Jack
Saturday, June 5, 12:22 p.m.
This holds no higher level of what-the-fuckery than anything else that has happened today, so of course I do. I thank Ling Po and follow the girl through a hidden door to a back stairwell. I feel slightly like Alice following the White Rabbit. That could also be because I’m going on my thirty-second straight hour of being awake, and everything has taken on an almost psychedelic quality. Her ponytail swishes back and forth like a metronome as she climbs the stairs.
“I’m sorry—who are you? And where are we going exactly?” I ask and turn around to check that Hallie is behind me. Safety in numbers. Hallie seems unfazed by the fact that we are following a total stranger up a back staircase without knowing exactly what we can expect to find at the top of it. We could disappear off the face of the earth right now and no one would know where the hell we are. It fits perfectly with the rest of our day.
“I am Mei, Ling Po’s niece. She told me you’re looking for your brother.”
“You know Alex?” I ask her eagerly.
“I knew him. Yes.”
“Knew? As in you don’t anymore? Did something happen to him?” I didn’t expect that. What if I’m too late because he’s finished the job he started back then and I’ll never have the chance to see him or give him Dad’s letter? Mentally, I begin preparations for the worst possible news.
“Come inside and have some tea.”
I’m not big on tea, but I’ll drink it if it means Mei will tell me where my brother is. We reach the second floor, and she opens the stairwell door, which leads us out into a regular hallway, right in front of a scratched, wooden door with a brass 2 hanging precariously from it at an angle.
Unit 2. This is where Alex supposedly lived.
If he isn’t here, then where is he?
She unlocks the door. It’s a smallish one-bedroom apartment decorated like a college dorm room, with tapestries and rock band posters on the walls, milk crates repurposed as bookshelves, a bright-orange couch with a matching overstuffed chair, and a giant TV across from them that takes up half the wall. A small gray cat meows as it sidles up to my leg before moving on to take up residence on top of a small, wooden kitchen table.
“Please—sit down.” Mei motions to the couch as she goes into the tiny galley kitchen. She reemerges holding another teapot and some cups on a tray and places them on the small coffee table in front of us.
“Thank you,” I say, accepting one. Hallie does the same. All this past tense has me confused. “So—this address is the last one I have for my brother. Did he used to live here?”
Mei nods as she pours us each a cup of tea. “He stayed here for a few months. We were friends. We met at Higher Ground.”
“What’s Higher Ground?” I ask. It could be a dispensary for all the name tells me. If it isn’t, it would be a great name for one.
She straightens and looks at me cautiously. “I’m sorry—he’s your brother and you don’t know what Higher Ground is?”
“The thing is—Alex and I haven’t spoken in a long time,” I explain. “I’ve only recently found out where he is.”
“Wow.” She takes that in and nods. “Well, Higher Ground is a transitional housing facility. Alex and I both lived there after we got out of rehab. After that, he stayed here with me for a while. It was only supposed to be long enough to find a job and get on his feet, but it ended up being around seven months. Then it no longer became a feasible situation, and he left.”
If he stayed here around seven months after treatment, it means he would have been living here when Dad died, which would also explain why this was the last address Dad had for him. It would also confirm my growing suspicion that Dad had stayed in touch with him, or at least kept tabs on him.
“So where is he now? Is he still in San Francisco?” Hallie asks.
“The last time we spoke he was, yes.”
“When was that?” I ask.
“I bumped into him downtown about a few months ago.”
“What—one month? Four months?” How am I supposed to find him?
“Do you know where he works?” Hallie asks. “We could go there.”
Mei shakes her head. “I don’t know. He’s had a few different jobs. I think he was a busboy somewhere in Union Square, and then he worked at a dry cleaner in North Beach. Like I said, I haven’t spoken to him in a while. In fact, if you find him, please tell him I say hi and hope he’s doing okay. And please tell him I am too.”
She casts her eyes downward, but not before they betray her sadness at their lack of contact.
“Is there a chance he might not be okay?” I ask.
Mei shrugs. “When you’re a recovering addict, there’s always a chance you might not be okay. It’s a day-to-day kind of thing. As far as I know, he’s clean and committed to his sobriety.”
