by R. A. Nelson
“So that’s where he grew up?”
“Ricky grew up all over, sweetie. Tennessee, Texas, Virginia. A dyed-in-the-Woolite navy brat. Never kept the same friends one place to the next. Probably the reason he didn’t like school so much. Sure wasn’t lack of smarts.”
She flips the page.
“Here’s Ricky when he was six—look at the little shit! I made him that outfit from a Butterick pattern.”
I swallow the image.
Straight black hair, thumbtack eyes, white chaps, a cowboy hat strung with red rawhide. He isn’t smiling and holds his cap pistols slackly, as if bearing up under a tsunami of disappointment.
“What’s he frowning about?” Schuyler says. I’d forgotten he was here.
“How should I know? Moody little bastard—one minute high as a 707, the next dragging rock-ass bottom.” Inhale. Barb’s setting the Land Speed Record for dragging a cigarette to the filter.
“It nearly killed Vince. Ricky hated Little League ball, would just as soon piss on a car as go near it with a wrench. Spent his days holed up in his room, reading. Half the time we thought he was deaf. Can you imagine?”
Yes. I can.
I rub my arms to restore the circulation. Is that my breath I see? It’s so cold in here. More photos. Mr. Mann’s childhood is surprisingly ordinary: wooden toys, bikes with rubber tassels, crooked teeth. Pajamas too small to keep his belly button covered. A Christmas tree strung with lights like banana peppers. Six Flags Over Texas. A dented trumpet. Schuyler has lapsed into a coma. I’m riveted.
“What about high school?”
Another album. At the third picture my heart jumps. I want to break furniture, scream until my throat bleeds, chew the carpet. Mr. Mann is skinny, a mass of dark hair, striped rugby shirt. My age! Those amazing eyes, but trapped in the body of a geeked-out loner, they’re scary. He’s hanging back from the crowd, uncomfortable. Looks like someone who could burn the school down on a bad day. So he had to grow into his beautifulness, his easier soul.
“Couldn’t wait to move out,” Barb says. “Had to go to college way the hell up north. Massa-gesundheit-what? That’s what I said when he told me. Why so far? You tell me.”
I’m too polite to tell you, I think. Because he had to get away. He was embarrassed, misunderstood. But it all makes me wonder—so the Boston accent is most likely affected, a camouflage. Just what else might not be real?
“What did he study?” I say.
“What else, artsy stuff. Thought he was a goddamn poet. The battles he had with his father! Join the navy, learn a trade. I had to laugh—Peter Pumpkin Eater couldn’t even change a tire. No, he’s going to be the next P. F. Eliot, Emily Frost, hell’s bells. Where does the time go? Tell me, where?”
I hope I’m not jumping the gun, but I can’t resist. “I’ve always wondered—how did they meet? Ricky and Alicia? How long have they known each other?”
Barb ponders. “Ricky could tell you better than me. The little shit barely calls! It was last fall, when he was still teaching at Duncan Hills. I think he met her over at the college. Him and that little gal were thick as thieves.”
Vince shuffles through, heading down the hall. Metamucil must be kicking in.
“Naps,” Barb says. “He takes a lot of naps. Doesn’t sleep well at night. We tried those little Band-Aids you stick across your nose. No good. They have this spray for sleep apnea, three squirts in the back of the throat—”
“Were you at the wedding?”
Barb looks sour. “You were there? A little fruity for my taste, but whatever floats your boat. They had to throw it together pretty quick. I wanted to help, but no, His Lord and Master put the kibosh on that.”
“Mr. Sprunk?”
“Ricky. Wouldn’t let me in on one little detail! Why? Tell me and we’ll both know. But you’re right, I imagine Daddy Warbucks had something to do with it. Walden Ponds, my left titty. Don’t get me wrong—Alicia’s sweet as a little bug, but the rest of that bunch can kiss old Rosy, know what I mean?”
I reach behind her, pinch Schuyler awake.
“Hey!”
“You say the wedding was thrown together quickly?” I say. “Why?”
