Dawn was coming through the windows, too quickly, always too quickly, moving much faster than my mind and body ever could. My wife Sharon, beautiful in middle age (and beautiful always!), was sound asleep next to me, her ear pressed against soft cotton. It was Saturday.
But I was awake, and thinking about $3,000. This was the budget that Sharon and I decided on together but it would actually be more if you really add it up – and considering that it’s the Grand Californian, considering that we wanted to do the Disney Princess breakfast with Rithika, our only child, who had just turned six, and the princess breakfast was something that she and Sharon had been looking forward to all year, I could not possibly refuse them. Queens and princesses, their full-skirted beauty, their fusion and exchange of energies with my sweet babies, Sharon and Rithika both. Though we had been to Disneyland twice already this year – as was typical for us – the Grand Californian was the aspirational experience Sharon had hoped and prayed for.
I was in no position to deny her. I believe in benevolence and its hierarchies – from myself to Sharon, Sharon to Rithika, Rithika to the small creatures, real and imagined, cartoon or flesh and blood. As I brushed my teeth, thankful for their strength, I remembered all the souvenirs that we had yet to buy. The toys and the Donald Duck shaped cookie cutters, the plush Minnies, the Princess Jasmine figurines, the Christmas ornament box sets which would come in specialty wrapping, to be ripped open with shaking hands. And not to mention all the Christmas shopping for Sharon’s extended family that was still to come. So much more to come, all the time. But that was it, wasn’t it? The momentum, the rush – the changing of the seasons and the various obligations they imposed on me. This was substance, this was life, one that could not be denied, even as the constraints closed in on me. I wanted nothing more than the happiness of those around me: this was the greatest charge that could ever be bestowed upon a person.
In the bathroom, Sharon had put out the Disney Christmas hand towels, little Christmas figurines – the familiar characters bedecked in green and red, dancing in stop motion next to the soap dish. In the shower, as I scrubbed myself clean with the Mickey-shaped bath pouf that Sharon had bought me, it began to enter into my mind that it would be closer to $4,000. This thought had occurred to me before, but I had not acknowledged it. But sooner or later – reality does arrive. I was shedding skin all over the pink checkered tile. I was getting clean and the day was beginning. Even amongst all of this newness, there was an intractable problem.
As I dressed, I watched the light streak across Sharon’s face, dutifully treated with those potions and elixirs she bought from the drugstore. Her leg was wrapped around the fuzzy blanket that she so loved, and her form was curved into a slight C shape. Her eyes moved underneath her lids, and I could only think about what she was dreaming about, and the recombinations of me or Rithika or anyone else we loved that lived behind her fluttering eyelids. I hoped that I was not a villain in her dreams. I hoped I was a hero, and she was a plucky heroine, and Rithika was part of a charmed epilogue, the product of pure love and impossible courage. Here, despite all the troubles, there was softness and there was light, and all that emanated from her. I thought of the first light, the first sounds, the light that emerges from all beings. Reality leaks, I see her, I see her hands, I see the bedspread and I cannot help but think about the world as transformed – a goodness etched onto everything, something more than what I can perceive with my five senses, but I know is there all the same.
But $4,000! It was not a good idea, not a good idea at all. But it was not about whether or not it was a good idea, because it was less about what was practical, what would keep us safe, or on track, and more about what would keep us happy – and grateful and bathed in this morning light everyday, no matter the cost.
It was not as if I did not have a job to support us both. Sharon’s job as a part time office manager brought in very little, and I was only an engineer at a small, unknown, Phoenix-area firm, a job that I tried very hard at but never seemed to advance so far in. I got the feeling – something ambient, something undefined, that when people looked at me, smiled at me – that tight line instead of open, and with teeth – that they were only humoring me. And I would stay smiling under the fluorescent light of the company kitchen, waiting for the leftovers that Sharon had packed me to heat up in the microwave, knowing my life was good, and worth it.
