Grendel's Guide to Love and War

by A. E. Kaplan

  I shoved Zip toward the car. “We are leaving now!”

  Another bolt of lightning made up her mind, and she ran back to the car. I got in the driver’s seat, and she sat next to me, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. “I am so tired,” she said, “of being the person things happen to.”

  I pulled out on the highway and headed back toward home. “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  “No,” she said. “You don’t know. And I hope you never do.”

  Ed’s call got dropped twice more. And then it went to voicemail.

  “Where’s the company?” Zip asked.

  “Um,” he said, clicking on the phone again. “Oh God. It’s in Chapel Hill. That’s like a hundred and eighty miles.”

  “I don’t think we have a choice,” I said. “It might take longer than that just to get somebody on the phone, and it’s not like we can leave those up there.”

  Ed sighed and kept dialing.

  “Do you think he knew we’d see it?” I asked. “It’s not like it’s that close to the house.”

  “Well, he obviously knows Ed works in Chambliss. He’d have to see it eventually.”

  “How would Wolf even know that, though?” I asked. I chewed on that while I turned up the speed on the windshield wipers. The rain was coming down in sheets and I had to slow the car to a crawl.

  “What did you mean when you said he taught you a lesson?” I asked quietly.

  She turned on the radio, flipped through a few stations, and then turned it off again. “I think you’d rather not know.”

  “Just say it, Zip.”

  She sighed and pressed her hand against the window. The glass was starting to fog up in the rain. “Okay,” she said. “Well. When we were dating, we had a couple of, you know. Texting conversations.”

  “Conversations? You mean— Oh, damn. Okay. Conversations.”

  “Yeah, conversations. With. Um. Pictures. Anyway, we broke up because I realized he was awful, and he forwarded them to everyone I knew.”

  I flinched. “Oh God. How bad were they?”

  “Like, bad.” She grabbed my arm. “Don’t ever put anything out there that you don’t want the world to see, Tom. Really. Just don’t.”

  “So he sent them to all your friends?”

  “Friends. Classmates. The maintenance staff at my dorm. Everyone.”

  “So what happened? That seems like the kind of thing that should get you kicked out of school.”

  She rolled her eyes. “He claimed,” she said, “that his phone was hacked, and he was just as much a victim”—she used little air quotes—“as me. The college said they couldn’t do anything with no proof, and then all his friends started calling me up and harassing me, and I didn’t want to have to leave school, so I dropped it. The administration acted like it was my fault for sending dirty dirties to my boyfriend when I should have been ironing my chastity belt or whatever.”

  “Zip,” I said. “That’s just. I’m sorry.”

  The pigs suddenly seemed…not inappropriate.

  “Yeah, well,” she said. “You know what? It was a cheap lesson to learn what an ass he was. It could have been way worse. Believe me.”

  From the backseat, Ed grumbled, “I’m not calling again. It just keeps giving me voicemail.”

  Zip gave me this look that said, How much of that do you think he was paying attention to?

  And I gave her a look that said, I have no idea.

  “Ed?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Dirty dirties. I heard. I have to say, I’ll never understand people who do shit like that.”

  “That’s because you’re a human being, Ed.”

  “I try. Are we almost there?”

  “No, Ed,” I said. “We aren’t.”

  It took us three and a half hours to get to Chapel Hill, another half an hour to find Garner-Grey Advertising, and another forty-five minutes to get someone at Garner-Grey Advertising to believe that the billboards had been hacked but—and this was the key point—not by us, and that they needed to not just reset them but turn them off until they were sure the security problem had been fixed.

  “The thing is,” Zip said to Garner-Grey’s very fine representative, “what’s to keep him from just rehacking them unless you fix whatever went wrong with your firewall?”

  “Our security measures,” said the little man behind the counter, “are excellent.”

  “Well,” said Ed. “I mean, obviously, they aren’t.”

  “We can’t lose the revenue,” the guy explained.

  “Are you collecting revenue with our faces up there?”

