Adverbs

by Daniel Handler

  “Oh, hey,” Adam motherfucking said. “This is Eddie. Eddie, this is that guy I told you I met yesterday, Mark.”

  “Matt,” I said. “Mike. I want you off my land. What you’re doing is exploitative and wrong and I won’t have any part of it.”

  “You won’t get any part of it,” Adam said. “It’s a free country and if something happens I will get it on camera.”

  “People want to see this,” Eddie said in her stupid bandanna.

  “I don’t want to see this,” I said. “I think you disgusting people are wrong and unfair.”

  “Adam,” Eddie said, “I thought you said—”

  “I’ll handle this,” Adam said. “Make sure the focus is right. They won’t pay shit for a fiery blur.” Adam stepped toward me and grabbed me by the shoulders and led me down the field a ways, where the city was at a less attractive angle and the building couldn’t be seen.

  “What’s the problem?” he said quietly. “I’m sorry, man, but she said she wanted to come. What am I gonna say?”

  “I don’t want you here,” I said. “Take your girlfriend with the boy’s name and fuck her in the fucking woods if it’s a free country.”

  “You gotta chill out,” he said.

  “Don’t tell me to chill out,” I said. “I’m a driving force in American literature.”

  “You’re a drunk bald kid in his underwear,” Adam said. “Go sleep it off, Mike or whatever.”

  “It makes me sick that you’re selling those pictures.”

  “It’s footage,” Adam said, “and it’s a free country I said.”

  “It’s not a free country,” I said. “I’m scared to live in the city. I’m scared to go home. I’m an important person and that makes me a target. Someone could kill me. Lots of people want to kill me. They’re mad at me and they want to kill me.”

  Adam looked at me then, and if it weren’t for his girlfriend he would have been back in the novel, because the view changed. His easygoing gaze changed for me and I thought maybe he saw how important I was, how vital to the American scene. “No one’s mad at you, man,” he said. “No one wants to kill you. Why don’t you—no, let’s not drink any more wine right now, okay? Coffee or something. It’s okay.”

  “Nobody knows,” I said. “Nobody knows how crucial I am. Nobody calls me.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  “How would you know it’s okay?” I said. “You don’t know me. You don’t even think I own this house.”

  “You’re not in danger,” he said. “Look, my camera’s not pointing at you, okay? It’s not going to happen to you. It’ll happen out there.” He jerked a thumb across the view.

  “You hope,” I said.

  “Sort of,” he nodded. “Sort of, yeah. I guess I hope something happens, because then I’m not standing here for nothing. I want something, you know, important to happen or it’s not worth it.”

  “And I’m not important enough,” I said. I wished I had two bottles of wine, and not just for the usual reasons. I wished I had all the right symbolism, two bottles, one of the sweet wine of red relief and one of the bitter wine of white disappointment that I could mix into a sort of rosé in my mouth. I’m very proud of that sentence. “I’m not important enough,” I said. “That’s it, huh?”

  “Importance is the least of your problems,” he said. “You don’t have any pants on, man.”

  “Looking good, Adam!” Eddie called. “I got it right in the middle and it’s looking good. The sun’s shining and everything, right on it. Come see!”

  “Yeah,” he said and waved. “Are you okay? You want to see it, Mike? Come see.”

  “No,” I said. “In a minute.”

  “It’s okay,” Adam said, and walked away from me at the height of my career. He went with his girlfriend and they turned their backs and looked out at San Fran. That’s always where the love goes, with somebody else away from me. I just stood in the hurting grass and saw them look. “Come see!” Adam called. “It looks good. Come see!”

