YOUNG & WEIRD
A written creative work submitted to the faculty of
San Francisco State University
in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for
the degree
A5
30
20IQ,
EN6,CU)
• L5143
Master of Arts
in
Creative Writing: Fiction
by
David Richard Liebig
San Francisco, California
May 2016
Copyright by
David Richard Liebig
2016
CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL
I certify that I have read Young & Weird by David Richard Liebig, and that in my
opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in Creative Writing: Fiction at San
Francisco State University.
Andrew
assistant professor
/V -
— ■*— -
Peter Omer, MFA
professor
YOUNG & WEIRD
David Richard Liebig
San Francisco, California
2016
This is a short story collection that asks more than it answers. Does youth come
prepackaged with alienation? Is escaping reality a comfort or a curse? How does the
human soul navigate this vortex of time, money, technology, and nature? These works of
fiction seek out the hilarity in the morbid, the beauty in the strange. With each piece, the
characters age—but the weirdness never lets up.
I certify that the annotation is a correct representation of the content of this written
creative work.
Chair, Thesis Committee I
Date
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I sincerely thank and dedicate this collection to: my parents, Andrew Joron and the rest of
the creative writing department, the literature professors who taught me so much despite
my best efforts, my vibrant cohort, and anyone who has ever felt weird.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
COVER ART..............................................................................................................................1
LIT.............................................................................................................................................. 2
THE SPRING OF THE FISH PEOPLE................................................................................ 12
GET PSYCHED......................................................................................................................22
COUNSELING........................................................................................................................ 34
ONSCREEN K IS S ..................................................................................................................45
THEN & ONLY THEN.......................................................................................................... 56
GASTROPOD......................................................................................................................... 71
KI & COPY
89
young & weird
stories
david liebig
Cover Art by David Liebig
2
LIT
m
m
m,
At one point in time or another, a skeleton, a soldier, and a monkey sat together on the
curb of a sidewalk of a street of a town.
Redding, the skeleton, was wondering why the hell his bones didn’t glow in the
dark, concluding you can never trust anything you buy to do what it says on the package.
He untied his left sneaker and tied it again for no reason whatsoever. His name was
Redding.
Matthew, the army guy to Redding’s right, let out a long, silent fart from his butt
and smiled proudly in anticipation of the inevitable reaction. Redding’s mom and dad,
who watched funky movies where the actors spoke French so you had to read the words
at the bottom and thought they were pretty cool because of it, would never have let their
son leave the house wearing camo fatigues and a sunblasted Supersoaker slung
overshoulder.
Mom and Dad might have allowed it if they knew war had nothing to do with
killing—not yet. So far, war meant nothing of reddened skin blown off the faces of white
sons with bluish guns.
“Fricken Matt!” the monkey complained, plugging the nostrils of her nose. She
had smelled the fart from Matthew’s butt.
3
“That’s nasty,” Redding added and stood up. He might not have said anything if
Katherine hadn’t.
Matt laughed. “I think next year I’ll be a skunk so I can go around dropping
bombs and just say it’s part of the costume.” He inhaled and wafted the smell into his
nostrils jesterly with both hands.
“You’re disgusting,” Kat said, rising to her feet. “Let’s go.”
She and Redding started down the block.
“What? Everybody loves their own flavor,” Matt said. Giggling, he followed the
others.
In the inevitable intercourse between Summer and her personified Fall— an intercourse
which later shall bring birth to bastard rains—Halloween had arrived on the coldest day
of all time. Suburbia, the setting, wore a blanket of molding mulberry leaves. It was the
coldest day. Ever.
Our three carried on from house to house, collecting whatever treats each had to
offer. Their breath was visible, as if their souls were leaking out of their mouths. The
neighborhood had many hills, and the kids’ calves began to ache oh so much. But they
trudged onward, cresting the rising concrete as, like the waves of time, it rolled in to hint
at some final, higher prominence.
4
What that prominence was was anyone’s guess. For convenience’s sake, here are
some options:
1. adulthood
2. the afterlife
3. a plot point
4. not death?
“There’s that old lady Edna’s house,” affirmed Red with words from his mouth as
the children’s tireless march halted before some unlit abode with neglected hedges.
Warty gourds near the front door added flavor and surely some symbolism.
“We should skip that dinosaur,” Matt said. “Last year she gave out raisins.”
“I like raisins,” Kat said as she vivaciously skipped across the actually quite dead
lawn.
“Well, what if she’s asleep?” Matt tried, but the monkey was already knocking on
the door, raising the tension.
A light flickered to life in the window. Sounds of careful movements made their
way to the other side of the door. Slowly, it opened.
“Trick or treat!” Matt, Kat, and Redding sang.
The door’s ponderous retreat revealed a woman with kind, cataract eyes. She had
silver hair that ended where her neck began and a whole bowl of individual Sun Maid
packs.
“Don’t shoot!” she said, throwing a broomstick of an arm into the air.
5
Matt, behind the others, had raised his squirt gun and was taking steady, squinted
aim.
“Give us the grapes and no one gets hurt!” the soldier shouted.
“Yessir!” Edna played along, smiling. “One for you,”— she tossed Matt a raisin
box—“one for you”—handed one to Kat—“and one for y o u ” Lastly, Old Lady Edna
dropped one of her treats into the skeleton’s bag—as if making an offering to Death
himself!
“Thank you,” said Kat, whose mom was a reproductive endocrinologist with a
specialty in hypothalamic pituitary dysfunction.
“Now, don’t go blowing the heads off of just anybody,” Edna said
foreshadowingly to our young soldier.
“I won’t,” Matt said. “Just the bad guys.”
Surely some sort of connection could have been made between Halloween,
raisins, and old people (of which Old Lady Edna was one), but none of the characters
drew any such conclusions. The children continued to follow the road.
There were other children out, collecting their own tax of taffy or chocolate-covered
thing. Some said hello to our three. Some wore cool costumes. All had candy on their
minds and Eden in their eyes.
6
On this day, tomorrow’s workforce tried on roles for size. Here a fireman, there a
clown. It was a parade of shapeshifters that would one day have to settle on single, static
forms.
Our soldier was ready to show that thing that made his candy sack so much
heavier than those of his friends.
He said, “Your guys’ bags pretty full?”
The monkey nodded. The skeleton nodded.
“Let’s go down to the church at the end of this street and hang out,” Matt said.
There was no objection. These three often sought refuge from boredom at that
quiet, white castle, and they’d already gathered enough sweets to last a few weeks. Matt
lugged his bag over his gunless shoulder and led their way down to the well-lit parking
lot (churches always leave their lights on for some reason). None of the three actually
attended on Sundays, but they knew from experience this was a place they could go at
night and not get bothered or too freaked out.
“You think the door’s unlocked?” Matt asked as they neared the house of
worship.
“I don’t know,” Katherine said shakily as if her innocence was at stake, as if all
their innocences were at stake, but she could not express such because... well that’s just
how innocence works. Still—stakes: There were some!
“We’ve never gone inside before,” Red said.
“I know,” Matt replied. “But it’s Halloween!”
7
The chapel was dead empty. Orderly pews disseminated from one ornately fashioned
altar topped by that triumphant lowercase “t.” The low light painted everything in shades
of black and white. The silence was, oxymoronically, deafening to the children’s ears.
The three kids, momentarily respecting that silence, drew to the head of the scene.
Katherine— cold, frightened, or both—clung to Redding’s arm.
Redding directed his male gaze at Katherine. His eyes, lustless and adoring, slid
down the length of her straw-colored hair bridled by a monkey-eared headband. His eyes
fell to her two-dimensional torso, her meatless thighs enwrapped in brown tights, her
matching Converse All Stars tightly laced. No intentions sprung from the delicate shapes,
but Redding thought she looked pretty cool in her costume.
Momentarily, he thought of Edna and the fragile limb she had raised in subtextual
surrender at her door. It had been skinny—but not in the way Katherine was skinny,
because Kat’s bones still held a promise. Edna’s arms were as thin as the pole upon
which they perhaps raised a flag half-staff in honor of some other who had worn the
costume Matt was wearing. Perhaps he had rushed into the night as bravely as Matt
charged the dark church now.
Matt reached the mouth of the center aisle and took a seat at the foremost pew.
The four-legged creature formed by Kat’s clinging to Redding arrived some strides
behind, didn’t sit.
8
“I don’t think we should be in here,” the creature said. “We should go soon.”
“Don’t be such babies!” Matt said. “You guys need to relax. Geez... You drive
me to the drink.” These were someone else’s words, but he borrowed them—and they fit.
Matt pulled the can of Budweiser out of his bag.
“What is that?” Kat asked, dropping Redding’s arm.
“Just something I thought we could try.”
“Where did you get it?” Red asked.
“My dad’s got a million of them in the fridge,” Matt said. “I thought he wouldn’t
miss just one.” The fact that the beer was specifically Budweiser implied that Matthew’s
father was of a particular social class. Redding’s parents purchased exclusively artisanal
craft beer beverages brewed at small, not-large microbreweries, a characteristic which
denoted a different social standing than that of Matt’s parents. None of the kids
considered any of this.
Redding set himself on the finished wood. Katherine sat next to him.
Their eyes had begun to compensate for the low light; more colors were
discernable with each passing minute, as if the ability to see colors was a metaphor for
the children learning things about their environment, with each passing minute—things
that they did not know minutes of time ago.
Matt cracked open the beer and took a gulp. The action made a gulping sound. He
passed the can to Redding, who was less confident and took a less-confident swallow.
“What’s it taste like?” the monkey asked. She did not know what it tasted like.
9
Redding handed her the can. Delicately, Katherine sipped.
“Feeling drunk yet?” Matt said naively, as if he were in a story about the naivete
of children.
“How do you know when you are?” Kat wondered out loud.
“I think you laugh a lot,” Redding said.
“Yeah. And when you try to walk, you fall down.”
The three young, under-the-legal-drinking-age minors passed the single beer back
and forth, taking increasingly bold drinks. It was emptied after a few passes. Matt placed
the empty can on his head and tried to keep it balanced there. It fell and clanked against
the bench as it dropped to the floor. The three young-aged youthful youths choked out a
semisweet laugh.
“I think I’m feeling it,” our soldier said. He stood up and walked to an abnormally
large birdbath that stood before the altar. The birdbath was filled with water, a substance
that functions as a motif in many stories. “I’m thirsty,” he said. Forming a cup with his
fingers, Matt brought handfuls of the water to his mouth.
“I think that’s holy water,” Redding said.
“Great. Now I’m God,” Matt said Machiavellianly. He continued to drink the
water with his mouth.
“No. I don’t think you’re supposed to drink that,” Kat said.
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t.”
10
With his back to his friends, Matt continued to drink from the basin—not to prove
that he was right in doing so, but to prove that he didn’t care. He did not care one bit. One
might even say, “He did not give a damn!”
Kat, who had submissively latched onto Redding again, said, “I don’t want to be
here anymore.”
“Yeah. Let’s get out of here,” Redding agreed.
Matt turned and wiped water from his face with the back of his hand. Suddenly,
the soldier climactically threw up his plastic firearm and pointed it at the others.
Redding, whose bones did not glow, was ready to become a martyr (although he
would not have used the word “martyr” because he had only heard the word a few times
in his life and figured it meant a person who builds things with bricks).
Matt pulled the trigger and a clear, thin stream, like that which is produced by a
hydrated person urinating, leaped out of the squirt gun and struck Redding in the face.
Redding, dressed as a skeleton—a skeleton being the thing that people become
after they die—was dead and his face was totally wet.
Kat, the monkey, started to cry. This brought Redding to his feet. He grabbed his
monkey by the paw and led her out of the church and onto the street in a manner that was
quite gallant yet kind of sexist if you really think about it.
“Oh, come on!” Matt called after the friends whom he had literally and
figuratively turned his back on and who were now literally and figuratively turning their
backs on him. There was much drama.
11
The skeleton and the monkey sat on the curb beyond the lit-up parking spaces, casting
shadows greater than themselves into the street. The soldier came slowly from behind,
carrying all three of their candy bags—an out-of-character gesture that was out of
character for Matt (remember? remember how I characterized him?) and—we can only
hope— earned.
“You guys forgot these,” he said with the solemnity of a priest speaking solemnly.
“Thanks,” Redding said.
Matt joined them on the curb of the sidewalk of the street of the town. He reached
into his candy sack. The monkey, who had just begun to settle down, waited nervously
for the soldier’s hands to show. You could tell she was nervous because she was
scrunching up her face in the manner that someone who is nervous does. From the bag,
he produced a Caramel Apple Pop. The monkey’s favorite. He handed it to her,
Biblically. She took the pop, wiped the tears from her eyes.
“Sorry,” he said.
The monkey stood. The skeleton stood. The soldier stood. And then the three
faced each other for the exchange kids will have every day until stolen by age:
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. But let’s go.”
12
THE SPRING OF THE FISH PEOPLE
m
m
m
Fall offered omens of rain. Dark days came unprompted—dark not in the sense of short
duration, but in some dampened, muffled way. All the town’s vegetation undressed and
crumpled in on itself, as if anticipating a blow. The canal, which cut the suburban town in
half, clung to dryness. An asphalt path hugged the canal’s snaking miles, and one
walking along the path might glance into the trench’s ever-stretching maw and think:
Thirsty. Thirsty’s what it is.
And after months of sensual buildup— everyone felt it—the sky delivered.
The rain arrived midday. No meteorologist, no elderly person had seen anything
like it. And the storm— if you could call it such, as there was little wind and littler
lightning—didn’t tire for days. These days became weeks. Flooding was a part of life.
Society adapted as well as it could. The town organized sandbag stations. These, in time,
were swallowed by the torrent. Schools, opting not to close completely, adopted an
abbreviated week, Tuesday through Thursday. Not so lucky, adults carpooled to work
with whatever friend or acquaintance owned a vehicle rugged enough to forge the
miniature lakes formed in gutters and parking lots. To the people of the town, it seemed
nature had decided to erase that pocket of Northern California from the map.
Tom reveled in it. During his newfound days away from Grand Valley Middle
School, the boy donned a purple poncho and walked the canal path. His house nestled
13
against a stretch of the trail, and his two working parents weren’t there on Rain Days to
tell him not to catch a cold. Besides, Tom loved the rain. More accurately, Tom loved the
rain’s effects. He hated school, so the days off felt like granted wishes. And the weather
kept everyone else indoors. So the path, pummeled and saturated to blackness, was his
alone— a personal highway through the violent murk.
The canal’s once-beckoning mouth had been drowned. A gargling bulge of water
slid along the channel’s fenced walls. Though the stream’s surface was scarred by the
sky’s wet bullets, a steady current belied the water’s depth. Tom watched the water move
with excitement. He stood in awe of the current’s inertia, indifferent to the bombarding
rain. He wished to be that strong. A group of boys at school called him “fag” and “pussy”
whenever they passed him in the hallway. Tom wished to be huge and thick like the
water in the canal, so that he might coolly devour the boys. He smiled, imagining a fistlike wave crashing through a school corridor and knocking the entire group off their feet.
It rained for a month before the first sighting. Local news touched on the incident—a
story about how regional ecosystems were handling the rain. A woman had called the
town’s wildlife center to ask what something “bigger than a fish or a duck” seen in the
canal could have been.
More stories cropped up, passing viruslike from mouth to ear in church pews,
break rooms, cafeterias. Everyone caught at least a mild case. Some obsessed: “Did you
14
hear what Mr. Donahue saw while walking his dog?” Others feared: “I’m sure Nancy
believes she saw that. I’m just not ruling out the possibility of a mistake.”
There was no doubt the weather had begun to affect people’s mental states.
Though umbrellas and parkas did their job of sloughing off the rain, moods, inevitably,
weren’t waterproof. Many attributed the canal stories to various flavors of winter
hysteria: seasonal affective disorder, cabin fever, boredom. After all, it was dark even at
the day’s peak. The sky was sheet metal.
But patterns emerged among the stories. Certain details persisted: gray fins,
scaled limbs, drifting shadows.
When Tom’s schoolmates spoke of these, he shook his head. When they pressed
the issue, he gave a skeptic’s snort. The sudden notoriety of the canal unsettled him. Tom
felt violated. The canal was his. And surely any mystical traits it had would show
themselves to him, if anyone. Wouldn’t they?
The gang of bullies saw Tom’s dismissiveness as veiled fear.
“The faggot’s scared of some fishies,” one said.
Tom was in line to get lunch at the cafeteria. His twisted fan club had joined the
line a few positions behind.
“No, he’s one of them,” another said. “Look at his big, buggy eyes. Tommy’s the
creek freak!”
Tom did have large, green eyes. They were pointed at the rainboots of the girl
immediately before him in line. The shin-high rubber boots were purple with white polka
15
dots. Tom liked purple. He focused on the boots, trying to mute everything else as the
boys began a chant of “Creeeek freeeak! Creeeek freeeak!”
Tom’s walks along the canal became ritual. The moment his parents left for work on Rain
Days and weekends, his plastic poncho was on, the conical hood pulled over his milk
chocolate waves. He desperately searched the toiling water for signs. Of what, he wasn’t
sure. Tom’s eyes hungered for the glimpse that would turn him from Someone Who Has
Heard into Someone Who Has Seen. Gray fins, scaled limbs, drifting shadows. He
shouted at the restless current: “Hey!” With both hands, Tom lifted a football-sized stone
from the mud. He lunged, grunted, and sent the rock on a balletic arc over the 6-foot-high
canal fence. It hit the water with a dumb plunk. Ripples radiated from the point of impact;
the current swept them away. Tom felt the way he did when his parents watched TV
during dinner—their heads faceless, turned toward the screen.
As suddenly as the rain had come, spring awoke. The clouds and downpour disappeared
overnight. A rapturous transition. The day matured into a deluge of light that covered
everything with explosive clarity. The parting of the oppressive gray was to the citizens
of Grand Valley, California like a revolution. The storm had been overthrown.
Things fell back in step with normalcy. The season had turned, of course:
Blossoms burst open with a scent as smooth and pure as their white petals; the well-fed
16
greenery flourished in exuberant hues; tiny birds, unseen for months, fluttered about,
peeping out mechanical songs. The overdue sun polished off the remaining puddles
within days. Schools resumed their five-day week. Four-wheel drive was no longer
necessary to get to work. And, for a time, nature’s wrath seemed sated.
