Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  Alexis peered downward, to where the closed and dingless phone was balanced on her thigh, and said, “It was just—I don’t know, like a passing thing, you know? But whatever.” She curled up her nose, absently running a fingertip along the glossy edge of her phone. “He was kind of a player.”

  “Uh huh,” Dave said. He’d caught something there, in that narrow little gap between the “you know” and the “but whatever”: a flicker of candor, a passing glimpse of naked or at least semiclothed emotion, like her heart scooting by while clutching a bath towel. Years of phonework with debtors had sensitized him to these micro-moments, when through a verbal crack he’d catch something revealed, often something trivial but at other times an essential and game-changing truth. Rarely, he’d found, was it difficult to work that crack into a fissure. People went out into the world clad in armor, but what they really longed to do was shed that armor—it was why they got drunk in bars, why they went trolling the internet under the cloak of an alias, maybe why they fell in love. With a puckish smirk he said to her, “Well, he wasn’t really your type anyway.”

  She stiffened, as he thought she might. “What’s that mean?”

  “Here we go again. It meant just what I said.”

  “Because he was Mexican? Is that it?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe ’cause his dad’s a fucking landscaper.”

  “So, what—you think I’m some sort of—gold digger?”

  “I think you aim high, that’s all.”

  “I’m not like my mom, if that’s what you’re saying.”

  “Whoa whoa whoa,” he said, with his hands splayed. This was an unforeseen swerve. “You calling your mom a gold digger?”

  “I’m just saying,” she said.

  Raising his voice, he asked, “So what’s that make me?”

  She lifted one shoulder in an apprehensive half shrug, a touch of fear whitening her face.

  Grinning, Dave said, “Makes me gold, that’s what it makes me.”

  For a moment, Alexis was silent. Then her shoulders pitched and rolled as she fell into laughter, and for a full silken minute the two of them giggled, snorted, sighed, and giggled again, not looking at each other but instead at the television, as if the SportsCenter guys were cracking them up, and while Dave didn’t fully comprehend why it was all so funny, he couldn’t stop himself from laughing, not unlike when he’d gotten stoned at Thanksgiving and several times later. For the first time tonight, he realized, he felt almost happy, almost human, felt like he understood the velocity and spin and break of the pitch coming off the mound, felt as if the day was maybe finally shifting from dammit to donuts. Felt a little, well, golden. As he exhaled a laughter-concluding wheeze Alexis reached toward him and said, “Gimme the remote.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause this is boring,” she said, though not unhappily. She thumbed the channel back to the tiara-girl show, reconsidered, then dropped them into a rerun of Jon & Kate Plus 8, which struck Dave as less boring than excruciating. Then again, he decided, the mommy on the show was from a certain angle kind of hot. The rear angle, for sure. Also the three-quarter profile angle. Although all she did, too, was talk about her kids.

  “What’s all that shit there, on the coffee table?” he asked.

  “College stuff. Course catalogs.”

  “Your mom says you got into Rutgers.”

  “I’m so not going to Rutgers.”

  As a Rutgers alum, he could’ve taken this as an insult, but chose not to. Alexis, he knew, had fatter dreams than that—getting out of Jersey, for starters, a desire he nostalgically if condescendingly understood from having over-absorbed Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town album as a teenager. (This was before Bruce had gone all lefty, or maybe before Dave had noticed the trails of lefty crumbs in Bruce’s songs.) Dave had never had the luxury of considering it, however. At eighteen, his in-state destiny had been dictated by his old man: You going to college, and you going to this one. Which is how it’d always been: You playing football, not basketball, ’cause I can’t stand all that fuckin squeakin. Fuck that job down the shore, you working for your Uncle Bobby at the Wawa this summer. Alexis was angling for Richard Varick College in Manhattan, and, so far as Dave was aware, angling fairly well: respectable GPA, an application essay that she’d worked on for weeks before getting it honed by a not-inexpensive “essay coach,” two retakes of the SAT and ACT tests. “Holding out for the city, huh?” he said.

  With a slanted grin, she replied, “Aiming high, remember?”

  “Yeah, I get it. Where’s Miguel headed?”