Barb taps an ash into her hand. “Oh, you know, it was one of those on-again, off-again deals. We thought they had split up for good in January. But I guess they were back to beating the sheets all spring.”
She laughs. A nimbus of secondhand smoke forms around her head.
I exhale slowly.
All spring. Beating the sheets.
My mind is a nuclear flash fire. I’m irradiated by an image: Mr. Mann, Alicia, limbs entwined, moving, kissing, his bed still warmly rumpled from when I just left it.
“Nine?” Schuyler touches my arm, trying to pull me together. “So Alicia was just coming by for a visit?” he says to Barb, rescuing me from my speechlessness.
“Hell, no. They don’t visit. They just show up when they need something.”
“What was it?”
Barb stands and brushes ash from her blouse. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
I stand, do my best to follow, my exploded mind trailing behind me.
How could he?
How could I have been so stupid? So wrong?
Schuyler and Barb are waiting in a back bedroom. There’s a beat thrumming in my ears; for a moment I can’t hear what she’s saying. I look around, trying to orient myself.
The room is clean. Sewing table, guest bed, exercise bicycle. But something about this place feels skewed, out of square. My legs are leaden and my head is spinning. I’m feeling sick to my stomach. What’s happening to me?
“Vince’s been meaning to convert this to an aquarium room for umpteen years,” Barb says. Her voice sounds very far away. She slides a closet open and I see magazines spilling over the shelf above the hangers. Barb steps on a footstool and fishes around in a box. My eyes have cleared, but I feel a strange terror over the way she’s standing, as if she might lose her balance and topple over.
“Here you go.”
She hands something down to me. My hands are trembling. I clutch it to keep from shaking too hard. It’s a skinny chapbook: One Million Secret Hills. Poems by Richard A. Mann.
“Ricky won some big award a hundred years ago back in college,” Barb says as I flip sightlessly through the pages. “Everybody gets their fifteen minutes, don’t they? Where the hell are mine?” She brays laughter. “Anyway, he got me and Vince to pay to have four hundred of these printed up. Then doodle squat. Couldn’t sell one damn copy.”
I try to read one of the poems, but the type on the pages is blurring. My heart is fluttering out of control. Mr. Mann and Alicia—I need to get away.
“Keep it,” Barb says. “We still have about three hundred and eighty-seven, if the mice and the silverfish haven’t gotten to ’em yet.”
“What does he want it for now?” Schuyler says.
“A special reading he’s giving over at the college. At UTC.”
“A reading?”
“Alicia says he’s doing some kinda poetry show out there tomorrow night. They found out he lived in town, asked him to do it.”
I can’t think. Barb’s face is beginning to blur. What is happening? Something is horribly wrong and somehow they can’t see it.
“I’ve got to—I’ve got to go!” I say.
I can’t tell if my words are audible. Schuyler isn’t picking up the hint. Can’t he hear me?
“Why didn’t he come himself?” he says to Barb.
“Don’t ask me. I wish we could be closer, but what can you do?”
What can you do.
The air in the room is closing around me. Why is it so cold? Everything’s so cold! It’s the Big Freeze, the time when everything stops moving. Heat death of the universe. Nothing in this house is important anymore, will ever be important ever again.
I’m going to die.
“I’ve got to go!” I say. I’m sure I’m almost shouting now.
�
��Wait! How about some lunch?” Barb says. “I’ve got some Polish sausage casserole left over from last night. I always make too much. Won’t take two shakes to get it—”
“No, no!”
“No, thanks, that’s okay,” Schuyler says.
I’m almost pushing him down the hall toward the front door.
Time is hardening into something fragile, brittle. We’ve poked a hole in the sun; ice is starting to gather. I can’t get outside fast enough. I feel the Snow Queen at my back. I’ll freeze to death if I stay.
At the door Barb grabs my arm and presses something in my hand, a yellow index card. “Hold on! Here you go.”
I stare, uncomprehending.
“Don’t forget the peppercorns! They make all the difference. Ask Ricky.”
A recipe for booze beans and dumplings.
escape velocity
Panic.
