The UnAmericans

by Michael Carter

  “It’s morbid.”

  “I think the Pope’s with you on that,” said Timmy.

  The day’s burden had to be addressed, the sooner the better. But she didn’t know how to start; the insult was too big. Maybe the best way was to stay out of his life. An apology for ladling so much crap on him stammered into the sunny room with an undertaking to make it up to him if she could – how, she had no idea..

  “It’s okay,” was his response and she thought ‘Okay’? As if she had been talking about spilling Sprite on his shorts. She had been spending weeks in the abattoir of the human spirit, going down on strangers for another JD and he lacked the imagination to see that facing this might be painful for her. The decency of his reaction infuriated her; it was false and fearful.

  “Slate’s clean. You owe me nothing. Just stay sober. Let’s not mention it again.”

  She chewed on it and let it pass.

  Coffee was made. Silences bruised them. He kept drifting back to Masha and Gia. She felt under fire from the other side of the world with Timmy as artillery guide.

  “So, who are they to send presents?”

  “I suppose they feel like they’re in-laws or something.”

  She explained the complexities of the so-called Georgian family of Max, Masha and their surrogate son/lover, keeping it as vague as she could. Timmy was impressed by Gia’s skill but the present’s material value was so obviously high that it triggered suspicion. On long lonely nights he had brooded on all the scenarios.

  “Kinda weirdly generous.”

  “Georgians are generous.”

  “Kinda weird though.”

  She watched dust float up from a hot oblong of sunlight on the laminate floor. She wanted the afternoon to end. Should she tell him everything? Traditionally the AA programme advocated scrupulous honesty except when disclosure would cause someone else harm or pain, and telling him would certainly do that. She contemplated her desire to hurt him.

  “Tell me about your dad. You didn’t talk about him before.”

  An old defence against her mother’s rants or the cheap jibes at school was to erase the tapes as they recorded, and call up a trance nothing could penetrate. This had triggered in the fifteen minutes she spent with her father leaving the tumour in his hair and his stale smell as her only memories.

  “You know, I just can’t remember. And maybe that’s best.”

  But she remembered how Gia was driven that night to do what he clearly would regret, and how urgently she helped him on, and how he left disgusted with his own weakness and shocked at her drunkenness. All the things he failed to say to her he had said in wood. They were as clear as if he had carved them in perfect English. His guilt and decency were waxed into the gorgeous surface. The human spirit glowed through the grain. She ran her hand over his chest of drawers. “This is kind of beautiful.”

  Something shifted. It was clear where the afternoon was now pointing. Athletes pacing the lanes behind the starting line, shaking their muscles and warming up, rather than come forward to the blocks that led to the long space they had to run. Time measured itself in pauses. He touched her arm; she dipped her head, communication reduced to a semaphore of physical moves. Right hands landed lightly on left forearms. Sunlight flared the blond hairs on her skin. They came a half pace closer and the awkward dance steps with the arms and shoulders began. Her head brushed his cheek and left her in a maidenly nervousness. He kissed her hair, and eventually, under Gia’s drawers and Masha’s Madonna of pain, they got in the blocks and the pistol fired. He tried a couple of new techniques and she realized he hadn’t been wasting his time while she sucked the dream pipe.

  A seagull landed on his balcony. He felt her stiffen. He could have chased it off, but lay listening to it padding about, flapping a wing, feeling her panic rise. When it flew off she relaxed. The moment of cruelty felt good. He asked if she wanted to move back in. This had not been the plan; he had spent the morning steeling himself to a strategy that was the complete opposite.

  “Okay” she said because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. It was settled. He would go with the flow. She was blank. “When?”

  “Whenever.”

  The words had come and gone. A fly wandered across the ceiling.

  “Your friend? Masha?”

  “She’s not my friend.”

