The Grand Tour (30 page)

“Operator,” said a female voice he was surprised to hear.

“I, uh. Hello?”

“Yes, operator,” the woman said again, unmistakable irritation pulsing through the distance and static.

“I. Um, can I place a collect call?”

“Number?”

What was his mother's cell number? He didn't know. He didn't know any numbers offhand besides the old house line that he'd had to memorize as a child, so he told her that one. The line rang—miraculously, it seemed to be working. He imagined the phone, sitting on the floor by the old hutch in the living room, half buried under an avalanche of magazines. After six rings the line clicked off. He desperately attempted to remember another number, any number, but the guard was already yelling at him to put the receiver down and move on.

He was led with a group of men into another holding cell, this one without a clock on the wall. Some very long amount of time later, the door opened, and everyone in the room was put in two lines. Two guards holding guns watched as a third went down the line and shackled each man to the one next to him with handcuffs, hand and foot. He was cuffed to a small Mexican with gelled hair and delicate, pretty features. The man was nearly a foot shorter than Vance, and as they were marched down the hall, he had to hunch and walk with tiny, mincing steps to avoid jerking the man off the ground like a doll. Several times, in spite of trying not to, he yanked the little man's ankle and wrist, which elicited a muttered torrent of Spanish invective—he understood
pinche
and
culo,
but he didn't know what
joto
meant.

They shuffled outside, into the gray afternoon, where a bus waited for them in a parking lot surrounded by a fence topped with coiled barbed wire. Vance and the little man instinctively turned toward each other and edged up sideways, one foot at a time, successfully boarding the bus. They maintained this close posture—like old dance partners preparing to clasp or spring apart into synchronized ballet leaps—all the way to an empty seat. The wordless cooperation lasted until Vance was situated on the plastic bench and began to weep. His seatmate made a puffing sound and averted his gaze, staring out the window in disgust.

A swell of conversational volume on the bus roused Vance just in time for him to read the white sign they passed at the intersection.
RIKERS ISLAND
, with subscript that announced, oddly,
HOME OF NEW YORK'S BOLDEST
. He hadn't believed they'd really be going to Rikers Island, a place he'd heard used solely as a byword for terrifying and inhumane incarceration. The bus bounced over a grooved metal seam and up onto a long bridge. Gray water crashed against the retaining walls on either side. Gradually, the indistinct shape in the distance resolved itself as a cluster of parking lots, gray buildings, guard towers, all surrounded by and topped with the ever-present whorl of razor wire.

They were taken off the bus and led into the main building, unlocked from each other, and ushered single file into one of the large central cells just past the guard station. This cell was bigger than the last, but there were also more men. On the edge of the room sat a toilet that looked as though it had literally never been cleaned. It was streaked with shit and clogged in useless protest with rotting food that writhed with maggots. He swallowed the vomit that rose in his esophagus and sat against the wall on the filthy floor, careful to keep his bloody hands on full display.

Most of the men slumped exhausted on the wooden benches or on the floor. The ones who didn't were in the grip of some kind of drug withdrawal—fetal, vomiting—or in the grip of some kind of drug, scratching, pacing in tight, hostile circles. After an hour or so, a guard brought in a plastic bin filled with trays of food. The smell may have been unappealing on its own, but here it was a rare perfume that temporarily masked the stench of shit and piss and BO. Vance waited until most of the men had grabbed a tray, then took one and ate. He would previously have considered the beef stew completely—definitionally—inedible, but as he swallowed the mush and gristle, he considered how flexible a word “inedible” really was. Almost anything was edible, given lack of options. The trick was not chewing.

The stew was seawater salty, but they were given no water. Many more hours later, several guards came in and escorted the prisoners out of the intake cell into a large tiled room, where they were told to undress. The showers were turned on, spumes of freezing water that rapidly warmed up to just regular cold. Despite the temperature, Vance stood under a showerhead and drank the water, choosing not to care or think about the condition of the pipes and spigot it was traveling through. Most of the men had the same idea—although the most drugged out or drug sick hunched hydrophobic in the corners—but unlike Vance, they cupped the water in their hands to drink it. He kept his hands away from the water as best as he could, desperate for them to remain bloody.

