Mercy
What they did to Eddie the night he overdosed was put tubes up his nose and needles in both arms and then roll him into a room in the hospital where machines made dull roaring noises, and he had to hear the hissing inhalations from other bodies in other beds. It was not even quiet. It wasn’t at all where he wanted to die, and he tried to say this, but his mouth was taped over a tube. Get me out of here came out as Emmeowee, and Home was just a call like a bird’s.
He’d gotten it all wrong, what dying would be. The poetry of it was not in this room. Why wasn’t he alone? The sanctity of this time was clogged with strangers. He was next to the private gasps of other men, their muffled animal efforts. All men. He loved women—why hadn’t they at least put him with women?
He had no way to open his eyes to see, and he didn’t want to see. They were a mess, all of them. He knew that much. He was past the strength to look. The dark was fine with him.
And then he remembered he was supposed to be kinder. Weren’t they all in this together? All of them as fucked up as he was. Worse. He could hear how hard they were working for air, poor bastards, with lungs no good at it. Working, working. Did that mean he was really dying, if his mind could remind itself to make room for mercy? It frightened him to think so. And then it didn’t.
Later they were shining a light on him, pulling up his eyelid under the bright beam. He made a noise that meant something like hey. Yes! they said. Yes! They were glad to hear him.
Tell us your name. Can you say your name for us? They had to take the tube out of his mouth to get his answer. He knew what to say just fine. The sounds of his name were unconvincing when he growled them out, but he knew they were his name.
Later, after a different doctor came, he could show that he knew his address, and why did they need that? He knew his age: twenty-six. They asked if he could say what year it was. He really did not want to be bothered by these things and was surprised the staff was so preoccupied with them when he could barely speak. 1974. Can you tell us the name of the President of the United States? Richard Nixon was hard to say without lisping. The hospital seemed to him the most literal place he had ever been. The most small-minded.
It was named for a saint, this hospital, but no priest was sent in, at least not when he was awake. Now there was an older woman with very short, very bleached hair, bending close to ask him if he was really sure he had no insurance. And who was his next of kin? Someone had to be called to pick him up.
His actual next of kin were his parents and sister, who were four and a half hours away from New York in Rhode Island, and they didn’t need to see him like this. The last thing he remembered was Ginger, whom he loved, throwing up and then coming out of the bathroom with her clothes all soaked with water from splashing herself to clean up. His friend, Ivan, who’d gotten them into this, was laughing. Eddie gave the hospital person Ginger’s phone number but then she complained that no one answered. Anyone else?
They were trying to put him back into the story of his life. They needed particulars. He didn’t need them now; he was still in another space. He wanted to be left in this freedom. But they had quite opposite ideas.
And why was there no sign of Ivan? He was nowhere in sight. Eddie was afraid to ask. He gave the short-haired woman Ivan’s phone number, which he also knew by heart. The woman came back into the room to say that she’d let the phone ring a long time with no answer.
And where was Ginger if she wasn’t answering? On a weekday (was that what it was?), she could be at work. Or later she could be at an acting class. He was in love with Ginger, which hadn’t kept him from going home one night with a gorgeous and somewhat crazy woman named Denitia (these things happened if you were a bartender in New York). Ginger had suspected soon after, and he’d just, okay, admitted it. Not lying had been a bit of a mistake on his part, even if he’d meant well. How disappointed Ginger had been. The whole plan about shooting dope, which he hardly ever did and was just another thing to do together, had been an attempt to re-entice her, convince her that his excesses were sexy.
They weren’t going to let him out of the hospital unless someone arrived to take him. He just wanted to be home—was that too much to ask? Someone who liked him was going to have to help. He couldn’t remember Denitia’s last name—something long—but then he could. The short-haired woman said, wearily, that she supposed she could look up the number.
He had sort of forgotten what Denitia looked like until she was there. All wrapped in a rabbit fur coat with her long hair twisted in a complicated knot, half falling down. “Hi, hello, hey you,” she said, which was nice of her.
He asked her to wait in the hall while he put on his clothes, the jeans and sweatshirt in the room’s closet. There was no wallet in his pants and no set of keys in his jacket. He made a fuss about it to the nurse, but she said that was all. Too bad for him was the philosophy here.
Denitia was a good sport about signing him out, though she seemed a little scared of him.
He explained in the cab that they were going to have to go to her place, and she said, “Sure, fine.”
