Imagine Me Gone Read online

  I hadn’t told Michael anything about Seth yet, though it had been six months already. Being single was something he and I had long had in common. Something to commiserate about. Celia was the one who’d been in relationships. Michael and I didn’t want each other to be alone, but the fact that we were had developed over the years into a kind of solidarity. It gave us a means to be close. And to remain loyal, somehow, to the past. Part of me knew that this was a racket, that it fed on gloom. But I didn’t know how to give it up. I could play down what was happening with Seth, suggest that it was still preliminary, and who knew what might come of it. I could even tell Michael that I was in love. He would listen to such a declaration with thirst, at least when he stopped talking about his own predicament long enough to hear it. But that Seth loved me back? That if anything he was the more affectionate? Of course Michael would never be less than polite about it. He’d say he was glad, and yet I would be cutting him off, leaving him more isolated than he already was. And what for, if I could just soft-pedal it, allowing him the sense that nothing had really changed?

  One of the things that had recently made it easier to imagine telling Michael at least something about Seth was that after years of trying, he had finally gotten into graduate school. Albeit at the advanced age of thirty-six. We had thought it would never happen. My mother had fretted to Celia and me that he just made himself more miserable by applying fall after fall, only to reap another set of rejection letters each spring. But somehow he’d managed to persevere, and now he had done it. He said he didn’t care about an academic career, he just needed to do his work, and that he would be happy teaching high school if there were no college jobs. It was a plan, at least, a way he might eventually support himself. My mother still helped him with his rent, wrote checks for his therapy, and ran down what little savings she had. Here, at last, was a solution. Only it turned out his stipend didn’t cover everything. He would need to find work, and take out more loans. Because of his lousy credit he needed a co-signer.

  “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.

  He turned off into a Speedway, and I parked at the edge of the lot to wait for him. He struggled with the gas cap, unable to open it. A minute went by, and then another, and still he couldn’t manage the task. He didn’t kick the truck in frustration. He showed no signs of impatience at all. He just stood there, failing at it. Until eventually he turned around and scanned the lot. When he saw me, he didn’t wave me over or call my name. He remained by the capped tank, helpless and abdicating. Can’t you do it for me? his expression asked.

  “I’m curious,” I said later, in a Thai restaurant in a strip mall near campus. “What would you have done if I hadn’t been there?”

  “I guess I would have figured it out,” he said sheepishly.

  “And if you’d been with Caleigh, you would have figured it out, right? You wouldn’t have just stopped. What is that? Why do you do that with me?” He’d passed beyond his hyperarticulate, racing worry into a kind of fugue state, scared of the menu and the waiter and the food. “Why should it be different?” I said, jabbing the question at him, willing him to do better than this.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  My phone rang—Seth calling from Denver. I told Michael I would be back, thankful for the excuse to get up and walk out, even if it was into the hot evening air.

  “It’s like babysitting,” I said after Seth asked me how things were going. “Like taking care of an aging child.”

  “He must be glad you’re there, though,” Seth said.

  “I guess. That’s not how it comes out, but yeah.”

  I asked about his visit home. He’d spent the morning playing video games, and the afternoon at the mall. When we’d first started dating, each new discovery—that I didn’t need to make weekend plans to fill empty evenings, that I had someone to talk to at the end of the day—had come as a revelation. The discoveries were different now. I could sense his mood in a phrase or two. I knew when he was worried about me, and felt guilty for it. These were their own kind of marvels, strangely reassuring as proof that Seth and I were, in fact, involved. Just hearing him describe his day with his family untensed me. Forty-eight hours with Michael and it was as if my own life had ceased. I hadn’t returned phone calls or even responded to my editor’s e-mails. Through the plate-glass window of the restaurant, I saw my brother waiting in front of the food that had now arrived. For a moment, I glimpsed him as a stranger might: a thin, unshaven man in black cotton work pants and a gray button-down shirt damp at the armpits. Pale-skinned, hair thinning, already middle-aged.