They were strip-searched, given ill-fitting orange DOC clown pants and tunics to put on, and divided into several groups—housing units A, B, C, and D. Vance was D. An older guard with a feathery blond mustache, who looked like a gym teacher, led them to an interzone between buildings, toward what looked like an airplane hangar with a giant
D
on the side. They moved past a guard station to a chained-off area inside the building, where they were again searched and then gave their names to another guard carrying a clipboard. Vance's name was checked off the list, and he was ushered through a door, into the jail area proper.

It was a two-level building with a large common area on the lower level, which mostly seemed to be used for clustering in suspicious groups, wandering around in menacing circles, or doing push-ups, or just shouting incoherently. There was one main staircase, lined with green railings; from both sides muscular, shirtless men did implausible numbers of pull-ups, dangling for minutes at a time like overripe fruit. The second floor was invisible from the first. Vance asked the blond guard which cell was his—the guard laughed and said in a passable British accent, “We have you in room fifteen, sir. When would you like your supper to be served?”

At the far side of the common area, there were two telephones. Vance moved hesitantly toward them, but there was a long line against the wall. Two men toward the rear got into a minor scuffle over who had gotten there first. Lacking any better plan, Vance climbed the stairs to the second floor. At first glance, it seemed preferable, in that less of the population was upstairs, and the overall volume level was much lower. On the other hand, the still silence of the prisoners here, lolling half hidden in their cells, somehow conveyed more menace than the yelling and carrying on downstairs. Individual voices coalesced into a soft, generalized moan, a murmur that expanded and contracted like breathing. Vance walked around the large circle until he found a cell that only had one man in it, a small white man in a knit cap, taking careful notes in the margin of a book.

Vance said, “Can I stay here?”

Without looking up, the man said, “You set foot in here, I'll kill you.”

Farther around the block, he found a room housing a man who seemed terribly ill, gibbering and sweating on a stained gray cot. Though the concrete floor was spattered with yellow bile, which probably explained the absence of other cellmates, Vance entered and lay down, and immediately fell asleep.

The next day, late in the evening, he got to use the phone. His roommate, Danny, a friendly young junkie from Staten Island, explained the process to him between bouts of dry heaving into (also at, around, and near) the disgusting stainless-steel toilet. You could make two phone calls a day, provided the phones were available. You charged the calls to your commissary account. When Vance told him he didn't have a commissary account, Danny frowned with worry, a troubling look to be receiving from a guy with crusted vomit all over the front of his shirt.

“No one knows you're in here?”

“Not yet. That's why I need to make the calls.”

“Oh, man. Okay, wow.”

Whimpering with sickness, lying on his side with his arms crossing his stomach, Danny told him to just use his account. His parents put money in it, he said, it wasn't even his money, he didn't deserve it. He repeated the eight-digit code several times.

“Thanks,” said Vance. “Can I get you something?”

“Nah. I just gotta wait this thing out, nothing else for it. Hey, buy yourself a candy bar or something, too.”

Vance made his way downstairs and took a place in the line, which didn't seem to have moved at all in twenty-four hours. And after an hour of standing in it, it still didn't seem to have moved. By the institutional white clock up on the wall, it took three and a half hours before he was in front of the guard booth, giving them Danny's commissary number. He held the phone to his ear, and his breath, after giving the operator his mother's number. This time, a man answered.

“Vance? This is your uncle Joe. What's going on?” Uncle Joe was a dubious personage who lived in Idaho and operated some sort of heavy machinery, whom they had last visited when Vance was thirteen. He remembered a fat, floridly pink-faced guy wedged into an armchair in front of the TV, so inert as to seem helpless, paralyzed by the spectacle of the World's Strongest Man competition.

“What are you doing there? I'm in jail.”

“Yeah, the operator said. The fuck.”

“Put Mom on.”

“What the hell's going?”

“I fucked up. I'm in jail. Put Mom on.”

“Vance, she's in the hospital.”

“What?”

“We've been trying to get ahold of you, but your phone was off.” An image flashed through his mind of the dead phone, cocooned in a plastic evidence Baggie in a bureaucratic mausoleum of former possessions.

“Is she okay?”

“No. She's having heart problems. Not enough potassium or something. They said she was severely malnourished.”

“Malnourished?”

