The Adventures of Gregory Samson, Space Explorer: The Origami Man-Free Sample!

by Benjamin Mumford-Zisk

was supposed to be the letch, not her, me I could handle. Everything moved slowly. My morning was patient terror, the inside of the accident all over again, watching the blurry spinning world for detail because these details might be the last I see.

  Iris held my hand down the hall until we got to the top of the stairs. Her palm was warm, and I could still smell her lips deep inside my mouth. She let go without a word and bounced down the stairs, hair flying around her head. I think of her now as a symbol of finality, the textural memory of something lost or left behind. The lingering sensation of the last step of concrete under your feet when you leave the road and walk into the woods.

  I was going to have to move out. I could feel it.

 

  3

  Dylan was standing at the stove with his back turned when I moseyed into the kitchen, a respectable distance behind Iris. His shoulders were slumped, and he was drinking from a big glass of ice water. While I refilled my coffee cup he poured three large dollops of batter on the griddle.

  “Welcome to the Land of Death,” he grunted.

  “Gee, you haven’t been to the Land of Death since college,” I said. “Must be a hell of a hangover.”

  “Red wine and Manhattans.” Dylan shuddered. “There’s bacon in the oven.”

  “There’s a cure-all,” Iris said.

  “Grease is good for a hangover,” Dylan said. “Not so much for your arteries.”

  “Fuck ‘em,” Iris said. She drank her coffee. I sat down across from her and gave her a friendly smile and she opened her eyes wide and mimed screaming, then smiled once and shrugged.

  I grinned weakly. I wasn’t feeling very eloquent. My shell, felt but foreign, made me feel like I wasn’t sitting quite right in my seat. My stomach roared incessantly at the smell of pancakes, coffee and bacon. There was a bowl of cut melons on the counter, too, and their smell wove underneath everything and flickered at the edges of my vision. I blinked hard. I wasn’t synesthetic. I wasn’t. Unless now I was.

  Dylan set the table with bacon, eggs, blueberry pancakes, buttered toast and honeydew wedges, then refilled everyone’s coffee. He was a big man, with long arms that he loaded with four plates apiece. His skin under the hot ceramic turned bright red, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “Now, how long did all this take you?” Iris asked. Dylan shrugged.

  “Ten minutes or so. Fifteen.” He shrugged. “I dunno. It was all autopilot.”

  Iris looked at the neat kitchen. Dylan cleaned while he cooked, so the kitchen was nearly spotless.

  “Teach me, Master,” she said. Dylan shrugged and buttered a pancake.

  “Ok, first you gotta chop me a thousand onions.” He grinned. “We did food prep for prisons and colleges and shit back in school. Fed ourselves, too. Like, I learned how to chop a bell pepper real easy by chopping a thousand bell peppers in a row. You know?”

  “Forget it, I’m out,” Iris said. “What’d you do last night?”

  I filled my plate and took a bite of pancake and the thing in the back of my mind sat up and yelled in my head, a bright, happy, surprised noise. Somebody else’s happiness. Glee felt at a distance. I managed to start chewing, and the tone settled into a constant, level roar of approval and desire.

  “Got tanked with the staff,” Dylan said. “Got the new line guy to take me home.” He winked at her. “He’s cute.”

  Iris glanced at me, but I barely noticed. I was too busy having my mind blown apart by the experience of a bite of bacon. My brain was a sodden mess of happy chemicals and fight-or-flight hormones. It was all I could do to keep a straight face.

  I drank a big slurp of hot coffee and scalded my tongue and the chemicals went away and I slumped a little in my seat.

  “Mitchell is gay, Iris.” Dylan grinned. “Mine. Greg, you with us?”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled. “Just tired. Breakfast is great.”

  “He says he slept on his neck wrong,” Iris said. Dylan grinned at her evilly, and Iris waved her hand dismissively. “Greg, what’d you do last night, anyway?”

  I sipped my orange juice while I thought of a lie, and everything in my vision started to glitter. The thing in the back of my mind really liked OJ. I took another sip, and the same thing happened. I put the glass down.

  “Greg?” Iris said. “Hello, Cadet Samson, come in please. What’d you do last night?”

  “Ya get laid?” Dylan grinned, and Iris looked at him sharply.

  “No,” I said immediately. “I went to the Chanticleer after I got finished in Dryden. Had a few drinks and came home.”

