“A Better World”

Blake Bailey is the author of Cheever: A Life, published earlier this year by Knopf. His previous book, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Regarding the following story, Blake tells us, “Like the narrator’s brother, Todd, my own brother took a lot of drugs and eventually killed himself in a jail cell. He also had a marvelous sense of humor, and this is one thing that I distinctly miss about him. As for other elements of the story, I prefer to consider them as fiction, more or less. “At the moment I’m working on a biography of Charles Jackson—author of The Lost Weekend and other novels—who was a very sweet man and a consummate addict. So going back to my brother’s story is, perhaps, a way of trying to see these matters in the round.” As grown-ups, my brother, Todd, and I didn’t have much in common except family, so usually we’d talk about that; our father’s second wife was a prim neurotic named Martha, who eventually cast us both into the outer darkness—Todd the felonious ex-marine and me the good son, a schoolteacher of decent repute. So we’d sit around and swap stories about what a cunt she was. Also I’d ask him what sort of drugs he was taking, and Todd would rear back and glare at me with mock reproach. Once when Todd and I were drinking together—his life had just turned to shit for the umpteenth time—he got a sort of gloating look and said: “Ma will never give up on me.” In this respect he was more prescient than I. Soon after that, he lost another in a multitude of crap jobs and then demolished a friend’s car while driving drunk. (His own car—an old BMW our father had given him long ago—was in the shop at the time.) He ended up in the hospital with a bad head injury, whereupon our blustery, long-suffering, tenderhearted mother said she was through with that asshole, he could rot in the hospital, and so on, but a month later he was living with her. “What could I do?” she said to me in a frenzied way. “He looks so emaciated! His skin is gray! He’ll die if I don’t help him!” “Let him die!” “Don’t say that. You don’t mean that.” “Let him die. Better him than you!” But she wouldn’t let him die. Todd convalesced on her couch, quietly, and barely seemed to notice her. He never went anywhere because there was nowhere to go. His crazy girlfriend—a vaguely Arabic woman named Zhila—wasn’t seeing him at the moment, and a big supply of pain pills obviated the one errand he was liable to run. He got up only to go to the bathroom, and seemed content to lie there forever as long as certain needs were met. Even my mother couldn’t take it; Todd seemed a waxen embodiment of everything that had gone wrong in her life. After a week or so, she asked him to leave. “Why?” he asked, vaguely hurt. “You’re just too depressing, Todd.” “Why?” “Go to the hospital! You need help!” “There’s nothing wrong with me.” But finally he left. As long as his things were in my mother’s storage shed, and she provided his only permanent address and therefore received his mail (magazines such as Tiger Beat and Stereo Review, many unpaid bills, his monthly disability check from the VA for back and neck injuries, and motivational literature with titles like “15 Minutes That Will Change Your Life!” that kept coming for years and years), he knew he had plenty of reasons for returning. One day he showed up asking for money. He needed $100 to tide him over for the rest of the month, and since he already owed my mother a great deal of money and seemed to accept that she wouldn’t give him more until he’d made some effort to lessen his debt, he offered to write her a postdated check. He mentioned with a kind of pride that he was cutting corners by living out of his car; in fact the $100 was needed for minor repairs. It was an old car. He spoke in a kind of chattering monotone, as though he’d rehearsed the spiel a thousand times and was eager to get it over with. His eyes seemed to stare past my mother to the money and whatever he wanted to buy with it. She knew he wasn’t leaving without $100, and the main thing was to make him leave. She’d have to get cash at an ATM, she said, and suggested he make himself at home in the meantime—have a snack—but he preferred to follow in his car. From my mother’s place in the country to the nearest ATM was maybe ten miles, and never once was Todd more than a few feet from my mother’s bumper. The roar of his stereo made it all the more menacing, like being overtaken by a tsunami. At stoplights my mother shook her fist at Todd in the rearview mirror, mouthed obscenities, appealed to his belief in a benevolent deity, but each time she was met with the same blankly determined stare. Finally they arrived at the ATM. My mother got the money, parked, and bustled over to where my brother sat in his BMW. “Are you out of your mind? Are you trying to get us killed?” Todd pondered this. “I guess I’m just a crazy motherfucker,” he said. “Look at yourself!” She reached into his car and adjusted the rearview mirror; Todd obliged her by staring at himself, cocking his head with old fondness. “You need help! Go to the