The Speed Chronicles (20 page)

They walked ~fifteen blocks and unrolled the carpet on the sidewalk. Jack put books on the carpet and wrote prices on paper and they sat with their backs against a wall. A British man picked up a book, looked at it a few seconds, said “I'll take it,” gave Jack two dollars while looking in his wallet for a five-dollar bill. Daniel sincerely praised Jack's writing to the British man for a few minutes. The British man thanked them and walked away. Daniel said the British man had said “getting in on” in a hesitating manner, like he wasn't sure if he was getting the idiom right, and that Daniel had looked at Jack when he said that. Jack said he didn't notice. “He only gave me two dollars,” he said. “Seems like a scam.” An overweight, fashionable, shy-seeming girl bought two books without removing her large headphones or speaking. Four black male teenagers appeared. One, who seemed much more interested than the others, asked if he could read some of a book and then read some of it and laughed and said, “I'll take it.”

“Sweet,” said Jack.

“Do you like Adderall?” said Daniel.

“What is it?” said the teenager.

Daniel described it in a few sentences.

“So, it's like Ecstasy?” asked the teenager.

“Sort of,” said Daniel. “Without the euphoria.”

“Are you in?” said the teenager.

“No,” said his friend. “But I'll watch you do it.”

The teenager bought two Adderall.

Nick McDonnell appeared on a bike and introduced himself to Jack and said they had met before. Jack said, “I remember,” and said something about KGB Bar. Nick McDonnell bought two books and said he looked forward to reading them. Jack asked him about his McSweeney's book. Jack said, “You know Mike Tonas, right?”

Nick McDonnell said he wished Mike would return from Portland.

“He's there permanently?” asked Jack.

“I think so,” said Nick McDonnell.

Jack said he would move to Portland.

Daniel said, “You would?”

Jack said, “I don't know.”

Nick McDonnell said he had a reading at The Half-King the next night, then rode his bike diagonally across Bedford Avenue.

“Do you know that person?” asked Jack.

“No,” said Daniel. “Who is that bro?”

“He's rich,” said Jack. “I liked his first novel. It was published when he was seventeen, I think. His father was the editor of
Rolling Stone
or something. His novel was blurbed by Hunter S. Thompson, Bret Easton Ellis, and Joan Didion and was just made into a movie by Joel Schumacher or someone. In the book the main character is a white person in high school who sells drugs. We should go to his reading. Tomorrow night.”

They sat without talking ~twenty minutes.

“Should I use more Adderall,” asked Jack.

“You're better to be around when you're on Adderall,” said Daniel.

“What do you mean?” said Jack.

“You're really quiet without Adderall.”

Jack went to Verb and ingested ten milligrams of Adderall, stood in line for the bathroom, peed, washed his face. He ran to where he and Daniel were selling books. The sky was mostly gray. There was some orange, red, purple in the distance. It was ~5:30 p.m. An Asian girl with a cell phone to her right ear approached and slowed a little and passed. She reappeared a few minutes later without a cell phone and said she knew who Jack was, from her coworkers. Jack said something about Adderall. “Are you guys cops?” she asked. “Because I'm waiting here to buy pot from someone. But I'm not sure about him.” Daniel asked whom and she showed Daniel the drug dealer's business card. She bought two books and went to an ATM and returned and paid for three Adderall. She asked if Daniel or Jack had a driver's license, to move her friend's car from Crown Heights to the Graham L train stop for money. They talked about that a few minutes without concluding anything and it was quiet a few seconds and she removed a magazine from her bag and said she was translating an article from Mandarin and asked if Jack was good at translating. Jack said he couldn't read Mandarin. Daniel asked where she was from and after a few minutes she began talking about her boyfriend who went to India after college, then returned to America and died, a few years ago. Jack heard her say something about how her boyfriend's funeral had become a party—that, for some reason Jack didn't hear, it had been the same as a party—except everyone was wearing black.

TAO LIN
is the author of six books of fiction and poetry, including
Richard Yates
, his second novel, which was published in 2010.

everything i want

by megan abbott

for Courtney Love

Y
ou destroyed them, didn't you, doc?” one of the government men said, his arms deep in the drawers of the doctor's battered old filing cabinets. “All your records.”

They wouldn't believe him when he said there was nothing to destroy. That he'd never kept files on any of his patients. He didn't need to keep records, to document any of it. Hundreds of patients over fourteen years of practice conducted in the second-floor office of the old Reefy Building, so much care woven into its fraying rugs, so many tears sunk deep into the heart pine floors. He could tell you everything about any of them.

“At a certain point,” he said, “I could just look at them and know.”

He remembered a motion picture he saw once, years ago, when he still indulged in leisure on an errant Sunday. A man sees what life would be like if he had never existed, his town a ruin, his family shorn, the world transformed into a nest of teeming vice. We would all like to believe we matter so much, he thought. That we are holding back the dam. But in his case, he knew it to be true. All those lonely souls who had darkened his office doorstep, who waited for him in the morning and lurked under the hallway sconces at night, who telephoned him at all hours, their voices keening in his ear.

If he had never arrived in town, they would still be shadowliving, tucked behind drawing room drapes, hiding under their office desks, crying into pocket squares on the bus ride home.

