Futureproof (13 page)

March

I'm seeing Richard—my bio-dad—this week for only the second time ever. I'd never actually seen his face until I was in ninth grade because after they split up, my mother had thrown away every picture, discarded every remnant of his existence. Regardless of his mystique, despite the fact that he was in every way a phantom, I still maintained fantasies that he was a fighter pilot or a knight, somebody who would one day come roaring up in a cloud of dust and lower his mighty redheaded vengeance on Victor.

Black-haired, black-hearted Victor resents my and Jonas' red hair, perhaps more than anything else about us. He's always referring to us as my mother's “little golden-haired boys.” Our hair is a constant testament. It clangs around in Victor's head, rings the story of my mother's previous attachments to the world.

I came out of my room that day when I was fifteen and there he was, my
real
father, kneeling on the hardwood in the foyer with my little brother. Jonas looked up at me and grinned as big as I'd ever seen him grin. And even though I had never seen this man before in my life, I knew it was him. His hair was red, just like ours. And, like ours, it was curled in thick tangles. I'd been holding out hope that Richard was like McMurphy from Kesey's
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
: fiery-haired, full of life, a guy that stuck it to The Man. But aside from hair color, the man in the foyer couldn't have been further from McMurphy. Despite his height, 6'3" or 6'4", his presence seemed somehow diminutive. He was barely there. I could feel his bones beneath his shirt as we hugged. My dreams of one day growing out of this body and into a Charles Atlas type were crushed like a ninety-eight-pound weakling at the beach. That day realities were permanently altered. The father I had imagined would be ready to raise his children. Ready to save the day. I knew as soon as I saw him that this guy couldn't save shit. He had the look of someone worn down long ago, a ghost of something real.

Jonas was only about thirteen then, and he was a lot more willing to let bygones be than I was. Part of me wanted to punch dear old dad in the face. Who the hell was he, after all? I was only just meeting him for the first time, the man who was responsible for half my gene pool. Beyond that, it was good to finally know what the old man looked like, I guess. Everybody said I favored him, but I didn't see it.

We zipped around Atlanta on the MARTA train, just the three of us. We ate pizza and ice cream and rode a glass elevator up the side of a building. I kept catching Jonas looking at him out of the corner of my eye. We could have looked at him all day.

We traded
Saturday Night Live
anecdotes. “Remember the one when…” type stuff. He laughed like I did, at the same parts, and
I wanted to love him just for that reason alone. But I couldn't. He'd been gone for too long.

And now he is back again.

We're meeting him at the airport. Jonas and Andie are with me when he comes out of the gate. His hair is all grown out and frizzy. He looks just like he did in that picture he gave us the first time we met, the one where he's at the tennis court before Jonas was born. He looks more tired now though.

He hugs Jonas and me, compliments me on the dreads. I can tell he's trying to relate and it annoys me.
See, even our hair is similar!
When we get to the car he asks if we know where to pick up a bag of “grass.” Jonas pulls one from his pocket. We toke up going down the highway.

