"Sorry," you say.
"Don"t be," she says. "I"m sick of people being sorry. I don"t even know how I feel about it anymore."
"I know," you say, and you do understand, at least a little bit. "Me, neither."
"I just came over to see how you were doing," she says. She shudders a little. "I was worried."
"Why?" you say. You try to touch her for a moment, and she lets you, she lets you put your hand on her arm, but you can see that she really doesn"t want you to; she moves back after a second: off-limits. She looks at you again, sighing heavily.
"People were saying that you died last night, did you know that?" she says. She waits a minute, seeing that you didn"t know, then shrugs. "That"s what was going around. They said you killed yourself. You got drunk and drove into a tree. You know how it goes."
"Jesus," you say. "Who told you that? That"s just sick! Who said that?"
"Oh, come on," she says, and flinches irritably. "I"m sure all your friends heard the story, and all my friends heard the story, and I"m sure they all pa.s.sed it around among themselves. Like whispering down the lane. I mean, I don"t even care where it started. They can"t help themselves. It"s all one big TV show to people."
"Well," you say. You let this sink in for a moment. What do people really think of you? "Well, I guess I"m still alive," you say at last. "Are you glad?"
"I don"t know," she says. And that"s not what you want to hear. But she only shrugs, doesn"t look at you. "You know, the first thing I thought when I heard it was, like, "Good for him." I mean, I thought-at least you did something. Do you know what I mean? I guess I always thought it would be bigger, when a terrible thing happened. Didn"t you think so? Doesn"t it seem like the houses ought to be caving in, and lightning and thunder, and people tearing their hair in the street? I never-I never thought it would be this small, did you?" She wipes a hand over her nose, shutting her eyes tight. She looks small and fierce standing there, though everything in the neighborhood is quiet. A car pa.s.sing in the distance is playing Top 40 music loudly, and sprinklers are ticking away on lawns, and an airplane is drawing a white line across the sky. She is not crying. "I"m glad you"re all right," she says. She looks up at you as you stand stupidly. "I mean, you are, aren"t you? You aren"t going to kill yourself, are you?"
"Not unless you want me to," you say, and it"s only half a joke-you don"t know what the rest of it is. But she doesn"t answer anyway, only puffs out her cheeks in a tired sigh.
"So," she says at last, "what are you going to do now?"
You notice, of course, that she doesn"t say "we." That can"t be helped, though it also tends to make your reply pretty much meaningless. You wave your hand vaguely. "Haven"t decided yet," you say, and she nods.
What if you said, "We could still get married"? What if you said, "I still love you. We could have other kids." There was a time, before Caleb died, when you could have said it. You prayed to G.o.d, actually. Dear G.o.d, you said, please don"t take my baby. I"m sorry that I ever b.i.t.c.hed about Meg getting pregnant, I truly repent every negative thought I ever had, and I swear that I"ll be a good father and a good husband and I"ll be happy with my life. Please, G.o.d, you said, hunched outside the gla.s.s case of Caleb, his poor little monkey body drawing another breath, please, G.o.d, I made a mistake. I take it all back.
But you can"t tell her this, either-your maudlin prayers would only hurt her, would only draw you both back to the baby"s eyes, opening, raking across the incomprehensible world. That empty, terrible look: She knows it, too, though she never went to look at him like you did. You can see it in her expression as she shifts from foot to foot. There will be no more marriage, no more babies.
"Well," you say, "I would have married you, you know. I would have been happy."
"I know," she says. She is quietly thoughtful for a moment, but she is leaning away from you. You won"t touch her again, or kiss her, and it"s even hard to look her in the eye.
"Do you think we"ll always be sort of in love with each other?" she says, and smiles at a sad thought she"s thinking. She doesn"t blame you, exactly, though she knows you should have been a different person. "Do you think we"ll be always connected?"
You just shrug. "I don"t know," you say. "I haven"t lived that long."
