Fiction – Page 2

Poetics of a Broken Conversation

11 November 2018

Categories: Fiction

It feels like this. Just like this. When the whole world screams prompted by only the byte of a soundless letter, it always feels like this.

There is a tragedy. A mass shooting, an earthquake, a mass shooting, a police betrayal, a mass shooting. As Americans, we have our inclinations. You hear it from a friend and then you explore it and it passes through your conversations and you’re not alone. No one around you is. You know one or two people affected by the whole thing, though you don’t know them well, but that isn’t the point. You stop to wipe your brow and rub your eyes and presume that as the traffic rolls and the apartment buildings stand across from you, that at least the world goes on. You control your hands. You’ve promised yourself you’d stay off social media. Promises are tricky, though.

You pull out your cell phone. You unlock the screen. You find the social media app that tells you what the world is thinking, what’s really at stake, and where your investments have taken shape. It takes a minute to pop up. Your phone is slow. In the meanwhile, the street traffic motors on as if it doesn’t need you to prove its direction. The apartment buildings puff their brick chests as if they don’t need you to be proud of their congestion.

Your social media app finally opens and you start scrolling through the feed. It isn’t long before you come across one and then two and then a lot more posts that people keep posting about the tragedy. So many shared words about what happened, who did what, why it happened, why it shouldn’t have happened, where it happened, with tremoring responses begging specificity and clarity and can anyone get the details right, and these are the posts that interest you. Because it hasn’t been too long since the tragedy, please, but it’s been long enough. You’re pretty sure people should have gotten the particulars certain by now. But so many words are still stuck in rhetorical mud like horrible and whatever and disaster and America and worse than we could have imagined and what is happening to our world alongside oh get over it and there’s nothing new under the sun and yeah sure but what does it mean for me and yeah you’re right what does it mean for me.

After a while, one opinion runs into the next until they all strike you as skin that consumes a body like a treadmill. Like it’s all just the track beneath you, a scampering you once retained the power to fire on but whose emergency button you can no longer reach, and, in the speed that picks up, your only choices, to keep pace or jump off, both intend to bruise you terribly. You look up from your phone and have to breathe to be okay with the street traffic still stalling and braking and the apartment buildings still rising above you.

It’s okay, you convince yourself, and you dive into the social media comment threads again. You scroll, and you read the responses, one into the next into them all until answers muddle each other because no one keeps pace with the provocations that compel them. They just can’t. Conversations hurdle over other conversations, everyone convinced they can manage exchanges without the natural constraints of a tongue, because Lord knows it’s faster to process anxiety through bone and skin than past teeth and lips. Thumbs and palms translate all that energy faster. Everything else just slows you down.

You scroll because you’re sure there is somewhere you can offer details that alleviate the feelings. Perhaps even an enumeration of the feelings. A precision in the hyperbole that only bad things happen. You’re pretty sure that everybody needs you to not stumble into themselves, to keep them from replacing a tragedy of fallen children with a tragedy of unpasteurized ideas. Because everyone needs you, yes, you, to keep from overwhelming the dead and turning the tragedy into just another a book, something that evaporates after critics have taken hold of the ideas. But damn if you’re not finding where you’re needed and so you look up. The street traffic honks and flickers at itself. The apartment windows bubble like they can’t contain their pride.

You scroll through the social media comment threads again, and this time it doesn’t take long before you fix your attention to words that make you feel, someone’s declaration of What a tragedy, and so you give their comment a thumbs up. Finally something to ground you. And then you read someone’s But there are so many tragedies every day though, and you give this a thumbs up, too, though you’re not exactly sure if this diminishes your anxiety or affirms it passively. And then you realize that there’s something wrong with the mill because you come upon some weird things like Shut up about all the tragedies and then Stuff happens every day losers and then a string of What makes this one so goddamn special, Yeah so special like was it even real, Yeah and how do we even know it was real, Yeah and is anything real really, and you start to wonder if feelings have the capacity to procreate with other feelings in a festival celebrating incest where mutations are bound to happen and deformities are possible.

You shake the phone like it’s not even real. You look up and the street traffic keeps crossing lanes and making turns, and the buildings keep waving curtains and fluttering blinds, all of it like we’re standing on a pier saluting the ship as it steers into the ocean. All of it even though we know there’s an iceberg we’re all just pretending isn’t there.

You start walking. You notice it makes the treadmill manageable. You choose to keep up. You decide you can and that you want to, and so you return to your phone and thumb back at one of the comments you’re not sure about, you type Did you really just say that.

You’re confident that whoever uses social media and participates on a comment thread understands the façade of the medium, that within contained boxes to type and a constrained volume of text to use, there’s always context beyond the font, an applicable ethos that we are responsible for presuming a compassionate meaning behind the words, because, after all, we simply don’t have the space to explain it all, and we simply don’t have the time to articulate the reasoning behind the reasoning, and you’re pretty certain everyone operates under the same rules, and you’re fairly certain these aren’t just your rules, and that even you are always faithful to your rules.

You shake your head when other people’s comments start talking back to your comment. You shake your head at everyone’s habit to scream. You reread your comment to be sure you didn’t mean what comments back at yours seem to think that you meant, and you reread because they’re wild, What’s wrong with you you crybaby and Who died and made you chancellor of the fucking internet and Violence is violence and you’re never going to stop what’s in somebody’s head and heart to do so go die or whatever and leave us alone.

You don’t mean to get loud at an intersection. You don’t mean to sigh something like Are these fucking people for real, but you do. At a red light, a father with his son to your right and a woman with her backpack to your left sideways glance at you, and then at your phone, and they seem to know what is and isn’t up but you don’t confirm. You nod at the adults even though they don’t ask you anything, and then the light turns green. You walk ahead. You’re just trying to keep up with the social media comments as they suggest that the tragedy’s victims are just playing hurt and then say that the cameras are everywhere and everybody wants to be on camera and then say that everybody’s just telling newspapers the stories that sell newspapers and then say that it’s just about the money, that it’s always about the money.

You don’t thumb back right away. The sidewalk starts to decline and you don’t want to trip over a cement crack. Even as the traffic eases and the buildings chop into smaller heights, you step on faster. Your arms have to start swinging in order to control your tempo, and you skip over a tree trunk cracking the ground like a seismic shift pushing earth into the sky.

You’re already walking in a neighborhood when you realize you’ve probably been walking in a neighborhood for at least two blocks. You’re fairly certain you’re almost where you need to be. Just two more streets to go according to your calculations. You have a job to do. The front gates. The front yard toys. The passing curbside mailboxes. The social media comment threads need you. They need you to prove how absurd they all are. Tragedy carries up and down the street, from wall to wall, like a cornered mouse, and when gutters congested in leaves and errant shopping bags all stranded by the last rainfall get in the way of a clean escape, garbage will stick to the bottom of your shoes. So many words you find are just garbage sticking to the bottom of people’s shoes. You have a job to do. And you’re almost there.

The comments keep rolling, of course, stuff like Death is all around us and The media is so stupid and This must be great for ratings and Can’t everybody see that all we need is freedom. And just when you think it couldn’t get worse, the intersection you arrive to bristles in leaves raining over a retaining wall, and the comments pour over the top and you wonder how much longer the game can run, and whether the score is too wild for anyone to bind the teams together. But you’re also just three addresses down, and you have a job to do, and so just as long as that is true, the clock has to keep running, too.

When you’re where you need to be, you turn on your live feed. The phone falls out of your hand, but it doesn’t matter because no one tunes into anything right away anyway. You pick up the phone quickly anyway and dust off the screen and introduce yourself. It’s all formality, but the world has never been lost over etiquette, and you’re not sure anymore who does and doesn’t receive these manuals anymore. You introduce the house you’re standing in front of. You confirm the presence of a grieving family inside that house. You point to the hedges, the fences, the garage. To the trash and recycling and compost bins. To the uncut grass. You imagine aloud how grieving distracts us from basic chores, how everything falls by the wayside, from window washing to bathing. You touch the shrubs. The dandelions at the gate. You affirm the acreage and the house number and the latch to get in, the vitals of such a situation, you confirm to your growing social media viewership, that aren’t unlike the plaque beside an art installation. You tell them you’re just trying to collaborate with the piece they all see. You’re just trying to explain it all. And in that vein, you have to confirm that you can’t deliver on the promise to interview the family. They have not returned your phone calls or emails, and you point the phone back at yourself so the porch beams frame the setting behind you. You breathe and say nothing even as viewers tuning in start to add up.

And then you exhale before telling everyone that it’s time to take a closer look.

You push open the wobbly front gate. You identify the losses that all the families have faced. The daughters, sons, fathers, mothers, providers, lovers, friends, dear friends, and companions. Standing on the gravel path, you confirm how families like these don’t need ridicule, that trespassing into their mourning would be a disgrace, that opening their front door would be criminal, that whosever tarnishes this family’s name on social media commentary only lays their own bodies to shame.

You ask your audience if they can hear it, the sounds creeping between front door and frame, seeping through the natural crevices in the house. You kneel by the door. You place your phone’s speaker and voice receiver against the wood. You point the live feed back at you and you confirm it all in a whisper. The family inside is sobbing, a crying depth so profound only wolves moan more wildly, especially when they can no longer find the moon to tell them where to go. This, you tell everyone, is no fiction. This, you say, necessitates faithfulness. Tragedy, you tell your audience, is always a clearer question than answer.

You point the live feed away from you to capture the curtains and the blinds and the doormat smothered in unopened mail. You point to the chimney smoke and the vehicles in the driveway. A jogger passes by and you explain to your social media viewership that one always finds people for whom the world goes on, for whom the world continues in sweat and sore knees. You posit that perhaps the density of a neighborhood’s runners identifies a ratio one extrapolates to make a statement about the spared, the fraction of a population unaffected by tragedy, something like three in every four or four in five or five in six or some other particular that feels meaningful and smart. All tragedies, whether mass shootings or earthquakes or mass shootings or police betrayals or mass shootings, bring meaning, and as Americans, we have our inclinations for mean, and after every time we have fewer and fewer places to hide.

You shut down the live feed. You tap off because you need a breath. Exhaustive work collaborates with extensive reprieves as strongly with anything else, but right then the jogger that had earlier passed the house circles back. She stops to check her time and sideways glances as if more than just measuring her pulse. She leans over her knees as if stretching her hamstrings, and then she coughs and spits onto the curb, and then she calls out to you. You hold the family’s unrolled newspaper as you wave. She approaches the wobbly gate and looks up and down the street and shouts for your name. You nod. It occurs to you that not everyone is trained in good intentions, that we don’t all receive manuals of discernment. And you don’t know why but your heart jumps a palpitation. You clear your throat and nudge your way out of yourself by starting down the porch steps. You want her to believe your legs can sway easily into any kind of question. After all, no one asks for explanations from someone who knows how to belong.

You have not invaded this family’s privacy. Their information is all over social media anyway. No one loses their youngest child in a mass shooting tragedy without television reporters obsessing on whereabouts and all the crying. All you really wanted was to capture this house, record its face, acknowledge its pain to teach sympathy in the context of the social media comment threads that need a classroom. We can all be steered to pity. Intentions are all we can ever have.

The jogger reminds you that the onus is on you, and she demands to see a lanyard or a badge or a driver’s license. Prove you’re not a spy, she says. Always these internet people with their crazy ideas like weeds.

You tell her that you can provide what you need to provide. And you nod. You don’t know what will or won’t assure someone, and so words and movements are always an experiment. Surely this jogger will see you’re one of the better ones. That you’ve brought good intentions. And so you tell the jogger that you’re not there to bother the family because at a time like death every good neighbor extends just the necessary hand and nothing more, And so what makes you such a good neighbor, she says, and you’re not sure how much to appreciate her third question because anything beyond two makes for an interrogation, and the sun is already strong enough. Tone is a weapon, and because it can just as easily cut through time and through bodies you tell the jogger that you’re not there to disturb anyone. But do you know them, she says, and you ask her if that kind of certainty only gets in the way. Then why are you here, she says, and you tell her that this family shouldn’t be bothered. But do you know them, she says, and so you ask her why any of that should stop somebody from being moved, which is when you notice that the adjacent neighbor is out on his front porch, halfway down his steps, a light, long-sleeved shirt billowing over his loose pants, and you don’t know why, but you start to wonder how far personal spaces extend, and whether or not breaking them down is a process with instructions not everybody gets a manual for.

The jogger tells you to leave, and you try to tell her you’re there to help, but then she tells you that you’re not a real neighbor, but you try to tell her that helping hands are all different, but then she says that neighbors don’t keep people away at the butt of gun, which surprises you because nobody has opened up any debate about what is and is not a tragedy, and so you start to wonder why she can’t see that you can only work with what you have, that you can only bring your good intentions. But then she brings the world on you when she asks you if you have a gun, and your eyes shoot open, perhaps uncontrollably, which you hope isn’t the case, and in that process, you realize you don’t answer her, and because hesitations can be their own kind of weapon, without one, the jogger pulls her phone off a bicep strap and unlocks her screen.

You can only imagine who she plans to call, and quickly, but you hope not too quickly, you reach into your back pocket and pull out your notebook. You tell her you’re at the house to account for last details, something of a ritual that local newspapers process to confirm timelines and names and the states of everybody’s souls. You shake the coiled pages hoping its flapping travels across the lawn, and you don’t know how much of it has before she tells you that she doesn’t know what to do and so she’s going to call the police, which alarms you because when you look around you, there isn’t a tragedy you can measure, and so you throw your palms up. You raise both your hands to demonstrate just how empty you’ve always been.

One foot at a time, you make sure not to trip on a gravel stone or over the weeds. As the impasse plays out, the neighbors across the street and to the left step onto their deck and the neighbor across the street and to the right gets to the sidewalk and the neighbor next door makes his way to his gate.

On the sidewalk, the jogger shuts the wobbly gate behind you, and even though no one’s fired a gun, your skin bristles at a tempo in the air made worse by the gate’s clamoring lock. You have a tendency to mumble to yourself when no one appears to be listening to you, and it’s then that you realize how hard it is to control a habit. It takes all the fire in your body to cool down.

The jogger crosses her arms, and you tell her that your car is way up the road but that you’ll leave for it now, and she says that she wants to walk you there, but then you tell her that you’re not afraid to go alone, to which she says that fear doesn’t have a direction when the world is as crazy as it is.

You see then the neighbors at their gates, all the way down the block. Couples. Singles. Strangers. Dogs. A plague whose only name is running talk, and though not everybody has a conversation, rumors have been known to travel without any wind. There’s the story everyone sees and the story everyone makes up, and oceans can’t always tell the difference.

Which is why you stop abruptly to reach into your back pocket because you want your phone to capture the street of stories, too, to combat these people’s stories with your own story because that’s the momentum that long ago set us asea. And it happens so quickly because it happens just like it feels, and it feels like your skin gets stretched and pulled off your bones, and you don’t know what to call what happens next except that the elements of the broken conversation you were counting all fall out of order, and clarity stings you in the breaths that you start to lose because, evidently, you, too, are the reason neighbors can’t reconcile what they have seen with what they are feeling.

First the jogger barrels into you like she’s pushing through you, and your only defense to hurl her aside surprises you because you can’t believe somebody can feel so sturdy and at the same time so light. And then the next door neighbor rams you, and you stumble trying to wiggle out, but the shuffling puts you on the cement beneath him where he shouts into the sky that you have a gun, that you’ve come bearing no intentions at all, and so you fight with open palms so the world can see how sick it can be when it doesn’t want to see. You’re in it thick, and you throw your hands around, but information fixes nothing, and the heat gets hotter, and you scream that you have good intentions because what else are you going to do.

You swing at the man’s neck and chest, and you scream about the mistakes they’re all making. No one listens, and how can they when everybody screeches to get it away, shrieks for someone to take it away, kicks your side ribs to poke it away, jabs your hips because somebody keeps yelling that they’re all going to die if they don’t grab it away. And you try hollering that you’re sorry for whatever you’re sorry about, for whatever sorry means, about your intentions, and that you only wanted to correct the record, to live feed and inform and alleviate the tension that exists in the world, but high noon is a plague, and everyone is always holstering a gun even when they’re not. And when the neighbors let up for a moment, you try to tell them that you are choking, but someone sits on you hard, and the coughing gets in the way of everything you can hear and everything you want to add. The weight of it like a poison of bad opinions that run into each other until no one can discern anymore one hand from another. And then you hear the shot. The one you’re pretty sure they’ve been wanting to hear all along. The one that they couldn’t have cleared their heads without. And then the world goes dark.

Every Universe is Exactly the Same

9 April 2018

Categories: Fiction

After so much pleading, after hands pressed together in mock prayer, after pleasemompleasemomplease, after promises of rooms cleaned and weeds pulled, the Scientist finally relents. She will allow her son, who is eight years old, to walk home alone from school the following afternoon, even though she is unsure, even though she has been brought to tears by news segments, read horror stories on message boards, and really, if she’s honest, she’s not sure why it matters so much to him, because she was eight years old such a long time ago and has lost track of the feelings that bubbled inside a younger version of herself. The Scientist will not be Lame Mom Destroyer of Fun. She will be Inwardly Trepidatious But Careful Not To Pass On Her Own Manias Mom, which is a challenge, demands more of her mental energy than she can really spare given the work she is doing. She cannot escape the What Mom am I? trap. She knows that she will fight against herself forever, and so, yes, for once she relents. She says fine, whatever, who cares, walk home by yourself. Wait, she says, check with your dad. But her son already has, and the Scientist is not surprised to learn that her husband has no opinions vis-à-vis their son walking home from school.

There are decisions, the Scientist understands later, so close in proximity—temporally, spatially, cosmically—to their consequences (here, picture a black hole slurping up light) that the gap between them feels bridgeable, one rung back down the ladder, so much so that the decision-maker might feel as if he or she (she) could move outside of time and remake the choice. But this is just a feeling and has no bearing on the truth of the matter.

The truth is this: the next day the Scientist’s son did not return home from school. He simply never arrived. The details here are irrelevant. We too have seen the headlines, the parted hair, buck-toothed, polo-shirted school photo hanging over the shoulder of a not-sad-enough news anchor who has only forty seconds left for this segment before he or she has to talk about the baby elephant born in the Cincinnati Zoo the night before. We too have watched the news and said, oh my god; those poor people; Christ almighty; I can’t watch this; what time is Jeopardy on; is it before or after Wheel of Fortune; what the hell is keenwah anyway. And then we moved on with our lives and forgot about the sad pictures on the TV screen because, and listen closely because this makes all the difference, it was not our child. Our child was in the basement playing videogames, or at volleyball practice, or asleep in the crib monitored by a Wi-Fi enabled nanny cam to ensure that our names, our child’s face, never appears on the five o’clock news.

Or maybe our child was never been born, or was born early with a peanut-sized heart that refused to pump blood, or our child grew into a smart, capable young adult and then made a decision that wasn’t really a decision, and then a series of decisions that weren’t really decisions, weren’t anything more than the neurons you had gifted them sparkling like fireworks, and ended up overdosing in the bathroom of a KFC. And maybe because of the pain we had felt, continued to feel, we thought we knew or could at least guess at and pantomime how the Scientist felt when her son disappeared.

But no one had ever felt what the Scientist felt. No one would ever feel it again.

Of the details that are relevant, there is this: there was no body.

There was searching, the calling of his name, flashlights dug out of drawers filled with tape and rubber bands, flyers printed and stapled to telephone poles beside advertisements for concerts by bands with names like The Deadbeat Dads and Flesh River, beside other flyers for missing cats and guitar lessons at twenty-five dollars an hour. To save time, please fill in the gaps here with scenes from films and television you have seen: police dogs and yellow tape, frantic phone calls, hands slammed against steering wheels, shower crying, the interrogation by police of a bald man in oversized glasses who lives in a halfway house a few miles from the victim’s school, who also happens to be a sex offender.

Picture this also. Do some of the heavy lifting. Save me the trouble. Imagine a child’s funeral without a child, the burying of an empty grave.

And now this story diverges from those stories.

The Scientist’s grief is a channel; it’s an inter-dimensional gateway into alternate realities. She builds new worlds every hour. Most often, the worlds she builds, the universe she returns to again and again is identical to our own in every way except one, and it is different only in that she said no when her son asked if he could walk home alone from school, and now he’s nine years old and is very in to Boba Fett and Wolverine and YouTube cartoons about how aliens might one day contact Earth. In the universe she has made in her mind, the Scientist’s husband does not go into the basement to scream, he does not come out of the shower with cherry-colored scratches down his arms and chest. In this universe, the Scientist and her son go on long walks through the park in the evening and he asks her questions that have arisen in his mind throughout the day. Some are pointless trivia (when was the first Super Bowl); some are matters of opinion (who would win in a fight between Thanos and Galactus), and some are scientific inquiries (If the earth is spinning, how come we can’t feel it move). She answers when she can, lies only occasionally, and shrugs when he broadens the scope outside of her purview. In this universe, they walk hand-in-hand as the sun sets casting long shadows across the grass and water, and as the light fades, as the lamps begin to flicker awake, she explains to him how the world works.

She creates more universes than this in her mind, but as you can likely imagine, they all share certain commonalities: a decision made differently, a son returned.

It is this mechanism, this unhealthy pursual of unreachable outcomes that, like a match held to crumpled newspaper, sets off a burning inside of her. She was at certain points in her academic career skeptical of those branches of quantum theory that had been co-opted by the science fiction dreams and acid trip hypotheses posited and built upon by well-known and influential physicists. Why focus on Every Possible Reality when, in this reality, we did not understand how our minds worked, when our bodies could turn on us at any moment and begin pumping poison into our blood. But grief is nothing if not a catalyst for change, so the Scientist revises her opinions concerning the nature of reality and sets about building a machine.

She lives in her lab, dreams about her work, sees her son in the faces of boys who are eleven now. She circumvents playgrounds, closes her eyes when passed by a school bus on the street. The Scientist avoids her husband, who has given himself over to God’s will, and found in a community of big-smiling, too-sympathetic, ancient-text-studying strangers, something akin to, but not exactly, hope. She is grateful for these people, in that she does not have time to deal with him, has no comfort she can share, but maybe one day, she thinks, when the machine is finished, she can take away his pain, if only temporarily.

The Scientist too has been building up a faith, but it is of a different type, it is a faith in the world seen from odd angles, in choices rechosen, her life split infinitely, each moment a new her emerging from some quantum cocoon, and for every version of her that exists, hidden somewhere in the folds between space and time, there is an opportunity to have done differently, to have saved her son. If the theorizing was true, if every possible outcome had been, would be realized, only somewhere else, on some separate plane of existence, then it would be logical to assume that at least one of those infinite outcomes included her son returning home that day. And if a world existed where that outcome had been realized, she would find it.

In secret, she builds the machine. In secret, she finds a way to cross boundaries that had been heretofore uncrossable, to move from one rung of the ladder to another. The theories were mostly right. Imagine an infinitely large tree, every branch a decision; what you ate for breakfast, what shirt you chose to wear, your job, who you married, if you decided to have children and so on and so forth. On these branches are more branches, more decisions, each one its own world, its own singular universe, and in each universe is another version of you, this one a tattoo artist with an affinity for robot pin-ups, and here, this one a bank teller forever unable to express to your family who it is you have fallen in love with, and then there is this one, who has helped develop a cutting-edge navigation technology used in rockets made by the government to annihilate huts and caves in sand-covered countries. But this is not a story about you. It’s about her, the Scientist, in all her variations.

She uses the machine to cross into these other branches of reality, and in each one, she locates herself. Of course, there are realities in which she has died, so she corrects for that, adjusts a few dials on the machine so that it skips those worlds, it skips also worlds where she never married, never gave birth. She finds the other versions of herself mostly in her home, or a version of it, in the same city where her son disappeared. They believe, like she does, that he will return one day, a teenager now, with a passion for rap music and black-and-white samurai movies, wearing thrift store t-shirts and women’s jeans. But when she finds herself, as she always does, she finds a woman working in secret to build a machine to find another version of herself who made a different decision than she made and a son who is not bones and dust buried in a shallow grave in some forest two states over.

But these are only some of the Scientists that exist on the infinite tree of cosmic possibilities, so she continues to search, finding versions of herself in Florida, on to marriage number two, skin the color of a football, and still sonless. She finds versions of herself in Alaska and Japan, in Sacramento and Atlanta, versions who have started charities, scholarship funds, and organizations dedicated to aiding bereaved mothers. Not all of the Scientists are scientists, not all have built machines. But our Scientist is one of those who has, so she keeps searching, getting farther and farther out on the thinning branches of existence, imagining her son as an adult, as a college student studying physics or philosophy, dating a capable young woman, someone a lot like the Scientist used to be, falling in love, getting married. She sees in her mind the possibilities of his life, all the ways he could have been, and it is this hope that spurs her on, the hope that in one of these worlds she made the right choice and he is alive. Twenty-seven years old now and a father himself. She will find him, or she will search until she is dead.

This is, in fact, the case. It’s the machine that kills her, sending poison rays into her bones each time she crossed over. She understood the risk, felt the potential reward was worth a slow and painful death in a hospital bed, no longer capable of searching for her son, watched over by her grey-haired husband who prays silently for her death to be peaceful. The Scientist tells no one about the machine, the other worlds she visited, not even her husband. She casts her mind back and feels nothing but pity for the other hers, for herself. She visited a thousand worlds, saw a distinct version of herself as many times, and in every one she made the wrong decision. In all his permutations, her son never returned to her.

Our Scientist dies in her sleep. Many others live on.

Road Messages

9 April 2018

Categories: Fiction

Thomas had been the electronic sign manager for the Department of Transportation in Florida for four years. From the control center in Miami, he loved watching the road logistics screen. He sifted through incoming data for continuous updates on delays, accidents, roadwork, and complete traffic standstills.

Though he had never become the writer he once aspired to be, he took pride in the fact that his lit messages were visible for all – gold bulbs flashing over I-95 from Jupiter to Miami. It was a fun but hectic job, especially since the addition of Amber and Silver alerts. In Florida, with so many senior citizens, Silver alerts were now a daily occurrence.

After failing to become a published short story writer, and also unwilling to work in insurance or retail, the only careers he envisioned for an English major, he enrolled in a certificate program in computer science and road engineering, securing a job for the state DOT. Even though it wasn’t short story writing or poetry, Thomas still found joy in writing code and entering the daily message board updates. The flashing lights on the road board spoke to him, like a heart constantly beating or a mouth spitting out new lines.

On a Sunday at the end of August, a tropical depression formed off the coast of Africa, and he had a feeling that this hurricane might eventually hit Florida. There had never been a hurricane evacuation order since he’d started at the DOT. This was the event he always dreamed of. His day in the sun. His time up at bat with bases loaded and two outs. Evacuations of three million Florida residents meant that he would be front and center. All of those evacuees would be reading his words on the signboards as they escaped the swirling winds of Hurricane Jane.

He watched eagerly as the storm grew in wind speed and size. The Weather Channel became his constant companion, even at night as he dozed off. On September seventh, he sucked in his breath when the hurricane reached category five status.

On September eighth, Thomas cracked his knuckles and typed the first important message: Hurricane Watch, Evacuation Route, Traffic Expected. The second message occurred when watch became warning. This was followed by No Parking on Side of Road and Fender Benders Move to Shoulder.

Fourteen days after the initial formation of Jane, he had grown tired of listening to Dr. Rick on the Weather Channel. He’d set up a cot in the situation room, gathered his hurricane supplies: flashlights, canned goods, beef jerky, water, and Oreos. The cameras aimed at 95 showed only a few cars moving north. Everyone else was either hunkered down in their homes or apartments, or had already gone. Having cabin fever and no one to talk to, Thomas became restless. He began typing hurricane haikus:

       Your windy arms fly
       We hold our heated breath close
       Category five

This was picked up by the highway camera, and by that night made the national news. Twitter feeds picked it up and hurricane fans re-tweeted it. Thomas wasn’t aware this was occurring. He stared in a meditative gaze at the outer bands arriving in the Keys.

He heard wind at the door and water began to leak in and then cover the floor of the building.

He entered a second hurricane haiku on the signboards when Dr. Rick announced that the eye was over Miami:

       Jane, no longer plain
       Doppler radar indicates
       Your arrival soon

When the loud wind and scary sounds stopped, Thomas opened the door outside to see sun and sky as the eye passed over. He walked to the road so he could witness his haiku live. A smile spread across his face. Published, he thought. As he walked back, stepping over palm tree branches and roof shingles, the light faded, dark clouds slid in, and a roaring sound moved behind him.

Hell, MI

9 April 2018

Categories: Fiction

My big bad beautiful brain wants another shot, another taco and a big fizzy cherry joke to wash it all down. Such as: What’s the difference between spit and swallow? But! You’ve done it backwards again, says Brain, whispery, lisping. Brain has this way of knowing things I would never admit, would never dream of telling. For example: that the way my current lover’s dumb slim body hits my body—against walls; down onto his pallet bed; all the way, sometimes, it seems, up past my cervix and into my stomach cavity—puts me in some lake state where all the breezes balm and I become so light, so placid, so sure this person is a real person. And the word floats up like a dead shark, greyly bloated with its own splendor. What’s the difference between like and love? Spit and swallow.

And which do you do when you know it’s a lie, black or white or bloody neon red all over? Takes an expert to know the difference: like/love/dead/drowning. (Zebra in a blender.) I ask can I do anything differently, anything better, and he says, You were never my problem. The half-compliments will be the ones that kill me. He says, You aren’t meeting the real me. So as a remedy for ourselves he drives us way out of the city limits to the A&W next to the fruit stand, buys us burgers and floats. I become tearful, maudlin, pouting. I dab my eyes with the scooped collar of my crop top, expose my nipples.

I really thought there’d be Cherry Coke, I pout, and he says, fatherly, Don’t sulk, and I say, I would never. I’m pouting. And he squeezes me on all of my hipbones, tells me to be quiet and eat my dinner, and I think, OK Dad, but don’t say it because the things he does oh god to my tits and neck and with those hands, oh god, fathers. No father could ever.

There was the year of the ox, year of writing Father’s and Mother’s Day cards to all our current and future lovers. A plea or a joke or a little too real. All the while we were already fighting again and here was I, late and greedy and indulgent and bloated, positive in my own conviction. Finally I bled, so cabernet-drunk there was one wild ecstatic moment I thought it could’ve just been all the wine. But what business did I have being wild or ecstatic? We finish the floats and he says there is a lake; we can go to this lake. Did you remember a swimsuit, he asks, eyes hoping I haven’t, though this is the kind of lake that has children and grandparents. They appear all around you. But in the end he brings me to this big open field, photographs me in my babydoll coveralls, electric fence and a dead Cadillac in the background. Fade out.

Loverboy is pale pale translucent paper skin so beforehand I spend all my time in the sun so that I’ll become a very deep rich brown. Arrive in a house wherein we listen very, very closely to one another; examine the shapes our mouths make toward one another. I had painted my nails cherry red for more contrast when they were on his chest and then he tells a joke: Why can’t Jesus get you pregnant? Why?

We are sober he hates beer doesn’t have any bottles is too hot for walking anywhere. There is a glass of water in front of me I wrap my little red-tipped paws tight around it. We watch movies naked miss chances to say things to one another like: Drop everything for me, use your mouth on me. Things like: Because He comes in your heart. Fall in love at some point or maybe we already had done.

And he’ll say, Do you have to go, and I’ll say, Yes, for my health and wellness, for the children. The children eventually will ask what the fuck I left for and I’ll have no good answer, I know this.

Fade to two years from that lake date, past or future, year of the unicorn. Him wearing boxer briefs making fried rice with Sriracha, in love with me again or, at least, for the first time. Flash fade to one hour before the photo field, treading in the lake, treading water/time/past/future/like/love/drowning, never asking for anything. Asks if I want to, right now, but I can think only: Parasites. Just say no: fear of the zebra mussel. He says, Liana, of course. Deception of the man who says your name early and often, who is amorous in the early hours. What this means: He is used to waking up with someone. What this doesn’t have to mean: He wished to wake up with you.

Fade back to the A&W, to the root beer float to go he orders off the drive-thru genius. Sorry about the coke, he says, and WHAT COKE, I say, panicked, checking my wallet and bra for a bag. Did I take it into the ocean?! I must have squealed, but he says we haven’t even seen the lake yet. I meant like the Cherry Coke, he says.

Cherry joke is more like it, I say, squeezing my paper cup so hard it melts.

A Series of Improvements

10 November 2017

Categories: Fiction

We were sleeping the first time we heard the alarms. We woke up in fright and went to the window. The alarms came from somewhere in the middle of the city, somewhere near the fire. Later we heard a continuous, mechanical roar circulating in the sky and sometimes vanishing in cycles. The sound grew louder and louder, then it seemed to be inside our house. The room was shaking and our parents came running down the stairs. We looked at the city and there it was, the huge helicopter pouring water over buildings consumed by flames.

Our house stood at the top of the hill. From up there we could see the city and the river. At night the city was lit by yellow and red lamps. By day it seemed to be surrounded by a translucent haze. We stood at the window, staring at the city. Our parents did not take us there and we never understood why. Over there, we knew it, there were amusement parks, candy stores, and movie theaters.

The next day everything was normal again. In the morning we played cards and at night we watched the news. But when the journalists started talking about the fire, threatening us with groundbreaking, new information, that’s when our mother took the remote. She turned off the television and sent us to bed. We lied down and closed our eyes, but we didn’t sleep. Still we could hear the muffled voices of journalists talking about last night’s disaster.

The alarms rang once more that week and again at night. But this time no helicopter appeared in the sky. The flames spread rapidly from one building to the other and we heard a massive explosion. The fire lasted all night and only stopped burning the next morning, when there was nothing left to burn.

It was then that the first of them appeared. Suit and tie covered in ashes, his face full of scratches. He was slowly approaching our house, hugging the leather briefcase where he kept all of his personal belongings. When he saw us, he asked to speak to our father. He said he was a lawyer and that he needed help. The city, the entire city, had been destroyed. I just want a place to sleep, he said. Our father was willing to help him as long as the lawyer worked for it. Since we were not involved in legal imbroglios, our father offered him to look after our kitchen garden. We still did not have a kitchen garden, of course, so our father asked the man to cultivate one.

The gardener wore flannel shirt and jeans and worked from six in the morning to five in the afternoon. After work, he would fall on a pile of leaves and sleep there until sunrise. Inside his briefcase, among letters and contracts and bills, there was a cell phone, a photo album, and a flashlight. We took the flashlight and the phone to play. We left him with only the photographs.

Throughout that week, three more appeared. An engineer, a pharmacist and an artist. Their clothes were covered with ashes and they wanted a place to sleep. Since we did not need bridges, drugs, or beautiful paintings at the time, our father offered them to take care of the garden’s irrigation system. We still did not have an irrigation system, of course, so our father asked them to build one.

The three men joined the gardener. That week they erected walls of cardboard and garbage bags around the piles of leaves. Each of them slept in a cubicle. Sometimes, when the weather was cold, they cuddled each other. That week we got new toys: pencils, notebooks, test tubes, canvases, and brushes.

