David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

It had nothing to do w/u, Benji wrote.

“I wasn’t opening a discussion.” Claudia shifted in her seat, wiped her eyes one last time. Everything about her now said business . “I didn’t help you then, but I’m helping you now,” she said, reaching into her trendy bag and producing a colorful trifold brochure with two smiling octogenarians on the front, their heads touching tenderly under a flowering tree. “Treadwell Acres.” She tossed it on his lap.

Benji gave it the once-over, flipped to a new page in his pad, and drew a big?.

“Dr. Malek gave it to me,” she explained. “It’s one of the best rehab facilities around. They have a fantastic mental health unit.” She mustered a hopeful but hollow smile, as if presenting a child with a secondhand toy she meant to pass off as new. Benji responded with a dubious look and began bouncing his pen along the thin and pulpy page. I can stay w/u. He placed a dot under each word as if leading Claudia through a sing-along.

“You can’t stay with me.” Claudia broke the news a bit too cheerfully, Benji thought. “I’m sorry, Benj, but you can’t. I start teaching next week and haven’t read half the books on my syllabus. I’m behind on the Selkirk place. I don’t have time to babysit.”

Benji didn’t like to sulk, but he wasn’t above it either. I don’t need a babysitter!

“Your doctor disagrees. So does your social worker. So does your therapist. So do I.”

Treadwell Acres?! I’m not 80, he scribbled, then drew a series of mad lines under and through each word until the message looked thoroughly redacted.

Claudia opened the brochure to show him another picture, this of a freckled young woman staring out a sunny window with a stock photography glaze of hope in her eyes. “Look. Not everyone is eighty.”

It failed to make him feel better. I’ll find someplace, he wrote, flashing his notepad with a petulant shrug.

“Where?” Claudia asked. “Where will you find?”

To be fair to Claudia, most of Benji’s friends were poorly equipped to play Florence Nightingale. They spent their days hiking from one audition to the next and their nights telemarketing or tending bar or offering certified (but not necessarily chaste) massage, which left little time for developing a bedside manner. His nursiest friend, a straitlaced chorus boy currently making his way across Washington state as a flying monkey in the traveling company of Wicked , could no sooner swoop down and tend to him than his former roommate, who’d sublet Benji’s room to a couple of cater waiters with dreams of becoming Alvin Ailey dancers, could offer him his old bed.

Rhonda & Jim, he wrote defiantly, desperate to prove his sister wrong and satisfied that he’d found two of the most decent, responsible, bulletproof people either of them knew.

“Rhonda?” Claudia’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Who has thyroid cancer?”

He caught a brief, stinging glimpse of his own narcissism — what kind of friend forgets a friend’s thyroid cancer? — but his mind refused to pause. He suggested Thom and Guyang and several strategically unnamed “good friends” he claimed Claudia didn’t know, but she shot each of them down with marksman’s skill. Thom lived in a sixth-floor walk-up. Guyang already had a baby. And friends she’d never heard of? How good could they possibly be?

“There’s nothing wrong with Treadwell,” said Claudia, resolute.

Benji uttered as emphatic a “No!” as his throbbing tongue would allow. It was a howl more than a word and spurred his roommate to raise the volume on his TV to an unneighborly pitch. “I wava say ear,” Benji cried in pain, his Sharpie shaking as he translated, I’d rather stay here!

“I’m sure you would. But here isn’t an option.” Claudia pulled a sleek silver thermos from her bag and, her still-red eyes finding him over a capful of steaming coffee, continued in a harsher tone. “Not that you get a vote. You surrendered that right the minute you decided to play Billy Joe McAllister. You turned your ballot over to me.”

I’ll stay with Mom.

“Mom is nearly eighty, Benji, and already has enough patients,” Claudia answered. “Her hands are full.”

U think Mom will let me end up in a nursing home?

“It’s not a nursing home. For God’s sake.”

He tossed the brochure back at her. Looks like one.

What, he wondered, if I tell the truth? It was impossible to know whether an alteration to the story of his fall would spare him the torture of his sister’s good intentions. But what had once felt like a pardonable omission of a key detail now, in the fiery light of Claudia’s grief (not to mention the shadowy threat of waking in a rehabilitation facility for the aging), felt like a hoax. A hoax he was about to be punished for.

“You realize sharing a house with Mom means sharing a house with Dad?” Claudia asked.

True, he hadn’t thought of that. How could he possibly share a house with Henry? How, when nobody knew how to push Benji’s buttons better than his father, who many years ago, like an architect charged with building a young boy from the ground up, had helped install them? Henry called actors “mountebanks” and maddeningly, purposefully, added the word “the” to every title on his son’s filmography— The Prodigy, The Hamster for Hannah . And though age and illness had considerably dulled Henry’s sharpest edges, his belittling commentary continued to play in Benji’s mind, as a radio plays on even after the power’s been cut. It was Henry who Benji now heard. A cruel and cacophonous litany that rose above Claudia’s sorrow and chastening, above the blare of the clumsy roof patcher’s TV. True, he would come clean to avoid his father.

“This could be exactly what you need,” Claudia persisted, flapping the brochure in front of him like a fan. “Time to relax. Regroup.”

But Benji had stopped listening. His brain busied itself composing a confession that his sister wouldn’t automatically reject as a ploy to steer past their father on one hand, a convalescent home on the other. What to say? What to say?

Facebook! he wrote, adding the exclamation point with a flourish of relief. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? He had 658 friends on Facebook. Certainly one of them, or a friend or acquaintance of one of them, or a friend or acquaintance of one of them , would cast a pitying eye on what could be billed a meagerly famous near-suicide. He was, after all, the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question (’80s edition). A little fame, like a pinch of spice, still clung to him. Certainly someone on Facebook would be willing to season their stew with it.

Claudia’s face collapsed with disdain. “Facebook.”

He’d forgotten his audience. His sister wasn’t quite the technophobe their father was, but she subscribed to a philosophy of social media that easily made her look as dated as an Atari.

“Is Ashton Kutcher going to come to your rescue? What? You’re one of his four million friends. Or maybe your prom date? She was a nice girl. Or someone else you haven’t spoken to in twenty years.”

“Yur tho mean.”

“And you’re ridiculous. If you died tomorrow, how many of those friends would be at your funeral?” This was a favorite question, one that present circumstance rendered completely inappropriate but habit and passion spurred her to ask anyway.

Benji managed a look of shock that Stella Adler would have been proud of.

“Sorry. That was a shitty thing to say. But we’ve talked about this, Benji. Relationships are like trees.”

“Ot the twee!”