  “Yeah, come see!” Eddie said. “Come see!” she said. “Come see! Come see! Come see! Come see!” and so I walked over there. I stood in my underwear where anybody could have seen me, but nobody did. Adam and Eddie were looking through the camera, and the camera was pointing the wrong way so I stood there with nobody and looked out at the unimpeded view of the famous building I don’t need to designate, neither in my novel nor here. I stood there, January 17, and looked at this thing that people were looking at instead of me. It was a terrible thing, this shift in focus. This is love if it’s not with you, a terrible fiery something that makes people look away, and it feels like a punch in the throat. It was terrible, this terrible view, this symbolism too much to bear, unviewed and unpaid for and off camera in the hinterlands. Even in the novel I just stood there, looking at the landmark and feeling the terrible shift, because a few minutes later it was gone.

  clearly

  This part is a love story forgotten by its characters. If you were to ask them about it, any of them who are still alive, they would remember it again, but not all of it. They would each remember a few details, separate from one another, but the people in this story do not see each other anymore. They have faded even from one another’s sleep. No matter where their minds wander, those who are still alive, these people do not cross each other’s paths. All four of them have completely abandoned one another.

  The woods are still there, though, and protected by law. The trees, tall and close together, and the moss spreading its green dark mossiness, and those mushrooms we should not eat, that’s all still there. If you were to ask these forest things if they remembered the story, what would they say? Nothing. The forest does not answer the questions of nature-addled idiots. It is not interested probably. The forest has abandoned these people too. If the forest thinks—and I don’t think it does—it thought about these people for a few minutes, while it was happening, and then moved on, as when someone you know tells you a story about someone you don’t know, or you notice a fight between lovers on the street who do not know you are there. You might remember a few things—what he drank or how quickly the money was gone or what she lied about—or the next time you see a beer stein, a hairdryer, you might think: He threw this at her. This smashed on the wall, but then what? It is not being thrown at you. You are not the bruised one in this story.

  Adam’s bare skin, and Eddie’s bare skin, are unbruised at this point too, as they kiss fiercely in a clearing. Eddie is a woman and so has more of her clothes off. Adam’s shirt is unbuttoned, down the middle, with one shoulder bare, awkward but unnoticed. Eddie’s shirt is gone, someplace in the plants which grow on the ground. She is on her back. Her breasts are bare and in the dull gray sunlight you can see her skin as she opens her mouth and moves around. Adam is crouched on top of her, of course. Their coats are nearby because the weather is not warm. The air is like the first bite of a good apple. Eddie’s skin is goose-pimply where Adam is not touching her. She keeps moving his hands to different parts of her, moving his mouth to her breast, to her shoulder, but mostly to keep warm. Every part of her grows cold when he is not there. Adam unbuckles his belt and unzips his pants because the plan all along was that they were going to have sex in the woods.

  Adam blinks down at her three or four times. His eyes are shot through with red and his penis equally fierce. He looks at Eddie, shifting and arching, and for a moment it looks like something terrible is meandering its way through her, but Eddie is only trying to get comfortable. The floor of the clearing is filled with things, and Eddie feels as if she is sleeping on a bed of macadamia nuts, uneasy and crunchy. Adam lifts one of her legs and then squints and winces for a moment.

  “Are you—?” Eddie asks. “We don’t have to.”

  “No, no,” Adam says. “No.”

  “I’m sorry,” someone else says. “I’m really sorry.” He moves another branch aside and steps the rest of the way into the clearing with his backpack. />
  What is a clearing, anyway? It is someplace in the forest where nothing is growing, or where something used to grow but nothing has come to take its place. It’s supposed to have nothing in it. That’s why Adam and Eddie chose there, but now there is another person. At least he is apologizing.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t mean to. But my friend is hurt. We fell down. He can’t walk. He can’t even walk here. I’m really sorry.”

  Adam lets go of Eddie’s leg and it drops to the ground. There is a small marking, or a row of markings, where his hand held her there. Eddie takes her shirt. “What?” she says.

  “I’m really sorry,” he says. “We need your help. Help. My friend needs your help.”

  “What—where is he?” Adam asks.

