How Lucky: A Novel Read online

  Marjani told me that one time in an idle, stray aside, when we barely knew each other at all. She was in fact bathing me, a few years ago, back when I could talk a little better, back when I insisted on washing my stomach and penis and balls myself, back when I still had some pride about those sorts of things, back before that sort of shit stopped mattering entirely. This was far enough ago that talking about death felt like a theoretical discussion, the way you can talk about death with someone who isn’t currently dying. It is easier to bring up death when it’s not in the same area code as you are, and it wasn’t back then. It is probably worth noting that nobody has mentioned it to me in the last couple of years.

  Marjani was a little younger then, a little thinner, a little looser with a laugh. She spoke openly, happily, about her son, who was twelve then and is probably about to graduate from high school now, though I’m only guessing: she hasn’t mentioned him in years, and I only know he’s not dead now because I assume even Marjani would take a day off if her son died, and she hasn’t missed a day since she started working with me. She has hardened slightly in the years since, taking a cue from my own silence, our series of grunts and nods and shakes our own private, efficient language. We can look each other in the eye and talk, just like I can with Travis. She has been poking and prodding and lifting and scrubbing and twisting and carrying and rubbing me for the majority of my adult life. We read and react to each other like a dance team, understanding every flinch and quiver, what they mean, what they say to do next. No one will ever know me as well as Marjani does, even though I am still never quite sure if she even likes me. Well, she likes me, or at least she doesn’t dislike me. She is kind, gentle. But she is also doing a job, performing a function for yet another white boy that is either unable or unwilling to do it for himself. She cares for me, and makes me comfortable, and helps me every time I need help, perhaps above and beyond what is required of her as a condition of her employment.

  But if my Medicaid quit paying Marjani, she’d stop, and I would likely never see her again. She would go on to something else, and I would die in this house, filthy and full of lice and alone. I know that, and more importantly, she does too. She has been doing this long enough to know that you must separate yourself somewhat, no matter how much you might care, or even no matter how much you might not. She has taken care of people who have died before, and she will do so again. How do you do that without checking your emotions at the door?

  But three, four years ago, Marjani wasn’t so good at this just yet. She was still curious, and still a little more unguarded than you’re supposed to be with me. She was just making conversation. This is a common occurrence around me: People love to talk when they’re with me. Next time you’re in a room with someone else, just one other person, try this experiment: Don’t talk for fifteen minutes. By minute three, the person you are in the room with will be jabbering away about anything, anything to fill the emptiness with some sort of sound. So with me, people just talk and talk and talk and talk. They’re talking for two. The air must be filled.

  She hadn’t gotten accustomed to my silence yet back then, or at least not accustomed to me not saying much more than “Ow” and “Yum” and “More,” so she talked. She told me about where she was from (Pakistan), whether she was married (she was), and whether she had any thoughts on living in Athens for the last two years (it’s too hilly for her to ride her bike). I am not sure any of these topics came up again in the next four years, or at least not anytime recently. This was her onetime information dump. People will just talk and talk and talk.

  But then she told me what she did for a living. About half of her life is odd jobs, taking every opportunity she can to be a part of the gig economy. She helps out a cleaning crew, she works with the university to pick up trash after sporting events, she even picks up a couple of shifts at Jason’s Deli downtown when school is in session. She does that to remain busy. Now that her son is in school all day, she told me, she tries to pick up every bit of cash she can; her husband works (worked?) at a restaurant downtown.

  Her main job, though, is taking care of dying people. She is not a nurse, she explained, though she can do basic medical care if she has to. The job isn’t about that sort of comfort.

  “It’s about being there with them when they are . . . true?” she told me, washing my back in the tub. “That’s the word. People are the real people they are when they are dying. Do you know?”

  I grunted “Yeahhh,” less out of agreement than out of an obligation to hear this stranger out. Sometimes people just need a reminder that you’re there.

