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for made-up men and women
Archaeology is destruction.
—archaeologists
PART I
ONLY THE STUPID CAN BE HAPPY
1
Stanley Arrives in Prague
The man who met me at the airport was made up. He wore concealer and low-key lipstick. On both hands, his fingernails had been lacquered in clear polish. I was meant to notice these unsubtle subtleties, which I did, and I was meant to feel dropped at the front door to a dark, deviant, and complicated mystery, which I didn’t.
“I am representative of your uncle,” he said, presenting me the key to the apartment.
He was stooped and saggy-faced, a man dragged all the way to the end of middle age. English sounded hairy in his mouth. He wore a black suit, shirt, and tie, but his sleeve cuffs were streaked with white chalk. The chalk, still powdery, poofed when he moved.
He held a poster-board sign that read:
STANLEY?
and included an impressionistic charcoal portrait of a figure that was meant to be me. No white chalk was in it. The way the face was arranged, it looked about to eat itself.
On the intercom a woman spoke in sternly bored Czech. We were standing near the exit, under the airport’s huge hangar-like ceiling. I felt sore and foul from the long flight. Around us, backpackers, traveling retirees, and businesspeople tapped out cigarettes on their way to the street, where they stopped to smoke, the gathered cloud looming up above them like a ledge full of gargoyles.
“We are thanking you,” said the man.
I took the key from his palm. He stared at me with an exaggerated indifference, as if he wanted me to suspect that he was masking spite, as if his goal, outside of key-delivery, was to make me think myself observant. There was a chance I’d seen him in Chicago sometime, slinking out of my uncle’s garage with the other artists. To tell them apart was tricky: their work was to change who they were.
He said, “Are you having question?”
My eyes adjusted to his face: its texture shifted, seeming caked and rubbery. He was maybe more made up than I’d thought. I imagined what it would be like to be him—a willing “representative of” my uncle, an adult who’d agreed to participate in another adult’s game of pretend—and what I found myself feeling, instead of pity, was disgust. There were many hateful things I could’ve said to this man. But if I said them, I might shout them, and if I shouted them, I might shove him. It would be the mess my uncle wanted. I put the key in my pocket.
“I won’t have questions,” I said.
He lowered the sign. His face jerked. “You will find yourself around?”
I left—I crossed the lobby, I went through the doors. Outside I paused in the smoker’s cloud to study my map. The urge to smoke was a stake in my chest. I breathed indulgently.
The made-up man watched me from inside the airport, acting like I couldn’t see him. He had put a hand to the glass. He was crying.
A bus took me to a tram that took me to the city center. It worked the way the guidebook said it would. From there I walked, and the closer I came to Old Town Square, the more the tourists, travelers, and citizens clotted up the cobblestoned streets and corners, stuck together with their separate languages. Buildings stacked on the centuries, each one older than the last. The streets narrowed and twisted. Through intersections I caught glimpses of the Square, its broad spaces, its mob, its murmur.
The alley that led to where my uncle had said the main door to the apartment was, though, I couldn’t find—I went up and down the same set of streets; I squeezed past the same sidewalk cafés and tour guide stands. The alley wasn’t where it should have been.
I widened my search, walking bigger boxes-within-boxes.
The streets re-straightened. Tourist spillage shrank. Locals strode into grocery stores and pharmacies, out of banks and boutiques. They plodded up to their apartments above storefronts. I paused at the open door to a butcher shop, where men and women waited in ordinary boredom. An old man paid for a package of hog guts, and a young woman motioned for a bigger hunk of pork, and a little boy kicked another little boy in the butt.
I didn’t want to, but I started to double back to the Square. At a corner that I thought I’d recognize, but didn’t, I stopped. I stood through several cycles of traffic lights. Citizens coursed by on foot, not speaking, and in cars and on scooters, not honking. I shifted my bag to my other shoulder.
More people passed, their faces firm.
I didn’t know what to say to myself: I was afraid.
A fashionable old woman came to a stop in front of me. She glared. I glared back. She looked like the sort of old woman who completed every task on her own, who maintained her solidity through an unreflective commitment to routine. My being there had bent that routine.
She spoke Czech. Her voice was loud and wet.
I told her, in Czech, that I didn’t speak Czech, did she speak English?
The light changed again. She snatched my arm and made me help her cross the street, scolding me, shaming me, and at the opposite corner she tried to tug me off-course, her way. I blushed. When I wriggled my arm free, she raised her voice.
People slowed to watch.
She poked me in the chest, yelling now. Her hands had a pickled stink.
A young mother carrying a kid in a body-sling intervened.
The two spoke. The kid squirmed to get a look at my face. He was mustached in snot.
The young mother squinted at me and said something.
I asked her if she spoke English.
“She is saying you are a relative,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“You look as if you are from here.”
“I’m not.”
“I am seeing that.”
They turned their backs on me together.