VA!” He lowered his eyes and sighed. “You’re right. I will.” “You can’t go on like this!” “I know. You’re right.” She gave him the money. “Promise?” He nodded like a little boy about to cry. She kissed his cheek—too sallow even to support pimples—and asked him to call her later. A couple of weeks later he called her from the county jail. The police had found Todd sleeping in his car outside a crack house (I fancy there being a sign to that effect); there were drugs in the car and so on. Still, it might have turned out better if Todd had seen fit to cooperate, but I gather he resisted, strenuously, and so was given a three-year sentence. Somewhere in there his postdated check to my mother bounced. At the back of my grandmother’s house in Vinita, Oklahoma, was an ugly paneled room that used to be a screened porch. My grandfather, dead all these years, had once gone there to drink in peace; Todd and I slept there during our childhood visits. One night he confided that he lived in two separate dimensions. The present one I knew. In the other he had a different and far more appreciative family, and no little brother. He described the whole setup in detail. I think the main conceit was that this other family was more or less opposite to the one we shared: blond like him (my parents and I were dark-haired), inclined to take him along when they traveled (as opposed to ditching him in Vinita), wholly devoted to him, in fact. He became a bit tearful as he told it, as a sense of what he was missing in the here and now came over him. I started crying a little too. Not because I had any particular grudge against my parents or the present dimension in general—I didn’t—but because I seemed to experience a foreglimpse of the bad life my brother was going to have. After being arrested outside the crack house, Todd went on and on about the lawsuit he meant to bring against the Oklahoma City Police. “That’s going into my lawsuit!” he liked to say, calling himself “the white Rodney King.” His own quixotic posturing seemed to amuse him, while at the same time he was quite serious. At first Todd was in a minimum-security prison. He was even allowed to teach some sort of literacy course, since it didn’t go unnoticed that he read a lot (magazines and library books relating to his lawsuit) and had a way with words. More often than not, though, his glibness got him in trouble: It was hard to say who hated him more, the guards or the inmates; in any event he got a lot of write-ups, and finally someone set his hair on fire while he was sleeping. After that he was transferred to the medium-security facility, where my mother and I paid him a visit. It was a grim place. We stood in a little holding cage outside the walls while we were identified with a video camera; then, after a thorough frisking, we were conducted to a dingy cafeteria where inmates met their families on visiting days. My mother had packed an elaborate lunch, and we filled the empty minutes opening various Tupperware containers and filling our plates just so. Then we sat in the flyblown heat and waited. Finally my brother showed up with a mass of other inmates who dispersed themselves among tables of loved ones.

Todd gave me a rough hug, pressing my head against his bony, muscular chest. “Look at you!” he said, surveying me at arm’s length. “My God, I think he’s almost as pretty as me!”

Sitting down to our food, my mother remarked of Todd (as though he were absent or deaf), “I don’t think he’s so pretty anymore. What do you think?” Her tone implied that the point was at least debatable and it was up to me to resolve it one way or the other. I looked at Todd—chewing, undismayed, awaiting my verdict for better or worse. “He looks fine to me,” I said. “All things considered.” “See?” said Todd. “Forever young.” He went on eating in his old way of endless fastidious nibbling, sometimes removing a piece of masticated fat to a side plate. I noticed he was balding around the temples and getting thin on top too (or perhaps that was where they’d set his hair on fire). The middle of his forehead was scored with jagged little creases that I thought were acne scars, until Todd told me they were from head butts. After lunch we were herded outside, where we could sit at picnic tables or wander the lawn. Somehow we got hold of a half-inflated football and chucked it around, then joined our mother at one of the shaded picnic tables. She watched our conversation in an abstracted way, as though she were trying to picture us as children. For a while Todd spoke of nothing but his lawsuit—in that half-joking deadly serious way of his—then abruptly dropped the subject and focused wholly on me. He wanted to know every detail of my life, or as many as I could provide in the half hour left to us: How did I meet my girlfriend? Did we sleep together on the first date? How much did I make as a teacher? Was it hard to get certified? What kind of car was I driving these days? Then it was time to go. “Well, Todd—” “Well—” And he gathered me into his arms, whacking my back a bit too hard as he let go. He didn’t let