I went to Rithika’s room – who lay perfectly asleep, underneath her Aladdin sheets. She was so still she could be a doll, but I could not wait for her to be awake and marvel at the movement of her limbs, her undecipherable yet completely decipherable exclamations. Her sleeping form was surrounded by all the familiar creatures – Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck. Goofy stood out on the rug. Mickey was stamped on the curtains. She sleeps with a Pluto that she hugs tight to her chest, which Sharon wanted to buy her for what was her 5th birthday, and I could not say no – because that was not what our life was going to be about. She looked more like me than Sharon. She was my color, my father’s color, and perhaps his father’s. Despite her bright eyes, which had yet to open for the day, her browline looked like mine – South Indian all the same. I smoothed the hair off of it. She shifted slightly against my palm.
I left her room and sat at the head of the kitchen table, farmhouse style per Sharon’s choice. Sharon had swept and mopped the kitchen clean last night so the air smelled fresh and green, like Pinesol. Her house plants were growing wild out of their containers, green, leafy, bursting out of their pots, sheltered from the heat outside.
And outside there was only desert, flat dust-flecked roads and palm trees. Buckeye had come a long way in its development in the 10 years we had lived here – but we were still so far out, in the outskirts – the edge of the city’s civilization. I would take the long 40 minute drive on the freeway, and arrive back at a home which would rise up in front of me, braced against the mountains and blinding blue, with little around it besides a few neighbors, and all the frames of the new houses that were yet to come. When it rained there was nothing better. We would wake up to the soft pattering on the roof and the windows, the smell that wafted into the house that was fresh and old all at once.
Once, Rithika and Sharon returned from a hike along the cactus spotted hill behind our subdivision. Rithika drank her water from her plastic cup, and Sharon taught her what the word “paradise” meant, and I looked over Rithika’s head to see Sharon’s face – and there was nothing lovelier or more mysterious, as if she had been born to explain this very fact to our daughter. Rithika cried that evening. I don’t remember what it had been about, but I recall her wailing, the sound echoing around the house – out of the windows and into the desert outside, and even that felt mysterious to me, a sound I had heard so many times, responded to on instinct. But I still marveled at it.
She had chosen this house and I did nothing but tell her “yes – of course, this one.” We were meant to have this one, this I knew for certain. It was more expensive than was wise. But I had to have it, for her, and Rithika, who had yet to have been conceived at the time.
I hoped for something to come to me, something I could do for myself that wouldn’t involve reaching out to my brother Abhishek, or my father, or even my mother – the only one of my immediate family that I missed, and terribly at that. But where was I supposed to get $4,000? Maybe $5,000? If it wasn’t for the mortgage, if it wasn’t for the limited edition collectibles we had amassed on the spring trip, Rithika’s princess-themed summer camp – I wouldn’t worry as much. But all of these things had happened – decisions we had made, money taken out, and that was that, and then the money was gone. These things were not arguable, you could not make half-measures of them, what was done was done. But this holiday trip was also not negotiable – it was for Rithika- for her memories, these photographs that we would place in a family album, that we would thumb through wistfully once she got old enough to hate us for a real or imagined reason. It was also for Sharon – who wanted so much for Rithika, and wanted so many images of her – holding Mickey’s hand or smiling with a princess, some angelic made-up actress, bursting with tulle and beauty, exchanging bright light with my daughter.
I had asked my father for money before. At the time, I told him I was doing an online MBA, the paperwork for which I had falsely drawn up from whatever was on the Arizona State University website, program information, logos and tuition invoices and all. I was supposed to complete that in a year and half, and I didn’t want to have to make up elaborate stories about my progress.
I opened up the laptop and tried to make the numbers move and make sense: the mortgage for this four bedroom Tudor revitalization home, the car payments, insurance premium, grocery bills, Sharon’s student loans, all the Christmas gifts for Sharon’s family and the small gift I would send home to my mother, though that was hardly worthy of the line item. Nothing worked, nothing materialized. The numbers were immutable, reentering the formulas, or copying and pasting one number into a different cell- it was only an exercise, a rearrangement of what was already there in front of my eyes. I ended up back where I was, thinking about $4,000, maybe $5,000 if I was being realistic, but I had to be grateful, I had to look at my home and those I’d been charged to protect.
