Flings

by Justin Taylor

  (Later, Rachel would tell Danny that Miles had gotten his hands on some seriously cheap shit. She’d drifted in a warm gray-on-gray la-la land for about twelve minutes; then the sickness had set in. Miles had called her to the phone from out of the bathroom, where she’d been huddled. All in all, she said, the biggest disappointment since the Matrix sequels.)

  Danny sat slouched at Percy’s kitchen table, swirling a wineglass full of Old Crow, his magnum opus splayed before him. His work was a disaster. He saw that now. His ostensible monument to Rachel was in reality a fairly astute but immensely boring exposition of his own most regrettable qualities and aggressive failures. His narrator was unreliable, unlikable, and calculating: a cipher for his worst self, a conniving sneak with a pornographer’s eye for exploiting sentimentality, matched only by his penchant for producing actual pornography. Every sex act was recorded, but not as a memory or emblem of love; more like evidence entered into the record at a trial.

  He finished the glass of bourbon and lurched about the apartment, flipping light switches off, closing shades.

  The pioneer cemetery on Southeast 26th was a designated historical site, easily mistaken for a park and protected only by a chain-link fence. He hopped it, plunged headlong into the blizzard of shadows cast by the great oaks, silence booming like the sea in his ears. He realized that what the occasion required was music. Music consecrates everything and this was a holy moment, or it would be soon.

  He picked a spot near—but not on—the grave of one Mollie Fletcher, 1832–1845. Poor kid. He piled the notebooks on the ground, then turned his attention to his iPod, a first-generation model about the size of a pack of cigarettes. He scrolled down to Rilo Kiley’s Take Offs and Landings because Rachel had first turned him onto them, back three years ago when she’d been a bright-eyed indie rock girl. And because the first song on the album starts out “If you want to find yourself by traveling out West / Or if you want to find yourself somebody else that’s better, go ahead.” So it was pretty much perfect in every way. He turned the volume up as loud as it would go, knelt before his little pyre like Hendrix in that photo where his guitar’s burning, hit the play button, stuck the device in the breast pocket of his plaid snap-button shirt. He coaxed a flame from his Zippo and held it to the pages of a spiral-bound Mead with a blue cover. It took. The cover curled up from its corner, revealing its white reverse side even as that whiteness blossomed into an orange that was already browning, the brown almost as quickly again becoming white-gray ash borne away on the breeze. He watched the fire take on a life of its own. Jenny Lewis’s high, honeyed voice swarmed all the space between his ears, and everything she sang was the most important thing he had ever heard before, though he’d long known all these lines by heart. By the time he got to that song with the chorus that goes “These are times that can’t be weathered and / We have never been back there since then,” his great work was history and he was singing along with her. Cocooned in noise and self-pity, Danny felt like a pure spirit, righteous, the king of his own broken heart. He never heard the police approaching, or their shouts for him to get his goddamn hands in the air.

  What could he have looked like to those night shift beat cops? A Satanist, perhaps: yowling on his knees before a fire in the old cemetery at close to the witching hour. His hands were in the air now, a lazy arrhythmic sway, but he still couldn’t hear them, so they tasered him and he writhed on the ground in an ecstasy of suffering. His pants went piss-dark; the earphones flew free of his whipping head. From his new dirt-level vantage the wimpy fire looked scary and right. Then a second zap sent his eyes up into his skull.

  Everyone came in the morning to bail him out. It was like the day he’d flown in, only Rachel was there, too, and everybody looked somber and fatigued. Danny was hungover, ashamed, rotten on Portland—fuck his court date; all he wanted was to leave town. They talked him down over breakfast at the Cricket—the same place he and Rachel had lunched the day before, lifetimes ago now. And what had the whole thing been about, anyway? He wouldn’t say, only forked apart sopping pieces of the house special, his hand shaking as he raised it to his mouth. They let it go.

  Not much changed between him and Rachel. They kept things status quo while her internship wound down; then she decided to go back to Schmall, not explicitly to get back together with Marcus but everyone knew it was in the cards. Percy’s job moved him to Eugene and he didn’t invite Kat along. She was bartending downtown and doing great for herself. She took over the lease at Rachel’s place. Ellen got hired on at the film company but was just killing time. She wanted to go to law school, she thought.

