by Bill Gaston
I mean from day one.
I guess. So?
So tell me what to say. Create something for me.
Rich, that isn’t what —
Write a story about this.
Hmm. I’m not sure I get —
It’s even a good idea for a story.
It’s not my kind of story, Rich. I wouldn’t have a clue what —
Well, that’s what I want you to do.
Why?
It’ll solve everything.
How?
Well, lots of people read your stuff. I mean I talk to —
They really don’t.
I talk to people every day who ask, “What’s your brother writing now?” and “I sure loved his last one,” and —
Rich. Hardly anyone reads my stuff. Seriously.
I know you don’t make a dime but, no, they really do. And they will. When even one neighbour reads the story, or even hears you did a story about a Hitler moustache, word will get around and they’ll know it’s about me and I’ll be absolved.
This is supremely confused on your part.
It’s a good story. It’ll work.
Why don’t you just tell them yourself?
Because in the story I’ll come off better.
How so?
Well, in your story I’ll be conducting an experiment about, about “modern Jews,” you know, in North America, and neigh-bourhood attitudes, and what people would do, or more to the point wouldn’t do, if they encountered Adolf Hitler. It’s a noble experiment I’m doing.
You want me to make all that up?
Well, I was sort of doing that.
You weren’t remotely doing that.
In an after-the-fact way, I sort of was. But in your story, that’s what I’m doing, and everyone’s fears are quelled, and I even come off as sort of — I don’t know — “interesting.” “Brave,” in fact. It’s a risky thing to do.
What a lawyer.
I’m taking that as a compliment.
Rich, c’mon, it’s a dumb idea and I’m really not going to do it.
Fine.
I have to add that this is maybe the most indirect —
I didn’t want to remind you, but I will, of those times back in the not-so-good old days when you were having some problems meeting your, you know —
You paid my rent a few times, I’m eternally grateful, I paid you back. This is years ago, Rich. And you keep reminding me.
And now I’m asking you for the return favour.
I’ve never once mentioned that you charged me interest, Rich. Rich: you charged me interest.
That’s not an abnormal thing. If you find it so, I apologize.
And you own twenty percent of everything I will ever make.
It’s a contract we signed. It’s business.
Not even an agent charges that. I’m your brother.
I bailed you out.
Some rent money. Years ago. Ratty little basement suite.
Where would you be now if I hadn’t?
Anyway — Rich? — it’s not my kind of story. Lacks a certain ring of truth.
You’re kidding.
And there’s no, no punchline to it. There’s no meaning. Not my style.
Maybe he encounters the mob and . . . and talks them down. I don’t know, make it up. You’re a fiction writer. You lie all the time.
Actually I don’t.
What’s the big deal? I’m asking you a favour. I’m worried here.
I don’t think it’ll work.
It’ll be hard-hitting. It’ll be entertaining.
I think you should just tell the truth.
I can’t! How?
I think the truth would make a better story. It might be kind of funny. Maybe even a little touching. Human, anyway.
I disagree.
I’m the writer.
Well, I’m a strategist.
That’s for sure.
And I’m extremely good at it.
In that case I’m going to ask you what Richard asked you: what are you making?
Oh, come on.
Maybe you need some help making your self.
What do you mean?
Rich? I’m having an idea.
What.
You ever hear the concept, “holding a mirror up to nature?” It was Shakespeare.
No.
You know how I always used to carry that little tape recorder with me? For dialogue? Tape conversations?
No, but sure.
Well, I found it so helpful, I’ve been taping my phone calls. For a couple of years now.
What? Even this one?
It comes on automatically. Sometimes I review the tapes. It helps me with cadence and stuff. New expressions. And people say the most revealing things about themselves, but always in the most . . . indirect ways.
I’m sure they do. Fascinating.
Actually, I’m serious, Rich.
About what.
About the truth. About how the story is the conversation we’ve been having.
No way.
Well, “way.” Maybe it’s a story.
I’m a lawyer. I won’t let it happen.
Ah, who gives a shit.
You’re serious.
Let’s just tell the truth.
Don’t please.
It’ll solve both your problems. You explain yourself to everyone, and you tell the truth for a change. Start making yourself.
I don’t think so. Don’t, please.
Everything you’ve said, everything you will say next, is the truth. It’s just — a mirror.
I don’t think so.
The truth is all it can possibly be.
Turn it off.
I’ll be doing it out of love. It’ll be medicine. For your family. I’m actually serious, Rich.
I’m on the verge of hanging up.
Well, that’ll be punctuation, won’t it?
You’re in it too.
Yes! It’ll be cleansing!
You’re a weirdo. You’ve always been a weirdo. You’re the weirdo.
C’mon, why not.
I’ll come off like an asshole.
You really won’t. People will see you clearly and they’ll understand.
No, they won’t.
It’ll be — it’ll be self-secret.
You’re the asshole now.
Well, I’ll be exposing myself too.
