by Kirk Farber
One motivated jock has a bright attitude, though. He’s a meaty guy, someone who does a lot of pushups. I never catch his name, but whenever we’re both at the end of our respective trailers, he waves to me and says, “It’s just like getting paid to work out, huh?” and then he rolls down the trailer door, bangs it twice, and waves at the truck as it pulls away—a job well done.
It’s just like getting paid to be mentally tortured, I want to say, but I keep my mouth shut and smile at him just enough so he can’t tell if I’m smiling or not. Gerald has warned me in his own way to stay cool, and I’m determined to make good after my late-night visit. Somehow I finish my day and tell Gerald thanks and make my way back home.
The drive home feels surreal, as if I floated all the way. I make it inside and stretch out on the floor with Zero. I stare at the blank white ceiling for a while, but every time I blink I see packages. If I close my eyes, the boxes descend upon me and then I’m trapped, stuck behind my own eyes. Eventually I get so tired I fall asleep without realizing it, only to have a nightmare about mail being shoved under my door. It’s Mary Jo from across the street doing the shoving, and she’s cackling hysterically. “You’ve got mail!” she screams. “You’d better do something!”
chapter 54
When the soil slides between your toes, when you feel the earth seeping into your ears, blocking out the sounds of the living world, when it’s covering your eyes so all the light is shut out and you’re totally surrounded by serene darkness—that’s when you know you’re fully committed to the mud bath.
Some folks fear commitment because they fear their loss of freedom. But when you totally commit yourself to something, you free yourself from the burden of wasting your energy on other, less worthy things. Right now I’m completely unencumbered by forty-five pounds of backyard soil. It may not be mineral-rich like the spa’s Moor peat mud, but it seems to be doing the trick.
“What the fuck are you doing?” a muffled voice asks from the top of the hole. Her acrid tone is easy to recognize, even through my plugged ears. It’s Candyce. “Why is there a hole in your backyard? And why are you in it?”
I drag my hands out of the thick mud, and a loud sucking sound tells me I finally got the consistency right. I scrape the mud off my eyes and open them. They must look like two eggs in the bottom of a giant frying pan, from her perspective. This makes me smile. She stands with her arms crossed, one hip cocked hard to the right. If I do look like two eggs at the bottom of a pan, she doesn’t find it amusing.
“Hello? Can you even hear me?”
“Mm-hmm,” I say, the humming quite loud in my ears.
She huffs, appalled, I think, that I’m not explaining myself, that I’m not jumping up to meet her. She tosses a piece of paper down at me as hard as she can. It floats down, against her intentions, and gently lands near my right hand. “Dr. Singh’s results on your CAT scan. I thought you’d want to see them.”
I delicately pinch the paper between muddy thumb and index finger, pinky extended as if I’m about to sip tea. Candyce shakes her head and stomps away from the hole’s edge. A series of scratches and dots make up Dr. Singh’s handwriting, and next to that, more studied, deeply slanted letters. The legible handwriting says: “Normal.” Candyce’s translation. My CAT scan is normal.
I sit up to celebrate. The mud slides down my chest and back, cold and heavy. My nose is at ground level. I look across the yard, and there is Candyce, walking back to her car. “I’m normal,” I say. She gets in her car and slams the door. “I’m normal!” I say again, louder this time, but she can’t hear me. I carefully stand up and step out of the hole, back on solid ground, waving madly at her, my body black and melting, my hair matted and wet. “I’m normal!” I yell at her, “I’m normal!” But she drives away.
Across the street, Mary Jo stands by her mailbox. I wave the paper at her, my egg-eyes wide. “Look,” I say, and smile broadly at her, but my elation is misconstrued as something sinister.
“I don’t swim!” she yells, and runs back in her house.
chapter 55
I am in a celebratory mood. My clean CAT-scan results have had a galvanizing effect on my life outlook. I need to get away from this house, out among people and activity, even if they’re strangers, maybe especially so. I take a long, cleansing shower, get dressed, and head over to The Basement on Longley Street.
The Basement has jazz playing 24–7 and unwritten menus—you order what you want and they improvise. Most important, people come here to relax, read, and get juiced up on caffeine. I order a double espresso, and find the darkest corner available. I’ve decided to bring the postcards. I plan on meticulously studying them until I find the one elusive detail that explains everything. A lot can be learned from the details. I stack them in a neat pile and begin.
It’s only after holding the third one up to the light that I realize Jane from yoga class is here too, and she’s stealing glances in my direction. I can’t tell if she recognizes me right off, or if she just thinks it’s odd that I’m reading a stack of postcards, but here we are, two semi-strangers, aware of each other’s presence.
Jane is plain. That’s why I like her. That’s what makes her beautiful. I don’t really know much about her, not even her real name. I like to think she spends a good amount of her time sipping warm coffee drinks here, alone, and meditating on mountain tops. Well, hill tops.