“I guess she hasn't eaten in a month or something, weighs like ninety pounds. She's hooked up to machines, under observation. Critical condition.” His uncle sighed, and Vance could very clearly see him standing there in the filthy kitchen, feeling nothing at the moment besides put out. “Well, anyway, sorry. What do you want me to do for you?”

“I don't know. Post bail. They set it at ten thousand.”

“Jesus H. What did you do, rob, uh, Carnegie Hall?”

“I beat a car up with a pipe.”

There was a pause as Joe considered this information. “We don't have ten thousand dollars, you know that.”

“I don't think you have to pay that much, just call down here and give them my name.”

“How long they got you in for?”

“I don't know, I could be in here months before they even have the trial.”

“I mean, maybe it would be good for you, you think of that? You can't just go around fucking cars up with a pipe.”

“Tell Mom. Is she awake?”

There was another long silence at the other end. He suddenly desperately wanted to get off the phone—Danny's gracious company seemed like a tropical paradise compared with the prospect of continuing this conversation. Joe said, “I'll see what I can do,” and the phone clicked off. Vance hung up the greasy chipped plastic receiver and headed back upstairs to his cell.

T
he water felt and tasted even worse than it had looked and smelled when he'd been standing far above and peering down at it. His mouth and nose were filled with a thick putrescence, bitter chemical rot, that seemed to contain every horrible thing mankind was doing to the planet. He gagged underwater, swallowed more of it, and came to the surface flailing for purchase against the concrete wall beside him. He had changed his mind, he wanted out. But there was too much accumulated slime on the wall to get a grip. Cans, cigarette packs, rotten food, sodden cardboard, and an interstitial green foam created a solid layer of scum that he disturbed with his thrashing. He went under again and came back up, his face barely breaking the surface of the water. His loathsome leather shoes, the orthopedic clodhoppers he'd bought for the tour, were like concrete blocks on his feet. He went under again and couldn't make it back up but continued to thrash ineffectively, while some corner of his mind waited impatiently for the peace and acceptance everyone said comes to drowning victims. It didn't seem to be happening—where was this goddamned fucking peace he'd heard so much about? Where was it? All he felt was an angry and terrified desire to live more and remorse at the life he'd lived, which was, thankfully, not flashing before his eyes.

Something did flash above him, however: red light and a barrage of muffled noise. It was the world—he wished it away. Having depleted his already depleted reserves of energy, he floated down into the verdant murk of the water. He seemed to watch himself there, arms and legs splayed forward in a semicircle, like some giant, mutant prawn. It was quiet now. His white hair waved back and forth in the water, and he suddenly felt an intense, fond sadness for himself. Goodbye me, I'll miss me. It surprised him that he felt this way.

When he woke up there was no sound, and he seemed to still be underwater. There was a woman, some kind of frantic commotion. No need to make a stink about it, he wanted to say. Someone stuck something in his arm. To his right, he thought he saw Eileen, but that couldn't be. Then the dark rolled in again, like a summer storm rushing in overhead.

Everything in the room was white—white bare walls, white ceiling, white sheets on the white bed on which he lay. White light streamed in from a distant skylight, which framed a small patch of white cloud. For a few moments, he couldn't shake the certainty that he'd been wrong his entire life: there was, in fact, a heaven, and moreover, heaven had taken him in. How embarrassing to discover all of those dumb Christians he'd always mocked had been completely right. And, of course, he'd been wrong about it—why should the afterlife be any different than anything else?

But slowly small, human details of the room emerged. A picture of children on the bedside table. The faint sound of music issuing from somewhere. A door to the immediate left of the bed, through which he could see a toilet and the red rubber of a plunger. These details didn't, in themselves, preclude the possibility that this was the afterlife, but taken together they imparted a much more terrestrial feel to the room.

“Hello,” he shouted, but his voice was reedy and weak, and there was no reply. He lay there for another few minutes, already exhausted by consciousness, but curiosity finally got the better of fatigue. Pulling himself upright against the iron bars of the headboard, he managed to throw his left leg over the side of the bed, but he was tangled in the sheets and couldn't get the right one over. He managed to get the sheets off and saw, around his abdomen, the unmistakable puff and pucker of a diaper. This knowledge sapped whatever remaining will he might have possessed. He curled back into himself and pulled the sheets up and sank back into the snowy white of the mattress, the prison, the crib.

