Sweet Nothing

by RICHARD LANGE

  We’re on the second floor of one of those open-air complexes that’s wrapped around a few messy beds of tropical greenery and a tiny swimming pool. The sun only shines on the water for an hour or so in the middle of the day, when it’s directly overhead. This early, the pool is still in shadow. The deck chairs are empty, and a beer can drifts aimlessly in the deep end.

  “You’re doing great,” I say to Troy when he reaches the bottom of the stairs.

  He’s better on level ground, more sure of himself. We walk past the mailboxes to the gate and push out of the complex into the bright, blaring morning. Gardeners are doing their thing all up and down the street, lawn mowers and leaf blowers, and a disgruntled garbage truck snatches up dumpsters, flips them over to empty them, then slams them back to the pavement.

  It was hot yesterday, and it’s supposed to be hotter today. Troy wipes the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. He hikes up his pajama bottoms and sets off stiff-legged down the sidewalk toward Hollywood Boulevard, his arms extended out from his sides to help him balance.

  “Damn, man,” I say. “You sprinkle speed on your Wheaties?”

  “I’ve got to start taking care of myself,” he huffs. “If I don’t do something about my weight, I’ll be dead in five years. And I don’t want to die.”

  “Me neither,” I say, “I don’t want to die either,” but that’s a lie. Sometimes I do.

  Troy only makes it as far as the liquor store before running out of steam. A hundred yards. He leans against the building and gulps air like a flopping fish. His face is bright red, and his Lakers jersey is soaked with perspiration. I ask if he’s okay.

  “Will you go in and get me a Coke?” he says, fishing in his pocket for a dollar. “Diet.”

  I bring the soda out to him. He drains it quickly, and we start back to the apartment.

  “Tomorrow I’ll go a little farther,” he says. “And the day after that, even farther.”

  I’m pulling for the man, definitely, but I remember the hypnosis clinic, Berlin, and the lottery, so the best I can do for now is humor him.

  A lemon drops off a tree and rolls across the sidewalk. I nearly trip and fall trying to get out of the way. Time for bed.

  I NEVER THOUGHT about life before mine started to go wrong. I just lived it, like everybody else. But then you lose your job, and your wife leaves you for the neighbor and takes your kids, and you go from whiskey to weed to coke to crack just like the commercials warn you will. You lie and cheat and steal until one night you find yourself holding a knife on this guy, Memo, who’s supposed to be your buddy, your partner in crime, and Memo gets the jump on you and gives you a concussion and you come to in jail the next day, bleeding out of your ear.

  Stuff like that raises questions: Why me? What next? Where will it end?

  THE SUBWAY I work at is half a block from a hospital, which is where most of our customers come from. The restaurant is open twenty-four hours, and I’m on from midnight to nine a.m. Some nights are dead, just me and the radio, and other nights it’s so crazy that I’m tempted to tear off my apron and call it quits. The reason I don’t is that this is what starting over is like. It’s hard. It’s minimum wage and night shifts and managers who are fifteen years younger than you.

  I got this job after rehab, when I transitioned into a sober-living facility, and I’m still here, ten months later. The part of me that once made a hundred thousand a year and had four salesmen under him is unimpressed, but the part of me that was living in a park and breaking into vending machines for dope money can’t thank me enough.

  Two Korean teenagers slink into the restaurant around 2:30 a.m. One of them is holding a bloody T-shirt to his shoulder. He slumps, pale and silent, in a booth while his friend orders sandwiches.

  “Your buddy all right?” I ask.

  “He got shot,” the kid at the counter replies. “We’re going to Kaiser after.”

  People do this a lot, stop in on their way to the emergency room. They eat something first because they know they’ll have to wait hours to be seen. A guy came in a couple weeks ago with a nail through his foot. He’d been messing around drunk with a friend’s tools. Said it didn’t hurt except where the nail was touching bone.

  I check the booth after the kids leave, wipe away a smear of blood. My favorite show is on the radio, After Midnight. The host is talking to a man who found a hole in the ground that he claims is a portal into hell. He lowered a microphone into it and recorded the screams of the tortured souls.