Jane has a few contradictions about her, like how she sits near the front window but then covers her face from the sun. She could easily move away. I imagine she sits in the window because she likes to drink her coffee while she drinks in the life of the city street. A quiet, curious type. Habitual in her habits, reclusive, yet seeks the company of others, though not necessarily directly. She would be a mountain gorilla in the Great Apes documentary I watched last week: fiercely intelligent, mostly solitary, but could die of loneliness if she doesn’t have the occasional company of a mate. That’s Jane, sipping on her latte, thinking deep thoughts, vaguely dissatisfied, searching for something deeper, something real. But for all I really know, she could be a rabid baboon, subject to impulsively flashing her sex flower for all the other baboons to see. It’s a vulgar thought. I opt for mountain gorilla: pensive, reflective, mysterious.
I wonder if she somehow psychically shared my crashing zeppelin dream, and now she’s looking over to me to give thanks for my rescuing her, to celebrate our survival together. I wonder if she’s had any similar nocturnal visions about me. Of course, I’ll never ask her. Suddenly I’m tired. I don’t have the energy to go introduce myself. Something is drawing me to do so, but even if I did, what would I say? “Hello, mysterious gorilla. I know I look tired and disheveled, but I’ve been working weird hours at a new job and obsessing over the postcards my vanished girlfriend has been sending me. Don’t worry, we’re not together anymore. Would you like another latte?” It’s better if I sit here, quiet. Nothing bad can happen if I just sit in my dark corner and sulk.
“Sid?” a voice pleads from the darkness. “Are you freaking serious?”
I shut my eyes tight in hopes of becoming invisible.
“Well?” the voice implores. It’s Candyce. She has spotted me, and there is no mistake on her part. Footsteps clop loudly toward my quiet, gloomy little corner. She’s got two hissy-fit friends in tow, both of them dressed in black, with tri-colored streaky hair cut in a shoulder-length bob fashion. “Jesus Christ, Sid. Are you following me now?” she asks. “Is that your new tactic?” She gains strength from her cloned disciples. Their necks bob and weave, their eyes agog, puffs of air pushed through pursed lips. It’s like a bad nature show, these three warning the others in the herd about me. “Well?” she asks.
I sip my coffee.
“Is the mud hole not working out anymore?” Her friends snicker and sneak glances at each other.
I add more creamer, watch the little white swirls lighten the entire cup to a paler shade of brown.
“What, are you mute now too?”
Yes, I am. I am mute now.
She hisses through her teeth. Something caustic builds inside her, the final alarm that will let everyone in hearing distance know to stay clear of me, the dangerous predator.
It comes like this: “Freak.”
It’s a whisper, but said with such clarity and conviction that it’s more effective than a screech monkey’s scream. She has caught the attention of everyone. I am a freak. A stalker freak, with something about a mud hole left undefined, which leaves room for dangerous thoughts in the public’s imagination.
The triple threat walks defiantly away. I close my eyes again, this time to reverse a slowly rising headache. Flashes of light relent beneath my lids in a quiet, staccato surge. When I open them, Candyce and her girls have rounded the corner into the main room. I look over to see if Jane witnessed this scene, but she is gone too. This makes me sad, like I’ve lost something else. Something important.
It’s to my great relief when I leave The Basement that Jane is outside on the sidewalk. I start to walk in the opposite direction so she won’t think I’m a stalker freak, and she coughs. I turn back, and she’s looking at me.
“Did you say something?” I ask.
She shakes her head.
“Sorry,” I say and turn away.
“You like to travel, huh?” she asks.
“I’m looking for someone,” I mumble, then turn around to look at her.
“I didn’t hear you.”
“Yes, I like to travel,” I say.
“Me too.”
We both nod at the sidewalk.
“You’ve been around?” she asks, motioning toward my postcards.
I have them clutched in my right hand like a child holds a balloon. I stuff them in my back pocket. “A few places. Different countries.”
“I’ve been to Dublin,” she says.
“Really? How did you like it?”
“It was rainy. But I loved it. Great people.”
More nodding.
“I’ve been to Barcelona,” I offer, but can’t think of anything to add.
“How was that?”
I look up at the sky to search for an answer. A jet plane flies just outside the proximity of its sound. “It was bright,” I say.
“I bet.”
“Look, those girls back there—”
She waves them off. “I know.”
“You know them?”
“I know their type,” she says, and wrinkles her nose.
Then she does this amazing thing. She smiles at me, real, simple. I try to smile back but I’m afraid it’s more like a wince.
We both study the ground again. Words come out of me that I don’t expect, and then she says words too, and then she writes something and hands me a piece of paper and I do the same, and she waves and walks away.
I look down at what she wrote: Melanie. My Jane is named Melanie.
And somehow we’ve exchanged phone numbers and I’m left standing on the sidewalk wondering what got me to this new place that only moments before was abject humiliation. I hold her number tightly between my finger and thumb like it’s a winning lottery ticket. But nobody knows I’ve won, and even I don’t know how much is in the jackpot, which makes me happy and nervous and thrilled and sad all at once.
chapter 56
I know there will be bruises on my waist the next day, she’s hanging on that tight. I don’t blame her. Speeding across cold water on a Jet Ski at fifty mph can be a little scary.
