Flagged Victor (27 page)

Chris wrote in surprisingly precise, small print. On one of those postcards, maybe the koala bear, he asked how Susan was doing. He had not heard from her and missed her. Then he mentioned that the local girls were very accommodating to the needs of a foreign tourist. He said that Australia was just like Canada, except the beer was better, there was sand instead of snow, and everyone banged everyone all the time. Then, in even smaller print, he asked me again to check in on Susan, and to see if she needed anything.

I
called her on a Tuesday evening, and we agreed to meet for drinks on Friday afternoon, when her classes were over. The sky had broken open and spilled a bit more Indian summer on us all. It did me good to drive into the city, in the black Fiero, wearing Chris’s sunglasses, the ones he’d bought with the proceeds of our first robbery and forgotten on the dash when I dropped him off at the airport.

Susan wore jeans and a tight T-shirt and pink sneakers, and she looked to me like a vision of freshman purity. I’d forgotten her caramel skin, and the way her hair looked when it was pulled back from her face. She greeted me with the exuberance of a child, jumping up and down in place a little, rising up to hug me hard, holding onto my neck, breathing into my chest, releasing, beaming up at me.

You bastard, she said. Am I not allowed to see you or something when Chris is gone?

We sat down at the table. I was confused and muttered something about the phone system working two ways, but I suspected she was right. Some barrier I’d set up, a kind of tension or force field, had prevented contact between us.

We had snacks and a pitcher of Long Island iced tea (it seemed like a dangerous drink to start an afternoon off with) and talked about the end of her summer and the beginning of her school year. She was angry with me and Chris. She called us idiots for not registering in her first year. It would have been so much fun to be together. At least Chris had a reason—he had planned this trip to see his grandfather for years—but what was my excuse for not being at school? She had so much energy it was pleasurable to be with her in the moment, but it also had an unsettling effect on my sense of reality. She was rewriting history as we talked, as though, in her mind, Chris had indeed saved his pennies from years of part-time jobs to take this trip, as if the Sheraton had never happened, as if she’d never stood in her panties, braless, and thrown a plate of scrambled eggs at Chris’s head, as if I’d never fucked her friend in the bed beside her. She had the air of a person who’d entered recovery and chosen to believe in a different world.

When the pitcher was finished and the waitress was going off shift, I asked Susan if I could drive her home. She glared at me across the table and said, You’re not getting rid of me that easily. So we left the bar and went out to dinner instead. The nicest steak restaurant we knew. It felt good to spend money again.

I asked her how she was enjoying university. She told me it
was the best thing that had ever happened to her, and that she felt free for the first time in her life. I asked her what English courses she was taking, and made a comment that it was too bad Rivers was on sabbatical, and that I wished I’d gone with him. She stopped chewing and looked at me.

Leah did.

Leah did what? I asked.

Leah went with him. That’s the rumour, anyway. Can you believe her?

I tried to think that through. Leah went with Rivers to Thailand? Did that mean she was apprenticing for him, or was she something more?

Wow, I said.

No kidding, she said.

For some reason, this news sobered me up and pricked a dormant determination to write. I had the feeling that I had been lulled into sheep-like compliance while revolutionaries were being lined up against walls before firing squads.

So, Susan said, are you going to tell me the truth?

I wondered which truth, of the many dozen possible versions, she was referring to, and carefully asked her to be more specific.

About what Chris is up to.

I realized she must be talking about the bank robberies and collected my meagre mental and spiritual resources to tell a lie.

Susan interrupted my confession before I began.

Does he really have a grandfather in Australia?

It took me a moment to recover. A grandfather. I forced a laugh. As far as I know, I said. And then, just because Judas would, I allowed for a shadow of doubt. But you know Chris.

She grimaced, and that sour face was her admission. She did know Chris.

So what’s he really doing over there? she asked. And when I looked blank: Let’s keep it simple so you don’t have to lie. What’s he
doing
on an average day? Is he working? Is he suntanning? Is he fucking everything that moves?

He told me he’s written you about five letters. You probably know more than me, I complained.