Two weeks later, there were seven men living and working in our yard. They took care of our vegetables, managed the irrigation system, and set up cages for birds and small rodents. That’s when our father asked them to build a wall around the hill. He said our house was an oasis of prosperity in the neighborhood. Who knows what could happen if we stood exposed and unprotected? There was so much going on, so many people fleeing from the destroyed city. They had nothing left and now they wanted what we worked to achieve. The workers argued cautiously with our father. They had come from the destroyed city and never did anything wrong. They worked hard. That’s when our father got emotional and said: you no longer belong to the destroyed city, but to this family.

For ten days the workers took turns on long trips along the riverbank. From there, they brought rocks to be broken and stacked around the hill. It took them another fifteen days to finish the wall. When the construction was completed, our father placed a chair next to the wall and asked a man to stay on guard. Tell anyone passing by they are about to trespass forbidden area. That man used to be a doctor.

At night, our father announced a celebration. The wallmaking was done., We were now safe and should be happy. He killed a chicken, which our mother roasted and served with some vegetables from the garden. We and our parents had a wonderful evening and the giblets were offered to the workers.

In exchange for the food, they washed our dishes.

Order and Reflex in North Jersey

10 November 2017

Categories: Fiction

This was back during a period of my life when I thought of myself as having things. What did I have? In no particular order, the same things a lot of people have: a smartphone; an apartment; a monthly MetroCard; a Facebook page and an Instagram account; a checking account and a savings account; student loan debt; a steady, well-paying job that wasn’t too good or too bad; furniture; books; records; access to HBO GO and Netflix; neighbors; a doorman; a closet full of respectable middle- to upper-middle-class clothing; an IRA; a 401(k); stock in a once-great-but-now-pretty-much-obsolete film and camera company located in Western New York State; parents; siblings; an antique mirror; a baseball signed by Larry David and the cast of Seinfeld; countless other things.

Currently, I do not have a spouse or partner, but I do have a three-year-old son. His name is Noah. For a while he lived with me all the time because his mother, my ex-wife, is no longer living. She died a year-and-a-half ago. It was nobody’s fault. We had already separated and figured out how to be on “good terms” (her words). We shared custody then; now we don’t. She had an aneurysm and passed away, alone in her apartment. It was a difficult time. I understood the situation. I even accepted it. Nevertheless, it’s strange for me to say that something I have is not just an ex-wife but a dead ex-wife. Neither are things I ever thought I’d have. Nor did I anticipate having a son. But I do have a son.

The story of our family goes like this: Jack and Jill met in college. Jack and Jill started dating and quickly became inseparable. Jack and Jill were an item: not just Jack or just Jill, but Jack-&-Jill-Together—a single thought. Everyone who knew them agreed it was perfect, including Jack & Jill themselves. Jill was a poet (or wanted to be) and Jack was a fiction writer (or wanted to be). Instead, they both became teachers and moved out of Jersey into the City. They would write in the summers. They would publish a poem here, a story there, and eventually they wouldn’t have to teach anymore because that’s how that story goes. And there was to be no children. Children as children were fine as long as those children were someone else’s children. Children got in the way. Children replaced writing. Children were for everyone else. Poems were children, stories were children. Books were children. Actual children were not children. Until one day they were: one day, children were children again, and where were theirs? Jack & Diane had them, as did Jack & Joan, and Jack & Jack, and Joan & Joan. Who were they to be different? Who did they think they were? It was time to put away childish things and make an actual child.

So we did: we made our son, Noah, and from the moment of his birth we pretty much gave up on writing. Later, we gave up on each other, and later still her brain gave up on her, leaving me and Noah alone in the apartment.

There was me and there was him. He was a thing I had. And me: I was a thing he had. He probably didn’t think about our relationship that way—he was only one-and-a-half—but I did. He was part of the list, the inventory of my life. When I think of that time now I’m not always sure I loved him as much as I loved my books or my apartment—our apartment—but I did care about him a great deal, and I did love him most of the time. Other times I did not. Other times he screamed if he was unhappy, and then he became nearly identical to a car horn: someone or something is in his way and he knows he simply must alert this person or thing to his presence. Because this will fix things. Screaming fixes things. The person or thing will move, he thinks, and he’ll be happy because he’ll have what he wants, whatever it is. It’s the having that matters most to him, the having and the happiness.

As an adult, I know this is true only sometimes. I know there are just too many of us to be happy all the time. I also know that even if you get what you want, you’re just as likely to be unhappy. Especially if you’re a U.S. citizen or someone who grew up in the U.S. He doesn’t know this yet; he doesn’t know what “the U.S.” is or what a “citizen” is and he doesn’t care. He doesn’t know that everyone dies and that no one has any say in their birth or the circumstances of their birth. He lacks knowledge and experience of almost everything. He is basically helpless, and yet he’s lied to me—a lot. I know that he has. All the foods he likes are bad for him, but he would eat them all the time if he could. He’s never shared anything, never been a sharer. I’m sure other parents dislike him; it was always difficult for me to arrange playdates. I didn’t think of this then but now I think it’s because Noah is a difficult child. My son, Noah, is one of those kids other parents look at on the playground and go, “Wow, that is a difficult child.” He wants everything in the store. If he sees it and is interested, he thinks it should be his simply because of his interest. Money is a concept that means as much to him as Existentialism or the Cloud or being on time. He is an excellent drawer; I wouldn’t be surprised if he grew up to be an artist. His favorite song is “She Loves You” by The Beatles. He used to hate it when I played jazz in the apartment or if I decided that tonight’s one of those nights we wouldn’t watch anything. He hates taking a bath and going to the bathroom and changing his clothes and keeping things neat. This is how I know he’s a young person. He would die if someone didn’t make him do all the things he hates to do and he’s never thanked me or anyone else for keeping him alive.

Sometimes I think he thinks his mother is dead because of me. This may very well be true. It’s one of the first things I thought about when she died: did I give her an aneurysm? Was my personality somehow responsible for her death? Obviously, it wasn’t, but what if it was, in some small way? It’s possible, isn’t it? I don’t know.

Noah used to like to “lose me” in the Park. “Losing me” meant that he’d pretend to be invisible right in front of me. He’d cover his eyes and then maybe hide behind a tote and think that that was all he needed to do to lose me. Even if we were sitting on a blanket facing each other he’d somehow think he was invisible to me if he put his hands over his eyes. Why are children like this? (Many of my students are like this too: they seem to believe I can’t see them looking at their phones during class if they look at their phones beneath the table—we all sit at four tables arranged in a square—even though they know anyone can see what anyone else is doing beneath the table. It’s very strange.)

One time, Noah said to me, “Dad, you’re crazy!” and I said, “I am?” He said, “Yeah, you’re crazy!” and I said, “How come?” He said, “I don’t know,” and then went back to playing with his toys, as if he hadn’t said anything at all. When I said, “‘I am?’,” part of me wondered if he was right; and if he was right, how did he know? But of course he was just repeating something he’d heard somewhere else. He could’ve just as easily said, “Dad, you’re a cat!” or “Dad, you’re late!” or “Dad, you’re an apple!” or “Dad, you’re my dad!” I wondered if he’d ever told his mother she was crazy, but then I remembered he couldn’t talk like that when she was alive.

Neither of us are—were. Crazy, that is. In fact, of the three of us, I’d say Noah is the most likely candidate for craziness. If not on his own merit, then perhaps by way of circumstance. The world he’ll inhabit as an adult is a world I’m glad I’ll never see. This world here that we live in right now is rapidly becoming the kind of world I don’t want to live in. Everything has so much weight. Everything matters all the time, from the second you’re born. Appearance is everything, impression is everything. The judgment of others is constant—every day is Judgment Day because living is public. Every day I almost fail. Every day I wonder if this will be the day I give up. I don’t think quitting is bad. Sometimes it’s required. I quit playing baseball in the second grade and it was definitely the right thing to do. I didn’t enjoy it; I wasn’t any good at it; my teammates disliked me because I was no good; the coaches disliked me because I was no good; I quit and it was right. Everyone was pleased with the decision. My parents weren’t, of course, but they got over it because I started playing basketball instead and I was much, much better at that. At the time, I thought they were pleased simply because I was a better basketball player than I was a baseball player. Now I know that’s only partly true. Now I know the real reason they were pleased is that they had a story to tell: “He quit baseball because he wanted to concentrate on basketball instead, and anyway he’s much, much better at it.” That’s how that story goes. It’s very short, and very easy to understand. A lot of people like that story. If nothing had replaced baseball, things would’ve been much more difficult for me. They would’ve sat me down to talk about why I wanted to quit, to explain to me that quitting isn’t something people respect. They would not have said that quitting didn’t work for them because they wouldn’t know what to tell their friends, and I understand that now. As a parent, I get it. We are being judged all the time by all the other parents. I garnered a certain amount of sympathy among the other parents at Noah’s daycare because my wife—ex-wife—died. I garnered almost no sympathy at all when we were separated, but now that she’s dead, there’s a story and I’m the protagonist; and whatever backstory there might be that might make me appear one way or another, no one really seems to care about that anymore because someone has died, and that someone is a person who used to love me and with whom I created this little boy they see and know, this Noah. I am Noah’s bereaved father to them. The sad, slumping, pathetic fortysomething widower and occupant of a one-bedroom apartment. Bereavement: also a thing I have (to all the other parents, that is). Also a thing on my list. Their list about me is different from my list about me, just as my lists about them are different from their lists about themselves.

What I’m really talking about here is secrets. That’s no surprise. We all have them. Some of them are worse than others. Some of them are meaningless. But that’s not a very good story. No one wants to hear a story about a meaningless secret. For example, a secret I have is that I wasn’t all that sad when my ex-wife died. I was certainly shocked and saddened, but I wasn’t overcome with grief the way I might have been if our marriage hadn’t already failed. The other parents don’t know this about me. Noah doesn’t know this about me. I would never discuss it with him, for one thing—you can’t really have a discussion with a three-year-old—but there’s also the fact of the funeral. I cried at it. In public, in front of my son and my ex-wife’s family and my own parents and a small gathering of our closest friends, I looked sad and overcome with grief. I hadn’t been faking it, but I happen to know that I was crying more out of confusion and the overwhelming sense that my life was now going to be lived in a constant state of being overwhelmed. Everything was overturned, nudged out of orbit. Whatever metaphor works. All I knew was that there was me and there was Noah, and I was completely responsible for his life.

That’s how that story was all set to go. That’s how that story was all set to go until it didn’t. Something changed. Several things happened. Most of them weren’t all that important. First, there was a siege of rabbits in Brooklyn and Queens. Nobody knows why or where they came from, but for about a week it was true that a thing Brooklyn and Queens had was a rabbit problem. It got so bad that they stopped traffic during the morning commute one day. Rabbits flooded the Battery Tunnel. I’m not kidding. The tunnel was a parking lot full of angry drivers honking their horns and so many rabbits that the cars couldn’t move. Imagine that scene. It was incredible. The footage on the news was like something out of a disaster movie. I remember I thought of Watership Down and that very strange sequence with the domesticated rabbits in David Lynch’s Inland Empire. Animal Control had to be called in to round them up and get them out. Who knows what they did with them all.

The other thing that happened—the thing I’ve been driving at all along here—involved me and Noah and a Zipcar and my ex-in-laws’ house in North Caldwell and a somewhat regrettable but totally necessary scene in their driveway. They never liked me that much anyway. I don’t know. What are you gonna do? You stay or you go; that’s all there is to it. That’s all there is to anything, really. It’s a classic American story. I don’t feel very good most of the time now, but that’s OK because this is what I’ve chosen. This is the life I’ve decided to lead. I feel better about this life that I don’t feel very good about than I felt about my life the past year-and-a-half since the funeral. That’s just the truth, I’m sorry. So there you go: at least I have that. It turns out I still do think about myself in terms of having things. Or not having them, I guess.

Feast

10 November 2017

Categories: Fiction

Om grew up in Loka village, beside mountains, wheat fields and orchards. Sometimes a late spring frost stunned the apple trees, and the young fruit bore thick brown bands that they wore into adulthood.

The tainted apples were no good for the market. Om and his brothers would be invited into Old La’s orchard to collect the gumdrop-sized jewels for their mother to make jam and jelly. The boys held contests to see who could eat the most. The tart little fruits puckered their lips and sapped the saliva from their mouths. Om always won. He slept soundly those nights with victory on his numb tongue.

His father raised sheep and his mother sewed, and together they brought up seven children. Om went to school in the next village, but only when they had money. When it rained too hard or not enough, he stayed home, and sucked on roots to distract his mind from the awful gnawing in his stomach.

When Om turned twenty, he traveled to the nearby township and attended classes for metalwork, and it was here where he met a girl who waitressed at a noodle shop. She had long, gentle eyes and a small mouth that pursed when she took orders. Her name was Lin.

One spring festival she took him home to spend the holiday with her family. He could just afford to bring plum wine, a frozen leg of lamb and a barrel of apples from his parents’ orchard, and the only way he knew to combat his humiliation was to drink and smoke until he forgot his name.

The men played cards until the early hours of the morning, and the night took him in a blur. He remembered very little, besides the steam that rose off the frozen cobblestones when he retched on the way back to his sleeping quarters, and the shame he felt the next morning when he saw that his mess had disappeared.

He married Lin that winter. By the following spring festival she had given birth to a girl, and they moved to town, where his brother found him a job as a clerk in a bank. Om never finished fourth level math. He didn’t know the first thing about numbers, but the pay was enough to give them a start. He began to trade liquor, and Lin sold hair accessories. Soon they accumulated enough stock to fill an entire corner of their one room home, beside the baby crib, radio and mini-freezer. The future looked bright.

After dinner, the leader’s booming voice piped into their warm little room. The voice told them that the national harvest was good that year, better than the year before. The voice said that their people were pushing back invaders and would soon add another twenty-four kilometers to the northern boundary. If they just tightened their waist belts a little more, they would surely be out of the dark times and by next year the streams would once again be filled with fish, and the meadows with flowers, the sky with birds.

Soon their little family grew from one child to four. The thought alone kept Om up at night and sapped his strength during the day, but it never diminishing his spirit, which soared with the leader’s confident words as he congratulated comrades for another week of honest work that would surely build their empire to new heights.

On Om’s thirty-third birthday, the leader unveiled his new plan. They were in need of men—young, strapping men, older men with skills, men who could apply their minds, men who loved their country, men willing to give their bodies. They asked for volunteers, but everyone knew that it was mandatory. Om bade Lin and his children goodbye, and left with the first round of recruits.

Within a fortnight he and sixty other men found themselves stationed at the north wall. Mostly they did nothing. Om whittled pieces of wood into figurines that he salvaged from the furnace. He made a fox for his eldest girl, fish for the middle ones, and a curved canoe for his youngest boy, who had Lin’s long eyes. The pile of figurines only grew with the months. The soldiers ate steamed white buns and boiled roots, and washed them down with melted snow. Every morning and night, they listened to the leader’s voice come on the radio, encouraging them and heaping on praise, as they shivered and thought of their warm beds back home, of good food and good wine, their wives growing barren and their children becoming adults.

Om learned two new dialects. He learned to prefer Anna Karenina to War and Peace. He found his knack for keeping peace.

Gradually it dawned on Om that there was no threat of attack. The men at the north wall were kept there not to defend the kingdom against a warring tribe, but to trap them and age them like bulls in a pen until they softened into withered and harmless beings. Om held the betrayal quietly in his heart, and he did not speak of it to anyone, but when the leader’s voice came on the radio he no longer greeted it with joy, but with growing resentment and anger.

Six years passed. News of the leader’s defeat finally reached the north wall. After the string was cut, the troops quickly disbanded. Om arrived home to find his town destroyed and his youngest dead from pneumonia. Lin’s hair had turned silver and hard as fishing wire. Within a month, she passed. Om took two stones to the nearby tarn, tossed them into the clearest part and slept for two nights on the mountain. Then he took his three remaining children back home to Loka.

The village was nearly empty. Most people had gone to the city, leaving only the elderly, so Om pedaled a tricycle and delivered milk to the toothless lot. In the afternoons, he repaired bicycles and alarm clocks and stereos to send his children to school. He buried his father in the late summer, and his mother in early fall. Two more stones in the tarn. His brightest girl caught a hard winter fever, and he had to wait until spring for the tarn to thaw before he could properly commemorate her.

He needed help; he was desperate. He took a poor, dark-skinned village girl for a wife, and she soon bore him another daughter. He cursed her for making another mouth to feed, and he went off to the city to look for work.

It took Om four months to find a job as a guard for a new mall. He slept in a six-person dorm in town and returned to the village on weekends. His dorm smelled of rancid oil, urine and unwashed bodies. He could not rid his blankets of the stink. He longed to see the stars of his childhood village, which were now snubbed out by plumes of coal factory soot. He dreamt of running naked through the millet fields that had become highways and parking lots. He wanted to feel small and protected by the mountains that now guarded his parents’ gravestones. He even missed hearing the great leader’s voice as he ate canteen food with the other men. He dreamed of returning to school to stimulate his mind, but there was never enough money or time for that.

The new government encouraged spending and trade, and soon all kinds of goods appeared. Om returned to the village every week with bright toys, new snacks and shiny gadgets that he found in the brightly lit stores. He bought his children a globe of the world and watched them mouth the names of places they heard at school: Moscow, Karachi, Barcelona. Their little fingers spread wide and spanned the distance from their home to these faraway lands. Om had never heard such places spoken aloud, and hearing them from his own children took away his breath.

His young wife fell sick so often that Om lost his security guard job in the city. He took to wandering the streets of town, knocking on doors, looking for work. He gravitated towards the river and often found himself in the middle of the bridge.

Om could lose himself in the rippling mass, seeing feasts and wine and the firm flesh of pretty young maidens. He would stay until policemen harassed him. “Go home, old man,” they yelled, and only then Om would think of his children, about their sticky hands and their wide eyes, and he sulked back to his pitiful sleeping mat, ashamed and anxious.

That winter was harsh, and the freeze had settled for weeks. He was cold, but could not afford coal for the heater. His ulcer burned, and his throat ached like a raw wound. The city was growing bigger and glossier all the time, with new buildings and roads appearing overnight, and cheery new shops where new signs and toys rotated constantly.

Om peered into restaurant after restaurant. He saw families huddled around steaming bowls of soup. Where was all this wealth coming from, and why didn’t he have any? He felt the river rise and the tarn overflow, and imagined himself being carried off by the rapids.

Om entered the next noodle shop he saw and sat down beside the window. A small plate of pickled radishes sat on the table. He picked up one vinegary sliver and put it into his mouth. Its tartness jerked his muscles awake, and sent him straight back to the stunted apples of his childhood, the ones ruined by their brown rings of frost.

A waitress appeared. Her cheeks were flushed from the heat of the kitchen.

He couldn’t leave now. He was too embarrassed. As she pursed her lips and tapped her foot, he took his time with the menu. He finally settled on a big bowl of noodles with two meat dishes, one mutton and one beef, and a plate of winter squash with boiled carrots, to which he added stewed beets, mulled wine and roasted peanuts. He watched her as she took down his order, but she revealed no reaction. She’s a village girl, he realized.

“Add another bottle of mulled wine,” he commanded, warming up now. He clinked the last of the coins in his coat pocket to an old patriotic tune and studied the other customers as if he were the shop-owner.

Later, left alone with his feast, he looked down at his purple hands. He cupped them around the hot noodle bowl and brought it up to his face. The hot broth scalded the tip of his tongue, but no bother. Slowly, ceremoniously, he began to eat.

The Lady of Dien Bien Phu and the Senegalese Giant

10 November 2017

Categories: Fiction

She sat by the window of her hillside stilt house with a puddle of afternoon sunlight in her lap, her hands resting on a spindle across her thighs. The wall clock chimed five times. In another hour, the fog would move in now that it was the month of March, and the warmth of the day and the last glimmer of sun would be gone. She would wake up in the early morning and the fog still hung in the valley and the cold made a film of ice in the basin out back.

Her left hand holding a pile of fiber white as cotton, and with her right hand she pulled the fibers whose end was tied to a hook on the tip of the spindle’s shaft, pulling and stopping to twirl the spindle, and the fiber spun gaining its length and the spindle slowly dropped. She paused and wound the twisted yarn onto the spindle. A deep, drumming sound had her look out the window. Down by the creek that flowed around the foot of the hill a ruffed grouse, dappled and gray, was beating its wings rapidly. She listened to its maddening drumroll as it stood on a log and realized that it was its breeding season. It got down from the log and started feeding on the coarsely-toothed leaves of the blue boneset. They grew on the moist edge of the creek, bursting violet and blue with their fluffy-looking flowers, mixing in with low-mounded bluebeard that was flowering in a profusion of blue mist.

The creek flowed through a ravine between two hills. The water was running low before the rainy season which came in April and in the creek’s shallow riffles, water willow grew in large colonies. The banks were rocky and slippery. Years ago, she had broken her ankle when she came down to fetch water. In their rock-strewn crevices and weathered crust, limestone fern sprung out in masses, verdant fronds a somber green in the deep damp shade.

Beyond the rocky bank where the next hill dropped gently to an arc, the sun reddened the dip of the hill above the valley floor. She squinted into the glaring hillside as she heard children’s singing. A giant silhouette followed by five small silhouettes descended the hill in single file. The children’s singsong voices drifted across the air:

Father’s presence

Immovable mountain

Mother’s love

Vast ocean

A healthy tree

Always lush with leaves

A child’s legacy

The giant stopped upstream at the foot of the hill and the children broke off running back toward their hamlet. The seven-foot-tall man always attracted the hamlet children when they saw him. Come look! Mr. Ibou is here! He would stop and speak to them, the Viet children, the Thai children, in their mother tongue. Yet he spoke French when he conversed with her because he did not trust his Vietnamese—pitiable, he said—to make an intelligent talk.

It was Wednesday. His son would arrive at this time, carrying water in two metal pails to fill her earthen vat, always fetching water upstream, as told by his father, where the creek’s water was clean before it got soiled by the washing of clothes and the scrubbing of cooking utensils from the Thai families who lived on the other hill. Ibou had let his son bring her fresh water every week since he became older. He must be sixty-five now, five years older than she. His son was slightly taller than an average Viet or Thai man, but he was ox-strong. Coal-black and strong. She had heard that when the baby was born, people screamed at the tiny creature not red as a normal baby but soot black with dark, frizzy hair. The medical cadre who midwifed the childbirth said, “He takes on his father’s gene and not a tiny trait from his Thai mother. This is normal, I assure you. Nothing evil.” They called the baby, “Dam.” Black in Thai. A healthy baby and now an incredibly strong man in his thirties. Once two buffalos locked horns, grinding and ramming each other. Hamlet people thronged around them, yelling and beating drums to break them up, and then they dumped straw on the beasts’ heads and burned the straw. But the buffalos stayed locked. Dam walked up to them, grabbed their horns and pushed them apart.

Now she climbed down the wooden ladder outside the house and stood under the shade of the Ylang-Ylang tree. She could see Ibou crossing the grassland toward her lone house, the tall red grass blazing in the setting sun, his silhouette bobbing as he moved along the creek’s bank through a grove of blood banana, the dark red splotches on their fronds bloodstained-looking in the brightness. It was so quiet she could hear the creek, and the air was suddenly tinged with a custard fragrance, heady and clawing. She shivered as she would every time she stood in the tree’s shade and its scent would come, light and momentary.

The old man finally emerged into her front yard after climbing a flight of rock steps. He carried the pails like tin toys by the wooden handles, as he headed to the earthen vat that sat in the shadowed space under the stilt house’s floor. He paused as he passed her. “Comment allez vous, madame?”

“Cava bien,” she said. “Et ta famille?”

He came toward her and set the pails down side by side in the sun. “The family is fine. I’m glad you asked because the wife is a grandmother and the son is a father now.”

“I was thinking about Dam when I saw you coming.” She looked up at his dark face glistening with sweat, a childlike face free of wrinkles. “When was the baby born?”

“Sometimes after midnight last night. The wife and a woman neighbor delivered the baby.”

“I cooked something for him. I thought I’d give it to him when he came. Can you take it back to his family?”

She meant the family of first and second generations living under the same roof.

“Sure, madam. The family will love it. The wife says, ‘That lady of Dien Bien Phu can cook Thai dishes so well I forgot that she is Viet.’” He bent so he could see her better in the shade because of the sun in his eyes. “The wife always says, ‘the lady of Dien Bien Phu’ when she speaks about you. I told the wife, ‘She has not aged.’” He scratched his white-stubbly chin. “True, madam, you have not.”

She touched her paisley headscarf in lavender wrapped tight around her rolled-up hair. Let loose, it would fall to her waist in a luxuriant curtain of black. “Merci.” She looked toward the vat under the house and back at the pails. “You don’t need to make another trip. We had a good rain last night and it filled the basin in the back.” It rained heavily in the previous night for a change. When the rainy season set in next month, she would not see his son again for some time until the dry season in October which lasted through March.

Ibou picked up the pails of water. “I’m going to fill the vat and I’ll be on my way.”

“Please come up to the house. The pot is heavy for me.”

“Yes, madam.”

Going up the ladder she could see him dip the wooden scoop into the vat and drink a healthy swig from it. He had to bend almost touching the ground with his knees just to fill the vat. Barefooted she entered the house, the bamboo-slat floor cool from the air rising up from the open space, uncluttered and clean, beneath the house. Momentarily she stood, feeling the coolness on her skin and then went around the floor loom to the kitchen hearth that sat in a corner near the second window. She liked a house airy and well-lit, so when she weaved during the day ample sunlight would come in through the two large awning windows, each propped open with a bamboo rod.

She lifted the lid on a tall earthenware cooking pot when Ibou appeared at the door. He ducked as he came through the door. The floor shuddered. His head brushed the traverse rod, clanking the metal loops from which dangled balls of colored wool. He stood, hunched, as if to make himself smaller.

“I have never come into your house before since I knew you,” he said, his white eyeballs darting left and right. “It must be thirty-four years now. Oui, madam?”

She believed it was. That year, 1960, she left Ha Noi and came back to the valley on the sixth anniversary of the victory of Dien Bien Phu. She did not come from here; but she had come here in 1954 to be a tiny, insignificant part of the military campaign against the French Empire during the siege of Dien Bien Phu as a 20-year-old singer and dancer of an entertainment troupe.

“Had it not been for the excavation in 1960,” she said, smiling, “you and I would’ve never crossed paths. And I would’ve bitten my tongue in two if I said it meant nothing to me to know someone like you who had shed blood on the soil of this valley.”

Ibou nodded solemnly, straightening his back. His head hit the rod and the metal loops clinked. “I came back here in 1959. It has been my home since. But I never thought I would find another soul here, like me, who had come out of that hell alive.” He wiped sweat off his face with the sleeve of his old army shirt, its original olive color now a dull yellow. “When I saw you in that crowd at the excavation, I knew you weren’t Thai. But there were no Viets at that time living on the hills, just Thais. I had to ask around.”

“I believe I was the first Viet making my home here.” She crimped her lips, remembering. “Some years ago, I heard about a man who claimed that he was a Dien Bien Phu war veteran. He had married a Thai girl and lived in Pom Loi hamlet.”

It sat in a cluster of hamlets along Pom Loi creek that flowed east-west. Westward it went as far as Provincial Road 41 dotted with hamlets, red dusted on a windy day from the surrounding hills. Ibou lived somewhere among those hills.

“So you met your compatriot, madam?”

“Yes. It turned out he’d seen French aircraft shot down repeatedly over the valley by our antiaircraft artillery. He was only a civilian living in one of those hamlets on the east side of Dien Bien Phu valley and there used to be a Viet Minh’s antiaircraft deployment ground nearby. He looked embarrassed when he told me the truth that when he was drunk, he’d tell hamlet children that he was an antiaircraft gunner and show them a long aircraft wing that now sat on the roof of his house. He told them it came from a French airplane he shot down. The wing had been converted into a trough to collect rainwater. Sometimes he’d take the children to a plain a kilometer from his home, where the children saw several wrist-sized cartridge cases among a handful of hoes. He told them the cases came from the 37mm antiaircraft projectiles and the hoes were the tools with which the bo doi—soldiers—used to dig trenches and their deployment shelters.”

She told Ibou most of the battle remnants as weapons could still be found aboveground, but not the human remains.

“I know that, madam.”

Between 1959 and 1960, she remembered, local authorities had begun moving the dead’s remains in the valley to the newly built cemeteries, one of them A1 Cemetery at the foot of the old A1 Hill. Most of the tombs had no names on the headstones. A few months after she had begun her new life in the valley, she heard news of the excavation. It was a hot and muggy summer day at the digging site where a large crowd of local people packed, watching the district reconstruction team digging an old trench, 30 meters long, near the western side of A1 Hill. Sometime before noon there came yells. A crewman had just shoveled a leg bone out of the dirt. Then more bones. In whole, in pieces. Then a human skull, then another. Past noon they had unearthed thirteen skeletons. One of them was still in sitting positions, clothes tattered clinging to bones, a PPSh-41 submachine gun held in his hands now bare of flesh, four grenades strapped to his belt, a Tiger Balm little jar in one shirt pocket, a fountain pen clipped to his other shirt pocket, and a pouch made of parachute cloth. Inside the pouch was a lock of hair. For days she kept thinking about the lock of hair. She imagined its owner, a girl, perhaps her age—for most of them who had joined the military campaign against the French in Dien Bien Phu were young girls. A girl still living with a fishhook in her memory day after day, from waking moments to haunting dreams that had no scents, no colors, only a lingering melancholy of a love story half real, half remembered.

Now she lifted her face to Ibou, her hand touching her brow as if to pinch a fleeting thought. “I didn’t tell you this. But I knew who you were when I saw you at the excavation site.”

Ibou drew up his shoulders. “How?” He grinned, his white teeth gleaming. “Before you met me?”

She left the hearth and went to the wall between the two windows. She pointed at the graphite-on-paper drawing framed in black bamboo. It was just after dawn in that 27cm x 20 cm drawing, when her entertainment team was performing in the heavy fog before the enemy airplanes would take to air. The ravine was the stage and the artillery men of the 45th Artillery Regiment, sitting on the hillside, watched. The 105mm battery units had toiled all night building out their emplacements and shelters and now sat, rapt, hugging their knees, watching the performers who sang The Ballad of Cannon Pulling, accompanied by a sole accordion. That only instrument was a war booty the commissar of the 351st Heavy Division had donated to the performers. It had a red color, she remembered, carved with the words: “Victory of Him Lam Hills,” the first French stronghold at Dien Bien Phu to fall on March 13, 1954. She could never forget the moment she stopped singing and bowed to the men on the hillside. Most of them had nodded off; others were dragging on their cigarettes to keep their eyes open. The accordion musician pulled her aside and said, “Let’s play something soft. Let’s not disturb their sleep.”

Now she waited until Ibou had studied the drawing up close. She could see his mouth move with wordless sound. The mouth stayed open because his gaze shifted to one side of the scene where three French prisoners, escorted by two small bo doi, were also watching the performance. One prisoner was a black figure who stood among them like a tree. The figure could have passed for a lone tree had it not been for the strong graphite lines that showed the contour of a man standing so tall and black like a giant in the land of the Lilliputians against a pale, translucent fog that, without him, the drawing would lose its charm.

She had expected him to say something as he fixed his gaze on the drawing, his legs bent, hands bracing his knees. Finally, half turning his face to her, he spoke, “I see you and me in there and I was thinking how forty years less one month have passed like a blink of an eye.”

“You surprised me,” she said, suddenly perked up. “Forty years less one month?”

“Mid-April, 1954. I don’t remember the day though. What I remember is the rain. I still hear its sound—not like when you are inside a house—no madam. Primitive sound. It made you shake like a leaf hearing it in the forest.”

She looked at the drawing. Just fog. Then, yes, rain would come. Morning, afternoon, night. It came without warning and fell for days on end. She remembered the black giant who drew everyone’s gaze as he was shepherded through the ravine at the end of the performance. “How did you become a prisoner?”

“Our emplacement was overrun,” he said, straightening up. He half-turned his body toward the framed drawing as though he did not want to be so nakedly tall facing her.

“You were an artillery man?”

“Yes, madam.” His eyes became still, like he had just recalled something but decided not to tell it. He blinked.

“You were captured on that day?” She motioned her head toward the drawing.

“Two weeks before that. It was on the first day of the Viet Minh’s second offensive. March 30. Our side called it ‘Battle of the Five Hills.’ Dominique 1 and Dominique 2, and Eliane 1, Eliane 2, Eliane 4. I know your side had different names for them.”

“Yes.” She nodded. “Eliane 2 is our A1 Hill. The terrible hill.”

“But on that day,” Ibou said, glancing at the drawing, “my fellow soldiers and I were taken to the rear, roughly fifteen kilometers away where every day we would no longer hear the sounds of artillery and fighter-bombers. Don’t ask me if I missed them, madam.”

She smiled. “The war might not have missed you either.”

“I thought about that too. And about why we say that we never miss it.” He leaned on his arm with his fist resting on the wall above the drawing. He bent his head to a hand-span from the drawing. “Did he miss it? The artist who drew this. Are you a friend of him, madam?”

She put her hand over her lips, thought, then said, “We were lovers.”

“Oh-la-la.” Ibou turned his body and looked down into her eyes.

She laughed lightly when she saw his excitement. She still heard her spoken words trailing in her head. For forty years they had been locked inside her.

Ibou trailed his long forefinger across the drawing’s bottom corner where the artist signed his name. Le Giang. “I recognize his name.”

“You knew him?”

“If that’s his name.”

“His alias. We didn’t use our real names during the military campaign for different reasons. One of them is identity secrecy.”

“I knew him,” Ibou said softly. “He gave me a drawing he did—for me.”

“How interesting.” She inhaled deeply. “What did he draw for you?”

“A charcoal-on-paper sketch. Smaller than this here. I believe 15cm by 20cm. He gave it a title too.”

“In Vietnamese? Or French?”

“Vietnamese. But he told me what it meant.” Ibou frowned then smiled. “Portrait of Brother Tak-Mak.”

She chuckled hearing him in Vietnamese. “So he drew you. But ‘Brother Tak-Mak?’”

Ibou kept nodding then he laughed. His laugh sounded like a rumble. “That was the name they called me after my capture. During the two weeks in the valley they cross-examined me and I cooperated. I gave them the positions of our artillery emplacements in the valley and the concentrated firepower of our headquarters. But they already knew that. What they wanted to know was our mobile artillery. They had no knowledge of it until they launched their first offensive on March 13. We hid those mobile units and only revealed them when the Viet Minh came at us, and we inflicted heavy casualties on their infantry. During the interrogation there was an interpreter. The interrogator asked a lot about the deploying schemes of our ghost artillery. Our transit plan for it—where and how. He kept saying ‘thac mac’ and the interpreter had a hard time interpreting the words. Once I knew what they meant, I spoke the words when I had things I was curious to know about. They laughed and started calling me ‘Brother Tak-Mak.’”

His excitement made her feel lively. Forty years less one month. She smiled at the phrase just recalled. “I’d love to see that drawing he did for you.”

“I recognized his signed name. I thought that was his real name all of these years.”

“His real name? Tran Khang.”

Ibou mused. “He told me he was an artist-reporter for the newspaper of the 351st Heavy Division. He looked so young. But what a gifted young man.”

“We were of the same age. Both of us were twenty at that time.”

Ibou tilted his head as he looked down to seek her eyes. “Where is he now?”

