Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

With Duncan gathering the remaining shreds of his dignity, the two youths strolled away like octogenarian lovebirds on a country lane. Or like a mental patient and his orderly in the asylum gardens.

Alaina was looking at me. There was the faintest smudge of a taunt on her face, yet at the same time, exploration, as if she were probing for something she hadn’t yet discovered wasn’t there. “Well, well, well. And in the bastard there beats a heart.”

“Who ever said I was a bastard?”

“Who ever said you were anything but? But hey, you just talked a kid out of splatting himself all over the sidewalk, so I guess you weren’t as out of your element as you thought.”

My element. The word instantly sent me tunneling. Everything seemed to be swirling wider and wider, no two facets of my life touching anymore. I was just as lost as Duncan, with his dreams of suicide, his Pontiac at large somewhere down the road. I watched him and Marin promenade themselves about the courtyard, the very picture of emotional mayhem, the kind that simmered just below the surface until it erupted into the material world like hellfire and you just knew that some god-awful universe was about to be born.

I said, “I don’t have the faintest clue what my element is.”

“Well, would you mind putting off looking for it until you’ve found your legacy?” Alaina teased. “One bullshit existential crisis at a time.”

I sucked in a hollow of air and said, “If I’m no longer needed at this clambake, I’ll be off.”

“Off ? Off where? I wasn’t done chewing you out for being a whiny little schizo and pulling the plug on the reunion that nobody wants to see happen.”

“Well, can we finish that little chat some other time? I need to go.” I cleared my throat and unearthed the closest thing I had to grace. “I need to go cut a record.”

Alaina’s face registered horror movie stupor. “A record?” She stepped forward and depressed my toe under her overpriced footwear. “But wait—I’m confused. I thought you’d made a mistake. Music isn’t the answer. Those days are gone, they’re never coming back. You looked for them, all right; you looked in the pantry, in the garage, in your sock drawer—”

“You can go fuck yourself, you know that?”

“Oh, I know.” She tousled my hair, then made a face and wiped her hand on the grass. “Well, I’m glad to hear it, MoonPie. I don’t even want to know what nugget of inspiration that suicidal little puke leveled you with up there. Go tell your second-rate novelty acts to dust off their instruments. I’m booking you guys a studio before you throw another hissy fit and change your mind again.”

“Probably a good idea. And we’ll do our best to come up with some music you can sell.”

“Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. Whatever you come up with, I’ll get you your record contract. I’ll get you a tour, concert halls packed with girls in heat, and dressing rooms with craft beer and candy dishes.”

“I want M&M’s in those dishes.”

“Of course you do.”

“But just the green ones.”

“You shall have only green M&M’s, Mr. Tremble.”

“Good. But I might change my mind. I might want only the pink ones.”

“They don’t make those, pumpkin, but we’ll get them for you anyway.”

“Indeed you will. It is, after all, the little things that matter.”

“That’s not true, Theodore,” she said. “It is very much the big things.”

We stared at each other, each of us fighting back a grin as the seconds passed in this one frozen frame of our lives.

One day I’ll die, I thought to myself, and this will be one of the things I did with my time.

Just then, the scene was ruptured by a fire truck raising Cain, men with ladders and bullhorns bursting forth with gallant commotion. Alaina chomped her gum with a casual insolence as a hulking man in suspenders and fire-retardant pants strode toward us. Alaina greeted him with an exaggerated glance at her watch.

“You’re just in time,” she quipped.

I’ve lost track of how long I’ve been out here when a lamp in the living room flicks on behind me and the balcony door slides open. Sara, enrobed in a Race for the Cure T-shirt that hangs down over her knees, steps out into the predawn and asks what time I got in. I find myself unable to speak, so she leads me inside into the pale glow of the lamplight. She is staring into my eyes with deep, profound worry.

And then it all comes out. I tell her I’m done, I’m punching out of my useless fantasies for good. The search for lost things has brought me nothing but emptiness. They’ll just have to stay lost. I have an almost panicky need to be with Sara, to be safe in our home. I want never to leave again, I tell her. I want to be with her every single day, raise children together, take vacations in SUVs crammed with toys, crumbs, and snack wrappers. I want to pick out Halloween costumes together. I want to do all that and only that and come home every night and close the door behind me. This is what I want for the rest of my life. Nothing else matters.

I say this and then I drop onto the couch. When I look up, I’m startled to the bone at what I see. Sara is an old woman, eighty-five, older even, her features encroached upon by a latticework of wrinkles and wilting skin, her hair shorter and gray. The old woman—it is Sara, I am sure of it—unfurls a tolerant smile at me, my mind having once again gone adrift, and says, “But honey, we’ve done all that.”

I don’t understand. And then I catch my own reflection in the glass balcony door and see that I too am old. I’ve aged a half century in a minute. I am dizzy with the dawning horror that, addled with an old man’s dementia, I’ve forgotten who I am, I’ve forgotten the life I’ve lived. Everything I think I’ve been experiencing these weeks and months already happened long, long ago.

I shake my head, disbelieving, forcing it all away.

I look around our living room and see photographs of our children. They are adults now, surrounded by families of their own—­cherubic boys and girls, our grandchildren, distant reverberations of Sara and me in their cheerful faces.

This can happen. It must happen. You live decades upon decades, and the tired and declining mind erases it all and convinces you that you’re forty-five or twenty-five or twelve. That your life is still in bloom, still an engine rumbling with promise under the wing of an airplane.

Sara sits down beside me and drapes her hand over mine. “We’ve had a wonderful life together.” She glances up at one particular frame on the wall, and a familiar shadow returns. “Mostly wonderful.”

I follow her eyes. The two-year-old boy on a sand dune squints at us from under the glass rectangle.

“We can’t be like this now,” I plead. “He needs us.”

Sara allows her eyes to see the photograph, and for a moment she is with him on the dune in that blue and windy day that we’ve held on to our entire lives.

She pats my hand tenderly, our purple veins and bony fingers interwoven. The years have slipped away from me like a weightless astronaut on the blue ring of the world. “That was a long time ago, Teddy. Don’t think about such things now.”

“We can’t be old,” I insist. “We have to stay. Someone has to stay and remember.”

And then I can’t breathe. A sheet is being draped over my face and my last breath is a gravelly snore. I claw helplessly at the sheet but only grow more entangled. Time has sped forward again and it is now the end. I am dead; they are burying me. Struggling for breath, I lash against the airless vault into which I’m being caged forever. The end is here. Soon I will feel nothing.