Summer in the Land of Skin

by Jody Gehrman

  I had a roommate my junior year in college, Natalie. She was obsessed with food. She was portly and homegrown, a girl who knew how to bake her own bread by the time she was seven. She used to fill our little apartment with the most luscious scents—fresh basil, crisp and green, paired with tomatoes that reeked of summer; oxtail soup; sizzling bacon; chocolate chip cookies so fragrant they made you dizzy with longing as soon as you walked in the door. I remember the year I lived with Natalie more clearly than the rest of my teens and early twenties combined. It wasn’t that we were close, or having fabulous times together or anything. It was just that her cooking revived all the senses that had been dormant in my body for so long—the connection between the nose and the tongue that says, here it is—life—come and get it.

  Colors seemed brighter that year, my clothing felt fluid or itchy, tight or loose; I noticed the difference between when I was hot and when I was cold. All the sharp edges of life that had been lost on me for more than a decade started to announce themselves again. It was as if the smells Natalie exposed me to opened a floodgate, and all the rest of my senses came rushing out of their tomb.

  But then Natalie was raped at a party in Pacific Heights, and she went home to Ohio. I never heard from her again. I went back to Top Ramen, mac and cheese, an occasional listless apple. And my senses, informed of the false alarm, went to sleep again.

  As soon as I enter Smoke Palace, I know something is very wrong. There is chaos in the air—I catch the faint scent of vomit as I pass the bathroom. I can hear Lucy before I turn the corner into the living room.

  “He’s not— Danny—is he even breathing?” Her words tumble over one another like dominoes. I enter the living room in time to see her take a small mirror from her bag and prop it up in front of Danny’s face, which is lying on the floor, looking more than a little gray. “I saw this in a movie,” she announces, her eyes glowing. She watches intently. “It’s not—he’s not breathing!”

  Arlan sees me and nods. He’s in the kitchen, pouring himself a Jack and Coke. As I find my backpack and stuff the letters into it, Arlan crosses the room and sits in the chair by the window, where he can study Danny’s face better. “Looks a little weird, doesn’t he?”

  “Anna!” Lucy says, crawling over to me. “He’s not breathing! He’s not!”

  “What’s going on?” I ask. The smell of vomit hits me again and I feel a little dizzy. “Something wrong with Danny?”

  Lucy holds onto my legs and whimpers, “It’s happening, Anna! I said he should die, now look! He’s dead!”

  I move into the room, closer to Danny. As I approach him, my head feels light and my shoes touching the popcorn-strewn carpet seem unreal. Across the street, one of the Goat Kids screams at the top of his lungs, then dissolves into laughter.

  “Goddammit!” Lucy cries. “We got to get him to a hospital.” She’s drunk; her face is splotchy and red. “Jesus, Arlan! Get him out of here!”

  “You’re joking, right?” Bill says. “You’re totally joking.”

  I move to touch Danny. He’s wearing a tank top, and as I make contact with his bare shoulder, I shiver involuntarily. One arm flops to the carpet, and I see the track marks there—sickly bruises tracing the web of veins. I feel a faint tickling at the back of my throat, as if I might get sick, but I swallow hard and look at Arlan. “How long has he been—?”

  “He’s not breathing! I’m serious!” Lucy’s huddled down close to Danny’s head, holding the mirror up to his mouth again.

  Arlan comes over and looks at the little mirror. “Fuck,” he says. “Okay. God.” He dashes into the bedroom. “Where are my keys? Luce? Where are my—?”

  “I can drive,” I say.

  “We have to take him now!” Lucy yells. She slaps Danny’s face desperately. “Wake up, stupid! Jesus!”

  Arlan and Bill pick up Danny by his legs and arms awkwardly. They’re both wasted. On the way to the truck, Bill leans over and pukes into the grass. Lucy keeps screaming, “Hurry up! Jesus! He’s not breathing!” She keeps putting the mirror in front of his mouth frantically. I get into the truck and start it up. The cab only has room for three at the most.

  “Arlan, you come,” I say.

  “No,” Lucy says. “He’s drunk. I’ll go.”

  “I need someone to help me carry him in, though.”

  “I’ll go,” Arlan tells her.

  “You assholes,” she says. Her red, mottled face goes tight with anger and she kicks the front tire. “Go on, then!”

