Alex
A day in the life of Neil's father, Alex. From "a Precipice".
“Alright, Oat-Neil,” Alex says as he pulls up to the front doors of Maple Park Elementary School. “It’s that special time again.” His son looks cowed. He doesn’t make to get out of the car.
“I’m embarrassed,” Neil mutters.
“Oh, mate,” Alex sighs. The front doors of Maple Park Elementary School open and the children, lined up by grade, file in. Parents pull up, their children bail out, and their SUVs move on. Busses hum as they start to make their escape. “It’s truly not as bad as all that. Happens to everyone.”
“I made you late for work.”
“I called my boss and I explained the situation. He said it was okay. I’m not mad.”
“Why not?” Neil finally looks at his father. He’s wearing a jacket. It’s an unseasonably chill day for the end of August. His thick dark hair has a perpetual cowlick that is particularly comical after he wakes up.
“Because people get unlucky sometimes, and because you’re earnestly sorry.” Alex tries in vain to smooth down the cowlick on his son’s head.
“Is earnesty like honesty?” Neil asks.
“Ha. More or less,” Alex chuckles. “Now get a move on. Have a fine Tuesday.”
Neil collects his backpack and starts working the momentum to get the ridiculous mass onto his shoulders. “I can’t think of a good nickname for you like Oat-Neil.”
“That’s okay. How about ‘Dad’?”
“That’s okay for now.” Neil waves and takes off, his bulbous pack bobbing against his spine with every step. His father watches him see a couple of kids he knows, exchange some words, and disappear into the school building. Then, he puts the car in gear and checks the time. “Eleven hours and forty-six minutes,” he sighs.
“Alex,” Nina calls through the small crack in the door she propped open. “Mahmoud wants to see you.”
He cranes his neck to see over his shoulder at Nina, then looks back at his patient. Geriatric male, diabetic, four kids, Coke Zero. Something like Jerry or Barry. “Good news or bad news?” he asks Nina as he goes back to taking vitals. She doesn’t say anything. He looks back to check that she heard. Her head still peeks through the gap between the wall and the door. Her eyebrows go up. “Thanks, Nina.” The door closes shut gently. She is a generally amiable nursing assistant who takes a lot of phone calls and carries a lot of messages between staff at Yale New-Haven Hospital. Poor woman is underutilized and they treat her like a carrier pigeon. “What are you in for today, Mr. Twenny?”
“Damn storm is killing my joints,” the older man says as he shakes out the arm the blood pressure cuff just squeezed. Rheumatoid arthritis. “Thankfully, this is my last stop before we leave for the house in Boca Raton.”
“Well, that sounds very nice.” Alex gets up to leave. “Sit tight, sir. The doctor will be in shortly.”
As he heads toward his superior’s office, he updates Mr. Twenny’s chart. Dressed well and hygienic. Ad. Rheum Arthritis to existing diagnoses. Leaving town. He greets the odd doctors and nurses. They wave back, nod, occasionally ignore. He passes by Nina’s desk. She affords him a thin-lipped smile. “Thanks again, Nina.” She smells like something. Coconut, or something. It’s nice, Alex decides.
When Alex arrives at his superior’s office, Mahmoud is finishing a conversation with someone Alex doesn’t recognize. “How are you, mate?” Alex rattles off congenially as the woman leaves. She ignores him.
“Come in, Alex.” Mahmoud’s office is sparse, utilitarian. Always smells like good food, though. Alex knows that Mahmoud likes the Ethiopian place in Whitney Avenue. When there’s a meeting or a retreat, Alex pushes to get catering from there. Mahmoud himself is bald, with skin like cinnamon and sunken eyes.
“Wanted to see me, mate?” Alex asks, sitting down easily in one of the plastic-and-wire chairs.
“Admin wants me to put you in a probationary period.”
“Oh. Well, that must be a mistake. I’ve worked here longer than you,” Alex chuckles jovially. He knows what this is about, and the possibilities are blasting violently through the his mind.
“Yeah, I know. They’re evaluating you, Alex. Do you have an idea why this would be happening?”
Alex pretends to think hard. “I ‘spose I’ve taken a lot of emergency time off lately. My family is struggling, and my son needs me.” Alex shakes his head minutely. “I don’t understand, Mahmoud. People are in crisis. Don’t they need all the hands they can get right now?”
“Which is why they are not just firing you. But you could be facing a reduction in pay, reduction of time-off, rescheduling to second or third shift.” Mahmoud shifts uncomfortably in his seat and rests his forehead against his hand.
