It would be so easy.
I wondered if people have died this way — drunk, armed, loosening their ties. I imagined it was common among certain occupations.
Then the tie opened, and I hadn’t shot myself. I took a drink from the bottle as reward.
The waves rumbled in. This place was nothing like the dunes of Indiana, where Lake Michigan makes love to the shoreline. Here in Gloucester, the water hates the land.
As a child, I’d come to this beach and wondered where all the boulders came from. Did the tides carry them in? Now I knew better. The boulders, of course, were here all along — buried in soft soils. They are left-behind things. They are what remains when the ocean subtracts everything else.
Behind me, near the road, there is a monument — a list of names. Fishermen. Gloucestermen. The ones who did not come back.
This is Gloucester, a place with a history of losing itself to the ocean.
I told myself I’d brought the gun for protection, but sitting here in the dark sand, I no longer believed it. I was beyond fooling myself. It was my father’s gun, a .357. It had not been fired for sixteen years, seven months, four days. Even drunk, the math came quickly.
My sister Mary had called it a good thing, this new place that was also an old place. A new start, she’d said. You can do your work again. You can continue your research.
Yeah, I’d said. A lie she believed.
You won’t call me, will you?
Of course I’ll call. A lie she didn’t.
I turned my face away from the wind and took another burning swig. I drank until I couldn’t remember which hand held the gun and which the bottle. I drank until they were the same.
During the second week, we unpacked the microscopes. Satish used a crowbar while I used a claw hammer. The crates were heavy, wooden, hermetically sealed — shipped in from some now-defunct research laboratory in Pennsylvania.
The sun beat down on the lab’s loading dock, and it was nearly as hot today as it was cold the week before.
I swung my arm, and the claw hammer bit into the pale wood. I swung again. It was satisfying work. Satish saw me wipe the perspiration from my forehead, and he smiled, straight white teeth in a straight dark face.
“In India,” he said, “this is sweater weather.”
Satish slid the crowbar into the gash I made, and pressed. I’d known him for three days, and already I was his friend. Together we committed violence on the crates until they yielded.
The industry was consolidating, the Pennsylvania lab the latest victim. Their equipment came cheap. Here at Hansen, it was like Christmas for scientists. We opened our boxes. We ogled our new toys. We wondered, vaguely, how we had come to deserve this. For some, like Satish, the answer was complicated and rooted in achievement. Hansen was more than just another Massachusetts think tank after all, and Satish had beaten out a dozen other scientists to work here. He’d given presentations and written up projects that important people liked. For me it was simpler.
For me this was a second chance given by a friend. A last chance.
We cracked open the final wooden crate, and Satish peered inside. He peeled out layer after layer of foam packing material. It was a big crate, but inside we found only a small assortment of Nalgene volumetric flasks, maybe three pounds weight. It was somebody’s idea of a joke — somebody at the now-defunct lab making a statement of opinion about their now-defunct job.
“The frog is in the well,” Satish said, one of his many opaque expressions.
“It certainly is,” I said.
There were reasons for moving here. There were reasons not to. They were the same reasons. Both had everything, and nothing, to do with the gun.
The lab gates are the first thing a person sees when driving up on the property. From the gates, you can’t see the building at all, which in the real estate sector surrounding Boston, speaks not just of money, but money. Everything out here is expensive, elbow room most of all.
The lab is tucked into a stony hillside about an hour upcoast of the city. It is a private, quiet place, shaded by trees. The building itself is beautiful — two stories of reflective glass spread over the approximate dimensions of a football field. What isn’t glass is matte black steel. It looks like art. A small, brick-paved turnaround curves up to the main entrance, but the front parking lot there is merely a decorative ornament — a small asphalt pad for visitors and the uninitiated. The driveway continues around the building where the real parking, the parking for the researchers, is in the back.
That first morning, I parked in front and walked inside.
A pretty blonde receptionist smiled at me. “Take a seat.”
Two minutes later, James rounded the corner and shook my hand. He walked me back to his office. And then came the offer, like this was just business — like we were just two men in suits. But I could see it in his eyes, that sad way he looked at me, my old friend.
He slid a folded sheet of paper across the desk. I unfolded it. Forced myself to make sense of the numbers.
“It’s too generous,” I said.
“We’re getting you cheap at that price.”
“No,” I said. “You’re not.”
“Considering your patents and your past work—”
I cut him off. “I can’t do that anymore.”
“I’d heard that. I’d hoped it wasn’t true.”
“If you feel I came here under false pretenses—” I began climbing to my feet.
“No, no.” He held his hand up to stop me. “The offer stands. We can carry you for four months.” He leaned back in his leather chair. “Probationary researchers get four months to produce. We pride ourselves on our independence; so you can choose whatever research you like, but after four months, it’s not up to me anymore. I have bosses, too; so you have to have something to show for it. Something publishable, or on its way to it. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“This can be a new start for you,” he said, and I knew then that he’d already talked to Mary. “You did some great work at QSR. I followed your publications; hell, we all did. But considering the circumstances under which you left…”
I nodded again. The inevitable moment.
He was silent, looking at me. “I’m going out on a limb for you,” he said. “But you’ve got to promise me.”
That was the closest he’d come to mentioning it.
I looked away. His office suited him, I decided. Not too large, but bright and comfortable. A Notre Dame engineering diploma graced one wall. Only his desk was pretentious — a teak monstrosity large enough to land aircraft on — but I knew it was inherited. His father’s old desk. I’d seen it once when we were still in college a dozen years ago. A lifetime ago.
“Can you promise me?” he asked.
I knew what he was asking. I met his eyes. Silence. And he was quiet for a long time after that, looking at me, waiting for me to say something. Weighing our friendship against the odds this would come back to bite him.
“All right,” he said finally. “You start tomorrow.”
There are days I don’t drink at all. Here is how those days start: I pull the gun from its holster and set it on the desk in my hotel room. The gun is heavy and black. It says Ruger along the side in small, raised letters. It tastes like pennies and ashes. I look into the mirror across from the bed and tell myself, If you drink today, you’re going to kill yourself. I look into my own gray eyes and see that I mean it.