I wished I could tell Sharon but then Sharon would cry. She would never be angry with me- but she would look up at me and blink back tears, the effort of which would make all her lovely features collapse. Eventually, there would be a few tears shed – and then she would smile at me, but with great effort. And then, we would have to tell Rithika, and that would be real screaming, tears running down her face, her putting on her crumpled princess costume, if only in protest, in mourning of the Christmas at Disneyland she had been promised; the thought was beyond unbearable-
“You’re up early.” The sun was coming through the windows, pouring through in earnest now, and there was Sharon, standing in the midst of it. There are many people who look at their wives as if they are strangers, those people who can hardly remember what it felt like to clasp hands for the first time, or they can remember it all too well – but the touch has been effaced, the image has been effaced, and all they are left with is woundedness, a lack. Many of the engineers at work spoke that way. My own father spoke that way, only worse. Suffice to say, I could not understand such a thing.
Sharon is usually up earlier than me, up earlier than Rithika- because she wants me to be strong and alert, and for Rithika to be ready for a whole new day. She wants me to be happy – so she’ll make me a cup of coffee, she’ll make waffles, with a berry compote she learned to make from one of those food bloggers she loves to read. There’s a Mickey Mouse waffle iron that she plugs in every morning. She adds eggs, oil, and cinnamon to a pre-made mix in a big purple bowl, and stirs until it’s smooth. And then minutes later there is a Mickey-shaped waffle sitting on a matching purple plate, a pat of butter on top, melting down onto the plate, with the berry compote, placed in the space between Mickey’s ears. As she did this, I remained busy with my numbers and the credit card statements. I saw Sharon move in my peripheral vision, her shadow turning towards me. As she took the plate and was about to set it in front of me, I thanked her, and closed the lip of the laptop. She was not to worry. This was my burden, and would remain my burden. She left the room to get Rithika up and ready for the day.
And then, alone again in the kitchen, I took the fork – that farmhouse style utensil set that went so well with the linens and the solid wood table – and put it right through Mickey’s chin, and then those ears, the ears that were so dripping with berry compote, smeared it all over the purple plate, holes in his face, holes in his eyes, that shape, all mangled now – relief to no longer be hungry, relief to be eating my wife’s cooking, that could be nothing short of sublime. Sweet, but not too sweet. The contents of the plate in front of me were golden and bloody. All the matter was in front of me, mixed and braced against the lip of the plate. I took forkfuls of what remained and swallowed it down.
And then Rithika came running out of her room, in her Aladdin pajama set. Sharon told her she was her little princess Jasmine, Jasmine. Once she told us that Jasmine was her name after all, and cried when I called her Rithika by accident. I did not know how long it would last, our calling her Jasmine, and for a while I was concerned. She was signing all her school papers with Jasmine, so much so that the teacher called Sharon. I could hardly blame her for being Jasmine in her mind – by default, of course. But also because she loved that specific shade of blue, the sky in Aladdin, the notes of the songs, the curved, exaggerated Middle Eastern structures. And Rithika loved Jasmine. And Sharon loved that she loved Jasmine. It was pure continuity. Rithika held the ends of her shiny hair after Sharon brushed it, closing her eyes, willing it to grow longer. It was something that I could only be so honored to be a part of.
“Daddy ate Mickey!” Rithika said, as she emerged from her room and sat in the chair next to me. Our grown up girl sat without a booster seat now, peering up at me with my own blinking eyes from underneath her lashes.
I had a week. A week until there was a credit card payment due, and we were all kept up with the mortgage – but there was simply not enough – the week following was my payday, and Sharon’s payday the week following that – but that was of such little importance. Rithika finished her breakfast. I had come to no solution, and Sharon took her plate to the sink, soaking it in foamy bubbles, which smelled like a cartoon lemon. Sharon looked over at me, over Rithika’s head, with a look on her face that I could not discern. It could have been suspicion, it could have been pity, which would mean that she knew everything, after all. If this were the case, the question remained why she would leave me to suffer alone; but perhaps it was also for my sake, so I wouldn’t have to know that she knew that I was a failure, and that there was nothing solid for me to offer them this Christmas, only my prolonging of the inevitable.
But then there was Rithika, asking to go outside, asking if we could all go outside and be together in the sunshine. Sharon took her hand. And then, both of my princesses were gone, and I was alone with my problem.