We spend the next four days at Andie's smoking a lot of weed and laughing at dumb shit. When we turn in for the night I get all stoned and introspective, in light of the current situation. A guy travels nine hundred miles to see his estranged sons. They spend the whole time smoking up. It makes no fucking sense. Father is reunited with children after years of separation. They get high together. I don't know. It's anticlimactic. Rick is turning into just another guy in the Rolodex. He no longer possesses the aura that the
idea
of him held before we actually met. He doesn't elicit any kind of real sentimentality out of me. He hangs out, smokes weed, enjoys a few drinks now and then, laughs about stuff, always uses a phone card when making long-distance calls, reenacts dialogue from old
Saturday Night Live
episodes, eats little, complains less, doesn't take sides in petty arguments, doesn't discriminate against minorities, remains politically left wing, laughs about stuff, tells of famous rock legends he's seen in concert (The Doors, Bob Dylan [three times], Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin), never pees on the seat, stays clean shaven, cleans up after himself in the kitchen, takes pictures with a Polaroid camera
he bought just for this occasion, always puts the toilet seat down, works in a record store back home in Philadelphia, never asks to borrow money, always pays his way when we stop for a burger, pays for me and Jonas to see a live band, argues (with spirit) over the top five bands and movies and TV shows of all time, laughs about stuff, smiles a lot, carries around a small backpack, gives no indication of mental aberration or abnormality, has never remarried since leaving our mother twenty years ago (though still lives with the same woman he left our mother for), doesn't understand why kids these days are so promiscuous because even in the hippie heyday of free love there weren't this many STDs and unplanned pregnancies, gives no indication of ever having been evil, presents no sign of ever having hated his children, presents no obstacle to probing questions regarding the past, posts no objection to drunken epithets hurled his way, offers no defense for past actions, stays upbeat, calls when he says he will, embraces warmly, laughs contagiously—and yet…as he waves from the airport hallway and then boards the plane, I know I don't know him.

Jonas and I stand there until he's out of sight, then head back to the parking lot before the plane takes off. Neither of us says anything. I turn up the stereo.

This is nothing.

This is what it feels to be in limbo.

And here is the final proof, this riding down a nondescript highway, listening to cheesy shit on the radio and crying about it. I look over at Jonas from the corner of my eye because God knows I don't want him to see me crying, and his head is turned to the passing traffic, and as we're flying past a semi I can, just for a moment, see his face reflected in the window and there are tears streaming down his cheeks.

The buildings flip past like shuffling cards.

April

We're tripping—Andie, Corey, and me. It's a rare
day-trip
, which comes with its own set of virtues.

We've just gotten back from the gas station, where it was unanimously voted that I'd be the one to go to the window to ask the attendant for a pack of gum, Wrigley's Spearmint, the Plen-T-Pack with the seventeen sticks. There's nothing better than gum when you're tripping.

I get up to the window and the lady says, “Can I help you?”

Only then do I fully realize the magnitude of the task before me. I'll never be able to get all the information out: “Wrigley's Spearmint Plen-T-Pack, please.”

So I'm just standing there and trying not to laugh and she's looking at me like I'm crazy and I can feel my eyes getting wider and
I can see the individual dust particles settling on the lenses, the air drying them out, tears beginning to form because I can't even bring myself to blink—

She asks me if I want something or am I just going to stand there. So I say, as concisely as possible, “Gum.”

“What kind?” she asks.

“Gum,” I say again.

She looks at me for a minute, sizes up the situation, decides she'll make it easy on us both, grabs a pack of Wrigley's Spearmint, of all things, and holds it up to the window. I nod my head. It isn't the big pack, but I'm excited because she randomly (intuitively?) reached for the kind we wanted.

We're all loudly, happily chewing away by the time we get back to the house. Andie suggests we watch the Nirvana
Unplugged
video that Corey taped a few days earlier off of MTV. He turns on the tube and is about to pop the tape into the VCR but Nirvana
Unplugged
is already playing on MTV.

“What a crazy coincidence,” Andie says.

As they go to commercial, one of the talking heads interrupts and solemnly says that if you haven't heard yet, Kurt Cobain has been found shot dead in his Seattle home. There is video of the electrician who happened upon Kurt's body and saw his suicide note lying in a flowerpot filled only with dirt, the pen stabbed through the paper.

That's it for the news, they say. We'll be back with any updates as soon as we get them, they say. Then
Unplugged
comes on again. We're sitting there on the couch. The name of the song they're playing now is “The Man Who Sold the World.”

I run out onto the back porch and let go. I can't stop crying. He was the belligerent front for all of our insecurities.

Andie comes up behind me, puts her arms around my waist and doesn't say anything. I am truly grateful for her at that moment, maybe for the first time ever.

We watch the constant MTV briefings for hours, the inevitable retrospectives, the professional analyses, the promptings to call this number if you feel like doing something to yourself because you are so very upset by this news. Then we get in the car, tripping and everything, and drive far south, into the country. The trees flicker in the breeze, the sun is warm.