It’s a vivid, cold, amazing dream. “Lean into me!” I yell back at Melanie. We both cower down into the wind, creating one sleek aerodynamic unit, protecting ourselves from the icy sea spray as we bash through the waves. A sheet of water splashes over us. I keep my hand on the throttle. Another wave slides across our backs. Her grip around me is unyielding.
The night hides us as we speed up the coast, away from the bad people who follow. We can’t see them, but they’re close, bearing down on us, just outside our periphery. The continuous jarring against the waves is taking its toll. I wonder if we’ll make it.
Melanie says something into my back, a worried murmur. I feel it more than hear it. She can’t take the running anymore. She’s losing feeling, it’s too cold. Her grip loosens a bit, a weakening in her attachment to me, to this vehicle. All around us is the vast, surging ocean.
I back off the throttle. Only one thing to do. I turn the Jet Ski around and head straight back into the source of our turmoil. My heroine is startled but I can feel an uptick in her excitement. She too knows it’s the only way, and I’ve done the only thing that can be done. Melanie’s grip finds new strength, and I pull down on the gas once again. This time, I don’t even feel the cold of the water because we’re flying now, floating over the chop of the black waves, a storm cloud on its way to deliver a punishing release.
chapter 57
The Randomizer picks a number and I wait for someone to answer. I’m decked out in my plastic headset and hands-free microphone, staring through the cubicle wall ahead of me as I try to construct a face from some stranger’s floating voice. This someone will almost certainly be in their home, and I will be transported to their living room through their earpiece and into their ear, inside their head, my alien voice taking up space in their mind for a few choice moments. What an incredible opportunity. But all I’ve got to talk about is cruise ships and five-star hotels.
I daydream about a mile-long, touchless car wash, the kind that pulls your car along after you throw it in neutral. This automatic wonder has four cycles of soap and a quarter-mile drying track that leaves your car spotless. It’s twenty minutes of high-tech dirt eradication, a marvel of modern times. Space-age suds.
A distant voice in my ear wants to know who I am.
I steady my mic between forefinger and thumb. This is ground control, I say, and we’ve got another one ready to go on the Miracle Mile. Throw it into neutral and off you go. Imagine the serenity. Experience the bliss. This is no ordinary clean.
“I’d buy some if I knew what it was,” the voice says.
The Randomizer has made a connection. I know from the sound of her voice that she is five-foot-four, a waitress at the local mall. She smokes. She doesn’t condition her hair enough and doesn’t read much, but when she does it’s romance novels, and she’s not embarrassed to say so.
“Sorry ma’am, just trying to set the stage,” I say. “This is Sid from Wanderlust, and I have an exciting offer to tell you about.”
“Go on, Sid.” She sucks on a cigarette—a wet, dirty sound. “Tell me all about it. Tell me every naughty little detail.”
“When’s the last time you took a vacation?” I ask.
chapter 58
“What’s the big deal?” Natalie asks. “It’s a phone call. You make them all day long.”
I want to tell her that it’s not a big deal to her because she’s not the one making the phone call. This is not some memorized pitch. There’s nobody inside my ear coaching me on this one. I pace across the kitchen floor, my cell in the crook of my neck, and check the fridge again, as if there will be something new inside, on this, my third opening of the door. I’m also wondering why my cell phone connection only achieves crystal clarity when I’d rather not be talking on it.
“If you don’t want to go out with her, that’s fine,” she says.
“I do. I want to.”
“Good. Then call her.”
“I can’t.”
“You can’t?”
“I have some things I need to finish.”
“Oh,” she says, like she’s heard that one before.
“Maybe next week.”
“She gave you her number, right? Don’t keep her hanging or she’ll be history.”
It doesn’t feel like I’ve been ignoring her. Lately Melanie has been in my head in strange ways. She returns to my thoughts like a satellite in orbit. Her faint signal passes my ears, again and again, barely audible, but constant, reaching from somewhere out in deep spa
ce that might not even exist anymore, like a lost ancient wisdom spinning through the sky. I want this wisdom, but I fear losing it. Losing her. Losing something else.
“I do want to call her. Just not this week,” I say.
“Not this week?”
“Next week would be better.”
“What are you doing that’s so important you can’t call a girl?”
I slide the kitchen curtains open and peer into the backyard—the mud mouth of my homemade spa yawns dreamily up at the night sky. “Big project.”
Natalie sucks at her teeth, pushes air back through the gaps, in and out, louder and louder. This is the hideous sound she makes when she feels she’s being lied to but doesn’t have the energy to argue. “Well, call her when you’re not busy,” she says, “or let me know and I’ll call her. Just don’t leave her hanging, okay?”
“I won’t.”
“Say it.”
“What?”
“Promise you won’t leave her hanging.”
“I promise I won’t leave her hanging,” I say plainly, but feel panicked.
She sucks at her teeth again. “Well,” she says, “I’ll let you go. Have a good one.”
I hang up the phone and a pressure builds in my chest that feels like oversized shirts stuffed in a tiny closet. I take a deep breath and exhale slow and one of the shirts goes away. I walk out to the garage, and another shirt is gone. I grab a shovel, and with each step through the dewy grass of the backyard I feel lighter, clearer somehow, ready to move earth under the sparkle of the stars.
