Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 (38 page)

 
          
 
It was like trying to close an overstuffed
suitcase. Big slabs of Chuck kept flopping out—an arm, a leg, his head—until
the three of them pushed together and finally crammed all of him into the
shower stall and turned on the water and shut the door.

 
          
 
Preston and Marcia had barely been able to
roll him out of the car, couldn't possibly have lugged him all the way back to
the clinic, so Preston had woken Twist, and they had half-carried, half-dragged
him across the sand and squeezed him through the window.

 
          
 
Now he lay curled up in the shower stall, a
great mass of reeking meat, and they waited for the hot water to steam him back
to consciousness.

 
          
 
''What's he on?"
Preston
asked.

 
          
 
''Smorgasbord," said Marcia. "Little
bit of everything."

 
          
 
"I'd say juice, mostly," said Twist.
"Christ . . . smell the man. I wonder where he was tryin' to get to."

 
          
 
"Oblivion," Marcia said. "Looks
like he made it, too."

           
 
Dan had urged her, begged her, to try to get
their jobs back for them, so though she knew from the outset that the hope was
vain, she had tried. She tried to see Lawrence Tomlinson and was refused an appointment.
She drove up to Xanadu to see Banner, but Chuck turned her back at the gate, nicely—reluctantly,
embarrassedly—but obviously he had been instructed to keep her away from
Banner, on pain of losing his own job.

 
          
 
She lodged a protest at the county level, then
with the state, but found herself swimming in a sea of procrastination and
buck-passing. She made inquiries at the various associations of mental-health
professionals, but they all refused to take a case based only on innuendo and
inferences drawn from Tomlinson's carefully crafted letter.

 
          
 
She was angry enough to go public with a
charge of racial discrimination, but a friend of a friend, a woman who was
going out with one of Tomlinson's flunkies, let her know that silence would be
the course of wisdom: No, the Banner board wouldn't write letters of
recommendation for her and Dan, but on the other hand, if she kept her mouth
shut they wouldn't pour poison in the ears of the administrators of the other
thousand or so clinics across the land.

 
          
 
She had applications out to sixteen rehab
centers, from
New Jersey
to
California
.

 
          
 
Dan, meanwhile, was taking a course in fixing
transmissions so he could work at AAMCO. He had always liked cars.

 
          
 
She had started doing volunteer work with a “Just
Say No" program, cruising around, making friends with kids, shooting the
breeze, finding a basketball if they wanted to play, convincing a merchant to
permit them to put a hoop up in his parking lot. That kind of thing.

 
          
 
That's how she had begun to see Chuck, just
hanging around. At first, she had thought he was Twelfth-Stepping—keeping his
own memory green by spreading the word—and she had stayed away from him so
nobody could deduce a conspiracy of grown-ups.

 
          
 
Then he had shown up in that red Porsche, and she
had smelled rot. He gave everybody rides, let some of the kids drive it even,
and it was like he was some sort of Pied Piper, always with a knot of kids
around him.

 
          
 
She stopped him on the street a day or two ago
and let him know that the Porsche was spreading the wrong message, it was bad
news, because what it was telling the kids was: Happiness is money. And these
kids knew only one way to get money. For crissakes.

 
          
 
And Chuck—nice Chuck, friendly Chuck, Chuck
who had known so much pain of his own but still seemed to feel her pain when
she was fired—had told her to fuck ofl^ and mind her own business. With eyes
whose pupils were the size of pinpoints, as if light—the tiniest atom of
light—hurt. With a voice that came from somewhere deep in his guts, and a
tongue that lagged a fraction behind every word it wanted to utter.

 
          
 
Last night she had seen the Porsche parked in
a courtyard of a half-finished condo complex. Its hubcaps were gone, and
someone had bent the radio antenna in half.

 
          
 
Today, driving back from the unemployment
office, she had seen it parked behind a roadhouse. She went inside, and in the
dark, sour-smelling bar was Chuck, smashed out of his mind, lurching with a
list, playing darts for money with two truckdrivers. As she watched, he lost
and couldn't pay up, had run out of money, so the two truckdrivers slammed him
up against the dart board, and while one of them held him, the other threw
darts at him. They didn't have to hold him, though, because Chuck thought the
game was hilarious. He ducked the first two darts, but the third one hit him in
the chest, in one of those pectoral muscles the size of a standing rib roast.
He pulled it out and tossed it back to the truckdriver and said something like
“Try again, asshole, I bet you can't hit me in the eye."

 
          
 
She tried to get the bartender to stop it, but
he said, '*Are you crazy, lady? I don't need to have my place turned into a
pile of matchsticks. Besides, they're having fun, no harm done."

 
          
 
By now she figured she had to find out what
had gone wrong, what had pushed Chuck over the edge, this guy whose sobriety
was as precious to him as his soul— hell, he used to say his sobriety was his
soul.

