He laughed at this haunted humor and looked back to the smiling pictures of Lisa perched before her stiff white-bread stepfather and chubby, dim-looking stepbrother. Then they went upstairs, and beneath her posters of Trent Reznor, Kurt Cobain, and a shirtless Nelly, simultaneously cast off their virginities.
All this was preamble to the protracted war between him, Lisa, and Bethany. From word one, Mrs. Kline did not like Bill. He enabled Lisa’s rebellion, had her coming home late, had her getting caught with small bits of pot or condoms or bottles of liquor. Lisa informed him of Bethany’s retrograde attempts to enact punishment, to “ground” her so to speak, but Lisa was too smart, too defiant, too fiery to treat like a child. He recalled picking her up, Bethany standing in the foyer with her hands on her hips, a cheek-chewing expression of fury rippling through her facial folds.
“Your mom totally despises me,” he said as she climbed into the car. “We’re never going to change her mind.”
“Nah, Ashcraft, just get your tongue up her vagina. That’s what turned me around on you.” He threw the car into gear, laughing madly.
Weirdly, once Bethany learned that Bill’s mother worked for the local newspaper, she took up writing letters to the editor as her principal hobby, gaining a more or less permanent position on the New Canaan News editorial page, where she expounded on such topics as the immorality of not allowing a moment for prayer in schools, the teaching of intelligent design, the dangerous possibility that teachers were not being screened for past sex offenses, and just generally that there was a holocaust going on in abortion clinics.
His dad would fume every time a letter appeared and wonder why the paper had to keep giving this woman space. Bill always figured his mom lived her entire life in a sub-audible state of misery over having left her native Queens to follow her husband to his dicktoon hometown. She’d interned at the New York Post, and Bill had the feeling that giving up her dream of someday writing at a major paper had been a bitter, softball-sized pill to swallow just so her husband could carry on the dentistry practice started by his own father. Bethany’s letters became a constant source of tension in their marriage. He could tell his dad didn’t like Lisa, didn’t trust her even though she shared none of Bethany’s odious views. On the Ferris wheel at the county fair that summer, Lisa was the one who climbed onto him and nearly sucked his lips off, grinding into his lap while the games dinged and the stadium lights spilled across the country band wailing away onstage. She was the one who’d gone down on him when they climbed up on the roof of the library, and she was the one who suggested they pee on each other, just to give it a shot. Yet she still called herself a Christian, still kept a pointless Bible quote etched into a wooden plaque in her room. William Sr. deeply distrusted this pretense of religiosity, and like Bethany, he seemed certain Bill would end up getting Lisa pregnant.
His mom, the quintessential purveyor of mom-reasonability, chided them both. At the paper, she was always ending up in the middle of these stupid small-town controversies, and she had the disease of seeing a false equivalence in everything, of lending credence to idiots and charlatans. She said of Bethany, “It’s all she’s ever known. People like her grow up in a small town and get the same kind of cruel ideas fed to them their entire lives, and they wrap it up in their worldviews because that’s the context they understand. Her husband left her at a young age, and she had to raise a daughter alone for a long time. That’s a hard thing.”
Bill could never tell which of his parents he was in more of an argument with. How much of his nature could be attributed to spending his formative years arguing with his mother’s on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand Obamaian pragmatic streak? It would strain their relationship enough that they stopped speaking for several years. Similar pointless, circular arguments ensued with his father, but that resulted from Bill’s total disinterest in law school or med school or, God forbid, dental school. All that formal education just made people higher-paid fools or more articulate fools, but fools they remained.
Lisa was no fool. Never had been, never would be. They broke up the week before he left for college. Out at the Brew, parked in the shade of a tree where the moonlight couldn’t reach, they sucked on each other, turned the interior of his Accord into a sauna, and that’s how you broke up in high school. You fucked like a corporeal toast to the heartache of new beginnings.
“I can’t wait to see where we’ll end up,” she said, playing with the hairs on his chest, letting free a few uncharacteristic tears. “If I had to bet, you’ll be the only person in this town to do crazier shit than me.”
“You think?”
“Of course. It’s why I decided to let you love me for a minute.”
