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i.
When Michael is ten, he reads a book about the Kennedys.
His mother is obsessed with Kennedys, says she can’t stand their politics but damn if they didn’t have style. He understands her identification with them, this big, wealthy family forced to pose for stiff photos in white clothes.
He sits, balancing the heavy covers on his knees, and reads about the eldest Kennedy brother. Joe, who is saddled with all the responsibilities and dreams of his family, his parents. He reads that when Joe died in combat, all those big dreams shifted.
He reads that his younger brother John, upon hearing the news of his brother’s death, shook his head and said “and now the burden falls on me.”
Michael doesn’t get a chance to finish this book, because his mother yells to him from the living room that he’s going into work with his father today, even though it’s Saturday. Even though it’s summer. He decides JFK is his favorite president, though.
He sits at the short end of his father’s desk, watching him examine spreadsheet after spreadsheet. Occasionally George Sr. passes them over to his second son and quizzes him on what certain columns mean. Michael answers obediently, and when his father says “yes, that’s right” in his quiet voice, pride starts to swell up inside his chest.
When the phone rings about an hour into the workday, with news that Gob and Lindsey got busted smoking pot outside the banana stand, and George Sr. goes on a ten minute rant to whoever's on the other line, voice bouncing between his whispers and bellows. He calls Michael’s twin sister and older brother useless, delinquents, bad kids. Nothing he’s ever called Michael.
Michael isn’t a bad kid. He wouldn’t dare, doesn’t like the feeling the word puts in his chest.
Now it falls on him. Okay. He can handle this.
ii.
Michael’s baby brother is the most nervous person he’s ever met.
Buster hyperventilates when he’s the slightest bit uncomfortable, clings to their mother or sister’s side at the sight of a new person. He can’t even keep down food that isn’t in it’s plainest, most segregated form. Peanut butter and jelly and white bread all on their own plates in front of him, eaten one after another, never together.
One time, Gob pointed out that they all mix together in your stomach anyway, and Buster had to breathe into a paper bag.
Michael is glad he doesn’t do that. Doesn’t wear it on his face and in his breathing when he feels the walls closing in on him. When he’s spent hours studying for a test and just can’t get it, and finds himself staring into space with an iron grip closed around his heart. When the future and every bit of responsibility both known and unknown are waiting to grab him, and suddenly he’s too overwhelmed to even move.
Not that he does. Feel like that. People who feel like that are called fragile and special and pansies, in various tones of voices by his parents. People who feel like that don’t run companies.
Michael eats PB&J sandwiches with all the ingredients squished together like God intended. When approached by strangers, he forces himself to the front of the group and shakes their hand hard, like his father taught him.
Michael, at fifteen, decides that he is fine.
iii.
Freshman year of college, Michael goes on a few dates a girl named Suzanne. She has long, shiny dark hair, tested out of four Gen Ed classes, and most importantly, wants to kiss him back. What more could he ask for?
They’re lying in her double long twin bed one Thursday night – on a school night, college was really making him go crazy – and making out. His hands up her shirt, her legs hooked around his own. Nothing he hasn’t handled before.
Until Suzanne has her fingers on jeans, undoing the buttons. She presses the heel of her hand against his half-hard cock through his boxers, a little too hard to be pleasurable.
Michael’s eyes widen and he suddenly feels his heartbeat in his ears, so intense it almost hurts. Suzanne blows her beautiful hair out of her eyes and grins.
“Do you have condoms?” She asks. Michael sits up straight in bed, but Suzanne’s still got her hand down his pants, and now his face feels really, really hot.
“We’ve only been on two dates,” he blurts out. Suzanne frowns and sits back on her heels, and Michael knows right then there will not be a third.
For the next week or so, a rumor that he’s gay flutters through their social circle. Why else would he freak out when a gorgeous girl says she wants to take his virginity? Was he molested or something? Was he broken?
Michael hides out in the library, chews his pencil halfway through, but he doesn’t start a fight about it. He knows he’s not gay. He’s just...not ready. If he said it out loud, his friends and brother would mock him forever, but he wanted his first time to feel special, safe.
What if Suzanne got pregnant? What if he did something stupid and she laughed at him? He wasn’t going to face all these anxieties and possibilities for someone he wasn’t in love with, someone who wouldn’t last. Risk versus reward. Sunk cost fallacy. He’d known how to read the world like a business transaction since he was a little boy.
He could wait. Waiting was safe. Waiting was fine.
iv.
“What, are you the pregnant one, Michelle?” Gob laughs.
Michael leans his head against the blessedly cold rim of the toilet. “Really funny, Gob. You should open on Carson.”