“I just…tell me again, Mahmoud. We can work this out.”
“You’re right. If you went to great lengths, this could be fine.”
Alex’s heart sinks. Bloody fuck. “What sort of lengths.
Mahmoud opens his laptop and clicks around for a minute. “You have time scheduled off in October. Two weeks. I know it’s important to you, but if you rededicate and make up for lost time during those weeks, I’ll speak to admin.”
“That can’t be done,” Alex, his hands up placatingly. He sits up in his seat. “Who is it that’s cross with me? Is it Tracy? I see her at the Subway on Whalley Avenue sometimes. I’ll talk to her.
Mahmoud folds his hands. “I know. Your pilgrimage is that time, right?” Alex collapses in his chair, his eyes darting over the marks on Mahmoud’s desk. Whatever his supervisor says next he doesn’t hear well or remember clearly.
“You’re a sensible man, Alex. You have a good spirit,” Alex hears Mahmoud say after a while. “I believe in God, too. But this place? This hurricane? Sometimes it becomes harder to find him.”
Alex puts on a rye smile. “I 'spose that’s the challenge I’ve been issued, aye? I intended to travel thousands of miles to find God somewhere else. But he’s here, yeah?”
Mahmoud folds his hands. “Maybe so.”
Alex stands. “Thanks for looking out for me, mate. Let’s get Habesha one of these days soon, alright?” He leaves before he can see the genuine smile he imparted on Mahmoud’s tired face. “Seven hours and four minutes,” Alex sighs to himself, checking the time.
On the way to the Subway on Whalley Avenue, Alex is whistled at. He throws a glance over his shoulder. An unhoused man with sandy, straw-like hair sticking out of a Patriots hat stands on the other side of the street. He’s wearing sunglasses. Alex figures the whistling isn’t directed at him. He walks on.
When the second whistle rips through the late summer air, Alex doesn’t look back. The weather is nice. He is hungry. He has eighteen more minutes for lunch. Then, he is shouted at. He hazards another glance over his shoulder. The man is following. Alex sighs and treks on.
More shouting. Alex wonders what about his appearance is so stimulating to this person. Is it his fairly neat hair? His navy scrubs? His slightly crooked glasses? Now the man is hobbling faster. Alex is tempted to speed up, but elects not to change his pace. He remembers how games of chase went with Neil when he was little. Once you run, you consent to the game. You are chased. Instead, in a quiet corner of the back of his mind, Alex imagines the angles of his pursuer’s neck, the fulcrums of his elbows and knees, his center of gravity. He walks along Jewell Street and listens to the man’s breathing become louder and louder, more and more labored.
Finally, there is Subway. That yellow and green sign that Alex is certain will be his salvation. Ultimate BMT. Toasted. Extra banana peppers. Garlic aioli. He hears his pursuer collapse behind him and something impacts his heel. He keeps walking, but finds he cannot swing open the jingle door until he looks back. The man’s cap has fallen off in one direction. The day is hot, and Alex’s pursuer is splayed out on the warm concrete. Bloody fucking hell. He leaves the door to that air-conditioned nirvana and stoops next to the Patriots fan. “You alright, mate?” The fellow mutters something indistinguishable as he struggles to his feet. Alex lifts under one armpit.
And so it is that Alex is many minutes late returning back from his lunch break. He buys the fellow and himself a sub, struggles through a conversation, and tends to the large bloody scrape on his face that Alex gathers he earned when he fell. As he sprints back to Yale New-Haven hospital, frustrated and overheated and sweating profusely, he checks the time. “Four hours and fifty-nine minutes,” he pants.
When they were still married, Alex and Lourdes talked about taking their son to one of the Disney parks one day. They went back and forth about whether a child’s life is actually that much richer for having been to one of the mega-amusement complexes. They had both been when they were children, but in hindsight, it seemed funny for two intellectuals to hang up so much on a children’s pilgrimage to a mega-corporation’s playground. Here, in the parking lot of Gracie Sports USA on Connecticut Avenue, Alex struggles to imagine a happier place on earth.
Fluorescent light brilliantly illuminates the many growing sheens of sweat. A tall mirror wraps around the entirety of the thirty by forty foot space, starting at hip level. The dojo is already lousy with the grunts and odors of bodies struggling and smacking the mats over and over. Judokas of every belt and experience level clap each other on the back’s, lauding the other over their control, their flexibility, their cleverness. “Look who it is! Mr. Brown Belt himself.”