“I appreciate this,” he said during the cab ride. “I mean it.”
He was gazing out the window at his city, his Manhattan, all those people going about their business. Denitia said, “What was it like? Did you see a light?”
She was talking about his near-death experience. The nurse had given her a few details about his intake.
“I missed that part,” he said. “I just remember waking up in the hospital and being very out of it.”
“You were out of it. Far as you can get. You have to think,” she said. “Maybe a tunnel, with light at the end? People don’t forget.”
By then the taxi was at her building on one of the scrappier blocks in Chelsea. He had no money to pay for the ride, which he apologized for.
There were three flights of stairs—he could walk them if he took it slow and gripped the banister. Denitia was making him a celebrity survivor of his own stupidity. Where had she gotten the light-in-the-tunnel idea? People used religion in stylized and shallow ways now. They made a gimmick of it, which was worse than the old stuff. He’d been raised Catholic and had not been a believer since his early teens, but there were phrases he still kept in his head.
In her apartment, the windows looked out at the air shaft next door, but she’d fixed it up pretty well. He hoped she wasn’t expecting sex. He said, “Is it okay if I rest a little?” before he collapsed on her bed. It was a bed with a plaid flannel coverlet, very homey and appealing.
When he woke up, night had fallen outside the windows, and she let him use her phone to straighten out his life. He had to call the bar where he worked, and Fred, the owner, answered right away. There was bar noise behind him. “Where the fuck were you?” Fred said.
“I was in an accident. A friend was driving the car.”
“We thought you were dead. You okay now?”
“I’m fine, all fixed,” Eddie said. “Never better.”
Fred was calling out, to the room beyond the phone receiver, “Eddie’s fine! He’s good!”
He heard cheering. It was really his home, that bar. He was thinking of details he could make up about the auto accident. Just a few.
They had someone else working his shift behind the bar now. Not the star Eddie was, but the guy was doing okay. “Three weeks, we’ll have your spot for you again. Promise.”
How could that be? He was beyond insulted. That was the best they could do? Three weeks, really? Fred said, “Think of it as a break.”
And who had a key to his apartment? Only Ginger. It was awkward phoning her from Denitia’s phone, but he did. “Hey, girl,” he said when Ginger answered right away.
Ginger was shrieking and laughing and calling his name, “Eddie, Eddie,” wildly happy to hear his voice. His live voice. She hadn’t known which hospital Ivan had taken him to, and she didn’t know anything about Ivan now either.
He said, “I missed you, babe,” softly so Denitia couldn’t hear, though she probably could. He said he had a favor to ask, and he got Ginger to say she would meet him right away at the apartment.
Denitia was cooking some sort of food in the kitchen. “You’re leaving?” she said. “I’m making this dinner.”
“That’s so nice.” He sat at the little table, let her talk about how protein was crucial for him now, and ate what she’d made, or some of it, a bit of hamburger and fried potato. “It’s very good. Thank you. I mean it.”
“You don’t care,” she said as he got up.
He hugged her anyway, which she didn’t seem to mind. “The cold will be good for me. Wake me up. Alaska on the Hudson.” He had to ask if she had a subway token he could borrow.
And he was late to meet Ginger, who wasn’t waiting on the street outside his door on Sullivan Street. He rang the bell, and after a minute he heard, “About time,” through the static of the intercom.
Two flights up, there she was, in the doorway of his apartment. With her wispy reddish hair, her sharp eyes with their pale lashes. “Hey, girl,” he said.
“Oh, Eddie,” she said.
The apartment looked like hell, though it turned out she’d cleaned up a bit. Most of his plants were okay, but the jasmine had withered badly. He found his wallet in the pants on the kitchen floor, the jeans that she and Ivan had changed him out of. His license and all his cash were in the wallet still. Of course. His keys were in the pocket of the ski jacket they should’ve dressed him in.
“Feels like I was away for years,” he said. “I probably look at least ninety.”
“You look beautiful,” she said, and she had her arms around him; they were kissing. What an excellent life he was coming back to.
“I’m so sorry about everything,” he said.
“Don’t bother,” she said, “being sorry.”
He wanted to bother. Meanwhile, they were walking each other to the bedroom. Time to start again, to be back in this world.