He feels a much more empathetic hand on his back, rubbing between his shoulder blades. Tracey eases herself onto the bathroom floor to sit cross-legged next to him, despite her increasingly unwieldy stomach. “He’s been having morning sickness longer than I have,” she smiles. “Dr. Lopez calls him a ‘sympathetic puker’.”
Gob makes some racist crack about the name of their OB/GYN, but Michael isn’t really listening. His sore stomach muscles clench and he’s gagging into the toilet again.
He knows he can only get away with this for a couple more months. Letting Tracey think this is some expression of solidarity, and not the cold, unrelenting panic that it is.
He’s twenty-two years old. He and Tracey were just getting into a groove as a married couple, in their first Bluth-made condo – which he had to pay full price for! He’s still trying to work his way up into an upper management position at his father’s company and God, his father, he doesn’t know how to be a dad, he had no male role models that weren’t drunk and absent and occasionally setting his bedspread on fire with ill conceived magic tricks. He’s going to ruin his child and Tracey will hate him forever and they’ll get divorced and God, Michael, you’re such an idiot, you–
His eyesight blurs and the next thing he feels is the tiles of the bathroom floor on his back.
“Oh my God!” Tracey is shrieking, holding his head in her lap. “Gob, get me some water, I think Michael just fainted.”
Now Gob’s face is looming over his, the slightest bit of concern betrayed in his eyes. “Mikey?”
I’m fine. He tries to say. All he can manage is to reach back and touch Tracey’s hand with one of his own.
Gob gets him a glass of water and ends up spilling half of it on his face, and Tracey leads him back to their bedroom, a hand still rubbing his back, and he’s never been so mortified in his life. Stupid Michael, working himself into hysterics, making your pregnant wife help you to bed when you’re the one who's supposed to be taking care of her.
“You done pussying out?” Gob pokes his head in, and Tracey throws a pillow at his face.
Michael kind of agrees with him, though.
v.
“And that’s when I told them that was more an instance of apraxia rather than being apolitical,” Lindsey’s new boyfriend, Tobias, laughs heartily at his own joke, seemingly unperturbed that no one else at the dinner table joins in.
Lindsey beams, seeming to take strength from this silent disapproval, and reaches across her plate to clutch his hand.
Michael almost rolls his eyes, but stops himself just in time. Instead he tightens his grip around George-Michael, who is sitting in his lap with a tranquility unseen in most toddlers. He’s the only member of the family Lindsey let meet her new beau before tonight, and each visit he’s less impressed than the one before.
He tries to send Tracy a telepathic message – God, she really knows how to pick ‘em, huh? – when the sound of his own name pulls him back into the conversation.
“–of course. For example, Michael, what do you take for your anxiety disorder?”
The table goes silent. Lucille drops her fork against the side of the plate with a clink. Even the help seems to freeze around the edge of the table.
Tobias, however, doesn’t seem to notice he’s done anything wrong. He just stares across the table, smiling pleasantly. Waiting for an answer.
Michael’s mouth feels dry, and he presses his fingers against George-Michael’s warm, squishy baby stomach. It doesn’t help anything. “I–”
“Are you sure you don’t mean Buster, sweetheart?” Lindsey asks with a cocked eyebrow.
Gob snorts. “Great boyfriend, Linds, can’t even tell your brothers apart.”
The silence breaks. Lindsey leans over the table to lay into Gob, who starts gesticulating wildly with a fork. Buster perks up in his seat and starts listing all the medication he is on – “Xanax, Celexa, sometimes Klonopin to help me sleep” – and Lucille shoots daggers across the table at George, hisses something she probably doesn’t think or doesn’t care that anyone else can hear.
“How dare he imply Michael’s not normal.”
The weight of his son in his lap suddenly feels crushing. Michael turns and hands him off to Tracey, who tries to squeeze his knee comfortingly. But he can’t look at her, all of the sudden.
He gets up from the table without anyone noticing, and slips onto the balcony. The breeze off the ocean flutters against his face.
Michael a smart guy. He knows by this point in his life, after sixteen years of education and twenty-four years of walking around in his own body that something isn’t quite right. He shouldn’t jump out of his skin as easily as he does, shouldn’t feel the weight of every misstep and mistake like another pound of the sky on Atlas’ shoulders.
He just didn’t know someone else could see it too.
That made it real, somehow. He might look normal, have the middle management job and the adorable family, but that doesn’t fix it. Just like pointing to his parents or his brothers and sister or his childhood or how scared he was of dating or failure doesn’t account for everything going on in his head.
It’s just him. And he can only hide himself so well.
vi.
Michael isn’t sleeping.
