Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever (10 page)

“None,” the woman says. “I don’t have a son named Bruce.”

Back at the hotel, I smoke the joint like you would a cigarette: just keep taking drags until the whole thing is gone.

I get myself into a lot of trouble, going overboard like this.

Sometime after the last glints of sunlight slip below the horizon I realize I’m bored staring out at dark water, and then I realize that this is actually a normal, coherent thought, and this makes me think maybe the worst has passed. I think I’ll go down to the restaurant, order something not too greasy and a coffee, then check out and start back home. A nice night drive. Become nothing but a pair of headlights cutting swiftly through the silken dark. Mmm.

What can I eat that won’t be too greasy?

Some kind of sandwich, which would also go well with the coffee. I want lots of mustard, so much spicy brown mustard that everybody in the place can smell it and they all gawk, and if there are no other customers to gawk then only the waiter will, and I am more ready for this coffee and sandwich and drive than for anything I have ever been ready for, even as I feel my
self slipping off to sleep, curled up in the chair there with the bed so close but also far away and the last thing I realize is having not decided between smoked turkey and roast beef.

Bruce is in the room with me. He’s over by the bed, pack slung over one shoulder and his whole form—body, clothes, everything—is incandescent, flickering like old film. “Hey,” I say. “I thought I saw your mother today.”

“I don’t have a mother. I’m not even a college student, just a traveling kid. Here’s what happened: I woke up early this morning, took forty dollars out of your wallet—you can check if you want—then walked back to the highway and started hitching again. A man in a light blue ’89 Dodge van with no windows picked me up, took me to some lonely place he knows about, messed me up pretty bad, and then left me there. I died. Also, my name isn’t Bruce it’s Malachi.”

The ghost gives me this look of ultimate affection and some pity, like he’s sorry how fucked up this is but it’s all in perspective, or would be if you could see it from where he’s standing.

“Of all the people to visit,” I say, “why me? Or is it more like you’ve got some list and I’m pit stop number whatever.”

“You’re the one who wanted to be psychic,” Bruce says. Now he’s laughing at me. “Look Rose, I’m sorry I made up that story. I’m not really dead.”

“You promise?”

“Oh yeah, for sure, though the thing about my name
is
true. What actually happened was after I left your place I tried to shop
lift some breakfast from a gas station candy rack but the cashier saw me and there happened to be a cop nearby and when they searched me they found some other stuff I didn’t tell you about, and now I’m in county lockup, two towns over, and even though you’re not a psychic, it turns out that I am. I’m visiting you via astral projection, which sort of makes my body look like it’s having a low-grade seizure on my cot, not that anyone’s checking. Anyway, I’ve come to tell you I accidentally left my iPod in your car and I’d really like to get it back, though I guess they won’t let me have it while I’m in here so I don’t really know what to say.”

I give the ghost my phone number. If he ever calls I’ll know this wasn’t a dream.

“Thanks, Rose,” he says. “You were really good to me.”

“And yet you left without so much as good-bye.”

“Rose, don’t make this about Steven.”

“I didn’t tell you about Steven.”

“Yeah but ghosts know everything.”

“But you’re not really a ghost, right?”

“Well, I’ve got the psychic thing going for me too, now. It’s complicated. Look, I didn’t ask for any of this.”

I remember now how young Bruce is, ghost or no, psychic or no. And I’m not calling him goddamn Malachi. “Nobody asks for anything,” I tell him. “Every day of your life is getting something you never asked for.”

I wake up and my mouth feels like it’s stuffed with old wool. It’s dark, but I don’t know what time it is.

Late or early.

The phone’s ringing. That’s what woke me.

Bruce?…Steven?…Jack, actually. Worried, I’m sure, or maybe just a bit put out, since we haven’t touched base in a few days.

I wait until the ringing stops. When it does, I shut down the phone. It chirps out its little good-bye song.

The problem is now I’m awake.

I put the TV on and some all-movies all-the-time channel is showing
Touch of Evil
. Commercial-free, no less. (Lottery tickets.) It’s at one of the parts where Janet Leigh is alone in the room at the motel in the middle of nowhere.

Instead of drawing obvious parallels, I take the longest shower you can imagine. Hottest, too. I leave the bathroom light off but the door open and the TV on. Marlene Dietrich tells Orson Welles his future is all used up.

I turn my face into the stream and feel the drops beating against my eyelids like rain on windows. I open my mouth and let it fill with water and swallow and then do it again. I shut the water off, wrap myself in a towel, sit down on the edge of the still-made bed, and watch the rest of the movie. It’s the last scene, where Charlton Heston is walking through the river, holding the tape recorder up to keep it dry and then Orson Welles hears his own recorded voice echoing off the stone arches of the bridge, then the big shootout.