He’d always thought of her as an especially graceful lover, at ease with the steps along the way, shedding clothes, leaning back, trying different kinds of touch. A lyrical person to be in bed with—and not humorless either. He was as grateful as ever to be entwined with her, except that he couldn’t have sex. The mechanism of it had entirely left his vital parts. He was a man too newly back from the dead, it seemed.
Ginger was not one to give up easily, and she had her wiles, but it was no use. “I guess I’m still sort of sick,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
“No problem,” she said.
It was indeed a problem, and after they lay still for a while, they tried again, but his body had lost its connections to joy. How could that be? It could.
Nothing wrong with his health—he didn’t think so—but he was haunted. He’d come back from the afterlife with death’s shadow on him. What an irony that he couldn’t remember a single moment of his visit to the beyond. He didn’t know any more than he ever had, unless the knowing had buried itself.
Ginger said that once he’d passed out, Ivan had put ice cubes down his underwear to revive him—could that have done something?
And once again, they couldn’t get Ivan on the phone. Ivan, his best friend. Maybe he’d only pretended to be okay that night and he hadn’t been. Eddie called the hospital and inquired if anyone with that name was or had been a patient, but nobody knew a thing, and they weren’t nice about it either.
Not good. Ginger stayed till morning, but then she had to go home, had to go to work. His body continued to forget how to enable itself to enter hers, though he did his best for Ginger in whatever ways he could.
Once he’d gotten his haunted corporeal form into the shower, he walked across town to Ivan’s building. It was twenty-one degrees outside, according to the sign on a bank, and windy. He rang Ivan’s doorbell, and it didn’t matter how many times he rang. He walked around the block and came back in ten minutes, but the ringing still got no answer. Did the doorbell even work?
And what if Ivan had collapsed in the street? He could be there still. Lying frozen stiff in the cold. Eddie walked west, block after block, looking into the nooks of doorways, along the gutters below the curbs. It had been four days. Could a man be left on the street for that long? People were. In the sleeting, glacial rain. But Ivan wasn’t, as far as Eddie could see.
Friends were calling Eddie’s apartment, once word got out about his alleged car accident. He told certain people the truth, since he didn’t want to lie to everyone. It was different talking to people now. He could tolerate certain kinds of joking about his disappearance but not others. A good death joke had to be better than good. A man walked into a morgue. They meant well, sort of. He liked his friends, but he’d gone where they hadn’t.
And he lived in the wrong moment in history to be cursed with celibacy. He loved his era otherwise. Or had. He couldn’t even fantasize about Ginger without feeling cursed. They weren’t quarreling but there was a different mood between them. Ginger kept trying to be cheerful and sounded fake. She had never been fake.
And then the hospital sent its bill. In the envelope they mailed him was a list of fees owed for services rendered, and the total was a little less than what he made in a year. Who were they kidding? And what could they do? Send bill collectors to threaten him? Garnish any salary he made for the next fifty years? Have him hauled off to debtors’ prison?
They’d never have found him if he hadn’t stupidly told them his correct address. It made him want to leave the city at once, disappear without a trace. He dreamed that night that he was boarding a train at Penn Station, and Ivan was with him. They were taking a train to England—Ivan knew a way to get there by rail. They both thought this was a great idea. Ivan had brought pillows and blankets so they could sleep in their seats, since the trip would be long. In the dark railway car, he saw Ivan’s outline glowing with a cool, white aura as if his skin were a fluorescent bulb. Denitia had talked about “beings of light”—beloved dead people that the near-dead sometimes saw. He knew then that he was traveling with a dead man, and the fear of it went straight through him so that he woke out of the dream.
He was cold when he woke in his bed—the radiators went off at night—and he understood that he was afraid of himself too, a shivering relic, a human who smelled of the grave. Of course, he wasn’t a zombie or one of those dead saints who resisted putrefaction—he was Eddie, a basic guy. He sometimes said prayers for himself now, though he didn’t think any deity wanted him praying for a hard-on. (Maybe one did.) He prayed to be lodged at a distance above all trouble, in a space separate from all earthly bullshit, which was what he thought prayer was for.
He was losing Ginger, whom he loved. He could imagine no one better than Ginger, no one rarer or smarter or more deeply alluring, but she was of the opinion that his interest had waned, that he was too nice to tell her he wasn’t attracted to her any more. He had no proof that this wasn’t true. No physical proof.
