The Goldfinch
Boris looked at me. Then he ran both hands through his hair and said: “You’re a blackout drunk, Potter, you know that?”
“Give me a break,” I said, after an incredulous pause.
“No, am serious,” he said mildly. “I am alcoholic. I know it! I was alcoholic from ten years old, when I took my first drink. But you, Potter-you’re like my dad. He drinks-he goes unconscious while he is walking around, does things he can’t remember. Wrecks the car, beats me up, gets in fights, wakes up with broken nose or in whole different town maybe, lying on bench in railway station-”
“I don’t do things like that.”
Boris sighed. “Right, right, but your memory goes. Just like his. And, I’m not saying you did anything bad, or violent, you are not violent like him but you know, like-oh, that time we went to the play pit at McDonald’s, the kid pit, and you are so drunk on the puffy thing the lady called the cops on you, and I got you out of there fast, standing in Wal Mart half an hour pretending to look at school pencils and then back on the bus, back to the bus stop, and that night you don’t remember any of it? Not one thing? ‘McDonald’s, Boris? What McDonald’s?’ Or,” he said, sniffling lavishly, talking over me, “or, that day you are totalled, wrecked, and make me go with you for ‘walk in the desert’? Okay, we go for a walk. Fine. Only you are so drunk you can barely walk and it is a hundred and five degrees. And you get tired of walking and lay yourself down in the sand. And ask me that I leave you to die. ‘Leave me, Boris, leave me.’ Remember that?”
“Get to the point.”
“What can I say? You were unhappy. Drank yourself unconscious all the time.”
“So did you.”
“Yes, I remember. Passing out on the stairs, face down, remember? Waking up on the ground, miles from home, feet sticking out from a bush, no idea how I got there? Shit, I emailed Spirsetskaya one time in the middle of the night, crazy drunk email, stating she is a beautiful woman and that I love her completely, which at that time I did. Next day at school, all hung over: ‘Boris, Boris, I need to talk to you.’ Well, what about? And there she is all gentle and kind, trying to let me down easy. Email? What email? No recollection whatsoever! Standing there red in the face while she is giving me xerox from poetry book and telling me I need to love girls my own age! Sure-I did plenty of stupid things. Stupider than you! But me,” he said, toying with a cigarette, “I was trying to have fun and be happy. You wanted to be dead. It’s different.”