David Hopson: All the Lasting Things

Of course, Benji could have corrected them by now. Whatever happened on the bridge lacked the unambiguous intent of Madame Bovary gobbling up her arsenic or Inspector Javert flinging himself into the Seine. Benji’s recklessness may have bordered on a death wish, but he knew he’d been enjoying the fruits of a lie, as if he’d been feasting on a basket of sympathy and concern addressed to someone with a much more serious illness. Even with his tongue stitched and swollen, he could have scribbled on the pad his nurses provided him and told Claudia or his tearful and tiptoeing mother or the nice doughy social worker who looked in on him every other morning that they had it all wrong. But he’d spent two weeks tucked in a warm nest of communal misunderstanding, and, corrupt as it may have been, that, for the moment, was where he wanted to stay.

Which isn’t to say Benji didn’t feel guilty. How could he not? But whatever guilt his deceit stirred up, his store of ancient resentments quickly helped to settle. There were his father’s magniloquent speeches about the virtues of holding a job, a real job, a job that, unlike pet or apartment sitting, required the payment of taxes. The wan, worn admonition to “leave Benji alone” that counted as his mother’s primary defense, the eye-rolling impatience with which Claudia dismissed his career: he resented these things almost as much as he resented the career itself. A Hamster for Hannah , for God’s sake!

He took the D-list movies and bit roles in crappy regional reps in stride, with the sort of self-mocking humor common to men whose failures may in fact be their greatest success, but he hated the substantial scripts that passed him by. His greatest achievement (or at least the one with the most gravitas) — the miniseries in which he played Rimbaud’s brother — had had its plug pulled and sat collecting dust in some cryptlike vault under PBS, never to be seen. He hated the agents and directors who failed to see in him what he occasionally saw in himself. He hated the audiences who’d never heard of him or, worse, treating him like a trained monkey they happened upon in their favorite restaurants, bullied him into putting down his salad fork and saying the only four words they thought he knew— That’s what you think! The more slights Benji counted, the more forgivable, even justified, his lie seemed. To right a cosmic imbalance didn’t necessarily square with committing a great wrong.

Besides, his distress brought out Claudia’s kinder side, and he liked Claudia’s kinder side. The hospital allowed him, like the rest of the patients under psychiatric care, two one-hour visits of no more than two people per day, and he sank more comfortably into his stiff, pancake-thin pillows knowing that Claudia would be one of them. She brought him frozen fruit bars and thick, cold smoothies, the only forms of nourishment his poor tongue could take, and refreshed with tabloid and fashion industry trash the pile of mindless magazines that grew to teetering heights on his nightstand. And though she, too, wasn’t above urging him to take a job waiting tables or giving him a hard time for the few hundred dollars he borrowed here or there, she would quietly make sure that his uninsured fingers never touched a bill.

That all this eventually had to end came as no surprise to Benji. Who knew better than a childhood star the proverbial fate of all good things?

“We have a problem,” Claudia said, stepping into the room with a look that told him somehow, overnight, the honeyed spring that so satisfyingly flowed his way had run dry. No more magazines. No more smoothies. “They’re not willing to release you on your own.” She pushed a high-backed vinyl chair closer to the bed but stayed standing behind it, the coming pronouncements apparently wanting the severity of a podium, even a makeshift one. “I spoke with Dr. Malek. Agreeing to see a therapist isn’t enough. He’s not convinced you’re not a danger to yourself. He wants you supervised.”

The day before, the same Dr. Malek had dangled the promise of freedom like a hypnotist’s charm, so to have the spell broken now, with such callous sibling economy, brought an angry flush to Benji’s face. He reached for the pad he used to keep up his side of the conversation and wrote, Supervised?!

“That’s what he said.”

Benji grimaced. Of course, the only thing better than being in the hospital would be getting out of it, and he’d been looking forward to doing just that. He considered this unexpected twist in the road, trying to figure the best way around it. I’ll stay w/u, he wrote.

“And do what?” Claudia asked impatiently. “Wander off to find the next bridge?” She sat down in the chair as if suddenly very tired. “He’s right. We can’t let you hobble on back to the toolshed like nothing happened. Things don’t snap back to normal like that. I don’t know why I thought they would.”

He hadn’t planned beyond the toolshed — she had him there — but the thought of prolonging their afternoons together, of milking every last drop of Claudia’s kindness, brought the curl of a selfish smile to his lips. To spend the day drifting in the shallows of reality TV, sipping berry blasts on his sister’s calfskin couch: an unemployed actor could find worse ways to recuperate.

“Damn it, Benji.” She covered her eyes with her hands and rocked forward, elbows on knees. He watched a shudder move along her back and grinned against the pain in his mouth. He was such a problem, wasn’t he? What trouble would he get into next? He was ready to have a good laugh with her. Even if he ended up being the punch line, he’d laugh his way onto that calfskin couch.

But then the sniffling began, and he realized that his sister wasn’t laughing. He dropped his pad in his lap, helpless to help her, miserable to see how thoroughly he’d cracked her shell. Her sadness, maybe because she so rarely showed it, demolished him. “Caw-da,” he said, his tongue moving like a speared fish. She didn’t look up for a long minute, not until she wiped the last tears away. Rarely did she give anyone the privilege of seeing her cry, and now she looked embarrassed, flushed red beyond her breakdown and angry for having succumbed to it.

“You’re such an asshole,” she said, her voice still shaky but unwilling to yield. “Why are you doing this to us? I know this isn’t about us, but fuck you, Benji, this is about us too. It’s about Mom and Dad. It’s about me. You were going to leave me alone. With them . What were you thinking?”

Benji hung his head and answered as best he could, “E oth oo soopid hings. Ow.”

Claudia gave him an exasperated look: she didn’t speak Bitten Tongue.

We both do stupid things, he wrote.

Claudia looked doubtful.

We pick each other up. It’s what we do.

“I’ve never done anything this stupid,” she said.

His pen was poised to write Nick! Forget writing Hello?! Baby! The name of her ex-boyfriend would have been enough of a reprimand, but he put his pen down and sighed.

She looked from her brother’s eyes into her own hands, as if their emptiness might comfort her in ways he could not.

“How could you do it?” He couldn’t count the number of times she’d come back to that question. And still he had no answer for it. “I spend every second I’m not here worrying about you. Wondering if you’re ever going to be okay. How any of us can ever trust you again. And I spend every second here wanting to strangle you. I do, Benji. I’m sick about it, and I hate you for it.” She ruminated over her cup of coffee, sipped at it as though it imparted bitter wisdom. “You didn’t end up on that bridge alone. I know that. I helped you get there. Or I didn’t stop you from getting there. I wasn’t enough to stop you, which amounts to the same thing.”