Blackbird

by Michael Fiegel

  “Ooh, ice cream.”

  Before I can argue, she snatches the map away and skips off. I follow but only because that way lie fewer child beasts.

  • • •

  Edison got some sort of rainbow-colored theoretically eggless concoction that looked like what you scrape out of the freezer when you’re defrosting it. I got something called Blueberry Sunrise, which turned out to basically be blue corn syrup.

  Had I ever tasted real blueberries?

  “I could get a job here,” I said. “We could come to the zoo for free every weekend, and I could get discount ice cream-like product. Megyn said they’re hiring.”

  “What is it with you and serving people?”

  “Do what you know.” I shrugged. “This is what I know.”

  “You know a great deal more than this. Working for tips is—”

  “Not working? Yeah, my tips paid for this ice cream … replica. And our tickets. And gas.”

  “And now you are penniless and have to beg for more tips. Welcome to the machine.”

  “Yeah, having money is bad,” I said, voice dripping with sarcasm.

  “Money is not the evil,” he said. “Society is. I thought you had learned that by now.”

  “Look at us and our first world problems. Our apartment only has four walls. We only have three laptops. I’m so depressed, I don’t know how I’m going to live another day without slicing my wrists open with a box cutter. And I don’t even own a box cutter. What ever will I do?”

  “You can get a box of fifty at Home Depot. Here, my treat.”

  He reached towards the back pocket of his jeans, and I smirked, imagining for a moment he was going for one of those old people change purses, stuffed with silver dollars. I immediately felt guilty for the thought.

  “Fifty seems redundant. You only need six to take down an airplane.”

  “Not even,” he said.

  “Oh? What’s it take?”

  “I will show you someday.”

  “Promises.”

  • • •

  The zoo has one section for each continent on earth, and walking around between them is about as tiring as walking to each of the actual in turn. We make it through North America and halfway through Asia before, wheezing, I find my knees are about to give and my head hurts. Most of what is wrong with me only starts hurting if I exert myself doing something stupid, and this?

  This is stupid.

  “Come on,” she says. “Elephants.”

  I do not want to see elephants unless they are being electrocuted. I am in bitter pain, with worse coming if I am not careful. The back of her neck is already sunburned and I fear for my own. I sit heavily on a bench fortuitously located beneath a particularly shady tree. A fountain nearby sprays cool, tainted water into my face, and I welcome it. Eventually she comes over and sits down next to me, concerned or feigning it.

  “You ’kay?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “Go, explore. I will wait here and suffer alone.”

  “No, I’ll sit with you. I need a rest, too.”

  “I do not need your pity.”

  “I’ll pity you,” she says. “I’m gonna pity you so hard.”

  When I do not react, she sighs and gets serious.

  “I just want to help you. You helped me, so why won’t you—”

  I try to laugh, but it comes out hoarse and broken. When I stop coughing, I spit out, “How have I helped you?”

  She has no ready answer.

  “Let me get you something to drink,” she says and runs off to fetch.

  This should have ended. I should end this.

  I look around, and see no one else alone, save for desperate zoo staff sweeping up peanutty detritus from the sticky ground. Alone in the crowd.

  I could leave, I realize.

  I could run. Well, walk quickly, at least. For a short distance. I would not get far, but far enough to hide until she left. And then I could be alone again. That would be safer, for both of us. She could be happy waitressing and I could … do something else.

  But what would I do? And since when have I ever made a decision based on how safe it was? When have I ever run from something that meant me no harm?

  Before I can come to any conclusions, she returns with a neon orange cup, carrot-shaped with eyes. “Stay Healthy,” it says on the side, mocking me. “Get Five Servings a Day!” If they mean the Diet Coke inside, I do.

  “No straws?” I ask, sipping from the side.

  “I know. I’m disappointed, too. I wanted to feed them to the monkeys.”

  We sit for a while, me drinking. She says nothing else, suddenly distant. Has no doubt done some thinking while gone. But I am done thinking for the day.