go of my mother for a long time; he’d started crying and didn’t want others to see. Finally he wiped his eyes against her shoulder, one and then the other, and whispered good-bye with a little gasp. On the other side of the locking Plexiglas door we turned one more time to wave at him; he managed a jaunty smile as he stood bobbing slightly on the balls of his feet. When Todd got out of prison he moved in with my mother for a few months, but it didn’t go well. They’d made a deal: He couldn’t drink more than two beers a day and would have to earn his keep by doing odd jobs like feeding the animals, painting barns, weeding the garden—that sort of thing. It worked for maybe a week or so, then it didn’t; two beers became three, and so on from there. One night he drunkenly assaulted our mother, and when I came home for Christmas and arranged for the police to remove him from the premises, he threatened to kill me. But soon enough he was back in prison. Naturally we worried about his getting out again. He seemed capable of anything. My mother still took his calls and could vouch for the fact that he had dark designs on me, my father, and our stepmother, Martha (with whom I’d reconciled at last, such was our solidarity vis-à-vis Todd). For many years, oddly enough, my brother had fancied himself a born-again Christian, and my mother tried to remonstrate along these lines: “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” she’d declaim, whenever he hinted at killing or hurting us, or “Turn the other cheek!”—though actual Scripture had little effect on Todd, since his understanding of God’s Will was largely subjective. But we needn’t have worried. The Todd who left prison a few years later was pretty much incapable of harming anyone but himself, and this he did promptly. The day after his release he fell from a third-floor storage compartment, bouncing off another compartment on the way down and, flailing to stop his fall, ripping large strips of skin off both arms. I daresay the process of sifting through those pointless belongings of his—the mad clothing, old magazines, dead letters, crates of dusty records, and the like—had been an exquisitely melancholy business, and doubtless he’d gotten plastered in the process. Back home in Oklahoma City, bandaged like a mummy, he took a room at a little motel off Classen Circle. (I went to see it the other day: “19 Dollars a Night/Weekly Rates Available”—the name of the place. A squalid patch of neighborhood, needless to say, though I noticed our dear old high school was visible in the distance like Gray’s Eton, where ignorance is bliss.) While Todd was in prison that second time, my mother had arranged for his monthly VA checks to be deposited in a high-interest money-market account, which Todd managed to deplete within a month after his release. His crazy girlfriend, Zhila, was a religious fanatic who called my mother every other day and blubbered in that nebulous accent of hers, “He’s smoking the crack all the time! He is trying to get me to smoke the crack!” For most of his adult life—don’t ask me how—Todd had been able to segregate his crack-and-hustling life from his church-and-Zhila life, but now the worlds blurred and it must have been disconcerting for all concerned. Zhila surprised Todd with strange old black men; Todd showed up for services at their Baptist church in a state of nattering lunacy. When, however, my mother arranged to meet Todd for lunch, she stopped by his motel room and saw nothing amiss but a few chaste beers on ice in the bathroom sink. Todd looked a bit gray in the face, a bit banged up, a bit emaciated, but otherwise in decent fettle. “Oh, that goddamn Zhila’s always been crazier than hell,” she told me afterward. “Todd’s fine! Well, not fine, but I’ve seen him worse…” A week or so later Todd called her to say he was broke, utterly broke. “I don’t know,” he said, in the same woebegone way he’d told my father, 25 years before, that he’d dropped out of NYU after a single semester. “I don’t know, Ma”—over and over. He wanted to live with her again. Turn over a new leaf. When she refused, he sighed but offered little argument; in that case, he said, he wanted to come over and pick up his stereo, his last valuable possession, which she’d kept in storage while he was in prison. My mother forbade him to come anywhere near her house, but arranged for her old boyfriend Bill—a dear friend to the family these many years—to bring it to Todd’s motel. “What did he look like?” I asked Bill a few months later. He started to speak and his eyes filled. Bill had always been fond of Todd and vice versa. Finally he shook his head and said, “I left there feeling very fortunate.” Todd had decided to become a preacher. For those who wonder where such people come from, it might be interesting to know that there are actually training camps where one spends a month studying the Bible, practicing declamatory gestures, and perhaps learning a few financial rudiments—or so I imagine. Whatever the case, one emerges with a diploma of sorts, an official man of the cloth, all for a fee of $500. Or so it went at the camp Todd planned to attend—and so far so good: He got almost $800 for his elaborate stereo system and called our mother in a jubilant mood. He’d report to camp on Friday, he said, and within a month he’d be a bona fide fisher of men. Already he deplored the sinner he’d been in days gone by, to say nothing of his atheist mother and his whole atheist family—bound for the pit. By Friday, alas, the money was gone. