Irreversible Read online

  Dedicated to my brother, Marty.

  He deserves better.

  He’s always deserved better.

  But this is the best I’ve got.

  PART ONE

  HOME

  O wad some Power the giftie gie us

  To see oursels as ithers see us!

  —Robert Burns, “To a Louse”

  whoever comes for me

  I didn’t even know who I wanted to come for me.

  Not Carl. I knew I didn’t want the first person through the door to be Carl. Because a boyfriend was always going to think the worst about another guy who was with his girl. And I was only with her because he wasn’t. He let her down, and if he hadn’t, things would have been way, way different. He wouldn’t want to hear that, but it was the truth.

  I might have wanted my sisters to come, because they loved me, and that’s a good thing to have when a guy is in trouble. Fran, though. Fran would have been better than Mary, because Fran would listen to my side.

  My dad, Ray. Ray would take my side before even hearing what my side was. Maybe that wouldn’t be the best thing. Maybe better if the campus police came, impartial, taking my statement and seeing there was nothing to this. Nothing but craziness, mistakes, and misunderstandings.

  I didn’t know what I wanted. I just knew I was going to wait for it to come.

  That was a lie. I knew what I wanted. I knew who I wanted.

  I wanted Gigi Boudakian to walk back through that door. I wanted Gigi Boudakian to come back and say how crazy all that was, how the fresh piney air and the clarity of morning light breathed sense back into her and back into the whole universe. Because I could never rape anybody. Rape. Even saying the word, even saying it to myself, nowhere else but inside me, caused my head to crackle with lethal pain, caused my stomach to try to launch right up my throat and out of me.

  And to think I could do that to Gigi Boudakian? Hurt Gigi Boudakian in any way at all?

  How could she? How could she think that? How dare she? How fucking dare she? How fucking dare you, Gigi Boudakian?

  No. No, no. This was a nightmare. Was this even a nightmare? Even nightmares needed to make some sort of sense, come from some real place somewhere. There was nothing real about this.

  No. It was not her fault. Nothing was, nothing could be. I didn’t know whose fault it was, but I knew it was not Gigi Boudakian’s fault.

  I also knew I was a good guy. Good guys didn’t do bad things. All we needed was for Gigi Boudakian to remember that, to know it like she always knew it, and come back. So we could all know it again.

  • • •

  “Get the fuck up.”

  It wasn’t like I was unprepared for this. But I couldn’t have gotten “the fuck up” if I tried. I didn’t try. I stared at the cinder blocks in the wall, counting them like I had been doing ever since it got light enough, tracing the straight, right-angle lines of mortar holding them together.

  “I’m not gonna say this a whole lot of times. And I’m not gonna just let you lie there, and I’m not gonna kick the shit outta you while you’re already down. So, if I have to pick you up and put you on your feet first, that’s what I’ll do, so you might as well just get the fuck up, now.”

  The wall had 120 cinder blocks altogether. You would think they could slap a layer of something, anything, over the blocks so they didn’t have to look so cold, penal, and punitive. How much could something like that cost anyway? Hardly anything, I would guess, and the difference would be transforming. Anything would be better than this soul-sucking business here.

  He was good to his word, though. To all his words. He wasn’t having any of this nonsense of mine.

  I felt weightless as Carl lifted me up off the rotten little bed. It was like it was no effort for him at all, as if he was doing it almost tenderly. Like a dad taking a little kid out of bed to get ready for preschool. He must have remembered. Carl. He must have remembered when we were friends and who we were and how we were and that’s why this was all wrong and why when he manhandled me it was with a gentleness almost. This was the reality, and soon enough everybody would be back to the right reality, the one where I was the guy I always was and the insanity would go away and Carl and me and naturally Gigi would come back to earth and realize how everything just went a little mental and forget about it. Because we knew better, didn’t we? Carl thought I did something terrible to someone we both love. We all knew better than that. Right?

  Carl’s surprising and reassuring soft grip, lifting me and then lowering me, said as much. You can tell more from touch, and from every other human connection, for that matter, than you can from words. That’s what I have learned. And Carl’s manner told me what I needed to know, that everything was going back to okay.

  Until it told me otherwise.

  At the best of times, Carl was a man of the minimum of words. Now was not the best of times, and he minimized even the minimum.

  He held on to me with his right hand, pulled the collar of my shirt up over my left ear, and the intensity of his expression almost, almost, pulled my attention from his big gnarly fist thundering down and crashing into my eye socket. I heard the snap-crack of bone-at-bone and remembered how deadly Carl always was. Left-handed, smooth, great balance. He had unfeasible hands, huge, hard, and almost as big as his head when he held fists up either side. He had a small head anyway, but still I marveled, and admired and cheered him on and never once considered those fists would be a problem for me.

  But right then, that expression on his face was almost as alarming. Famously stone-faced, Carl allowed his features to crack like pond ice, and I was sure I saw him start something like crying as he dropped the hammer on me.

  I didn’t see much else after that. Felt quite a lot of sensations, though. Anyone who says they felt nothing throughout a violent trauma because they were in shock is talking crap just so they don’t have to keep feeling it forever. Because I was deep into shock already and still felt a whole lot of sensations that Carl handed out to me. Felt every one at the time, and will feel every one for as long as I can feel.

