Sag of the Banner

After the ceremony Mom asks if I want pictures, but what she’s really asking is, where are your friends? All around us graduates are hanging gowned arms over receptive shoulders, performing acrobatics with their caps. I tell Mom I don’t have many friends in the English department. The way it worked out, most of my friends are in the Sciences. This is a lie. My friends are at home, smoking on the porch couch, plotting their intoxication for the day. They either dropped out or never dropped in to begin with. The other day Syd, wanting to eat acid at midnight, was genuinely surprised when I told him I had class in the morning. The fact that I’m still in school just does not stick with him. 

“How about we take a picture?” I suggest. “You and me.”

Mom frowns, eyeing a group of graduates jumping in unison.

“Excuse me,” I say, recruiting a passerby to take the picture. I put my arm around Mom. She can’t help but smile. She loves me in that deep, encoded way.

I take Mom to lunch. I take Mom to the park. After the park, we tour the track and field facility and watch the distance runners make their endless rounds. I stay one step ahead of things, strategically avoiding bringing Mom back to the house. She would be horrified by Syd and Lamp. Syd can briefly pass for sane, but then you notice his jaw, how his forehead’s slightly wet. Lamp, though a sweetheart, does not pass the eye test: he has a twelve-inch mohawk, dual neck tattoos, and gauge holes the size of sand dollars. And even if they weren’t home, it’s anybody’s guess how many empties will line the balustrade.

I suggest an early dinner. I say I know a place on the river. We walk, and by the time we get there, Mom has sweat lines running down her back. The hostess asks for our reservation, and when I tell her we don’t have one, she looks up from her list, mystified.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “But you’re aware it’s graduation weekend, right?”

“Is it?” I say.

Mom eyes me like, please don’t.

The hostess bunches her mouth, thinking. Then she leans forward and whispers, “I’ll see what I can do.”

We follow her through the dining room where the tables don little placards with last names on them. She stops at a wobbly cocktail table near the bathrooms, slips the placard into her pocket and says, “Eat quickly, skip dessert, if you catch my drift.”

After we order, Mom won’t talk. She turns to the window and pretends to look at the river, but she’s not looking at the river, she’s looking at me. I know this because she’s done it before. In high school, when my girlfriend and I would watch movies in the living room, Mom would sit in the kitchen behind the pony wall, feigning disinterest while studying our reflections in the sliding glass door. At the first hint of intimacy she’d walk in, ask some forced, unrelated question, and try to will our separation by her presence alone.

She glances me in her peripherals. She wants to say something, to impart her motherly wisdom, but the truth is I haven’t fucked up badly enough yet. I just graduated from college, I’m employed, and because of Dad’s will I’ll never have to ask her for money in my life—to express concern would seem overbearing, but not expressing anything is gouging out her soul.

When the waiter brings her salad, she doesn’t eat it, she just forks things around to make it look like there’s less. Finally, after a sip of wine, she says, “So what do you think you’ll do next?”

“I was thinking we head downtown and catch some music.”

She drops her eyes, smoothes her pants. “Neil, I’m talking about your future.”

“My future,” I say. “By my future I assume you mean my job.”

“Well, that’s certainly part of it.”

“I’ll work the landscape gig through the summer—”

“And then?”

“And then I’ll go from there.”

At the table beside us a man clinks his glass. He stands, toasts his daughter, and the daughter, still in her graduation attire, says oh stop it over and over again to her family’s delight.

Mom tries a smile, but it goes slack. “You know,” she says, “when you were a little boy, maybe six years old, you said to me, ‘Mommy, I think God gave me a lot of gifts.’” She pauses, then bites her bottom lip. “You said that to me, Neil. And you were right. You do have a lot of gifts. So many gifts. I just worry that—” She buries her face into her sleeve, her torso shuddering. I wait for it to pass. When it doesn’t, I flag the waiter and mime for the check.

