At the Bottom of Everything(73)
“You and your friend wrecked my fucking life, you know.”
“I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry.”
“I should wreck yours too. I could do it with one phone call.”
“I understand. I’m sorry.”
He went away for long enough that I thought he might be making his one life-wrecking phone call, but then he came back and he sounded like he was drinking something. “You know, that girl, she doesn’t belong on my conscience.”
“No.”
“That family, they were good to me, they believed me. No charges, nothing like that.”
“I know.”
Before he hung up, he said something so kind I almost dropped the phone. “You guys were fucking kids. Just fucking kids.”
And that was it.
So he’s not going to call the police or kill us or anything. And I think talking to him did something good for me. I read somewhere there are two kinds of guilt: the sweaty, frantic, four-in-the-morning kind, where you almost wish you’d get caught, and a quieter, sadder kind, where it feels like you’re sitting on a rainy beach, looking out at the water. I feel like calling him might have pushed me from the first kind to the second. (I should probably go easy on the audiobooks, it occurs to me.)
From: <Adam Sanecki>
To: <Thomas Pell>
Date: Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 6:14 PM
Subject: (no subject)
Hey. I’m just back from visiting you. I came there meaning to tell you something, and I managed to spend the whole hour not doing it. Much easier to talk about Sonia and law school applications, it turns out. Maybe you got Raymond’s note too (I’m not sure if he’d have your email, actually) but Sri Prabhakara is dead. He died last week. He was ninety or so, and he had a heart attack in his sleep. There’s a service for him at the center in a couple of weeks. I couldn’t think of how to say it, but I should have told you. I’m sorry.
From: <Adam Sanecki>
To: <Thomas Pell>
Date: Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 9:14 PM
Subject: (no subject)
Hey. Reassure me the phone line isn’t dead, OK? I can’t tell if it’s me being paranoid or an actual change (me being paranoid’s usually a pretty good bet), but I’ve been getting a weird feeling. Things are good/normal with me.
From: <Richard Pell>
To: <Adam Sanecki>
Date: Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 8:44 PM
Subject: re: greetings
Adam—
I hope this finds you well. Your mother tells us you’ve got a serious girlfriend—this is, I know, just the kind of thing twentysomethings most like for their friends’ parents to discuss in the lobbies of movie theaters. Anyway, bring her by the house sometime and we promise to feed you well and embarrass you minimally.
Some fretful Thomas news—he’s still in the hospital, but lately threatening to check himself out (Kafka ghostwrote the laws regarding committing an adult against his will, I’m fairly sure). Also—and please don’t repeat this to him, since he seems to have taken his correspondence with you as one of his refuges from all the medico-parental aspects of his life—his doctor told us this morning that he seems not to be taking his pills. Unsure how new a development this is, but alarm bells are jangling in Sally and me. He’s had the usual litany of complaints with the pills—fuzzy-headedness, bloatedness, etc.—but they were seeming to do the job, taking the more worrisome items off his mental menu. And lately those items have been creeping back, so we’d already been concerned: lots of ordinary words used in unordinary ways—becoming, seeing, falling, opening. Mainly it’s been a look, though, which I’m sure you became acquainted with in India—a strong impression of having his thoughts on matters over the horizon, which is, the doctors tell us, precisely the wrong place for them to be.
We’ve already imposed on you more than anyone could reasonably—or unreasonably—ask, but I wonder if you’d be willing to keep writing to him, visiting him, etc., and if you could—if you think it’s warranted—reassure us about whether there’s been a change, whether the story seems to you about to tip back into crisis. We’ve come to trust your vision in all this much more than our own, and to a certain extent even more than the doctors’. I think there’s a sport in making authority figures wring their hands, and Thomas has become all too skilled at it. My sense is that there’s less nonsense between the two of you, and that you might be able to tell us whether this is the sort of thing that could be cleared up with some family sessions and pharmacological tweaks, or if it’s something, again, entirely other.