Cannibals in Love (28 page)

“The first clear thing that August saw, after that, were the smoldering flames hissing off the Murder Elm. He lost his drowning grip on the pitchfork and started running up the hill, with his boots sucking in the mud and shit…”
I stopped again, feeling like I had been reading too long.

“Don't stop,” Danielle said, hanging on the story.

“This is the part that happened, though.”

“What happened?” she asked in earnest.

“Well…” I hesitated. “The elm tree was struck by lightning and the cows died of electrocution.”

“Oh,” she said, dropping back in her seat.

I'd just ruined the entire story with this death knell, but I wanted to tell her the truth. I wanted someone to see where I'd begun. I wanted to try and untangle it all in my own head, too.

Danielle tried not to look disappointed. “It's sad. The cows all died.”

“A lot of them.” I nodded. “A few lived.”

“Read it to me,” she said hopefully.

“Okay.” I cleared my throat artificially and kept going.

“Black and white, death was laid out in front of him. One single bolt of lightning had inexplicably killed forty-three of his fifty dairy cows. This, he would later learn from Guinness's London office, was simply unprecedented…'
That part is true, by the way,” I offered solemnly, and kept reading.

“August was shell-shocked by the scorched earth and carnage that he saw. He sent the live cows ambling backward with his unsteady movements. He picked up the head of a dead Holstein and shook it to make it real, but the emptiness he felt knocked the wind out of him.

“‘What a waste, what a waste…' he said in a hollow voice.

“The living cows circled and stared, in reproof, while August sank down among the humiliating dead. He felt a weight that crushed involuntarily. He tried to rise to his feet again and couldn't. He felt the ground disappearing and suddenly rushing up to meet him. August's rope had just been cut from the top branch of the Gallows Elm. He looked at the curdling udders with frenzy as he felt himself sinking into the soft earth. His head spun. Death of the cattle is death of the farmer is death of the farm
…'” I stopped.

“And it goes on and on, a little,” I said quickly, as I turned the whole thing back to the front page. “It's not right yet, exactly. I'm not convinced I've earned this big kind of biblical ending-thing.”

“Gosh.” Danielle exhaled. “I feel a little dizzy now.”

“Right. Sorry.”

“No, it's a good thing. We missed our stop,” she said with a laugh, looking around. “It's good. It's weird, really weird.” She smiled, imparting something strong in her silence. “I can't believe you got all of that into ten pages.” She laughed again, breaking her own tension.

I started to say something about this, but I stopped myself. Nodding mutely instead.

“Here,” she said, taking the story away from me. “Let me read it for real. I'll take it home. I can give you notes.”

“Oh. You don't have to do that.”

“No, let me,” she said, pulling out a pen. “Write your email address on the front. I'll send you my notes. I like it, I do. It's good.”

There was something charged in this proposition, like she'd just caught herself sounding insistent and was surprised. I smiled at her and she looked away. I wrote my email onto the top of the story and I gave it back to her.

“Thanks for not asking if I'm on Facebook,” I said dryly.

Danielle laughed, and her eyes got big and shiny. “Have you ever read Michel Foucault?”

“Who, the philosopher?” I smiled, thinking this a particularly strange question to ask on a city bus. “Wasn't he the guy with the circular prisons…”

“Right, yeah.
The Panopticon
,” she said excitedly. “And I was reading that last summer—for something totally unrelated—and I had this epiphany about Facebook.”

“Facebook?” I asked, not understanding.

“Right, right, so listen. The purpose of the Panopticon is to induce a conscious and permanent visibility upon the inmates, right? You never know who's looking at you, or when. You give up your privacy and you behave because you never really know who's watching. So, with Facebook, what happens is that the population begins to self-report. And then we all start to surrender our privacy in order to indulge in the loss of everyone else's privacy. Right?”

“Holy shit,” I said, a little startled. “Facebook is the new Panopticon!”