  He said nothing, which of course indicated that they were.

  “What’s supposed to be up there?” Zip asked.

  “Um, Dunkin’ Donuts and Cracker Barrel.”

  Zip leaned over the counter and he leaned away from her. “If you don’t turn those off until this is fixed, I will personally call Dunkin’ Donuts and Cracker Barrel and tell them you are charging them to put other people’s advertisements up there.”

  The guy set his pen down and looked at us over his glasses. Ed crossed his arms and tried really hard not to look seventeen.

  “Okay,” he said. “We’ll take them down for a day while we fix the problem.”

  “Good,” said Ed. “Because we’re going to go back and make sure you actually do.”

  By the time we got home, it was almost ten o’clock, dark, and blessedly quiet. I was wiped out from driving to North Carolina and back, and my back hurt from hunching over the steering wheel for too long without a break. The only positive was that the Rothgars’ was dark and lonely. I sighed as we drove by.

  After Ed left, Zip and I went inside and shut the door. “I’m going to bed,” I said. “I’m celebrating the end of this day by being asleep before ten.”

  “Tom, it’s a little distressing to watch you morph into an eighty-year-old woman. Are you going to start wearing support hose next?”

  “Not till summer’s over,” I said. “Mrs. Lee says they chafe in the heat.”

  I went down the hall and into my room, kicking my shoes off and flipping the light on. The room stayed dark, and I tried flipping the switch a few more times: nothing. “Damn,” I muttered. And then I became aware that there was a breeze in my room. I was sure I hadn’t left the window open.

  I felt a wave of dread as I ran into my dad’s room, grabbed the lamp from next to his bed, and plugged it into the outlet by my door.

  “Shit,” I said. “Oh shit.”

  Zip appeared in my doorway. “Tom, all my clothes are gone. Oh,” she said. “Oh my God.”

  My room was completely trashed. The window was wide open, my bed was on its side, and my laptop was upside down on the floor. The shelf under my window, the one I used to hold all my interview notebooks, was flipped over, and there were notebooks all over the room. Torn paper was everywhere, in pieces too small even to tape back together. There had been thirty-two notebooks on that shelf. I could only imagine how long it must’ve taken to tear every sheet into such small pieces.

  I slid down to the floor and sifted the pieces through my fingers, picking one up to read it. All I could make out was Margaret Murelle, born. She’d died last February.

  Half the women I’d interviewed had already died. He’d torn up the life stories and random musings of people I’d never see again, never talk to again. People who would never have another idea or wish or joke to write down. I leaned forward and rested my head against my desk.

  “I think I’m going to throw up,” I said. But I didn’t. The corner of the desk pressed into my temple, but I was glad for it. It gave me something else to think about, the cold metal discomfort. Something hard and pointy and more tangible than the lost stories of thirty-two of my neighbors.

  Zip picked up one of the notebooks—the one for Mrs. Pollack—and opened it. A pile of tiny shreds of paper fell out and onto the floor.

  “How long did it take you to compile all these?” she asked quietly
.

  “Two years.”

  “Did you have files anyplace else?”

  I pointed to my laptop, which was in the middle of the floor and didn’t look like it had been set down any too gently.

  “Did you have it backed up?”

  I swallowed. “No.”

  On the windowsill, there was a folded piece of paper. It was inexplicably, horribly pink. I picked it up, knowing exactly who it was from.

  Darling,

  It’s bad enough I’ve been forced to spend my summer in Podunkville, but if you think I’m going to spend it in silence without wine, women, or song, you are very much mistaken.

  By the way, this is the most pathetically boring room I have ever dismantled. Please don’t force me to dismantle anything else in your house.

  Folded inside the letter was a picture of a sleeping pig wearing what I could only guess was my sister’s underwear on its head. I handed the letter to Zip, who read it before crumpling it up and throwing it to the floor with the rest of the trash.

  “He’s taken this too far,” she said. “I’m going over there.”