It’s the worst kind of suction of all.
It comes from your center, makes a gravity well around your heart, pulls everything bad to you.
I slam into the car, fumble to get the door open. The instant I hear the ignition catch, I’m peeling out, bumping one tire up over the curb. I tear out of there, not even caring if Schuyler’s got his door shut. I’m trying to achieve escape velocity.
For the first mile I leave the windows rolled up, holding June inside the car as long as I can.
“Wonder what temp she keeps her air on, freezer burn?” Schuyler says. His voice sounds odd, rushed. “Maybe old Vince is embalmed. He would fall to mush without it.”
I hear him, but I’m not hearing him. I’m still measuring the distance between my heart and Mr. Mann’s. He is my sun, and I’m moving farther and farther away. Crystals are forming in my blood.
Is this where you’ve left me, Richard? Is this what getting old is all about?
Is this what I have to look forward to? Barb’s frozen world? Desperately sucking the life out of people, even strangers, to get someone to listen to me, be with me?
Faster.
“You want to slow up a little, Nine?” Schuyler says. “Stopping would be even better. Did I mention my hunger? It’s become apocalyptic.”
I shiver, glancing at the recipe card poking out of Mr. Mann’s chapbook. Schuyler pulls his seat belt tighter.
Faster, faster.
Wilkie’s underinflated tires are shrieking as I move from lane to lane, dodging other cars.
“Okay, to keep from thinking about dying in a gasoline fire, let’s recap,” Schuyler says, voice tremulous. “Mr. Mann once owned a Sit ‘n’ Spin. His mother, subphylum Party animalia antiquus, likes booze in her beans. Booze in anything, probably. His father rents out his frontal lobe as a loofah sponge.”
My heart is trip-hammering so bad, it’s come loose in my chest. I keep waiting for it to reattach itself. I feel Schuyler’s eyes on me. I press down on the gas pedal. Where am I running to?
“And how about Vince’s bone structure?” Schuyler says, voice a pitch higher. “Definitely something supraorbital going on there. Australopithecus afarensis, my good doctor?”
I stare straight ahead, the lines on the road starting to blur.
“Okay. Not quite that remote,” Schuyler says. “His knuckles were pretty clean. Homo erectus? But maybe without erectus’s stately charm. Say, Australopithecus robustus? Wait. I know what you’re thinking, Dr. Leakey. There’s not one thing robust about that man.”
I feel him looking, looking.
“Homo habilis, then. That’s my final offer.”
We’re roaring along. The other cars are falling away now. My face is locked. Schuyler leans over and speaks directly into my ear:
“Vince has three testicles. The one in the center is able to divine the future.”
I laugh.
It bursts out of me like a jet of water under pressure. My laugh gets louder and louder. I laugh as if I might be cured or go insane.
“Hey, ease up a little,” Schuyler says.
I pull over finally, nearly weeping with laughter. I collapse against his chest. I can’t stop thinking about Vince, oracle-like on the toilet, communing with his loins.
I feel Schuyler tense—I’m scaring him.
“You okay, Nine?”
His chest is hard. I like touching it.
“You okay?” he says again.
The laughter is going down inside me; I’m deflating like bag-pipes. This takes a long time. When it’s over, I push him away more forcefully than I mean to. I swipe at the corners of my eyes. “I’m okay. I’m okay.”
“What was that?” Schuyler says.
“I don’t know. I feel like I could throw up. I think it must’ve been a panic attack. I felt like I was dying. God.”
“You scared me.”
“I’m sorry. Really. I’m sorry.” We sit awhile, watch people trundling groceries to their cars. The world has snapped back to its regular shape. My hand brushes Mr. Mann’s book. I suddenly remember—
“A reading!”
“What?”
“Barb—she said Mr. Mann is doing a reading at UTC. Some kind of poetry thing!”
“Yeah.”
“Tomorrow night.”
“That’s what she said.”
Schuyler starts to smile.
Perfect.
wet
Home.
I smell the sauce the minute I come through the door. Mom senses something is up. She’s making manicotti.
