A Calling for Charlie Barnes Read online

  In between interruptions, like his consultations and follow-ups, we must have watched close to twelve hundred hours of television over the course of his recovery from surgery and his two rounds of chemo. We watched, or rewatched, all of Cheers. We watched at least two-thirds of Seinfeld and half of Friends. Mindless, time-killing sitcoms helped keep him alive. There were also less familiar offerings: niche shows on the Syfy channel, Canadian whodunits, classic sitcoms he could remember loving back in the day, now so unwatchably bad that he questioned the judgment of his earlier self. If beloved old shows could crater, did that give the lie to today’s amusement? Personally, I did not know what to make of the show Lost, which struck me as both aimless and tedious but uncanny, too, in the way life itself is uncanny, full of a grand, anachronistic, possibly scripted intent. We got through its six seasons in twelve days. He was conked out half the time, healing up, or dying a little more—maybe both, who could say?—so that each show, each season, each series we completed must have been for him a kaleidoscope of narrative more than any coherent story. When he began to snore, I’d pause the television and peer over at him. I owed him everything.

  But he hurt me, too, during this time—inadvertently. Though it was nothing I didn’t already know.

  We had started watching Downton Abbey, more mindless fare. But every now and again that show went for the jugular, piercing the veil of a pretty little period drama to deliver pure dread.

  The year is 1912. The heir apparent to Downton Abbey is a lawyer from Manchester called Matthew Crawley. As a newly minted aristocrat, Crawley finds himself chafing against the highbrow customs he’s required to sustain. When Mr. Molesley, his proud valet, attempts to help him with his cufflinks, the thoroughly modern Crawley objects to such slavish interference. Surely, he remarks to the servant, you have better things to do.

  Doing his British best to paper over his wounded pride, the servant replies, “This is my job, sir.”

  Crawley scoffs. He looks the man in the eye, in the mirror, and doubles down.

  “Seems a very silly occupation for a grown man,” he says matter-of-factly.

  Matthew Crawley has done the unspeakable: he has destroyed the fiction that Mr. Molesley requires to go on believing that his life is a useful thing, that it’s being spent with dignity and purpose.

  Without so much as turning to me, Chuck remarked from his recliner:

  “Sounds like what you do, Jake.”

  There was silence as I peered over at him. “Beg your pardon?”

  “Writing novels,” he said. “All that make-believe. That’s a very silly occupation for a grown man, too.”

  It was not an attempt at humor, just a statement of fact. If it was uncharacteristically callow, I don’t think he knew it. He went on watching. The scene changed. I must have turned back to the TV. Ten minutes later, he was asleep again.

  I had believed that a silly occupation for a grown man was dressing in a clown suit and calling yourself Jolly Cholly, or manufacturing and marketing a flying toupee, but apparently these were sound pursuits compared to the concerted silliness of writing novels. I also believed I had his respect, but he had no more respect for my childish scribblings, comic sketches, and published titles than his ex-wives and children had for Steady Boy and his schemes.

  He could treat real life as a fiction, wish away this and will that into existence, manipulate the truth and toy with people’s feelings, leave off the old dead drafts and start over with a new cast of characters whenever the whim struck, trade an Evangeline in for a Barbara and swap Downers Grove for Schaumburg … he could put all the tactics of the writer’s craft to good use in his life, but I was the silly one for making a career of it.

  45

  I did what I could for Barbara: tidied, shoveled the drive when it snowed. No great thanks was ever forthcoming. That was okay. I wasn’t there for her. She may have been jealous that I had the luxury to act the hero, cooking for him and driving him to his doctor’s appointments, when she was the nurse and natural caretaker between us, not to mention the man’s wife. I walked on eggshells whenever she was home from work and even rented an apartment on Roselle Road to make myself scarce on weekends. I was rarely there, but I think it pleased her to know that I had a place to go, that I was a part-time valet like Mr. Molesley and not a permanent fixture. I turned down a residency in Menerbes, did the grocery shopping.