I hadn’t wanted to – but I had to try something. I sat down at the kitchen table and dialed my parent’s home phone number, though I hoped that no one would answer, and I could forget the whole thing.
****
“Hey Shankar.” It was my older brother Abhishek on the phone. I could hear noise on the other side – muffled chatter, chairs scraping, a melody pressing into the receiver, the kind of activity that signaled a full, well-attended life. My father loved to entertain. As a child, growing up just an hour away from where we lived now, I had shrank from these gatherings, staring blankly out the window or sitting quietly with my mother and the women in the kitchen. My father held court as the head cardiologist at Banner Health, sitting with his beer and samosas that my mother left for him and all the lesser doctors on the coffee table. There he would sit, sizing up the rest, spreading the grease and fat everywhere onto napkins – hardly noticing when they would fall to the floor.
Back then, I had a condition – clammy hands that would drip down onto my jeans. Even the handkerchiefs my mother lovingly folded and pressed into my hands could not stem the sweat. And then I would be asked to shake someone’s hand, and my father would roll his eyes, knowing what was coming, feeling the wetness and the skin contact as if it was his own palm.
“I didn’t realize you were visiting.” I said. I never knew what to say to Abhishek, and hadn’t known since before we were both teenagers. My brother once said that the reason why I turned out the way I did was because I did not grow as tall as my father. He didn’t say this to me, but I heard it – secondhand from my father himself, who laughed at me after he repeated the remark.
“Yeah. Actually I moved back.” This was surprising. The last I heard – he had been in San Francisco and had sold one of his ecommerce interfaces for a couple million – and was looking for the next thing. My mother said he lived alone in a big tall tower – with barely any furniture. Maybe there had been a girlfriend – probably a fair amount younger than he was. Drugs, partying, but my mother tended to exaggerate.
“You’re living at home then?” He laughed.
“Don’t be stupid. I’m just here because Dad made me; I don’t have the excuses you do. I’m in an apartment.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know how to feel. He had seen Rithika maybe twice in her whole life. At a dinner once, after pouring an oyster into his mouth, he told me that it made sense that I picked a woman like Sharon for myself. It was not meant to be a compliment. I wanted to be angry with him, but it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t understand love.
“Listen – Shankar, we should catch up – I’ve been thinking about things and, well – it’d be nice to be around your family.” I wanted to hang up, the way I would hang up in high school, as if we hadn’t even spoken and my dialing of the number hadn’t even happened.
“Oh I don’t know-”
“Things haven’t been easy. There’s no one for me to talk to here. And – I guess I saw your name on the caller ID and realized that I should have reached out earlier, and I felt hopeful. Who else understands you like your brother you know?” I’m sorry to have been so out of touch, and I just, well, sometimes I don’t know what to do with myself-” He let the end of the sentence drop. This was unlike him. He was usually curt, far more sure of himself.
And yet, here was an opportunity.
Abhishek lived alone and had moved back. He sat on a couple million dollars. He was looking to reconnect. It was all fate, it was all clear, and all I had to do was to visit Abhishek and hear about his life without frowning, and Sharon and Rithika would have their Christmas at the Grand Californian.
“Okay.” Abhishek told me an address. I wrote it down. I did want to see him, I did want to make sure that he was okay, of course I did, and the favor would come – by virtue of my inherent care for him.
Later that day, I told Sharon that I had something at the office to take care of. I don’t know what she thought but she nodded and kissed me goodbye before I left. Rithika was napping on the couch, exhausted, and once again, dressed in her princess Jasmine attire. The sun was sinking down behind me. The Donald Duck bobblehead on the dashboard was bouncing up and down. I looked out of the window and in the clouds – dotted with pink sun, I kept seeing that Mickey Mouse outline, against the sky and against my eyelids. I wondered if I was going crazy. I thought I would feel better once the light faded but then it was just darkness and my headlights, and my once-again sweaty hands on the steering wheel.