Yes, but he doesn’t
tell
me anything, she said. He tells me so much that I learn nothing.

It was an old technique of the compulsive liar. Cover up whatever you are doing or have done with a storm of plausible and entertaining details.

I bet he is fucking everything that moves, she repeated.

You cannot hear a woman use the word
fucking
thus, and feel unstirred.

Chris? I asked, as if we were talking about the pope.

Yes, Chris. Fucking everything that moves.

I doubt it.

What’s to stop him?

You.

I’m ten thousand miles away.

I mean, he wouldn’t want to cheat on you, even over there. He wouldn’t want to jeopardize what you have.

Had I ever spoken a larger lie? Or was there some truth in there also? I could no longer tell the difference.

You wouldn’t tell me even if you knew, she said. You’re thick as thieves.

And we both knew that was true.

Is he ever coming back?

I shrugged, the most honest answer I’d given all night. I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure. I had a bad feeling either way.

She began to cry. She went weepy, as drunk girls often do. She drew attention to herself with her tears. I’m sure the other diners and the uncomfortable waiter and the glaring female bartender assumed that this was our high-priced, low-class breakup meal. Naturally, I was the perpetrator because I remained stony-faced and was eager to hush her up.

Do you want to go someplace else? I asked.

Yes, she answered in between sniffles.

We ended up at the Sheraton. We had more drinks at the bar. Both of us missed Chris badly, and it seemed that by sharing more time together, we were resurrecting his presence. The decision to get a room seemed, even to me, to be a chaste one. It was for sleep, not sex—the sleep of consolation and loneliness and a desire to escape from the false and strained and, yes, fucking drab lives we were both leading absent Chris’s magic spell. So we lay together on the bed, in our clothes. I allowed myself the taking off of my socks. Her eyes closed tightly, as if she were trying to squeeze out the memory of a nightmare. She was very drunk. I kissed her forehead and her nose, and brushed her hair, and listened to her breathing.

If I knew Chris was never coming back, we could be together, she said.

I did not say anything. What lies could I offer? What comfort?

By the time I’d worked my mental gymnastics to a suitable conclusion, I realized she was asleep.

That
fall, Rivers’s book hit the shelves, and hit them hard. I could not help but see it whenever I went into a bookstore. Have you ever known someone famous before they were famous? So this is what it looks like, I thought.

I did not buy his book. I could not read it.

Was I proud? Was I bitter or envious? Was I numb?

I was all of these things, in complicated proportions, at various times and moods. But I wish that I’d wished my friend luck more wholeheartedly before his luck arrived. I wished that I felt lighter about his success and less anxious about my own floundering future.

I finally got a letter from him in mid-October. It was sent from Thailand. Inside was a yellowed piece of newsprint, torn from the
New York Times.
On a second sheet of paper, in marker, Rivers had scrawled his note to me: NYT review. Complete bullshit. Complete misunderstanding of my work. Interview all lies. Never said any of it.

Then: Leah says hi.

Why had he sent it to me? I wondered. The review was harsh, the interview harsher. It called Rivers an overhyped, blustery talent whose claims for greatness were only surpassed by his talent for profanity and his derision of other authors more noteworthy than himself. The tone was bemused and insular. I felt for him, a flush of shame in my face, an ache of anger in my belly.

I wrote him back. I used as much profanity as possible to press my solidarity with him. I talked about Nietzsche and high crimes and morality sailing, and I told him it would all be worth it when they wrote about him again, years from now, and called him truly great.

I feared that this review would knock him down, alter the trajectory of his career. My fears were realized. His book seemed to falter afterwards. The tone of the
New York Times
review crept into every later review. Soon, the copies in stores were no longer stacked in piles, and became reduced to a few, spine out, stuck on back shelves.

I did not hear back from Rivers right away, and when another letter came, at the end of November, it was written by Leah.

She
went on at length about her arrival in Thailand, the confusion of Bangkok, the change in climate and diet, the monsoon that had gotten them stuck for weeks halfway to the islands. They’d settled on Koh Atsui, which was sufficiently infrastructured to provide the necessities, but not too overrun by tourists.