  ‘Well. Whatever. She rang. Twice. First to check we’d got the gifts. Then again.” Progressively he saw more and more as comic strip: people in cafes, the homeless round trash bins, sex, loneliness, couples struggling with each other – they were just drawings in a cheap story. He imagined himself and his estranged wife from the fly’s viewpoint; two bodies side by side but not touching, staring up, resigned, a storyboard frame enclosing their intimate separateness.

  “The guy who made the drawers?”

  “Gia.”

  “Yuh.” He slipped in a little pause. “He was murdered.”

  The fly rubbed its front limbs together.

  “Murdered as in dead?”

  “Brown bread.”

  He waited for some reaction, monitored the pause, analysed her body tension and voice quality.

  “You mean really murdered?”

  “Totally. No more.”

  There was nothing more, no request for details, not a flicker. He still couldn’t be sure.

  “That was a while back. A message. I didn’t ring back. What would I say? But Man, she was upset.”

  “I bet she was.” She watched the fly. “They were lovers.”

  “Who?”

  “Gia and Masha.”

  “I thought they were..?”

  “Yeah. But they were lovers too.”

  He watched the fly.

  “It’s a Georgian thing.”

  How many other ‘Georgian things’ had she learned? She used up all the emotion in the relationship. He wondered if he could take it again.

  “There was another call. More recent.”

  “Yeh?”

  “From your father.” He felt her stiffen again. “Just saying ‘hello’. What could I say? You weren’t around.”

  The neighbours said hello when Lucy passed on the stairs. The artist had moved in his girl friend, and when they discovered the girl friend was a wife Lucy experienced approval. The marriage certificate possessed a runic power, even among women younger than she, who by her logic should be spending their evenings topless on bars littered with vodka slammers. Respectability in the young seemed neurotic.

  Strong urges to drink still hit her; each day was knotted with struggles against flying to the nearest bar. It exhausted her. She forced herself to meetings though they were the last place she wanted to be, and in some desperate moments prayed to a God she no longer believed in to help her stay sober, and in others philosophically mused that if she drank again, it made no difference. Maybe she just hadn’t quite had enough this time round. The mental hospitals, stomach pumps, sleaze balls with diseased dicks, and suicidal longings didn’t seem too bad on days when the booze called. Sobriety, a roof over her head, a little money to buy sale price shoes, and the capacity to remember what she did the night before, were poor substitutes for a return to the ninety per cent proof that left dry vomit in her purse.

  Between these crises life rumbled along in an outwardly normal way. Timmy went to work and she nursed him through the little depressions and failed ambitions he brought back with him. In the evening they would eat, watch television, go to movies, or she would borrow his car and drive to a meeting. He talked of a future that seemed to be from someone else’s life; of possible things she might want to do, of college courses and re-training while she could think no further than the next Weight Watchers recipe or how the fuck she was going to get a drink before she went mad.

  At times the e
pisode surrounding her father overwhelmed her. It would hit her in the street and deflect her eyes from any human face. In AA they urged her to get on the programme or that shame would whip her back to the bars and death or madness. When she got sober first time round she had indulged an idea that she was safe, that sobriety brought insulation from the world’s harshness, and had sustained this naïve delusion with a conviction that now astonished her. It had died in Tbilisi’s bullet-pocked streets. If nothing else, her father had given her a sharp dose of reality.

  Sobriety also brought exhaustion and insomnia. While Timmy worked, she went to daytime meetings, walked on the beach till the seagulls drove her off, toppled asleep in the most inappropriate places to wake over cold coffees or attached to magazines by strings of saliva. But then night came and switched her awake.

  She wandered the apartment, read a little, tried not to eat, absorbed the scorn and sadism in her head, and fought against hitting the streets like one of the un-dead cruising for the next high. When she got sober in Palo Alto first time round, she used the insomnia to go on long night drives and turned her life into a nocturnal road movie, cruising coastal routes under the stars or past the little buildings and parked Beetles of Silicon Valley, where the dot-com boys, Heroes of the new mythology, hauled in the infinite numbers of the universe in Pentium nets, and Hermes, the winged messenger was finally grounded by snowboarders with the Information. Everything seemed possible then, but now? Even if I get properly sober, what can I do with this raw material that is me, she asked a deaf universe. What little marks would she leave? The mortgage, the child with the learning disorder, the final face-lift? For her – so they kept assuring – ordinariness was an achievement. Keep it simple.

