“^5,” he responded, as she rose from her bed: a high-five for her killing mission.
The stink bug seemed to sense her purpose. They were weird like that. From the window side of her room the stink bug went buzzing over to the door side, as though making a break for the hallway. Fat chance: Alexis’s door was closed, because Alexis’s door was always closed. The bug bounced off the poster taped to the door, on which her name was broken down into an acronym: AWESOME, LOVING, ELEGANT, X-CITING, INTELLIGENT, SURPRISING. She stood in the room’s center, waiting for the bug to land somewhere—though from her observation they didn’t really land so much as crash. This one got lucky, colliding with a stack of her laundered clothes. It steadied itself on the folded corner of a blouse—a mint-green checked one that her friend Gus, depending on his mood and/or meds, called her “cowgirl shirt” or her “Taylor Swift shirt” or her “truck-stop hooker shirt.” Alexis didn’t like cowgirls or country music and definitely not truck stops but she did like the shirt—way too much to drench it with Raid. With her fingertip poised just above the button she pantomimed spraying the bug, in order to scare it off her shirt, but gingerly, because she also didn’t want her shirt fouled with insectile cilantro stink. Ping: “Iz it dead yet?” Miguel texted. While she paused to answer—she always tried to be witty with him, but unable to devise a way she just tapped “No”—the stink bug made a calculated leap to her dresser, perching itself atop a framed photograph of her dad and engaging in what looked like push-ups and felt like taunting.
Four photographs of her dad were on the dresser top, reclining inside Target frames. This one was the largest. In the photo he was holding Alexis, mere days old, with an unlit cigar clenched brashly between his teeth: a victor’s pose, with her as his trophy. Of all the photos in the world she loved this one the most. Her mom had unearthed it for a seventh-grade school project about genetics, and, as with the other photos on her dresser, Alexis had framed it herself. Lauren Shprinzel, who’d been her best friend back then (before Lauren’s older brother got killed in Iraq and Lauren went half-crazy and full-emo and asked everyone to start calling her by her brother’s name), told Alexis her dad looked like Bruce Willis. This was a serious stretch, to Alexis’s eye, yet ever since then she’d found herself drawn to Bruce Willis movies—nestling into one when she’d happen upon it while channel-surfing, or ordering one up on pay-per-view when she was feeling lonesome or depressed. The resemblance was negligible at best, but there he was anyway: her dad, saving the earth from a hurtling asteroid, going back in time to stop a killer virus, taking a samurai sword to a rapist in a pawnshop basement. There was odd comfort in seeing him—or some vague approximation of him, some dad-like avatar—kicking ass in the cinematic afterlife. On that same genetics project, she’d put down “hero” for her father’s occupation. Her mom objected to that: “He was a bond trader, honey,” she’d said. “Put down bond trader instead.” (Alexis refused.)
She studied the bug for a while, which would’ve been more like her had she been high, which she wasn’t. It looked like a gray-brown shield with legs—like a video game version of a bug, she thought. No-frills insect evil. Dave said stink bugs had come from Japan (or somewhere like that, she didn’t remember), and they weren’t around when he was a kid. This one crawled along the top edge of the frame, pausing directly over her dad’s head. She thought maybe she could blast it from there by spraying it point-blank at an upward angle, but she didn’t want to risk it. So far as she knew, that was the only copy of the photo in existence—back when she was born, people still used those old film cameras, like the one her Grandma Tooney still brought out every time Alexis visited. (“Oh, you’re just the spittin’ image of him,” her grandma would always say, with such a surge of emotion that it seemed she’d never noticed this before.) Still, Alexis drew the nozzle close to the stink bug, to fully gauge the risk. The bug shifted slightly away from her, and then, with obliviousness or nonchalance or probably with neither because it was just a stink bug, it jumped frog-like and sideways off the frame. Pure predatory instinct jammed Alexis’s fingertip down onto the button, unloosing a fierce and sustained mist of poison that spattered the bug in mid-flight—along with everything behind it.