The sun did its work on the canal’s water as well—although slower, as if it
weren’t a priority. Inch by aching inch, the level dropped. The path flooded with
celebrations of the weather: Summer-dressed people walked in talkative groups, rode
bicycles, and jogged upon its hide. Even Tom joined the parade. On the first rainless
weekend, he pulled his blue mountain bike out of the depths of the garage, gave the tires
a quick pumping, and was gliding up and down the stretch of path outside his house. The
boy still felt possessive of the trail and canal, but something in him swayed with the
season. The thirst for solitude was less strong. Why shouldn’t he let others use his trail?
Tom asked his parents if he could bike to school the following week, and they agreed—as
long as he wore a helmet. The ride to school, only a couple of miles, could be made
entirely on the canal trail. He practiced the ride that Sunday, slaloming the others on the
path. It amused Tom that these people only now realized the delights of the miniature
road. Fairweather fans indeed.
In truth, it was the thought of gray fins, scaled limbs, and drifting shadows that
had kept most of them away during the rain. But spring, full of light and laced with
invisible gold, squelched that mystique. Images of gray fins, scaled limbs, drifting
17
shadows—which few wanted to believe in in the first place—felt far off, impossible,
absurd. Until the first one emerged.
The spring of the fish people was marked by confusion more than anything else. People
had questions. Where did they come from? Why did they die? Is my family safe? Was it
some kind of hoax? If not, were they all dead? There was an ugly, black balloon tied to
that last one: were they all. It carried the maddening possibility that there might actually
be more of the things. And ones that moved.
The only certainty Grand Valley had was the creatures themselves. Or what was
left of them. For as the final inches of canal water receded curtainlike to reveal the
marshy dregs, there was something among the algae and filth that confirmed all of
winter’s fears.
The child-sized corpses lay at random intervals. Their gray color nearly matched
the canal’s concrete walls, which formed a blunt, inverted pyramid. This meant the
orbital cloud of flies that formed around each body was the best means of spotting one.
The bodies were similar to each other if not identical. They did, in fact, have fins—
membranous fans where hands or feet would be. But their limbs— stunted-looking
things—appeared less scaly than they did blubberous. Their flesh had the mushy quality
of frog skin. The neck was slit with gills. A gorgon-like bouquet of tendrils cascaded
18
from crown to shoulder, so that the head, if severed, would resemble something
cephalopodic that belonged in the dark depths of an ocean.
And many were severed—either as sport or out of fear. A decapitated vampire
stays down for good, the legend says. Most were left in bloated, morbid slumber. It
became a controversy. The people of the town argued over what to do with them. And as
they did, the gilled ones rotted.
Those were the most-attended city council meetings Grand Valley had ever seen.
Various groups lobbied for different courses of action. A good deal of people actually
wanted the bodies to be burned, to purge the canal and eliminate all remnants. The
wildlife center sought permission to extract one and study it. There were preservationists
that fought vehemently for nothing at all to be done. With so many diverging interests
and not even the remotest precedent to follow, the city council stagnated.
Nature, however, did not. The fish people’s bodies deflated over time. A
nauseating miasma hung above the canal. The clouds of flies thinned. Their ashen skin
darkened and began to cling to an inner bone structure. They decomposed phenomenally
fast. By the time Tom had been riding his bike to school— gratefully, knowing some
parents didn’t allow their kids near the canal anymore—for two painfully observant
weeks, they were skeletons.
19
After school one Friday, Tom rode home—boyishly drunk on the promise of weekend.
He wondered if his father would let him borrow a camera to take pictures of the
skeletons, lounging with finality in various positions. Tom feared he would approach the
canal one day and find them gone—removed, wasted away, or simply banished from
reality. Yet there they were, as he pulled onto the canal path and stood on his pedals to
get a better look. Tom sat back on the bicycle’s seat and looked ahead. And when he did,
his muscles tightened. The group that bullied him was ahead, clustered on the canal side
of the path. They were throwing rocks at one of the skeletons, shouting things like, “Die,
fucker! Die!” One held a gnarled stick and was taking home run hacks at the chainlink
fence. A crisp rattle followed each hit.
Tom’s backpack seemed to double in weight. His instinct was to slow down, to
turn back. He knew other ways of getting home. But beneath the acid bath of dread, Tom
hoped. This was his path. They would let him pass. He rode on.
They heard him coming and shifted their attention.
“Tommy’s here to suck his fish friend off!”
“Nice bike, fag!”
“Does your mommy make you wear a helmet?”
Tom stared at the length of path beyond. He knew they couldn’t catch him on his
bike. He just needed to get past. He nearly was.
In a deft motion, the boy with the stick tossed it underhand into the spokes of
Tom’s front wheel. The wheel caught with a clunk. The back of the bike bucked up,
20
chucking Tom headlong over the handlebars. His head and right shoulder hit the asphalt
first. Dizzying streaks of pain ripped through him.
The group exploded with laughter. They walked away, awarding the one who
threw the stick high fives and pats on the back.
Tom forced himself to his knees. Pain rang through him like shouts in a canyon.
His knees and elbows burned, and he knew if he looked at them he would see blood. He
let the backpack fall from his shoulders. He unclipped the helmet’s chin strap and pulled
it from his head. A split ran through the styrofoam shell. One tear fell onto the helmet,
and seeing it hurt worse than any of his injuries. Tom whirled the helmet at his bike,
which lay a few feet away, handlebars grotesquely facing the wrong way.
One leg at a time, Tom got to his feet. He turned toward the canal and began to
walk. When he reached the fence, his hands found chain links, his feet left the ground. He
climbed higher, clinging to the metal lattice like a rat scaling the wall of a cage. A metal
sign bolted to the fence said, DANGER: STAY OUT, STAY ALIVE. He used this to get a
better foothold. At the top, he straddled the fence, which wavered under his weight. Tom
flung the other leg over and began to climb down, into the mouth of the canal. When his
shoes touched the dirt-caked concrete slope, he turned around, sat, and inched his way
down crablike. Standing on the canal floor, Tom felt a strange gravity. He felt small and
large all at once.
He kneeled before the skeletal corpse the boys had pelted with stones. This one
died on its back. The bones were stringier, sharper than those of a human. Where a skull
21
might be, an aerodynamic cranial plate sat, separate from a thin, pointed mandible. The
poker chip-sized eyeholes of the masklike plate were hollow, yet seemed to stare. Tom
reached for this bone and studied it.
He lay on his back, perfectly parallel with the collection of bones that once was a
fish person. Tom rested the cranial plate over the top half of his own face. Through the
eyeholes, he stared up— into the gaping, cloudless sky.
22
GET PSYCHED
m
*
*
The king sat tall upon his throne and stroked his guard lion’s golden mane. He surveyed
the crowd. His subjects swirled, lost in the throes of a majestic ball. What a generous
king he was, to hold this lavish event—especially one to last for 40 days and 40 nights.
He looked to his queen beside him and smiled. She did not smile back, likely awed by his
generosity. The king continued to stroke the lion’s neck, and the mighty beast nuzzled his
leg. The past few hours were hazy to him. The royal wine will do that, he supposed. The
king could recall the royal carriage coming to a halt outside the ballroom, and his
highness disembarking to much fanfare. But had he and the queen graced the crowd with
the customary opening dance? He was undoubtedly escorted to this throne— such
formalities—but by which of his aids?
snap
When Rex walked into the Grand Valley High School library at the start of lunch period
in search of Mandy Avila, who for some reason spent every lunch and brunch on the
school’s greasy, ramen-smelling PCs despite her pandemic popularity and not just
hottest-girl-in-school but famous-person-hot looks, he was feeling good. He was even
23
peachy when he found her—accordioned up with her feet and butt on the computer chair,
her knees somehow way up by her face—clicking through images of prom dresses.
“Oh, that’s a nice one,” Rex said over her shoulder as a ruffly green gown popped
onto the screen.
“Yeah, that’s every girl’s dream—to be a walking re-creation of the Emerald
fucking City,” Mandy said.
“I know. I was kidding,” Rex said, wiping his sweaty fingers on his jeans and
taking the seat next to her. “But dresses,” he said, “for, like, prom?”
And when she turned to him, her nose ring catching the yellow library lights and
looking gold, even though Rex knew it was silver because she had the same one on in her
profile picture on Facebook, the profile picture where there’s nothing but sky behind her
freckle-peppered cheeks embracing so much smile that her eyes are squinty—when she
turned to him and told him Louie Beeler wrote prom question mark in shaving cream on
her Jetta yesterday, Rex still felt ...fine.
“You don’t say no to the quarterback,” she said.
“I guess not,” said Rex, who had never owned shaving cream.
He was chill. It wasn’t like looking at that profile picture fullscreened on his
laptop was the only thing to finally get him up to 20 pull-ups on the bar hanging in his
bedroom doorway. It wasn’t like he had in his backpack a gallon-sized Ziplock
containing one nutcracker and five walnuts, one of which had been carefully sawed open
along the seam with Rex’s dad’s jigsaw so the brainy nut could be removed, eaten, and
24
replaced with a rolled up strip of Sharpied paper (Dear Mandy—will you go to prom with
me? it said)— the split halves of the shell superglued whole again and set to dry overnight
in hopes that someone, a certain someone, might want to “try out my new nutcracker”
and be, like, swept off her nut-expecting feet or some shit.
No. It wasn’t anything like that.
After relating the library incident to Zack on the sidewalk outside 7/11, Rex checked his
phone, r u goin 2 prom, he read as Zack was saying “mad tragic” for the third time.
“And then she goes on to tell me that she and like half the people on our bus are
gonna hit the skitz,” Rex said.
Zack, sitting on the curb, set his Slurpee down and crossed his arms.
“I know,” Zack said.
“You know?” Rex asked, jumpshotting his empty Slurpee cup at the concrete
trashcan and missing by yards.
Zack told him how at lunch, while Rex was busy getting his heart broken, Jim
Hoogland went around and took a tally of how many hits their group would need. Jim
knew the guy who knew the guy who had the psychs.
“And what’d you say?” Rex asked.
“I told him count me in.”
“You told him count you m?”
25
“Yeah, man. Who texted you?”
“Hold up,” Rex said. He asked Zack if he remembered all the crazy shit they’d
heard from Rex’s older brother about his prom three years ago, when all his friends got
psyched. Joe Verducci suddenly handing Principal Beverly the gold leather Nikes he got
to match his tux and insisting, through the sobs, it was “to absolve the national debt.”
Sarah Park eating so much of her dress she had to get her stomach pumped. And rumor
had it Fred Bower was still holed up in his parents’ basement, practicing kung fu in order
to “fight off the alien invasion.”
“Some people flip,” Zack said. “But you have to be, like, predisposed. It got
brought up in Honors Psych. Bernstein said that, although she doesn’t condone it or
whatever, it really only screws up people who are borderline. Like half-crazy to begin
with. I don’t think that’s me.”
“I don’t think that’s me either, but I’d rather not risk it.” Rex’s experience with
mind-altering drugs started and ended with a slight wooziness he felt after taking the
recommended dosage of ibuprofen following his wisdom teeth removal. In retrospect, he
might’ve just been dehydrated.
“Look, bro,” Zack said. “All I did was give myself the option. Jimbo’s gonna grab
a hit for me. I don’t know if I’ll take it. I’m with you about those stories. Scary as shit.
But this is prom. Our last hurrah of junior year.”
26
Rex remembered telling Mandy in the library that he’d catch her later before
walking across campus, pulling out the bag with the custom walnut et cetera, and
chucking it into the dumpster behind the gym.
“Honestly,” Rex told Zack, “maybe I won’t even go.”
He waddled defeatedly over to the bush his Slurpee cup had landed in, pulled it
out, and flung it behind his back toward the trashcan. It bounced off the trashcan’s lip and
somersaulted into the parking lot.
“For real, man?” Zack said. “I use my football hooks to get us on the cool people
party bus, and you bail at the first sign of things not going your way? Who are you right
now? And who texted you?”
“Angie Ahmadi. She asked if I’m going to prom.”
“Angie Ahmadi who wears tracksuits to school and lives in Sandstone Heights?”
“No, the other one,” Rex wiseassed.
“She’s hot,” Zack said. “Wait, how does she know you?”
“Her dad’s one of my clients.”
Zack snorted and picked up his Slurpee.
“One of your clients?” Zack said. “That’s some pretty fancy language for a
poolboy.”
“Well, the Ahmadi’s are fancy. One time I fished a fucking dollar out of that
pool.”
“So you gonna go with her?”
27
“Angie? What do you mean?” Rex asked.
“There’s only one reason a girl asks a guy if he’s going to prom out of the fucking
blue like that.” Zack took a drag of Slurpee and said, “She wants you to ask her, bro.”
“You think?” Rex said. He pulled up her Facebook page on his phone and flipped
through the profile pictures. “She is pretty hot. I guess I’m down.”
yea, u? he sent her.
Zack had his Slurpee cup tilted toward his face and was scraping the last chunks
into his mouth with the straw.
ya. do u have a date? Angie sent back right away.
“Dude, she totally wants to go with me,” Rex said.
“Told ya,” Zack said, the words heavy from the slush in his mouth. “Only one
reason.”
nah, not yet, Rex sent.
Three seconds later, she replied: o cool! cuz my friend lexi wants to go wit u.
Rex showed Zack the text.
“OK, two reasons,” Zack said.
After Rex (unnecessarily) reminded Zack that Alexis “Sexy Lexi” Sandoval’s
claim to fame at Grand Valley High was getting with four dudes over the course of a
single pool party one summer (of which there was photographic evidence), Zack
reminded Rex that a) prom was just a week away and b) “You know what they say about
beggars.”
28
“All I’m saying is you wouldn’t wanna get stuck with, like, Blind Barb or
someone.”
Apparently Rex was taking too long to respond to Angie, because she texted him
again, adding, she ’11 touch ur thing, i f u go wit her.
Rex showed Zack, and Zack laughed.
“Hey, things are looking up for you, my man,” Zack said.
“I’d appreciate if you didn’t use the word ‘thing’ around me for a while.”
Rex typed his reply: lol that won’t be necessary, but tell her that I ’m down, what
color is her dress? Sucking air in through his teeth, he hit send.
As the party bus rolled away from Louie Beeler’s house—where anyone who’s anyone
had hours ago convened to sip Martinelli’s from plastic champagne glasses and pose for
parent-taken pictures of each couple, the whole group, now silly faces, just the girls,
couples again, and so on—Rex slumped onto the leather bench that ran along one wall of
the bus and breathed in brain-numbing whiffs of the floral perfume on his vest—the
perfume left there when he asked Mandy for “one just us” and she’d slung both arms
around his waist and pressed her cheek into his chest. As they held for the picture, he
worried she could feel his thumping heart.
Music crashed through the bus, each bass note a miniature earthquake. Some sort
of neo-disco ball sprayed dots of light—red, blue, green—that raced crazily around the
29
dark walls, the ceiling, the 24 well-dressed teens. Everyone was pretty much just eyes
and teeth under the blacklights.
They passed around Louie’s “birthday presents”—handles of Captain Morgan and
Smirnoff placed in shoeboxes and wrapped like gifts to get them past the parents. Rex
took pulls of whatever came his way, each gulp burning in his chest. Then came the
psychs. Out of shirt pockets and bras, the people around Rex produced Visine bottles
with the labels ripped off. Rex watched as they, in their tuxes and silky dresses, leaned
back and dribbled the contents of the bottles into one eye, then the other. Rex thought of
the electrified little wink Mandy’d given him when Lexi showed up at Louie’s in the
ruffly green gown from the library, the Emerald fucking City. Lexi was next to him now,
smelling like all the hairspray in the world, the bottom half of her dress swallowing his
legs. He focused on that wink when the vodka was shoved back into his hand. He took a
pull so deep that when he opened his eyes the flying dots of light left streaks in his vision,
collecting like neon spaghetti. As Rex blinked the spaghetti away, he realized someone
was standing in front of him.
“How ’bout you?”
Rex looked up at Louie, wondering what you have to eat to get that tall.
“Your buddy bitched out,” Louie said. “We got one left.”
Rex looked at Zack, and Zack looked back. Before Rex could speak, Mandy was
there, her hand on Louie’s chest, her dress tight and crimson.
“Not Rex,” she said. “Rex isn’t like that.”
30
Suddenly the tiny bottle was in Rex’s right hand. He looked at her, feeling his
bones turn to steel, the way they did when he worked out to pictures of her. Facing up, he
winked back, like he should’ve done at Louie’s, squeezed the skitz into his eye. Cold as
ice. The other eye. He was covered in cheers from the crowd and never not aware of
Zack’s eyes on him.
The king sat tall upon his throne and stroked his guard lion’s golden mane. He surveyed
the crowd. His subjects swirled, lost in the throes of a majestic ball. What a generous
king he was, to hold this lavish event—especially one to last for 40 days and 40 nights.
He looked to his queen beside him and smiled. She did not smile back, likely awed by his
generosity. The king continued to stroke the lion’s neck, and the mighty beast nuzzled his
leg. The past few hours were hazy to him. The royal wine will do that, he supposed. The
king could recall the royal carriage coming to a halt outside the ballroom, and his
highness disembarking to much fanfare. But had he and the queen graced the crowd with
the customary opening dance? He was undoubtedly escorted to this throne— such
formalities—but by which of his aids?
snap
He reached to readjust his crown but found merely hair. He asked the queen
where his crown had gone. This seemed to confuse her. Was that the night-blooming
jasmine outside the palace he smelled?
31
snap
He turned his attention to the lion and was shocked by the sudden thinness of the
creature’s mane, as if it had partially evaporated.
clap
There was a jester before him, making childish sounds. But when the king looked
up he saw she was no jester but a maiden dressed in embers. And she clapped once more.
He saw that when she breathed so did the fire she was wearing.
“Rex.”
That voice, the voice of thousands and thousands of angels, speaking in harmony.
Rex followed the voice to its face and found the face of a goddess. A goddess’
goddess. The freckled cheeks stretched into a smile, which broke into laughter.
“Are you with me?” And she turned to the queen, in the seat to his right—less of a
throne than a chair with a sheet over it. “Hi Barbara.”
Barbara? Blind Barb?
“He’s a cute pooch, isn’t he?” Mandy said as she kneeled before Rex to pet the
vested dog. And her perfume, enveloping him, pulled him into the moment. He suddenly
knew everything he knew. And more. He saw that Mandy was made of particles, an
infinite number, each one a Mandy, and each of those Mandys made of infinite, smaller
Mandys. And so on. Forever.
“I heard you were tripping pretty hard,” she said.
