The Learners: A Novel (No Series) (28 page)

“Thanks for dropping me off. Look.” The upholstery in the front seat, practically a sofa, smelled of stale pipe smoke. I didn’t want to leave it. “I know I’ve let you down. Let you all down. I’m sorry. I’ll do better, I promise.”

“Oh, come on, you’re doing fine. You’re too hard on yourself. Ease up.” He opened the driver’s side door, came around to mine, helped me out of the car. The predicted snow had started, the air quiet and crisp. “You’re a lot like that Winter fella, actually. I remember now. He pushed himself too hard. You need some rest. It’ll be good for ya.”

He shut the trunk, set my bags on the curb. A big, glorious bear hug. “See ya in December.”

Would I? God, please, I hoped so.

Sketch. Would you ever draw upon how much I love you?

His great sedan chugged through the glittery swirl of polka-dot flakes, out of the parking lot and onto State Street.

A half hour early, I planted myself at the bar in the station. I wondered if Himillsy had ever been here. She must have.

I’m just trying to do right by you, Hims. Please don’t hate me, I just don’t know what else to do. I’m at wit’s end. Like you were.

But, Sweet: I don’t exist anymore. I’m just in your head. That’s where I live.

If you can call this living.

Forget me. For good. Let me die. It’s your only chance.

No. Never. How could you ask me to do that? How could you?

Because that’s what you want.

You’re so wrong. You’ll see. To forget you, to lose you forever, I’d lose all hope. And that’s not what I’m doing.

Oh, really?

I know how it looks. Trust me. I’ve got this figured out. Goddamm it, I do. You of all people should know: I am in control of my undoing.

And rebuilding. I’ve learned from the best.

The two great teachers in my life: Winter, who taught me who I could be, and Milgram, who taught me who I really was.

And that is a problem of locomotive proportion. By far the hardest I’d ever been assigned.

And now what? Now, finally, after so many missteps; I will meet the train. I will solve it.

The only way I can. You see, I figured it out—the best way to survive an on-coming train is to leap onto it the second before it hits you. If you do it just right, you can make it. Even Tarzan did it once, believe it or not, this one time he—

“I know that look.” The bartender’s voice, a finger-snap to my face. “It’s a girl. It’s always a girl.”

“Vodka,” I managed. “Neat.” Asshole.

“But I’ll tell ya something, I mean it. If she walked in this bar, right now, do you know what you’d do?” He reached for a bottle, a shotglass. “No matter how much she hurt you, no matter what happened, if she asked your forgiveness, you’d give it.”

“Please—”

“Because here’s the truth:” I. Hate. You.

“When it comes down to it,” he smiled with a self-appointed, ten-cent, seen-it-all authority, “hey, everything’s forgivable, right?”

A
QUESTION THAT BEGS YET ANOTHER BRIEF
TYPOGRAPHIC DIGRESSION
.

Typography can do a lot, but it has its limits like everything else. Words, too. Sometimes you feel something so profoundly and yet so strangely that it defies description. No way of expressing it is right. And yet, because you need to tell someone, to show someone, you have to try.

What if you feel it this way,

FORGIVE ME.

But you feel it this way, too?

Forgive me.

And when you try and say it like this,

Forgive me.

It comes out like this:

Forgive me.

So what is the lesson here? Maybe it’s impossible to articulate, and that’s the lesson. Or maybe this time there just isn’t one.

“Right, sport?”

Or if there is, it could simply be that at crucial moments in one’s life, bartenders should just shut the fuck up.

With hands that wanted to strangle him, I downed the shot and put two bits on the bar. With feet that wanted to kick his throat, I strode out. Down the walkway. To the platform.

Right on schedule. There it was. Weird: the great and terrible train; now that it was here—finally here, hissing epic shrieks of black impatience—I wasn’t scared of it anymore. I was ready to enter it, resigned. Even grateful.

Here we go.

And so I did.

With less than an hour till the end of the trip, I brought out my own schedule: yes, it was time. Time to implement the plan. I rose from my compartment, walked to the bathroom at the end of the car, locked the door behind me.

A mirror above the fetid sink. Turning my head, I brought myself to look at me for the first time in what seemed like months, at my ears, with their little wonder-flaps.

Don’t fail me now.

Extracting the amber bottle from my vest pocket, I unscrewed the cap, emptied it into my hand.

Thank you, Tip. You’ve given me so much, you really have. The tablets shone like stars in the universe of my palm—blasted out of orbit, on their way to another galaxy.

They are enough for what I need. It says so, in a little warning, right there on the bottle itself.

