My wife heard me sobbing in my sleep again last night. She later told me I’d been trembling too, and that was what had woken her up.
“Ron, it’s been six months! You’ve got to talk to a therapist now. I’ll come with you”, she said. The desperation was clear in her voice.
I stared at the pattern on the blanket and waited for reality to slowly set in. When it did, it didn’t bring much relief. I’d gotten better at putting up a facade of normalcy in the last couple of months, but the darkness had slowly crept into my dreams. You can only pretend when you’re awake.
“What was it today?” she asked.
“Same as always, flashbacks of being bullied at school”, I lied.
She held my head tightly to her stomach and let out an exasperated sigh that let me know I hadn’t sounded convincing. “I don’t get it. Why don’t you just tell me what happened in the summer? I’m trying to help you but I hate being blocked out like this! I can respect your space but it’s hard for me seeing you suffer like this!”
“I’m fine. I’ve always had these phases. It’ll pass”, I lied again, feeling the cold sweat on my forehead.
“What phases?? I’ve never seen you this way before, it only started after you got back from Skokie! Why don’t you just tell me what happened?? Please!”, she failed to avoid raising her voice, and to be honest I didn’t blame her.
“Don’t worry. It’ll pass”.
I got out of bed and walked to the window. The snow was falling gently outside.
“I’m gonna go finish up that thing I’m writing”, I told her after a while, still staring into the white darkness.
“What? Are you – Ron, it’s three in the morning!!!”
“I think it’ll help when I’m done with it”. I walked up to her and kissed her cheek. I could see the tears starting to form around her eyes, and it broke my heart to see it.
I put on a shirt and made my way to the bathroom to wash my face, before heading off to my study.
Halfway there, I felt an overwhelming sadness come over me as I pictured her sad eyes.
I walked back, and peeped in through the door to see her sitting on the bed holding her head in her hands. “I love you”, I said, hoping she wouldn’t spot the uncertainty in my voice.
x-x-x-x
I wish there was another place to begin from, but the truth is it started with a phonecall I got around midnight last May, right after I had finished making love to my Linda, my wife.
“What? Who on earth…” I groaned as I felt around for my phone on the bedside table, broken out of a stupor that was on the verge of drifting seamlessly into sleep.
“Hello?”
“…Ronald Cheeseman?” a scratchy voice on the other side asked after a brief pause.
“Yeah?” I mumbled groggily.
Silence.
“Yes? Who is this?”
I was sure I heard some sniffling this time, but once again, no response. The sound told me there was no problem with the line though.
“Look I don’t mean to be rude, but I hope you have a good reason for calling at this hour, whoever you are”.
Linda was now awake, and widened her eyes at me briefly to ask what was going on. I made a clueless face and shook my head at her.
I was just about to give the anonymous caller a telling off, when he finally spoke again.
“Ronny? This is Al. Al Blank”.
I sat up hurriedly.
“Al? Wow…uhh, what’s up? Is everything okay? What’s wrong with your voice?”
Even as I asked, I could tell he had either been crying, or had a bad cold. Given the long silences and what I had heard about Al the last time I’d heard of him, I could tell it probably wasn’t a cold.
“Ronny, how is everything? How’s Linda?” he asked hoarsely.
“Good, good. What about you? Wow, I thought I’d never hear from you again. You’ve been completely off radar for so long”.
My words felt weirdly formal, especially addressing a guy I had gone to both school and university with. I guess that’s what happens when you haven’t spoken to someone in nearly 10 years.
I couldn’t make up my mind on whether to say “sorry about your divorce”, given how long ago it was. I also wasn’t sure if it would be a good idea to remind him about it, knowing the circumstances that led up to it.
“Hey, Al? Is everything okay, man? Is there something you wanted to say?”
More silence.
“You there, buddy?”
I couldn’t help but feel conscious about how unnatural the “buddy” sounded, but I was genuinely concerned for him. I wanted to at least try to make him feel comfortable with my words, not that I could do anything else.
“Listen man… I think… I mean I am…struggling a little bit. Things aren’t great, they haven’t been for a while”.
“Okay. You wanna talk about it? I’m here to listen”
“Yeah. I guess I have no other choice”.
