Things You Should Know

by A M Homes

  I open a beer, take a breath. “I can’t stand it anymore.”

  “You’re stronger than you think.”

  I have spent nights laid low near the exhaust pipe of a car, have slept with a plastic bag over my head and silver duct tape around my neck. I have rifled through the kitchen drawers at three A.M. thinking I will have at myself with a carving knife. Once fresh from the shower, I divided myself in half, a clean incision from sternum to pubis. In the bathroom mirror, I watched what was leaking out of me, escaping me, with peculiar pleasure, not unlike the perverse pleasantry of taking a good shit. I arrived at the office dotted with the seeping red of my efforts. “Looks like you got a little on you,” my secretary said, donating her seltzer to blot the spot. “You’re always having these shaving accidents. Maybe you’re cutting it too close.”

  All of the above is only a warm-up, a temporizing measure, a palliative remedy, I want something more, the big bang. If I had a gun I would use it, again and again, a million times a day I would shoot myself.

  “What do you want to do about dinner?”

  “Nothing. I never want to eat again.”

  “Not even steak?” my wife asks. “I was thinking I’d make us a nice thick steak. Yesterday you said, ‘How come we never have steak anymore?’ I took one out of the deep freeze this morning.”

  “Don’t try to talk me out of it.”

  “Fine, but I’m having steak. Let me know if you change your mind.”

  There is a coldness to her, a chill I find terrifying, an absence of emotion that puts a space between us, a permanent and unbridgeable gap—I am entirely emotion, she is entirely reason.

  I will not change my mind. This isn’t something new, something that started late in life. I’ve been this way since I was a child. It is the most awful addiction—the opposite of being a vampire and living off the blood of others, “eripmav”—sucked backward through life, the life cycle run in reverse, beginning in death and ending in…

  Short of blowing my brains out, there is no way I can demonstrate the intensity, the extremity of my feeling. Click. Boom. Splat. The pain is searing, excruciating; the roots of my brain are hot with it.

  “You can’t imagine the pain I’m in.”

  “Take some Tylenol.”

  “Do you want me to make a salad?”

  I have been married before, did I mention that? It ended badly—I ran into my ex-wife last week on the street and the color drained from both our faces; we’re still weak from memory. “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “I’m better,” she said. “Much better. Alone.” She quickly walked away.

  There is an enormous amount of tension in being with someone who is dying every day. It’s a perpetual hospice; the grief is too extreme. That’s my specialty, pushing the limits, constantly testing people. No one can pass—that is the point. In the end, they crack, they leave, and I blame them.

  I’m chopping lettuce.

  “Caesar,” my wife says, and I look up. She hands me a tin of anchovies. “Use the romaine.”

  “How was work?” There is relief in other people’s tragedies.

  “Interesting,” she says, pulling the meat out of the broiler. She slices open the steak, blood runs out.

  “How does that look?”

  “Perfect.” I smile, grating the Parmesan.

  “A guy came in this afternoon, high on something. He’d tried to take his face off, literally—took a knife and peeled it.”

  “How did you put him back together?”

  “A thousand stitches and surgical glue. Another man lost his right hand. Fortunately, he’s a lefty.”

  We sit at the kitchen table talking about severed limbs, thin threads of ligaments, the delicate weave of nerves—reattachment, the hope of regaining full function. Miracles.

  “I love you,” she says, leaning over, kissing my forehead.

  “How can you say that?”

  “Because I do?”

  “You don’t love me enough.”

  “Nothing is enough,” she says. And it is true, excruciatingly true.

  I want to tell her I am having an affair, I want to make her leave, I want to prove that she doesn’t love me enough. I want to have it over with.

  “I’m having an affair,” I tell her.

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Yes, I am. I’m fucking Sally Baumgarten.”

  She laughs. “And I’m giving blowjobs to Tom.”

  “My friend Tom?”

  “You bet.”

  She could be, she very well could be. I pour Cascade into the dishwasher and push the button—Heavy Soil.

  “I’m leaving,” I tell her.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When will you be back?”

  “Never. I’m not coming back.”

  “Then you’re not leaving,” she says.

  “I hate you.”

  I married her before I loved her. For our honeymoon, we went to California. She was thinking Disneyland, Carmel, Big Sur, a driving trip up the coast—fun. I was hoping for an earthquake, brush fire, mudslide—disaster.

  In the hotel room in Los Angeles I panicked. A wall of glass, a broad expanse of windows looking out over the city—it was a surprisingly clear night. The lights in the hills twinkled, beckoned. Without warning, I ran toward the glass, hurling myself forward.

  She took me down, tackling me. She sat on top, pinning me, her one hundred nineteen pounds on my one fifty-six—she’s stronger than you think.

  “If you do that again I won’t forgive you.”

  The intimacy, the unbearable intimacy is what’s most mortifying—when they know the habits of your bowels, your cheapnesses, your horribleness, when they know things about you that no one should know, things you don’t even know about yourself.

  She knows these things and doesn’t say it’s too much, too weird, too fucked up. “It’s my training,” she says. “My shift doesn’t end just because something bad happens.”

