The index of self destru.., p.41
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, page 41
Frank wasn’t sure exactly what day it was. He would have said that it was still summertime, but the chill in the air suggested October. Well, it did seem to Frank that things must be coming to an end pretty soon. He screwed open the bottle, which was nearing empty now, and he drank down the last of it. He would need to buy another. But he didn’t have his wallet.
He had to find a place to work. The main branch of the public library was just a few blocks away. He’d spent many hours there over the years, for galas or speaking events, though he’d never actually worked in the library during the day. But it was one place where he wouldn’t be asked for money or ID. He walked crosstown to Fifth, where the street was filled with traffic, mostly yellow cabs, and the sidewalk with tourists. At the corner he found a garbage can, and he tossed the bottle into it. That left him just his bag. Did he really need it? He opened it and took out his last remaining book, The Warning Track. The rest he dropped beside the bottle in the can.
What would you change if you knew it was all going to end? Suddenly Frank understood that what Prasad had said was true. Or almost true. Frank had been right that he hadn’t retired. He’d been fired for some stupid thing he’d said. They’d asked him to apologize, and he’d refused to do it. There was a principle involved, but he couldn’t for the life of him say what it had been. How long ago was that? He’d given his whole life to the paper, and they’d cut him loose the first chance they got. But that wasn’t quite right, either. The paper had given him far more than he’d given it in return. He’d never appreciated the place, always thought of his column as a kind of obligation, something that was keeping him from his real work. It had been his real work. For better or worse, that work was over. It was too late to do anything about it.
He saw himself now with great clarity, an old man with a stubbled face, an old forgotten book in his hand, headed to the public library to rant about the work he needed to get done. There was no more work. It was too late. What would you change? He stood at a corner, facing a green walk sign, looking at the line of cabs waiting for the light to turn. He saw the walk sign become a blinking don’t walk and then a solid one. What would you change if you knew? The cabs started to move. So, Frank thought, before stepping into the street, I am to become a nonentity, then?
2.
Tuesdays were her busiest at work, and that day Twinkie had called in sick, which meant that Lucy would be alone with the kids until gym, with only a half hour for lunch. This was the second time in just a few weeks that she’d had to take the lead, but she didn’t really mind. In some ways, she found it easier to work alone. Though she was the assistant, she had more experience than Twinkie, kept firmer control over the students, was—to put it simply—better at the job.
She felt slightly foggy that morning, but most of the day passed uneventfully, until just after lunch. While walking the kids through a social studies segment, she got halfway into a sentence and found herself unable to get out the other end. She couldn’t remember the word she’d been about to speak. When she tried to put her thought differently, the thought itself was gone. She couldn’t fake her way through the sentence, because she couldn’t remember what she’d already said.
Experience told her that the best tactic in moments of classroom uncertainty was pressing forward, never giving up the kids’ attention. It hardly mattered what you said, so long as you kept talking. The moment you stopped, they filled the vacuum with their own talk. But she couldn’t remember any words at all. She wasn’t sure that she’d ever known any words. That sounds expelled from holes in our faces might stand in some way for human feelings and ideas seemed luridly bizarre. Scattered scraps of conversation passed between the children. Some boys stood from their seats. The situation readied itself for complete disrepair. Then a change in the room brought all attention back to her. How rare to have every one of these faces looking up at once. Most had expressions of benign curiosity, but in a few Lucy could see discomfort and even fear. Gradually it came to her that she was babbling, standing at the board making nonsense sounds. Now she was afraid, but she didn’t know how to get back on track, or even how to make herself stop. She didn’t know how long this had gone on by the time something in her brain snapped into place and she fell silent. From there she did her best to continue talking as though nothing had happened.
Half an hour later, she walked the children down to gym. After dropping them off, she went to the bathroom to throw water on her face. She wasn’t sure how worried she should be. She’d suffered a few less dramatic incidents of mild aphasia since the school year’s start, when words didn’t arrive in proper order, when she said one thing while meaning another or found herself unable to express a simple idea. They had all occurred in the presence of other adults, who’d quickly swooped in to finish her thought, taking her hesitation for a youthful lack of poise. (Only Lucy knew the real extent of her pedagogic confidence.) These events had been unnerving in the moment, but once out of them Lucy found it hard to believe they’d even happened, and she largely forgot them until the next one arrived. If she thought about them at all, she blamed them on the pot she’d been smoking most nights, a habit she fully intended to cease as soon as she stopped living with Krista and Danielle.
This latest incident felt harder to dismiss. If it could be blamed on pot, it would demand that she stop smoking, but it seemed to point instead to the malaise of the past four months. Now that she had insurance, she could have gone to the doctor, but she didn’t have time, and she didn’t want to be told again that everything was in her head. Looking in the mirror, she considered the possibility that Clara Lune was interfering with her mind, punishing her for stopping their appointments.
