Imagine Me Gone (30 page)

He turned off into a Speedway, and I parked at the edge of the lot to wait for him. He struggled with the gas cap, unable to open it. A minute went by, and then another, and still he couldn’t manage the task. He didn’t kick the truck in frustration. He showed no signs of impatience at all. He just stood there, failing at it. Until eventually he turned around and scanned the lot. When he saw me, he didn’t wave me over or call my name. He remained by the capped tank, helpless and abdicating. Can’t you do it for me? his expression asked.

“I’m curious,” I said later, in a Thai restaurant in a strip mall near campus. “What would you have done if I hadn’t been there?”

“I guess I would have figured it out,” he said sheepishly.

“And if you’d been with Caleigh, you would have figured it out, right? You wouldn’t have just stopped. What is that? Why do you do that with me?” He’d passed beyond his hyperarticulate, racing worry into a kind of fugue state, scared of the menu and the waiter and the food. “Why should it be different?” I said, jabbing the question at him, willing him to do better than this.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

My phone rang—Seth calling from Denver. I told Michael I would be back, thankful for the excuse to get up and walk out, even if it was into the hot evening air.

“It’s like babysitting,” I said after Seth asked me how things were going. “Like taking care of an aging child.”

“He must be glad you’re there, though,” Seth said.

“I guess. That’s not how it comes out, but yeah.”

I asked about his visit home. He’d spent the morning playing video games, and the afternoon at the mall. When we’d first started dating, each new discovery—that I didn’t need to make weekend plans to fill empty evenings, that I had someone to talk to at the end of the day—had come as a revelation. The discoveries were different now. I could sense his mood in a phrase or two. I knew when he was worried about me, and felt guilty for it. These were their own kind of marvels, strangely reassuring as proof that Seth and I were, in fact, involved. Just hearing him describe his day with his family untensed me. Forty-eight hours with Michael and it was as if my own life had ceased. I hadn’t returned phone calls or even responded to my editor’s e-mails. Through the plate-glass window of the restaurant, I saw my brother waiting in front of the food that had now arrived. For a moment, I glimpsed him as a stranger might: a thin, unshaven man in black cotton work pants and a gray button-down shirt damp at the armpits. Pale-skinned, hair thinning, already middle-aged.

Seth was going on about a party he wanted us to go to the following weekend, and a friend he wanted me to meet, and I said it all sounded fine, without really listening, thinking instead of the picture of Bethany I’d seen on the desktop of Michael’s computer when he opened it at the apartment, still there after all these years.

“You had a long day,” Seth said. “I’ll let you go.”

“Can we talk before bed?”

“Yes, silly. Of course.”

As soon as I reached the table, Michael asked what was wrong.

“Nothing,” I said. “Why should anything be wrong?”

“I just thought something might be the matter.”

“No,” I said, scraping rice onto my plate, suddenly ravenous. “It was Seth. The guy I’m seeing. I’ve mentioned him to you.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’s fine,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

“You’re dating him.”

“Yes.”

“That’s good,” Michael said. “How is it going?”

“Actually,” I said, “it’s going really well.” I could have stopped there. But he’d asked. “To be honest, I think we might be in love.”

His head moved fractionally up and back, as if avoiding a punch. “That’s good,” he repeated, more gravely this time. “I’m amazed you haven’t been talking about it. I can’t imagine not needing to talk about it. Given how frightening it is. You must be afraid he’s going to leave you.”

“Not really. I think we’re good.”

He squinted at me, trying to make sense of what I was saying. “Where did you meet?”

“Online. Last winter. He’s from Colorado. His parents are still there, still married. Apparently they want to meet me, which I guess is a good sign.”

“Extraordinary,” Michael said. “Has he been in therapy?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What do you guys talk about?”

“Whatever comes up, I guess. He’s got good taste in music. You’d like some of the stuff he’s played me.”

More than telling him I was in love, it was telling him this that felt cruel. Michael’s crushes had always run through music. This would make it real for him.

“He understands my work, too,” I said. “When things come up last minute, or I have to leave town, he’s good about that. You should meet him sometime.”

“Sure,” Michael said, gazing at the curries, which he still hadn’t touched. He didn’t lack an appetite. He just seemed to have forgotten how to serve himself.

“Here,” I said, holding out a plate to him. “Eat.”

And so we did, in silence.

“What courses are you going to take?” I asked, eventually.

This he was able to answer at length, listing subjects and texts, going into the critical orientations of the various members of the faculty and how they did or didn’t comport with his own theoretical commitments. “I’ve read most of the first two years of the material before,” he said. “I’d start my dissertation tomorrow, if they’d let me.”

Seeing an opening, he started in on his perennial subject: slavery and trauma. I could never tell if he actually thought he was discoursing on all this to me for the first time, in which case the drugs had given him mild dementia, or if—and this seemed more likely—it didn’t matter a great deal whom he was describing it to, he just needed to narrate it, over and over.

Earlier that summer the magazine had run my first feature in months. I had written a story about Wall Street bundlers who had begun to favor Democrats. My editor had cut some of the color I’d worked hard to get into the piece but not, for once, the implied criticism. It had drawn a slew of comments on the website and been reposted all over, making the marketing department giddy with excitement. Michael was on the list of friends and family to whom I had sent a link, people who didn’t read the magazine and would otherwise never see my work. He’d been on that list for years. My mother subscribed, of course, wanting to see my articles in print. Celia usually sent a quick e-mail in response, as she had to this one. But from Michael, as usual, not a word. At home during Thanksgiving or Christmas, he would listen attentively enough if I was telling him about an assignment, but I had no sense if he ever read what I wrote, and, if he did, what he thought of it.