  “To see them at the end, how they really are, it is very lucky,” she said, and I wondered if she was like this with everyone, or just the ones who can’t talk back. “It is a gift. So it is my job. My gift is my job. I am very lucky.” She then started coughing for a second, left the room, returned, and put me to bed.

  She never talked to me about helping the dying again. She shut it down, right there. I wonder if someone had died earlier that day, and she hadn’t gotten it out of her mind yet. And then it hit her that it was my turn. It was my turn to make her lucky.

  I still think about that conversation, such as it was, every day.

  She comes in, does her job, smiles, is kind, says goodbye, and leaves. There is goodness in her gestures and clear pleasure in her work. But it’s just work. I appreciate it. I love her. I need her. I think she needs me. It feels like there should be more. I think maybe it is my fault there is not more.

  She is still here. She is closer to me than anyone has ever been. But does she know me better than I know her? Does she shed me like a jacket when she goes home? This is her job. This is what she has done, and what she has given me. Marjani is the center of my life. And yet I pray she doesn’t miss me when I’m gone.

  9.

  I am awake. Marjani is here, as always in the mornings. “You have a note, Daniel,” she says, propping me up, unbuttoning my pajamas, wiping down my face. “It is from Charles, you should read it.”

  Charles is the only orderly from the service that comes by every night to turn me in bed whose name I actually remember. He’ll clean me up and make sure that I’m still breathing. I like Charles a lot. Charles is in fact third cousins with Stacey Abrams, who ran for governor of Georgia last year and almost won. I had an Abrams bumper sticker on the back of my chair, and Charles wouldn’t stop talking about it. He’d only met her a couple of times, and he said she was very nice. He actually came over early election night 2018 to watch the returns—“You’ve got cable,” he said—and he kept me up most of the night yelling at the television. I eventually watched the final returns with him; he cried when Abrams lost. Charles is cool.

  Charles has Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and the other guy—a skinny white guy whose name I can never remember. Harry? Frank? Maybe it’s Frank? It might be Harry—has Sunday and Monday. They share a key: they unlock when they come in, and lock up when they leave—at least I hope they do. I only know of these men as shadows in the middle of the night, heavy-breathing phantasms who lift me and clean me up in silence. They are gentle, efficient, and always apologetic: If I wake up, it means they’re having a bad night on the job. They always tiptoe in the back door around 2:00 a.m., check on me, and then tiptoe back out. They exist only to keep me alive in the night, and I might not recognize either of them by sight in the daylight. I do not know how much they get paid, but it is not enough.

  As Marjani washes her hands for breakfast, she reads me the note.

  Daniel you left your computer on last night. I shut it off so you could sleep but I promise I did not look at anything. You should be more careful I could have stolen all your credit card information and be halfway to the Bahamas by now. ☺

  —Charles

  “He is a very funny man,” Marjani says, somehow scrambling eggs, sweeping the floor, and flipping on the television at the same time. “I worked with him at the hospital a few years ago. He i
s kind. Has four beautiful children and a wife who worries about him being out all night.” She straps me into my chair and wheels me over to the table. “I am sorry, I think I am the person who forgot to turn your computer off last night. But he’s right, you need to be more careful about your computer. It is bad for your eyes.”

  Marjani is always concerned about my health in useless ways. She is taking care of a man whose body is in a constant state of atrophy, yet an amusingly high percentage of our conversations is about little well-being tidbits far more applicable to someone who wouldn’t find such alleged maladies as trifling as I do. Sure, Marjani, let’s really get worked up about flossing. Last week I had a hole in one of my socks, and she lectured me for five minutes about frostbite. In October. In Georgia.

  I give her a little nod and a raise of my eyebrow—Travis calls this move “the Groucho”—and she laughs, and it strikes me that Marjani is in an oddly cheerful mood this morning. It makes me happy.

  I check the computer first thing. Marjani has me up and cleaned and brushed and clothed and then I’m grunting and bobbing toward the computer, there, there, there there there.