32
Rex stared down into the nauseating chasm of tessellate Mandys, all of them
speaking in unison: “This shit is crazy. I spent like an hour just now on the dancefloor
thinking I was seaweed.” Rex forced himself to focus on just one of the faces. Just one
set of freckles and squinty eyes. A singular face bloomed before him, like zooming in.
With all of his will, Rex held it there. “And when I snapped out of it Sarah tells me Louie
went into the bathroom with Lexi. While I was seaweed.” The face started to spin. “So I
guess we both need a new dance partner.” Nothing but sky in the blue eyes before him,
spinning. Cracking open into kaleidoscopes. Spinning. Rex feeling the Gs in his stomach.
“Look. Zack told me what you did with the nuts. That is the weirdest fucking thing I’ve
ever heard. But also kinda cute.” Her face a kaleidoscope, sucking him in. “So why don’t
we—and if it’s OK with Barb here—go dance. Come be seaweed with me.” Spinning
kaleidoscope. And at its center, the eye. The eye in which Rex saw some black dot, a
small glob of makeup, just left of iris, stranded on white. Rex saw. Engulfed in gravity.
He plunges the pool skimmer into the tar. He lifts the tar-laden net, dumps the contents
into the basket bound to his back. Again, he plunges. If the massive black mound is
lessening, it is beyond his perception. Yet he fills the basket with the stuff, again and
again, to carry across the great white plain, to the edge, and distribute it along the black
border there. He shovels another load of the ebony goop into the basket, and the straps’
painful grip on his shoulders tells him it’s enough. He turns and begins the trek across the
33
white glass that surrounds the stranded black pile in all directions. The trek to the edge.
He alternates between north and south. This time he heads north, walking across the
deadly smooth glass toward the black wall he knows as the northern border. Once there,
he will dump the contents of his basket onto the wall and use the pool skimmer to smooth
the dumped pile into the blackness of the border. In the distance, he can see the black
stalks that tower over the northern border. A similar feature lies in the south. Perhaps on
the return trip he will allow himself a glimpse of the colossal circular window that lies in
the east—the window to the sky. But for now: north. He trudges on, enduring the weight
of the basket. He carries on, fulfilling his duty and purpose. He moves the tar. As he does.
As he will do. As he has done for the past seven years.
34
COUNSELING
Mk
mt
“I had this really weird dream,” said the young lady who had moments ago introduced
herself as “Liss—no, Melissa—well, OK, Mel.”
Opposite Mel sat the Middlestate University Health Services counselor. She was
trying to breathe through her nose without making sound and staring at the sky-colored
eyes of the woman before her. Audrey, the counselor, readjusted the cardboard cuff on
her Starbucks cup, took a sip.
“Which— do you do dreams? Is that like something you know about?”
The counselor nodded in a sure-why-not manner. She had a roommate once who
would order (online, in bulk) those little donut-shaped stickers that reinforce punched
holes. As far as Audrey knew, this roommate was the single person on earth who actually
used the things. To the counselor, Mel’s irises looked precisely like these—the blue ones.
“’Cause I’ve never really done anything like this before, so I don’t really know
what the whole protocol is for like therapy, which—are you a therapist or a psychiatrist?
Technically?”
“I prefer ‘counselor,’” the counselor said. Learned and licensed for this very
thing—with plenty of student debt left to prove it. The slowly dwindling six-digit number
was Audrey’s version of a husband, she supposed. It sent her monthly love letters (bank
statements), stuck around in sickness and health. Till death would they part, it seemed.
35
Audrey looked at her white cup with the brown sleeve, considered taking another
sip, didn’t. Make it count, she thought. The Fancy Coffee Quota had been instated the
first time Audrey did the math (money-wise) of one Caffe Latte by five days a week by
four weeks a month by twelve months a year. Which added up to—give or take—holy
shit on a stick.
“Well so anyhow,” Mel said, “I don’t really know the rules when it comes to
counselors. Like am I supposed to just say whatever I want?”
The counselor shrugged her eyebrows. “Anything you like. There are no rules.
Love your bean, by the way. Tiffany’s?”
The blue eyes seemed to brighten. “Oh, thank you. Yes. Mom thought it’d be cute
if we had matching Perettis.”
At least Audrey didn’t have to suffer through this uncaffeinated. She lifted one leg
over the other and rested the Starbucks cup on her skirted thigh. Her one decent coffee
this week and the rest of the time it was camel piss from the dining hall pump pots.
Today was Monday.
Audrey gave the coffee cup another glance, which Mel apparently saw because
she said, “I only drink Starbs too. Campus coffee is like ew. And don’t get me started
about the food.”
Audrey’s grip on the cup tightened. She put forth something like a smile.
Although the school’s coffee was a necessity, the counselor had never eaten campus
36
food. She didn’t have a problem with the cuisine itself; she couldn’t stomach the
criminally high prices, which were decidedly, Audrey thought, “like ew.”
“You were saying something about a dream,” Audrey said.
“Oh sheesh yeah.” Mel tucked a golden ribbon of hair behind a pink ear. “It really
freaked me out. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was in a hospital. The hospital. My
dad’s hospital. The hospital my dad works at. He’s a doctor down south. And it looked
different, but I could just tell it was his hospital. And I was a patient. And gosh..
What is it about other people’s dreams that makes them so soul-suckingly boring?
the counselor thought. She’d set her coffee cup down on the nightstand-ish table to the
left of her chair.
“.. .where it gets weird but I was in one of those reclinable beds like Gramma
Gretch was before she passed. And so sheesh this is so strange but these tubes were going
into me, like penetrating me all over my body. There were big ones and small ones. Like
IV tubes on steroids. And they were putting stuff into me. The bigger ones had this gross
gray chunky stuff like... One time my mom made this stuff curds and whey and it really
looked like throw up. And my sister and I made her promise not to ever make it again.”
“There were curds in the tube?” the counselor asked. Audrey unbuttoned and
folded back the cuffs of her blouse, taking care to keep her left forearm covered. She let
her eyes drop to the puny lump of silver dangling from Mel’s neck. The roommate had
had a bean too.
37
Rachel was her name. The roommate. She had a bean, an Acura, and a whole
fucking roll of those reinforcement stickers at all times, Audrey thought.
“It looked like it. In the big ones. And they were pumping me with it but I could
just tell it was nutrients. Like this nasty baby barf stuff was something my body needed in
order to, like, live. I just knew. And the smaller tubes had well like olive oil going
through them. They were filling me with what looked like olive oil o r...”
Audrey could see in her head the two-bedroom-one-bath she shared with Rachel.
It was downtown, a refurbished place. Cream-colored walls and new-carpet smell. It was
a nicer place than two half-time paychecks from Poncho’s could afford, so Rachel’s
parents paid most of the rent. Rachel “got help,” she would say. What Audrey came to
understand was that Rachel “got help” from her parents much the same way fish get help
from water. But this was no skin off Audrey’s ass; it meant she got a killer deal on her
share of the rent.
That’s how Audrey knew Rachel—Poncho’s. Five days a week, the two served
tacos and beer to the college-aged masses. On the nights they both closed, Audrey and
Rachel went out for Grey Goose-crans. This was a time before thousands of hours of
supervised counseling practice. Before grad school even. Audrey was a lowly psychology
undergrad, even more broke than she was now, but yet to feel the full weight of her
current six-digit hubbie. Rachel taught Audrey the art of saying “Grey Goose-cran” or
“Goose and cran” instead of “cranberry juice with Grey Goose”— as if Audrey would
ever say any of those stupid things without Rachel there to close the tab. Sometimes
38
Rachel’s topaz eyes and fluttering lashes even skirted the need for a tab. Life to Audrey
often felt like being that guy in old cartoons who’s on a speeding train, furiously
throwing down stretches of track in front of the wheels to keep himself going. If people—
namely Rachel and her tight, tan midriff (that thing was like flypaper for frat guys’
eyes)—were going to join the cause and chuck some rails of their own in front of
Audrey’s engine, she wasn’t about to stop them.
It wasn’t until Rachel offered Audrey her spare bedroom (“You won’t have to
take the smelly bus anymore, and having the place to m yself s just unbearably lonely...”)
that Audrey realized those rails, like all things, came at a price. The rent Rachel set was
less than half what Audrey paid for her previous place (the laundry room in some
family’s house on the outskirts). But the difference in rent turned out to be more of a
wage Audrey earned. She found herself washing mounds of Rachel’s food-crusted dishes
left in the sink week after week. Serving as sole trash taker-outer and TP roll replacer.
Having her entire box of Lean Pockets eaten for the third time in a month by some frat
guy invited back to see more than just Rachel’s midriff. And—and this was the worst—
biting her tongue when Rachel responded to Modest Mouse’s We Were Dead Before the
Ship Even Sank—the album whose cover art adorned Audrey’s left forearm in permanent
blue ink—by plugging her actual fucking ears.
“...yeah let’s just say olive oil. And I somehow just knew this was medicine. My
body was sick in some general way and this extra virgin-looking drug was keeping the
39
sickness at bay. And at one point I looked at where all these tubes were coming from and
followed them back to—and this is where it gets really weird..
The counselor chucked her eyebrows up as if to say, “Oh?” She was looking at
Mel but seeing Rachel— in a tan T-shirt, black shorts, ankle boots. And one of those
floppy-as-hell hats everyone remembers the guy in “American Gothic” wearing even
though he isn’t.
The music festival had been Rachel’s idea, but she didn’t have to twist Audrey’s arm.
Modest Mouse was on the lineup. Not only that, but Rachel offered to drive them there in
the Acura and pay for Audrey’s ticket. That’s what Rachel was, an enabler. Audrey
endured, and Rachel enabled. Audrey endured, for instance, Rachel dropping remarks
like that We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank sounded like it was “recorded in a
dingy basement somewhere.” Half of Audrey wanted to box Rachel’s ears and tell her
that the album’s flaws, its rawness, its dingy-basement-ness was what made the album
worth listening to. The other half of Audrey wanted to see Modest Mouse, and was
willing to endure a weekend with Rachel to do so. The latter half won out, convincing the
former that the trip’s expenses would be Rachel’s penance. A holiday bonus from
Audrey’s second job as Rachel’s roommate.
40
Besides, Audrey’s final quarter of school was coming to an end, as was her supply
of train tracks to throw in front of herself. There wasn’t exactly a boomtown for people
with bachelor’s degrees in psych. On Rachel’s whim, Audrey’s train rolled into Napa.
“I only have so much cash,” Audrey said. “And do you have any idea how much
food is going to cost at this thing?”
“C’mon. It’s on me.”
“I’m still feeling the beers we had on the bus.”
“Just. One. Drink,” Rachel said. Her hat bobbed with each word, jellyfish-like.
“Don’t you wanna get to the festival? I’m sure the bands have started by now.”
“Modest Mouse doesn’t come on until 5,” Rachel said. “I checked, remember?”
They were sitting at an outdoor bar near the pool of some high-end Napa resort
they had no business being at. At least Audrey didn’t. The bus (one of those chubby ones
that take retirement homers on field trips) was meant to carry them from the Holiday Inn
to the venue, stopping at hotels along the way to pick up more festivalgoers. But Rachel,
who already on the bus surprised Audrey with six cans of Coors Light from her purse for
them to split, had other plans. So far the warmness of the beer was the only thing on the
trip she’d actually had to endure. It turned out Rachel could be pretty fun when she
wasn’t faced with the responsibilities of everyday life. This was vacation. This was her
element. So when the shuttle stopped outside the faux-rustic complex of rotundas and
columns and Rachel hopped off the bus, strutting through the automatic front doors as if
41
it said Rachel’s up on the wall in ornate lettering instead of Vine Heritage, Audrey
followed.
“The tubes came from this machine on the wall by my bed. Just a very hospital-looking,
gray plastic box with little green lights that blinked. And a long like groove down one
side. After some time though the lights still blink but now they were yellow. And here we
go so then all of a sudden my parents walk in. My mom and my dad. Just in regular
clothes. My dad not in his scrubs even though it’s his hospital. And they come in and
look down on me in a very caring way. Like parents. You know. Like how they look at
me when I have a fever or something. Smiling but in a sad way kind of. And my mom
comes over and touches the side of my face or pats or strokes the side of my head and my
dad goes over to the machine with the tubes and slides a credit card through the groove
on the side so it’s a credit card slot and after he does the lights on the machine blink
green again.”
Audrey slurped down the last of her third Grey Goose-cran and looked around. The sun
had swallowed the earth, it seemed. Everything was bright and hot in the Vine Heritage
pool area, which butted up against a hill swathed in vineyard rows. The pool itself was a
giant wiggling diamond. Clusters of healthy-looking, middle-aged folks were all about,
laughing or lounging, their golden skin literally shining in the sun, their clothes an array
42
of colors Audrey could only think of at the moment as Easter shades. No one was
swimming.
“I still can’t believe we got in here,” Audrey said. Before today, she didn’t know
hotels this nice existed.
“Isn’t it great? We should be festies more often.”
Festies? Audrey thought. They hadn’t even gotten there yet. She looked down to
check her watch, realized she wasn’t wearing one, and noticed the rosy beginnings of a
sunburn—just a faint smear of rouge across her tattoo. The bluish ink that spanned her
arm formed an anchor, suspended by a hot air balloon.
“What time is it?” Audrey asked. “I wanna be able to get a good spot for Modest
Mouse.”
“There’s one in Santa Barbara next month. We wouldn’t have to drive through
half of California for that one.”
Audrey felt an impulse to knock Rachel’s hat off her head. She endured it.
“But what time is it?” Audrey said. “My phone’s in your purse.”
Rachel began rummaging through the purse. “Yeah, about that,” she said. “I think
I might’ve made a mistake about the lineup.”
“You what?” Just. Endure.
“Honestly, I think we missed them.” It was her Ray-Bans she pulled out of the
purse, not Audrey’s phone. “But isn’t this just as fun?” She put the sunglasses on.
43
“We w hatT Audrey said. She thought of the messes, the frat guys, the ignorant
comments, and a wave of queasiness passed through her.
Rachel plopped her stupid hat down on Audrey’s lap.
“It’s fine,” Rachel said. “Maybe they’ll be in SB.”
Nausea came again, and Audrey felt a bead of sweat crawl down the side of her
face.
Rachel stepped out of her boots and walked toward the pool. The last thought
Audrey had before she threw up into the hat was about Rachel’s walk. Step after step
landed on the balls of her feet, like she had something stuck way up her ass, hips leading
the stomach. Audrey’d never walked like that in her life. It was a dance she’d never
learned. She’d never needed to.
Audrey looked up from the vomit filled hat to see if anyone noticed she threw up.
Everyone’s eyes were on Rachel. The heads of the poolside crowd followed the
roommate as she made her way to the shallow end’s descending steps. Who the hell are
these people? Audrey wondered. Their clothes seemed less vibrant than they did
moments ago. Audrey thought their tans looked orangish, unnatural now. Their laughs
were coughed up, forced. Grass looks much greener but it’s green-painted cement. A
Modest Mouse lyric.
Audrey tossed the hat into a nearby fountain before turning to watch Rachel stride
into the glimmering water, fully clothed and drawing patchy applause from the
spectators.
44
For the first time, Audrey wondered just where the hell her train was headed.
“And they give me that sad little smile and then leave the room until the machine’s lights
go yellow again and it all kind of repeats. And I just know that all this is keeping me
alive. That if my parents don’t come in and swipe the machine the lights will turn red.
But it can’t go red ’cause then I won’t get the stuff in the tubes anymore. And I need the
stuff. I don’t know how I know you know how dreams are but I need the stuff in the tubes
to live. And this dream went on and was so bad and so sad and really just scared the
bejeezus out of me. And all day I’ve been thinking about it and wondering like what it
could mean. And I came here to see like... what it could mean.”
And now came the part where Audrey pulled herself out of the memory, away
from the cardstock square hidden beneath bills and junk mail on her kitchen counter—the
embossed paper she knew said, You are cordially invited to Vine Heritage Resort & Spa
to celebrate the union o f Ra—but hadn’t read anymore—pull herself away from all this
and meet the eyes of her third Rachel this month, whose name was Liss, Mel,
whateverthefuck, all along her hidden tattoo trying to sing that Modest Mouse lyric about
(she couldn’t remember it word-for-word; she hadn’t listened to the song or band in
years) traveling so far in the universe you end up right back where you started.
Audrey reached for her Caffe Latte and held it before her with both hands.
“O f the utmost importance,” the counselor said, “is to realize it was just a dream.”
45
ONSCREEN KISS
m
Mth
*
Bill asked Mel if she had anything to drink around here. Like anything. Mel, from the
bathroom, shouted, Yeah, like a a-third-a-bottle-of Smirnoff in the freezer—oh wait
that’s what she and Stel used to make Bloodies yesterday. So, no? Bill asked. Mel,
striding past him to wash hands in the kitchen sink, slurred, Did she look like she needed
any more anything at this point? Bill opened his mouth to ask if the bathroom sink was
too mainstream; he closed it when he felt his heart pick up. Bill’s heart suddenly felt like
some small, feisty animal trapped inside a bag, trying to get out. Why? He was here, in an
apartment he’d been in at least 50 times, with a good friend, engaging in some purely
platonic hanging out. Of course there was always that shot of adrenaline that came with
entering a female’s space. Her home. Her room. Her world. Bill had spent his childhood
observing girls from the outside. They were unexplored territory. Then at some point in
his teens the vault door was flung open and Bill got to enter. No matter how many times
he did, he felt like Indiana Jones intruding on some ancient, booby-trapped tomb. Full of
intrigue. Scared for his life. It was the things. The butthole-tightening expectation that the
walls would be made out of tampons, and the subsequent discovery that they actually
kind of were. With Mel, it was the neon green fleece blanket—the initials M.A.M.
embroidered in white on one corner that made it so obviously a grandma gift—draped
over her futon. The Friends Blu-ray box set under the TV. The red KitchenAid on the
46
kitchen counter. The CLEAN/DIRTY dishwasher magnet. The key rack. Yep, Mel was a
girl. No doubt about it. And there was something audacious about it being 2013 and her
not trying to be anything else. Heart: dunka, dunka, dunka. Bill asked it why. Even if this
looked like something, like what movies and TV portrayed as something that might lead
somewhere, it was only what it was—so, why? Why the coked-up gerbil impression,
heart? Bill tried to say something. He could not. Words were gone. Like all of a sudden
English was a foreign language. Classic will they/won’t they, Max had said. But right
now Bill felt less Ross Geller, more Neo getting his mouth fused shut. This was more
than boyhood butterflies, he admitted. This was full-on ugly-head rearing of the thing.
