Four New Messages (6 page)

Freshly flowering bushes and trees went out of their ways to impress beauty on the youth—the scads of polished khaki kids stalking the kempt paths, groping in the topiary. A frisbee flew overhead. Birds high up enough resembled frisbees. Another class earning credit by punting at soccer. Extraneous jackets were laid out for impromptu picnics. Water bottles wafting clarifying alcohol. A girl smoked a cigarette wedged between her girlfriend’s toes.

She came out of Reading Freud PSY 23090, unbound from Green Hall and onto the green, headed toward Chancellor for a coffee. Did she want it iced? Indubitably. Anything to go with that? No that will be all. It was like a phrasebook come to life. What a terrifically executed textbook exchange, why thank you.

Emmanuelle wore mosquitoeye sunglasses, a tshirt whose logo read
Brand,
her skirt never showed lines, no underwear map.

While she waited for change her phone rang, she took the call (from friend R., poli sci major, public health minor, in the midst of a shaming crawl back from a date the night before with a 33 year old iBanker in the city), skimmed milk into her coffee and half a packet of artificial sweetener without bothering to stir.

At the testudinal traffic light she crossed.

College students driving adult cars, vehicles actually too fancy for any adult and perhaps better never driven. They drove them impulsively, alternately absent then reckless as if they already had jobs to get to.

Nassau Street laid the boundary of campus.

Em caffeinated while walking, hollowing her cheeks, pursing for suction then chatty again. Such oversize overactive labials. Let’s imagine the waves radiating from her phone—what if they were visible? what if they were colored by her mood? Rainbows, refractive rainbows. Wavelets of talk coursing through the air, coursing daily through our own ears and mouths and minds—yet we’re never privy to that talk. Or we’ll become privy only when it develops into tumors on the brain.

Retail gave purchase to the quieter suburban.

At a corner with a receptacle she stopped, sipped her last, tossed the coffee inside—not a trashcan but an empty newspaper vending machine.

The day was warming, still not warm enough for flipflops—Em’s thongs to soles athwack.

She took two more blocks then rounded the corner: Victorians—two floors, three floors—windows that hadn’t been cleaned in failed semesters, porches in a slump. Stoops stooped. The lawns diseased.

Em stopped to tuck phone between ear and shoulder, scratched in her handbag for keys.

Enver crossed the street and waited at the bottom of the stoop until Em turned the key in the lock then he took the stoop in two steps and once on the porch gave her a smile of glittering fillings.

She kept the door open for him with a flipflop. Thinking he was the roofer?

She was still on the phone but on hold. (Her friend’s banker date had called, the slut beeped over.)

Enver entered, held the door.

She had a teensy stud in the left naris, a diamond pimple.

He waited for her to check mail.

Yes? Em turned to say, flicking hair into a quote behind the uphoned ear.

Enver closed his eyes.

He couldn’t talk while looking at her sunglasses.

What do you want?

She flipped shut her phone.

He said, I want you to change your blogs—opening his eyes only after remembering what Marjorie had told him—I want you to take what you say on your blogs about Mono Man down.

Excuse me?

She dropped the coupons received to the vestibular rug.

And then, he said, to send email saying this was wrong and made up by you to everywhere also.

Also?

Linked, he was straining, posted.

That’s impossible! flipping open the maw of her phone, with hardbitten pink polish pressing three buttons then the most commodious, Send—and when she repeated, I want you to know how impossible that is! Enver knew she was stalling, for time, to call, the police.

He swiped at her phone, knocking it to fade its ring through the air as she kicked him with a flipper all gawky, sending her off balance—tricky this kicking in a skirt—and though he put out a hand and caught her before she fell, which must’ve been his attraction to her, which must’ve been his, he knew the word from the only other language he knew besides this minimal language and Albanian,
tendresse
(there was so much his brother didn’t know that came to light in court: he’d labored a full year in Marseille), with his other hand he made a fist and punched her, driving his knucks into her skull cradled by his hand.

From the floor the ringing continued.

A CCTV camera awning a deli two blocks east caught him on the run—add that to the testimony of Em’s neighbor, a spooked Korean grad student Enver thrashed past on the stoop, spilling the kid’s bachelor cold groceries: fruit and cereals, sprouts, soy yogurt.