Jesus, no.
We’ll do it together. It’ll be humbling for both of us. It’s my career, and it really isn’t that good a story.
No way.
We’re already doing it. We’re doing it now. It’s almost done! This is the easiest story, I’m not even typing! This is the —
You’re laughing at me!
I’m not!
I’m going to hang up.
You’re right, we’re always making ourselves!
I’m hanging up.
It’s a story. It might even work. I can feel it working.
It’s not a story.
That’s never for the writer to judge.
I’m not the — I don’t know what to do.
Why don’t you get some sleep?
That’s not what I mean.
Rich?
What.
Trust me. Everyone will know exactly what you mean.
FREEDOM
Wa comes breathless to the door but stops. The glass door is a black mirror and he has surprised himself again. Here he is: Wa. His eyes are not blue but he is handsome as hell. He gives himself the wink of Downey Jr., the one that says, J’arrive.
Wa’s dreams are all coming true. America is vachement cool, at least Des Moines. It is so cool that, right beside this pawn-store (whe
re he missed his beanbag chair by a week, the lady said) is a gunshop. Paris didn’t have gunshops or pawnstores, not like this, with guns right next to — sometimes — beanbag chairs.
Wa has his paper in his pocket. He has waited his weeks while they check him out. He can picture the FBI googling him bigtime, can see a row of them at their computer screens with his face on it, or one with his hollow skull in glowing green bars like an empty birdcage turning slowly around. They’ll know he’s spelt “Roi,” meaning king, even though you just say “Wa.” (Here in America — his mother laughs and points at him — they’ll say Roy.) The FBI probably know his shoe size. And they will know Wa was three when he moved to Paris with his mother but that he has always been Americain even though — as everyone tells him — he has a shits way of talking. (You can’t speak French or English, his mother laughs, pointing when he tries to speak something.) The FBI know every city in Europe she modelled in and how she was rich but sure isn’t now, and they’ll know when she got out of the skinny-clinic, though she still paints her nails with one thin line of nail polish because one line alone isn’t fat, and he bets they track all her monsterfag boyfriends, especially that short one with the carrot breath who tried to poke him when he was twelve and who probably winces still and covers his petit pois even at the thought of Wa, and for sure they know how his crazyfou ideas got him kicked out of schools until there weren’t any American ones left so he isn’t the best reader in the world — if that’s a crime, to not read, fuck them. But, merde, maybe they also know how on his eighteenth he sort of spent some hours in jail in Lyons after they found him on the bathroom floor à la gare, no shirt, he’ll never drink pastis again, but come on, ce n’est pas possible, they can’t not let him have a gun because of that.
Wa reads the window, the one word he knows: GUNS. He has already decided where it will go in his pants. He’s seen how you stuff it in the front, but he’s also seen the gun go off — once right in the meatpipe, and once, in a comedy western, in the cowboy boot. The main thing is to never have the gun barrel near veins. Wa’s main fear is bleeding to death. To just drain like that. When you’re stabbed or shot comme Ça it doesn’t hurt much and you’re awake, just draining. You see it so much: the buddycop runs up and cradles your head, and you look up and say what’s important. You feel like a hose is running inside but there’s no handle to turn off — Jesus merde that freaks him out. In fact he saw a RealTV on it, on emergency rooms, a poor mec just sitting there and the nurse sees him turn white and she knows it’s internal bleeding, meaning the hose is on inside and they’re calling your loved ones in, who see your skin as white as your eyes and they cry, and all you feel is this deep-hose on, and you have no muscles left as everyone watches you drain and waits for you to say what’s important.
So Wa’s gun is going to be stuffed in the back of his belt, pointing at the least veins he can think of, the bum.
He stands at the glass door and takes his paper from his pocket, checks his face, and wonders if the FBI know he’s gained fourteen-and-a-half since coming to America and that his new face is bigger than in his passport. They won’t know his mother has yelled at him every time he steps on the scale. The thing with Paris is, the food costs too much. The thing with America is, MacDonald has two-cheeseburger events, and how can you exactly walk by that, even though your mother says all the salt they use makes you retain water in your fat cells? (It is hard for her to say“fat cells,” so you know she is afraid for you.)
But how can you resist the treasure here, Jesus merde. Wa isn’t sure, but he thinks America gives things away. He has passed signs outside two restaurants, signs with American flags on them that say, Wa is pretty sure, free fries. That’s the word “free” up there, and he knows “fries,” and these are restaurants across the same street from each other and this place is vachement incroyable. Not even his mother will be able to go skinny here.