  “I’m Tomas,” the other person says, even though he does not have an accent. “My friend and I were walking here too. He’s only—I don’t know—he’s by the brook or creek. He can’t walk. The two of us fell while we were walking. I need—”

  “The forest ranger,” Adam says. “The ranger station.” He blinks his red eyes.

  “I know,” the other person—Tomas—says. “But somebody should sit with him. Or I’ll go, and I mean you’ll go, and I’ll stay with him, but I need your help.”

  Adam and Eddie scarcely have to look at each other. As moral dilemmas go it’s not much of one. Adam zips his pants up and hands Eddie her coat which is closer than his. It’s within arm’s reach.

  “I’m really sorry,” Tomas says. “I’m—do you want me to step away? I’m sorry.”

  “Just for a second,” Eddie says on the ground. “I need to get dressed.”

  “I know,” Tomas says, and he turns around and takes a few steps into the trees so they can only see his backpack. It is the closest thing to discretion he can do. Adam throws his coat on and laces his shoes and walks away from Eddie like he’s ashamed of her. He steps out of the clearing where Tomas is waiting for them. “I’m sorry,” Tomas says. “I’m really sorry. There’s just no one else here.”

  Adam gives Tomas a smile made of wire and sort of limps his arms in the air to indicate the way of the world, although he is furious. “We were going to have sex,” he says. Why not say it? You’re in the woods and you’ll never see this man again.

  “I know,” Tomas says. “Sorry.”

  “She’s embarrassed,” Adam says. Now there are three people in the forest when they thought they were two. There are three people in the forest and two of them are men and so they will blame her, the woman, for anything they can dream up.

  “Yes,” Tomas says. “I’m sorry. I’m Tomas.”

  “Adam.”

  Adam and Tomas shake hands, but Adam is angrier still. He did not hear it, the first time Tomas said his name. Tomas is a man who used to be Eddie’s lover, six or seven months before this story takes place. Adam knows this from the stories Eddie tells, the way you tell stories about people you know. Eddie and Tomas did not have a bitter parting, and so Adam has thrown stones at Tomas, as he lay in bed with Eddie and she told stories. Adam hates Tomas and tried to get Eddie to join him in hate. It hasn’t worked, although Eddie will admit certain shortcomings, and the two men have not met until now, in the forest, when Adam has decided that the Tomas in Eddie’s stories and the Tomas in this story are the same man.

  “What are you even doing here?” Adam asks. “Foggy. Fog and rain. Terrible day for a hike.”

  “I might ask you the same question,” Tomas says. It is the wrong thing to say.

  “You can see what I was doing,” Adam says and scrubs at his eyes with one fist.

  “What’s wrong with your eyes?” Tomas says.

  “Allergic,” Eddie says, all dressed. She steps out of the clearing and stands with them. Adam can see over her shoulder into the clearing. Eddie has taken everything with her and there is no trace, not even in the leaves on the ground, that two people or three people were ever there. Adam will get home and find dirt on his shoes, a few small things captured in his jacket, in his socks, traces of the forest on him, but not the other way around. “Adam’s allergic to something in here,” she says. “Something in the forest.”

  “Is that so,” Tomas says, looking at Adam’s eyes.

  “Where is this friend?” Adam asks. “Where is your friend?” He has noticed that Eddie has not bothered to introduce herself.

  “Down this way,” Tomas says, and the three of them disappear from the clearing completely. They abandon the clearing for the rest of the story to walk together. This is how it is in life and love. In life and love we are with people for a while, and then we join other people, people we have not met, and we walk with them, and we leave behind all the things where we used to be. Sometimes we leave people behind too. Sometimes we walk away from the forest and abandon a person there and never see them again. This happens every day. Every day this happens and scarcely anybody cares.

  By the brook or creek is Steven, on the ground near the water with two backpacks beside him. He is almost prone on a small arrangement of fairly flat rocks, with his legs stretched toward the water and his head squinting at the cloudy sun. He looks pale, or perhaps he always looks that way, but he is smiling, with his arms out in a wide stretch, until Adam and Eddie and Tomas walk through the last of the trees, and he curls up and frowns at them.