“Well, I’m listening. You can take your time”. I had school the next day, but I couldn’t just leave Al this way, no matter how sudden this was.
“Ronny, I’ve got something to ask you”.
“Sure, go on”.
“Can you come over to my place for a few days? I think I need it. I think I need to talk to someone”.
“Umm… I think so? Are you still in Skokie?” I said unsurely. I didn’t want to say no, but trying to squeeze in a weekend trip to Skokie (from Cleveland) would be tough given the heavy end of term workload at the school I taught at. Besides, it seemed like he wanted someone around for more than a couple of days. “Is it okay if I did that next month once summer holidays start? Or if you want to come over here I could go over this Friday and drive you back to my place the next day. Linda and I would love to catch up with you!”
I somehow knew asking him to drive himself wouldn’t be a good idea, and to be honest, I wasn’t sure if he was allowed to, or if he even had a car anymore. I didn’t want to risk embarrassing him by asking.
“I don’t want Linda to see me … like this. And I don’t really think I can leave the house either. It’s complicated. I’ll tell you when you’re here. Next month is fine though. Yeah, still here in Skokie”. Al blew his nose, his voice sounded sad and distant.
“Alright”, I said, immediately knowing what he meant by “like this”, even though he didn’t elaborate. “You sure you’re gonna hold up fine till then? Do you have someone else there with you? Anyone to talk to? Are you seeing a professional of some kind?”
“Don’t worry. It’s not a… not a time thing. I just need to get some things off my chest … or so I think. And some company … well that would help. I can wait a month. I live alone now. Becca and I got divorced by the way…I mean … that was a long while ago”. Al seemed to be shifting from talking to me to softly muttering to himself midway through his sentences, and I strained to catch everything he was saying.
“Yes…I’d heard. I tried to reach out to you but you just disappeared off the face of the earth, man! All social media accounts gone, and your number was unreachable too. And then…yeah”. I stopped myself mid-sentence.
“So you know then”.
I kept quiet. I wasn’t sure if what I knew counted as much or too little, and I was worried about either of those two possibilities.
“I just wa–”
“Ronny”, Al spoke at the same time as me after a shared pause. I waited for him to go first. “I’m so sorry I called you like this… in the middle of the night. But please just know that I had to. I’ll hang up now. I’ll finish up some work and I’ve… got an early start tomorrow. I guess you need to sleep too. Sorry if I woke you. I hope… I look forward to seeing you next month. Bye”.
Al hung up without waiting for me to say bye, or that I hoped he knew he could call me whenever. His voice was getting heavier towards the end and it seemed like he was about to cry again. I noticed I had walked out of the bedroom, naked, while on the call. I also found my heart racing with a mix of anxiety and something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
When I went back in, I could tell from Linda’s concerned face that I seemed a bit dazed. I told her everything Al had said, except the part where he said he didn’t want her to see him “like this”. She knew Al too, of course, but not nearly as well as I did.
x-x-x-x
Al Blank was one of the more curiously interesting people I knew. For the most part, I had personally thought of Al as the good kind of interesting. Around the time I had last heard of him though, calling him “interesting” would have been a rather cruel euphemism to describe the utterly bizarre and tragic set of circumstances that had befallen him.
‘Al’ was short for Ally, but it had once been short for Alireza, the name he was born with. Strangely, it was his caucasian mother, not his half-Persian father called George who had strongly insisted on that name. I guess that’s the kind of thing you do when you are deeply in love and find the world full of new and wonderful possibilities.
You don’t think about the fact that a child called Alireza Blank could end up being an introvert who would hate being forced into having a five-minute conversation about his “strange” name, his multi-ethnic family, and what his religion actually was, every time he met someone new. You also don’t think about the possibility that if things went south, that five-minute conversation would often have to end with a mention of his parents’ divorce.
By the time you’re in middle-school, kids pick on the tiniest of things that stand out about you, and a guy with a first name and a last name that didn’t seem to go together was an easy target. I didn’t exactly have it easy myself with a name like Cheeseman, but Al had it way worse, sometimes bordering on really malicious stuff. Adolescents can be the most vicious people sometimes, especially since, unlike adults, they often don’t have to risk losing a job or being socially shunned over it.