  “That’s ancient Latin,” the man who discovered the hole says.

  “What are they saying?” the host asks.

  “‘Save me.’”

  About four a woman comes in and orders a cup of coffee. It’s rare I get a lone female at this hour, and when I do, she’s usually bundled up like an Eskimo and pushing a shopping cart. This chick is gorgeous. Arab. Armenian, maybe. Tall and thin with olive skin and long black hair. She’s wearing jeans and a pink blouse, a white sweater over that.

  “You work at the hospital?” I ask as I slide her cup across the counter.

  “No,” she says with some kind of accent. “My daughter is there.”

  I notice that her eyes are red and swollen and that her mascara is smeared, and I feel bad. Here she is, going through some sort of tragedy, and I was imagining what she’d look like naked.

  “No charge,” I say, waving away her money.

  “Please,” she says. “Take it.”

  “Really. My treat.”

  She pushes the bills into the tip jar. Her fingernails have been chewed to the quick. She sits in the booth by the window and stares out at the electric orange night. A bus blows past full of people going to work, and I begin to prep for the morning rush. After an hour, the woman tosses her cup in the trash and calls out a thank-you as she leaves. The pale creep of dawn is filling in the blanks outside. Another goddamn Tuesday, gentlemen. Let’s make this one mean something.

  I WALK WITH Troy again when I get home. He goes twice as far, almost to where Spaghetti Factory used to be, where they’re putting in more condos.

  “I think I’m losing weight already,” he says.

  I check my e-mail on his computer while he’s in the shower. There’s something from my son, who’ll be fourteen in September. Sick Shit is the subject. It’s a video of a kickboxer getting his leg broken in the ring, his knee snapping back the wrong way. I almost puke watching it. Every month or so the boy sends me something like this. Never a message, just a clip from YouTube, usually disturbing.

  I haven’t seen him or his little sister in three years. My ex and the neighbor packed them off to Salt Lake City after they were married, and there was nothing this here crackhead could do about it. I was actually kind of happy they left. The kids were getting to an age where they’d notice my shaking hands during our once-a-month lunches at Pizza Hut, my red eyes, the smell of booze on my breath.

  The last straw was when Gwennie, my daughter, found a bloody syringe in the glove compartment of the car I’d borrowed to drive down to Orange County for our visit. The rig wasn’t mine, but I still had to do some fast talking about how diabetic kitties need shots just like people do. That story always got a laugh from some asshole when I shared it at meetings.

  I don’t go to AA anymore, and right now I’m so glad. I grab a can of Bud out of the refrigerator. I’ll never touch drugs again, but I need my three after-work beers. They’re all I have to look forward to these days.

  Troy’s got Kelly’s Heroes and asks if I want to watch it with him. Maybe it’ll take my mind off my kids. He has a fifty-five-inch TV in his room, surround sound. I sit on the floor with my back against his bed. When the movie’s over, he says he’s going to order some chicken, but I’m not hungry. I’m not tired either, so I go down to the pool.

  It’s nice. A breeze is blowing through the courtyard, and birds chatter in the bamboo and banana trees that fill the lava-rock planters. The pool mirrors the square of blue sky above it, cl
ouds floating in the water. I take a deep breath all the way from my gut and pop open my last beer of the day.

  The new people spill out of their ground-floor unit with towels and sunscreen and a pitcher of something. A guy and a girl, early twenties. They moved in a couple weeks ago and have already thrown two parties the property manager had to shut down. The guy’s playing music on his phone, the kind of shit kids dance to these days.

  “This gonna bother you?” he asks, pointing at the phone.

  “Not me,” I say.

  They’re both tall and tan and in great shape. She has blond hair and big fake boobs; he’s darker, with a tattoo of a thorny rose wrapped around one thick bicep. They look like advertisements for something you want and want and then realize you didn’t really need.

  A police helicopter flies low over the complex. The girl whoops and lifts her bikini top to flash it. When she sees me watching, she yanks the top down and says, “Oops. Sorry.”

