The Normals

by David Gilbert

  "You look like a sack filled with hungry rats," Yul Gertner told him.

  "Fuck you," Stew said. "It's awesome and you know it."

  "Do you have an asshole tattooed on your ass?"

  "No, I have your momma's face down there."

  "Thanks, she's dead."

  The animal within Stew sagged. "Seriously?"

  "Seriously."

  "Oh."

  Then Frank Gershin spoke up, Frank who always wears a long-sleeve turtleneck under his green jersey and normally sits like a quiet observer from a more civilized land. His eyes have seen things, they insist. "Tattoos, pierces, brands," he proclaimed, "are for everyone and their mothers nowadays. Nothing there but a bandwagon of ink and studs and spikes. I hate them all. All the modern primitives, the body manipulators desperate for outrage. It's a tired empty trend. You might as well be cattle with a brand from the circle jerk ranch." Stew Slocum crossed his arms as if the beast had burst through his rib cage and there, snuggled in his hands, was a kitten.

  "You wanna see something real?" Frank Gershin asked. "Something that isn't badass but true?" He stood up and removed his green jersey, folding it neatly, then did the same with his turtleneck. Nobody cared about an emergency caesarean anymore. Frank Gershin's torso was punctuated in scars, not scars like apostrophes and hyphens, but scars like angry globular periods from an epic pen. Deep and circular, they covered his body, the healed-over tissue devoid of personality, as if pores had released blisters of magma brewing below the surface. Frank raised his arms, turned around. His backside held similar grammar.

  "What the hell is that?" Yul Gertner said.

  "Gunshots."

  "Were you in a war or something?" Billy asked.

  "Nah, all of these were done on purpose," Frank told them. "Except this one." He pointed to his left pec where a meaty scar was puckered in a brutal kiss. The wound was even nastier on the other side, like a rose, a pink American Beauty with its bloom spent. "This one is the first one I got. My younger brother gave it to me. A hunting accident. He got overeager and confused me for a deer. I think it hurt him more than it hurt me, the way he cried."

  "That's quite an accident," Billy said.

  "Yeah," Frank replied, rubbing the wound like a worry bead. "But the rest were done on purpose."

  "That's sick," Stew said.

  "That's right that's sick," Frank said.

  "How do you get shot on purpose?" Billy asked, leaning forward, wanting to touch this human Braille and perhaps read the pain.

  "I know this guy in New York who specializes in trauma. Found him on the Internet a couple of years ago when I was fooling around with sites about gunshot wounds and came across this link, which led to another link, and then a chat room, and finally a warehouse in the outskirts of Queens. It's this guy's studio. He's South African, was a medic in some mercenary unit. He's a whiz with trajectories and ballistics. Hand loads all his own ammo."

  "Trauma?" Stew asked.

  "Yeah."

  "Like really being shot?"

  "Yeah, but my traumatist runs a very professional operation. He dopes you, shoots you, stabilizes you, treats you, and if you need further care, dumps you in a hospital. He has an EMT unit on his payroll. All his wounds are very clean, and he can give you whatever you want."

  "Is this like the latest rage?" Billy asked.

  "I hope not," Frank said. "But there are its enthusiasts. The first night I met him he was about to do a Joan of Arc on this Goth heretic nut. I show up and do all the secret password stuff and the warehouse door slams open and there he is, a fist of a man, head like knuckles. All he's wearing is a red Speedo and a pair of flip-flops. His accent is like the Nazis conquered England, and he takes me around his studio, which is part firing range, part hospital, and totally soundproof. As he's doing this, Ms. Joan Wannabe is getting her legs and thighs painted by an assistant who uses some special flammable gel that burns at a low but disfiguring heat. She's naked except for a bulky flame-retardant bra and panties. Very freaky. The South African sits me down and shows me his trauma portfolio. It's filled with photographs of low-caliber wounds that cost in the low thousand-dollar range, depending on placement. Arms and legs are cheaper than torsos, he tells me. He explains the difference in caliber and jacket, the signature impacts of specific ordinances, a three-fifty-seven magnum versus a thirty-eight special. He gives me a lecture on Baretta, Colt, Luger, Ruger, Webley-Scott, Martini-Henry, Mossberg, and Snider, which is his favorite, because it's obscure and leaves the sweetest sort of exit wound. This guy knows his stuff. He tells me about the popularity of historical trauma, an Al Capone, an Andy Warhol, a Bonnie and Clyde—for couples only—a Dillinger, a Jesus Christ. And, of course, the Joan of Arc.