  Danny had a problem—he was homeless, almost broke, and needed to stick around town to finish his community service, or else live the rest of his life with a bench warrant out on him in the state of Oregon. He got a job doing shitwork for Greenpeace. Hey, you got a minute for the whales, the seals, the trees? He wore a blue windbreaker, held a brown clipboard, stood smack in the middle of the sidewalk. Ellen had more space than she knew what to do with out at her place and was glad for the company. She helped him buy a secondhand Trek bike to ride to work. It turned out that Danny and Ellen were the ones who were right for each other all along. Weird world. Weirder still for everything Ellen knew about Danny and Rachel, which was, well, everything.

  They only had one secret from Ellen: the whole heroin saga, the third plotline of that already-storied April day—Danny and Rachel both gone dark with stupidity, and Ellen in her blazing grief. “You know what I think?” Rachel said to Danny one time. “There’s nothing honorable about hurting someone you care about for no good reason. I think that the only way to make it up to her is to keep keeping the secret.” They never brought it up again, even to each other. What else was there to say?

  Ellen specialized in contract law at BU. Danny designed websites. They had a son and named him Dylan and were doing well for themselves but had no love for Boston, so when an opportunity arose in Hong Kong she said she wanted to take it. They lived in a tower in the Central Mid-Levels and Ellen commuted to an office in Taikoo. They had been in Asia nearly three years and loved it, but were always eager for their old friends to come visit. Rachel, freshly divorced at thirty-one from a man named Rowan, was encouraged and cajoled and prodded and finally said yes. She would come for thirteen days—all her vacation time, but the flight was fifteen hours so it hardly seemed worth it to come for less.

  (Percy had died several years earlier, thrown from a horse while on a weekend getaway with Kat’s successor. Kat herself still lived in Portland. She had a new set of friends, owned her apartment, sent e-cards on all their birthdays, but had basically written herself out of their lives.)

  “I had the weirdest dream,” Ellen says on the morning of the day Rachel lands. “I dreamed I never got tired of experimental film. I was on the faculty at Hampshire. I had this big brass key that opened a room full of old projectors. Also, I’d never quit smoking.”

  “I’m glad you quit smoking,” Danny says. Then, “Have you ever even been to Hampshire?”

  “I’ve never even been to Amherst,” she says, laughing. They make love and then she has to get ready for work. She’d have liked to go with Danny to meet Rachel, but this whole week is going to be rough, in no small part because she’s taking several personal days next week: they’re going to show Rachel the city, do all that touristy stuff they’re always hearing about but never seem to get around to checking out.

  If you asked her, Ellen would say it is a testament to her own superlative taste in people that Danny and Rachel had the strength to exhaust their sickness for each other, then recover to achieve the chaste, sibling-like love they were always meant to enjoy. If this is a partisan reading, let it slide. Few enough stories end well, and even this one is haunted by the specter of Rachel’s future, betrayed by but also bereft without that SOB Rowan. But that problem’s on ice back in America, so for now let us say things are going well enough.

  They drop Rachel’s things at
the apartment, then head right back out again: to Taikoo to meet Ellen for lunch. The trick is to stay busy so you stay awake. If you can make it through the first day, you’ll sleep hard that night, beat your jet lag. Dylan’s at kiddie gymnastics class with the live-in housekeeper, here called an amah, or helper. Ellen has to cut lunch short for a call. Danny and Rachel take the metro under the harbor to Kowloon, where they wander in and out of neighborhoods and markets until it gets dark. Ellen checks in via text every hour or so, but the upshot is she’s not getting out of there anytime soon. Dylan’s spent the whole day with the helper by this point, which Danny and Ellen agree is not to become a habit, but once in a blue moon like this won’t damage his psyche irreparably, and the truth is even if they haul ass they won’t make it home before bedtime. Danny could call the helper and tell her to keep Dylan up, but then they’ll all pay tomorrow. Forget it, Ellen texts him back; it’ll be fine this one time. He agrees, signs off xoxoxo, and turns to Rachel, who’s looking exhausted, so they head for the cross-harbor ferry, board, and find an empty bench on the upper deck where they sit, side by side, midway between two alien skylines on a small ship bobbing in the far-flung waves.

