Nothing Is Terrible (18 page)

“What do you do if you get cold?”

“There are places in the tristate area like my father’s house and other places that the Manhattan survivalist knows of.”

“You’re quite the arrogant bastard, aren’t you?”

“I’ve got your icy hands against my chest and you’re being mean again.”

“I apologize. I don’t always know when I’m doing it.” This was true. I still don’t always know when I’m doing it. Who among us is always cognizant of her own aggression? Are you? Come on, be honest,
are
you? If you are, you should write a memoir of
your
life, and you can call it
I Am Always Cognizant of My Own Aggression
by Reader Dearie.

“Would you please take me to one of those places you know about?” I said to Mittler. “Maybe one that’s really nearby?”

He took me to a building on East Second Street, which had been condemned but which Mittler and several other Manhattan
survivalists inhabited nonetheless. The door of the building was made of steel and badly painted the color of rust. Someone had soldered a strip of jagged metal to the bottom of the door, so when Mittler pushed the door open the piece of metal made an earsplitting screech as it scraped along the cement floor of the entrance hallway. “This is our burglar alarm,” Mittler said. Two skinny and nearly identical white people regarded us from the landing of the stairs to the left of the door. They went away. We climbed two flights of stairs, walked down a decrepit hall, and stood in front of another badly painted door that was sealed with a combination padlock. Mittler undid the lock and opened the door, revealing an orange tent. The tent took up almost the whole room that contained it. It was nearly big enough to stand up in. Four people could sit inside it cross-legged on stained, tan foam-rubber squares that were not covered with cloth. Along one wall were four tightly rolled tubes of colored blankets or blanketlike material. There were two space heaters that were powered, I later learned, with electricity that the people in the building were siphoning from either the government or a large corporation, depending on who was telling you about it.

“How often do you come here?”

“I live here during the winter mostly, and during the summer I come from time to time to show solidarity. Want some tea?”

“Yes.”

He squeezed water into a pot from a soft gallon-size leather canteen and pushed down over and over on the plastic pump of the fuel tank that was attached to his camping stove. He lit the stove.

“Why Scarsdale?” I said.

“What?”

“You said you had to go to Scarsdale to get the fuel because it’s illegal in New York City.”

“I didn’t think you were listening.”

“My question is why not Yonkers or Mount Vernon?”

“Because Chet who you saw for a second who was the blond guy on the stairs who is recovering from dysentery right now has a dad who doesn’t talk to him who owns a camping store in Scarsdale but his sister will talk to him who works for the dad in the store and she will agree to meet him at the Scarsdale train station or sometimes at a pizza place with the dad’s car with the fuel in the trunk of the car. Chet thinks he got the dysentery from being very weak from lugging the fuel from the pizza place back to the train station because it lowered his immune system plus having to go to the exact town where his father is not talking to him.”

“You’re opening up,” I said.

Mittler left the tent. I thought that meant he was closing back down again. I was so attuned to the ways people had of closing down that sometimes when people opened up I thought they were just closing down in disguise.

“Why the tent?” I asked when he returned.

“For the orange-colored light, because the orange range of the light-frequency spectrum is the most peaceful.”

“How come everyone in the world has knowledge of things like that except me?”

“Two things. Reading and living.”

“I read and live.”

“What do you read?”

“Poems, lately.”

“Do you live the poems?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“I know you don’t live them because you’re not nice.”

“So, I’ve read poems with people in them who aren’t nice.”

“But if you know they’re not nice in the poem, you shouldn’t act like them in real life. That’s what I’m talking about.”

“Mittler?”

“What?”

“I want to have sex with you again. Do you want to?”

“No.”