  “You are like an addict with that,” she says, and situates me in my seat. “You have ten minutes before breakfast. Try not to ruin your brain.”

  I’ve spent half the night thinking about what I’d posted. What if one of Ai-Chin’s friends sees it and thinks I know more than I do? What if I’ve given them too much hope? Is that cruel? What if it wasn’t her?

  When you’re alone all the time like me, you can’t help but lose it a little at night, when there are no people to distract you and keep your mind occupied. All the lazy, thoughtless, instinctive things we do every day, we never consider their ramifications until we finally have some peace and quiet to ourselves, which is probably why we spend so much time avoiding peace and quiet. But I have all the peace and quiet I want.

  The police can do their jobs. I will ask Travis to help me call them. Maybe this sort of internet rumormongering does no one any good. It gives hope, it takes away hope, and it accomplishes nothing. It feels real. But it isn’t.

  Maybe I should delete it before it sends someone down a rabbit hole.

  The page is still open. My post is just sitting there, staring at me, flipping me off. Eff you, post. You are from a weaker me. I will be stronger today.

  I take a deep breath before clicking Refresh. This leads to a light gasping fit, and Marjani has to come in and settle me down, and by the time I’m settled down, she’s wheeling me in for breakfast. My eyes dart around the room as she feeds me grapefruit. At one point, distracted, I jerk my head left and knock the fork out of her hand as the juice runs down my chin.

  “Daniel!” She jumps back like I tried to bite her. “What is wrong with you today?” I jerk my head back toward the computer. Her shoulders slump. She frowns. She looks at me as if I’ve called her something terrible.

  “You are being a pill, Daniel. That thing is turning you into a mean robot.”

  I jerk my head again.

  “A mean, mean robot,” she says, wheeling me back to my room. She looks at me.

  I look her in the eye so we can talk. This is basically like with Travis, maybe not quite as advanced, but she’s picked it up in the past two years.

  What?

  I am coming back at lunch today, Daniel, and if you are still sitting there, I might throw you out the window.

  Did you just make a joke?

  I did. Did you like it?

  I did. Now please leave me to my computer already.

  I smile, and she smiles back, and all is fine again as long as she gets the hell out of this room so I can get rid of the goddamned post.

  I finally click Refresh.

  The post sits there . . . ignored. No one has responded, and, even better, it’s being voted down by all the Redditors as irrelevant and pointless and “poop emoji.” Hopefully you get outside more than I do and therefore have no idea how Reddit works, but basically, when someone votes down a post, it gets pushed down the page so fewer people see it. Redditors are particularly suspicious of anyone who creates an account just to post something one time, assuming they are a spammer, a bot, or just a jerk trying to promote something to the community without Respecting the Community. I’ve been monitoring Reddit for years, but I’ve never actually posted anything. I think of Reddit, and Twitter, and all the places we gather to yell at each other as fishbowls, aquariums: they are far too entertaining as self-contained ecosystems to be disturbed by my awkward, oafish hand. The fish are different if you try to be part of them; they change who they are simply because you are there; I wouldn’t want to be a part of any club that would have me as a member; they’re nice places to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there; you get it.

  But I broke my rule. I stuck my finger in the fish tank. Now the fish are all downvoting me.

  They are doing me a favor. They are making sure as few people as possible see my mistake. I feel better immediately after I delete the post. Let’s call the police. Let’s let them do their job. When Travis gets here, we’re going to have ourselves an afternoon activity.

  10.

  I’m lucky to have an online job. Yes, people call me a zombie cocksucker all day, but being on the internet all day is my dream job. My internet experience is different than yours. I think of the internet like my disguise. It’s the only place where people don’t treat me like I’m either a monster or a charity case to be pitied. People can’t see me, so they can’t treat me any differently: I’m just another internet asshole like everybody else.