Dietrich again: “What does it matter what you say about people?”

She has all the best lines in this movie.

“But I didn’t tell you the last part yet,” I say to Jack.

“Okay,” he says, “hang on real quick while I load the drier.” It’s Tuesday night. We’re back at his place after a nice dinner, and it’s looking like I’ll stay over. There are some things I left here on another occasion that I can wear to work tomorrow. Jack tossed my items in with some laundry of his own, so they’ll be fresh and clean.

I’m telling him all about my weekend away, except for a few things about Bruce that I don’t tell.

“Okay,” he says when he returns from the other room.

“Okay,” I say, and give him back his spot on the couch so I can snuggle up to him once he’s settled. “So I’m on the way back home.

“I don’t really need to stop but I guess I just want to. It feels more like a trip when you do, and otherwise the drive isn’t that long. I’m sipping on a strawberry soda I bought from the machine at the rest pavilion, sitting on a picnic table—not on the bench at the table, but actually on the tabletop itself, with my feet on the bench.

“Maybe ten feet away there’s another picnic table. They’re both poured concrete, gray, with dried bird shit and old graffiti and everything on them. Anyway I’m alone at my table but this other one’s full. A whole family. Mom, dad, three kids, plus another adult. An aunt I guess, mom’s sister or else dad’s. That’s what I decide while I’m watching them. Oh, and also that one of the kids is hers, though I can’t tell which. They’re all six of them eating sandwiches and spooning out chicken salad and potato salad from these plastic containers,
passing things around, eating cubes of watermelon from a big Tupperware. It’s warmer off the coast, but still pretty chilly. They’re all in jackets and sweaters, having this kind of summer picnic while dressed for fall in the middle of this cold spring, and I think that’s part of why I like watching them. They’re apple-cheeked but getting through it. Nobody is even complaining that I can see.

“Now the one woman is wiping the kids off and loading them back into the family minivan, which looks like a rental. The man is helping, so I decide he must be that one’s husband. The other woman is cleaning up the lunch things all alone. She stacks up the dirty paper plates, gathers up the plastic utensils and puts them on top of that stack, then pops the lids back on the containers of food.

“The garbage cans are up at the pavilion, so she has to walk past my table. I’m finishing my strawberry soda, holding it straight up to get the last of it. She pauses before me. I put the can down on the table.

“‘You want some chicken salad, ma’am?’ she asks me. ‘There’s quite a bit left over.’

“I’m looking at her, silent, like I’m thinking, and I am, but what I’m thinking isn’t about her at all. I’m thinking to myself that when I get back on the road I can either go back to my life or I can turn out of the rest stop into the northbound lane of traffic and just go. I know you don’t like hearing it but it’s true, that’s what I was thinking. There are so many places I’ve never even seen.

“‘It won’t keep,’ she says. ‘We’re not taking it with us. It will go to waste.’

“It actually looks like good chicken salad, and I
am
hungry, having left the beach late that morning without eating first. All I have in me is strawberry soda.

“‘I saw you watching us,’ she says. ‘We’re good, clean people and I know this is what you want.’

“And she’s right, but I still don’t move to take the food. I don’t know what it is, and I guess I’ll wonder about it for a long time. I mean, I’m not scared of germs, strangers, or anything. So why can’t I let myself say yes?”

+

Summer, 2004

+

I loosen my grip on Andrea’s neck and tell her, If you were with me I’d only hurt you when you wanted me to and she says, Then what would be the point? Her voice is a shred. She clenches around me like a raised fist when I cut her air supply again.

A different day:

I’m thinking about that song “Debaser” by the Pixies and repeating the chorus under my breath while I work—“debaser, debaser, DEBASER, debaser”—which I guess doesn’t sound like much, but you’ve got to imagine it the way I do, which is with a melody.

Or that’s what I hear whenever Brendan walks into the store. Chords fill the air, ooze like oil from a slab of deli meat. It isn’t like angels singing and little pink hearts floating around my head or whatever. It’s more like I’m imagining his theme music. We both hate the classic rock that 101.9 plays, but it’s the only station our crappy radio gets. And that’s a lame thing to hate, probably, but it’s what we have in common, and it is good, finally, just to pass minutes with music—any kind—because in silence you fall out of time. No. It’s the other way. You don’t fall out, you fall in. You get stuck, like running through a field and you twist your ankle on a rock. And you just lay there.

