How Lucky: A Novel Page 20

  I am not bitter about coming around too late for this. I am happy for them! And anyway, it’s not like Spinraza suddenly makes their life easy or anything. All Spinraza does is give them a modicum of hope that someday they might have an outside shot at something resembling the vague outlines of a normal life. Spinraza comes with its own issues too, not least of which is that you can only get Spinraza if you’re SMA-1 or SMA-2, the most severe forms, and every injection is going to run you $125,000 apiece. You get five injections your first year, and three every year after that, which means that over the first ten years of your life, it costs $4 million just to give you a chance at maybe possibly staying alive. You thought my mom’s life was hard enough raising me? Now imagine what insurance looks like when you have to fight for four million bucks’ worth of injections.

  I wouldn’t change anything, all told. I’m glad they’ve made advancements. I’m glad they know more. I’m glad SMA is not an obvious death sentence anymore. I’m glad a bunch of people dumping water on their heads and posting it to Instagram made an actual difference in the world. It’s only a few years later, but you would never see an Ice Bucket Challenge now. We don’t trust or believe anything online anymore. I’m glad that happened at the exact last moment it could have meant anything. It doesn’t seem like things are getting better, but sometimes they are, they really are.

  But my life is mine. I had an opportunity to live as close to a “normal” life as I possibly could have. That’s not nothing. I will take it. I have taken it.

  But yeah.

  When you know you’re going to die young before you ever know what “dying” or “being young” even means, you’re an odd combination. You can be incredibly cautious (what if right now is when it happens?) and stupidly reckless (what if tomorrow is when it happens?). I’ve spent my life with death sitting right next to me, silently observing, taking its time, happy to scoop me up on a whim. I had to take advantage of the little time I had. For me, it manifested itself in taking big risks, like moving to Athens, far away from my mom and almost everything I knew.

  I wonder what it would have been like if I hadn’t always known I was gonna die. I wonder if I’d be sitting in this chair right now, in Georgia, in the middle of the night, with crumpled bones and a maniac pushing me down the street while muttering to himself about how heavy this “gimp” is, with no one knowing where I am, with no one who can help me. I put myself in this predicament, I think, because I felt both fragile and immortal. I cheated death for a long time. And yet here I am. All because the end always felt around the corner.

  Don’t judge. It’s just around the corner for you too.

  57.

  I’m sorry about all that, Daniel,” he says. “Ai-Chin will be disappointed in me. She says she liked you. She didn’t tell me about the chair, though. We’re going to have some words over that.”

  He inhales deeply. “Ahhhh . . . Now let’s get back to this bacon.”

  Jonathan is making bacon again. At four in the morning. In my kitchen. He wheeled me back home, panting and cursing all the way because I had the emergency brake on and he didn’t know how to click it off, pushed me up my ramp, brought me inside, stashed me in the corner, kicked Terry to make sure he wasn’t moving (he wasn’t, though I think I saw his chest move a couple of times), washed the blood off his hands in the sink, picked up the bacon he had been eating off the floor, put a piece of it in his mouth, scowled and grimaced, placed it in the trash, walked up to me, looked me in the eye, apologized, mentioned that Ai-Chin hadn’t told him about the chair, and then said, “Now let’s get back to this bacon.”

  Nothing hurts anymore. This is a gift, I suppose, like at the end of Brazil, when Jonathan Pryce is in so much pain while he’s being tortured that he leaves his body and imagines a future where he makes a hero’s escape and runs off with the woman he loves. I am just curled up in the chair, tucked into this corner, and the pain of my broken bones and my gasping lungs and whatever is causing my hair to be dripping blood from its wet tips, it’s all somewhere else. I appreciate the break. I must look like I’ve been dribbled down multiple staircases, but I’m alert, lucid, even a little calm. And the bacon still smells terrific.