The thing that’d been possessing Bill in recent months. The thing that made sweat ooze
out of his face throughout lectures in even the ACed classrooms. The thing that made him
need to find bathrooms on deserted fourth or fifth floors—up where they keep obsolete
tech and tenured professors—to do his business. The thing that made him actually walk
into Middlestate University Health Services last week and, resisting the urge to make any
What About Bob? references, ask the receptionist where one might maybe go if he wasn’t
feeling great in like a mental kind of way. The receptionist had smiled and pointed down
one corridor to a row of chairs, a miniature waiting room, where sat none other than the
illustrious Mel M. Bill said thank you to the receptionist for this information which he
would relay to his friend who was having such ailments. He scurried out of the building
before Mel could spot him and half-jogged all the way home and put on What About
Bob? and laughed at Bill Murray. Mel’s kitchen smelled like fruity scented candles that
47
were previously burning but no longer lit, Bill noticed. He loosened his tie and swallowed
a large dose of So What. So what if Mel had that night at dinner with all of Film Club
chosen the seat next to him. So what if she went to the museum with him and it was fun.
So what if the five mandatory presentations on sexual assault Bill attended as a
Middlestate freshman made him unable to be alone with a woman, ever, without thinking
she was afraid he was going to rape her. Dunka. This was just what it was. Bill Davis. In
her space. His heart doing gymnastics. And her. Looking better than ever. Even i f all that,
she called him buddy in texts. Once, she wore her retainer in front of him. So. He
accidentally said it out loud: Why? (At least it was speech.) She dried her hands with a
pink hand towel hanging next to the sink. Because not to name any names but a certain
roommate of Mel’s named Jess Marie Schwartz thought it’d be a dandy idea to just up
and shave her hairyass legs in the bathroom sink, which was now terminally clogged,
which—hence the kitchen sink, Mel said. Any more questions, detective? Actual health
implications of the clunky, now-painful dunka, dunka were (Mel daintily pried off one
size-eight yellow flat, then the other, right there in the kitchen) the least of Bill’s worries,
he decided.
—Bill is nice.
—Yeah, but like too nice, no?
—Oh, Mel. What even is ‘too nice?’ I don’t think ‘too nice’ is part of my belief system.
48
—Don’t give me that. So if he asked you to go to, I don’t know, a museum or some
freaking thing, you’d be like—
—I’d go.
— You’d go.
—I’d go.
—Museum of natural history. Mannequin cavemen. Cavemannequins. In buttflaps.
Staring at you.
— Sounds interesting, actually.
—Whole exhibits about like different kinds of waves, in the ocean, which—did you
know there’s different kinds? A room full of rocks.
—Have you been?
—Oh, I’m not buying it. You’d go. Yeah right, you’d go. You’d go and hold his hand
through the Ice Age and probably push his freaking fedora up on one side to whisper in
his ear, ‘Hey, where’s the dinosaurs?’
—Uh, that’s a pretty vivid picture. Have you been? Because it sounds like—
—I’m not buying it.
—But you have been buying newspapers for him. Why do that if he’s undateable?
49
—I happen to frequent the university store—you know I don’t like running low on
Scantrons. Sometimes I grab Bill a WSJ while I’m there. Big deal. I don’t remember that
being a scene in When Harry Met Sally.
— OK first of all, ‘WSJ’ is more syllables than ‘Wall Street Journal. ’ Second, someone
needs to remind that kid he’s not 40. And third, Sally Albright might not do that, but
Betty Draper would.
—For the love of Bechdel, let’s change the subject.
—Fine by me. How would you feel about me borrowing your razor? And before you say
no, I wanna remind you how good a roommate I am and how much you love me and all
that crap people say when—
—I have extra razors, freak. You really don’t have one?
—Don’t even think about shaving those, those... mammoX\\ trunks in our shower. That
would be major cloggage.
—No shaving in the shower. Got it.
—You’d really go? It wouldn’t be, like, weird to do those things?
Mel was not one to initiate a kiss. But standing there in the kitchen, surely looking cute as
heck in no shoes and the black dress that according to her dad had the Grand Canyon of
necklines (William McCleary, M.D., had his moments)—just standing there, waiting to
50
be kissed, and yet not being kissed despite said cuteness, was whatever’s one step past
Excruciating on the awkward scale. Bill was just standing there. He was staring at her
feet and—was he clutching his chest? It made her feel like maybe there was something
wrong with her feet because he was staring at them instead of the Grand Canyon, which
she had specifically decided to wear that night after the convo with Stel about How do
you know when you’re ready?—which— You don’t, is pretty much what Stel had said,
which—Wow, thanks for the help! And this self-consciousness about feet was opening a
floodgate of insecurity that had been dammed up since Mel had had her webbed middle
toes fixed, which was like years before periods were even a thing. Which—-why had Jess
all of a sudden wanted to join the female population and shave her legs? Did she have a
date or something? It bothered Mel that she didn’t know. Mel was always up-to-theminute on what other people in Film Club were doing. It was the why that sometimes
tripped her up. Like Bill right now. What the heck? Mel was mostly confused because
she thought looking cute was the hard part. She had googled Audrey Hepburn pictures
before doing her hair; she knew Bill liked that old crap. She thought Bill, who was
notorious for James Deaning the heck out of tipsy, up-past-their-bedtime coeds, would
know what to do here. She wanted to be Deaned. Brandoed. Fonda me, Mel thought. But
Bill, in his tweed three-piece and matching fedora, just stared at her not-even-webbedanymore feet and sort of hugged himself and seemed to be shivering. Mel put one foot on
top of the other. She felt the wine from dinner slosh around in her belly. She felt the
awkwardness grow and expand, like a flame getting closer and closer to skin. She
51
couldn’t take it. So Melissa McCleary—Melissa Ann McCleary, 22 years old, who
supersecretly didn’t even trust herself to have opinions on abortion, stamped a big mental
SCREW IT on the whole situation and stepped and leaned and pressed her face into Bill’s.
— Say there’s a film you like.
—There’s a film you like.
—OK, smartass. There’s a film that you like.
—At least one.
—But you’re not sure if liking it makes you a good filmophile. Because it has... a lot of
commercial appeal.
—Mainstream.
— Yes. And the you you wanna be might not be the you that likes that film.
—A superhero movie, for instance.
— Sure. Whatever. So what I’m wondering is how do you even know if you actually like
the movie or if you’ve just fallen for the same superficial stuff that made it big at the box
office?
—CGI explosions. Sexy costumes. Household names.
—All that. This movie has all that. And... I like it. I think. But isn’t that stuff just
designed to get me to like it? That’s my question. Is that ‘like’ real? Am I genuinely in
like with this film, or am I just another... Just...
52
—A moth to a flame.
—Yeah.
—A plebe to an Iron Man.
—Yes.
—Bill, I’m going to tell you a story I’ve never told anyone.
—Uh oh.
—When I was 11 the live action movie of Josie and the Pussycats came out. The
marketing push was Biblical. There were TV spots, radio ticket contests, entire aisles of
Josie and the Pussycats school supplies. Naturally, my little sister and all her adorably
idiotic friends had to see it. Had to. And when release day for this desecration of all that
is holy in entertainment finally came around, guess who got stuck chaperoning five 9year-olds to the downtown cinema?
—Oh no.
—They all wore little headbands with cat ears, Bill. Cat ears. All of them. My parents had
to bribe me. Upgrades for my computer.
—I didn’t know...
—But here’s the thing, Bill. As scarring as it was to walk up to the ticket booth and tell
the guy in the Pulp Fiction shirt ‘Six for Josie and the Pussycats,’ I’ll never forget the
involuntary smile that took over my face about halfway into the first musical number. I
liked it, Bill. I fucking. Liked it. There was so much to like. It lampooned itself and had
one hell of a soundtrack. Of course, as the credits rolled, I feigned disgust to the jumping-
53
up-and-down, cat-eared posse that had unanimously voted it The Best Movie of All
Time. But internally I was a resounding sixth vote: Yes! Yes, it was! A couple months
later when it came out on DVD, I rode my bike to Best Buy and bought two copies. I’ve
never bought two copies of anything else in my life, Bill. Why would you need two
copies of one movie? I set up our family’s old tube TV in my room and watched it every
night that week. I watched it once a week for the rest of seventh grade. I still know every
word to every song.
—Holy shit, Max.
—Here’s the point. You should kiss her.
— Wha—kiss? Kiss who? Your sister?
—-No. Is that hat restricting bloodflow to your brain? You came to me just now with a
question about liking a film. The value of commercialized art. An interesting discussion,
although not the one you wanna have. You said ‘film,’ I heard ‘Mel.’ Don’t think I don’t
appreciate the trope, though.
—Well then. I guess my cards are, as they say, all on the table.
—It doesn’t take a genius to figure you out, Bill Davis, but a genius I am. Have you been
at any of the Film Club outings you’ve been at? You two are classic will they/won’t they.
It’s not a matter of whether your Tike’ is ‘real’ or not. If I can like a movie made for
preteen girls with half a brain— genuinely like it—then anyone can like anything. Your
whole dilemma about being ‘tricked’ into liking her is just a distraction. I watched you
bring home a different girl each night of Labor Day weekend, a three-day weekend. None
54
of them actually appealed to you. And not once did you talk to me about being tricked
into liking. That’s the difference with Mel. Liking is on the table. You’re just trying to
trick yourself out of it. Or out of having to choose. Self-inflicted paralysis.
Bill seemed to be having some sort of allergic reaction to Mel, the way she had had to
walk his dazed, shivering body out of the fluorescent-lit kitchen and into her bedroom to
sit him down on her bed, all the while rubbing his back and asking, Are you alright? Hey,
are you OK? It reminded Mel of the nights when Stel would overdo it with the Cuervo
and Mel would have to stay up, comforting Stel and making sure she didn’t choke on her
puke. These nights were never fun for Mel, but being the one doing the comforting
always felt at least somewhat like winning. But Bill hadn’t touched alcohol that night—
Mel had watched. At some point during the awkwardness in the kitchen, he had slipped
into, like, Caledonia? The first words he managed to get out in her bedroom were: I’m
sorry. And then: I’m really, really sorry. Mel showered him with gentle It’s OKs and kept
up the backrub. He looked like he might cry. She literally prayed he wouldn’t. Mel felt
motherish enough as it was. Oh William, she cooed. It’s Bill, Bill said, and he winced out
another I’m sorry. Mel said it was fine. And she meant it. She had given up on tonight
being the First Time when, in the kitchen, she had started to kiss him, found his face
unresponsive, and, not knowing what to do, kept kissing until of all things the word
necrophile slid into her head, which—no. Mel shuddered. It’s not you, Bill said. He was
55
sitting on the bed, staring at the carpet. His hat was off. His vest was unbuttoned. Mel,
who briefly neglected her backrubbing duties to zip a hoodie up over the Grand Canyon,
said, No, really, it’s OK. You don’t even know how OK it is. And then something
occurred to Mel that hadn’t before. She asked, Why?
56
THEN & ONLY THEN
m mk
Maximillian von Baumgartner has a John Adams quote on his desk. It’s printed on
parchmentish paper and laminated, propped up next to his computer monitor like a family
photo. The quote reads:
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty
to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to
study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural
history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and
agriculture...
Max plugs the fake cigarette one-hitter’s low-caliber mouth with (if Max’s friend of a
friend of an acquaintance can be believed) high-caliber Cali organic. Max’s lighter is
absurdly longer than the actual one-hitter. It’s one of those camping-grade safety lighters
more suited for suburban barbecues than for getting high by yourself.
There was the time Film Club went camping. It wasn’t until after they got to Oceanside
Dunes that they realized none of the five had ever started a fire before. No, a campus club
meant for, like, debating Capra versus Coppola wouldn’t attract many Boy Scout alums,
Bill had said. But Max got one going—eventually. He used so much lighter fluid the
57
s’mores tasted like metal and ass. They sat around that fire all night, bitching about
Middlestate and its lack of a film department.
mh
Max pulls the lighter’s trigger and it spits out a ribbon of flame, which he sucks into the
weed-stuffed one-hitter. It’s the same lighter he used to start the campfire. There’s a faint
crackle as he inhales, and if Max keeps his breath steady he can almost make it sound like
the ocean did that night. Max remembers zipping out of his tent in the early morning and
ambling toward one of the dunes to piss on it. He remembers pausing at the center of
their little camp; he could hear sobbing coming from one of the girls’ tents.
*
There was the time Max and Bill hacked into the back end of the Middlestate University
website and added a throwaway email address to every mailto: link on the staff directory
page. This made it so they would receive a copy of each faculty-bound message initiated
there. Occasionally, Max responded to students’ emails, posing as whatever professor the
student was attempting to contact. It was about rebellion and anarchy, but mostly it was
about trying to make Bill laugh:
Your partner’s half-assing his half o f the project you say?
Well that reduces things to a measly quarter now, doesn 7
it? You, dear student, must not stand fo r this. Here’s my
58
advice : Fight partial butts with partial butts. Turn the other
cheeks. You see, we professors assign these group projects
in order to impart certain skills that will help you succeed in
life. And let me tell you: In my 109 years o f life on this earth
I have not found a single skill more helpful than half-assing.
So learn to be uncooperative. Meet your partner’s every
inaction with an equal and opposite non-reaction. For, in
the words o f the late, great Horatio Stern, To love is easy;
to hate— oh, therein lies the true test. D on’t google that
quote. I ju st made it up. See! Half-assing. That’s not even a
real person.
Max can’t remember the last time he smoked weed, but if he had to guess, it was some
time before he joined Film Club. Now all that’s left of Film Club is memories, and the
one unread text message he woke up to this morning. Max sets down the smoking
paraphernalia and looks at his phone. He can’t bring himself to open the message—not
yet. So he goes with the memories.
59
There was the time Mel got elected Film Club president and made that uncomfortably
political joke about whether the world was really ready for a woman pres, which caused
Jesse to gag.
Max doesn’t understand politics. He just doesn’t think you can change the world by
yelling at it. He doesn’t think you can change anything that way. It never worked for
Max’s dad when Max was a kid. There’s more to the quote on his desk:
My sons ought to study mathematics, (et cetera, et cetera, et
cetera), in order to give their children a right to study
painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and
porcelain.
He snaps the lighter, puffs up the cherry, breathes in, holds. Max has a theory that his
dad, a CEO, was trying to say something about Max’s liberal arts education by giving
him the laminated quote for his 21st birthday. Max has theories coming out of his ears.
He lets out the breath—his mouth making a bahh sound—and watches the smoke float
away.
There was the time Jesse wanted to launch a new exercise class at the Rec Center called
Big Sis, where each session would be a bunch of cardio and verbal coaching meant to
60
prepare female students for breaking up with unwanted, over-sensitive boyfriends.
Jesse—the only female on Middlestate’s rugby team—would lead each class herself. She
even met with the Rec Center admins about it, suggesting they squeeze Big Sis in during
the 45 minutes between Spin Thin and Yogaflex. The admins told her it all felt very...
agendaed. What Jesse did in front of the suited men then (and of course reenacted at that
evening’s Film Club gathering) became something of a Middlestate legend. She stood up
and told them: You can try to make some gender thing out of it, but what it all comes
down to (—and here I borrowed from the peerless Ms. Morissette’s second-best song, she
spittle-flingingly explained to Max and everyone over pizza that night), what it all boils
down to is that... Well, deliberately breaking someone’s heart is a lot like ripping out a
bunch of your teeth. With your bare hands. In other words, not pleasant. The admins said
they would table the idea.
Aside from Max, the apartment is empty. The apartment smells empty. Right now it also
smells like marijuana. If asked to describe the smell of emptiness, Max would say
carpety. No—uncooked spaghetti. It’s what’s left after your best friend graduates, moves
out, takes the sales job with the big-numbered salary hundreds of miles away and you
resist utilizing the newly freed square-footage because (to your dad) someone might
wanna sublet the room and (to yourself) that jersey’s hanging from the rafters. Not that
Bill—who taught Max that phrase, hanging from the rafters— should have done anything
61
different. It is, to Max, merely another example of a person being a person and Max
being something else.
*
There was the time Max and Bill’s email scheme roped in a message from a sender they
recognized. They were sifting through the dozens of emails fellow Middlestate students
sent their teachers that day, and came across one with the subject ENG 121 - 2nd Person
Journal Asgmt. It was [email protected]—Jesse’s address. At first they
just looked at each other. Max wasn’t sure what Bill would want to do. Max wasn’t sure
what he himself wanted to do. Eventually, Bill said, We can’t open it. Especially if it’s
some kind of journal-type thing, Max said. Bill said, That would be a major invasion of
privacy. Unlike the metric buttload of emails we’ve already opened over the past week
and a half, Max thought but didn’t say.
Max sniffs at the weed and the emptiness in the air and remembers how part of him had
already, in that moment, decided to read Jesse’s email once Bill wasn’t around. Starting
to feel high, Max thinks about how the person you are is rarely anything like the person
you tell yourself you are. He wonders if he should get a medical marijuana card, just
submit to the fact that this is something he does. He has even been having lower back
pain recently, which according to one website is caused by overuse and according to
another site is the result of inactivity.
There was the time Max opened the email. It was just your standard Here’s my
homework, teach-type message, but there was a document attached. Max looked over
shoulder to make sure his bedroom door was closed, then opened the attachment. And
that’s when Max learned more about Jesse than he ever thought he wanted to:
When Someone Compares Your Body to a Gorilla’s Body
You will be confused at first. You will remind yourself your
physical strength is part o f your identity. Then you will
forget this. Then you will remind yourself again. You will
come to indict everything you think you know about
yourself. You will stop going to your favorite place in the
entire world, the gym, which is where you overheard him
say it in his black sweatshirt with the white greek letters—an
O with a sideways I in it and an I with a sideways O in it.