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he told Zhila, begging her to buy him a bottle of gin and take him to a movie, any movie, anything to get outside of himself. In the theater Todd drank the whole bottle and commenced a kind of weepy muttering, so that people around him changed their seats or left the show altogether. A total stranger could see that Todd was drowning, drowned. On Saturday, a day late, Zhila dropped him off at the ministry camp. She’d decided to loan him the $500; she prayed God would intervene and make Todd a preacher after all—then, perhaps, they could be married. On Monday he either was asked to leave or took it upon himself to abscond with Zhila’s money. Anyway he disappeared for a while. I got the news from my mother, who blustered against that worthless miserable sonofabitch and vowed never to trust him again, etc. A few days later my father called: “Any news of your brother?” he asked, with the usual wincing hesitation, and I told him the whole story—the ministry camp, the hocked stereo, the gin bottle, and so forth. I told it for laughs, but my father didn’t laugh; Todd had yet to become a remote figure of fun in his eyes. When I mentioned the part about the moviegoers recoiling from poor old boozy Todd, my father seemed to stifle a gasp, as though he’d been knifed in the stomach. Todd resurfaced on Valentine’s Day and gave our mother a call. The moment she heard his voice she let loose a typhoon of abuse, until finally, her anathemas exhausted, she waited for the usual ingenious rebuttal. But there was none. Silence. “…Todd? You there?” He breathed. He was there. At last she said, “Well, anyway, it’s Valentine’s Day. C’mon, I’ll take you to lunch.” They met on a street corner near a place where my mother liked to get dim sum. It wasn’t a particularly cold day, but Todd was homeless again and wearing what remained of his wardrobe in layers. This created an impression of bulk. Once they sat in a booth, though, my mother got a good look at her son, or what was left of him—the bony face that even she could no longer wish back to health. Its sallowness bespoke a failing liver, and the eyes leaked weary tears, one after the other, catching in a grayish beard and plopping wearily, at length, onto the plate. One after the other. Todd pushed his food around and wept. For once my mother was at a loss. “Todd,” she said, “you need help.” He nodded, then buried his face in a napkin and tried to pull himself together. He let out a shuddery sigh—shew-ew-ew—blew his nose out into the napkin, and said, hardly a whisper, “I know, Ma.”She offered to take him to a hospital but he only shook his head. After a dull pause, again and again, she’d repeat some variation on the remark “You need help,” and Todd would wispily agree. The upshot of the lunch was that she found him an apartment and paid the first month’s rent. That afternoon she called me. “He needs money!” she said. “He needs to eat! He’s dying! He can’t pay the heating bill!” On and on. I listened, amazed. “Where will this end?” I asked her. “I don’t know! We can’t just let him die!” But I detected, or thought I detected, a very faint inquisitive turn at the end of that statement, as in “or can we?”—as though she were seeking permission or at least canvassing my viewpoint. “Let him go,” I told her. “Let him go, Mom.” But she couldn’t. “I can’t! Call your father!” “Why?” “I don’t know what to do!” And she burst into tears. So I called my father and explained this latest development. As he got older my father very rarely lost his temper, but a catharsis was long overdue where Todd was concerned. “He’s 42 years old! Tell him to walk off a tall building!” Todd must have agreed, since around that time he rode an elevator to the top of 50 Penn Place—the tallest building in the suburban section of Oklahoma City where we’d grown up—but the rooftop door was locked, so he came down to earth again. I heard about this from one of Todd’s few friends, Thomas, a musician manqué with a goatee who’d moved to Boston a few years before (leaving Todd all the more bereft in Oklahoma City). One day Todd had called Thomas and mentioned that he was trying to kill himself but being thwarted by stupid shit like locked doors. “Fifty Penn Place isn’t the only tall building in Oklahoma City,” Thomas pointed out. “Yeah, but it’s the only one nearby,” said Todd. “I’d have to take a bus downtown, you know? Pay a buck. Fuck that.” Surely such acedia was a matter of comic hyperbole. Thomas laughed. Todd laughed. It was a fun conversation. At one point Todd said something like, “I’m a double felon and my fucking back hurts all the time. I look