  It is about love. It is about getting enough, having enough, drowning in it, and now it is too late. I am permanently malnourished—there isn’t enough love in the world.

  There is a danger in this, in writing this, in saying this. I am putting myself on the line. If I am found floating, face down, there will be theories, lingering questions. Did he mean it? Was it an accident—is there any such thing as an accident, is fate that forgiving? Was this letter a warning, a true story? Everything is suspect. (Unless otherwise instructed—if something happens, give me the benefit of the doubt.)

  “What would it be like if you gave it up?” she asked.

  I am incredulous.

  “If you abandoned the idea? Aren’t you bored by it all after all these years; why not just give it up?”

  “Wanting to be dead is as natural to me as breathing.”

  What would I be without it? I don’t know that I could handle it. Like being sprung from a lifetime jail, like Jack Henry Abbot, I might wheel around and stab someone with a dinner knife.

  And what if I truly gave it up, if I said, yes it is a beautiful day, yes I am incredibly lucky—one of the luckiest men in the world. What if I admitted it, you are my best friend, my favorite fuck, my cure. What if I say I love you and she says it’s over. What if that’s part of the game, the dance? I will have missed my moment, I will be shit out of luck—stuck here forever.

  “Why do you put up with it?”

  “Because this is not you,” she says. “It’s part of you, but it’s not you. Are you still going to kill yourself?”

  “Yes,” I say. Yes I am, to prove I am independent, to prove I still can. “I hate you,” I tell her. “I hate you so much.”

  “I know,” she says.

  My wife is not without complications of her own. She keeps a baseball bat under her side of the bed. I discovered it by accident—one day it rolled out from under. Louisville Slugger. I rolled it back into place and have never let on that I know i
t’s there. Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night, sits straight up, and screams, “Who’s there? Who is in the waiting room?” She stops for a second and starts again, annoyed. “I don’t have all day. Next. Bring the next one in.” There are nights I watch her sleep, her face a naive dissolve, tension erased, her delicate blond lashes, her lips, soft like a child’s, and I want to punch her. I want to bash her face in. I wonder what she would do then.

  “A thought is only a thought,” she says when I wake her.

  And then she tells me her dreams. “I was a man and I was having sex with another man and you were there, you were wearing a white skirt, and then someone came in but he didn’t have any arms and I kept wondering how did he open the door?”

  “Let’s go back to sleep for a little while.”

  I am getting closer. The situation is untenable, something has to happen. I have lived this way for a long time, there is a cumulative effect, a worsening. I am embarrassed that I have let it go on for so long.

  I know how I will do it. I will hang myself. Right here at home. I have known it since we bought the house. When the real estate agent went on and on about the location, the yard, the school district, I was thinking about the interior—the exposed rafters, the beams. The dead man’s walk to the top of the stairs.

  We are cleaning up. I wipe the table with a sponge.

  “What’s in the bag,” she says, pointing to something on the counter.

  “Rope.” I stopped on the way home. I ran the errand.

  “Let’s go to the movies,” she says, tying up the trash. She hands me the bag. “Take it outside,” she says, sending me into the night.

  The yard is flooded with light, extra lights, like searchlights, lights so bright that when raccoons cross to get to the trash, they hold their paws up over their eyes, shielding them.

  I feel her watching me from the kitchen window.

  We go to see The Armageddon Complex, a disaster film with a tidal wave, a tornado, a fire, a global-warming theme. Among the special effects are that the temperature in the theater changes from 55 to 90 degrees during the film—You freeze, you cook, you wish you’d planned ahead.

  The popcorn is oversalted. Before the tidal wave hits, I am panting with thirst. “Water,” I whisper, climbing over her into the aisle.

  She pulls me back into my seat. “Don’t go.”

  At key moments, she covers her eyes and waits until I squeeze her free hand to give her the all clear.

  We are in the car on the way home. She is driving. The night is black. We move through the depths of darkness—the thin yellow line, the pathway home, unfolds before us. There is the hum of the engine, the steadiness of her foot on the gas.

  “We have to talk,” I tell her.

  “We talk constantly. We never stop talking.”

  “There’s something I need to…” I say, not finishing the thought.

  A deer crosses the road. My wife swerves. The car goes up a hill, trees fly by, the car goes down, we are rolling, we are hanging upside-down, suspended, and then boom, we are upright again, the air bag smashes me in the face, punches me in the nose. The steering wheel explodes into her chest. We are down in a ditch with balloons pressed into our faces, suffocating.

  “Are you hurt?” she asks.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Are you all right?”

  “Did we hit it?”

  “No, I think it got away.”

  The doors unlock.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t see it coming.”

  The air bags are slowly deflating—losing pressure.

  “I want to live,” I tell her. “I just don’t know how.”

  THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW

  There are things I do not know. I was absent the day they passed out the information sheets. I was home in bed with a fever and an earache. I lay with the heating pad pressed to my head, burning my ear. I lay with the heating pad until my mother came in and said, “Don’t keep it on high or you’ll burn yourself.” This was something I knew but chose to forget.