As the waiter arrived to clear our plates, I asked Michael about it. Maybe it was having finally told him about Seth. Or the fact that I had a flight back to New York in the morning, and didn’t know when I would see him next. Or simply that the two of us hadn’t spent this kind of time together in I couldn’t remember how long, and I wanted to know.

He appeared confused by my question, and took his time answering.

“You’ve had advantages,” he said. “The networks you’ve been a part of, the friends who’ve hired you.” How did he know friends had hired me? Had I told him that? Had Celia? “The kinds of advantages most black people don’t get,” he added.

I’d been leaning forward in my chair, keen for his response, but I sat back in wonder now. I didn’t think he had given my reporting a second thought. But no, he had it all worked out.

“And so that makes what I do illegitimate?”

“Not illegitimate. It’s just part of the context. Not many black women report on politics for national magazines.”

“Oh, come on. Is that really where we still are? Isn’t that what you called ‘bureaucratic multiculturalism’? Checking the box with a colored face?”

“That’s a danger, sure. But maybe what’s more telling is how you take the suggestion that the world isn’t a pure meritocracy. Like it’s an insult to your accomplishment.”

“And it isn’t?”

“Well. If it’s an insult, think what that means: all the qualified people just happen to be upper middle class and white. That’s a three-hundred-year coincidence.”

“I’m asking you about the work I do, and you’re giving me a lecture on affirmative action?”

His impassive eyes gave him the look of an ideologue trying not to sacrifice principle for sentiment.

“I read your piece,” he said. “It was well done.”

Maybe because I was tired, or because it had been so long since he’d offered me any praise, even this reluctant snippet caused my self-pity to well up in its warm, depressive sweetness. I worked as hard as I did, for so little pay, on articles and mini-articles and web teasers that passed into the ether almost as soon as they were published, ignored in favor of the cable-news bloviators, and yet still it turned out I was too privileged and establishment to satisfy my brother’s politics.

“Thanks,” I said, signaling the waiter for the check. “I’m glad you liked it.”

Back at the apartment, he helped me assemble his futon, and we opened the boxes with the sheets our mother had packed, along with the pillows and blankets. He made up the bed while I put away the plates and bowls, and rinsed off the silverware. Then we unpacked his suitcases and set up his closet. I wished we could play music, something to make the rooms a little familiar before I left, but he had forgotten his speaker cables, so we worked to the sound of the fan in the window.

By the time we’d sorted all his belongings except the books and records, it was nearly eleven. I had an early flight from Detroit, and it would take us an hour and a half to get to the airport in the morning. I had booked myself a motel, and I drove us there in the Grand Am, along the empty streets, wanting more than anything for him to say something funny as we passed the gas stations and the darkened malls, something absurd to lighten the moment and release us both.

In the parking lot, as I handed him the car key, it struck me that I should have booked us both at the motel, so he wouldn’t have to sleep in that apartment with no air-conditioning on his own. But it was late. It would take time for him to go back and get his pills, and I was exhausted.

Michael

I’d imagined it like the reading group with Caleigh and Myra: the camaraderie of a devotion to radical scholarship, an interrogation of the historical determinants of affect in black life, and perhaps some volunteers for the reparations movement. But to my shock it turned out that most of my fellow grad students subscribed to cable, went to the gym, and weren’t certain yet what interested them enough to write about. It’s not that they objected to my work, or didn’t want to hear about transgenerational haunting, but it didn’t move them. It was my thing, which was fine by them, though not a cause for urgency. Doubtless I came across as something of an odd quantity, being the only white man in the program and older than the junior faculty. Which isn’t to say anyone behaved in an unfriendly manner, just that if there was a potluck, I didn’t hear about it. No matter, I told myself, you’re here to do your work.

That might have been enough, if I’d been able to consume books and articles as fast as I had those many years ago during the first reprieve of Klonopin. But pages of text appeared waxed to me now, covered in a film of distraction. By noon I’d have only a paltry set of notes, and acid in my stomach at the horror of all that remained unread. I kept putting off the duller course work to try to do my own, only to fall behind on both. In the evenings, on the phone, Caleigh tried to convince me things would improve, that I simply needed to adjust, while Mom suggested I would sleep better if I turned down the heat.

It hadn’t occurred to me that living on my own would be different from living with Ben and Christine. I’d come to dread Ben reminding me IT’S THURSDAY, the day I spent in fear of forgetting to take out the garbage or properly clean the bathroom (I might use the wrong detergent and ruin the tile; I might miss a patch of mold and reap a silent resentment). There was none of that on my own now at Spartan Village. I took the trash out when so moved. Yet no one was in the other room watching
24,
eating slow-cooked legumes. No one affectionately mocked my frozen-enchilada dinners, as Christine had for years. I hadn’t realized that her laughter was what made them honorable. I had lived most of my adult life with Ben, and later with him and Christine together, without noticing I was doing it, and yet I had never suspected that hearing the muffled edge of their conversations through closed doors and the toilet flushing upstairs had done so much to assure me that other people existed. In the new apartment the cinder-block walls cut off all sound of the neighbors.

Occasionally, on the walkway, I’d chat with the portly medical resident from next door, a soft-skinned, childlike man from Delaware who was doing a rotation at a pain clinic and complaining of having to treat nothing but refractory patients. Like the woman who’d gone to visit relatives in Chicago after her third spinal surgery only to be run down in the aisle of a Costco in a shopping-rage incident, requiring him, against his better judgment, to FedEx her a prescription for fentanyl patches, which she’d applied all in one go, causing her to miss the Detroit stop on her bus home, and sleep through to Toronto. They’re dumpster cases, he said, other services don’t want to deal with them, so they turf them over to us. Leading me, naturally, to wonder what kind of supplies he might keep in his own apartment.