I have to say, she wrote, I love it here. I love the gentle culture, and the gentle pace, and the gentle warmth, and the surprising moments of everyday beauty.

And then, without warning, she told me what had happened to Rivers.

He met a friend, she wrote, an Australian named Mike, who was a brilliant poet, and they made a habit every week of visiting a bar on the other side of the island. You know how important conversations are to Delmore. They always rode on Mike’s motorcycle, Delmore on the back. Neither wore a helmet. It was not always possible to see the road, especially in the dark and unlit central part of the island, and they must have struck a fallen tree. Mike was killed. Delmore survived.

She told me the grim details. He was recovering in the hospital in the main town on Koh Atsui. She’d begged him to allow her to transfer him home or at least to Bangkok, but he insisted there was no point. The injuries to his chest healed better than expected, but his left arm, crushed and dragged along the road, became infected and had been amputated a week ago.

He’s very depressed, she wrote. It’s understandable. I feel like I’ve aged twenty years in the last month. I’m living like a nurse. I look after him every day. He hates being an invalid confined to bed, and he hates needing me, and he hates himself most of all. I’m afraid of what he will do. Your letters would be very meaningful to him. Please keep writing them. I wish you were here to spell me. I’ve told him that I’m telling you what happened so you don’t need to pretend not to know.

I could see Rivers lying on his back in the open hospital ward. I could smell the mix of smells around him, burnt sand, rotting garbage, coconut milk in rice, antiseptic gauze. The palm leaves outside the veranda were so crisp and dry they looked inauthentic. The ward itself was cool and pleasant. The concrete floors were splashed every few hours with a bucket of water, and this simple, casual, almost indifferent act seemed like a votive offering when the coolness rose up. White sheets hung like a maze of walls throughout the large room, dividing it into sections, filtering the sun, taking away its bite. The only unexpected sounds were the occasional bleat of a scooter, moments of chatter, sudden laughter, the clank of silverware on porcelain. I could see Rivers closing his eyes and sleeping, horrified whenever he opened them again and remembered what had happened.

His right leg, his left arm. I cried for him. It seemed, to me, as though he were dead. That even though he lived, he no longer actually counted. I tried to understand why and realized that it was because two such injuries made him worse than an invalid, they made him a spectacle. He had become a monument to tragic failure and bad luck, to clumsiness and poor decisions, a warning of the dangers of trying too hard and fucking up.

I wrote him a long, meandering, and heart-soaked letter, filled with pomposities. I used descriptions of setting to articulate my feelings, as Hemingway might. I described the autumn here, and the slow death of everything green, and the tang of decomposition in the air, and the smell of an old bookstore, and the mundane comfort of working a simple and undemanding job so that I could be violent in my writing. I lied and told him that I was rereading
Lord Jim
as a way of recovering from my own personal wounds, which I did not elaborate on. And I ended by telling him that I needed him to hang on and be strong, and that the world needed him too, because he had so much greatness yet to give.

Just before Christmas, he wrote me back, a postcard with an empty beach and two mysterious islands jutting like emerald mushrooms from the blue water of the bay. A half dozen words were all he offered in exchange for my ten-page ode to bullshit.

Writing, he wrote, is a life-threatening activity.

The
tragedy—and I know I must explain why anyone should pity me—is that I was different by the time Chris came back. I had sobered. I had become serious of purpose. I woke every
morning at four-thirty to write before work at the bank. And when writing time was over, I lay on the floor and did fifty pushups and two hundred sit-ups. This did not mean I was settling in to a staid vocation. I knew I did not want to be employed in the bank forever. I’d had my fill and was ready to return to school. I had decided to finish my degree in two muscular years, apply to a famous American graduate school in creative writing, publish my first story in the
Atlantic
or the
New Yorker
, sell a novel, garner big reviews, write bigger novels, become famous, and die wretched. If I could have maintained my austere and monk-like devotion to routine, and my solitary relationship with drink, I might have become something noteworthy.