The Gum Thief (27 page)

Until I met Bethany I was about as human as a box of discounted tax software. When Bethany accidentally started reading my stuff, suddenly I felt as if ... maybe creativity could save me, maybe I could invent a more desirable world. And maybe I could salvage something from all the crap and loss and pain and-and maybe I could become rich! And maybe ... well, all the typical wannabe's maybes.

The last few weeks haven't been my finest hour. I have Wayne and, once in a blue moon, Zoe.

I'll try to work on
Glove Pond.
To have true readers on my side makes all the difference. I couldn't do it on my own. Bear with me. Thanks for the food. It all gets eaten.

Roger

PS: By the way, Diana certainly never visited me at Staples.
If
you ever want to remove an actor from your life, simply tell them they can't act. Poof! They'll be gone, trust me.

Glove Pond

It
felt like a month had passed since Kyle and Brittany had arrived for dinner at the charming and gracious home of Steve and Gloria. The young couple no longer felt like the people they were when they arrived.

"What college does Kendall go to?" Brittany asked.

"Harvard," said Steve.

Gloria turned and almost spat at him.
"I
wanted him to go to Yale."
"If
you like Yale so much, Gloria, then tell me, what city is Yale located in?"

Gloria froze. "That's dirty pool. Nobody knows what city Yale's located in. It's its own place.
It
doesn't need a city."

"All you had to say was New Haven."
"I
knew
that. Not telling you the name of the city was my way of telling you how important I think Yale is."

A gleam came to Steve's eyes. "Out of curiosity, Gloria, do you know the name of the city where Harvard is located?"

"Don't be silly."

"Where, then?"

"Harvard is Harvard." She paused. "Why, we visited Kendall there a few weeks ago. Don't you remember?

We dropped off snacks and a box full of domestic

comforts."

The word "Kendall" brought Steve back to what passed for reality in the dining room. "Of course we did." Steve looked at Kyle and Brittany. "Kendall is an excellent student. We visit him regularly."

Kyle asked, "Are you sure you don't have
any
photos of Kendall?-Snapshots? JPEGs? Polaroids? High school yearbooks?"

"No," said Steve.

"Really?"

"None."

"They're all out being cleaned," said Gloria.

"Oh come
on,"
said Kyle. "You have to have photos somewhere."

"No," Steve said. "It's the latest thing-sending your photos out to be cleaned. Not only do they come back looking like new, but they're also arranged neatly in stylish new photo binders."

"That's ridiculous," said Kyle. "There has to be
something
here somewhere." "Say," said Steve. "You know what we
do
have is a large selection of Kendall's toys. We can show you those."

"Why would I want
to
look at toys?" Kyle asked.

"Don't move," said Gloria. "I'll be right back."

"Really, Gloria-you don't have to ..."

But Gloria scurried away to the basement, and Steve was hearty. "Kendall was a good child. He loved his toys. Scotch?"

Kyle looked at Brittany, who appeared far away. "Brit?"

"Oh-sorry. I was looking at the clock over there."

"Wretched things, clocks," said Steve. "Give me an hourglass or a sundial any day of the week."

From the basement came rattling noises, and Steve poured more Scotch for Kyle. He then looked at Brittany. "So tell me, how is life different with makeup covering your face all the time?"

"This?" Brittany put her hand to her cheek, massaged the tissue and looked at the resulting kabuki ovals on her fingertips. "I think I'm over makeup now," she said. "It protected me for a while, but it's like a magic spell. Once you lose faith in it, it's merely more junk in life."

Kyle gulped his Scotch.

Silence made Gloria's rattling in the basement more menacing. Steve said, "What's a JPEG? You used that word a few minutes back."

"AJPEG?" said Kyle. "It's an image you send around on computers."

"Why is it called a JPEG?"

Brittany said, "It's an acronym for Joint Photographics Experts Group."

"Thispegs, thatpegs-why
can't people be happy with a sepia-tinted daguerreotype? Ah, look, here comes Gloria with a comprehensive selection of young Kendall's toys."

From the basement's portal-a door over towards the kitchen-came a dreadful drumming sound that became higher in pitch as Gloria neared the dining room. With small beads of sweat percolating through the pancaked cosmetic stratas atop her brow, she staggered through the doorway and dumped a pile of
weatherworn plastic animals, pedal carts and miscellaneous outdoor toys. "There!" she said. "Kendall's toys. He exists."

Glove Pond:
Brittany

Brittany decided not to tell Kyle about the origins of Kendall's toys. Why bother? Steve and Gloria were eccentric, to say the least, but
nuts?
Maybe not. She certainly wondered how a child belonging to this couple might have turned out. The absence of Kendall photos was suspicious, but if Kendall had half a brain, he probably would have fled the nest at the first possible moment. Maybe he took his photos with him.