It doesn't seem like this day should be any worse than any other. It's beautiful, really. Maybe that's the Acid. But what's missing is not readily apparent.

Andie holds my hand. Corey starts crying. The road sounds comforting under the wheels, the solidity of tires and speed.

When we get home the answering machine light is blinking two messages. The first message is from Andie's dad saying we need to pay the electric bill or he's going to let them turn it off next time they call asking for the money. The second message is Trizden. He's saying that Kurt Cobain
blew his fucking brains out.
He sounds angry. He can't ever let himself be sad. He can't ever be consumed.

“Looks like I need to find myself a new hero,” he concludes. As though by saying that he can undo all of this.

 

We play Nirvana all the time for the next two weeks straight, through all the vigils and the readings of his suicide note. Fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds are cutting themselves, scratching his name onto their arms with razor blades. It is in the midst of this when Andie announces that she hasn't had a period in weeks.

We go to Eckerd and I gank a pregnancy test. As we're waiting in the bathroom the allotted ten minutes, Andie sitting on the toilet, me leaning in the doorway, I already know what it's going to say. It has to be like this. She is going to be pregnant. She is going to be pregnant and we're going to be fucked because everything is upside down. The signs are all so fucking obvious. Nothing was ever going to be OK. Nothing ever was.

Andie holds the test stick up to the light.

“I'm pregnant,” she says, like she's reading a newspaper.

May

I get home from work exhausted, covered in heat rash and filled with anxiety. Every passing day, every passing minute, every second, there is a child growing larger and more incomprehensible inside Andie's belly.

Johnny wasn't too bad today at the job, seemed downright jolly by comparison to his typical self. And still, a child grows in Andie's belly.

This is never far from my mind.

Is there a difference between suffocating and smothering?

Andie sits around getting lazier and more psychotic. She's had employment a couple of times in the past two months, but her initiative always ends hours after she starts the job with her calling and begging me to come get her. “I can't do this,” she'll say, her voice tight. “I can't be around these people. I feel like
I'm going crazy.” The last time this happened she called from the side of the road more than seven miles from where I'd dropped her off for a telemarketing gig. She had no recollection of how she'd gotten there.

Something has to change.

I tell Andie that I will help her pay for an abortion, that I will take care of it within the next couple of weeks. She agrees to the plan.

We call to schedule the appointment. I hand her the receiver when they answer the phone at the clinic.

I tell her that I'm moving back home with my parents and taking Sativa the cat with me.
I'm moving back in with my parents
, if that's any indication of how bad things have gotten. Because she's always sleeping when I get home from work. She sleeps all day and then stays up smoking weed and watching TV long after I go to bed and I've pretty much gotten sick of having to clean the house and make my own dinner while being the only one bringing in any money.

I went to Trizden the Animal Mother first, of course, but he wouldn't have any part in helping me. He doesn't want to get involved again.

The last thing we do before I leave is divide up the socks. We always wash our socks together and then throw them into a drawer and wear them indiscriminately until they're all dirty again.

We dump out the basket on the coffee table and take turns picking.

“Is this really necessary?” Andie says.

“It is if you want any of the socks.”

“Don't you care about me anymore?”

“Of course I care about you. What's that have to do with the socks?”

“I don't want you to leave.”

“It will be better when I leave. Then we won't always be up each other's ass and wanting to kill each other.”

She starts to cry again. “It just feels like this is the end,” she says.

“Why does it feel like the end?” I try to sound compassionate, human.

“Because you're taking half the socks.”

We look at each other for a moment and then we're both laughing through tears. I can't help it. I'm crying, too. I pull her close to me.

“If you want I'll just buy some new ones,” I offer.

“No. Just promise you'll always bring our socks back together.”

“I promise.”