  After the massive left overhand exploded the right side of my face, Carl met my nose with a right uppercut that shocked me back upright before I could dive to the floor and be done. I couldn’t even get my bearings before he hit me with the exact same right uppercut, catching my chin this time, clattering my teeth and hopping me briefly in the direction of the ceiling.

  It was only when I landed, when I felt my feet galumph back to earth, that I realized I had left it. It was only then that I realized I could seriously be leaving it for real if something didn’t change here quickly.

  “Just talk to me,” I said, reaching out semi-blindly to try to wrap Carl up in a boxer hug to get him to stop punching me. “It’s not the way it looks—”

  I got nowhere near tying him up, as he got nowhere nearer to talking to me. He had already decided. As if to return my words to sender, the next thing I got was the full force of Carl driving his whole self behind a straight left hand that hit me flush and drove my jaw back so ferociously I could hear it bang, both sides, into the base of my skull behind my ears.

  I went almost entirely deaf with the impact. Now my eyes were bleary with blood and mucus and panic and probably all that additional blood I was picking up off Carl’s knuckles, and the front of his powder-blue button-down shirt, so I was as close to deaf-blind as possible when I threw my first serious angry punch with malice aforethought toward my old friend’s head.

  I had to. You have to, at some point, unless you have already given up the will to survive. I didn’t want to hit Carl, because I didn’t want to make this horrible nightmare of a lie any more real. Fighting him made it real, but not fighting him could kill me.

  He sure
ly wasn’t expecting it at that stage, because I felt the pop from my knuckles right through to my heels as it landed bang-on his silent, fuzzy orb of a face. He backed up two, three awkward paces, and thunked into the yellow closet door.

  “Okay now,” I said, surprised and I suppose also a little bit jacked at what it seemed I could do. “Let’s cut the shit, Carl, okay, and sort out what’s really going on here.” I held my hands up as I approached, still only able to make out a slushy, sloppy outline of the guy I once knew, from that fading world I once knew. I thought it was going to be all right now. Or some version, some approximation, of all right.

  My hands-up approach to him was like surrendering, or like greeting an old pal after a long time away.

  He came launching off the yellow closet door to meet me before I could get to him. I saw his mouth motoring and thought this was just perfect, Carl finally deciding to talk back to me just when I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. Someday we’d laugh about this, probably. Probably. When all was put back right. Maybe not laugh, though, okay. But get there, and be better, and be sane about everything.

  But not today.

  I could not even count the number of sharp, scorching punches Carl threw at me then. He banged and battered my face, my skin, my skull, with left and right and left and right-hand shots that had me reeling rapidly backward. My blood was shooting in every direction, the globlets clearly visible to me as they sprayed off, like pulpy tiny rats abandoning the sinking ship of me.

  I landed eventually—half landed—back on the bed where he’d found me. Perfectly halved, with my spine back-bent between the mattress and the floor. Carl let himself fall dead on top of me.

  “It’s not like you think, Carl,” I said, freaking myself out with the underwater sound of my own voice.

  I was thinking my only chance was to read his lips and hope to read just the right things on them. But even that small chance was dumped when he roared, or howled, or made whatever lipless big noise that was before slamming his head into my chest with enough force to snap me like a jackknife. My chin cracked into the back of his head, and one or both of us opened up a whole new flow of blood that finally turned us into one great disgusting indistinguishable soupy mess.

  How? I thought, as I lay there flattened, back-bent, blood-swamped, with Carl’s head embedded in my chest and not going anywhere anytime soon. How did we get here? I thought, as the two of us, or one or the other of us, made the whole room shake with the sobbing that nobody could hear but anybody anywhere surely could feel.

  I would not have budged if I could.

  Anyway, I couldn’t.

  When I finally woke up, I was not on my back, not on the mattress. I was on the cold, whitish, blood-awash floor. I was on my face, and I was alone.

  off the floor

  Keir?”

  It was an awful sound, hearing it said that way. A bruised, regrettable ache of a sound. Too close to the last howl of a dying great beast. My eyes were closed and so I had only the sound.

  “Dad. Dad? Ray, I’m all right. I’m fine,” I said as I found myself helping my father, to help me, up out of my own vast blood puddle. I looked at the hunched hulk of him through swollen slitted eyes, and I just wanted to shut them tight again. I hated to see him like this. I’d have rather endured the same beating all over than to have him see the results just once. “Really, it’s nothing. You know how it always looks worse than—”

  “Jesus Christ, Keir,” Ray said, depositing my ass decisively onto the bed, just like old times.

  “Jesus Christ, Ray,” I said, attempting a smile that didn’t get very far.

  • • •

  It was, to say the least, a little blurry, the hobbling shuffle that eventually got me and Ray to his car together. It was the beginning of the proper time of the morning, when the joggers and couples striding toward breakfast someplace nice had taken over from the night crawlers and made a place like Norfolk shine just like in the brochures. I saw, fleetingly, these sights, these good people trying to ignore my old man and the mess he was transporting. Or trying to appear not to have any morbid curiosity about the scene. Hard to imagine anybody really disinterested, though. I’d have been staring good and hard if I were them; I know I would because I would not be able to help myself. Maybe these people were all just better than me.