You will see these letters in your dreams. You will remember
how smoothly, how naturally he form ed the words while
spotting bench press fo r Levin Green, who laughed and who
is on the rugby team with you and who you thought was
your good friend. You will never go back to the gym. You
will accept the personalized workout mix CDs Max makes
you and when he excitedly asks you i f they’re getting you
sufficiently pumped you will say oh yes they are getting me
so pumped. You will learn to love hunger. You will starve
fo r it. You will forget about your job at the gym ’s front desk
until you get an email from your supervisor asking i f you ’re
OK. You will not respond. You will not work out fo r two
months. You used to work out every day, sometimes twice a
day. You will develop a twitch in your left eyelid. You will
purchase razors fo r the first time. You will purchase
tweezers. You will order these things online because the
thought o f someone seeing you purchase them is
unthinkable. You will get an email from your supervisor
saying your last paycheck is waiting to be picked up. You
will not respond. Commercials fo r the new Planet of the
Apes will physically hurt you. You will be sure when they
come on that everyone in the room is thinking only o f your
hideous, simian qualities. You will start working out in your
bedroom at night after your definitively non-simian
roommate has gone to sleep. You will work out hard. And
when you ’re beaten down, emptied out—you've exhausted
64
every calorie you consumed in the last 12 hours, forcing
your body to use itself as fuel—when logic just dissolves
because y o u ’ve strangled the mind, letting in only the
inanest mantras (DON’T STOP; KEEP IT UP; GET IT,
GIRL), returning to a baser form o f man—when your soul
seems to float out o f your fucking body, so you 're looking
down on that hulking mound o f flesh (you) heaving,
thrashing mindless in a fatal fight against everything,
literally everything (or nothing?)—when you finally ascend
to Heaven, see the face o f God, and swallow it—then and
only then can the working out begin.
mb
Max— so high now that his vision’s framerate seems to have dropped—tries to remember
why he even thought it was a good idea to come clean with Jesse, to now, a year later,
pen the pages-long text message that explained everything—how he read her words, how
they ripped into him, and how walking the Middlestate hallways had felt different ever
since. Max doesn’t believe in a Right Thing To Do, but he supposes the message had
something to do with tying up loose ends. He doesn’t want to believe it was only out of
missing Film Club. The message Max scribbled down on paper, trashed, rewrote, typed
up, and sent last night said that Jesse was wrong, that she was actually beautiful. Truly,
65
deeply beautiful in a way that Middlestate or some punk in a sweatshirt could never taint.
If it ever seemed like he had kept his distance from her, the message said, it was only
because he felt so goddamn close to her for such the wrong reasons. He hit send, and
then—nothing. She didn’t respond. Dread descended on him. Max didn’t eat dinner. And
when he woke up this morning with her name on his phone—her reply just one fingertap
away—the dread only grew.
There was the time Film Club rented a projector from the Middlestate library and turned
a whole wall of Stella’s living room into a movie screen. About halfway through The
Princess Bride, some little beetle-type thing floated up and landed on Inigo Montoya’s
face. Yuck, Max said. Oh, get over it, Jesse told him. Max said, I will not; it’s disgusting.
Bill placed a cautionary hand on Max’s shoulder. It’s disgusting? Jesse shouted. So
disgusting, Max said, shrugging off Bill’s hand. Jesse leapt from her place on the couch.
Max flinched. She bounded up to the wall’s giant, mustached face telling her to prepare
to die. She pinched up the Tic Tac-sized insect and turned to Max. I’ll show you
disgusting, she said before dropping the bug into her mouth. And Max watched in awe as
she chewed and chewed and finally swallowed, not once breaking eye contact with him.
Max thinks about how futile it is to cut emotions off of your body—they just grow back
like warts. But how brave you’d have to be to try.
66
There was the time Max held his piss and followed the sobbing sound to Jesse’s tent. He
unzipped the door and crawled in without an invitation. She was startled but didn’t tell
him to leave. And Max just sat there, in her tent, telling her it was OK. It was OK to feel.
And Jesse cried some more but she nodded weakly through the tears. Max scooted over
and wrapped an arm around Jesse and held her, knowing it was likely one of the few
times she’d ever been held.
Of course, that last one never happened—but it’s as vivid to Max as any of the ones that
did. Vivid and untouchable, like a film. That’s the thing about time, Max thinks: You can
never touch it, but it’s always touching you.
There was the time this summer Max got so high he became momentarily sure all the
other members of Film Club didn’t even exist. They were just products of psychosis.
Tyler Durdens. Alternate versions of himself. But what struck Max during that lapse into
solipsism wasn’t so much the earth-shattering realization that his life was a lie, but rather
just how close they all felt to him. They were his. And they were safe.
67
Max has been trying to get that high ever since. He buys from the same dealer, sits at the
same desk, and smokes from the same one-hitter. He always uses the safety lighter. And
it never really works. He can never quite recapture that feeling. Like Bill, Jesse, Mel, and
Stella are cheery little characters in a novel-in-progress. Actors on the set of his mind.
And so he turns to the spattering of dispatches, emails to Bill at his big-boy job, text
messages to Mel about grad school— each reply a little shorter than the last, a little less
vibrant than before. And that’s when Max thinks—as he’s thinking now—of his father,
who loves only dead men.
There was the time Max emailed his dad to let him know he’d finally declared a major—
English. His father replied with a quote from Benjamin Franklin:
Either write something worth reading or do something
worth writing.
Max sticks a finger in his mouth and finds the chip in his left front tooth. It feels bigger
than he remembers. But maybe he’s just high. His phone buzzes across the desk. The
screen lights up with the words:
2 New Messages
Jesse Schwartz
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Max lifts his phone from the desk. It feels extra heavy somehow. He unlocks the screen
and reads Jesse’s messages:
I do n ’t hear from you all semester and then suddenly you
send me all this? What is with you?
The second one:
Honestly, I ’dju st prefer i f you came over to talk about it.
There was the time Stella threw a party for the three-fifths of Film Club that were
graduating. Max and Jesse, a year behind the others, were destined to spend one
awkward, Film Club-less year at Middlestate. But they came and drank and were happy
for the others. After hours of drunken photoshoots and reminiscing, Max said he was
going to walk home. The others protested, but he told them he needed the air. And he did.
Max knocks on Jesse’s door with a playful, two-handed drumroll. He’s high—about three
miles above his body—and thinks, What am I even doing here? The weird knock is
something Bill would’ve done, to lighten the mood after the half-mile death march over
here. More of a swim, at this altitude. And just as Max’s drumroll is about to peak, the
door swings open, leaving him pawing at the air like a begging puppy. Jesse grabs his
69
wrists and pulls him inside. She kicks the door closed and pins Max against the wall next
to it. She’s decked out in exercise clothes and Max notices her hair looks lighter, longer
than he’s ever seen it. So you like getting into people’s shit, you little perv? she says.
There was the time Max walked home from the graduation party, drunk and trying not to
upchuck. He felt somewhat cold and shivery, despite the night retaining most of the latespring day’s heat. He was barreling through a forward-heavy march, his mind
meandering through thoughts of life post-Film Club. Then Max’s roving eyes landed on a
wooden sign, rising from a nearby lawn’s retaining wall. His march and thoughts both
halted. The painted sign was black with white greek letters—an O with a sideways I in it,
an I with a sideways O in it. Max stood, staring at it. He was no longer cold. No longer
queasy. But he could feel Founding Fathers standing on his shoulders.
I’m sorry, Max says. I’m sorry for what I did but mostly I’m sorry that assholes exist.
Jesse lets go of Max’s arms but holds her ground. She looks him up and down and then,
pouting, shakes her big head. Max is tickled by the melodrama. He stifles the urge to
giggle into an accidental smile. Are you fucking high right now? she asks. Profoundly,
Max says. She shakes her head some more and one strand of the now-light, now-long hair
drifts down across her reddened face. She seems to be fighting back tears.
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There was the time Max started kicking the sign. Exploratory nudges at first, and then
full-on horse stomps. Again and again, wanting to break the fucker in half. Max kept
kicking it, not caring when jolts of pain began shooting up the leg, not stopping when
three guys came running out of the house, shouting at Max from the lawn—What the
fuck are you doing? Max just kicked, and kept kicking when they sprinted over the lawn,
hopped down the retaining wall. They grabbed him. What the fuck are you doing? Their
hands were all over him, holding him back from the sign he was still trying to kick,
hitting him. A blow to the head sent everything spinning. Max crumpled. There were
more hits on the way down as Max floated headlong, falling until his face and tooth
splashed into the sidewalk.
Max surprises himself by reaching out and gently sweeping the fallen strand from Jesse’s
face. He lets his hand settle against her jawline. His palm picks up the faint workings of a
mouth. His wrist beats with a pulse. Why can’t people just be? Jesse asks. Max breathes.
Because, he says, maybe we’re not, well, in this world. He says, Maybe we are it. His
hand remains. The air is taut.
71
GASTROPOD
m,
m
m
Dear Mom,
fuck
72
One. Big. Bowel movement, Gary thought. That’s life. Peristaltic evening traffic ushered
him toward Burger King. Terry Gross spoke distantly through the dash about an
upcoming reality show that would send people to live on Mars. It was the kind of talk
radio rerun Gary usually left on as background noise because it somehow made him feel
like less of a shithead for what he was about to do. Maybe because it was NPR, so it felt
somehow studious, productive. Maybe it just put another voice in the car.
Gary was on his way back to the apartment he shared with Stephanie when he’d
suddenly gotten Hungry. Stephanie’s dad covered the rent on the apartment. Daddy, as
she called him, covered tuition for the Strategic Planning for Growth class Gary was
returning from as well. Daddy covered a lot of things. It was like he was paper. And Gary
was rock. One more minor expense wouldn’t hurt, would it?
Gary smiled. “This won’t hurt a bit. No it won 7,” he said in a voice like he was
talking to a baby. The sickly sweet rush rose up in him, the way it always did when he
was close, the way it did when there was no turning back. But really was there ever any
chance of turning back, once he got Hungry? Gary held his tightlipped smile; he knew the
answer.
When Gary was 12, he discovered masturbating. Throughout junior high, he
would walk home from school and simmer with excitement knowing his mother would
still be at work for hours after he got to the house. Sometimes the thought was triggered
by the smell of a certain tree he passed on the way home: fresh cum. Anticipation washed
over Gary like hot milk. Once it occurred to little Gary on any given weekday that he’d
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have all afternoon to bask in the pleasure of himself, it was like, yeah, good luck trying to
think of anything but spewing that warm feeling onto a Kleenex as soon as possible. He
didn’t walk home then so much as he was pulled, a tightlipped, 12-year-old smile
spanning his pimpled face.
The glowing Burger King sign pulled Gary’s silver Ford Focus (another gift from Daddy)
up to the drive-thru menu.
“Hi, welcome to Burger King. Can I help you?”
Gary ordered a large Number 2 (Double Whopper®) with onion rings and a
Sprite, a Bacon Double Cheeseburger, a Big Fish Sandwich, a six-piece Chicken
Nuggets, a side of fries, and an OREO® Shake.
“Would you like to try our Cinnabon Minibons, only here for a limited time?”
Gary’s smile widened.
Gary paid for the food with his personal credit card, not the card Daddy’d given
him. Later, Gary would use Daddy’s card to pay off his own bill. This way his latenight
meals didn’t show up on Daddy’s statement.
As Gary drove home with his left leg joggling, Terry Gross was asking her guest,
one of the reality show’s future participants, had she considered what going to Mars
would mean for her sex life— being marooned with only a handful of people she may or
may not find attractive.
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“And what about me? Do you find me attractive?” Gary added in his best Terry
Gross. He laughed at himself.
An urge to reach into the hot, greasy bag that sat shotgun and rummage for a fry
gripped Gary, but he resisted. To maximize pleasure, he’d wait. He’d pull over a few
blocks shy of their apartment complex, kill the engine, and feast. He’d roll down the
windows to let the smells air out. After the food was gone, he’d throw each piece of trash
into a neighboring complex’s dumpster. He’d check his face in the rearview mirror for
signs of sauce or grease. Then he would finish the drive home, climb the steps to 206, and
sit down with Stephanie to eat the dinner she’d made.
That night Stephanie had made her Megalixer, a juice that contained kale, Swiss chard,
and collard greens—which to Gary pretty much meant lettuce, lettuce, lettuce. She paired
this with a saute of tofu, asparagus, peppers, onions. She crushed the garlic before adding
it in, she told Gary, in order to unite the alliin and alliinase, forming allicin—a compound
“just about good for you in every way.” A side of quinoa salad bumped up their protein
intake, while adding riboflavin and saponins to the mix.
Gary’s torso grunted as he dropped into the seat opposite Stephanie.
“You must be starving,” she said.
“Love me some riboflavin.”
Gary began to eat.
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Stephanie asked how class was, and Gary thought of Dr. Gulch drawing Pac-Manshaped graphs on the whiteboard. He thought of the letter, aborted, on a page where there
should’ve been notes about annual revenue. Market penetration. Product development.
The words swam around inside Gary’s head. He said class was great.
Stephanie pawed at something on her plate with her fork.
“My parents wanted to know if we’d get dinner with them on Friday,” she said. “I
think they’re going to Ruth’s Chris.”
“Ruth’s Chris! Delicious,” Gary said with a full mouth, wondering what color his
vomit would be later. Megalixer usually meant green. What goes in must come out. It
was often a tossup which end of Gary would be involved in the coming out, but tonight
his body was mercifully unambiguous.
“G ary...”
“What?”
“It’s not just about the food.”
“No, I know. I know. But it doesn’t hurt, right?”
“So you’ll go?”
“I’m there. Sign me up.”
“They’ll be happy to hear that. Daddy’ll want to know how your classes are
going.”
No, Daddy’ll want to know how his little investment is going. Stephanie’s Daddy
(and he’d made this loud and clear on multiple occasions) saw getting a liberal arts
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degree like Gary had about as practical as skydiving without the parachute. But Daddy
was a businessman. Daddy understood investment. Chapter 1, Section 3—Investment:
The act of purchasing or funding something with the aim of gaining future income,
known as a return. “Think of it as a second chance,” Daddy said almost a year ago as he
handed Gary the brochure for the MBA program.
A few hours after dinner, Gary slid into bed next to Stephanie.
“You smell like dog,” she said. “Did you shower today?”
Just what Gary needed—an excuse to relieve himself. He lugged his body to the
bathroom, turned on the shower. Then he dropped to his knees and lifted the toilet lid.
Green indeed.
Undulating stretches of freeway pushed Gary slowly out of the city on Friday.
Eventually, a coiled off-ramp expelled the silver Ford onto a homeward road. The drive
from here was spastically wooded, and at one point Gary spotted the crumpled corpse of
a deer. The lifeless creature looked like it had been dragged to the shoulder. Something
about it made Gary turn down the radio a bit. Then he passed another. And another. Four
dead deer in all, and each made Gary feel a little more empty as he drove by it.
Stephanie’s words came to him: “It’s the drought, I think.” They had driven past an
inside-out racoon on their way to Whole Foods the other day. “The animals get thirsty
and come down from the hills looking for nourishment. At least, that’s my guess.”
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Gary rolled down the Ford’s front windows to get some air. Immediately, the
smell of cum filled the car. Spring, apparently tired of waiting for winter to arrive, had
shown up out of turn, bringing with it all the usual colors, creatures, and blooms—
including the one that smelled like cum. Gary didn’t know what the plant looked like, but
the milky stench had always been to him the very essence of the season. The smell sent
Gary elsewhere. He turned down the radio even more; it was below reasonable listening
volume now. Driving became secondary. He felt his heart rate pick up. Gary saw himself
squirting a pearly load onto Kleenex. Then it wasn’t Kleenex but a wad of rough,
industrial toilet paper. Gary wanted it to be Kleenex but it was toilet paper now. And he
saw more: a box that was red. Not the candy-apple red that adorned the McDonald’s
drive thru sign. A meaner red. And the word BIOHAZARD. Gary saw white walls and
shiny floors. He smelled bleach.
Gary looked at the dashboard clock. Organizational Behavior and Leadership had
gotten out early. Stephanie wouldn’t expect him to get home for another 30 minutes—30
gorgeous minutes. They seemed huge, almost edible.
Gary made a left turn at a stop sign, throwing his right wrist and the purple rubber
band around it into view. The rubber band looked like a raw red onion ring, even smelled
faintly onionish. He’d stretched the loop over his hand that morning as a reminder to
himself. Save room, it said. Dinner with Stephanie and her parents was in an hour. Gary
needed to decide how much of a shithead he actually was. He rarely Got Food twice in
the same week. But Gary was Hungry.
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The silver Focus reached the turnoff for the apartment. Gary sped through the
intersection. He wasn’t going home like this. He needed to be filled.
Audie Cornish was reading part of a recent study that claimed college was no longer
worth the cost as Gary bit into his Jumbo Jack®. As Gary chewed, his eyes jumped from
the Homestyle Ranch Chicken Club to the Deli Trio Grilled Sandwich to the twin
Monster Tacos™ to the Seasoned Curly Fries to the Chocolate Overload™ Cake, all
lined up neatly in the passenger seat. Chapter 3, Section 2— Inventory: An overview of
total goods in stock. One good thing about living with someone with a degree in nutrition
is knowing things like how the human body takes about 20 minutes to realize it’s full.
Gary chewed. No way was he going to lose that race.
“What we want to know is are people still getting enough bang for their buck?”
Audie Cornish asked her source.
“Your mom gets banged for a buck,” Gary said through the food in his mouth.
But he didn’t laugh. It was low-hanging fruit.
“That’s something young people in this country need to start asking themselves,”
said the female interviewee. “Especially those in less lucrative fields. What I mean to say
is, if you can’t find a job, what have you gained from going to school?”
Gary met Stephanie in a general education class that he’d renamed, to her
amusement, How to Not Be Racist. Their relationship slowly blossomed over the next
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four years. On Friday nights, while their peers gathered at local bars, the two stayed in.
Stephanie would roll pudgy joints for them to smoke, and Gary’d quiz her on her notes.
They called it Higher Learning. Gary was more clever then, it seemed. He’d quiz her in
the voice of a 1940s noir detective: “Now listen, see. We want answers and we want ’em
now.” Most times, the studying devolved into pleasant if contained intercourse.
He tried to remember the last time he and Stephanie had sex. That part of their
relationship seemed to have slipped their minds at some point during the two years since
graduation. Gary never pressed the issue; it kept her from fully noticing the changes in
his body. Gary dropped a hand from the burger to roll his fly to half-mast. It had been
weeks since he could fasten the button on his jeans, but the zipper was a new thing. That
was American courtship, Gary knew. One minute you’re Humphrey Bogart, the next
you’re Homer Simpson. The trick is, by the time you become a cartoon, the other’s
already hooked. You’ve trapped her with the initial performance. Your claws are in deep,
and she’ll leave them there for fear of greater wounds caused by ripping them out.
Stephanie would never leave Gary. He’d heard on NPR about wild animals gnawing off
their own limbs to escape steel-jaw traps. But people aren’t wild animals.
