since George obviously refused to go beyond the medical community’s recommended one glass a day (for a healthy heart). He had actually held his hand over his glass when Joe offered him a refill, like a virgin pushing a hand off her knee (Joe thought, red-faced and unsteadily weaving now down the cellar stairs).

Before he reached the bottom, he lost his balance and skidded down the last few steps, then was forced into a painful sit-down on the final one in order to avoid pitching left shoulder and neck first onto the floor. Now he added right buttock to the areas on his body that—after yet another pointless ball toss with Tad yesterday—ached with fiery pain.

(Who was George to so condescend to and have such contempt for him, his life, and his family? Who was George, anyway, but—)

“Joe?”

A voice startled him. He realized he had—even in this uncomfortable position and in agony—fallen asleep. He turned and saw the shadow of a man above him in the basement doorway, looming weirdly large though speaking in the familiar—though not as familiar, he allowed, as it once had been, now slightly affected—tones of George.

“Joe? You all right?”

Joe made to wave but was so weak that his guest began to climb with concern in his direction, his shape refracted by the kitchen light behind him, shifting bigger then smaller then bigger as it came closer. Joe couldn’t help it, he felt his heart beat faster as he was about to be reached by someone he’d known all his life yet whose distorted form he no longer recognized and even sort of feared.

“We were all worried. You’ve been gone so long,” George said when he got there. “Can I help you up?”

“No, I’m fine,” Joe mumbled, more than a little annoyed by George’s solicitousness. What was he, an old blind dog who’d wandered out a door someone had left open (like their own dog, Clowny, recently had, and who tonight had only one milky eye opened from her usual place under a living room chair to acknowledge George’s head pat—the evidence of which was immediately removed by George with a squirt of his hand sanitizer before he proclaimed her “a remarkable beast”)?

“I’m fine!” Joe called up to Michelle, whose faint voice replied “Okay” with so little urgency that Joe knew George had been the only one worried, and only at being left alone for so long with Joe’s wife and son.

George shrugged, apparently eager to spend more time with his old friend—or just not return so soon to his old friend’s family. He sat one step above Joe on the chilly cellar stairs, and his leather blend of shoe and sneaker—now an annoying symbol of either pleasing everyone or committing to nothing—bobbed in Joe’s face when he crossed his legs.

“Wow. A ping-pong table,” George said, checking out the items near them on the floor. “And what’s that? A boiler.”

“Almost sounds like a new poem,” Joe said, smirking. “You want a pad of paper, or can you keep it all up here?” He pointed to his bald head, miscalculated the distance and jabbed his finger uncomfortably close to his eye.

George stared at him, as if literally not understanding what Joe had just said—or what, more accurately, he’d just done: ranked him out, as he and Joe had called it in their youth on the uncountable occasions when one said something comically snotty to the other, an event apparently unknown to George now with all his acolytes. Then understanding appeared like a flashlight beam on George’s face and he smiled, as if once again seeing a new sight, though this one was less entrancing than the others, was even a little annoying.

“Oh, right,” he said, “right.”

“Hey—remember the summer we both worked in that insurance office, which was in that guy’s house, and you spilled soda on his files and we threw them away and never came back to work until he told our parents, and then they forced us to go back and work for him for nothing the entire rest of the summer? And my Dad always called us ‘the two dumbkopfs’ after that?”

George’s smile of recognition briefly appeared, grew, then shrank, then grew again, then disappeared altogether. It was as if he were a computer trying to retrieve information it had erased, and after briefly succeeding, completely failing. George didn’t answer at all, as if even acknowledging the question was impossible since Joe’s password to their shared past had been removed and so denied. Then he simply looked around the dusty basement with the same nod of admiration he had shown to everything else all night.

“Yep,” he said. “Some place. Some place you’ve—”

“Look!” Joe said, and he didn’t care how loud he got—the basement was sound-proofed enough that they’d stuck an expensive drum set down there to divert Tad, which he used so rarely they soon donated it as nearly new to the high school‘s music department. “I’ve had just about enough of this! I know what you’re doing! Why don’t you just stop it and say what you really think! You hate all of this! You think it’s awful! It’s okay, this is me!” And he was surprised to discover that he had meant the last three words not to encourage intimacy with George but to establish that he and his environment were the same—or he would have done had Joe really said it instead of just imagining he said it, since he was now afraid to say anything of the kind to his old friend.

“Thanks,” was what he said instead, and even that was slurred by his intoxication. “Thanks, Gor,” and he couldn’t get out his whole first name intelligibly.

George shrugged, confusedly—why thank him? He should be thanking Joe—and then let out a long, refreshed and refreshing sigh.

“It’s just such a joy, I don’t mind telling you,” he said, “to know oneself—to be oneself. Finally, finally, like meeting someone I’ve always heard about and who everyone else was so sure that I would like. To be able to admit that I care nothing for respectable things—family, kids, career—that all I care about is my work, about—pretentious or not, call it what you want—creating beauty. And that I can say this out loud to you—it’s such a risk, to you of all people, my old pal—is so freeing, like saying, I don’t know, I’m gay, or something other people are so often ashamed of. It allows me not to mock anyone else anymore, and what they are and how they live, which I always did when I couldn’t say what I wanted out of life—what I loved, that’s really the word. And if it’s mawkish not to judge others anymore, to merely appreciate them because they don’t reflect on me or me on them—as if we’re from separate planets or in different galaxies or however far away we’d have to be not to reflect on each other—then it’s mawkish. I’ll accept any characterization of myself because I finally know who I am, so
I don’t
care when people say what I’m supposed to be and know that I’m not.”