So he walks in at the start of his shift while I’m pumping the meat slicer and sort of thinking about him. He’s in the mix, let’s say. The slicer is converting a length of capicola—long as my arm and nearly thick as both of his—into sandwich-ready slices of the same.

I’m pumping the meat slicer with my right arm, catching the paper-thin rounds of capicola in my left hand—both hands gloved—and tossing the slices with measured gestures. Flicks of the wrist. Each little disc into one of three piles. The boss calls them stacks, but that’s because when he does this it all stacks neatly. When I do it there is a mess and when I’m finished the slices of meat make tall zigzagging decks that sway like skyscrapers and need to be straightened before they can be wrapped in clear plastic and put away in the cooler. The decks get shuffled smooth and perfect, like
the space of skin between Brendan’s navel and the waist of his skater pants. He’s maddening, constantly adjusting himself or stretching his arms all the way up so the bottom of his shirt pulls up, his pants slung so low, the better part of his boxers is exposed, but even the underwear doesn’t go any higher than his pale bony hips. How old is he? It almost doesn’t matter. He’ll look fifteen until he’s thirty.

Leaving work:

Maybe I’m whistling that song again. Down the street a little ways a man standing at a collapsible table is signing people up for credit cards, offering tee shirts and cheap Walkmans as a signing bonus, wincing in the relentless sun, mopping his forehead with a hairy forearm. I scribble gibberish on the form and take my little radio. He calls out to me that I didn’t show him a driver’s license, or something else he needs to verify something else. And also that I took his good blue pen. I ignore him and cross the street.

My thing:

I like to read out loud. I know
Story of the Eye
practically by heart but fuck that because holding the book is what’s so good. It starts to get heavier in your hands as you work up to the moment when it is time to put it down. This isn’t a fetish like I can’t live without it. I just mean that it’s so good. The words fill you like water and they reach deep into you like a surgeon would. And nobody loves it like Andrea does. With nothing but Bataille between us I picture our minds over-
bleeding like the heart of a Venn diagram. I could pin Andrea with a phrase if I chose carefully enough, but that would compromise my favorite conception of her—as a shifting mystery that dances and rings like a wealth of glass, shattering. She’s my Simone. That is, when she’s not off somewhere with goddamn motherfucking Will.

At the library:

I stake out a back corner with
Heart of Darkness
and my new Walkman. It has those little buds that go right in your ear. I thumb through the wavelengths, past the classic rock, over now to AM, searching for Rumsfeld.
And this also, said Marlow suddenly, has been one of the dark places of the earth.
I guess the juxtaposition is heavy-handed, but whatever.

I can’t find Rumsfeld, but some radio personality is reading a list of the atrocities depicted in the photos that have surfaced, in the videos and other photos that are as yet only rumored. Images of horror, and their clinically disinterested annotations, fly across wires and airwaves; the electronic pulses and micropulses like the steady beat of flapping wings, and I imagine storks bearing the names of unnamed methods, dropping each into the fore of the mind where it lingers for just a moment
like jewels flashing in the night of time
(thus Conrad) or
a world where gestures have no carrying power, like voices in a space that is absolutely soundless
(thus Bataille).

I flip to the end pages of the book, the blank part, fish the credit man’s pen from my jeans pocket, and start to copy down the list as I hear it: these are the activities with which
the poor or underachieving tiers of my graduating class have lately been, in the name of God and country, filling their days:

“And even if these allegations are true,” the radio personality says, “what people need to understand is that we are in a
war
right now, and
that
means that certain—uh—exceptions must be” and I sort of zone out for a while. “Let’s take some calls,” he says later, and people either agree or disagree with him.

So the end pages are scrawled solid. This documentation will sit sight unseen, lost in a long row of classics, like the factory-sealed deli meats when they sit at the back of the cooler until we need them or they go bad first but we try to use them anyway. This book, I see, has not been checked out in years, and whoever bothered with it on June 7, 1988, left no mark in the text to indicate if it left him with an opinion, feeling, impres
sion, or sense. I know that just means he is a good public citizen, respectful of the library, but I wish instead he’d left a note or tagged a signature, anything to bridge the gulf of years.

But on the other hand the list isn’t like unique or really original. I’ve seen worse stuff in movies.
The dreams of men, the seeds of commonwealths, the germs of empires
;
the horror and despair in so much bloody flesh, nauseating in part, and in part very beautiful, and what greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth!
It kind of kills me to think about too much.
The fascination of the abomination—you know.
But I have changes of heart sometimes.
Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.
Suddenly short of breath as I imagine someone discovering my list and them imagining me and what I was thinking as I scribbled. If they could even know, somehow.
I have never had any aptitude for what is known as striking a pose.
Or maybe I’m not ashamed; just really careful. I check the book out and take it home, not intending to ever bring it back.