 

Living back home is not as bad as I thought it would be. Victor leaves me alone, for the most part. He actually had a job for a while there, painting for a large contracting company. But then he fell off of a forty-foot scaffold into an empty swimming pool and fucked his legs up. Now he's waiting for the insurance settlement to come through, the one that'll make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. And even if he's still not working for his family, at least he had to physically fuck his body up for the free money that's about to come their way. That gives me slight consolation.

Victor's a lot happier now than I ever remember him. He knows it's only a matter of time before he is compensated for his injuries. He stares at TV most of the day in the front room and sometimes I go sit in there with him, watch the news. There has been all kinds of coverage about some new occurrence of genocide in Africa. The footage shows black people chasing after and killing other black people, including women and children. They have no guns. It is all done with axes and machetes. The reporter says that the estimated death toll is 800,000 in two months.

“Fucking stupid niggers,” Victor says. “They kill themselves if you let 'em.”

“Why doesn't anybody stop them from doing this shit?” I say to nobody in particular.

“Fuck 'em,” Victor says.

A man is being interviewed with an interpreter. He says he and two of his children barely escaped with their lives, that his wife and five other children were all murdered. He says a man who was one of the town leaders was married to a woman who was part of the targeted minority ethnic group. The leader, in order to set an example for all the others, brought his wife and children out one by one and decapitated them, each in turn, with a machete.

“I knew then we had to flee,” the man says. “But it was too late. By the time I got back to my home, they were all dead. Only the children I had with me, my two eldest sons and I, managed to escape.”

He does not cry as he says this. He has probably told the story a thousand times now, has probably told it so many times it almost seems like it hasn't actually happened to him, like he is simply recounting a terrible dream.

He brushes a fly from his forehead.

 

It's dark when I arrive. I told Andie I'd stay with her the night before the procedure.

“I'm nervous,” she says.

“I am too, but this is for the best.”

“I know.” We're both whispering.

“I mean, we're just kids ourselves. We can't be responsible for another human being. You know?”

“I know.”

I'm stroking her hair in the dim Christmas lights of our—
her
—room.

“If we had a baby now it would ruin our lives. We wouldn't be able to do anything. We'd be stuck doing bullshit work, living in run-down neighborhoods, becoming fat and worthless. And how can we offer a child anything when we haven't got anything ourselves, right?”

“You're right.”

“Why do you seem so upset, then?”

“I don't know.” She leans on her elbow facing me. “I'm just scared. I don't know if it's going to hurt. Or hurt the baby.”

“It won't hurt it. The doctor said you're only five or six weeks along. He said it's only the size of a nickel or a quarter. I'm sure it won't be able to feel anything. It won't even know it ever existed.”

“Yeah. But
I
will.” She shakes her head, slumps back down on the bed, rolls over to face the wall.

“It's going to be OK.” I rub her arm.

“Do you love me?” she asks, trying to choke back sobs.

“Yes, I do. And I'll be with you through this whole thing.” She pulls my hand over her face. Her tears are hot and wet on my palm and fingers.

 

We drive past the gray-brick clinic once before I turn around and go back down the alley to the parking lot behind the building. I am surprised to see that there are no protestors outside. My biggest fear about this whole thing has been that there would be all kinds of crazy-ass religious zealots wielding picket signs and spitting at us, maybe even a nutcase with a shotgun. But there's not another human being in sight. Must be the political off-season.

“Are you sure it's open?” Andie asks as we climb the stairs to the entrance. I pull on the door and it swings wide. The inside is clean, with a black and white tile floor, but it has the same kind of gray pallor hanging over it that the outside of the building emits. Andie squeezes my hand.

A nurse behind the desk leads us back to a room furnished only by a metal chair with padding on the seat, a table with stirrups, and an odd contraption in the corner that looks like a miniature washing machine.

The nurse looks only at Andie as she speaks.

“I hope you had a chance to read over the pamphlet, but in case
you didn't, I will quickly go over the procedure you are about to have. If you have any questions, I'll be glad to answer them then, OK?”