Cue the flask of Seagram’s. Then it occured to me, on the cusp of my finality, that I shouldn’t take them all at once. Better done in segments, like chapters. With the first gulp of six, it’s Before. The second, During. The third, After. The fourth…After That.

And it struck me, as the last of them went down, how easy it is to accept that once something is swallowed, it no longer exists—whether it’s an excuse or an execution order.

D
URADREAM HELPS YOU SEE THE NIGHT

And so now they didn’t.

You had the right idea, Hims, but the wrong technique, the bum luck. Like always. And now, I am stealing your idea. But I’m making it foolproof this time. It’s not what it appears to be. This is how it will go:

The pills consumed, I return to my seat. We reach my stop. The conductor taps my shoulder, I slump. An ambulance is hastily called, my parents notified. There will be worry, then relief. My stomach will be pumped, the crisis averted. And then I will wake up. And I will have my life back. The horrible freight will have been unloaded and taken to be burned. I will be twenty-two again, instead of a hundred.

And I will start over, go back to the firm, I will heal things with Tip. I will be forgiven. I will go on to do great things. The right things this time. I will have learned and proven: The solution needs to be as devastating as the problem.

So that’s the plan. It is obscene in its self-indulgence and narcissism and I’m not proud of it.

But it will actually work, for me. And I will survive it.

And on my way back to my seat on the largely deserted car, it occurs to me: Himillsy, did you have Darwin’s tubercles? Funny, but as often as I gazed longingly at your glorious head, years ago, months ago,

…I can’t remember.

SIGNING OFF.

C
ONTENT AS
S
INCERITY
.

Oh! Is it that time already? And we’ve only just scratched the surface (to use a metaphor). But we have no control over these things, do we? And so, I thought I’d end tonight’s program in my most earnest guise, Sincerity.

There really isn’t much to say. This is me, Content, in my most basic, uncomplicated form. I simply am what I say I am, with nothing to hide and no other agenda.

Okay, I’ll admit: I can be a bore. I am your driver’s license. I am a price tag, a phonebook, a lease, a road map, a will.

But…I’m also a construction paper birthday card, scrawled in crayon with hysterical devotion by a child who actually loves you. I am the dead mouse lying faceup on your welcome mat, left just for you, by Mittens, your cat.

I am the Constitution of the United States.

And don’t forget, when I am angry, I am this:

“HAVE YOU NO DECENCY, SIR?”

Please, please, don’t confuse me with Deception or Irony or Metaphor or anything else. If you can learn to recognize me, and accept me, then you’ve learned a great deal indeed.

Well, I’ll be saying good night now. I hope you’ve enjoyed our brief time together, and if you only remember one thing this evening, I sincerely hope it’s this:

What it all boils down to, what only ever really matters the most when it comes to Content, is Intent.

And I mean that.

With all my heart.

“Which leads us to now. Right now.” I am actually saying it out loud, in our compartment, to the man across from me, our knees avoiding each other like the wrong ends of magnets. My seatmate: a greasy, corpulent slob in a skintight pinstripe suit and a dingy pink broadcloth shirt dotted with stains. Asleep. As if rendered helpless by some sort of virulent cheese poisoning. I have been telling all of this to him, everything, because he was someone I could tell it to and pretend he was listening. It helped me stay calm. But that was all in the past. And now it is now, almost the end of the trip. I can’t think about the past anymore.

I am erasing it. I cannot fail. God, this is finally starting to feel…good?

Ten more minutes go by.

And now the train…screeches to a halt. No platform outside, pitch black. In the middle of nowhere. What’s going on?

An announcement over the public-address system:
“We’re being held here by the dispatcher, waiting for the northbound train to pass. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.”

Dear God.

Not now. Get moving. Moving moving moving.

Ten more minutes evaporate. Twenty. I search frantically for the conductor. Nowhere in sight.

The PA cackles again:
“We’re sorry, passengers, there seems to be a mechanical problem at the track switch. Please be patient.”

Nonononono.

And then the truth, the real truth, springs open like a Venus flytrap—I’d thought that I was leaving them: Sketch, Tip, Himillsy. Winter. Milgram. Mom and Dad. Leaving them.

But I’m not.

The trap closes shut, the air thins, and now I understand: It’s not that at all, it’s the opposite—they’re leaving
me
.
That’s
what’s happening. And I suddenly can’t bear it. How can they, how CAN they? Don’t leave me, please.

Good-bye.

“Huhh-ummf.” Jumbo is stirring. Shaking his big bulbous head with a snort. Like the bloated dirtpig he is. He could never, ever understand this loss. He is immune to human understanding.