  SUNGOLD

  Twenty minutes max in the mushroom suit—that’s the official rule. But it’s still a smallish company and there are only two suits to share among twenty-one franchise locations, so there’s pressure to make the most of your turn while it lasts. When the thirtieth franchise opens—late next year, if you believe HQ’s projections—they say they’ll order a third suit, and at fifty a fourth one, which sounds good until you realize that the proportion of mushroom suits to restaurants is actually in decline. Anyway, our turn started this morning and Ethan, that savvy entrepreneur, is eager to leverage this brand-growth opportunity, never mind that it’s 95 degrees out with 100 percent humidity. He’s a real trouper, Ethan. Especially since it’s me in the suit and not him.

  It’s hard to stand upright in the suit, much less walk in it. I had to be led out here and planted on the corner where I’m sure to be seen by traffic in all directions. My own view, meanwhile, is like peering through the hair catch in a shower drain. “Wave your hands,” Ethan advised me. “See if you can get people to honk.”

  Well, plenty of them do honk, but not because I’m waving my hands. The suit doesn’t have hands. They’re honking because the suit is bruise-purple, furry, and mottled with yellow amoebic forms across a cap like a stoner’s idea of a wizard’s hat blown up to the size of a golf umbrella, though I prefer to think of myself as a huge diseased alien cock. When sweat gets in my eyes I can’t wipe them. The hair catch goes from HD to blurry. It’s not that big of a switch.

  Different people respond to the suit in different ways. Children stroke the fur, tug the cap if they can reach it. Then they ask it for presents. Their moms don’t want them to touch it—“That’s dirty, sweetie,” they say, which is true, every square inch of it, inside and out—but they do want, inexplicably, for Junior to stand next to it—“Big smile now”—for a cell phone picture to text to Daddy, some guy in an office park scrolling through an emojis menu, looking for the one that says, Why is our son standing in the shadow of a huge bruised dick?

  Frat boys throw a shoulder as they pass by, rarely bother to look back and witness my flailing attempts to stay on my feet. They know what flailing is; they’ve seen it. Their mandate is to induce, not to observe.

  Bicyclists want me to get out of their way, which is not a realistic request given my ranges of speed and movement, but also, fuck them, they ought to be riding in the street. It’s not my fault that’s illegal in this backward-ass college town—though, having never ridden a bike myself, for all I know it’s a Florida-wide thing. Anyway they scream at me. I would lunge toward them if I could lunge at all.

  Black teenage boys—now this is interesting—will cross the street to avoid me. They’ll sprint into traffic; I’ve seen it through the hair catch. And these are the same suave posses who practice their rhymes at full volume on the steps of the public library, who hit on girls from across the street. Now I’ll grant you, a guy wearing a full-body fur mushroom suit to promote an organic vegetarian pizza pub is arguably the whitest thing to have occurred in the history of whiteness, but it’s not as though it’s going to rub off on them. It’s not like it’s contagious, like breathing the air around me will result in sudden loss of pigmentation, cravings for old Friends episodes, and, I don’t know, a Dave Matthews box set. On the other hand, it’s only fair to admit that if such a disease existed, and if it were airborne (as indeed mushroom spores are), then I am exactly the person who would be carrying it—patient zero, Typhoid Whitey—so maybe they’re wise to play it safe.

  Okay, you’ve got the picture: this is a shitty job. But not everything about it’s shitty. In fact there are many perks. I’ll tell you.

  First, I get paid under the table. As far as the federal government’s concerned, I haven’t earned a taxable dime in three years. Second, I get a free shift meal every day I work, plus whatever I can steal, which is plenty. I mean it’s not just food and booze. Ethan is a terrible businessman, the worst I’ve ever encountered: a blackout alcoholic and probably bipolar, though he’s also a cokehead and smokehound, so maybe his emotional swerves are side effects—or, rather, the intended effects—of the way he paces his days. What I’m trying to put across here is that Ethan’s the perfect boss. He is reason number three or, really, all the reasons. Whenever I see a light on in the restaurant after hours, I knock on the kitchen window, find him rolling blunts at the salad station or deep-throating the spigot on the Jagerator, a medium quattro formaggi in the oven and him without anyone to share it with. He unlocks the back door for me, and forty-five minutes later I’m shit-faced, fed, and getting another raise.