Dooley comes out after she leaves. He"s been watching, of course. He wants to know if something beautiful or tragic has happened, because he believes in beauty and tragedy. And though you don"t want him near you, you don"t have the heart to drive him away. At least he loves you-that"s something. Watching the car pull away, you think of him at the window, watching Jerry playing touch football with you. You think of him offering up a complicated, scientific answer to one of Jerry"s stupid questions, and Jerry widening his eyes in that earnest, good-natured way: "Whoa, you"re brother"s kind of a brainiac, isn"t he?" and Dooley glowing at him. Watching her car turn left at the stop sign, you imagine that you and Dooley could understand each other perfectly, if you wanted. "Get this," you say, as he stands there expectantly behind you. "Rumor has it that I got drunk and drove myself into a tree last night. People are saying I killed myself."
"Geez," he says.
"People will talk," you say, and he nods. The f.a.g of the school, he already knows this.
"But she wanted to know you were all right," he says hopefully.
"Yeah," you say. "She was thinking of me."
Your tone of voice makes him silent, and you both listen. The argument indoors has mellowed; there are no voices. They"ve gone to separate rooms, probably, or they might even be making up. This happens sometimes: There is evidence that they were once wildly in love. They got married young, as young as you and Meg are, and maybe if they hadn"t had kids right away they would have been okay. You really don"t know.
"They"ve quieted down," you say, and he tilts his head doubtfully.
"So far," he says.
But you wonder. If Caleb had lived, would Meg have hated him as much as your mom hates you? Would you have become an old drunk, like your dad? Does everything perpetuate itself?
Who knows? You and Dooley are here now-there"s no turning back. You sit there together, and Dooley"s fingers pick at one another nervously, as if he"s trying to pluck words out of them.
"Did you guys make up?" he asks in a small voice, and you give him a hard look.
"What are you talking about?" you say, and you feel his big eyes turn on you-earnest, sad eyes, hoping for approval.
"You could still get married," he says. "You could have another baby." It"s a squeak, a whisper, but of course it goes right through you like a thin arrow.
"No," you say. "That"s not going to happen."
"But ..." he says. And then, terribly, he starts to cry. "It"s not fair," he says, and you stand there, frozen in place, as he snuffles stiffly, as kids are riding their bicycles on the sidewalk and the fourteen-year-old girl next door is setting out her towel on the front yard to sunbathe. "I miss the baby," Dooley tells you solemnly, wiping his eyes. "I know it sounds weird, but I would have liked to be an uncle. It would have been fun." He clears his throat. "Just that," he says, "it could be so different, that"s the weirdest thing."
"It could have been so different," you repeat. What do you say to that? "Dooley," you say. "Let me tell you something. Look at your books. Look at The Great History of Time, or whatever the f.u.c.k it is. One person doesn"t mean anything. There are how many people in the world? Five billion? Six billion? How long did you say it would take to count to a billion? You know, you told me once. Like a hundred years or something? One baby doesn"t amount to a hill of beans, Dooley," you say, and when he gives you that stricken, red-eyed gape, you have to go on. He has to know, doesn"t he? He"s not a child anymore.
"Listen to me," you say, and you give him a hard shake, holding him tight by the scruff of his shirt. "Does it ever occur to you that you need to start thinking about yourself, Dooley? Does it ever occur to you that you don"t fit in here, and you"ll never fit in here, and that if you are ever going to be happy you are going to have to stop worrying about how different things could be and get out of this rotten place? That"s what I"m going to do, and that"s what you should do, as soon as you can. Does that ever occur to you? Or are you a total moron?"
Oh, horrible-to see him bawling like that, to feel him jerk away as you try to catch him. "Don"t touch me!" he cries. "You don"t know me! You don"t have any idea what would make me happy, you a.s.shole, you a.s.shole," he cries. And you can hold him in your arms, you can restrain him. You can hug him, rocking.
But there"s something in his eyes that frightens you.
What if it"s more terrible than you think? What if Dooley knows more than you? What if you have to carry this dead baby with you forever? What if you have to linger with this for the rest of your life?
That wouldn"t be fair, would it?
Slowly We Open Our Eyes.
1.
O"Sullivan and his older brother, Smokey, have been driving in silence for a long while when the deer steps out of the darkness and into the middle of the road.