  On the internet—and especially on Twitter, a program that is specifically constructed for people to be abrupt and blunt with each other—no one knows they’re supposed to be nice to me or politely ignore me. So they’re not, and they don’t. I can tweet something like “I don’t think I like the new Childish Gambino album” and immediately people just start pummeling me, I’m an idiot, I’m a racist, millennials are all lazy know-nothings, I suck. And it is so awesome! This is the reason my profile picture on Twitter is just a close-up of my face, a smiling one where I look just like every other dumbass kid. If I had a picture of me in my chair, they’d be wary of slapping me, or they’d just make a bunch of “handicapped” jokes. But they have no idea I have SMA, or that there’s anything different about me at all. I’m just another anonymous punk to be taken down.

  I’d much rather someone hate me than feel bad for me. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t anyone?

  I know I said I’d let the cops handle it. But a little online sleuthing never hurt anybody.

  And the more I read about Ai-Chin, the more I need to know.

  She left a thin online profile. She had an Instagram account that she only used twice: in August, she posted an out-of-focus picture of an ugly cat, and two weeks ago she posted a picture of a bird sitting on the fence in front of a house just down the street from mine. You can tell she was working hard on her English: she posted a comment in English below the picture that said, “This is my pretty bird who is my morning friend.” There are many comments below it in Chinese, and thirty-four likes.

  She wasn’t on Facebook, as far as I could tell, and no Twitter, though, to be fair, Liao is a near impossible name to narrow down on Twitter. All I could find out about her came from her student profile and news reports, which is a very 1990s way to learn about someone.

  The morning routine continues. Marjani props me up and starts washing my head, neck, and shoulders. She hates that I like to sleep shirtless—she says it just forces her to wash the sheets more often—but it does save her the trouble of peeling a sweaty shirt off me every morning. In the last couple of years this odd film, a thin, white, almost mildewy substance, has started to form around my neck when I sleep. I don’t know what it is, and to be honest, I’m afraid to find out. Marjani, bless her heart, has never once brought it up, even though she’s wiping it off me every day.

  She puts a shirt on me and apologizes when I groan, thou
gh she doesn’t have to. My arms move so rarely that the act of someone raising them above my head first thing in the morning feels like being drawn and quartered, but that’s not her fault. You can’t roam the world shirtless every day, not even in Georgia.

  She plops me in my chair and rolls me into the kitchen. She’s being a little clumsy with me this morning, like she’s in a hurry. I give her a couple of curious looks, but she doesn’t seem to notice them. She just shovels Cheerios into my mouth and wipes down the table. The nighttime check-in guy appears to have left a beer can on the counter, and Marjani’s gonna make him pay for that one.

  I think about what I know about Ai-Chin from all the articles I’ve found.

  She’s nineteen years old.

  She was born and grew up in China.

  She just got to campus two months ago.

  She is studying to be a veterinarian here at the University of Georgia. We have an excellent vet school.

  She didn’t know anyone when she moved here but Melissa Lei. Melissa only met her because their families knew each other in China.

  She didn’t know anything about Georgia, or the campus, or America. It is possible that one of her closest friends here in Athens was the disabled man who saw her every day without her knowing. She did wave to him once.

  She speaks halting, sporadic English.

  She was walking down my street just two days ago.

  She got into an old tan Camaro while walking down my street.

  No one has seen her since.

  “Rrrrrrghhhhawwwwwwww.” That was me. Marjani just brushed my hair a little too firmly, and I yowled. “Sorry.”

  “When is Travis coming by?” she says. But before she has a chance to say something disapproving about him, he bounds through the door.

  “’Sup Mar,” he says, taking a banana out of Marjani’s hand and popping it in his mouth. Marjani hates being called Mar, and Travis knows this, which is why he does it. I suspect she secretly likes it. Marjani is a person who has learned how to be invisible in every room and has grown comfortable with it. Travis instinctively understands this and thus refuses to ever let her be invisible, which drives her crazy and also makes her smile more than I’ve ever seen her smile any other time.