I arrived at the address he had given me. It was a condo in downtown Chandler. The oranges and the blues of the development, and the welcoming signs, and the bike racks and the xeriscaping all seemed friendly, promising even. Luxury living was even advertised. It looked like a nice place for a different kind of person, perhaps someone with fewer burdens but fewer blessings than I did. Perhaps such a person would not have the worries that I have, but I loved to worry, I loved the responsibility that this love put forth. I walked up the steps to the third floor, I felt the muscles in my legs activate, my heart pounding: I was to stagger under the weight of my immeasurable blessings until life itself was over.
I arrived at Apartment 3C. And then, before I knocked, Abhishek opened the door, smiling at me and hugging me very tightly, his palms pressing hard against my back, pressing me into his gray shirt. There were many smells – stale takeout maybe, Mexican food that by now should have been in a dumpster, something mildewing as if someone had spilled something on a carpet and let it fester, cigarette smoke and sweat; Abhishek himself was sweating and the apartment was somehow quite hot despite the sign outside that advertised a luxury environment and the moisture was plain and obvious when he hugged me, as was the scent of liquor, and his whole form was less than solid, skinnier than before, far less himself than I once remembered him to be.
Even amongst all of this, my only hope was that it wouldn’t smell worse when I took a step forward into the apartment, and more importantly, that the smell would not cling to me and get stuck in my clothes. I worried that if it did, the scent would never come out, and it would cover all of us, and all of Rithika’s princess clothing and her costumes forever. I felt shame cover me and drop into my heart, into my stomach, turning my guts.
As he let go of me, I saw something pleading in his eyes.
He waved me inside. Inside was indeed just as odorous, if not more so – old socks, like socks that had been pulled out of a dirty laundry pile, and reworn over and over again. I took the steps in and I realized that there was no couch, just an enormous, expensive looking burgundy armchair, some red and black abstract art leaned up against the walls, not yet hung up, two pillows for sitting on the floor, clothes strewn this way and that way, white takeout boxes stacked up in a tall pile, the counter next to the sink piled up with mostly plastic dishes. I saw two closed doors – the bedroom, the bathroom, maybe a closet. Though the living room and the kitchen were quite spacious, everything around us was formless and out of place, rotting and dissolving into the matter from which it had come.
Beyond the abstract artworks, which menaced rather than comforted, there was nothing ornamental. There were no Mickeys, no Plutos, nothing sweet that loomed over us, no cartoon eyes placed watchfully around the room to witness this squalor.
“How long have you been living here?” I almost wanted to ask him how long he had been living “like this” but I had to be patient. I was also here to make him feel better, I reminded myself.
“Oh you know – nearly a year and a half at this point.”
“You’ve been a 45 minute drive away for a year and a half?”
“I didn’t want to bother you. Like I said – your phone call was serendipity. Anyway, do you want something?” And before I could really reply there was a heavy glass in my hand. A couple ice cubes and whiskey I realized, as I took a sip. That is what Abhishek liked to drink – so I remembered. He had one of his own. He sat in the armchair, sprawled out and loose-limbed leaving me with nowhere to go besides one of the cushions on the floor. I sat there – looking up at him, thinking about Rithika’s face as I continued to inhale the scents.
“So you might have heard that Anita left me. Like officially a year and a half ago which is why I moved back, but now it’s really done – as of six months ago.”
“Who’s Anita?” He ignored my question and stared at the blank wall in front of him.
“Mom liked her. She was very smart, very beautiful. Probably too young for me – but that’s what happens, you know? I was 34, she’s you know – 25 when we met – but sometimes you just can’t help it. Maybe mom never mentioned it to you. In any case – she really left, she lives in Borneo now. Which – you know, good riddance.”
“What is she doing in Borneo?”
“It doesn’t matter. She was tired of what was a meaningless life, which to me – is a problem of being young, which became my problem too I guess. So now she’s saving the rainforests or the orangutans or something else. It’s fine. It’s all well and good. The orangutans don’t really need help from someone like her, but I guess they should take all the help that they can get. All hands on deck, that sort of thing.” He was gesturing a lot as he spoke, slowly sinking into the red backing of the chair, waving his glass around like a weapon. “They’re not doing well, I hear. It’s very grave. Habitat destruction, and of course, you know – climate change. People are always talking about it. I even offered to donate to the whole cause you know? To persuade her that she could still have her life with me and the orangutans. But that wasn’t what she wanted.”