That it went tumbling floorward barely registered to Alexis. She gasped. Positioned behind the photos, in a sequin gown, was the Barbie doll her dad had given her just before he died. The Barbie had taken the Raid blast head-on; the stuff was dripping down her face and shoulders in milky-gray streams, like in the videos Dave was so fond of watching on his computer. “Fuck,” Alexis said aloud. She was almost a decade removed from playing with Barbies, but this one—this one had meaning, this one was way more than a plastic doll. That’s why she’d posed it there, at the corner of her dresser—to remind her of that last birthday with her dad when he’d delivered that long rectangular giftwrapped box to the table and joked about there being a hamster inside (because a hamster was what she’d asked for). And now she’d just . . . gassed it. With Dave’s stupid Raid. Because of the plague of stink bugs in this stupid house that no one had asked her opinion about buying, in this room she’d been assigned without any consideration as to whether she wanted it . . . “Fuck,” she groaned, and grabbing the poisoned Barbie by its teeny waist she fled into the hallway.
And ran smack into her mom, who leveled a baffled frown at her, one eyebrow scooting up her forehead. Icily, she said, “Barbies?”
Alexis blurted, “Stupid stink bugs!” brushing by her mother toward the bathroom. “They’re all over my room! Can’t we call a freakin exterminator or something?”
Her frown only deepening, Sara followed Alexis into the bathroom where Alexis was stripping off the sequined gown to rinse the Barbie in the sink.
“Did one of them spray Barbie?” Sara asked, with more bemusement than concern. You could hear it in her voice: a faint trace of huggie-wuggie baby talk.
“No, I did. With Raid.” Alerted by her mother’s tone to how little-girlish and ridiculous she must look, bathing a Barbie in the sink, Alexis sighed and explained, “Dad gave this one to me.”
In the mirror, as she took an exfoliating bar to the doll, Alexis saw a different, darker frown appear on her mother’s face. She brought her gaze back down to Barbie whose fixed smile and wide eyes, despite the suds, formed an expression completely opposite to her mom’s, if a little ghoulish as well.
“No he didn’t,” her mother said. “I did.”
“Whatever,” Alexis said, barely audible over the faucet’s hiss. “Dad did. Right before he died. I remember him giving it to me.”
The way Sara rolled her eyes suggested exasperation, but sadness too. That here-we-go-again routine she sometimes did. “Alexis,” she said, “I bought that one for you. I remember the dress on it. And the ring. I got it at the Toys-R-Us at Rockaway Square Mall. I bought you that, and those awful rhinestone jeans you wanted from the Limited Too. Do you remember those?”
Alexis reassessed the drippy Barbie in her hands. She noted the ring: a big fat chunk of silvery plastic on the doll’s hand. Its yellowy hair, whatever it was made of, had clumped from the water. Wringing out the hair, she said, “I think you’re wrong.”
“Does it matter?”
It did, of course, but she couldn’t quite say how—not to herself, and definitely not to her mom. “Not really,” she mumbled.
But it did—did. She’d never understood the imbalance: how her dead dad could mean so friggin much to her, yet mean nothing to her mom. Why the only mementoes of his existence were in her room. Why her mom couldn’t even acknowledge him as the hero he was. The first time her mom went on a date after 9/11—maybe it was a year later, but to Alexis it’d felt like September 12th—Alexis had thrown a huge tantrum, crying so hard and inconsolably that Aunt Liz, her babysitter for the night, had to call her mom back home. The second date went the same way, though instead of calling Sara back Aunt Liz had sat Alexis down for some “girl talk,” during which they’d struck a deal for Alexi
s to act cool in exchange for staying up as late as she wanted. She hadn’t said this to Aunt Liz, because with her you just listened, but the question throbbed: How could she think of replacing him? She’d hated all the replacement candidates her mom had paraded by her over the years: a miserable line of middle-aged losers who spent three minutes pretending to be interested in Alexis before ignoring her altogether. Then came Dave, the culmination of loserdom, who’d somehow won the pageant. “Guess what?” she remembered her mom announcing. “Dave and I are getting married”: with the same level of excitement or import she might’ve used in announcing the purchase of a new car. What she hadn’t said then was, “Guess what? We’re moving, too.” Into some tacky plastic faux-mansion in a zombie subdivision. Nevermind about the house you grew up in, dear, the one where your dad taught you to walk, where he danced with you to the Bruce Springsteen “screen door” song—we’re chucking all that for some . . . dude. Dave.
