by Joshua Mohr
The table is small and circular and lacquered into its top is the iconic picture of King Kong atop the Empire State Building, swatting at airplanes.
“So Aubrey told me a confusing story about last night,” Jane says. “You did run into her husband, right?”
“I did. We still have their tent poles.”
“She said you told him that Schumann ran you off the road.”
“I’d totally forgotten we even borrowed their tent poles.”
“You told me you fell off your bike and Schumann drove you to the hospital.”
“I might have left out the beginning.” Bob sticks his tongue in his coffee—still too hot. He looks down at King Kong instead.
“So you lied to me.”
“If you think omission is lying.”
“Everyone thinks omission is lying.”
“I didn’t know how to tell you the truth. It’s embarrassing.”
“Do you remember when I caught you jerking off last week with the chips?” Jane’s face goes from its earlier contortion—the appropriated curiosity and apprehension and pity lifted from the Native Americans—and morphs into flat-out disgust. “Are you saying this is more embarrassing than that?”
A week ago Tuesday: Coffen had been minding his own tawdry business on the Internet—wife and kids sleeping the night away. He was another half-drunken, lonely, sad, suburban father sitting in his study, inappropriately conducting fevered searches re the shaving habits of certain coeds who were okay with strangers witnessing the upkeep of their nether regions. Coffen gawked and Googled and swigged vodka on the rocks from a sweating tumbler and munched nacho cheese Doritos, and a rhythm developed between these motions—gawking, Googling, slurping, munching. It was the vodka that presented the first problem piece of the puzzle. See, in his haste and enthusiasm Coffen wasn’t paying attention to the condensation from the glass, how it made his fingers moist, how with the next clumsy dip of his hand into the Doritos bag, the orange dust plastered itself to it. Under normal circumstances, he would have identified the vibrant sticking orange dust and properly cleaned it off, but he wasn’t exactly in his right mind, a combustion slowly stoking in his body, and as the scene built to its dejected ending, he dropped his pants and latched his phallus in his fist and the vibrant, gummy orange dust transferred and stuck to it like fluorescent sawdust.
Meanwhile, Jane, thirsty, awakened, and wondering why Coffen hadn’t come to bed, burst into his office and observed the scene for herself—Bob yanking sadly, his prick bright orange.
Shame rained on him immediately. Coffen thought: Two people can know each other so well and yet there are always new ways to disappoint your partner, disappoint yourself.
He quickly pulled up his pants and pushed his fluorescent orange penis inside.
“Those chips are supposed to be for the kids,” Jane said, and walked out.
Now Bob says, “It’s a different kind of embarrassing, but I’ll tell you if that’s what you want.” Coffen tells her another pared-down version of the truth, one that contains more of the crucial plot points than the first iteration he’d shared, yet it still isn’t entirely true: In this new remix, Coffen and Schumann were having a good-humored competition, a couple blokes fooling around on their way home, horseplay between subdivision friends that unfortunately didn’t end the way either had hoped or expected or wanted.
“Why would you agree to race a car on a bicycle?” she asks with the same judgmental look she’d given Bob after seeing him fluorescent orange. It’s as though he’s covered in the artificial dust as they sit in the café.
“Boys will be boys,” Bob says.
“Your gender is ridiculous.”
“Yes, we are.”
“But I’m glad you’re okay.”
It’s the closest thing to affection she’s said to him lately, and it makes Bob happy to hear her express gladness that he’s all right. (Last night, after returning from the ER, Jane seemed like the whole episode was inconvenient, didn’t express any worry for Bob at all.) He’ll take what he can get, stares down at the lacquered King Kong, frozen there, stuck in mid-swat. “Tell me about your morning tread. Are you all ready to go for the world record? Does Gotthorm think you’re ready?”
“Well, that’s actually what I want to talk with you about,” she says.
Gotthorm is her water-treading coach. He played goalie on the Norwegian water polo team in the 1984 Olympics, and to see him today, you’d think he could still leap in the pool and tussle with the youngsters. Or hop over to the next fjord and burn and steal whatever tickles his plundering fancy.
