The Past Is Red
Page 5
Down there in the dark under the mountain, my hair still sticky with blood, red scars up one leg and down the other, I just couldn’t fathom that much love. Those kinds of resources. I don’t care about central heat and air or tupperware or The Best of Saturday Night Live! DVD box set or pistachio ice cream or even penicillin. I have literally all the Air Jordans I could possibly ask for over in Shoeshire. The only thing I want back from the Fuckwit world is this. This thing that has its grave in Winditch under the dead, burnt-out Home of the Tigers jumbotron. I want to have that much left over. I want to have enough left over that it matters to me who has the best smile at the volleyball tournament.
All their mountains of golden wasteful love held up Garbagetown, which seemed like it meant something, something vital, but I was so tired I couldn’t quite get hold of it.
Maybe somewhere in all that dragon hoard of positive thinking, there was the trophy I should have gotten for blowing up their wicked engines in Electric City. I tried hard. So goddamn hard. I participated the fuck out of that day.
Tetley Abednego: Better Luck Next Time.
After a while, I fell asleep with my arms curled around the World’s Best Wife.
* * *
I WOKE UP to warm fingers pulling my hair away from my face.
“Are you her?” a voice said. A stranger’s voice. An impossible voice. No one followed me. I was so careful. I am always so careful.
“No,” I whispered. “Go away. I’m nobody. I’m the eighth-best daffodil. I’m Gretchen Barnes.”
I opened my eyes to what I already knew I’d see: a young, angry person crouching above me with huge dark hurt eyes. I’d put that hurt there. Nobody else. It was my hurt. I owned it. I’d seen it plenty of times before. I was old friends with that hurt.
A tall girl with shaggy brown hair and skinny legs and a faded tank top that said LIVING FOR THE WEEKEND across the chest in yellow and a tattoo on her forearm. Bold, black, healed.
X | MR. YUCK | X
I braced myself. I knew what was coming. It was going to be terrible. But she was here and she was going to hurt me probably and I couldn’t do anything about that but just look forward to the part of my life where this had already happened and didn’t matter anymore.
“Well,” I said softly. “You’re here. I’m here. What are you going to do to me? Burn me? Cut me? Choke me? There’s some fresh skin on my back if you want to leave a mark. Anything you want. That’s the law. It’s okay. I forgive you.”
The girl hesitated for a moment. I could see her whole personality in her jaw as she ground her teeth. Poor thing. She grabbed my wrist tight. My stomach muscles tensed up against the pain on its way toward them.
Then the girl kissed me and kissed me and I kept still, knowing that a hidden knife was coming, inevitably, up between my ribs or in my kidney, but it never did. She just kissed me again. And again. But not lover’s kisses. Dry, friendly, joyful kisses. Like we’d known each other all our lives and fate had kept us apart, but no longer, no longer. She kissed my forehead. My cheeks. My hands. My chin. Even my nose, like a teasing grandfather before he steals it. This strange woman down in the dark kissed me and held me, and in between she whispered over and over: Shhh. It’s okay. It’s okay.
And it broke me. I could feel myself crack like dried wax over a tin box. All those fists and shocks and people spitting in my face never once flayed me so hard as that total stranger holding me in the Garbagetown basement where no one could see. And just for a half of a half of a second in that cave it all did matter, it all mattered so much: Terrence Hardy’s poor dead perfect smile and how hard Samantha Belfort tried and that old Greg Ambrose was there at that spelling bee, so very completely there, present and participating at that frozen, untouchable moment in time, a moment that got turned into a golden cup and lasted past the end of the world.
* * *
SOMETIMES WHEN I am 100 percent loneliness by volume, I pat Big Bargains’s head in the water and whisper to her the same thing that girl whispered to me when she got tired of kissing me and holding me while I shook like a loose wire. When she whispered it, it was a simple promise. When I whisper it, it’s so many things at once, each word might as well be a leather-bound volume of the encyclopedia of my whole wet blue obsessively sorted life.
