Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

I stared back at her. “So, I think maybe you’re oversimplifying it, but yeah, that’s the gist of it.”

Alaina raised her arms to the ceiling. Touchdown! “What am I going to do with you?”

All the charged particles boomeranging around my head lifted me out of the chair and sent me pacing. “I don’t know what to say. I think I just had this realization that playing in a band again isn’t the answer. Whatever those days were, they’re gone and I’m not ever going to be able to find them. I was wrong to go looking.”

Alaina was incredulous. “Are you dumb, Teddy? Seriously—like, did you even graduate from college? Have you ever heard a musician say that making music brought them peace and happiness? Because I know an awful lot of musicians, and you know what? They are all miserable human beings. Miserable, tortured souls, suffering for what they’ve convinced themselves is art—suffering in vain, by the way, because what most of them make doesn’t come close to art, but I suppose self-delusion is some kind of Darwinian device that keeps you mental cases alive. Regardless—there is no way you could’ve reasonably thought that ginning up the band again and diving back into this fucked-up world was going to help you achieve nirvana. Case in point: Nirvana!”

Facing her window, my eyes drifted far over the skyline, past the collective cabin fever that raged through the city, afflicting all, diagnosed by none. And that, I understood at that very moment, was precisely what I’d learned: there really was no escape from any of this.

“What happened?” Alaina’s voice was now jarringly gentle.

“I don’t know,” I said with all the rock star grievousness in the world.

“Did something happen with Mackenzie? Is she out?”

“No, she’s in.”

“Did she not accept your Facebook friend request or something?”

“She’s in,” I repeated, fumbling for words. “I just don’t know if she’s in . You know what I mean?”

Alaina’s face was a thicket of disbelief. “Not even a little bit.”

“She doesn’t need this. None of them do. Shit, Jumbo doesn’t even need this.”

Alaina grabbed an apple off her desk and hurled it at me. It struck me in the chest.

“Ow!” I yelped.

“Of course they don’t need this! If they needed this, you would’ve heard from them at some point in the current millennium. You need this because it was your band. It’s your heinous mug up in that London gallery looking like a slob. And it’s you—and only you—who has the power to change your legacy. To the extent you have one. And to the extent it needs changing.”

She paused for an exasperated breath.

“Look. Teddy, my little cheese blintz, I love you. I will always love you. I have a soft spot for you; it’s mostly pity, because you have no idea who you are or what you have or, frankly, what to make of anything in this life. But if you walk away from this now, after everything you’ve done, I’m probably going to skip your funeral.”

I stared at her, caressing the apple-sized wound just south of my clavicle.

“That didn’t hurt, you big baby,” Alaina said. “And pick that up for me, will you? I’m going to eat that.”

There was a knock on the door—soft, not convinced it wanted to be heard. It was Marin, Alaina’s assistant with the punky ’do.

“Yes, Marin?” Alaina was irritated. “We’re a little busy in here.”

“Dave Chenier is on the phone.”

“Jesus. How often does that guy call you?” I asked.

Alaina rolled her eyes. “You were Dave Chenier once, and I rolled my eyes plenty about you. What does Mr. Fuckface want now, Marin?”

“He’s not happy.”

“Of course, he’s not happy. Nobody’s happy! Transfer Mr. Fuckface to the conference room and I’ll take him in due course.”

“Actually, there’s one more thing,” the young woman interjected apologetically. “I’m not totally sure, but I think my ex-boyfriend might kill himself.”

Alaina glared irksomely. “Do you mean right now or in the general sense that all of us more or less consider suicide at some point?”

The girl gave a cumbrous swallow. “He called me ten minutes ago and said he was going to kill himself now. I guess he meant then.” She checked her watch.

“Holy fucking shit, Marin!” Alaina erupted. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah, so I was going to run out for a bit. I should probably check in on him. Do you mind?”

“Are you high? You can’t go to a potentially suicidal ex-boyfriend’s apartment by yourself.”

“Oh.”

Alaina was nearing the end of her wits from the many flavors of stupidity presenting themselves this afternoon. All of it finally gave way to a helpless shrug.

“I was fixing to give Teddy here the spanking of his life, but fuck it. Let’s go.”

Evidently, the let’s in let’s go included me, because before I could make my escape, I found myself sandwiched between Alaina and her underling in the back of a taxi, Dave Chenier presumably still on hold.

We zoomed uptown in various states of agitation. When Alaina wasn’t barking at the poor Pakistani cabbie for failing to make the traffic vanish, she was consumed with e-mails on her phone. Marin, for her part, seemed far more tense about monopolizing our time than about the health status of her ex-boyfriend. She spent the ride peppering us with apologies.

“By the way,” Alaina said without looking up, “do you know who we have the pleasure of riding with today?”

Marin shook her head.

“This is Teddy Tremble.” No reaction. “From Tremble. The band.”

She suddenly lit up. “Oh yeah. Sure. ‘It Feels like a Lie.’ Neato. It’s an honor, sir.”

I groaned and focused on the exotic synth pop dancing out of the dusty dashboard.

We zipped up Third Avenue to the Upper East Side, its endless palette of storefronts and apartment buildings blurring past. I was really hoping a dead body didn’t lie at the end of this ride. I was in no mood for grief counseling.

“How long were you with this lad?” Alaina wanted to know.

“Almost three weeks.”

“Three weeks and this guy is offing himself over you?” I hooted.

Alaina’s eyes glimmered. “You must be a beast in bed.”

“This guy’s got serious issues,” I told Marin. “If he happens not to be dead, I strongly recommend never seeing him again.”

“Oh God. I hope he’s not dead,” Marin panted. “I have a major fear of dead bodies.”

“You know what I have a fear of ?” Alaina raised her voice toward the driver. “Dying in a taxi with the radio stuck on the Bollywood station.”

The cabbie, muttering unintelligible invective, let us out in front of a decaying courtyard behind which a gray brick apartment building rose up about a dozen stories. It was the kind of place that housed the Marins of the world—young professionals rendered borderline insolvent by the city’s economic tourniquet.

Marin eyed the front door with palpable trepidation. There was no sign of the police, which meant either false alarm or already-bagged body.

Something drew my attention upward, a slight movement just above my field of vision, a color out of sync. I lifted my eyes three or four stories up, and there it was: a person on the ledge.

It was a jumper, but a jumper with apparent second thoughts, or at least mixed emotions about this whole killing yourself thing. He seemed to be leaning back against the wall as far away from the edge as possible, as if he’d realized that despite the sincerity of his tantrum and the purity of his outrage against life’s injustices, at the end of the day—shit—heaving yourself off a building was a far less vivid enterprise in theory than in practice.