  In the light, Jonathan doesn’t look crazy anymore. He’s just the same postgraduate doof I thought he was in the first place, doughy, pasty, entirely unremarkable. Amusingly, he has put on Marjani’s apron to cook the bacon.

  My mind drifts. My mother loved bacon, and Travis loves bacon, which may be why Marjani always makes it. Mom’s a midwestern girl, and she used to fry up bologna for me. You ever had fried bologna? I know it’s a little trashy, but I’d eat fried bologna sandwiches on Wonder Bread, covered in ketchup, as long as she’d keep putting them in front of me. It’s the ultimate white people food: spiceless, flavorless. But hearty. There are twenty slices of bologna in an Oscar Meyer package. That used to feed me for a week. I always liked that old house. Mom sold it when she decided to leave the EIU job, and then when I moved, we just—

  Jonathan is sitting at the table, eating his bacon and staring intently at the wall. What was this all about again?

  Ai-Chin. The pain slowly returns, which makes me feel urgent, insistent. What was all this for?

  I conjure up what I can, and from somewhere deep, I make a sound.

  “Aiiiiiiiiiiiii.”

  Jonathan snaps out of his trance. “Oh, look at you,” he says, smiling. “You’re a piece of work, Daniel. Full of surprises.”

  Rather than get up, he scooches his chair toward me, still seated, scraping it against the floor and leaving scuff marks all over the linoleum. He positions it across from me and once again puts his face up close to mine. He always looks at me like I’m a toy he can’t decide if he should play with.

  “What are you trying to tell me, Daniel?”

  “Aiiiiiiiiiiiii.” A deep, extremely painful breath. “Chhhhhhhhhhh.” Another. Some sort of liquid drips down my nose, and Jonathan, not insensitively, wipes it off with his shirt cuff. “Nnnnnnnnnn.”

  He jumps up from his chair as if he just sat in something. “Daniel! Are you asking me about Ai-Chin?” He walks over to the refrigerator, still looking at me with something resembling awe. He takes out a beer, a stray Terrapin Golden that Travis left in there. “You are nothing if not persistent. She was right about you. You really are sweet.”

  He takes the bottle and pops it open against the edge of my dinner table, leaving a nick in the wood that’s going to irritate Marjani. He pours it into a pint class and lifts it to me.

  “Cheers, Daniel,” he says. “Cheers to the one guy I can talk to.”

  And then he begins to talk.

  This was all I wanted, all along. I wanted to know if it was him. I wanted to know why he took her. I wanted to know where she was. I wanted to know if she was safe. I wanted to know why this was all happening. I wanted to know if it was all real.

  Jonathan talks. He talks and talks and talks and talks.

  And I am unable to listen. The pain has ended its sabbatical and overtaken me again, and I find myself passing out, waking up, passing out again, waking up again. My ears have begun to ring so loudly that I wouldn’t be able to make out what he was saying even if I were awake for the whole thing. It is all just droning noise. I have no idea what he’s saying. I can barely tell if he’s still here.

  None of it matters. Maybe he said he took her because he was lonely, and it’s something that we shared, and maybe he thinks Ai-Chin really loves him because he’s a sad pathetic man with no social skills who blames everyone else for all his problems and lashes out because he can’t handle the real world. Maybe it was a master plan. Maybe it was all an accident. I have no idea. I am only barely conscious. It doesn’t matter what he’s saying. None of it matters at all. All that matters is that he has her. And that now he has me.

  I’m sure he hasn’t noticed. To him, I look the same awake or asleep, alive or dead. He just keeps talking, just to himself. As always, and probably as forever.


  We went through this whole thing to find out the truth of what happened, to find out what was real, and he’s sitting here right in front of me, in my kitchen, telling me the whole thing.

  And I can’t keep my eyes open.

  58.

  Jonathan lightly slaps me across my left cheek with his phone. He finally noticed I was asleep.

  “You are a little too captive of an audience, it seems, Daniel,” he says. “To be fair, we have been through a lot.”

