Blackbird

by Michael Fiegel

  Even memories are lies, every one; each time you recall something, you’re not remembering the thing, you’re remembering the last time you remembered. Lie built upon lie. But I know my parents were real, that their lies were real, that I am real, that all of this was real, not because of my memories, but because of my emotions. My feelings. That’s how I know things are true. Chemicals don’t lie; they only burn, and scar. Quick, and deep and forever.

  Of course, these were Xtian thoughts. Dinah, the friendly stock character waitress, bedraggled and dizzy with tip money, did not dwell on such things. So I just waved at Edison and the neighbor, shut the car door and flounced towards the porch, white blouse open a bit too far. Itchy black skirt I longed to peel off. Bare legs, stockings in the glove compartment. Edison hated it. Which is why I did it. One of us needed to be the antagonist in the relationship.

  “You’re early,” he said, biting back further commentary.

  I nodded, made sure there was no hidden meaning in what he was saying, no code that said “Run, you fool, they’re inside the house.” He nodded back, subtly.

  “Half-day,” I said. “For the Fourth.”

  “How’d ya do today?” asked Mister Neighbor.

  “Hundred,” I said, a small lie not far from truth (the best kind, Edison would say for the eighth or the eightieth time). “Not too ugly for a holiday.”

  There was more small talk, punctuated by the constant crackle of fireworks, but I stopped caring and went on autopilot about the same time Edison rolled his eyes at me. We went on about nothing for a further five minutes or so, and then I said we had to figure out dinner and peeled the neighbor off the porch. Edison waited until he was out of earshot before spewing venom.

  “One day,” said Edison, “I will inflict upon him such agony.”

  “He’s just being nice,” I said. “Not hurting anyone.”

  “All the more reason for picking up his slack. A hundred?”

  I reached down to help him, but he shook me off and lifted himself up, hiding his own hurt. Either he was genuinely getting better, or more likely, getting better at burying the pain.

  “We didn’t do so bad,” I said.

  We? Me.

  “That’s four … and twenty, I think, total for the weekend. All of it tax-free.”

  “When have we ever paid taxes, Xtian?”

  “Shhh. They’ll hear you.”

  “With that much we can each have our own chicken pot pie tonight, instead of splitting one. It’s the American dream.”

  I shrugged, and he paused at the door, noting that I had not budged.

  “You have a better idea?” he asked.

  • • •

  We go to the usual place, so I get the usual things, though I will suffer for it later. My stomach is not what it once was, not without many pills. But the rest works, and the food tastes like it should, false and salty and sweet, and it almost makes me forget. Almost. Children scream nonstop in the background, reminding me yet again that the world is a horrid place full of horrid people who deserve to be removed from it so that there is more room for me. And her.

  “Tomorrow,” I say, “I am coming back here to give them a reason to cry.”

  “Someone’s feeling better,” she says. Diet Coke for dinner. Does she ever ingest calories? Not in front of me lately. Perhaps at work, when she can, crumbs on the floor, leftovers. Grass, perhaps. I push some fries towards her, and she ignores them, just vacuums at the empty at the bottom of her cup. It seems I should speak, as if this would be where I put a lesson, but I wonder instead if there is any more to teach, and more importantly if there is any more she will allow herself to learn. I pick at the remnants of my food until she is done chewing her ice.

  “Ready?” she asks. We walk three long blocks to the car, too cool giving way to too hot, nothing just right. Then down an alley and two extra turns, just because we are being careful nowadays. When she pulls out of the parking lot, she turns left instead of right, away from the house. Wrong.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  She just smiles. The worst sort of answer.

  • • •

  It was a long way to the lake, hours, but we got there before dark, which was lucky for us because the boat deposit had been paid in advance and was nonrefundable. He didn’t want to get on at first, but it didn’t take much. I promised to keep us out of Pennsylvania waters. Besides, we had nowhere else to be, nothing else to do, and this was better than watching the news spew fear and hate, or driving aimless circles around 270, playing spot the tourist. And this had a purpose.

  I lifted the box from the trunk, carried it into the boat, set it down, almost daring him to ask. Nothing. Maybe he knew it was not a fishing rod, which was why he refused to look, just stared across the lake, watched the fireworks redden the waves. I steered towards the gore, turned off the engine and let the current take us where it wanted. There were surprisingly few people on the lake, and we didn’t have to worry about running into a drunken boater.

  I lifted the top off the case, leaned the barrel on the edge. Now he couldn’t ignore it.

  “Where did you get that?” he asked. He didn’t comment on the fact, but it was a model 700 rifle, almost identical to the one we’d been using out on this very same lake, five years earlier.

  “Online,” I said. “Don’t worry, I was careful.”

  I expected him to press further, but instead he got straight to the point: “Why are we here?”

  “I’m trying to help you,” I said. And maybe I believed I was.

  “Help me what?”

  “Get back what you lost.”

  “What I lost.”