  "We tour his small burn unit, small surgical theater, small recovery area. All this adds to the cost, but real hospitals would ruin the work and plastic surgeons he considers the worst kind of art restorers. He mentions the chance of death but explains how a single death would put him out of business so he's anything but reckless. All the while he's talking, Ms. Joan Wannabe is pointing to the areas of her upper body that she wants burned. She sees me staring and she smiles and tells me this traumatist is an artist. He goes through his more exotic menu. Bow and arrows for the cowboy, Glocks for the hip-hopster, a Tupac is mentioned, a Biggie Smalls, and for the connoisseur, he has access to a world-class gun collector who has museum-quality munitions that he's willing to loan. You can get shot with a flintlock, a harquebus, a Kentucky, a tommy, a Henry, an Enfield, a Springfield, a Krupp, a Remington. He even has the pistol that killed President McKinley in 1901 and one of the machine guns that got Sadat. The only condition is the collector gets to watch, kind of gets him off, the traumatist tells me. This is crazy, I'm thinking, and I'm ready to bolt. The traumatist goes over and injects morphine into Joan, and she's lifted a few feet off the ground by wires and pulleys, her arms forced upwards. A ladder is brought over. He tells me in no way will he do fabrications of faux cancer surgeries or amputations or eye removals for the sake of a conversation piece. Like that's what I'm thinking. He has standards, he says. All of his work is the result of real injury. He inspects the prep work of his assistant and adds a few more brush strokes. Now I'm ready to leave before anything happens, but Joan, she's hanging there and I'm stuck on her eyes. Two assistants come over with fire extinguishers. The traumatist checks his watch. Joan is shivering. And I'm like, leave. But her eyes. Every second pounds from her eyes, like a hammer working metal into a bowl that will soon be filled with something precious. Sorry. But it was something, the flame, the smell, those eyes staring like they're giving you a gift. I've been hooked ever since. I'm wearing about sixty thousand dollars worth of trauma, but you get to the point where you want every inch covered."

  "I don't think so," Yul Gertner said.

  Frank Gershin slipped back on his turtleneck under the screams of a soon-to-be teenage mother, the doctor telling her not to push, not yet. "You get shot and you know something has happened to you, something that will stay with you a thousand feet per second. I felt it when my brother shot me and I feel it now. This is real stuff, boys. No matter how well prepared, the fact is, you've been hit and you're bleeding and you're hurting and there's always someone on the other end."

  Billy lies in bed, near asleep, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations splayed on his chest like hands performing CPR, pumping compressions of Shakespeare and Milton and whatever else might revive him. His skin has never felt so bare. And as he fades into a nap, an image appears, not of Frank Gershin and his scars, but of Frank Gershin's brother, little Bob or Jack or Tim, walking the woods with his older brother, excited by the prospect of a deer. And maybe, in the buckless boredom, little Jessie or Fred put his brother in the scope, just fooling around, lined up his older brother in the crosshairs. Fingers slip, Billy thinks. Muscles jerk. Voices scream a second too late but they can echo forever.

  26

  BILLY IS roused from sleep by Roger Coop, eternal keeper
of the phone, a Tantalus condemned to reach for a call that never comes. "You've got a fucking phone call," he tells Billy.

  "Me?"

  "Unless there's another Schine around here."

  "Do you know who it is?"

  "Do I look like your secretary?"

  "Could you ask who's calling?"

  "No fucking way."

  "Okay, is the voice male or female?"