My name is Sixty Watt Wen. Come with me. There’s a place we can go where nothing matters and everything is always okay.
4
SIXTY-SIX PERCENT
LOTS OF DAYS out here on the water I don’t talk to anyone but my moringa tree. The sun comes up, the sun goes down. I remember things long done and over like Sixty Watt Wen and the cave under the jumbotrons. I check my lines for mackerel and my traps for crabs. I check my tree to see if its little drumstick-pods have ripened enough to eat yet. I name the clouds, and then the stars, and then each of my breaths individually. I walk through my memories like a house I’ve spent a life keeping neat and smart.
I look at all the little steel muscly men holding the lines on No Pain No Gain and I wonder about the Fuckwit who owned this boat, which would be a very nice boat if you could reverse everything it’s been through and take away all the rust and barnacles and the cracks out of the vinyl and the ennui out of the engines. Wouldn’t we all, I guess, even though I earned my barnacles and they’ve got as much right to be here as the rest of me. I think about why he would name a pleasure craft after pain and why he couldn’t just have regular cleats for regular ropes like a regular person. I wonder what those strong metal men had to frown about so deep when they had enough protein every day of their lives, so much protein and time that they can get all swollen up with it like that.
I eat, I perspire, I sleep, I excrete, I regret my choices, I yearn for the past. I have a very full schedule.
But today I talked with Big Red Mars. Nothing can be bad on a day when I talk to Big Red Mars. She’s the best person I know. She is nothing at all like me. She is beautiful and clever and wise and she knows about science the way I know about Mr. Shakespeare and Mr. Webster and she never, ever raises her voice even when I have obviously upset her, which is a very good trick when you think about it, and I have never met anyone else who knows how to pull it off. Even Maruchan and Goodnight Moon, for whom I rot in love forever, aren’t half as good. They can’t be. I can’t be. Even my man Oscar is grouchy sometimes. But not Big Red. It’s like her heart is brand new, straight from a Fuckwit factory, never taken out of its shrink-wrapped box.
And I hate her.
And I love her.
And I hate her.
I calculated it in my head and came up with solid numbers: I hate her 66 percent of the time. I love her all the rest.
I study her like a new kind of bug. She studies me the same way, only I am an old kind of bug. If you squint, that’s enough like friendship it makes no space between. The day I met her I knew I was never gonna be the girl from before I heard her voice ever again. But that’s okay. I could just watch the old Tetley floating away over the sea until she was drowned and gone.
Other than Sixty Watt Wen, Big Red Mars is the only person in the great dumb post-boomtown universe who didn’t put a hurt on me the day we met. What I did matters less to her than a dried-up ink cartridge with nothing left to print.
It feels nice to be new to somebody. To not have anything dragging behind you.
Red comes to talk to me when she can sneak away without anyone knowing about it. She’s not allowed to go outside. That was the first thing she told me about herself the day we met. She was so breathless and excited and afraid and curious and she said: I’m not allowed outside. My father says it’s not safe. But a ship doesn’t really count as outside, does it? A ship isn’t outside or inside. It’s a loophole.
Her father is called Swarovski Mars and I don’t expect I will ever meet him. Her people would get real unjoyful if they found her talking down to someone like me. It makes her feel all sour inside to keep secrets, but I don’t care a bit. That’s what I mean about Big Red. I’v
e been sneaking and creeping so long I forgot how to hold my head up straight. I think maybe she was born with an extra organ. A little secret second pancreas that’s just so full of sweet it tops her up when everybody else has run flat out.
That’s not to say she’s perfect. Perfect things make me nervous anyhow. She never swears, even when I beg her to; she gets very cold if I am not there when she wants to visit; and when I say she doesn’t care about what I did, it’s mostly because it doesn’t have anything to do with her personally, so it’s like it never happened. Come right to it, I don’t understand her very much at all. For one thing, her parents love her, so she’s basically a space alien to me. But it is important to accept your friends even when they are a little awful. Everyone is a little awful. Except Dorchester and Big Bargains and all the many squawking great-grandchildren of the Original Grape Crush.