“Your favorite, darling!”
She hasn’t done this in months, maybe years. It’s the fanciest thing she cooks. This is what she does when she doesn’t know what else to do for me. Maybe someday I will get the connection, the motherly cause and effect.
“Let me help you,” I say.
She pours out the egg batter into micro-thin shells. When they’re done, we stuff them with ricotta, mozzarella, cottage cheese. Ladle sauce over the top and pop them in the oven. While we’re waiting for the timer to ding, I give her an oregano peck on the cheek.
“You’re sweet,” I say. “I’m sorry about everything lately.”
“I’ve just been so—” She dabs at her eyes with a pot holder and honks into a tissue. “Your father and I, we—”
“It’s all right, Mom.” I hug her narrow shoulders. “Everything is all right. Please don’t worry so much.”
We watch TV. I feel as if I haven’t eaten in a hundred years. When the manicotti is ready, I eat as though it’s my last meal. Later my chest burns in the dark; I can’t sleep, thinking about Mr. Mann.
Tomorrow night. The plan.
Mom hears me stumbling to the bathroom for an antacid and gives me some melatonin. “You father takes them,” she says.
It’s supposed to make me sleep naturally. The trouble is, I want to sleep unnaturally. I’m burning alive, thinking about my last time with Him.
Turn on the computer.
Kitty Nation curls around my feet. Niagara Falls at night could be anywhere. Newark, New Jersey. But I know they’re still there, the couples, in their rooms, touching each other in the dark.
I close my eyes. Maybe they dress after making love. Get up while they’re still liquid, flow down the halls that look the same at any hour of the day or night.
They stream outdoors past the sleepy clerk in the lobby. They’re barefoot; the cement is cold leading to the falls. They hold hands. The closer they get, the louder the noise, a sound that makes them feel very small in the nighttime. They draw together in horrified fascination. A spray wets their faces. They’re at the edge now, touching the cold aluminum railing. They can’t see the spray, can only hear the thunder as the whole river throws itself over the abyss.
They jump.
smaller
Morning.
I’m still here.
But I wake up flat. Something has changed.
Something about meeting Mr. Mann’s parents, seeing where he came from, his pain, his reality—everything is flat.
It’s dead and flat.
&nb
sp; The person I fell for, what part of him was ever real?
What if his whole life he has pretended to be someone else, whoever he needed to be? Maybe it’s all a kind of survival mechanism. And the by-product of his survival is this: he makes you fall for him—that ’s how he survives it. How he survives life, love, anything. Maybe he’s like that all the time, not just in class? It’s just like he said—it’s all an act.
That’s his gift.
Was there ever really a chance for us?
What is down in the middle of him, his very center? Does he even have a center, or do you just cut away the layers, away, away, away, until you are left with nothing?
Every inch of Barb and Vince’s cold, dead house—now it’s tangled up with my thoughts of him. My memory of him, my image, my love—it’s there, frozen in time with all the rest of it. There is no changing him now. No going back, ever again. It’s flat.
I’ve lost.
The beautiful part of the love has leaked away—the part that mattered most. The only part that’s left is the flip side, the animal side, the side that wants to gore and rut and bite.
Consume.
I jump out of bed and stare into my mirror—if I could just see his eyes right now, I would know if it’s still there. I would know. But it’s flat. A flatness spreading out before me so long and low and brutal, a flatness big enough to swallow years, lifetimes—I’ll never be three dimensional again. He’s stomped my whole universe, made me into a plane, a line.
A point.
I’m so tiny, I’m about to vanish. You can’t atom smash me any smaller. There’s nothing left. The part of me that was real, the God particle, is gone.
Did it ever exist at all?
No, there is no changing that now.
So there is no changing what I have to do, either. Somehow the flatness—it makes me stronger, more certain of my direction, sets my track. I turn away from the mirror. It’s time to teach him. Teach him how you make something real.
looking for lincoln
The plan.
Time to execute it.
The Crackling Forest is different too. I can feel it.
The light? The wind in the leaves? How can spring not feel like spring?