She wondered what she would say to the children after gym, but when the time came most of them appeared already to have forgotten the incident. The world was for them an often-incomprehensible place, and life had trained them to assume that whenever they did not understand adult behavior the fault was their own. Part of Lucy wanted to acknowledge the strangeness of what she’d done, assure them that they ought to be upset by what they’d seen, as she was upset by it. Instead, she went about the rest of the day. They had another hour before dismissal, and she had half an hour of cleanup after that.
On her way out of the building, Lucy noted that another day had passed without her telling the school that she meant to leave at the end of the semester. Every morning she planned to have this conversation, and every afternoon she left without having said anything.
Sometimes she told herself that she needed to speak with Sam first. They’d seen each other only one since she’d left, but they’d spoken several times, and it was fairly clear to them both that she’d regained control of the relationship. If she’d told him that she was going back to Madison when school broke in December, he would agree to come along. It sounded like he would have his book sold by then, and he wouldn’t need to stay at the Interviewer.
She didn’t bring up Margo when they talked, and he didn’t ask about Claire. They both understood that these obstacles had been cleared from their way. The only remaining barrier to their reunion was Lucy. What exactly was keeping her away? She wanted to experience some independence before returning to her old life. Perhaps she also wanted him to suffer a bit more, to even out their ledger.
If what happened next was up to her, and she wanted to get back to Madison, it stood to reason that this was what they would do. So why had she still not said anything? Eventually—perhaps around Thanksgiving—it would be too late. The decision would make itself. Perhaps that was just as well. All she was committing to, by not saying anything, was staying through the end of the school year, which was what she’d been prepared to do from the beginning. If she went back to Madison without a job, she would lose another five months of her life, probably spending it at her parents’ house while she and Sam waited for the lease on their own to end.
At a bodega near the apartment, she bought a six-pack of beer to share with the girls. Upstairs, she found them sitting together on the couch, watching a video on Danielle’s laptop.
“Want to get high?” Krista asked as Lucy walked in.
“Sure,” Lucy said.
She took three beers from her bag and went to the kitchen to put the others in the fridge. Back in the living room, the girls had shifted slightly to make room for her.
Lucy had worried that they would regret their initial invitation to “hang,” but when she’d joined them the next night, they’d acted as though she were part of their normal routine. She’d sat with them after work almost every day since.
Krista rolled and lit a joint while Lucy drank her beer. When the joint came to her, she took a single, long drag and passed it on.
“What’d you do today?” Danielle asked, as she almost always did.
“I was at work.”
“Right. How was that?”
It seemed difficult to explain what had happened without making either too little of it (I lost my train of thought in the middle of class) or too much (I had some kind of psychotic break and freaked the kids out). The girls already thought she was strange.
“Long,” she said. “One of the other teachers was sick, so I had to do everything on my own.”
“Sucks,” Krista said.
“Hard,” Danielle agreed.
All three of them laughed.
Lucy liked these girls, though by any objective measure they should have infuriated her. They had a great talent for self-dramatization, got in spectacular fights over matters that seemed completely trivial to Lucy when she understood them at all. They hardly worked—Krista a few shifts a week at a coffee shop, Danielle even fewer at a bookstore in Soho—but complained constantly about their jobs, about the ridiculousness of their customers, the stupidity of their bosses, the myriad ways in which their workplaces would be improved if the world would just listen to them.
Yet they seemed despite or perhaps because of all this self-induced turmoil to be having so much fun. Even their complaints were lodged with a kind of knowing irony, as though they were a necessary part of the game being played. The primary—perhaps the sole—objective of the game was to enjoy yourself. That this attitude ran counter to every ethical principle with which Lucy had been raised was part of its appeal. So many of her college friends had moved to big cities after graduation—mostly Chicago, but also New York, San Francisco, LA—some to start graduate school or take jobs at banks or marketing firms, but many to do what Krista and Danielle seemed to be here to do: spend a few years having fun before real life began. They got jobs that let them pay the rent but gave them no real responsibilities.
When Lucy had found out that she was moving to New York, she’d emailed two old friends who as far as she knew were still living here. Megan—her old roommate, with whom she’d lost touch—had written back almost immediately to say that after six years in the city, she’d moved to Columbus, where her husband had grown up. She offered an enthusiastic list of restaurants and bars in Williamsburg and the Lower East Side. These are probably out of date already!! she wrote. But it’s a start. I’m so jealous of your little adventure. Have so much fun. On one of her date nights with Sam, Lucy had taken him to a bar on Megan’s list, and she had never felt so old in her life, at least not until she moved in with Krista and Danielle.
The other girl had taken more time to respond. She’d moved about a year before to Westchester, she’d written. She loved the city, but she’d wanted her kids to have a lawn. She was home with them full time, and she didn’t get into Manhattan much, but she would definitely let Lucy know the next time she planned a trip. Lucy hadn’t followed up, and she’d never heard from the girl again.
She’d come too late. Why hadn’t she moved when she was younger? Why had she stayed all that time so close to home? She was tempted to blame Sam—he’d needed stability; he’d wanted to get married right away—but that got it reversed: she’d chosen Sam because Sam meant safety, because he’d given her an excuse to stay where she was. Married or not, they could have gone anywhere. They’d stayed in Madison because she’d wanted to stay. Even once he’d found this good job in New York, she’d wanted to stay. Why had she spent so much of her life afraid? She had learned in a child psychology class about attachment theory, in which a stable caregiver became a “secure base” from which to explore the world, but it seemed to her that the opposite had been true, that her roots had held her where she was.