  The information sheets had the words “Things You Should Know” typed across the top of the page. They were mimeographed pages, purple ink on white paper. The sheets were written by my fourth grade teacher. They were written when she was young and thought about things. She thought of a language for these things and wrote them down in red Magic Marker.

  By the time she was my teacher, she’d been teaching for a very long time but had never gotten past fourth grade. She hadn’t done anything since her Things You Should Know sheets, which didn’t really count, since she’d written them while she was still a student.

  After my ear got better, the infection cured, the red burn mark faded into a sort of a Florida tan, I went back to school. Right away I knew I’d missed something important. “Ask the other students to fill you in on what happened while you were ill,” the principal said when I handed her the note from my mother. But none of the others would talk to me. Immediately I knew this was because they’d gotten the information sheets and we no longer spoke the same language.

  I tried asking the teacher, “Is there anything I missed while I was out?” She handed me a stack of maps to color in and some math problems. “You should put a little Vaseline on your ear,” she said. “It’ll keep it from peeling.”

  “Is there anything else?” I asked. She shook her head.

  I couldn’t just come out and say it. I couldn’t say, you know, those information sheets, the ones you passed out the other day while I was home burning my ear. Do you have an extra copy? I couldn’t ask because I’d already asked everyone. I asked so many people—my parents, their friends, random strangers—that in the end they sent me to a psychiatrist.

  “What exactly do you think is written on this ‘Things to Know’ paper?” he asked me.

  “‘Things You Should Know,’” I said. “It’s not things to know, not things you will learn, but things you already should know but maybe are a little dumb, so you don’t.”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding. “And what are those things?”

  “You’re asking me,” I shouted. “I don’t know. You’re the one who should know. You tell me. I never saw the list.”

  Time passed. I grew up. I grew older. I grew deaf in one ear. In the newspaper I read that the teacher had died. She was eighty-four. In time I began to notice there was less to know. All the same, I kept looking for the list. Once, in an old bookstore, I thought I found page four. It was old, faded, folded into quarters and stuffed into an early volume of Henry Miller’s essays. The top part of the page had been torn off. It began with number six: “Do what you will because you will anyway.” Number twenty-eight was “If you begin and it is not the beginning, begin again.” And so on. At the bottom of the page it said, “Chin San Fortune Company lines 1 through 32.”

  Years later, when I was even older, when those younger than me seemed to know less than I ever had, I wrote a story. And in a room full of people, full of people who knew the list and some I was sure did not, I stood to read. “As a child, I burned my ear into a Florida tan.”

  “Stop,” a man yelled, waving his hands at me.

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you know?” he said. I shook my head. He was a man who knew the list, who probably had his own personal copy. He had based his life on it, on trying to explain it to others.

  He spoke, he drew diagrams, splintering poles of chalk as he put pictures on a blackboard. He tried to tell of the things he knew. He tried to talk but did not have the language of the teacher.

  I breathed deeply and thought of Chin San number twenty-eight. “If you begin and it is not the beginning, begin again.”

  “I will begin again,” I announced. Because I had stated this and had not asked for a second chance, because I was standing and he was seated, because it was still early in the evening, the man who had stopped me nodded, all right.

  “Things You Should Know,” I said.

  “Good titl
e, good title,” the man said. “Go on, go on.”

  “There is a list,” I said, nearing the end. “It is a list you make yourself. And at the top of the page you write, ‘Things You Should Know.’”

  THE WHIZ KIDS

  In the big bathtub in my parents’ bedroom, he ran his tongue along my side, up into my armpits, tugging the hair with his teeth. “We’re like married,” he said, licking my nipples.

  I spit at him. A foamy blob landed on his bare chest. He smiled, grabbed both my arms, and held them down.

  He slid his face down my stomach, dipped it under the water, and put his mouth over my cock.

  My mother knocked on the bathroom door. “I have to get ready. Your father and I are leaving in twenty minutes.”

  Air bubbles crept up to the surface.

  “Can you hear me?” she said, fiddling with the knob. “Why is the door locked? You know we don’t lock doors in this house.”

  “It was an accident,” I said through the door.

  “Well, hurry,” my mother said.

  And we did.

  Later, in the den, picking his nose, examining the results on his finger, slipping his finger into his mouth with a smack and a pop, he explained that as long as we never slept with anyone else, we could do whatever we wanted. “Sex kills,” he said, “but this,” he said, “this is the one time, the only time, the chance of a lifetime.” He ground his front teeth on the booger.

  We met in a science class. “Cocksucker,” he hissed. My fingers were in my ears. I didn’t hear the word so much as saw it escape his mouth. The fire alarm was going off. Everyone was grabbing their coats and hurrying for the door. He held me back, pressed his lips close to my ear, and said it again, Cocksucker, his tongue touching my neck. Back and forth, he shook a beaker of a strange potion and threatened to make me drink it. He raised the glass to my mouth. My jaws clamped shut. With his free hand, he pinched my nostrils shut and laughed like a maniac. My mouth fell open. He tilted the beaker toward my throat. The teacher stopped him just in time. “Enough horsing around,” she said. “This is a fire drill. Behave accordingly.”