And we lay down on her bed together, in the house she shared with her mother, and I said: I came home like you asked.
And she said, Too late.
And that was the thing that happened on the bed in the house Emma shared with her mother.
The day after talking with Roberto, I woke up with a big head, sunlight slicing through a gap where the blackout curtain had drifted away from the window. Checked my phone, saw I had two text messages. One from my friend Hankie: ‘Where’s our boy?’ And the second, from my only other friend, Dwayne: ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are.’
I got out of bed and scrubbed my face until it stung. Slapped myself a few times, checked my reflection, decided I was presentable, if barely. I drove to the ferry dock and found them standing outside the bar across the street, beers in hand, watching a table of leathery old men play dominoes.
I was glad to see them, but the chief emotion I felt at their sudden, incongruous presence was relief. I took off my sunglasses, exchanged one-armed, back-slapping hugs.
What brings you to Hades? I asked.
We sensed a disturbance in the Force, Hankie told me. What the fuck happened to your face?
When my father was sick his bruises wouldn’t heal. I learned, by watching him, that this is a hallmark of the true endgame: the body stops bothering to repair itself. One bruise in particular, on the back of his hand, lingered for the last two months of his life. He wasn’t engaged in any vigorous work at that point, of course, so there must have been some sort of relatively benign domestic accident involved. Maybe he whacked his hand with the refrigerator door or something. I never asked.
Whatever the cause, that bruise persisted. It started off normal, purple and well-defined, but then instead of fading it devolved to a deep black and stayed on, implacable as rot. And really that’s what it was. A spot on my father’s hand, rotting. Giving up the ghost a bit before he did.
When I noticed that circle of black, I understood that it was over. This understanding arrived unencumbered by any definable emotion. I could have been reading a weather forecast, for all that I felt. It was just a sign.
At Duffy’s, Dwayne and Hankie and I stood outside the bar smoking cigarettes, and I told them how the week before one of the island’s ubiquitous retired gringas had asked me what my impressions were of the Samson parable in the Bible. Like, what the takeaway was. The moral. And I said I told the woman the moral of the Samson parable was that, given half a chance, a woman will take a dump in your heart, and fin. And then of course the gringa bristled, thinking I meant to make a gender debate out of the whole thing, which was not my intent. The guys groaned at this, and drew on their cigarettes, and we all three recognized the moment and took pleasurable advantage of it, flicking our cigarettes into the gutter and returning to the table to talk righteous shit about the women in our lives, and women in general, cracking crass jokes and generalizing and hitting all the clichés and believing them and laughing and not feeling a bit bad about any of it. Hankie loved his wife and I loved Emma and Dwayne just loved women, but we hated them, too, and hated on them, and drank to our hate, once, twice, a third time, turning our empty shot glasses upside down on the table, and at the end of it we left arm-in-arm and each felt, though we didn’t talk about it, ready to return to these women and be better.
Maybe a week before my father died I broke down in front of him for the first and last time. I’d cried while he was sick, of course, but never in the same room with him. If I felt a jag coming on I’d go to the bathroom, or make up some reason why I suddenly and urgently had to leave. But that day I just gave in, went to my knees on the carpet in front of the La-Z-Boy he pretty much lived in those last months, put my face in his lap, soaked his pant legs with tears and snot.
And he uncharacteristically put a hand on my head and let it rest there. And he quite characteristically said, Come on, now, stop. I’m not dead yet.
Hankie said, Listen to me: the further you crawl up a woman’s ass, the more she will despise you. Word to the wise.
He sipped his beer, gave an authoritative nod to emphasize the point.
Well no shit, I said.
Dismiss me at your peril, he said, then leaned forward and put his hands flat on the table. Listen, I can simplify all this for you. I can solve all your problems before you’re finished your beer. Is that something you might be interested in?
I’ve got nowhere else to be, I told him.
Alright. Get ready. Here’s the thing. Here’s what women want.
Give us a minute to brace ourselves, Dwayne said. Remember, this sort of wisdom comes easy to you, but for us it’s like staring at the sun.
Get bent, Hankie said.
I will, Dwayne said. Just as soon as you’re finished.
Okay, Hankie said. Neither one of you is or ever has been married. I’ve been married ten years. Happily. And this is from the horse’s mouth, too, by the way. I didn’t come up with this on my own. This is what Lisa told me: women want us to adore them.
Wow, Dwayne said after a pause. Just, wow.
Wait for it, Hankie said, holding up one finger. They want us to adore them, but not for the reason you think.
Okay, I said.
They want us to adore them, Hankie continued, not because it makes them feel good, but because it facilitates their need to suck us dry. They want to squeeze every drop of life out of us, leave us nothing but a husk, like what a fly looks like when a spider is done with it. But here’s the problem. Just as they’re about to get those last few drops out of us, they realize that they’re the ones who are hooked in. They realize they adore us right back. Next thing they know, they’re carrying our kids around in their bellies and washing our underwear for us.