For a moment, I didn’t move or speak. I couldn’t. My fear had peeled away to panic. All of my reasons for being in Prague went bad at once. This was a separate country, a separate people. These were Czechs building Czech lives in a Czech city, thinking and feeling Czech. They themselves were their own reasons for where they were.
A man slammed my bag as he walked by.
The panic crumbled. My mouth was dry, my face was sweaty.
I wandered back the way I’d come.
Near the Square I found the alley I’d been looking for, the entrance shadowed by a busted archway. It could’ve been a path to a private courtyard. I’d passed it I didn’t know how many times. The alley ran straight to my uncle’s three-story apartment building, which stood with a sullen pride, shoulder-to-shoulder with its more dignified neighbors. It was wall-like. No first-floor windows, a door that looked like it’d been installed that day. I double-checked the address. The key fit the lock when I jammed and wrenched it. I walked through the lobby and took noisy stairs to the third floor, every step a wincing creak.
The apartment stank a little, a kind of pesticidal sweat worked into the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom. The bed was a full, its sheets coarse to the touch. When I sat on the living room couch the cushions gave out a muffled toot. I slumped. My body deadened, going heavy, and at the same time, my head loosened, going light. It wasn’t even noon. I stood up, just to stand up.
That was when a window in me broke.
What broke it came through it: a very bad feeling.
I sat down. The very bad feeling sat down too.
I decided not to think about it.
2
Stanley Thinks About It
The very bad feeling hadn’t been hurled through the window in me by the made-up man or the fashionable old woman. It wasn’t the work of panic. It had no connection to jet lag or culture shock, or to recent sleeplessness, or to an old grade of anger that was being hammered into guilt and buffed into dread. It didn’t originate in any of the members of my family. It wasn’t T—it wasn’t anything I hadn’t already thought about T, felt about T, and done or not done to T. I put my hands on top of my head. I didn’t know what it was.
3
Stanley Knows What It Was
It was a space at the center of myself that wasn’t me.
4
Stanley Tries to Feel the Space at the Center of Himself That Isn’t Him
The space at the center of myself that wasn’t me had shoved whatever it was that should have been there—my actual center, a central me—flat up against the outlines of myself. I could smell my own stupid breath. The space took up space it had no claim to. It was impenetrable. I couldn’t understand it: it was in me, but not me.
I lay on the couch, dizzied. My borders began to warp.
Memories of awful things I’d felt as a kid came crowding back:
Me stomping barefoot on a dead baby bird on accident.
Me slugging a best friend in the face on purpose.
Me hearing my dad trip down the basement stairs, thumping and slapping and shouting hate.
Me seeing my mom raise the chair she’d been sitting on as if to smash it, only to lower it, sit again, and smile.
Me helping Busia from the living room couch to her walker so incorrectly that she slapped me in the throat.
Me and my brother hiding in the bathroom while my brother explained with a calm that I despised how our parents weren’t divorcing but weren’t planning on spending time together anymore, and although they’d say separately that it wasn’t our fault, he knew, for reasons he’d made a list of, that we were to blame.
“Look,” he’d said, pressing the list into my hand.
Downstairs our dad yelled, sounding armed, and our mom laughed, sounding armored. They took their act from the kitchen to the living room, from the living room to the dining room, from the dining room to the kitchen. Whoever veered out of character first, lost.
Our dad kicked the stove and hollered.
Our mom clapped out ovations.
My brother said, “Read the list!”
He was at the end of junior high and I was at the end of elementary school. He didn’t hide his crying, or couldn’t.
I took the matches off the toilet tank and I burned the list in the sink.
My brother didn’t smack me—I didn’t know it at the time, but he never would again. He put his hand on my shoulder like we were in a movie and we’d made it to the end. He felt better, I saw, and from behind that feeling, he couldn’t see that I felt worse. The paper flared and crumpled, smoking. We watched it go out on its own.
5
Stanley Hears Footsteps, Which, for Reasons That Aren’t Clear to Him, Remind Him of His Father
Someone was tromping up the apartment building staircase.
I hadn’t left the couch—I felt shaky.
The footsteps were tired and loud. They seemed to say: Get it over with, already. Every major structural component of the staircase—the stringers, the risers, the treads—contracted with rickety squeals, as if the thing had been built to be installed in a haunted house.
I rolled over onto my side, to turn my back to the door.
The footsteps pounded on.
6
Stanley Reflects on His Decision to Accept His Uncle Lech’s Proposal to “Apartment-Sit” for Three Days in Prague
It would be a mistake. I would make it. I would follow through on it.
There would be no mystery in the “mystery” manufactured by my uncle’s art project.
There would be nothing I didn’t “realize until it was too late.”
There would be nothing I didn’t “realize until it was too late” with T.
What there would be, instead, was refusal—the refusal to recognize the extent to which I’d lied to myself about the sort of man I wasn’t.