“He was sent to the South shortly after our victory at Dien Bien Phu. The North had prepared for the infiltration of the South as soon as Viet Nam was divided into North and South by the Geneva Convention in 1954.” She looked back toward the drawing. “I have not heard from him since.”

Ibou dropped his voice. “You never married, madam?”

Her lips formed the word ‘No’ as she shook her head. She caught him gazing at her and he blinked.

“You’re most beautiful,” he said, his face and his eyes gone soft. “You must have loved him very much. Had he ever drawn you, madam?”

“I’d need to ask him that, wouldn’t I?”

Her fluty laugh had Ibou nodding, then he, too, laughed.

Ibou left carrying back in his now empty pails the food that Miss Dien Bien Phu had cooked for his son’s family. In one pail he had a lidded bamboo basket that held glutinous rice wrapped inside a banana leaf, having cooked with magenta-leaf plant’s extract which had a purple color that turned the glutinous rice into a deep purple. When he took the basket from her he inhaled deeply the banana leaf’s scent and, after asking her “May I?”, pinched a morsel of glutinous rice the color of red-violet and put it in his mouth. He shook his head as the ever-faint sweetness from the rice slowly cut through his taste buds. The famed Dien-Bien rice, plain or glutinous, that he had for years eaten and loved from his Thai wife’s cooking. In the other pail was a tall crock glazed in teal color. Inside was a whole duck, roasted golden, having been baked with sour wampee leaves packed in its gut which was sewn tight; and when he lifted the lid, a warm, lemon-tangy scent of the leaves seeping through with a darkly rich smell of cooked meat made him moan.

Her culinary flair always impressed him; but her weaving artistry was what left him in awe. In the early years she sold her tapestries on consignment at the market that convened at dawn on each Sunday along Provincial Road 41, where Thai women dressed in black satin skirts, coming from neighboring hamlets, sold poultry and pigs and sun-dried fish, wild tobacco and cottonseed and sugarcane. Then she made tapestries on order only. Once his son rented a packhorse to carry a large tapestry, rolled up into a long, heavy bundle and laid across the horse’s back, and rode along the twisted, dusty provincial road to meet a bus which delivered local merchandise to unknown places in the outside world. A few times, Ibou recalled, the addresses on the bundles read France, Japan, China. The locals called the famed weaver, “The Lady of Dien Bien Phu.” Her mother was a weaver in Ha Noi, who taught her how to weave when she was a teen. One of the intellectual few who joined the Viet Minh’s military campaign in 1953-54, she was university educated and had a sublime voice that she used to entertain the bo doi as a singer and dancer. Ibou never asked her why she chose Dien Bien Phu as her new home. Perhaps she wanted to return to the valley, he thought, because treasured memories of camaraderie—and perhaps love—manifested themselves in hills and creeks and in the pristine white of mountain ebony.

The sun was setting low behind the Pe Luong mountain as he went through a wooded gully. Near a bamboo grove he heard sharp whistled notes, tinkling, and looked up to catch a bamboo warbler, white-throated and brown, singing ti-ti-teer, ti-ti-teer, and its ringing cadence followed him until he went past the bamboo thicket and picked up the creek again. Ibou felt thirsty. The creek’s bank was crawling with birthwort, twining on the ground with their woody stems, and walking past he could smell a foul scent from their pale, trumpet-shaped flowers.

The creek, after meandering through the wooded gullies, came out into a grassland and scrub. Red grass, tiger grass, wild sugarcane. The trees and shrubbery ancient and tough. They were fire-resistant and drought-tolerant. The turkey-berry, the yellow-wood, the Indian gooseberry. In the distance he could see A1 Hill silhouetted against the red sun. He followed the creek hearing it bubbling as it coursed between A1 Hill and another hill angling from it. Phony Hill. The Viet Minh called it F Hill. Every time he passed by here, seeing where Pom Loi Creek ran through the gap of A1 Hill and F Hill, he felt an inexplicable gloom that made him often shake his head. That gap was a pre-registered spot by his two batteries when he was a gunner. Manned by West African gunners like himself, the two batteries sat on the hills of Dominique 3 and Dominique 4, looking southward to A1 Hill and F Hill. When the Viet Minh’s second offensive opened up on the evening of March 30, 1954, his batteries pounded the gap where the bo doi massed. They pounded until the spent shells piled up waist high around them. The carnage left countless bodies of bo doi along that infamous creek. He, too, narrowly escaped death when he was taken prisoner and trekked back to the rear, 15 kilometers away, to get food provision. They moved along the notorious creek that flowed through the gorge between the hills whose brows and flanks had been burned by napalm and constant shelling to a glaring red. On one pre-registered spot they got shelled. One bo doi was killed.

The sun just set behind A1 Hill and the hillcrest glowed red. The bare, red-dirt hill had taken years to come back and was now thick and green with teak trees. Gone from the hilltop were the bamboo crosses the Viet Minh had erected and draped them with white parachutes—those fell into their hands, courtesy of the French parachuted misdrops—to commemorate their dead in multitudes. Many of the dead, pounded repeatedly by the artillery to eternal damnation, were buried most of the time not in whole, in cavities that were hurriedly dug, for the diggers might get killed at any moment by thundering artillery.

When he reached A1 Hill, he stood looking up at the summit where a lone banyan etched its skeletal trunk against the sunset. Black on red. The skeleton of a dead tree. Beneath it used to be an underground bunker, large enough to hold an infantry company, built with bricks and ironwood from rubble of the old colonial governor’s house. During the siege, the French rifle companies who defended the hill, would retreat into the shellproof bunker each time the Viet Minh charged up the hill, and call for artillery. From D1 and D2 hills and from the central sector in the valley, Ibou remembered, the cannons roared and the bare banyan being used as pre-registered marker had stood miraculously untouched many times like a sinister witness of one slaughter after another. It had rotted over the years and became a columnar tree whose core was a hollow where birds and sometimes rodents sought shelter.

He went past the cemetery at the foot of the hill. In the misty dusk he could see the yellow blossoms of the dwarf Ylang-Ylang shrub lining the solitary path that cut through the burial ground. He thought their flowers were beautiful. Long-stalked, sea-star shaped, with each thin curly petal drooping. He thought of Miss Dien Bien Phu standing under the Ylang-Ylang tree waiting for him to arrive with the creek’s water. He couldn’t help thinking of that distant past 40 years to date. The drawing she showed had brought it back to life, and that past had quietly superimposed itself on the landscape that suddenly lost its familiarity around him.

Cicadas were singing in the clumps of camphor trees beyond the hill. Soon they would ease their chorus when the evening fog shrouded the valley. He had seen native visitors coming each year to the cemetery during the summer months, searching for the names of their deceased kin on each headstone, most bearing no names, looking them up in vain on the single stele engraved with a handful of names identified, the rest unknown. Many of the visitors came from distant places; yet, all came with a same wish: to find peace in an identified name. They found none.

Ibou often avoided coming this way, for the cemetery made him think of his compatriots—the West African gunners—and his fellow legionnaires. All the fallen ones. Thousands of them had become dust under the soil of this valley. There was no cemetery for them. So many had died just in the Viet Minh’s first offensive they were to be buried on the spot. No more ceremonial burial in the central sector’s graveyard, where one day shellfire burst open all the graves and the smells were so bad the rotted remains had to be re-buried alongside the new dead in mass graves excavated by bulldozers. He heard the Viet Minh prisoners call the mass graves, “Ma Tây.” The Tây Graveyard. Years later, after living with the Viet, he learned many slangs and coined words the Viet reserved for those they despised. “Tây” was a demeaning word they call the French. But the Viet was a peculiar race. They called him “Tây Den” when they captured him. Black Tây. That went not only for his Africans but also for his fellow Algerians and Moroccans. Their swarthy complexion, their coal-black skin scared the Viet, especially his own Senegalese whose faces were marked by tribal knife scars. “Tây rach mat.” “Scarface Tây.” When he had been accepted into their culture, the word “Tây” remained but took on a friendly meaning. The hamlet natives called him, “Brother Black Tây,” and when he got older it was, “Ong Tây Den.” Mr. Black Tây.

He went up the provincial road. In the twilight cricket frogs were calling from the vegetation bordering the road. Pebble-like clicks filling the air. A flock of bar-backed partridge were feeding in the roadside grass. At his looming sight they bolted, scattering into the underbrush. He went on. Moments later he heard the male partridge whistling. Ti-hu-ti-hu-ti-hu. The flock had run toward Nam Rom River in the distance. Parallel with the provincial road, the river ran north-south through the heart of Dien Bien Phu valley. The Thai who were the first settlers in the valley named the river “Nam Yum.” His Thai wife explained to him that the Thai word, “Nam” meant river, and “Yum” referred to the Spanish cedar. She said the river originated in the woods of Spanish cedar and thus bore the name Nam Yum in Thai and Nam Rom in Vietnamese. The River of Spanish Cedar.

The river crested this morning because of the heavy rain the night before. During the siege of Dien Bien Phu he had seen it overflowing many times. The swollen river would rush headlong and its cold water, the natives said, could wash clean the horses’ hooves and soak through the buffalos’ hide. One morning in late March during the siege the river crested. From D1 Hill, he watched through binoculars the cresting river and saw that all the shallow graves that had been dug the day before along the muddy bank to bury the dead legionnaires had been swept away.

Then in February of this year, shortly after Tet, workers of the National State Farm, whose task was to modernize the entire valley for farming and cultivation of edible plants, unearthed 17 skeletons on the bank of Nam Rom River. When he heard of the news his gut feeling told him those were legionnaires’ skeletons. There used to be barbed-wire fences along the east bank of the river, where the French High-Command headquarters sat. The legionnaires used to bathe and fetch water from the river before the siege began. After that it was suicidal day or night to venture outside the barbed-wire fences. Sometimes though patrols and sorties met their fate and the dead were quickly buried where they fell.

For two days Ibou visited the riverbank site where a pavilion was set up by the local authorities to hold the human remains in 17 tieu sanh—stoneware coffins. They had washed the bones, kept the tattered personal belongings in nylon bags, and burned incense sticks in a rice-grain filled bowl for each coffin. One of his close friends, a Senegalese rifleman, was killed in a bloody encounter during a patrol and was buried, he believed, in a spot on the Nam Rom bank.

On the first day Ibou saw a Vietnamese medical doctor overseeing a group of men washing dirt off the bones on a sieve, and Ibou believed that they were looking for teeth. The doctor told him that the dental remains would tell of the race and, based on their worn-down state, determine the human age. He watched them for half a day sorting through bone fragments—shine bone, thigh bone, wrist bone, skull—and observed them measuring the bones. On the second day Ibou came back when the examining team had just finished documenting each personal item which had been found with the human remains. Plastic sew-through buttons, brass buttons, diamond-shaped Legion insignias showing rank and chevrons, black hobnail boots. Then the medical doctor made his announcements. The skeleton remains belongs to deceased Caucasians, namely Europeans, based on the bone characteristics and dental records. The dead were not Vietnamese, evidenced by the combat boot size, the insignias, the French army’s driver licenses, the bronze wrist bangles carved with French names. The doctor estimated forty years for the burial, judging from the attrition of bones. Ibou thought of his dead friend and of thousands of dead legionnaires and believed it was a miracle that these remains had turned up. They would now receive a proper burial back home, wherever it might be, and their souls would rest in peace.

The male partridge called again. It was too far down the riverbank for him to see, just its whistling in seesaw rhythm rippling through the air. Another call, loud and crackling, echoed from behind him. It came up again among the coppice of teak on A1 Hill. Somewhere uphill a laughingthrush was calling as it foraged in the grove canopy.

A misty black shape loomed on the hillcrest. The black carcass of a wrecked tank. The Bazeille tank. He knew all the names of the tank squadron. His artillery crews covered for them with fire support. The 10-tank squadron each had its name painted white on the side of the tank. The black remains of tank Bazeille had become a landmark. Beyond A1 Hill stretched the bluish folds of Ta Lung Mountain on the eastern horizon. Mist was thickening. He tried to make out a thin line that in daytime showed through the green of the forested mountainside like a faded chalk line that dipped and rose, disappearing then re-appearing. The old cannon-pulling trail. Had the authorities decided to restore it, that remnant of war? Otherwise time and nature would eventually erase it. He had heard The Ballad of Cannon Pulling sung when an escorting bo doi proudly explained its meaning and inspiration to him and his fellow prisoners that morning in the ravine. The ballad and the epic achievement of such determination had become a lore. How they had toiled for days and nights manhandling the 2.5-ton cannons up that mountain range and then install them on those mountain forward slopes, fooling the French intelligence and its mighty artillery brain trust. Neither he nor his superiors know anything about this—how the enemy had pulled off such a feat.

The first time he had insight into the scope of this grand scheme was the night they were done with interrogating him. They had grilled him for two weeks. Sometimes the regular interpreter was filled in by another man. Ibou thought he was a boy. Thin, pale skinned, profuse black hair thatching his brow and his ears. He rarely smiled. Ibou never saw him laugh but smile on rare occasions. Then only his lips curled up, the eyes lost their steeliness, and the face melted into a pure, youthful vulnerability. Perhaps he tried to guard his vulnerability by not laughing nor smiling. The steely look in his eyes wasn’t unfriendly. But Ibou would feel like his soul was being probed whenever he met the young man’s gaze. The young man sat in the interrogation only three times. During the breaks he would remain on the chair and draw pictures of the battles, of human beings toiling and suffering in the trenches, the underground shelters. A war artist, a frontline reporter. He told Ibou in his soft, low voice. Ibou was drawn to him. The young man was reticent yet an attentive listener. He spoke very little only when he must, but Ibou found in him a kind soul who saw something beyond beauty and repugnance in humans and nature sometimes brought together in beautiful unison, sometimes in horrific destruction for both. One night they questioned Ibou on the French counter-battery fire, which they admitted, was superior to their own. After that Ibou said he was “tak-mak” to know how they had succeeded in lugging all the heavy artillery pieces up to the mountains, how they managed to dodge the French counter-fire artillery. The youth opened a notebook and showed Ibou drawings and sketches done in pencil and charcoal. He dated each work and signed his name. Le Giang. Ibou studied the drawings of the bo doi pulling or dropping ropes on the unwieldy guns—the 105mm field guns, the 37mm antiaircraft guns—on steep hill slopes, some at hair-raising 45 degrees. He looked at one pencil drawing entitled “Mock Artillery” which showed an open-field deployment of four crude-looking 105mm cannons. It dawned on him why they were not hidden in casemates like all of the Viet Minh’s heavy field artillery. The youth explained that each of the guns in the drawing was made out of a tree trunk, painted black, and set uptilted in an open field visible to the enemy. He said in his precise French, enunciating each word, “Those who deserve praise in our artillery division are not the forward observers, the watch tower observers or the gunners. They are men who live and die on the mock deployment ground, because they draw fire from your artillery and your fighter-bombers.” There were always people in each drawing, each sketch, Ibou recalled. And they stayed on Ibou’s mind. It must be their gestures or the look on their faces. Ibou could not forget them. Then as he took back the notebook, the youth said, “The people I drew are dead now.” Ibou thought then said, “Vous dessinez les fantômes?”

“Yes,” the youth said, “I drew ghosts.” Later that evening the youth returned when Ibou was resting. He gave Ibou a sheet of paper. “For you,” he said tersely. His mouth agape, Ibou stared at his own face in a charcoal sketch, at the faint lines across his cheeks, his tribal knife scars. Portrait of Brother Tak-Mak. He clasped his big hands around the youth’s. “Merci mon ami. Merci beaucoup.” At dawn he was taken to the rear. He wanted to say goodbye to the youth but was not allowed to. He asked for a piece of nylon and wrapped the drawing with it. He had felt something he never had before. He felt significant, a self-worth that had eluded him since childhood.

The red in the evening sky was gone and the hillcrests became thin lines in the fog. It cloaked the riverbank and the air turned chilly. Ibou could barely make out the manioc plots at the foot of A1 Hill. He felt the weight of the pails in his hands. He must get on home. His wife, his son’s family would soon enjoy Miss Dien Bien Phu’s cooking. Had the artist youth ever drawn her portrait? Ibou thought as he hurried up the provincial road. Was he still alive?

END

Bad Bets

3 April 2017

Categories: Fiction

Jay counts out her regrets in the grooves of one-dollar casino chips, spends half of them at the blackjack table with the lowest entry and loses the rest at poker. She doesn’t know how to play poker. Her fingers twitch across the felt surface, over and over in increasingly tighter circles like water swirling down a drain, or the lines of a snail’s shell, or a woman wandering, not remembering where she is, until she’s just barely moving, scratching at the surface.

The man one seat over jabs her in the side. She tells him she doesn’t have any more money and gets up, tipping the wooden chair over and nearly spilling his beer. She’s got terrible luck, anyway. Her mother should’ve named her Jinx instead.

On the walk home, the city moves. The lights flash. People smoke cigarettes. She doesn’t see.

This is how she grieves: with her eyes closed and her pockets empty. By scrounging for quarters under the paint-splattered cushions and the tiered shelves of dead plants in her apartment. Phee hid them everywhere before she left. On days when Jay is angry, when her guts twist into knots and food is flavorless and music is an electric needle in her brain, she thinks that maybe Phee did that on purpose, to give her something to do. So she’d spend her life literally picking up the pieces.

She’s probably right, too. Jay is angry most days, and Phee loved metaphors almost as much as she loved art and hated plastic, which she decided is hollow and empty and not artistic at all. Hence their ruined furniture.

She was a person with religious dedication to the strange. Jay could not explain her to anyone that asked, and Phee liked it that way. She hid things to purposefully forget where they are, bought plants to watch them wither. On their first anniversary, she got Jay a rabbit. The sound of the wrapping paper being torn from its wooden crate nearly stilled its heart from fright, but no. That came later.

“This is art,” Phee told her, all smiles, their hands wrapped together around the handle of a too-small knife. It took three tries before the rabbit’s legs stopped jerking like a fish on a line.

“Life is beautiful because it ends.”

Even on days when Jay isn’t angry, she can admit that Phee had been out of her mind.

She should’ve seen it coming, then, but that’s always easy to say after the fact. Above everything else that Phee loved – fireworks, the texture of acrylic paint, the smell of anise – she adored endings the most. That’s all anything is, she’d said. Life is like a string of firecrackers, and those moments of violent, reckless sensation that end the moment they start are the most valuable of all. Nothing means anything until it’s over.

But you never really expect someone to kill herself for art.

She made it a spectacle, her body slick with gasoline and set aflame in the steel matrices of unfinished construction work, a living inferno bright enough to see from the highway two miles south. It made the papers. Phee would hate that now, if she knew. She’d wanted to disappear without a trace – there are no notes, no videos, no pictures. She’d never given a gift that could be kept, not once. She wanted an ending, and if she could’ve taken every piece of her, every desiccated vine and spray of paint and hair from her brush, she would’ve. It’s only because Jay had been home that she hadn’t.

Now, Jay thinks she should probably just finish the job. The arm of the couch is digging into the back of her skull and she doesn’t remember lying down. The whole damn house should burn, and everything in it, herself included. She’s sort of surprised Phee hadn’t killed her first to take the memories with her, too.

There’s a reason we count down our lives in little endings, second after second, over and over again. Anything that lasts is worthless. That’s what Phee said, before she burned herself alive to prove it.

Jay knows she was crazy. Now, existing in the gap between start and finish that Phee left behind, she also thinks she was right.

She doesn’t have the same conviction though. Instead, she chips the colors off their walls, stays in most days, leaves sometimes to wander casinos on the west side of the city. She never gambled before Phee died. The first time came two days after on a whim, when she stared tight-lipped and rigid on the stool in front of the slots, pressing the button until she’d run out of money and the machine reminded her in blinking san-serif, “GAME OVER,” “GAME OVER,” “GAME OVER,” every time she tried to repeat the bet. Does that mean something? She’d wondered. Phee would’ve thought so.

But Phee has ended, and Jay is just stuck.

It’s nine in the morning. Someone’s car is smashed in an intersection, the windshield left fragmented on the pavement, and the traffic is abysmal. Jay watches the drama unfold until the SUV is towed and the backs of her eyelids are imprinted with the kaleidoscopic lights of the ambulance.

There’s a woman sitting on the curb when the wreckage is cleared. Two black mittens are forgotten at her side in favor of bare hands. She rubs her face and pushes the heels of her palms into her eyes for a long, long time.

When she finally looks up, Jay is already walking away, disappearing into the double glass doors of the casino. Her arms are numb with cold. She’s stopped wearing jackets on the short walk between her apartment and here. It’s too difficult to keep track of that many pockets in the face of too many grasping fingers.

Her feet drag against the gaudy red and gold carpet, and she finds that only the more expensive tables are open. The other regulars eye her wearily. After dozens of games without making a single dollar, most of the card players that recognize her see a walking black cat, or an open umbrella, or a ladder just waiting to step over them. The blackjack tables clear out before her butt can even hit the stool.

Today, though, she only has thirteen dollars, so she goes for the penny slots and sits behind a machine themed by some amalgamation of Asian cultures. The music is an insultingly stereotypical blend of synthesized bamboo flutes and guqin. She plays the lowest bet and taps the button. Dragon, lotus, dragon, gold. Nothing. She does it again. It takes two hours to burn through half her money, and a little over ten minutes past that to notice there’s someone standing behind her.

There’s no reason to think the woman from the car accident would’ve followed her, but Jay is somehow not surprised. The resignation in her posture had been complete, and telling. Miniscule flakes of glass still glitter on the polyester of her coat.

She doesn’t speak, though, just takes a seat at the machine next to her and stares at the flashing screen. Eventually, Jay hands her a dollar. They play in silence.

The woman’s name is Marie and that car had been the only thing she owned. It takes nearly ten days to find out that little bit of information, not that Jay made it a priority to do so. She ran out of money, as usual, and went to grab the bottle of complimentary water and take her leave when Marie dropped a wad of bills in her lap. After being handed two hundred dollars, Jay felt it only polite to ask her name. That’s when she told her about the car.

“Insurance paid out,” she explains. “Six thousand.”

“But don’t you need it?”

Marie just shrugs.

Bewildered, Jay stays for another hour before gathering enough of her wits to stand. She does so slowly, hoping to make it clear without having to say so that she’s only heading to the blackjack table and not trying to make a break for it. Marie seems to understand. They maneuver through the narrow aisles, and when Jay sits, the other patrons stand, grumbling under their breath. Marie doesn’t ask. She watches the game until Jay is fifty dollars down, and then she takes the seat on her left, sliding a couple of five-dollar chips forward.

She’s luckier, or maybe smarter, or maybe both. By the time Jay loses half her money, Marie has won it back. She wordlessly refills the stash like the ocean around a capsizing ship, Jay hauling water and Marie flooding it just as fast so that by the time the evening crowd starts to wander in, too many people for her liking, they’ve both broken even.

They walk out together. The wind is cold enough to steal their breath for a moment.

“Where are you staying?” Jay asks when Marie has followed her nearly home.

Again, Marie just shrugs, so Jay holds the door open for her when they reach her apartment.

Time is passing. Or at the very least, things are changing.

The first week Marie lives with her, it’s like she doesn’t. Things are mostly the same. She sleeps on the couch and wakes when Jay does, following her out the door to the casino. They return each night with the same amount of money, with the same expressions on their faces, like the day hasn’t happened at all.

In the middle of the second week, Marie hits a small jackpot on one of the twenty-five cent slots and buys them cheap beer that she drinks like mouthfuls of cough syrup. They only stay for a few hours that day, and then the alcohol weighs down their eyelids and draws yawns from their mouths.

Marie grimaces when she swallows the last half of the bottle in one go.

Jay catches the look and doesn’t ask, but Marie says anyway, “I hate beer. It reminds me of my sixteenth birthday.” When Jay doesn’t answer, she looks like she’s about to explain, her mouth parting, and Jay flinches like she’d lifted a hand to strike her.

It’s not that she doesn’t want to hear it, she says, it’s just that she doesn’t want to know, so they walk home in silence. Jay sways unsteadily at points until she’s guiding herself along the brick walls of fast food chains and office buildings by touch rather than sight. She falls asleep fully clothed.

When she wakes the next morning, achy and feeling like she hadn’t slept at all, there’s a plate of pancakes on the kitchen table.

“They’re a little flat,” Marie explains, “because there isn’t any baking powder in the cabinet.”

And then she resumes her meal without another word. Her eyes are determinedly fixed on a weathered novel borrowed from the bookshelf in the living room.

Jay is paralyzed in the doorway with one hand white-knuckled around its frame, pissed. Now there will be dishes in the sink, and she’ll have to buy more of the coffee she never drinks, and the kitchen will smell like food. Stiffly, she takes a seat and can’t put the words she wants to say into a coherent chain. She’s not sure if she can instill the sensation with any meaning, the one pinching at her from the inside like a nagging child; in fact, she’s fairly certain it doesn’t make any sense at all. After fifteen minutes, Marie stands and opens the window, washes the dishes, and goes out to buy coffee and baking powder.

Jay stares at her food and tries to wrap her fingers around the anger singing her nerves into stillness, but it keeps slipping from her like a fistful of smoke, the remnants of charred remains, and she can’t find a reason to complain, even though she wants to, so she eats the pancakes. Marie returns hours later. She looks ten years older and too tired for a trip to the store, but neither one mentions it.

More time passes. More breakfasts, more money spent. Coffee becomes a daily occurrence that Jay can’t find a reason to fight about. Outside, the air gets colder, enough to frost the sparse grass in the medians. The sun sets as if it’s grown impatient watching their daily comings and goings, lives measured in time passed rather than used, and the early darkness is like a magnet, pulling in more and more people to engage in gambling and drunkenness and debauchery until their time spent at the casino dwindles with the daylight hours. The bodies multiply. At four in the afternoon, Marie wins a hundred dollars and hands it to Jay, who leads her out the door. She spends it on cheap wine and one-dollar scratch-off tickets that they scrub clean with Phee’s quarters. The carpet is littered with aluminum colored flakes of latex that neither of them cleans up.

Jay, predictably, wins nothing. Marie tallies twenty dollars by the time they’re a third of the way through. She switches half their tickets, stacks of paper as thick as a deck of cards, and yields the same result.

“You must be cursed,” she laughs.

At the bottom of a second bottle, they’re both drunk enough that Jay laughs, too. “It certainly seems that way.”

Marie swaps part of the stack again, shaking her head in wonder.

“If we ever go to a racetrack, remind me to bet against you.”

Jay doesn’t answer. She wishes she hadn’t said it. Her smile wilts, but she finishes the wine and the scratch-offs anyway before stumbling to her room, closing the door behind her only to nearly slam it into Marie. She stands there, anesthetized by alcohol and confusion, staring at her for quite a while until the other woman merely ducks under her arm. Marie slips into the room and nearly trips when she simultaneously tries to pull off her socks.

“What are you doing?” Jay asks through gritted teeth. Marie does not look concerned.

“Sleeping.”

Then she slips under the navy comforter, turns over, and does just that.

“Get out,” is what Jay wants to say, but the words are all sticky as syrup and jammed in the funnel of her constricting throat. If she opens her mouth, she doesn’t know which pieces will untangle from the knot of frustrations and doubt and whatever else is in her, coiled and burning like a fuse, to escape her, so she leaves the door open and goes to the couch. Her eyes won’t close, though. She’s just staring at the ceiling and trying not to see the tickets on the floor, or the empty wine bottles, or the long black strands of hair that have stuck to the cushions, but it’s all there just the same. The couch no longer smells like paint. Marie’s shoes are by the door. The last dregs of coffee are still in the pot.

Life has moved around her, and she’s still stuck in this open space, standing on a sand bar in a shifting ocean. She could walk one way or the other, but that would mean having to choose, so she doesn’t. Jay throws the blanket off of her and goes back to her room. She curls in on herself at the very edge of the bed and tries to pretend that if she doesn’t move, nothing else will, either.

A month later, the dead plants that Phee left behind are decomposed to mush. Marie has started to keep a large pot of boiling water on the stove to temper the dry winter air, and the humidity leeches into the rotted tissue until the stems and leaves melt into each other like Dali’s clocks.

Not even the smell of orange peels and cinnamon can cover the stench. One morning, Marie disappears as she habitually does, leaving Jay to wander the casino alone, and she returns home to find the plants are gone. This is when she puts her foot down.

Jay stands in the living room, shouting at empty air as Marie wanders past her in circles, unbothered, wiping the dust off the shelves and picking up dirty glasses to throw in the dishwasher.

“You can’t just do this!”

Marie doesn’t even look at her. “Why?”

“Because – the plants! They’re –“

“They’re dead.”

“They’re supposed to be dead,” Jay argues lamely, arms dropping to her sides. “And they weren’t yours to throw.”

She wants to catapult Phee’s words from her mouth. She wishes she could explain the aesthetic beauty of finality, the value in catastrophe and resolution, but it won’t make sense coming from her, and she knows it.

She listens to the click of the dial and the heavy thunk of machinery as the dishwasher starts. Marie takes her time circling back to the living room, and when she at last does, she stops in the doorway with her hands on her hips like a mother who’s lost patience with her child’s tantrum. Half-moon contusions darken the skin under her eyes to an ashen purple. They look like thumb prints. Her clothes – Jay’s clothes – no longer seem to touch her body at all. They just drape there like shirts on a hanger.

There’s a newspaper in her hand, the one Jay keeps folded and jammed between her old college textbooks on the shelf. Marie holds it up.

“They weren’t yours either,” she says, and no sooner is the last word out of her mouth than Jay is lunging at her, snatching the paper and pivoting on her heel to face the living room window behind the couch.

The city is still churning, and from this vantage six-stories up and overwhelmed into a thoughtless stupor, Jay can’t help but watch it. The evening traffic crawls in the graying light. The radios are probably on. People are hitting the horns of their cars, talking to each other, but that, at least, Jay ignores. Her hands are pressed firmly over her ears.

“Get out.” Her voice is mercilessly loud over the blood rushing in her ears.

She waits, shoulders hunched and motionless, for a long time, and when she finally lets her hands drop from her head as cautiously as if she’d been holding it together, checking to see if the glue would hold, she listens.

The dishwasher has stopped running. After another minute, the heater clicks on, breathing warm air from the vent over her head.

She’s alone.

Jay sells her phone and pays the cable bill for the first time in three months. She stares unblinkingly at re-runs of old sitcoms, bad TV movies and mind numbing infomercials late, late at night. When the sounds stop battering her brain in a meaningless cacophony, switching from senseless jabber into whole, identifiable words, she mutes it. The silence makes her fingers drumming against the keys of her laptop agonizingly loud. Her paycheck comes in ten days later, and she glares at the number in her checking account, higher than it’s been since the first day she went gambling, and goes to a 7-11 fifteen blocks away to buy lottery tickets.

She dumps them on the kitchen counter in a haphazard pile and leaves them there. The next day, she does it again, and then again, piling scratch-offs and Mega Millions and Powerball into a heap on the granite like a dragon hoarding fool’s gold. By the end of two weeks the pile is spilling onto the floor.

At three in the morning, after staring at her bedroom ceiling for an hour, Jay rolls out of bed like her mattress has turned to hot coals. The restlessness is like sitting in an oven, feeling the temperature rise minutely with each passing second. She scrambles with unexplainable urgency to find one of Phee’s hidden quarters. Her fingers grasp around cold metal underneath the dresser, and then she races to the kitchen to grab the first scratch-off that catches her eye.
The quarter makes one long, neat line across its surface before she stops, whatever exigent force possessing her dispersing as suddenly as it came.

They’re all losers. She knows that already.

If Marie had gotten them, maybe they wouldn’t be, but Marie is gone. Really gone. The only signs of her having been there are in the absences she’d left behind: no shoes by the door, no dead plants, no more wet coffee grounds in the trashcan. Jay puts her elbows on the counter, some of the tickets rustling to the ground and quietly scraping against the tiles, and then she puts her face in her hands and laughs, because it’s funny, she thinks, that Marie is better at endings than Phee had been.

And Jay, meanwhile, is where she’s always stood, stuck between forward and back, unable to start anything, let alone finish it, but she finds herself staring into her closet and reaching for her coat, and she thinks that she must be crazier than Phee had ever been, for assuming these things have really been her choices to make.

The security guard at the casino recognizes her instantly and smiles, mumbling something about “it’s been a while” that Jay acknowledges with a half-hearted pleasantry. Inside, things are just how she left them. The loud techno-pop and synthesized beats still blare from the slot machines. The same people still work the tables, the same regulars give her the same looks. There are no windows and no clocks on the wall, purposely obscuring the hour and the turning of the world around them. If Jay wanted to, she could sit down and merely pretend that nothing has happened. She could convince herself that it’s been only two days since Phee died and there had never been a car crash on the corner of 3rd and L Street.

She doesn’t, though. Instead, she navigates between one end of the floor and the other, over and over again, searching until she spots the maroon shade of a parka and the spill of long, dark hair over the back of it, getting thinner and thinner. The top of her head is partially covered now by a knitted hat. Marie is draped over one of the machines. Her mittens are gone and Jay thinks they must’ve been stolen. Two cocktail waitresses idle nearby, waiting to intervene, but she waves at them and they wander off at the sight of her familiar face.

“Hey,” Jay shakes her gently. “Wake up.”

Marie, her forehead still pressed to the machine top, rolls her head slightly to the side and cracks an eye open. Her fingers are trembling, the muscle in her jaw quivering unsteadily when she flexes it. The rings under her eyes seem to have distended halfway down her face. She hadn’t really been sleeping, Jay understands immediately, she’d just been too exhausted to move.

The comprehension is not a burst, or a flare, or an explosion of emotion. It blooms deliberately from the seed planted months ago when Marie first disappeared and returned with the posture of a weary soldier, because Jay can’t help knowing things, like how Marie takes her coffee in the morning, or how she avidly avoids autobiographies, or this, an ending in slow motion, even if she doesn’t acknowledge what any of it means. No one can will things into nonexistence.

Marie opens her mouth, preparing to speak and waiting for Jay to stop her, but she doesn’t.

“I’m dying, you know,” she says mildly.

The words are like the flat of a knife sliding along her skin. It doesn’t hurt yet, but it will, eventually; for now, though, the sensation is so jarring that it makes Jay laugh.

“Aren’t we all?” She giggles nervously, feeling like an idiot.

Marie can’t find the energy to answer, but she manages to smile at the terrible joke. Jay hits the “Print Voucher” button and helps her from her seat. When they pass the cashiers at the front, Marie tugs at the sleeve of her coat weakly, but she keeps walking.

“Tomorrow,” she promises. Tomorrow, or maybe the day after, or maybe the day after that, and if they make it to the spring, Jay thinks, maybe they’ll start a garden.

You Might Forget the Sky Was Ever Blue

3 April 2017

Categories: Fiction

The gymnasium sweats. It’s autumn by the calendar, by the start of the new school year, by the way the store displays are all lined with jack-o-lanterns and cornucopias. But by temperature, it’s unseasonably hot for Shermantown, New York. Too hot to run after a football outside. Too hot for the un-air-conditioned gym. And yet, by whatever combination of state and school and Mr. Henderson’s whim, here we are. We warm up with calisthenics. Jumping jacks, pushups, sit ups, running laps.

