The Duration Read online

  Chickie Benecik, he of the untimely phone call, wanted to meet at the corner of Council and Railroad Streets, the edge of what passed in the Knots for the wrong side of the tracks. The Knots was on the way up, relatively speaking, but it still had a ways to go, and parts of the city remained breeding grounds for disaffection and the things that came with it. Some of those parts were just down the hill from the entrance to the Knotsford Medical Center, which is where, I gathered, Chickie had recently been spending time.

  I parked the Escalade and engaged the e-brake. Hah! With Kelly on the wing, it was all I was engaging these days. And better for it.

  Chick and I had been toddlers on the same short street, only children, quickly inseparable, classmates at Cameron Elementary and altar boys at St. Barney’s from nine until twelve, when that stuff with Bill Trivette came out. Unsie and Jimmer didn’t come along until later, probably around 1995, when we started playing Catholic Youth Council ball. Our coach was a lunatic named George Harvey. He used to wear these cutoff sweatpants that must’ve been twenty years old. He had that big old gut and a big ass and he’d hike those bad boys up so tight that when he’d crouch to bark at us in the drills his nuts would press through the thin fabric of his sweats, right in our faces, like a tennis ball that hangs in your garage to tell you where to stop the car. It was hard for us to focus on what he was saying with his nutsack hung out like that, so we fucked up the drills, which infuriated him, and then we had to run sprints. All because he couldn’t buy a pair of pants that fit. He was old school. One day after practice, Jimmer suggested we just find a way to snip that shit off, free George Harvey from the tether of his nutsack. Solution! He’d be less angry and we’d be less tired. We were still getting to know Jimmer at the time, and weren’t sure if this idea was genius or sociopathic.

  But yeah, George Harvey. He kept sticking me at power forward because I was already tall at the time, and I was like yeah I’m tall but I can handle the ball, I’m like Magic Johnson, put me at the point, but he wouldn’t because his godson played point. You know Jim Flake? Yeah, he was okay but he wasn’t going to get any quicker.

  Chickie was our shooter. He had a stroke that was like half poetry and half automation, a grace note practiced ten thousand times. When he got older, in high school, if we could get him the ball in the right spot, I didn’t even look for a rebound, I just ran back on defense as soon as he rose up. Chick used to let out a little whoop when he shot, until Coach Harvey made him stop, but he wasn’t doing it to be a jerk. It seemed involuntary. Sometimes he whooped whether the ball went in or not. Unsie was our big man until he quit to ski and Jimmer eventually took over the point. Man, we rolled kids. They could not hang. We even rolled the Golacks, up at laconic Misconic. Colonic Misconic. One summer we were playing rec league there and as we’re walking into the gym, the Golacks are outside just glaring at us. Ronnie, Robbie, and their little brother Tim-Rick, who was so nice they named him twice, except he wasn’t nice at all, he was the meanest fucker we’d ever met. And they didn’t like getting whipped. But we whipped them anyway, and then while we were still in the gym, they tried to push our car down an embankment.

  I hadn’t seen Chick in the eight years since my father’s funeral. After high school, my decade had gone college, Dad’s heart attack, law school, semi-engagement. Chick, I gathered, had done a couple of different junior colleges, drifting across the Southwest, then two stints with an international aid and education outfit called SmartSeeds. First one was in Guatemala, digging wells and building schools for Guatemalan kids. I got one postcard. Then the South Pacific, some island kingdom near the nuclear testing atolls where everyone glowed and the babies had twelve fingers. Just about as far away from Gable as it was possible to get. Somewhere in there he’d made it back to stand beside me at the wake. Then he was gone again. I hadn’t really given him more than a passing thought in years. Just knew he was out there somewhere, doing his Chickie things. Everyone was doing their things. Figured we’d get together someday, reconnect, wouldn’t really miss a beat.

  Which seemed to be what was happening.