It was probably all the unwanted attention (and possibly his parents’ divorce) that made Al officially change his name to Ally right after he graduated from high school. It didn’t make any difference to the people who knew him though. We still called him Al, same as before.
Of course, the curious history of his name isn’t even half of what made Al’s story fascinating.
Now this may sound like an impolite thing to say about someone, but growing up, he was about the most invisible kid you could imagine. He looked positively bored with the mundane realities of everyday life, and wanted no part in it whatsoever. His short, pudgy frame didn’t betray even the slightest bit of athletic ability. Heck, he wasn’t even interested in watching or following sport … or anything else that kids his age liked to watch or talk about!
His grades at school were consistently poor. He couldn’t sketch, paint, sing, dance, play an instrument, speak in public, and never showed interest in any of these things either. He even hated being outside!
One would possibly put this down to the bullying he faced, but here’s the thing: I’d known him since first grade and the bullying only really started around seventh grade when the kids started fully imbibing all the nasty stuff from their parents and surroundings. It was around eight grade when his parents got divorced too. But he was always that way from the beginning!
He even sat next to me for the whole year in fourth grade, and despite my best attempts, I could barely even call him a friend by the end of it. He hated talking, and preferred to stare outside the window to look at the squirrels instead. He wasn’t shy or timid. In fact, he had a quiet, foreboding sort of confidence that added something of a mystique about him.
While he did answer when spoken to, he would look mildly irritated at being forced to put his complex thoughts into words for us mortals. He may well have had some sort of secret superiority complex, but if he did, he was too unbothered to tell us even that.
I’d been to his house, and his parents both seemed perfectly nice. His dad was very quiet and mild-mannered, his mom was a bit eccentric but seemed to love children. No one ever heard about any problems with the Blanks, and while the divorce came as a surprise, it was about as “mutual” as a divorce can get, with both parents continuing on civil terms. For all intents and purposes, Alireza Blank was a nihilistic grandpa stuck in the body of a plump little kid who perhaps quietly thought he was better than everyone else for reasons best known to him.
In ninth grade, something happened that changed him for good. Maybe it was because he was already getting called names, or maybe it was his parents, but he had become more detached than ever by that time. Then, one day, he made the mistake of crossing our English teacher, Mrs. Shaw. Mrs. Shaw, may god rest her soul, was a tiny woman with white frizzy hair who loved putting the fear of god into kids twice her size, and often their parents as well.
That year, we were asked to submit a final term essay at least 1500 - 2000 words long. That’s a lot of words for a ninth grader, and all of us cursed and grumbled our way through it for a whole week, knowing there was a C+ waiting for us at the end if we were lucky. I’m sure Al hated it too, seeing as he submitted an essay that consisted of three short sentences.
Mrs. Shaw gave him the worst kind of dressing down that you could still get away with as a teacher back then. Nowadays you’d be straight up fired from your job if you said some of the things she said to Al that day, and in front of the whole class too.
I won’t go into the unsavory details, but she brought up everything from the divorce to the reason why she really thought he gets bullied by others. Stuff like that doesn’t just come from wanting to discipline a student, but feeling personally insulted by one. It got pretty ugly and most of us were wishing we could leave halfway through it. By the end of it, Al was in tears. I’d never seen him cry before. None of us had.
Surprisingly, it did the trick.
In the weeks that followed, Al started making a concerted effort to talk to people and put himself more out there. He was still very much an introvert, but he no longer looked like he pitied everyone else’s existence anymore. He even got pretty good at taking jokes at his own expense, laughing along with others. That sort of thing really goes a long way in dissuading bullies, for the most part. Like I said, Al was never really short on confidence.
He never quite got into any co-curriculars, but he did start putting more effort into his studies. And while most of his grades went up from poor to average, he reserved his best efforts for English class. We had Mrs. Shaw again in tenth grade. All of us received the shock of our lives when, almost exactly a year after that unpleasant incident, Al got an A in his tenth grade English final assignment. No one else had scored above a B+, with most of us scoring lower.