Henderson is rotund. His tarnished silver whistle bounces against his pot belly with every step and I’d like to ask him how long it’s been since he’s had any meaningful exercise, but I’d never dare actually say anything. I go through phys ed quietly. Keep my head down, keep to myself. I’ve survived three years already under Henderson’s instruction. One year to go, and I don’t intend to martyr myself now.

But today, we wrestle.

Henderson doubles as the wrestling coach. When there’s a heat advisory, or the field outside gets saturated with rain, or there’s a tear in the volleyball net, he defaults to having us run wrestling drills.

The blue mats are out. Two by two. A dozen sets of them. We all know what’s coming.
Henderson blows his whistle. “Partner up.”

Last year, when Jacob and I were still friends, we made sure to stand close to each other in gym class, certain we would play at the same speed and no one would get hurt or embarrassed. Now, Jacob’s the last person I want touching me, the last person I want to smell the stink of.

Everyone has a partner. Shit.

Jacob’s coming for me. “What do you say? You and me?”

Even he sounds tentative. It occurs to me neither one of us has options. Neither one of us wants to be with just anyone. Only, he isn’t avoiding me the way I’m avoiding him. He doesn’t have a clue.

Everyone has already migrated to their mats—the new ones, of course. The ones that are already sweat-stained, but at least it’s only sweat from the last couple years, not the ones with cracked vinyl covers that have had guys dripping into every crevice since the 1980s.

Henderson blows his whistle. “You two, pick a mat.”

In the first drill, Jacob has to lie face down on the mat, arms at his sides. I’m tasked with trying to roll him over. He can’t move his limbs, only stiffen his body and use whatever momentum I muster against me. I try, but not that hard, pushing and then reaching over his body to pull him toward me. He doesn’t budge. In terms of wrestling, we’re inescapably mismatched. He’s a weight class up from me, yes, but also muscled everywhere I’m flabby. I’d might as well be trying to turn over a car.

Henderson blows his whistle. Reverse.

Now I’m face down.

I struggle, even though I’m not supposed to. I can’t bring myself to give in to the inevitable when Jacob starts pushing and gets my left side an inch off the mat. I think he’s going to choose my same strategy and go over me to pull me toward him and that I’ll have no choice but to roll with his strength. He does climb on top of me but stops in a mount, pecs pressed to my back. He digs his wrists under me, between my arms and sides, into my rib cage, cinching in until he locks his fingers just under my heart. He’s stronger than I remember. Or I’m weaker. A grunt and he’s pulled me in the air. Dead weight, at a sixty-degree angle to the mat, he’s hugging me tight. He might toss me over, flat on my back. He might heave me over his head, so my neck slams down, my skull pushed forward, every possibility of paralysis.

I pay attention to his breathing while he holds me there, coming from my right side. I tense my right arm and then swing back, stiff as I can, landing an elbow straight in his nose.

“What the fuck?” He’s not holding onto me anymore. He’s got a hand over his face but it only covers so much. His eyes water. Blood trickles from his nose down to his chin.

Henderson’s got me by the back of the neck. “You think you’re tough?” His hands are massive and I know he’s not gripping me as hard as he can. He could break me even more easily than Jacob could have and, in that non-school-sanctioned moment of physically restraining me, he really might do something to that effect.

He stops, I think, because he sees I’m crying. I’m not sure when I started, but it wasn’t when he grabbed me.

“What’s wrong with you?” Jacob puts his hand down and there’s a single trickle of blood out his left nostril. I’m disappointed, having hoped to shatter his whole nose, crush his face, leave him horribly disfigured. “You want a fight, I’ll fight you.”

Henderson has one hand on my left shoulder, and one on Jacob’s left, to keep us separate. It occurs to me he doesn’t know what he’s doing, doesn’t actually have control over the situation. A pair of his wrestling kids take things too far and he knows how to restrain them, how to hurt them just enough to get them to calm down. But we’re not wrestlers and he doesn’t know our history. Perhaps most importantly, I’m confident he doesn’t want anything to do with either one of us beyond this moment.

Henderson lets go of Jacob first. “Go to the nurse’s office.”

I can see Jacob weighing his options. Tackle me and he could probably get in a couple good shots before Henderson stops him. But then, maybe he’s confused about the summer. Maybe he really doesn’t get why I haven’t returned his calls and why I’ve been ducking him in the halls at school.
Jacob walks away.

When I turn back to Henderson he’s already eyeing me. “You can go to the guidance counselor’s office.”

On the way there, I try to puzzle out why that’s where Henderson’s sending me. Why not the principal’s office? I worry that he knows. Maybe it’s the tears, or maybe he’s more observant than he seems. Maybe he’s seen something like this before. More likely than all of this, though, it occurs to me that he sent me out the opposite gym door and in the opposite direction to Jacob, along a path where we won’t meet. He was probably supposed to escort one or both of us to our destinations, but then he’d have to figure out what to do with the rest of the class. Henderson is the kind of coach who resents complications, and has figured out how to make his life as easy as it can be.

I’ve visited the guidance office before, for class scheduling, to meet with a woman whose hair was dyed a slightly different shade of orange each time I saw her. Junior year, I got moved to a different counselor—Mr. Troja, forty-ish, tall and fit, who had worked in college admissions before changing career paths. He told me about that past at our first meeting, a year ago, and not so subtly established that I’d been shifted to him because teachers had pegged me to be on the college track.

We’d charted a course. AP classes to take. Colleges to research over the summer. We agreed we’d meet during the first week of school this year, and he sent me an appointment slip through my homeroom. I blew off the meeting. I didn’t want to tell him that I hadn’t spent any time thinking about college, or that I was thinking about dropping out of all of my AP classes. I didn’t want to talk about why.

Now, the whole room is bathed in yellow light, and the secretary looks up from a keyboard covered in protective plastic. She tilts her head in sympathy. Me in my gym clothes, eyes red. Maybe she thinks this is how I dress for school, white t-shirt tinted brown with age, and navy basketball shorts. I catalog the kids I’ve seen sent to the guidance for anything other than routine visits. It’s where they sent Emily Parker to get the news when her dad died in a car accident. Mark Jonsson got sent there after his girlfriend dumped him and he shaved his head. Felicity Parks, after she had a meltdown during the chemistry final last year.

This secretary must talk to crying kids all day. I wonder if any of them leave this place feeling better.

“How can I help you?”

In lieu of any better answer, I ask for Mr. Troja.

“Mr. Troja is on vacation this week.” She clicks on her computer mouse and bats it around. “But it looks as though Ms. McIntyre is free now. Let me call her.”

“I’m here, I’m here.” I’ve never seen Ms. McIntyre before, but she materializes before us. She can’t be more than twenty-two. Fair skin, caked in makeup, long blond hair in a ponytail. I’m surprised I haven’t heard more about her because she’s exactly the sort of woman that the guys usually talk about, but then again I haven’t spent much time with the guys this school year. “Mr. Henderson said you were on your way. You must be Cal.”

She leads me back to her office, tells me to have a seat on an easy chair, coated in brown cracked fake leather, and closes the door behind us. She has a series of motivational posters lining the wall behind her desk, and it takes me a few seconds to recognize they’re jokes—like one that says Take the lead, beneath it a picture of a momma bear leading her cubs, failing to notice the mountain lion closing in on the back of the line, caught in a mid-air pounce. The caption under the picture clarifies, predators pick off the stragglers first.

“I heard you got in a scuffle.” Ms. McIntyre circles her desk, sits down in her wheelie chair, and then scoots on it, out, around her desk, drawing closer. “Can you tell me what happened?”

On her desk, there’s a very small photograph, not more than two inches by two inches. It’s Ms. McIntyre kissing a man in front of the ocean. This is her husband, or fiancée, or boyfriend, or may be an ex-boyfriend, and maybe that’s why it lies flat on her desk, rather than hung up. But no. There’s a piece of dried Scotch tape curled, stuck to the top edge, that must have attached the photo to the bottom edge of her computer monitor, out of sight of the other guidance counselors, Dr. Henderson, kids like me. That last piece of her own life she’s keeping for herself, while she puts on this counselor face for the school.

“It sounds like you were angry. Did Jacob do something to make you angry?” Ms. McIntyre leans in close and for a second I think she’s going to take my hand like my first grade teacher did when I couldn’t keep up with the reading pace of the smart kids’ group. Ms. McIntyre’s hands are smooth and she smells like lilacs. I scan her desk for her hand lotion. Maybe it’s stashed in a drawer. The lotion and the soft tissues with lotion in them, and the gel pens that are easier on your writer’s callus. All in contrast to the contents of her desk, all number two pencils and the same sand-paper-grade Kleenex they have on every teacher’s desk and in the nurse’s office.

“I can see you’re clenching your fists,” Ms. McIntyre says. “It’s OK to be angry.”

She hands me two balls of red putty, and I take them. Flatten them in my fists so the edges leak from beneath my pinky on the left, between my thumb and forefinger on the right.

“You’re friends with Jacob, right? That’s what Mr. Henderson said.”

I’m surprised that Henderson noticed that, and that he communicated it to Ms. McIntyre.

Ms. McIntyre crosses her left leg over the right, just above her knee. Her skirt is shorter than I realized. This closed door meeting with her, one on one, would probably be a fantasy for most of the boys in school.

“I can’t let you go until you say something,” she says. “That’s what you want, right? To be on your way?”

The carpet on the floor is discolored beneath my feet, a shade darker maroon with rows of black diamonds, outlined in yellow. The school probably ought to pull it up, like they did the same carpeting from the library last year to reveal the hardwood underneath. But maybe it’s safer this way. The kinds of kids sent to the counselor might throw themselves to the floor, and carpet is softer. I might throw myself down. See if I can fit between diamonds and fall into all that maroon. Maroon like dried blood and shit and maybe I can drown in all of it.

“I’m going to ask some yes or no questions, all right? And all you have to do is tell me yes or no. Or you can nod or shake your head.”

File folders sprinkle Ms. McIntyre’s desk. Each might be a different student. A different basket case. Black ink on yellow legal pad paper inside. Or maybe there’s a form. Fill in the blanks. Name: ________ Grade: ________ Neuroses: ____________

“Are you still planning to go to college?” she asks. “Cal, look at me.”

Our eyes meet. Hers are blue—not bright, but intense. A gray-blue like morning, right after rain clouds clear.

“Do you want to move far away from here?”

This room probably looks the same, any day, any season. Say what you want about Shermantown, it does have seasons. The long, bleak winter of course. But we get two or three months of summer, too. We’ll have an autumn soon. A few weeks of trees with gold-orange leaves. It must be hard to spend every day in this same space. To leave home when it’s still dark and to come home when daylight fades. Between black and sunset pink, you might forget the sky was ever blue.

“Is Jacob the reason you want to go far away?”

I’m on the floor now. Don’t know how I got here. Crying my goddamned eyes out and I can’t say a word. I’m not sure how long it is before Ms. McIntyre’s there with me. But not on the floor. On her chair. Body folded in two, hand on my shoulder. When I look up, I’ve got a primo view right down her shirt. I should want this. Should pull out my cell phone and take a picture and make like that was all I was after.

I can’t stop crying.

She keeps a hand on my shoulder until my breathing steadies. Next thing I know I’m back in my chair, pulled up to the desk. I’ve got a yellow legal pad beneath my hands and I’ve already started writing. Jacob took me to a party this summer and we made out. I wanted to stop but he kept going and going. Then I shat everywhere.

I tear out the sheet and crumple it up. I look for a wastebasket but can’t find one. Ms. McIntyre’s standing over me though. I look up at her. She’s read every word.

“I need for you to talk to me, Cal. Just to me.”

Dad gets home from work early by his standards. 5:22. Blazer in hand, collar already unbuttoned, tie hanging loose from his neck. I watch him walk to the house with his eyes on the ground and I know that this isn’t going to be an ordinary night of beef stew from the can or microwave meals, followed by homework and TV and trying to stay out of each other’s way. Tonight, he’s going to take me out to China Buffet or Billy Brew’s for what he calls our “man-to-man” talks.

This will be the fourth. The first one, two and a half years ago, came when I scored a seventy-four on the Earth Science Regents and we had a discussion about how a straight-A student could do so poorly on such a big test. He alternated between chastising me for not working hard enough (which I was pretty sure was how he actually felt), and coaching me on generic study tips he’d Googled over lunch, before he softened up: was I taking on too much? Should I take fewer classes next year? Lose an extracurricular?

The second time—which, in the moment, I hoped would be the last—he took me to a baseball game and asked what I knew about sex. I can only assume using the game as a backdrop was an attempt at a natural segue into asking if I knew what first, second, and third base were. I thought we had each left the experience uncomfortable enough that he wouldn’t try again.

The third time, last spring, it was about getting a job, and how it was time I learned responsibility. I half-heartedly applied to work cash registers around town. No one called back, and I spent the summer sleeping in, reading, and hanging out with Jacob.

We go to Billy Brew’s, the same site as our last talk. It’s a bar and grill, crowded enough that we need to wait half an hour for a table. Dad goes to the bar and gets himself a Heineken, me a root beer, but he encourages me to sip off his like he did when I was in the eighth grade, and really hadn’t ever had a beer before. Bonding, I guess. A little late.

Ms. McIntyre asked me if Jacob and I had, on the night of the assault—her word, not mine—been drinking (Yes), how much (Four beers? Five?). She asked if I had been penetrated (Yes). Was I sure Jacob heard me tell him to stop? (No.) She told me that the victim of an assault was never to blame and I shouldn’t beat myself up over it and that I’d done the right thing by telling her, as if I had made an effort to volunteer any information. And then she told me she would need to call my parents to discuss the next steps.

I begged her not to. She said that there were certain laws. So I spent the rest of the day thinking of all of the things Dad would ask me and all of the things I might say and going in circles because I knew exactly how it was going to go.

“I got a call from the school, Cal.” Dad speaks quickly. He starts all of these conversations this way. “The guidance counselor and the principal.”

So Dr. Thibodeau knows, too. Dr. Thibodeau, who couldn’t pick me out of a lineup.

“Is it true?”

I study the liquors on the glass shelves behind the bar. There’s a mirror behind them that doubles everything, right down to the back of Dad’s head.

“Cal, did Jacob—did he take advantage of you?” Dad doesn’t make any motion toward his beer. He doesn’t look away. This is the father I’ve never had. Not acting out of duty or his concept of what a father is supposed to look like. It’s almost like he cares.

“Yes.”

“Was this the first time?”

I can see where this is headed. The same sort of conversation I had with Ms. McIntyre once she got me talking a little. Clinical. Investigatory. I don’t want to have that conversation again. But what can I do?

I tell him it was the first time.

“Had the two of you fooled around before?” he asks. “Are the two of you homosexual?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?”

I remember the stabbing sensation I had felt when Jacob slipped off with his girlfriend Lily, when I convinced myself that he didn’t really care about me and how I was still feeling hurt about that when he came to me in the bathroom and how I liked it when he kissed me at first. Even now, that part seems nice.

Then Dad puts his hand on my elbow. When I was a kid, he did that a lot, when he really wanted me to listen to him. When he warned me not to play with the knobs on the stove. When he took me to Rockefeller Center to see the big Christmas tree and gave my elbow a squeeze: don’t let go, no matter what. “I’m going to be with you on this, Cal. I know you don’t want to talk about it, and you probably wish it would all go away. But I’m not angry with you. I just want to make sure you come out of this OK.”

That does it. I’m crying again. Not the kind of tears you can just wipe away because they’re coming too fast and heavy. I’ve got a vague sense of Dad leaving money on the bar and standing me up. He’s got his arm over me and God knows what people think. There might be people who know me here. There has to be people who know my father. Shermantown is too small not to know someone—there are only so many places to grab a burger.

“You’re going to be OK,” Dad says again in the parking lot.

The funny thing is, in the time he’s fumbling with his keys, while I’m waiting for my door to unlock and while I look at myself, elongated in the reflection of the passenger side window, there’s a second when I actually believe him.

All of that sense of belief and hope and comfort—it’s all gone the next morning as we wait outside the principal’s office. The secretary is a slim young man with glasses and a tie. He works from a laptop computer and offers Dad a cup of coffee while we wait. He doesn’t acknowledge my existence.

The waiting area outside Dr. Thibodeau’s office was remodeled over the summer. There are two walls consumed with bookshelves, stocked with volumes like Moby Dick and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Rumor has it he gives you a book, depending on what you did. I heard Johnny Reds talk about his visit to the principal’s office after he got busted looking up girls’ skirts. Before he left, Dr. Thibodeau pulled The Autobiography of Malcolm X and advised him to read it and come back to talk to him when he had. Someone asked Johnny if he had followed through and he said Fuck no, I’m not doing any more reading than I have to.

I wonder what book Dr. Thibodeau might send me away with, and if Dad would insist on me reading it.

The door to Dr. Thibodeau’s office opens, and immediately I know there’s been some sort of mistake—a bad decision, an error in scheduling. Jacob’s dad walks out first, wearing his navy mechanic’s coveralls. He looks tired. Then Jacob, fists clenched, eyes on the ground. He’s furious and he hasn’t even noticed me yet.

He stops when he sees me. I figure he’ll stare me down, then pound me into oblivion. But he stops there in the middle of the office. His bottom lip trembles. “Why are you doing this to me?”

I look down at my father’s hand. I wish he’d put it over my elbow again and repeat what he said the day before about being with me on this.

“You’re trying to ruin my life.” A tear rolls down Jacob’s cheek.

I almost tell him I’m sorry, before I remind myself why we’re both here.

He turns his back to me. “I do have a question, Dr. Thibodeau.”

“Yes?”

Jacob’s voice is all over the place and his shoulders are heaving. “Is he going to get in trouble for lying about everything?”

Jacob’s dad takes him by the shoulders. His hands are enormous, even bigger than Henderson’s. “Let’s go.” He squeezes.

Jacob goes with him, but on his way out the door, kicks out a leg at me. It just grazes my shin, and hits a leg of the couch harder and he stumbles as his dad pulls him out.

That’s when Ms. McIntyre pops her head out of the office doorway. I hadn’t known she would be there today. “We’re ready for you, Cal.”

Dad leads the way inside. I hadn’t realized there would be a uniformed police officer inside either, or a Child Protection Worker. Ms. McIntyre introduces her as Ms. Farrell.

Dr. Thibodeau looks different from our old principal—at once more lax and more stodgy. A tweed blazer, shirt, and tie, a teapot in front of him with white mugs on white saucers. “Please make yourselves comfortable, all of you. We might be here for a while.”

I’m not sure if it’s a decision of the school or the police, but Jacob and I each get “no contact orders.” We’re not supposed to talk to each other, text each other, get within one hundred yards of each other, as Dr. Thibodeau explains, “to the extent that it is reasonably possible to do so.” If one of us shows up at a football game and the other one is already there, the second person to arrive has to leave. Same thing outside school—I guess that’s where the police come in—if someone shows up at a restaurant or a party.

We’re not supposed to talk about what happened to anyone else who was at the party, either, until the investigation is over. “This is for the protection of each of you,” Dr. Thibodeau says, and, he suggests, to protect our friends from lying and getting themselves into trouble.

I don’t know if it’s a direct response to Jacob’s question, but the police officer tells me that it’s in my best interests to tell the truth. Even if it’s embarrassing. Even if it seems irrelevant. If I lie it could result in “life-altering consequences.”

The day inches along. I wait for something to happen. I try to read for AP English, but it’s just words on a page; how can I pay attention to any of that now? I scroll through Facebook and everything seems trite or trivial. I consider options for distracting myself, but it doesn’t feel as though I ought to have fun at a time like this, like now that I’ve spoken up, I need to play the part of a victim. Mostly, I lie on my bed, on top of the covers, and stare at the ceiling, tracing the imprints from where I used to have glow-in-the-dark stars.

The school rearranges Jacob’s schedule, not mine. We go one week. Then two. When I walk by Dr. Thibodeau’s office I see familiar faces from the party last Fourth of July. I see Lily. She stopped making eye contact with me in the halls days before she got called in. How much has Jacob told her? If he’s told her anything, he’s going against Dr. Thibodeau’s orders, but can you really expect someone not to talk to his girlfriend when something like this happens? He could get her to lie. No one was in the bathroom with us, but the closest person was Lily, in that bedroom down the hall where I saw the two of them making out, what, five minutes before he came for me? Maybe she did see something. Was waiting for Jacob to come back and heard us. Did we make sounds? Maybe she heard me say no.

Maybe she knew about me and Jacob all along. Maybe he never had any secrets.

After two and a half weeks of interviews and deliberation, the police decide there isn’t enough evidence to pursue criminal charges, though the Child Protection Worker makes it clear we could still pursue a civil suit. Dad takes me out for dinner again to talk about that. I tell him no. I tell him I’m not angry anymore.

According to Dr. Thibodeau, technically the no contact order is no longer in effect, but it’s still his recommendation we stay apart. To avoid any complications. Jacob doesn’t seem to have a problem with that, and I sure don’t.

By spring, it’s like I’m in a different school, a different world. I eat lunch alone at the top of the bleachers. I know where I’m going to college and high school has deteriorated into a formality in between my life before and my life ahead. I work hard to prep for my AP exams, but once they’re over, I don’t even bother showing up half the time. It’s easy by then. There’s a college orientation weekend that I miss a Friday and Monday for, so I take Tuesday and Wednesday, too, and no one even calls me on it. Those days, I eat my bologna sandwiches at home, in front of telenovelas I can’t make out a word of, but that I like for the illusion of company.

Come the end of the school year, it’s probably more nostalgia than anything when Brittany Peterson invites me to her graduation party. We sat next to each other in Social Studies freshman year. She has an enormous house with a pool out back and parents who don’t seem to care if high school kids drink alcohol as long as they don’t make too much of a mess. I’ve been to two parties at that house, and Brittany has always been nice to me. Asked me what I thought of Lord of the Flies when we were reading it for English and really listened to me when I talked about my theory that Piggy represented Jesus, and touched my arm, and told me I was smart.

It’s nostalgia, too, when I actually go to her party. I show up late and figure I won’t stay long. No one answers the doorbell, but the door is unlocked, so I let myself in and wander through and around a mass of people, only half of whom I recognize. The place is all marble floors, flat screen TVs, spotless. A large mansion. A small castle. Past the screen doors out back, the party only thickens.

There’s a keg out there, right in the same spot where I found one three years earlier. I don’t bother to pour down the side of the Solo cup. Let it foam up, more head than beer. I’m not looking to get drunk tonight. Not like the bare-chested kid who takes the tap next, or the half-dozen other people who have lined up behind me. Everything smells like chlorine. The side of the house—white by daylight, is a pretty, inconstant shade of blue from the way the fancy lights in the pool refract up out of the water.

That’s when I hear him. Jacob’s laugh, loud and goofy, almost a barking sound. He has his shirt off and he’s chest deep in the water, leaning against the side. He has his arm over a girl in a pastel pink bikini top, wet hair all plastered to the sides of her head except for one clump that juts out and hooks in like a third of a pretzel. At first, I think it’s Lily, but when I get a little closer I see it’s Brittany herself. Her skin is usually fairer, but she’s been getting some sun.

Brittany kisses Jacob’s ear. Maybe whispers something. And in that moment his eyes catch mine.

I don’t think Brittany tipped him off. Why did she invite me at all? Does she want a confrontation—for Jacob to tell me off in front of a crowd? Or does she want us to reconcile before summer? Maybe she forgot we were ever friends at all.

Brittany doesn’t seem to have noticed me, and curls her whole body toward Jacob. Her hand across his body, resting on the opposite shoulder. Chest to chest now.

Jacob’s still watching me. The last time we looked at each other was outside Dr. Thibodeau’s office. He doesn’t look angry like that now. He’s at peace. Relaxed. I wonder, if I go over to him now, if he’ll talk to me. Not that I want to talk to him again. Right? Wasn’t that the point of making the report and making him change schedules? Of eating lunch alone to keep from sitting at the same table?

But then Brittany’s on him. Her head between Jacob’s and mine. She swivels and grinds over him.
I dump my beer in the bushes and leave. I don’t know why I came at all, but I’m not having fun and I’m not going to have fun, and I just want to be somewhere else. I have to push past another couple making out by the screen door. Then I have to remember the best route to get back out front. I zig zag through rooms I know I have been in before and ones I know I haven’t seen. A billiards room that a subsection of the party has spilled into, in which a girl in a tank top who I recognize from my French class last year stretches a bare arm over a guy to guide the stroke of his pool cue. She looks up at me and glares. Then the guy, too.

Another room’s full of chatter until I walk through. Everyone quiets down. I fix my eyes straight ahead, on the opposite doorway. There’s an oil painting of Ronald Reagan over it, and even the president seems like he’s staring me down.

I make it back to the front door. One final circle of people. Even Lily’s there, but either she doesn’t notice me, or she saw me coming and now she’s doing everything in her power to avoid eye contact. Johnny Reds stands beside her and nods his head to me, not an unfriendly acknowledgment. He doesn’t ask where I’m going or try to get me to stay, though. He turns back to his conversation with another girl in the circle, a girl with dark tan skin and a curly mess of black hair.

Back in my car, back on the road, I turn on my high beams. I’ve never understood why, but rich as it is, this part of town has no streetlights. It’s only in passing the sign—Now Leaving Shermantown… See Us Again Soon!—that I realize I’ve made a wrong turn. I’m headed the opposite direction from home.

I play out fantasies in my mind of what the next years of my life might look like. That I’ll meet a girl like Brittany or the one leaning over the pool table, or the freckle-faced girl from Chemistry whom I should’ve asked to prom. That we’ll be a couple and we’ll have our group of friends and we’ll laugh over late-night pizza and studying for exams. That my father will come to visit and leave me with a six-pack of beer. That I’ll have a normal life. In this moment, it all seems possible.

I take a series of turns that I think will loop me back toward home. The scenic route, though I can’t see a thing to either side of me, just pitch blackness. I end up hitting a dead end and have to turn around. Try to trace my way back to Brittany’s house. There’s no rush, I tell myself, I’ll find my way. Nothing at all about this road looks familiar.

Orlando

3 April 2017

Categories: Fiction

Clover mites march out of the library’s foundation, and Alex crushes them with his thumb. They mark him like freckles, like scabbed over zits, like chicken pox. Some have infiltrated his skin. Fingernails can’t dig deep enough to scratch the itch, to pull them out.

Students strut by his desk, backpacks slung over their shoulders, late for class. They are laughing. They cannot see what he sees. But they sniff out his strangeness like a smoke signal, like an alarm, and steer clear.

If he focuses on answering research questions, then maybe they’ll go away. But being a librarian is boring, even for him, today. Instead, he waylays his dreaming with the news. And that is where he sees it again.

NPR, CNN, BBC, and NBC have bought the same photos of people folded in half.

People huddled together under palm trees, holding small, wooden, cross-shaped figurines.

Depending on who you ask, those won’t do anything; or maybe this is what all that praying did.

Maybe that is the problem.

Alex finds Christopher Soto’s poem in the slurry of Facebook confessionals. A heartbroken poet recommended it. As he reads, the funerals in Orlando are being planned, and the body bags are being zipped shut, and the mothers and the fathers and the sisters and the brothers and the lovers are waiting to know if the tags on the bags match the tags on the toes of the bodies.

He jumps from one article to another:

◦ It does not matter who is stroking your hair, so long as they keep their handkerchief pressed into that surprising bullet hole and whisper, “Be strong, baby, be strong.”

◦ Liquor bottles look beautiful when you’re pressed against a bar’s floor.

◦ The family’s house is on fire, and those who do not live there say: “It is the family’s’ job to put out the fires. They chose to live in those houses.” They say: “It is their problem, and we have given them broken fire hoses and buckets of dirty water, but we shall not lend them our muscles, or our tears, because we have none. Not for them.”

During Alex’s lunch break, he walks to the quad with his boss.

His boss’ hat is drawn down to disguise his concern. Black sunglasses cover his eyes so his colleagues won’t see them leaking. Professionalism is a top priority for him.

Jessie is there, standing in the shade of an oak tree. She wraps and unwraps a purple scarf around her neck. Her mascara is a mess.

A man with a pastor’s voice recites Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech. He too has a dream; and the dream is the same; and the dream was for Alex and for himself, and for the one-hundred and two people who can’t scratch deep enough to draw out the music of gunfire and screaming and sirens ringing in their ears.

On the grass, mourners form a circle. And in the center of the circle a Jewish woman sings in Yiddish. Her blue dress spirals and flows out beneath her. Her arms stretch outward. She is a dreidel, spinning, twirling, unfurling, catching raindrop tears in her palms. Her voice touches Alex on the shoulder, cups its sound around his ear and whispers, “Shalom.”

A strong breeze blows through the trees; the rainbow flags flutter. Her singing grows louder. She cannot stop spinning. She doesn’t sing Shalom anymore, but now: “How strong I am. How strong.”

And the words place themselves like iron bars where the flower of Alex’s spine wilts from the weight of his backpack, or the weight of Orlando, of an entire city.

He, too, is mouthing the words, “Shalom.” But he is not Jewish.

Someone Alex does not know grabs his hand.

The wind carries caterpillars off the trees.

Someone says: “Omar was like a child spraying a water gun at a rabbit through the bars of its cage. The creature can do nothing but shiver, shake, and shit itself until Omar has given up or his pistol has run dry.”

Ava stands in the center of the circle, and the mourners struggle against the wind to keep the flags taught. Ava’s words fly across the quad, and bury themselves deep into the giant oak’s heartwood. Her syllables lodge themselves between the initials AT + LE, next to BM + MA, under SS + AG.

The mourners hear: “We should be angry.”

Ava punctuates her sentences with her fist. Leaning forward in her combat-boots, she looks ready to run into a burning building. To save the people inside who are screaming so loud that even God has turned the volume down.

She turns her back toward Alex.

The latina behind him murmurs, “How strong I am. How strong.”

Ava turns toward him.

“And it could have been you.”

She stands in the circle, pointing at him; her hand is in the shape of a gun; she is shooting him with those words. Everyone sees him; they see a target made of cardboard and concrete and Elmer’s glue—it is so heavy. He didn’t know he had it before, but now he can’t wipe his eyes and keep it steady in the wind at the same time.

An important man, the kind of man people protest to, is speaking. But he doesn’t seem to

mean it. It is all, “My heart is broken… blah, blah, blah.”

Five years ago, students refused to leave the library until he said, “You are safe here. You are welcome.”

He asked thieves to cut out his tongue so that he wouldn’t have to say it. But even thieves did not want it.

Powerless, he made his wife pin a rainbow ribbon on his wrinkled Armani suit and another on her pantsuit.

He used his lapel to obscure it; hers was camouflaged in a beautiful carnation she decided would be her new signature look.

His wife’s expression reminds Alex of that picture. The one of Carly from his sister’s wedding: two-year-old Carly staring at the camera, bored, miserable, and on the verge of shitting herself. Waiting for her mother to drink the only glass of wine she’d had in two months while she talked with the bride about love.

Jessie holds Alex’s hand. She is crying from behind her glasses, and he tells her, “Don’t be sad, Jessie,” although he couldn’t stop himself when the man with a pastor’s voice read, “I

Have a Dream.”

Alex dreams, too. The world has fallen back twenty-years. The Wyoming prairie is colder than he imagined. Alex searches for the fencepost where Matthew Shepard has been tied. Where snot is freezing in his nostrils. Jessie points to shadows on the horizon, saying, “Don’t let them get away!” The footprints in the snow are melting.

“Don’t be sad, Jessie,” Alex says.

The man in the wrinkled suit leaves the circle.

Another man replaces him. Patchy beard and a day-glow orange sign. No More Guns.

His mission is different; this is his opportunity to shine.

After the vigil, Alex sits down at his desk. He refuses to answer the emails that have built up over lunch. Daydreaming has already distracted him.

His heart has been shot through with an AR-whatever, and he is laying on the bar’s floor next to Edward, Stanley, Luis, Mercedes, Juan, Terry, and 97 other people who are crying, or can’t cry because they are wondering if they’re good enough to go to heaven.

Some have taken out their phones to text, “I love you, Mommy,” but it comes out, “I loathe you, Mommy.”

Turns out, it is impossible to tame fingers that cannot quit jumping each time Omar does to Edward and Juan and Mercedes what he did to his pet rabbit.

10.

Tony trots up to the desk. He’s been working on that goatee for a while. Alex has seen him on campus—around. He’s thin, short, older, straight.

They whisper to each other about what it feels like to be afraid. Alex says, “It feels like when a wasp is stuck in your car. You put the windows down because you want it to get lost. You don’t want it to hurt you, but it’s looking for someone to sting. Then you swerve off the road and into the shrubs when it gets you in the neck.”

Tony says he carries a gun, but it’s not an AR-whatever, and he doesn’t know what he needs it for.

Protection, he says.

He says he doesn’t know what it is like to live like an owl, twisting his neck around to see who belongs to the footsteps creeping up behind him.

“But, I can imagine,” he says.

11.

Tony says he can imagine how it feels to wear a target. Alex laughs.

A target is invisible to the people wearing it, but the mothers say, “I always knew.”

The fathers say, “Take that damn thing off.”

“Help us,” the people wearing it cry. It is too heavy.

Tony smiles and leaves. On his hip, the bulge of his piece protrudes like a tumor.

The clover mites are in the thousands now, marching over Alex’s arms and legs.

They’re pouring out of a crack in the foundation. It is widening and too expensive to fix.

Alex is sick of the headlines, so he watches the mites march out of that crack.

12.

Alex keeps a one-liter water-bottle in his bag, and if he doesn’t hydrate, then he will shrivel up. And gays don’t shrivel.

13.

If an idea could be shot in the back with an AR-whatever, then no one would have to lay their head in anyone’s lap and hear, “Be strong, baby, be strong.”

The handkerchief pressed over the bullet hole is dirty and may only cause infection. But it’s the only thing that the bear has with him. A handkerchief. A smoke signal. He pulled it out of the back pocket of his leather pants.

The building isn’t burning, but smoke stings his eyes. He wipes his face. He tastes blood. He smells blood. He hears blood. And now his blood is mixing with someone else’s, which is something gays are told never to do.

14.

Alex turns to the gossip columns: “Omar Mateen, allegedly gay…” They gave him his very own target. Placed it around his shoulders like a prized hog and said, “blue-ribbon, first place.”

And the people ate that shit up.

15.

Omar Mateen Allegedly Gay

“According to two men who claim to have previously had contact with Mateen via a gay dating app, Mateen frequented Pulse for as many as three years. He was often seen in the corner of the bar, drinking alone. Mateen was known for his violent outbursts, which were common. He abused his wife.”

Of course, they all say, and roll their eyes. That! That explains everything!

Once, a man reports, Mateen pulled a knife on him after a dispute about religion.

His wife made no comment. She was not asked.

One man says it is like peeling powdery wings off butterflies.

We are waiting for the Canadian Press to confirm these details.

16.

When Alex is home, he kisses his husband goodnight and pulls the covers up to his chin.

He is standing in the center of the circle, in the grass, beating his chest and howling. He covers himself in dirt and shoves leaves into his hair. He pours the one-liter bottle over his head, and mud trickles into his mouth. He chews the grit. Swallows the mud. The man with a pastor’s voice is bellowing, “I have a dream,” and the Jewish woman can’t stop twirling. “Shalom, shalom, shalom.” She wheels into the sky, shrieking, “Shalom.” Her dress flies off her body and floats to the earth like a piece of paper. She is gone.