He wouldn’t hang out with her at night in his old bar, either, or any other bar. Once, he’d wanted to run a bar of his own, and now he couldn’t remember why he’d wanted to be around crowds of people hour after hour. He’d lost interest in small talk, as it was fittingly called, and he couldn’t remember why he’d wasted time on people’s passing and worthless opinions.
Owning a bar-of-the-moment had maybe never been much of a plan. Did he need a plan? When he was in grade school, he’d said he wanted to be an inventor (he had the excellent idea to build a bicycle that flew). And then, when he was ten and serving as an altar boy, it thrilled him to imagine being a priest, like Father Reginald, with his amazing holy offices. Puberty took away that goal. But he did talk to Beth, his little sister, about what God wanted of them. In kindergarten, Beth had prayed every day for her much-loved grandmother to come back to life—she sort of knew it was no use but continued for months. And then, in third grade, when cliquey girls were picking on her, she mentally intoned “popularity, amen,” as her wish for herself at the end of the Lord’s Prayer everyone recited in school. He’d tried to tune her religious impulses a little higher. Sometimes he was a good brother; not always.
He could go to church now if he wanted—the city was full of churches—but his hungers were not for that. They were nonetheless hungers. In his days of being unemployed, he walked for hours through the city’s byways, and he went past the Hare Krishna people on Second Avenue. Six or seven guys with shaved heads, heavy sweaters on under their orange outfits, bopped around on the sidewalk in the cold, beating different drums and singing Hare Hare. He didn’t mind them. In fact, they made an insane sort of sense to him now, tuned to their own frequency, chanting in Sanskrit, trying to insert a new vibration into the raw and vulgar New York air.
Ginger did an exact imitation of them when he talked about them that night. She had that talent: she could mimic anything, getting (in this case) the perky yet plaintive wailing of the chanters. Eddie said it was their “motives” he understood.
“They’re showing up in airports now,” she said.
“I’m going to Alaska,” he said. “Soon as I can. It’s time.”
“What are you talking about?” Ginger said.
“Everything here is done,” Eddie said. “Time for me to leave.”
“We’re done?” Ginger said. “Is that what you mean? Totally washed up and over and done with?” Ginger had a biting tone at first, and then she was crying. Her face was pink and collapsed, and she was looking at him in disbelief out of her wet, weeping eyes. “What did I do? What did I do?”
For the rest of his life, of all the wrong and deluded things he did, the one he regretted most was leaving Ginger. He told her at the time that it wasn’t her fault, he just had to go, which sounded like some lame-ass cowboy song. He was taking to the road. He said as many fond things to her as he could—how great she was to talk to, how perceptive her take was on everything, how amazing she’d been since he’d come out of the hospital. What a fabulous future she was probably going to have without him.
“I don’t really require,” she said, “this kind of condescending bullshit.”
And where had he gotten this high-drama plan of Alaska?
“I have a friend,” he said.
“A girl,” she said. “You’ve had someone else for a while, haven’t you? What a liar you are.”
The friend in Alaska was a guy he’d known since kindergarten who’d gone to Anchorage to be a civil engineer; construction was booming now that the pipeline was starting to get built. The guy liked it there a lot, people said. Eddie could write to tell him he was coming; someone at home would know the address.
“There’s no one else,” he told Ginger.
This did not comfort her. Nothing did. The unfairness of it was unbearable to her. What had she done? What had she done? Why was this happening to her? He had no answer to these questions. Did he have to discuss the unfairness of human existence? That was the story, and all stories ended in death. Though he had not expected to be the dispenser of acute injustice.
How inane he sounded, even as he marshaled himself against her. She was the last person he wanted to be cruel to, and he was telling her how misguided she was if she’d thought they were going to last forever. “What did I do?” she said. “I didn’t do anything.” Well, she’d done a few things, if she wanted to hear his list. Not much of one, really. She had a few counter-examples of her own. But it wasn’t an argument she could win by being right.
Ginger, whom he loved, wept in pain because of him. What he knew full well, even at the time, was that he would never find anyone better than Ginger. It was highly, highly unlikely.
And he never got to Alaska. That pure and spectacular dream—icy wilderness, grizzlies and caribou and eagles, great town bars—met its fadeout in his bad feelings, politically, about working in a boomtown of the oil industry. Liars and polluters.
