“Charlie D isn’t doing his show today. He didn’t finish it on Thursday and he didn’t do it Friday or yesterday either. I got a buddy of mine to tape the show when we were at the lake. This guy named Troy is doing ‘Heroes’ now.”
“And you’re worried,” I said.
“It’s not just some stupid fan thing,” Eli said defensively. “Charlie D has really helped me. Last fall, when I’d just started going to Dan Kasperski, I felt like such a loser. Not many kids are so messed up they have to see a shrink.”
“Lots of kids are,” I said. “And lots of adults.”
Eli went to the drawer, took out a big metal spoon, came back and stirred the fusilli. As we talked, he kept his gaze on the boiling water. “I know that now,” he said. “But it’s because of Charlie D. I found ‘Heroes’ by accident. I was looking for some hard rock and all of a sudden there was Charlie D talking about how the first law of Buddhism is that life is suffering.” He turned to me. “Can you imagine how great it felt to find out that I wasn’t a freak? That it was the same for everybody?”
“I can imagine; in fact, I can remember.”
His obsidian eyes widened. “You felt that way, too?”
“I felt that way, too.”
“Maybe that’s why you’re so nice now.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“It’s true. And it’s because of what Charlie D says. Once you know that everybody’s suffering, you can get past your own skin, and that’s when the fun begins.”
“He’s right,” I said.
“It worked for me.” Eli’s voice rose with excitement. “As soon as I realized that everybody had garbage to deal with, things started getting better. When I told Dan, he said that a lot of his patients never missed ‘Heroes.’ Dan said life’s a wild and wacky ride, and we all need a lot of guides to get us through. Then he said I could do a lot worse than to travel with Charlie D for a while.”
“That’s a pretty high recommendation,” I said. “I don’t know many psychiatrists, but I think Dan Kasperski is brilliant.”
“So is Charlie D,” Eli said. “Even my Popular Culture teacher, Ms. Cyr, thinks so. For the last couple of months, she’s been letting our class listen to ‘Ramblings.’ That’s the part at the beginning of the show where Charlie talks about the topic of the day. We’ve had some good discussions about what Charlie’s said.” Eli stirred the pasta mechanically. “He was so sharp and so funny, but lately he’s gotten really bitter. One of the kids said Charlie sounded like he was going through a major meltdown.”
“Did it sound that way to you?”
“Yeah.” Eli made a gesture of helplessness. “You didn’t have to be a shrink to know Charlie was in serious trouble. I can’t describe it, but I’ve got some of the tapes. Ms. Cyr is letting me do my major project on Charlie’s show.”
“Could I listen to the tapes?”
“Sure. I’ll get you some from the last couple of weeks and some from before so you can hear the difference.”
“Good. And Eli, I can put your mind at rest about one thing. Nothing’s happened to Charlie. He just had to get away for a while. He and his dad went to visit Charlie’s mum in Toronto.”
Eli’s shoulders slumped with relief. “I was afraid he might have tried to kill himself.”
“Did he sound that bad?”
“Yeah,” Eli said. “At the end, he did.”
By the time I’d drained the pasta and mixed the dressing, Eli was back with a carrying case. “The ‘Ramblings’ are all in order,” Eli said, “and they’re all dated. Listen to them. You’ll see what I mean.”
I didn’t open the tape case until Taylor had had her bath and we’d read two chapters of Charlotte’s Web. I wanted to give Charlie D my full and undivided attention, and that would have been impossible with Taylor bouncing around. After she and I had said our final good nights, I went downstairs, made myself a stiff gin and tonic, and carried it and the tapes up to my bedroom.
In a house where anarchy and noise are the order of the day, my bedroom is an island. It’s an airy room with ecru walls, flowering plants, and stacks of books and magazines that I intend to read some day. The two stars of my room are the mahogany four-poster that had been in Ian’s family for two generations and the deep, pillow-strewn window seat that was my treat to myself when we renovated the house. From the window seat, I can look out onto our backyard and the creek beyond it. It’s a view that always brings me comfort, and as I slid the first of the tapes into my stereo, and Charlie’s dark-honey voice filled the room, I knew that, in the hour ahead, I would need to draw comfort from every source I could find.
Charlie didn’t interpose a filter between himself and his audience. The stream of consciousness I heard seemed to flow uninterrupted from a deep and private place within him. As I sat in my pretty room, with my children just a touch or a phone call away, the image of this lonely blood-scarred man, isolated by the glass of the control booth, offering up his lonely acts of communion with strangers, broke my heart.
None of the “Ramblings” was longer than three minutes. In all, there were perhaps thirty-six minutes of tape. Not much, but enough to know that when Eli said Charlie was in the middle of a meltdown, he was right on the money. The formula of “Ramblings” was a simple one: Charlie chose a quote, then played verbal riffs on it.
The early “Ramblings” were a lot of fun. Most of Charlie’s sources wouldn’t have made the cut for Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, but they were great jumping-off points for his particular brand of edgy wisdom. He played some wicked variations on Kris Kristofferson’s observation that “You should never sleep with anybody crazier than you,” and he went the distance with Roughriders’ quarterback Steve Sarkisian’s musings on mindset: “You can’t get too high or too low. You have to keep chucking.”
But in the two weeks after Ariel left, Charlie began to draw from a well that grew progressively deeper and darker. The emotions driving the riffs described an arc familiar to anyone who had ever been dumped: disbelief, confusion, anger, bitterness. But on the show he did the day before Ariel died, Charlie had found himself in a place the lucky among us will never know.
On that show, Charlie took as his text a poem by a man named Peter Davison. The poem was called “The Last Word,” and in it Davison used the metaphor of an executioner standing axe in hand over his kneeling victim to describe the pain of a lover who wants to become an ex-lover. The image goaded Charlie into a diatribe whose words froze the marrow.
“Hey, all you executioners out there, cringing in horror at having to watch the edge of the axe nick through flesh and creak into the block, do you want to change places? Do you want to be the one who hears the axe singing through the air towards the small bones in the back of the neck? No more crocodile tears, executioner. In a minute, you can wash up and go home to a bed warmed by a new lover. No new loves or new beds for the one on the other end of the axe. He’s finished, sentenced to purgatory, doomed to an eternity of remembering the scent of your perfume as you leaned close to make sure the blow was fatal.”
I reached over and flicked off the stereo. I was numb, stunned by the nakedness of Charlie’s revelations. Little wonder that Robert Hallam had been anxious to speak to him. I put the tapes in the case and walked down to Eli’s room. He was at his desk, reading, but the set of his shoulders told me he’d been waiting for me. He jumped up when he heard my step. “What do you think?”
I tried to lighten the mood. “Charlie seems to have forgotten what Steve Sarkisian says about not getting too high or too low.”
Eli rewarded me with a small smile that vanished as soon as it came. “You can see why I was relieved when you said they were zeroing in on somebody else for his girlfriend’s murder,” he said.
“He’s lucky to have you on his side,” I said.
Eli met my eyes. “I was the lucky one,” he said. “Charlie saved my life.”
As I walked downstairs to let Willie out for his last run of the night, I couldn’t shake the dread that had enveloped me when I listened to the tape of Charlie’s “Ramblings” the night before Ariel was murdered. But whatever his demons, Charlie had been Eli’s saviour; I had to hope that by now he had found a measure of peace.
I was standing on the deck watching Willie chase a moth, when the phone rang. The voice on the other end
