by Sam Lipsyte
“Is it closure you seek?” he’d say in melodious English.
Inside, the father of the family would smile and take the mother’s hand.
“You have made us happy by coming,” he would say. “We have waited many years for this.”
“Closure is not forgiveness,” the mother would say, with even more melodiousness than the child. “But you are a blessed one, for you shall enjoy both.”
Then there would be an unexpected crunching sound, but actually that noise wasn’t coming from Mandy’s movie. An SUV rolled into the gravel driveway. The doors opened and children scurried out in scout uniforms. A tired-looking woman with grocery sacks followed.
“Can I help you?” she said.
Mandy thought she might be Brazilian. Or maybe Belgian.
“Look,” the woman said, and stabbed a finger down the road. “If it’s about the nightclub, I already signed the petition. I don’t want them to build it any more than you do. Those drunks will crash into my living room. But I’m really busy right now. Take care.”
Mandy nodded, and the woman turned to her stoop.
Her legs throbbed, had gone rubbery, and the bus back to the city was in the other direction, but Mandy hiked on around a bend of firs. The Shell sign hovered, its colors dulled, a corner of it broken, or maybe bitten off. They’d shuttered the station, covered the pumps with dirty canvas hoods.
What the poor woman died for, thought Mandy, but then knew it was a rotten thought, too romantic, something for Tovah’s poem cycle. The blazer, the tan, the lost dream of American entrepreneurship, her seduction and abandonment by transnational loins—these things hadn’t killed her mother. Nor had her father, with his smeary, world-historical wound. What murdered her was her mind, a madness factory full of blast furnaces and smokestacks. Mandy’s mind had erected one, too, but Mandy would discover a way to raze it. She would grow a beautiful garden on the ashes of the factory, teach cardio ballet in more and more places, build a modest cardio ballet empire. She would forgive Craig and help him however she could. She would help everybody. She would save herself.
The bus pulled into Port Authority, and she rode the subway uptown. Cal waited near the door of her building, and again they didn’t speak but did their dance of nods and shrugs, and he followed her into the lobby, just as he must have followed her home some night to know where she lived. What was creepy to civilians was protocol for their kind. How else were you going to figure out where somebody lived, where the drugs were, or the money, or somebody to cling to long enough to forget the shame.
Inside the apartment, Cal pulled a bottle of wine from his coat, but Mandy shook her head, poured them glasses of water from the tap. They gulped them down and filled the glasses again. Then Mandy led Cal into the bedroom and lit a lavender candle. Cal stood before her and stroked her hair.
He started to take off his shirt, but Mandy whispered, “No.” He seemed to understand, even tugged his sleeves down to his wrists to better hide his tattoos. He pulled her to the bed, and his body was smooth and taut through his shirt. Toward the end, he whispered something too muffled to make out, though she heard the words “beautiful” and “feels” and “so good,” and then maybe “cabal.”
The world was what it was, one day at a time. Mandy rocked Cal to sleep and thought about this day she’d had, this stranger in her bed. She thought about pinot blanc. She thought about all the colors of the key tags, about salmon and salmon-colored blazers and the cleaver on the kitchen’s magnetic strip. Before she fell asleep, she yawned once and stretched her arm across the panzer tank, invisible to her now, that in the morning would burst forth in loud hues from Cal’s belly.
Tomorrow she’d look up tattoo removal. They were doing big things with lasers. When he was just a little more stable, she’d break up with Cal, gently, and then she’d begin her project of helping everybody she could help, and after that she’d head out on a great long journey to absolutely nowhere and write a majestic poem cycle steeped in heavenly lavender-scented closure and also utter despair, a poem cycle you could also actually ride for its aerobic benefits, and she’d pedal that fucker straight across the face of the earth until at some point she’d coast right off the edge, whereupon she’d giggle and say, “Oh, shit.”
the REPUBLIC of EMPATHY
WILLIAM
My wife wanted another baby. But I thought Philip was enough. A toddler is a lot. I couldn’t picture us going through the whole ordeal again. We’d just gotten our lives back. We needed time to snuggle with them, plan their futures.