When he woke again, the room was mostly dark. The skylight was an indigo stamp on the high ceiling. He was hungry and terribly thirsty, and his diaper felt wet against his skin. Again he shouted, but this time his voice came out in a rough whisper. Again, he pulled back the covers, and spent a tremendous amount of energy getting his legs over the edge. He leveraged himself up woozily, then stood, which was a mistake. It wasn't that bad actually: the wood floor smelled of lemon polish and felt cool against the side of his face. He crawled to the door.

Outside was a small landing with a staircase leading down. “Hello,” he whispered again, uselessly, and to no reply. The staircase was walled on both sides, with a door to the right at the very bottom, so it was impossible to see what waited below. Holding on to the wooden banister with both hands, he swiveled around on his ass and began working his way down, step by step. He would achieve a stair, pause and catch his breath, and attempt to summon the will to conquer the next one. He remembered the time he and Eileen watched two-year-old Cindy climb the three stairs leading up to their apartment in Fresno. Much the same as this, it had been long and arduous, a real nail-biter. Halfway down, his arms began to quiver. Two-thirds of the way down, his arms gave out and could no longer support his weight. Unable to go down or up, he straightened himself out and slid down the remaining stairs, coming to a rest at the base of the stairs in a sprawl.

When his heart had calmed to a mere hammering, he turned over and crawled through the door into an empty living room. Some kind of percussive, fluty number jazzed its way out of two tall wooden speakers that stood on opposite sides of the room like sentinels. The Oriental rugs he crawled over looked and felt as though they were from the actual Orient, and not just a store with “Oriental” in the name. With the last bit of energy at his disposal, he managed to pull himself most of the way up onto a crushed-leather sofa, on which someone had been thoughtful enough to leave a tartan wool blanket out for him. He wrapped it around himself and promptly passed out again.

A large person stood over him, and he was a small person, obscurely ashamed. He'd done something—it was his mother. No, it was his wife. No, that was a long time ago. The vaporous figure of Eileen finished coalescing in front of him, smoke made flesh in a tailored houndstooth blazer and black jeans. “Back from the dead. How are you feeling?”

“I need to go to the bathroom.”

“I bet you already have.”

“You're enjoying this.”

“Oh God, no, not at all.”

It took a great deal of time and energy, but she managed to get him to the bathroom, and he managed to get his diaper down and lower himself onto the toilet, which he pissed into for another long stretch of time. Drained, in all senses, he hobbled with her the ten feet or so back to the sofa. She sat down beside him and covered him back up with the afghan. He said, “What the fuck happened?”

“You fell into the East River and got pulled out by someone nearby. They said you were dead for a couple of minutes, but the paramedics revived you. It made the evening news; a friend told me what had happened. You were in New York Methodist ICU in a coma for four days, then you woke up, but they kept you asleep with drugs, so you could heal faster, I guess. That went on for a few more days, and they moved you to a regular bed, at which time I pulled some strings and got you released to home care. Some paramedics carried you up to the guest room. They'd wanted to keep you there for another week of observation, but I figured at seven thousand a day you'd prefer to stay here. I'm only charging you five.”

“Thanks,” he croaked.

“Were you trying to kill yourself?”

“No. Yeah, I guess. I don't know.”

“Oh, Richard.”

He lay back and looked up at her, feeling for all the world like a wayward child awaiting parental judgment. She stroked his plastered hair back from his forehead.

“How did all this happen?”

“I don't know.” He was going to elaborate on this, then realized there was no further elaboration possible, although it was certainly necessary. He didn't know—that would have to work for now.

She thought about that for a minute, then sighed and pressed up from the sofa. “I can't get you back upstairs by myself. Maybe Molly can help me. You'll have to stay on the couch for now.”

“Thanks,” he said again.

“Sleep,” she said, and he did.

The next day, with the help of the estimable Molly, a rotund person with an orotund voice, whom he immediately feared upsetting, he was reinstalled in the guest room. He slept more. Later, Eileen stood over him holding a Formica tray that supported a bowl containing canned chicken noodle soup and a stack of soda crackers, plus a small plastic pill container. She set it beside him on the bed and regarded him, then nodded at the food. “You haven't had anything solid in almost two weeks. You should eat, if you can.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“That doesn't matter. Here, take these and then get a little food in your stomach.” She took the pillbox from the tray and emptied the contents of a compartment marked
MONDAY
—two large speckled horse pills and three smaller ones—into his palm. He washed them down with a swig of orange juice. She said, “I'll be back for the tray later. We're going to a movie. Don't come back downstairs, okay? Stay put.”