  "This isn't twenty questions. Answer the phone or I'll hang up."

  "No, yeah, okay."

  Billy rolls out of bed and into the hallway where the receiver hangs down like an unwritten form of pay phone misdemeanor. Ragnar skids his stomach, Ragnar skip-tracing his ass to Albany. Or maybe Sally asking what she should do about all of his books, Sally slightly recovered. Billy stares at the phone's black pendulum, still holding Roger Coop's bitter displacement. He picks it up, hears heavy breathing and background chatter and a few violent coughs. Ragnar, he thinks, definitely Ragnar.

  "Anybody there?" comes over the line.

  It isn't Ragnar. It's something worse.

  "Abe?" Billy says.

  "Billy?" Abe says.

  "Yes, Abe."

  "Billy, is that you?"

  "Yes, Abe, it's me."

  "It's your father calling."

  "I know."

  "Where are you, Billy?"

  "How did you get this number?"

  "I called you not long ago and your lady friend gave me this number."

  Billy curses caller ID. He thinks of Sally's cool revenge as she constructs a dozen book boxes.

  "I got a shipment of stuff from you," Abe says.

  "I moved," Billy says.

  "I thought for a moment you were coming home. I thought I would come home one day from visiting Doris and find you, waiting for me, but it was always just the boxes. I started wondering if something was wrong, if these were personal effects. That and the flowers you sent. I started thinking, so I called."

  "Were the flowers nice?" Billy asks of Ragnar's floral threat.

  "Sure, lilies. Very nice."

  Billy wishes he knew what lilies looked like. "What'd the note say?"

  "Thinking of you or something like that. Always in my mind. Can't really remember."

  Behind Abe, voices chatter, disrupted by the occasional announcement over a loudspeaker.

  "Where are you calling from?" Billy asks.

  "An airport bar," Abe says.

  "You going somewhere?"

  "Me? No. Not me. But there's a Marriott not far from Whispering Pines and it has a free shuttle to and from the airport."

  "Oh."

  "I come here after a visit when I'm in no mood to go home. All those bus transfers. Too much. So I come here and walk around and sit and read and watch the news. Sometimes I sleep. Sometimes I spend the night like my flight's been canceled and I'm stuck here, that way I can get back to Doris first thing in the morning without two hours of commute. It's not a bad place to be, plenty of bathrooms, water fountains with good cold water, bookstores, food courts. It's one of the few places where a man can still get a shoeshine. The people, they assume you're like them and you're traveling and you're just waiting for your plane. It's not a bad place for an old man."

  It sounds too depressing for words, and while Billy almost serves his father a thick slice of mockery ("I hear Charles de Gaulle is beautiful this time of year") he relents, knowing (a) the effect would be lost on him, (b) the idea of his father pleasantly wandering around the Cincinnati airport trounces any humor, and (c) he could hear himself in his father's words. It's one thing to see yourself in your father's face, the same eyes, the same chin, but it's another thing to hear yourself in your father's words, in gestures and phrases, in those small recognizable ways that dislodge you from the inside. Instead, Billy says, "You're not old."

  "I'm old enough."

  "You should come to New York. We can spend the day at JFK." Billy is half-serious. "Come for the weekend and we'll hit Newark and LaGuardia as well."

  "I knew JFK when it was Idlewild," Abe tells him. "There wasn't a better name for an airport. Shame about the man but too bad we had to lose Idlewild as well."

  "You all right, Abe?"

  "That's why I'm calling you."

  "How's Doris?"

  "She'll outlive me."

  "What'd you mean?"

  "I mean she's stronger than I am. Always has been. I fear the time when I'm no longer here for her and that kills me, her being alone, untended to."

  Billy catches laughter, odd, almost mechanical laughter somewhere near his father. A tattered parrot could be perched on Abe's shoulder, the original owner having died years ago and all that remains are recycled expressions of affection. "What the hell was that?" Billy asks.

  "What?"

  "You didn't hear that?"

  "What?"

  "That laughter."

