by Owen Thomas
The newspaper was supposed to have provided an opportunity for distraction. It fails miserably. I need medicinal-strength distraction. I pat my pockets for my phone, but it is still upstairs. I use the kitchen phone and call Cee Cee Lewis. No answer. I hang up without leaving a message. Shit.
I need cannabis. In my mind, I am back home. I think of all the old hiding places; the familiar nooks and crannies just big enough for a baggie. I know they are all empty but I cycle through them all anyway, checking them off in my head. But what is the point? I am here, not there, and all of those hiding places are in the disaster zone crime scene of my heavily subsidized condominium. Suddenly my parents are in there with me, looking around in abject horror at the destruction as I poke into this closet and that cupboard for a few flakes of distraction. God, what will they think of me?
I move into the living room where I dissolve into the couch cushions and surf the morning simulated news programs. They all clamor with human-interest disaster pieces featuring reporters in boots soldiering past the stench of mold and raw sewage to interview a man in a skiff who hasn’t slept in a week, a woman in a shelter missing a daughter, a boy swinging an empty leash, a grimy man with a stethoscope around his neck, an old woman sleeping in a wheelchair in the lobby of a building; all abutting stories about pudding-infused chocolate cake, and about the acai berry diet, and about the starlet anorexia crisis, and about tattoo removal. Movie reviews. They do the weather forecast on location from Bourbon Street. I mute the volume and watch the images.
Sleep, never sated, feeds again. The couch seems to float. I drift off into the empty silence of my old home. I dream I am lying on a log in the middle of the back yard. The yard is a lake. The yard is in the living room. I try to paddle to the kitchen but the log is too long and will not turn. I climb out the window. I scale the house. I am on a rooftop in the Ninth Ward. I try to make a boat out of a chimney. I struggle to hold the chimney in my arms, looking into one sooty end like a brick monocular. I cannot see anything without pointing the chimney back down toward the hole in the roof from whence it came. There I can see the top of Chuck North’s head. He is down there talking with my father. They are picking up dead fish and putting them in the pockets of their suit jackets. At first I think that Katrina has pushed the fish in through the windows and left them for dead. But then I recognize the couch. There are DVD’s and condoms and panties strewn everywhere. Karl Gustafson pulls a bag of trash across my field of view. I am looking down at the carnage in my own condominium. Those are my dead fish. Katrina is not responsible. I am responsible. Brittany Kline is playing the violin to the television. Mae and Shepp are on the screen kissing. Brittany wears high heels and red painted toenails. She stomps one foot one the floor three times. Stomp, stomp, stomp. She is testing the floorboards. Stomp, stomp, stomp. The sound is hollow. Something is buried there. Stomp, stomp, stomp. She looks straight up at me looking down at them all through the hole in the roof. She points.
I am catapulted out of the dream in a film of sweat. I sit up panting. Listening.
Thump, thump, thump.
The man at the door works for Federal Express. He holds out a clipboard and I sign. Behind him is a box the size of a small refrigerator. He pushes some buttons on a combination tricorder/phaser thing until it beeps. He holsters his weapon, takes his hand truck and leaves me to worry about getting the box inside the house.
It is more cumbersome than heavy. I turn it and tip it inside the foyer and close the door. I give the thing a kick and the box lets out a metallic rattle like it might be a miniature version of the barber pole swing set Tilly and I used to have out in the backyard. The label is addressed to my father, from an inscrutable acronym followed by the ubiquitous abbreviation, “Inc.” I leave the thing by the door and head to the kitchen for my late-morning snack.
Respect for my parents’ privacy lasts about twenty minutes. I bring the kitchen shears out to the foyer and go to work on the box. This violation is not without some contrived justification. A combination of boredom and a growing allergic reaction to my own existence has convinced me that now, suddenly, it is time to right an unanswered wrong of the past.
As I cut into the cardboard, I call to mind the afternoon my father searched my room for the Playboys he normally kept beneath a green terrycloth towel under my parent’s bathroom sink but which went mysteriously missing in the fall of my sixteenth year. Listening not at all to my protests of innocence, my father had pushed past me in a bee line for my room, rifled through every desk drawer and every box in my closet, under the bed, under the mattress, until, coming up completely empty-handed, he had grilled me over whether I had taken the magazines out of the house to show my similarly prurient friends – as if the missing magazines had not been his magazines from the beginning. He even asked if I had sold them or traded them for some other contraband. After all, I attended a lowly pubic high-school where, unlike the Vanguard Academy, there was probably a healthy market for pornography, drugs and stolen goods. He did not actually speak those words, but he didn’t have to. The event marked my earliest experience with unreasonable searches stemming from my attendance at Bertrand J. Wilson High School.
Coming before the years of open rebellion, my father had never even thought to interrogate Tilly or to search her room. When I asked her later that day, she readily confessed to having soaked the magazines in water, hauling them down the street and dumping them all into Heinrich Van Susteran’s trashcan. When I asked Tilly why she had done such a thing, her perfect little face had darkened, vulcanizing before my eyes.
