This was the worst ever, even worse than the depression that had followed the Famous Thanksgiving Jag of 1980, the one that had ended his teaching career and his marriage. It had also come close to ending Nora's life. He had come to that time in Penobscot County Jail. A deputy was sitting outside his cell, reading a copy of Crazy magazine and picking his nose. Gardener learned later that all police departments are aware that jag-drinkers frequently come off their hinges deeply depressed. So if there happens to be a man available, he keeps an eye on you, just to make sure you don't highside it… at least not until you post bond and get off the county property.
“Where am IT Gardener had asked.
“Where do you think you are?” the deputy asked. He looked at the large green booger he had just scraped out of his nose and then wiped it slowly and with apparent enjoyment onto the sole of his shoe, squashing it down, smearing it along the dark dirt there. Gardener had been unable to take his eyes from this operation; a year later he would write a poem about it.
“What did I do?”
Save for occasional flashes, the previous two days had been totally black. The flashes were unrelated, like cloud-rifts which let through uncertain flickers of sunlight as a storm approaches. Bringing Nora a cup of tea and then starting to harangue her about the nukes. Oh yes, the nukes. Ave Nukea Eterna. When he died, his final word on the whole fucking mess wouldn't be Rosebud but Nukes. He could remember failing down in the driveway beside his house. Getting a pizza and being so drunk great big runny clots of cheese went down inside his shirt, burning his chest. He could remember calling Bobbi. Calling and babbling something to her, something awful, and had Nora been screaming? Screaming?
“What did I do?” he asked, more urgently.
The deputy looked at him for a moment with a perfect clear-eyed contempt. “Shot your wife. That's what you did. Good fucking deal, uh?”
The deputy had gone back to his Crazy magazine.
That had been bad; this was worse. That depthless feeling of self-contempt, the grisly certainty that you had done bad things you couldn't remember. Not a few too many glasses of champagne at the New Year's Eve party where you put a lampshade on your head and boogied around the room with it slipping down over your eyes, everybody in attendance (with the exception of your wife) thinking it was just the funniest thing they'd ever seen in their lives… Not knowing you did fun things like punching department heads. Or shooting your wife.
It had been worse this time.
How could it be worse than Nora?
Something. For the time being his head hurt too badly to even try reconstructing the last unknown period of time.
Gardener looked down at the water, the waves bulging smoothly up toward where he sat, forearms on his knees, head sagging. When the troughs passed he could see barnacles and slick green seaweed. No… not really seaweed. Green slime. Like boogers.
Shot your wife… good fucking deal, uh?
Gardener closed his eyes against the sickening pulses of pain, then opened them again.
Jump in, a voice cajoled him softly. I mean, what the fuck, you don't really need any more of this shit, do you? Game called in the bottom of the first. Not official. Rainout. To be rescheduled when the Great Wheel of Karma turns into the next life… or the one after that, if I have to spend the next making up for this one by being a dung beetle or something. Hang up your jock, Gard. Jump in. In your current state, both of your legs will cramp and it'll be over quick. Gotta beat a bedsheet in a jail cell, anyway. Go on, jump.
He got up and stood swaying on the rocks, looking at the water. Just one big step, that's all it would take. He could do it in his sleep. Shit, almost had.
Not yet. Want to talk to Bobbi first.
The part of his mind which still wanted a little to live grasped at this idea. Bobbi. Bobbi was the only part of his old life that still seemed somehow whole and good. Bobbi was living down there in Haven, writing her westerns, still sane, still his friend if no longer his lover. His last friend.
Want to talk to Bobbi first, okay?
Why? So you can make a last stab at fucking her up, too? God knows you've tried hard enough. She's got a police record because of you, and undoubtedly her own FBI folder as well. Leave Bobbi out of this. Jump and stop fucking around.
He swayed forward, very close to doing it. The part of him that still wanted to live seemed to have no arguments left, no delaying tactics. It could have said that he had stayed sober-more or less-for the last three years, there had been no blackouts since he and Bobbi had been arrested at Seabrook in 1985. But that was a hollow argument. Except for Bobbi he was now completely alone. His mind was in turmoil almost all of the time, returning again and again-even sober-to the subject of the nukes. He recognized that his original concern and anger had rotted into obsession… but recognition and rehabilitation were not the same things at all. His poetry had deteriorated. His mind had deteriorated. Worst of all, when he wasn't drinking he wished he was. It's just that the hurting's all the time now. I'm like a bomb walking around and looking for a place to go off. Time to defuse.
Okay, then. Okay. He closed his eyes and got ready.
As he did, an odd certainty came to him, an intuition so strong that it was nearly precognitive. He felt that Bobbi needed to talk to him, rather than the other way around. That it was no mind trick. She really was in some kind of trouble. Bad trouble.
He opened his eyes and looked around, like a man coming out of a deep daze. He would find a phone and call her. He wouldn't say “Hey Bobbi I had another blackout” and he wouldn't say “I don't know where I am Bobbi but this time there's no nose-picking deputy to stop me.” He would say “Hey, Bobbi, how you doin”?” and when she told him she was doin” okay, never better, shooting it out with the James gang in Northfield, or lighting out for the territories with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and by the way, Gard, how's your own bad self, Gard would tell her he was fine, writing some good stuff for a change, thinking of going over Vermont way for a bit, see some friends. Then he would go back out to the end of the breakwater and jump off. Nothing fancy; he would just bellyflop into the dead zone. That seemed to fit; after all, it was the way he had mostly gotten through the live one. The ocean had been here for a billion years or so. It would wait another five minutes while he did that.
But no laying it off on her, you hear me? Promise, Gard. No breaking down and blubbering. You're supposed to be her friend, not the male equivalent of her slimebucket sister. None of that shit.
He had broken promises in his life, God knew-a few thousand of them to himself. But this one he would keep.
He climbed clumsily up to the top of the breakwater. It was rough and rocky, a really fine place to break an ankle. He looked around apathetically for his scuffed brown totebag, the one he always took with him when he went off to read, or just to ramble, thinking it might be lodged in one of the holes between the rocks, or maybe just lying there. It wasn't. It was an old campaigner, scuffed and battered, going back to the last troubled years of his marriage, something he had managed to hold onto while all the valuable things got lost. Well, now the tote was finally gone, too. Clothes, toothbrush, bar of soap in a plastic dish, a bunch of jerky meat-sticks (it amused Bobbi to cure jerky in her shed, sometimes), a twenty-dollar bill under the tote's bottom… and all his unpublished poems, of course.
The poems were the least of his worries. The ones he had written over the last couple of years, and to which he had given the wonderfully witty and upbeat title “The Radiation Cycle”, had been submitted to five different publishers and rejected by all five. One anonymous editor had scribbled: “Poetry and politics rarely mix; poetry and propaganda, never.” This little homily was perfectly true, he knew it… and still hadn't been able to stop.