Alexandra appeared at a bar in the East Village to meet Lyle Michaels two hours after leaving the internet café. She was sick with cheap noodles and sick with her own stories, but to see a friend from NYU mitigated the lie, approximating a reunion of sorts, she thought. She told herself that.
Lyle’s foot was propped on a brass pole lining the floor beneath the bar in an Irish pub, and for a while they sat together on cracked stools, looking at pictures of the baby. They exclaimed. They spoke of how it used to be that he’d have taken out his wallet.
“What are you doing here anyway?” Lyle said.
Alexandra returned the phone, watched Lyle raise himself from the chair a little to fit it in his pocket. She set her face. “Seeing an old friend,” Alexandra said, “who I think is in trouble.”
“When you say trouble.”
She chose her words. “Maybe needs in-patient.”
“Because.”
“Because I can’t tell you.”
It had become clear that her brother was losing his mind—odd sentences, odd paragraphs—and she didn’t know where to retrieve it. What she knew was that he had been a boy who smoked Pall Malls. A twelve-year-old with a pack-a-day habit. Not menthols. She knew he had been pushed out of home too young.
Lyle pulled noisily at the bottom of a drink that was over already. “You’re having a friend committed.”
“He’s not a danger.”
“So he needs to surrender himself to treatment,” Lyle said.
A squeeze of lemon into her drink. A stir. Jangling ice. “That’s the problem.” She did not understand his eyebrows, their puckering now. She turned up the corners of a napkin so it clung to her sweating glass. “He needs to think it’s his own idea.”
“And you’ll feed it to him.” Lyle leaned toward her.
“I’ll help him.”
“Well, if I’m ever in trouble, don’t help me,” Lyle said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He really that far gone?” Lyle said, tapping a straw against his head. “Because to do that to someone.”
“To do help.”
“You really believe that?” he said.
Alexandra rubbed her cell phone with a thumb. Overhead, a woman on television was deciding between three choices to prevent her elimination. She trusted the knowledge of those she knew. She made the call.
“I believe everything he says doesn’t match everything I know.”
“Maybe he knows something you don’t,” Lyle said.