Life is hard. The world is punishing. These are the things he knew. In the face of such fermenting loss, the inconstant racket that is the only respite from sinking despair, why shouldn't he give them some joy?

He would always remember it, that icy December morning when he first hammered the
C. Tremblay, MD
sign on his office front door. Balanced on the window sill, his transistor radio crackled with news of Albert Schweitzer receiving the Noble Peace Prize. A man in Oslo recounted a story about how young Albert, traveling on a river in Africa, experienced an Important Moment. Gazing on the rays of the sun shimmering on the water, the abundant beauty of tropical forest, wild beasts at rest on the river banks, it was as though an “iron door had yielded, the path in the thicket had become visible.” Suddenly, a phrase came to him:
Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben
. Reverence for life.

“
It is the youth of today who will follow the path indicated by Albert Schweitzer
,” the radio man was saying as Dr. Tremblay brushed the sawdust from the door face. “
All through his long life he has been true to his own youth and he has shown us that a man's life and his dream can become one
.”

The doctor stood back and observed his handiwork, the porcelain enamel sign gleaming. Until that moment, he had never once felt he belonged anywhere. From that day forward he devoted himself to all those who sought his care, working harder and harder as the years passed.

For the last four years he had seldom left those careworn 250 square feet.

Who knew, after all, when Mrs. Neel would need to be lifted from deepest summer sorrows by the sight of the incandescent bulb glowing in his window nigh on two a.m.? Who knew when Mr. Cass, once nearly three hundred pounds and could not pick up his toddling daughter off the floor, might ask for help to fight the sound of his long-dead mother's voice telling him to clean his plate, clean all the plates?

No, he needed to be there, and so he spent his nights nestled on his tucker-leathered davenport, wrapped in an afghan lovingly knitted by Mary Floss, the proprietress of the BRE-Z Laun-Der-Rite and a woman with more than her share of dooming sorrows: two sons lost in Brittany and Kursk and a bleary husband consumed by reckless habits far worse than her own, which the doctor didn't consider a habit but a salve, a balm, a protection from the glaring sight of her mottled hands. Days spent, hands in lye, packing bachelor bundles in stiff blue paper, and the only pleasure to be had was the time with her knees clenched tight between his own, the blooming syringe settling deep in her arm, and her eyes flickering to high heaven.

Oh, Mary Floss, you deserve that, and so much more.

He was born fifty-two years ago to a sad-faced woman with no husband and a physician father with a long dark coat for whom she made meals and played the piano every evening. Within an hour of his birth, his grandfather took him from his mother's weakened arms, removed him from the house, and delivered him to one of the hospital nurses, a woman whose own infant girl had died in the crib of inanition many months before. Her breasts were still full, which she understood as a strong portent. Taking the newborn to her grieving chest, she determined to raise him as her own.

In her fruit cellar, the nurse kept a steady store of liniments, balms, demulcents, vitae, physics, and medical and homemade compounds gathered from her workplace and conjured through her own ministrations. Such is the way he learned the secrets of the body, the mind, and the heart. As he grew older and showed the facility and, she said, a native kindness, she taught him to understand the mystical properties of medicines, the ways that chemistry and the natural world and modernistic technology can all work in harmony. And that medicine is at once art, science, and magic.

One day, the nurse took him by the hand into her dark bedroom and, touching her lower belly with a trembling hand, she said that of all the things she had taught him, this he must remember most: when you have something eating you from the inside, whether it be of mind, body, or spirit—because these things are one—then you truly and at last understand what pain means and how it must be stopped. For herself, she halted it—or held it at bay—by means of the milky glass of ergot and morphine that she kept on her bedside table. And she halted it more and more as her body grew smaller and her eyes sunken. When he was thirteen, the nurse died, her body found by him in the fruit cellar in a state of undress, her hand still curled around that milky glass. Her face was both ruined and serene.

From this point forward, he made his own way. His grandfather arranged, via his lawyer, to give him sufficient funds to continue his schooling in a private young men's academy 250 miles upriver. Eventually, he ended up at a small medical college, but these details were not important to him, even as they were happening. The only thing that he recalled from those years was that he worked very hard and lived as if almost in a dream. All that mattered was that one day he would have his own practice and meet the needs of all his patients as they sought meaning and value in their lives.

This mission came to him during his first Important Moment, which occurred when he spent three days with a young girl in Marfa, Texas, a girl with green ribbons twisted through long braids. He met her at a roller rink where she always held one leg aloft behind her. For seven years, she had worn a cast from the base of her neck to her knees and elbows, she told him, and now had one built-up shoe to accommodate the right leg shriveled still. When she skated, it was as if the cast had never been there at all, and her body was beautiful, weightless.

The last night, she took him out into a large field astride the Chinati Mountains. When dusk fell, mysterious orbs of light appeared on the horizon then rose in the sky dancing wild tangos with each other in great pulses of blue, yellow, and a kind of phosphorescent green. As he gazed in wonder, hand in hers tightly, knuckles burning, the girl told him these lights had saved her father during a terrible blizzard, lighting his way to the shelter of a cave.