Gary resumed his two-hand grip on the Jumbo Jack® and took a bite. Boom. His
mouth became a galaxy of tastes and textures: sweet, fleshy bun; tangy, oozing sauce;
charred, spongy patty. All these wadded into harmony as Gary’s teeth mashed and tongue
writhed. He had to pinch his nipple to keep himself from weeping out of ecstasy; red eyes
wouldn’t do.
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After cleaning his car and disposing of the evidence, Gary hauled himself to 206. He had
just enough time to tell Stephanie class was super and change his shirt before they needed
to leave for dinner. From the bathroom, Stephanie was asking what if he wore some nice
slacks like the ones he wore to graduation or something, which made Gary, facing the
bedroom’s full-length mirror and buttoning up his shirt, smile fiercely. There are some
things you have control over, Gary knew. Fitting his enlarged ass into those pants was not
one of them. Gary had long since learned to smile at these things, because— like, what
else?
“They aren’t ironed,” Gary shouted back.
Finished buttoning, he looked into the mirror and smiled at his smile. He felt
satisfied, complete. He felt ready to take on Daddy and Daddy’s wife Feyline.
Stephanie glided out of the bathroom, made-up and wrapped in a green dress. She
asked was he ready. Gary looked at his girlfriend. Her hair, dyed barbecue-sauce red, was
down in all its purple mountain majesty. Her eyes were soft and brown (like a deer, Gary
thought) and cushioned by chipmunkish cheeks. She was utterly gorgeous. He wanted to
tell her so but knew it would force her to compliment him back. And when she
complimented Gary there was a pause, a nearly imperceptible space between “Thank you.
You’re— ” and whatever she found to fill the space. The pause was microscopic, but it
cut Gary. Deeply. And he didn’t feel like being cut. So when she widened her caramel
81
eyes as if to say, “Yes? Something on your mind?” he looked down and said, “You bet
I’m ready. Let’s go. I’ll drive.”
Stepping into the car, Stephanie told Gary they needed to pick her parents up on
the way.
“I guess they feel like being chauffeured,” she said.
As the silver sedan rolled out of the parking lot, Gary noticed Stephanie staring
birdlike into the crack between her seat and the passenger door. Gary watched through
his peripheral vision as she reached down and pulled into view a small orange-yellow
coil. She held the curly fry up, pinched between thumb and forefinger. Chapter 3, Section
4— Spillage: A to-be-accounted-for amount of goods lost or damaged in transit to its
desired destination.
“What is this?” Stephanie asked.
We want answers and we want ’em now.
Gary looked at the fry. Saliva flooded his mouth.
“I have no idea,” he said.
Stephanie looked at him heavily. She rolled down the passenger-side window and
sent the little pig tail flying.
Greeting Fey line was a five-senses experience. The first thing Gary noticed when she got
into the car was her scent: an intrusive cloud of perfume that smelled powdery, floral,
82
expensive. The second thing he picked up on was her voice: “Hey, kids,” she sang
smokily. Next, Gary felt her acrylic talons on his head, playfully scratching from behind.
He looked into the rearview mirror to smile in response and noted the skin-tight, leopardprint jeans. And that final, ever-important fifth sense? She asked if anyone wanted a
breath mint. Gary always did. Though, Gary’s stomach was beginning to feel somewhat
unstable. Was the woman’s perfume already starting to make him queasy?
Daddy’s entrance was less sensory-intensive. In a navy sport coat over a white
Polo shirt, he clapped Gary on the shoulder and tossed him a “Thanks for driving, bud.”
Then the Focus was on its way to the restaurant. The silence that ensued gave Gary too
much room to think. The tightness of Feyline’s jeans. Her nails on Gary’s scalp. Gary’s
blood rushed. He squeezed the steering wheel. How had Daddy caught her? What sort of
trap had he used? Who had he needed to be, before being Daddy? Boring-ass Daddy. He
tried to imagine sex between Feyline and Daddy. Who was on top? How long did he last?
What did the old man’s ass look like? Before the line of thought could get any weirder,
Gary turned on the radio. A male voice Gary immediately recognized as Ira Flatow of
Science Friday was wrapping up a segment on banana slugs.
“— given that they raise the funds. The study would map the genome of the
gastropod, which has never been done for a terrestrial slug before.”
Slugs.
Gary’s instinct was to look at Stephanie. He swallowed it. About a week ago, he
emailed her a chunk of text from Wikipedia. Something he found interesting. It was about
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slugs. How sometimes a slug’s penis gets tangled up during sex. They get stuck together.
In order to separate, the mate has to bite the other slug’s dick off. Chapter 5, Section 1—
Cannibalization.
Gary’s business classes were all at night, and Stephanie worked 9 to 5. So Gary
spent the girlfriendless daytime looking things up on the Internet,
monogamous animals besides humans
feeding tube procedure
ediple
edipal
Did you mean:
If something piqued Gary’s interest, he sent it to Stephanie, who typically
responded with some moderate showing of interest. To the thing about slug sex, she
hadn’t replied.
The sign for a Wendy’s, freckled and grinning, floated by outside. Gary’s eyes
followed it. He wanted to be there. He wanted cold, foamy Frosty™ in his mouth.
Ira Flatow went on: “The researchers hope to learn more about the evolution of
the creature— why it is how it is—by comparing the data to that of similar species.”
Gary had a hard time paying attention to the radio after noticing a certain
heaviness that had settled into his lower abdomen. He also wanted to cum. He was
Hungry and Homy and oddly full,
astronomy
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gastronomy
gastrostomy
Did you mean:
His emails to Stephanie were a reaching out. Small, hesitant antennae extending
into space. The last time they made contact was a month ago: Hmm. I had no idea there
were so many kinds. O f feeding tubes. Have you talked to her? I know you don’t want my
advice about it, but I had an idea. Have you thought about snail mail? When my dad
married Feyline, I had a hard time expressing my thoughts on the whole thing. My
emotions kept screwing up the message. So I wrote him a letter. It helped. Just think
about it.
Gary looked at the purple rubber band around his right wrist. He thought about
stretching it back with his other hand and letting go to deliver a sharp disciplinary slap.
Then he remembered himself; doing that in front of Stephanie and her parents was out of
the question. Gary drove on, feeling pregnant and even more so when he thought he felt
something move in his nether regions.
The men sat across from the women at the table. That put good oP Daddy-o right by
Gary’s side. He had all but ordered for Gary when they sat down: “I’m sure us carnivores
will be having steaks.”
85
Gary usually felt at home in restaurants, but right now he felt caged. His lower
half seemed on the verge of exploding. All his urges burned into one blinding need: to
escape. He gripped his thighs and waited for an opportunity to excuse himself to the
restroom. Stephanie offered him the bread basket.
“■
— and I said I doubted Bey once’d ever set foot on a surfboard in her life,”
Fey line was saying.
Gary gagged on an insufficiently chewed chunk of crust.
Feyline turned to him. “It’s funny, right?”
Gary set the gnawed hunk of bread on his plate and got ready to lift himself up.
What goes in must come out.
“Now,” Daddy said, setting a hand on Gary’s shoulder, “you’re gonna have to let
us know if this isn’t enough food for you.”
Hard and fast, Gary nodded.
“And I wanted to ask you something,” Daddy said.
Gary’s leg was bouncing up and down, almost hitting the underside of the table. It
took every ounce of willpower Gary had to contain himself.
“How’s your—”
Here it was. The fucking classes. Gary was already nodding. It felt like some
business-meaning jungle snake had wriggled its way up his ass and turned to stone. Why
now, you old bastard? Why. Right. Now.
“—mother doing these days?”
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Gary’s nodding petered out. His leg’s bouncing slowed. “M y...?”
“Your mom, kid. Tell us how she’s doing.”
Gary saw that mean red again. BIOHAZARD. He heard electronic murmuring,
distant blips. Saw blanched light. The rolling gumey with that one rebellious wheel. The
wheel that saw the sheer absurdity of losing one’s parent. One’s roots to humanity. One’s
maker. One’s God. The steady hand on a hellish-hot day pressing the cold, condensating
Coke® can against the back of your neck. Ahh, that’s better.
Gary’s leg froze. He wanted the bathroom. He wanted to go there like he had after
seeing Mom’s collarbone. Dead snakes under skin.
Feyline and Stephanie were looking at him now, blinking.
“You OK, honey?” one of them said.
In the hospital, Gary had looked at her. The woman who had wiped endless shit
from his infant ass. Who had once, without thinking, ripped off her sweatshirt—the shirt
incidentally coming with it—to catch vomit spilling from his mouth. Who had come to
Ben Landry’s at 2 in the morning to rescue Gary from his first ever sleepover because
Freddy Krueger scared him out of his mind. That woman. His whole family. Half
swallowed by a hospital bed. White sheet draped over her like the victim in some hack
procedural. And Gary, after finding the ever so slight rise and fall of her chest, turned
away and walked into the room’s airplane lavatory of a bathroom to yank and pull and
rub himself into feeling OK. He tossed the cummed-on toilet paper into the red plastic
box. The one that said BIOHAZARD.
87
“You know, if she’s not getting the care she needs there, we can arrange to send
her somewhere else,” Daddy said.
Dear Mom,
When you got sick, I stopped knowing the difference between people and animals.
Gary looked at Daddy. “How about Mars?”
Daddy guffawed. “Good to see you’ve still got a sense of humor. But tell us, how
is she?”
Dear Mom,
You are dear.
Gary started to smile.
“Well,” he said, smiling wider. “It’s sort of funny.”
Gary started to snicker.
Daddy smiled. “What is it?”
Dear Mom,
You are dying.
Gary was laughing now.
“They’re ...”
His leg was bouncing again.
“Right now they’re trying to get her to eat.”
Daddy’s smile faded. “I see. Well, is that really something you should be laughing
about?”
88
Gary giggled violently, his body a cocked gun.
Daddy’s eyes narrowed.
“You’re full of shit, aren’t you?” Daddy said.
Those words. At that moment. The funniest thing Gary’d ever heard.
His face stretched redly into one silent shriek. He doubled over onto the table.
Warmth and pressure filled the seat of his pants (Chapter X, Section Y—Shitting
Yourself) and on its way out hit some comedic G-spot deep within Gary, cracking him
open into full-on hysterics.
89
KI & COPY
mh
*
The June air felt stuffed into those skinny Osakan streets like so much damp wool.
Humid is too weak a word, Kelly, a copywriter—and a damn good one at that (Our inhouse wizard; I’m talkin’ actual fucking magic, Suze once said)—thought as he swam
through it, pausing to wipe constellated sweat from his temple with an Armani cuff. He’d
brought it on himself, though. Suze let him choose between the song and dance for the
Toyota people and introducing himself to Audi HQ, which was in Ingolstadt, Bavaria,
which what even the fuck? Right away, Kelly said Japan. Suze said did he know Bavaria
was Germany. No, Kelly said, but still Japan.
Maybe Sausageland wouldn’t have been so bad, because it turned out streaming a
handful of English-dubbed animes wasn’t ample preparation for this, his first trip to Asia.
Besides the heat, there was the food. Kelly hated seafood, let alone raw fish, let alone raw
fish on the bone with its cartoonishly helpless eyes intact and staring up at you, which the
hotel served for breakfast each morning. Besides the food, there was the language. Kelly
honeymooned in Rome despite knowing no Italian (unless you counted two years of high
school Spanish, which Deb, his wife, did not). They made do. As if toilette pubblica was
really so hard to decipher. But Osaka was a different animal. The so-called words on the
unavoidable glowing signs that populated Namba district belonged to a different
alphabet, a non-alphabet, a collection of half-assed hieroglyphs. As Kelly walked the
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feedstream promenade—hot, hungry, lost—he couldn’t tell a whorehouse from a
laundromat.
But this was Day 3. Kelly merely had to survive until the final Toyota meeting the
next morning. Then it was: book the first flight out of there, pick up whatever the
Japanese version of Ambien was, and wake up back in the land of Making Sense.
The feedstream, according to the guide book Deb downloaded and sent Kelly
during his flight, was once the Dotonbori Canal, a manmade river that at night would
catch the district’s countless lights in Monet-like, rainbow ripples. Decades ago, the
water and tour boats were replaced with the flowing river of information Kelly walked
beside now. News blurbs, advertisements, and seemingly random photos floated
downstream at a steady, readable pace— if you could read Japanese. Was it just a giant
LCD? Tech was never Kelly’s forte. The screen itself probably didn’t move, just the
images. Kelly figured the random photos— selfies of smiling couples, closeups of food
items, other wastes of digital space—were fed into the stream by some hashtag. Post a
picture on whatever social media site, tag it with the appropriate keyword, and— bloop—
it shows up somewhere in the feedstream. Kelly’d seen something similar in Times
Square.
Maybe he’d mention the feedstream in the meeting with the Toyota people. They
were already pretty sold on his pitch. They just wanted one more conversation to smooth
things out.
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Kelly stopped walking and wiped more sweat off his face. He needed to eat. He
desperately surveyed the area for any sign of a restaurant. He would fucking kill for a
McDonald’s. Just tell me who and how, he thought. He’d try to use the guide book to find
food, but the battery on his smartwatch was already in the red, and he was going to need
that last bit of juice to GPS his ass back to the hotel. He was doing the salmon thing,
wriggling against the foot traffic, sticking out like a sore dick. Kelly’s own reflection in
the bathroom mirror was the one non-Asian face he’d seen since landing in Osaka. Still,
Namba was flooded with people. Mostly younger folks. Teenagers, Kelly guessed. Right
now he crossed paths with a trio of tall, pole-thin dudes, each done up like a gay John
Wayne. Velvet ten-gallon hats, hugeass chrome belt buckles, bedazzled boot-cuts. Kelly
nodded at them. Howdy, partners. He could appreciate a good get-up. Behind the
cowboys, a lone girl pushed a miniature stroller carrying the smallest baby Kelly’d ever
seen. He needed to call Deb, he thought. As the girl got closer, Kelly saw that it was
actually some kind of animatronic doll in the stroller. It blinked and swiveled its head
toward Kelly. He ripped his gaze away. Japan had just hit a new level of weird. He really
needed to call Deb. He looked at his smartwatch. Still red. Well, yeah. What did you
expect? That it’d osmote energy out of your ass? Kelly imagined spending the battery’s
last leg on a call home. Hey, babe. It’s me. Yeah, Japan’s great. But they don’t have any
food here. So I’m just gonna have to lie down in the street and die. Yeah, I know you’ll
miss me. I’m sorry it had to end like this. Just one more thing: I want you to know I was
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hoping for a boy. I know we said we wanted it to be a surprise and whatever happens
happens. But. I was kind of hoping for a boy.
*
PARTYLAND: FROZEN YOGURT.
The words were huge, neon, and—most importantly—English. Kelly had turned a
corner—his $2,000 suit now soaked through with sweat, his stomach audibly digesting
itself—and there it was: PARTYLAND: FROZEN YOGURT. A two-story building with
soaring, clear-as-air windows offering full view of something Kelly recognized: those
god damn self-serve levers. Lined up, chrome, and kick-me-in-the-nuts recognizable.
Kelly could not have imagined being so happy to see the things. They meant food. His
mouth began to water.
Kelly plunged his spoon into the heaping mound of frozen yogurt he’d topped with hot
fudge, chocolate jimmies, and mini marshmallows. He stuffed a gigantic spoonful into
his mouth and watched the city. He was on the second floor of Partyland, sitting on a
stool that faced the window. He was getting really into the song that was playing in the
yogurt shop. It provided the perfect soundtrack to his decadent meal. The song had eased
in with a gradual, tinkling buildup— like metal raindrops on a roof. The tinkling
climaxed, then melted into a latticework of laser-sharp synths. He plunged the spoon,
filled his mouth. The beat dropped. A handful of military-grade weapons had decided to
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start a band. That was the beat, Kelly thought. Not bad. Voices cut in. It was in fact the
same voice, layered in harmony with itself a hundred times. Japanese words. Forced
through thousands of filters. Chopped up. Decidedly no-hu. Utterly pop.
Pop was it for Kelly. He had cried the day Taylor Swift died. There was
something about pop’s synthetic nature that made it more authentic to him. It was cool,
artificial, and sweet—the frozen yogurt of music. Pop could not make a fool out of you,
because you were already a fool for listening to pop. The lie was the truth. So many times
he’d tried to explain it to Deb. She never really got it.
Music was Kelly’s first love. Throughout college, he cheated on music with
words, for whom he eventually left music altogether. But you never forget your first. At
USC, Kelly wrote a weekly music column for the school’s online newspaper. They let
him on as a freshman and kept him there for all four years. That’s how good he was. He
was like a savant, jumping into albums as if they were pools. He built worlds out of the
sounds, made them visible to readers. Ironically, it was writing samples from that column
that scored Kelly his first copywriting internship.
His career path had to change, he always told himself, because music was
changing. There wasn’t really a place for people to write about music after Kelly
graduated, because there weren’t really people making music. The music singularity
didn’t fully hit until Kelly was in his late 20s and waist-deep in corporate America. But
Kelly had long since seen it coming. In his column, he’d covered the po-hu (posthumous)
movement. People had watched versions of dead musicians perform onstage as early as
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the mid 2010s. But it was the technological evolution, the algorithms, the massive
collections of data that truly brought them back to life. With these at its disposal, what
was left of the music industry could produce, in labs, songs and albums that deceased
artists literally would have written. Michael Jackson, for instance, released far more (and
far better, in Kelly’s opinion) music po-hu than he ever did during his life. It was only a
matter of time before the music labs cut their cumbersome ties with manmade music and
engineered original, digital artists: no-hu. They used the po-hu programs as a foundation,
then played jazz. So to speak. The potential was limitless. A no-hu musician could be
anything and everything that was sonically possible. This was the music industry’s
chance to make a comeback. They streamlined the workflow by installing self-replicating
codes, thereby washing their hands of the creative process altogether. The computers
wrote their own songs. So no-hu artists became self-sufficient—truly no-hu, aside from
periodic IT maintenance. As long as the music labs kept their servers humming, their
geese laid golden eggs.
Selling concert tickets, any musician’s primary source of revenue, was as simple
as giving the no-hu artists bodies. Piece of cake. That had been doable as far back as
2012, when a holographic Tupac took the stage at some music festival. Technology had
only improved over the following decades. Unbound by human constraints, no-hu
performers could put on one hell of a show. Perfect dancing. Perfect showmanship.
Perfect beauty.
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The whole thing seemed rather inevitable to Kelly, who knew since taking Music
Theory 101 as an elective sophomore year that humans did not, in fact, invent music.