  We drive to the hospital in a grim, sickly silence, broken only by Arlan’s occasional “left here,” or “right at that light.” It feels like it takes forever to get there. Arlan props Danny up, but whenever I make a right turn, his arm slides toward me and the cool clamminess of Danny’s skin makes me feel like I’m going to wretch. The sun is setting as we drag his long, limp body into the hospital, where nurses put him on a stretcher and wheel him off to a corner of the room shrouded in green curtains.

  Later, a doctor with tiny spectacles and a smooth, moonlike face tells us if we’d waited any longer he’d have died, but I cannot tell if he’s congratulating or scolding us. There’s a grown man crying out, “Mama—mama, please!” from behind one of the curtains in a way that sets my teeth on edge. All I want is to get out of here, away from the smells of piss and disinfectant, away from the clinical faces and their matching, efficient hands—the overweight nurses with sad, dour faces, and the doctors, some of them jocular, some silent and corpselike themselves, moving around with clipboards, putting on and taking off their latex gloves.

  As Arlan and I walk back to the truck in silence, one of the lights in the parking lot flickers and then goes out. We climb into the cab and sit there a moment, staring out the windshield.

  “Jesus,” he says finally, leaning his head against the window. “What a night.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “You want to stop somewhere for a drink?”

  “Better not. Lucinda was pretty worked up.”

  “Right,” I say, feeling stupid. “Forget I asked.”

  There’s a weathered pack of Camels on the old bamboo table between Grady and me. He picks it up, turns it over, and a single cigarette falls into his lap, slightly bent. We’re sitting on the porch back at Smoke Palace, watching the night grow black. Stars appear one by one. Occasionally, a bat swoops into our line of vision, a small wad of darkness jetting past. Upstairs, Lucy and Arlan are fighting. Their voices float through the open window now and then.

  Grady fishes a book of matches from the pocket of his shorts and lights the salvaged cigarette. He exhales, and I watch the smoke as it twirls into thin, abstract shapes before us. “Smoke bother you?” he asks. I shake my head. He draws in his breath in a contemplative way before continuing with a thought he initiated five minutes ago. “Kerouac’s good—so raw, such an anarchist, in his own way….” He taps the ashes from his cigarette off the arm of the chair.

  “You just left me here!” Lucy screams. “You don’t give a shit about—”

  “He was going to die!”

  “But you weren’t thinking about—”

  “You told me to go!” The window slams shut, and I’m glad not to hear the rest of it.

  After a silence, Grady tries again. “You ever been to India?”

  “Never,” I say. I wonder silently if this is connected to Kerouac’s anarchy. He’s been doing this for a good forty minutes, now—moving in an irregular rhythm from one random thought to the next, like someone searching for a good song on the radio.

  “Amazing place,” he says. “Changed my life. Tremendous poverty, of course.”

  I can’t forget the emergency room, the moon-faced doctor, Danny’s arms lying limp and blackened like rotting fruit. I can still hear the man’s voice from behind the curtain: Mama—mama, please!

  Grady looks at me quizzically. “You okay?”

  “Me? Yeah, why?”

  “You seem a little out of it.”

  I shake my head. �
�Just tired.”

  “You want to rest in my apartment?” I shake my head. I’m too tired to determine if he’s coming on to me. His lips close around the cigarette; he holds it European-style, between his index finger and his thumb. I imagine him practicing this for years before perfecting it. A bat darts into the trees. Somewhere above us, a TV is droning on at top volume.

  The smell of the emergency room comes back to me, a ghost of an odor, and I feel queasy. “You sure you’re okay?” he asks, when I touch my fingers to my forehead.

  “Maybe I will lie down,” I say. “It’s been a long day.”

  “Sure. You should rest.” But neither of us move.

  After a while, he sighs, and an image of him at fifty flashes before me—he’s wearing a tweed jacket and a wool beret. His face is lined with age but his eyes have the same alarming emptiness.

  “I like Kerouac,” he says quietly to the stars, almost to himself. “But he’s got nothing on Marquez. Talk about imagination. That’s anarchy, too—a world where anything can happen.”

  What the average citizen doesn’t realize, the TV above us warns, is that 72 percent of lethal—but somebody changes the channel before the warning is complete, and a laugh track explodes into the night.

