But wait.
He’s already made a mistake.
Seconds after sending his text to his parents he realizes his error.
What he should have done is disable the tone that alerts him he’s received a new text, should have minimized any temptations to analyze responses from them.
He’s still standing in his bedroom, right in front of that splayed suitcase, its black material looking like a filleted seal. He’s wondering what you do with this two-ton guilt and how you’re supposed to live through this suffering and endure a life with constant grief, those sounds wheezing in his head like an old coffee maker, and then his BlackBerry beeps.
He knows that the text is from one of his parents, probably his mother, and he knows that reading a message from either of them is a bad idea, and he knows that if he reads it he won’t be able to sever the conversation there, and yet he can’t stop himself. He so badly wishes that he could resist this bait, but he’s not strong enough.
Here’s his mother’s response: What happened, sweetie?
Got mugged. I was punched and kicked a few times. Broken nose. Cracked ribs. Etc.
Hold on. .
There’s about forty-five seconds of nothing, time for Noah911 to put his phone down. Go outside. Take a shower. Eat something. Do fifty pushups. Don’t read any more of their texts. All these directives whirl around his head and yet he does nothing except sit there.
Another alert.
This is your sister’s fucking funeral!
That’s his father’s foray into the conversation, and it sends a shudder through Noah911. A rictus jimmies onto Noah911’s lips. Finding it funny, actually, reading and rereading the inaugural text from his father; he can’t help but hear the message in his father’s voice. Like he’s in the room. Yelling it. That exclamation point is like a lightning bolt. Many a time in Noah911’s formative years he’s seen his father’s exclamation points in person, punching holes in walls, chucking china. He never put his hands on his wife and kids, but he governed through fear and the possibility of violence.
Noah911 texts back: What can I do? I’m injured.
Be injured on the plane. Be hurt here.
I can’t even walk.
Get your ass to the airport!
If he had it to do over again, he might have tried something surgical. An appendectomy. Or an exotic disease, like dengue fever. That’s a thing, right? The kind so contagious that the authorities wouldn’t allow him on a plane for fear of infecting others. He should have thought this through more.
From his father: Call us.
My jaw is sprained and broken nose kills when I try to talk.
Call us!
My jaw is SEVERELY sprained and nose throbs like crazy.
From his mom: We’re worried about you.
And then this from his dad, barely a second later: Prove it.
Prove what?
I want to see your beaten-up face.
Camera on phone is broken.
Then let’s Skype.
No response from Noah911 for over a minute.
From his father: Hellooooo!!!
Noah911 does what he should have done five minutes ago, before this fiasco started. He puts his phone down, actually placing it in the empty suitcase, if only he can send that as his proxy. He turns and leaves the room, the apartment, and heads out for a drink. A glass of vodka. At the very least it gets him away from the phone and the parents and the press conference and the suitcase and the flies.
They live — he lives — at 25th and Bryant, in the Mission District. There are a lot of bars on 24th Street, a major thoroughfare through the neighborhood. From what he understands, ten years ago this was a pretty tough stretch, but people like Noah911, rich and white, have been flooding this corridor, corroding its character. People tag sidewalks and walls with pejorative thoughts on gentrification—This city used to celebrate diversity—but it’s too late. It’s already happened. Such comments are as useless as bemoaning the weather from last Thursday. And as Noah911 now understands, once something has happened, there’s nothing you can do about it.
He stops at the door of a bar, peeks inside. It seems too jovial. The room is filled with young and shiny kids. These people seem like they’re drinking to have fun, and that’s not what he needs. Noah911 seeks the kind of dive bar in which people drink to peel despicable memories from their minds like dirty socks. Is that REM on the jukebox? People still listen to them? The bar has perfect burgundy carpet, stools with shining leather, a bartender actually telling a joke to a gaggle of customers—How many straight San Franciscans does it take to change a light bulb? Both of them! — and Noah911 needs to get away from this cheery scene, sink into some squalor.
The next saloon he spies is a Latino bar, mariachi music blazing in a near-empty room. There are three guys bellied up, the faces obscured to him from the doorway, thirsty silhouettes resting elbows on the bar. Barren of any furniture. A concrete floor. No tables. This seems like a place to become a shadow, shrouded in blackness, but it’s the music that keeps him from going inside. Mariachi features horns. Trumpets. Tubas. Which brings Noah911’s mind to the brass band and there’s no way he can sit in a room with horns hollering at him.
He continues his hunt for a just-right bar. Noah911 approaches and rejects five more, before finding the perfect place to slide inside.
It’s the bar’s color scheme, or lack thereof, that entices him. The place is painted entirely black — floor, walls, and ceiling. Noah911 is reminded of his suitcase, and knows this is what it would be like to climb inside the thing, zip it up, bathe himself in the darkness and quiet, keeping all the guilt away.
He walks to the center of the room and his eyes are brought up to the ceiling. He’s wrong: It’s not totally black. There are pieces of broken mirror glued up there, shining like stars in the sky, and it seems so beautiful that he chokes up.
Flies swarm back by the liquor bottles. There’s a TV in the corner, playing the news. Ten guys, no women in the place. An old Jane’s Addiction song hits everyone in the face.
Noah911 climbs onto a stool and the old man approaches, wearing a T-shirt that says SPANK ME, IT’S MY BIRTHDAY.
“Happy birthday,” Noah911 says.
“Lay off, will ya?” he says. “Lost a bet with my niece and have to wear this stupid shirt all week.”
“What was the bet?”
“Aren’t you a curious asshole?”
If there was any debate as to whether or not Noah911 had picked the right spot, this seals the deal. He’s home. This is the perfect pub for what he has to do. “I didn’t mean any offense,” he says.
“No, it’s not your fault. My fuse is spent. People busting my balls about this shirt the whole time. What will you drink?”
“Ketel One on the rocks.”
The bartender limps off to find the right bottle, and Noah911 peeks up and down the other stools. There are a couple men like him, drinking alone, cuddling dejection with every sip. At the far end, though, way over by the TV and its news program, is a group of four guys. They have the look he needs and are pretty brawny, too.