Home Land

by Sam Lipsyte

  “I should remember. That’s the thing. I want to be involved in your lives. Or I think I do. But then, really, when I look into my heart, I’d rather be on the driving range, or getting drunk, or my wick dipped. Is this shocking you?”

  “Some nights,” I said, “I picture myself naked, covered in napalm, running down the street. But then it’s not napalm. It’s apple butter. And it’s not a street. It’s my mother.”

  “Right,” said Fontana. “I knew I could talk to you. I read your file. You’re one of those not uncommon cases. You don’t really fit into any category. You’re pretty bright, but no student. You hate jocks but you do appreciate a good sporting event. You deplore violence, except against the state. You can probably scrap okay, too. You’re sort of bitter, but beyond the more stupid varieties of rage. You think of pussy all the time. Not just pussy. Breasts. Butts. Even the occasional schlong. It’s all a flesh swarm in your mind. You think you’d like to be some kind of artist, but you have no idea what that means, and you’re afraid you’re too dumb, which could be true.”

  “That’s in my file?”

  “No, just scores and grades. Extracurriculars, tardies. The rest is extrapolation. Professional guesswork. How am I doing?”

  “Perfect score. Were you like me in high school?”

  “No, not at all. In fact, I think I’m more like you now.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Our ages are not our ages, you know? Adolescence, post-adolescence, it’s not just a matter of body hair. They’re philosophical positions. I wrote a thesis about this once. Sort of. Didn’t finish. Should have finished. Goddamnit, Miner, most of these kids at school here, I hate them. They’re all phonies. I want to rebel against them. They don’t understand me. How do I connect with them?”

  “You can’t.”

  “That’s what I thought. There’s no way, really. And really, it’s not my fucking job. My job is to make sure you go to class. That you don’t blow dope on school grounds. Speaking of which, I know about the maintenance shed. Stay the hell away from there.”

  “Copy that.”

  “What’s with the jargon? The argot? Are you crestfallen you don’t have a war? A police action? Something muddy and devastating? Some absurd carnage you can hang your disaffection on?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Do you know how idiotic that is? How horrible napalm is? Or was? Or is?”

  “Sir, I do, sir.”

  “Your father, he owns that catering hall, the Moonbeam, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Nice place.”

  “We’re proud of it.”

  “Oh, are we? That’s good to hear. Now go to class.”

  “I have a free.”

  “I took you from your free? I’m sorry for that.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “You can tell people what we talked about. I don’t give a damn. I’d rather you didn’t, but it’s your call.”

  “I think I’ll leave it here.”

  “A wise and generous decision.”

  Gary was still waiting by the juice machine.

  “What happened?” he said.

  “The maintenance shed is a no go.”

  “Shit,” said Gary.

  POINT BEING, Catamounts, I could write reams on my former confidant Fontana. But he’s a different man now. He’s not that tender teen trapped in a slack duffer’s body whose misery once spoke to us so. His stewardship of the Notes has warped him somehow, and now my updates will languish unread unless I can muster all the cunning muzzled voices require.

  Allegory, parable, fable, these are the smuggle ships of freedom, the cigarette boats of daring ideas. I speak of tales too countless to enumerate, about yard dogs, for instance, or independently minded sandpipers, which may appear, at first glance, fanciful, if not a bit opaque, but which upon further reflection reveal themselves to be songs of fierce resistance, or blueprints for revolt.

  This being the case, allow me to close my update with a little story. It means nothing, not a damn thing, wink, wink. Don’t read too much into it, Principal Fontana, capice?

  It’s just a simple tale, a mere folk legend, for the kids:

  Once there was a little girl who owned a little mouse named Teabag. He lived in a large metal cage in her room. This little girl loved Teabag with all her heart, loved to stroke his tiny head with her finger as she fed him crumbs of Camembert cheese, which is pretty pricey, even in mouse portions, especially for a child on a fixed allowance of seventy-three cents a week.

  Then one day the girl got cancer. Her father, a doctor, administered the chemo immediately, but it was too late. She died that day. There was so much to do between all his weeping and grieving, so many arrangements to make—flowers, a titanium casket, a suitable poem—it was a while before the father remembered Teabag at all. The poor mouse had been weeping, too, going hungry in his cage. The girl had left no instructions for his care.