I jumped on him, as was my tendency, and knocked over the camping stove and the pot of boiling water. Mittler threw me off of him and shut off the valve of the camping stove. The knee of his stiff, dark-blue jeans was darker with water. The first thing he said was, “Lucky this tent is made of flame-retardant material.” The second was, “You hurt me again. This time on my leg.” The floor of the tent was soaking wet. He took me to another room of the condemned building where there were no space heaters. The room was long and narrow and empty and bright, and very very cold. Mittler took off his wet pants. He stood there in his briefs, looking out the window. The skin on the side and back of his right knee was stained bright red where the boiling water had burned him after I tried to have sex with him. Also there were goose bumps on his skin. I felt that it would have been nice if I ever got to kiss the burned skin but I didn’t think I was going to get to. “Do you want me to leave now and never come back?” I said.

“No.”

“What do you want me to do?”

After he had looked out the window for a while longer he turned toward me and extended his muscular arms in front of his torso as if about to do a front handspring. He encircled me lightly with his arms and whispered in my ear, “You’re trying to
be nice.” He walked down to the other end of the room and stood with his back against the wall in the Malcolm X position. I paced the short width of the room near the door. It got darker. Mittler shivered. That was how we passed the next little while.

I think it might be giving reality too much credit to say that Hoving Harrington Hartman drifted in and out of it, but when he stood wearing one of his daughter’s long, dark, masculine aprons in the kitchen in the twilight as if prepared for my return from Mittler’s condemned building and said, “I made brownies for you to eat after a difficult day,” I feared the brownies. Who knows what he was really doing while perceiving himself to have been making brownies? He could have cooked his own feces, for all I knew. You think I’m joking, reader.

“Sit,” he said. I sat. “Love is mysterious,” he said, putting a plate of the dark brown pastries in front of me, along with a glass of cold milk. “Drink the milk. Milk is the mother.”

I took a sip. “Have you seen Skip Hartman today?” I asked.

“Who?”

“September.”

“No.”

Even more than his daughter, Hoving could not be trusted to mean what you thought he meant. He tended to get
no
and
yes
mixed up. He sat down across the table from me with a cup of hot water and sighed. He grasped a large brownie and jammed the entire thing into his mouth. It took him a while to moisten and soften it with his saliva and, with his tongue and the roof of his mouth, press it down to a shape and size he could start to chew. During this time he stared at me and I listened to the air whistling in and out of his nostrils. Once he
started chewing, he tried to smile at me with his misshapen teeth, of which there were about half the number that his daughter had, but by all counts she had an unusually high number. With half the brownie down his gullet he said again, “Love is mysterious. As you get older, your understanding increases, but so does the amount of pain you must endure, so it may seem as if you are standing still.” Hoving gagged and spat a small spheroid gob of wet brownie onto the kitchen floor. “Go on,” he said, “have a brownie.”

“How do I know it’s really a brownie?”

“Flour, egg, milk, bittersweet chocolate, sugar, vanilla, baking soda, walnuts, salt. Have one.”

“Not hungry.”

“Today you are defeated by love. You are listless. Tomorrow, you will understand something that you do not understand today, and the pain will be less. You will kiss and feel pleasure again. For now, have a brownie.”

“Don’t want to.”

“I see that you are too sad to eat a brownie. Go to your room.”

I went.

For the next five nights Skip Hartman slept away from home and did not return in the day. I called Joe and Ruella and Tommy and Myra and everyone I knew to ask if they had heard from her. They all said they had not and I thought they were lying.

I was afraid to leave the house. I believed Skip Hartman was waiting around the corner for me to leave. When I left she would come in and change the locks on the front door and put all my things on the sidewalk. She would fold all my things—my
T-shirts and pants and things—into perfectly square piles and place them on the sidewalk, and she would line up my shoes along the wrought-iron fence on the sidewalk next to the clothes. She would place my books—the books she had given me, the important books she thought I needed to own, though she owned most of them in first edition—in two piles: one pile of novels, one pile of poems. The novel pile would be Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë and Jane Austen and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Marguerite Duras. The poem pile would be William Carlos Williams and William Shakespeare and William Matthews and Wallace Stevens and Sharon Olds and W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore and Mary Oliver and Elizabeth Bishop. The books would all be wrapped in see-through plastic against the weather. So would all the clothes and the shoes. I thought of everything in the world that I owned. A moment later, I was done thinking of everything in the world that I owned. Could you own a person? I knew you could sell a person. Could you give a person away? What is the difference between losing a person and giving a person away? You could be sitting in your house not thinking of anything, I thought, and some people whom you thought you couldn’t lose could come up to you in your house and say, “Darling, we are going out for the evening,” and you could say, “Bye,” and you could give them a kiss, and unbeknownst to you, you are giving those people away with that kiss.