Gotthorm always stands by the pool in only his red Speedo, encouraging Jane, his cock and balls like assistant coaches poking through the flimsy suit. Coffen himself can’t help but stare at Gotthorm’s bulge on the days he stops by Jane’s training sessions to show his support. It’s not the size of the bulge. No obscene mound distends the Speedo. It’s the nakedness, the proximity of the bulge. How from Jane’s vantage point in the pool, she has to stare up at it for hours at a time, treading water there—a bulge on a pedestal, if you will. In fact, Coffen sometimes can’t help but assume the worst: Gotthorm, Jane, and his bulge, the three of them someday riding off into the sunset together.
“Talk to me about what?” Bob asks, slurping his coffee.
“We think that maybe the reason I cramped up the last time I went for the record is that my mind was too heavy. I was literally weighed down by my mind.”
“Your mind literally weighed more?”
“We were thinking that this time my mind needs to be free. Totally lithe. It has to weigh less than a single scale from a fish.”
“How does one diet her brain weight?” Bob asks, feeling the threat of laughter. This is classic Gotthorm. He talks about treading water in a new age way that makes Coffen want to puke. Her brain is literally too heavy with thoughts, weighs her down, drags her to the bottom. Yup, that’s obviously the problem.
“We’re not sure you should be there this time. I psychically weigh more with you around.”
“Thanks.”
“That’s not meant as a criticism.”
“Sucker punch is more like it.”
“Bob, you know how much this record means to me. Please. Don’t blow this out of proportion. I want to set myself up to succeed. I’m asking for you to help me in a different way this time out. Help me by not being there. I really want the record.”
“I mean, there’s nothing I can really say. The kids and I will keep our distance.”
“Oh, the kids can be there,” says Jane. “We think it’s best if I see them through the travails of treading for so many hours, so I remember why I’m working so hard. They bring out the best in me. Gotthorm says motherhood is very primal and I’ll push myself even harder if I see my children present.”
“Is there anyone else besides me who has to stay away?”
“Don’t turn this into a ‘poor me’ thing, Mister Grumbles. Don’t do that thing where you feel sorry for yourself and I have to comfort you.”
“I will cheer from a distance,” Coffen says, simply because there’s nothing else he can say. Going over the top with some fuming tirade won’t change her mind. He needs to be mature. He knows—or thinks he knows—that she’s not trying to hurt his feelings. If this is what gives her the best chance to break the world record, so be it.
Bob had stood by the pool the whole time during her last attempt, only breaking away to use the bathroom. The kids were there for some of the time, too, cheering her on. But it’s hard for children to understand the immense achievement of treading water for so long. To them, it’s boring. It’s hard to watch. But Coffen understood Jane’s dedication. He knew how hard she’d worked at it, how she had cramped up, her head spending more and more time under the water, until finally the record attempt had to be called off in the name of safety—it was Bob, not Gotthorm, who held her as she cried that night.
“The world record is eighty-five hours,” J
ane says. “That’s three and a half days. It doesn’t sound like such a long time to tread until you’re the one bobbing in the pool. Then it feels like your whole life.”
“Tell Gotthorm how I used to train with you, treading water as long as I could last. I’ve always been supportive. He doesn’t like me.”
“He doesn’t understand guys like you. He’s like Schumann. They are built to use their bodies. You’re not.”
Coffen needs to change the subject before, like Kong, he takes one bullet too many and falls to his death. He tries to get it out of his head that Jane wants Gotthorm, tries but it’s not working. Why would she choose Bob over a modern-day Viking? He goes with, “Are you excited for Björn the Bereft’s magic show on Friday?”
“I hear he’s a miracle worker,” she says. “But it’s more marriage counseling than magic show.”
“What made you want to do this in the first place?” Bob asks.
“We made me want to do this,” she says.