*

Outside it’s still bright as hell. We’re in that late-spring building phase where the days don’t end. I’m about to suggest ice cream, but Mom mercifully announces that she’d like to go to her hotel. We start up the street in silence. At the intersection a honking truck parades by, balloons streaming from the bed, Congrats Ethan painted across the back window. From my belt line, I flip Ethan off.

The hotel’s not a hotel, it’s a motel, and it’s sketchier than I imagined—beige, nameless, bordering a 7-11. On the second floor a fidgety man bites on a cigarette, patting himself for something.

“This is where you’re staying?”

“Everything was booked,” she says. “You didn’t give me the dates—”

“I know, I know,” I say.

Her flight’s at noon tomorrow, so we agree to meet for breakfast in the morning. She suggests somewhere near my house, but I quickly shut this down and say I know a diner down the block from here. She doesn’t respond. She just stands there in the unrelenting light, her forehead grooved from a day of frowning. She looks old, breakable. She looks like somebody that can die.

“All right,” I say, turning to leave, but she shuffles forward and falls in for a hug. I count to three, then I sort of wriggle her off.

*

At home Syd and Lamp are sitting on the porch couch, laughing in deep, low-frequency voices. I walk up the steps and see a litter of whip-it cartridges scattered across the ground like pine cones.

“Want?” Syd says, holding out the dispenser.

“Why not,” I say, inserting a cartridge and taking a hit. It’s cold, milky, then suddenly it’s like somebody put a tin bucket on my head and hit it with a metal rod. Slowly, the sensation ripples away until I’m back in my body, on the porch, on Earth. 

“Where were you all day?” Syd asks.

“Graduation,” I say.

Lamp loads a cartridge. “From what?”

“College.”

“You’re still doing that?” Syd says. 

Lamp takes a hit. “Cull-edge,” he says, in that low voice.

“Cull,” Syd says, chuckling.

“Huh?” I ask.

“You don’t know what cull means, graduate?”

I shrug.

“It’s when breeders kill off animals with undesirable traits. It’s also what institutions of higher learning do to their most creative students, metaphorically speaking.”

“You dropped out, Syd.”

“But if I had stayed.” Syd snatches the dispenser from Lamp and loads three cartridges into it.

“Are there beers?” I ask, not wanting to witness him die.

“Fridge,” Lamp says. 

I go inside, grab one, and tell myself it’ll be the only one, but I keep going back for one more until they’re gone. Then I plant myself next to Syd and Lamp on the porch couch and don’t get up until the sky suggests morning.

“Shit,” I say.

“What?” Syd says.

“I have to meet my mom for breakfast.”

“Take this,” Syd says, handing me a pill from his coat pocket.

I eat it without asking what it is. With Syd, this is best.

*

I cut through campus on the way to the motel. The decorations from yesterday’s graduation are still up, but the scene feels forgotten, deflated. The grass lies shoe-flattened, the rows of folding chairs sway in and out of alignment, the class-of banner sags low over the podiumless stage. Something airy blooms in my belly. Maybe a shit. Maybe Syd’s pill. Probably Syd’s pill.

At the motel the fidgety guy’s still on the balcony, pacing between rooms. Me too, brother, I think.

I knock on Mom’s door, but she doesn’t answer. I knock again. Still, nothing. My mind goes to the normal places: died in sleep, passed out in shower and hit her head, murdered by tweaker upstairs. I consider asking if he’s seen her, but as I look up, I catch a glimpse of raw sun, and these amorphous blobs invade my vision. I try to blink them away, but with each blink they multiply. I stumble into the parking lot and sit on a curb stop. My extremities go tingly and weightless. Then I become overly conscious of my heartbeat. I can feel it thudding in my neck.

My phone buzzes. It’s Mom. When I pick up, I forget what I’m supposed to say, so I don’t say anything.

“Neil, are you there?”

In the background I hear laughter, suspiciously Syd-sounding.

“Neil?”

“Where are you?” I ask.

More laughter.

“Mom?”

“Yes—hello? Honey, I’m at your house. I’m here with your roommates.”

“My house?”

“Come home, we’re waiting for you.”