  The guy waves the blue plastic pitcher and calls out, “Margarita?”

  I show him my beer. “Thanks anyway.”

  I can tell he’s going to sit next to me as soon as he offers the drink. He’s got a buzz on and wants to talk to someone who won’t know when he’s lying and might get some of his jokes. His girlfriend is hot, he’ll say, but just between you and me, bro, dumb as a bag of rocks.

  He’s Edward, she’s Star.

  “Star?” I say. “Really?”

  “Her parents had high hopes,” Edward explains.

  The two of them are in from Miami to test the waters. If something happens and they decide to stay, the first thing they’ll do is get out of this shit hole and buy a house in the Hills with the money Edward is due from some kind of settlement. He’s been bartending to keep busy, and Star dances at a nightclub. I give them six months out here, tops.

  “What do you do?” Edward wants to know before he’s even asked my name.

  Star is on the other side of the pool, where the sun is brightest, on her stomach on a chaise.

  “I was a sales director,” I say. “Industrial refrigeration units.”

  “If you hear of anything in entertainment, I’m available,” Edward says.

  The guy’s not even listening to me. That’s okay. I sip my beer and stare at his girlfriend’s ass. I haven’t had sex since sober-living, when this Oxy fiend and I snuck off to the laundry room.

  “You live with that fat guy,” Edward says.

  “Troy,” I reply.

  “That’s got to be weird. Does he stink?”

  I had the same sort of questions in the beginning. I found Troy on Craigslist when I was looking for a place. His last roommate had skipped out suddenly, and he needed someone to make rent for the month. It was six hundred dollars for the bedroom or three hundred for the futon in the living room. I took the futon.

  I’d never lived with a fat man before and wondered how it would be. He eats a lot, of course. Large pizzas, quarts of ice cream, a box of doughnuts in fifteen minutes flat. He sleeps in a sitting position, propped up on the bed with pillows, something to do with his breathing. And he snores, man. He snores like a car that’s ready to conk out. That’s the only good thing about working nights.

  He wasn’t always so big. He showed me photos of himself when he was in high school, and he looked like a jock back then. He got sad, though. He came out here from Ohio to be an actor but ended up office manager for a chiropractor, and that did him in, the disappointment, after being so sure he was born to do something special. He let himself go, lost his job, and now he squeaks by on disability and the occasional check from his parents.

  “Does he lay like the biggest shits you’ve ever seen?” Edward continues.

  “Troy’s great,” I say.

  Edward is already on to something else, the time Sean Penn showed up at the bar where he works. I let him finish the story, then go upstairs. I can tell I won’t be able to get to sleep, that I’m going to lie on the futon and listen to the afternoon pass on the other side of the blinds while thinking about my kids and how I’ve probably fucked them up for life and wishing it was like it used to be, when I could knock myself senseless with whatever was at hand.

  A COUPLE OF days later the Arab woman shows up at the restaurant again, at four a.m., just like last time. There are dark circles under her green eyes, and her fingers tremble when she passes me the money for her coffee.

  “How’s your daughter?” I ask.

  Her response gets caught in her throat. She swallows hard, and a tiny, perfect tear slides down her cheek.

  “Aww, hey, I’m sorry,” I say.

  I duck under the counter and pop up beside her, but then I’m at a loss, not sure what I was planning to do. I can’t just stand there, so I pick up her coffee and guide her to a booth.

  “Thank you,” she says as she sinks into the seat.

  I hustle back to the counter and grab some napkins. She takes one and dabs her eyes with it.

  “Sit,” she says, “please,” so I do. There’s a long silence while she pulls herself together. I look down at my knuckles, up at the buzzing fluorescent light on the ceiling. It’s uncomfortable being so close to someone else’s pain.

  “My name is Zalika,” she finally says.

  “Dennis,” I reply. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Thank you for asking about my daughter.”

  I was flirting when I did, trying to show that I remembered her, hoping for a smile.

  “Unfortunately, she’s not doing well,” Zalika continues. “She was hit by a car and hurt very badly. She’s been in a coma for a week now.”

