“Tchoupitoulas Mattress Madness at Chuck’s Tchoupitoulas Mattress at 5300 Tchoupitoulas,” shouted the TV.
Hearing that garishly unparallel name repeated, Victor thought he might be suffering a heart attack. His breath tightened. It was as if he hadn’t outgrown his attacks at all. Then, as the man bellowed it all again, the ghastly, elegant truth struck Victor. Although he’d lived half his life near Tchoupitoulas Street, he’d always been drunk.
Half in nightmare already, he barely noticed his brain shutting off. He passed out cold. The next morning he awoke into a period he would think back on as a new, outsized childhood. Looking around at the squalor of his basement apartment he saw cobwebs in the corners, piles of garments, cluttered trash. He couldn’t take it; he shut his eyes again until he was too parched to lie still. He stood up to find water. Landing on his right foot, he stopped, sat down, rose again on the other side.
“Just a test,” he said aloud, as if his mother now spectated in heaven. He made a point of arriving on his right foot at the sink.
He gulped water and promised himself to clean the apartment, but as he scanned the room he saw there would be no way to scrub out its sheer lopsidedness. There were low ceilings, half-windows up to the street. If he was to remain sober, he would just have to suffer through it until he found a salaried job. How to do that, though, when everywhere he turned there was only ugliness: the phlegmy French names of the avenues and neighborhoods, his unclassically proportioned apartment, the Uptown bars where whole years had dwindled away, the men who lived in them, the names of liquors — Dewar’s — the name Gary, Gary’s white beard, Ernest’s gray one, the name Ernest, all of it so suddenly, viscerally nasty that he dreamt of a lobotomy just to soothe himself into a breath?
The prospect of AA meetings, where drunks would speak their names aloud and he would say, “I’m Victor,” gave Victor such apoplexy that he cut an index card to wallet size and listed
Blackouts
Drunk nose
Prediabetic
Fat
Unemployed
Barebacking
Reflux
Credit cards
Drunk driving
Shat pants
along with three more columns of dire reminders. Whenever he felt like drinking he took the card out and read it. After a week its edges were worn and he’d spoken only to store clerks. He wondered if he could have befriended anyone, ever, without liquor’s aid. Within minutes of his first drink, he’d made a first friend, and all other friends had derived from that one. There’d been a domino effect, he was thinking when a FedEx man arrived with an envelope from a Yazoo City probate court.
Of course, thought Victor as he tore into it: he was his mother’s next of kin. He skimmed through reams of papers. He would inherit the house, sell it, live off the income. Everything happens for a reason, he was telling himself when he read the executor’s name.
Now he fell into a vision. On the body of a strapping teenage Albert Alfsson, Victor saw a rheumy-eyed and hoary head. Floating near it was a disembodied hand, slapping him. He let the papers fall, and sat down. It wasn’t a pleasant vision. The quality of his sight was deteriorating, along with the fantasy itself. The old parts aged, the youthful ones regressed. Soon he beheld the aged infant Albert in the air before him. He didn’t faint, though. He sat still until his legs went to sleep. Finally he collected himself enough to stand up. He collected the papers, too, threw them into the trash, carried the trash out, came in again, locked the door, lowered the blinds, and lay down.
Law & Order proved most usefuclass="underline" twenty seasons, five hundred hours. It had mostly neutral names, disyllabic, Scots-Irish or English. Aside from his walks to the corner for DVDs and cigarettes, he stayed home ordering delivery. He watched the spin-offs, gaining weight. He watched The West Wing, Deadwood, 24. When characters spoke words he didn’t like, or called each other by ugly names, his breath caught, but that was better than not watching. During Lost he struggled to button his jeans. By Six Feet Under he’d stopped wearing them except on cigarette runs. On the day his Visa card quit working, he was cinching his pant waist up with his left hand.
“Got another card?” the clerk asked Victor, but his wallet was in his left pocket. His right hand held the pen, ready to sign a receipt.
“Maybe,” he said, leaning against the counter. Using the pressure as a sort of belt to free up his hands, he retrieved the Discover card. It felt like a divine gift for that one to go through. He looped the grocery bag around the pants hand and headed home, smoking with his right hand until he saw a ruddy-faced blond man by his apartment stairs. The adrenaline of recognizing Albert Alfsson felt like a hit of pure cocaine.
“You’re home,” Albert said. He seemed younger than he should be.
Clutching his waist, Victor approached. “Who are you?” he said, falsely.
“You seem kind of peaked.”
“I’ve got food poisoning,” said Victor, going for the stairs.
Albert followed him in as he hurried to the couch. “It’s been hard to find you.”
“I’ve been designing a museum.”
“Let’s get down to brass tacks. Your mom didn’t have many folks caring for her. I was there a lot. I read her rites.”
Victor sat on the couch. He put his head in his hands. Albert’s words were fading in and out, and it was hard to follow his drift, at least until he held up a paper.
I have a whole new life, it read in Victor’s loopy scrawl. We were immature kids. I don’t miss you. I never loved you.
“This is a copy. My lawyer has the original.”
“I thought Sievert was lying,” said Victor, his skin clammy.
“Sievert’s a Christian.”
“If you kept it—”
“Your mom kept it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I needed Mary to explain why you’d said those things.”
“Take the house,” said Victor at once, as if that would cancel out a decade of his behavior. “It’s yours.” His fingers were tingling again. He wished Albert would hit him, slap him silly. Those fucked-up fantasies, the hook-nosed villain: his mind had known it should be punished for what he’d do. It had sought preemptive redemption, Victor thought, as his body hummed with a nearly electric vibration and silvery specks blotted out Albert’s handsome face.
He awoke to Albert pressing a compress to his forehead. He’d been laid out on the couch. All these years later, blond fuzz still dotted Albert’s sinewy arms.
“Are you awake?”
“Please go away,” Victor said.
“Do you want to hear her answer?”
Shaking his head, he could see movement in the far left of his vision. He had left the TV on mute. It was showing a close-up of the stricken face of Ruth Fisher, the brittle mother in Six Feet Under. Albert would leave, he thought with a thrill, and he could rewind the DVD and watch what was happening to Ruth.
“She said, ‘A pediatric psychiatrist warned us he’d be this way.’”
Now he sat upright. “The house is yours,” he said again. Albert could raise boys of his own in it, teach them the Bible, slap them. Anything to shut him up.
“She knew it’s not your fault. She pitied you. She used to drive down here and watch you from across the bar.”
“Albert, stop talking.”
“I want to sell it on your behalf, set up a trust. Do you know what that means? A trust like Sievert’s?”
That was when a wild idea grew in Victor.