“We’re going to throw you a party,” Danielle announced. “You need to meet some people.”
“You need to meet some boys,” Krista clarified.
“I’m still married,” Lucy reminded them. That fact suddenly seemed very funny to her.
“You’re not obligated to fellate anyone in the bathroom,” Krista answered. “Just have a conversation with someone who isn’t, like, a mentally challenged youth.”
“You’re a mentally challenged youth,” Danielle told Krista.
“Plus,” Krista persisted. “Nothing would drive Waxmouth crazier than looking on your TeeseStream and seeing you partying with some hot young meat.”
Lucy didn’t have a TeeseStream, but she knew this was beside the point. Did she want to drive Sam crazy? She couldn’t really say.
Her life was like that now. She had no idea what she wanted, no idea what the future held, no idea where she would be even six months from now. She had never felt that way before. She was often scared but also excited. There was much about her life in these days that was difficult, but she found this difficulty stimulating, perhaps even necessary. Her life up to this point had been too easy, she thought. She hadn’t meant it to be that way, hadn’t realized that she was shying away from difficulty, but that was what had happened. Now, almost everything was hard. She might get dragged out to sea, the waters might swallow her alive, but she might as easily find herself having safely passed to some place entirely new, a place she’d never even imagined before.
“Sure,” she said. “A party sounds cool.”
Lucy’s phone buzzed a few minutes later, and she knew it was her parents calling. She considered ignoring it, but she’d taken only one pull. Better to get the conversation over before she had more.
Her parents checked in every few days, but a brief conversation was usually enough to dispel any worry that might lead to tougher questions. When they asked about her job, she stressed how busy she was, which she hoped would explain why she wasn’t calling them. When they asked about Sam, she said he was fine, which seemed to be more or less true. She didn’t lie, merely omitted the elements necessary to the construction of an accurate picture of her life. This was better for everyone. She would likely enough be back in Madison just a few months from now with Sam in tow, and if her parents thought that he had been cheating—she wasn’t even sure that he had, but it was the only conclusion the facts would support—they would never forgive him for it.
“We heard the news,” her mother said when she picked up. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
She supposed it was inevitable that they would find out. Sam might have called them, but she couldn’t imagine why he’d want them to know. Maybe he’d told a friend back home who’d passed on word to them. She almost believed that they’d simply sensed it; their power over her felt at times that great.
“How are you holding up?” her father asked.
Her parents’ habit was to sit in different rooms, on different phones, speaking to her at the same time, giving her the full stereo effect of their dinner-table chatter.
“The whole thing is pretty surreal,” Lucy said.
“It’s probably a big misunderstanding,” her mother cut in.
Lucy let out an inarticulate affirmation. She supposed in a sense that it was.
“How is Sam?” her father asked.
What kind of question was this? Lucy understood that they thought of themselves, in relation to Sam, less as in-laws than in loco parentis, but at least in this case, she thought, their loyalties ought to be clear.
“All right, I guess.”
“Well I think he’s being very poorly treated,” her mother said.
What had he been telling them?
“By me?” she asked.
“By the magazine.”
Now Lucy was thoroughly confused. In her slightly stoned state she felt, like her students, uncertain how much of this confusion was her own fault.
“The Interviewer?”
“Not them,” her mother said, sounding frustrated. “The other one, the one that wrote the story.”
Lucy remembered the profile Sam had been so excited about.
“The Reverberator.”
“That’s right,” her mother said.
“We’re sure there’s a very good explanation for all of it,” her father put in.
“It’s a big misunderstanding,” her mother repeated, more definitively this time.
There was a silence on the line while they waited for Lucy to give them the very good explanation that would clear up the misunderstanding. She pressed the phone against her thigh while she pointed to Danielle’s laptop on the coffee table.
“Can you go to the Reverberator?” she asked the girls.
Danielle clicked a few times and the headline came up on the screen: “Quantified Swirl: Has the Algorithm King Been Double Billing?”
Lucy put the phone back to her face.
“I can’t really explain right now,” she said. “Like you said, it’s a misunderstanding. We’ll get everything straightened out soon.”
“This is so exciting,” Krista said as Lucy hung up the phone.
Danielle was reaching for her computer, but Lucy said, “Can I read it first?”
“Oh, right,” Danielle said.
The article—what Sam had told her would be a puff piece, a profile to help sell his book—was an exposé. As she got through the first paragraphs, Lucy felt an instinctive drive to protect Sam. He needed her now more than he ever had. But she continued on with increasing incredulity. She’d known about the old posts, but there was more than that. The article said he’d been plagiarizing the Herald. How could he have thought he’d get away with that? Then he’d lied about it all to the journalist who was profiling him. The whole thing made him sound like an idiot, which was one thing he was not.