So he went to Canada instead. Who moves north in winter? It was an irony that suited him. And he did know someone in Toronto. Nathan, who’d once lived in a group apartment with him when they were sophomores, had crossed the border into Canada five years ago to avoid the draft. An act of nerve and fear and principle that Eddie, who’d had deferments and a better lottery number, had not had to make. By now, the government wasn’t sending in new troops—peace accords had been made and broken—but napalm was still raining from the skies over Vietnam. Eddie envied Nathan being on the right side of things.
The years in Canada were good years for Eddie, fucked-up though he was when he arrived. He stayed in a very cheap hotel his first nights, in a room as spare and windowless as a monk’s cell, though the hotel was far from monkish, with drugged-out residents pretty evident. Why did he think he was better off there? But he was. The newness of all of it did him good—he walked the streets, which were cleaner than New York—and nobody bothered him. They were into not bothering.
He liked Canadians, and, in fact, Ginger was Canadian. Maybe she’d visit her family in Ottawa and he’d see her here, passing through. He watched for her on every corner. He just did. A lot of women sort of looked like her.
Everything that happened to him in those early days was improbable. Right away, he found Nathan—in the phone book!—and Nathan said, “Eddie, what the hell. How are you?” and let him sleep on his couch for three months. Nathan had grown a beard and cut his hair, and the ordeal of exile had made him darkly satiric about everything, which Eddie quite liked. They made fun of how Canadians waited at traffic lights when there was no traffic, and Eddie said all the rose bushes in the park were being pruned to death for the sake of civic order. His father was a landscape gardener, so he knew pruning. And then a woman Nathan was dating had an uncle who was an estate manager and needed a guy to prune and weed and do minor construction. Who gets gardening work in winter? Eddie liked it, working outside. Toronto wasn’t that much colder than New York.
He got along well with Nathan’s friends, mostly other exiles. A few of the draft resisters had brought wives or girlfriends, but most of the women who hung around the house were not from the States. Eddie fell for an amazing blond from Saskatoon whom he saw reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead. So, was it readable? “Parts are,” she said. She laughed when he said, “Most people think gardeners can’t read,” and he understood that she liked him.
It turned out that, this side of the border, his body worked fine again. Lena (that was her name) had a lush and ample figure, very different from Ginger’s. After his first time in bed with her, when things went just fine, he was so wildly grateful to her that he began to blame Ginger in his mind. Always so self-absorbed and vain. How glamour-driven and unrealistic she was. He watched Lena when she slept, and he moved his own chest up and down in time with her, out of tenderness but also out of the strong feeling that her way of moving was the right way. She had a simplicity that was not stupid. She had, actually, a quite complicated job as a school counselor. Lena was what he longed for, all through the hours of his manual labor outside. He did forget Ginger, or he forgot her enough.
Of course, Lena was not really as elemental as he wanted to think, but that was more evident later. He got his own copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. People used to use it on acid trips—Leary and Alpert and their academic crony Metzner suggested it for overseeing the death of the ego. The chapters had prayers of protection and advice a person could utter to a loved one who was starting to go through whatever dying was. Too bad no one had chanted these to him when he was in that region. Ivan could have, if Ivan had been anywhere around. Ivan had a deep, clear speaking voice. Or Ivan might have been in need of those prayers himself; his brain might have failed to tell his vital systems to continue and left him stranded, unoxygenated forever, on the same night when Eddie was hovering in the zones between. The bardos. When Eddie tried to tell Lena about that night—the very word heroin was a big surprise to her—he heard himself murmuring the other theory, which rose and fell in his heart, that Ivan had run off when things had looked bad for Eddie, for fear of the law coming down on him, and left him to the mercies of the hospital.
“What’s your gut feeling?” Lena said.
“I have dreams of Ivan dead,” Eddie said. “I think my friend is gone.”
“That’s it then,” Lena said. “You know what you know.”
Eddie had never believed in gut feelings—a convenient superstition, in his opinion. But he wasn’t against convenience. He had to live with the unknown as well as he could.
Lena was his girlfriend for two and a half years. What a lovely feeling of escape he had, in the early days. He was away from the corrupt city that had almost killed him, and he’d fallen into comfort with a woman of true merit who thought he was a person of substance in disguise as a mere gardener. And he liked hanging out with Nathan and his buddies, that wry bunch of refugees. The Fall of Saigon—the last, disastrous event of the war—was on TV during his time in Toronto, and they all watched, stunned, to see the desperate locals and desperate Westerners running and scrambling and grappling to climb into helicopters. Mobs trying to scale the walls of the embassy.
