An hour or so later, I was seated at the bottom of a steeply banked chemistry lecture hall, beside Tom, Trudy, Charlene, and Roberta. I had showered and changed, and Solito was late. It was a packed house, with people standing in the back. I glanced over at Carl, who shook his head, grinning furiously. Ten minutes passed. At a quarter after seven he gave me another look, and I got up to announce that the evening would be canceled. The room quieted as I turned to face everyone. At the top of the hall I saw Solito, coming through a side door in dark clothes, holding a folder. I went ahead and read my goddamned intro, standing behind a long, narrow, black-topped science table with goose-necked sink plumbing and gas valves, under a feeble overhead light. I felt myself entering a trancelike state, soothed by the sound of my own voice, yielding as elegantly as I had at breakfast. It was a thoughtful and affectionate introduction. The audience applauded.
Solito walked down the steep staircase and went to the lectern and sipped some water as I took a seat. He turned on the overhead projector so that it flashed a bright blank screen. Hesitant, speaking slowly, in a practiced and self-deprecating tone, he said that it was a pain in the ass to be introduced by someone he admired, in a way that confused me. Some artists made him anxious and insecure, but I had reached out to him or whatever. He started talking about my book: “These days, bumbling antiheroes are commonplace, even quaint, but six years ago…” What the hell. He used a few of the same terms I’d used about his work, “powerful,” “piercing,” “blunt,” forcing a comparison between my forgotten comics and his internationally lauded life-and-death struggle across a continent, to make me look like a footnote maybe, a sideshow, while at the same time intentionally mocking my introduction, twisting the flattering and conciliatory things I’d said. I peered around to see if anyone else had noticed. It seemed that no one did. The compliments felt like punches in the stomach. I sat there dazed, not sure if I’d just been ripped apart.
He put a page from his book up on the screen, giving us time to examine it, unhurriedly, then spoke with confidence about decisions he’d made in constructing each section. Then he repeated the process with another page. It took thirty-four minutes. The lights came up, and he answered questions with deep sincerity, as though the Dalai Lama had materialized in his saffron robe. He embodied the geopolitical dilemma, this problem of human migration. I am the border, the scar, the wound, the bridge between worlds. Big deal. Shut up. Blow me. He was calm and amiable. A man crawled around on the floor in front of me in what looked like a bulletproof vest. He held a camera in his hands and had another hanging from the vest. You wouldn’t have known that Solito hated the routine or how, as he’d told me at breakfast, these questions were destroying him day by day. He’d admitted in interviews and again here that certain scenes conflated his own experiences with those of a younger cousin who’d made the journey with him, who he’d cut entirely out of the story. He confessed to this audience something I hadn’t read in any article: that it was some third relative, and not him or the cousin, who’d been pulled off a bus at age four and placed in detention for months. They had the story, but that wasn’t enough. They wanted the story behind the story, they wanted to get the facts out of him, so they could decide for themselves whether his suffering was real.
I woke up before dawn, gasping, suffocating, flopping around like a dying pigeon. We had no money. We’d lose the house. I felt that iron will, the force, the cult of Robin, the rules I had to live by. Did I even see her anymore, or did I only see things I imagined, the lie of my hate-filled projections, the cartoon of a wife I’d created?
The best times were with them: these beautiful people who called me Daddy and were never afraid, who didn’t have a scary father and didn’t know I was crazy. At home I was a part of something beyond my understanding, whole evenings spent in a daffy haze of singing, clapping, lifting, swinging, blowing up tiny balloons, my face turning purple, touching and examining every inch of them, like a violinist inspecting his instrument, kissing their sticky, doughnut-smelling feet.
It didn’t matter. It was never enough. I needed life beyond them. I wanted more: people, praise, battles, conquests. I wanted to travel beyond myself, to explode out and out and out.
I thought of the monster who’d beat Amy and left her there bleeding. I couldn’t fly back in time to protect her. I felt the crust of blood on these sheets and thought chaotically of the eclipsing impenetrable blackness of her obscene fortune, strange tax breaks, Shenzhen factories, unbreathable air, Cardinal Performance Capital grinding out millions under byzantine debt structures. Solito’s wounded border, his continent of pain. Our hijacked country, sliding into rising seas. I saw Iris, Robin’s mom, seated at dinner, head bowed forward, ignored by us as she waited for death.
I heard birds outside singing their wake-up songs, and felt myself tire of fear, like a rubber ball bouncing slowly to stillness, changing from night to day, from a night mind to a day mind, from fearful and blind to fearless and lucid. I understood why Amy married Rapazzo. She could use his money to reform education and eradicate poverty. Together they’d smash the old world with technocratic muscle and raise up the masses, that wad of scum beneath them. Or maybe that’s what she hoped, or maybe that’s not why she married him.
I recalled our final moments on Sunday afternoon. We’d been screwing for an hour, she needed to leave, drive to New Hampshire and rescue Lily. Her wrist throbbed, the pain went all the way up into her jaw. She shivered. “Ask me to stay,” she said. I’d already imagined that first shitty oneline text she’d send and how that would excite me. She refused to put her clothes on. She loved the Barn and wanted to live here forever. But then, with her broken arm, she pointed out things she’d change, recalling the loftlike space of the ski chalet they’d once rented in Idaho, and some colonial-era money pit a friend of hers had renovated. She’d start with the windows, the kitchen, the plumbing and light fixtures, then scrunched her face and decided to gut the whole place.
A canister of room freshener had been sitting on the night table beside the broken lamp, left there by the cleaning crew, and in a dubious and insulting way, she suggested places around the apartment that needed Febrezing, the kitchen walls splattered with cooking oil, the moldy shower fan and broken front door. The ants in the kitchen, the spiderwebs and grease stains. In thirty seconds, the place had become something to be fumigated or demolished. I went along with it, and suggested Febrezing the couch, my armpits, a few of the moldier conference participants, like Beverly, who used a walker and an old-fashioned cigarette holder and thought she was Norma Desmond. We laughed our heads off. Together we were sharp and quick. Then she pinched her eyes shut and launched herself forward in one motion, bent over, leaning her body against my legs, sobbing. I thought she’d somehow bumped her arm.