“Hm. Okay. I found a pair of Jimmy Choos at T. J. Maxx, that’s kind of a miracle, right?”
“Come on.”
“You’re very high, aren’t you, honey?”
“A little.”
“You never get high.”
“It’s New Year’s Eve.”
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll play. Let’s see … it was at least ten years ago.”
She pauses.
“What is it?”
“It’s ridiculous.”
“What is it?”
“It was, I guess it was, the year my sister came back.”
The seldom-spoken-of younger sister. Barrett knows only sketchy details, after a decadelong friendship with Liz.
“Go on,” he says.
“This is silly.”
“Go on.”
She pauses.
“She went off her medication. And one day she just … disappeared. For almost a year.”
“You’ve told me that. I think.”
“I don’t talk about her much.”
“I know. I know that.”
“I’m not sure why, really. Well, okay, I guess it’s because it obviously runs in the family, and I’m afraid it could happen to me. That’s fucked up, isn’t it? Like the Greeks refusing to name the god of the underworld, in case he overheard them.”
“What is it that runs in the family?” Barrett asks.
“Well. Schizophrenia. It didn’t happen until she was twenty-three. She’d been the smartest, loveliest girl in the world. She was fine, she was just fine. She was in law school, she’d gotten an internship with the ACLU, which as you may or may not know is a very hard job to get. And then she had this break. And she was someone else. She was paranoid and anxious about almost everything and she had these crazy ideas about corporate plots, and assassination squads and, oh, well, she … changed. She was just … another person. She had to quit school. She moved back in with our parents.”
Andrew says, “Her name was Sarah.”
“That was in fact her name,” Liz says. “Anyway, she went on medication, and it helped, but only sort of. It made her a better imitation of who she’d been. But it was as if Sarah had died, and been replaced by some sort of pod person.”
“I see pod people every day,” Andrew says. “All over the place.”
“She hated the medication, everybody hates the medication, it makes you fat and drowsy and it just kills sex entirely. And, one day, without telling us, it seems she stopped taking it. And left. One day. When our mother and father happened to be out of the house for a while.”
“She left,” Barrett says.
“She walked away. We couldn’t find her. We tried everything. At first we looked around the city, and then we started calling the police and putting posters up all over the place. She was completely out of her mind, she was a pretty twenty-three-year-old, who knew what someone might do to her?”
“Women are kind of screwed, in the world,” Andrew says.
“She had some money with her, we knew that. She liked having money, she’d just take it from our mother’s purse, our mother never minded. We didn’t even know how much, but probably enough for a bus ticket someplace. And after a month or so, I thought our mother was going to die. I mean, literally. Sarah left in December. If she hadn’t been raped and murdered, she could have been frozen somewhere, she could have been starving to death.”
A silence passes. The room crowds around them, all shadow and spike.
“I’d go over to my parents’ place,” Liz says, “and my mother would just be sitting there. In a chair in the living room. Just sitting there. Like she was, I don’t know. In a waiting room, waiting to see a doctor or something.”
“What about your father?”
“He was devastated too. But he was himself. He kept doing things around the house. Fixing things. Like, if the house was in better shape, Sarah would come back. I knew, I thought I knew, that if Sarah … never came back, our father would be okay. Fucked up of course, but he’d survive. I wasn’t sure our mother would.”
“Did you think she’d kill herself?”
“No, I thought she’d … vanish. Bit by bit. That sooner or later she’d develop some illness, something the doctors couldn’t diagnose.”
Andrew says, “People do that. People get sick from their lives.”
Liz, her patience finally exhausted, gives him a stern, teacherly look.
If you don’t know the answers, perhaps it would be best if you just listened.
Barrett says, “What happened?”
“What happened was. Like, five months later, there was a knock on the door, and it was her. She looked awful. She weighed about ninety pounds and she had bugs in her hair and was dressed in things people had thrown out. But she was there. One night. Out of nowhere.”
“Really.”
“It seemed so impossible. We’d been hoping, of course we had, but we’d been practicing for the idea that she … wasn’t alive anymore. And then one night, there she was.”
“Where had she gone?”