At Nathan’s house, it was not much of a celebration, but someone did go out and get a bottle of whiskey, and the toasts got more riotously raw as the night went on. None of what they’d seen meant the exiles could go home without facing jail. Their lives were still ruled by murderous officials. Eddie got as drunk as the rest, in his sociable way, and had to be tended by Lena before she could drive him back to their apartment.
When Eddie remembered that night, and he did remember, it turned shadowy because of what came later, as if they’d all gotten carried away. The thing about being young was you didn’t know what lay ahead. In two years, a new president—a liberal, born-again Christian—pardoned all draft evaders. Who knew? Much of Eddie’s own life felt like that, a botched and risky present that the future dragged into a pattern.
After Lena split up with him because he was so obsessed with his gardening, he got more obsessed with his gardening. His father in Rhode Island was not happy that they’d paid for four years of college so that he could dig in the dirt like his dad. But Eddie had higher ambitions. He’d designed a huge garden in the back of someone’s mansion, with a glorious group of exclusively native plants. This was a newish idea, and he had other ideas, like no polluting fertilizers and no ruining the water table. Anna Marie, his new girlfriend, had once campaigned to stop a gas pipeline in the wilderness, and it was actually stopped. Did Eddie care about wilderness? He did now. Not because the trips with her to endangered forests wrenched his heart (though the forests were something) but because, more and more, he held humans fuck up everything as a political principle.
Anna Marie thought that all his physical work had made him very lean and in particularly sexy possession of his body. Well, that was nice. She was not as easygoing as Lena had been, but she brought a different intensity to their erotic contact that took him quite far. He forgot Ginger, except when he didn’t.
On Ivan’s block in New York there had been a street guy who yelled as he panhandled, “Save the whales! Save the winos!” Now Eddie was sleeping with a woman who had filmed her fellow activists on high-speed rafts sent out between bleeding sperm whales and Russians throwing harpoons. He’d never known anyone who even aspired to be fearless, except in stupid ways. This year she was photographing toxic waste in the form of chemical clouds along the horizon.
He was turning thirty pretty soon, and he didn’t think he’d stay in Canada forever. Anna Marie was occasionally furious about this. On the other hand, he needed more schooling if he wanted to call himself a landscape designer, and credits were cheaper in Canada.
In his younger days, he’d sampled any drug he could get his hands on, but in Canada he just smoked a little weed now and then. Grass, herb, whatever they called it; people were always emphasizing its botanical identity. (Though even heroin had started life as a cheerful poppy plant.) There was a general feeling in his world that nature knew best. He had not grown up with this feeling—penicillin, climate-controlled buildings with sealed windows, and frozen food had all argued for subduing nature for human benefit. And now he had to battle mold, mites, rot, and rootworms in whatever nice ways he could.
People always said they envied his working out in the fresh air, but he didn’t entirely believe in fresh air that way. Nature was cruel as anything. Anna Marie said that sturdiness was required of all species. He liked this dictum, but it turned out she meant that the world was losing species fast. And would never get over it.
That was the question, wasn’t it—what could ever be gotten over. He didn’t even know how to ask it properly till later. No one did.
He never did have a friend like Ivan again. He was very glad for the years he hung out with Nathan—they had great talks and could happily chew over any world question. But the two of them didn’t persuade and tempt and corral each other into further adventures, pushing the proverbial envelope. When was he ever as brave as he was in New York? It made him want to visit the place, just for a few days, when he went down to see his family at Christmas. He was solvent enough to buy an airline ticket, but when he got to the airport, the ticket was nowhere in any of his pockets or in any part of his luggage. Had he left it at Anna Marie’s? It was too late for the airline to honor his protests, and the plane left without him.
How concrete those years were, how specific and tangible everything was. If he forgot to have his garden plans xeroxed at a copy shop, they could be lost forever. He used the checkbook from his bank to pay in stores. Mail was forwarded by the post office with stamped and handwritten instructions. His clients’ addresses and numbers were written on Rolodex cards. Photos were printed from negatives. All of it was subject to slippage, fading, rot, dust, spillage.
He lingered in Canada for a whole other decade, and by the time he got himself moved back to New York at the start of the nineties, the physical world was just beginning to fizz into cyberspace. He left Toronto when a client accused him of cheating her, putting in a cheaper kind of tree than he’d told her. The woman knew nothing about varieties of pine. He made mistakes, but this was not one of them; he had his honor, and he was outraged to hear it impugned. He thought everyone knew who he was, but maybe they didn’t.