A year later, when he heard what Lisa had done, he wrote to her to make sure she was okay. He’d heard rumors—gossip as currency, people all but bartering with it—about a pregnancy, about an abortion, about a blowout fight with Bethany.
In an e-mail, Lisa assured Bill that, no, she wasn’t pregnant. She’d packed a bag, grabbed her passport, emptied her savings account, and bought a one-way ticket overseas. Told her mom not to bother looking for her. At first, Bill loved hearing all this. It impressed him, inspired him. Whenever he found himself lost or in danger abroad, he’d think of how Lisa had been doing scarier shit when she was just an eighteen-year-old kid. Six years after she left, when he found himself working in Southeast Asia, he went in search of her.
I’m in your neck of the woods, he wrote to her via Facebook.
Lisa Han
5/23 3:03 p.m.
No shit!? Where? Why?
Bill Assata Shakur Ashcraft
5/23 5:24 p.m.
Where to begin? Um, I’ve been in Cambodia buying up child prostitutes.
Lisa Han
5/24 9:07 a.m.
Can’t say I’m surprised, but uh, yeah, please tell me that’s a joke?
Bill Assata Shakur Ashcraft
5/24 11:11 a.m.
Ha no joke. But I mean like buying them out. So I was over here working for this NGO that frees girls from the sex trade, gets them back to their families, and sets them up with shit to do so they don’t have to go back to prostituting (and so their families don’t sell them back ). Get me? We like set them up with seed money and training to start their own markets, selling sandals or beads or fruit or whatnot.
Lisa Han
5/24 2:54 p.m.
Ah goddamnit I always knew you had some deep decency in you, BA. Don’t tell me you’ve turned into an actual catch since high school?
Bill Assata Shakur Ashcraft
5/24 3:44 p.m.
It’s an adventure. You haven’t lived until you’ve faced down a Cambodian pimp.
He asked if she wanted to get together, but she never wrote back. He decided to go in search of her and rode a motorbike up the Ho Chi Minh Trail, stopping only to see some spider holes. The mission went to hell, though, after an unsettling near-death experience: dusk, an errant log, launching over the handlebars and past the ledge of the trail into pure jungle canopy, tumbling and falling for what seemed like such an enormous gulf of time, sensing a final impact that would surely end in a dry twig snap he’d hear first in the bones of his neck, trying to settle on a pleasant final memory to go out on and coming up only with Kunthea, an understandably shy nine-year-old girl with bony, collapsible limbs and a mouth of bent brown teeth.
(They’d successfully negotiated with her madam, an old woman who’d probably been the plaything of German businessmen when she was a child and understood this as the natural order. When Kunthea clung to the post outside the house, afraid to follow the four white people and Cambodian translator now hectoring her to come along home, Bill reached down and plucked a Jolly Rancher from behind her ear. While she busied herself with the wrapper, he loaded his fist and plucked out another: “This is insane. Your ear’s a candy factory.” She came with them after that, and before she went to bed that night, Bill found a toothbrush in her ear and taught her how to use it
.)
A fine memory to die on. Until he came to land softly, improbably, in a bed of grass as comfortable as a down pillow. Eyes darting, lying in the noisy breath of the jungle, he checked to find himself completely intact. He spooked the birds when he screamed that he was fucking unbreakable.
A few days later, unable to track Lisa down, he caught a flight out of Hanoi with the last of his cash, and he never heard from her again. He wrote her several more times, but she never answered. He worried about all the typical things: if she’d found out about Kaylyn, if she’d always known about Kaylyn, if she’d long hated him, if she’d thrown her laptop into the South China Sea, etc. What it came down to, though, was this: like everyone else, she’d vanished from his life. He could only stare at the dark and wonder what had become of her.
Gripping the wheel with both hands, Bethany Kline took one last small roll of her head, as if saying to herself, Sure, I guess I’ll live with this miserable thought, and punched the accelerator. The car went zooming off, carburetor rattling.
Then again maybe Bethany was another hallucination. An acid flashback materializing from the sweat-drenched electrical storm. Either way, he wished he could simply rip open the package and blindly snort away whatever was inside just to see where the cocktail took him.
“Wanna get a drink?” he said to a busted blue fire hydrant.