Dwayne and I stared at him, dubious.
Horse’s mouth, Hankie said, and sipped his beer.
Nightfall found us at the same table at Duffy’s. Across the street, a group of caballeros tied their horses to the railing next to the water. They lit cigarettes and glared at us. I pointed them out to Hankie and Dwayne.
Those the fuckers that knocked your teeth out? Hankie asked.
Hard to say, I told him. Might be the same ones. Might not be.
It made no difference to Hankie; he set about endearing himself to the caballeros. He flipped them off, grinning. He hawked magnificently and spat in their direction. He pointed at them, then drew a finger across his throat. He laughed while they glowered. The bartender came over and told him to cool it, and though Hankie wasn’t afraid of the caballeros, he was afraid of being cut off, so he cooled it.
We should roll those fucks, he muttered over a fresh beer. See if they’re so eager to scrap when it’s five on three instead of five on one.
But the caballeros didn’t like those odds, apparently, because despite Hankie’s goading they eventually saddled up and clattered down the street.
Pussies, Hankie said.
I had a feeling that I’d end up paying for his impudence, but I didn’t want him to feel bad about that, so I said nothing.
By his own count Hankie had almost died six separate times, owing to the fact that he was narcoleptic. All these near-fatalities were ignoble, including the latest: he was at home late, the kids and Lisa long since in bed. He had smoked a bit of hash earlier in the night, which he’d followed with a vodka tonic and a few beers in front of the television after Lisa retired. He found himself watching something called Barbecue U. on public television, and he got hungry and went into the kitchen to heat a pair of Hot Pockets. Sat back down on the sofa, got through the first one okay. A bite or two into the second he fell asleep, an unchewed slab of pastry and marinara lodged between his molars. When it slid back into his trachea he woke with a start. After a moment his brain came fully awake, and a sudden awful clarity descended. He tried to c
all to Lisa but couldn’t make a sound. He had maybe a minute before he blacked out and it would be over and his son would come downstairs in the morning for school and find his father stiff and outstretched on the carpet. This thought got Hankie moving. He stood and staggered into the kitchen and slammed himself down on the back of a wooden dining chair half a dozen times, bruising his sternum and diaphragm.
That sounds painful, I said.
I wanted to live, goddammit, Hankie said.
I don’t know, I told him. I think I may have just sat there and suffocated. I mean, if it’s a choice between that and skewering myself on the back of a chair.
You need to get real, Hankie said. You need to have a fucking family, for starters.
On the beach the next day, I asked Hankie if he’d ever passed out in the midst of coitus.
He rolled his eyes. Have I ever passed out having sex? Think about who you’re asking. I constantly pass out having sex.
Ask a stupid question, I said.
So listen to this. Back in like 1992 I was in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York, across the border from Vermont, shooting a movie.
Before he and Lisa got married, Hankie had worked for a while as an actor.
We finished the shoot, he said, and we’re all just hanging around for the night before we head back to wherever we came from. The art director on the film was this older woman named Frankie. That was actually her name. Wasn’t like short for Frances or anything. Hankie and Frankie, no shit. But so we all sat around and got drunk to celebrate the end of the shoot, and I end up in bed with Frankie. And we’re being friendly and fooling around, and I actually pass out with my fingers inside her. And then I come to who knows how much later, and she’s still there in bed, all snuggled up as if she hadn’t had to pull my fingers out of her after I fell asleep. The kicker is, after that she still wanted to go with me to Boston the next day. By the way don’t talk to my wife about this or I’ll kill you.
Lisa is aware that you had sex before the two of you met, right? Dwayne said.
She’d be mad that I was talking to you about it.
Don’t worry, I said. I won’t say a word to her. But it’s going in the book.
What book? Hankie asked.
That night we drank shots of Old Grand-Dad, toasting, in order: all the women we’d slept with in the past, my dead father, Hankie’s family, and the bright shining day in the near future when we would find ourselves together again.
We didn’t realize Hankie had had one of his narcoleptic episodes until he went backwards off his stool and hit the wood floor headfirst.
But he was energized, apparently, by the catnap and attendant head contusion, because when we piled into the Jeep after the bartender threw us out, he insisted on driving. We veered wildly through the streets, laughing like we were in high school again, like we’d invented drinking and driving, and Hankie took the turn onto my road too wide and slammed the grill of the Jeep into a palm stump on the corner. Water sprayed from the radiator, soaking the dirt, and blood ran in a trickle from my scalp and down my face. Hankie and Dwayne laughed even harder when they saw I was bleeding, and I laughed along with them, though by that point, mildly concussed, I didn’t have any idea what we were laughing at.
On Monday morning I dropped them off at the ferry terminal. I didn’t know it then, but the bright shining day in the near future when we’d find ourselves together again would not ever come to pass.