  Nothing for it now, the father thought. He was a busy man, this doctor, much in demand. Rich people depended on his barbiturate prescriptions. He took Teabag’s cage to the sidewalk, raised the metal door.

  “Good-bye, little fellow,” he said.

  Teabag wandered the neighborhood. The bigness of things was ever so frightening, all those bicycle wheels and curb grates and trash pails, the awful percussion of shoes, those pounding wing tips, high-tops, boots, not to mention the singles bars and how do you talk to women, anyway?

  Teabag found an upended paper cup near the minimart, scurried inside. There in the cool dark of the cup he squeaked out the name of the dead girl again and again, licked at flecks of coffee dried on the walls of his ready-made cave. The flecks made him nervous. He had a sad nervous hole in his heart. Now, suddenly, he felt himself being lifted upward. His paper shelter swiveled in midair. Teabag gazed into a pair of eyes the color of stale filberts, slivers of which the little girl had also fed him on occasion. The face around the eyes was bathed in blood.

  “I’m Fontaine,” said the face through its viscous red web. “Why do you weep, little mouse?”

  Teabag started to tell this creature Fontaine about the little girl, her father, the Camembert, the chemo.

  “Stop!” said Fontaine. “I don’t want to hear it!”

  “But it’s all true,” said Teabag. “It’s what happened to me.”

  “That’s not the point,” said Fontaine. “It’s not celebratory, see? It’s too negative. It’s even kind of sick. Chemo? Camembert? It makes no sense!”

  Whereupon Fontaine squeezed the paper cup. Mouse guts squirted to the pavement. Our poor hero was now but a smear of fur, even the grief pinched out of him.

  Well, Catamounts, I hope you enjoyed my little “meaningless” story.

  Tell it to the tots. They’re brighter and braver than you may care to believe.

  A Sort of Forlorn Smirk

  FELINES OF THE EAST, I rejoice to announce the birth of a spanking new bank balance, courtesy of Penny Bettis at the cola outfit. The check was cut last week and now I’ve got a cupboard full of noodles, reasonable wattage in every room. Is this perhaps what it’s like for some of you more respectable Catamounts, with your pension plans and golden parasails, that sense of sated languor, as though Fate, suddenly, and without solicitation, had offered up her stippled shins for your tongue’s worship?

  Not too shabby.

  This must be how our very own Phil Douglas feels. Philly Boy, congratulations on your continued success at Willoughby and Stern. You’ve always been a persistent guy, Phil, a real plugger, whether the task at hand was to find a hole in rival Nearmont’s vaunted line or a fag to bash after the Friday night game. Though not the most talented athlete at Eastern Valley (this honor obviously belongs to varsity deity Mikey Saladin) you were always the most brutal and adamantine of Catamounts, an avatar of the jock warrior code, if you will, which I’m sure you will.

  I’m also fairly certain at least a few of our contemporari
es shared my fantasy of cornering you in Eastern Valley’s dank shower room and firing a hollowpoint round into your skull. We could picture the startlement in your eyes, the suck and flop of your dead-before-it-hits-the-floor body hitting the floor, your brain meat chunked, running out on rivulets of soapy water across the scummed tiles, clogging up that rusted drain the school board never saw fit to replace. Your pecker would be puny with death.

  We’d never do such a thing, of course, not like those suburban murder squads of today, those peach-fuzz assassins in mail-order dusters who lay down suppressing fire in cafeterias. I remember watching TV with Gary during one recent standoff, that magnet school in Maryland where those dodgeball refugees exacted payback with Glocks and grenades. SWAT teams scoped for headshots while the TV shrinks railed against video games.

  “Video games?” said Gary, fingered the carb of his bong. “Try school!”

  We’d ordered in fish tacos. We were watching the horror, as one anchorman put it, unfold.

  “Fuckers did it,” said Gary. “I mean, I don’t condone what they did, ultimately, but, ultimately, they did it.”

  “Totally, ultimately,” I said.

  “Balls to the wall, baby!” said Gary, let go with a war whoop, or maybe a war gargle. All the old salty agony.