It wasn’t so hard to move. He found a very decent place in Queens—once a backwater to him—in an apartment with a yard. A pretty neighbor told him the police had once dug up the yard, looking for a dead body. They’d found nothing, but some people on the block were sure a body was buried somewhere nearby. “I hope you’re not spooked by that,” she said, flirting.
“Not me,” he said, flirting back. He didn’t say, I’ve been dead myself, but he thought it. The corroded skeleton that had once held the self of a stranger was not dangerous. He knew what danger was.
The pretty neighbor was a single mom who worked for an insurance company. Her name was Susan, and they kept having conversations in passing. He probably sounded very out of it. He’d lived outside this city almost twenty years, and walking around made him remember more than he wanted. In days of yore, Ivan had always drunk Yoo-hoo when he was too stoned to be hungry, and here it was, still in the window of the local bodega.
New York had fewer beggars now, but near the subway station was a guy in multiple layers of hoodies holding out a notebook page on which he’d written, I Need Help. Who could argue with that claim? Though Eddie could remember, in the old days, people insisting that panhandlers didn’t really need the money; they were scammers who took in large sums and used them for drugs. Remembering his outrage at this opinion made Eddie dig into his wallet and take out the only bill he had, which was a twenty. The guy in the hoodies gave a crooked, embarrassed smile and said, “God bless you. Bless you.” Which no one used to say.
Eddie passed the guy almost every day after that—the guy always caught his eye—and he never forked over a twenty again, but he always handed over something and got blessed. Susan the neighbor saw him and smiled broadly, in her sexy way. Eddie was pretty sure she liked him, but he took his time before making a move; they actually went on dates—people didn’t just hop into bed anymore—he knew that. And the hopping went very well, once they got to it. Not that he was a fan of the current trend of hesitation.
He heard himself telling Susan that he almost died once. From being in a car that was hit by another car. He said the collision itself was a blank to him—what he remembered was finding himself inside a very dark tunnel with a speck of brilliant light at its end. He understood that he had to work very hard, getting to the light. A friend had died in the same accident, he told her. He found that out when he was awake. His best friend, Ivan, whom he used to do everything with.
“May his memory be a blessing,” Susan said. It was what Jews said, according to her, and Eddie was sorry he hadn’t known it before, to say to himself about Ivan.
Why did he need to invent this other fable? Drugs would have taken away any youthful charm in it. And Ivan had been coming into his mind more often, now that he was back in this city. Even Queens, where they’d never been together, had Ivan all over it. In his head, Eddie still repeated the phrases Tibetans followed in their Book of the Dead. Save him from the great darkness of the between! Hold him back from the harsh red wind of evolution! Evolution was a new translation of karma, and he liked it. He didn’t especially think Ivan would’ve gone for any of it.
It took longer than he’d expected, but he had referrals and people to call, and he began to get work—good work—designing and setting up gardens, including a fantastic one on a roof in Soho, and he wrote to Nathan to celebrate and also to complain: “Rich people are fucks.” Nathan said late-stage capitalism was only going to get worse. Merciless greed. No argument there.
Things were going well with Susan. On a weekend when she was working in her office (people worked more now), she asked if he’d take Darby, her eight-year-old son, to the movies. He liked Darby fine and they went into Manhattan to see The Lion King. The lines for the tickets were long, and while they waited, he saw a poster for a movie with an actress who looked like Ginger, but older, with her hair in a side part. It was Ginger—Ginger billed as Astrid, her real name! Playing a nurse in World War II! It had never occurred to him that she’d actually get work acting. Darby said, “Why are you yelping?”
She’d done a lot better without him, hadn’t she? The entire world had heard of Astrid, it turned out. Susan said, “She’s been on TV, she’s been all over. You never see anything.”
Even Nathan, in Toronto, said, “Oh, yeah, she’s good. I’ve seen her in a bunch of things. That’s Ginger?”
She never would have stayed with him. Maybe she didn’t even know his name any more. He was glad she had all this fame—good for Ginger, look at her now—but he couldn’t help feeling he had lost her yet again.