  CHAPTER 8

  Boulevard Park

  In the days that follow, Lucy is icy around me. She’s cold to Arlan, too—in fact, the only person she likes is Grady. She’s very chummy with him, insisting he take her out for ice cream or tacos and making it clear that we’re not invited. Grady indulges her, but he rolls his eyes at us when she’s not looking.

  Thursday evening we get word that Danny has been released to his parents, who opt to store him in a rehab center in Victoria until he can regain composure. After Arlan tells us the news, Lucinda goes off on one of her classic tirades about people being addicted to drama and fostering hideous notions about victims and heroes and other “patriarchal ass-wipes.” In the middle of her speech, she stops midsentence and stares at us accusingly. “You people wouldn’t get it if I carved it into your foreheads.” Then she disappears into the bedroom and sits in front of the computer, chain-smoking and pecking away at the keyboard all night.

  A couple days later, the new issue of Pulp appears on the back of the toilet. I flip through it and a particular headline catches my eye: “Shirley Temple Alien Invades Bellingham.” There’s a blurry, black-and-white photo of Shirley Temple doctored with huge alien eyes and a UFO taking off behind her. The article that follows is short and to the point:

  Bellingham, WA — Experts now agree; the truck-driving, too-cute-for-words stranger that rolled into town last month is indeed a dangerous extraterrestrial. Don’t be fooled by her innocent blond locks or her rosy cheeks. In a top-secret investigation, law enforcement officers revealed that she developed her alias after years of watching Shirley Temple reruns beamed via satellite to her homeland of Io, one of Jupiter’s moons.

  In a recent interview following her arrest, the space-woman confessed to her crimes: fraud, impersonation and entering the planet without a visa. She also revealed, after extensive torture, her mission. She was sent by Io’s secret police to thrust Earth back into the patriarchal Stone Age in which Miss Temple thrived—to overthrow any feminist gains made in the last fifty years and return us to a black-and-white world where women are women, men are men, and little girls looking for Daddy are the ultimate seduction.

  The writing isn’t as good as her usual stuff—it’s not very funny, and I can’t see her audience being amused by such a stupid little jab. I wish I could leave it at that, dismiss it as just another of her antics, like Arlan and Grady always do. What little peace there is in Smoke Palace is maintained through the guys’ ability to ignore Lucy’s habitual tantrums. Instead of laughing it off, though, I start to obsess. The whole Shirley Temple thing just gets under my skin. And that shit about “little girls looking for Daddy”—what is that supposed to mean? The more I think about it, the more it gets to me.

  I knew from the beginning that Lucy wasn’t exactly loyal, but I didn’t expect her to turn on me over nothing. What did I do? I gave Danny a ride to the hospital when he was half-dead. Is that an act deserving of all this?

  One morning I awake to find the house empty. I had another bout of insomnia last night, and when I finally fell asleep I spent those precious hours dreaming about Lucy tricking me into getting naked and then leaving me in all kinds of humiliating situations. As I survey the room from the couch, I decide I can’t stand this dirty apartment another second. I get out the vacuum and go to work. I discover that cleaning only feeds my bad mood; I start slamming the old Hoover against chair legs and baseboards like it’s a battering ram, tossing stray shirts and pillows out of my way with fervor. Outside, a thick fog is rolling inland from the bay, and there’s a chill in the apartment, but by the time I’m finished with the living room I’ve broken out in a sweat. I move on to the bedroom. I’m so engrossed in my task, I don’t even notice when Lucy comes home, and I jump when I see her in the doorway, watching me with an amused expression.

  “What is this?” she says, as the vacuum whines into silence. “TaeBo housekeeping?”

  I look at her there, so smug and in control. I’m overcome with an urge to slap her. “Why don’t you just tell me to leave?”

  “What?” Her expression loses its teasing easiness and looks suddenly defensive.

  “You’ve obviously finished with my services. I was just here for your amusement, wasn’t I.”

  “Jesus, Anna—what are you talking about?”