“They’re all about S-E-X, David,” she had whispered angrily. “I found them and I looked at them and they have pictures about S-E-X!”
As if I had never seen such a thing; as if I did not know every glossy navel and kneecap in every missing magazine by heart; as if I was not every bit as upset at the prospect of a Playboy-less house as my father. Irritated that she had taken them out of my reach as well, I asked her why on earth she had carted them all the way down the street to the Van Susteren’s trash.
“It’s where they belong,” she had said. “In the trash! And that way daddy won’t know where to find them and so he can never get them back. Unless you tell, and I don’t care if you do tell, D.J., ‘cause they’re all wet.”
I could have told my father what I had learned, rubbing his mistake in his face. Not me! Her! Do you see how I am innocent? Totally innocent! Do you see?! But I had held my tongue. I had tucked away the indignity of the warrantless room search for another day. In time, the magazines replenished themselves like mushrooms in the dark. They are not there anymore. I have checked. This morning.
I sit cross-legged on the floor surrounded by dozens of inexplicable parts: black aluminum piping of all shapes and sizes, black nylon strapping, six smaller boxes of thick, brightly colored rubber strapping, glide tracks, hooks, screws, five sizes of bolts and washers that numbered in the dozens, bolt protectors, floor protectors, foam grips, a seat swivel assembly, a seat, and plastic foot pedals. It takes two hours of pouring over pages of assembly instructions that have been terribly translated from some other language, I’m guessing Chinese or maybe ancient Egyptian judging from the hieroglyphic diagrams, to put this fucking thing, this CoreFlexx 9000 Deluxe GITMO Torture Rack, together.
At the two-hour mark I hear my phone ring upstairs. I race for it, hoping it is Cee Cee returning my call. It stops bleating before I get there. No message. I check the number as I walk back downstairs. Caitlyn Carson Lewis. Thank God. I sit back down on the floor. I redial.
“There you are,” she answers.
“Sissy.”
“DJ.”
“Don’t call me DJ.”
“I let you call me Sissy.”
“Other people call you Sissy.”
“Other people call you DJ.”
“Not any more they don’t.”
“Oh?”
“I’m trading it in.”
“For what?”
; “Inmate Number 32947.”
“Will you settle for simply Dave?”
“‘Til the jury foreman reads his little note. Then I’m strictly a numbers guy.”
“Obsessing a little, are we?”
“You have no idea.”
“So was that you?”
“Was what me?”
“Who called a while back.”
“Oh. Yeah. That was me.”
“I didn’t recognize the number.”
“I used the kitchen phone.”
“Yeah. I obviously put it together. Could have left a message.”
“I guess.”
“You sound pissed off.”
“I am pissed off.”
“Why?”
“I’m assembling a fucking … CoreFlexx 9000.”
“What the hell is a …”
“I have no idea. But I just spent the past hour putting half of it together backwards. That’s why my dad left town. He secretly wants me to assemble it for him.”
“Diabolical. Are you sure it’s backwards?”
“No.”
“Need some help?”
“Yes. But not with this.”
“With what?”
“I’m going bat-shit crazy with nothing to do. My head is one big horror movie. You still have access to a certain … herbal panacea?”
“Do I still have access?”
“Yeah. You, know. A supply.”
“I’ve got access.”
“Can you come over?”
“I guess. I don’t know what kind of company I’ll be. I’ve been up all night. I have to go back over at eleven tonight.”
“Another Dancing Danny?”
“Marie. Forty-two. Stage four pancreatic.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. Not much dancing over there.”
There is silence on the line. I try to resist. Out of respect for her exhaustion. Out of respect for poor Marie, whose terminal disease puts my troubles in perspective. Or should, anyway. But I cannot resist. The thought of an entire day in my own company is more than I can bear. I feel like I am drowning.
“Can you come over anyway? Does that make me an asshole?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You… wait. Yes to what?”
I give her directions to my parents’ place. My mood brightens a little at the prospect of relief, but this does nothing to improve my assembly of the CoreFlexx 9000 which would seem to require the ability to concentrate. I have to disassemble everything and start all over. Now I am missing parts.
Caitlin is at the door forty-five minutes later staring down at the mess of my second reassembly effort. She closes the door with the heel of her boot. She looks tired.
“That can’t be right,” she says, taking off her baseball cap and pointing down at the giant black skeleton in front of me.
“Gee, you think?”
“Yes. It’s… it’s… backwards. I think.” She kicks the side of the contraption. “This part must go back there. And that goes up here.”
There is a smudge of grime on the toe of her boot. I cock my head.
“You know you have the Virgin Mary on your boot?”
“What?”
“Seriously.” I point. “Head. Eyes. Hands. Plain as day. You could make some serious money. Oh, wait, hold on. This just in.” I cock my head the other direction. “If you look at it this way, it looks like a bat. Wing, wing, head. See?”
“No.”