Mrs. Shaw, a woman who looked like she had never smiled at anyone in her life, made Al stand up and had the whole class applaud him for his incredible turnaround. She then had him read out the whole essay to us. She told us it was the best she’d read at this level in her twenty five years of teaching. All of us cheered as Al went very red in the face. Big Bob Watkins, the guy we jokingly called Mrs. Shaw’s son because he sat on a wheelchair right beside her desk, later swore he saw her tear up and that the rest of us couldn’t see it from the front because of her extremely thick glasses. We didn’t believe him of course, we thought that was taking it too far.
Al and I weren’t really close in school. That only happened when we ended up in the same English Literature program at university. We hadn’t coordinated our applications or anything, and it was a pleasant surprise to see him in my class on the first day. When you’re in a new place and nervous, you tend to stick to people you already know. We grew real tight pretty quick.
Al was driven by two pursuits during our freshman year. One, he decided he never wanted to go to work and instead would follow his passion to become a full-time writer. When I say he “decided” that, I don’t mean he casually shared that desire with his peers and professors. He became wholly fixated on it, the same way he hadn’t let himself rest until he had wrenched an A out of Mrs. Shaw in tenth grade. In a way it made complete sense. Writing was the only thing he was good at, and perhaps more importantly the one thing that gave him a sense of purpose and identity.
He also developed a strong infatuation towards a tall, freckled girl from the Anthropology department. It just happens that I’d signed up for a beginner-level anthropology course for reasons totally unrelated to the girl, and naturally Al asked me to set him up with her. Now, no one believes me when I tell them, but I swear I didn’t know she would fall for me instead, despite my best efforts to put in several good words for Al. In time, I fell in love with her too, and that’s how Linda Brooking became Mrs. Linda Cheeseman seven years later.
If Al had any negative feelings when Linda and I started dating, he did a pretty good job of hiding it. Apart from giving us more space as a couple, he still spoke to me the same way and sat next to me in class. He always remained a shy and awkward around Linda, but he was that way around women in general.
But one spurned pursuit drove him to double down harder on the other one. The one he had full control over, from his end at least. Two years after we graduated, I was finishing my post-grad and had moved in with Linda. Al, on the other hand, had shown zero desire to either apply for a job, or to continue studying. Meanwhile, he had signed up to about a dozen writers’ clubs, had hired and fired a literary agent, and had approached countless publishers with all sorts of manuscripts.
“You’ve got to have a back-up plan, you know”, Linda had told him on one of his rare dinner visits to our former Chicago apartment. “Your dedication is admirable, and I’m sure something will work out, but people just making it big as an author off the bat like that is rare. All great authors were doing something else before they got published. That’s just how it works!”
Al had shuffled uncomfortably, mumbled something, and stole a quick sideways glance at me. He had made me promise I wouldn’t tell Linda that he was dating a girl called Becca at the time, lest she double down on him needing to get a job. I would’ve told him the same thing, of course, but I knew better than to argue with him knowing full well I wouldn’t win.
When I said bye to him that night, I knew he didn’t appreciate the nagging and wasn’t gonna turn up or stay in touch for a while. I was more right than I had thought.
I next heard from him more than a year later. It was a phonecall from the man himself. The bastard had only gone and gotten himself published! He asked me if I’d like to pre-order a copy and of course I said yes!
But that wasn’t nearly the end of it! When it hit the shelves, the book started selling like hot cake. It sold around 7000 copies in its opening week, and continued to be on the nationwide bestseller list for the first month and a half! For a debut novelist to pull that off was the stuff of dreams. The kind of dream that only Al could’ve dared to dream without a backup plan.
Funnily enough, and I hate saying this about a friend’s work, I didn’t quite see the appeal after reading it. It was your average murder mystery with a somewhat interesting twist at the end that I frankly saw coming before I got halfway through. But heck, what the hell did I, an English teacher at your run-of-the-mill school know how these things work! And even if it was a fluke, even if these things are just a matter of luck and good publicity, I wasn’t gonna begrudge Al his moment in the sun after he had busted his gut for it for so long!
Now, when you sell those kinds of numbers as an author, it goes without saying that you’re going to earn yourself a book deal. Al announced it to the guests after getting quite drunk at his wedding, which happened three months after he got published. I got pretty drunk myself and Linda had to drive us home the next morning. I didn’t know it then, but that was the last time I would see Al.
We would occasionally talk over the phone until around two to three years afterwards, when things took a weird turn. Al’s second book came out. It was the second installment in the initial deal he had signed.