  I stood on the corner and looked for him, trying to pick him out of the stragglers on Council Street. I wondered if I was sure I’d recognize him, but of course I would. By the end of high school, he’d developed this slouchy, limpy walk that looked like a strut. The sidewalk was sloped steeply down to the west, and KMC was just one distracted orderly away from sending a gurney rolling into the Housatonic. Up across Council, in the blocks off the rotary, sat St. Eustace, another hive of high school rivals, whose queen bee I’d dated briefly in 2000. She was a cute girl from the east side of the Knots, daughter of a judge, Shaunda Schorenstein or something like that. Shaunda Schoenstein. She’d taken me to her senior formal that year. I was just a junior from Gable, and we got a lot of dirty looks, which I think was what she was hoping for but sort of scared the shit out of me at the time because even though you’d think Catholic schools were full of sweethearts it’s just the opposite, but I manned up and held her close and nodded at the dudes I knew from the courts, and later, in the downstairs girls bathroom, she pulled me into a stall and let me get to third with her, which I tried to do in a nice way, and, as I recall, she tried to help me do in a way that would make the experience meaningful for her too, until I think I came in my tuxedo pants. And that was that. High school. What do you want?

  Chickie was already a half-hour late. I called the number I had in my cell, but it went straight to voicemail and that was full anyway. I walked to the entrance to KMC and approached the information desk, where the nurse receptionist looked at me suspiciously. Light brown skin, a robust waistline, a tattoo peeking out from the collar of her shirt. Big hoops hanging from her ears, wrong side of 28 and 215. Which made two of us, except for the hoops. She had long lacquered nails that looked unlikely to pass muster in an operating room. Her name tag said “Lemon.”

  “Hello, Lemon,” I said. “I’m supposed to be meeting someone. I think he was a patient here.”

  She sort of rolled her face, as though skeptical of the very notion of meeting someone, and looked at her computer screen.

  “What’s the patient’s name?”

  “Chickie Benecik,” I said. “Philip Benecik.”

  Nobody’d called him Philip in, like, the entirety of my existence. Even his mom called him Chickie.

  Lemon kept looking at the screen.

  “Your name?”

  “Peter Johansson.” I gave her a smoldering look, the one I’d used to reel in Kelly, the one I used to put on at the foul line when there were cute girls in the stands.

  “Sorry,” she said. “But you’re not on our list. I can’t give you any information about a patient. It’s the law.”

  “So he was a patient?”

  Lemon looked annoyed.

  “What I mean is if he was a patient, and he’s not a patient anymore, then you can tell me that, right? That’s legal. Trust me. I’m actually a lawyer myself.”

  Feckless. But maybe charming in its fecklessness? I’d gotten by with it before.

  Lemon seemed briefly willing to engage, the blinds of bureaucracy open an inch. Another nurse ambled by and gave me the evil eye, sort of impressively for someone wearing flower-print scrubs. Lemon glanced at her and harrumphed. Some history there.

  “Come on, Lemon,” I said. “Don’t let her come between us.”

  Lemon rolled her eyes.

  I laughed.

  “I’m just messing,” I said, chuckling, looking at my watch. Not a threat until it’s too late. I could do this all day. It’s where I excelled. “When life gives me a lemon, you know what I do? I say thanks. I’m not trying to squash it, either. It’s perfect just the way it is.”

  Lemon returned to her computer screen, but she was smiling.

  “This says he checked out two hours ago,” she said, and then, “What did you say your name was?”

  “Pete Johansson.”

  She reached down below her desk and
came back with a manila envelope. Chickie’s writing. Block letters. Pete So Handsome.

  Her hoops swayed.

  “This you?” she asked, raising her eyebrows sort of skeptically.