  Ethan is a self-sabotaging trust fund maniac whose folks set him up with this franchise for his thirtieth birthday, mostly, I think, so he’d have somewhere other than the grounds of the family estate—a former plantation, it could have gone without saying—to play “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” at blowout volume a dozen times a day. As long as he keeps his annual losses in the mid five figures they’ll keep him in business. So he has his clubhouse—with its audiophile-grade sound system, bulk alcohol purchase orders, and Showtime After Dark–grade waitstaff—and the family is spared both the Allman Brothers and the train wreck, if that’s not too redundant to say. The college, for its part, inducts a freshman class every single year. (I myself was in it once, and look at me now!)

  These kids, like I did, come from towns where the vegetable on the menu—when there is one—is either Jell-O or tuna fish salad, so organic mozzarella cheese is a legitimate thrill. The girls we hire cut deep Vs into the necks of their uniform tie-dye T-shirts, which is technically a violation of the terms of our franchise agreement, but so far nobody’s complained. I don’t know who started this tradition. I also don’t know why an eighteen-year-old girl—a girl who’s been in town all of four days; who decides to try our restaurant for lunch because there was a 20-percent-off coupon in her dormitory welcome packet and we’re on the only off-campus street she can name; who walks over here, comes in, sits down, has to shout over the strains of “Melissa” or “Jessica” to give her order to a server who for her part is probably named Melissa or Jessica, wearing tell-all jeans shorts and a shirt that’s essentially confetti; who is charged $8.95 for two pieces of pizza and a Sprite (that’s with the coupon, mind you, and before tip)—stands up at the end of her dining experience, brushes the cornmeal off her skirt, and thinks to herself, How do I become the slut who just served me lunch? But it happens, man. It happens like clockwork, and the lesson—not the first or the last time I’ve learned it—is that there’s an awful lot of shit in this world that I don’t know.

  Ethan hires girls he wants to fuck, obviously. I mean he hires girls everybody wants to fuck: radiant vortices of bleach, wax, and puka shells who know exactly what you’re thinking when you look at them, who sound like TV s
hows—believe me—when they’re pretending to get off. To Ethan’s credit—and this is the only time you’ll catch me using that turn of phrase—he doesn’t fire them for not fucking him. He waits until he catches them stealing; then he fires them. And they always end up stealing, irrespective of whether they need the money. Need’s got nothing to do with it. Ethan’s just a hard guy not to steal from. He brings something out in people. I’m lucky he doesn’t want to fuck me because it keeps him from noticing how badly I’m fucking him. If I had tits I’d have been shit-canned years ago. Instead I keep getting promoted, to the point where I’ve become a kind of imperial factotum, body man for the restaurant, what in a real place of business would likely be described as “the manager,” a term Ethan abjures on account of its lack of good vibes. I do the books and the purchase orders, the scheduling, plus incidental waiting, bussing, onion chopping, secret sauce mixing (half balsamic vinegar, half anchovy-free Caesar dressing, pinch of salt), and of course, at the moment, I wear the mushroom suit. It’s some low-down proletarian shit, I’ll grant you, especially for a guy closer in age to Ethan than the Melissa/Jessicas, but you know what? I’ve got an ex who adjuncts at the college and I know what she makes per poetry workshop. I also know what her current squeeze—a math PhD—gets for his Intro Stat lecture, a class that seats four hundred and is simulcast on the web to twice as many again. I’ll own a house before those motherfuckers, that’s for sure.

  A light goes out and then comes on again, but it’s blurry—I mean blurrier than usual. I feel oddly relaxed but also weighed down somehow . . . somehow . . .

  Oh, that’s right.

  The suit seems to have become horizontal, and me with it, and there seems to be a transition scene missing, so smart money says I had a bit of heatstroke and fainted, fell. I’m facing upright—that blurry light would seem to be the sky—but stuck. If it rained right now I’d drown, which is scary, but somehow not scary enough to keep me from blacking back out.