Benjamin Markovits - You Don't Have to Live Like This

“Nolan,” I said again, then sat down on my knees and felt his neck for a pulse. Some gestures are tender just because the motion itself needs gentleness. I had trouble at first, there’s a lot of loose skin and tissue, and the cords in his throat were stretched by the angle of his head. But he was breathing, his lips moved, and then I found his pulse, which was steady enough and felt like a small gulp of blood, one after another. The human machine was operating fine and the rest of him couldn’t get in the way of whatever I felt for him. I sat like that I don’t know how long, until I heard the sirens coming nearer.

The cops came, the ambulance came, doctors did their business and loaded Nolan up on a stretcher — he’s a big guy, you could feel how heavy he is, the way they carried him down the stairs. One of the cops rode along in the ambulance, they set the sirens off, the squad car followed, and another car drove me to the station to make a statement. I called Beatrice from the road, and about twenty minutes later, Tony showed up with Mel Hauser.

I’d been to this station before, on Beaubien Street, a big square grand old building, like a town hall. It’s where they took my fingerprints for the education board. This time they emptied out my pockets and checked my wallet and removed my shoes. They took my fingerprints again and lined me up against a blank wall and photographed me looking different ways — mug shots.

Tony got the same treatment, but he liked these guys or at least pretended to. These were working-class Detroit city cops. One of them had a buzz cut and glasses, his face was reddish, his hair, too, and his chin ran down his neck in tough folds. A fat strong medium-size guy named Lisicki. Mel knew him — it was a good idea bringing him along. They gave me my shit back and pointed to a row of plastic chairs. It was like waiting in a hospital waiting room.

Then Beatrice came in with a lawyer, Dan Korobkin, a skinny Jewish guy with quick expressions and a reasonable amount of hair. Robert James wanted somebody around to talk me through the legal process. It turned out this lawyer knew my brother a little, Brad was two years ahead of him at Chicago. At least, this is what Korobkin told me. He sat next to me, on one side, Beatrice on the other.

“Is there anybody you want me to call?” she said. “I can let them know.”

Korobkin said, “What happens now is a lot of procedural stuff, a lot of paperwork. They’ll take a statement. You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to answer, and if you feel like talking something over with me first, we can find a space. After that my main priority is to get you home.”

At one point he went to the bathroom, and Beatrice leaned over and said, “So what the fuck happened.” Along with the makeup, which she hadn’t taken off, she had a strong scent of perfume on her, which was mixed in with her own smell — also strong on a hot day. God knows I must have stunk, too.

“Nolan saw Michael wandering around, you know, Tony’s kid, and got him into his car somehow, because he thought he was Robert’s. This was at Robert’s house. Tony and I had gone out to lunch and left Michael behind. And then when we came back he was gone. So we got in the car and started looking for him. Anyway, Nolan ended up at my place, because he knows I’m a friend of Robert’s, and I guess he wanted to make some kind of communication — some kind of threat. He’s pissed off about the Meacher thing. I tried to explain that Michael was Tony’s kid, he had nothing to do with Robert, but by that point everybody was shouting. I got them inside, into my place, but they kept screaming at each other. I tried to call the police but Nolan took the phone away, physically, by force, and then Tony and Nolan started going at it. I didn’t see the whole thing, I had to step out. But when I came back they were rolling around on the floor. Nolan’s already a little beat up, and Tony caught him in the— He had this bandage on his face that came away, and that must have hurt, because he just kind of lay there and Tony started kicking him, and I had to pull him away. Because by that stage Nolan was out cold. He lives with his mom just down the road and I figured he might have left the kid there, so we went to look, and the kid was there, and we took him away. Then Tony drove him home and I kind of sat with Nolan until the ambulance arrived. That’s the best I can piece it together. The whole thing’s a big fucking mess. Where were you? You look all dressed up.”

“Downtown. I had a meeting. Some guy called Krause from Goldman Sachs.”

“I think we got lucky, it could have been much worse. I think it’s going to be okay.”

“For who?” she said.

Tony kept talking, he seemed in a good mood. “The motherfucker took my kid,” he said to Lisicki.

“I don’t want to hear it. Mel, tell him to shut up.”

“Shut up.”

“Look, I didn’t do anything, he was beating the shit out of me. But what I’m saying is, he had it coming. The son of a bitch definitely had it coming. Don’t expect me to feel bad about it.”

“I don’t give a fuck what you feel. Keep it to yourself.”

“Does anyone know how Nolan is doing?”

“What’s that?”

“Does anyone know how Nolan is doing?” I said again, as loud as I could, but I don’t think it came out clear. I was all talked out.

Lisicki said, “Nobody knows.”

I felt like I was coming down with a cold. My bones ached, and there was a flat pain, like a low noise you can’t get out of your head, running from my butt to my knees. A loose wire of nerves that kept shorting. Beatrice put her arm around me, to warm me up, she said. I must have been shivering — on a hot June day that was still waiting for rain. I had the sense for the first time in years, since I was a kid maybe, that my face was something physical. That the bones of my face were a wall and my mouth was a door and I didn’t have to come out if I didn’t want to. Nobody could force me.

But then they called me in to make a statement, and I remembered my brother’s old joke about my stories. How I said, this and then this and then this.

AS SOON AS I GOT home I called Gloria, but the cabins they were staying in didn’t have phones — and her cell had no reception. It went straight to voicemail. So when she came back Friday night I had to tell her about the whole business. The story had been kind of accumulating in me over the past few days, and I knew it would come out rehearsed, I knew I would sound formal and underemotional and overconsiderate, and that’s how I sounded. But I had to tell her anyway. The other problem was she came back brimming with her own hard-to-follow stories, about people I didn’t know and which didn’t seem very important, relatively speaking. But I waited for her to tell them anyway, patiently. She sensed my patience, too, and that pissed her off even before I started.

So right from the beginning we fought about the whole damn thing.

“I don’t understand what happened,” she said. “Nolan passed out?”

“Yes.”

“And you left him there, for how long?”

“About ten minutes, fifteen minutes.”

“You’ve got to realize how upsetting this is for me,” she said.

“What do you mean, for you?”

“This is personal for me. You understand that. Nolan’s my friend.”

“He’s a friend of mine, too—”

“Apparently not. But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

“You mean your dad.”

“Don’t say it. I mean you, I mean you. .” She was crying and kind of hitting me, which I recognized as a good sign, because if she could take it out on me, she could probably let it out, too. But all of this sounds more calculating than I felt. I was very upset. I tried to tell her this, I wanted to make it clear, but it came out as more of a statement of fact than I would have liked, not an outburst of feeling, and she had limited sympathy.