  “Oh, God. I dunno. Sussex County Community College, maybe? Working with his dad, probably.”

  “He was a player, huh?”

  “Kinda?”

  “Kinda, how?”

  “Like, he was dating some junior. Supposedly they’d broken up. Not the actual case.”

  “Two-timing you, then.”

  “I guess.” She peered down at her phone again, and then with an abruptly inflamed tone, as if the screen had relayed some red-hot reminder, she said, “He’s just a dick, really. Just, like, shrugged when I found out about it. Was like, oh well, if that’s how you’re gonna be about it, catch you later.”

  “Adios.”

  “He didn’t say adios.”

  “Thought it, I’ll bet.”

  “You’re such a jackass.”

  Dave raised his eyebrows, leaned in. “You need me to rough him up for you?”

  “Right.”

  “I got ways.”

  She pursed her lips. “What ways?”

  “My ways.”

  “You’re all talk.”

  “Here,” he said, feeling challenged, “gimme your phone.”

  In a swift protective gesture, she scooped the phone off her thigh and said, “What?”

  “Just give me the fucking phone.”

  She was holding it over her head now, the way you keep a leaping dog from snagging a milkbone. “Why?”

  “’Cause I’m calling this asshole.”

  She shifted the phone to an unseen point behind her neck, so that to access it he might conceivably need to remove her head. “Not from my phone!”

  “Fine,” he said, unholstering his own phone. “Just read me off the number.”

  “Why?”

  “Just read me the number.”

  After a long hesitation, her eyes flipping from phone to Dave then back again, she did so, her face settling into a rubbernecker’s expression of equal parts terror and curiosity. When Dave hit the speaker button, and peals of static-hemmed ringing filled the room, she removed a hand from her own phone and slapped the hand across her open mouth.

  “Fuck, what’s his last name?” he said. “Quick.”

  “Rios.”

  Miguel answered just as Dave was clearing his throat. “Miguel Rios, please,” Dave said, as Alexis went skittering back into the couch pillows, coiling herself like a cornered rodent. Dave winked.

  “Yeah, who’s this?” came the kid’s voice.

  “Sergeant Dick Mancuso, Byram Township Police. What’s your location, sir?”

  At this point Alexis smothered her face with a pillow.

  “Who’s this again?”

  “You heard me. Mancuso, with a, uh, M. Your location, please.”

  “I’m—I’m at home?”

  “You’re needed for questioning.” Dave reached over and swatted the pillow pressed to Lexi’s face, because her muffled squealing was making it sound like Dave was calling from a slaughterhouse. He’d made this call before, though not in decades; somewhere back in his brain was his original script, which he’d last used to get back at his dipshit cousin Victor for borrowing Dave’s car to drive to a Giants game and parking in a handicapped spot. Two-hundred-dollar ticket. “We can send a cruiser over now, or we can schedule a meeting at the station at, let’s see, eight tomorrow morning.”

  The anxious gulp they heard incited contrasting reactions: from Dave, a toothsome grin;
from Alexis, a hard, cellphone-weighted slap administered to the pillow covering her face, followed by a pained moan. “Questioning for what?” they heard him ask.

  “I’m not at, uh, liberty to say that at this point, okay?” Dave said. “Look, kid, don’t make this hard on yourself. Don’t be stupid, okay? We can do this with or without a warrant. Now or tomorrow?”

  “You sure you got the right Miguel Rios?”

  By this point Alexis was doubled over, face down in the pillow. Dave kicked her in the shin, to make sure she wasn’t suffocating herself. “Student at Sussex High?” he said. “Yeah, you’re the one, hotshot. Eight o’clock tomorrow. Sergeant—” He had to think for an extra moment here: Who the hell had he said he was? Oh, that’s right—“Mancuso, with an M. Station’s in Stanhope. You’re gonna need to be accompanied by a parent or guardian, got that? I’m required to advise you that you have the right to be represented by legal counsel.”

  “Legal . . . ?” The kid’s voice was cracking. “What’s this all . . . ? I’ve got school in the—”

  “That’s not even close to your biggest problem right now, capeesh? How bout we’ll write you a note?”