  And he looked me right in the eyes, and I was immediately and completely convinced that he knew I had betrayed him. And I would tell him the truth, all of it. And I would leap overboard and play at Ophelia. And I would kill him. And I would kill myself. And I would wither under his gaze and dissolve into nothing. And the stars would fall and angels would cry blood. And.

  But the moment passed, and he did not know and would not. It didn’t make me feel better. I wanted him to know but I couldn’t be the agent. Instead, I pulled the rifle from the box and held it out for him. He still refused to take it, so I loaded it and set it on the seat beside him.

  “Go on, shoot. No one will hear it over the fireworks.”

  “This is not going to accomplish anything,” he said. Not angry, more amused. “You think this will fix me? Like butter on a bee sting. A folk remedy, something you can cure like hiccups.”

  “Ten bald men,” I said, unable to help myself as I imagined Edison bald, old. Doddering and senile, a cartoon character.

  “You cannot wives’ tale this away, Xtian. There is nothing to cure.”

  “Nothing to cure,” I asked, “or nothing curable?”

  “Just nothing.”

  “Come on. It’ll make you feel better. When’s the last time you killed someone?”

  “Ask me again in three seconds,” he said. I smirked and began counting.

  On two, he picked up the rifle, spun it towards my head, and fired.

  • • •

  The shot is aimed generally landwards, but there is more to miss than hit out there considering the light crowd—although you never know. Of course the only purpose here is to not hit her. It was not so long ago that I did quite the opposite, intentionally put her in harm’s way and thought her dead, after she was tested and found wanting. That time, it ended with the gun to my head, her victorious after failure. This echo of events seems appropriate, somehow.

  “You were right,” I say. “That did help.”

  I hold the gun out to her, giving her a turn. She ignores me.

  “Take it,” I say. “Maybe you’ll do better.”

  This is a poor attempt at dark humor—go on, see if you can hit me. But she takes it the wrong way, I think, assumes that I am referring to her failure back in Buffalo. And maybe I am.

  “Fuck you,” she says softl
y. So I toss the rifle into the lake.

  “That was three weeks of tips,” she says angrily. The atmosphere seems to change. There has been something brewing for a while, but suddenly things get a little darker and stormier.

  “Get a better job then,” I say. “What you do is slavery. You may as well pick cotton.”

  “While the master sits on the porch, drinks lemonade and reaps the benefits.”

  “I did not ask for this. And I do not think you want it, either.”

  The fireworks are all but over, leaving naught but stars and shadows against the night sky, and she could be anyone, and I anyone to her. But I know this is not true. We could not be anyone but what we are, could not be anywhere but here. This is as sure as gravity, as sure as a train wreck and just as messy. It will get messier still, before it is over. And it will be over, eventually. That much has been certain since the moment I picked her up nine years smaller. It was the goal, in fact. She is old enough now to ask the right questions. And answer them.

  She turns and looks at me—I can feel her eyes burn in the darkness—and something ends as she does so. Something releases. And I feel suddenly that we have been rising all this time and now we have crested the hill and are falling. This is where becoming becomes became, where potential becomes kinetic. This is where guts churn and stomachs turn inside out. But I feel strangely calm. Because though we both know something is coming, only I am sure of how it will end. This is a bullet in a gun, and it wants to come out, hit or miss.

  I wonder if either one of us will survive.

  • • •

  I watched him watch me for a long time, wondering what he wondered. It seemed like something needed saying, but I wasn’t sure what that was at the time.

  What’re you thinking?

  Hell no. I didn’t care what he thought, just then. I wondered, rather, if he knew how I felt about him. Really felt. Love, hate, all of it. Especially love though. The Greeks had four words for love, and I had no idea which one fit, but it was there: real, chemical, inevitable. You spend enough time with someone and your molecules blend. You become part of each other. It seemed like it should be obvious, though it maybe wasn’t, or at least would not be to most people. Would he be surprised? Probably not. To him it would have been inevitable and impossible, both at once. And he would have laughed at my words and ruined my soul.

  The thought made me consider the truth again. Not because I wanted to come clean, to beg forgiveness and reconcile. I wanted to wield the truth like a knife, to tear him apart and hurt him like he’d hurt me. But what stopped me from doing that was the thought, dim but persistent, that this was what he wanted, to see me dirty, to show me how horrid I had become. As bad as him. Maybe worse than him.

  Yes, he wanted me to say something, anything. Wanted it so badly I could see it on him like a scab, waiting to be picked off. Like a blister aching for a pin. He wanted a lunge so he could riposte. And so I said nothing, did nothing. I just slid over to the wheel of the boat, started the motor, and took us back in. We rode in silence the entire way. At the time, I thought it was victory. Now I’m not so sure it wasn’t cowardice instead.

  The shore loomed ahead like the edge of the world. It felt like the future was shrinking, like there was not much time left. For something. For anything. But all there was, then, was not yet. Not yet.

  It was well after midnight when we got to shore, the entire boat ride back in silence. Silence would keep on filling us up for some time, to overflowing. It followed us to the car, broken only by the doors slamming in tandem, the purr of the motor, the chatter of the radio. And then, despite the noise, our personal silence accompanied us home.