“Couldn’t you have gone with her?” Part of me could hope. Wouldn’t that be so lovely, so innocent? If he and this Anita became stewards or protectors of the forest, perhaps Rithika could love them. Just like Mowgli and his friends. I had an image of Abhishek, showered clean, standing next to a smiling woman holding an orangutan, its nearly human hand reaching down to Rithika’s outstretched one.
The Jungle Cruise was one of Sharon’s favorites at Disneyland.
“Well – I didn’t want to. What the fuck was I going to do in Borneo?”
“Maybe work with her? She’s working for a wildlife preserve?” Perhaps I could help Abhishek find purpose, love, and fealty; he could be new again, he could live for something or someone, throw away all the takeout boxes, and pour his whiskey down the drain. And he could help me with my $4,000. $5,000! I began to picture beautiful visions of the future – mine this Christmas, his for the rest of his life!
“That’s not the point. The point is that she’s saving the orangutans and that’s the life that is suitable for her. The orangutans are endangered. We all need to help them, she says. But I’m not moving to Borneo. She can stay there and keep it all. You know, and I told her – well – there are lots of people in California that have problems – why not try to help some Californians? But she was dead set on the orangutans. But I think it’s bigger than that. It’s like – she’s one of those Russian dolls and she keeps opening herself up to find something on the inside – some kind of goodness I suppose, or meaning or strength but then it’s like she’s down to her actual final moment of examination and there’s one piece left, but of course that’s solid wood too, so there’s nothing to rip apart anymore. So she’s stuck there with all these things she’s ‘unpacked’ but now she’s crying all the time for no reason, so I say ‘okay go save the orangutans.’” I nodded. “She’s so good at making decisions- it’s a trait that was very admirable at one point but now – I’m not so sure.”
“You’re really not going to try to figure things out with her?”
He shook his head.
It was possible that the situation was beyond help. It occurred to me that I should at least be sympathizing with him- or at least, making him feel less alone about his problems. It bothered me to speak ill of Sharon, but I was never a good liar, and I wasn’t doing it because I meant it – I was doing it because it would be easier to win someone’s love if they thought that you were with them, embodied in their suffering, and that the suffering was present, omnipresent, atmospherically – and that they were not really at fault, but that these things were an immutable fact of life.
“Sharon and I – well – it’s been very tough because she really loves Disney – I think you knew that right?”
“Sure, yeah. Aladdin. I saw your kid – oh how old is she now? In one of those Jasmine costumes. But that’s different, you have a kid. Anita is selfish. She’s always been selfish – always making me go to those dumb raves, off hours at one of those warehouses where they park composting trucks, and what the fuck do I look like, staying out like that?”
“Sure, sure – it’s different. I’m just trying to say-” and I was closing in on the main point, since approaching things from a parallel, indirect conversational style was not working- “that her obsession with something causes me similar problems! It’s inconvenient at times.”
“Inconvenient is one thing-” It was obvious to me why Abhishek was so unlikable to Anita now – but I couldn’t give it up. I tried again.
“It’s not only inconvenient, it’s ruining my health. My blood pressure is high, I can’t sleep, I’m worried all the time about money, I can’t do anything besides think about all the things we have to buy, the expenses and the Christmas ornaments, and everything she wants for the house! I don’t know how to sit in a room with her and tell her no. I can’t give her bad news – it’d be such a terrible thing.”
“Well no one likes bad news.” Abhishek responded. He had finished his second glass and was up and pouring himself another. I tucked mine away on the floor. I couldn’t make this more complicated. I needed a sound mind.
“My point is that I know what you mean when they say that love requires a lot out of you. And I suppose-” I was concluding, “that what you are going through with Anita is similar to how I sometimes feel with Sharon – even in a marriage, with a child.”
“What can I say? Love hobbles you. It’s so deforming,” Abhishek said. He added, “obviously you know that better than anyone. You end up with someone else’s ideas stuck in your brain, their concerns stuck in your brain and there’s nothing you can do. You feel the world with their hands, and you hear it and see it through their nervous system. It’s pure pollution. And now – now, it’s like this rotten lifestyle consumerism. Borneo. Orangutans. No one is looking at the world with any kind of strength!”