  “Come on,” I say, standing, with some great amount of pain. “I want to go home.”

  Home. The word tastes wrong on my palate. Sour and salty. Unhealthy. Stale baking soda smell. Home is no longer where my fridge is kept, where I am alone. The fridge we have is hers, bought with her money. Home is now the opposite of alone. Home pins you down with an illusion of security and comfort, an iron maiden with a security deposit. Is that what she wants? What she thinks I want?

  The point is moot, as the car breaks down three miles from the zoo.

  For the moment, no one is going anywhere, least of all home.

  • • •

  “Sorry,” I said as the car rolled to a stop. “I didn’t do it.”

  “And yet you apologize,” he said.

  He popped the hood, and we looked inside. It was beyond our capacity to repair at that point, if at all. It appeared to need several quarts of everything.

  “Bus? Uber?” I pulled out my cell phone but he shook his head.

  “I know this sounds strange, but I really do not feel like killing anyone just now.”

  We looked around for options. That left a divey motel that reminded me of where Edison had been held, and a nicer place with a restaurant attached. Fine dining? Not quite, but still somehow appropriate. Too much so, maybe.

  • • •

  I order an adequate if pricey burger, while she ingests some sort of pale-yellow vegan monstrosity. She also drinks, perhaps to see if I will stop her. Why would I? In Ohio, at eighteen she can legally drink in the company of a father or guardian, and I am close enough as far as the wait staff is concerned. So she drinks. And by the time we are done eating she is in no condition to walk very far, and I am out of patience. She has not had much, just some sort of bright red alco-pop, but she is a lightweight in every sense of the word. A tolerance for alcohol is something you must build up and then maintain. Much like murder—it has been years since I have committed one. I have lost the taste of blood.

  I make the decision to check us in, even though it is a bit expensive. The girl behind the hotel desk does not even raise an eyebrow; I suspect I am not the first middle-aged man to check in with a young girl. I find this more disturbing than anything so far today.

  Of course, once we get to our room, the air-conditioning is not doing its job, but at this point if I have to go back down to the lobby there is going to be blood, so I drop Xtian on the bed, dive into a cold shower, and come out searching for my heartburn medication, staving off an ulcer for one more night. I am ready for a fitful, painful sleep.

  The room is stifling and hot, and she is sitting on the opposite side of the bed facing the futon, which is where I intend to sleep. It is only when I pass by her that I notice she is wearing nothing but her shirt and left sock, the mate just hitting the floor as the cushions welcome me with a squeak. This in itself would not concern me. It should, but it would not. No, what makes it different is her smile. It is like something Cheshire as she rolls her head, stretching her neck. Unfolding. Eat me, drink me. Thirty minutes ago I was her father. Now I am anything but. Or perhaps I still am. Which is even worse.

  As much as I feared this would happen some day, I never let myself think about it long enough to prepare a response. I should run. Always run. Bu
t I do not.

  “No, Xtian.”

  “Why not?” she asks, standing.

  “You’re too … you’re not—”

  “I’m old enough,” she says. “I can be the first legal thing you’ve ever done.”

  She walks slowly forward, every movement seemingly exaggerated for my benefit. Tense, a band ready to snap. I recoil.

  “No.”

  She frowns, moves past me to the curtains as if it was her plan all along, drawing them closed before (futilely) turning the air-conditioning up, which accomplishes nothing except making the fan louder. Close enough for me to smell her sweat, reeking beneath fading deodorant. Literally repulsive. And then she turns off the light and moves back to the bed. Each time, as she passes, I find myself drawing away, into myself, avoiding even the slightest contact, for fear it will trigger something destructive. Something final.

  And at last she sits back down on the bed, and though it is dark and my eyes have not yet adjusted, I can see her skew her head and look at me like a cat watches a bird.

  “It’s like you’re afraid to touch me,” she says.

  “I am,” I reply. A minute passes, then she stands and walks toward me again, hands out.