Ludicrous to go back to campus—cameras, everywhere, had him everywhere, running between surveillances. Cutting between frames.

He was as big as a movie to the cops, who had him in custody within three hours (picked up hiding in a basement playpen at his cousin’s in Plainsboro).

At the Biergarten I paid for Mono’s beers then checked my phone. I’d missed a few calls, had a few messages. Parents, delete. My landlord wanting to make a final Prussian inspection of the premises once my duffels had been shipped then get my keys. Girls, including one Amsterdam video artist with whom I had one unfilmable night. Do not del. The more attractive waitress, the Turk, was attempting Russian with the Russian, saying their
do svidaniya.
A foosball careered across its tabled pitch. A slot machine clanked from the interior dank.

Mono said, Naomi.

She was Mono’s cousin on his mother’s side.

They hadn’t spoken in years—Mono had last seen Naomi at his mother’s grave—yet it was she who saved him.

Both sets of parents had emigrated together, had already settled into Jersey and Ph.D. programs by the time they were Mono and Naomi’s age, both had graduated together (1982), had bought their houses and had their children at the same time (Mono and Naomi were born the same month, 1984), bought their BBQs, bought their inground pools, opened their email accounts—Mono related the success of this parental relocation, especially successful when compared with ours.

Though Naomi, unlike Mono, was said to have matured.

She was to marry a man so incidental to even his own self let alone to this tale that his name shouldn’t be recorded—let’s have tact, let’s try for it.

About two months before Mono’s exploits went viral Naomi’s mother called to announce the nuptials and guilt him into being there—New York—the tacky boathouse in Central Park.

She jotted his address for a formal invitation, said, We’ll catch up at the ceremony.

Mentioning, There’s a girl I’d like to introduce you to. She’s a nurse. She looks like A. Jolie.

I’m excited, was all he could say.

She said goodbye with: I called your father for your number. Don’t worry, the Poz is not invited.

Poz
being Armenian.

Mono, who did not speak Armenian, knew it meant dickhead or equivalent.

Imagine gripping the back fat of that nurselet for the slow dances or having to replay the act behind his meme fame for his smuttier uncles in the bathrooms between the entrée and dessert—Mono didn’t want to go, but he had to go: he’d already RSVP’d.

Still he procrastinated, waited until the Friday before the event to ball his only suit into his backpack—the suit black crisp funereal, bought for his college interview—and drive out to find the drycleaner’s.

He remembered a cleaner’s adjacent to a tanning salon or ye olde historic sandwich shoppe.

Or else adjacent to both.

He didn’t google, wished to locate by memory alone.

An hour later returning, having stopped at a diner to park a reuben in his gut.

His suit would be ready only on Sunday, they opened at noon. He’d have to crawl into the suit in the car on the way to the bus or the train.

Out on the patio it’d become a clear summer night—not cloying anymore but breezy perfection—I couldn’t believe I had just a week of this left.

The smoke of our cigarettes the only clouds of the moon—closing time.

We were the only customers.

I wanted to offer Mono to pick up his suit, send it to him—airmail? or boat rate?

On me.

We haven’t been in touch.

Mono said:

Squadcars surrounded his building. He knew they were idling for him. For dealing, for whatever Marjorie Feyner had done—he didn’t know Em was in a coma until resettled abroad, his second night insomniac in Paris when he’d checked that life online at a café.

Circling back, circling the lot.

His backpack was slung over the back of the passenger seat and inside the pack was his passport, which clinched it (the last codex, his last account, those durable blue covers).

They could have his computer, have bed and bare walls. His password, his password for everything, was
sdrawkcab
(remember it “backwards”).

He drove his mother’s car to Newark International, abandoned it in Parking. He wasn’t in any databases yet. A ticket would be sold.

McDONALD’S

I’d been writing a story,
yet another shitblast of the hundreds I’ve begun only to crumple for ply (I’d never been blocked before, some blockage should’ve been good for me but), came to that part in the story and just—I just had to stop, it was ridiculous!

