Upright Beasts (12 page)

Perhaps I'm projecting.

Let's just say that he felt detached from everything. He had walked by every storefront a thousand times. The dishes at his favorite restaurants had turned into the bland, familiar taste of our mother's microwave specials. He wanted to see flat plains with horizons dotted with nothing except the occasional dinky town nestled in the dust.

I read the e-mail from my mother on my phone while I was naked and urinating. “Foster made it to Colorado,” it said. “I don't think he's had a real meal in days. Can you call him? I'm worried.” I was feeling tired and drained myself. I had just finished making love to my girlfriend, who had made us stop halfway through and started tearing up. She wouldn't tell me what was wrong, and then suddenly she stopped crying, stood up, and said she wanted to switch to doggy style. I asked if she was sure. We finished that way, without being able to see the other's face, and afterwards she crawled on top of me, laughing.

Nearly thirty straight hours of driving. I know there are people who can bend pieces of metal with their bare hands or live in a glass box without food for weeks. I'm not saying it's worth writing up in the newspaper, but it does make you wonder if you can ever really know a person.

4.

Five things Foster noticed on his speed tour of the United States:

a) The way Kansas is shaped, a flatness bent only by the horizon, makes it impossible not to feel alone.

b)
When you emerge from the highway woods, the first sign of civilization is always a large green water tower. What do these towers do? Neither he nor I could think of any instance of them ever being used. Perhaps they weren't even full anymore, just old relics left as a reminder of leaner days.

c) The image of an orange sun slowly rising over the blue mountains of Appalachia, which my brother pulled over to photograph only an hour into his trip, has the exact unreality of an early color film.

d) The number of small mammals that survive off tourist scraps at rest stops could form an army large enough to conquer Chicago.

e) The subtle changes in fast-food architecture, especially the fake adobe walls of burger chains in the Southwest, are ripe for a postmodern cultural studies thesis—“Capitalist Simulacra in Regional Restaurant Chains” or some such. Perhaps I'll pitch a blog post about it someday.

5.

It was late at night and Foster had crossed the Mississippi River into a new state. He pulled the car into the bright parking lot of a midwestern McDonald's.

His legs felt as if they were tingling with
TV
static. The position of his body while driving had dug his belt into the veins of his legs for hours, cutting his circulation down to a dead man's. He limped around the parking lot to try to shake the blood back down. A couple walked by, chatting and checking their paper bag for their extra order of fries.

The streetlamps above the parking lot and the light pouring
from the glass windows were so bright, and the surrounding woods and road so dark, that the McDonald's felt like some oasis in a desert of night. You could imagine wild beasts roaming the edges of the forest, held back by a fear of the torchlike M.

Foster walked inside and went straight for the bathroom. He pissed for thirty seconds and washed his hands with a squirt of pink liquid. He had to hit the faucet button three times.

Even at this hour, there were people ahead of him in line: a couple holding each other around their waists and two teenagers talking loudly about the shapes of their boyfriends' privates.

Foster was a man of routine, part of the reason this drive was proving something about himself to himself, so he already knew his order. The cashier looked half-asleep as she punched in the different orders with fingernails that had been painted the yellow and red of the chain's logo.

Foster calculated the miles he had left to go. It seemed to him he was living a version of the American dream, staking out a new life for himself in a land miles from home. Sure, he was probably less likely to die of dysentery than travelers on the Oregon Trail, but the principle was the same.

He had two hundred dollars in his wallet and a few more in the bank.

It was his turn, and he stepped up and glanced again at the various options. He already knew what he was getting, but it was some kind of reflex. Perhaps he just didn't like looking random cashiers in the eye.

“I'll take the number six combo,” he said. “With a regular Coke and large fries.”

“Didn't you hear what I was saying?” the cashier said.

“What?” Foster said. Now he glanced at her. She was thin and sickly looking. Her uniform visor was turned stylishly
off-center. She gave an annoyed sigh and gestured at the teenagers, who were squirting ketchup from a hooked tube.

“No more burgers,” she said. “They got the last meat!”

6.

I want to expand on something I said earlier about not knowing exactly why my brother left. Sometimes I say this to people, especially women who are strapping their bras back on, and they think it means my brother and I don't get along, or that family isn't important to me. We get along quite well. When we get together, we talk about new movies or old books, but we don't pry open our rib cages and poke at what's inside. I visit him and my parents a few times a year. The big holidays mostly.

You can lose touch with people pretty quickly this way. I remember my first girlfriend, at least the first one I'd count as real, meaning we had sex and saw each other more often than a monthly dance. Her name was Vanessa Chance, and we'd first kissed below the bleachers of a homecoming game. When the school year ended, Vanessa went away to summer camp in another state. She sent me a letter that said, “You're so far away, it's hard to believe you still exist.” By that time her face was already starting to turn fuzzy in my memory. We broke up two weeks before the start of tenth grade.

7.

Foster passed the man in the chicken suit every time he drove to town. Foster didn't have a job exactly. He'd worked long hours on the fly rail of a local theater to save up for his temporary escape. He was now living in an apartment he had secured on Craigslist before he drove west. His plan was to photograph all the dusty, crumbling old mines. If the photos turned out well, he would try to get a gallery to display the series alongside
an artist's statement about loss, forgetfulness, and the decline of American industry. Mostly, like everyone I knew, he just wanted to pretend he was doing something with his life.