Closing in on thirty fast, he had an urge, undaunted by the temporal challenge, to find Lisa Han, wherever she was, and ask if she still saw passion and decency in him. If that young version of her could see him now, like this, a decade on, would she still recognize what she saw back then? How dearly he wanted to ask her if there was any chance she still believed in him.
* * *
In the liquor store, he scanned the shelves looking for the right potion, tickled by that lovely little thrill of unexpected booze. You could go high-end, he figured, groping a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, or just keep on keeping on with the Jim Beam that had gotten him over the Ohio River. The decisions alcoholics had to make. If sober people understood all the work that went into deciding how best to get loaded, they would get over themselves and sling a little fucking admiration his way. He selected Jack Daniel’s in the end because they didn’t have the right size Beam.
“I’ll take a pack of Camels and a Bic too,” he told the Indian cashier, who seemed to recognize him from all his efforts to buy booze in high school. Bill glanced at the analog clock hanging over the cashier’s left shoulder, but the hands all pointed, dead and still, to the ground. He pulled out his timer. It was the size and shape of a large skipping stone or maybe some middling lizard’s egg and felt good to hold. In the white plastic casing the stiff numbers read: 01:47:18.
“You got ID, buddy?” he asked in his crisp accent. Bill used to try to stop guys on the basketball team from calling him “Apu,” usually to no effect. He knew, likely, by the way of his mother, that this man had an engineering degree and had lost a child to leukemia. Now he was only an obstacle to a drink, and one with Cheetos dust in his mustache at that.
“I’m like thirty, bro,” Bill rounded up, swiping his near-maxed credit card and snatching the bottle.
The cashier made no objection. Instead he said, almost tenderly, “Big storm coming later. Don’t be wandering around all night drinking.”
Bill left without acknowledging this, tearing the cellophane wrapping off the pack of smokes. He wasn’t a smoker, but there was nothing like a cigarette when you were drunk (which basically made him a smoker). One thing he missed about the northern climes was having a cigarette during a brutal midwestern winter. Something about standing on frigid pavement, switching hands as each went numb, pulling in that silky cloud of nicotine. The warmth ran all the way to your toes. A buzz like a tuning fork going off in your core.
Clamping the little guy in his teeth, he unscrewed the cap from the whiskey and drank from his bottle of light.
Now he was really feeling no pain.
He wandered to the side of the lot where he could watch the entrance and took a seat on the curb to smoke his cigarette and wait for the world to happen. The tape around his midriff crinkled when he sat, and the package dug in, acted almost as a back brace so that he had to sit with preposterous posture. He recalled the night’s loose-leaf events: a nose exploding to pulp under the fist of a drunk hick in the Lincoln Lounge. Interrupting a long conversation about The Murder That Never Was, the town’s great isosceles-sided rumor, too crazy to be true, too ingrained to discount. He and Jonah outside, recalling when Harrington bricked two free throws with half a second left to almost cost them the conference championship. Harrington had been a better songwriter than basketball player. From there, he finally got to thinking about Kaylyn. The green-eyed island of heat.
He took the idle time to pull the picture from his pocket. At some point long ago he’d folded it into quarters, maybe to tuck it in his wallet when he was certain he would get mugged in a harsh neighborhood in Phnom Penh, and the paper had two tactile ridges bisecting the surface, cutting through the date (10.15.02). On the actual picture side these ridges were reversed into chalky white divots flaking away whatever chemicals formed the images, so that Bill’s face, which had gotten caught in the fold, was scabbing away from his nose to his left eyelid. Like he was vanishing à la Marty McFly’s family in Back to the Future.
He sucked on his cigarette and let his gaze travel from the center out. He had his arm around Lisa, his fingers just creeping over her neck. He wore a blazer a size too big and gray dress pants a size too small. He remembered how the waist had bit at him all night. The silver tie almost matched the pants. He had sideburns down past his ear, a teenager’s demonstration of masculinity. Lisa wore a slim black dress with spaghetti straps and a deep V that exposed, in some of the mothers’ opinions, an expanse of olive-brown cleavage too scandalous for a homecoming dance. Her hair popped off the back of her skull in an abrupt ponytail, and she was shaking her head so that the black strands were caught in inky motion. She’d chosen for her goofy face a model’s squinch, her slim, smoky eyes boozed and dangerous.