Coffen retreats to his coffee. He was lying earlier to the barista—he can’t smell or taste any grapefruit in the brew. Nirvana’s dirge is over. A new song he doesn’t recognize starts up. King Kong is frozen for all time. And Bob is covered in fluorescent orange, like a crop duster had targeted him and spackled him in the artificial film. A visual marker for all that he’s done wrong, so many mistakes that Jane doesn’t want him to cheer her on as she goes for the record. Everybody else on planet earth is welcome, just not Bob.
The Muzak feels like it’s getting louder as they sit there in silence.
Looking like a neutered stooge
Bob Coffen stands in his kitchen, waiting for the macaroni to reach the right softness so he can pull the pot off the burner. He sips from a tumbler of vodka and watches his son, Brent, play one of Bob’s signature games, Disemboweler IV: Let’s Get Bloody!
In this final installment of the franchise, the game chronicles the carnal sojourns of cannibals traipsing through post-apocalyptic America in the hopes of disemboweling the last surviving citizens of this once-proud nation and chomping on their flesh. Right as one lucky cannibal is about to dig in and feast on a victim, they shout to their cohorts, “Let’s get bloody!” Once a cannibal croons this signature line, the corresponding graphics never fail to render a scene rich in slaughter, fantastic scribbles of innards and organs.
Brent is good at it, too—perhaps genetically inclined. No normal nine-year-old would be so gifted at these games that readily stump people twice his age. Brent’s cannibal dominates the action. In fact, he now rips out another character’s larynx and munches away on it, holding the larynx in his hand like an apple.
Brent says to Bob, “Did you see that move, Dad?”
“Good work.”
“I’m already on level five.”
“Keep it up.”
“Benny and Tommy can’t get past level two.”
“You’re a natural.”
“Tommy’s cat has worms.”
“That’s no fun.”
“Let’s get bloody!” Brent says, smiling at Bob, his avatar still choking down the larynx.
Coffen takes another swig of vodka. He’s turning his children into house cats: too helpless to fend for themselves outside the subdivision’s safe haven. They’re going to be easy targets, like him. Their futures are lined with oleanders and plocks.
He spoons out a single piece of macaroni and pops it in his mouth—still a bit crunchy.
Jane enters, dolled to the nines, walks over to a hallway mirror and fusses with her hair, working the wisps back into the elaborate pattern of braids. She has long worn her hair in a system of weaving braids that reminds Coffen of crisscrossing highways. It’s something he’s always loved about her—the way she’s kept this unique hairstyle into middle age, while other subdivision wives look increasingly homogenized.
“Are you sure he’s not too young to play that game?” Jane asks.
On-screen, Brent’s cannibal repeatedly bashes a citizen’s head onto the asphalt, then laps up the stream of synapse stew leaking from the opened skull.
“It’s nothing worse than what’s online.”
“Does that mean he should play it?”
Bob picks up his vodka and has another sip. “Are you having fun?” Coffen says to his son.
“Let’s get bloody!” Brent calls over.
“He’s enjoying himself,” Coffen says.
“He’s nine,” Jane says.
“It’s better we’re open with him about the real world, so he feels safe enough to ask us questions later about sex, puberty, drugs … ”
“Cannibalism,” she says.
“Exactly. Nothing is taboo in the Coffen residence.” Yet once this posit escapes Coffen’s lips, his face changes. Shoulders slump. He’s immediately saddened because not even his denial, a normally impenetrable fortress of rationalizations and white lies and blind spots, can offer asylum from the simple fact that almost everything is taboo in the Coffen residence these days.
Luckily, the conversation can’t continue because their daughter, Margot, three years older than Brent, comes into the room, scrolling on her iPad’s touch screen. Margot looks up and screams to Brent, “Don’t miss the teeth upgrade on the next level, or you’ll never be able to eat those Navy SEALs.”
“I know that,” he says.
“You always miss it.”
“I do not.”
“Margot, can you help me with something?” Coffen asks his daughter, watching her fingers work the iPad.
“I’m hanging with a friend right now, Dad.”
Coffen looks around the room. “Who?”