“We don’t know, really. She said something about Minneapolis, she said something about South Beach. But she’d turned down a law school in Minneapolis, before she had the break, and she’d gone to South Beach the year before, on vacation. We never really got the story. It was hard to tell whether she remembered where she’d been.”
“She was home, though.”
Liz nods gravely. She might be agreeing to some harsh but inevitable verdict.
“Yes. She was home.”
“Which was kind of a miracle.”
“I don’t pray,” she says. “I don’t believe in God.”
“I know that.”
“But for a few weeks after Sarah came back, I did keep saying these silent thanks to every person who’d given her a dollar, every person who let her sleep in their vestibule, anyone who’d ever given her anything. After that, I always give a dollar to anybody who asks.”
“This was after you saw the light.”
“It was at least three months later.”
“But still.”
“Okay, yes, you fucker, in strict chronological order, it was after I got very high on some very good hashish, and thought I saw some kind light. Do you honestly think there’s a connection?”
“I’m not sure. I keep wondering about that.”
“Well. It’s good, it’s very very good, that she’s home, that she’s safe. But she’s not
better.
She’s back on her medication. She’s fat and slow and she lives in her old bedroom. She plays video games.”
“It’s better than dead in Minneapolis.”
“Still. It’s kind of a shitty miracle, don’t you think?”
Andrew says, “Hey, three minutes to midnight.”
“I’m not really thinking miracles. I’m thinking, I don’t know, portents.”
“Two minutes and fifty seconds,” Andrew says.
Liz tells him, “Go into the living room and make sure everybody knows. I’ll be there in a second.”
“You’ll be there for the countdown?”
“Absolutely. Go, now.”
Andrew rises obediently from the bed, leaves the room. It’s Liz and Barrett, side by side on the bed.
“Does it matter?” Liz asks.
“Does what matter?”
“A portent. Something like that.”
“You’d have to say it’s interesting.”
“Sweetheart. I’m thinking more like, I’d have to say it’s wishful bullshit.”
•
Tyler and Beth have ducked into the kitchen, for a bit of alone time. They hold each other, leaning against the countertop.
Beth says, “We’re almost in another year.”
“We are.” Tyler buries his nose in the crook of her neck. He inhales her as deeply as he does cocaine.
There’s a speck of grit in his eye. He tries blinking it out—he can’t loosen his hold on Beth, not now, to rub at it.
“And the world hasn’t ended,” she says.
“Not for some of us.”
She presses him more tightly against herself. “Don’t start,” she whispers. “Not tonight.”
Tyler nods. He won’t start. Not tonight. There will be no screeds about secret CIA prisons in Poland and Romania, warrantless wiretapping, or the fact that Bush himself has now admitted to thirty thousand Iraqi civilians dead since the war began. That would be the war against a country that didn’t attack the United States in the first place.
Tyler says, softly, close to Beth’s ear, “They found mammoth DNA in England.”
“So, they can make a mammoth again?”
“That’s probably a little premature. Let’s just say they were never going to make a mammoth again
without
mammoth DNA.”
“That would be so great. Imagine!”
“It would be extremely great.”
“They’d keep him in a zoo, though, wouldn’t they?”
“
No
. They’d want to study him in his natural habitat. They’d build a whole mammoth preserve for him. Probably in … Norway.”
“That’s nice,” she says.
“You know what else?”
“What?”
“Fiji overturned its sodomy laws. You can be gay in Fiji now.”
“That’s good.”
“
And
…”
“Mmm-hmm?”
“Princess Nori of Japan married a commoner, and relinquished the throne.”
“Is he handsome?”
“Not really. But he has a true heart, and he loves her more than anything.”
“That’s even better.”
“Of course it is.”
From the living room, Ping’s voice. “One minute to midnight!”
Beth says, “Let’s stay in here, okay?”
“Somebody will come and find us.”
“Then we’ll tell them to go away.”
“Absolutely.”
Unexpectedly, Tyler starts weeping. It’s a dry, quiet weeping, more like gagging on tears than shedding them.
Beth says, “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”
Tyler lets her hold him. He can’t speak. He’s surprised by this sudden assault. He’s afraid, of course he’s afraid, on Beth’s behalf—a remission so unanticipated, so inexplicable, could vanish as mysteriously as it arrived. They both know that. They discussed it once, and agreed to discuss it no further.