But Peg really wanted another baby, said we owed Philip a brother or a sister. That seemed like a pretty huge debt. What do you do for the second child? Have a third?
“Peg,” I said. But I had no follow-up. Or was it follow-through?
Peg sat at the kitchen table scribbling in the workbook she’d gotten from Arno, her German tutor. The handwriting didn’t look like hers, though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her handwriting.
“This is a dealbreaker,” Peg said.
“The deal being our marriage?”
“Please don’t leave me,” she said.
“Who said I wanted to leave?”
“If you refuse to have another baby, that’s the same as leaving me.”
“This is emotional blackmail.”
“The emotional aspect is implicit. You could just say blackmail.”
“But why, Peg?”
“This morning I smelled the top of Philip’s head. That sweet baby scent is gone. Now it just smells like the top of any dumbshit’s head.”
* * *
I took Philip for a walk. He tired easily, but his gait was significant. He tended to clutch his hands behind his back, like the vexed ruler of something about to disintegrate.
“How about a brother or a sister?” I asked.
“How about I just pooped,” Philip said.
“Thanks for your input.”
Peg always said I shouldn’t model sarcasm for the boy, but who will? Everybody’s so earnest around children. Besides, I’ve always wanted to model, to strut down the runway under all that strobe and glitter while the fashionably witty cheer on my sarcasm.
* * *
Later I had to jet over to the office. The flip-flop prototypes were a total joke. Art had ignored my notes. Where were the porpoise pods, the sea grass? I hated Art. They needed some attitudinal realignment, or whatever the badasses say. Art and I were scheduled to meet in the meeting room and communicate about our communication problems.
Gregory walked up to my desk. He didn’t work for our company, but rented a room in the building, where he made paintings for plays and movies. Gregory painted to the specifications of the filmmakers and stage directors. He could paint a copy of a famous painting or create a whole original series to represent the work of a character in a play or a movie. His oeuvre wasn’t known, but it had won fame and riches for fictional artists in several films.
Gregory always wore a festive shirt and a baseball cap with no logo. He said he wore these clothes because he believed they made him resemble a thoughtful, retired gay cop, which he was.
He’d come to see if I’d join him for a joint.
“Code Doob,” he said.
“Stat,” I said.
We went to the roof and smoked and stared at the large metal exhaust units mounted on nearby roofs.
“So, Peg…” I said.
“She wants to do a number two,” Gregory said. “I mean…”
“Oh, yeah, I told you already,” I said. “Guess I don’t have anything super-recent.”
“That’s okay,” Gregory said. “I got one. Guy just asked me to do a painting. Not a copy job, but a painting in the style of. A very famous painter. Died young, but did spectacular things. A great talent. All my gifts would fit in his pinkie, and so forth. This guy said he would pay me the equivalent of what I thought a real, newly discovered peak-performance painting by this painter would fetch. I said it would be many mil
lions. He said, ‘Fine.’”
“Why?”
“Said he’s interested in exploring questions of authenticity, and he’s got the money to do it. Investment banker. But did some art theory in college. He’s not going to throw his money away on a yacht he’ll have no time to … yacht on. Here, at least, he’s shaking things up.”
“You’ll be so rich.”
“I told him to go to hell.”
“Why?”
“I’m a copyist and a hack visionary, but I’m not a criminal. Fuck the banker.”
“You’re a proud man,” I said.
“If that’s all it takes. Hey, look.”
Across the way, on the roof of another building, two figures fought. They both wore dark coveralls and walkie-talkies clipped to their tool belts. They threw huge roundhouse punches, wrestled, choked each other, broke apart, and banged each other into the shiny exhausts and flues. You could hear the metal flutter.
“It’s either about money or women,” Gregory said.
“Or another man,” I said.
“Don’t get inclusive on my account,” Gregory said.