  Six weeks after the Whipple, we took an involuntary hiatus from our television marathon. You might suspect, by that, an infection or sudden fever; it was not so straightforward. It was the middle of the day in Schaumburg, capital of TiVo, in the Kingdom of Netflix, and I was having a hard time keeping the political intrigue straight from the police procedural, the family drama distinct from the science fiction. We spent time in spacecraft and surveillance rooms, in precinct offices, law courts and strip clubs. Oh, the sound and fury of endless streaming! Yet every forty-four minutes or so, I would tune back in to the old man who was only ever half awake, and no matter where we’d just been—in Pakistan spoiling a plot, or rooting out a mole at the Pentagon, or solving the metaphysical puzzles of a sudden rapture—I was returned to the ongoing, essentially static, event-free drama unfolding on the recliner in a stuffy suburban living room, the cellular drama that will represent, for most Americans, the only one that threatens, that entangles, that destroys: the small, stupid drama of a person dying of cancer, the biggest and dullest drama on earth, which might have been called—if it weren’t already the title of a TV show—the facts of life.

  The power went out. The TV blinked off, the sound cut to silence. I was roused from a stupor and sat upright. I expected to look over and find Chuck snoring right through it, but he was awake; indeed, he had collapsed the footrest and was peering deeply into the room as if dazed, mesmerized. He turned to me and, with a curiosity I had seen no sign of since the surgery, asked if I was an alien.

  “A what?”

  “An alien?”

  He pointed to the television. It was blank, but I got his meaning. All our news of extraterrestrial beings came from there.

  “Not that I know of,” I said.

  It was a puzzling remark, not quite a joke. A moment later, I did what you do when the power goes out: drifted into the kitchen wondering dumbly whom I might call. When I wandered back into the living room, I found the front door open. Chuck was standing in the yard peering up at an overcast sky. It was a moody day on Rust Road, full of fog and bruised cloud. As I idly watched from the doorway, he walked to the curb where my rental was parked, opened the door and climbed in. By the time it dawned on me that he had my car keys and I might want to go after him, stop him, do something … he’d turned the engine over and was rounding the bend, out of sight.

  At last, it made perfect sense. The temptation to blame himself had always been very strong. If a product didn’t perform, the marketplace wasn’t the problem. The marketplace was efficient. The fault belonged to the inventor and entrepreneur; it belonged to him. His ideas were off. Is there a need for this in the marketplace? These nice people were looking for a good time and you gave them herpes. Do you even have a lawyer? Voices, so many voices saying No, not good, get lost. How could a whole chorus of voices be wrong?

  What a temptation!

  He left the neighborhood of Rust Road and gained the expressway and a mile later pulled off to the shoulder near the interstate exchange. He let the car idle as he opened the door and stood looking out at the traffic converging at junctures east and west while commercial freight pounded past him and little sedans zipped by. He could feel his hair blow around in the currents. Very unlike him, to leave the house without a hat. To the north, the Woodfield Mall; to the east, the city skyline; to the south, stalled traffic glinting under the sun, inching along the highway; and to the west, a steady flow of it bifurcating and shamrocking into the four corners of the earth … and for the first time, he saw it all for what it really was.

  He got off the highway at the mall exit and paid
a visit to the Sears, Roebuck. No one called it that anymore. It was just “Sears” now, this anchor store among the last of its kind.

  “Do you have the Doolander in stock?” he asked an employee who was making a display of pink antifreeze bottles.

  “The what?”

  “Endopalm-T?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Do you have Endopalm-T?”

  “I don’t know what that is,” the employee said. “I can look it up for you in the system, if you’d like.”

  The system. He followed the man over to it, where he spelled out Endopalm-T, but the system had no match.

  “Is there a different system?” he asked.

  “Sir,” the man said, pointing down at his feet, “you can’t be in here without shoes on.”

