Through the windows of the psych ward, where I was transported by ambulance, the scrubby desert mountains resembled a painted backdrop. I stared at those mountains to avoid looking at my shaken children and frightened parents （now both in their seventies）; my brothers, Ames and Alfred; Trudy, who held my hand and asked if I needed more money. All of them wanted to help, and their tenderness filled me with despair for having brought them yet more sorrow and disappointment. Failure upon failure. I wept uncontrollably, and the doctors scrambled for some better way to stabilize me. It took almost three weeks.
There was one exception to my remorse: the man who’d saved my life. I hated Drew for having thwarted my bold urge, which now had abandoned me. Drew hated me for, as he put it, trying to kill him within twenty-four hours of my arrival. Now we shared the booby prize for his heroic act: a person no one wanted, not even me.
Our blunt exchanges of enmity began while I was still an inpatient, but it was after I was discharged and back in Drew and Sasha’s guest room （whose windowsill she had lined with flowering cacti to cheer me up） that we gave full vent to our mutual loathing. I shouted at Drew through the desert silence, and he shouted back at me. Sasha begged us to stop, demanded we stop, and stormed out of the house when we ignored her. We couldn’t stop. One night, as we raged at each other across their deck, Sasha began spraying us with a garden hose the way Trudy, back in Winnetka, used to douse fighting cats. Stunned, we covered our heads until, helpless and waterlogged, we both began to laugh. That was a turning point. “Do I need to get the hose?” Sasha would ask when she sensed us drifting into conflict. Drew had begun forcing vitamins on me in the hospital; at his house, he imposed a high-protein fresh-food diet and enrolled me in a punishing course of physical therapy. As my color improved and I worked on my limp, I caught Drew eyeing me now and then with a look I struggled to name. Then I got it: curiosity. I was fifty-one. Whatever I did with the rest of my life would belong to Drew as much as me. My actions mattered immediately and directly. This discovery roused my old ambition; I felt it prickle to life like a limb so long asleep, I’d forgotten it.
I returned to Chicago nine weeks after leaving. On the ride from O’Hare to my apartment, I gazed at the sparkling buildings downtown and felt my failure and exile slide back around me. Nothing had changed. The act of entering my studio was forensic, like visiting a crime scene. The stale air had a faint toxic sweetness. I was afraid that if I went to sleep there, I would never wake up. So I stayed awake, organizing my possessions overnight and arranging for them to be boxed and shipped to Drew and Sasha’s house. I left keys and instructions and money in an envelope for the super, and hoped for the best.
Dawn had barely broken when I got back on the Blue Line to the airport. As I watched the illumination of the Chicago sky, I was dreaming of the desert. I wanted to fill its emptiness with a different story than the one I’d lived so far. Like Sasha had.
I rented a room in town and began studying for the California bar, feeling a rumbling return of my old appetite for arguments and statutes. Within a few months, I was doing legal work for some of Drew’s indigent patients. At the end of my first year, I was elected mayor of our San Bernardino town. If these victories seem improbable, I invite you to recall the narrative power of redemption stories. America loves a sinner, lucky for me.
Drew and I never talk about our odd history, but I think my “success,” and any good I’ve managed to do, have brought him gladness. Sasha tells me, during her long hugs that I’ve come to depend on, that I’ve helped him to relax. After our twice-weekly tennis games, Drew usually stops and has a beer with me rather than bolting straight back to his clinic. When the balloons are out, as they often are, we raise our glasses at the sky before we drink.
Rhyme Scheme
M has four primary freckles on her nose and approximately twenty-four secondary freckles. I say “approximately” not because her secondary freckles can’t be counted—few things in this world can’t be counted—but because I can’t stare at M’s nose for long enough to count her secondary freckles without making her uncomfortable. Her hair is thicker than the hair of 40 percent of the women who work among us and longer than 57 percent, and she wears hair bands 24 percent of the time, scrunchies 28 percent of the time, and her hair loose 48 percent of the time. She is exactly one week older than I am—25.56 to my 25.54—a fact I learned from the icebreaker our team leader, O’Brien, conducted during a taco party he hosted at his house for our whole team when we first became a team. Each of us gave the date, time, and place of our birth, and O’Brien plotted our data on a dynamic 3D Earth model and slowly rotated it so that we could see all forty-three team members ping into existence over the course of our aggregate age span. In the model, M and I seemed to come to life at the same instant.