His boss crosses his arms and squints from behind his glasses, crying. His tears are clover mites.

The important man holds a rake, and he is raking tongues into a pile.

The man with the day-glow orange sign is using it for a math lesson, adding one and one to get 102, which is not divisible by the time it takes for Edward, Akyra, Oscar, Brenda, Deonka, or Alejandro to stop the bleeding where Omar shot them with his water gun.

“How strong I am. How strong.”

Colony Collapse

28 November 2016

Categories: Fiction

It’s ridiculous. Alice rummages in her bag and extracts a Marlboro while she steers with one hand. Well, that’s one word for it. It’s actually humiliating, taking a job. An old benefactor, the Vulture Capitalist, funded the position at Brainard Academy with the provision they offer it to her, and yes, the college seems thrilled—she’s a catch—but doesn’t he get it that this rescue operation implies she’s through?

Alice Whipple is a New York City art star. More precisely, Alice is, or was, one-half a New York City art star. For twenty years, her work has been a collaboration with Gordon Lessing. But even the smashing success of the Central Park piece—the New York Times called it astonishing—could not, for Gordy, outweigh years of watching their colleagues buy summer cottages while they wrangled with permitting and fundraising. Five months ago he’d announced it was time to “bow out.” He said the bureaucratic bickering—which Alice managed—had sucked him dry. He forgot to mention the wealthy Houston socialite.

Since then, Alice has come up with nothing, nada, zero, zilch in the way of new work. Her gallery, and certain friends, have begun avoiding her. She’s exiled herself to California. Alice gropes for a lighter. The ridiculous thing is that the job is three thousand miles from New York. Or maybe that’s just sad; the whole thing is just sad. Alice squints, looking for Bear Creek Road.

What truly is ridiculous is that, in the service of said job, she is now wandering the hills above Oakland, California trying to find the Bee Man. Perfect, she thinks. Lost, trying to find some man.

Matthew herds a dozen art students onto the stubble. Beginning Sculpture has read “Living with Weasel,” constructed wildly interpretive bee boxes, and now it’s time for field work. He drops his duffle, squats, unpacks an elegant white box, looks around, puts it back and stands up. He scratches his head. The teaching assistant, a second year grad student called Shakespeare, is smoking behind the van next to the ‘No Smoking’ sign.

A black CRV zooms in and brakes sharply beside the restroom. A tightly-packed woman hauling an enormous mustard-colored bag hops out, strides to one side of the redwood building, twirls, strides to the other side, and disappears. Matthew figures she must be the new Endowed Chair for Special Projects, one of those bullshit positions the board cooks up so the students—and they—can rub shoulders with Art Stars. This time it’s the female half of Lessing & Whipple. What would she want from Brainard?

Alice has heard of the Bee Man, of course. Matthew Chance has been in all the majors, and the gorgeous footage of his break-out piece, Swarm, is still shown at MoMA—quivering honeybees creeping the head and bare chest of a beautiful barefoot boy. Her best friend, Casey, who she talks to every day, asked if he was still a babe, but Alice didn’t know. He didn’t sound like a babe, he sounded like a robot: Beginning Sculpture in Briones Regional Park—beeep—Join them if she wished—beeep—MapQuest directions—beeep.

Like Alice was a hostile invader. Which, she supposes, she is.

So then Casey asked what “Hunting the Wild Bee” had to do with teaching art and Alice had piffed, Come on, girlie, this is fuzzyland.

East Coast artists casually disparage the other coast: it’s mellow, meaning boring; the people lack edges. Thirty years ago, when Alice and Casey were red-hot art students at U.C.L.A., they’d both loved California, but they’ve forgotten.

Alice thinks, Beelining. Shit. Maybe I should take up Buddhism, too.

The woman reemerges. In black boots, black denims, and a black leather jacket with industrial zippers, she looks like she must be hot. Pale skin, red lips, blowball hair—she also looks like Art. And she looks rattled, clawing in that ridiculous bag.

Matthew gathers the kids. Time for his Artist’s Talk: how he got his first hive when he came to live with his grandmother at age ten, and then, at Berkeley, switched from engineering to art not because he liked art—he does not—but because that way he could pursue what interested him, namely bees. (No explanation for why he didn’t just study entomology.) Did they know that every culture in history kept bees? He adds, inexplicably, that every culture also had a village idiot. Idiot-boy, he repeats, scanning the field.

The students chuckle. They think of Matthew as a throwback, but they admire him. He’s different. He’s Important.

The breeze lifts a strand of Bee Man’s hair and Alice pulls out a small video camera. She carries this camera everywhere. It gives her something to do, and also a place to hide; it staves off panic. Bee Man spreads his arms. Alice zooms in. Remarkably untouched face, excellent skin, straight nose, squinting hazel eyes; blue-plaid shirt and, no kidding, Carhartt overalls; slight paunch, touch of crotch, and then the flaxen-haired arm. She focuses: a tanned hand with long fingers, also glistening with bright tiny hairs. She pans back to the slow-moving mouth.

“One queen and roughly 50,000 workers, every one female. Excellent set-up, because females share. And they give, honey to eat and wax to burn.”

A girl in Doc Martins flashes her homey a look.

“I know,” Matthew says, “but never mind. Femaleness is the crux of the hive’s perfection. I find political correctness repulsive, don’t you?”

The kids shift and shrug. Matthew glances toward the parking lot. Now The Artist is filming him. He turns his back, squares up, and recites more of the hive’s virtues—communication, population control, and division of labor. “Cooperation,” he says, “a lost art.”

“So no idiot bees?” a kid asks, laughing at his own wit.

“Not even the drones.” Matthew coughs, a nervous noise. “Once the mating flight is accomplished, the drones’ work is done and the girls kill them off.” Someone giggles. “No idiots.” Matthew looks around again. “Just bees.”

“So is the Artist the Idiot? I mean, in your work?”

Matthew scrutinizes the kid. Matthew has always preferred not to over-think his stuff, let alone pin words to it. And how many artists would appreciate being called an idiot? Though for some, it would be a step up.

Mr. Bee Man in the flesh—and all he can manage is one quick look? Maybe her calling this a field trip pissed him off. Alice herself has never wanted to teach, not after watching it sap her friends of time, and more importantly, of focus, until their work, if they still made work, became rushed, rote, and self-derivative. She hopes this Special Project thing will not divert her too much—ha ha, that’s a joke. Right now Alice wouldn’t care if her work were rushed, rote and self-derivative, she just wants some.

There was the tough spell after college in 1977, when she couldn’t figure out how to be an artist. But then she’d had an epiphany in the Sonoran desert and taken off to New York with her sweet boyfriend James, where she made a name for herself doing performance—cages, parakeets, and her nude body. After James died in 1983, she stalled again, almost two years. But in 1985 she’d hooked up with Gordy. They started small, guerrilla actions, like sheathing abandoned tenements in black balloons. Their piece about the Amiriya massacre, 408 white shoes in Times Square, like a flock of ghostly doves, brought attention, and attention brought angels, and gradually, their work evolved into vast temporary installations, culminating in risings: miles of tiny pink parachutes drifting like airborne jellies over the paths of Central Park. Now Alice wonders, did Gordy realize there’d be no way to top that piece? She hadn’t been willing to see it, but they—their work and their love—might have run its course.

But how is one supposed to start over in middle age? Late middle age. It’s not like she has wealthy Houston socialite. The Vulture Capitalist is gay.

“An individual bee might live only three weeks, but the hive can live forever. What else do we have that’s forever?”

“Art?” The kids snicker, but they believe it.

Matthew is a good example of forever. A seminal Bay Area Process artist, he achieved instant fame with the 1977 performance, Swarm. He worked only with bees. In one large atrium, as bees filled their honeycomb with nectar, Matthew painted the windows with beeswax until the entire space was a dim, sweet-scented amber chamber. In a later piece, he trudged into the hills with a hive strapped to his back, slowly enough to avoid losing foragers. In 365 days he covered one-half mile. He seemed satisfied. The art world raved.

But after Matthew’s wife, Sally, died in a car crash in 2002, he stopped. He would go into his studio and rearrange cases of butterflies, fly-fishing lures, bricks of beeswax, duck decoys, ancient lead weights, woodworking tools, milled lumber. Nothing.

No one pushes him. Though the board prefers their professors be working artists, no one is going to query Matthew Chance about his next piece.

Matthew turns to beckon The Artist. She’s got her head in that bag again so he gestures to Shakespeare and starts the herd moving.

As Alice pulls out cigarettes, a high-spirited nebbish oozing tobacco, sawdust, and young fresh manhood appears.

“Hi, I’m Shakespeare,” he says in a melodious tenor. He widens his chambray-blue eyes, prettily framed by luxuriant black lashes, and flicks at his nut-brown bob. “The hair. And who might you be, my Lady?”

“Hello, Shakespeare.”

“Actually, there’s no smoking here. Fire danger.” He spreads his hands apologetically.

“Fine,” Alice says. “Well then, shall we catch up with the others?” and she strides off. Shakespeare trots after her.

“…yarrow, and clover?”

The word “clover” rises, a conversational thing Alice attributes to a duplicitous attempt to disguise one’s natural aggression. A West Coat thing.

Matthew is studying her.

Alice extends her hand. “Hi. Alice Whipple.” She smiles. Matthew doesn’t. His hand is warm.

“Right. Okay.” He releases her hand, his gaze still inquisitive.

“Is there a question?” Alice asks.

Matthew glances away as though embarrassed. “See that?” he says, gesturing toward a fluffy, magenta-tipped floret. “Clover.” He pauses. “They call it something different in New York?”

Someone snickers and Alice blushes, which pisses her off, which makes her blush more. “The streets of Manhattan do not, alas, customarily sprout clover,” she enunciates, “but I did get out to Central Park one time, and they had it there! Clover! That’s exactly what they called it! As for—what did you say? Yarrow? I don’t know yarrow.” As though she had not been raised in Kansas.

Matthew points to a faded coral pad on a two-foot stalk.

“Oh,” Alice says. “Achillea. I see it, yes. It’s all over, actually. Terrific, we’ve established clover and achillea, or yarrow, as you prefer. Excellent.” She spreads her dazzling smile around the circle of spellbound students and reflexively pulls out her camera.

“You mind putting that thing away?”

For a tense moment they stare at each other, a tall, lean hayseed in overalls and a small, pear-shaped hipster in mirrored wraparounds. A crow caws in the distance, three hoarse beats.

“You’re going to need both hands for the bees,” Matthew says in his uninflected tone. “You’re going to want to pet them.” He smiles and turns. “Hey, see that? See?” There’s a bee on a clover blossom. He speeds up, “I’ll just, uh, finish…” and launches into the list of killers, ending with the most deadly, the varroa mite, which showed up in 1986—

The ten-thousand roses piece, Alice thinks.

First Journeys, Matthew thinks.

—and then lambastes monoculture, which he calls a disease-dispersal-system, the end of bees, which means the end of almonds, apples, avocados, blueberries….

Alice wonders when he’s going to associate any of this with art.

She’s lying on her back filming flying black spots. It’s actually great. First she placed honeycomb in the upper chamber of Matthew’s 19th-century bee-box—no, first she shed the leather jacket and the messenger bag—and then she stalked a foraging bee, set the box over it, and removed the trap door. Exactly as predicted, the bee crawled to the upper chamber to gorge on honeycomb. When Alice gingerly lifted off the lid, the bee flew off, came back with reinforcements, and now lots of bees are coming and going.

So pleasant, the smell, the breeze, the happy holler of art students becoming kids again. Even the sticky fingers aren’t awful. Still, despite the fact that it’s so nice—or maybe because of it—Alice’s eyes fill. What will she do here?

Suddenly Matthew is kneeling beside her and Alice scrambles, dropping her camera to reposition the sunglasses. A black disc, the aftereffect of staring toward the sun, hovers where his face should be. “What color would you like?” she hears. “Ochre and cad red have been taken, but you can have aqua or cobalt or—”

“What?” Alice blinks.

“You need to mark your bees.” Matthew is offering an old cigar box with twelve compartments containing twelve jars of powdered pigment. “What?” he says, as if she’s said something but he didn’t quite catch it. “You want purple?” He lays a Lilliputian brush and tiny jar beside her leg. “A dot on the thorax. There. And don’t forget to time the round-trip so we can compute the distance.” When Alice doesn’t respond, he reiterates, “There. On the thorax. They don’t mind. Look.” He leans closer, and she breathes in his woody smell as his finger strokes the bee.

When he rises, Alice feels him touch her head. But it’s the breeze. Surely Matthew Chance wouldn’t pet her.

Alice has stopped by classes, met students, attended board meetings (bored meetings), faculty meetings, and the alumni, faculty, and student shows. Lots of art being generated at Brainard. Not by Alice. She feels as though she has some sort of aphasia, like her artistic language is gone. It would be interesting if it weren’t so terrifying. When people ask what she’s working on—and they do—she waves her little camera and says something indecipherable about video and process. Alice, who is known for carefully-scripted installation, senses skepticism. She imagines them circling for the kill.

On their next phone call, Casey says Alice should return to performance; make use of the Endowed Chair gig. Talk about beginning where you are! Start with one plain wooden chair. Which she could endow with…?

“I think Shakespeare has a crush on me,” Alice says. “He’s stopping by my office every day to tell me how amazing my work is. He seems especially interested in the early stuff.”

“Can you blame him? You were gorgeous. And naked. How old is Shakespeare?”

“Come on, Casey. I’m done with men. Seriously. I don’t even miss sex. Besides, he’s like twenty-eight or something.”

“Perfect! You might not be done with sex if you had a twenty-eight-year-old to do it with, Al.”

“Just—no.”

“Hey, what’s that sound? Are you outside?”

Alice is on her little lanai overlooking a dry creek bed. “It’s eucalyptus. They murmur.” She’s been filming the thin blue leaves. She likes eucalyptuses, the smell, the sound, those sickle leaves, though apparently she’s not supposed to. They’re invasive, they burn, the Californians scold. But did they transport themselves from Australia? She refrains from responding. “It’s 70 degrees here, Casey.”

“It’s dumping here. So what about going back to your early work? It could be so layered, commenting on yourself commenting on your beginnings.”

“Come on,” Alice snorts. “I can’t go back to that unless I want to change the intention from interrogating the male gaze to erasing the male gaze.”

“Perfect,” Casey says, and laughs her wifty heh-heh-heh..

“No,” Alice says. “So you saw Gordy in last week’s Sunday Style? You think it’s a promotion, from Arts to Style?”

“He just wants her to finance his film.”

“That stupid movie. There’s no way he’ll get it together to make a movie without me to organize him.”

“They say she’s now organizing him.”

“Really? Don’t those rocket-ships on her chest get in the way?”

Alice visits Beginning Sculpture a second time. Bee Man seems to think she will show her slides, but she didn’t bring her slides—had he asked her to bring her slides?—so he queues up a video called The Way Things Go, a gargantuan, comical chain-reaction piece, and disappears. Some crisis with bees. Afterwards, Alice nods politely while the students discuss Process: Begin Where You Are; Trust in Accidents, Trust in Yourself—trust, trust, trust, trust, trust. Like it’s easy. Like every one of them is just a little bag of jewels ready to be spilled onto the rich black velvet of the waiting world.

Okay, she can mock them, but what if these raw beginners actually know something, or have something, that she doesn’t? Like hope. When Alice gets home, she sits outside and films eucalyptus. She doesn’t bother to look at the footage before erasing. She’s still not sleeping.

At November’s cocktail party, Alice gazes at the view of San Francisco Bay and chats with a painter named Michelle, who looks like Anjelica Houston. Everyone at the party looks like Hollywood. Alice wishes she were home on her deck.

Shakespeare ambles up and ogles Alice. “Hi,” he says, his eyes shining.

Michelle hugs him. “Where’s the Boss?” It’s a joke. Apparently Matthew never comes to these things. In fact, it’s been over a week since he’s been on campus.

“Oh, man,” Shakespeare says. “You keeping up with this Colony Collapse thing? Tons of bees just disappearing and no one knows why. They leave behind a bunch of supercedure cells like they’re trying to raise new queens. Like the trouble was the old queen.”

Alice feels affinity with those old queens.

When she gets home, she Googles “Colony Collapse.” Shakespeare wasn’t exaggerating; it’s catastrophic. How can they all just die for no reason? She considers telephoning Matthew, but what would she say?

“So what are you doing for fun?” Casey asks.

“Oh, sitting at Cody’s scribbling endless crap in my journal. And drinking very good coffee.” Alice is writing about her work with Gordy, and about her early work—blah blah, trying to get herself going. The only truth she’s discovered, and this mortifies her, is that she’s always had a man to work with. Is that where her ideas, not to mention confidence, have gone? Well, she’s determined to move forward on her own. She’s a feminist, for crying out loud.

“You’re writing now?”

“It’s nothing. So have you heard about this bee thing? Colony Collapse Disorder?”

“What?”

“Bees are dying, like in droves. They may all be wiped out. Seriously.”

“Bees?”

“Honeybees.”

“Are you hanging out with Bee Man?”

“Shakespeare told me about it at a party. It’s like their immune system has failed, like bee-AIDs. It reminds me of James. He would have loved this guy.”

“Shakespeare?”

“The Bee Man.”

“Was it a fun party?”

“Not particularly. The people are polite, and pretty, and thin, and everyone hugs. It’s unsanitary.” Alice laughs. “And no one smokes. So what’s the latest with Gordy?” She lights a cigarette.

“I don’t think he’s having fun. Boob-Job seems to have moved on.”

Alice wonders what she would do if he called.

In the dark, industrial, high-ceilinged space, the Works on Paper instructor gestures toward a six-by-eight-foot abstract drawing called Sunday Afternoon with Chamomile Tea. Matthew, as guest artist, slips in the back and perches on a stool. He looks tired. He nods at Alice. She lays her BlackBerry in her lap.

“I like how sort of huge it is,” a girl says. “Like I could sort of get lost, you know?”

“The line is beautiful,” says another. “One continuous, um…?”

All the heads bob.

“It reminds me of those ghost drawings by Barbara Heston.”

“Okay,” Matthew interjects, “yes, but let’s be careful with comparison. You know, ‘it’s been done?’ I know you weren’t saying that, uh…”

“Georgia.”

“Solzhenitsyn called it the ‘tyranny of the new,’ this fanatical drive for invention. I really think it’s death to young artists.”

“Wait,” says a student from under the hood of an oversized sweatshirt. “You have to do something new. How else do you get attention?”

Alice is cranky. Still not sleeping. She butts in. “One could say that if it hadn’t been for Duchamp’s Urinal—a very new idea—you yourself wouldn’t even be considered an artist, Matthew. Am I right?”

He shoots her a look she can’t decipher.

“Nor would I,” she adds with false modesty.

Matthew says, “Did you know that ninety-five percent of students are no longer making art five years out of school?” He stands. “Our job is to prepare young artists for a life.” Alice flushes. Her job is to make art.

Matthew strolls to the artwork, bends down, and runs his finger along a torn-off corner. He looks to the student.

“Oh,” she says. “That’s not part of it. I mean, I didn’t want to waste the sheet.”

“How can something—Ms. Whipple? You mind?”

Alice had started filming. “Of course,” she says, and lays the camera next to her BlackBerry.

After a moment, Matthew says, “Excuse me,” and marches toward the massive door. He glances at Alice. “Could I have a word? Please?” Alice doesn’t move. “Outside?”

Alice takes her time stowing the camera and BlackBerry. When she slides off her stool, her sweater catches on a screw. She yanks it loose and follows Matthew through the door.

“Filming me? While I’m teaching?” He’s leaning over her, close.

Alice squints into the sun and says, “I’m not filming you. I mean, I film everything. It’s what I do.”

“It’s what you do? It’s what you do when? It’s what you do when you’re Endowed Chair, or what you do when you’re Alice the Artist?”

Alice’s scalp prickles, every follicle electric. “Alice the Artist” is that horrible character in the Robert Bruch chapbook, a shrewish, cutthroat, promiscuous, and worse, supremely banal person. No one calls her that to her face, of course, and Bob always insisted the character had nothing to do with her, but Alice knows it’s not true—she never got along with Bob—and she knows that everyone knows it’s not true.

She says, “You of all people should appreciate the Art-as-Life, or is it Life-as-Art, practice—”

“NO. I do not. I take my job seriously. I do not use my students as fodder.” Two feet from her nose, he crosses his arms.

“Fodder? Fodder? I’m not their teacher. Anyway, filming actually deepens my engagement.” Alice fishes in her empty pockets. She crosses her arms. She fiddles with the loose loop on her sweater.

Finally, Matthew says in an even tone, “It’s hard to think with that thing following me around, okay? And Janet’s work deserves our full attention.”

Alice wonders if he’s suddenly too tired for a fight or simply bored with her. “Jen,” she says. “The girl’s name is Jen.” When she glances up, he’s got his eyes fixed on her. Her arms tingle, and she blushes, but she doesn’t avert her gaze.

“Fine. Jen.” Matthew turns away.

Back in the studio, he starts again, “Bright white, large-scale, 100{0d6c0367c8c8ce3328d7385a3995d880bbc0bef238b7f2a91697c38c5b607893} cotton artist’s paper hand-sewn onto galvanized pipe, grey thread…dark rough wall, dirty grey floor…” He nods. “So this bright piece floats in this dark space. Intentional?” He studies the work. “Wandering line, watered-down, sumi…Asian art, and the past—intentional? …artist’s process…gentle puckers—intentional?”

Alice leans forward. She’d forgotten it could be fun to talk about art. Like, when nothing’s at stake.

Matthew holds out his hand. “Now I would argue that once you hang something on this wall in this space, everything must be by intention. So this ragged bottom edge, missing a corner—violent, or careless? How does this,” he bends over to touch it again, “interact with the floor, with the other edges, with the meanderings of the line and the puffs? What does this do to what has come before?”

Matthew backs up a couple of steps, stares, nods, leans forward again and fondles the missing corner, as though to make it whole. “Violent, or careless,” he murmurs. Alice thinks, The Man Who Doesn’t Like Art sure does care. But he’s right, the torn corner is bad, though violent may be a bit extreme.

He faces the class. “Okay then. Um, Janet, is it?”

“Jen,” she whispers, eyes round.

“Okay, nice work. Um, any questions?”

Over coffee in the Lair, Alice asks Shakespeare if Matthew has always been such a fanatic.

Shakespeare says, “Not fanatic. A purist. Matthew thinks intention must precede process. Makes you think. Makes him a great teacher. Not to mention his work is incredible.” Shakespeare pauses, and then says, “Maybe performance uses intention in a different way?”

Who’s doing performance? Alice thinks.

The week of Thanksgiving, Shakespeare shows up at Alice’s with a six-pack of Coronas to celebrate Indians—he claims he’s one-quarter Choctaw—and to tell her there’s a BFD—Big Fucking Development—proposed for the pastureland adjacent to Matthew’s place. He gestures toward the camera on the glass table. “How goes the work?”

“Fine,” Alice says. “Really well.” She films and erases, films and erases. In psychiatric circles, this would be called self-soothing.

“I could load your footage onto your laptop for you. I’d love to see what you’re up to.”

“No thanks. I’m trying to, you know, stay fresh with it?”

After she scoots him out Alice Googles “Oakland, development, permit,” but she can’t find anything. She wonders when—if—Matthew will come back to campus. She thinks again about calling him and again decides it would be stupid. She would look stupid.

Winter break, Alice is not ready to face New York, so she drives herself down to Monastery Beach, south of Monterey. When she hops onto the golden sand, she spies a dark shape at the end of the cove and drifts toward it, filming.

It’s a long-necked grebe tangled in turquoise fishnet, rolling in the surf. Alice stuffs her camera into her jacket. When the bird washes in, she snags it, hikes to higher ground, and sits. She stares at the tangled bird in her lap, preternaturally calm. She will need scissors for the tough filament, or knife, or even a nail clipper, but she’s got nothing. And there’s no one in sight. Finally, she grasps one leg and weaves it through the filament, and then ducks the head. The bird doesn’t resist. It has to hurt, but she makes herself keep going, occasionally swiping at her forehead. When she finally lifts the last line from the bleeding shoulder, the bird just lies there, cold as stone. Alice cradles it to her chest, and cries.

Eventually, she carries the bird back to the water. She’s doesn’t know what else to do. The first wave floats it out; in and out, it floats. Alice brings out her camera. When the bird gets deeper, things go bad. It can’t stay upright. It rolls and bobs, its neck undulating, head dipping under the rough water. But it’s out too far now. She should’ve taken it somewhere, to a shelter or something.

Later, when she talks to Casey, Casey insists that Alice couldn’t have known what to do. Then she says, “Didn’t you have your phone?”

Alice doesn’t admit that she had her phone but no one to call.

When she looks at her footage of the tangled bird, she weeps again. But she doesn’t erase. It stays with her, ways she might use the footage, what kind of piece these images could turn into.

One evening in January, Gordy’s number pops up. Alice doesn’t answer. He doesn’t leave a message. She pours a glass of wine, picks up her cigarettes, and goes to sit with the eucalyptuses.

Shakespeare tracks her down. “It’s supposed to be my final critique, and Mr. Big Deal Guest Artist is all, ‘I don’t know anything about objects’—the fucking guy’s a sculptor. Then some shit about the twigs on the pipes, how they filter light. It’s not even a piece. What an asshole.” And Shakespeare hasn’t heard from Matthew for three weeks, and he hasn’t been on campus for literally months.

“I have an idea,” Alice says. “Let’s go find him. Aren’t I sort of his boss?” She’s not his boss. But she’s still not working, and she’s not sleeping, and the man is at least more interesting than her deck.

“Well, no. You are my Special Projects Chair.” He gazes at her, adoring and high. And pretty.

“In which case I should speak to your mentor about your Senior show. Let’s go.”

As soon as they turn off Canyon Road they spot a roiling white plume.

“Shit.”

“Shit.” Alice accelerates. She grabs the Rescue Remedy, a gift from Michelle, and spatters her tongue. “Where do I—?”

“I don’t—wait.” He leans forward. “Slow down. This is it.”

Alice swings onto a rutted road and guns it up the hill. Beyond a stand of live oaks, firemen in black-and-yellow vests shoot geysers from a ladder rig onto a smoldering building. Ten feet beyond that, a white clapboard bungalow sits unscathed, and standing between the bungalow and the burning building are Matthew, George Ginsberg, and Lou Stickley, old art buddies from the ’70’s. They’re swigging homebrew while they watch.

Shakespeare leaps out before the car stops. “Hey, man. You okay?” Matthew, in shirtsleeves, salutes with his 22-ouncer.

Alice steps out, zipping her jacket.

“Ms. Whipple!” Matthew calls. “Now where is that damn camera when you need it?”

“What?”

“That was my studio. You could have recorded the ending.” He looks relaxed, maybe a little drunk…

George cries, “Welcome to the retirement party of Mr. Matthew Chance, artist, bon vivant, and Bee Man extraordinaire!” They hoist their bottles and holler “Rest in Peace!” clearly not for the first time.

“I’m glad you got the butterflies out,” Lou says, “but I’m going to miss those ducks.”

Matthew says, “I feel bad about the wax. Todd, you want to grab a couple of brews for you and Ms. Whipple?”

After some final questions—no idea how it started—the firemen issue a citation and chug down the dirt road. After some last laughs, George and Lou also take off. When Shakespeare heads into the house for another round, he calls, “Hey, man, show her your hives.”

Matthew looks to Alice, whose cheeks sport two strawberries from the strong ale.

“Oh, yes. Are the hives okay?”

“No,” Matthew says. “It’s just a matter of time.”

She follows him down the hill, slipping on shiny leaves. The stacks of white, green, and gray boxes surrounded by a wire fence remind her of a military installation. A few hardy foragers are flying, golden in the low sun.

“When they go, I go,” Matthew says.

His hair is the color of the bees, of corn tassels, which stirs in Alice a sharp nostalgia for warm nights and fireflies, thunderstorms and supper on the porch. She touches his arm. “Listen,” she says, “we—Shakespeare, Brainard—everyone misses you.”

“I don’t know what I’ve got left in the tank.” He glances at her.

“But you’re such a brilliant teacher. And your work…”

“My work is over. Done. Haven’t got the heart for it.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“No, you don’t.”

Alice’s chest tightens. “Yes, I do.” The sun is tinting the stacks pink, like flesh. She says, “They seem alive.”

“They are.”

“Right. But I mean, the stacks. They’re like actual beings.”

“That’s right.”

“Okay.” She sets her empty bottle on the dirt. “You know, I do know. I’ve been stalled all year. I mean, ever since Gordy, you know, the work with Gordy was over. No idea what to do. No ideas at all. Like I’ve forgotten how to be an artist.” Alice’s heart thumps—fear? Relief.

“Like it’s something you are rather than something you do. Kiss of death.”

“What?”

“I thought you were making a video piece.” He stoops to deposit his empty.

“I’m not. Seriously, I’m stuck.”

Matthew wipes his hands on his thighs. “I thought you were filming me. For some kind of New York joke.” He glances at her. “You know, making fun of the West Coast dope.”

“Oh, no. I was just filming so people would think I was working.”

“People?” He chuckles. “It’s a hard world out there, isn’t it?”

“It would be so nice to just start over. But how do you do that when you already have a presence?”

“How do you do it when you can’t remember why?”

Alice doesn’t answer. She’s distracted by a sound, like two dry hands rubbing together. It’s the oak leaves, but the sound still niggles, reminding her or something.

“Ever heard of ‘telling the bees?’” Matthew says.

“What?”

“Long ago, it was believed that bees would thrive only in harmonious families. ‘Telling the bees’ was essential—good or bad news, even everyday happenings, but especially about the deaths. The bees had to be told about a death before sunrise of the following day or they would die too.” Matthew’s gaze is fixed; his hands dangle like he has no use for them. “But I never told them— about Sally. I should have told the bees.”

“Oh Matthew.” His face is so plain. She looks away.

Matthew startles her by tapping her shoulder. “Yep. That’s it.” He stretches, drops his arms with a humph, and mutters, “Idiot Boy. I bungled it. You have to be as interested in the life as the work.”

Alice stares at him. She laughs, almost a bark. “Ha! That would require the life be as interesting as the work.” Hers certainly wasn’t. And really, it’d been a while. What used to interest her? She says, “So are you going to build a new studio? Start over?”

He squints her way, and then looks at the hives. She hears that subdued rustle again, and now Alice knows what it reminds her of: rattlesnakes moving across sand, the sound she heard thirty years ago in the Sonoran desert, standing naked in the moonlight on a rock in the middle of a rattlesnake migration, a crazy night on a misbegotten road trip during the bad time after graduation. That night had changed everything: she and James had fallen in love, and she’d found her work. But it’s getting late; Alice can’t just wait around for another miracle.

She says, “Let me rephrase that. I am starting over.” Blushing, “I’ve got a bit of footage.” She nods at him. “I’d love someone to talk about it with. Also, I’m interested in the honeybee.”

“You are?”

“So it would be great to, you know…”

“Have a West Coast dope to talk to.”

“Have a West Coast friend, Matthew.”

The Eye at Night

28 November 2016

Categories: Fiction

By the time she finally made it to The Lazy Eye there were a good half-dozen cars in the parking lot, all of them crowded against the building, every one covered with a light dusting of snow. Steam leaked from the tavern’s rooftop vent into a black sky. Pulling her Buick under the streetlamp Tina locked it up tight and stepped to the back door, fanning cold into the damp circles under her arms.

Merle was behind the bar when she came in, leaning on his elbows and looking at her as if he’d been waiting all night for her to arrive. “I was starting to get worried,” he said. The neon lettering above him glowed blue onto his bald head.

“I’m early, Merle,” she said. “I don’t start for another fifteen minutes.”

“Weather’s shit.” He reached under the bar and produced an apron, and laid it on the counter in front of her. It was a bicentennial rag, one of three still left in the place. Three more weeks and she could finally throw the ugly things out. “There’s drunks and idiots all over out there.”

“And about seven of ‘em still in here,” she said. She snapped open the stars and stripes apron and held it against her waist, looping the ties around her body twice before tying them off.

Merle straightened up and drummed his fingers on the bar. He looked at her like he did the first time he ever saw her, his eyes rolling up and down her body, stopping at the ‘Spirit of ‘76’ at her lap, teeth chewing on the stray hairs of his mustache. It was not sexy or salacious. It was as if he was the team captain, still deciding which side of the field she ought to play on. Finally he said, “I gotta ask you a hell of a question.”

“What is it, Merle?”

“You ever been in a fight?”

“That’s a hell of a question all right.”

“I wanna know. You ever been in one?”

“You mean, like, ever?”

“Yeah, ever.”

Tina tucked her hands into her apron pocket and looked at the floor, flipping the entirety of her life through her mind. There wasn’t a lot down there for her, outside of the peanut shells at her feet, and a few cigarette butts, snubbed and crushed. “I don’t know,” she said. “In school I guess. Once or twice.”

“How’d you do?”

“I did all right.”

“You’re a little gal,” he said. “You must be quick on your feet.”

Tina looked him over. He held her eyes in his, red-ringed and unblinking. “I’m quick enough,” she said. “What do you want to know for?”

He walked away from her then, paced down the bar collecting empties from the three old codgers spaced out among the stools. One of the men held up two fingers. Merle went to the fridge and pulled out a couple cans of Rainier and slid them down the bar.

“I threw Freddy the Sailor out of here about an hour ago,” he said, walking back to her. “Belligerence and general vulgarity.”

“And this is news?” Freddy’s disagreeable effect was not surprising in the least.

“He was worse than usual. Took a swing at me and almost clipped me in the head. I sent him on his way with a split lip and a little bitty patch of hair gone from the side of his head.” He reached a finger up and touched himself, just above his temple.

“Well, that doesn’t sound good for him,” she said.

“It wasn’t. Thing is, Freddy’s old lady called about ten minutes ago, screaming all kinds of shit at me saying, How dare I touch her husband and he’s a honored vet and blah, blah, blah.” He leaned against the back counter and folded his arms over his chest. They were wrapped in tattoos, of an eagle and some words that Tina had never been able to read. “She says she’s coming down here.” He looked down at those arms of his. “So you need to be ready for her.”

Tina coughed out a laugh, a kneejerk reaction that was unexpected even for her. This, she’d already decided, was not her problem. Six dollars an hour paid for drink serving and small talk, not drama over something she’d had no part of.

“Ready for what?” she said. “I got no beef with her.”

Merle cocked his head at her. “I can’t hit a woman,” he said, as if stating the obvious. “If that broad comes in here raising hell, you’re gonna have to lay her out.”

“Do I have a choice in the matter?”

“Not really. I hate to put it that way, honey, but that’s the way it’s got to be.”

Tina felt her knees sigh, and she steadied herself on the bar. She didn’t have it in her to be without a job again. There were two mouths to feed at home, counting her mother’s. Christmas was around the corner and her car was running on only three cylinders. Merle stared at her with those reddened eyes. There was nothing else she could say.

“How big a gal is she?”

Over the next 45 minutes the door opened and closed at least a dozen times. Some people left and a few more came in already tipsy, including a couple rough-looking coots Merle knew. Every few minutes Tina passed by the front window and took a look outside to see if anyone new had pulled into the lot.

