David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“Keith said you were reluctant to participate in Group today,” prompted the doctor. “Why is that, do you think?”

The doctor-type people here were always employing that fake-wonder-y voice. It was true that Leo had been as silent as a panther since his arrival, barely twenty-four hours ago. He just shrugged at the doctor’s question. How far back would he have to start? He was sober for the first time in weeks, but what had replaced the dark sloshing was a profound confusion about whom and what to trust. Best to keep his mouth shut. He found most questions unanswerable, or answerable in too many ways.

And something in the shell of his mind was saying, Just because you’ve made a hash of your own life doesn’t mean someone else’s ideas are any better. Especially not those of a man with a pen cup marked Pens. Was this guy even a doctor? Leo looked around the little office for a diploma.

Hmm. Clinical psychologist. From an institution Leo had never heard of. Oh, and insult to injury: Bringing the Inside Out was prominently displayed on the doctor’s laminate bookshelf. Proof pretty much positive that this doctor was ill-equipped to dispense advice on any of the important questions.

Long ago, back in college and for some years thereafter, Leo had been best friends with the author of that fatuous work. But once Mark flukishly became famous, he dropped Leo, had some sort of assistant return Leo’s calls. The wild success of Bringing the Inside Out had bothered Leo deeply. Was that all you had to do to make it in this world? Sling shit while smiling? It was strange too; the Mark that Leo remembered would have eviscerated a book like that. Booklet, really. It was about one hundred pages, with wide margins. Presumably, he’d made a fortune from it, which was also deeply annoying.

Leo found his voice. “You a fan of Deveraux?” he asked the doctor. He raised his chin toward the bookshelf.

“I think there’s a lot in that little book, yes. Are you familiar with his work?”

“Very,” said Leo, the sixth word he’d spoken since his arrival.

He watched the doctor try to leverage this opening, his index finger running through the pages inside the folder again. Leo could guess what was in there — a grim précis of his last few months as reported by his sisters and whoever else had done advance work for the intervention.

Yesterday, when he’d answered the door and found his three sisters standing on his front porch, Leo had known straightaway. None of them lived in the state. And though the days of the week had lately come to mean little to him (just as seeing the clock-based time was inevitably a surprise), Leo did know that each of his sisters had a real job. Ten a.m. on a Thursday was not a drop-in hour, even in Portland.

Two of the sisters were busy tending to a family fortune built by their grandfather, the board-games magnate Lionel Crane. The company had been known as Crane and Herron until Lionel Crane and Nat Herron had come to a bitter falling-out, in 1975, over a golf score. Neither man had any idea what an apology was, so a disagreement (about whether a deep tractor wheel furrow on the twelfth hole of the Millbrook Golf Club constituted “ground under repair”) had bloomed and grown septic until the two men were unable to talk to each other in anything but Attorney. That had been a one-day news story in its time — the expensive sawing in twain of the company that made the classic game Board Room (in which players forged allegiances with one another to force others out). The two men fought especially over the rights to the company logo — a crane and a heron intimately entwined on a light blue field — and ended up having to sever the two birds, graphically. The resultant CraneCo (now signified by a winking crane in a top hat, a less compelling logo) went public ten years later and had grown steadily as a youth and family brand.

Rosemary, the eldest of the Crane children, was the chairman of the board. She had never had any problems in the success department. And to Leo, she sometimes seemed more like a forbidding aunt than a big sister.

Heather, the youngest Crane daughter, had started at the company right out of college. It was she who had negotiated the purchase of a small computer-games company that brought onto the CraneCo platform surprise hits like Wackadoodle! and Catch the Bunny. People in the industry apparently thought she was some sort of games savant, like she could look at any collection of random objects and design a game around them. This was funny because Heather was crap at games and puzzles and the abstract figuring they required, always had been. When they all played games as children, Heather’s older sisters generally stomped her. She might sometimes win a game of Mastermind or Battleship — she was good at plodding through possibilities. And she could hold her own when it came to the character-based games like Masterpiece or Clue or, one of the siblings’ own, Rescue the Baby, which involved putting infant Leo in his crumby baby seat in some sort of perilous position (often it was quite perilous — on top of the fridge, or alone in the dumbwaiter) and then devising elaborate ways of saving him.

Daisy, the middle sister, was Leo’s favorite. As a child, she was earnest but had a very low tolerance for bullshit, and she’d always had a mouth on her. Once, she either ruined or saved a wedding documentary by looking right into the camcorder’s lens and, when prompted by the offscreen uncle videographer— What do you think about this great wedding, Daze? — saying, I think this cake sucks. And that old preacher guy talked for like a fucking hour. That lady Uncle Farouk married is mean. She could also lie, brazenly, and was always proposing theoretical scenarios of death, like, “But Daddy, what if you fell off the skimboard and hit your head but then you drowned but then the fish ate you but before you were all the way dead?”

In her way and in her twenties, Daisy had exhibited some of the same problems that Leo had grappled with, though she had gotten off the ride well before the point at which Leo now found himself, or she had devised better coping strategies, because she was a physician’s assistant and the mother of two; she lived in Austin, and generally seemed to have figured out how you become a levelheaded citizen and a reliable person. But she had always been the sister willing to cut Leo the most slack.

So she was the only one he made eye contact with when he saw them there, a sedge of Cranes on his porch. Presumably, shifts had been covered and child care arranged and plane tickets bought and cars rented. Uh-oh, he thought. They must mean business .

Of course it had come to this. In the months leading up to their appearance, he had already fielded quite a few calls from them, calls in which he’d had to deflect their love and concern, minimize the increasing oddness of his blog posts, and promise to show up for the appointments they’d made for him with various doctors and therapists. But he’d missed all those appointments and quit taking his sisters’ calls around the time that the mania had crested and the other thing had started to bite. Still, he had enough wit shreds about him that morning to at least try to mount a defense, or another deflection.

“Surprise party?” he’d asked them at the door, and he gave his mug a little shake, which he shouldn’t have done, because the ice cubes therein announced themselves with a cold rattle, and it was Daisy, closest to him, who bent over his mug, took a quick whiff.

“Is that gin?” she asked. “Gross, Leo.”

“Has this sort of thing happened to you before?” asked the doctor. “Have you ever gone up and down like this?”

“I’ve been up and down a few times,” he finally offered. He had, over and over. But never like this.