Some night:

We’re messing around and she starts wishing aloud that we had some rope to play with. I think my belt, the braided kind, can suffice. She makes fun of my idea. A couple loops and twists later there she is, wrists bound behind her, tits stuck thrust forward. She’s surprised, pleased; shakes them a little. I leave her underwear on and knock her around some, watching it darken.

I flip her on her back and wave my cock in her face. “No,” she says, “not in this bed, my boyfriend was just in this bed.” That’s part of it, I guess. I untie her after a while. She’s finishing me off. I’m on my back, she’s got a hand on my cock more or less like you’d hold a joystick. In my head I’m sort of flashing on some video games I’ve played. When the jizz arcs, some splatters the wall. “Goddamnit,” she says, then: “Well, you wrecked your fucking shirt, too.”

Once more with feeling, one of us says, and the other thinks this is just so funny.

My walk home:

When it’s very cold and I hock up and spit a good one there’s this blast of condensed breath that explodes out like a wintry comet behind the launch of saliva and phlegm and I think of what I think tracer bullet trails look like—every fifth round—and how it would be to have a gun that fired tracers, or a reason to have a gun that fired tracers. Yeah, that’s it, what I’m really after: not the gun, but the reason for having it. But right now it isn’t even cold so I guess I’m imagining that part too, and just spitting.

A different day:

Brendan is doubled over, laughing or pretending to laugh. Waving his arms around. Some theatrical skater bullshit. He puts gloves on, makes a joke about the meat slicer.

Today we are the bookends of a four-person operation,
five if you include the girl who works the register, who is hot and mostly ignores us. We both notice when she looks over our way. She takes the orders and the money and a cigarette break every twenty-five minutes. Someone else toasts the bread and applies the meat and cheese I’ve sliced, another adds the vegetables or whatever else. Jalapeños and honey mustard; low-fat mayonnaise or that orange shit that goes on a Reuben. Brendan wraps them when they’re finished, stuffs each in a to-go bag with a slice of pickle wrapped in crinkly waxed paper. What this all translates to is that he and I don’t talk much. We are the poles of the production line, separated by the length and specifics of the gourmet sandwich gestation process. Have you had your way today? With who?

Meanwhile:

In Abu Ghraib, which is a dirty building somewhere in a desert, there are former AT RISKs once condemned by every guidance counselor. The grandchildren of immigrants who had the anarchism beaten out of them by cops in Chicago. Ambivalent patriots and even some true believers. And they’ve all been given loaded weapons and the keys to small rooms containing people that, as a matter of policy, they must learn to hate or else they already do.

I work and I work and I stare at this whirling blade and I think about everything while I slice the

—Ham

Which is roughly the shape of a loaf of bread, though wider and heavier and longer and pink as a boiled baby and is 11 percent water and comes wrapped in this plastic with a red crisscross design on it and when you slice it open a stream of orange-gray liquid spills out and then you pull the whole wrapping off and it makes a wet
huck
noise and a little more liquid spills into the stainless steel washbasin and the blade goes
whir-whir
when you start it up and you have to figure out what’s the good number to set the slicer to so that the meat slices are each three-quarters of an ounce.
(Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet)
and

—Turkey Breast

I think of that one soldier, the girl, with the cig on her lip and that smile (thumbs-up!) and I can’t help but think if she is so evil or lucky or something else I can’t imagine and how the turkey breast is roughly the size and weight of a bowling ball that has been squashed a bit—ovalish—it has a brown skin to simulate having been oven-roasted and it is 15 percent water and when you cut the plastic off the liquid spills out golden-brown and then you need to stick it in the freezer for a while so the water in it freezes
(for the first time I saw her “pink and dark” flesh cooling)
because if you cut it while it’s warm the water will run right out of it and leave minuscule paths and caverns through the wide pale center of the shiny wet bird-ball so that when you run it
whiz-whiz-whiz
over the blade it will make slices that fall into your waiting medical-gloved hand as streamers of turkey-ribbon or small piles of turkey-rags because it, like everything, loses coherence in the aftermath of losing essential waters
attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture
and okay duh it’s not like the Iraqis at Abu Ghraib were the first people in history to find themselves naked at the wrong end of a dog leash and

—Roast Beef