Any Resemblance to Actual Persons by Kevin Allardice Page B

breath being fed back to mein the earpiece—how exactly does one address an answering machine, especially one like this that wasn’t even an answering machine, this thing that was no longer a physical box to hold my message but rather something ephemeral, floating out there in the ether: Where was my voice going?— so I hung up, and called again. This time it went directly to his voicemail. I hung up and went home where I took forty milligrams of time-release Ritalin, sat down with my sister’s manuscript, and read it straight through.
    By the time I finished, it was morning. The light was orange and thick through the windows, like that old vaudeville trick of holding a bottle of rye in front of the spotlight. Chris was up and pouring himself some cereal before heading off to school. He saw me in the living room, three hundred pages stacked on my lap, and said, “Just give ’em all Bs.” It took me a moment to register what he said, to realize that he thought I’d been grading papers all night again, and then I realized that I too had school to get to. It was Monday and I had four classes today, two sections of comp, two sections of lit. I stood up off the couch only to realize that my legs had lost all feeling, were now just two leg-shaped sandbags. They folded beneath me and I collapsed to the floor. Chris burst out laughing, a sound I hadn’t heard in quite a while, though it was muddled and warbly from the milk and cereal in his mouth. I tried to shake my hips a little to urge some blood flow to my legs, but it wasn’t working, so I just kept shaking some more. In response to all my twitching and writhing, still a pile of useless limbs on the floor, Chris said, “Oh, wait. Shit, are you having a seizure or something? Are you being real or just trying to be funny?” That “trying” rather annoyed me, since if this were an attempt at humor I’d sayit damn well succeeded, since he had, after all, laughed. Despite the fact that humor was not actually my goal here, and that slapstick is not my preferred mode even when humor is my goal (I’m more Noël Coward than Three Stooges, if I can say so myself), Chris never gives me enough credit as a wit. Anyway. There I was, twitching on the floor, calmly cursing Chris for not helping me, curses that I instantly regretted since he just walked away, leaving me to help my own damn self off the floor.
    I managed to shake some blood back into my legs, walk around a bit, banging my feet on the floor until I stopped feeling like someone with cerebral palsy, just in time to brew some coffee and hit the road for my morning classes, my mind the whole time trying to process what I’d spent the entire night reading. It had been surreal, reading a narrative featuring people I knew, my father, my mother, my sister, myself even, being puppetted into characters, familiar people acting in unfamiliar ways. The George McWeeney in Edie’s book both was and was not my father. I recognized the man: Her descriptions of him were eerily accurate, reminding me of details I’d long since forgotten—the patchy stubble that told us he’d been working too much, the smell of the cracked Naugahyde chair in his office, the way he just said “hmmm” in a warm way instead of laughing and how you knew that was somehow more genuine than a laugh. In one scene, while Mom was pregnant with me and visiting her parents in New York, Edie describes our father trying to water the potted flowers in our backyard: He’s wearing slacks, wingtips, a tie, holding our mother’s handwritten “while I’m away” instructions in one hand, the hose in the other; so focused on rereading the instructions to make sure he’s doing it right, he doesn’teven notice that he’s flooding the poor geraniums. That seems about right. But there are other scenes, other recovered memories, the crux of her case against him, of that