“Shouldn’t we call this in?”
“Good thinking, Citizen.”
We did call it in, but only after the next thing that happened. One of the guys grabbed the other guy’s shirt and spun him off the edge of the building. The falling guy fell. His head hit a steel fence post and made a moist, crunching sound. His body slid limp beside a Dumpster. Vomit fired up my throat. Gregory called it in, used a language I knew vaguely from television.
We gave statements to the police. Afterward we went to a bar. Gregory warned me that I might have nightmares about the grisly scene we’d just witnessed, but if I had the wherewithal to utter, from within the dream, the word “Miranda,” I might break out of the gruesomeness.
“Why Miranda?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s just what I use. You can use your own word.”
“Was she a friend of yours, Miranda?”
“She’s the friend of every cop who believes in a person’s right to remain silent.”
* * *
Peg was angry that I got home so late, but when I told her the story, leaving out the joint part, she seemed appeased. She didn’t care if I smoked marijuana. She smoked it or, rather, took tinctures of THC on her tongue. But the idea that I might be out of the house doing anything enjoyable, and not generating revenue, enraged her. She had a right to be enraged. She was home with our son a good deal. It took a toll. You can cobble together a solid twelve minutes of unconquerable joy a day caring for a toddler. It’s just the other fourteen or fifteen hours that strip your nerves and immolate your spirit. Peg was a warrior, but she got testy the time I told her that. She said she didn’t want to be a warrior. She wanted to be the smart, sexy, sociable woman she’d been before Philip.
I should have said, “You are, honey. You still are.”
Instead I said, “Better save up for a time machine.”
We hardly talked for a week. But I guess she’d forgiven me, as lately it had been all about another baby, and today my absence had been excused, even if it took a corpse to clear the air.
“You must be traumatized,” she said. “Oh, sweetie.”
She sat on the carpet with Philip, who chewed on a toy hammer.
“I’m okay,” I said.
I squatted down and stroked Philip’s face.
“It just reminds you of the fragility of everything,” I said. “Especially the fragility of brawling on the roof of a very tall building.”
“Let’s not ever do that to each other,” Peg said, her eyes filling with tears.
* * *
That night, I dreamed I had another son, a bigger one, and he punched me in the neck and I stumbled off the edge of a skyscraper. I fell through the air. I could also feel myself climbing out of the dream. Gregory floated near me, waved.
“Miranda!” I shouted. “Miranda!”
Peg shook me awake.
One hand cradled my head, the other hovered in a fist.
“How long have you been seeing this Miranda?” she asked.
“She’s a constitutional guarantee,” I said.
“She goes all night?”
“Forget it.”
“I can’t,” Peg said. “I’m pregnant.”
“We’re going to have a second kid? I thought we were going to keep discussing this.”
“A second kid? We have two kids already.”
“We do?”
Two boys walked into the room. One looked like Philip, but a few years older. The other, smaller, didn’t look like anybody I knew. They wore matching airplane pajamas.
“We can’t sleep,” the Philip-looking one said.
“Come on down,” said Peg, like a very tired game show host.
The two boys slid into bed with us. The smaller one curled up beside me. He giggled and put his finger in my ear.
“Papa,” he said, dug hard with his fingernail.
“Ow!”
I jumped out of bed, clutching my ear.
“Toby,” Peg said. “Don’t hurt your father.”
I ran out of the bedroom and into the living room. Things looked different in our dark apartment. I opened another door to step into the hall. But cool, spongy grass had replaced the smudged carpet. In fact, there was no hall. I stood on a lawn on a moonlit lane. Night air filled my lungs, and I stared up at the stars, then across to the houses, cream houses with high porticos that sat along the silent block. In one, flabby nude figures moved behind a blindless bay window. The goddamn Lockwoods masturbated each other on their sofa again, though how did I know their name or that these exhibitions were habitual? Did it matter? This couldn’t go on. What if Philip, or the other one, what’s-his-face, Toby, saw?