Humans discovered music. In that class, Kelly learned about intervals. How making one
sound and then making another sound exactly five pitches higher would produce the
same effect—the ambiance of triumph, a positive feeling—whether these sounds were
made by a clarinet or wind through a cave. Music was a force of nature as much as
gravity. Music was as much fact as it was Platonic ideal. Musical notes were nothing
more than humans’ arbitrary division of sound, like miles of distance, minutes of time.
These things still exist, Kelly knew, without us there to chop them into bite-size pieces.
And so it had returned to nature. Out of human hands. The whole world one big
vintage Casio, stuck in demo mode.
Kelly’s yogurt cup was empty. The song was fading out. He hadn’t thought so
much about music in a long time. He dropped the plastic spoon in the empty cup, tossed
the cup in a nearby vaporizer. Taylor Swift, Goddess of Pop, Dies at 103. He
remembered reading the headline out loud. Deb saying, Does anyone really care? She’ll
still put out music. Her kissing him on the cheek, leaving the room. His eyes welling up.
Toyota wanted more meetings. They needed to keep talking. Could he stay until Friday?
Kelly thought he had them in bed, legs spread. Now it seemed like he was the one getting
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fucked. They didn’t think his taglines would translate well into Japanese. The nuance
wouldn’t carry over.
He left the hotel’s conference room in a daze. He needed to wake up from this
nightmare. He smelled funky after the sweat treatment his jacket got the previous day,
and his eyes were heavy from a night of rough sleep. His stomach growled. Yesterday’s
frozen yogurt was the last thing he’d eaten. Kelly lifted his fully recharged smartwatch
and pulled up the digital note he’d gotten from a Toyota employee on his way out of the
meeting—directions to a noodle bar. A new-message alert blipped onto the screen. Deb:
Can’t wait to see you tomorrow! Hope things are going OK.
Fuck. He forgot to call her. He swiped the message away and dictated a new one
to Suze: Toyota’s playing hard to get. Gonna have to stay a few more days in this
godforsaken place.
Suze responded almost immediately: aww, poor baby, do you need
reinforcements?
Kelly looked up. The suited Toyota people began filing out of the conference
room, bowing at him as they passed. He didn’t want Suze to come. Not because it
wouldn’t help— because he knew what it meant. He and Suze. Working as a team.
Staying in the same hotel. An exotic locale. It was a recipe for... something. He waited
for the last guy to bow and leave, then dictated: Thanks, but that w on’t be necessary. Just
remember this when you draw up my holiday bonus.
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Not that hooking up with Suze would be the end of the world. They had eerily
good chemistry. She owned the room during the pop culture Jeopardy game Kelly made
for Deb’s babyshower. She was his boss, and that turned him on in a way that was more
cliche than he wanted to admit. Sure, he’d had sex with the thought of it countless times.
But that was just it: He liked the idea of Suze. He knew the real thing would never
compare.
Kelly was doing the salmon thing again—walking alongside the feedstream, dodging
freakishly dressed teens. Except this time he had a destination. The directions he got from
one of the Toyota suits were simple enough. Dotonbori Noodle Bowl was only a few
blocks ahead. He would suck down some food, check in with Deb, and then make a plan
for wrapping stuff up business-wise. He wasn’t sure what to do with his copy. MOVES
YOU IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE. How do you simplify that? TOYOTA: NOT A TOY.
The taglines were hypermacho, overly American, because that’s what the execs had
asked for. That’s why they reached out to a Los Angeles agency. They wanted to try
selling cars the American way—with big, sexy lies.
Kelly started sweating again. Here come the waterworks, he thought. Suddenly
the thought of hot noodles didn’t seem so appealing. But he needed nourishment.
Especially before dealing with Deb.
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He located the restaurant, thanks to an image of a bowl and chopsticks above the
door, as well as photographs of several entrees posted in the window. Pictures, Kelly
thought, a language we all speak. He entered the shop and found himself facing what
appeared to be a vending machine—smaller versions of the entree photos as buttons with
yen amounts. No way these meals come out of this thing, he thought. Kelly looked across
the shop and saw a steamy kitchen with a man in a black shirt and what Kelly would call
a do-rag on his head. The man was concentrating intently on a number of large, metal
pots that seemed to be full of boiling water. The aroma of the kitchen reached Kelly’s
nose and suddenly he was totally game for hot noodles again. Kelly watched a young girl
insert yen into the vending machine, which then spit out change and a small, rectangular
ticket. The girl handed the ticket to the man with the do-rag. She (literally) skipped over
to what must’ve been her mother, shooting Kelly a shy smile along the way. Holy shit she
was adorable. Maybe a girl wouldn’t be so bad, Kelly thought. He followed her example,
minus the skipping. Soon enough, Do-Rag set down in front of Kelly a real-life replica of
the entree picture he had pressed. Hunks of gray-brown meat. A nest of thick, white
noodles. Half a hard-boiled egg. Something green. Kelly devoured it all.
Kelly’s eyes opened. He saw bowl. Bowl? He lifted his head, slowly. It was the noodle
bar. He was still there. The meal must have put him to sleep, his face landing in the now
empty dish. Shit. He must have been more hungry, more sleep-deprived than he’d known.
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He felt groggy, crammed-full. A food baby, Deb would have said. He wiped a slug of
drool from his chin. Or was it broth? Kelly looked around. He was the only customer in
there now. Do-Rag flashed an inscrutable look. Out of one nightmare and back to
another. The dream had been fucked. The one that woke Kelly up.
In the dream, Kelly was walking along the feedstream (as he was apparently wont
to do nowadays). But the place was deserted. No flamboyant cowboys. No life at all. The
weather was wrong. More like June Gloom back in LA than the tropical hellfire we all
know and love, Kelly thought. And it was silent. He’d noticed the silence. The silence
was... silvery. Kelly almost smiled. It was a description he would have allowed himself
back when he wrote about music. Not now that he wrote words for billboards. And he
kept walking, not sure where he was going, until he picked up on a strange noise. A
mechanical sound. A whir. His eyes chased the noise, across the feedstream, which was
black. Turned off. Dead. Kelly looked past the feedstream’s opposing bank, where
another path mirrored the one he was standing on. There, at the concrete strip’s middle,
was the fucking doll, the non-baby from that psycho’s stroller. Discarded. On its belly. Its
rotating head struggling against the ground. Whatever tiny motor and gears inside
overworking themselves. Trying and failing to turn toward—
That’s when he woke up. Alone in the noodle bar, save for Do-Rag, who kept
looking over and thinking who knows what.
Kelly tapped the face of his smartwatch to check the time. Three alerts popped
onto the screen. One missed call from Deb. Two new messages. From Deb.
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He opened the first one: I ’m having serious contractions.
The second, sent 40 minutes after the first: My water just broke. I ’m calling my
brother.
Kelly’s stomach dropped to the floor.
OK, 3 p.m. here, so... 16 hours. Ack, fucking math. He used his fingers: 3, 2 ,1 ...
.
11
11 p.m.
Yesterday.
It was 11 at night in Los Angeles. Yesterday.
Kelly jabbed Deb’s name with his finger. It started calling. His heart jumped up
and down. He listened to the ringing on the other side of the world.
The ringing.
Ringing.
She didn’t pick up.
As far as Kelly was concerned, there were two types of people. There were those who
could enjoy a magic show, and there were those who spent the entire performance in
some rodential mental scramble, trying—desperately—to figure out how each trick was
done. On their third date, Kelly learned Deb was the latter. They made acquaintance the
usual way, via local net, and hit high marks on Chemistree—the latest compatibility
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index at the time. After two smooth virtual outings, Deb asked why didn’t they just hang
out IRL already. Kelly knew where to take her.
Enchantment had just opened up and was getting buzz like only a gimmicky Echo
Park basement joint could. They arrived in separate driverless cabs, found each other on
the sidewalk. As Kelly hugged Deb’s actual body for the first time, he noticed her real
self seemed a few inches shy of her VR profile. A weird thing to be insecure about,
height. But she was a model. Kelly wouldn’t put anything past a model.
Inside Enchantment, the lights were low. The tunes on in the place were less than
enchanting, Kelly thought. But he didn’t say anything. A solar system of circular tables
surrounded the lounge’s centerpiece: a humongous cylindrical mirror. This, the solar
system’s sun, stretched from floor to ceiling and reflected the room with uncanny clarity.
But, as the tuxedoed host led them to their table, Kelly noted differences between the
room he stood in and the one represented in the mirror. Objects were out of place.
People’s poses were off. A white-haired man sitting alone at one of the tables nearest the
thing was sipping from a vapor cigarette, relaxed; in the mirror, his reflection was instead
all eagerness, leaning toward the table’s other end, where a smiling woman sat.
It’s digital, Kelly whispered to Deb. There’s a delay—thirty minutes, an hour
maybe. Just wait. Keep an eye on that thing and we’ll show up in it eventually. This
moment will show up.
We should take a photo when it does, Deb said.
We should, Kelly said, pulling back her chair for her.
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Their pre-dinner conversation consisted of the third-date usuals (So do you have
family around here? What about LA do you love? Do you like your job? What about LA
drives you nuts?) and occasionally dipped into those subjects that served as aching
reminders to Kelly that not celebrating his 30th birthday hadn’t stopped it from
happening.
Ever think you’ll have kids? Deb asked.
Kelly felt a flash of emotion—that embarrassed feeling he got whenever someone
behaved precisely the way he expected. It was a feeling Kelly got a lot. And the moments
made spontaneity seem like an illusion, made romance a myth. Why were people were so
god damn much like people? He’d seen the question coming from a mile away. He was
telling her about how in his early teens he’d been an amateur magician himself, and was
even hired to perform at kids’ birthdays a few times. Her face had lit up.
Kelly said he couldn’t fathom having kids but also couldn’t fathom not.
I know what you mean, she said, picking up the menu tablet and flipping through
to the booze. He watched her poke an ORDER button somewhere on the wine list. Want
anything? she asked. Before he could answer, she added: I just feel like if you live your
whole life and never have children, it’s like, what’s the point? You know?
Kelly nodded. Gin and tonic, he said. What kind of food do they have on that
thing?
Let’s see, Deb said, scrolling on the tablet.
Anything Italian?
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Deb stopped scrolling. She looked at him with mock austerity and said: You.
Like. Italian. Food.
I wish it was the only kind.
I could kiss you right now.
I thought models didn’t do bread. Or pasta. Or food.
Oh, don’t let this dress deceive you, Deb said. My body’s more or less one big
carb.
He told her she looked fine, and that he could see himself going to Italy just to
eat. And in fact a recent promotion at work had made international travel, for business or
otherwise, very much a possibility.
A large man in a red suit approached their table and introduced himself as Lucien.
I’ll be entertaining you lovely people tonight, he said. His hair and voice were abundantly
oiled. He wore a cowboy necktie with a hunk of polished turquoise and had matching
turquoise-set rings on assorted fingers. Other performers casually drew near the other
occupied tables. The white-haired man with the vape cig shooed away a woman in a
black gown who strolled up to his table with a deck of cards. She retreated, smile fading.
Lucien proceeded to treat Deb and Kelly with a series of tableside tricks.
A magic wand appeared in his hand. Tiny white LEDs speckled the black rod, like
stars in the night sky.
As if that wasn’t already up his sleeve, Deb said, smiling. Lucien winked at her
coolly, but Kelly saw a dew of sweat along his hairline.
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Lucien swirled the wand above his other hand. Kelly got another flash of that
embarrassed feeling, but he kept watching. With this now charmed hand, Lucien clutched
at the air before him, grabbing from nowhere a white rose.
Ow! he shouted. I always forget the fucking thorns.
He transferred the flower to his other hand and shook out the supposedly hurt one.
Kelly’s embarrassment melted; it was all part of the bit.
And because some body didn’t bring any flowers of his own, this goes to the lady,
Lucien said in a stage voice.
Patter, Kelly recalled. That was the name for the practiced schmoozing between
tricks.
Lucien held the flower out to Deb, who smirked before reaching for it. As she was
just about to touch the rose, it wilted away from her hand, out of reach, to dangle down
below Lucien’s grip.
Terribly sorry, Lucien said. I seem to be having some, um, performance issues.
His voice was rehearsed shame. He waved the twinkling wand over the limp rose
and gradually it gathered itself back up to the original stiffness. He offered it to Deb. She
looked at Kelly, then reached.
Again the flower lost its backbone and she missed the stem.
Kelly was amused. The guy was as good as they get in the don’t-quit-your-dayjob leagues. It made Kelly miss doing magic. The thrill of pulling off a carefully crafted
illusion. It had everything to do with what the audience saw. That look on their faces that
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said: You. Are. Beyond. Belief. A look Kelly learned about in fifth grade when he
brought his homemade arm-guillotine to show and tell. The rest of the class looked up at
him from criss-cross-applesauce, and a blondie in the front row watched extra intently.
Kelly yanked the rectangular blade—a delicious hiss and shink as it came out—from the
slit of the wooden box that (from the perspective of the class) housed his limb. He
revealed an arm intact, unscathed. Blondie’s mouth became unhinged. That look, even at
9 years old, got Kelly off.
Deb gently kicked Kelly under the table and made a what’s-up-with-/7n.s'-guy face.
That’s not a real rose, she said.
There’s no fooling this one, Lucien said. Remember that, he added, elbowing
Kelly theatrically.
Their drinks arrived. Kelly pinched the lime wedge that came in his and stabbed it
down below the ice with his puny cocktail straw. Deb sipped her wine.
What else ya got? she said.
What else? said Lucien. What else? Well, only the splendor of the Milky Way
itself!
Watch, the magician said.
Slipping the rose into a jacket pocket, he held his wand above their table,
suspended in the space between Deb and Kelly. Lucien worked his fingers in a caterpillic
wave. The wand somersaulted from knuckle to knuckle, and back again. This was beyond
anything Kelly’s younger self could have accomplished, he thought. This required
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practice. Discipline. Deb’s purple-shadowed eyes caught Kelly from across the little
show, then returned to Lucien’s dextrous hand.
Behold.
Lucien’s free hand stretched out one wing of his suit jacket, like a backalley
watch salesmen offering wares. But there were no watches to be seen—just silk so black
it seemed to loom.
The somersaulting stopped. Lucien slammed the wand into the blackness of his
jacket’s lining. It crashed into the silk and was gone. But the little lights remained,
somehow transferred to the jacket’s interior and dispersing with momentum from the
blow.
Kelly was floored.
Oh, look! Deb blurted. Look!
Yes, Lucien oozed. Yes! He let out a chuckle, but the chuckle dried up into
coughing as he realized Deb was not referring to his trick. She was standing up, pointing
at the great columnar mirror.
There we are! she said, patting Kelly on the shoulder.
Kelly stood.
They watched as the recent past was reenacted on the mirror’s surface: Reversed
versions of the two, looking elegant as hell together, followed the host into the room, as
had happened a short while ago.
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I’m so sorry, the real Deb was saying. Would you mind taking a picture of us with
ourselves?
Lucien lowered the side of his jacket. The stars were gone.
Oh, I— but—yes, of course! The stage voice stumbled.
Kelly’s shoulders tightened up with shame as he handed Lucien his watch to take
the picture. He’d been ready to applaud the guy. But now the man was flustered, and it
would’ve seemed like pity. So he just went to pose with Deb.
Later in the night, he and Deb were knotted bodies, one big muscle stuck in
spasm, on the billowing shag rug in her Santa Monica loft, and Kelly lurched and
pumped until her body quivered beautifully beneath him and the tightness in his
shoulders clenched, then drained away completely.
Kelly sat on the edge of his hotel bed in Osaka. He stared at his smartwatch. Its wallpaper
was the photo Lucien took, nine months and one Malibu wedding ago. Deb set it as his
background the morning he left for Japan. So you won’t forget about me, she had said.
Their smiling selves with their smiling selves.
Kelly stared. Waiting to hear from his wife.
He was young when he first learned about his gift with words. In seventh grade
Ms. Harkins told the class to write an I Am poem for homework. What Kelly brought to
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school the next day, craving that same post-performance look of awe, had shocked his
classmates. Shocked himself.
And when you turn the corner
To see the lights and hear the sirens,
That tiny part o f you
That hopes
There was an accident
— that is who I am
At times throughout his life, the lines came back to Kelly. And they were with him as he
waited, the words reading themselves over.
And over.
And over.
Into oblivion.
Something happened.
The screen had lit up with Deb’s name, and Kelly stood and yanked the
smartwatch from his wrist. But it wasn’t her voice that came out. Something happened,
said Deb’s brother.
Alex, thank god. Is she there? Put her on.
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Kelly, listen. She’s really tired.
I bet. Is she OK? She with the baby? My god. Is it a boy?
Kelly, slow down. Where are you right now?
What do you mean, where am I? I’m in Japan. I wanna talk to Deb.
Kelly—ah, Jesus. I fucking hate this. I thought you would be back by now.
What? Stop being fucking weird. I need my wife. I need to hear about the baby.
There’s—
What the fuck is wrong with you? Put. Her. On.
There’s no baby, Kelly.
Kelly’s stomach made a fist. Something like a fever fluttered through him.
Don’t tell me that. Don’t fucking tell me that. You don’t know. (Kelly’s words
became soggy. Somewhere between speech and moan.) Put Deborah on. Put a doctor on
or something.
Kelly walked into the bathroom, thinking he might throw up.
They tried, Alex said. It... (this word hit Kelly like a raindrop on his forehead)
came out upside down, all wrapped up in the cord. I really wish you would’ve (his voice
sharpening) answered earlier. She’s... She’s crushed, man. And in pain. What are you
doing over there? She needed you.
Kelly’s eyelids felt weighted down. Facing himself in the bathroom mirror, he
saw sunken smears of purple underneath his eyes. The lids were puffy. He gave in to their
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weight. He swallowed, hearing perfectly the muscles in his neck squish down the spit.
Slowly, calmly, Kelly said: She doesn’t wanna talk to me.
She needs time, Alex said, the sharpness gone. She’s a wreck. She needs sleep.
They’re taking care of her. And I’ll be here. But, no, she doesn’t wanna talk to you. I’m
really, really sorry Kelly. About everything. You just take care of you right now. We’ll
be in touch, OK?
Eyes closed, Kelly let the watch fall from his hand.
But, no, she doesn’t wanna talk to you.
—that is who I am
What do you mean it looks like you’re going to Japan next month? Are you out of your
actual mind? What reality do you live in, Kel? I’m due in June. Do you not see the huge
fucking human you put in me? This was your idea. There were things I could’ve done.