“Right.” I try to imagine what sobriety must look like on Alex. Mostly when I saw him, he was sleeping, high, coming off a high, or looking for one. I know how much this last year and a half has profoundly changed me, so it’s not a stretch to imagine it would have affected him significantly too.
“I wish I could be of more help. That’s all I know.”
“It’s more than what I had, so thanks,” I tell her.
“Anyhow—he left a few things here, and I’ve been holding on to them in case I got to see him again. I suppose it makes more sense that you should take them. You can give them to him when you see him.”
“Well, seeing him hinges on figuring out where he is,” I say.
“That still puts you at greater odds of seeing him than me.” Mei reaches down to the bottom shelf of her bookcase and extracts a small, cardboard shipping box, the lid flaps straining to break free under a single piece of Scotch tape. She puts it on the table and gives it a slight nudge in my direction.
I reach tentatively for the box and open it. Inside is a deck of erotic playing cards and a harmonica, which sit on top of a vintage Japanese version Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time shirt from 1998 that is identical to the one my dad brought me once from Comic-Con that coincidentally went missing. I knew it. Underneath that is a folded piece of paper jagged at the edges where it was ripped from a spiral notebook. Shoved in the crease of the fold is a robin’s-egg-blue paper bookmark for City Lights Bookstore with the name “Malcolm” written on it in all capital letters.
I unfold the paper and cast my eyes on my brother’s unmistakable chicken-scratch scrawl.
It’s exhausting trying to be happy while simultaneously believing you don’t deserve to be.
News flash! No one is perfect. Distrust most of all anyone who makes you think they have all the answers and knows what they’re doing. Everyone is pretending on some level. Conforming to please. You can’t look to someone else to tell you how to be happy. That shit comes from within. You are entitled to be anyone you want to be. Just be authentic.
It must have been a journal entry he’d torn out. Or a note he wrote for someone. I might as well have written the words myself for how much I feel them. Perhaps Alex and I are operating on more of the same frequency than I’d thought.
“By the way, I’m sorry about your father,” Mei offers by way of condolences.
“So, Alex knows then?” This confirms what I’d suspected earlier when I discovered the letter, which only makes this more confusing. Obviously, my mother must have told him, but he wasn’t at the funeral. And she kept perpetuating the story even after Dad’s death that she didn’t know how to reach him. Why would she keep lying to me, especially at a time when I might have benefitted from having him to talk to?
“Yes, of course. He was quite shaken by the news.”
Was he? Why didn’t he reach out to me or respond to my texts or emails?
Hallie asks what I don’t have the balls to. “So how come he left?”
Mei’s expression darkens slightly, and her shoulders hunch forward, like a balloon deflating. “At Higher Ground they advise that people who are in recovery should not live together because one can easily trigger the other if they backslide.”
“Did he start using again?” I ask. My stomach bottoms out at the thought. It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to see why he might backslide if that happened around when Dad died.
“No. I did. And it nearly caused him to.” She gives a tight-lipped smile, clearly ashamed. “Like I said, I’m clean now, but once that happened, he knew that it was no longer a safe space, and he had to go. I can’t blame him.”
I’d automatically assumed Alex would have been the one to screw things up. It sounds as if for once my brother was trying to do the right thing.
“I’m sorry,” I say because this topic seems to make her sad. I pull out the bookmark and turn the printed side to face Mei. “Do you happen to know who Malcolm is?”
Mei shakes her head. “It might be someone he works with. Or maybe someone who works at City Lights?”
“Is this anywhere near here?” I’d heard of City Lights. It’s one of the most famous bookstores in this country and known for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s controversial poem “Howl” in the 1960s. It was the epicenter of the Beat Generation movement. All the big authors of the time—Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg himself, and other greats—were frequent fixtures there. I love a good bookstore. So did my dad. Alex never struck me as much of a reader, but maybe he loves bookstores too. It wouldn’t be the first time he surprised me today.
“Yes, it’s not far. It’s on Columbus Street, about a ten-minute walk from here.”
Hallie looks at me and smiles. “I think I know where we’re headed.”
We walk up Grant a few more blocks and then cut through the aptly named Jack Kerouac Alley that empties out onto Columbus Street adjacent to the bookstore. The Transamerica Building looms to our right and there to the left, big windows overflowing with tomes, is City Lights Bookstore.