  The night-bred thoughts of her father and the yellow brick road to brutality in Tbilisi was picked over incessantly. The killing of a weakness in her, the death of romance, she thought, the snuffing out of a childhood comfort, was it such a bad thing? Hadn’t the dreams just led to a thousand gutters and beds of strangers? In the bedroom, a murdered man’s dreams held her panties and bras and her husband’s socks.

  She quietly opened the glass door onto the balcony and sat by its edge. Stars were visible above the milky fade of light from the city. Everything under the same sky she thought: all the problems, all the good stuff, all the shit; her mother asleep in an exclusive estate in Arizona beside her millionaire husband, her father god knows where, Gia in a grave or wherever they put the dead in Georgia, and Masha now going without it. Without her older man, without her younger man. Without. The Madonna and Child watched her from the shadows. Their eyes were portals for all the misery and darkness she had touched. She kept staring at them and they kept staring back till she became afraid of ghosts. “Come to us. We are hideous, we are frightened. Embrace us. Love us,” they whispered to her.

  “Okay, okay. Get off my fuckin’ back,” she replied.

  She took a number from the message board in the kitchen area, lifted the phone and returned to the window. In AA they suggested she write to Masha to thank her for the gifts. “Don’t phone,” someone had said. “And if the gifts disturb you, get rid of them,” another had added. She looked back, and allowed the Holy Pair to disturb her again.

  It would be daytime, she was sure of that. Seagulls hung over the palms in the sodium light. She dialled Masha’s number. The answer machine clicked on.

  ‘Masha, it’s Lucy. Hi. I’m sorry I haven’t got back in so long; I’ve been off the rails. Gia. I don’t know what to say; I was really shaken when I heard. His work is so beautiful. I don’t know if beauty is the right word for your work; powerful? Haunting, certainly. I’m no expert, you know, the only culture round here is live yoghurt but certainly you are so talented and I am very moved by your kindness. And Gia’s... God... There’s a little bit of both of you in Santa Monica. It’s four in the morning. Insomnia’s good for the time difference..’

  Masha observed her arm extend and lift the phone.

  “It was the theme from Solaris.”

  They picked up as if they were still in the dining room in Tbilisi but with all the weight time had loaded on them. Lucy was aware of the eerie calm in Masha’s voice as she was given the details of Gia’s emasculation. “Fuck!” trailed out of American night into Georgian day. No one knew why he was murdered, but in Masha’s vendetta-ridden country murder was almost a sacred tradition. Her grief bridged east and west in an uninhibited arc of pain. God had taken away someone who was as near as she had to a son – albeit with an Œdipal complication – and with him had gone the tattered illusions of a future. No detail was spared in the description of how Max found him or the depth of his devastation. Masha knew Max’s love for Gia might by rights have been for Lucy, but what Gia and she had got up to that last night in Tbilisi was as clear as if she’d stitched a thank-you note in his underwear. The deliberate insensitivity flattened Lucy but she saw how fighting for her own flimsy self-esteem over Gia’s broken body would be beyond churlishness, so they sat with it ten thousand miles apart in a truce girdling half the Earth, letting the light and the dark coalesce.

  Eventually the conversation stumbled on to the Maui wedding. Lucy gave it the stand-up treatment and had them both laughing, Bloated with symbolism and sentimentality, Timmy was insisting on a second marriage in Santa Monica. “A symbolic new start, as if for God’s sake… Oh, maybe, maybe I shouldn’t be so damned cynical. Who knows?” Lucy stepped onto the balcony, her eyes fixed on the circling seagulls. “Why don’t you come? There must be cheap flights. See California. Shop, eat too much. The light’s great for painting” Turning up the intimacy she confessed the whole kit and caboodle about her alcoholism. Masha declared that was another thing Lucy could blame her father for.