After Dwayne and Hankie’s departure, after Roberto’s wisdom, I reached out to Emma anew. But she continued to elude me, offering the occasional brief brusque message and little more, always only in response to a message I sent her. What she did not seem to understand—or what she understood just fine but was unable to rise to—was that when I told her I was going to the beach and wished she were there to accompany me, I wasn’t reporting the facts of my day to her like some news ticker. I was trying to rivet her to my moments, and myself to hers, insofar as was possible from half a world away.
But her response, when it came at all, would read something like: Sounds nice. Enjoy the sun.
There are those who believe that after the Singularity, machines will not just be perfect lovers to one another, but to human beings as well. In fact, if the machines allow us to go on existing, and if we don’t succumb to the terminating effect of our own uselessness, people may never have relationships with one another again.
You scoff, but listen: we develop emotional attachments to inanimate objects as a matter of course—and these things offer only the clunkiest, most transparent facsimiles of companionship. Yet already we often prefer them over people.
A man passes time in the garage, tinkering idly with his vintage Camaro, rather than play cribbage with his wife.
A child simulates feeding and caring for an electronic key-chain pet, rather than pay attention to the very real and oft-neglected family dog.
A teenager spends hours communing with two-dimensional images on a television screen without speaking a word to the family camped out on furniture all around him.
We do these things, make these choices, every day.
Given this, don’t you think a man would prefer the machine that pretends to love him, rather than the woman who pretends she doesn’t?
Or, in turn, don’t you think that this same woman, while pretending not to love the man, would prefer the machine that offers unconditional and flawless middle-aged maternal affection, rather than the flesh-and-blood mother who tries over and over to kill her?
The answer, of course, is an easy yes. If you’re being honest.
Emma, of course, being the woman who pretended not to love the man. Which in turn makes her own personal mother the flesh-and-blood mother trying over and over to kill her.
This is not, as you’ll see, an exaggeration.
Emma often talked about having to raise herself, and from what I saw this was a fair assessment. Her father was a weekends-and-holidays ghost before she even graduated from a stroller, and through her childhood her mother descended into a slow burn of alcoholism and manic depression, with fierce laser-beam rage aimed directly at her only daughter.
By the time I came on the scene in high school, trouble could occur between them violently and without preamble, like a tornado touching down out of cloudless skies. The usual sad litany: bruises and cuts no one talked about, fleeing to a girlfriend’s in the middle of the night, walking tense circles around her mother for days after an episode.
Usually the worst of it occurred when no one else was around. One time, though, it happened right in front of me.
Years later, Emma and I were having brunch, and she said, Sometimes I think it really wasn’t as bad as I make it out to be in my mind. Like maybe there were one or two things that happened, really bad things, but beyond that it wasn’t remarkable at all. Just your garden variety mother-daughter stuff.
I sipped my Bloody Mary. That’s sort of classic, though, right? I said.
What do you mean?
Just that it seems like often when people are abused, especially by people they love, they end up having selective memories about it, to protect both themselves and the people who hurt them. End up making excuses, or else just omitting memories wholesale.
Maybe, Emma said. It’s all pretty jumbled, and I have a shitty memory besides.
Maybe that’s precisely why you have a shitty memory, I thought but did not say.
Instead I said, Let me tell you something I remember. This is back in high school. You and I were sitting at the kitchen table in your house. Your mother was on the phone, on your behalf in some capacity, like maybe she was talking to a teacher, or your soccer coach, or whatever. And you tried to get her attention—you wanted to tell her something to relay to the person on the other end. When you tried to get her attention s
he held up one finger to silence you, like this.
I held my own index finger up, put it right in Emma’s face, two inches from her eyes, hanging over her plate of poached eggs and hash, over the ramekins of butter and syrup, a black memory casting shadows on the detritus of our happy Sunday afternoon.
And then, I told her, a few moments later, you tried to get her attention again. And this time there was no warning. I don’t even think the words were completely out of your mouth before she slapped you. Full-on, digging back and swinging from the hips. Turned your head around. You put your face down, stared at your lap, and you didn’t cry and it seemed like you didn’t dare to even put a hand to your face to feel at the damage. It was like you were trying to be still enough that you disappeared. But the worst part was, I did nothing. I just sat there and clenched my jaw. I wanted to put my fist through your mother’s face. But I did nothing.
Emma stared at me. Really?
Really, what?
That really happened?
Yes.
Are you sure?
Emma. I’m not the only one who remembers her doing things like that to you.
She looked down at the tabletop, much as she did on that day fifteen years previous, and stirred her Bloody Mary. Finally she said, It’s really embarrassing, you know, to realize you’re walking around with a memory like that in your head.
Around that same time, Emma received a Christmas card from her mother, with whom she hadn’t spoken since the summer. She gave it to me, and I struggled to read the messy script, written in the unsteady hand of a woman who had drunk herself into a host of physical disabilities:
Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles Page 4
