Apathy and Other Small Victories (2 page)

“No shit.”

“Like I said, we have a few questions for you.”

“All right,” I said, and sighed.

I was still foggy and my head was throbbing, but I could play vice squad with these two for a few minutes. It would make them feel like they were being useful, and it would be an interesting start to my day. I just hoped I hadn’t done anything stupid the night before. I didn’t remember anything illegal. I didn’t remember anything really.

“Where were you last night, around 10
P.M
.?”

“Probably at a bar.”

“Probably?”

“Probably.”

“What bar?”

“The one down the street.”

“What’s the name of it?”

“What’s this about?”

“How well do you know Marlene Burton?”

“Who?”

“The assistant at Dr. Weinhardt’s office. Your dentist.”

“Oh, deaf Marlene.”

“She had a last name.” Sikes broke his shame-induced silence. “She wasn’t defined by her disability. She was a person too you know.”

I know, fuckhead,
I signed in response, working my hands slow for emphasis. I waited for him to react. I wanted to slap away the cockiness that was already creeping back into his blotchy, running face. When it was clear that he had no idea I’d called him a fuckhead in sign language I said, “What about her?”

“Marlene Burton was found dead last night.”

My dentist’s name was Dr. Weinhardt but I called him Doug. Doug had episodes. He’d flip out and have to lie down and monitor his pulse and breathe slow and in rhythm like a pregnant woman or else he’d faint, which he usually did anyway. He thought iced tea helped, so he kept a pitcher of it in his back office on a table beside his fainting couch, and he carried a monogrammed flask with him wherever he went. The monogram was D.W.I. Douglas Weinhardt the First.

“But D.W.I. are the initials for Driving While Intoxicated! And it’s a flask but there’s no alcohol, it’s only iced tea. Get it? And I don’t even drive! I take the bus every day! That’s funny, right?”

“Jesus Doug.”

He thought his episodes were being caused by a series of brutal attacks he’d suffered recently. This is how he explained it to me:

“About three months ago I was getting off a bus downtown when all of a sudden—Psshew!” He smacked both his hands against his ears. “The big folding accordion door closed right on my head! And then there must have been a malfunction or something because it just went Wham! Wham! Wham!” He pressed the air around both sides of his head three times fast with his palms, spreading his fingers and holding his elbows high, like some New Wave dance that was so embarrassing no one even joked about it anymore. “It kept slamming into my head until I fell out into the street. When I woke up there was a crowd of people standing around me and a man was snapping his fingers in my face. The bus driver said he’d never seen anything like it. I couldn’t stand up without falling down again. I had to ride home in the back of an ambulance. And then a few weeks later, on a different bus with a different driver, it happened again! It’s happened six more times since. I don’t even call the ambulance anymore. I just crawl around until my equilibrium comes back.”

“Christ Doug. Maybe you should see a doctor.”

“I am a doctor,” he said.

It would have sounded smug if he hadn’t just finished telling a story about getting his head jackhammered by a bus door. It’s real hard to come off as even slightly superior when you’re living a
Tom and Jerry
episode.

Doug had a dental assistant named Marlene. My first appointment I was reclined in the chair and Doug was gouging my teeth and gums with something he called the
sharpo
. “Just cleaning the plaque out of the gutters,” he said as blood drained into the back of my throat.

There was a bright light hovering above me like the ones aliens and angels use to trick people into not running away and I was breathing hard through my nose and panicking because I was choking to death on my own blood. Then I heard someone else come into the room, their shoes softly padding the floor. The light steps sounded like a woman’s.

“Oh there she is. Just in time. Can you hand me the pro-ber?” Doug said.

He was speaking very slowly and louder than a normal person should. A woman’s hand passed between me and the light. I saw red nails, and I was very impressed with myself. I had always been perceptive. I could’ve been a detective. I could’ve been blind and still been able to solve crimes and mysteries. I was almost like a superhero sometimes.

“No no, the pr-o-ber,” he said way too deliberately, adding an unnecessary syllable. I figured she was either six years old or retarded. If she was that young she shouldn’t be wearing nail polish. And if she was retarded she’d better not be allowed to play with the drills.