He weeps, too, over the wedding song he sang for Beth, more than a year ago. Why can’t he seem to forget (never mind forgive) the fact that it wasn’t a good song, despite the assurances, from everyone, that it was the best thing he’d ever done? Yeah, right. It was heartfelt, it naturally enough elicited tears, but Tyler knew, he knew, that it was more sentimental than searing. He’d been defeated by his own lacks. He winces, now, to remember:
sliver in my heart
had remained, but without any mention of ice; there may have been (he’s willed himself to forget the particulars)
our double-handed, solemn approach
, rhymed with
the invisible driver of the ancient rose-decked coach.
He knew he’d run out of time, he’d run out of talent, and delivered a ballad, a nice little ballad, appropriate to the occasion, satisfying to all present, but not a creation hammered out of bronze; not a song that mingled love and death, that could be sung after the lovers themselves were dust. It was local. It was of course ecstatically received, but even as he sang it, as Beth stood trembling (frail then, her skin the same watered white as her silk dress), transported, aflame with love for him; he knew even then that he was a minstrel, his forehead encircled not by gold band or laurel wreath but plumed hat; adept at singing of love because he did so for hire, all over the county; convincing because well practiced, so accustomed to feigning romance for strangers that he could at this point do nothing
but
feign, even when the feelings were his own. The musical language of convincing fakery had become the only language in which he sang.
The song was lauded, as it would be. But the singer always knows.
Tyler weeps for many reasons, among them his own failure, a failure of the worst kind, a secret failure, as others insist that with his love song to Beth he broke through, he conquered, he found the treasure he’d been seeking.
“It’s okay,” Beth says again.
Tyler has not wiped that speck out of his eye. The petty distractions of the flesh …
From the living room: “Twenty, nineteen, eighteen …”
•
In the living room, a giddy nervousness. Where is everybody? It’s just Ping, Nina, and Foster.
Foster, eyes on his pocket watch, says, “Seventeen, sixteen …”
Where, he wonders, is Tyler?
Ping asks, silently,
Foster, is tonight the night?
Nina says, to herself,
I’m sorry, Stephen, I don’t know what I was thinking of, I’ll call you right after midnight.
“Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen …”
Andrew walks in, doing his shoulders-forward walk, that simian thing. Why is he still here? How can Liz stand it?
There’s no denying that he’s hot. He’s helpless, and she likes running the show. She’s finally freaking out about her age. He must have an amazing dick. It’s a maternal thing, she should have had a child. She’s decided one of these guys is just like any other, why keep switching around? He’s hot, very hot. He must bore her to death. Does she know she looks ridiculous with him? She must be getting tired. Maybe he’s different when they’re alone.
“Twelve, eleven, ten …”
Ping says, “Where’s Liz?”
“On her way,” Andrew answers.
Foster is ready, he’s not a young thing anymore, I’ve loved him for so long. Why did I say that to Stephen, I’ve got to learn control. Tyler, where are you? Why did I say that, not young anymore, where are you?
“Nine, eight, seven …”
•
In the bedroom, Liz says to Barrett, “We’re not happy, are we, about finding drugs in Tyler’s drawer.”
“No. We’re not.”
“You going to talk to him about it?”
“Yeah, I guess. I mean, I have to, right?”
“You’d be the one.” She huddles into herself, folds her arms over her chest.
“We both saw a light,” Barrett says. “You and I.”
“An airplane. A little puff of cosmic gas.”
“I don’t think so.”
“What else could it have been?” she says.
“Six, five, four …”
“We should go in there,” she says.
“I know.”
They remain where they are.
“Three, two …”
Barrett gazes imploringly at Liz.
“One.”
•
Tyler and Beth kiss, ravenously. As they kiss, Tyler breathes into her and, at the same time, inhales her. They exchange some kind of potency, he can’t tell whether he’s kissing his own health into her or drawing her miraculously restored health into himself. It doesn’t matter. He decides it doesn’t matter. She’s molded to him, they’re here, it’s 2006.