Big Red isn’t called Big Red because she has red hair any more than I’m called Tetley because I have Tetley-colored hair. That’s not how names work anymore. Another funny fact is that I gave her that name, all those years ago when she first wandered out of her home like we all did. I was the first stranger she encountered, and I yelled out the first bit of trash I could think of and that was that. She doesn’t have red hair at all. She shaves her head for pest control and doesn’t remember what color her hair was when it was young. After Goodnight Moon I never thought I’d care about anyone’s hair again. But you can’t ever imagine what you’re going to care about when you turn into the version of you that’s waiting on the other side of five years from now. That’s a stranger waiting to ambush you, and all you can do is plant your feet and try not to get thrown.
* * *
IT’S PAST MIDNIGHT before she can slip away without anyone noticing. I wait, all patient and loyal like I’m a good dog or a good person or both or neither.
I lie down on the foredeck under that mess of stars and she finally shows up and lies down too and we whisper to each other and where our whispers pool together it gets so thick and soft between us you could plant flowers there and they’d grow like madness.
“What do you want to be when you grow up, Red?” I say so quiet. I am already grown up and whatever I am going to be I already am forever. But Big Red Mars still has time. She still has a chance.
And she says back: “With you.”
5
THE BEST AND THE WORST
THERE’S ONLY A coupla reasons to get married in Garbagetown and love isn’t one of them. If it was just about love, why bother? For the tax benefits? For inheritance? So you’ve all got the same last name? So you can go to heaven because God is just a real hardass about having a giant party and a bit of jewelry before you get down to screwing? Who cares? That’s Fuckwit talk. Nasty little hoarders. St. Oscar says SCRAM to all that. Just be trash together and love as long as you can and then stop when you can’t anymore and be trash separately.
One reason to actually get married is if you’re from different parts of Garbagetown. People get weird about strangers. They tend to get less weird if you give them your own personal homebrew with an ABV percent of oh-shit-son and make them dance in front of everyone they know. Another reason is if you or your intended happens to be from Electric City. Electric City still thinks marriage exists and is real and absolutely necessary and isn’t buried under the Pacific with everyone else getting noshed on by fat squid. Brightboys and brightgirls are very concerned with inheritance. Electric City is about the closest you can get to still being a Fuckwit in Garbagetown.
Every part of Garbagetown has a different idea of what seals the deal in terms of long-term party-prefaced cohabitation. In Candle Hole, you light a new candle off the bride’s old doorstep and carry it together to a fresh pile of wax. In Lost Post Gulch, you blindfold each other and scrabble around in the hills until you get a paper cut, and then read each other the contents of that piece of old Fuckwit mail and it’s supposed to tell your fortune. Like if it’s a Christmas card your babies will be born alive and stay alive but if it’s a medical bill too bad, so sad.
Electric City has one, too. It’s stupid, but I’m in no place to criticize it nowadays. Nowadays, I think it’s amazing. See, they’re so rich and tidy over there, so high on their own fumes, they still think they own stuff. Like they didn’t just pick it off the pile no better than the rest of us. So the parents give their kids gifts. Like Fuckwit dowries, only it goes both ways. Each family hands over the best and worst thing they’ve got in a chest, and if the bride and groom are satisfied that what’s in the chest is both good and bad enough, it’s full steam ahead. It’s symbolic. They have enough left over for symbolism. It says that everyone brings the best and worst of themselves to a marriage and to their children. Everyone loses something and everyone gets something.
I wonder how different everything would have been if I’d known all that back in Winditch. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Not me, funny little darkgirl from a turned-off burg like Candle Hole. Not me, Little Miss T-Day. No chance on this blue ball of nothing that anybody’s parents were ever going to let their brightboy marry me. So when Sixty Watt Wen unstrapped a chest from her back and threw it down on the floor of the cave between us, I didn’t get it.
“What’s that supposed to be?” I asked.
“Gifts,” said Sixty. “The best and the worst. And food. We thought you’d be hungry.”