“Well, poor Barbie,” her mom said, but by now Alexis had already snuffed out her sentiment, and didn’t respond. She thought about trashing the Barbie right then and there—the wastebasket was right beside the sink—but doing so struck her as too aggressively spiteful, almost certain cause for an undesirable bout of sit-down talk. Talking about anything with her mom yielded one of two results: her mom brushing off whatever the issue was, often with some variety of condescending unhelpfulness (it’s a phase; getting over it would be the best thing; once you’re grown up you’ll laugh about this) delivered with a smile less sincere than Barbie’s; or her mom overreacting and dragging her to a counselor, like back in eighth grade when Gus posted video of one of his salvia trips on YouTube—salvia was a legal herb and the high passed quickly, it wasn’t a big deal—and Susan Vitarelli’s mom instigated a school-wide freakout. That was her mom’s philosophy, as far as Alexis could tell: ignore the issue altogether, or else hire someone else to deal with it. She gave the Barbie’s hair-clump one more halfhearted wringing and returned to her room, abandoning her mom to the bathroom door frame, to which she was presently clinging as though girding herself for an earthquake.
She lobbed the nude Barbie onto her bed and sank down beside it. Then she texted Miguel: “Bug dead.” When a minute passed, without any reply, she brought the phone back up and looked at what she’d sent him, cringing. Bug dead: the lamest text message ever sent. Averting her eyes from her own lameness, she gazed at the Barbie, whose soggy hair was leaving a little seep of wetness on her comforter. She waited another minute or so, until the silence was too much for her, and carrying the Barbie by its hair she took it to her closet and chunked it into the corner. She knew it was a plastic doll but the constancy of its smile unnerved her anyway; something about it felt betraying. She spun around at the sound of her phone pinging, but when she fumbled it into her hand she saw it was only Katie Horner, wanting to know if their history assignment was due tomorrow or Friday. “Tmrw,” she typed back. Why hadn’t Miguel responded—besides the fact that she’d sent him an appallingly lame text? She leaned back onto the pillows on her bed, half submerging herself in their vapid plushness. Why wasn’t he in love with her?
That’s when she noticed, in the furthest reaches of her peripheral vision, the stink bug, staggering out from behind the corner of the dresser. Flopping itself forward on Raid-slackened legs, it was slowly—painfully slowly—heading her way. “Jesus,” she whispered. She tried to ignore it, sinking deeper into her pillows and foundering in the awfulness of her loveless solitude, but she couldn’t help monitoring, with equal measures scorn and admiration, its creaky, gasping progress across the beige carpet. Bug NOT dead went through her mind: the imaginary text message to this boy whom she wanted so badly and stupidly to be in love with her. She closed her eyes, but even in that blindness she could see the stink bug coming, could somehow feel its advancement on her skin. Finally she propped herself up onto her elbows, and, with a sigh, slid off the bed. The stink bug halted, seeming to groggily sense her shadow as she stood looming above it. A shoe-sole would finish the job, but she was barefooted, and anyway . . .
Alexis ripped a page from the school notepad on her nightstand, and slipping it under the stink bug, which tumbled into the semicircular tube she’d made, she carried it to her window and dumped it, gently, onto the sill.
2
FOR THE LONG CRAMPED FLIGHT to San Francisco to attend his first meeting of the Waste Isolation Project Markers panel, back in January, Dr. Elwin Cross Jr. stuffed his carry-on bag with a half pound of homemade venison jerky; a tin of Altoids to counteract any close-quarters social effects of the jerky; his laptop and BlackBerry and their tangled black contrails of charger cords; seven amber vials containing his Metformin (for metabolic syndrome), Lipitor (cholesterol reduction), Avapro (hypertension), Colcrys (gout), Meloxicam (bursitis), Elidel (eczema), and Clonazepam (anxiety), plus a squat little bottle of baby aspirin and a pack of lozenges said to prevent snoring; a thick packet of background information, dressed in staid government-issue binders, that he’d been sent for meeting prep; and four books: The Half Way to Healthy! How to Shed Pounds and Feel Great with One Simple Fraction, by Simon Levine, MD; Alzheimer’s Essentials: A Practical Guide for Caregivers; a fiercely underlined copy of Surviving Infidelity: A Man’s Guide pressed upon Elwin by Fritz during one of their increasingly squirmy conversations (how he missed the old boring Fritz! Heartbreak had liberated Fritz in the worst way, unleashing years of pent-up testosterone. “The keisters around here!” he’d say after a walk through campus. “You just want to . . . bite them!”); and an oil-splotched edition of the Haynes Jeep Cherokee Repair Manual 1984–2001, which Elwin considered the most pleasant if least comprehensible of the four books.
