In January, Adam began coming to the office smelling like old people, evidence that he was wearing his late father's unwashed clothing. The notion of a person standing next to me in a dead man's cotton dress shirt – like some odd, familial grave robber – wasn't disturbing. That was understandable. That was forgivable. The concern wasn't even the smell. It was the unsettling likelihood that Adam hadn't washed the clothes on purpose.
Adam's father died on Christmas Eve day last year, three months after I met the son. Later, I learned that Adam's father had been sick for a number of years. Although I didn't say it, ever, I suggested to myself, as someone would who has just watched a sentimental owner and senile dog emerge from a veterinarian office, that it might be better for everyone once Adam's father finally passed. Eventually, of course.
The pain was inevitable and elongated by the father's interminable hospital visits and, later, his hospice lifestyle: as he lay there dying, co-workers offered calls and help and cards and groceries and thoughts and hopes. At least that's what I thought. As Adam would tell me later, I was mistaken.
The pain is drowned by the pace we kept. We keep. The current continues, sometimes loudly; sometimes the loss sits under the pace passing over like breath fading from a cold windowpane; sometimes the pace cuts around the pain, underscoring its presence, screaming its name, making us do things that we'd consider not doing, if we thought about the doing at all – we're wearing dead people's shirts.
I come into the small, shared office, and Adam is there at his desk, feet freed from shoes – and socks this time – as he pours Gold Bond on his toes. In a moment, he'll have to go to work. Adam will have to go down to the studio and explain to tonight's celebrity guest what she is supposed to do after she walks out onto the stage, sits in the chair next to the show's host, and begins to have a conversation in front of two hundred people she doesn't know.
Adam looks up at me sheepishly as I come through the door. He always has the same slack-jawed, goofy look, but I know he's relieved that I'm not his boss, our boss, catching his dubious hygiene.
Adam gets nervous easily. He pours bottles of Gold Bond on to his fearful, damp feet. I know that Adam is going to stop in the restroom before going down to the studio, as he stops every time before going to brief the host of the show about topics he will discuss with the celebrity guest. When I took this job, I was warned that Adam was a “creative producer, but needed a strong associate to keep his shit together.” I've a knack for translating politeness into obscenity: Adam is a fucking mess and we need someone to do his job for him.
“Hey man…”
Adam always begins conversations like this when he wants something from me. I raise my eyebrows. Getting Adam's voice down right is nearly impossible; the same problem John Irving had with Owen Meany, but in the opposite cadence. Adam speaks as though someone had embedded a normal voice on an LP, set it to play, and then set a finger on the record, giving the voice a deep greasy drawl. Words fold over one another like encroaching sea waves on an incoming tide.
“Hey man…You'd be interested in a bicycle at all?”
I'm somewhat relieved that whatever this is it has nothing to do with the show. The bike has bad wheels, Adam warns, after I accept. They need to be fixed and he doesn't know how much that will cost. “But I'll take it to the bike store on Melrose and tell them to fix it. It's just the spokes. And then you can pay for it when you pick it up.” Besides that fix, he says he'll give me the bike for free.
Some days, Adam likes to ride the bike to the office. His only exercise. In the past few months, he's put on a lot of weight, which is an understatement. I'd heard he used to be skinnier, even svelte at a point, he now looks like he's swallowed a pregnant midget, who is standing at attention in his belly, beneath the un-tucked shirt of a dead man.
The pace is like a cave, like sunglasses at dusk, like dried wax on your fingertips, like your head under gaggles of goose down pillows. One sense removed at a time as the rest of each of us keeps going forward. A mass of people exiting the subway. Caught in the exodus. Not our stop. Not our stop! The doors close behind us. The platform is empty. The station is unmarked.
The weight came with his father's sickness. Now Adam doesn't ride the bike because the bike was his father's. I wonder, briefly, of bikes and shirts. I've already offered to take it, and take the charge at the bike shop, whatever that may be. But I have to, somehow, get out of this now that I realize the bike had been his father's. I'm not afraid of haunted two-wheeled machines; I am afraid of haunted co-workers.
I sit on the couch next to Adam's desk and pick up a very old copy of New York Magazine – on the cover is Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan. I've read it, but I flip through it because when I'm talking to Adam, I can't look at him in the eyes. And I can't stop thinking about how I have just inherited a dead man's bicycle wrought with corrosive memories.
Adam's father is indeed fully dead now. Interred, respected, memorialized.
Last week, Adam traveled to New York for a memorial service for his father. The family lived in Patterson, New Jersey for many years while Adam's father was a writer for Reuters. I was led to believe he covered a variety for subjects for the news service, beginning with theater and regional politics. He later moved his wife out to California – where their sons already lived; Adam in Los Angeles and Adam's older brother in San Francisco – and wrote about celebrities and films. Friends from Los Angeles flew back east for the memorial service that was held on the east side of Manhattan, near the UN. Adam's brother did not attend.
Adam bought a new shirt when he was in the city. He went to H&M an hour before the service because he'd spilled on the dead man's shirt he was wearing at lunch.
I decide, after flipping past an ad for Polo in which a young man and woman are sitting (bored!) in a glowing field, that I'm just going to let the thing about the bicycle fade. I'm not going to bring it up again. I know Adam will never again mention it, if I don't.
“Have you ever heard of the movie ‘The Room'?” Adam asks me.
He goes into a pitch for the best worst film ever made. This is Hollywood: you aren't madly creative unless you embrace the genius of the unintentional. Hollywood is full of curators who would fill the wings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with sketches from Mrs. Raines second grade class of 1998 and sculptures of the next great oblivious reality bloke. I wonder, briefly, if there is a thing such as pseudo-irony.
The pace is on your hands as they run over your scalp. The shivers hit your neck. You scratch again because you didn't reach it the first time. You look up, over the impossible waves, to see the port bearing down on you and you wonder, ruefully, when is he going to flinch? Outside, the landscape flickers from color to black and white, back to color. Through the pallid window, you think you catch a glimpse of something you were supposed to remember. And then the scene fades to a blinking cursor on a blank page.
Tonight, Adam will be congratulated by co-workers. He will do a good job. Tonight, someone will say she feels sorry for Adam; she feels like it's the first time he's been complimented. He will know he's done a good job. Tonight the pace will tease Adam; he will be able to see the life on the blank page; he will be able to resist the exodus; he will be able to lift his head from the numbing waters. Tonight he will drink with good appetite and sleep without dreaming, his corpulent figure wrapped in bed sheets that he bought not even a week ago.