“Oh sure – there’s a lot I feel about consumerism – that I think even in the case of my own marriage…” I was trailing off because Abhishek wasn’t even looking at me, or acknowledging my attempts to link our situations – he was looking around, drinking more. For the first time that evening it occurred to me that I ought to be extremely worried about him. But he was still talking.
“There’s been a lot I’ve been thinking about – we have to get back to a place of real ambition and entrepreneurship. And we have to live in a place that people are proud to live in so they don’t get all these psychoses – orangutan-related psychoses – such that we can live in community again-” He was slurring, walking around now, pacing back and forth. I asked him if he wanted to sit on the floor with me, and he and his half empty glass came with him, and then it was empty no longer, and he was pouring it again, missing it and landing on the floor. He was beginning to lean against the foot of the armchair, closing his eyes.
“Man – I need to go to bed” And he was about to stand up, and was about to stagger into what I presumed was the bedroom, but I couldn’t let him pass out. I had to ask the question – I only had a few days left and who knows with work, with Rithika, with Abhishek’s erratic behavior if I’d have another chance to get my money, which if I was being realistic and practical about the whole thing – it would be better to ask for more, so that I would not have to ask again. And it was only this chance that I needed; after that – maybe I’d get a raise, or maybe I could start investing – and there would be another way out of it, and I could be alone, with my family, my daughter, my wife and away from Abhishek. This last thought made me feel incredible sadness, my hands were sweating, my senses were being overwhelmed by the smell of the apartment. I thought about Abhishek lying here, choking on his own vomit. I got him a glass of water, and he managed a few sips, sitting on one of the floor cushions now, leaning up against the armchair.
“I – Shankar – you need to let me go to sleep.” He was leaning against his elbows, eyes drooping. And as his body was wilting, so were all my grand ambitions, and the images I had – of us at the Grand Californian – sipping cocktails – Rithika holding the real life Jasmine’s hand were dissolving. And then I was panicking because how else was I going to get my money, if not for this person, in this apartment? And what was going to happen to him? There was no throughline to his life, no plot or sense of good or evil, there was nothing at all, except some inevitable end, some car crash, literal or figurative.
“Abhishek – I need to speak with you.” I was shaking him now but he was brushing me off. I thought about pouring cold water on him – and was about to do so when I saw his phone was in his pocket. I took it out. He was soundly out and the bile was starting to rise up in my throat from the smell and my overwhelm- I hadn’t called Sharon back. I didn’t want to be here anymore and I couldn’t stand it for another minute.
Then it was right there on his phone. So easy, so simple. I used his thumbprint to unlock the phone. Cracked screen. A million notifications bunched up at the top . Never mind all of that.
I sent myself three transactions of $3,000, $9,000 in total as I only needed a little extra, a little time for me to figure out the next thing. As I was about to delete the transactions, I looked at his text threads. Pleading messages to his ex-girlfriend.
Anita sent him back a long block of text that it was okay – she treasured him, valued him, loved him so much so that she had to keep herself as herself, and not an extension of him, and not an extension of their lives – and it was very difficult, you see – trying to hold onto your life in a committed, serious, LTR (long term relationship, I assumed) with someone so committed to holding onto her as a symbol of something, and not the actual thing – and what was the actual thing, at the end of the day?
Surprising myself, I sent back the money.
I deleted all the history from his Venmo. He would not remember. I got up to leave, pulled the cushion off the armchair and elevated his head with it. I smoothed his hair down, and saw him breathe – slow, and soft. Certain that he was soundly asleep, and lying on his side, I opened the door and left.
I did not know what I was going to do, if I was going to shut the door, walk down the stairs, drive the long drive home, come home and find Sharon exhausted but smiling, reading Rithika to sleep. There would be Sharon looking up at me from her seat by Rithika’s side, and all those versions of her that I loved through the years, Rithika’s closing eyes blinking in acknowledgement of her beloved father, all those cartoon faces of stuffed animals nestled around the bed with their black and white eyes tilted upwards, all staring up at me in exaltation as I opened my mouth.