Andie starts to say something but it gets tangled in her mouth. She clears her throat and tries again. “OK,” she whispers.

“The procedure you are about to have is called
vacuum aspiration.
”

She points to the machine in the corner and Andie sits down, still squeezing my hand.

“With this machine, the doctor will quickly, in five to ten minutes, empty your uterus. But first I will need you to get up on this table—”

Andie stands up to get on the table.

“Not yet, darling, just let me finish telling you what is going to happen with the procedure and then you can get up there.” The nurse smiles at her with a gentle tilt of the head and continues talking.

“I'll need you to get up on this table and let me inject your cervix with a numbing agent. This numbing agent will allow us to insert a plastic…”

I look down at Andie as the nurse performs her speech and I can see that she is closing down now, I can see it in her eyes. She is ready to go through with this. She is closing everything out, shutting down emotionally and in every other way. She will do what they tell her to do.

“…It creates suction to remove the uterine contents. Again, the entire procedure should take less than ten minutes to complete. Do you have any questions?”

I look at Andie. She is staring at the table.

“OK, then let me get you to put on this gown. Take off your pants and underwear and I'll be back in a moment.”

Neither of us speaks. The only sound in the room is the rustling of Andie's jeans and the tinkling of piano whispered through the overhead speaker. She climbs up on the table and lies back, holds her arm across her eyes.

The nurse returns minutes later with a tray on a cart.

“Let me get you to put your feet in the stirrups, honey.”

She snaps on some white latex gloves pulled from a dispenser above the machine, then takes a large syringe from the tray.

“Just let your knees fall to the sides, sweetie. It's easier on both of us that way.”

Her face disappears beneath the gown. Andie squeezes my hand, winces in pain.

“It's OK, you're doing fine,” the nurse's voice says. She stands up, places the syringe back on the tray.

“We're going to let the anesthesia work for a few minutes,” she says, looking at Andie, “and then the doctor will be in to complete the procedure in just a little bit.” The indiscernible song playing over the intercom sounds louder now.

The doctor comes in, makes no eye contact with Andie or me, but gives a gruff acknowledgment with his back turned as he hooks a tube up to the machine.

“I need you to stay as still as you possibly can,” he says as he turns the contraption on.

It hums.

He is short and balding, wears glasses, has a pinched face. His forehead furrows and his breath whistles through his nose. He disappears under the gown and Andie squeezes my hand again and the sound from the machine seems to pick up in intensity.

Andie cries out, digs her nails into the meat between my thumb and forefinger.
“Oh, God,”
she cries, and I look down at her and she looks at me and there are tears streaming down her face. “It hurts,” she says.

“I need you to stay still,” the doctor says, the unmistakable tinge of impatience framing his voice.

“She says it hurts,” I tell him.

“Of course it hurts,” he says. “It will be over in just a few minutes.”

There is blood and other matter visible in the plastic tube as it makes its way back to the machine. I am crying now. We started this thing. We fucked each other all over her house, on the kitchen table, in the hallway, in the tub, on the bathroom sink, on the floor in front of the bathroom, on both couches. We never tried to keep this from happening.

My arm is numb from Andie's grip, blood slowly trickling down my hand to the fingertips.

And then it's over.

The doctor pulls the tube out, tells her to try to make herself comfortable, says that the nurse will be in shortly.

Andie convulses in tears, moaning, her body quivering. She wraps her torso around my arm, holds herself up on me.

“We killed our baby,” she sobs. “We killed our baby.”

The Muzak is playing loudly now, a song that I actually recognize but can't quite place because of the bastardized format. It's so loud it nearly drowns out the despair. And then I can tell it's “Angie.”

“We killed our baby,” she's whispering.

I don't say anything. I wipe my eyes and nose on my shirtsleeve.

 

On the way home I stop at Arby's to get Andie her favorite Jamoca shake.

She doesn't want it, she says.

I throw it out the window as we exit the parking lot and it splatters all over the trash can and sidewalk.

Our socks are back together by the end of the afternoon.