  "That's the gentleman on the bar stool next to mine. But he's not real. He's a robot who sits here and tells jokes with his other robot friend. Not robots, animatronics is what the bartender says. They're the regulars here. They sit together and tease each other and pretend to drink beer. People seem to find them funny. After every hour they repeat their routine. I know all their jokes by now, as does the bartender. He says it's part of the theme of this place and one day soon he's going to crack a bottle over their heads and give them the bum's rush even if they're worth a fortune in electronics."

  "I think it's based on a TV show."

  "I think that's right."

  "And what're you calling from, a cell phone or something?"

  "I got one so Doris can always be in touch, not that she calls, that part of her is gone, but she still answers the phone, that part is still intact, the answering part. I call her when I'm on the bus on my way home. I talk to her and I know she's listening because I can hear her breathing."

  For some reason the fact that his father has a cell phone depresses Billy.

  "You know what I was thinking, Billy?"

  "What's that, Abe?"

  "I was thinking you should go to Forty-seventh Street and visit the family store. You should storm in and tell them who you are, the offspring of Abraham Schine and Doris McMinn. That would be something. Kick open the doors—no walk in quietly, yes quietly, with dignity, and stare down all those Schines and Sappersteins and curse their hard hearts. Find my brothers and tell them how happy I am, how glad I am I barely escaped their clutches, how I lived for love and they lived for something much harsher and look at them now. I'm sure they look awful. Oh yes, you really should. Today. Or tomorrow. But soon. I can imagine their faces. They might take great pride in their handshakes but they have no honor. Tell them that exactly. That their idea of family is as bad as what we barely survived. I'm sure we're a Wanted poster in their minds. Tell them you went to Harvard and maybe dress like you're a big success and could buy the store because I bet their sons are working the counters and hustling estates, waiting for the grande dames to keel. Offer them an outlandish sum. Oh yes, you must."

  Billy hears the laughter again, though explained, no less creepy. He considers telling his father that he already visited the store (Schine Brothers Gems in shimmering rhinestone) a few years back. He went in on the sly and posed as a boyfriend looking to become afiance and told the black gabardine behind the counter he was willing to spend twenty grand on an engagement ring. Perhaps the salesman was a relative, bearded and bespectacled but with a surprising sense of humor that contradicted his appearance, as if his warmth came from someplace ancient. He brought forth his merchandise and said, "Some lovely tombstones for the bachelor." He explained the varieties of cut and setting, using his pinky as pointer, then he called over a raven-haired beauty, Sasha her name, who possessed a glorious left hand and an intriguing Russian accent. She slipped on the rings and presented her paw as if ready for a waltz. "I like the baguettes on this one," she purred. Billy agreed, as did the relative Schine who eyed Sasha up and down and teased, "Sometimes I think you weren
't our wisest hire for men seeking wives." She greeted this with a blazing bit of smile. Around the counter came another salesman, another possible Schine, but younger, with payos instead of a full-grown beard. He edged by the first salesman, affectionately bumping his shoulders and saying, "Is Sasha ruining another engagement?" Billy played along, Sasha as well, with easy nonbinding flirtation. The older salesman joined in and muttered, "If you want her you'll need a minimum of four carats." Billy was tempted to give himself up, in the company of these men and this pretend bride, reveal himself as the son of Abe, quietly whisper the truth—lam Billy Schine—and leave these black coats less villainous. Instead he told the salesman, "I'm going to have to think about it." The salesman, disappointed, gave him his card—Lev Halevy, sales associate. "I know we can find you something, so call me when its' time." That was that. Outside, Billy stood in front of the store and hated himself for saying nothing of consequence, his heart pounding with ridiculous adrenaline, his feet stutter-stepping with notions of going back inside before finally giving up.

  "Billy?"

  "Yes, Abe."

  "Where are you?"

  "I have to go," Billy says, spotting Roger Coop down the hall.

  "I'm glad you called," Abe says.

  "You called me."

  "The flowers, they were nice. You should know, I'm terribly alone.