  “Captain Thorazine,” I said. “Good to have you back, sir.”

  “Teabag, son,” said the Captain, “lock and load.

  But our vengeance by proxy vaporized in an instant. Some correspondent hunkered near the bike rack delivered the news via video phone: The duster boys had killed the only black kid in the school, called him the N-Word, Nigger, too, shot him in the gut.

  “No!” said Gary. “No! No!”

  “God, no!” I said. “God, God! No, No!”

  “They ruined it!” said Gary. “Why did they have to be racists? The bastards ruined it!”

  The bastards did ruin it. Their pure hate was tainted now. We pine for avengers. We get bigots, thugs. Only love survives contamination, Catamounts. (Man, if I’d had this on paper at the aphorism slam in Toronto … )

  So, Phil, my dear Mister Philly Douglas of Willoughby and Stern, locker room sadist, source of my very nickname (another time, alums, another time), please don’t worry about my tender little shower murder fantasy. We who may share it never posed a threat. We have no weapons, no nerve. We’re gentle rejects.

  BESIDES, good Catamounts, I’m getting on with my life, getting to the brunt of it. Today I woke early, near noon, brewed some coffee in my mother’s antique Silex, watched a tiny bird outside my window dance a little dance on the air-conditioning unit. I felt a great communion with this creature, hummingbird, sparrow, whatever the fuck it was. What we both have is today, I thought, until we smack into deck-door glass, or fall from the sky twisted up with some avian virus.

  The milk was bad but I poured it in my coffee anyway.

  Make do. Like the Donner party.

  I’ve been doing a bit of toilet reading about those people-eaters. I keep a little shelf of books about history’s horrors in the can. A few pages on the ravages of pox, or the cruelty of Pizarro, I’m steeled for the day.

  This morning a din came through the bathroom wall—stabs of noise, the sound of human laughter. Those kid neighbors Kyle and Jared were on another speed binge. One of them, Kyle, I think, told me they were grad students, though there isn’t any college nearby. They grind it out past dawn a good deal, their rants growing shriller by the hour: the birth of combustion, the chromosomal makeup of chimpanzees, the reason for rainbows, war. I don’t mind. Kids must coddle their excitements. Soon enough the normies have you surrounded. It’s all barricades, bullhorns. Come out, come out with your wonder abated.

  Now the laughter came softer through the wall. The sun was maybe funny to these fellows. I could picture the ashtrays, heaped, the smeared mirror in daylight. Fly high, babies! Guts aflame, beak-smash looming, fly baby birdies, fly!

  A sudden fatigue fell over me. Sudden fatigue syndrome?

  I put myself down for a nap.

  I’ve always been a peaceless sleeper, not to mention a bully in the rack. I used to shove Gwendolyn around, snatch pillows out from under her head. I had no idea I was doing it. One night, maybe dreaming of dragons, I socked her in the nose.

  “You fuck!” said Gwendolyn, switched on the lamp. “What are you doing?”

  Blood had gathered in the lovely groove above her lip.

  “I have no idea, baby!” I said.

  Somnambulistic innocence only takes you so far. People get fed up. Gwendolyn got fed up. She’d laid out so many reasons she was leaving I figured there was probably only one: the brute I become in slumber.

  Maybe it’s punishment for past sins, or else I just nap too much, but I’ve been having a tough time falling asleep these days. Those car alarms out on the boulevard don’t help. That whine, that wail, tripped by the merest graze. Touch me and I’ll scream. I swear, I’ll fucking scream.

  Dusk and I’m up again, take cold coffee to my desk. My computer snoozes with ease, the bastard, but when I set my mug down with too much force the monitor pops into brightness. What hath God wrought? I am become death, destroyer of worlds. Show balloons?