I didn’t find it any better or worse than the first one, but it didn’t come anywhere close in terms of success. In fact, considering it was from a bestselling author, it wouldn’t be harsh to say that it did pretty badly. But that wasn’t the weird part.
About a week after the book came out, Al had a psychotic episode. He got violent at home with Becca, and accused her of colluding with his own mother in conspiring against him or trying to kill him. He then proceeded to try to take his own life, failed, and subsequently went through a prolonged treatment for schizophrenia.
It was around this point that he cut off all contact with me, and indeed with nearly everyone else he knew. Becca would pick up when I would call, telling me he wasn’t available, or it wasn’t a good time. I would keep checking in periodically, until one day when he picked up himself and told me he didn’t want me to call again.
The last time I heard about Al was from a mutual friend, at a high school reunion many years ago. Al had cut him off too, but his wife knew someone in Becca’s immediate family. They’d told him that Becca had gotten herself a divorce after Al displayed further bouts of unexplained rage.
He told me something else about Al which to this day makes me feel uneasy to think about, even when I try to see it through the prism of mental illness. Apparently, a few months before the divorce happened, Al had submitted another manuscript. Not to his regular publishers, who by that time had canceled the book deal for obvious reasons. In fact, it wasn’t a novel at all, but a short story, if you could call it one.
What it really was was a rambly, badly-written essay about his dog. It had no characters nor a plot. Just meaningless, disconnected details about what the dog liked to do all day.
x-x-x-x
When I pulled up to Al’s driveway that summer, my stomach sank a bit. It was completely overrun by weeds that were spilling over from the filthy front lawn. The house looked like it had seen much better days, with the paint peeling off in many places. Linda and I had discussed the possibility that Al might be in need of money, and if I should make the offer myself without waiting for him to ask. That seemed increasingly likely now.
Al was waiting for me near the rusted garage door with a toolbox near his feet. I could tell he had been trying to unjam it for a while. When I got out, he stared blankly at me for a good few seconds before breaking into what felt like a forced smile and offered his hand, which I shook. He had lost most of his hair, which made him look older than he was supposed to at his age. His eyes looked like he didn’t get much sleep.
We exchanged pleasantries before Al led me inside. The first thing that hit me was a mild musty smell that comes with a lack of ventilation. The second thing I noticed, once my eyes adjusted to the poor light, was the massive amounts of junk that cramped the living space. Discarded boxes, heaps of paper tied together with rope, and the whole gamut that comes with being a hoarder.
I didn’t know where to start as I sat down on the sofa with a bunch of old files stacked to one side. Al wasn’t saying much, and in fact looked mildly irritated by my presence.
“Damn shame”, he finally said, kicking at the floor.
“Huh?”
“Nothing. Nothing you’d want to know about now, at any rate. Unless you’re okay with breaking into someone’s house. Are you?”
I widened my eyes in alarm.
“I’m joking”, he said, shaking his head.
I wasn’t so sure he was.
“Al, what’s going on with you? I’m sorry but all this…you wanna talk to me? I’m here to talk, or listen to you”
“That’s why I asked you to come here. But it’s not the right time now. They won’t be here till next week, so we just have to stick it out for the weekend. Sorry about the house being a mess, you can take the extra bedroom upstairs. That one’s pretty uncluttered. If you’ve got something to say about all the stuff I have in here, don’t”.
“Okay. Who is “they”…?”
“You’ll know”, he quipped dismissively.
I looked at Al and felt uncomfortable by a returning sense of familiarity that was growing in me. This wasn’t the Al I knew after tenth grade. This was the one I had known in elementary school and through most of middle school. Completely shut off from the world, forced civility betraying the unmistakable hint of irritation in the company of others. That silent arrogance was back, as if there was a whole world inside his mind he didn’t want to share with anyone. I guess the rough times he had endured had weathered away at his carefully built social pretenses, but then why had he called me here?
It goes without saying that I was also seriously questioning his mental balance at this point.
“You get out of there if he starts making you uncomfortable, you hear me?” Linda said over the phone on my second night there.