  “But my dad has to—”

  “Look. Clock hits 8:01 and a bench warrant gets issued. So be on time, is I guess what I’m sayin.”

  “Sir, can I ask—”

  “Nope, you can’t. Not till eight tomorrow. Catch you later.”

  And with that he hung up. Cackling, he wagged a middle finger at the phone before reholstering it. “‘Catch you later,’” he quoted himself quoting Alexis quoting Miguel. “Did you get that part?”

  Alexis lifted her face from the pillow, her cheeks imprinted with the pillow’s weave pattern. “Ohmyfuckinggod you’re awesome,” she gasped.

  “He’s not getting a good sleep tonight,” said Dave.

  “You’re insane.”

  “Mancuso, with an M,” he said, continuing his own highlight reel.

  “Ohmygod, that was so wrong.”

  “Told you I had ways.”

  She put a hand to her chest, clearing her lungs with a long whoooo, then looked up at Dave. For a short while her smile held—she had obviously enjoyed the submissive crackling in Miguel’s voice, the vengeful little dart they’d thrown—but then something like a shadow passed across her face, darkening her expression. Her eyes narrowed and her lips came together as she stared at Dave in a weirdly searching manner, the way you look at some dimly remembered person whose name you can’t quite recall, scanning for visual clues. Finally she said, “Why’d you do that, perv?”

  “Whaddaya mean, why?” He grunted, pretending to be listening to the semi-hot MILF on the television screen who was rehashing a marital spat about the choice of a jungle gym. “’Cause you fell for this asshole, and the little asshole was two-timing you.”

  “Maybe I did,” she said softly, so softly that Dave told her to repeat it. “Maybe I did,” she said again. “I dunno.” Together they listened or rather appeared to listen to the TV husband’s side of the jungle gym dispute. “Why are guys such assholes? I mean, I gave him—I told him . . .”

  When Dave looked over at her he could see just how far her expression had fallen. She was back to rubbing the edge of the phone again, as if it was some holy talisman, like the turquoise eye his Aunt Ida bought off some psychic in Ocean City to ward off fear that she used to rub the dickens outta whenever Dave’s father cracked a beer at family get-togethers. Was that a tear in Lexi’s eye? Oh shit, he thought. Now he’d done it. But done what? It occurred to him that maybe he shouldn’t have merely prank-called that dumb little yardboy kid. Maybe what he should’ve said was: I hope that back-inventory tramp of yours is a swimsuit model, pendejo, because this girl right here is about as beautiful as they get. Or maybe, better yet, he shouldn’t have said anything at all, to anyone. Maybe he should’ve just concentrated on the fucking SportsCenter guys until all the odd empty feeling had passed. Trying to skirt the issue, he said, “Which guys are assholes? This one on the TV?”

  “No,” she sniffed. “Guys.”

  “Not me,” he said.

  She snorted. “Naw, you’re an asshole too.”

  He glanced at her, glanced away, and then staring at the television screen announced, “You wouldna talked to me back in high school, you know.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I wasn’t gold then. Not even close to gold. Not even tinfoil.”

  “But you had the nice ears.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s true.” He was quiet for a while, as if pondering this—though he wasn’t pondering it. He wasn’t pondering at all. “Let’s turn the fucking channel, okay?” he said, and she went sifting through the channels until she found one that drew an approving nod from him. An old Bruce Willis movie, midway through. She set the remote on the coffee table, followed by her phone, and then Dave said, “Put your head over here,” which she did.

  5

  A MONUMENT WAS RISING in his dreams. Sometime around the end of April, three months after Elwin’s first meeting with the Waste Isolation Project Markers panel and two weeks after the second meeting, the mission was beginning a slow and peculiar creep into his subconscious.