New, safe things. I looked into it those 13 days I didn’t hear from you. After the call,
when I told you. No— look at me. You can’t imagine how hard those weeks were for me.
Not even with that big fat creative brain your slutty boss loves so much. I called my
parents, Kel. Like a little girl. They were in New Zealand for fuck sake, celebrating her
retirement. They cut the trip in half to come and see me. I was a mess. But then. Then
you came in here all galant saying, We can do this. That you’d thought about it. Mr.
Romance. Who was that guy, Kel? You knew. You knew what this would mean for
Ill
modeling. I wouldn’t need a career, you said, if I was your wife. I can’t go back to doing
this alone. It’s too late, Kel. It’s too late. You really think my dad missed the wedding
because of work? How gullible are you? Yeah the whole thing was rushed but he would
rather quit his job than miss his daughter’s wedding. He just couldn’t stand to see your
face.
In the morning Kelly didn’t bother with his meeting. Fuck Toyota. Fuck Japan.
Fuck this ugly fucking world.
He hadn’t slept. He just lay sprawled on the bed in his clothes, staring into the
dark. All night long, the conversation with Alex replayed in his head. He impulsively
picked up his smartwatch a few times, wanting to write something to Deb. Searching his
mind for the right thing to say. Anything to say. But, for once, Kelly had no words. Then
he’d read the last few messages he got from her. The two she sent before Alex must’ve
rushed her to the hospital (Kelly’s job). About to be a mother, she had thought. And there
was the message before those two: Can’t wait to see you tomorrow! Hope things are
going OK. Less than 24 hours ago. Kelly winced. Since then so much had been broken.
From his bed, he watched the sunrise—yellow-gray, smudged and muted by
smog. City sounds began to multiply below. Restlessness overtook him, and he rolled off
of the bed. He headed for the toilet to pee, caught himself in the mirror. His shirt was
thoroughly wrinkled, untucked, and open at the neck. It didn’t seem to matter.
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He took the stairs down the building’s backside and exited through a behind-thescenes corridor, avoiding the conference area and lobby. And there he was, back in the
thick of it. Street-level Osaka. It was earlier than he’d gotten out before, and there seemed
to be some sort of pedestrian rush hour happening. He watched the flurry of people for a
moment, the strengthening sun harsh on his eyes. The heat hadn’t quite taken off yet, but
the mugginess was there, all over Kelly, like a sweaty ghost molesting him.
Kelly felt hungover. The word that came to mind w as... ruined. He was jittery.
Wired yet exhausted. Hungerless yet starving. None of it made sense. He kept trying to
label the situation in his mind, but the words were slippery. The phrases kept canceling
themselves out— an Escher-drawn scaffolding of logic: He was separate from this place
but stuck here. He was here for work but wasn’t working. He was a father; he was not a
father. He was a husband, but...
He started walking. With no will to be a salmon, he was swept into the freak
parade. There were business guys—immaculately tailored suits, shoes pointier than any
foot. Girls wearing surgical masks like sterile ninjas. He passed a glorified hot dog cart
where an aproned woman poked at sizzling dumplings with—a fondue fork? She
frantically kept the balls tumbling around her egg carton-shaped griddle. The dumplings
gave off an enticing donuty smell, but the red cartoon octopus on the front of the cart told
Kelly to steer the fuck clear. He passed a place with flashing neon signage and an
automatic sliding door. When Kelly got close enough to trigger the door’s motion sensor,
the glass panel slid away and out poured a mountainous sound— like Niagara Falls with
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metal shards instead of water. Inside, amidst a zoo of lights, people sat facing what
looked like digital slot machines. Pachinko, Kelly remembered from the guide book. The
bizarre type of pinball didn’t use actual steel balls anymore, Kelly’d read, but speakers in
the parlor pumped out a reproduction of the noise they used to make. It was part of the
experience. Still in step with the crowd, Kelly found himself, again, beside the
feedstream. There were people inexplicably holding umbrellas. A round-faced man
dressed like a sushi roll handed out flyers. There was bleached hair, reddish-brown hair,
but mostly black hair. The ethnic monotony was surreal. Wave after wave of people, and
none of them looked like Kelly. He couldn’t believe they weren’t staring at him. He knew
he looked like shit, probably smelled like shit, and was unlike anyone else in this
metropolis. But nobody gave him a second glance. Nobody gave him a first. The only
reason Kelly wasn’t a freak, he realized, was that they weren’t making him one.
Then the feedstream went black. Kelly’s heart stopped. Was this a dream? He
stopped walking— oof, someone knocked into him. He turned around. One of the
businessmen. Watch where you’re going, ya pointy-shoed fuck. The man bowed at Kelly,
muttered something in Japanese that sounded like sweet Muslim, and went on his way.
Kelly turned to the feedstream. What the fuck? It was still black. Some of the pedestrians
stopped walking to check it out. Most of them ignored it.
Kelly drew closer to the edge of the walkway, pushing past people to get a better
view. Turned off, the feedstream looked like a landing strip. A droning sound was
coming from the big black screen. Was it broken? Getting hacked? None of the other
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people seemed worried. The droning grew louder, fuller. Japanese characters flashed on
the screen and faded out. Flashed on the screen and faded out. Kelly looked down the city
corridor and saw the same words repeated on the feedstream every few dozen feet, in
both directions. The sound grew huge, matured, became pleasant. It was a note. The
words on the screen continued to pulse, and every third time they showed up they were
English. They said: SONG PREMIERE.
Japanese. Japanese. SONG PREMIERE.
The note, now recognizably from a synthesizer, shifted. No, it climbed. Then the
feedstream’s unseen soundsystem blasted the two pitches together.
That was it. One of nature’s hidden wonders. A perfect fifth.
The sound of a snare came pitter-pattering in, tripping over itself in calculated
syncopation. The beat grew crisp, as if each hit were breaking the drum. But there was no
drum. There were no hits. This was no-hu.
Periodic claps punctuated the beat—precise, handless claps. The synthesizer
soared into a melody. Five guitars from five different eras of music joined forces for a
chord progression. A bassline Kelly felt more than he heard boomed below, following the
progression like its shadow and its overseer. Orchestral strings swayed somewhere in the
middleground. There were sounds from uninvented instruments— instruments that’d
never been, would never be. Kelly stopped trying to isolate the sounds; there were more
layers to the music than he could follow.
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Then something rose out of the feedstream. Out of the black. The top of a head,
then shoulders. An opalescent bustier. It was a person, emerging from the screen as if by
rising platform. A glowing person. Appearing real in every way—only brighter. The hips
now, blaring through the white silk skirt. Shins. It was a woman, standing, staring back at
Kelly. Pedestrians trickled over, and he felt vaguely claustrophobic as they walled him in
against the feedstream. But Kelly was in front. No one could obstruct his view. Kelly
could see everything. Kelly could see... her.
Her hair was the Aurora Borealis. Her motions were joy made physical. Lifting
the long, impeccable leg and dipping into unseen pools. Hands, little windcarried flowers,
floated by the gently angular face. Her not-quite-anime-size eyes were backlit purple
jewels. She moved, not dancing to the song but being it. Extending both slender arms and
tossing them after the slightest windup into a vertical windmill, arm over arm smoothly
somersaulting like Lucien’s wand. She blinked in slow-motion, and as the whiteshadowed lids stretched open the irises were, instead of purple, green—the green of
sunlight oozing through Japanese maple leaves. That same green passing through her
modulating flame of hair—green blurring into white into purple into pink—that at
moments became weightless, as if underwater, and joined in the rhythmic interpretations.
Sound manifested as body manifested as sound. The two in conversation.
The pink lips parted. Out spilled an entire choir. The voice(s) from Partyland.
Instantly Kelly knew this was the no-hu artist he had heard and loved back at the yogurt
shop. Now he was seeing her, watching her perform new music. The words were
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Japanese but they gave Kelly chills. He thought about the years of evolution that had led
her to this song. Tech evolution, yes, but more so her personal progress—the writing and
rewriting, the algorithmic pachinko game.
Exact copies of her danced and sang in unison, several yards apart, up and down
the feedstream. Like the SONG PREMIERE announcements. But this one had shown up
right across from Kelly. The hologram seemed to be performing just for him. She was
his.
And he was hers— lost in it. Kelly felt like he was literally drinking her in,
extinguishing a thirst he never knew he had. Kelly was here, in this moment. Kelly was
free. Sure again that there was beauty in the world. And outside of it:
The feedstream wasn’t black anymore. It had pulsed with color, then dissolved
into renders of celestial bodies—a virtual tour of the galaxy. Watching her sway and twirl
across these dazzling backdrops, Kelly felt stimulated in a million ways. She was a
technological achievement. She was art. She was sexy, yet graceful and calm. She
seemed so sentient. So devoted to the show.
And then: The song was over. A bow, a flutter of clapping for herself, another
bow, a curtsy, and she vanished. The backdrop’s stars uncoupled and departed— fickle
fireflies. There was nothing. Kelly felt a twinge of heartsickness at her absence. And
then: Two Latin letters faded into brilliance, fluctuating across that spectrum—green,
white, purple, pink.
The letters:
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Ki
Kelly broke off from the main drag, meandering through mazelike alleyways and
sidestreets. He floated in a dreamlike stupor. He was trying to get lost. He wanted to get
back to Partyland. Getting lost was how he got there the first time—why not try it again?
He questioned this thinking. Then questioned the questioning. Every few minutes, Kelly
tapped his smartwatch to check for messages, for calls. Nothing. He wanted to get back to
Partyland because he thought they might be playing more of her music. Ki. Those
glowing letters, that word, that name. It was burned into his mind.
The smartwatch screen lit up. He panicked. It was from Suze: Toyota says you
stood them up. What’s going on, kid?
Kelly swiped the message away. It wasn’t the one he cared about. He kept
walking, vaguely wondering what would happen if he lost his job. He thought about the
Japanese businessman that ran into him, so invested in his career he couldn’t see two feet
ahead. Then he thought about Deb’s dad. Would rather quit his job than miss his
daughter’s wedding, Deb had said. And Kelly? What about Kelly?
It didn’t matter. Because she existed. He had seen her. And if the world could
look like that, even for moments at a time, things would be OK. Deb and everything
would be OK. No need for harakiri. Kelly felt something— like the soothing, wispy
waves of a Xanax just starting to kick in. Relief. They would be OK. Better, even. They
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weren’t ready for a baby. They hardly knew each other. Kelly realized—knowing even as
the thought formed it was something he would hide from Deb forever—part of him was
glad the baby died.
He was deep in a labyrinth of sidestreets. Was this even Namba anymore? Maybe
he’d reached another district. The streets were cramped and quiet. The heat was heavy,
but these skinnier walkways didn’t let in as much light. No crowd—just the occasional,
hunched passerby. It felt less touristy than the feedstreem promenade. Was that what
Kelly was, a tourist? He stopped. The neon lights were less abundant here, so the glowing
animated poster stood out all the more. It took Kelly a moment to accept what he was
seeing. He was seeing her. He was seeing Ki.
The LCD poster showed several girls, all apparently no-hu. The girls were
different but the same. On a white background, they each cycled through their own little
dance move. The two-dimensional performers would complete four choreographed beats,
then repeat, stuck in that single brief action. It made Kelly think of a display case of
mechanical toys. Something about it felt cheap. Ki was in the middle, slightly bigger than
the rest. She pirouetted, pirouetted. He could almost hear her voice(s). At the bottom of
the poster, a pink, pulsing arrow pointed to the left, where a black curtain filled a
doorway. There was a slight gap between the curtain and the doorframe, and Kelly tried
to peer inside. It was too dark to see.
Kelly wasn’t sure what this place was.
That tiny part o f you
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But he had an idea.
That hopes
He checked his watch. No messages. No calls. He made sure the ringer was on
full blast, then pushed his way past the black curtain.
A smell hit Kelly like entering one of those Venice Beach shops with the
imported incense and colorful handbags and crystals and crap. But this room was bare,
unfurnished, its walls painted black or some very dark color. The only light was the
bluish backsplash from a stream of holographic bubbles rising by the back wall. To the
left of this, a hallway ran into darkness. Kelly spoke, halfheartedly: Hello? The sound of
a door shutting came from the hallway. Carpet-scuffing steps approached. Fight or flight?
he thought.
A man in a silver T-shirt entered the room. Kelly couldn’t make out much about
him except for the gaudy chrome garment. And that he was tall. He stopped a few paces
from Kelly. A few of his paces. Kelly watched the man’s silhouette, backlit by the
glowing bubbles, lift one arm, then the other. The room grew gradually brighter, taking
on a purple glow, and it became visible the guy was moving one finger across the face of
his watch, tracing a circle. As the finger arced, the purple light thickened. He must’ve had
some sort of dimmer app.
Kelly could see now. The man had a goatee. The walls were deep purple. Or
maybe that was the light? The guy brought his hands together like he was about to say
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grace. He bowed his head toward Kelly. It was rigider, more guarded than the other bows
Kelly’d seen. Kelly hesitated, then gave an awkward little bow in return.
The man waved Kelly over to the bubbles of light. They were rising out of a fly’s
eye of lenses built into the floor. The blue-tinted, transparent spheres floated up until
disappearing into the ceiling. Kelly’s new friend cupped his hands and corralled one of
the golf ball-size bubbles. As he pulled back his hands, the bubble came too.
Kelly tapped his watch. It lit up, seeming extra bright, somehow sobering in the
strangely lit room. But no messages. No calls. He looked back at the bubble.
The man pinched the sphere at two points, then drew his hands apart. The bubble
grew, and as it did Kelly could make out a small figure moving inside of it. It was one of
the no-hu girls from the poster, dancing and gaining size as the sphere became as big as
an orange, as big as a head. The miniature person’s hips rolled. Her hair swayed. Not Ki,
but a distant cousin maybe. The man’s hands unfolded and spread out, palms up, in an
offering gesture that said, Please, eat up, and confirmed Kelly’s hypothesis. This was a
no-hu brothel.
Kelly looked the man in the eyes.
The man bowed his head.
No, Kelly said.
The man looked up at him. He swatted the enlarged bubble and the image blurred,
then evaporated. Nothing between him and Kelly. The man scratched at his goatee, then
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turned to face the other bubbles—the self-replenishing cloud, drifting lazily upward. He
made that offering gesture.
Kelly stared at him, knowing there would be other girls, different girls in each of
the spheres.
Two letters glowed in Kelly’s mind, as if branded on the inside of his forehead.
He read them:
Ki, Kelly said, pronouncing it like the beginning of kite.
Silver Shirt looked confused. His gaze fell and rolled across the floor in search of
meaning. He looked up with sudden recognition.
Ki, the man said, pronouncing it like the things that open locks.
The man led Kelly down the hall, past a number of closed doors. Then there was a
room. The one that would be Kelly’s. And inside Kelly saw it. The machine. The
illegitimate child of a massage bed and a dentist chair. Instead of the hole in the face
rest—Masseuse Toes TV, Deb once called it—there were built-in VR goggles. Instead of
the spotlight and weapons rack of suckers and sprayers and scrapers, there were
mechanical hands, several of them, and other tubular, textured implements, waiting to
descend lovingly on the next customer. There was a hole for your unit, and below it under
the table Kelly saw a black-canvas funnel fashioned with a city of motors and pistons and
hinges that perhaps grasped or vibrated or both. Kelly felt disgusted, enthralled. He was
at once drawn to it and afraid. Aroused and repelled. The hole seemed so dark. So deep.
So impregnable. My birth control says 99 percent, Deb had said, so in a way this is a
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miracle. Kelly could only approximate the images those goggles promised. Ki’s glowing
face, so close to his. Her voice(s) hotly entering his ear. Him able to touch her. Her
touching him back, everywhere, all at once.
Ringing. His watch was ringing.
He looked down. His wife’s name. So bright.
He looked at the machine. The bridge between worlds.
He left and answered the call.
Debbie. Are you OK?
Her voice was cold and calm: What are we going to do, Kel.
I don’t know. Look—I’m sorry. I don’t even know...
We lost our baby, Kel. I... (her voice careened into a sob) I strangled him. They
didn’t wanna tell me boy or girl but I just screamed until they did. He was a boy, Kel. We
had a baby boy. I killed him.
Kelly had wanted to tell her they would be OK. He had wanted to tell her about
Ki. About the beauty. But that was all absurd now. None of it seemed real.
It was not your fault, he said, forcing his voice steady. I swear you didn’t do
anything wrong.
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He’s gone. I felt him move around inside me, all those months. (Her voice was
thick and mournful. She sounded like she’d aged, Kelly thought.) Getting air I breathed.
Eating what I ate. He was part of me. And he’s gone.
Kelly felt shaken. Not sure of anything.
He heard her take two shuddery breaths.
Why did you leave? she said. Why did you go?
Kelly felt vast and hollow. A drafty bam. Why had he gone? Why not just stay?
Why not choose Germany, even? Had he really needed to ship himself off? So far away?
In rushed that embarrassed feeling, unbearably sweet, like tickle torture. But this time it
was Kelly who seemed so predictable. Hesitant Father Gets Cold Feet. You couldn’t put
that on a billboard it was so cliche.
We told everyone, she said. Had the shower. All those gifts. People were so nice
to us.
And something in that last word had felt good, warmed him a little. He said:
Us.
And Deb, of course reading the volumes behind his one tiny word, replied:
Things will never be the same.
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There was a Japanese maple tree outside Kelly’s childhood home. Every fall, the leaves
would droop and turn blood red. But in the summer, its thousand tiny splayed hands, the
color of half-ripe limes, reached through the oceanic sky.
Oh my god you can see it from here—the Colosseum. How much was this room, Kel?
Wait, no— don’t tell me. Just come out on the balcony. Look at the sunset. So pretty. All
those colors... Give me your hand. Feel this. No, under the bump. See? Feel the
wiggling? Seems like the little one loves Italian food as much as we do... And I had a
thought. Can you grab my watch, Kel, on the nightstand? I wanna get a picture before the
sun goes down. Anyway we were sitting there at our little table on the cobblestones and I
had this thought about those corny songs you love. And how I always say they’re not real
life? But—how do I say this. This trip isn’t real life, really. This honeymoon. It’s perfect,
like a dream almost. But we’re gonna go back home. You’re gonna go to work. And then
there will be poopy diapers, throwup, crying. But... It still feels worth it, doesn’t it? I still
appreciate this moment. So in a way this is one big pop song. Because when things get
sour we can look back and replay the memory. And it won’t be real. But it’ll be
something. You know? Hey. Kelly. Say something.