For a second, it seems as if the world is paralyzed. They can see the deer with its hoof lifted, taking a delicate step into their path, dreamy as a sleepwalker. They can see the enormous skeletal bouquet of antlers as it turns to face them. They can see the truck"s headlights reflected on the blank black surface of its eye.
Then they hit it. The thump of the body blow comes almost simultaneously with the shatter of the windshield, the blinding swash of blood across the gla.s.s. "Watch out! A deer!" O"Sullivan cries belatedly, and Smokey says, "No kidding, motherf.u.c.ker," and he yanks the steering wheel to the left and right. The truck lurches sideways toward the ditch. It seems likely, O"Sullivan thinks, that they will flip over and roll down the embankment and burst into flames.
So when they don"t-when, instead, they come to a stop at the side of the road and the dust uncoils its slow eddies into the tangle of headlights-it almost doesn"t seem real. The two of them sit there, speechless for a moment, until finally Smokey turns on the windshield wipers. The wipers twitch like the last gasp of an insect leg and smear an arc through the grue.
"Oh my G.o.d," O"Sullivan says. "Yuck."
2.
Things had turned bad for O"Sullivan in Chicago, and he had decided to make a new start of things out west. O"Sullivan liked the sound of this sentence, its muscular clarity. Things went bad for O"Sullivan, he thought, as Smokey"s eighteen-wheeler truck pulled up in front of his apartment. O"Sullivan also liked the idea of people calling him "O"Sullivan," though for most of his life he had been known by his first name, Donald, or Don, or Donnie, all of which struck him as rather small and petty. To say, "Donnie had decided to make a new start of things out west," sounded somehow more pathetic.
He hadn"t yet decided what the "new start" would involve. In actuality, O"Sullivan and Smokey were on their way home for their grandmother"s funeral, and O"Sullivan had not yet told his parents that he planned to stay on indefinitely, that he was hoping that he could live in his old room for a little while, that he was not only broke and without a job and a month past due on his rent, but he had also managed to ama.s.s a fairly significant credit card debt.
It had been their mother"s idea to have Smokey pick O"Sullivan up as he pa.s.sed through Chicago, because O"Sullivan of course couldn"t afford a plane ticket home for the funeral. She had been nonplussed by this admission, she almost seemed like she didn"t believe him. O"Sullivan was, after all, a college graduate, the first person in his family to reach this pinnacle, and his mother was so far blissfully unaware that her son had no marketable skills whatsoever-yet another liberal-arts major who found himself struggling to hold down a job in the service industry. Waiter: fired. Bartender: fired. Hotel room service: also fired.
Smokey, meanwhile, had dropped out of high school and had been driving trucks for a good ten years now. Makin" great money! he said. And there was, O"Sullivan felt, a certain level of aggressiveness in the way that Smokey parked the big semi truck outside O"Sullivan"s apartment building and blew the big foggy lighthouse horn until O"Sullivan came to the fourth-floor window to peer out.
It would have been nice, he thought, to leave with some dignity. He would like to say: "O"Sullivan swung his duffel bag into the cab of his brother"s semi and they sped away, toward the silver strip of interstate, heading into the horizon." But the fact was that O"Sullivan had three suitcases and several large plastic garbage bags full of his stuff and one box of books that had to be shoved and argued into the narrow storage area in the back of the semi cab.
"What the f.u.c.k?" Smokey said. "Looks like you"re taking your whole G.o.dd.a.m.n apartment with you!"
"Not exactly," O"Sullivan said.
There was an awkward silence. The apartment building disappeared in the rearview mirror and the truck crawled out of Evanston and into Skokie, inching, stoplight by stoplight, toward the interstate. The cab of the truck smelled like motor oil and pine air freshener and male body odor. They were suddenly vividly aware of how little they knew of each other, how little they had in common. How long had it been since they had actually spoken to each other? Two years, maybe?
"So," O"Sullivan said. "What"s been going on with you?"
Smokey sighed, and the air brakes sighed too as the traffic light turned green. "Oh, not too much," he said. "Just workin"."
"Yep," O"Sullivan said. He nodded masculinely.