  My eyes focus and look up at him. I feel a surge of strength, and the pain fades for a moment. It occurs to me that I truly hate this motherfucker in front of me right now and would like to see him run over by a truck.

  “But you will want to see this.”

  His phone is showing a grainy video I can’t entirely make out, but appears to be some sort of security footage. It is. It is security footage. I see a dark figure, pixelated and hazy, and then it moves, slowly at first, and then quickly, jutting left and right but locked in place at its center. There is no sound, but the figure is looking toward the sky, no, toward the camera, and screaming. I think it’s a scream. Where I’m guessing the mouth is, it’s opening wide for a few seconds at a time. A scream is as good a guess as any.

  “See?” Jonathan says. “She’s fine! She was always fine! We’re friends. She finally likes me.”

  I pass out again.

  59.

  When I wake up, Jonathan has stopped talking. He has stopped paying attention to me. He has stopped doing anything at all. He is sitting in the chair in front of the television in the living room, where Travis is usually playing video games and occasionally passing out when he doesn’t feel like driving home. One weekend, I think he was depressed about a girl or something, he didn’t leave that chair other than to use the bathroom or open the refrigerator for about sixty hours.

  Jonathan is not playing video games, or watching anything. He looks exhausted. It’s still dark, but I’m starting to hear birds chirp outside. I realize it’ll still be hours before Marjani arrives. Jonathan has been up all night. I’ve been up all night. As far as he knows, there’s a man he killed in the kitchen, an act, it’s becoming increasingly clear, he’s never done before, and one he’s struggling with. He just stares into space. He’ll blink heavily every few seconds, sometimes put his head in his hands, sometimes put his chin into his shoulder, maybe nod off for a bit before snapping himself alert, muttering to himself.

  I watch him trying to calculate all this.

  It all just got out of hand. You took Ai-Chin, and that was bad, that was very bad. But you haven’t killed her. You locked her in your home and put a camera on her, but, if I can piece together at least some of what you were trying to tell me, you haven’t beaten her or raped her or done much of anything to her. You just . . . had her. She wanted a ride, she got in your car, you didn’t take her to where she wanted to go, you took her to your place and then before you knew it, here you were, with the whole South searching for her, her whereabouts leading every newscast, mass vigils all across the town, with all kinds of different people gathering to try to find her, to help her. All because of you! You went out to breathe it all in, because how could you not? This was happening as a result of a series of decisions you made. You made the world happen! You had been invisible, and then you weren’t. Then you mattered. This made you feel connected. This made you feel important. This made you feel seen.

  I position my mangled left hand so that I can say something. I can still say something. It hurts. But I can say something.

  “Jonathan.”

  He slowly lifts his head up and turns it to me.

  “It. Is. Not. Too. Late.”

  He gives me a tired, sad grin. “Look, you can talk,” he says. “Good for you. We should have been talking this whole time. But you’re not gonna trick me. I’m”—he puts his head down on his chest—“I’m on to you.”

  He closes his eyes and succumbs to sleep. I get it.

  He sits there, for five minutes, for ten minutes, not moving.

  And then I notice.

  His phone.

  It’s sitting next to him in the chair, on the armrest, the same place Travis’s phone always sits when he conks out. I can still make out the figure of Ai-Chin on the Nest cam on Jonathan’s phone, glowing from the iPhone screen. I can even tell she’s sleeping too.

  I turn my head to my left. My wrist has some feeling in it; it has throbbed constantly since typing Jonathan that message. I can move it, slightly. More to the point: I can jut it forward enough to make my chair move. I can’t control my chair: I need my fingers for that.

  But I can push forward.

  And then what? I can’t pick up the phone. I can’t dial it.

  But what else? Am I just going to sit here and choke on my own blood? That’s what’s going to happen if I don’t do something. Oblivion is just around the corner.

  But.

  I’m not ready for it.