“What kind of car does she got?”

Merle shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “A Ranchero if she’s driving Freddy’s rig.”

She leaned over the booth and looked out at all the cars crowding the space under the tall, lit sign. There wasn’t a Ranchero and what was there looked empty and dark to her.

“Don’t tie yourself up in a knot, honey,” Merle hollered. “Freddy’s wife is a big talker. Probably won’t even come in.”

Somebody got up and changed the channel on the television to an old movie that was already in progress, a black and white western. A woman was standing with her back against the bare logs of an inside wall, a rifle held at her side. A man called something from outside among a band of sagebrush, huddled with a group of men squatted behind a low ridge. “You’re a bunch of liars!” the woman screamed back at them. “Every last one of you!”

Tina pushed off from the table and forced herself to wander the bar, collecting empties from the booths and making small talk with the guys she knew, tucking the occasional dollar tips into her pocket. They talked about basketball and last year’s shipyard strikes and she nodded along with them and teased them about their long beards and thin hairlines. Still, she stole glances out the window when she could. At some point Merle began running the blender, and a couple of young gals who had come in earlier started screeching over the pinball machine, cocktail glasses on the spindle table behind them, paper umbrellas scattered around the stems. Things were picking up and people seemed to having fun, forgetting all about what had happened with Freddy.

By 11:30 the parking lot was a field of white. Faint tracks snaked gray from parking stalls to the main road, some darker than others. In a cone that fell from the tall post lamp, flakes drifted and spun, and Tina found herself thinking less about Freddy’s woman and more about how good the tread might be on her own tires, and whether the plows would be out on the highway by two o’clock. She’d been there for three hours and there were only a few more drinkers in the place than there had been when she arrived. By now it was proving to be a slow night probably thanks to the weather, which was fine by her.

“I can tell you’ve decided that she ain’t coming.” A woman leaned back on her barstool and looked over at Tina, eyes glassy and seated over ruddy, puffed cheeks. “You think the snow’s gonna keep her at home.” She wore a man’s sports jacket with the cuffs chopped and frayed. She pointed a twig finger at Tina. “That bitch turns into an alley cat if she thinks she’s been screwed over,” she said. “I seen her in action.”

“I’m not worried about her,” Tina lied. Merle looked up from a glass he was cleaning.

“I didn’t say you was,” the woman said. “Alls I’m saying is that you better be ready for her if she does show.”

“Nobody asked you to weigh in, Hattie.” Merle walked down and took an empty glass from the space in front of her. He held it up and she nodded. “I wouldn’t make a five dollar bet on anything Freddy’s woman says she’ll do,” he said. “Chances are she’s dead asleep on the couch burning a hole in the upholstery with her cigarette. Either that or she and Freddy are up at the casino spending their rent.” He titled a bottle of gin over a tumbler and winked at Tina.

The woman shrugged her shoulders and tipped back to the bar, taking a scoop of peanuts into her hand. A guy next to her leaned in and said something into her hair and she laughed, cracking a peanut in half and tossing the shell onto the floor.

“How old is your kid?” Merle asked. He produced a towel and wiped down the counter. Tina took a seat on the stool opposite him.

“She’s eight,” Tina said. “My mom watches her when I’m here. She cries every time I leave.”

“Your mom cries whenever you leave the house?”

Tina laughed at that. “God I wish,” she said. “My daughter, Merle. She doesn’t do well with my being gone, especially at night.”

“She’ll outgrow it,” Merle said. “She’s only eight.”

Tina leaned over the bar and took a glass, and filled it with water from the faucet. Thank God, she thought, that he didn’t ask about the man in her life (or lack thereof). She didn’t have the energy to get into the particulars, dredging up stories of late night battles with her ex, the screaming. The unevenly placed pictures, hung for the sole purpose of covering the fist-sized divots left in the drywall. It was all months behind her and she was in a better place, even if it meant being under the same roof as her mother all over again. Even if it meant working nights serving well drinks and cheap beer to a bunch of bottom-rung alcoholics.

Tina asked, “You have kids?”

“Somewhere,” he said.

“You don’t know?”

“They’re grown and gone,” Merle said. “The boy, he’s twenty-six and in California. Moves about every six months. His older sister, I ain’t heard from in some time.” He stared past Tina at the wall behind her, where the picture window looked out into the front parking lot. “It’s complicated.”

The ice machine kicked up, like the low rumble of a passing train. Fewer people were asking for refills now. Maybe they figured they had plenty of time until last call and they were saving their dollar bills, or they were thinking it might actually be a good idea to get somewhat clear-headed for the drive home.

One of the pinball girls whooped and smacked the side of the machine, and Merle shot a look over at them. Tina said, “You want me to go kick their asses too?” Merle laughed at that and right then somebody sitting over at the window called out, “Hello Merle. Here she is.”

Tina stood just outside the front door with her hands in her coat pockets, watching the figure seated inside the darkened Ranchero. It had stopped snowing, though tiny glasslike specks still drifted and swirled in the air. The car was dirty white with gray paint splotches covering the fender, and there was no license plate where it should have been on its front. After a minute or so the driver’s door opened, and a plume of blue smoke rose up into the sky.

It occurred to Tina that Freddy’s woman might have thought to bring a gun with her, or maybe a knife, and at the same time those same men that had announced the Ranchero’s arrival were likely still staring out that window, waiting for all sorts of shit to come down out there. In fact, the whole bar was probably in there watching them, laying bets on the table and taking down names. Still, she kept her eyes on the car, and the woman climbing out of it.

As Tina had anticipated she was a rough-looking woman, heavy all around with sweat pants that hugged her wide hips too tightly, bunched down over slip-on canvas shoes not smart for the ice and snow. She wore a thick parka on top, its fur-lined hood cradling her pink, round, moonlike face. She could have been thirty or fifty as far as Tina could tell, with a long mane of crow-black hair that fell down over her broad shoulders.

“I just about ran my goddamned car off the bridge,” she called out. “I can’t fucking believe I made it here in one piece.” She walked over toward Tina, stepping on the concrete like she was learning to walk for the first time.

Tina said, “You look like you’ve been put through the wringer.”

“I feel like it.” She approached Tina and stopped, and slid her hands into her coat pockets. Her lips curled down at the sides and she drew her eyes into slits, peering like she was trying to see her through a fog. “You a lady bouncer tonight?” she said. “Merle send you out to knock me on my ass?”

Tina straightened herself up tall, as if the change in posture might give direction to the way things might go. Something rolled in the pit of her stomach and her fingers itched and crawled inside her pockets.

The woman laughed. “You don’t look like much,” she said. “I got a twelve year-old niece with more shape than you.”

“I can take care of myself.” Tina pushed her voice down into her chest, hoping the sound of it might carve itself into the air. “It’s a cold night to end up on the ground.”

“No shit,” she snapped, and then her face fell together again, the lines drawing down like lightning from the sides of her mouth. “Tell that to Freddy. He’s got a rash all upside his head and for all I know his shoulder is knocked out of joint again. I’m probably gonna have to run him to the ER tomorrow.”

“Merle says he was out of control,” Tina said. “Said he had to toss him out before someone else did a lot worse to him.”

“Bullshit.”

She stepped back from Tina and yanked her hand from her pocket. It was only when she waved it in the air that Tina could see she had a ball peen hammer in her fist, the round metal head glinting from the lamp overhead. Tina pulled back, put up a hand in front of her.

“Look lady, I’m just doing what I’m told so I can keep this job,” she said. “I got a kid at home.”

“So what? I got two.”

There was no way of knowing what Freddy’s gal would really do, how serious or crazy, or high, she was. But Tina knew if that hammer came at her she would have a half a second to figure it all out. She looked at the woman’s legs, at the sagging gray cotton that hung like old skin. She could kick her squarely in the kneecap, knock the leg out from under her and send her falling to the pavement. That would not be hard to do.

“I’m sick of this,” the woman said. “I tell Freddy to stay the hell out of here but he won’t do it. Goddamn Merle in there, sucking up our money night after night, standing by while Freddy pisses our rent away on beer and pool. We got kids, for God’s sake. I don’t even know if he can work now with his shoulder the way it is.”

The hammer rocked back and forth in her hand as she went on, punctuating every cuss word she threw out. “This is bullshit. I gotta come to this goddamned place and fight his battles for him.”

Tina looked down at her knees again and moved in a little closer. Her feet dragged so heavy with each step, concrete cinderblocks fused to the ends of her rubber band legs.

“I could go and bust out that big window right there,” Freddy’s woman said, stabbing the hammer toward the front door. “And maybe while I’m at it I might just knock you on your skinny little butt. Knock you right out.”

Tina’s own knees shifted but she held herself still, frozen. Like a statue. What they were saying inside now, she wondered. Was Merle there with them and could any of them even see the hammer? It was possible, she thought, that she was standing in such a way that the line of sight between she and Freddy’s girl was completely blocked. She could have a gun pointed at my face, she thought, And nobody would be able to do a goddamned thing. Six dollars an hour plus tips suddenly felt like a hell of a lot less money now than it had the day before.

“You know they’re all just in there watching us,” Tina finally said. “Probably laying bets. Waiting for us to have at it.”

“Yeah, that’d be like them wouldn’t it? Fucking pigs.”

“That’s men.”

“Don’t I know.” Freddy’s woman stretched onto her toes. She squinted her eyes and craned her neck, as if those few inches would allow her to make out what was already impossible to see. “We could give em a show if you want to. Take a swing at me. See what happens.”

Tina looked back over her shoulder. Figures and shapes lingered in the glass, but she still couldn’t make out what was what.

“I say this whole thing is a lousy idea,” she said. “Even if you tossed that hammer on the ground to even things up it’s too damned cold out here to start punching on things.”

Freddy’s girl swung her arm slightly from her side, tapping the hammer against her leg. Her jaw clenched, and her eyes began to well up. Dropping her head back she gave out a rush of air then reached her free hand up to her face, wiping at her cheek.

A breath of wind kicked up, taking an icy hold on Tina’s bare neck. “What’s your name?” she asked. “Anybody in there just calls you ‘Freddy’s woman’.”

She looked Tina up and down, one edge of her lip curling. “You first.”

“Tina. Short for Christina.”

“Tina,” she repeated. “It figures.” She rocked back on her heels a few times then said, “I’m Sammy.” When Tina didn’t say anything she added, “I know it sounds like a man’s name.”

Tina said, “No it doesn’t.” Then she said, “I say it feels like a goddamned freezer out here, Sammy. How about we duck into your car for a bit? Warm our hands up.”

Sammy looked back over her shoulder at the Ranchero and stared at it as if she worried that the car itself would not allow such a thing. “Freddy still ain’t fixed the heater.”

“Come on,” Tina said. “It’ll take us out of the freak show we’re putting on just by standing here.”

Another gust of wind picked up and tiny flakes swept from the ground up into the air. Sammy shrugged her shoulders and slid the hammer back into her pocket, then reached up and wiped at her nose. After looking past Tina at the tavern once more she turned and walked back to the car.

The inside of the car reeked of dirty oil and stale cigarette smoke and man sweat, and the backseat was strewn with rags and clothing, and crumpled brown paper sacks and crushed soda cans. Tina sank down in the passenger seat, kicking aside candy wrappers and curled pull tabs from beneath her feet.

For a time they sat in near silence, Sammy’s rattled breathing the only sound filling the space between them. The spread of gauges on the dashboard were cloudy with grime but Tina could see that there was less than a quarter tank of gas sitting beneath them. She thought of how, even if she wanted to go, if she wanted to pull out of that parking lot and just keep on driving Sammy would likely not even get as far as the county line. She was just as stuck as any of them.

“I don’t know what the hell to do,” Sammy finally said. “He ain’t gonna be able to go to work tomorrow and we got bills due. Merle had no reason to beat on him like that.”

Tina turned in her seat and leaned against the door, the metal handle cold against her back. “I don’t know anything about it,” she said. “Maybe he didn’t. But like I said, I heard Freddy was pretty riled up.”

“Oh big goddamned deal,” she snapped. “He gets like that cause he drinks too much. Besides, Merle’s the one that serviced him. If he wouldn’t of poured the booze, Freddy wouldn’t of drank it, right?”

A curtain of fog began to draw down over the windows and Tina found her stomach finally settling. There was something good about being in this space with this woman, a comfort in spite of everything: the garbage, the hammer. The unknown. There was something to be said about a simple conversation, even a sharp one, possibly winning over a public brawl.

Sammy sniffed. “You think it’s easy for them boys to see their daddy all beat up?”

Tina shook her head. “It’s not good for them to be seeing him dead drunk all the time, either. That’s hard for a kid to take.”

“I know that.”

“I speak from personal experience on that one.”

“Well so do I, so I guess that makes us even, doesn’t it?” Sammy reached out and flipped the ashtray tab a few times. “What the hell else am I supposed to do? It’s too hard on my own. No man out there wants a woman who looks like me, and two kids as a bonus.”

“None of this here feels all that easy to me,” Tina said. “But then what do I know? The last man I had pitched the TV through the front window just because he couldn’t remember where he left the remote.”

“You’re shitting me.” Sammy pushed air through her teeth, a real grin pulled across her face. “Now that’s something I ain’t seen, and I have seen a lot.”

They sat quietly, Sammy still fiddling with the ashtray. Tina watched as a tiny drop of water slid down the slope of the windshield, leaving a dark stripe in its path where the blue neon of the Lazy Eye sign shone through. Finally Sammy dug into her pocket and pulled out a clutter of keys, and stabbed one into the ignition.

“You can go on in now,” she said. “I ain’t gonna raise any hell.”

“You sure?”

“Yes I’m sure. What am I gonna do? The minute I walk in there Merle will call the cops and my ass will be in jail before I can say How Do You Do. And then what? My kids with no mama, just a drunk ass man that can’t even reach around to wipe his own ass.” She produced a pack of Marlboros and tapped one out from the box. “I don’t know why I wasted the gas to come here. Like he’s worth all this.”

Tina leaned to one side and reached into her front jeans pocket, and pulled out a folded stack of bills. They were all her tips for the night, not much. Twenty bucks, maybe a few more. But she handed it over to Sammy anyway, laying it on the dashboard.

“What’s that for?” she asked.

“I don’t know. A tank of gas,” Tina said. “Maybe a cup of coffee and a hamburger on your way home. Whatever you want.”

Sammy snatched it from the dash and handed it back over to her. “Hell no,” she said. “You earned that fair and square. God knows I wouldn’t have the patience for them sons of bitches in there. Plus on top of that, being sent out here to duke it out with me. I coulda had a gun on me or something.”

“The thought did cross my mind.”

“What the hell kind of boss does that? I hope he planned to give you a bonus or something.”

Tina put her hands up in surrender, and Sammy took back the cash, tucking it into her pocket with the ball peen hammer. “Thank you, then,” she said, almost in a whisper. “You didn’t need to do that, but it will sure come in handy.” She produced a lighter from somewhere and lit up her cigarette, and just like that the car was full of smoke.

“I better get back inside,” Tina said. “You drive careful on your way out of here. There’s drunks and crazy people out there.”

“At least I don’t have to worry about the ones in there,” she said, nodding toward the window.

A half dozen pairs of eyes locked onto Tina when she came back into tavern, some swollen behind thick eye glasses, all of them searching her face for some sign of a fight, maybe bruises or fingernail marks, Tina figured. Someone called out, “Merle, you need to give that woman a raise,” and another voice answered, “Amen to that.”

“You all right, girl?” Merle asked from behind the bar.

“You care?”

“Sure I care.”

“That’s easy to say from back there,” Tina said. “She could’ve killed me out there, you know.”

“What? She have a knife or something?”

“What difference does that make now?” Tina said, taking a seat on the stool. “I didn’t see you coming out there to check my pulse.”

Merle walked to the coffee pot and poured a mug half full, then reached under the bar and took out a bottle of Irish Cream, adding a splash. “Here,” he said. “Warm yourself up and maybe we’ll talk about that raise. Fair enough?”

She nodded and blew across the rim.

He waited a minute or so, let her take a couple drinks, and then he started asking her about all that had happened, about why they had gone to the Ranchero and what she’d had to say to Tina. Freddy was a hard man, Merle said, but his woman was harder. She had to be, to stick with the likes of him.

“She’s a tough gal all right,” Tina said. “But that shouldn’t have to be a bad thing.”

“I guess not.”

Tina gave up a few things but found that she preferred to keep most of what had happened back where it happened, and before long they left the subject of Sammy alone altogether. Merle started to tell Tina a story about his old man and his bootlegging days. The old coots sitting in the booths, meanwhile, seemed to have forgotten all about the fight and had no concept of the lateness of the hour. And if they had people at home waiting for them, wives sitting on the sofa in a darkened living room or lying in bed, curled on one side glancing at the red glow of the clock, the men didn’t let on that they cared in the slightest. Merle just kept on talking and pouring and Tina kept on bringing it to the men, taking their money and their words and, on occasion, a quick glance out at the curling tire tracks that stitched over the snowy parking lot.

Magic

28 November 2016

Categories: Fiction

Night Train ignored the squeeze of his wrestling mask by thinking of how badly he wanted to beat up Magic. The silver mask, adorned with a black locomotive on both sides, had been Night Train’s signature for nearly forty years, but now his chin oozed from the bottom edges, the lower ties left undone. Night Train parked his Lincoln Town Car in front of the Biloxi Bomber’s house and leaned across the bench seat to open the passenger door. The car had been a symbol of the prominence Night Train had achieved in wrestling; now the leather seats were cracked and faded, the cushions worn out and uneven. The creak of the passenger door reminded him of the snap of the ring ropes, drawing a smile from beneath the spandex.

The Biloxi Bomber moved slowly towards the car, wearing his World War I pilot’s hat, goggles sitting on the top, with a white three-piece suit. He leaned on a cane with one hand as he curled the other into a fist beneath his chin, contorting his face and snarling his lips as he had for decades.

“The train keeps a rollin’!” Biloxi shouted out Night Train’s catch phrase as he steadied himself against the door.

“I haven’t heard that in a long time.” Night Train smiled beneath his mask. “You look up for a brawl.”

“It’s been a long time since we had a good one of those.” Biloxi paused at the door to catch his breath.

“The suit’s a nice touch,” Night Train said.

“If we end up in the paper I want to look presentable.” Biloxi passed in his cane before lowering himself into the car. He still measured his movements, only now to protect himself instead of an opponent. “My daughter gave me this suit. If we make the news I want her to see it.”

“We’re going to be in the paper, just like in the old days,” Night Train said. Decades before, after twice-monthly shows at the Greensboro Coliseum, the wrestlers went to The Sucker Punch, a smoky poolroom with cinder block walls, poor lighting, and a greasy plywood bar. A few locals would try to test the wrestlers, to see if they were as tough as they claimed, and they always found out it was true. No one called a lawyer. No one called the cops. But the promoters called the papers, because an article about their wrestlers clearing out a bar of good old boys made for great publicity.

Night Train smiled at the memory. “We’ll not only be back in the papers, but we’ll be the biggest story on the World Wide Web pages.”

Biloxi let out a high pitched laugh. When Night Train was booking a territory he had never let him laugh on camera. A man over six feet tall and an athletic 300 pounds should have sounded like an angry bear, not an anxious horse.

Night Train looked in the mirror before he pulled back onto the road, the mask covering what it always had: cheeks too chubby to be intimidating, a face too round to strike fear into the good guys. In time it had come to hide teeth lost to misplaced elbows, a nose misaligned by errant punches, ears cauliflowered by headlocks held too tight.

Biloxi patted his old friend on the shoulder. “I’m amazed the mask still fits. Goes great with a polo.”

“It’s a little snug. But it’ll do for one more fight.” It had been over twenty years since they were last in The Sucker Punch, before the Global Wrestling Experience killed off wrestling’s system of regional territories, replacing them with a nation-wide product emphasizing entertainment over wrestling and body builders over wrestlers. “Here’s what I wanted you to see.” Night Train patted a stack of papers between them. The papers were pages from wrestling web sites that covered the GWE, chronicling not only current storylines but also discussing backstage politics, listing salaries, and spoiling future plans. On top of the stack was a picture of a muscular wrestler with long blonde hair, holding up a championship belt like a rock star would a guitar. “That’s Magic, the one I’ve been telling you about. He’s their top guy.”

Biloxi studied the picture before interrupting Night Train’s thoughts. “Nice looking. Great physique.”

“They all look like that now. They look good…”

Biloxi chimed in with his friend to finish the familiar line they had used for years in promos. “…but barbells don’t hit back.”

Biloxi let out his high-pitched laugh again.

Night Train adjusted his mask and kept talking. “Let me tell you what we’re going to do.” He was used to scripting events. Late in his career he had been the head booker in the Carolinas, telling wrestlers who was winning, who was losing, and where they could go if they didn’t like it. “We’re headed to The Sucker Punch. But now it’s not The Sucker Punch. It’s called the Gate City Tap Room.”

“That doesn’t sound nearly as fun.”

“The GWE had a show at the Coliseum tonight. From what I’ve seen on the computer Magic and his buddies hang out there after the matches, just like we did.” Night Train adjusted his mask around the neck. “This won’t be hard to get going. Look at how much money these guys are making. Six figures. Travel covered. And they only work 200 dates a year.”

“We worked 350 when business was slow. Double shots every Sunday.”

“This generation is spoiled. They don’t know what it means to be tough, to sacrifice, to work your way up. That’s the only way you learn to respect the business. We’ll tell them that, and a little bit more.”

“There’s no way they can respect the business.”

“Of course not. So we’ll teach them how, remind them whose coattails they’re riding on. Run them down and wait ‘til they make the first move. Then we can do what we want.”

Biloxi turned the picture of Magic towards Night Train. “How do you know a guy who looks like this will fight?”

Night Train looked at his friend, glad he had the mask to hide his exasperation. “He has to fight. He’s a wrestler. He’s not very good, but he’s still a wrestler.”

“He doesn’t look like much to me.” Biloxi held the picture of Magic up to catch a few flashes of passing headlights. “How many guys he’ll have with him? I can only take three or four now.” He rubbed a thumb across the top of his cane.

“It doesn’t matter how many.” He pointed towards the pages in Biloxi’s hand. “Even with all of this out there, if he gets his ass kicked by a couple of old men, it’s going to look bad.”

“We’ll cost him a few weeks’ worth of missed shows at least.”

“That’s the thing. They get paid when they’re hurt. Don’t even have to wrestle. Magic got two weeks off for a concussion.”

Biloxi shook his head and tapped the side of his bomber hat. “I probably had so many concussions that my grandkids will inherit them.”

They rode in silence for several minutes, passing by new billboards and unfamiliar exit signs. Night Train finally resumed the conversation. “What I can’t figure out is why they call him Magic. He doesn’t look like a magician or a wizard.”

Biloxi squinted at one of the pictures blurred across the sheets of plain paper. “Why did they call you Night Train? Who were never a train.”

Night Train paused. “You’re still quick on the comeback. Verbally, at least.”

Biloxi smiled and held up his fists. “These are still pretty quick, too. Let those young bloods try something.”

Night Train looked in the rearview mirror. “It’s because I hit hard like a train. That’s why.”

Biloxi looked over his friend. “I never knew that. You were already Night Train when I met you.”

“You know why you’re The Biloxi Bomber?”

“I’m from Biloxi and I could fit into this hat.” He let out his laugh again. Night Train thought that maybe, in the car at least, it didn’t sound so bad.

They settled back into silence while Biloxi continued to read Night Train squinted against the headlights and listened to the familiar sound of tires running the road. He had driven to Greensboro hundreds of times over the years. It was much faster now with the new bypasses, but he preferred the old roads and highways they had traveled for decades.

Biloxi read through several sheets before looking up. “It says here that they’re not allowed to blade anymore.”

“It might scar up those pretty faces and scare the little kids they want watching.”

“How do you believe in a chair shot if there’s no blood? How does anyone figure that?”

“They don’t have to. The fans don’t think it’s real anymore. They do chair shots every week now, and the guys just get up. It’s not like we did it, when a chair shot meant something.” He patted the stack of papers again. “It’s these pages. The fans know what’s really happening. Everyone’s in on it.”

Biloxi looked at Night Train. “Why would they want to be?”

Night Train felt his heart pumping at the exit for High Point Road. As they passed the Greensboro Coliseum they saw the GWE trailers lined up behind the building. The crew would be tearing down the ring and getting ready to drive it to the next town. The parking lot was mostly empty, so the show had been over for a while. Magic and his boys would be well into their evening by now.

Greensboro had changed in the twenty years since monthly wrestling shows left. The Coliseum was renovated, and the area surrounding it gentrified to please the outsiders flooding the region. The Sucker Punch was razed and replaced with The Gate City Tap Room, a hip micro-brewery.

Night Train checked his mask in the mirror while Biloxi pulled himself up by the peeling vinyl top of the Towncar. He got out of the car and said across the roof, “They don’t get fired anymore for losing a bar fight. The big shot owner probably doesn’t even want them scrapping.”

“Maybe because he knows they won’t win.” Biloxi steadied his cane on the pavement. The gravel lot of The Sucker Punch had absorbed the blood of bruised locals decades ago. The newly laid asphalt was easier to walk now.

Night Train tugged on the cast iron handle of the front door and held it for Biloxi, who was reading a sign explaining how the new building’s floors were made of wood from abandoned barns.

“You ever heard of ‘reclaiming’ before?” Biloxi asked as he shook his head. In the light coming out of the door Night Train noticed how much weight Biloxi had lost. He was a shrunken version of the man who could throw loud mouthed locals into the gravel dust two at a time.

“No,” Night Train quickly responded.

The Gate City Tap Room was shiny and polished. A chalkboard hung above the bar, covered in the names of strange beers: Fat Tire, Fox Barrel Blackberry Pear, Old Rasputin Stout, In Heat Wheat. The front of the room was filled with people sitting on high leather stools. The voices at the bar died down as customers turned to look at Night Train and the Biloxi Bomber, but the stares were momentary. A man with a waxed moustache walked by and said, “I like your style, dudes.”

There were no pool tables; instead a trio of skeeball machines occupied a back corner. The Gate City Tap Room was much larger than The Sucker Punch. It wasn’t filled with cigarette smoke or lit with flickering fluorescents. The air smelled clean, even as it passed over the nosepiece of his old mask. Night Train led the way through sections of tables, scanning the crowd, the mask making it hard to see.

Night Train recognized the figures playing skeeball. He saw them on Monday Maniacs, performing their high-flying acrobatics and posing for the camera. Some of the wrestlers playing skeeball were supposed to be faces and others heels, but here they were, in public, socializing as if good and bad no longer meant anything. In the middle of the group was Magic, the center of attention of his fellow wrestlers, his bleached blonde hair illuminated by the floodlights dangling from exposed ceiling beams.

Night Train made eye contact with Magic. He saw them standing across the ring from each other, waiting for the bell. As Magic moved forward, Night Train could feel their lock up, the push of their weight against each other, the heads close enough to whisper last minute plans before starting the match. He listened for the crowd to tell him it was time for the first move.

Instead Magic’s arm fell across Night Train’s back with a strong slap. Night Train jerked as Magic shouted, “The train keeps a rollin’!” His voice sounded clean like it did on television, with no accent, no conflict between the sound and its source. “I used to follow you in Pro Wrestling Illustrated before we got TBS in Omaha.”

Night Train stared at Magic’s deeply tanned cheeks and smooth forehead. The light reflected off of his white teeth, fully intact. Night Train had always been prepared for an opponent who would go off plan, or a star who decided he didn’t like the finish. But tonight he hadn’t planned on anything happening in The Gate City Tap Room that wouldn’t have happened in The Sucker Punch.

“Is that the Biloxi Bomber?” Magic stepped over to Biloxi, shaking his hand and telling him a similar story about wrestling magazines. He had even seen Biloxi once, on a card in Kanas City, in the dying days of the territories. “Let me buy you gentlemen a drink.” Magic waved down the bartender. In a few moments he returned with two bottles of beer.

“Thanks,” is all Night Train said. He looked at Biloxi, surrounded by several of the other wrestlers who had made their way over, all tan, well-built, and alike.

Magic stood opposite of Night Train. “So were you at the show tonight? What’d you think?”

Night Train thought of matches that had gone awry. He always used the noise of the crowd to figure out where he was in the ring, but the voices in the bar weren’t directed towards him. The sound was just in the air. He kept listening for a cue. “No, we didn’t make it.” Night Train grasped the beer without looking at the bottle.

Magic took a drink and kept talking. “That’s too bad. I’d love to hear what you think about the way I was working over the leg tonight. It’s old school, but at a house show you have the time to tell a story by working on a body part. You can’t do that on TV. Not enough time.”

Night Train felt like he was grabbing a headlock in the middle of a match to give a confused opponent time to compose himself. “That’s right. That’s what you should do.”

Magic stood in front of Night Train in an awkward silence before patting him on the back again. “Look – we love it when the legends come visit.”

Legends. Night Train listened to the word. The background chatter faded. He could see Magic’s lips moving but there was no sound. Night Train felt his mask tighten around his skull. He tried to shake off the blow. He wasn’t sure how much time passed before Magic’s voice broke back in.

“…I loved that angle you did with Dusty Rhodes when you turned on him in the cage. And the promo you cut afterwards. Whoa—that was the stuff.”

Night Train turned towards Magic. “You’re supposed to be an asshole.”

Magic threw his head back and laughed, the sound fitting and natural. He then leaned forward and rested his hand on Night Train’s back. “Nope. I just play one on TV.” He laughed again and the man and the character separated, the line between them clear.

He kept talking. “You’re welcome to come backstage anytime. Guys like you don’t need tickets. Here,” he reached into his pocket and pulled out a smartphone, “let me give you the number of Talent Relations. They’ll be sure you can get in whatever show you want.” He showed Night Train the number. “I’ll text it to you.”

Night Train paused. “I don’t text.”

“Ok,” Magic said. He picked up a napkin and waved to one of the bartenders for a pen. “We’ll do this the old fashioned way.” He jotted down the number and handed it to Night Train. “They’ll get you in backstage, too. All the performers would love it. We’d all love it.”

“Performers?” Night Train listened to the word while Magic furrowed his smooth, unscarred brow. “Is that what they call you?”

“Yeah. That’s what we are. Me. You.” Magic pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “All of us. Right?”

“Thanks for the drink,” Night Train said. He could hear the crowd clearly now. The audience was alive. He sat the beer down, untouched, and looked around for Biloxi. He couldn’t find him, but he could hear his laugh, the high-pitched cackle that was out of place in a wrestling promo but fit well in a hip new bar. Night Train thought about where he would be standing right now if The Sucker Punch hadn’t disappeared into this strange room. He took a deep breath and smelled nothing familiar: no smoke, no cheap beer, no dried blood on his lip.

The only thing he knew was the noise of the crowd. He could hear the voices fill the Coliseum, restless, waiting for a reason to pop. It was the right moment to make his move, to create momentum. He looked at Magic, perfect, polished, slick like a movie star, the warm lights making him easy to see. He thought about the compliments, the acknowledgement, what he had expected and what had actually happened. He heard the sounds of the ring: the snap of the hose wrapped-cables, the thud of the canvas covered plywood, the cheers of the fans telling him what to do next. Night Train tugged on his mask, feeling the fit, and then charged his opponent. He heard the roar of the crowd, the rush of air, the scream of voices, revealing what was real, signaling the moment the match would get going, letting him know that soon there would be impact.

Alleviation

1 April 2016

Categories: Fiction

Everyone wants relief. Forest Grove Psychiatric Hospital has a suicide prevention call center where I volunteer my time to alleviate, to relieve. I sit in a cubicle and follow a script. My fellow colleagues are Frank who has a hereditary history of mental illness; Ruby who is an adult obsessed with Hello Kitty and is severely, acutely depressed; Latisha who has tried to jump off bridges in ten cities; and Mike, who went to college and is working on his master’s degree in child psychology, but is living back with his parents after a stress-induced suicide attempt. Frank says, “But everyone has problems, even the wealthiest, most well-to-do. And that’s another thing, 50{0d6c0367c8c8ce3328d7385a3995d880bbc0bef238b7f2a91697c38c5b607893} of the calls we get are about people’s money worries. Everyone always frets about money. People who don’t have money believe money can solve their worries, and in some instances that is true, but in most instances it doesn’t matter how much money you have across the board, there is a cut off. Eventually money doesn’t make you happy.”

Happiness. This is our training for the hotline: make sure to instill happiness into every phone call. If you sound grave, they will sound grave! Try to lift some spirits while also practicing active listening and participation. Everyone also wants to feel loved. Everyone wants to feel heard. “Money and love,” Frank says, “and relief. 50{0d6c0367c8c8ce3328d7385a3995d880bbc0bef238b7f2a91697c38c5b607893} of callers are trying to kill themselves over love. Why is it the thing that will kill us dead?” He doesn’t wait for my answer. “Hold on,” Frank says, “I got a call.”

I run into my newly ex-girlfriend at the bar later in the evening. I buy her a beer because I am stupid. She should be the one buying me beer for all the times she was such a douchebag. She has a new phone, something she couldn’t quite get the money together for when we were a couple, but now she has this shiny new toy and she says, “Can I get your number again? I’m sorry, I’m embarrassed, I know I should have it memorized by now but you know, I only remember my mother’s phone number.” I give her the number for Forest Grove Psychatric Hospital’s Suicide Prevention Call Center.

Many shifts go by and I only take a few calls, all pretty mild in comparasion to what I was trained for. Mike says, “They really train you for trauma here.” Ruby says, “I’m glad because I don’t want to have to deal with anything real.” They all nod their heads in agreement. Anything real? Isn’t someone calling a hotline about suicidal ideations real enough? I think about this through my entire shift, through the one call of a teenage girl whose boyfriend broke up with her before prom and her guidance counselor told her to call us. After the call I think, I can handle teenage girls and proms, but yes, what is it about that call that is less real than say someone who has already made the physical attempt, pills in throat, a slashed wrist, noose. The teenager on the phone said she thought about drinking Drain-O. Mixing it with Sprite. She said she blended a little cup of it to see what it smelled like last night and it smells like rotten eggs. “Drain-O will kill me, right?” she asked for reassurance in the plan. I said, “Yes, and it will literally burn your insides out.” She was quiet and said nothing for a while, while I kept the conversation cheery and repeated my rehearsed script.

Before my shift is done, I get a call from my ex-girlfriend. All calls are recorded, says the digital voice, for safety and security purposes. She says, “What the hell, is this some kind of sick joke, Nina? Why am I calling a suicide prevention line?” Before I can say a word, she unloads on me about respect and how this is why we broke up: I don’t respect her as a woman. “Why do you hate me, Nina?” she slurs. When she asks this, I realize she is drunk, probably on pills, probably at some stupid cliché bar with frosted glasses and frosted lighting and kidney shaped couches that are uncomfortable and some sort of Lite House Music. The thought of it all makes me want to scream into my headset. “Nina, are you there?” she asks. “Give me your real phone number,” she says, “stop playing games, I’ve had it with these games.” I hang up the line and shut down my computer for the evening.