I was. I was so hungry I didn’t even clock that we snuck in there like a bug in oatmeal. I could have bitten off her fingers and called them candy. Sixty Watt brought me smoked cat meat and a cigarette box full of rice from the Lawn paddies and a baby food jar with a fat baby face on it, only it wasn’t packed up with pureed banana-strawberry like the label said, it was full of roe she scooped out of a mama salmon herself.
Sixty Watt opened the chest solemnly. Inside was something even I knew instantly was terrifically, absurdly precious: a small TV/DVD combo unit with a flip-up screen, hooked up to a fully charged solar pad. My new friend went to turn it on.
“No,” I yelped.
It was too much. Whatever was in there, whatever could actually play on an actual screen, I couldn’t bear it just then. My heart would have exploded. Touching that thing was like touching a diamond wrapped in an emerald. It was too rich to even get your brain all the way around it.
“Shhh.” Sixty smiled. “It’s okay. It’s all okay forever.”
She hit a button with a sideways triangle on it. In the silence and the dark and the trophies, the screen blazed up like a bomb lobbed a century ago and only just now landing where it could do the most damage.
I couldn’t even understand what I saw. The screen was all golden and full of Fuckwits drinking golden things, and for no reason I could tell, every once in awhile, even though there were only two or three Fuckwits talking, hundreds of voices laughed somewhere far away and invisible and suddenly someone was singing about how making their way in the world today took everything they had, and everyone was so beautiful and big and their lips shone so soft and full of hydration and they kept drinking and drinking like there would never stop being enough to pour down their gorgeous slavering maws, and then a man walked in who was so fat I thought he must have been a king or a Buddha or just so so sick. I had never seen a belly like that, so round, so abundant, so soft like love, and everyone yelled his name at once so he must have been a king, and his name was NORM, and they were all screaming, screaming that word, screaming for the normal world, the perfect, sopping, toasty, golden bright NORM that I could never even touch, and the voice kept singing, asking me if I’d like to get away, get away from all of it, and that’s all I wanted, to get away from the golden light and the golden dead and the golden singing about everyone knowing my name because I knew what it was really like when everyone knew your name and it had no gold in it, not even a sip.
“Turn it off,” I whispered. Sixty Watt did. I rubbed my eyes.
I could still see the images even with my eyes shut, flipped upside down and green and burning. It wa
s horrible. It was beautiful. It blasted out everything in your head that wasn’t itself and set up house there. I hated it. I adored it.
But I had no way of comprehending what the other object was. I knew a TV/DVD player from the stacks of dead ones in Screen Lake. But I’d never seen anything like this before. More than that, I’d never seen something I’d never seen before. When you live on the great garbage patch in the sea, nothing new ever comes to town.
This was new.
It looked like a small, glossy black snowman. A round base, then a thinner rectangular section in the middle, then a long slender teardrop tapering gracefully up to a little blue crystal tip. It had no ports or openings or cracks or battery compartments. Something had scraped up one side of it pretty nasty. A deep dent and a silver crosshatch of scratches in the otherwise perfect surface.
Like a dark, misshapen candle.
“It’s just junk,” Sixty Watt said with a gentle smile. “Maybe a sculpture. Maybe a doorstop. It doesn’t do anything. It’s the worst thing we could think of. It’s not even electric. Just useless.”
That we again, and I still didn’t notice.
It may not have been electric, but it was elegant.
Elegant was the word I thought of, right away, even though I’m not sure I once ever thought of it before then. Nothing in my life jumped up and thought it might like to be called elegant. The Fuckwits in the magazines in Periodically Circus were elegant. They draped themselves on things and had long soft necks and superhydrated lips and smooth SPF one-million-and-one skin that never felt the full body slam of the windless, shadeless equatorial sun. They had bored expressions in their jeweled eyes and those expressions were somehow the most elegant parts of them, like the actual meaning of elegance was the boredom and not the beauty. That’s what I thought of when I first touched that slick, clean, black plastic something in Sixty Watt Wen’s weird dark chest.