“How did you—” I start to say,  but she hangs up.

I bolt back through campus, where a clean-up crew is now deconstructing yesterday’s clutter. The stage is being yanked into cubic pieces as the chairs are loaded onto these rolling caddies. I slow to a jog, last night’s beer-foam creeping up my esophagus, but then I remember that every second Mom’s alone with Syd is another irrevocable second alone with Syd, and I speed up again. When I round the corner onto my street, I see the three of them sitting on the porch couch, Mom in the middle, like some kind of demented family. The porch is cleared of last night’s paraphernalia, and at the far end sits a pile of trash bags neatly tied and bowed.

“Howdy,” Syd says, his arm extended behind Mom.

Mom’s wearing yoga pants and running shoes, her ponytail fed through the back of a baseball cap. Her cheeks, forehead, and the tip of her nose are flushed pink.

“Did you run here?” I ask.

“I jogged, yes.”

“I didn’t know you ran.”

“I didn’t know you ran,” Syd says, pointing at my shirt. I look down and see little sweat circles poking out from under my arms.

“Not very fast,” Mom says, tapping her wrist.

“I thought we were meeting at the motel,” I say. “How did you get my address?”

“Honey, I co-signed your lease.”

I let that sink in.

“Did you see the mess out here this morning?” she asks.

“What mess?” I lie.

“There were these whipped cream chargers everywhere and an unbelievable amount of cigarette butts.”

Syd leans forward. “I’m telling you, Caroline, it’s those damn vagrants. It’s a real problem around here. They’ll colonize your porch in the middle of the night, and when you come outside in the morning, they've vanished.”

Caroline. Sometimes I forget she has a human name.   

“You didn’t hear anything?” Caroline asks me.

“I guess not,” I say. “I’m a deep sleeper.”

“He wasn’t when he was young,” she says, eyeing Syd. 

“A crybaby?” Syd asks.

“The biggest,” Mom says. 

Syd grins. “I wish I could say that I’m surprised.”

For a moment, nobody says anything. Then Lamps asks, “Can we go to breakfast now?”

“Yes, of course, Lamp,” Mom says. “Where do you want to eat?”

“Denny’s,” Lamp says. “They have the hugest omelets.”

*

Mom and Lamp walk side by side, chatting. They’re as strange a pair as you can fathom: Mom in her jogging attire, Lamp in a sleeveless denim vest and jeans with enormous holes ripped out of the knees. Syd and I hang back, a few paces behind.

“Nice lady,” Syd says, nodding towards Mom. 

“What the hell happened back there? She just showed up?”

“Jogged right onto the porch. We were still on the couch—Lamp was asleep on my shoulder.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her what she needed to hear.”

“And what was that?”

“Relax, kiddo,” Syd says, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t you trust me?” He dry-swallows a fistful of pills. Then he offers me one. I don’t want it, but I take it anyway.

At the diner we sit in a corner booth, and Mom hands out the menus.

“Now don’t be shy, boys,” she says. “Order whatever you want.”

Syd orders a black coffee, no food. I order oatmeal, thinking it’s the only thing I can stomach. Lamp orders a Denver omelet, a half stack of pancakes, four pieces of bacon, and a side of hashbrowns. When the coffee comes, Syd pours in an obscene amount of sugar. When the food comes, Lamp inhales his omelet then starts running his pancakes across the plate, mopping up the juices.

“Hungry boy,” Mom says. “Do you want my toast?”

“Yeah, yes,” Lamp says, with animal eyes. “Thank you Neil’s Mom.”

Lamp crunches into the toast, spraying crumbs all over the table, which is shaking on account of Syd’s incessant leg bouncing. Every once in a while Syd will crank his jaw like he’s trying to disengage it from his face. After a particularly demonic crank, Mom asks if he’s feeling okay. Syd assures her that it’s the coffee—he says it gives him the jitters—but not two minutes later he waves the waitress over for a refill. I’m just waiting for him to keel over, seize out, turn this outing into an incident.