  “No.”

  “Just stand up.”

  She grabs my hands and pulls me up, and then she wraps her arms around me. I close my eyes and let her, my own arms hovering slightly above her shoulders, unsure what to do with them. I was a child the last time someone hugged me, half her current age, a bit older than she was when I took her. At least a minute passes. Possibly forever. But eventually, I take her shoulders and push the hug away, push her back to the bed and turn away.

  “Do you love me?” she asks.

  I don’t respond.

  She sits heavily on the bed and removes her shirt, which she tosses in my direction. It lands on the air-conditioning vent, which does not make much difference one way or the other.

  The bed squeaks. I screw my eyes shut and pretend to stare out the window through the crack in the curtains. Nothing moves, not even the air. I feel as if I’m suffocating.

  “Hey,” she says.

  No.

  “No,” I say.

  “You don’t like me?” she asks.

  “I don’t like this you,” I reply.

  A sock hits me in the back of the head, drapes itself over my shoulder. I shake it loose like an insect, a serpent. A disease.

  “It can’t be worse than my last time,” she says. “Funny. Last time was the first time, too.”

  I want her to shut up. I do not want to envision what might have happened to her, or for her to remember what actually did. But she keeps going. I block it out, take myself somewhere else for a while. I only turn from the window and face her once she is quiet again. She is lying on the bed, head hanging loose from the side as she stares at me upside-down. My eyes have adjusted, and I can see what I already knew. This is not the first time I have seen her naked, but it is the first I have seen her nude. Exposed.

  “Come here,” she says.

  “No.” It feels wrong to be even this close. Unhealthy.

  “Why don’t you love me?”

  I don’t answer. Not the first time, nor the third. Eventually she stops talking and starts breathing more or less rhythmically, and I move to the futon and collapse.

  It is not a matter of “don’t.” It is a matter of “can’t.”

  I do not sleep.

  • • •

  I woke up what I guessed was quite a few hours later with a terrible headache and a crick in my neck, the sun in my eyes and the sheet draped over my body. He had moved to the couch and sat there judging me. Crumpled fast food bag on the floor, smell of bacon and hash browns. He’d gone for breakfast, hadn’t bothered to get any for me.

  The TV was on, muted. Cat food commercial.

  “Do I need to say sorry?” I asked.

  “If you don’t remember,” he said after a tense moment, “then I suppose not.”

  I rolled over to ease the pain in my neck, awkwardly twisting myself in the sheets to the point where it became uncomfortable. In the end I just kicked them loose into a ball and curled up, arms around my legs, goose bumps up and down my arms despite the growing heat. I wondered exactly what I’d said. I supposed the lies were still safe or else I’d probably be dead, or he gone, or both. Which meant—

  “No,” he said as I jerked my head around, question on my lips.

  After a moment, he added, “But not for your lack of trying.”

  “Well, shit.”

  I got dressed in silence as he stared out the window, at the window. At anything that wasn’t me.

  “Well, I suppose it can’t get worse than this,” I said, dropping onto the bed to pull on shoes.

  “It can always get worse.”

  I thought about that for a second. And decided he was right. I had been through much worse.

  Only when I was fully dressed again would he look at me, staring in silence. Not judging, just evaluating. Or re-evaluating. It was, in many ways, the closest we’d ever been, and I think somehow, right then and there, we finally knew where we stood: on opposite sides of a canyon, tethered by a length of rope. We were connected, yes, but we could never be closer than we were at that moment. Not unless one of us jumped and dragged the other one down with them.

  After that, we were both ready to be gone.

  “I wish I could be like you,” I said as we walked down the long hall in dense, carpeted silence. To fill a sudden, obscene absence of words. “You like being alone. I don’t. I need you. I need to take care of you and be taken care of. I need to matter.”

  “You need to matter to yourself.”

  “How?” I asked.