  28 April 1964

  I am paranoid. Every car is following, every person watching, every call monitored. Nothing matters or has any impact except the problem which grinds me smaller every second.

  A low barrelling sky squats above me. Pressure is high; it has been a day of headaches and calls for Advil throughout the office. We need a thunderstorm to clear the air. Way in the distance the rain is charging in like rampaging locusts. In the baby store parking lot I have a strong desire to turn myself in but grab my hat and spring cheerily into the store.

  “Hi. How are they?”

  “Good. Real good, thank you. Hey, could I use your men’s room?”

  “Men’s room?”

  “I must adjust my maternity girdle.”

  She laughs her bridgework at me and wonderful breasts balloon the ‘Happy Stork’ logo on her work coat.

  The john window frames backyard America: a Hopper Hopper never painted. An alley runs the length of the stores and beyond it are roofs of single storey houses over wooden fences, cat’s cradles of phone and power wires, loneliness in a familiar landscape. That alley is my Rubicon, lined with broken pallets, trashcans and Happy Stork Babygrow boxes. Agents hunt me down in cheap suits and Ray-Bans on this side; my legions wait on the other in cheap suits and fake Ray-Bans.

  I unlock the rear door, walk to the fence and scan the alley. Nothing but a heavy sky, and the noise of banging blood in my ears. A sweat drop spreads into a tiny flower shape in the dirt and fades, breezes whine in bare trees. A gate stands twenty yards down the other side of the alley, but the twenty yard stroll is open ground where men will swarm out of yards and young wives watch over meat loaf mixes as my rights are read by hats and horn rims. This is the crucial moment in my life, knee deep in diaper boxes.

  The pull to do nothing is almost irresistible then I am walking down the alley and in through the gate, along the side of a house, past a small kidney shaped pool with a candy wrapper marooned in breeze patterns in the middle. Then I am on a front lawn in a street of front lawns, then on the sidewalk. The street is empty but for a green pick up. Nothing seems as quiet as the silence in a suburb.

  T
hen the green pick up hacks into life and cruises over to me. The driver is swarthy. He says “Hi, bud.” The cabin stinks with blue collar smells of metal and grease and is littered with cigarette packs, grubby work manifestos, chewed pencils and gum wrappers. My feet slide on oily rags. We drive off, each second putting distance between me and the baby shop and everything. Wintry lawns slide past. A woman in a headscarf smokes in a window. I look down and see my hands knuckle white round the keys to the Chevrolet Impala. Peg needs them; there are no spares. I curse at my thoughtlessness.

  My watch reads 6.38pm and rain begins to drum the roof.

  Georgia – Spring 1999

  About ten-thirty in the morning he saw a dark blue Mercedes parked a hundred metres on the road towards the village, roughly where he had walked into the killers on the night of Gia’s death. The other passengers had gone, leaving the driver looking down at something below the dashboard. Suddenly he got out and the movement startled Max to the guns. He moved without thinking, beautifully controlled by adrenaline. The Gyurza materialised from the drawer in his writing desk and the Makarov was retrieved from under his pillow. The man was leaning against the Merc door by now, smoking and looking at the sea, keeping an eye out. Max loaded the Gyurza with the armour-piercing clip. Slav Eyes and his thugs would be on their way to the house, picking their way through the woods no doubt.

  “Get out of any building. Don’t be caught somewhere” snaked down to him from the Marine who took them through basic weapons training in the late Fifties. He ducked his way from shadow to shadow, looking long-range through windows. The obvious place for their approach was through the woods tumbling down the hill to his house at the back. Peeping through the edge of the bedroom curtains he saw no movement in the trees, but they were so dense they would hide a rabbit. The Slav Eyes could be in there watching him already. There could be four of them, but more likely to be three. Overwhelming, but never mind, the whistle had gone, the game was on; Max felt okay.