Logically, he knows he must be dozing off here or there. Once in college he read that the longest any human being can stay alive without sleep is eleven days.
It’s been sixteen days since Tracey died, ten since the funeral, and Michael is still, somehow, alive. So he must be sleeping.
Just not very well. For what feels like the sixteenth night in a row, he finds himself drinking in the kitchen of the model home, where he took George-Michael after he came home the hospital for the last time.
Just a temporary measure, for a newly minted widower and motherless boy. It would just be too hard to go back to the place where he and Tracey raised him, where he nearly lost it at the smell of her shampoo in the shower.
The summer sky is turning it’s early morning purple as Michael finds himself on the bare, strangely sterile floor, looking into the wide endless future.
He always panics when he does that. But never as badly as in this moment. His heart stutters in his chest, his throat stops letting air down to his lungs. The heavy weight on his chest seems to gain an extra dozen pounds.
The bottle of vodka he’s been keeping under the sink in the model home is almost empty, and he thinks he’ll probably finish it off this morning. It’s within arm’s reach, at least, but a poor substitute for what he really needs,
He needs Tracey to rub his back. He needs his wife, the only person he let see him like this, who loved him anyway. He needs this to be over, this insomniac hell where his twelve year old is sleeping in his bed every night, crying his eyes out.
Yesterday morning, Michael woke up on some side of manic and decided today was the day George-Michael was going back to school.
He dressed him and shoved all of his son’s notebooks and pencils into his bag and forced a smile, forced Michael Bluth’s patented “Everything’s Okay” look in his eyes, and practically shoved him out the door. No half day, not tip toeing back in, just bulling through.
When George Michael came running home that afternoon, dove straight into the refrigerator, Michael realized he’d forgotten to feed him.
Stupid, stupid Michael. Tracey never would’ve fucked up like that, if he had died she would’ve kept it together, she…
Every day of his life from now on is going to be without her. Every day is going to be his worst fears.
His stomach stayed in knots long after he fed his quiet kid dinner. Knots that were only now turning into a churning acidic feeling while he lurches forward onto his hands, and he’s still not breathing.
“Michael?” a voice yawns.
Michael squints at the figure standing behind the breakfast nook, in purple silk pajama bottoms and no shirt.
“Gob,” he says, and pronounces his brother’s name with a hard g, like he knows he hates. “Gooob.”
“You drunk?” Gob asks, sounding understandably confused. Drinking vodka straight from the bottle on the kitchen floor was his move, after all.
Michael shakes his head for too long, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. “I can’t do it.”
“Yeah you can, you’re the biggest lightweight I know.”
“Fuck you.” Michael spits, and tries to take another swig, but the bottle is empty. He drops in on the ground. “Fuck this.”
Gob sighs. “I have to do everything in this family.”
Reaching into the top shelf of the cabinet above Michael’s head, he pulls out a bottle of wine, the cork still in it. Michael reaches up for it like a child for milk.
“How’d you know…?” He mumbles. Gob sits down on the ground next to him, their knees bumping together.
“I live here, dumbass.”
“No you don’t.”
“There was a problem at the marina and...whatever, I’ve been here three mon-why does, why does nobody ever notice?”
“I’ve been busy.”
Gob rips the cork out with his teeth, takes a long drink, and hands it over to Michael. “This is gonna make you so sick by the way, I have not been storing this at the right temperature.”
“I don’t care,” Michael says, tears pricking his eyes. Gob shifts uncomfortably, tries to inch away, but Michael – this drunk, loose Michael who the world is moving around in the wrong way – clutches his arm, pulling him back.
He presses his face hard against Gob’s bare shoulder, letting the tears come, letting himself sob in huge, hoarse gulps.
“I can’t do this,” he says. “I can’t raise him all by myself, I can’t be his dad and run the company and be the person you all need me to be. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t…”
He finds himself blathering against Gob, who shifts to get his arm out of Michael’s grip and wrap it around his shoulder.
“Yes you can,” Gob says. Neutrally, simply. Like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “You have to.”
Michael picks up the wine bottle and drinks, drinks until his gag reflex makes him stop, swallow, breathe. He breathes again.
He falls asleep against Gob’s shoulder, something he hasn’t done in twenty years.
The next morning, Michael wakes up hungover with a sore back from sleeping upright. Gob is gone, but someone threw both the empty bottles in the recycling bin.
He brushes his teeth, shaves, and gets George Michael up and out the door for school, a little extra money tucked in his pocket in case he doesn’t like the lunch Michael triple-checked that he left with.
He puts on a tie, not too tight, and gets on his bike to go to work.
He’s fine. He has to be.