I was in the extra bedroom upstairs, which, while mostly empty, didn’t seem like it had been opened in a long time. Thick layers of dust lined the floor and the odd piece of furniture. On the wall was a framed picture of Becca, Al’s former wife, with her arm around a large doberman, and another one of Al and Becca smiling at the camera, with the same doberman beside them.
“I will. But I don’t know how to ask if he needs money. He’s acting like he doesn’t even want to talk to me. He literally shushed me when I tried to make conversation at breakfast”, I told Linda.
“Yeah I’m not sure either. I think just let it be, or maybe try to slip it into conversation if you get the chance”, she said.
I did exactly that over the weekend, casually broaching on the subject while we were picking out some stuff from the nearby departmental store. It was the first time we had left the house that weekend, and I assumed it was meant to break the ice, but he barely spoke. When I asked, Al gave me a look of disappointment that immediately made me regret it.
“I know you’re confused. You’ll see soon enough”.
After several more attempts at trying to get him to talk to me, I made up my mind to leave at the earliest chance. I did not feel qualified enough to help him, and he was strongly resisting all attempts at conversation. I didn’t want to drag a grown adult to a doctor against his wishes. Besides, these things never work if the person isn’t willing to talk.
And to be perfectly honest, I was starting to get a bit spooked by this point, and there was absolutely nothing to do in this place when your host wasn’t even up for conversation. I fell asleep that night while trying to think of excuses to leave early the next day, and if I could find other ways of finding him the help he clearly needed.
I don’t know how long I’d slept, but I was jolted awake by Al shaking the daylights out of me.
I let out a cry in horror as I took in what was happening.
“Ron, WAKE UP! THEY’RE HERE! They’re fucking here!” he hissed loudly, almost menacingly.
“Al, what the — what is wrong with you?” I said, trying to shake him off. I looked at my phone, which said it was just past midnight.
“COME ON, there’s no fucking time. You want to see this, I’ve been waiting to show you for so long!”
“Show what? Al — “ I protested as he held my collar and nearly dragged me out of the room, as much as someone half-a-foot shorter than you can manage.
I was wide awake now, and could see Al’s eyes crazed with excitement, the veins on his neck protruding as he muscled me into his room.
What on earth was he going to show me?
If the circumstances were any different, I’d go on for a bit about just how bad the smell in Al’s room was. But presently he forced me down on his bed, right beside the closed window that overlooked the street outside his house.
“You see that?” he hissed softly, pointing to a car that was pulling into the garage across the street.
“What the fuck is going on?” I asked, bewildered.
“You’re gonna need this”, he said, handing me a pair of binoculars. “And don’t make a noise or they’ll hear you. That’s why I’ve kept the lights off”.
“Al… seriously. You’ve got to stop. You’ve got to stop this man”, I said, pushing his hand away.
“Just take a look. If you think I’ve wasted your time you can get me admitted in any psych ward of your choice”, he said, still pointing to the car across the street.
I started saying what I wanted to say, before deciding not to. I indulged Al, more out of fear for my safety if I didn’t comply than anything else.
I looked through the binoculars as two figures exited the garage across the street. One was a short woman whose greyish white hair seemed to glisten under the street light as she locked the door behind her. She proceeded to push a rather large young man on a wheelchair towards the front door of their house. They were talking, though I couldn’t hear what they were saying through the closed glass window in Al’s room.
Not that I particularly cared to eavesdrop, because my jaw was already on the floor by this point. A cold shiver ran down my spine as my brain tried to make sense of the impossibility that my eyes were witnessing. It was Mrs. Shaw and Big Bob Watkins, looking for all intents and purposes exactly as they did from the time I knew them at school, over 18 years ago.
Leaving aside the fact that it made no sense to see them living together, there was no way Bob could still have looked like that well into his late-30s. Even more pertinently, Al and I had been to Mrs. Shaw’s funeral during our final year at university.
I turned to Al in shock, who had pre-emptively put a finger on his lips. He looked back at me in the darkness with a crazed look in his eyes.
“Al”, I whispered, my hands trembling as their grip on the binoculars loosened. “What the fuck is going on?!”
Al slowly pulled his finger away from his lips, that maniacal look still on his face
“You would’ve thought I’m crazy if I told you instead of showing you”, he whispered back. “But this isn’t even half of it. This isn’t even the craziest part”.