  My dear sweet Doctor Ryson, why Principal Fontana feels compelled to forward my updates to you even as he refuses to publish them is a question best left to psychoanalysis, but I do appreciate how you’ve taken time out of your busy schedule performing unnecessary hysterectomies to get in touch. I’ll copy out your letter here for the enjoyment of curious Valley Kitties:

  Dear Mr. Lewis Miner:

  Though I can’t say I remember you from our Eastern Valley days, I can conclude, after perusing the material Principal Fontana sent me in my capacity as former President of the Student Body and current President of the Alumni Association, I’m rather relieved I don’t. You see, Mr. Miner, you strike me as a lonely, misanthropic man whose worldview has been considerably narrowed by Fear and Insecurity. Have you ever traveled, ever loved, ever experienced excitement, ever done anything kind for anyone? Perhaps if you had you wouldn’t be so quick to brag about your autoerotic activities and the images which fuel them. You’d know that there are real women attached to your pathetic fantasies, real women with real feelings, real families, real dreams. I’m not here to legislate desire, of course, and far be it from me to tell people what they should do with their bodies in the privacy of their own minds, but I do wish to impart to you the pain you’ve caused others, or would have caused others had Principal Fontana not been wise enough to refrain from publishing your material in Catamount Notes.

  I hope you’ll take this in the right spirit, Mr. Miner. Though, as I mentioned, I have absolutely no recollection of you from our high school years, Principal Fontana assures me you were a classmate of mine, and I remain optimistic you will someday develop into a decent, giving member of our Catamount community.

  Sincerely,

  Stacy Ryson, MD

  Very savvy, Stacy. I must admit, I didn’t realize when I accepted your campaign pencil all those years ago you’d be elected President for Life. A pity I wasn’t notified. I’d been under the impression Eastern Valley was a democracy. Serves me right, I guess. I never took those advanced civics classes, or any kind of honors course at all.

  Maybe that’s why you don’t remember me. Allow me to offer you a refresher course on the subject of Lewis Miner, that pale anxious fellow perched a few seats behind you during four years of homeroom. Probably you were too absorbed in those last minute emendations to your assignments to ever notice me, but there’s a chance you heard my name read aloud one of the seven or eight hundred times attendance was taken by Ms. Tabor.

  Or else perhaps you recall the occasion you fainted at the water fountain in corridor C? I certainly won’t forget it, how you took that dainty sip, so careful not to let your lips touch spout, the way your bulging knapsack swung back as you straightened and seemed to fling you like a stuffed doll, which you somehow resembled i
n your penny loafers and sailor’s shirt.

  But physics did not fly you tileward, Stacy. Biology did the job. I’d seen the tremors in your hands, the glittering devastation in your eyes. (Were you eating enough? Sleeping at all?) Yes, others were more intimately involved with your rescue that day, but just for the record, it was yours truly who suggested someone send word to the nurse’s station. Let this also stand in the official log: how our eyes met with such guarded and lovely meaning as they wheeled you away on the gurney.

  God, I worried for you, Stacy, which I’m certain I mentioned a few weeks later when I asked you to the Halloween Dance. You replied that though you volunteered after school to work with the demented, you made it your policy not to date them. That was quite a quip, Stacy. It made me admire you all the more, so much, in fact, that I went home and masturbated with a giant bread bag on my head, nearly died. My poor father found me gasping for breath in the basement. He ripped away the suffocating sheath but then his fingernails, dirty from fixing the toilet, cut my face, resulting in a terrible infection.

  So let’s not play the pain game, Stace. My guess is there’s more than enough to go around.

  Have I loved? I’ve loved. Witness the aforementioned Gwendolyn. I’ve liked with serious gusto, too. Need I name names, Catamount names? With apologies to the following for violating their privacy, try these on for size: Sarah Chin (kissing, baring of torsos) Denise Gray (fondled, fingered), Sharon Roland (heavy and/or genital petting) Bethany Applebaum (all and sundry).

  Bethany, I guess we were what folks in more superficially innocent epochs called sweethearts. We popped each other’s cherries down the shore after the prom, both of us gooned on Sambuca while that motel TV filled the room with game show. Neither of us, as I recall, deserved a prize.

  Where have you been hiding yourself, Bethany? Last I heard you’d gone off to Cornell, that fancy college renowned for its wooded suicide ravine. You did send me a letter from school, notarized by Jeanine, your resident dorm counselor, concerning my jerkhood. Maybe your points were valid, Bethany, but, really, we never had that much in common, not enough to warrant the assassination of my tape deck with your nail file when I dumped you on the drive back from the shore.