  This was unusual in multiple ways. Elwin didn’t often dream, for one thing, owing to a case of weight-related sleep apnea that tended to constantly scramble his REM-state channel lineup. What the act of dreaming brought to mind were the ancient frustrations of watching TV with his younger brother David, who’d lie on his back in front of the Philco Cool-Chassis “Miss America Series” set with the channel knob lodged between his toes, rotating the knob every two minutes in fractured, commercial-free contentment while from the couch Elwin and Jane would hurl murderous threats and occasionally magazines or flatware. On those rare nights when Elwin did manage to sustain and remember a dream, however, the dreams were always oblique, immaterial, indecipherable except at the basest symbolic level: unsatisfying Dada dreams in which, for instance, Maura didn’t return to him pleading for love and forgiveness, no, but rather a bucktoothed Dunkin’ Donuts cashier with a vague if sufficient resemblance to Maura shorted him on his change. That was it: a dream yielding nothing in the way of enlightenment or even a sense of his mind processing its sorrows somewhere deep within its gyral folds—yielding nothing, really, save a healthful aversion to the Dunkin’ Donuts in the Marasmus State student union. He missed the vivid, oversaturated dreams of his younger years, when whole civilizations would appear to him, as in a private sci-fi novel, his mind swarming with the delicious phonologies and morphologies of lost or never-were languages, leaving him flushed and eager when he awoke, caffeinated from the inside.

  These newest dreams, to his great and bewildered surprise, were very much like those. The first one arrived the night after the panel’s second meeting, at the Attero Laboratories Waste Isolation Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico. There he’d been outfitted with a headlamp-equipped hardhat, goggles, and emergency oxygen pack, and dropped two thousand feet down in a wire-cage elevator for a firsthand look at where eight hundred thousand steel drums of radioactive waste would eventually be stored. With him in the elevator were a blue-suited safety officer; Byron Torrance, the Pollyanna-ish genome biologist; and the artist on the panel, Sharon Keim, a Nevada sculptor whose most notable work was a thirty-ton granite polyhedron on the outskirts of El Paso that several Hollywood actresses had commissioned as a monument to battered women. Elwin liked Sharon; she was thorny, subversive, eager to lance the more swollen egos on the panel, as in:

  “I feel I should admit something,” Torrance announced in the elevator, about a thousand feet down. This he said floridly, with that same grandiloquence he applied to everything he said—one sensed the cameras were always rolling in his mind—but since Elwin had yet to become accustomed to this he awaited the admission with suspense. Torrance sighed. “I’m somewhat—claustrophobic.”

  The others must have been similarly disappointed, because no one responded—
not even the safety officer, whose job it was to respond. Obligingly, Elwin broke the silence by soothing, “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  Sharon leaned into Elwin. “You’re stealing his lines.”

  Elwin didn’t notice any reaction from Torrance, or any sign that Torrance had even overheard; he was too distracted by the playful pinch Sharon gave his arm as they went sinking downward. The pinch felt lingering—if only by second fragments—and he chose not to acknowledge it lest he give her cause to stop or, worse, curdle the moment with some embarrassing overacknowledgment. Only after she’d released her soft pincers did it occur to him that his lack of notice could’ve suggested he hadn’t actually felt it—that his insulating layers of arm-fat were thick enough to buffer tactile sensation. And only after that did it occur to him that he was thinking like a seventh-grade girl. He cleared his throat, trying to be a linguist again, an expert in soberminded descent.

  They’d emerged into a floodlit gray salt corridor, thirty feet wide and fifteen feet tall, that branched into a series of smaller subcorridors appearing to stretch infinitely outward. The walls, chilly to the touch and stippled with violet crystals, had been carved with angles that struck Elwin as impossibly sharp, the corners crisp and level as if steel girders were positioned behind giant sawn slabs of salt, or as if ten thousand men with ten thousand chisels had been chinking away since antiquity. Elwin saw his seatmate Carrollton, the materials scientist, ogling them with openmouthed admiration; Carrollton even rubbed the walls and tasted his fingers, to verify their saltiness. Forklifts went clattering by, trailed by squawks of static from the walkie talkies hitched to the drivers’ belts. Down one subcorridor workers on scaffolding were fireproofing a ventilation shaft. The workers were all wearing identical blue suits, and were as indistinguishable, at first glance, as the ants in an ant farm: a sub rosa colony of subterranean laborers. In the main corridor one shouted, “Watch to your right!” as he floored some sort of deep-earth golf cart past the doddering clutch of panelists. This one was wearing sunglasses, Elwin noticed, and with a doubletake he confirmed the set of Mardi Gras beads strung around the driver’s neck: subterranean homesick blues.