“You gonna eat that?” Lamp asks, pointing his fork at my oatmeal.

I gaze into the steaming bowl. It looks like nut-garnished vomit.

“All yours,” I say.

Lamp digs in, the oatmeal slipping through the spaces between the fork’s tines. I consider handing him my spoon, but then he starts stabbing at individual oats. Lamp was homeless before he moved in, he pays us food stamps to sleep on the porch couch, and it has never occurred to me until now that he’s probably constantly hungry.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” Mom asks me. 

“Stomachache,” I say.

“You should eat something, honey, you look so pale.” She butters up a piece of toast, flattens a glob of strawberry jam across it, then sets it in front of me.

I reach out for it when Syd says, “Don’t force feed the kid, Caroline. I don’t want him getting sick all over the table.”

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, Syd. He should get something down.”

“That’s a myth.”

“Breakfast is a myth?”

“The prolonged withholding of foods—i.e. fasting—gives the body the time and energy to recuperate while it’s not so bogged down with digestion.”

Mom bunches her mouth left. “I don’t know,” she says. “I know Neil, and when he doesn’t eat, he starts to get dizzy. He used to faint as a boy, do you remember that, Neil?”

I do remember, and the remembering makes me queasy. “Excuse me,” I say, getting up for the bathroom, and as I do, the blobs return. This time when I blink they don’t just multiply, they converge, and before long my field of vision has become this aqueous blur.

I somehow feel my way to the bathroom, shoulder through the door, and collapse onto the cold tiles. I crawl to the sink and splash water onto my face. When I look in the mirror I see a pale stranger, the skin around the eyes swollen and heavy.

There’s a knock at the door.

“Occupied,” I say.

“Open it, you idiot.”

I crack the door and Syd forces his way through, then locks it behind him. He inspects me with that half-disgusted look of his, as if he’s my coach and I’m the most pathetic creature on his field.

“What would you do without me?” he says, sticking out a fisted hand.

“What is it,” I mumble.

“What is it,” he says, laughing.

I look into Syd’s eyes. His pupils are these bulbous, enveloping growths.

“Take it,” he says.

“Tell me what it is.”

“Seriously, Neil.”

“I am serious.”

He thumps me in the chest with his fist. I throw my elbow, connect with his jaw, and he stumbles back, steadying himself against the paper-towel dispenser. He looks surprised, like he didn’t know I had it in me.

“Look,” he says, putting a hand up and stepping cautiously forward. “You’re a little riled, I’m a little riled, we all need to come back down. So help me help you, pal, because it’s not my mom out there, right? This is the end of the road. Lamp and I are leaving. The next time you pass out there won’t be anyone to peel you off the floor.”

I see Syd, I hear him, but I’m thinking about this time when I was a kid and I passed out in church. I was standing beside Dad in the pew when I started to feel light-headed. He must have noticed, because he looked down at me and said, “Neily-boy, you feeling all right?” I went to grab his arm, but the room went TV-static, then the darkness at the corners of my vision folded in on itself. I came to on my back, lying in that little strip of floor between the pews, staring at his concerned face overhead. It’s my only memory of him. I must have been five years old.

“Last chance,” Syd says.

Without fully deciding to, I reach out my hand.

“Good boy,” Syd says, curling my fingers around the pill.

*

Outside, Syd and Lamp say their goodbyes to Mom. Then Lamp goes in for a hug. Mom accepts it, and they stand there embracing each other on the sidewalk for some time. Finally, Syd tugs at Lamp’s shirt, whisking him away, and Mom and I are alone again. 

“I have half an hour,” she says. “Should we walk through campus?”

I nod, and as we walk, I keep expecting her to ask: Who are your friends? What was that on your porch? What happened to my little boy? But she doesn’t ask me anything. She just strides along, chin slightly raised, occasionally making a comment about a bird, tree, or the flower-scented air.