  Nobody spoke for a moment. Dylan ate a strip of bacon. Iris looked out the window at my car in the driveway. The buzzing in my head rose to a fever pitch, and I ate another bite of pancake. Whatever the damn thing was, it really liked blueberry pancakes.

  “You got in at like three in the morning,” Iris said. “I heard you in the bathroom.” She looked me straight in the face. “How much did you have to drink?”

  I opened my mouth and couldn’t think of what to say. Inside my head, the unaffected part of me sighed and rubbed its scalp. I’d gotten myself caught in a lie. This hadn’t happened to me since sophomore year in college. Goddam pancake-loving shell. And of all the lies to get caught in, and at this moment…things were looking bleak. Christ. I was normally so good at this sort of thing.

  “Not too much,” I said. “I just got to talking to people.” I was defending myself to her. Not to them. To her. Dylan was just a spectator. It had happened without my noticing.

  “You’re hung over!” Iris said. “Why didn’t you take a fucking cab?” She wasn’t loud, but her words were. Her anger was palpable. Dylan took slice of melon and began to eat it with a spoon. I took a deep breath and bled it out.

  I should clarify: I’m not an alcoholic, and I didn’t make a habit of drunk driving. But eight months before all this happened I drove home from my own birthday party and wrapped my car around a tree. I walked away from the crash blowing a .16 and lost my license for six months. Hell, I nearly went to jail. My memory of events is hazy, but apparently I gave the cops a hard time.

  Iris had been living with us for a little more than two months, at that point. She put fifty bucks in a fake rock next to the door, for cab fare, and made me promise never to drive drunk again. The fake rock trick was something she got from her mom, who forced a similar promise out of Iris’ father when Iris was about nine. Her dad was still alive, but he’d broken that promise a lot more than he kept it, and eventually lost his license for good. He was a drunk, and it caused Iris a lot of pain.

  I’d kept my promise. I’d left my car places, taken cabs, walked, replenished the fifty bucks as needed, the whole shebang. None of which meant dick now that I had lied myself into trouble.

  Iris opened her mouth, narrowed her eyes at me, and then devoted herself to her breakfast. After a few minutes, she said, “Well?”

  “Well what?” I said. I’d eaten a fair amount in the intervening time, and the thing in my head was discovering what it was like to get tired after a big meal. Maybe I could eat the thing into submission, if it turned mean. Kill it with hot wings, or something. What a weird morning.

  “What’s your excuse?” Iris asked. I sat back and drank more of my coffee. Fuck it, I thought. Embrace the lie.

  “I had four beers and five shots,” I said. “The beers were PBR long necks. I was there from nine to three. It’s not much alcohol. I paced myself. I’m a grown up.”

  Iris nodded tightly and finished her toast. “I’ve listened to a lot of rationalization in my life,” she said. I bristled a little, and she raised her hand.

  “You made it home,” she said. “That means that what you did matters as a whole, not pieces. You’re alive. Good. You paced yourself, yeah, but you also went to a place where you drank a lot and then drove home. You didn’t have to, but you did. You chose to.” She put her hand edge-down on the table, and gestured to the left. “That’s what happene
d, period. There’s no changing it.” She swept her hand to the right. “Now you figure out what you’re going to do, going forward.”

  After a moment I opened my mouth, and she cut me off. I think she’d been waiting for me to speak.

  “It doesn’t matter, what you say,” she said. “Not anymore. You said you wouldn’t do something, and you did it. So now you need to prove you can change. Your words don’t matter, because you made them meaningless.” She took a deep breath and drank the rest of her orange juice. I noticed it didn’t seem to put her into a hallucinatory state. She wiped her mouth carefully and took a deep breath, looked at the clock, and said, “I’m going to meet Nia at the Farmer’s Market. I’ll see you later.” She made eye contact. “I’m not mad.”

  “Ok,” I said.

  “It’s not the end of the world, Greg,” she said. “But it’s the truth.”

  I nodded. She got up and put her dishes in the dishwasher and went around the house for a half minute and then out the front door. I cleared my throat and ate some more bacon.

  “That moment seemed emotionally fraught,” Dylan said. “Was that moment emotionally fraught?”

  I shrugged.

  “Of course, she’s right,” Dylan said. After a moment he reached across the table and slapped me softly across the back of the head.

  “Take a friggin’ cab next time, idiot.” He stood up with his empty plates and kissed me on the forehead. “Love you.”

  “Love you too,” I grumbled. He