David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

Throwing the covers to one side, Arnav bounded out of bed, stormed into the bathroom, and shut the door. Max wanted to call out, but the loud gush of pee made the silence between them deeper, more rigid and impassable. When Navi emerged, he stood, naked, hands on hips, waiting. “Everything is not fine. You’re averaging three, four hours of sleep a night. Your mood is all over the place. You were a complete jerk to that waiter last night.”

“And I apologized to him.”

“You don’t think I know you by now? You’re swinging like a madman from tree to tree. I’m just waiting for the vine to break.”

“I’m working,” Max explained. With the carnal detour he’d hoped to travel blocked, he sensed that sincerity was the only route open to him. Or rage. He certainly had it in him to throw a tantrum, especially now, with three weeks’ worth of psychotropic drugs dissolving in the drain, but he tried for the gentler, more reasonable path. Hugging his knees to his chest, he went on. “I’m finally working again.”

“What are you talking about finally ? You’ve been working since you started.”

“Yeah, but now I’m in a groove. I’m almost done. And it’s good .” Work: here was his first defense for all misbehavior — insomnia, oversleeping, overeating, forgetting to eat entirely, brooding, neediness, acting like a jerk, jerking off five times a day. The only defense that mattered. “You’d rather have me where I was when the radio wouldn’t tune? When once every third day I might grab a snippet I could work with. Something I could barely hear. Some faint little melody I had to chase down before it sunk back into static or broke into noise. Noise. Or would you rather have me here, where I am now? Where the station’s been playing twenty-four hours a day for—”

“Three weeks. I know how long.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing. Nearly a month of solid work! I’m supposed to apologize or something? I finished the second act, Navi. That’s a good thing. That impossible fucking act. Why aren’t you excited about that?”

“It’s not a good thing,” Navi countered, “sleeping three hours a night.”

“When music is the first thing I hear in the morning and the last thing I hear at night, and everything else, everything that’s not it, is a fucking distraction, that is a good thing.”

Arnav may have been stung, but Max knew he wasn’t fragile enough to crack at being called a distraction. He also knew Arnav wasn’t crazy, though he wasn’t above trying to make him appear so.

“You know I’m happy that you’re working. But what kind of work are you doing on three hours of sleep?”

“Stop saying that. I’m sleeping more than three hours,” answered Max more coolly. He aimed for poise, for the kind of imperturbability that might throw Arnav off his scent, but Arnav’s jaws were locked, and he wasn’t letting go.

Navi walked to his dresser and put on his little oblong spectacles, staring, blinking, as though Max were an exhibit meant to stir up curiosity and concern. “We went to bed at one.”

“And I woke up at four. Fine. Three hours. You know I can’t sleep when I travel,” Max said lamely. Then, with rising heat: “I don’t need you counting sheep for me. Or giving me etiquette lessons. Or anything. I’m fine. Just like I fucking am.”

Arnav returned to his side of the bed. His granny distaste for profanity tightened his mouth into a thin, straight line, but he folded his legs under him and took Max’s hand in his. “You’re flying solo.”

Now it was Max’s turn to bound off the bed. He went to his dresser, retrieved a few more T-shirts (though he’d already packed more than he would possibly need), and dropped them in his bag. “You say I’m not taking my pills. I say I am. Are you counting them?”

“You wouldn’t leave them in the bottles. You’re too smart for that. You’d flush them down the toilet.”

Wrong, Max thought, diving through the loophole of his lie with this slightest of technicalities. “So you are counting them?”

“I’m worried about you!” It wasn’t often that Max saw anyone as even-keeled as Arnav abandon equanimity. He seldom heard the deep, mellow voice that supported him like bedrock quake with such high emotion. Ready for it (for anything!) as Max thought he was, the sound of Navi approaching tears left him undone. But he could not, would not concede. Now that his mind had a taste of clear, fluid, creative freedom, he refused to slip back into the thick, jellylike waters of lithium and Depakote, where his mood might have been stable but his brain refused to swim at its quickest pace, where the stream was perfectly calm but also silted and slow, and a beach full of radios (there for no other reason than to torture him) refused to tune. Max had music now, and now was the only thing that mattered, no matter the harm, no matter the price.

“I know you,” Arnav finished dismally. “I know when you’re working out of a good place. And I know when you’re high as a kite.”

Max leveled his eyes and, meeting his own dare, said, “You can’t stand it when I’m successful.”

Arnav lifted his glasses and rubbed the weariness from his eyes. “That’s it, Max. You got me. Because up until now I’ve been holding you back. Watching you wither away in obscurity.”

“It’s good that I’m going,” Max answered. Stuffed as his bag now was, he had to lie on top of it to wrestle the zipper shut. “It’s good I’m getting out of here.”

“Because Evelyn is so much more supportive than I am. You honestly think you’re going to write there with everything that’s going on?”

Max did. He may have been kidding himself, but he did. In fact, it sounded to him like the perfect plan. Later that afternoon, he and Benji, Cat, and Claudia would descend on the house on Palmer Street, filling it one last weekend before they admitted his grandfather to Saratoga’s best geriatric nursing facility and Evelyn began her search for a smaller, more manageable home.

By Monday, after delivering Henry to St. Anthony’s Home for the Aged, after his mother and uncle (and, by all accounts, almost aunt) had returned to their lives, he would find himself with two precious weeks of writing time in an undisturbed room. A room of his own, where he could rest assured that Evelyn wouldn’t come poking at him in the middle of the night with maddening accusations. She had no designs on shoving even a single, solitary, dulling pill down his throat. Instead, she’d offered him time, a room, nothing more (what else was there?), all in exchange for keeping her company over dinner. “Evelyn’s excited about my writing,” Max said as he stepped into a pair of underwear, pulled a striped purple tank top over his head. “She didn’t invite me there so she could sit at my bedside with a notebook. She invited me there to work.”

“She invited you there because she’s going to be lonely. Understandably lonely, rattling around in that house all by herself. She’s going to want you to sit in her lap all day.”

“She married a porcupine. You don’t think she learned how to step away from Henry when he was working? How to give him space?”

“I think she doesn’t know you well enough to know when not to step away. That’s the problem.”

“I don’t need a social worker, Arnav. Or a sleep therapist. Or another fucking psychopharmacologist. The only thing I need right now is a cheerleader.”

“And the Fishers are going to do that for you?”

“Better than you, looks like.”

“You’ve known these people for less than a year, and suddenly they’re your family. They’re the de Medicis. They’re the patrons of your art, not those of us who have lived with your bull—”