  I took the envelope, held it up to the blinking hospital fluorescents, but the manila was thick and opaque. I considered not opening it. Sure, maybe there’d be something great inside, something that would make me feel less annoyed about having taken a vacation day to drive two and a half hours out of Boston just to be stood up in the entrance hall of KMC. But what were the odds? You gonna come through like that, envelope? Probably not. Once, looking to furnish our apartment via Craigslist in a style I liked to call “Victorian Indochine,” I bought an old wooden cabinet for $20 from a guy who cleaned postmortem estate basements. It was a radio cabinet with a bad paint job, but the top lifted straight up like a treasure chest and I had visions of turning it into a bar. When I was putting it into the apartment, Kelly noticed that one side of it was hollow, and after a little inspection it became clear that there was a hidden panel on that side, a space beneath the main panel that wasn’t there on the other side. I knocked on it. I could see, under the paint, the places where small stays had been hammered in to hold the wood in place. I got excited. Who knows what might be in there? A map? Of course it was a map. Or a will. Or a gun, the gun used to shoot a good man in a cold cone of streetlight. I got a lot of mileage out of that panel during the cocktail parties we threw in those early days. Sometimes I’d come at the thing with a screwdriver and the guests would almost shriek. But I left it sealed up each time. Kelly said maybe I should just keep it that way since, odds were, the fantasy was sure to trump the reality. Sort of a bedrock principle of our relationship, come to think of it. But then football season came, and one weekend I got a little drunk watching the Patriots short-yardage themselves into another loss and decided that the time had come, and the screwdriver was at hand, and the paint chipped all over the floor, and when I finally pried the board back, the space behind it was empty. Kelly got the little vacuum and shook her head.

  I ripped the envelope open, sighed like I wasn’t interested, and felt around inside. I came out with a glossy brochure for a local health spa called Head-Connect at Fleur-de-Lys, the kind of brochure that’s folded into thirds and available at the front desk. That was it.

  I looked at Lemon.

  “Head-Connect at Fleur-de-Lys,” I said.

  Lemon just looked at me.

  “You ever been there?”

  She raised her eyebrows like I’d asked her to try a weird food or whether she’d ever been to Japan. A sort of protective revulsion, a do-not-want-what-I-haven’t-got kind of thing.

  “No, I have not,” she said.

  Head-Connect was a four-figure-a-night place down in Gable, a mystery spa whose guests roamed vast lawns and were chauffeured through the county in white vans. I’d never been inside. Well, that wasn’t totally true.

  I turned the brochure over. Looked into the envelope again. It was empty.

  “Is this where he’s staying?” I asked, more to myself than Lemon.

  “Mr. Johansson, I can’t give you any information about a patient,” she said. “But the way he looked I doubt it.”

  I walked back to the Escalade, head on a swivel but no sign of Chick. I sat in the front seat and sipped the dregs of my rest-stop coffee. I had to take a piss, but couldn’t bring myself to go back in and ask Lemon for the restroom. Our relationship, I felt, had run its course. Once, during a particularly rough period in college, I tried to hit on a young nursing student at the school infirmary after a panicked screening for syphilis. I was clean—jeez!—but the nursing student still wasn’t interested, and I’d learned not to press my luck with nurses. Plus, I didn’t trust hospital restrooms. The number of hand-washing posters, the industrial disinfectants, they all hinted at some bad shit lurking in the grout.

  I tossed the envelope in the passenger seat and headed down to Gable, the glory of the Knotsford-Gable Road, the same garish landmarks in reverse. I took the spur off 20 and headed over toward the Church-on-the-Hill, in whose parking lot, in a long-ago January, I used to make out with a high school girl named Rochelle Scalise. It was one of the few places around town that the local cops didn’t patrol, and we’d cut the engine and drop the seats back and yeah, sure, it was next to a graveyard and like 14°F out, but my thinking at the time was something along the lines of that’d just make Rochelle hold me closer. When you’re young, you’re strategic. On the matter of tactics, however, I could never figure out how to get my hand under her bra. In retrospect, maybe winter wasn’t the season for it. There’s something quintessentially adolescent, I guess, something almost noble, about trying to feel up a girl in a cemetery parking lot with a hand that is like this close to frostbite. I could still remember the beckoning warmth of Rochelle’s right breast as I stretched for it under the hem of her sweatshirt—the thing a small sun, a thermal reactor, a still-warm bagel. God bless her for letting me try too. She probably saved me a few fingers.

  I pulled into the parking lot, just like old times, the same worn hedges, the same crumbling tablets. I guess not a lot changes in graveyards. I cut the engine and tried to figure out, having come all this way, what to do next. Option 1: turn off my cell phone, gas up, and be back in Boston in two hours, beating traffic if I left right then. Option 1 held some appeal.