Part of my volunteerism is to deal with donations. I thankfully do not have to call people and beg, but I do have to rotate out with everyone else in logging all information, sending out thank you cards. Ruby is training me; she is fiddling with the computer trying to open the spreadsheet and I can’t watch her because I want to say OH MY GOD JUST CLICK THE TAB, CLICK THE TAB. I look at the ceiling and at my shoes and anywhere but over her shoulder. She finally arranges all of the documents and spreadsheets on the screen and says, “Here, I will walk you through one. It is a donation for $25.00 dollars.”

“Oh,” she says, “we get this one every single month without fail, have for the three years I’ve been here, who knows how long we have gotten it for but boy am I glad we do, saved us a few times when there wasn’t enough money.”

One week later, a Thursday morning, after a staff meeting, my first call of the day is my ex-girlfriend. She says, “I have called this number and hung up so many times this week, you have no idea, Nina, what kind of stupid game are you playing? Why are you so stupid? Yet another reason why we broke up, Nina, all these stupid games, give me your real phone number instead of this stupid hotline, what are you even doing there anyway?” I drop the call.

I sat in my bathtub after my ex-girlfriend broke up with me, drunk in my favorite floral dress, and repeatedly smoothed out my skirt while rocking back and forth, my black tights getting wet behind my upper legs and my butt soaked through to my underwear. Smoothing out my skirt over and over is the last thing I remember. I woke up on the bathroom floor, in my own puke, not remembering if I took pills or not, not remembering how much I drank, so scared I tried to commit suicide, even though I wasn’t even thinking of suicide when I was in the bathtub. I was thinking about how I hated her, how she destroyed my life, how I was finally rid of her forever, good riddance, even though my heart hurt so much.

The ex-girlfriend doesn’t know about the bathtub because nothing actually happened in the bathtub. I was drunk and got my clothes wet because my roommate had stepped out of the shower moments before. The next day was simply alcohol-induced paranoia. Something dark was happening inside of me, however. Heartbreak, but something even darker. My therapist said, “Talking to other people with different kinds of suffering will be helpful to you to gain some perspective on your own.”

It is my turn to handle the donations, the spreadsheets and documents open and laid before me on the screen. $25.00, there it is. I am curious and want to know more about this reoccurring donation, especially how long it has been happening. I do not get much information. All I can see is a comment in the “comments” section and it says, “To Audrey, love mom.” I do not think too much about it right away. In a few mornings, I talk to Latisha and she says, “Yeah, that was Audrey’s allowance,” and nothing more.

In the staff meeting the next week, I tell everyone that my ex-girlfriend keeps calling and harassing me here because she does not have my personal phone number anymore so what do I do? Frank is now the boss and he says, “Dispatch it back to me, I’ll handle it.” One week goes by without a word and finally I think she has forgotten, moved on. I dispatch the call to Frank as soon as I hear “You are so stu…” I don’t even let her finish. I do not ever receive another call from her again. Such relief.

Poor Little Chickens

1 April 2016

Categories: Fiction

The only clues were what she left on her desk. A yellow legal pad. A photo of a small blond boy. A white chunky coffee mug, a thick residue of coffee etching the sides. One time, three rubber bands in a sort of Venn diagram next to the phone.

Marvin hadn’t caught her. And oh, he knew it was a her. A she. Thin. Darkish, brownish hair. A bob. An almost bowl-cut. She’d been spotted, seen, observed, sometime between 5:30 and 6 on Thursday evenings. Just at twilight. Reports came in to Marvin, the Dean of Humanities. Greg in philosophy saw her across the courtyard, closing the office door, keys jangling. Because Marvin had told Greg all about the mysterious teacher using the spare part-time office, Greg had hightailed it around the square but no luck. She was gone. Vanished, like smoke.

The next day after listening to Greg’s voice mail, Marvin headed down to Police Services. Enough was enough. And there wasn’t enough. Space, that was. Time to get her out.

“No one has the key other than you,” the young woman said. She was barricaded inside her uniform, the protective vest underneath her buttoned up blue shirt like a steel prow or at least an intense corset.

“Can’t you have someone wait out there Thursday nights?”

She stared at him. Marvin looked down. Of course not. What was he thinking? They were cutting sections of classes like cheese. Firing deans who were then reassigned back into the classroom. No one trimmed the bushes that grew up the sides of the offices, ivy threatening to make a bad fairytale out of the entire liberal arts building. No more free bottled water, business cards, retreats. Sabbaticals cancelled. Class maximums raised. Cost-of-living raises rescinded.

Who had time for a mere office interloper?

“I don’t recommend you do it yourself,” she said. “Or any faculty member. Leave her a note.”

“I have. Several. On the desk.”

The woman watched him, gaze steady and wholly uninterested, wanting him and his complaint to disappear through the thick glass door and never come back. “Did you do a check of who is teaching on Thursday nights? Female faculty? Narrow it down? Call them?”

“No one,” Marvin said. “I matched the classes in Humanities and English. Then I looked through the whole schedule. All men. One woman during a 4-7 section. But astronomy and a class way up the hill. I called the Dean of Sciences to make sure. That instructor is about sixty and a redhead.”

The woman sat down in her stiff black chair. She clicked on her computer and typed away. “So I’ve sent a message to District. The Chief. Let’s see what he says. But it’s official.”

Marvin swallowed. What did District ever say but, “Cut! Close! Quit! Stop”? If he wasn’t careful, he’d be kicked back to a faculty office and sentenced to four sections of Introduction to Sociology every semester.

“Thanks,” he said.

She stared at him and then gave him a miniscule nod, a fast head dip he barely saw. For the first time, he noticed her badge, her name in black: Sergeant Holmes. He started, wondering if this was a joke, Halloween at Police Services: Sergeant Sherlock Holmes, Detective Marple, and Officer Poirot. He started to ask, a laugh filling his mouth, but her constant, unblinking stare pulled the gusto right out of him. Marvin turned and pushed open the door, breathing the strange air that the strange and unknown teacher breathed, too.

That night in their dining room, the redwood table gleaming under the stylish black and gold placemats they’d ordered from Room and Board, Marvin sat across from Jim. Outside the large window, a light wind blew off Suisun Bay, leaves flicking the glass. Jim arranged his napkin once, twice, on his lap, his movements punctuating Marvin’s story about Police Services.

“Easy fix, dear,” Jim said in that self-assured tone he always had when Marvin presented a dilemma. “Camera.”

For Jim, life was an easy fix, he a Q and A guy at a tech company, informed on everything, or so he made clients think. Sitting behind a large desk from 7 in the morning to 2 in the afternoon, headset on, swiveling in his chair like a NASA engineer.

“Has to be approved by District, MacGyver.” Marvin picked up his spoon. He was sure Jim used chicken broth in the carrot soup and didn’t tell him. After that last Costco run, Marvin had spotted the tower of boxed broth at the back of the pantry. Marvin wanted to pitch a fit about Jim’s passive/aggressive attempts to undermine his vegetarian health regime, but the soup was so smooth and rich and tasty, Marvin kept spooning in one bright orange mouthful after another.

“The secret is ginger,” Jim had said earlier. “And garlic. Pureed.”

“That’s it?”

Jim had nodded, his face over the steaming pot.

Liar, Marvin thought now, swallowing down another tangy spoonful. Cheat. Poor little chickens.

“You’re sure it’s a teacher?” Jim asked. “Not a student?”

Caught up mid-swallow, Marvin realized he’d not imagined it was a student. Maybe because the office was so neat, so tidy, all the objects placed just so. He and Jim didn’t have children, so he used his own childhood to remember the chaos. His room a horror of closed shades and piled clothing, plates pushed under the bed and porn stuffed between mattress and box spring. The mounds of detritus a protection against his parents, but also his schoolmates. The world. Everything and everyone who wouldn’t accept him. And who would? Skinny to the point of asslessness, prone to nervous over-talking, unable to meet most people in the eye, Marvin felt safe only in the evidence of his own existence, no matter how messy or—in respect to the magazines—dirty.

Imagining a student keeping a tidy, ordered office seemed impossible.

“How—“ he began.

But Jim was riding his tangent. “Or a homeless person. Somehow got a key.”

“With a photo of child on the desk? Pens in a row? And don’t forget the sighting. Dressed up like a teacher?”

“Did anyone get close enough to smell her?” Jim pushed back in his chair.

“What?”

“You know. Showers. Sinks. She might look all right, but you can always tell when someone is only mildly acquainted with water.”

“She’s fast.” Marvin took a piece of bread, sourdough, crusty on the outside, and bit in. “No one’s gotten close.”

Jim passed him the salad bowl. “Look, let’s go out. Thursday night. You and I’ll stake out the place.”

“What?”

“That’s right. Trap her.”

“Police services said not to. She might be—“

“Armed? A woman who looks like a professor? Gun in her bag?”

Marvin scooped out a mound of arugula and dried cranberries onto his plate. He breathed in lemon and olive oil. “Who knows? Weirder things have happened.”

Jim crunched through the salad, his eyes on Marvin. Things had gotten weird lately. Despite the budget cuts, the college had established a dedicated office for emergency support staff, an officer trained in all things horrible, plus first aid and CPR. Everyone was on high alert, waiting for a student to arm himself (most likely a him) and burst onto campus to shoot down the professor who had dashed his university dreams with a B. Marvin counselled his professors to be mindful of student reactions, even as President Jimenez insisted on strict adherence to grade standards.

Alone in his office with an angry, sobbing student, Marvin wished he weren’t pressed behind his desk, back to the wall. How could he jump over and past the student who turned violent? Instead of repeating the mantra, “You earned your grade. It wasn’t given to you,” should he just send the complaints upstairs? Let the Dean of Instruction deal with the mess. Her back to the damn wall.

But student weirdness wasn’t really what Marvin was thinking about. No, it was Jim. His focus on food these past five years. All these elaborate dinners. Soup made with cream (and chicken stock). Expensive oils. Walnut, grapeseed, avocado. How much weight had Jim gained this year alone? Marvin never mentioned (though he went through it) the orderly stack of pants in the closet, folded khakis and almost-jeans, in order of despair: 32, 34, 36. All too small. On his way to the dry cleaners last week, Marvin had checked the tags on Jim’s pants. All 38s.

When they met twenty-eight years ago, Jim had weighed a sprightly 145 pounds. At 5’ 8”, he hadn’t been skinny but pared to muscle and bone. Oh, how Marvin had admired his thighs, his strength visible under the denim. And his hair, longish, curling over his t-shirt collar. Marvin had been sitting behind him in Introduction to Government, staring at one luscious strand.

The professor had passed out the syllabi, but all Marvin had wanted to do was slip an index finger through one of Jim’s curls, feel the golden silk on the pad of his finger, pull.

“Do it,” the girl sitting next to him whispered, her eyes on Jim’s hair.

Marvin had turned to her and then back to Jim’s curl, reaching out a finger.

“If you want me,” Jim said now, pushing his salad plate away and leaning back, his hands on his belly, prodigious under his blue button-down shirt. “I’ll be there.”

Marvin speared a cucumber. “I’ll figure it out.”

Jim sipped his wine, looking out the window at the back patio. Underneath the table, their shih tzu Bangle scratched an ear, dog tags wangling.

As he crunched through the cucumber and swallowed, Marvin knew he was no one to judge. Here he was, stuffing his face, night after night, not arguing about elevated cholesterol levels or blood pressure or giant pants. The six-foot boy who had sat behind Jim in government had weighed 155 pounds and had sported a full-head of brown hair and bright blue eyes, 20/10 vision. Now weighing in at 185, his hair was mostly gray, his eyes still blue but now dim and bespectacled. At night without his glasses and headed toward the bathroom in the gloam, Marvin was mostly blind, staggering around like a scoliotic zombie. There was his right Achilles tendon, his carpal tunnel syndrome, and his left twitching eye. A real prize.

Bangle brushed against Marvin’s legs. Jim stood up and started to clear the table.

“Thanks for dinner,” Marvin said. “It was delicious. As usual.”

Jim turned, smiled, and in that second, there was that glimmer, that flash. And there was Marvin, too, all those years ago, wangled by hope, breathless. For that second, whole.

“Homeless folk are sleeping in the Learning Center,” safety officer Dan Beckel said. “Left a nest. Blankets. Canned goods. Used the bathrooms. Stink to high heaven. Had to call in maintenance before the 8 o’clock classes rolled in.”

Used the bathrooms. There went Jim’s water theory. Marvin stared at Dan over the expanse of wooden desk. The man sat stiff and stern in his chair as if they were discussing known terrorists or a ticking bomb. Gave him purpose, Marvin suspected, though in a dangerous situation, Dan would be needed.

Marvin sipped his coffee, looked up over Dan’s head to see students outside his office heading to class. Dan gazed at him, blinking in a slow, orderly fashion, his brown eyes wide-open, protuberant, as if a true emergency were imminent.

“The woman in FO 215 doesn’t seem homeless. There’s no nest.”

“We can change the locks. Chief said to put through the work order. Can’t stake it out. No resources. But if she can’t get in, she can’t get in, you know?”

“But what if she’s a teacher?” Marvin put down his coffee mug. “She seems to go to class. It looks like she’s teaching.”

Dan seemed to be flipping through an imaginary protocol binder in his head, rule 407 A.1.a or something like it: No unauthorized faculty or staff assigned keys to offices.

“If you can’t identify her, she can’t use the office,” he said after a moment. “If her teaching materials are locked in the office, she’ll come to you. If she needs the office for student conferences, she’ll show up here to complain.”

Marvin wanted to argue for her rights as a supposed teacher, but he also wanted this problem gone. He felt like smacking his hands on his desk, standing up, and yanking Dan all the way to the office. Fine. She was going to be evicted. Why couldn’t they change the locks there and then? Dump all the stuff on the desk into a cardboard box. Maybe they could toss everything into a dumpster. Desk and chair and credenza. Gone. Open the windows, air out the office, bring in maintenance to steam-clean the rug. Solved. Over. Finished.

If she came to complain, Marvin would send her to Dan, who was sitting at attention in the emergency office. Not Marvin’s problem.

But no. The cogs must spin at their approved speed. And after a few more words, Dan stood up and left. Marvin pulled out a work order form and filled it out and put it in his “out” box. He stared at it and then picked it up and walked it over to his assistant, Jemma, who was watering her small lush potted plant garden on the top of her desk.

“Could the student assistant run this to Buildings and Grounds?” he asked, handing her the paper. “This needs to happen.”

“Like yesterday.” Jemma looked up over her glasses and her fern fronds and then snatched the form with one thin hand. With a razor fast glance, she analyzed the form for any errors and then tossed it on her desk. “Amazing you just let her stay.”

“What would you do?” he blurted, his face flushing enough that he looked down and fiddled with a pile of paperclips.

Jemma put her hands on her hips, her thin lips pressed together until she released them with a slight smacking sound.

“I’d stalk her like a cat over a gopher hole,” she said. “I’d wait till she turned the corner and then pounce.”

Jemma clapped her hands, the sound a loud surprise, enough to make Marvin step back.

And then, the phone rang, and she turned to answer it. Marvin drifted into his office.

Jim had slammed down the phone, if that was possible with a cell. In any case, he hadn’t said goodbye. All Marvin had wanted to do was tell him he was working late.

At first, Jim heaved out a huge sigh into Marvin’s ear. Then he said, “This isn’t about that woman, is it?”

Marvin paused, and that’s when Jim knew he was lying. Jim always knew. “I told you I’d help. Now I’ve got a fucking soufflé whipped and ready to go in the oven. Done in 30 minutes. You said you’d be home by 5.”

“I—“

“Yes,” Jim said. “I. Your favorite word.”

That’s when he hung up. But now Marvin’s phone was in his pocket, and he was standing still and straight by the column two doors down from the woman’s office. No, he thought. Not her office. The office, but it seemed taken by her, the mug still there, the photo in its frame.

A few students slipped past him, Marvin pretending to write on the pad he clutched officially. Just a dean doing his busy work. But he’d already written what he needed to: Hi, there. You’ve not come to talk with me, despite my repeated requests. This office is going to be reassigned. Please remove all your belongings forthwith.

He’d actually written forthwith.

The Jim in his head said, “Really? And you used the word please? For god’s sake.”

Marvin took one pass around the square, his eyes focused on the door. At every clack of heel, he turned and simultaneously pushed back against the walls or columns, expecting the mysterious teacher to pass by.

“Hey,” someone called out. “Marvin.”

Marvin turned to see Greg striding toward him, books and folders tucked under one arm. His stomach, round and smooth, moved gently under his button-down shirt, a large cantaloupe, a six-month pregnancy. When he’d been hired, Greg had looked like a Southern Californian lifeguard. A water polo player. A long tall drink of blond water. His theme songs would be from the collected works of The Beach Boys, The Doobie Brothers, and Fleetwood Mac. “So are you looking for our intruder?” he boomed.

Marvin wanted to press an index finger to his lips and shush Greg, but that would be infantile. He blushed, then rubbed his forehead trying to erase the color.

“Thought I’d stalk,” Marvin said.

Greg’s mouth popped open. Oh, Marvin thought, he was kidding.

“I have to get her out,” Marvin said. “Or it’s going to go upstairs. Could be nasty.”
Greg nodded. “Don’t want trouble these days. You heard what happened to Rose Tranby. Back teaching business English. So much for that pay bump before retirement.”
Marvin nodded. All he needed was a major meltdown by a homeless professor.

Greg cleared his throat, stepped back, his free hand on his hip, jaunty and kind of cowboy, a retro Patrick Swayze. Maybe his theme song was from Garth Brooks. Could Greg’s hips swing? Could his toes tap? Marvin wondered about straight men. Often, actually. How did they walk through life in their straight skins? Some of them were straight in name only, slipping into bars and rest stops for the sex they really wanted. How did it feel to look one way but want something completely different? Every single day of his sexual life, Marvin had awakened in the right body and next to the right body. Or, at least, type of body. What about Greg? How did he wake up? The idea of Greg naked wasn’t exactly exciting, but thinking about Greg with another man was intriguing. Really, what would two straight horny men do in a locked room? One of Marvin’s favorite fantasies, used more often than he wished, Jim so often falling asleep in front of the television. It wouldn’t be that hard to reach over and kiss him, but instead, Marvin would finish watching the television show. And maybe another. Or at least that’s what he told Jim the next morning. Thank god for those imaginary straight boys in confined spaces.

Marvin blushed. “So I’m going to hang here and see if I can find her.”

“Do you need my help?” Greg asked. “I can stay late. No problem.”

Marvin took one step back. “I’ll call Police Services if there’s an issue.”

“You sure?” Greg said. “Let me put this stuff in my office.”

Marvin imagined Greg, sans folders, pushing him onto the desk of the imaginary teacher, the one no one could find. First they’d close the blinds. Then, well, let the festivities commence.

“You go,” Marvin said. “She’s probably already spotted us. I’ll have to try another night.”

Greg shrugged slow, another cowboy move, the nonchalant hero ready to walk into the sunset. “Keep me posted.”

“Will do,” Marvin said, almost wanting to salute. Or fall to his knees, his hands gripping Greg’s ass, pressing himself into the glory inside Greg’s pants.

Greg clomped away down the hall, all the warm air going with him. Marvin crossed his arms and pressed his back against the column. The air stilled. The sun skid orange across the sky, setting behind the building and then the hills. Marvin peered around the corner, waiting.

But then what? What was he really going to say?

“Excuse me, but what are you doing in this office? This campus?” or just a quick, “Who the hell are you anyway?” or even faster, “Get out.”

Below him, a skateboarder whizzed by, strictly against the rules. And then, the waft of a forbidden cigarette. If he weren’t spying, Marvin would be down there handing out pamphlets. Smoking only on the perimeter of the campus and the parking lots. Use the designated ashtrays. Next time. Marvin pressed against the column, the steel cooling. He shivered. Maybe in just minutes, he was going to out this woman. Take something from her she needed. Reveal her secret and scare her away. Show her for the fraud she was.

He’d never been outed like that. His sexuality had been Saran-wrapped in high school. He’d worked all summer at the local swim club (oh, that tight orange Speedo) and then he’d flown across the country to attend Columbia. Somehow, his parents accepted his “way too much homework” excuses, not pressing him to come home Thanksgiving and Easter breaks, those long steamy days he spent in bed with Jim doing all he’d dreamed about since he was ten. A quick Christmas home each year and a week during the summer, and before he knew it, his parents were both dead. By then, he and Jim had been together five years, and his parents—killed on Highway 5 by a drunk trucker—had never met him. Never knew (at least never said the words aloud) Marvin was gay.

After the funeral, Marvin didn’t give a shit who knew. But there was a limit. There were rules.

An only child, he inherited the house. For a week, he interviewed real estate agents, until Jim said late one night, “Why don’t we move to California? Live in the house.”

“The suburbs? That Oak Street hell? We will have to hide out there. In plain sight.”

“It’s a nice house, right?” Jim squeezed Marvin’s shoulder. “Paid for. Big yard. We can get a dog.”

We can die out there, too, Marvin thought. And he didn’t mean from boredom or heat stroke or gossip. But from AIDS, San Francisco and temptation just twenty miles away.

But Jim kissed him, once on the shoulder. Once on the neck, his warm face against Marvin’s cheek.
So Marvin applied to Cal, Jim applied to USF, and they both finished grad school while living in the house Marvin had grown up in. Mowed the lawn. Painted the house. Planted lavender. Handed out candy at Halloween.

“Let’s volunteer to be Boy Scout leaders,” Jim had said after doling out the last Snickers from the plastic pumpkin head. “Take the boys on ‘overnights.’ Wink, wink. We could be the talk of the town!”

“Run out of town with pitchforks more like.” Marvin turned off the porch light. “For god’s sake, Jim. It’s not funny! I grew up here with these people. You don’t know how they think. What they imagine. So don’t even joke about it!”

Of course they never volunteered to do anything with children, and they didn’t go into San Francisco to party and sex it up. As far as Marvin knew, they’d both only slept with each other, though, of course, Marvin had imagined a number of possibilities over the years. Greg, for one. But from the moment Marvin wanted to gently pull on Jim’s curl, that was it. From the second Jim turned around in the wooden desk, asking about the reading assignment. Smile, smell of heat and something green, his pulse, a pounding that went past and outside of Marvin’s body. A miracle after years of no one.
Days turned into weeks turned into years. The political climate changed. Gavin Newsom. Gay marriage. Sports figures outing themselves. But still, Marvin and Jim. Only each other. But they were alive, weren’t they? Marvin had an accumulated 178 sick days. So many of their friends died. So many were on regiments of drugs they would be on for the rest of their lives. Traditional. Ordinary. He and Jim lived like Marvin’s parents had. And still did. Other than the truck and dead parts, of course.

A chill wind picked up and blew down the hall. Marvin tensed, imagining that he heard footsteps. Heels. He flattened himself, tried to be invisible. He conjured Jim with his camera and MacGyver smarts. He held his breath, not wanting his lungs to get in the way of his ears. She would turn the corner now. Now! But no. He exhaled, shifted. Nothing but wind.

The next time, she wasn’t so lucky.

Marvin rushed toward her as she unlocked the door with a small pale hand. She was humped over, burdened by a bag lumped with stuff. She clutched a binder, a faded, peeling school logo sticker slapped on the front.

“There you are. I’ve been wanting to talk with you,” Marvin said.

She didn’t look at him, but he saw the collapse in her body, the admittance of defeat. “I know,” she said.

“Please give me that key,” Marvin said as the door opened. “Now.”

She turned to him. He didn’t take in breath as he’d thought he would, recognizing her. Or seeing her homelessness. Or her lie. She seemed familiar, as if this was the person he’d known about forever: small, plain, brown-eyed. Her face was a small tired oval, her cheeks reddened, her hair wind-blown and thin.

She pushed the door wide open, and they both walked in the office. She turned away from him and started to put the mug, frame, and pens on the desk into her bag.

“Who are you?” Marvin asked. “What have you been doing here?”

At that, the woman started, almost shook. “I? Why, I teach here, of course.”

“What do you teach?” Marvin asked.

She looked at him the way his second-grade teacher Mrs. Franklin used to. Why, the look said, must they continue to send me the challenged? The sadly botched and bungled children? The skinny, the wrong, the mentally ill? The untoward and uncouth? The miscreants?

The woman spread her arms wide. “Why, Shakespeare, of course.”

Marvin couldn’t help it. He looked around the bookless office, as if expecting to be surprised by the bard’s collected works, shiny-backed, gold-filigreed. But as they had been every time he’d let himself in, the shelves were empty.

“I see,” he said, palming his cell in his pocket. If only he’d put Police Services on speed dial. Dan Beckel and his skills would be helpful right now.

“Why, I’ve been teaching here for years.” She flicked on the desk light and sat down, scooching herself in, patting the surface as if looking for inkwell and letter opener. Or maybe a quill. “I completed my dissertation on Shakespeare at Stanford. Now I teach only the most difficult classes. Hard work, of course.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Marvin said, his voice finding a non-threatening cadence, the lull he might have used on children, if he’d had any. She was certainly older than he was and fragile, too, ready to break, as delicate as an Elizabethan manuscript.

He pulled up the extra chair and sat down. The woman searched her desk again, her hands making a shush shush sound on the wood. She actually looked like a Shakespeare scholar, small, dark, intense, as if sonnets were crammed into her head to bursting. Her coat was worn but wool, her shoes cracked at the toes and heels but leather. She smelled not clean but not dirty either.

“The students these days,” she went on, “don’t pick up on the subtleties. Poor little chickens.”

Marvin thought of all the chickens, clucking in their death camp coops. Jim stirring the big pot of soup, glugging in the broth on the sly, hoping that Marvin wouldn’t notice but knowing he would. The students in their rows, pecking toward their futures one class at a time.

“I’m with you,” he said.

“We need more funding.” She turned to him, eyes alight. “To take them to Stratford-Upon-Avon! To the Globe in London! To really experience the plays as they were meant to be.”

Where were they all meant to be? Maybe they’d started in the right place, but instead, they’d ended up here in this office. What did they have to look forward to?

The woman clasped her hands, looked up at her empty bookcase. “Maybe the whole school could read Hamlet. A symposium!”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Marvin agreed. “And interestingly, we’ve had a recent budget increase. Would you like to talk with the president? I’m sure he would love your ideas.”

“Why, to go to England again,” she said. “That would be simply lovely.”

Marvin could do it. He had more than enough saved up. Just a drive to SFO. Then they could take the redeye to London. Business class. He could make this poor woman’s dreams come true. At least for a week.

After a week of plays and museums, he’d pop her back on the plane, and then what? Come home? Or maybe he could stay. Retire early. Travel the way he never had as a young man.

Mouth open, the trip whirled in his mind, but then the woman began to hum, a tiny melody but wrong somehow. Off-key and out-of-place. He breathed in, sighed, felt his bones press against the wooden chair.

“Let’s go see the president now,” Marvin said, standing and holding out a hand. “He always works late.”

The woman smiled, smoothed her hair, and took Marvin’s hand.

“Don’t forget your bag,” Marvin said. “And why don’t you let me lock this door for you.”

The woman handed him the key. Her hands were rough, the nails ragged. Up-close, Marvin saw that her lipstick had been applied in a crooked bow, giving her a strange, almost tragic smile. But still beautiful. She couldn’t be more than fifty. He could imagine her the girl next to him in government, the one that smiled when he finally did pull Jim’s curl. Where had she gone? Was it Stanford? To study Shakespeare?

“Thank you so much,” she said as they both walked out and he closed the door, locking it tight.

“All safe,” he said. “Let me escort you.”

He led her down the hallway, listening to her talk about Yorrick and Horatio, maneuvered her down the stairs toward Police Services.

“No ID? No local family?” Jim served Marvin a slice of eggplant piccata, placing it with chef-y flare next to the pile of lemon pasta with organic basil and mound of little gems salad.

Marvin shook his head, his throat caught not on food but sadness. How she’d turned to him, her dark eyes wide with the trip they would never take together. All those Shakespearean words evaporating like steam.

“Did you find out her name? If she’d ever taught there?”

“No,” Marvin said. “Nothing in her bag. No wallet. No address book. Phone. Nothing.”

Her life, Marvin understood, was as empty as the office had been.

“So they’re going to hold her? Pending what?”

“A psych eval,” Marvin said, spearing a perfectly torn piece of lettuce, lightest green. On his tongue, the tang of citrus, the smooth of oil, the pinch of salt.

“Poor thing,” Jim said.

“Poor thing,” Marvin agreed, thinking of the woman, her hands raised, eyes wide.

“Poor little chickens,” she’d said.

Jim chewed and swallowed, wiping his mouth and sitting back. “Now you can assign the office to a real teacher. The semester can proceed as originally forecast.”

Marvin agreed, but nothing was that easy. Yes, she’d be gone, but the thing that had made her sneak into an office remained a mystery. Whatever had turned her from real to pretend was deep inside her. And now she was sequestered inside hospital walls, trapped in bureaucracy, disowned, unwanted, unloved, no family or friends to call. A Jane Doe but still alive. No trace or clue in her office or on her person. The set she’d concocted for herself would be dismantled. Tomorrow, maintenance would come in and clean away all traces of her former non-life.

Jim served him some more salad, and without thinking, Marvin reached out and grabbed his hand.

“What?” Jim asked.

Under his grip, Jim was warm. Marvin gripped harder, and Jim didn’t flinch. Together, they hung together, leaning slightly over the table.

“Hey.” Jim put down his fork.

Marvin pressed hard, let go, sat back. Jim watched him, his carefully prepared meal between them.

“Hey,” Marvin said.

Later that night, Marvin lay awake in bed, Bangle curled at his feet. Outside, the sprinkler system sprung to life. Clearly Jim had forgot to adjust it for the season: he was snoring his way into winter while the lawn waterlogged.

Marvin shifted onto his side. He couldn’t stop thinking about the woman, feeling her thin hand in his. He’d spent weeks strategizing her capture, but all he’d done was find a sad lost woman using an office to help her try to remember a life she might not have ever had.

It was like the life he might have had if he’d gone home during break. Without Jim, he’d forever have thought he was the bungled and the botched. He’d have spent his time home barricaded in his room, hiding out until it was time to leave.

The sprinkler stopped and then started in another quadrant, the house pipes quivering and moaning under the floorboards. Marvin swallowed, sighed, turned over again, and hugged Jim, all of him, holding him close, thinking about those golden curls that were still there, at least in his mind. Jim stirred, spun around, his mouth at Marvin’s ear.

Marvin put a hand on the back of Jim’s neck, closed his eyes against the dark of the room. Inside him, bright and clear, that morning class. The smell of linoleum. A chalkboard. His new textbook. Jim’s smile, the way he understood in two seconds what had taken Marvin his lifetime to understand. The girl encouraging Marvin to reach out, touch the curl.

In their bed, Marvin kissed Jim. As he’d wanted to from that first moment. Yes. There it was. How could he have forgotten? Touch, his finger always sliding on the inside of that tight curl. His heart beating in his throat. A pause of lightness. Marvin reached out again.

New Providence 1977

1 April 2016

Categories: Fiction

Bonnie walked up five concrete steps, and opened the glass storm door to our tiny kitchen in our little New Jersey house on a sunny morning. I remembered it was a weekday, because my brothers were at school, my father was at the office. I think Bonnie said something about going to work, or a job interview, but my memory can’t be trusted.

I always want to change Bonnie’s name, but I can’t. Her name is so much a part of who she is for me. The “B” are her two large breasts. The “o” is a boob. The double “n”’s, more boobs. The “i” is the dark space between her breasts. The “e” is her ass, round and sassy and in perfect balance with her breasts. At the time, and forever more, Bonnie was the va va voom representation of womanness. She was an aspiration. A coveted contrast to the flat-chested stick figures in magazines and movies that I would encounter later.

Bonnie spoke breathlessly to my mother, nodded her pale face, red lipped, capped with a whipped topping of white blond hair. It was some kind of beehive variation that left me with a cultural understanding that not many of my peers have. I only heard her heavy smoker’s whisper, I have no knowledge of their actual conversation. I was looking at her curves, covered in green knobby wool.

The green wool suit was important. I can smell it, baby powder and Chanel Number 5. It made me cough. I know I could feel it, just looking at it. Feeling is important. I carried a blanket around with me until I was five. It was knobby too.

The green of the wool was light with a yellow undertone. It was spring grass. I would find a green dress in a heap of sweaty throw-offs in a dingy Salvation Army garage sixteen years later in Portland, Oregon. Maybe it called my name, or maybe it said her name, though I didn’t recognize it. I pulled the dress out and shoved it in a black plastic bag. It was two-dollar bag day. When I got it home, I recoiled at the color: a muddled olive green, a shit green, a cat food puke green. What was I thinking?

I flattened it out on my bed. Empire waist, small lapels, it looked about knee length. I grabbed it to put it on and noticed the tag was missing. There was no size, no indication of what it was made out of. It felt woolly and slightly scratchy in my hand. I folded out the collar, then turned it inside out. The long seams were singling stitched, the smaller ones had large loops. Some places had been sewed more than once, twice, even three times. This was handmade. Someone had cut the back vent, had attached the collar, had found the perfect green zipper. Someone working in bad light in the small extra bedroom that used to be Aunt Colleen’s or little Margie’s, before she married Steve. Someone who lost countless pins in the swirls of variegated brown shag carpet and who broke green threaded bobbins and knew how to fix them.

I put the dress on and it fit over my large chest perfectly. The empire waist allowed a slightly fitted straight skirt to skim over my under-proportioned hips, ending at my pointy knees. Bonnie had sent me this dress; I see it now that it’s all written down. As I hung it up at the hotel before my aunt’s engagement party, my mother exhaled her disapproval. The color is all wrong. It looks so matronly. She shook her head, sucked her teeth, her hand at her throat. Then she berated the dress with a long peachy-pink fingernail. Look at those holes. She was worried I would embarrass her. She was embarrassed. Don’t worry about it, I said. I had a big jewel encrusted brooch, brushed fake gold, to pin over the two holes above my right breast. I smiled smugly at compliments all night. My mother later told me I was right about the dress while sipping a Dirty Martini, eyes scanning the rented banquet hall. Thank you, Bonnie. Thank you very much.

On that morning, Bonnie was not alone. Her purpose was to drop off her youngest child. Let’s call him Chester. His actual name has no meaning, though I am sure it does to him, but it has been changed. He was a year younger than me, so he was probably about two or three. He had his mother’s white blond hair shooting out of his head, large and bucket-shaped. All kids that age have heads the size and shape of buckets. It has to do with the growth of the brain, the skull. Eventually, our bodies catch up with our heads, at least for most of us.

Chester had a brother, about three years older than him. They were raised to address their mother by her first name. Bonnie! Get me a another popsicle, Bonnie! Chester and his brother were given freedom that their parents never had. They were unshackled from the chains of rules, laws, sense, and reason. The end of this story is a direct result of that parenting philosophy. It is a harbinger of what will come: temper tantrums, bad grades, skipping school, sneaking out after curfew, sucking beer and cigarettes, vomiting rum and coke, smoking clumsy joints, dropping out of high school, laying bathroom tiles, upping to two packs a day, crashing cars into trees, walls, other cars, two more white blond bucketheads, prison, disfigurement, right-side paralysis.