7
Stanley Reflects on the Sort of Man He Was
Before I dated T, I dated Bernadette. We met a month after Ro and I broke up, in early August. That summer I’d been part-timing for my dad’s residential remodeling crews, reverse-commuting to south Chicagoland sites where I gophered for subcontractors, fetching tools from trucks and taking lunch orders. It was the job I’d had in high school. On the days I didn’t work, I stayed in: I reread old anthropology textbooks, or grunted through a sequence of sit-ups and push-ups and pull-ups, or smoked cigarettes on the stoop, or sat with a six-pack of tallboys in front of the History Channel, which I punched on when I lurched out of bed, dazed, and off when I lurched back, blunted. I kept my apartment tidy, wiping the counters and changing the sheets, but despite my scrubbing and washing and spraying, every room in the place smelled stale. It was like I lived with a roommate I never saw. The only decorations were on the fridge: although it’d been a month since I’d talked to Ro, I hadn’t removed the strip of photo booth pictures, the four-shot sequence from her little brother’s wedding back in April—Ro in a feather boa and me in a fedora, a couple of crazy poses, a happy cockeyed kiss. I decided that when I could go a day and a night without looking at those pictures, I was over it.
One afternoon, Torrentelli and Barton buzzed up. They’d bought tickets to the Sox game. “If you don’t say yes,” said Torrentelli through the intercom, “we’ll keep asking until you do.” “I have a taser,” said Barton. I put on a shirt. We took the Red Line, hanging from hand straps, sharing shitty whiskey from a flask. Residential and industrial cityscapes slashed by. A few stops from Sox Park, a hip kid jumped up on a seat, introduced himself to the car as Criminal A, and broke out into an original rap. Two teenage girls put money in his hat. At the ballpark we hiked to our seats in the empty middle of an upper section. It was late summer, the air exhausted, heavy with humidity. A chemical glow hazed up from the field. In it, the players seemed small, but their actions were big, fast, decisive. I was envious. We burped through beers and a box of nachos. Torrentelli patted my arm and said, “She’ll regret it.” I didn’t even shake my head. Barton gestured at our DH: he struck out swinging, stranding two base runners. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, and start feeling sorry for your team,” he said. We smashed four home runs, all solo shots, but by the seventh-inning stretch we were losing, and in the end we lost by five. We shuffled out of the stadium with the rest of the fans, every one of us having agreed to act like there’d never been a moment when we thought we’d win. A face-painted superfan in a wheelchair chanted, “We won’t be good until I’m dead, we won’t be good until I’m dead!” The L shot us back to the North Side. We settled on a neighborhoody bar we’d never been to and couldn’t find the name of, where we split pitchers and played shuffleboard, misremembering the dangerous things we’d done together growing up and debating the course of the city’s future and avoiding the subject of romantic relationships. At last call we shot good whiskey. On the street we decided we weren’t done, so we went around the corner to the new 4 a.m. bar, McGrabbits. Until the week before it’d been an unhappy pool hall. The only change was that the tables had been hauled away. The main room was wide and deep and dim, slopped with wasted men and women. The DJ at the back banged from ’90s hip-hop to EDM to remixed classic rock. I was no longer drinking: I was dumping beers into the drain that was my body. Everybody leaned on everybody else, having lost the power to look, move, or act like who they were, and I shouted, “Ro and me are on my fridge!” and Torrentelli shouted, “You don’t want to get over her!” and Barton shouted, “You
’re an asshole, an asshole can get over anybody, anytime, except himself!” and we did a shot of Malört, which even at that hour tasted like licking wood glue off a carpet. Torrentelli left with a bow-tie-wearing hipster prince. Barton shook two cigarettes at me. I promised to close my tab and be right out—I staggered through the stacks of people, clipping shoulders and hips. You’re not looking for a fight, I said to myself. You’re looking for somebody who’s looking for a fight. At the bar I leaned, wallet out. A blue-haired bartender paused in front of me to pour four shots of pink booze. She was as angry as she was bored. I couldn’t believe it—her crooked scowl, together with her dye job, made her look like Cassie, my first high school girlfriend, the only woman to ever hit me in the face. Cassie had tic-tac-toed her arms in cuts and polka-dotted her thighs in burns. Anytime she smiled, she made it seem on accident. Our breakup had been a roll across a barbed-wire fence. The bartender slammed the bottle back into a bin. I stared, wanting her to see me, wanting her to mistake me for someone I wasn’t, a someone she’d once been sure she’d loved. I waved. I waved at her with both hands. Behind me, a woman said, “You’re aggressive!” I turned—the woman was short, so short I almost missed her, and dressed for a much fancier event, a corporate benefit or an awards ceremony. Her smile was sincerely drunk. “Get me a drink,” she said. I asked her what she wanted. “No,” she said, “say, ‘What the fuck do you want.’” I shifted back to the bar, but she snatched my wrist—her hands were strong. “Are you actually aggressive?” she said. She swung my arm from side to side, the beginning of a kid’s game. “I don’t know,” I said.
I kissed her.
At noon the next day we woke in my bed, pantsless but not shirtless.
“Bernadette,” she said.
The Made-Up Man Page 1