The wood floors creak under our feet as we enter. This place seems to go on forever, stairs leading up and down, alcoves off to the sides. I’ve never seen this many people inside a bookstore when it wasn’t the holidays. It gives me hope for humanity. I could easily get lost in here for hours. There’s so much to explore, but I can’t get caught up in that right now. I’m on a quest to find Malcolm.
But as I turn a corner, I come face to face with an endcap display of my mother’s book. There’s her heavily photoshopped face staring back at me with a perfect smile. It stops me in my tracks.
“What’s wrong?” Hallie asks.
“That’s my mother.”
“Your mother is here?” she starts looking around.
I shake my head. “No—the person on the cover of that book. It’s my mother.”
Hallie reaches for a copy and reads the title aloud. “Love Your Vagina, Love Yourself. I think I saw her on The View.”
“Not at all completely embarrassing.” I wince as she starts to thumb through it. “Yep, nothing like being a teenage boy just trying to low-key it through high school and then your famous sex therapist mom writes a book critics call ‘groundbreaking’ with the word vagina in the title.”
“Groundbreaking. That’s impressive.”
“It’s weird—people love her, like she’s some revolutionary thinker with all the answers. She can’t even pick a restaurant for dinner. She’s one of the most miserable people I know. Out in the world, she acts like she’s some authority on happiness, but at home she’ll lock herself in her bathroom with a gin and tonic and a pack of cigarettes, crack the window, and have a good cry.”
“Who doesn’t?” Hallie returns the book to its place on the shelf and follows me in search of an employee. “I take it you two aren’t super close?”
“More like we coexist in the same space. Like if you saw us together in private, you wouldn’t necessarily know she’s my mother. In public, she’s the doting parent who boasts proudly of my achievements, but the minute we’re back home, we barely talk.”
We continue to wind our way through the store. The shelves are crammed full and are close together, making the space cramped and hard to navigate. There are chairs everywhere, inviting people to sit and read, and the signs on the walls urge them to think. My inner nerd is like a kid in a candy store.
I glance at the name tag of each employee, but none match the one I need. I wind my way back toward the front room, hovering near the register so I can ask if a Malcolm works here. There’s a huge queue of people waiting, and I immediately sense the stink eye from people assessing if I’m about to be that guy who thinks his time is more valuable than everyone else’s.
I opt to make my way to the end of the line. An employee walks by and accidentally bumps me.
“I’m so sorry, my friend,” he says and rests his hand on my shoulder. He’s probably somewhere in his early thirties with shoulder-length dreadlocks and a pierced nose and reminds me of a late ’80s Lenny Kravitz. Just as he’s about to walk away, I catch a glimpse of his name tag.
“Malcolm?” I ask.
He turns toward me with a smile. “I’m him; how can I help you?”
Bingo.
He looks like the kind of easygoing guy who is prepared for and unfazed by any request, no matter how obscure. I’m sure he’s expecting me to ask him where I might find books about muckraking or essential Latin American feminist poetry. My phone vibrates in my pocket, but I ignore it.
“My name is Jack Freeman. This might sound weird but—I’m trying to locate my brother Alex. I found this City Lights bookmark amongst some stuff he left behind at his old apartment, and your name was written on it, so I’m hoping maybe you know my brother and can point me in the right direction to find him.”
He smiles cautiously. “You’re Alex Freeman’s brother?”
“Yeah. Does he work here?”
“Well, well.” His eyes light up, and he smiles as he studies me, which is a little unsettling. “Nah, he doesn’t work here. He comes here sometimes though.”
“So, you know him?” Excitement courses through me. “Does he live around here then?”
Malcolm puts a hand on my shoulder again. “I’m about to take my break. Wait for me in the Poetry Room. I need to give these books to a customer, and then we can talk. Gimme two minutes.” He points in the direction of the Poetry Room as he walks away.
I look at Hallie, who shrugs and follows me up a creaky, wooden staircase to the Poetry Room to wait for Malcolm. True to its name, it’s a small nook crowded with chairs and windows and floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with nothing but poetry. There’s a lone patron in here, and in the time that we’re waiting, she leaves.