“Thank you. Now can I get some suc-tion? Suc-tion?”

She put the thin vacuum tube in my mouth and it sucked and slurped the blood from the back of my throat as Doug kept hacking away. I could breathe again. This woman had saved my life. I would probably marry her, even if she was six years old and retarded. We would have a strange life together.

“Oh gosh, you two haven’t even met! If someone’s putting their hands in your mouth you should at least know their name,” Doug said. “Shane, this is my assistant, Marlene.”

A head leaned over close to me, eclipsing the tricky, paranormal light. There was a serene halo of blond hair lit up all around her face. Single strands hung down like icicles. It was beautiful.

“HI NICE TO MEET YOU!” she shouted atonally into my gaping mouth.

I saw this documentary once that had black and white footage of a man in goggles and baggy clothes. He looked vaguely German, or like someone the Germans would’ve taken prisoner back when everything was black and white. He was pale and skinny and his head was shaved bald. His legs were in stiff, clunky iron boots and his arms were shackled and pulled straight down at his sides by taut chains bolted to the floor. He looked very nervous.

Then shit started flying all over the place. He was standing in a wind tunnel. The force of the wind blew his baggy shirt and pants tight against his skinny body and the fabric flapped and rippled behind him frantically as his arms shook in the shackles, but the iron ski boots kept him from blowing away. The goggles protected his eyes but his mouth was wide open and his lips were pulled back exposing his teeth like a horse on one of those hillbilly postcards. He looked like he was screaming but the only sound was the whir of turbines and the rushing wind. That’s where the footage ended, but I’m pretty sure his head got blown off soon after. I think it was some kind of experiment.

And that’s how I felt. Like a vaguely German prisoner in leg irons and chains whose scream could not be heard above the deaf girl wailing in my face. Soon my head would be gone too.

Later, as Marlene was putting away the sharpo and the prober and humming loud and off-key to herself, Doug leaned towards me and said, “She’s deaf you know.” But he said it under his breath, discreetly, so she wouldn’t hear.

I spit more blood into the sink.

* * *

Doug spent most of his time freaking out in his back office, so that’s how I got to know deaf Marlene.

I’d never actually talked to a deaf person before but I’d been swimming and gotten water stuck in my ears lots of times, felt that underwater silence as I shook my head and watched people’s mouths moving without hearing the words, so I knew what it was like for her. I could empathize. And I always used to watch reruns of
The Facts of Life
when I came home from school and I had vivid, uncomfortable memories of those episodes where Blair’s stand up comedian cousin would mock herself to get laughs and teach tolerance to Mrs. Garrett and the rest of the girls. She had cerebral palsy but she talked like a deaf person, so the lesson was the same. I could sympathize, and pity.

“Hey so how long have you worked in this place?” I said.

She was standing right next to me looking at a dental chart, and of course she couldn’t hear a goddamn word I was saying. I barely resisted the impulse to clap or snap my fingers.

“Hey So How Long Have You Worked In This Place?” I said again, because sometimes it is hard to remember not to be an ass.

Marlene glanced up in mid-sentence and saw that my mouth was moving, and when it stopped she smiled and nodded her head and laughed quietly and politely, just like hearing people do when they don’t know what the fuck you just said. Blair’s cousin was right. We are all the same.

We stared at each other and it was so awkward I considered murdering myself or giving her the finger just for something to do, but instead I made a fist and stuck out my thumb and screwed it into my cheek. I saw a monkey do it on
Sesame Street
once. It means
apple
in sign language.

“APPLE! LIKE THE MONKEY!” she shouted, genuinely excited. Deaf girls love
Sesame Street
. We both laughed for as long as we could, which was for much longer than it was funny.

She had too many teeth going in different directions. Her hair was a frizzy mess, like she was three weeks past a bad perm, and the blond dye kit was obviously cheap and self-applied. But still, she pretty much looked like anybody else. She didn’t look especially deaf. But she was. She was.

