“Well, you sure fucked her to death.”
Jack lolled his head in my direction. He was lying in a mechanical hospital bed, eerily reminiscent of Hughie, the two men in my life reduced to convalescence by a book tour! His left leg was elevated and encased in a white plaster cast due to a compound fracture in his femur, a nurse had explained as she escorted me to his room. His handsome face bore cross-hatching of scratches. From the tumble over the knoll or the sharp fingernails of an overexcited Amanda? It was hard to know. “What?” he said in a narcotized voice through chapped lips and a look of despair.
“Amanda died,” I said solemnly.
“What?” His eyes welled with real tears.
I let that sink in for effect. “Just kidding. She told the doctors it was the best sex of her life.”
“Don’t fuck with me, Miles, I’m hurting here.”
My eyes traveled along the plaster cast. “Must have been painful.” I shook my head.
“Are you joking?”
“You must have caught a gust of wind right at the exact moment she flipped you over for the sideways straddle.”
“Not funny, Miles; not funny.”
“I guess this is the end of the road.” Jack looked at me with questioning eyes. “Amanda said she was taking you back to Byron Bay to rehab.”
Jack lowered his chin to his hospital gown. “Yeah, I fucked that one up.”
“You’ve still got Washed-Up Celebrities.” Jack pouched out a cheek with a defiant tongue. “I wasn’t going to sign on the dotted line for its bastard cousin, FYI.”
“I had a feeling,” Jack said. “It’s all for the best.” His eyes traveled to the ceiling, searching for heaven. “I love that woman,” he said. “I know you think she’s a drama queen, but she fills me with life.”
“Yeah, we all have our predilections in the partner department,” I concurred.
“You probably don’t remember this, but a year before I came here, I was cast as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman at the Taper. Okay, it only ran fifteen performances, but I got great reviews and it was damn rewarding.” He brought a hand to his heart. “It brought me back to what I love about acting. But it didn’t pay the rent.”
“I don’t remember you telling me about that.”
“You say books are dead; well, so is theater, so is acting. It’s all garbage now. We’re just scavengers, Miles, foraging for the crumbs.”
I don’t know if the fall off the cliff and the near-death experience had dislodged a rare moment of profundity in Jack or what, but we were on the same wavelength again, our trajectories no longer asymptotic, a polysyllabic I spared him. “Yeah, it’s not fun being superannuated,” I said. Jack furrowed his brow at superannuated. “Dated,” I defined. “Sunsetted into irrelevancy.”
Jack looked reflective as he nodded solemnly at my words. “What about you?” he finally managed, throwing me a sidelong glance.
I shrugged. “Just me and Max now, I guess.”
“Hana won’t come back?”
I shook my head. “The love of your life performed a pretty thorough job of alienating her.”
“I feel guilty about that.”
“Don’t. You tried. With Washed-Up Writers and Dan O’Neill. And I appreciate that, Jack. I know you have my back. And I have yours.”
“I got you up the South Island and across Cook Strait,” he said, sadness in his voice.
“That you did. And what a ride it was. More memories for the archive.”
“Don’t journal this and put it in the Miles Raymond Papers,” he half pleaded.
I laughed through my nostrils. Out Jack’s hospital window, I could make out our home for the past week parked in visitor parking. Max was ensconced in there, waiting patiently for me, as he always did.
“Are you going back to California to meet your daughter?”
My gaze remained out the window. I nodded.
“It’s going to be fine.”
“Maybe I’ll meet the person who’s going to take care of me when I stroke out, the way I had to with my mother.”
“And that was some trip,” he said, referring to a four-thousand-mile road journey we had recklessly undertaken with my wheelchair-bound mother to get her to Wisconsin and reunite her with her sister. “What’s next? Are you going to abort the tour?”
I shook my head no. “I’ve still got a few more events Hana had penciled in and committed to, and I don’t want to disappoint those folks. I’m a professional.”
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” Jack said, his rheumy eyes fixed on me.
“I’m tempted to write about this trip, but you remember what my former agent said to me when I told him a scene in my manuscript he didn’t believe had actually happened in real life?”
“I know. Sometimes reality is more fiction than fiction.” I was fond of repeating my most sententious lines, and Jack was fond of teasing me about my repeating myself. Then he squeezed his eyes shut and winced in pain.
“I’m going to miss you, brother,” I said. “This might be the last time I see you in a while.”
Jack pried his gaze away from the ceiling and rolled his head in my direction and looked at me with imploring eyes. “Get the neoplasm checked out, Miles. It might only be a wart. For me. Your buddy Jack.”
I nodded. Whenever I went to the dark, Jack went to the light; whenever I went to the serious, Jack went to the playful; whenever I drank heavily, he slowed down; whenever I was having relationship complications, he ignored his for mine and was there for me; whenever I was broke, he loaned me money, even if I know sometimes he shaved it off a girlfriend’s debit card; whenever Jack needed important self-reflection, I was there for him because that’s usually all I was capable of rationing from my meager cache of provisions. Once he told me my “wisdom” was “priceless” and I felt cherished by his loyal friendship.
“I’d get back with Ella,” he suggested. “She sounds like she’s one in a million. And we’re running out of time, Miles.”
“It’s the one thing we have in common, Jack. Just when you find the supposed ne plus ultra of women, you dream of another, someone who has more to offer, when in reality it’s only a treadmill of a fantasy, and the truth is we’re both afraid of commitment because we’re terrified the other door will never be opened, that the door that did open just slammed shut on us and we’re now immured in that selfsame fate.”