  “No,” I said, pushing up from the floor. “Don’t. He’s nuts, Zip.”

  “I’m going,” she said. “I can handle myself.” She turned to go and I grabbed her arm. She stopped and stood staring at my hand.

  I let go. “Sorry,” I muttered. “Look, he’s…Don’t go over there. He won’t stop. It’s not going to fix this.” I gestured around the room. “Just don’t.” I grabbed her hand. “Please, Zip. Please.”

  She sighed. “Fine. I won’t go.” She walked across the room, stepping over the debris of two years of work, and tried to shut the window. It wouldn’t budge. After pulling it three or four times, she gave up and walked away.

  “You might as well get a trash bag,” she said. “ ’Cause you’re not going to bed at ten after all.”

  It took us two hours to put the furniture back together, jerry-rig my window with saran wrap and Scotch tape to keep the bugs out, and throw out all the little pieces of trash. We piled the empty notebooks under the shelf, and I set my defunct laptop on my desk. The only surviving notebooks were the two that were in my desk drawer: Marianne DeLuca’s, because it wasn’t finished yet, and my mother’s, because there wasn’t enough in it to justify keeping it with the rest.

  “They might be able to get the data off the hard drive,” Zip said. “I had a friend who fried hers dropping it in the bathtub, and the guys in the CS department pulled everything off and put it on another drive for her.”

  I didn’t ask what Zip’s friend was doing with her computer in the bathtub. I just said, “Maybe.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But maybe it’s for the best anyway.”

  I snapped around. “What does that mean?”

  “I just mean. I don’t know. I don’t think this”—she gestured at the empty notebooks—“is the healthiest pastime. I’ve thought that for a while.”

  “You don’t get to dictate what constitutes healthy behavior, Zipora.”

  “Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. We both know why you have this obsession. It’s all about Mom.”

  “This is not about Mom.”

  “It is. You never got over Mom,” she said. “You keep yourself locked up with all these old people who treat you like a little prince, and all you care about is writing stories about them, because you think it’ll make them live forever in your eternal memory or some load of crap.”

  I glowered at her. “That’s not why I do it.”

  “It’s totally why. You don’t have a book about Mom, so you try to make up for it by writing one about everyone else. But guess what, Tom? These books?” She held one up, and I jumped out of my seat and snatched it back from her. “This isn’t them. It’s just a bunch of words strung together. If you wrote down every last detail about their lives, it wouldn’t make them any less dead!”

  I hugged the empty notebook to my chest. “I know that,” I snapped. “You think I don’t know that? I know they’re dead. My interviews just…” I couldn’t find the words. I couldn’t explain how terrified I was of people’s stories getting lost. “Their experiences are unique. Were unique,” I corrected myself. “All this stuff. It’s unique. It’s. It’s. It’s the core of who those people were.”

  “You don’t actually think you can know the core of another person. That’s impossible.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Come on, Tom. Do you know what it is you’re trying to do? You’re trying to have, like, a mystical experience of other people. But you can’t. The whole point of mysticism, this thing you’re trying to do where you crawl inside someone else and live there, that’s how people try to experience God or whatever. It’s not how you know the little old lady who lives down the block. You can’t know people that way.”

  “But what if you could, Zip! What if you could, and you just never tried?” I grabbed a book off my floor and handed it to her. “Um, Montaigne. He thought so. He said a true friend was like another self. What else could that mean?”

  She took the book from me and flipped through the pages with her thumb. It had an orange sticker on the front that said “USED,” which she pulled off and stuck to her shirt before dropping the book back on the floor. “Good Lord. This is the problem, isn’t it? You’ve been selectively reading my old textbooks. God, if I’d known you were going to do that, I’d have sold them all back to the bookstore. Anyway, he stole that from Aristotle.”

  “You’re missing the point.”

  “Yeah, well, Montaigne also said that women were incapable of real friendship because our souls were not fully developed or whatever. I don’t really care what he said.”