The man in the chicken suit was the first thing Foster saw every morning before getting his coffee. The man made a real impression on him. Perhaps he simply seemed so bright and absurd in the middle of this forgotten town of half-empty buildings and abandoned mines.

I wish I could say that Foster caught the man urinating behind a tree on the side of the road or with his foam head resting on a bench as he rolled strikes at a local bowling alley, but it never happened. The man just danced sluggishly on the strip of gravel on the side of the road.

Perhaps it was a woman in there or a different man each day. You couldn't tell.

8.

The town in Colorado was called Victor. I remember looking it up on Wikipedia before flying out there, and the town's population was under five hundred in the last census. I can't remember if it was named after a man named Victor or merely the concept of triumph.

9.

I was pretending to be a writer at the time, bumming around New York on meager savings, attending literary parties for free cheese cubes and sour wine. Not that things have changed on that account, beyond the cheese getting softer and the wine more delicately poured. The point is that it wasn't hard for me to make the time to visit him. I told myself it counted as research for a novel I'd been outlining over and over without ever starting.

I booked an aisle seat, so I could go to the bathroom without stumbling over some sleeping stranger. When the plane took off, the man next to me, who had the exact same haircut as my father, asked me if I wouldn't mind holding his hand until we leveled off.

“What?”

“It's just something I always do,” he said. “Makes me feel calm. Normally my wife does it, but she couldn't make this trip.” I didn't respond, and he started to tear up. “She has cancer,” he added.

The man was balding and had a large gray mustache draped over his lip. I held his hand, which was surprisingly smooth and warm, as it would have made me feel petty and embarrassed to deny him. But I looked angrily away and imagined the nasty things I should have said to him instead.

10.

“Look,” Foster said. “Right there!”

He swung the tan Camry onto the main road. The car's floor was littered with trash. I even found a petrified taco clunking around its cardboard box. It annoyed me, because the car had been my car. It was my college graduation present for my pointless degree, and I'd left it at home when I moved to the city. It wasn't worth the hassle up there. In my absence, my brother had moved in with his fast-food wrappers and Talking Heads CDs and made it his.

“Just like you said.”

I turned my head in time to see the yellow blur of the man in his chicken costume. He seemed to be looking into the car at us, and I gave him a wave.

“Isn't that kind of crazy?” Foster said. “He can't be happy doing that, can he?”

11.

There wasn't a lot to do in town, and I was glad my flight was in only two days. Most of the shops sold knickknacks of the town's glory days, although how glorious those days ever were seemed up for debate.

The main things in town were the old gold mines. They were these huge jagged holes appearing suddenly off the road, like deep wounds in the land. Foster took me to three of his favorites. Each had rickety and abandoned buildings hanging over the edge of the pits. One was red, another sky blue, and the third may have once been white but now was sullied into a dusty brown. I suppose these were the buildings where the pounds of rocks had been crushed to rubble and the shiny bits separated from the dirt.

“These are really something. Can we go down in them?” We were standing over the pit by the blue building.

“Probably not a good idea,” my brother said. “But we could sneak up there, maybe.”

We climbed up the tower attached to the blue building. There were some dust-coated milk crates we used as seats. I couldn't see any gold glinting in the old rocks below. My brother locked a zoom lens on his camera and starting clicking away at the evergreens that dotted the hill rising beyond the pit. I halfheartedly sketched out a story idea, but mostly I sat there and tried to decide about my relationship with the woman back home or figure out if the decision had already been made for me. Every once in a while, a small bird would fly onto the railing, notice us, and flitter off again.

“It's really peaceful up here, right?” Foster said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I see how someone could get used to this.”

12.

“How are you doing? In life and stuff?” I was saying. There were only seven other people in the sports bar.

“Pretty good, I guess.” Foster finished chewing his bite of burger. “You know, I feel like I'll give myself a few years to see if the photography takes off. If not, maybe I'll go to law school. I've been doing a little
LSAT
preparation already.”

We finished up, and I covered the tab. It seemed like the older brother thing to do.

Walking back to the car, I saw a dark blue Ford pickup with the bright yellow chicken costume leaning against the passenger-side window. It was just the body. There was a deep black hole where the head should have been.

“Holy shit, Foster,” I said, elbowing him.

We walked over and looked in through the window. The head was on the floor next to a large water bottle. It was made of bright yellow foam spray-painted with white and black for the eyes. Someone had drawn two phalluses on the dirt of the pickup's back window.

“Do you think he was eating at the bar with us?”

We went back inside and ordered another round of beers. Suddenly there was excitement in the stale bar air. We looked around. Other than the family of four eating in the corner, there were three men at the bar. They were all looking at different sports games on the overhead TVs. There was a skinny guy in a flannel shirt watching baseball, a clean-shaven teenager glued to hockey, and a slightly overweight bearded man following a golf tournament.

“With how small this town is, everyone must know the guy as the chicken suit guy,” Foster whispered. “Imagine every person you pass knowing this horrible detail about you.”

“Must be hell to hit on girls,” I said. “Or men,” I added.

When one of the men looked our way, we quickly shifted our eyes to the
TV
screens.

“I bet it's the beardo,” I said.

We watched him eat a hot wing with surprising daintiness.
Afterwards, he carefully cleaned his fingers on a napkin. He had a small mountain of used napkins and sucked-bare bones in front of him.

“Let's go say something.”