  Or maybe I hadn’t seen them. They looked awfully close to the scenes I had pored over so hard, for so long. I had projected myself into every page, picture, and paragraph of the Norfolk University prospectus for two solid years, planning my exquisite existence here. The images that flashed through my mind were spooky close to those images I had lived with for so long.

  “Where are the girls?” I asked when Ray was leaning over me to buckle my seat belt. He forgot to do it when he lowered me into my seat and only remembered after buckling himself in. He growled his frustration as he thrashed around, getting himself free to take care of me.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Who called you?” I asked as he impatiently roared out of the dormitory parking lot without bothering to do up his own belt again.

  “I don’t know, Keir. I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Keir,” he hollered, scaring me. I jerked forward, raised my hands up and spread them wide at the windshield the way you would instinctively prepare for an upcoming head-on. Or for warding off a pummeling. He had my attention. Counting just now, I could still tally up on one hand all the times Ray had shouted at me in my whole life.

  “Yeah, Dad,” I said.

  “I don’t know, I don’t remember, I don’t care. Look at you. Who called me is not the goddamn point, all right? I don’t care about anything else right now except this right here beside me. Do you get that now? Do you have any concept of how . . .” He turned to look hard at me, sort of punishing us both for the state I was in. I heard him swallow hard just before I reached over and pushed his big crazy loving-me face back toward the road.

  “Watch what you’re doing, Ray, or you could wind up making a whole bunch of people on the road look like me before it’s over.”

  “Don’t joke,” he said.

  “Wasn’t joking,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t joke if you could see what’s left of your . . . my boy’s face. My lovely little boy’s face . . .”

  “Stop it, Dad,” I said, because he was killing me. “I wasn’t joking.” I almost wished it wasn’t him who came to get me. I almost wished anybody else, anybody other than Carl, that is, came to find me and bundle me off.

  Except it wasn’t even almost. There was nobody I wanted bundling me off at a time like this other than Ray. If only he could have done it without having to suffer seeing me at the same time.

  “What about the rest of you?” he said as he got to open road and pounded the accelerator.

  “There’s nobody else. I’m on my own.”

  “No, Keir, I meant the rest of you, your body, your injuries. Ribs, guts, what else do you have going on there that I need to know about?”

  “Nothing,” I insisted. Nothing that you need to know about.

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Well, that’s lucky, considering how it looks. Good, good. Now, I could take you to a hospital here, but I was thinking of trying to get you in closer to home, as long as you are not in too much—”

  “Nope,” I said firmly.

  “Nope what? Which do you prefer? How’s your head feeling? You think maybe you got a concussion? Yeah, maybe we shouldn’t take the chance, get you checked sooner rather than—”

  “No, Ray, no. I feel not so critical. Definitely no concussion, and definitely no hospital.”

  He inhaled so deep and long I wondered if when he let it go the windshield was going to blast right off the car into oncoming traffic.

  “Keep breathing, Ray,” I said, and he blew it all out as if he had been waiting for the order.

  “Al
l the blood, though, Keir. We can’t even tell how much you lost. There might be other things you can’t even—”

  “Orange juice.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll get me home and fill me up with orange juice, and the blood will be back to normal levels in no time.”

  “I don’t think that is the—”

  “Ray? Dad? All I want to do is go home. And the only person I want taking care of me is you. This whole situation is already bad enough, and to be honest, the only clear idea I have right now is to retreat. I don’t want anything for now other than to burrow in back home, to know that you are there and that the whole rest of the world isn’t. ’Cause, I don’t, at all, understand it, what’s happened and what’s happening. There was some alcohol and stuff, and that doesn’t help, I know. But I still don’t understand. I do not understand this. It’s all wrong.” There was a long pause then. This was the point where the crying came in, and I couldn’t say with any certainty which one of us got it started. “Ray . . . ?” I said with the intention of saying a lot more, but I wouldn’t even know what it was going to be until it came out of me.

  “Okay,” he said, big sniffles bracketing each syllable. “I’m gonna take my boy home, and take care of him. You need to run for the cover of home, well, that is what home is for after all. Whatever you need, Son. Whatever.”

  “That’s it, that’s all. Get me back where I belong and do what you do. Then I’ll be showroom new again before we know it.”

  He nodded vigorously, leaning a little harder on the gas until I had to point out to him how much worse the day would get if the state troopers pulled us over. He decelerated promptly.

  A period of welcome quiet passed as I looked out the window, through my letter-box lids, just watching the trees and the granite outcroppings whiz by. Then I felt heavy and nodded off, but that didn’t last long. Then I watched the blur of roadside again, then nodded off again. It went like that.

  “You are a good boy,” Ray said. I could tell from the pitch of his voice he didn’t know whether I was asleep or awake. He would have to say what he had to say regardless, I knew. As long as he could say it at the lump of me, something in him would be satisfied. I wasn’t interjecting anyway. “I’m sorry, Son. I never should have let this happen. I should have been able, somehow—”