“Fucking Facebook!” she shouted. People looked up at us from their seats. “It's Facebook,” she said more quietly. “The prisoners are the guards and vice versa.”

I laughed because I had no idea Danielle had it in her. Who knew this pretty girl from the suburbs was capable of making these kinds of advanced paranoid connections? All of a sudden I thought I might be falling in love with her.

“That's dark, Danielle. I like that one a lot.”

She sat back and demurred. “Yeah. Well, I don't pretend it's any kind of earth-shattering conclusion. It's all up on the Internet already. It just struck me when I thought of it.”

“No, it's yours. Own it,” I said, charmed. “So did you quit Facebook then? After you figured out you were—what's the word—
self-reporting
?”

“Oh, yeah, of course. Are you kidding? I had to,” she said. “What about you?”

“A while ago,” I offered solemnly. “I had no idea I was in a penal colony, though. I just didn't think it was that much fun.”

Danielle smiled at me, and I took away her pen to write
Foucault/Facebook
on the top of my hand. She laughed and looked away, out the window, before reaching up and pulling for the next stop.

“Facebook is nothing. Give it more time, they'll think of something way worse.”

*   *   *

We got off the bus, and back on again, as the dull sun began sinking into six o'clock. Danielle stood closer at each next stop, using me to block the wind, she said. This was the end of our day out in the city. We were having fun just watching the people on the buses, with their strange comings and goings. We made jokes behind their backs, but never mean jokes, really. We just wanted to keep talking.

We showed our transfers and stood on the crowded #20 as it arced us back across the river at rush hour. The conversations became very easy, and I confessed that I had only just discovered Don DeLillo and I was taking the year to read every one of his books in order. It was always so strange to discover a thing that everyone else seemed to know so implicitly. Danielle nodded and admitted to doing something similar with Keanu Reeves movies. And then we laughed and gushed about the greatness of
River's Edge.

Halfway up the hill, Danielle pulled the cord, saying that she wanted to walk the last ten blocks. But we mostly walked in silence. The whole day had been a dance this way. Our hands swinging, and nearly touching, like live wires. This was a danger to be fully conscious of. That was the fun we were having.

How could I say what my intentions with Danielle were? On some primal level I wanted to steal her away. I wanted her to fall in love with
me
, of course. But our errands were done and the day was over, too. We walked past my bike, past Powell's, to the Whole Foods. Danielle was looking around for her boyfriend, but I was not. His absence was a reason to keep going, to keep on walking. We went inside, out of the cold, out of the dark. We walked around the bright supermarket, trying samples and looking at the fancy foods.

Danielle pulled out her cell phone and told me he was there now. Outside somewhere, she said. We went back through the automatic doors and onto the street, where the night was suddenly threshed with neon lights. People were standing around and coming home from work. Some gutterpunk kid was yelling for his mutt dog to get out of the street, and Danielle made one last crack about dogcatching.

“Sorry,” I said. “I'm off the clock.” And we laughed in a hollow way.

She looked around the street, and back at me. She smiled with her nerves, I thought. We touched hands unconsciously and held on too long. I squeezed and let her go, feeling something unexpected. This happy rush of warm blood as we looked at each other without speaking. Danielle blinked first and turned away.

“Well…” she said nervously. “This was a lot of fun, actually.” She was afraid to really look at me now. Afraid that I could make her lose herself, I hoped. I wanted her to hate me as she hated herself for wanting me to steal her away.

“Yes…” I said, smiling and waiting for her to look back up. That look that said that she'd enjoyed our secret day in the city. In the movies this would be the kiss-moment. We would lean in and I would take her at the waist and bend her backward, or something.

But we didn't take a kiss here. Or, rather, I didn't, maybe. I liked the tension too much to spoil it all now. I didn't even want to touch Danielle again in this moment where men and women always hug platonically. Just to let the pressure off; just to say goodbye. But we didn't.

“I guess I should let you go, then,” I said. “He's probably waiting for you.”

