A Happy Catastrophe

“Really? Text messages?” He’d been astonished yet again at the way she sees the world.

The truth is he can’t get over how she lives her life, bouncing from thing to thing with the most open heart of anyone he’s ever met. She actually looks for complications to concern herself with, which baffles him. She will stop all their forward progress just so she can dig through her purse for money to give to homeless people on the street; she often carries cookies she’s baked (both the wheat kind and the gluten-free kind) to give to strangers—and, oh yes, she talks about the universe like it’s a personal friend of hers, as in, “Well, we’ll have to see what the universe has to say about that.” And when people are maddeningly late, she shrugs and says Mercury is probably in retrograde, and when objects are lost, she has this chant she says, and 90 percent of the time, the lost things obediently come right back from wherever they were escaping to. She says you sometimes have to “beam energy,” like that’s a thing. As near as he can tell, she actually thinks that Blix’s spirit hangs out near the toaster in their kitchen.

He can’t quite believe how much he has let himself love her. He can’t help it. Being loved by Marnie feels like he’s stumbled out of the attic where the crazy person lives, and now he’s allowed to go outside and breathe in the fresh air. He can smile. Make love. It’s like experiencing color again, after living in a world that had mostly faded to gray.

But then, once he finds himself basking in it, even the smallest bit, the bad thoughts show up in his head.

Hi, Patrick. Have you given any thought to the fire today? You haven’t? Well, try thinking about this, you with your happy, satisfied little life. All of this, may we remind you, can be taken away from you in the flash of a nanosecond. Every single shred of happiness—poof!

Her name was Anneliese Cunningham.

It’s a name he doesn’t ever say aloud anymore. No one says it. She had long black hair and big green eyes and one dimple, and she was an artist, and she wore black leggings and long black T-shirts and a silver chain with a crescent moon every single day along with ballet slippers, except in the winter when she wore furry boots. And she was twenty-four years old on the day it happened.

She didn’t believe in magic or Mercury in retrograde. She believed in art and in hard work that might pay off over time but probably wouldn’t. She had silences he couldn’t penetrate.

And now those silences stretch out inside him, like they have become a big nothingness existing among his organs and muscles. A black hole at his center.

He woke up in a hospital. He will always remember the way the room smelled and how the light felt like knives when they told him that Anneliese was dead. He politely asked if they could kill him, too, but they ignored that because they wouldn’t, and he couldn’t figure out how to change their minds. It would be so easy for them to do it, a little overdose, a willingness to look the other way. No one would report them. And he would be so grateful to them. But no deal. He had to get up; he had to learn to walk again, and there were painful surgeries and therapies to get through, and he couldn’t even move his face, couldn’t cry. But then—and he was supposed to be happy about this, everyone said this was wonderful, the miracle he’d been waiting for—he got a big settlement check. A payoff. What a rip-off, to take away his girlfriend’s life and his livelihood and then think that money could make up for even one second of it.

Here, my son. Here is what your girlfriend’s life was worth. Here’s what your well-being was worth, your joy, your face.

Die, he said to that face every day and every night. The face in the mirror.

He had a therapist for every part of him. Body, mind, and spirit. He went through the motions. And later, when the whole medical establishment said he was well enough—or as good as he was going to get anyway—he moved into a luxury hotel, because he was rich and so why not, and he ordered room service whenever he thought of it. He didn’t go outside for months, just ordered the filet mignons and the salmon mousses because he could afford them, and he threw most food away and spent his time watching daytime television and late-night movies and trying to figure out how to die without doing anything truly violent to himself because he didn’t have the stomach for that. People from his old life came and tried to reach him—even Anneliese’s parents, Grace and Kerwin—but he turned them all away. He couldn’t face them. He feels bad about that now; he should have summoned the courage to face them, and now it’s way too late. He wanted to be alone while he waited for death.

But when he didn’t die, when eons had passed and it looked like he was so incompetent at wishing for things that he was going to have to stay alive forever, he took a little research job, writing descriptions of diseases for a medical website, a job as distant from art as possible. He was irrationally angry with art, like that had been the thing that betrayed him. He wanted a job he could do from his hotel room, without any conversations with human beings. The website was designed for people who had some kind of distressing symptom, who were probably up in the middle of the night typing in things like: “black mole on armpit” or “headache after sex.” Patrick’s job was to get them to seek medical attention, so he wrote things like, “Possible malignancy” or “Possible brain infarction.” He took a kind of pleasure in ringing the warning bells for others. “This could be a sign of serious disease. You should see a medical professional immediately,” he would type. “DO NOT LET THIS GO UNTREATED.”

He could make anything sound dire, because to him, everything was dire: an ingrown toenail can lead to an amputation, a twitch might be a stroke, and a young woman in an artist’s apartment might turn on a stove to make a simple cup of coffee and that little surge of gas might trigger an explosion that kills her.

That is the world we live in, folks. Get used to it.

He can’t really explain the thing that happened next. He ventured outside one day, called there by a force he still doesn’t understand. As he stood there blinking in the sunlight, unsure of what to do, suddenly there was an elderly hippie woman walking toward him, smiling. She was wearing all kinds of scarves and jewelry and a pair of embroidered pants that looked like they’d once belonged to either a toreador or Liberace. She said her name was Blix, and she greeted him like she’d been waiting for him, as though they might have been old friends. He wasn’t used to people coming up and talking to him, particularly ones who didn’t look at all surprised by his appearance. He didn’t really want to talk to her—or anyone—but she wasn’t having anything that sounded like no.

So that was the day he learned, over a cup of coffee in the darkest corner of a New York deli, an elemental fact about life: that there are certain people in the world who find you and lather you up with so much love that you don’t even realize how it is that suddenly you belong to them in ways you could not have predicted. Like it or not, they get underneath all your carefully built defenses, and your whole fort just crumbles at their feet and all your foot soldiers hang up their weapons and retire. You try to call them back, and they say, “Nah. We’re good. See ya.”

She somehow wormed out of him the whole sorry story of his life, and then insisted that he come along and live in her building, a brownstone in Brooklyn. Hotel life was getting monotonous and boring, and Blix was very persistent. Much to his own surprise, that next month he gave in and moved into her basement apartment with a newly purchased bank of computers, and he adopted a ferocious cat who was hanging around the garbage cans. Most days Blix would come pounding down the stairs, ignoring every single signal he gave to her that he did not want to talk, and when he’d give up and let her in, she’d sit on the floor and tell him her philosophy of life, which mostly included a whole lot of fantastic swear words as well as some fairly insane talk about love and forgiveness and the universe and souls. The swear words were colorful and made him laugh. He had forgotten the sound of his own laughter. She had a book of spells, which he did not think she was serious about, but she told him she made good use of them, especially when people needed a little assistance in finding the right person—a concept he rejected. There is no right person, he told her, and she said that there absolutely was. Someone for everyone. Maybe several people. Everybody could have love. He just had to wait. In the meantime, she said, they could dance and eat great food. She had spectacular friends, including her boyfriend, Houndy, who was a lobsterman. There were times they all ate lobsters for breakfast, lunch, and dinner up on their rooftop looking out over Brooklyn—just like Patrick preferred it: close enough that they could watch the city unfolding but with enough distance that he didn’t have to interact with it.