But on that morning, we didn’t know all of this. Bonnie said goodbye to Chester, whose red face was pinched, his mouth open in silent protest. I waited for the scream to come out. He breathed, his tiny shoulders wobbled under his huge head. He wailed. He clung to her stockinged knees. She pried him off her. She gave his head a friendly pat as she walked towards the door. He ran to the glass storm door after her. She opened it, and holding one powder white hand to keep him back, she squeezed past him, and shut the door. She walked back down the cement stairs, stopped, waved, and disappeared. Chester screamed and cried and banged on the glass. He kicked the metal bottom of the door. Bonnie! Bonnieeeeee! I stepped backward. His anguish took up too much space. I retreated to the back wall of the kitchen. I didn’t even try to console him. He was in need. His grief was foreign, furious, out of control. It frightened me. My mother just let him cry and pummel his small red hands on the door. He balled his fingers into fists and hit the glass over and over.

I don’t remember the sound of Chester going through the glass.

I didn’t see it. I don’t know what I was doing when it happened. His voice just went from a persistent angry chant to a high-pitched animal sound. Then, ragged breath as my mother picked him up and placed him on the kitchen counter next to the sink. The window behind him was blowing a yellow flowered curtain. I could feel my mother shaking. You stay back there, don’t come over here. Chester’s face was mostly white, with tears and snot running down his chin and tiny dots and lines of red. He was looking down. Large pieces of jagged glass were lodged in his meaty arms. Fire-red blood was seeping out from under stiff translucent flames.

I ran away. I left the kitchen, and meant to go to the safety of my bedroom on the second floor. I stopped half way up the stairs. I sat down and cried like a little girl. I was a coward, a wuss, a pussy. In a house of boys, that was the worst thing you could be. I sucked the snot back into my nose. I wiped the tears off my face. I took a deep breath and walked down the stairs and into the kitchen. My mother was speaking softly to Chester and pulling out the pieces of glass slowly. He was taking small breaths. He looked up when I came into the room. He almost smiled. His eyes were shining in the morning light that flooded the kitchen. I could hear his eyes say: Isn’t this some crazy shit? Isn’t this cool? Maybe he was too young to say that and I was too young to hear that. But there was something there, just then. A spark, a beginning.

Hard Skin

2 November 2015

2 Comments

Categories: Fiction

She rubs the raw meat against her wart and looks into the setting sun. Her grandmother says if she counts to ten, the wart will disappear. So, she stares as hard as she can, all the time counting and praying for her wart to be gone. Green and blue spots begin to appear and she blinks rapidly to shake them loose. It never crosses her mind to question the wisdom of staring into the sunset or of rubbing a piece of sirloin on her hand. She knows that this is the truth and that tomorrow, when she wakes up, she will no longer have this ugly wart on her finger. She imagines the wart sinking beneath her skin as the sun sinks beneath the water and wonders what happens to warts and where do they go. Not really wanting to know the answers, she lets those questions float away.

She stops rubbing, kneeling down in the dirt of her backyard. She is directly in line with the sunset between the tall and slender papaya trees her grandpa had planted when they had first moved to this house. She must continue to stare at the sun as she digs a small hole. Grandmother says she must bury the meat, and when she’s done, she’s to turn and walk back to the house without looking back or it won’t work and she’ll still have the wart in the morning. She doesn’t want that to happen, so she digs diligently. The feel of the earth is soothing as her fingers pull out rocks, making room for her offering. As she walks back to the house, she wonders what would happen if she looks back. Would she turn to a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife? Her mother is waiting at the screen door.

“Did you look back?”

“No.”

“Good, good. Dust off your jeans and go wash your hands in the laundry room before you come in my house.”

She walks around the yard to the laundry room, next to the garage, dusting herself off as she goes. She’s afraid to look anywhere but in front of her. She remembers the first time she saw the wart. She was playing Chase Master with the other kids at school. She was It and she was running, pumping her arms, her legs crossing the distances between predator and prey. As she reached out her hand to touch the pony-tailed girl in front of her, she spotted the tiny, white bump on the forefinger of her right hand. She marveled at its sudden alien appearance. She tried to recall if she’d missed it while brushing her teeth that morning. She was so distracted that she failed to touch the pony-tailed girl, who was able to evade her and make it to Safe, a set of monkey bars at the far end of the playground. She saw that almost everyone had made it back, but she couldn’t seem to concentrate on anything but the wart. She knew it was a wart. She’d read the fairytales of wart-nosed witches and she thought maybe she was destined to become one, but she didn’t want to eat children or poison princesses. Should she go to the nurse’s office? The bell rang and recess was over. Everybody laughed and told the pony-tailed girl they couldn’t believe she hadn’t been caught. Would anyone notice the fleshy growth on her finger? Would they make fun of her? She jabbed her hands into her pockets and thought of ways to hide it.

At first, she put a band aid on it, hoping everyone would think it was just a cut or a scratch, but band aids are expensive and she knows her mother will start to notice that they were running low. Then, it started to grow, and since she felt she could no longer use the family’s supply of band aids, she began to draw on it, anything to hide its strangeness. The wart became the hub of petals, sprouting in a ring, an eye on the wings of a monarch butterfly in flight, or hidden at the center of an ornamental cross. At night, when her hands had been washed clean, she’d stare at it. At eye-level, it looked like the top of Mauna Loa, smooth with touches of crusted snow. She felt its hard, but pliant peak. Pushing on it didn’t hurt. The only sensation she received was from her fingertips running across its summit. It was not smooth and it was not rough. She couldn’t really describe what she felt. It was not like any other part of her body. It was and was not her flesh. In the mornings, as she daydreamed of far off lands, she would again hide it all under dancing fairies, bloated mushrooms, smiling cats.

Then, one day over a dinner of leftover spaghetti, her mother noticed a strange symbol on her daughter’s hand, “What is that Lei?” She looked at where she had drawn an ankh after an inspirational section on Egyptian Mythology in class. She didn’t think anything of it at the time. It was just another cool way to cover up her wart. Now she sensed that drawing symbols of other religions may not have been such a smart idea and she was suddenly afraid. Her mother got up from the table, walked over to her, and lifted up the offending hand, “Is that Satanic? That better not be a symbol of Satan on your body!” She pulled Lei from the table and dragged her to the kitchen sink. “Wash that off right now!” Quickly, Lei did as she was told. She didn’t think it was a symbol of Satan but wasn’t going to argue with her mother about it, especially not with her pinching her arm the way she did when she didn’t want everyone to see how angry she was. “If I ever catch you drawing evil symbols on your body again, you are really going to get it!” As Lei was washing the black ink off her hand, her mother spotted it. “What the hell is that?”

She had a feeling her mother already knew what it was, so she wasn’t sure if she should answer. “I think it’s a wart.”

“Let me see,” she lifted her arm up to let her mother have a closer look.

“How long you’ve had it?”

“I don’t know. A couple of months?”

“You must have done something. What did you do?” She pulled hard on Lei’s arm. “You tell me, girl.” Lei didn’t think she had done anything to deserve this growing mound of foreign flesh on her finger, but what could she say to her mother? What could she do to quiet her anger?

“Maybe the Obake touched me when I didn’t clean my room? Or, maybe I got it from that girl with the ukus and dirty feet?” Her mother laughed at this, and Lei could feel that the moment had passed and she was safe.

“Yeah, maybe the Obake did touch you when you didn’t clean your room. How many times I told you not to hide stuff under the bed? You know the Obake loves to live under messy beds.” Lei nodded at her mother’s wisdom. She would definitely clean under her bed. But in the back of her mind, she didn’t think that the wart was caused by a messy bed.

As Lei continued to wash her hands at the laundry room sink, trying to remove the dirt from beneath her fingernails, she thought again of her mother’s original theory of how the wart came to be. Unfortunately, the wart slowly grew, each day, conquering the smooth back of her finger, spreading towards each of her knuckles, and no matter how much she kept her room clean, it didn’t stop. Drawings could no longer hide its growth and the kids began to tease her as kids are wont to do. “Pop it! It looks like a big zit! Did you uff a frog? You look like you going have a baby out your finger that thing’s so big!” She didn’t think their taunts were so great, which is probably why she wasn’t hurt by them. She was sad because no one would eat lunch with her or play with her because they were afraid they were going to catch it. Who really wants to have warts all over their body? Sometimes, in frustration, she’d rush the worst kid, the one that teased her about uffing a frog and she’d hold her hand right next to his face and dare him to say it one more time. In those moments, she felt its power. She knew that the kids were afraid. She knew that they thought the warts were contagious, but until she’d stopped drawing on her hand, she’d played and eaten with all of these kids and not a single one had gotten a wart from her. She loved to see the fear in their eyes when she came near them. It didn’t make up for being teased and laughed at, but it helped to ease the pain a little.

Once, at church, she learned about Job. She listened to the Sunday school teacher, a haole girl from Utah, talking about how God wanted to prove to Satan that his servant, Job, a very wealthy man, would never renounce God, no matter what happened to him. Satan told him that the moment Job lost his money he would immediately stop loving him. God told Satan he could do whatever he wanted, so Satan had all of Job’s animals stolen and his servants slaughtered. Then, he had all of Job’s children killed. Did Job give up on God? No. Satan told God that if he hurt Job, Job would definitely curse him, and God said do what you want, so Satan covered Job in sores and Job cursed the day he was born, but did not curse God. Everyone blamed Job. They believed he was being punished for some kind of wickedness. Through it all, not once did Job curse God. As a reward for his unwavering faith, God gave him twice as much wealth and many sons and daughters.

Lei had never considered the possibility that God could actually let Satan test the faithfulness of his servants, hurting them or their families. That just didn’t seem fair. No one said anything to her about her wart at church, even though it was on display for everyone to see as she picked up the sacrament of water and bread during her Ward’s time in the chapel. Not even the other kids. She did wonder if her Sunday school teacher was trying to tell her something. She didn’t really consider herself a servant of God and maybe this is why God was letting her be punished. She never really thought much about God.

She imagines he’s a really tall haole with a long white beard, wearing really white robes, floating in the clouds above. Is she being taught a lesson? She’s not sure what that lesson could be and she doesn’t talk to anyone about it, especially her Sunday school teacher. Lei smiles at the end of the story as the class sings “Popcorn Popping on the Apricot Tree.” It’s a fun song, but Lei begins to wonder why they sing it. There are no apricot trees in Hawaii and what does popcorn have to do with God?

Lei loves to sing. It’s one of the only reasons she doesn’t mind church. She reads the hymnal as the Bishop drones on, trying to guess what songs are going to be sung next. They never sing in Hawaiian, but she doesn’t mind. Most of the songs were originally in English, anyway. Her favorite is “How Great Thou Art.” It reminds her of a love song. Not the kind of sappy love song on the radio like “Endless Love,” but a true love song. Not that she knows what true love is, but she imagines it to be something pure and golden and light. She thinks about Job in this instance and realizes that love may not be what she imagines, but this thought is gone in an instant as the first notes of “How Great Thou Art” carries across the chapel from the organ’s pipes, “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the worlds Thy hands have made; I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed.” She notices that most people don’t really know the melody of the first verse and the voices are subdued, but when her favorite part comes, she can feel the rising voices like the waves at high tide crashing against the walls and splashing back against her, “Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee, How great Thou art, How great Thou art. Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee, How great Thou art, How great Thou art!” As the words pour out of her, she feels something inside of her opening up and moving out of her, flowing with the notes into the wave of sound around her. As each wave pushes its way to the wall, another forms behind it, a continuous flow vibrating through her whole being and she can hear at the very top of all that sound, even higher notes reaching to the ceiling. She wonders if that’s what God sounds like. At these moments, she forgets about the wart on her finger, the malicious teasing, the playground power struggles, the weird looks from her mother, and she swoops and dives in and out until the last powerful chord crescendos and all is silent. She sits but feels disconnected as her insides soar. Then the bishop drones on, firmly settling her back inside her body.

Drying her hands on her jeans, she remembers that feeling and wonders if she could feel like that all the time. She doesn’t think that it’s a good thing. If you feel like that all the time, how could you tell the difference between how you should feel versus how you do feel? She wishes that singing could remove her wart, but she knows that is foolish, as she’s been singing every Sunday since she could remember and every Sunday since her wart came to be, yet nothing has changed. At least she doesn’t think anything has changed. So, she decides that as beautiful as her singing is, this is neither the cause nor the solution to her problem. No matter how much she wishes it to be, she knows this to be the truth.

As she walks back to the kitchen’s screen door, she recalls the luau they went to for her cousin’s wedding. She wanted to hide her wart, but the band aids were too small now, and she couldn’t draw on her hand. She asked her mother what she should do. “No worries. No one’s going to notice.” Except right off the bat, everyone started making fun of her. The aunties just laughed and told her she better clean herself better or it’s going to spread all over her body and grow like taro along her arm and up to her neck. Lei didn’t really believe them. She bathed twice a day. And, what did they know about bathing? She could see taro growing all over their necks, too. She didn’t say anything to them. She knew better. The uncles just drank their beers and laughed along. The other kids called her hamajang girl, and told everyone to stay away from her before she bachi them and give them all warts. She sat in the corner near the stage and sang along to the band, playing “He Aloha Mele,” a love song about stars and brown eyes, and wished she didn’t have that stupid wart. Her grandmother saw her sitting by herself and called her over. Lei loved the smell of her grandmother. It was soft and sweet like gardenia after the rain.

“What’s wrong?” She asked her wrinkled hands brushing Lei’s hair away from her face.

“Nothing, I just want to sit by myself.” She didn’t really want to bother anyone with her problems.

“You know that’s not true.” Lei nodded but did not say anything. “Do you know what our ancestors called a wart?”

“No.”

“‘Ilikona, or hard skin. Do you know why you have an ‘ilikona on your finger?”

Lei shook her head, “I don’t know why. I thought it was because I didn’t clean under my bed, or that I caught it from someone at school. Then, I thought maybe I was being punished for something bad I did, but I couldn’t think of what I had done wrong. I just think it is because it is, you know what I mean?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Really?”

“Sometimes, tita, our bodies show us what our minds cannot. Do you know what your body is trying to tell you?”

“That I have a big ugly wart?” Her eyes crinkled as her lips spread into a smile.

“You are so kolohe, sometimes. Yes, you have a big ugly wart, but why do you think you have a big ugly wart?” Lei wanted to tell her she had already thought about all of this, and she didn’t think that she needed to do it all over again. “Yes, yes. You think you know everything. Your mind can play tricks on you. Just think about when you first saw your wart. What were you doing?”

She thought about the game of Chase Master she had been playing that day she saw the wart for the first time. She had been running behind the pony-tailed girl and she was thinking about how much fun it would be to pull on her hair rather than touching her shoulder, and the more she thought about that, the more she began to realize that the pony-tailed girl wasn’t the only person she had really wanted to hurt. She had really wanted to slam that kid’s face into the ground who kept teasing her about uffing the frog, and she really didn’t have kind thoughts about her Sunday school teacher, either. And when she was singing in church, she really wanted to shove a hymnal into the bishop’s mouth to shut him up, wishing that church was all about singing and less about preaching, She didn’t think she had thought about anything when she was singing along to the band, but she realized, at that moment, she had been dreaming of all the ways she was going to get those other kids.

“I was playing.” She said as these thoughts sped past.

“I see.” And, maybe she did. “Let me tell you a story.” And, Lei listened. “Once, there was a man, who was full of ideas of how people should be and how everyone would be happier if they just listened to what he had to say. Now, not everyone wanted to listen, but the man didn’t care if they did. This bothered them, so they decided that maybe he had something to say after all. He told them that love is unconditional. Now, no one believed this. You can’t get something for nothing, they said. And, he said that is not true. Love is easy. It’s who you love that can be hard. If a man hurts you, do you love him? Of course not, they answered. And, he said that is not true. You must love that man even more because he does not understand that love is easy. Do you punish this man who hurt you? Of course you do, they answered. And, he said that is not true. You must not punish this man but love him for his flaws, and with your love, teach him to love. And they told him he was crazy. Why would we do that? He will never learn they told him. And, he said that is not true. He will learn that to hurt others is to hurt himself and to love others is to love himself. They did not believe him or understand. But he never gave up, and even on the day he died, he professed his love for all, never wavering as they nailed him to the cross on a lonely hill.” Lei let the words wash over her, soothing that hidden spot she could now see.

“I see, Tutu.” And, Lei learned how to get rid of the wart on her finger.

She enters the kitchen, walking past her mother, who thankfully says nothing. She closes her bedroom door and kneels beside her bed. She knows she should thank God for everything, and that she shouldn’t ask for anything, but she does so anyway, “Dear Heavenly Father, please forgive me and please take my wart away.” As her forehead presses hard into her clasped hands, she dreams of waking up free.

Parka Night

2 November 2015

Categories: Fiction

Howard sat alone in front of the television set with his legs propped on the coffee table. He blinked a few times to convince himself he was still awake, but the majority of details still seemed hazy, dreamlike, dispossessing him from the space. So he tried for a moment to focus on where he was.

Scanning his living room, he struggled to remember where furniture was supposed to be, what objects were supposed to hang from the walls. He recalled there being a watercolor, something Donna might have picked up at a rummage sale at some point. It had been hung somewhere in the room – a black swan cutting through the softness of a pond, its dark eyes almost invisible, always watching him from the same vantage point, perhaps from above the mantle.

He looked there and flinched. Not the mantle. That’s where Katelin’s pictures went, and her stocking around Christmas time. He remembered a picture with snow, Katelin in a hot pink parka barely able to stand above the three-foot pile she was playing in.

She’d played in the snow most days that winter. More of it was always falling, so it never got old. One afternoon he had been watching her from the porch when the home phone rang, taking him into the kitchen for a moment.

“Howard.” Donna’s voice seemed to drag a little over the line.

“How’s the convention going?”

“Our honey skin lotion is getting a lot of buzz.” She laughed, a single tone that scraped a bit as it was delivered.

“Katelin misses you….”

“You know that green serving dish your great aunt left me.”

Howard didn’t reply.

“Could you take it down for me?”

He sighed. “What’s the occasion?”

“Your sister kept eying it last Christmas,” she said. “And it’s just…well. I was uncomfortable.”
Howard leaned over the counter, pushing all of his weight into his elbows. “You really gave it to Martha.”

“She’s coming tomorrow to pick it up.”

His fingers had gone numb. “How does this always happen?”

“Just take it down, Howard.” Her words ground together a bit. “Maybe rinse it out if it’s dusty.”

Howard looked at the sink. “I haven’t checked the faucet yet.”

“The water’s still running dirty?”

“There may be a break in the line,” he said, trying to keep his words from catching. “In which case I won’t be able to fix it until spring.”

“Jesus.”

He turned away from the sink. “I’ve got to go check on Katelin.”

“But, Howard, the faucet….”

“She’ll want to speak with you,” he said. “She’s been asking for you.” He set the phone on the counter.

Howard continued searching the room. Maybe the watercolor had gone above the television set. He remembered back to football Sundays, after Katelin had watched her morning cartoons, when he’d stare for hours at a field on a fuzzy screen and avian eyes would stare back, somewhere in his periphery.

Howard looked to the television set for confirmation. There were a few movie posters taped to the wall, framing the appliance. They were all from movies that starred Jack Nicholson. “That’s not right,” he said. He rose in a series of motions that first put weight on his heels, then shifted to his toes as he teetered forward a little, then compensated for the buckling of his knees, then the swinging of his arms. Then Howard managed to get over to one of them for a closer look. It was a simple poster, yellow background and black print. And a face he wasn’t sure was human. It was lurking in the bold letters of the first word. A blurry, not so human face. He peered into its dark eyes trying to decide if these were avian enough.

Something shattered in the kitchen, and there came this pitter-pattering like raindrops as little granules of glass spilled across the floor. He stumbled into the kitchen, following shards that led him around the island to a great green pile. He recognized it immediately and felt quite satisfied. The remains of his great aunt’s serving dish.

“Katelin,” Howard called. It must have been her.

He moved into the hallway. Katelin was hiding from him. She knew she’d done something wrong. “Get down here, young lady.”

No sound came from upstairs. She was pretending to be asleep. He went over to the hallway closet and pulled out a hand broom and a dustpan. It would be easier if he just took care of this.

When he reentered the kitchen the room felt bigger, like it had succumbed to the same expansion that had driven the whole universe apart. Rounding the island, Howard found no trace of the debris from the serving dish. He dropped to his knees and let the broom and dustpan fall with him. There was something beneath the lip of the cabinet, a single green glint. He lay on his stomach and extended his hand, catching the delicate particle between the pads of his thumb and index finger.

“One.” He breathed and watched the particle tumble away.

Rising, he decided he should drink some water and try to sober up. He went to the cupboard in search of a glass and found it to be empty. He moved on to the next. There was only a single lowball glass inside.

“Where’d you all go?” He laughed.

Then he took the glass over to the sink and rinsed it out. The water that came streaming from the faucet had a golden radiance like whiskey. “Need to fix that,” he said and moved over to the cabinet above the refrigerator, where they stored their adult beverages far out of Katelin’s reach.

Howard poured himself a double shot of bourbon then placed it back up where it could do no harm. By the time he made it back to the living room, the couch had become a grey futon in his absence and the coffee table had sustained a few blows to its surface. He set down his bourbon. As he sat it became difficult to see through the glass, as if it filled itself for every inch he slouched. At the moment when it seemed about to overflow, he reached out to grab it, but then noticed that somebody was standing there in front of him.

The somebody was about five feet tall and yellow, with a not so human face and a television set surgically grafted to its middle. It stared at him, unblinking. He stared back. “You’re that guy, right.” he said. “The one from Katelin’s show. Laa-Laa or something.” The somebody didn’t reply. Howard shrugged and downed the last of the bourbon. “I think my daughter would like to meet you. She’s upstairs.” He yawned and started to close his eyes.

A jolt of static shot through the room causing him to sit bolt upright. Laa-Laa’s television set was on the fritz, cycling through white and grey with a high crackle. Its yellow hands went to its tummy and started rubbing in slow circles. It moved its head around on its neck as if searching for a signal. “Haven’t you converted to digital?” Howard laughed.

The static dropped off and the room experienced a sudden influx of light from Laa-Laa’s gut. Its hands fell to its sides, revealing a screen that was solid white. The picture seemed to be frozen. The white was absolute. But then something appeared in the corner of the screen, a speck trudging through the white, and a figure began to resolve itself. She wore a hot pink parka and barely rose above the snow. Howard couldn’t see her face yet. She was still too far away.

The figure stopped. The camera tilted up, revealing the tree line a few hundred yards behind her. They were birch trees. Silver and black. They had no leaves. The figure started moving again, towards the camera, until she was about twenty yards away. Then she plopped down in the snow and stayed where she was.

“Come here, Katelin.” Howard said. “Come to Daddy.”

“Where’s Mommy?” The girl called.

“She’s gone, remember?” he said. “She’ll be back soon.”

“I want Mommy.” She threw herself on her back to start a snow angel.

“Do you want to come inside and wait for her?”

“No. I want to play.” Her arms and legs beat the snow aside.

“All right,” he said. “But just for a little while longer.”

Somewhere a phone started ringing.

Howard woke up to find a late night infomercial playing on the television screen. The spokesperson was a man with a slight lisp who promised his sealant would allow Howard to make a raft out of Swiss cheese. It then showed the man taking his Swiss cheese raft to a local pond and rowing across it without taking on any water. A miracle!

It was still many hours before Howard would have to take Katelin to kindergarten. So he flipped through the channels until he found a program that wasn’t trying to sell him something. He finally landed on local news. It seemed kind of late to be reporting, but journalists were always going after the latest story.

The female news anchor was shot so full of Botox that there was hardly any room for her co-anchor’s face on the screen. She wore a red jacket with a blouse that let a lot of her cleavage show. Her smile was wide and white and she looked very tired.

“Any news?” he asked her.

“Not yet, Howard.”

“Will there ever be?”

She picked up her pile of papers and started straightening them out. “I don’t know.”

Howard moved closer to the television screen. “What do I have to do?”

“Something else.” She clicked the edge of her papers against the desk and it made her breasts swell against her blouse.

“Tell me.” He pressed his ear against the screen. “Whatever you need to say.”

“You don’t want that, Howard.”

“You never know,” her co-anchor said. “This could just be a game of hide and seek.”

The two of them started to laugh as Howard drew back from the screen. It was a low, uncomfortable laugh.

When he was far enough away to again focus on the screen, the woman’s face appeared void of emotion. She looked straight at the camera and flashed her beautiful teeth. “Up next. Judge not lest ye be the next judge. One local woman trying to make a difference in city hall has organized a letter-writing campaign to get Jesus Christ elected into office. That story coming up, right after this.”

Howard hit a button on the remote and the screen went blank. The face on the Jack Nicholson poster looked at him with reproach. “Bedtime,” he told it.

He went upstairs to brush his teeth and found himself staring into the mirror, toothbrush stuck between his lips and toothpaste building at the corner of his mouth. The man in his reflection looked as tired as the female anchor but not half as good. His eyes were buried between creases. They peered out like gophers from a hole, cautious and worried. He had a beard growing that Howard didn’t even remember starting. It would have to be shaved off. Howard had work tomorrow. Katelin had school. Donna had another day at her convention.

The bottle of shaving cream was almost empty, but he got enough out to coat his face. Then he brought out the razor and started from the sideburns. With each stroke, there was a slight tug that told him the razor was getting dull. But the hair came off, leaving bare, slightly red skin. He worked slowly when he got to the area below his chin. It was the place where he always seemed to get cut. The blade scraped up. At some point the skin in the wake of the blade went from pink to maroon, and he paused to watch the blood trickle down his reflection.

Something moved in the hallway. In the mirror he saw its shadow cross the light of the open bathroom door. “Katelin?” He wiped off his face and moved into the hallway. The floor felt slick under his slippers, like somebody had tracked in mud. It smelled wet, a cold kind of wet. He threw on the hallway lights. The floor was clean, aside from a little dust.

He moved over to Katelin’s door and set his ear against the wood. All quiet inside. Not a sound. He creaked open the door wide enough to see inside.

The bed was empty. She was gone.

Howard went for the nearest phone. It was out in the hallway. Picking up the receiver he didn’t know whether to call Donna or the police, but he couldn’t think about it, so he punched in a number. Somebody picked up on the third ring.

“What is this, Howard?”

“She’s gone, Donna.” He couldn’t breathe. “Katelin’s gone.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“She’s gone.”

Donna sighed on the other end. “Look, I’m going to make this easy for both of us. I’ll come home the minute you see somebody about this.”

“She’s gone, Donna.”

“That’s enough, Howard.”

“Please.”

“No,” she said. “You’re just trying to make me hurt.” She started to cry. “But where were you when it mattered?”

The line went dead.

Howard ran down the stairs and out the front door. His slippers slid on the icy stoop. He couldn’t risk the stairs so he leaped out into the snow. It was over a foot deep and took his slippers within a few steps from the house. After that, he waded through the snow in his bare feet, each step burning away some of their sensation.

A figure was moving towards the tree line. He followed as best as he could, but his body began to slow as numbness seeped up from his exposed toes into his core. The burning in his feet subsided, his nerves becoming entangled in a wet sort of warmth. Fifty yards from the tree line he collapsed. He lay on his stomach and watched the figure go, traces of pink flitting between the trees. Even against the snow it did not stand out much in the dark.

Soon she was gone.

Howard woke up in his bed. The alarm clock display read 5:00 a.m., but there was no returning to sleep now.

The faucet was still broken, so he took his toolbox into the kitchen and disconnected the supply line from below the sink with a few twists of a wrench. One end of it looked corroded. He stuck his pinky a little way in and found rust when he withdrew it.

When the new supply line was in place, Howard stood and turned the handle to full blast. For a moment it seemed like nothing would happen, but then a torrent erupted from the mouth of the faucet, filling the basin with a pool of clear water.

It had been such a simple fix; there was still so much time. So afterwards he made pancakes. Nothing passed the time like flipping pancakes. It distracted the mind too. There was a procedure to it. Pour four tablespoons of batter. Wait for air bubbles to form. Flip and cook at your discretion. Think only of pancakes. Repeat. When Katelin woke there was a stack waiting for her that could’ve fed her for three breakfasts.

Then he brewed coffee and sat in the living room with a mug in his hand. It smelled wet. Warm and wet. He kept his eyes focused on the mug. The watercolor watched him from above the television set.
Katelin ate her breakfast in the kitchen. As he rose to join her at the table the doorbell rang. Martha waited on the porch, scarf wrapped all the way to her cheekbones, gloved hands rubbing furiously together. “Howard.”

“Oh right. The dish.”

“How have you been?” Her speech was brisk, as if she believed any one of her words might freeze in the air.

“Sorry, Martha. The dish broke.”

“I don’t care about that, Howard,” she edged towards the door. “I want to know about you.”

He leaned against the doorframe, barring her entrance. “This isn’t the best time.” Katelin was finishing up in the kitchen. He heard her put down her knife and fork and take her plate over to the sink. He and Donna had just bought her a stool so she could reach. She turned on the faucet and washed her dishes, pausing to apply soap like he had shown her, giving them a final rinse.

“I’ve got to go, Martha.”

“What’s that cut on your chin?” She tried to duck past him. “It looks pretty deep.”

“I’m fine,” he said.

Martha got one foot over the threshold before Howard pushed her back. She slid on the icy porch, her legs coming out from under her. It was a hard fall. A solid fall with a solid sound. “Howard.” She lay on her back, a gloved hand extending out to him.

He looked down at the porch then lifted his eyes to scan the yard from the steps to the road, the driveway to the birch trees. Everything was white. All of it inseparable. “I’ve really got to go.”

“Two steps, Howard.” She waved her hand around. “Just two.”

“Get up.”

Martha rolled onto her side and pushed herself into a sitting position. “It’s cold out here, Howard.” She stood and moved towards the steps. “I don’t blame you for staying inside.”

Howard watched her trudge down the snow-covered walk and waited until she was in her car before he turned away.

Katelin was there behind him. “Daddy, is it time to go to school?”

“Are you ready?”

“Yeah.” She threw up her hands.

“Vamanos,” he said. It was the catchphrase of the character from her favorite cartoon.

“Let’s go!” She ran towards the door, wearing a backpack that looked just like the one from the show.

“Don’t forget your coat,” he said, but she was already out the door.

The Big, Bad Wolf gets home from work

2 November 2015

Categories: Fiction

All is quiet. He pours himself a glass of pinot and sinks into the wicker armchair on the back porch to watch the sunset.

His wife hovers. “Are you all right?” It is clear she has waited all day for him. It’s not clear to either of them why she does this. It’s always the same anymore: he comes home, pours himself a glass of wine, sits.

He doesn’t answer. She leans awkwardly on the arm of his chair.

They used to make love every day. They used to go hunting and fishing and running together. They used to be playful. There is static in the air between them. It is the potential energy of all of the things they used to do and don’t anymore.

“Am I a bad wolf?”

“You’re a big, bad wolf,” she says in her sultriest voice.

The last bit of gold is about to be engulfed by darkness. “That’s not what I meant.”

There is a constant chirrup, which could be a transformer, or insects, or a transformer. It is insects. Electronically steady crickets. Cicadas? Crickets. With the sun gone he sips his wine and a gnat washes up on his tongue. He splays it on the tip of his claw and considers its tiny broken body.

“Do you want other animals to like you?” she asks later over dinner. “Is that it?”

“No,” he lies.

“Why do you care whether you’re bad? Which you are.”

“How bad am I?” he asks, and she has to stop herself from cooing, Verrry bad. A bad, bad wolf who needs to be punished.

Each night she parades herself past him, presenting, presenting. Her posture is improving.

Finally: “This is about those pigs, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Fuck ‘em,” she growls. “We’ll go on a rampage. We’ll murder those little porkers. We’ll roast them in their own home and feast on their sizzled corpses.”

She wiggles herself into his lap and he positions her for continued access to his plate.

“It’s not that,” he says.

“No?” Smother the wriggling impatience. “What is it?”

“You know? I can’t quite say.”

“You’re afraid to get back in the saddle, is that it? You don’t know if you’re up for the job. Well, I’ll tell you, Mister—”

“Does every meal have to be so meat-centric?” he asks.

She stands up. Consciously relaxes her jaw as she notices herself grinding. Her dentist has been lecturing her. “I’m going to my mother’s,” she says.

She gets her purse from upstairs, and when the front door slams, there’s a waft of the perfume she bought in Paris. For her mother?

He forgets his resolution not to feel bad about the things he doesn’t care about. Instead of trying to want Maxine back, he gets high in the garden shed and then, full of hope and confusion, reads the novel he bought after googling “how to be good.” It begins promisingly. Ends in quiet desperation disguised as a dull moral. Deadline, he figures.

When Maxine saw the book she had to remind herself to unclench. “You’re depressed because you’ve changed,” she said to him. “You just need to get your bloodlust back.”

It all began three weeks ago, around the time of his final encounter with the swine siblings. “What exactly happened that night?” she asked.

No answer.

In bed with Papa Bear, she reassesses herself. She’s always leaned domestic as far as wolves go, but the violence rising inside her lately, an answer to George’s apathy, is like sunlight breaking through a hangover. But this is not the end. She stands up, gets dressed. My house is under a spell. Nips Papa Bear firmly in thanks. I must slay the enemy and save my prince-gone-soft. Throaty moan “Goodbye” follows her out the door.

The big, bad wolf was never one to feel particularly tragic about personal failures. Whenever he thinks about those pigs, something stirs in him, something he hasn’t felt since his father took him into the woods on the day he helped bring down an elk and said “today you are no longer a pup,” and they howled at the scattered seed in the sky.

It’s not anger or hunger or desire or wildness. It’s something different. The pigs outsmarted him. This, prey is capable of. This is something that happens in the world, and it washes him in wonder.
Has he felt this with his wife? Sometimes. Used to.

On the way home, she considers pups. Solution? Maybe they still could. Whether she could do that for him? No. He doesn’t want pups.

Now comes the remorse he didn’t feel earlier, the jealousy. Where did Maxine go? He should give her more credit. It’s not as if he tried to explain to her. It’s not as if he tried to share the experience. It’s not as though, either, he has missed her recent attempts to get his attention. What’s gotten into him (or out of him?) Just the thought of making her howl used to ridge his hackles. Now he smells his own desire, thinking of her lithe muscled form.

Maxine, he will say, Do you know what a Jainist is?

I can no longer dissociate myself from the consciousness of my victims, he will say. You’d be surprised what you can do with vegetables, he will say.

Suppose it’s not too late for little ones?

Across town, his wife kicks down the door. All her lust has transformed to the blood variety. Fuck that “Let me come in” business. The pigs look up in surprise from their dinner.

“Excuse me,” says the smallest swine, devastatingly cool. “May we help you?”

Where are the thrilling twitches, where the intoxicating smell of adrenaline? The pigs are as limp as her husband. She snarls. For a moment she pants at the threshold, cupping the rage like water draining from her paws.

They turn their attention to their supper. Little porcine grunts of contentment fill the air.
You have stolen my contentment.

When she arrives home, Maxine longs for a shower, for oblivion, but the shadows of candlelight flicker down the hall. She steps on something soft and sees the path of rose petals leading to the bathroom. Velvet licks of red break the tension of the candlelit water. Her husband is perched on the lip. It is unclear from his expression whether his twitching nose caught the scent of ursa patrem. Neither does he react to the blood and debris matting her fur.

Rather than remind him how she dislikes submersion, she climbs into the tub. Envisions extinction. The big, conscientious wolf speaks of things he wants and does not want to be.