We wind our way past the library, the business school, the old brick lecture hall where I systemically skipped presentations on Beowulf and Chaucer. We continue past the gym, the student union, the ramshackle creative writing annex where I first met Syd. He was the domineering kid in my Intro to Poetry class who coolly undermined people’s work with vague, rhetorical questions. One day he invited me over. He lived in this derelict one-bedroom house, and on his coffee table sat stacks of Burroughs, Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson. He asked if I’d ever done vitamin k before. I didn’t know what vitamin k was. The next thing I remember was staring at his ceiling tiles as if through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars, proximally aware of the sun on my arm, a marching band thrumming in the distance.

Mom forges ahead, passing beneath a row of flowering cherry blossoms, then out onto the quad. It’s empty now—no stage, no chairs, just grass, untrampled and glimmering. You would never guess that anything ever happened here.

“Should we sit?” Mom asks, but without waiting for my answer she walks into the middle of the lawn and does just that. I follow her, preparing myself for the waterworks, but when I sit, she leans back onto her hands and lets her head fall. She closes her eyes. She breathes. For a while I watch her stomach rise and fall.

“Mom?”

She inhales through her nose, exhales through her mouth.

“Are you meditating?”

She doesn’t budge, just breathes. 

“Mom,” I say, touching her shoulder, and she jolts upright, as though bee stung.

“Did I ever tell you about my college graduation?” she asks.

I shake my head, and right then the sun pokes between the clouds, a ray slicing across her body.

“I had been sick the whole week leading up to the ceremony,” she says. “Nausea, hot flashes, the whole deal. At first I thought it was my nerves. I was going to be the first person in my family to graduate from college—did you know that? Grandpa went straight into the navy, and your grandmother dropped out of high school in the tenth grade. But every morning, like clockwork, I felt sick all over again. I was dating your father then, and he was the one to suggest that I take a test. It came back positive, because I was pregnant with you.” She leans back and looks into the sky, as if the rest of her story is somewhere up there. “Of course, the graduation was in the morning, and when I walked across the stage, I thought that I might pass out. But I held it together, received my diploma, then I marched straight out of the auditorium and vomited in the bushes.”

She stops talking. She turns and holds me in her gaze. I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything, but in that moment, I am struck by the fact that those eyes have seen me more than any other eyes on the planet. Those eyes watched me crawl bloodied into life, then watched me slink dimly away. Those eyes have watched me feed and shit and dream.

“What time is it?” she asks. “I should get going.”

*

After she checks out, she orders an Uber, and almost instantly a black sedan pulls into the parking lot, ready to expedite our separation. Mom hefts her bags into the trunk and ducks into the backseat. She’s in such a rush that she forgets to hug me goodbye. The car pulls off, and from the window, she waves. It feels backwards. I should be in the car, and she should be watching me go. The driver makes a right turn, and then she’s gone.

I don’t feel good—exhausted and nauseous and wired. I start walking home, but before I reach the edge of the parking lot, I stop. The prospect of sleep-deprived Syd is too daunting. On day two of no sleep his monologues get loose, associative, dark. I go back to the motel’s lobby and ask if they have any rooms.

“We have the one that lady just checked out of,” the guy says.

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll take it.”

“We have to clean it first.”

“It’s fine, I’ll take it as is.”

He looks up from his computer, appraising me.

“She’s my Mom,” I say.

“Cash or card.”

I reach into my pockets. All that’s there is a lighter and a half cigarette. “Can you charge it to the card on file?”

He snickers, but he does it.

Her motel room’s a motel room—TV, dresser, bed. The comforter’s peeled off but still tucked in at the foot, hanging like a cape. By habit, I fish the cigarette out of my pocket, but the first drag makes my stomach hurt. I stub it out on the nightstand and toss it across the room. Then I lie down. The pillows smell like her. I can’t describe it, but I know it: It’s the scent that welcomed me into her car every day after school. It’s the scent of her bedroom, where, every night for two years after he passed, I slept. I’d always start out in my room, but then I’d see a shape, hear a sound, and come knocking. Some nights, when I opened her door, she’d be crying. Which is what I’m doing now. I tuck into the fetal position. I pull the sheets up to my chin.