So Wa loves America, Des Moines anyway. He has two hundred channels and the taxi drivers are nice, unlike Paris where they won’t talk to him because of his shits French, unless they’re Alergian. Here, he can speak his shits English and they ask him where he’s from. He says “Parees” and they love it, even though one turfed him from the taxi because of Iraq, the country that’s on one hundred of the two hundred channels. From other taxi drivers he hears Saddam jokes and towel-head jokes and some ask him, Why you in Des Moines? He doesn’t know how to say that his mother, a Jewish–Puerto Rican ex-model, is chasing a mec she married who owes her a truckful of money, and she’s reduced to prostitution (she cries and laughs on the phone to a boyfriend in Paris about this, though Wa thinks she is joking), so Wa just tells them he’s in Des Moines to buy a beanbag chair and a gun and he nods and winks his Travoltain-Pulp-Fiction. Sometimes they wait when he goes into MacDonald for his burgers and sometimes they disappear. The thing is, America isn’t fast. There’s line-ups for your burgers. He has a wait-for-your-gun paper in his pocket, and he is waiting for a beanbag chair in the pawnstore. He’s phoned malls in the skirts and can’t find one. He’s never really sat in one but he knows how beanbags feel and he’s seen in teenflicks how the idea is that they fit your lazy teenage body. As of a few months ago Wa’s no longer a teenager, but his plan is to get his beanbag chair, turn on his TV, take some steps back, then run to it and jump. If he lands like he’s already sitting flat like in Frasier’s dad’s La-Z-Boy, that’s how he’ll stay. If he lands like in a Malkovichin-a-powdered-wig straight wooden chair, that’s how he’ll sit. And it will fit him no matter how fat he gets. It’ll fit his ass even with a gun in his belt back there. If the gun goes off and shoots into his beanbag chair, pas problem, a group of beans is complètement without veins.
Wa pushes open the door to the gunshop and the electronic song greets him like it has every day for weeks, but today is the day on his paper. Whenever he comes to look at his gun, one of the waiters here talks to him and one of them doesn’t. Wa has learned that in America, you don’t shake everybody’s hand when you see them. He’s also learned you don’t piss in a park even if you turn your back. So he doesn’t stick out his hand, just keeps it in his pocket, which in Paris would mean you are angry. Behind the counter today is the wrong waiter, the guy who’s Wa’s height so they are exactement eye to eye, and he thinks Wa is stupid, and Wa believes also that with his Jewish–Puerto Rican skin, plus a tan from eating on McPatios, he’s as dark as a towel-head and it’s a problem for this guy. In Paris lots of Algerians smile at him and even talk to him in their shits language.
Over his gun, which sits under the glass, Wa places his paper. His mother helped him with it. She was surprised to see it, but then she said their neighbourhood isn’t the best and a gun would be très très bizarre et chic. She wants to keep it in her night table, but Wa knows she’ll forget and he can have it for his pants.
The mec who doesn’t like him is very eye to eye now and Wa smoothes the paper on the glass with his hands that are nervous and damp. The mec, who has a tightcap and grand moustache like the Hulkster, does not speak. He does not speak for so long, Wa knows it’s rude. He wants to call the guy a cont, because his mother told him it’s the worst word here, which is funny, since in Paris everyone’s a cont, mothers tell their daughters to arrête tes conneries. He wonders if Sean Connery knows that all of France knows what he means.
“To buy some bullets, also,” Wa says, knowing he hasn’t said it well. He adds, “My gun, that gun, here.” He moves the paper to the side and taps the glass with a finger.
“Not yet, it’s not.”
It’s easy. “Arrête tes conneries, toi.”
“What?”
“Rien. Noth.”
“What?”
“Cont. Cont.”
“What?”
The guy walks away watching him while Wa gives him Bruce Willis’s smallsmile. He knows there are other gunshops and wants to tell this mec exactly that, but he’s afraid if he goes to another gunshop he’ll have new weeks to wait. He hopes the guy doesn�
�t come back to him with questions, more test questions. Even to the question, “Why do you want this gun?” he won’t know what to say that would pass. There are lots of answers. One is, Because then I have a gun to show you outside the store. He remembers, yes, egalité is an answer. Egalité: a gun in America is the big equalizer, is what little Devito said once, pointing a gun at a huge unbelievable asshole.
The mec reappears from the backroom with the guy Wa likes. “Him,” he hears the mec say. Both look Wa over. They don’t know he can hear them.
“We gotta do a psych on this one.”
“Too late.”
“He’s gonna go postal, man,” the mec says, and Wa understands that they have the same expression here. In France it’s à la postal, only there they use acid for the face, probably because of no gunshops. Wa shrugs at them from a distance like a helpful friend.
“He ain’t gonna go postal.”
“Look at the guy.”
“Paperwork’s through.”
“I’m not selling it to him.”
The guy he likes shakes his head, says fuck, and comes on over.
“How you wanna pay,” he asks, picking up and eyeing the paper, “Roy?”
“Plastique.” Wa snaps his mother’s Visa card flat to the glass. “The bullets, also.”
“Yes, one puts beanbag chair into taxi,” Wa grunts at the driver, shoving. He knows it’s true because this is the second time he’s had to. This time, his mother has turfed him, so he’s moving.