“You’re either a Christian Saint or you’re Batman. I’m glad you heard it from me first. Not everyone is so accepting.”
“And you’re either drunk or stoned.”
“Neither, regrettably. Let’s fix that. Where’s the shit?”
“What shit?” She twists her head for another look at the CoreFlexx 9000.
“What shit. THE shit.”
“Oh. I don’t have any of that. Not with me.” She rights her head and leans back against the door, looking around, taking in my parents’ home.
“I thought you said you’d bring…”
“I said I have access. And I do. I never said I’d bring any with me.”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“One, it’s your parents’ house and that just seems wrong somehow. Two, because distraction is the last thing you need right now.
“Okay, one, we can go outside in the backyard or up on the fuckin’ roof, and two, distraction is the only thing that keeps me from laying myself over the railroad tracks.”
“No. Distraction, Dave, is what got you back to this point in the first place.”
“It was a totally illegal search, Cee.”
“I’m not talking about the bust. You have not been present and accounted for, my friend. You’re on auto-pilot. Identity by default.”
“I don’t have the slightest idea…” It hurts my neck to look up at her. I fidget with the wrench in my hand.
“You’re living your life in tiny little circles. You’re pre-programmed to end up where you started. Distraction makes that possible. Hell, distraction makes that easy. How many times do you want to go back to square one? You want to move in a straight line, you’ve got to stay conscious.”
“Fucking Yoda.” The anger is building. I push it back down. I don’t want to be angry. I want to be stoned. I look back up at her. She is eyeing the living room.
“Let’s go get it.”
She shakes her head slowly, inexorably. We stare at each other.
“Nice place,” she says finally, looking away.
“Look, all I’m trying to do, day in and day out…”
She holds up a finger, silencing me.
“Do or do not. There is no try.”
“Fuck. You just… I’m not…”
“Breathe, Dave.”
“So now you’re suddenly anti-pot?”
“I love pot. I’m anti-distraction. You want it for all the wrong reasons. You have anything to drink?”
I glare at her for a minute, then point her towards the kitchen. She clomps past me down the hall. I listen to her rummaging.
“Want something?”
“No,” I say, hating how dejected and beaten I sound.
She comes back with one of Ben’s grape sodas. She holds the bottle down to me. I shake my head. She closes her eyes and drinks, coaxing the soda down into her mouth until it is gone. She licks her lips and smiles.
Caitlin kicks off her boots and sits down cross-legged next to me on the floor, her knees pushing through the openings in her jeans. She smells like rain. Like fresh bread. Like… like a sunny sixth grade recess.
She sets the bottle down, pulls the hair behind her ears and leans over me, holding herself up on one hand, reaching with the other. Her t-shirt is a bellows, pumping the scent of her out into the room. She grabs the instructions off the floor, retracts her body, lays down on her back and reads, turning the pages one-by-one, hands and instructions straight above her face, like we are on a grassy hill in summer and she is blocking the sun with a cheap paperback potboiler.
I am not accountable for my actions for I have no future. My greatest long-term plan is the flicker of impulse. I duck my head between her arms and beneath the thin white pages of hieroglyphics and I kiss her, pushing my mouth against hers just firmly enough to feel the contours of her lips. She tastes like fizzy grape soda.
She offers no resistance and no reciprocation. I withdraw the same way I approached. I sit back in my space on the floor looking at her. Caitlin turns the page.
“Yeah,” she says, registering nothing. “This is the part you’re not understanding.”
* * *
Caitlin disassembles my work and lines up all of the parts according to size, shape and alleged purpose. She even lines up the bolts and washers, which I had been fishing out of a single pile. She works methodically through the instructions, commandeering the wrench and the screwdriver and conscripting me as her surgical assistant.
“Okay. A-12,” she says, pointing.
&n
bsp; “This?”
“Yes. And the one next to it. A-14. And I’ll need a red, C-5 strap.”
I collect the parts and hand them to her. My new subordinate role in assembling the metal upside-down black widow spider requires no thought or concentration and my mind wanders back into all the bad neighborhoods.
“You realize this hearing is in five days?” I ask, and then hear my own words with astonishment. “Fuck. Five days.”
“I need a yellow C-3 and a black A-8. Still going in without a lawyer?”
“I can’t afford a lawyer,” I say, handing her the parts.
“Your parents can afford a lawyer.”
“I’m not telling my parents. We’ve been through this.”
“I know. I just don’t understand it. I don’t know what you’re afraid of. Especially now that I’ve met your dad.”
“You’ve met him. You don’t know him. I’m not afraid…”
“Then call him. Get lawyered up. A-6.”
“I’m not calling him.”
“A-6.”
I read the labels on all of the pipes and hand her the one that looks like one half of the handlebars of a bicycle.
“You think he’s not going to find out about all of this eventually?”
“Please. One nightmare at a time. You know, if they arrest me on the Brittany thing or if they revoke my bail on the drug thing, maybe I won’t have to show up for the termination hearing. That’s my new plan, right there. Use these competing disasters against each other.”