This makeup is annoying me.

Brittany remembered applying it up in Gloria's pink boudoir, remembered how strangely liberated she felt once she put it on-the way it allowed her to briefly reincarnate as someone new who wasn't so wrapped up in the world and its problems. But she was tiring of it now. It was a brief phase in her life; she already felt herself entering a new one.

Meanwhile, Steve and Gloria were going through "Kendall's" toys, one by one.

"Ah," said Steve. "Kendall's novelty scooter, emblazoned with a cartoon fish to help him roar out into the world." The fish was from Walt Disney's
Finding Nemo,
which would have made Kendall at most, twelve.

"Isn't this precious!" said Gloria, holding a thrashed yellow loop. "Kendall's favourite hula hoop!"

"He loved that hula hoop, didn't he?" said Steve with the zest of a teenager who's learned a new swear word. "Newfangled things. Took us all by surprise, they did." Steve looked at Brittany and Kyle, their brains rigorously calculating an estimate of Steve's age. "I'm kidding," Steve said. "I'm not
that
old."

Gloria pounced on a small Fisher-Price choo-choo train, stripped of its primary colours by too many winters and too much sun, its plastic palpably disintegrating. "Watch what happens when I run this along the floor," she said, falling to her knees on the Persian rug,
"It
makes this darling little toot-toot noise." The little choochoo train's beeps made it sound like it had emphysema. Gloria and Steve beamed like proud parents.

Extreme empty nest syndrome? Alcoholic psychosis?

Steve sat down on the floor as well, spilling a drop of Scotch on his pants. "Look at this!" he said. "A plastic puppy!"

"I'll be back in a moment," Brittany said. She fled to the guest bathroom, a dusty little place with one functioning light bulb. Kyle's first chapter was lying atop the cistern. She ran the water. The hot wasn't on, so she rinsed her face with cold water, then looked around for soap, finding only the vintage soap shards.

She scrubbed at her face and watched the residue vanish down the drain like milk until finally the water was clear. There were no guest towels. Under her breath she said, "No disrespect, Kyle," and used his first chapter to sluice the water from her skin.

Shaking her hands to hasten drying, she left the bathroom, grabbed her coat and went out the front door. "I'm just getting a bit of fresh air, guys. Back in a short while." She stepped out into what had become a night so cold it made the stars vibrate.

Bethany

Hey Roger,
Glove Pond
is back-thank you. And it was genius that you FedEx'ed it to me from your place. I think Mom's boss truly is going to shit nickels when he gets the FedEx bill, but so what. As Gloria says, art must come first. And it's funny to think that, during the night, it had to fly all the way to Kentucky or wherever first before coming back here.

I lost six pounds this week. Not bad. All these shifts and my gym membership are paying off royally, and I
don't
think it's bad or scary for me to take an interest in my body. I can become strong. I
can.
I can become something lean and cat-like, someone whom the world will look at and go,
Whoa, there's one ass-kicking wench.

I couldn't sleep last night and there was this old Stephen King movie on channel 62 in which almost everybody on a jumbo jet headed to Boston vanishes in midflight except for these six people who were asleep. So these six people wake up, and in the seats where all of the vanished passengers had been sitting was the clothing and shoes they'd been wearing. I suppose the director wanted us to think,
Ooh, their bodies left, but
only
their bodies. Everything that wasn't a part of their bodies stayed behind!
But this is total crap. What
would
be left behind if everything that was you vanished? The only thing that's truly
you
is cells containing your DNA. So that means everything that isn't a DNA-bearing cell would be left behind on the 747. So yes, there'd be clothing and shoes, but there'd also be dental fillings, breast implants, hair weaves, false eyelashes, porcelain veneers, makeup, contact lenses, nail polish, artificial hips, donated kidneys, artificial hearts, pacemakers, cologne, heart stents-and if you think about it further, all the non-DNA stuff from inside the body: undigested food, bacteria, viruses, prions, snot, earwax, piss and drugs. And then the last thing of all would be the water that keeps everything going-gallons of water, because water doesn't have any DNA in it. Saliva would be left behind too, except for shed skin cells from within the mouth. BTW, that's how they nailed the Unabomber: from shed mouth cells in the saliva he'd used to moisten the flaps of his bomb-loaded envelopes. I think even eggs and sperm would be left behind, because aren't they only half of a DNA strand searching for another half?

So back up in the jumbo jet there'd be 250 seats containing ugly puddles of soggy crap where there used to be people. Imagine the smell.

Let's go further. Forget what got left behind in the plane's seats-what would it be, then, that was actually taken
away
in this movie's rapture event-thingy? Some weird, completely dehydrated beef jerky thing? Maybe not even that-we'd be like pantyhose.