“Harris! Good to see you, mate.” Alex embraces a man in his young forties with skinny limbs and a round, distended beer belly. Harris Montgomery-Bannon is married nine years, has an infant son, and a daughter on the way. He has been a blue belt for about a year: one level up from a novice white belt. Indeed, Alex tested for his brown belt last week and passed (but not without being choked unconscious four or five times in the span of two hours). It was hard-fought. He is now only one belt interval away from black.
“Sure you’re not too busy to be fraternizing with a lowly blue belt like me?” Harris asks, his face locked in mock-earnestness.
Alex laughs heartily. “I managed to pencil you into my schedule this week. Consider yourself lucky.”
“How’s your boy?”
“Quite well, I hope, with the amount the sitter is charging.” Alex works through some cheerful small talk that he won’t remember but nonetheless genuinely enjoys. He and Harris have been diligent rivals at the dojo for around four years now, and good friends on and off the mats. Despite being at distinctly disparate experience levels, their builds are different enough that they are relatively evenly matched. Although, only the instructor here at Gracie, Remi, knows that Harris comes out on top a little more often. Alex truly doesn’t prefer winning.
And then, they’re in it. Sweating, sliding their faces painfully against the mat and against each other, break-falling and collapsing in exhaustion. Alex gives himself over to the strategy, the grace, the artful systems of it. He doesn’t think of his probation, his pilgrimage, the crusted blood on the homeless man’s nose. He doesn’t even think of his family. He is here, present. For just a moment, though, he thinks of Mahmoud. He wishes his colleague could see him here, where he feels the closest to God.
Suddenly, Alex is airborne. He break-falls onto the mat and takes stock of his surroundings for the first time in…a while. No one is rolling. Everyone, the couple dozen that have gathered at Gracie Sports on a Monday night, has occupied the nine or ten square feet where he just was. He and Harris.
“Lift his feet up!” Remi calls out. The instructor is a short, very muscular Frenchman with chestnut hair receding at the temples and a crooked nose. “Harris? Fuck me, his skin is the wrong color. Harris?!” Everyone else stands silent, looking down at something.
Alex gets up and makes his way cautiously to the throng. “Wha—”
“Alex,” Remi calls out. “Call your hospital.”
“Jesus,” one of the purple belts breathes.
"Oh,” is all Alex can think to say. He pulls out his phone and dials 911. He can’t call Yale New-Haven directly and get an ambulance here any faster. Alex wonders heedlessly if you can dispatch ambulances directly from specific hospitals in France. Did Harris have an allergic reaction? Heart attack? His friend is still too surrounded for Alex to make anything out. He has handled himself in enough emergency situations to act swiftly and speak clearly. Once Alex has confirmed the ambulance is en route, he says, “I can help. Let me through.”
“NO!” Remi shouts. “Everyone, get your things. Harris will be fine. The doctors will take care of him. I’ll email by the end of the night.” No one moves. “NOW! GO!” he bellows. Everyone moves. Alex casts some glances over his shoulder while everyone is silently collecting their belongings and heading out into the lot. He still can’t make out his friend. Remi’s body is so broad, it blocks the view entirely. Then, Alex’s mind starts to churn.
When the ambulance arrives and Harris is carried out on a stretcher, Alex is sitting in his car in the lot. He couldn’t leave. He needs to know. And when he sees, he is certain. Harris’s skin is blue. The skin around his neck is purple and bruised. There is an oxygen mask wrapped around his face. Alex looks down at his hands. His fingers hurt to try and close too quickly. Only hold a choke for ten seconds. That is the hard and fast rule at every Brazilian Jiu Jitsu dojo worth its salt. Forty seconds, and they’re unconscious. At two minutes, risk of brain damage skyrockets from lack of oxygen. Alex almost choked his friend to death. When his instructor saw, Remi picked Alex up and threw him. He checks the time. Seven forty-five. It feels like no more than fifteen minutes since he arrived here. How could he have lost that much time?
Alex looks through the glass facade of the dojo from the view out of his car window. The lights are still on. Remi must be padding around, talking to paramedics or police. He catches his reflection in the large studio mirrors. He studies it. He reckons he looks like a child when he’s scared. I look so much like Oat-Neil.
The next moment, Alex’s reflection is splintered. The glass of the mirror shatters, and then the windows of the studio. He can’t see the spinning red and white lights anymore. Not the ambulance at all. He didn’t notice when the ground beneath him started to rumble but now, the earth has split apart. The parking lot is in two parts, the fault line on which it was paved pushing one half of it four or five stories above the other. The man in his car is frozen with indescribable terror as his car slips, heedless of the tire treads, toward the pitch chasm ahead.