  I’m not ready for the last thing I ever see to be this shithead sleeping in Travis’s chair as the girl he kidnapped starves right there in front of him on his phone.

  This is not how this ends.

  I don’t know how this will work.

  But this is it. I’ve got some kick left in me. You can smash my bones, you can crush my lungs, you can bloody my skull, you can even drink Travis’s beer out of my goddamned fridge.

  You cannot, however, make me just sit here and take it. Not anymore.

  The plan? There is no plan. Is there ever a plan? Just go forward. Just go forward, and see what happens.

  They’ll never see it coming. I wedge my wrist behind my joystick. There is a possibility that if I plunge my wrist forward and I’m at a bad angle in a confined space, I will just spin around in circles really fast until I fall over. Maybe the chair will just land on me at that point and finish the job. That’d be an appropriately dignified way to go out.

  Not a lot of options here. No precision. No control. No plan. Just forward. Just floor it.

  JUST FLOOR IT.

  This.

  This is for everyone who was born with this terrible disease decades ago. We are everywhere, and we are strong, and we are not just objects of your pity. For every one of you who talked to me like I was a moron, like my brain was malformed just because I used this chair and because I couldn’t wipe cheese from the side of my mouth, know that I forgive you. You just don’t know.

  This. This is for my mom. You did everything you could have done and more. You put your life aside for me, and you gave me what I needed to survive, and to be autonomous, to have my own life. You are the reason I am anything. I love you.

  This. This is for Kim. Another life, another time, another body.

  This. This is for Marjani. You have always understood me better than anyone else, and I have understood you. You are frisky and clever and smarter than all the idiots who take you for granted. You have a strength none of them will ever have. I do not know if there is justice in this world. I do not know what happens next. But if there is ever a reward for all this, it will be reserved for you. You should be president. You should be queen. You should be God.

  This. This is for Travis. Big, dumb, wonderful Travis. I’d never have had the courage to do any of this without you. You did the one thing I wanted everyone to do but never could get them to: you treated me just like every other dope, no better, no worse. There’s greatness in your future, Travis, because you have the only character trait that matters: you are kind. Go be fearless and mad and wild and free.

  This. This is for Ai-Chin. I couldn’t do much in this world. But maybe I can still do this for you.

  I take a deep breath. I glance at Jonathan. Still asleep. Maybe this will be a straight shot to his chair. Maybe I’ll go flying out the door and off the porch. Maybe none of this means a goddamned thing. But you have to do something. You gotta do something.

  I’m ready.

  Then I see it. My chair iPad flashes Travis’s face. The
re is a message.

  We are here. I see you. We got you. Let’s do this.

  I grin.

  I am not alone. I never was.

  With every whit of strength I have left, I slam my wrist against the joystick.

  60.

  I slam straight into the kitchen table. I moved about three feet.

  My dramatic escape.

  But this sets into motion a series of events. I am dimly aware of most of them. But here’s what I can reconstruct.

  The crash knocks over a vase with a tulip that Marjani put down as a sad little centerpiece and a cup of coffee that Jonathan apparently made but forgot about.

  Liquid spills all over the place. The coffee begins pouring off the table, and a large splash of it lands on Terry, who is not in fact dead. He groans.

  The noise from my chair ramming into the table wakes up Jonathan, who then hears Terry moan and leaps out of his chair, yelling, “Oh, no, oh no, oh noooooooo!” He runs into the kitchen and grabs the baseball bat.

  But before he can do anything with it, there is a jiggling of keys at the door.

  Marjani walks in.

  My God, Marjani. But she does not look surprised to see Jonathan, or the orderly, or even me, now jammed between the table and the refrigerator with tires spinning. And she certainly does not look scared.

  She does the strangest thing: she smiles. There is a tremble of her bottom lip. But still, she smiles.

  “Well, hello,” she says, as Jonathan stands there, bat in his hand, jaw dropped, a look of astonishment on his face. “My name is Marjani. I work here with Daniel.” She surveys the room.