“Okay.”

She left. He ate the soup and stared at the whiteness of the wall. He was reminded of staying home from school sick when he was a kid. His mother had always forced him to stay in bed, reasoning if he was too sick to go to school, he was too sick to walk around. She would even confiscate his books, saying he needed to rest, not read. It was a clever strategy and one that prevented him from feigning illness in all but the most dire moments of paper incompletion or test unreadiness. For a person whose being craved stimulation and distraction at almost all moments, staying in bed with nothing to do was a real kind of torture. He needed entertainment, food, TV, and alcohol. Alcohol—despite everything that had happened, the dull craving for it persisted somewhere between his spine and stomach. It was like the abusive boyfriend he kept crawling back to—
He loves me, he really does, he didn't mean to push me into the East River, you just don't see all the times he's nice to me
.

He finished the soup, lay back, and let his various cravings clamor like traders on the stock exchange floor. Gradually they quieted, and he was just lying in bed looking at dark city air through the skylight. Maybe the trick was to just allow yourself to want things. To accept the wanting without attempting to gratify it. Fighting the want did no good, because it was impossible to make yourself not want things. Furthermore, fighting the want somehow promoted it, legitimized it, made the desire for booze or women or whatever else terribly strong and potent.

He'd spent his whole life looking for consolation and had wound up unconsoled, inconsolable. Drink, food, women, TV, and sometimes writing had succeeded in distracting him, but from what, and why? The what was easy—life. The great, gentle backdrop of minor feeling and small event and day-to-day effort, victory, and failure. Why he needed relief from that, he didn't know. Because life was boring, because his brain chemistry was all wrong, because his father had been the same way he was. Because life reminded him too much of death. That was a big part of it. For decades, going back to the war—before the war—one of his main goals had been ignoring the fact of his own mortality; if it required anesthetizing himself, so much the better. And after a while, the damage he'd done to achieve this primary goal had to be ignored in its own right, which of course required more consolation, more evasions, more anesthesia. And so on.

An easier way to put it is that you're a coward.

He sprawled out on the bed, staring down at the snow-covered landscape of his own body under the sheet. The hill of his paunch, the parallel ridgelines of his legs, the valley in between. He felt old, weak—and he didn't feel himself getting any better. Those two minutes in the poisoned water had changed him, aged him, sapped his hideous vitality. And maybe that was a good thing. In an increasingly thick Demerol drowse, he imagined a child tramping joyously across the snowy field in front of him. An undisturbed vista of white, every footprint a new footprint.
You can make no more footprints, for now you are the field.

Molly stomped from the office to the kitchen and answered the cordless, which was ringing for the fifteenth time this morning. Richard muted the TV as she charged into the living room, wielding the phone like a blackjack. He cringed in half-anticipation of a bludgeoning. She had tolerated his presence well enough to this point—she had been, as they say, a good sport—but after two weeks in the apartment, the strain of his presence was beginning to show in the small muscles of her jawline, bunched up with the skin pulled taut and shiny over them.

“Make it stop,” she said, covering the receiver. “Talk to them, okay?” It had become clear in recent days that the press had somehow figured out where Richard was and gotten the landline number, but it was the number Molly used for her dog-care business, so turning the ringer off wasn't an option. They had agreed it would be best for him to ignore the interview requests, but they hadn't anticipated the callers' persistence or the journalistic interest in the story. He had made page 8 of the
Times
and page 1 of
USA Today
and the
New York Post.
Nobody really knew who he was, since nobody read anymore, but the spectacle of a quasi-known writer discrediting himself before jumping into the East River had a lurid interest disproportionate to his celebrity or lack thereof. Molly extended the phone to him. “And answer it yourself next time.”

“I can't.”

“Are you crippled?”

“Yeah, kind of.” The physical therapist who made a house call two days ago had urged him to move around as much as possible, saying that the episode had damaged his already damaged heart and possibly also some neuromotor functions of his brain. Heart and brain damaged, he said—yes, that sounded about right; that sounded like him. Walking to the bathroom, to say nothing of actually using it, left him panting for a full minute.