Super Flat Times

by Matthew Derby

  Having to repeat the same actions, such as touching, counting, washing?

  When I touch things, I can hear them break. I can hear the sound they will make in the future. I touch lots of things. When I touch a person I can know her faults. If I’m touching someone on the top of the head, I know exactly where his weak points are. The same is true for animals. My neighbor, in the life I used to fool people with, had an Irish setter named Pippin. “Here, Pip, come on, boy,” he would say to the dog from his porch door. I held the dog’s snout in my hands, and it told me about all of my neighbor’s secrets because it hated him. He was a wife swapper, which explained all the nice cars in the driveway. “You’re a good boy,” I would say to the dog, slapping its hindquarters, “you’re a good old boy.”

  The idea that you should be punished for your sins?

  My father owned a horse farm and drove trucks and cars into the quarry for extra cash or food. We could see them sometimes from the rope swing — bruised forms sulking at the bottom.

  I pulled my first pair of pants down near that same quarry. It was late evening; Dad nearly ran us down on his way to the water’s edge. We were hiding in the tall grass. My dick made a sucking sound, like a bad drain. Her name was Pam — she started to cry in the darkness.

  Later that summer we attended an outdoor piano concert. We didn’t think to bring a blanket, so we sat on the grass. The piano was like a thousand knives hitting me in the chest, one after the other. I would not see Pam again. She is pregnant now, living somewhere in one of those big boxlike states. I burned all of my pictures of her, something I’ve come to regret more than almost anything else, after all this time.

  Feeling afraid you will faint in public?

  In grade school we had an assembly. A man came to talk to us about the dangers of smoking. He had a hole in his throat and spoke with the assistance of a small machine. The room was dark; we were shown slides of the operation. One shot showed a nurse slipping her finger into the hole, right down to her knuckle. I started to see colors. Everything was far off, all of a sudden. I made my way to the back of the auditorium, where I collapsed, vomiting my lunch by the ticket booth. A guidance counselor found me there and admonished me for trying to duck out. “I’m sick,” I told him, wiping my face on my sleeve. “Nice try,” he said, dragging me back to my seat. “Nice try.” I thought this event would follow me for the rest of my life, but soon enough everyone was already on to the next thing.

  The idea that someone else can control your thoughts?

  We made sure our linens were dull and muted in color. Gray on maroon, navy on black, brown on black. My wife was concerned that bright colors would hurt the house. She drew the shades whenever there was a thunderstorm because the lightning put streaks in the linoleum. She had a thing about light — she wore tinted glasses in the house, which made her look like someone from another time. It made her teeth look like big planks. She was like somebody’s understudy in those glasses. When we fought I would make a bonfire in the backyard because I knew she would not follow me there. I could see her watching me through the attic window, sucking on an inhaler. I’d throw another log on the fire, sending a volley of sparks high into the air. This nearly always made her disappear for a few hours. Sometimes it rained. This, to her, meant victory.

  Other people being aware of your private thoughts?

  I didn’t like the way my life felt on me. Cumbersome as an old jacket. I visited dark places, bars with an entrance at both ends. I never used that back door that I can remember, but its presence there was essential. Somebody was always throwing darts. “Jesus,” I would think to myself, “those things are coming right for me.” One night a man in a green parka came in. He walked on thin, moon-shaped legs and sat in the chair next to mine. He was looking for clues as to the whereabouts of his son, who had crashed his motorcycle right outside nearly three years before. I told him I was a relative stranger, and he held out a photograph. It was his son. They both had the same long face, like the wooden handle of a gun. The police had dismissed the case, he said. His son did not commit suicide, no way. I excused myself. There was too much life hanging around him. I could feel his heavy breath. In the lavatory sink my hands grimaced, slick with liquid soap.

  Loss of sexual interest or pleasure?

  Not hardly ever.

  The Life Jacket

  I woke up in the back of a stranger’s car, a vast blue sedan with cigarette burns on the dash. Hard to tell what hour it was from my vantage point on the floor, the pale green light held high above the city in the distance as if by a teasing older brother. My neck was all bent and crooked, a hard impression of some car part pressed into the back of it. My whole body was caved in and folded like the thousand facets of a crushed aluminum can. I needed the pills. Nothing any doctor had done could come close: the weight treatment had not worked, neither had the saline injections, medicinal salves, the gyroscope, the boulder toss, submersion in the warm chemical baths. But those pills — not a whole lot I wouldn’t do for those pills, tiny plastic jackets of blue and white, the fine yellow substance inside that glowed like a burning star under black light. Pills that made you feel like an angry, hideous young bull let loose into the fighting ring. Susan would fix me up with a bag, I was sure of it.