like shit. I’m totally unemployable. Nobody wants to see me anymore. What would you do if you were me, Thomas?” “Talk about a rhetorical question!” his friend laughed. Then (so he told me later) he hastened to add that he was joking, of course, and urged Todd to seek help at the VA. Todd did not seek help, until one night he was arrested again. My mother called the station and learned he was charged with breaking and entering; also he’d spat on the arresting officers and gotten a good beating in the bargain. Todd went out with a certain bravado; the contrite ghost who’d pushed bits of dim sum around his plate on Valentine’s Day was, during the last few weeks of his life, nowhere in evidence. As always my mother kept tabs on him at the county jail—a ghastly place—where he was, by all accounts, a real live wire: He talked back to guards and prisoners alike, was often written up and pummeled, and was finally placed in solitary for his own safety. The white Rodney King again. To the end my mother believed that if only Todd could stop drinking and drugging, he’d become a productive citizen of sorts. She always made a point of saying so when she spoke to him on the phone. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” Todd would reply, and one night he told her to fetch a pen. He began dictating a sulky suicide note. The tender bits were all for Zhila; what he had to say to us, my father and me, was loving but defiant: “I miss your pagan asses.” “So I’m going to hell,” I said, when my mother told me as much. “Does this mean he’s finally going to kill himself, or what?” My mother deplored my flippancy—“Nuh!”—adding that the note had actually been dictated a week or so earlier and Todd was still alive, as far as she knew. So maybe he’d changed his mind. He hadn’t changed his mind. In fact he was waiting for an apt occasion—Good Friday, as it happened, though I’m not sure whether Todd identified more with the martyred Christ or the “good thief” Dismas (“today shalt thou be with me in Paradise”). In any case, just before midnight, he made a slipknot of his sheets and strangled himself in bed. Eventual efforts to revive him were unavailing. My mother likes to tell of how she got the news that night, as it appeals to her love of the macabre. She’d just woken up with terrible cramps when the phone rang. She knew it was bad news; she knew it had something to do with Todd; but such was the urgency of her condition that she had to grab the cordless with one hand, staggering, and fumble at her panties with the other. She’d just exploded on the toilet when the chaplain said, “I’m afraid I have bad news, Mrs.—” “And I think he must have heard something,” said my mother, “since he sort of hesitated, you know? Then he asked me to pray with him. He asked me to get down on my knees. So I said, ‘OK, go ahead,’ and the whole time I was straining at stool.” Then she bursts out cackling, beet red in the face, subsiding at last with a pensive sigh. “Ah God,” she says, dabbing an eye. “Poor Todd.” For a few months after his death I often thought of my brother, and sometimes I’d cry a little as I remembered reading Rupert Brooke’s “Clouds” when we buried his ashes in the pet cemetery behind my mother’s house: They say that the Dead die not, but remain Near to the rich heirs of their grief and
mirth.
I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as
these,
In wise, majestic, melancholy train,
And watch the moon, and the still-raging
seas,
And men coming and going on the earth. Part of me knew such sentiment was maudlin and all for myself—the bereft little brother who could have tried harder, etc.—so I’d take a deep breath and think of other things. A better kind of mourning were the times I’d laugh at something and realize that Todd, and perhaps Todd alone, would have laughed too. It strikes me as odd that I never once dreamed about Todd after his death. My mother reports the same phenomenon, and it’s a lot stranger in her case. She tells me that every other day or so she visits the pet cemetery and sits on the bench next to Todd’s grave, chattering at him. Whimsically she invests him with the supernatural powers of the dead: “You were a pain in the ass when you were alive, Todd,” she notes fondly, “so tomorrow I want you to give us a little rain. My herbs are dying!” Mostly, though, she scolds him for his conspicuous absence from her dreams. “Why don’t you ever visit?” “Does he answer?” I asked one day. “No,” she said. She sipped her martini and stared at a hummingbird droning at a feeder there on her porch. “I think he’s in a place where he just doesn’t think of us anymore.” And I remembered why I’d started crying as a child, 30 years ago, in that paneled room at the back of my grandmother’s house in Vinita. Todd had just confided about his second family who lived in the other dimension, and then he’d added—without vindictiveness, as if he were simply stating a poignant, intractable fact—that someday he’d disappear into their loving arms forever. “You won’t even visit?” I sobbed. “No,” he said, holding my hand. “I’ll never come back.”