I direct my attention to the shelves. There are separate sections for anthologies, Beat poets, modern poetry, the list goes on; I had no idea so many kinds of poetry existed. In high school we touch on the big names, the famous ones, but there are thousands of volumes here by voices I’ve never heard of, each with something to say, waiting to be discovered and heard.
I’m wondering how long it would take to read every one when Malcolm arrives, apologetic for having to keep us waiting. He extends his hand, and I shake it, then he turns a chair around backward, sitting directly in front of me. “I’m so glad you came. I thought we should talk more privately. I’m Malcolm Sinclair.”
I gesture toward Hallie. “This is my friend Hallie.”
Malcolm smiles. “It’s great to meet you both. I’m Alex’s sponsor.”
“Sponsor?” I parrot back.
He looks at me with confusion. “I’m sorry, I thought you knew.”
What he’s saying clicks. “Oh—sponsor—like as in you’re who my brother has to check in with to help him stay on track.”
“It’s all voluntary. He doesn’t have to do anything, but statistically those in recovery who seek out a sponsor in the first six months post-rehab have a better chance of staying sober. I’m someone he can count on to listen to him and support him no matter what. We share common bonds of addiction and recovery. I love your brother.” He puts his palm over his heart.
“That’s really cool,” I tell him.
He leans in slightly. “Right now, understandably, Alex is worried about interacting with anyone or putting himself in situations that might trigger him to use again. He has worked hard at his sobriety. I am honored to be part of his team. It’s taken a lot of dedication to following the twelve principles of NA.”
“Good for him.” I nod and then sit back in my chair.
“It will mean a lot to him that you’ve come. He speaks of you often.”
“He does?” This, of course, is startling news to me, because I haven’t heard from him in nearly two years, and the last time we saw each other, he looked right at me as I considered letting him die.
Malcolm nods reassuringly. “You seem surprised by that.”
“I guess I am. But in a good way.”
“You showing up is obviously a huge life event for Alex, one which I think would be good for him. This is going to have a great emotional impact for you both.”
I nod. “So, you can put me in touch with him? He must have changed his phone number, and he’s not on social media.”
“I think it would be best if I reach out to him directly first. Connecting with people from the past can be a huge trigger, especially family members.” The way he emphasizes especially makes me wonder exactly what he knows about my parents and me.
Malcolm chats with us well beyond the end of his break. He’s very easy to talk to, so I can see why my brother would trust him. At this point Malcolm knows Alex better than I do. He takes my number and says he’ll text me once he reaches Alex. It’s unsettling having a gatekeeper—a total stranger—standing between my own brother and me.
So, with nowhere to go yet, the only thing to do is wait. I’ve been like a Ping-Pong ball bouncing all over the city, and the sleep deprivation is starting to kick in. Everything has taken on the surreal tinge of an out-of-body experience.
“How are you doing?” I check in with Hallie. “These last few hours have been all about me.”
“No, it’s a welcome distraction, trust me. And I’m fine. A little hungry maybe.”
“Well, we’ve got time to kill, and we’re close to the best Chinatown in America. I say we find something to eat.”
“Sounds good.”
We head back toward Chinatown. As we wander past a busy hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Yum Yum Dim Sum, the smell of soup dumplings wafts out. I’m suddenly famished as well. With a name like that, we can’t help but stop, regroup, and test that claim.
The place is packed, and although the atmosphere is best-described as sanitary-lite, we grab the only seats left at the counter. As we order, my phone starts vibrating incessantly in my pocket yet again. This time, I grab for it and answer without even checking the caller ID, thinking it’s probably Malcolm and he’s decided to call instead of text. It isn’t.
“Hello?”
“Finally! Jesus, Jack, I’ve been trying to reach you for hours. Didn’t you get my voicemail?” Natasha sounds more annoyed than worried. Like she has a right to be either. I’m guessing she was the source of the buzz in my pocket earlier.
I jam my finger in my ear because I can barely hear her over the din of the restaurant. It would never occur to her in a million years that perhaps I don’t want to talk to her, that my not answering was intentional.
“I emojied,” I tell her. Hallie raises her eyebrows and mouths, Emoji girl? I nod, and she covers her mouth with her hand, suppressing a laugh. Natasha’s not nearly as entertained.