  I sat up. I had somehow gotten myself all the way out to the bay, which reflected a brilliant array of colored lights that hid its true, rust-colored ugliness. The couple I had followed around the night before had left no traces of ever having been here. Yet there was a conversation that I was sure I could remember snippets of — the woman talking about a doll’s head she used to comb in her backyard, how dirty the spring is with everything smelling like cold semen in the air, and what made a billfold different from a wallet. We met at a nightclub, one I’d come to in search of a hit. I used to go there a lot to pick up different things, but the neighborhood had changed since the last time I’d been there. It had whitened. So instead of the pills, or anything I could really make use of, there were these people. We started talking about sex — the woman told me I was being too uptight. I didn’t even know who she was. I got up to leave, but she took my arm and yanked me back into the booth we were occupying. Her face was nested in the center of a mess of matted, crimped brown hair, floating like a shrunken head. I remember telling her to stay away from my life. I remember that we all decided to take a walk.

  Susan was my old girlfriend, and she lived somewhere nearby. It had been a long time since I’d seen her. She was all sorts of different races — shades of black, with splashes of white and something else — the kind of shit no one could get away with anymore. Thirty years ago this kind of breeding was fine — encouraged, even. It had been completely legal to “mix and match” before the Voiding Initiative. She passed, though, fooling the Orange Jackets until the property-wide blood census. That was pretty much the end of our relationship. I am as white as a household appliance, and I was not going to jail over this woman.

  My clothes sat heavily on me, bent with sleep. There was a metal kiosk in the distance, shaped like a paper milk carton, with someone official-looking inside, all dressed in orange. I thought I saw him look at me and then go for a phone. Feeling around for my belongings, I picked up a crushed straw cowboy hat — something stupid the woman had put on my head at the nightclub. The man had laughed. “He looks just like that fellow ———.” His inflated grin was too much for me to handle. I only wanted to wear the hat more, placing it on my head like a true rancher.

  There was nothing else in the backseat but an empty water bottle and some magazines, so I slid out the door that was farthest away from the guard and crawled over to a set of high green Dumpsters. I heard a voice — “Hey, this is a — Hey, goddamnit, this place is —” It was as halfhearted an attempt as I’d ever heard. From behind the Dumpster I could see him standing outside the kiosk, hand held like a visor against his forehead to block out the powerful floodlights shining from the roof. He looked at his watch, pacing the length of the concre
te loading dock. Two truancy robots flew by overhead, ripping open the night with great big searchlights. I was going to have to make it through another day.

  As quietly as I could, I hopped the fence and set off on a dirt trail that led through a construction site. Giant, wiry structures, like the bones of a primitive monster, rose up on either side of me, black against the loud green cityscape. There were rows and rows of cranes and backhoes, their sharp, slender appendages hanging desultorily. I might as well have been on another planet.

  I hadn’t seen Susan in three years, but I was sure she could hook me up — she always seemed to be surrounded by people in the pharmaceutical business. “I see absolutely no reason why I shouldn’t just go on taking these pills for the rest of my life,” she had said one night, breaking the long silence we often observed after coupling. “You’re crazy, you actually…,” I said. “You actually — so this is you, from now on?” That is the thing with those pills — you think you’re getting better, when to the rest of the world you are unbearable. It is best to take them in spurts, hurling yourself into a dry period until the world starts to make you sick again. She had been taking them every day for just about as long as I had known her. They flatten everything, making you feel empty and suspended, like a cipher in your own head. She had taken on a sallow, compressed translucence — her body no longer felt like a real thing so much as a wax model. How are you supposed to tell someone that her whole life is based on a stupid lie?

  The construction site gave way to wide, empty streets lined with enormous steel and concrete structures that appeared to levitate in the night, suspended by unseen buttresses. Thin, crescent-shaped skyscrapers balanced on inverted concrete pyramids, as if forever on tiptoe. The sidewalks were canted to ward off the bums. Everything was skinned over in dark reflective glass, as if there weren’t enough reminders around of how ugly we are. Something moved through the sky overhead, lit all over with tiny red lights. I searched in my pockets for a loose cigarette.

  I tried to get off the pills several times. I used to check myself into clinics on a regular basis. First, the counselors strap you into a steel apparatus, which rotates on two independent axes. It seems like forever before they’re done attaching the nodes. The head doctor will look at some charts, take measurements, run your blood through the purifier. “We’re going to leave the room for a while,” they’ll say, slipping into lead bibs. “Can I get you anything before we begin?” The whole process takes hours, with cameras all over the place sending invisible rays straight through you and on into the other half of the world. Later they take you into a room with pictures of your body covering the walls, millions of small multicolored cross sections. You begin to understand how comical the body is, how much a caricature of itself, how much work the skin does in holding off this absurdity. Finally, they hand you a vial of dummy pills. These are supposed to simulate the effects of the real ones, but all they do is remind you of all the good times you had before. Pretty soon, you’re out in the night again, shifting cautiously around unfamiliar neighborhoods.

  I sensed that I was near Susan’s house. People called this area the Combat Zone. Each corner became increasingly familiar, from the old days. Dark cars slowed up at intersections, their open windows a provocation.

  Her place was tall and white, set into a hill with a wide porch and endless spiraling stairs. Not much had changed since I had last been there, except for the cars in the driveway and the unnecessarily cocky addition of a highway yield sign next to the front door, as if to say to the authorities, “Come on, we dare you.”