There was the kind of silence you can only have when it’s high noon, or when one of you is deaf.

I pointed at her, then pinched my nose closed.

She narrowed her eyes, confused, then shouted, “I’M NOT STINK!”

And we laughed about that for a long time.

When the detective told me she was dead there was a pause in my head where I thought of absolutely nothing, a hitch where nothing happened, just before the engine caught. When it did I wanted to make myself scream “No!” and start crying, but I knew that I couldn’t, even under the circumstances, and that fact had a better chance of bringing me to tears than Marlene’s death. I almost said “No shit,” which would have been my natural reaction, but this was no time for natural reactions.

“Jesus,” I said quietly, and lowered my head like I was thinking, which I was.

“We’d like you to come down to the station, answer a couple of questions,” Brooks said.

“Why me?”

“It’s nothing personal, we’re talking to everybody she had any contact with. Just gathering information.”

“Why can’t you just ask me here? Why do we have to go down to the station?”

“We also need a sample.”

“A sample?”

“Semen was found on the body.”

“Eww.”

“What, you don’t like semen?” Sikes said, challenging me again.

“All right, you want to do this the easy way?” Brooks broke in. “Come on down to the station.”

“Am I being arrested?”

“No, we’re just going to ask you a few questions.”

“Do I need a lawyer?”

“That depends.”

The trick is to be like Robinson Crusoe. Wherever you find yourself shipwrecked you build a temporary home out of palm leaves and sticks. You use hollowed out coconuts for lemonade glasses or to make string bikinis that you will never ever wear. You use sand and water. You make mud for no reason. Whatever’s lying around, you use it. But the trick is you build everything so flimsy that it has to fall apart. And when it does it looks like an accident, like unfortunate circumstances, or bad luck or timing. And that’s your way out. Then you go get shipwrecked somewhere else and start building again. Wash, rinse, repeat. Why these are the tricks, I do not know.

 * * *

I would’ve gotten out long before Marlene was murdered if it hadn’t been for Gwen. I couldn’t just walk away after knowing Gwen. Literally. I was incapacitated. Sometimes for days at a time. But it was more than that. Gwen was what hysterics think of marijuana. She led to crack and giving handjobs for a dollar on the street. Or their moral equivalents at least.

I fought my way out of her ghetto—I got thrown out actually—but I was stuck there just long enough that I fell right into a bigger, much worse pile of shit when I left. I suppose I could blame myself for how it turned out, but I’ve never been comfortable with that sort of thing.

It was before I’d started stealing saltshakers. I’d just gotten into town so I didn’t know anything yet. I was alone in a trendy bar that had overpriced drinks and a doorman who’d called me “Boss” when he asked for my ID, then said, “Thanks guy” when he gave it back. I had the hiccups pretty bad. I had to keep my sentences short so people wouldn’t think I was epileptic. This made everything I said sound very wise.

“Hi, I’m Gwendolyn,” she said, standing beside me at the bar. She had a round face and straight hair down to her square shoulders. I had been drinking scotch to impress any strangers who might have been watching me, and I was so drunk I could only see geometry.

“Hello Gwendolyn,” I said in the quiet time between hiccups.

“Please, call me Gwen. Only my grandmother calls me Gwendolyn.”

Then why the fuck did you introduce yourself as Gwendolyn, I wanted to ask, but that was way too many words in a row.

“Yeah,” I said instead.

Gwen worked at a big insurance company where she made important decisions. She was very decisive, but she would’ve liked the opportunity to be even more so.

“It’s hard sometimes because things can be so structured, and it feels like seniority gets rewarded over how much work you actually put in. I don’t want to disrupt the dynamic of the team—we all work so well together—but then I don’t want to get pigeonholed and wind up stuck in the same position two years from now either.”

“Labels are terrible things,” I said.

“That’s so true.”

We were connecting.

Then we were on the front steps of her apartment and she was bashing the inside of my mouth with her tongue. My dental work was crumbling like the moon does in movies when it’s the end of the world.

“Maybe we shouldn’t,” she said, and pulled back. Before I could agree she was mauling me again.