 
          
 
She couldn't go to the clinic, knew nobody
there would take a call from her.

 
          
 
Then she remembered the schedule, the A.A.
meeting, and decided to go. Maybe it would be a waste of time, maybe she
wouldn't learn anything. But it was better than sitting alone in a pasteboard
condo, wishing she had a drink and listening to a symphony of flushing toilets.

 
          
 
Afterwards, once she had received
Preston
's message, she had no trouble finding
Chuck. The red Porsche was in a ditch beside a vacant lot. She found a couple
of kids who helped her roll him from his car into hers.

 
          
 
Now that they had him, what did
Preston
need him for?

 
          
 
Preston
told her everything he knew, then said, *'I don't know, though. Suppose
Banner's already fired him.”

 
          
 
“I doubt it," Marcia said. *'That's the
great thing about us chronics: You're humble enough, there's always another
chance." She thought for a moment, and a look of loathing leavened by
sorrow passed over her face. ''How's Priscilla?"

 
          
 
"Shitty," Twist said.

 
          
 
“Living somewhere else,"
Preston
said, "in some twilight zone. Going
through the motions."

 
          
 
Marcia nodded. "You see it in abused
kids. Something inside them tells them they have to get away or they won't
survive. It's usually a real mess, a lot of irrational guilt, a sense that they
deserved it, but whatever it is is intolerable. They can't escape physically, so
they run away mentally. They create a secret safe place, and that's where they
live."

 
          
 
"What brings them back?"

 
          
 
"Time, if you pull them out of the
situation and give them real safety. If you don't, sometimes they don't come
back. They keep going."

 
          
 
Preston
could feel the pulse in his temples. "Where to?"

 
          
 
"New people. They'll create a new person.
The brain can't deal with the real person, can't take the overload of shit, so
it creates a new person that doesn't know anything about it. Remember Three
Faces of Eve? Remember Sybil?”

 
          
 
"Jesus . . ."

 
          
 
Marcia put a hand on his arm. "We're not
there yet. We'll make her safe."

 
          
 
There was a crash in the bathroom, and the
sound of the plastic door panel exploding out of the shower stall, and a roar
of an enraged hippopotamus.

 
          
 
Preston
and
Marcia jumped. They stood between the beds, looking at each other.

 
          
 
Twist smiled. He rolled off his bed and pulled
the table between the beds out from the wall and unplugged the brass lamp.
Glass broke in the bathroom, and there was the sound of Chuck falling and
cursing and struggling to his feet. Twist very calmly removed the shade from
the brass lamp and unscrewed the bulb and wrapped the cord around the base of
the lamp and gripped the lamp by its slender neck and tested its heft.

 
          
 
When he was seven years old,
Preston
had seen the original version of The Thing,
and after he peed himself he went up the aisle and stood by the usher, who had
seen the picture probably a hundred times.

 
          
 
He recalled it now, for standing in the
bathroom doorway was The Thing incarnate, hulking, staggering, dripping wet and
grunting with a lust to inflict grievous injury.

 
          
 
Twist shouldered past
Preston
and Marcia and stood facing Chuck, swinging
the heavy lamp at his side.

 
          
 
“How you doin'. Chuck?" he said.

 
          
 
“Bhaaa ..." said Chuck.

 
          
 
"Know what you mean. You must have a head
'bout the size of a fiickin' Buick."

 
          
 
“Bhaaa ..." Chuck said again, and he
swung a random punch that did nothing but cause him to lose his balance and
carom off the doorjamb.

 
          
 
"Now, Chuck," Twist said,
"here's what it is. You're a big motherfucker, I'll give you alla that,
but lemme tell you what. Scott here, and Marcia, they gonna dance around you
and hassle the shit outa you, like mongooses, till I get inside and fetch you
upside the head with this here heavy sumbitch, which gonna make your head feel
even worser. So what say we cool right down. Chuck, and have us a talk?"

 
          
 
Chuck said "Bhaaa ..." once more and
tipped backward and sat down on the floor with a thud that made the toilet seat
jump.

 
          
 
“Atta boy." Twist turned to
Preston
and said, “All yours."

 
          
 
Preston
asked Twist to fetch some coffee from the brewer in the common room. Then he
sat cross-legged on the floor outside the bathroom door and talked to Chuck. He
told him what Lupone had said about Banner. He told him what had happened to
Priscilla. Then he repeated it all twice more, hoping that fragments would
pierce the fog in Chuck's head and somehow assemble themselves, like a jigsaw
puzzle, into a comprehensible picture. He deferred asking any questions until
Chuck had had two cups of coffee and washed his face and run some toothpaste
around his mouth and drunk about half a gallon of water.