DANNY
Dad picks me up on Knickerbocker near the monument in Cresskill. He has his new girlfriend in the car. I throw my bag into the backseat and slide in, shut the door.
“This is my friend Lisa,” Dad says.
“Totally sincere greetings,” I say, stick my hand over the seatback. Lisa grins. She looks younger than Dad’s last few. He goes through them quick—like he’s stoked by the idea of them, but when they get too close, he has to send them packing. Or else, and this is my buddy Ronko’s theory, he’s secretly gay, and can’t face it. But who ever heard of a gay homicide cop, and besides, there’s no way you could be gay with this chick Lisa around. She has such nice, soft-looking hair, which is a tell-me-about-the-rabbits-George thing to say, but what can you do?
“Hi,” Lisa says. “It’s good to meet you. I’ve heard a lot of stories.”
“I’m sure they’re all true, but skewed by my dad’s peculiar vision of the world.”
“What’s his vision of the world?”
“He thinks raccoons are advance scouts for alien invaders.”
“It’s clear from their behavior that they work for the Greys,” Dad says.
“Oh, Gregory,” she says, and gives his head a playful shove.
“Watch out, I’m driving here!” Dad barks.
“Hey, Lisa,” I say. “What’s the lamest car in Bergen County?”
“A gold Firebird with four on the floor.”
She’s a local girl. She remembers that nasty joke from years before, after a quartet of satanic metalheads turned their car into a carbon monoxide Jacuzzi and went to meet their master.
She’s probably just a few years older than me.
“What are you two talking about?” Dad asks. He’s no local boy. He’s from Brooklyn. He moved us out here to Jersey when I was a kid. Dad’s also old. Too old for this chick. But you have to hand it to him. I generally want to hand it to him, and then, while he’s absorbed in admiring whatever I’ve handed to him, kick away at his balls. That’s my basic strategy. Except he has no balls. Testicular cancer. Sounds like a bad rock band. I sound like the narrator of a mediocre young adult novel from the eighties. Which is, in fact, what I am. Exactly whose colosto
my bag must I tongue wash to escape this edgy voice-driven narrative?
Back at the house, Lisa grills some steaks while Dad and I chop veggies for the salad.
“How’s your mom doing?” he asks.
“Mom?” I say.
“Your mom,” Dad says.
“Mom?” I say.
“Yes, Mom,” says Dad. His serrated blade bites into the cutting board. It’s like that commercial with the beer can, the tomato, the Japanese knife.
“Mom’s fine,” I say. “She’s rimming this experimental bassoonist from Santa Cruz.”
Dad throws the knife down, shoots me his photon-torpedo eyes.
Shields up.
“Don’t you talk about your mother that way,” he says.
“What?” I say. “I love the bassoon.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Sorry, dude,” I say.
Shields hold.
“Steaks are almost done,” Lisa calls from the deck. “Hope you like them severely wounded, but not dead.”
“Fantastic!” Dad shouts back. He’s got this big smile on his face, like he’s happy or something. It’s a rare expression. Mostly you only see it on the weekends, when he’s working on his paintings. It’s how he relaxes from being around so much homicide. Now his eyes flick my way, and I see that happiness drain away.
What Lisa just said, that’s how I feel about my relationship with Dad: severely wounded, but not quite dead. Okay, maybe that’s sappy and jervis, but it’s how I feel, and as the young protagonist, my job is to keep you abreast of my feelings. I’m brash, but you better believe I hurt inside. Like I said, I will do windows and colostomy bags. Just get me out of here before I have to tell you in the next chapter how I think internal affairs is investigating my father, and what it’s like to be the son of a cop, and also what it’s like just to cope with all the strangeness in the world, strangest of all being that I just know, with a certainty I’ve never experienced, that before she is out of our lives forever, I will be in Lisa’s ass, though you probably won’t get to see it, or even hear me use the phrase “in Lisa’s ass,” because this book depends on school library sales.
LEON AND FRESKO