“Right.” She nodded, turning to look again. “Yeah.”

“Have fun,” I said. “Have a good night.”

“Okay.”

I could tell she was bemused. Nodding and turning away from me, walking away again. I could see she had something else to say; I was supposed to stop her now. I was supposed to take the last word and try something dangerous in the halo of the streetlight. But I didn't do that because I didn't want to ruin it.

I let Danielle go, and I watched her body go blurry in the reflected lights as she turned the corner and came together with a different body altogether. Gone.

 

BALENTYNE

People don't just disappear anymore. You would hear someone saying this. Everyone was talking about John Francis Balentyne. This was the kid who disappeared. Just out of the blue, gone, and no one could say what had happened to him.

We didn't know Balentyne, but we talked about him, too. There were friends of friends, and all the loose degrees of separation in a small city. People felt like they could've known him, at a party, in a bar, just casually, wherever. Balentyne's roommates were talking to the free weeklies, and we would look for his name in
The Portland Mercury
. Everyone felt certain he would come back. Everyone was sure that the whole thing would turn out fine. John just did this sort of thing sometimes, and no one gave much cause to worry yet. It had only been one week.

*   *   *

The story of Balentyne was simple enough: he drank too much one night and had a bad encounter with a girlfriend, or somebody, at a bar. People said that Balentyne made an ugly little scene of it and got himself kicked out. They all remembered him leaving the bar, drunk and unhappy. Walking out onto the street to unlock his bike.

Balentyne came home around midnight, grumbling how sick he was of all this Portland bullshit. His roommates laughed and ignored him as they watched TV in the other room. Balentyne dropped his bag onto the floor and took a beer out of the fridge. He went into his bedroom and came back out again, banging his bicycle down the hallway, letting the screen door slam. He didn't say goodbye.

And that was the last time anyone saw John Francis Balentyne.

His cell phone rang and rang, and eventually went straight to voice mail. His roommates looked through his bedroom but found only unwashed clothes. There were no notes or explanations. No directions or intentions or clues left to follow. There was nothing on his computer but fragments of artwork. His truck was unlocked in the yard, but the only thing they found out there was a stack of overdue library books.

Overnight, a photocopied poster went up all over the city. Stapled to telephone poles and taped up inside of convenience stores. We looked at Balentyne's face now as we waited for the bus or a cashier to make our change. This missing poster became a stand-in for the real thing. It
was
the disappearance after a while, and it kept people talking about this kid they hardly knew.

After a week, the
Mercury
gave a small public recounting of the life and times of John Francis Balentyne. His friends reported misadventures and personal oddities. John might simply have gone home to see his parents, they thought, though no one seemed to have a number. Balentyne used to hop trains and hitchhike, they all recalled now. He once rode his bicycle down to L.A., which had taken him weeks. He was famous for walking around the city at night, taking photographs, and showing up at work the next day without sleeping. But he never missed a day of work. They were all certain of that. He was always working: two, three jobs at a time. Balentyne had a history of leaving in the summer for seasonal work, and that could be what this was. He used to have a job on a farm outside of Olympia. He used to harvest pot for some old hippie in California. A year ago he took a job on an Alaskan fishing boat and came back with a scar on his face.

Balentyne was just prone to these breakdowns in communication, they all said, almost defensively. Even in the best of times, he would miss a bill and have his phone shut off for a day or a week. It just wasn't that unusual. Balentyne could be a bit of a loner, yeah, but he always came back around.

Together we all told the ballad of John Francis Balentyne. There could be only two possibilities now: either he had taken off on purpose, or something bad had happened to him. People found themselves attracted or repelled accordingly. Even in the rush to rumor and conjecture, it was hard not to acknowledge some dark appeal in simply taking off. We felt threatened and excited by the disappearance of this young man. In a world of false connections, John Francis Balentyne had found some quiet mystery here. He had a secret, and like it or not, it was making a kind of folk hero out of the kid.