I came to the point I knew would come, the point that kept coming, the point where I’d have to say what I didn’t want to say, to say what I couldn’t—what had no place in, forget my story, I told my father, What I’m talking about has no place in my life!

What are you talking about? Dad asked and smiled retirement’s bridgework at being confronted by something as stunningly tedious as himself, probably—but himself fictionalized, as a fictional character—because I’m broke and so was wearing his clothing, also I have the beard he has because we both have weak chins. I’d come back to Jersey for the weekend to sleep without siren in my old ugly unrecognizable bedroom and fill up on homecooking.

I said, I can’t say the Word.

We were in the bedroom.

He sat on a chair across from me on the bed and sipped from a wineglass and stared.

I said, You’re trying to get me to say it.

The walls were white scuffed with recent paint slashes: color swatches my parents were considering for the bedroom’s repainting, assorted pastels and other near neutrals very much not me. The bed and chair were not mine but new. My hutch desk was gone along with the shelving, the room was being converted into a guestroom but—as Mom had strained to say over the phone that early Friday—I would always be welcome.

How can you tell me what happened without telling me what Word? Dad asked suddenly standing older and grayer and rounded goutish and taking his glass from the sill and tipsy but maybe his feet were asleep walked out of the room.

After dinner Mom disappeared sinkward to rinse and call back a friend who’d called interrupting stroganoff, while Dad and I stayed seated as if extra table legs and he said, Let’s try this again, so I told him the story:

I said, There’s this girl, we’ll start with her, I guess I have to describe her. She’s pretty? Dad asked, I said, I describe her as
tawny
(I wasn’t quite sure what that meant), with red hair dyed and two huge mouthsized eyes. She’s sexy? Dad asked and shot a look at Mom who was busy making a dietetic dessert sandwich of ear and phone and shoulder. I said, She’s like the girl next door to the girl next door, meaning she’s somewhat trashy but also covered entirely with blood, in the first scene she’s just bloody head to toe. Of course she is, Dad said (distracting himself with the bottle, he poured the last petit noir), but you can call the different sections of a book, scenes? I thought that term was just for the movies? I said, You can say scene about a book but if you say chapter about a film people will think you’re an asshole. Of course they would, Dad said then took a sip winking and by the time he’d replaced empty glass to tabletop the sink had stopped, the kitchen was empty and Mom was already upstairs, her laughter floating distantly and then disappeared, aerated into a higher hilarity—into the refrigerator’s hum, the run of the dishwasher, the clock’s compulsive perk.

She’s in the backseat bouncing, I said, that’s the opening: her body bloodied with a knife sticking out of it in the backseat being bounced between her seatback and the backs of the seatbacks in front of her— Wait, Dad asked, what the hell? I said, If he’s not careful on the next large preggers bump her corpse could tumble to the floor, falling atop the filthy mats, atop the sloppy wads of mats, to wedge between her seat and his recline.

His? Dad asked, I said, If he doesn’t slow down.

It’s night? Dad asked, I said, Yes or virtually, the sun’s gone down, moon’s gone halved, how’d you know? her body’s rolling and thumping.

What’s the night like? Dad asked, I said, It’s wet, the stoplights flash above like spotlights.

It’s green, a bright go green, the car’s being driven fast.

Slow down, Dad asked, who’s driving?

Her boyfriend.

Boyfriend?

Driving southwest, I said, away from the towns he’d grown up in, toward the towns she’d grown up in, poorer to rich, criminal to just criminally tame—quarter tank to Empty, burning last gas, he’s wasting time, he’s stalling.

Dad asked, What’s his name?

Blood’s pooling in the seams of the seats, blood’s puddling and the radio’s off but he turns it down anyway, that’s a good detail that he can’t stand all that noise, he’s turning the volume down, down, lower down, all this one paragraph he’s just lowering the volume.

Why’s he doing that? Dad asked, I said, It’s a circular motion like how you’re supposed to stab someone then diddle the wrist, tweaking the knob of the liver, the spleen.

That’s a good detail? Dad asked.

Neon sizzles past, neon sizzes,
zisses?
The windshield, in reflection, becomes signage. His throat burns, the boyfriend’s, “his hands are readied tense.”