  He got his start selling shoes—everyone knew that. But everyone also knew that Sears was by then a shadow of its former self. And they were worried about him? He left. He went next door to an office of H&R Block, the tax-prep chain, where he approached the woman sitting behind the front desk. She watched the sickly man approach, hair tousled, in plaid pajama pants and a Fighting Illini sweatshirt.

  “Jimmy Cayne,” he said.

  “Come again?”

  “Little guy, not”—he dropped his voice—“much to look at …”

  He offered the woman a universal shrug: What are you going to do?

  “What are you asking me?”

  “I’m here to see Jimmy Cayne.”

  “There’s nobody here by the name Jimmy,” she said.

  He nodded as if this, too, was entirely predictable.

  “Little guy,” he said.

  “No little guy here,” the woman said.

  “The little games people play for big profits,” he said, “headquarters, mansions, the ‘brand names.’ Tell him … I don’t buy it anymore.”

  He was light an organ or two, but in his mind, where it mattered, it was America that had been hollowed out. He left the H&R Block for the Sherwin-Williams next door, where he drifted down the aisles collecting paint samples. The assistant manager approached him.

  “May I help you?”

  “I invented the spill-proof paint can,” he said.

  There was a long pause.

  “Is that right?”

  “In 1971. Worked all night on it. Opened up this can of paint, see, it spills everywhere. I think to myself gotta be a better way, gotta be … next thing you know, I’m doodling. Conceptualizing, you know. Run out to the garage. Bent this in place, bent that … voilà! Spill-proof paint can. Apply for a patten … Patton … sorry, pat tent … never heard back. Two years later, open a new can … there’s my design. No recognition to this day. True story.”

  He waited for a reply, but the assistant manager was not human, either.

  Was there one human being left in Schaumburg? Was there one honest, sympathetic, feeling person in all the suburbs? Not at the Sears, not at the tax store, and not here at the place that sold paint, either. And I’m sorry, he thought, it was that way throughout Chicagoland, the Land of Lincoln, the heartland, and all the rest of America, too. It was stocked full of, crowded up with, overrun by … fakes, frauds, impostors.

  He couldn’t say for sure that every soul had been replaced, or even that he was still alive. A compromised world of fakes in which he felt ill all the time fit the description of purgatory pretty well. Either way, was it any great surprise that no product or idea of his had taken hold here? At last, it made perfect sense: his double-o’s, triple downs, and what-have-yous, they were never going to gain traction much less triumph in a world overrun by extraterrestrial beings. He knew that the minute the power went out.

  His side hurt where they had gone in weeks earlier and, in the guise of healing him, attempted to vacuum out his soul. Only they “missed a little,” to use their parlance; they “failed to get it all.” A little soul remained. It was all he needed to see far and wide what had really taken place in this world and all that was taking place still. Bankruptcy, disability, and homelessness now struck him as entirely advantageous to good fortune. The dispossessed, the disinherited, the ailing, those stuck in terminal holding patterns or arrested by their traumas and living as ghosts were, according to a terrific irony, the last of the living, while the overlords of wealth and good health were counterfeits. Martians? Mothmen? Humanoid flies? Hard to say. They could have been lizards zipped up in skin suits for all his command of the fine print.

  It was no accident that, after the paint store, he found himself wandering the county hospital. The old were there, the infected, the immobile, the amputated, the sclerotic, and the deformed. They loitered around the dry fountain smoking their old-school cigarettes. They choked the hallways with wheelchairs and IV poles. They lay helpless and terrified in their deathbeds, real people with real problems, unlike those invulnerable aliens out there running the show. What a monumental task it would be to roust these sad sacks into a respectable resistance, but that was his final hope, the ailing and enlightened the last people on earth …

  He had not had his scrambled eggs and was hungry when he departed the hospital. He took the rental around the drive-through. Ninety-nine billion served, the sign said. He had served no one. He had done nothing. When he got his food, he could not eat it. But at least he understood the disconnect between the sign and himself: what they served was alien grub, and what he required was real-person food. The flat gray patties, the nuclear cheese and the bright red-and-green goo on top all but crawled before his eyes. This was not a world for living in. He went around again to demand his money back, a favorite American pastime, but the prospect of attempting to explain all the suffering and outrage involved in “99 billion served” to one of the young and healthy drones at the window just frustrated and exhausted him.