On Bill’s other side was Rick, face partially obscured by two fingers traveling John Travolta–style across his visage. He’d gone all out and rented a black tux, from which his football muscle practically bubbled. His butt protruded slightly toward Bill, and it looked like a couple of black balloons trying to escape. Beneath the coat, the vest struggled to stay buttoned. Behind the Travolta fingers, he wore his football scowl, his brow tight and formidable, already spilling sweat before the dance had even begun. His other hand clung to the stark green of Kaylyn’s waist. Kaylyn had chosen to blow a kiss, and her lips, shellacked in purple lipstick, frozen in a pucker, passed the kiss to her open palm. Strands of her blond hair fell carefully to either side of her head, curled and bobbing timelessly in the stillness. Her lips reminded him of a single purple flower growing from a verdant forest floor. The way that color clashed with her dress certainly had to be intentional. Kaylyn knew how she would stand out in pictures, even in the background, and years later when people flipped through photo albums, they’d come to this homecoming section, and no matter if they’d known her or they were originally from Oregon and now married to a graduate of New Canaan High, their eyes would still be drawn to the girl in the green dress with the purple lipstick, and their gaze would track her in any photograph that followed.
Beside her, Stacey Moore had gone Bond Girl, both hands clasped together into a gun she held under her chin. In a long copper dress, the junior looked like a sexy penny fresh off the mint, the material catching all kinds of odd light from the cafeteria. Her blond was cleaner than Kaylyn’s, but cinched back tight against her skull by unseen scalp mechanisms. Her long, slim limbs seemed to crowd her own boyfriend out of the picture. Though Bill had loved her, found her warm and lovely and amusing, Stacey had always appeared awkward to him. She slunk her shoulders—in this photo too—as if she wanted to erase some of her height, embarrassed by the longitu
de it took to accommodate her presence. One sharp elbow looked like it might dig into Ben Harrington’s chest. He had been caught both trying to put his arm around Stacey and yet avoid catching that elbow in a rib. As a result, it looked like he was dancing badly to a rap song, his other arm dropping a finger to some unseen beat. (What might it have been in ’02? “Hot in Herre”? “Bombs Over Baghdad”?) In his stasis the baby-faced Harrington seemed to be attempting embryonically to preview the musician garb he’d someday wear. Bill and Rick had tormented him for the black fedora, cocked forward on his head here, and the black jacket over a black crew neck with a single gold chain sparkling. Who had he even been imitating? More importantly, did he realize how brashly that sweet baby grin of his clashed with the ensemble? It looked like a Halloween costume. His sideburns were also too long, nearly down to his jaw.
There were other people on the fringes of this picture. You could spot the stunted Dan Eaton beside Hailey Kowalczyk, her voluptuous figure still years away from widening. She had a smooth plastic face with spots of rosacea on her cheeks and forehead. She appeared to have dragged Dan into the frame, behind her Rainrock Road crew of Lisa and Kaylyn, who at the point of this photo had undergone some bitchy high-school-girl falling-out. And poor Dan looked like he wanted to be transplanted off the planet. Into some Fortress of Umbilical Love where he could limply marvel at Hailey in solitude. When Bill had seen him earlier that night, Dan had been uninterested in this picture. He’d handled it like the thing might poison him.
The night this photo was taken, Bill and Rick stayed in the basement of Harrington’s house, sneaking Kaylyn, Lisa, and Stacey in after midnight through a window. Rick and Kaylyn disappeared into Doug Harrington’s tool-draped workspace and fucked on the edge of the table saw after Rick made sure it was unplugged. (“Had the worst vision outta a horror movie right when I got off,” he drunkenly reported.) Harrington and Stacey took the bathroom, and after finishing, they sat in the basement rec area watching The Princess Bride, tossing M&M’s into each other’s mouths from across the couch. He and Lisa had gotten the night’s activities out of the way at the Brew, and in the dark, he’d imagined her as Kaylyn the entire time. Her Vietnamese heritage bled out of her in the starlight and Kaylyn’s German bled in, until in that dim halo he could see each girl as the other.
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