  Seth was going on about a party he wanted us to go to the following weekend, and a friend he wanted me to meet, and I said it all sounded fine, without really listening, thinking instead of the picture of Bethany I’d seen on the desktop of Michael’s computer when he opened it at the apartment, still there after all these years.

  “You had a long day,” Seth said. “I’ll let you go.”

  “Can we talk before bed?”

  “Yes, silly. Of course.”

  As soon as I reached the table, Michael asked what was wrong.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Why should anything be wrong?”

  “I just thought something might be the matter.”

  “No,” I said, scraping rice onto my plate, suddenly ravenous. “It was Seth. The guy I’m seeing. I’ve mentioned him to you.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “He’s fine,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

  “You’re dating him.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good,” Michael said. “How is it going?”

  “Actually,” I said, “it’s going really well.” I could have stopped there. But he’d asked. “To be honest, I think we might be in love.”

  His head moved fractionally up and back, as if avoiding a punch. “That’s good,” he repeated, more gravely this time. “I’m amazed you haven’t been talking about it. I can’t imagine not needing to talk about it. Given how frightening it is. You must be afraid he’s going to leave you.”

  “Not really. I think we’re good.”

  He squinted at me, trying to make sense of what I was saying. “Where did you meet?”

  “Online. Last winter. He’s from Colorado. His parents are still there, still married. Apparently they want to meet me, which I guess is a good sign.”

  “Extraordinary,” Michael said. “Has he been in therapy?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What do you guys talk about?”

  “Whatever comes up, I guess. He’s got good taste in music. You’d like some of the stuff he’s played me.”

  More than telling him I was in love, it was telling him this that felt cruel. Michael’s crushes had always run through music. This would make it real for him.

  “He understands my work, too,” I said. “When things come up last minute, or I have to leave town, he’s good about that. You should meet him sometime.”

  “Sure,” Michael said, gazing at the curries, which he still hadn’t touched. He didn’t lack an appetite. He just seemed to have forgotten how to serve himself.

  “Here,” I said, holding out a plate to him. “Eat.”

  And so we did, in silence.

  “What courses are you going to take?” I asked, eventually.

  This he was able to answer at length, listing subjects and texts, going into the critical orientations of the various members of the faculty and how they did or didn’t comport with his own theoretical commitments. “I’ve read most of the first two years of the material before,” he said. “I’d start my dissertation tomorrow, if they’d let me.”

  Seeing an opening,
he started in on his perennial subject: slavery and trauma. I could never tell if he actually thought he was discoursing on all this to me for the first time, in which case the drugs had given him mild dementia, or if—and this seemed more likely—it didn’t matter a great deal whom he was describing it to, he just needed to narrate it, over and over.

  Earlier that summer the magazine had run my first feature in months. I had written a story about Wall Street bundlers who had begun to favor Democrats. My editor had cut some of the color I’d worked hard to get into the piece but not, for once, the implied criticism. It had drawn a slew of comments on the website and been reposted all over, making the marketing department giddy with excitement. Michael was on the list of friends and family to whom I had sent a link, people who didn’t read the magazine and would otherwise never see my work. He’d been on that list for years. My mother subscribed, of course, wanting to see my articles in print. Celia usually sent a quick e-mail in response, as she had to this one. But from Michael, as usual, not a word. At home during Thanksgiving or Christmas, he would listen attentively enough if I was telling him about an assignment, but I had no sense if he ever read what I wrote, and, if he did, what he thought of it.

  As the waiter arrived to clear our plates, I asked Michael about it. Maybe it was having finally told him about Seth. Or the fact that I had a flight back to New York in the morning, and didn’t know when I would see him next. Or simply that the two of us hadn’t spent this kind of time together in I couldn’t remember how long, and I wanted to know.

  He appeared confused by my question, and took his time answering.

  “You’ve had advantages,” he said. “The networks you’ve been a part of, the friends who’ve hired you.” How did he know friends had hired me? Had I told him that? Had Celia? “The kinds of advantages most black people don’t get,” he added.