  “But—”

  “No, Tom. Look.”

  “And Emerson—”

  “Oh,” she said. “Good God. No. What are you trying to do? Do you think if you know people well enough, you can save them somehow? Because you can’t.”

  “I know I can’t save the people. No one can save the people. But their experiences, their stories, they mean something, and I can save those, Zip!”

  “What difference does it make if no one ever reads them?”

  I choked a little bit, because I never thought about that. Not really. “I’ve read them,” I said finally.

  She got up and added another layer of tape to the edge of the window. “Well, there we go,” she said. “See? It’s just your little vanity project. Because you never got over Mom.”

  The silence stretched between us, and I wanted, in that moment, I really wanted to scream at my sister, because she was wrong. I knew it. But I couldn’t find the words to tell her why.

  “You say I never got over it, but look at you!” I shouted. “You ran all the way to New York, screwed around for five years, and now what? You’re still acting like some lazy kid. Grow up, Zipora!”

  “I’m trying!” she snapped. She turned toward the window, so I couldn’t see her face. “You think I’m not trying? You just don’t get it. You don’t know what it’s like.”

  I was talking to the back of her head. “What what’s like?”

  She ran her fingers through her spiky hair, flattening it. “You can do everything right. Everything. And still not get what you want.”

  “You mean the acting thing?”

  “Yeah. I mean, my whole life, everyone always said, ‘Go for your dreams! Do what you love!’ ”

  I snorted. “Dad never said that.”

  She rolled her eyes and sat down next to me on the floor in front of my bed. “Okay, everyone but Dad. And I went to NYU and did everything I was supposed to. And now? I have nothing. Nothing! I can’t get a job as an actress. I have a degree I can’t use. One night I looked up and I was at a party for the freaking Slavic underground porn industry, and I was like, Is this what my life has really come to? Really? What the hell am I supposed to do now?”

  I listened to the crickets chirping through the window for a long time. “I don’t kno
w, Zip. What are you going to do now?”

  She turned back from the window. “I don’t know,” she said.

  From outside, I heard the squeal of speakers turned on at too high a volume. I closed my eyes. “You’re kidding,” I said.

  I heard car doors slamming and loud, bad music that I wouldn’t be able to block at all, now that my window was broken. I looked over at Zipora, who was laughing with tears rolling down her nose.

  “We aren’t going to win this, are we?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think we are.”

  I spent the night on the couch with earplugs in and the TV turned to static, which almost but didn’t quite block out the noise from next door. I woke up to the sound of Zip opening and shutting drawers in the kitchen.

  I groaned and sat up, and she winced.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I actually was trying to be quiet.”

  I lay back down and rubbed my face a few times while Zip continued tearing the drawers apart. I reached for my phone and saw that I had a text from Willow.

  It said, simply, Sorry.

  There was a finality to that one word that sank into my bones. I didn’t want to do this anymore. My books were gone, and I couldn’t ask anything else of Ed. Zip needed…well, what she really needed was to be far away from Wolf. And I thought maybe that’s what I needed, too. To be someplace else.

  I sat up and squinted at the too-bright light coming through the window. “Maybe Dad had the right idea,” I said.

  “What? Leaving?”

  “Yeah. Leaving. We’ve tried everything. It just made things worse.”

  She slammed the drawer she’d been digging through and frowned. “What happens when Dad comes back?”

  “I don’t know. At some point, their mom has to come home, right? How much longer can she possibly be gone?”

  “Have you asked Willow to call her?”

  I paused. “I don’t think she would be willing to rat out Rex.”

  “Coward,” she muttered.

  “Maybe not. Maybe she just has better self-preservation instincts than we do.” I rubbed my forehead. “I can’t be here anymore, Zip. I don’t want to look at my room or listen to any more bad music. I need…I don’t know. I need some time. It’s like my brain needs to breathe for a while.” I got up and went into the kitchen, peering over her shoulder into Dad’s junk drawer. “What are you looking for, anyway?”