Some time went past. O"Sullivan became aware that there was, in addition to the other odors, a very strong smell of diesel fumes, which made his forehead feel like it was slightly expanding.
"So," O"Sullivan said. "Too bad about Grandma and everything."
"I guess," Smokey said. "She was pretty old."
"Yeah," O"Sullivan said.
"And she"d gotten pretty mean, too, in those last months," Smokey said without taking his sungla.s.sed eyes from the road. "She really gave everybody a hard time."
"Huh," O"Sullivan said. "I guess it had been a while since I talked to her, actually."
"Lucky you," Smokey said.
He handed O"Sullivan a flask of peppermint schnapps, and O"Sullivan took it and drank without comment.
3.
Smokey is driving a semi truck whose primary purpose is the transport of medical and other hazardous wastes. This is Smokey"s specialty-he has a particular license and various authorizations to drive such a vehicle, which is somewhat scary, O"Sullivan thinks. "So what is medical waste, exactly?" O"Sullivan had asked after a long stretch of silence had unraveled, and Smokey filled him in with far more detail than he probably cared to know.
So now O"Sullivan has a pretty good idea. There are probably used needles and tongue depressors and cotton b.a.l.l.s; also rubber gloves, empty intravenous bags, b.l.o.o.d.y bandages, culture dishes, scalpels, swabs, lancets ... no doubt a few pieces of people as well, tonsils, placentas, appendixes, malignant tumors-whatever kinds of goop might be contained inside the human body. It grosses O"Sullivan out quite a bit; he thinks of it all stuffed and sloshing in the yellow plastic "hazard" drums that are stacked up in the trailer they are pulling.
As they sit on the edge of the highway after the deer incident he is faced with the image of the semi jackknifing and the barrels bouncing along the asphalt and cracking open. He pictures amputated human arms flopping like fish down the center of the road; syringes floating on beds of liposuctioned fat; gelatinous human eyeb.a.l.l.s wiggling merrily as they roll down the highway; and so on. He could continue to imagine other such grotesque stuff, but chooses not to.
"Jesus Christ," O"Sullivan says, and Smokey looks at him, blinking slowly, as if he"s just woken up. "Jesus," O"Sullivan says. "Did we kill it?"
"We didn"t even hit the thing, I don"t think," Smokey says, and then lets forth a colorful string of truck-driver curses. "We must have missed that son of a wh.o.r.e by the most gossamer of hairs."
O"Sullivan is silent. Nonplussed. The truck is tilted a little on an embankment, and the headlights illuminate a tangle of oddly slanted trees and shadows.
"Well," O"Sullivan says, "we must have hit something. I definitely heard a thump." But when they get out to look, there is nothing there. No twitching hooves, no rack of antlers, no mangled body. Upon inspection, the gore on the windshield looks like it might be reddish mud. There"s a crack in the gla.s.s, but it isn"t shattered, after all.
4.
"These pills are mostly a mixture," Smokey said, handing O"Sullivan a plastic Ziploc baggie. "They"re just ordinary pharmaceuticals, but they"ll still get you happy in various ways."
"Isn"t it dangerous?" O"Sullivan said.
"What?"
"Mixing pills and alcohol. Isn"t that dangerous?"
"Of course," Smokey said. "But you"re twenty-four years old! Where"s your sense of adventure? You"re supposed to think you"re immortal."
"That"s true," O"Sullivan said, somewhat apologetically. He put a pill carefully into his mouth, then swallowed another drink of the schnapps they"d been pa.s.sing back and forth. "Brr." He shivered.
"You"ll feel better after a time," Smokey said. "Don"t be a p.u.s.s.y."
"I"m not," O"Sullivan said.
"You want to hear a joke?"
"Okay," O"Sullivan said.
"So there"s three guys, right? A Frenchman, an American, and a Russian. And they"re sitting out in the woods, in a cabin, having a drinking compet.i.tion, which is, first you have to drink a bottle of vodka, and then after you drink every last drop you have to go outside and shake hands with a bear, and then, finally, they have to make mad, pa.s.sionate love to a beautiful woman."