Haywire, Brooke Hayward [the best ebook reader for android TXT] 📗

Bill came and sat beside me in the other armchair at the foot of the bed.

“Go on.” I was learning more about Bill in these afternoons at the hospital than in our entire adult life. There was a strange urgency to our conversations, as if somehow we had been given a second chance to catch up with each other—but if we messed it up this time …

“Well, when I got into New York I went over to the apartment at the Beekman. And I was dealing with a beard, remember? A full-on beard, which Pamela had never seen before. It completely freaked her out.” He threw back his head and laughed.

“I wondered what had happened to the beard.”

“Well, she made me go to the barber, Father’s barber at the St. Regis. What a hassle. She said if Father saw me in that condition, he might have a serious setback. Wouldn’t do him any good to get him mad, irritate him. She felt my hair was a little long, too, so I put it in a ponytail and told her I would dialogue with Father full-face only, so he’d never see it.” (He laughed some more, his zany laugh, which always made me giggle.) “And we came over here. To the hospital.”

“Well, at least you still have your mustache.”

Bill stroked it fondly.

“He was conscious at first,” he went on, “and coherent. We talked for a minute and he said that his play was terrific. He asked me what I was doing, and I told him Idaho Transfer [after Easy Rider, Bill and Peter Fonda figured they were a winning combination and had produced and directed two more movies together], and he said that was a terrible title. Hated it. Then he asked me how come I wasn’t in uniform—was I on leave? I didn’t want to remind him I’d been out of the paratroopers for ten years. I could have walked in with a full beard and dark glasses and smoking a joint, and he wouldn’t have known. His vision thing wasn’t happening. He was laying back, looking awful with the bandages and shit. He asked me if I had a gun. I said, ‘Yes, I do.’ He said, ‘What kind of a gun is it?’ They seemed rather strange questions. And I said, ‘Well, it’s a Smith & Wesson thirty-eight special,’ and he said, ‘Oh, good.’ Bizarre fragmented dialogue like that.”

We were definitely flip sides of the same coin. I knew that much. I felt better whenever Bill’s life touched mine. I felt, when I saw him, as if I were coming home after a long journey. As unreliable as he might be (and was) where anyone else was concerned—as eccentric, as fundamentally off center as I knew him to be—at that moment, he was the only person left in the world with whom I would unequivocably trust my life. We sat side by side in the armchairs at Father’s feet, and I thought irreverently it was unfortunate Bill was my brother; if it weren’t for the taboos about incest, I would have married him. It wasn’t so much sexual attraction (although I’d never pursued this line of psychological investigation: the taboos were thicker than blood); it was much less complicated than that. We had a tacit understanding.

“I feel alone,” I said to him. “Do you ever feel alone? I mean alone? Way up high where the air is so thin and cold nothing much can live? And besides, my mind is going. I’m turning into a manic-depressive right here. Whenever I come into this room, it happens. Up and down. Up and down. Both at the same time. It makes me queasy.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “That’s normal.”

Normal, I thought. It was cold in the room. A bracing climate. Freezing, actually. My skin hurt as if I were walking naked through a driving blizzard. Father’s body lay before us like the mound of a newly dug grave beneath fresh snow. All that white. All we could see of him, from where we sat, was his swollen belly looming toward us. A great white whale. Moby Dick beached.

Normal? There was definitely something in the air.

“Stop worrying about it,” said Bill. “Your senses are more acute than usual, that’s all. They’re probably more acute than the average citizen’s, anyway.” He paused. “You’re right. You are a manic-depressive.” He grinned at me. “Join the gang.” He went back to staring at Father’s feet beneath the ghostly bedclothes.

“By our standards,” he said without interrupting his contemplation, “most people don’t know the meaning of the word ‘depression,’ although it’s become fashionable to bandy around. But we had a superb education; our family wrote the textbook. We could probably give courses in it. Carry on the tradition. Those lows. Jesus, I think I know what Hell looks like. I’ve charted it, every square inch of it. I’ve been in states so bad I’ve been paralyzed with fear. Literally couldn’t get out of my bed for weeks. Totally wasted time. Pillow over my head. Really rank. No showers, no food, couldn’t talk, couldn’t read—couldn’t even concentrate on the TV. No relating to my life at all. Total stupor. Bad. I never want to go through that trip again. But you have to remember one thing: most people don’t spiral down as low as we have, but they sure don’t get up as high, either. No way. They mosey along on relatively level ground, a little happy, a little sad.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said. “I’d like that for a change. Sounds peaceful.”

“Boring,” said Bill. “Boring. You’d get sick of it. We’ve been exposed to too much. Overexposed. Once you’ve been there—those highs!—my God, they’re like Mount Everest. Hard to scale but worth it when you get to the top. Dizzy stuff.” Bill liked challenges. He was a mountain climber. He liked mountains, climbing up them and skiing down them. He’d been up and down the Amazon in a friend’s boat and over the Snake River rapids in a