  The doorbell didn’t seem to be working. I saw the shape of someone moving through the frosted glass, and started banging. The form paused, turned either toward the door or away. “Hey,” I called, “I’m looking for Susan. Do you happen to know. . .Does she —”

  The form grew, swallowing the dim light emanating from a distant room. I stood back while a series of locks were undone. The man at the door was thin, dark skinned, wearing a loose white T-shirt and large blue jeans, thick hair barely visible beneath a green knit cap. A child, half white and half something else, clutched his leg from behind, peering out into the night at me with wide, dark eyes.

  “What the — ?” he said, eyes barely open. Already, I felt stupid and alone.

  “I’m looking for Susan. Is she still — ?”

  Of course she wasn’t there. Of course he didn’t know what I was talking about. They never knew, one after the next. They never knew.

  “Then why is all of that shit in there hers?”

  “Hey, why don’t you just —”

  “I don’t care what she told you to say. She has some things of mine. Would you —”

  The man lifted his hands, palms out, pushing me out into the street in pantomime. “Go, go. Get out of —”

  “She knows who I am. We used the same fucking toothbrush so don’t —” The man went behind the door for something. The child followed his arm with her eyes, then looked back at me, something about the intensity of her stare turning me cold with anxiety. “What are you — ?” I said, moving back toward the steps. “Fuck is going on here?” The words came out of my mouth already rehearsed — I nearly choked with their hardness, the brittle, sharp shards of them lodged in me. He closed the door, and as I backed away down the steps I could see a hooked finger part the curtains of her bedroom window slightly.

  The woman from the night before had told me I was uptight. I was like a sealed envelope, she said. I let her get away with it because it was true. You think that people only imagine they know you better than you know yourself. It makes you feel as though you’re wearing your life on the outside of your body.

  Across the street, catercorner, there was a restaurant that was open, improbably, at whatever hour it had come to be. I took a booth that looked out on the house, laying myself out on the cool orange vinyl bench seat, the most comfortable thing I had felt that night. A waitress came, setting the table with exaggerated indifference. The fluorescent lights burned and flickered, turning everything a crisp yellow. Two old women sat at a booth across from me, staring blankly at each other, each clutching an identical ivory mug. They sat there, mute, in shapeless brown orthopedic shoes, some essential piece of them already dead, I was sure of it.

  “Would you like some more time?”

  “No, the coffee’s —”

  There were two clocks on the wall — one in Northern Time and one in Korean, and only the Korean clock was working: 9:39, it said. I didn’t particularly feel like doing the math.

  Susan was one of those people who needed to be walked. If I didn’t walk her, she would kick the sheets off the bed. “Okay, okay,” I’d say each time, reaching for a bathrobe in the darkness, at the small end of an interminable night. The last time I saw her, the night after the census, she was feeling dizzy. “I can’t sleep. I think I need to go somewhere,” she said. “I think I need a doctor.” She knelt on the bed, gripping the mattress, and vomited on the floor. I drove her to the hospital. We saw two police cars pulling into the emergency room entrance ahead of us. “You can just dump me off here. You don’t have to…,” she said, hunched over in the back seat.

  “No, I’ll…You just rest.” One of the cops got out to consult with the second squad car.

  “No, really, I’ll just get out and —”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” She had her hand on the handle, her whole body rigid. What was I supposed to do?

  The man opened Susan’s door across the street. The three of them emerged, their heads snapping back and forth, scanning the block. Looking for me, I supposed. Susan held the child on her hip. Where had the child come from? I wondered, standing suddenly, startling the old women from their protracted, mutual reverie.

  I made it out the door, stumbling, crashing into a pamphlet rack on my way across the street. Susan and whoever that man was ducked into an old wood-paneled station wagon. “Hey, Jesus —,” I called out, picking up speed. The guy backed out
into the road, nearly crashing right into me. Susan was busy in the backseat, strapping the kid into a special chair. Both of them looked at me with crazed, wide eyes, as if they had never seen me before. I knew immediately what had scared me earlier in the night when I’d backed away from the entrance to Susan’s house — the kid’s eyes, I could see right away, even in the darkness, were the same color as mine.

  “What?” she said.

  “You can’t…you can’t just . . .” Trembling, I was unable to spit out anything resembling a sentence.

  “Get out of here.”

  “That. . .that? The last time we were together . . .”

  It was hard to talk through the windshield. The man, her partner, shook a tight, vein-lined fist at me, cursing. Susan’s eyes watered, and she bent forward in the way that I had received her, crying, on all of those long, dry nights. The scent of her hair came to me then, oddly. A tattoo on the inside of her arm of a flaming, sacred heart.

  The car door opened and a foot came out. I bared my teeth at the man, taking a wide, fighting stance. We hovered there for a moment, trembling.

  Susan covered her mouth, running her free hand through the child’s hair. The child with her round, golden face — what features of mine had surfaced there, vying for some sort of attention? Having tried so hard for so long not to look at my own sloppy, asymmetrical head, I could barely tell.