  He gained the highway again and followed the Tri-State to I-57 south. Once upon a time, he had done this particular drive every Saturday. Yes, it was back to Danville for Charlie Barnes, back to the good old days, back to high school football games and functioning bowels—and back to the can-do spirit of his youth, drained from him these many years (as if via gastric tube) by the big city and its suburbs. He navigated the drive by feel, leaving the highway for the back roads at Kankakee and taking a left at the first fork, a right at the next. It was a straight shot into Danville from there. Nothing ever seemed quite so nostalgic as the heartland cornfields he passed, the Podunk towns. But when he pulled into the driveway of the house on Vermilion, he was inside an unrecognizable rental car, not the old Newport. That was confusing. He tried to recall why he had come. He had lived in that house once. He was real there, young and in love. But time had rendered it unrecognizable, it was crumbling and in need of repair, and no boy ran out to greet him. By the time the owner emerged to investigate why a stranger was parked in his driveway, Charlie was racked with sobs.

  “I’m looking for Old Poor Farm,” he told the man upon powering down the window, his face wet with tears.

  “Old what?”

  “The poor farm? Out on the Catlin-Tilton Road?”

  That was a real place once, realest place he’d ever known. People helping people, and heaven on earth just around the bend.

  “Well,” said the man, “if it’s the Catlin-Tilton Road you’re after …”

  He followed the man’s directions to the Walmart on the former site of Old Poor Farm. No trace of it remained: no more do-gooders in wool suits or pedestal desks holding jars of wheat germ. The social contract was over. Charley Proffit of Peoria, Illinois, had remarried and was living … where? And was she fake, too? He would have liked to know that at least one thing had been real once upon a—

  He had to admit to himself something that only a real person could: time had passed; he had grown old and would die. He needed help. But there was no one around to help him. Even the seasons, with their suggestion of renewal—that crisp touch of fall, that old hint of spring—were gone. He was wandering down an aisle of the Walmart in the purgatorial h
alf-light among the zombie hordes.

  “I came up with the soccer ball,” he told the cashier.

  “You want the sports aisle.”

  “Not the soccer ball,” he said, amused by his own mistake. “The sno-cone. You see, first I shaved some ice into a little cup, I did it for Jerry. Then I dabbed a little … what do you call it? I didn’t call it a sno-cone. I called it poor man’s ice cream. Marketing is everything. Timing, too.”

  The cashier looked to the bagger for help.

  “I never had good timing.”

  The bagger said, “Mister, you buying something?”

  He found, within reach, a display of candy bars. At last, real food. He took one Charleston Chew, one box of Good & Plenty, and two or three other old familiar items and placed them on the belt. Back in the rental car, he sucked on some Milk Duds in the handicapped spot. A pair of Danville police officers found him the next morning, 2:00 a.m., asleep in the front seat …

  Barbara and I had been looking for him almost twenty-four hours by then.

  “If you can’t take care of him, why are you here?” she asked me. “Do I need to hire someone?”

  “I didn’t know he had my keys. And I didn’t think he had the energy.”

  “First you let my dog out to die, now it’s my husband.”

  “For the millionth time,” I said. “I didn’t know it was an inside dog.”

  “I should have just agreed to let Marcy come,” she said. “Marcy is a disaster, but at least she’s competent.”

  “Why is Marcy a disaster?”

  “She’s a spoiled brat. She sabotages everyone’s happiness. She doesn’t believe her father even deserves happiness. She’s an asshole. Marcy is an asshole.”

  “Does Chuck know that’s how you feel?”

  “If Chuck were honest with himself, he would feel the same way. But that’s his daughter. He can’t afford to be honest.”