  “Steven, we’re here,” Tomas says. “I found these people in a clearing.”

  “We heard you were hurt,” Eddie says.

  “Hello,” Steven says. He looks okay.

  “What,” Adam says. “What’s wrong. What’s wrong with you?”

  “I don’t think I can walk,” Steven says, “like at all. It’s—it hurts. It’s gross to look.”

  Steven reaches down to his right leg and parts the leg of his pants, which someone has slit right up, cut with a knife or a scissors to see, or maybe it’s part of the wound, the same thing that caused it. Eddie gasps, or Adam. From the knee down almost to the shoe, on one neat side of Steven’s leg, is a round painful dome of an injury, swollen up purple and black. It has swollen up around a long gash, straight down the leg, although the gash is puckered and not bleeding anymore, as if it happened yesterday and has healed slightly, or is a fake, painted down his leg with thick putty and coloration. But the swelling looks very delicate and realistic, an almost gossamer, tender skin trembling across the wound, so that if you touched it everything would burst into thick blood, and the leg looks very wrong, bent somehow, or maybe that is just the shape of what has happened.

  “It hurts,” Steven says, and now he looks worse. There is a line of sweat at the top of his forehead, and he turns his head and spits onto the ground. “It hurts a lot.”

  “Keep it covered,” Eddie says. “Keep it covered, I think.” She looks around at the brook, which she and Adam had stepped across earlier, or walked alongside, she cannot remember. She wishes very hard that they were still at the clearing, although she had not been comfortable or very enthusiastic. But even bad kissing was preferable to this awful leg, this outrage at the brook. It is unfair that Eddie has to look at this terrible thing, that they all must try to fix Steven’s wound just because they are there. She has a thought that she and Adam could say they were going for help but instead just abandon them, leave the forest and go home. It is early, fairly early. Another person would show up, by the brook.

  “How did this happen?” Adam asks. Steven closes the pant leg again and covers the wound, and Adam thinks that he must have made a mistake, and that there are two Tomases, one her former lover and another one here in the woods.

  “We fell,” Tomas and Steven say at the same time. Tomas points up to a small, rocky slope, not many yards away. It looks like something you could fall from, probably.

  “We were carrying too much,” Steven says, and pats one of the backpacks beside him.

  “The packs are heavy,” Tomas agrees, though he keeps his pack on his shoulder. “We need to go to the ranger station, but I don’t think we should car
ry him.”

  “No,” Steven says. “It would hurt, and it’s not good to move the wound.”

  “We’ll go,” Eddie says. “The two of us will go. At the entrance, where we went in. It’s not far. Twenty minutes maybe. It’s not far. It’s not like we’re in the middle of nowhere. You can stay here.”

  “Someone should stay with him,” Tomas says.

  “That’s what I mean,” Eddie says. She looks at Adam and then away, down at Steven’s leg. “We’ll go, and—”

  “No, we’ll go,” Adam says. He changes his thinking again and the anger returns, prickly, moving beneath him and everyone else. His eyes get wide and he has a headache and his body feels wrong. The strain of not having sex, maybe, has helped this anger along, as boys are taught. And maybe a rival, Eddie’s old lover returning for her and leaving Adam with a wounded man, all on the pretense of getting help. “Tomas and I will go,” Adam says. “You stay here. Tomas and I can go. We’ll go quicker.” It’s the only thing he can say.

  “Why don’t both of you go?” Tomas says. “Just tell the ranger where we are, or bring him here. It’s the brook, right on the path.”

  “I have a map,” Adam says, although neither he nor Eddie have a backpack where it might be. They didn’t even bring a blanket, despite their plans, or a bottle of water. “We have a map. Just stay here and we’ll go, Eddie. But let’s go quickly. There’s lots of time before it gets dark, but we should be sure. We’ll be gone and back before you can recite the Gettysburg.”