And he went back the next day and bought a ticket to see the film. He had to wait twenty minutes before she appeared on the screen—she was a nurse who didn’t like anyone, but then she fell in love with another woman, who was tortured to death by the Nazis. In the dark of the theater, with Ginger’s face looming close, he remembered that human life was hideous. He was bitter on her behalf, and it was remarkable that Ginger could convey the unspeakable, eternal rottenness of the world, at the same time, she must’ve been so happy to get this great part.
She could not have done what she did on screen if she hadn’t suffered in whatever her own life was. Did he wish that for her? Did it make him feel better? Here he was, sitting with strangers in the dark, rows of people held utterly still, listening to her voice. He wanted to save her; he wanted to thank her. People applauded at the end, as if she’d won the war. He was so relieved that none of it was real, all just a movie, that he forgot everything but the liberty of this relief.
Really, he never liked that kind of drama, did he? When he saw Susan the next day, he told her, “It was sort of too much.”
“Well, people go for that,” Susan said.
“Some,” he said. “I kind of don’t.”
What did he go for then? “Less attachment,” he said. “I’m a Buddhist.” He was not a Buddhist—he’d read a few books—and he didn’t even like to meditate. But he loved the ancient and long-practiced possibility of slipping outside the fray, being a conscientious objector to the battles everyone else was fighting. When he used to chant in his head for Ivan from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, he always wished Ivan perfect freedom. A phrase he liked.
Of course, he was exaggerating his dislike for big emotions on the silver screen, making that up. It was too hard to give Ginger so much credit, too hard to have so much glory piling up on her side of things.
“People love her,” Susan said. “She’s very popular.”
“Why are you defending her?”
And they had a useless dispute about Ginger, whom Susan had never even met. She could praise the woman’s acting if she wanted to—what did Eddie care? Did he think, Susan said, that he could regulate every single one of her opinions? They said a few other things about who could tell who to do what, a sign to them both that they were not about to last forever as a couple. Which Eddie was sorry for, because he’d been getting to really like hanging out with Darby.
Nathan, over the phone in Toronto, asked if Eddie was going to write Astrid a message. There was probably a way to send one through her agent. Maybe she’d be glad to hear from him. Maybe she would lend her famous name to those campaigns against ocean-ruining plastics that were so close to his heart.
He thought his heart was not the issue, though it was decent of Nathan to bring it up. Ginger had always had good politics. Maybe he should rightfully take advantage of old ties to get help for what was important. It was not easy to imagine her as a regular person now that she was so famous. A woman who went to award dinners in a long, spangled gown with a train. Of course, she was still Ginger underneath that. (He’d been underneath). Once, he had wanted her to be part of his story, hadn’t he? But she had her own story.
Andhe’d always had regrets about splitting up with her. Grave and lasting regrets. He’d said stupid and untrue things; he’d brought her to tears just to get away. He’d wanted her out of his sight, dear Ginger. He was angry at her beauty because it was no help to him.
Back-from-the-dead creature that he had been at the time, been-there-and-back. He could hardly be around himself without shuddering. Ivan used to say that people really hated dead things—you could see how they shrieked at harmless dead rats in the street, ran from the snarls on those squashed faces. Ivan had enjoyed saying this was primeval of New Yorkers. He’d gone on to have his own primeval terror, hadn’t he, after he took his overdosed, maybe-gone friend to the hospital. He must’ve been so relieved to remember that he could run away. The flash solution. An escape he couldn’t not take. As Eddie had sort of always known.
And all those prayers for the dead he used to mutter to the vanished Ivan—had they been misguided bits of religious hooey? He did think they had been sincere. He’d been wishing Ivan across the rougher routes of the beyond, the treacherous passages, over the hellish chasms toward better chances. Nothing wrong with those wishes. Maybe they had helped Ivan with whatever zigzagging fuck-up of a life he’d had. Ivan the betrayer.
Whatever the prayers were, he’d do it again. Where was there ever enough mercy? Nowhere on the planet. No wonder people asked and asked for it. It made Eddie remember the time of raging fear in his own life, decades ago, in that chaotic hospital, when he’d had every reason to think he was on the verge of dying. When he’d been in over his head. Why didn’t he die? It wasn’t his turn, he always said to himself, as if fairness were involved. He was rude to the nurses, whom he should have thanked. He yelled in the emergency room, but that was as far back as he remembered. He’d been too far under. Did Ivan remember any of the part before that? Eddie knew he did. He knew that much. Whatever form he was in now, Ivan hadn’t forgotten.