“Yeah, and what the hell was that about? I write this forty-page apology over text, and then I’m freaking out because I went by your house this morning, but your car wasn’t there and you weren’t home, so I went back to Carly’s house, and it was still there. So then I started freaking out again because I didn’t know where you went, and you seemed really upset, so I felt bad, and then hours go by and you send me a freaking emoji,” she says and then takes a breath.
Hallie motions toward a little boy maybe five years old who is shoving an entire dumpling in his mouth. It makes me laugh.
“What—you think what I said was funny?” She’s pissed. “This whole night I’ve been worried you might’ve done something drastic. I know you can be reactive sometimes.”
My smile instantly disappears. “Whoa, slow down a sec. Drastic? Reactive? You broke up with me on the grounds of being statistically doomed according to an article in Teen Vogue Online and then told me you’re going to UCLA, which you’ve actually known for months. I think that definitely entitles me to some kind of reaction. I’m sorry if that feels a little drastic to you.”
Hallie nods and gives me a thumbs-up.
“See? This is what I mean. You make things a bigger deal than they need to be.”
“Jesus, Natasha, how could you stand to be with me as long as you did? It must have been hell for you. You’re such a martyr.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“I’m pretty sure you just said that.”
She sighs deeply. “I know you’ve been super depressed lately, and I’m worried about your ability to handle it on top of everything else, and I don’t want to be the reason—”
“Wow. That’s it right there, isn’t it? You’re relieved that I’m okay, but more because you don’t want that guilt hanging over your head that if I wasn’t, you might somehow be responsible.”
“I didn’t say that, Jack. You’re twisting my words. You always do that.”
“Let me ease your mind. I’m fine. I’m more than fine, actually.” Ironically, this is the finest I’ve felt in a long time.
A fire engine roars past with sirens blaring. “Where are you? You can’t be in New York already.”
“Why does it matter?”
“Jack—what was I supposed to think?” Her voice cracks and sounds shaky as if she’s crying.
“That I’m so torn up over our breakup that I’d possibly kill myself? That’s giving yourself a lot of credit, don’t you think? Everything isn’t always about you.”
“You don’t have to be mean.”
“That’s funny, you telling me how I should behave.”
She sniffles. “I deserve that, I guess. I’m just scared, Jack. We could pretend like we weren’t moving in two different directions for only so long. I didn’t know what to say. I only knew it had to be said.”
“No, you’re actually right,” I say as the chef puts a bamboo steamer filled with piping-hot dumplings in front of us, and I shove one in my mouth without delay.
I can picture the confused expression on her face. “You agree with me?”
I speak with my mouth full. “Yeah, like you said, what’s the point of dragging it out? Sounds like more drama than an episode of The Bachelor.” I move my mouth away from the microphone and say to Hallie, “Holy crap, these are bomb-ass dumplings.”
“Right?” Hallie says as she swishes hers in a pool of soy sauce.
“Are you with somebody?” she asks. There’s a sudden softening to her voice.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “I am.”
“You spent the night with someone to get back at me,” she says matter-of-factly, the momentary softness replaced by a chill worthy of a polar ice cap.
“Technically, I guess I did, but it definitely had nothing to do with you and everything to do with me. I didn’t realize I owed you a check in or anything really, for that matter.”
“Wow.” She sighs dramatically. “You’re angry.”
“Of course I’m angry. I’m allowed to be.” I realize my voice is elevated when a few people glance in my direction. I lower my voice and bow my head. “I’ll get over it, but a lot of crap just happened, Natasha. You had time to think about all this, so you can’t expect things to go back to the way they were in one day. Or maybe we never get there. Because that’s the thing, Natasha—you made your own choices, but you don’t get to choose the consequences.”
Hallie fist bumps me and grins as she mouths “Burn.”
Natasha doesn’t respond.
“Hello?”
Silence. Did she seriously just hang up on me?
I pull the phone away from my ear in disbelief, only to discover that all my googling and mapping has drained my battery yet again, and my phone is now out of juice. As in dead, most likely mid-rant, and I have no idea how much of that she actually heard. Well, at least she can’t call back. But the satisfaction is short-lived as I realize it also means I won’t be able to get Malcolm’s text.