  Then there was Option 2. I picked up the envelope and shook its contents out onto the seat. The brochure came out and fluttered open like a bat. Something slipped from its folds and landed on the floor. I reached over and picked it up. It was a piece of medical scrip, folded three ways like the brochure itself. On it was a pencil sketch. The sketch was rough and not very good, but I probably could have figured out what it was if I studied it. So I didn’t.

  We’d sprung a fish from an abandoned mini-golf once. It was May 2002, after the annual Senior Appreciation Dinner. A quarter of our classmates skipped the dinner altogether, and another quarter left early. We’d stuck around for the presentation of the Senior Gift to Ms. J., the terrifying gnome who’d for years meted out discipline as our high school’s vice principal. She was retiring that year, and our class had given her a fishing rod. No idea who had chosen the gift. It was hard to imagine knowing Ms. J. that well.

  We were the good kids, relatively speaking.

  Chickie was a sort of town ward—absent father, precocity, quirks. Forever showing up at your door with a ball just as you sat down to dinner, the kind of luck-struck kid who could, and did, pitch a no-hitter for Gable in a county pee-wee championship game when he was nine. After the Trivette stuff came out and his notoriety grew, Chickie started telling a story about how when he was a toddler, the daycare teachers took his class on a field trip to the bird sanctuary up on October Mountain and during a lunch break he’d taken a few wobbly steps down the trailhead they were picnicking at and into the path of a midsized brown bear. The teachers, not surprisingly, freaked out. One began yelling at the bear while the other tried to corral seven toddlers and shoo them back into the van. And the bear apparently got enraged and charged the one yelling teacher, knocking her down and bloodying her face pretty good, before returning to where Chickie stood and sort of nudging him deeper into the woods. And then they’d vanished for a half-hour. A pretty fucking frightful half-hour for those toddler teachers, I’d bet. Chick, according to Chick, was pretty calm about the whole thing, believing it to be theater, and folks surmised that the bear thought that he was a cub of sorts, a heartwarming attribution that did not stop the police from shooting it when they arrived. I suppose I don’t need to add that most of this story was uncorroborated. Sometimes I’d ask him about it. I never got good answers. But it seemed like a story he wanted to tell, a story that wasn’t another story, so we let him.

  The rest of us didn’t have near as much drama in our lives, real or imagined. We smoked our pot in the summer. We didn’t sell drugs or come back from lunch break buzzing and Super Glue beer cap
s to the blackboard in Mr. Morris’s social studies class. Unsie was an honors student and, our senior year, the best high school cross-country skier in the state. Jimmer had scored 1490 on the SATs without cracking so much as a practice test. He was heading somewhere big for college, somewhere with “Institute” in the name. MIT, RIT, RPI. Maybe it was Stanford. I was voted prom king, captain of the basketball team and most likely to succeed. It was a very small school.

  On the night of the Senior Appreciation Dinner, Unsie had borrowed his parents’ Suburban, the biggest car around. One or two girls had lost their bras in that car, but not much else, even though the way-back was large enough for a twin mattress—an accessory we often discussed obtaining but never did.

  “We should get the fish,” Chickie said, as we passed around a couple of purloined Zimas in the parking lot.

  The fish in question was one of Chick’s many obsessions, but this time, high school ending, twelve years of the straight-and-narrow behind us, nobody said no. Next thing I knew, we were in the truck.

  The fish was a guppy, I guess. I don’t know fish. Ten feet of cement poured over a mesh and wood frame, 4 feet high from her flat hollow belly to her stout dorsal. She was bright pink except for her fins and lips, which were a chipped blue, and her eyes, which were white and wide and lashed. She sat hidden near a copse of scrub pines along a commercial stretch of the Knotsford-Gable Road. A tube ran from her open mouth to a spot down on her tail, as one does, I guess, for all of us. She’d been a pretty easy third hole until the mini-golf went broke a few years earlier. All the other holes—the octopus, the submarine, the pirate ship, et cetera—were gone, taken off to who knows where, and nothing else remained of the course except a rusted chain-link fence around a plot of weeds.