The Haynes manual, in fact, was what Elwin fetched first, after wedging himself into a window seat and reciting a plaintive little prayer that the center seat would go unoccupied. His thighs needed that overflow space. He usually booked two seats, if a Business Class seat wasn’t available, but this time around he’d been too embarrassed to ask the government travel coordinator for two. The current political mood, he’d calculated, probably ruled out this sort of taxpayer-funded largesse; merely imagining the coordinator’s apologies was humiliation enough.
The congressional temperament was playing an unexpectedly large role in the Waste Isolation Project. Bill Owens, the project administrator from Attero Laboratories who’d recruited Elwin for the panel just before Thanksgiving, had confessed a measure of anxiety about whether Attero’s contract with the Department of Energy would be renewed; from what Elwin could surmise, the company’d lost its primary benefactor when the Senate Energy Committee’s chairman lost his Senate seat, in a much-ballyhooed upset, to a right-wing candidate who wanted to abolish the Department of Energy because the word “energy” was nowhere to be found in the Constitution. “So we’re fast-tracking this,” Owens said, with much apology for the bimonthly meetings this would entail. Only later did the irony of fast-tracking a ten-thousand-year mission occur to Elwin.
He flipped open the Haynes manual randomly, to the chapter on brakes. Along with a pair of Banks TorqueTube headers, K&N filter, Flowmaster Cat-Back exhaust package, Alpine stereo system plus Rockford Fosgate subwoofers, and whatever else added up to $1,387.62, the Haynes manual had come into his possession via Christopher, who’d made a seductive case for a “massive upgrade” of the Jeep after guiding Elwin through a satisfying round of bodywork repairs. Overwhelmed by the purchase options (“On the headers, you want ceramic-coated or stainless steel?”), Elwin had surrendered his credit card and dispatched Christopher to the AutoZone with tongue-in-cheek instructions to “go crazy.” The subwoofers alone were proof that Christopher had taken him literally. Though stung by the gone-crazy receipt (visibly enough for Christopher to posit a quavery, item-by-item defense, which merciful Elwin, sensing another failure being inked onto Christopher’s record, stopped midstream), Elwin was nonetheless enjoying the after-hours camaraderie in the garage: the banter, the loud cr
uddy rock ’n’ roll, the soul-tickling way a can of cheap beer tastes when plucked fresh from a cooler. Twice Christopher had dragged Elwin with him to McGuinn’s tavern, where Elwin had felt like a folk hero after besting the all-time high score on the video trivia game (“That’s my neighbor, motherfuckers!” Christopher shouted) and where a bartender dressed in a striking if unseasonable miniskirt had three times called him “big cutie,” which he dismissed on a rational level and yet, on another, fudgier level, savored like a perfect potato chip.
There was something soothing about the Haynes manual, Elwin had discovered: the way its schematics and enumerated instructions offered wrenchable solutions to just about every predicament, the way it broke down the mysteries of combustion and locomotion and made everything—even the grand opera of engine replacement—seem so elementary and doable, so one-two-three possible. He’d even taken to reading it in bed, as a sleep aid; it seemed to ease those terrible minutes between turning off the light and falling asleep when one is so profoundly naked before the truth of one’s circumstances. Why weren’t such manuals written for life, he wondered. (Haynes Linguist Repair Manual, 1958–.) For marital tension, he imagined: “Remove the tensioner mounting bolt (see illustration). Use a drivebelt tool to turn the tensioner clockwise for belt removal. Replace the belt.” For ennui: “Add 12 oz. octane booster to the fuel tank.” That sort of thing. He assessed the trio of other repair guides in his carry-on—how to repair marriage, obesity, the dissolution of his father’s mind, all of them loaded with obtuse directions to “try to let go,” or to “re-envision yourself,” or to mollify the stress of an afflicted parent by “taking time to focus on you”—and found them all flaccid and useless in comparison. Where, he wanted to know, were the real instructions he needed: what socket to use, what fluids to check, what nozzle to clean, which fuses controlled what and how to replace them? Oh, to be a machine: diagnosable, restorable, upgradeable, functional.
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