Adam Haslett - Imagine Me Gone

“He’ll be the one paying them back,” my mother said when informing me she had already agreed.

“And if he doesn’t?” I asked.

“What am I supposed to do? Tell him he can’t go?”

She worried about him every day. Now, finally, he had good news. She couldn’t deny him the chance. This left only the question of how he would get from Boston to Michigan. Michael driving a U-Haul for two days by himself to an empty apartment in a town he’d never been to seemed like a bad idea to all of us.

“He would never ask you,” my mother said. “And obviously you’re busy…but it would be such a help.”

Before she suggested this, Seth had invited me to meet his family in Denver on the same August weekend that Michael was due in Lansing. I’d fantasized about having in-laws. A comfortable, accepting couple who would be delighted their son had found a clean-cut professional, and who wanted to welcome him into their family. Their comfortable, intact family. Seth’s older sister, Valerie, and her husband, Rick, lived with their infant son just a couple of streets away from Seth’s parents. Rick worked at the construction firm Seth’s father ran. They were all, apparently, keen to meet me. I wanted very much to go with him, but if I could get Michael set up in his apartment and settled there, he’d have his new start. When I mentioned to Seth what my mother had asked of me, he said he understood. There would be other times, he said. I should do what needed to be done.

Michael and I left Ben and Christine’s apartment on a sweltering day in the middle of August, the old Grand Am that I had given him years ago hitched to the back of the moving truck.

He was in bad shape. The preparations for moving and the prospect of leaving the place he’d lived most of his adult life had addled him. I had to repeat the simplest directions two or three times before he could process what I had said. Whatever meds he was taking weren’t doing a very good job. I’d lost track by then of all the combinations he had tried. He talked about them whenever we spoke, but they had blurred together in my mind.

On the highway I had to remind him to keep up his speed on the hills and when to use his blinkers. He’d always had a poor sense of direction but after we stopped for gas outside Albany, he couldn’t even find his way back to the thruway. I lost my patience then, and told him to pull over and let me drive.

It took us another five hours in occasional rain to reach Niagara Falls. The quickest route to Lansing was through southern Ontario and back across the border at Port Huron. Niagara was an obvious place to stop for the night, and neither of us had ever been. I found us a motel on the Canadian side with a parking lot large enough to accommodate the truck and hitch, and checked us in on my credit card. There wasn’t much daylight remaining, and I wanted to get down to the water to see about catching a boat out to the falls.

“I should stay here,” Michael said.

We were both frazzled from the drive, but I couldn’t stand the idea of not getting out for a walk.

“What if someone calls?” he said in a stricken voice. He sat perched on the edge of one of the beds, staring at the motel phone.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m not getting any signal,” he said. “They might try the landline.”

“They? Who’s they?”

He examined me in alarm, as if I were telling him to abandon a vigil for the missing.

“No one even knows we’re here,” I said. “No one has that number.”

He heard my words but didn’t seem to believe them. “You go ahead,” he said. “I’ll be here.”

“That phone isn’t going to ring,” I said. “Get your jacket.”

He hesitated a moment, tortured by the dilemma, and then he did as I said. I don’t know what I detested more: his reluctance or his capitulation. They both infuriated me.

Out on the street, he trailed a few feet behind me, and I had to slow up to keep him at my side. We passed through hordes of tourists milling at the bins of trinket shops and gazing like deer into the caverns of sports bars. I hadn’t expected much from the place, but I hadn’t realized how ugly it would be, either.

We reached the passageway leading under the road and down toward the water, and joined the other latecomers being funneled into the lines of metal stanchions. Before long, we were through the ticket booth and onto a boat.

As it eased away from the shore, we climbed onto the upper deck, and the cliff came into view, and behind that the high-rise hotels. I headed toward the front, glad for the cooler air. A few minutes later, as we neared the falls and the boat nosed its way into the mist, people donned their clear plastic ponchos and we bobbed back and forth at the edge of being enveloped by the spray. We had seen this sight at a distance crossing the bridge from the American side, and I had thought, Yes, there it is, as pictured. But without the perspective of distance it was suddenly unfamiliar. A white atmosphere billowed around us like the depthless, blank white that people claim to see as death approaches. And high above this cloud, the huge lip of water tumbled downward, a perfect disintegrating line against the waning sky.

I had heard someone describe seeing the Himalayas for the first time, how they appeared like the limit of the earth, an edge beyond which there could be nothing but the emptiness of space. I’d never understood what they were talking about until now. I knew what I was seeing — what I was supposed to be seeing — yet on that rocking deck, with the roar in my ears and the whiteness encompassing me, my points of reference fell away, and it seemed that I was gazing into the void.

It’s worth it, I thought. Just for this, for a few moments of the almost sublime, even if I had to half talk my way into it, and allow myself the cliché of being impressed by Niagara Falls. I was in awe. And the vastness washed the frustrations of the day away, and I forgave Michael his worry and his fear.

When I turned around, I spotted him at the stern, not glancing upward but off the side of the boat, his glasses beaded with water. Everyone had raised the hoods of their ponchos, but this somehow hadn’t occurred to him. His black hair was soaked flat against his scalp, and he was hunching his shoulders, as if that would protect him from the sky.

Just look, for Christ’s sake! Look! I wanted to shout, but he wouldn’t have heard me.

The boat began to chug in reverse, the prow reemerging from the mist. I walked back to join Michael. The other passengers were chatting with one another now, flipping through images on their cameras to see what they had captured.

“Amazing, right?” I said.

He nodded in a quick, automatic fashion, as if I had spoken in a foreign tongue and it was simplest for him just to agree.

“You’re soaked,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “I guess I am.”

We reached the border crossing at Port Huron by midmorning the next day, and East Lansing by early afternoon. His apartment was a few miles south of campus in one of the graduate-student housing blocks set along a wooded cul-de-sac. The building was a two-story stretch of concrete, from the early sixties by the look of it, with stairwells at either end of a wide, second-floor walkway. His unit had two rooms, a galley kitchen, and a bathroom, with white cinder-block walls and linoleum floors. Five hundred dollars a month, Internet and utilities included. Celia had done the research online, and she and I had agreed he wouldn’t get a better deal even if he made a trip in advance. It would be the first place he’d ever lived on his own. I wished it were nicer.

“It’s clean,” I said, and he agreed.

We needed to unload the boxes and get the truck returned before we were charged for another day. The records took nearly an hour, and the books that much again, despite his having left most of both collections in our mother’s basement. He had a futon, a chest of drawers, a desk, bookcases, a few lamps, and one of the old wingback chairs from the living room whose torn fabric my mother had pinned a cloth over. I asked him how he wanted the furniture arranged and he said he didn’t know. I suggested the desk by the front window, and the bookcases along the rear wall, and he agreed. The boxes we left in stacks by the door and in the bedroom. When we were done, I followed him in the Grand Am to the rental lot on the other side of town. I’d reminded him as we were leaving that we needed to fill the tank before returning the truck, but he passed one gas station after the next, until I called him on his cell and told him again.