I did not leave the house for five days. I did not like Hoving Harrington Hartman and I avoided him, except when I was out of my mind with boredom, and then I would visit him in his bed in the living room, where he liked to remain, chattering to himself for most of the daylight hours. He had a remarkable sense of smell which, Skip claimed, made him the gifted gynecologist
he once had been. The noises Hoving made when he smelled beautiful things were like the noises other people make when someone does a nice thing to them sexually. I brought him a head of red leaf lettuce. He sat up in bed and sniffed it carefully. He peeled back a few leaves and sniffed beneath them. “This is what death will smell like,” he said.

Skip returned and pretended she did not know what she knew about Mittler and me, which meant that she walked around looking hard and fragile like a porcelain vase. She hardly spoke to me. I spread my books and clothes around all the rooms of the house. I hid some of my books behind her books. I made her read to me in the book room in the afternoon. I tried to sit in her lap when she read but she pushed me off. When she grabbed my body and pulled it toward her body each night in bed, it could not have been something she did of her own will.

As for Mittler, he and I played a complicated game over the next several months that went like this: I waited for him to contact me, and he did not contact me.

In the middle of March on the first warm morning of the year, I went down to the condemned building on East Second Street and tried the badly painted steel door. It was locked. I stood by the door in the sunlight. Clear water dripped from the roofs and fire escapes of all the buildings on the block. I stood for an hour in my running shoes. My toes went numb. I jogged up the block and back. Chet, the boy with dysentery, came walking down the street in mottled brown clothing. He was bone-thin. He smelled like molasses and horse manure.

“Chet,” I said.

“You’re making a face. Do I know you?”

“I’m Mittler’s friend.”

“Mittler doesn’t have friends.”

“How come you smell so bad?”

“It’s the dysentery. I can’t change my clothes.”

“Does Mittler still live here?”

“Maybe.”

“Is he in there now?”

“Maybe.”

“I love him.”

“The louder a lady proclaims her love, the more carefully you must inspect your pubic hair for crab lice after she leaves your mattress.”

“Who said that?”

Chet swiveled his head as if to locate the person who said it. He had fine, light hair that clung to his chalky scalp and neck.

“Could you check if Mittler’s in there?”

I think what was happening now was Chet was swooning. The skin on his face, a little viridian to begin with, turned green. His eyelids fluttered—have you noticed it’s the boys of the world who are naturally gifted with long eyelashes? He fell against the wall, which thumped a short gust of air from him. He leaned in a little twilight of dysentery. The way he practiced it, dysentery looked calm and voluptuous. The wall of the building was covered with guerrilla posters. The ambiguous poster Chet leaned on showed a man who, as best I could tell, had two anuses.

I put my hand in Chet’s damp, sticky pants pocket and retrieved a key. I draped one of Chet’s wan arms over my shoulders and opened the shrieking door of the condemned building. A person appeared on the landing who was basically the female Chet. The female Chet may or may not have had dysentery but resembled Chet and had, for all intents and purposes,
the same hair as Chet and the same unwashed body as Chet enshrouded in the same limp garments as Chet’s. I said, “I am helping Chet.”

“Put him on the bottom stair,” she directed from the landing. I did, and there we all were for a moment: Chet crumpled on the bottom stair; lady Chet in the dim light on the top stair, hands on hips, ethereal and thin; and I, wondering how much energy it would take to get past lady Chet. I moved first, slowly. The girl stared at me, swaying slightly; her eyes did not protrude so much as her face receded on all sides of her eyes. I stopped one stair below her. “No guests unaccompanied by a resident,” she recited, as if in a trance.