  They were jaywalking across Vermont, Zalika and her twelve-year-old daughter, Amisi. Zalika made it to the curb first and reached into her purse for her ringing phone. A car came barreling out of the setting sun, out of nowhere. The driver slammed on his brakes, but it was too late. Zalika heard the first thud, as the car hit Amisi and sent her flying through the air, and the second, when Amisi crashed back to earth.

  She turned and called for her daughter, her heart refusing to acknowledge what her brain already knew. Amisi! Where had she gotten to? That couldn’t be her, that tiny thing lying twisted and bloody in the gutter, arms and legs all at strange angles. Amisi!

  “Don’t touch her,” someone yelled.

  Two strong men held Zalika back, and she wanted to kill them. A woman tried to soothe her, knelt in front of her and spoke to her like a child. Zalika spit in her face.

  Amisi has been in the hospital ever since, tethered to our world by tubes that feed her, fill her lungs with air, and filter the poison from her blood. Zalika is at her bedside constantly, except for when she steps out for these early-morning coffee breaks.

  “The doctors don’t say it’s hopeless, but I can hear it in their voices,” Zalika says. “They’re giving me time to say good-bye, but soon they’ll lose patience.”

  She raises her cup to her lips and takes a drink to stop herself from talking, as if by not voicing the future, she can escape it. And what can I do but say what everyone says in a moment like this? “Don’t give up hope. Anything can happen.”

  Zalika doesn’t smile, but something softens in her expression.

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?” she says.

  “No,” I reply.

  “Good.”

  The door buzzes, and two Filipino girls in pink scrubs enter. I return to the counter to help them. Zalika leaves while I’m filling their order.

  TROY SHOWS ME a bag of lettuce.

  “Should I get an extra for you?” he asks.

  I came to the supermarket with him because I didn’t have anything better to do.

  “Sure,” I say. “I’ll grab some dressing.”

  All Troy eats now is soup, salad, and Cheerios. A diet he found online. I mostly live off sandwiches from work, one at the beginning of my shift and one at the end.

  “You need to watch what you put in your body too,” Troy says as he pushes the cart toward the t
omatoes. “Just because you’re not a fat pig like me doesn’t mean you’re not fucking yourself up. You’ve got to plan your meals.”

  “I’m more of a one-day-at-a-time guy,” I say.

  “Come on, man,” Troy scoffs. “Don’t let that AA bullshit bleed over into your real life. You know what’s wrong with most drunks? They’re all about taking it one day at a time. They don’t think ahead. If they did, they’d say, ‘I’m not gonna get loaded tonight because I have to go to work tomorrow.’ It’s not one day at a time, it’s a hundred days at a time. You have to take control of your life.”

  Troy is one of those people who get on track for a week and suddenly have the answers for everybody. I’ll remember to ask him about his amazing self-control when he’s back to making a meal out of a bag of chocolate chip cookies.

  And I do have a plan. Step one: Save money. That’s why I eat at work. That’s why I sleep on a futon. I’ve got about a grand squirreled away already. Step two: Get a better job. My applications are in at Best Buy and Fry’s. I’m ready to jump back into it. Put me on the floor and watch me go. Step three: See my kids, show them I’m doing better.

  Troy drops some tomatoes into the cart, and we roll over to the soup aisle. He needs ten cans of chicken noodle, ten cans of vegetable beef. My head hurts when I tap my temple. I stand there tapping, hurting myself, while Troy counts out his Campbell’s.

  On his way to the checkstand he brushes against a spaghetti-sauce display. The thing topples over, jars exploding wetly when they hit the floor, sauce splashing everywhere. Troy is mortified. His face flushes bright red as a kid in an apron rushes over.

  “Are you okay, sir?” the kid asks.

  “I’m fine,” Troy says. His pajama bottoms are spattered with sauce.

  I tell the kid that was a dumb spot to stack breakables, right in the aisle. What if it had been a toddler who knocked them over? I know he has no say in where the displays go, but I’m doing it for Troy, so everybody doesn’t assume the accident happened because he’s fat.