George stopped talking then and suddenly burst into tears, his face hidden by his hands, his shoulders shaking in the showy style of actors in old or even silent films. Yet when he revealed himself again, he looked shocked and exposed and real water dripped off of him, as if from a snowball assault that leaves your face wet and red and secretly hurting much more than you let on when you’re little.

Joe—who was supposed to have been helped up the stairs by him—now offered his own hobbling assist to George, supporting him emotionally at least with a hand on his back until they emerged from underground. Then the two quickly and abashedly separated, George making for a nearby bathroom on the ground floor, Joe heading up to another on the second. He caught a quick glimpse in the kitchen of Michelle, who was already doing dishes like a hypnotized woman unable to alter her nightly routine of eating, cleaning up, and going to bed early. Tad was already in front of the TV, his mouth brutally set in an expression he only had when doing this: making menacing little movements with his thumbs against onscreen characters who fled from his bullets as if stuck in his dreams of aggression.

In the bathroom, which was unofficially his own, Joe thought about his guest. George had dug deeper and deeper until he found himself buried alive—“surprise!”—like those kids and that actor, whose name now escaped him, on that scary old TV show. He wanted to be accepted by Joe as his true self, which was sincere and sensual and secretive and not the goofy boy Joe had known. He didn’t feel superior, felt no animosity, nothing negative—felt nothing at all in fact about Joe and his family and his life. New depths had been revealed to George, and Joe hid all his reactions to them beneath being “impressed,” which was neutral, neither positive nor negative.

Then he quickly locked the bathroom door and went into a Dopp kit designed for travel that sat in a wicker basket, not conspicuous yet not concealed, that he had intended would require a special amount of suspicion and an extra commitment to investigating for Michelle to open. From it, he took three small bottles of prescription pills, which he considered half-empty and not half-full given how much he depended on and needed them, which interacted unpredictably with alcohol, and which had blurred and distorted his perceptions all day, not to mention helped him to skid his car on the way home from the station.

Joe was on an anti-depressant, and to it he often added (in addition to large amounts of red wine) a pain killer he’d gotten after another father-and-son football game and a sleeping pill which, given his usual state of anxiety, served merely as a mild sedative and didn’t even begin to induce sleep. He’d become adept at re-filling prescriptions numerous times, using tools from Wite-Out and an old typewriter to the Internet, with its access to pharmacies as far away as Canada and New Zealand. He’d forgotten how many of any pills he’d already had today and so decided he’d had none and simply started his own self-determined daily dosages from scratch, and then doubled them.

The new pills mixed with the old ones already inside him, creating an even larger family of contrasting half-siblings, some amenable to teamwork in doing their job of easing or emptying his mind, others openly opposed. The back-and-forth effects caused Joe to dizzily hold onto the sides of the sink, staring at his own reflection, then seeing George when he closed his eyes, then himself with eyes open, then George, et cetera. Resisting a swoon and sitting on the closed toilet, he began to create a new interpretation of his friend’s behaviour and blurted-out confession that was more creative, comforting, and easy to accept.

How was it possible for someone to feel nothing about, well, about a way of life humans had willingly adopted—and not by instinct, but by
choice
—ever since they evolved from lower forms? They’d even picked lice off their loved ones when they were apes, right? Trying to stand, then deciding to delay that move until his sight of things stopped spinning, Joe leaned back more authoritatively on the closed commode, ignoring the scatter of glass as the back of his head hit and tipped over bottles of Michelle’s makeup on the shelf behind him as well as a paperback book which fled and fell, spread-eagled, onto the floor.

It wasn’t possible—to feel nothing, that is—about a little baby, a cute little baby, not if you yourself were human. It meant you had recused yourself from the human race, or had never been a member in the first place. To only feel affection or allegiance or whatever George had said he felt toward something abstract, like art or whatever, and not toward a little baby—and look at that cute little baby now, the one flying in the air by Joe right there in the bathroom, look at his little feet, and goodbye, baby, he waved, as the infant flew away on obvious strings and headed to someone else’s hallucination—well, it was unnatural and everything else that word implied.

When Joe thought more—squinting to do it, for it took an enormous effort to concentrate in this condition; he strained and looked like someone having specific physical and not philosophical difficulties, given where he sat—he remembered George’s own words and used them to incriminate him. (And not unfairly—maybe George wanted his words to be used in this way, for he needed to be known as himself, didn’t he, wasn’t that what he said: “We’d have to be from separate planets or in different galaxies or however far away you’d have to be not to reflect on each other”—right, wasn’t that it?)

Images from old sci-fi TV shows the two boys had seen and spoofed whirled around his face—actors in cheap comic costumes to play characters in the cosmos—like holograms seeming no less real than things that
were
real. Then he shielded his eyes from what looked like blinding bright lights directed down at him, which heralded the arrival of a vehicle with an ear-splitting engine roar and cold and powerful winds from landing gear that blew any object in its path (toothpaste, hair dryer, towel) from its perch. Joe’s own remaining hair was whipped away in a frenzy and stuck out like swinging saloon doors from the sides of his head.