  Nesting Instinct

  05/28/2018

  The next year or so in Columbus was uncomfortable. Not much changed on the surface: I went to work and made money while Edison stayed home, watched TV, and—when he was up for it—wandered aimlessly, as far north as the Ohio State campus and as far south as downtown. We walked together, sometimes, but mostly he did it by himself while I was at work. Or claimed to.

  It all seemed curiously normal, which I thought was probably driving him crazy. Crazier, rather. After all, it had been well over a year since Seattle, and all he’d done was stew and feel old and older. He said he had nothing to do, so I told him to write, so he said he had nothing to write about, no one to rant about. Except me, I supposed. He needed a change of scenery. We both did.

  The zoo seemed a good enough idea. I was shocked we hadn’t been there yet—it was one of those things you forget to do when you live somewhere. I thought it would be good for us both, to see something else in a cage. There was a risk that he’d flip out and start massacring whiny children by the penguin exhibit, but I was willing to take that chance. It might be entertaining, if only to find out how discerning penguins were about what they ate.

  It was hot as hell when we arrived, and it still took five minutes to coax him out of the car.

  “It’s a million degrees out,” I said. “I’ll be arrested for animal cruelty.”

  “Crack a window,” he grumbled.

  “Can we just please pretend to be a couple of average, normal sociopaths today?”

  “We need to pretend?”

  “’Zactly.”

  I climbed out and waited. Two minutes later, he finally got out, too. Global warming one, Edison North zero. He squinted in the sunlight as he gazed around the parking lot. Needed glasses, or surgery, refused both. Which was fine. We could afford neither.

  “This is that big room with the blue ceiling I’ve been telling you about.” I pointed skywards, imagining the cold up there. Outer space was closer than Cleveland.

  There were a lot of cars, and I hoped for everyone’s sake that most of them were there for the water park, because neither of us wanted to deal with an overcrowded zoo. For a moment I imagined Edison in swim trunks, flailing about as he flew down a waterslide. It was impossible to envision without also giving him an imaginary shotgun.

  “How will we find the car?” He had a point there; we always drove vehicles that looked as ordinary as possible. There were probably dozens of vehicles of identical make, model, year, and color in the lot. One of them probably shared our license plate, knowing Edison.

  “We’re parked next to the van full of enriched uranium,” I said.

  He turned and peered through the window, as if to prove my accusation. “Language tapes … a big red bundle of dynamite that says ‘BOMB’ on the side … a seven page letter from the leader of ISIS …”

  “They still a thing?” I asked. I had been avoiding the news, mostly for his sake. Every time I brought it up he got a look on his face like he was missing out.

  “Who knows? Every time you see something on the morning news about a van full of evidence, you can pretty much assume it was invented. And by that evening they will have found a badly manipulated image of two Arabic guys in turbans planting dynamite in a puppy factory. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

  “Are you going to rant, or can we go in and get something to drink?” I wiped my face.

  “Why choose?” he replied.

  • • •

  We are in line for half an hour and I want to murder her, them, myself, not necessarily in that order. Whose idea was it to come on Memorial Day weekend? We are not even inside the actual zoo and already amongst animals—tweens and teens and millennials and … I do not even care to discern. They are just one solid mass of foul. The way they move and sound and smell. This is the future. This is what is to come. I did not murder nearly enough when I had the chance.

  I instinctively back away, though not so far back as to lose our place in line.

  “Xtian, apologize for your generation, please.”

  “You broke us.”

  “Not enough.”

  My skin crawls and itches, old scars slipping back into awareness. Why did I agree to this? And which of us, in the end, decided this? I recall thinking this might be worth trying,
and I know she believes that this … normalcy might work for us and has thought this for a very long time. But how can she not see? This is wrong. For us, for anyone. This cannot work.

  She has forgotten what happened, every time things have seemed to settle down. In San Francisco. In Seattle. Perhaps she needs a reminder.

  We reach the window. A uniformed nothing person inside the air-conditioned booth watches us drip with sweat, takes her time finishing out the last order. A full minute passes before she deigns to speak with us. Perhaps Xtian senses this, for she steps in front of me and deals with the transaction, lest I end our outing prematurely with violence.

  “One adult, one child,” she peeps, age-shifting now that it is convenient to be young, rather than aching to be older. If she knew what ache was in store, she would do this more. Though I do not approve of the clothing, the too-short skirt and the too-tight top with “Peaches” on the front and “Cream” behind. If nothing else, if nothing more, she looks like her peers, and once again I feel a growing desire to kill that part of society away.

  She looks back to me, as if seeking approval, and I fake a smile. Yes, honey, you go ahead and order the tickets. The clerk is convinced, or more likely does not really care, does not get paid enough. We get our tickets and step through the gates. Lasciate agni, et cetera.

  “What first?” she asks, unfolding a map of the zoo, which suddenly looks more immense than my legs were prepared for. I choose something nearby, and enclosed, quite at random.