  He thought about that for a few moments. It was only after we reached the elevator two right turns later that he answered. As the elevator opened, he got inside, turned around, and put a hand out to stop me. And as the doors closed in my face, he said one word.

  “Practice.”

  He was gone by the time I got downstairs.

  I found my own way home.

  String Theory

  08/15/2018

  Summer flew past before I knew it. We talked, we fought. I baked cakes. He tried to teach me things; I tried to ignore him. He spent a lot of time like a slug on the couch, and I spent a lot of time at work and made some money and got a raise. I went out. I had fun, such as it was. I suppose I “practiced.” It all felt hollow, a dress rehearsal for a canceled show. But I did it anyway, learned the lines, and became one with the part. We got good at pretending things were okay.

  It seems impossible to think that two people could coexist under such circumstances for that long, much less their entire lives. But I guess it’s really easy to bury the bad stuff for the sake of convenience. It builds up and gets compressed. And then it’s just a matter of waiting for a trigger.

  That day, the trigger came innocently enough, shortly after my shift started.

  “Someone here,” said my manager. “Says he wants you.”

  “Old?” This was how I described Edison. It was how he looked lately. That and defeated. Although I got the impression that maybe he was putting on a bit, in both respects.

  “No. One of them.”

  For just a moment my stomach flipped. Somewhere inside I conjured up an image of the diner in Seattle, the hotel incident, but of course it couldn’t be any of them. I’d seen them dead and then some. And then I remembered that my boss was simply a racist bastard. It was hard to comprehend being like that. I’m color-blind as long as green’s involved. A tip’s a tip.

  “Keep it short,” he said. “And where is your—”

  I ignored the rest, put him behind a swinging door, and strolled out like he was nothing. Because he was. I winked at the busboy and popped on over to table six by way of three, then slid into the booth opposite my new customer while he still had his face buried in the menu. Before I said a word, I grabbed a purple crayon from the tray an
d started etching my name into the paper tablecloth, writing upside-down like they made us learn.

  “Hello there. My name is Dinah, and I’ll be—”

  Abe.

  My gun was in a little holster at the small of my back; he had one under a napkin on the table. From the look on his face as he lowered the menu, I got the impression he wasn’t here for trivia night.

  “Hello, Dinah. What are your specials today?”

  “Chicken parmesan,” I mumbled.

  “That’s it?”

  “Sorry. We’re not very special today.”

  “Oh,” he said. “But you are.”

  • • •

  “Fights are never won defensively,” I say. “You win by attacking. And there is always a weak point. Everything has a vulnerability. A soft spot.”

  “Like a baby head.”

  I glare at her, but that has no effect any more. Especially not when she is getting dressed for work. For some reason this involves every room of the house at once. I do my best to track her with my voice and not my eyes as she rushes between rooms, snagging her work blouse from the couch, already pulling a T-shirt off. I would call this a game that I refuse to play but it is past a game; at this point it is just a lonely chess set in the living room, abandoned halfway through at a convenient, difficult check point. I wonder who is black and who red. I wonder who is winning.

  “There is always a thread to pull, however slender,” I say. “You follow that thread, you pull the string, the puppet moves; you yank the thread, the cloak unravels, and there you will find your weak point, the staple holding the string. You find that, you yank it.”

  “I’ll yank your string,” she says, “if you ask nicely.”

  “I sense you are not interested in discussion right now.”

  “Discussion?” She walks into the kitchen brushing her teeth, spits a mouthful of toothpaste into the sink. “This is a monologue. You just want me to nod my head and smile.”

  “Smiling is optional.”

  “Good,” she says, “I can save two minutes a day by not brushing.”

  For a moment I watch her collect the things she always takes with her: her apron full of work, her phone, one of her guns (the P3AT, it looks like), and I think how I can barely hold any of those things now without pain. I sigh and stare at my bent hands on the table, tree roots struggling to find purchase in sand. Other things are healed, but my hands will never be right again. Age, damage, soft things and hard. Bones and nerves, tendons and ligaments.