“Ro.”
“Where is she?”
“You mean, ‘Where are we?’” She shakes her tablet at him, allowing Bob to make out a 3-D representation of the ocean on its screen, two avatars in wet suits, kicking their finned feet. “And the answer is scuba diving at the Great Barrier Reef.”
“Why don’t you invite her over for real?” Coffen says.
“The Barrier Reef is so much cooler than being here for real,” she says.
While Jane continues to manipulate her maze of hair and Margot studies her underwater trek and sort of watches Brent’s cannibal feast on a minister, Coffen pulls the pot of macaroni off the heat without tasting it again, dumps it in a colander. Then he pours it back into the pot and stirs in the orangey-cheese powder and milk for the kids’ dinner. He slops it into two bowls and stands there drinking vodka.
His mother-in-law, Erma, waddles in. She’s five feet and one inch of diabetic rage and immediately belts out, “What’s Brent doing?”
Brent is straddling the minister and eating fistfuls of intestines.
“Well, what’s he doing?” Erma asks.
Coffen and his mother-in-law aren’t exactly bosom chums. There’s never been any kind of confrontation or anything because Bob kowtows to her. He tries to communicate with her in simple and direct ways, like this: “He’s gaming.”
“That game is gross,” says Erma, then specifically to Brent, “Turn that off while G-Ma’s here.”
“Mom, please,” Jane says.
“But I’ve almost beat my all-time high score!” Brent says.
“Fine,” Erma says, “beat your all-time high score. Ignore your G-Ma. Pretend your G-Ma’s not nearing the end of her life.”
“Mom,” Jane says.
“What? I won’t be around forever. They should appreciate me while I’m still alive.”
Brent’s avatar is up and off the minister, slowly cornering an Amish-looking woman.
Then there’s a tooting car horn out front.
“Schumann’s here,” Coffen says.
“Schumann?”
“Our chauffeur,” Coffen says with a huge smile. “We worked out an agreement for what happened the other night.”
The horn toots once more.
“This is weird,” Jane says.
“Dad, I thought you hated Schumann,” says Margot. “I heard you
say he’s a douche.”
“What’s a douche?” Brent asks, outfoxing the Amish lass and now gnawing her thigh to the bone.
Coffen ignores this and asks Jane, “Shall we go, dear?”
She rolls her eyes, goes to get her coat, pats the many braids on her head so as to verify proper geometry. “I guess we shall,” she says.
“Might I say,” Schumann says to Jane, talking with a French accent, “that your sexuality is palpable this evening. If Bob wasn’t here, I’d make my play to pleasure you.”
He’s been laying it on absurdly thick since picking the Coffens up. Talking with that canned French accent, bowing when he opened the car door for Jane, making a big show of it. He’s even dressed like a stereotypical chauffeur—black suit, black hat.
Every TV show or movie Coffen has ever seen in which there are servants, these people know how to keep their traps shut, don’t speak unless spoken to, be seen and not heard, etc. So where in his right mind does Schumann think he should be spouting off sexually explicit plans? Bob may not be any kind of chauffeur expert, but come on, this seems like Servitude 101: The help should keep focused on the task at hand.
“Um, thanks,” she says.
Both Coffens sit in the SUV’s backseat. Bob tries to catch Schumann’s eye in the rearview mirror to give him a face that means Are you seriously being serious right now—palpable sexuality? You’re supposed to be a submissive role player, Schumann. Tonight, I’m the quarterback.
“I don’t know about you two,” Schumann says, “but my wife and I love a romantic glass of champagne in the park. It’s a perfect night for it. I brought a couple champagne flutes and a bottle in case you two were in the mood.”
“That does sound nice,” Jane says, “but I shouldn’t drink any alcohol. I’m going for the treading-water record again on Monday.”
But before Coffen can muscle a word in, there’s Schumann yammering, “It doesn’t sound nice, Jane. It is nice. A few sips won’t kill you. Coach used to let us have a few beers when we were in training to blow off steam.”