  I wrap the cord of the Hoover in place with quick, violent movements. When I’m finished I brush past her and go to the living room, where I grab my pack and start stuffing my things inside. I had no idea I was going to do this, but now that I’ve started, I can’t stop. She’s still in the bedroom, which gives me a good excuse to yell. “You got me to move in because you didn’t want to be alone. Now I bore you, so you’re trying to get rid of me. What is all this shit about Shirley Temple, huh? You think I take pleasure in being humiliated?”

  She appears in the living room doorway. “It was just a joke, Anna.”

  “It’s not even funny! It’s just a childish little outburst—it’s not even well written! I can’t believe you’d sink low enough to drag ‘Daddy’ into it. You don’t know shit about my dad, okay?”

  She folds her arms across her chest. “Look, I was only—”

  “You don’t know anything about me, because you never even asked!”

  “Will you just—”

  “You don’t give a flying fuck about anyone except yourself. Arlan and Grady might humor you—they let you have your little queen bee routine—but everyone knows you’re a self-absorbed little monster!”

  “I am not a monster!”

  She looks so enraged I half imagine she’s going to charge. We stand there, eyes locked. Everything hangs in the balance for a good three seconds.

  “Oh Jesus,” she says finally, and she starts to laugh. “I can’t believe I just said that.” She walks to the freezer and pulls out a bottle of gin. “Okay, so I’m a monster. You want a drink or what?” When I don’t answer, she gets me a glass anyway, sighing impatiently. “What? Don’t look at me like that! Yes, I’m a little spoiled. You want me to get down on my knees and beg forgiveness?”

  “That might help.” She looks at me, and I gesture toward the floor in front of me. “Go ahead. I’d love to see it.”

  “Don’t push,” she says, filling the glasses with ice, but her voice is gentle, almost pleading.

  I sense the graceful thing to do is to let it lie, but I’m not quite ready. I’m still worked up. “What provoked this whole ice queen thing, anyway? What did I do?”

  She contemplates the gin she’s just poured, and for a second I think she’s going to cry. She looks at me, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, and says, very quietly, “Nothing. You didn’t do anything.”

  “Then why have you been—?”

&n
bsp; “Look,” she says. “I spend most of my time around guys. I guess I just…” She shrugs and looks embarrassed. “I don’t know how to act, sometimes.”

  I put my pack down, and the adrenaline starts to leave me slowly, like water slipping down a drain. “You seemed really pissed off at me….”

  “I get like that sometimes. I don’t mean to.”

  I sit on the couch. She finishes making our drinks and brings me mine. We sip them in silence. After a while, I say, “I’ve never really had a girlfriend, either.”

  She rattles the ice in her drink, not looking at me. “I guess we’re a couple of freaks, huh?”

  “I guess we are.”

  I’m terrified of my father’s letters. They sit there in my backpack all the time, and whenever I think of them I get all agitated. I have to avoid sitting still for too long. Sometimes I want to devour every word ruthlessly like a starving dog, but more often I’m tempted to burn them. It’s what I’ve been craving my whole life—something to shatter the numbing silence he left behind—but the thought of actually sitting down to read his thoughts in his own handwriting makes my throat tighten with alarm.

  I go for long drives at all hours of the day and night. I sit on high cliffs and stare out over the water. I watch the mountains in the east and wonder what it is I expected to find in this green, rainy town that smells of pulp and ocean. Sometimes, at night, I walk around the neighborhoods and peer into windows as I pass by slowly, trying to catch glimpses of other people’s lives. It’s always been easy and soothing, fabricating strangers’ troubles, making up their torrid affairs, their irrevocable mistakes, their suicides. But now I’ve got a chance to unravel the big myth—the legend of my own father—and I haven’t got the nerve. Funny, how that works. I guess I’m big on imagining; the facts, sketchy as they are, have caused me nothing but pain.

  I’ve been avoiding Bender for a few days. I just can’t bring myself to visit him until I’ve read at least a few pages of the letters. I wouldn’t know how to explain my paralysis before that soft little pouch of leather. What if I discover that my father and I think exactly alike? Or, and this might be worse, what if we’re perfect strangers—what if it’s like finding a filthy little piss-scented notepad on the bus and struggling through the ramblings of an incoherent derelict? Either way, it can’t be good. If we’re too much the same, then I’ll know I’ve got that little seed of self-destruction in my genes, and it’s only a matter of time before I come to a bad end. But if we’re nothing alike, then I’m just as fatherless as ever.