“Is that such a bad thing?” Jack wondered, my musings eddying around his drugged brain.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. If you can resign yourself to it.” I didn’t want to leave. I knew when I walked out of Wellington Regional Hospital I would be all alone on the North Island, bracing for a long drive to Auckland. I started to grow panicky. All alone in a six-ton camper van. With a special needs cat.
“What’s next on the schedule?” Jack inquired.
“Featherston Booktown.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know. Probably some small-town Kiwi scam to gin up tourism dollars.”
Jack rasped a laugh. “Sounds intriguing,” he said, wanting us to part on a felicitous note.
I nodded, thinking many things. Jack could discern in my expression I was thinking many things because his eyes were bright with thoughts and ideas and big-brotherly advice.
A young nurse came in wearing a warm, apologetic smile. “How are you feeling, Mr. Manse?”
“Well, as you can see, I won’t be going out dancing with you tonight,” Jack said with a sad glint of salacity twinkling in his eyes.
“No, I don’t think so,” she said, oblivious to his tomcatting history, the many women he had seduced and forgotten. “The PT will be coming in a few minutes to outfit you with crutches and get you started on some physical therapy so we can get you up on your feet and out of here as soon as possible.”
“Good,” said Jack.
The nurse backed away toward the door. “I’ll let you two be alone.” She squeaked away on rubber slippers.
I shifted my attention back to Jack. The painkillers launched into his bloodstream were taking effect, and he was struggling to keep his eyes open.
Jack glanced at his cell. “Amanda’s going to be here in a bit.”
I nodded. As happened once before at his wedding years ago, a woman, his soon-to-be ex, had torn a chasm between us. My lingering antipathy toward Amanda was abating slightly, but I didn’t feel the need to bid her adieu.
I leaned forward and extended my hand to Jack. He hooked his thumb around mine in the old-fashioned peace shake of our youth and gripped it tightly. “Take it easy, brother,” I said, holding his hand tightly. “I’ll be watching for your show.”
With all his waning strength he gripped my hand tighter and wouldn’t let go. “If you need anything, call me. Anything,” he underscored, fixing his eyes on mine.
“I will. Good luck.”
“I don’t need luck,” Jack said.
When I walked out of the hospital room, I knew I had left a vacuum Amanda couldn’t fill. But heteronormative men like Jack needed women. Me? I wasn’t sure. I was too neurotic for them in the end. I think I had reached the grim conclusion my fate was to be eternally alone, wandering, the habitual puer aeternus chasing words in the dark cosmogony of my brain for answers to why I would never grow up.
I left the hospital, crossed the street, and climbed back into the camper van. Max was curled up in his carrier, his safe cave—one I didn’t have!—but he came out on wobbly legs when I unlatched it, and began plaintively meowing. I fed him a few treats, then set him on the seat Jack had occupied for the last week, the irony, the symbolism, not lost on me.
“Just you and me, buddy,” I whispered out loud to Max as I climbed in behind the wheel, a deep sadness suffusing me.
Hearing my voice, Max stood up on his haunches and tried to peer over the dashboard to the vast world outside. The mysterious, unknown world outside I was heading out into once again all alone. Then he performed something miraculous. He flexed his hind legs, debated for the longest time, then, in a great effort of will and courage, leaped up onto the dash, clawed with his forepaws to get a grip on the slick plastic, and settled, having stuck the landing in a warm sliver of sunlight he had his heart set on. Max had never once before leaped up onto anything—a bed, a couch, a table, nothing. I clutched a hand to my mouth and tears fogged my eyes.
“Magic Max man,” I said. “What the hell did you just do?”
He turned and looked at me with his owlish eyes and ears pointed to the heavens and that ineffable look of awe and wonder he always wore, as if saying to me, Don’t ever give up, Miles. I wanted to text Ella a picture of Max on the dash and inform her of his great accomplishment, but I feared rejection, so I showered Max with complimentary pets and whispered words of congratulations.
With Max settled comfortably on the dash, and a lifted feeling in me because of his miraculous leap to a patch of sunlight, I rooted my phone from my back pocket and typed in “Martinborough.” I wasn’t sure where I would be staying for the night, as I hadn’t anticipated my entire support base deserting me, wittingly and unwittingly. But I had Max! And obviously no fear of death, having already given the middle finger to God and survived his bolts of lightning. Was I losing my mind?
Driving solo, I navigated the camper van out of Wellington in a northerly direction. Right off the bat things were different. My dodgy eyes were betraying me. When I heard tree branches suddenly scraping the passenger side of the vehicle, I realized with exacerbating consternation captaining it all alone was going to require greater concentration, a degree of focus I feared I wasn’t capable of.
Out of Wellington, the road steepened, narrowed, twisted, and turned like never before. A dense fog was lying in wait for me, and I ascended into it without warning. By some freak of nature, I was winched up out of the known world and, quite literally, had soared into the clouds. Visibility fell to a few car lengths. I don’t know if it was the crazy week on the South Island, the sleepless nights, the resumption of my overimbibition, seeing a dispirited Jack in the hospital with his leg in a cast, losing the irreplaceable Hana, Jack and Amanda and their turbulent fuck, or finding myself all alone with Max, but I pulled off at the first emergency turnout I could make out on the shoulderless two-lane highway, braked to a halt, put the shift lever into park, bent my head over the oversized wheel, and started crying softly to myself, one hand resting on the purring Max.
Perusing the New Zealand Traffic Authority website this morning to prepare for driving alone on the country’s rural roads, I had come across the following advice: “Drive with recognition of your skill level and your understanding of how your vehicle interacts with these types of roads. There probably won’t be police on these roads, and chances are, no one will find you for a few days if you crash off the road and are rendered unconscious.”