Four New Messages

by Cohen, Joshua

  Though Naomi, unlike Mono, was said to have matured.

  She was to marry a man so incidental to even his own self let alone to this tale that his name shouldn’t be recorded—let’s have tact, let’s try for it.

  About two months before Mono’s exploits went viral Naomi’s mother called to announce the nuptials and guilt him into being there—New York—the tacky boathouse in Central Park.

  She jotted his address for a formal invitation, said, We’ll catch up at the ceremony.

  Mentioning, There’s a girl I’d like to introduce you to. She’s a nurse. She looks like A. Jolie.

  I’m excited, was all he could say.

  She said goodbye with: I called your father for your number. Don’t worry, the Poz is not invited.

  Poz being Armenian.

  Mono, who did not speak Armenian, knew it meant dickhead or equivalent.

  Imagine gripping the back fat of that nurselet for the slow dances or having to replay the act behind his meme fame for his smuttier uncles in the bathrooms between the entrée and dessert—Mono didn’t want to go, but he had to go: he’d already RSVP’d.

  Still he procrastinated, waited until the Friday before the event to ball his only suit into his backpack—the suit black crisp funereal, bought for his college interview—and drive out to find the drycleaner’s.

  He remembered a cleaner’s adjacent to a tanning salon or ye olde historic sandwich shoppe.

  Or else adjacent to both.

  He didn’t google, wished to locate by memory alone.

  An hour later returning, having stopped at a diner to park a reuben in his gut.

  His suit would be ready only on Sunday, they opened at noon. He’d have to crawl into the suit in the car on the way to the bus or the train.

  Out on the patio it’d become a clear summer night—not cloying anymore but breezy perfection—I couldn’t believe I had just a week of this left.

  The smoke of our cigarettes the only clouds of the moon—closing time.

  We were the only customers.

  I wanted to offer Mono to pick up his suit, send it to him—airmail? or boat rate?

  On me.

  We haven’t been in touch.

  Mono said:

  Squadcars surrounded his building. He knew they were idling for him. For dealing, for whatever Marjorie Feyner had done—he didn’t know Em was in a coma until resettled abroad, his second night insomniac in Paris when he’d checked that life online at a café.

  Circling back, circling the lot.

  His backpack was slung over the back of the passenger seat and inside the pack was his passport, which clinched it (the last codex, his last account, those durable blue covers).

  They could have his computer, have bed and bare walls. His password, his password for everything, was sdrawkcab (remember it “backwards”).

  He drove his mother’s car to Newark International, abandoned it in Parking. He wasn’t in any databases yet. A ticket would be sold.

  McDONALD’S

  I’d been writing a story, yet another shitblast of the hundreds I’ve begun only to crumple for ply (I’d never been blocked before, some blockage should’ve been good for me but), came to that part in the story and just—I just had to stop, it was ridiculous!

  I came to the point I knew would come, the point that kept coming, the point where I’d have to say what I didn’t want to say, to say what I couldn’t—what had no place in, forget my story, I told my father, What I’m talking about has no place in my life!

  What are you talking about? Dad asked and smiled retirement’s bridgework at being confronted by something as stunningly tedious as himself, probably—but himself fictionalized, as a fictional character—because I’m broke and so was wearing his clothing, also I have the beard he has because we both have weak chins. I’d come back to Jersey for the weekend to sleep without siren in my old ugly unrecognizable bedroom and fill up on homecooking.

  I said, I can’t say the Word.

  We were in the bedroom.

  He sat on a chair across from me on the bed and sipped from a wineglass and stared.

  I said, You’re trying to get me to say it.

  The walls were white scuffed with recent paint slashes: color swatches my parents were considering for the bedroom’s repainting, assorted pastels and other near neutrals very much not me. The bed and chair were not mine but new. My hutch desk was gone along with the shelving, the room was being converted into a guestroom but—as Mom had strained to say over the phone that early Friday—I would always be welcome.

  How can you tell me what happened without telling me what Word? Dad asked suddenly standing older and grayer and rounded goutish and taking his glass from the sill and tipsy but maybe his feet were asleep walked out of the room.

  After dinner Mom disappeared sinkward to rinse and call back a friend who’d called interrupting stroganoff, while Dad and I stayed seated as if extra table legs and he said, Let’s try this again, so I told him the story:

  I said, There’s this girl, we’ll start with her, I guess I have to describe her. She’s pretty? Dad asked, I said, I describe her as tawny (I wasn’t quite sure what that meant), with red hair dyed and two huge mouthsized eyes. She’s sexy? Dad asked and shot a look at Mom who was busy making a dietetic dessert sandwich of ear and phone and shoulder. I said, She’s like the girl next door to the girl next door, meaning she’s somewhat trashy but also covered entirely with blood, in the first scene she’s just bloody head to toe. Of course she is, Dad said (distracting himself with the bottle, he poured the last petit noir), but you can call the different sections of a book, scenes? I thought that term was just for the movies? I said, You can say scene about a book but if you say chapter about a film people will think you’re an asshole. Of course they would, Dad said then took a sip winking and by the time he’d replaced empty glass to tabletop the sink had stopped, the kitchen was empty and Mom was already upstairs, her laughter floating distantly and then disappeared, aerated into a higher hilarity—into the refrigerator’s hum, the run of the dishwasher, the clock’s compulsive perk.

  She’s in the backseat bouncing, I said, that’s the opening: her body bloodied with a knife sticking out of it in the backseat being bounced between her seatback and the backs of the seatbacks in front of her— Wait, Dad asked, what the hell? I said, If he’s not careful on the next large preggers bump her corpse could tumble to the floor, falling atop the filthy mats, atop the sloppy wads of mats, to wedge between her seat and his recline.

  His? Dad asked, I said, If he doesn’t slow down.

  It’s night? Dad asked, I said, Yes or virtually, the sun’s gone down, moon’s gone halved, how’d you know? her body’s rolling and thumping.

  What’s the night like? Dad asked, I said, It’s wet, the stoplights flash above like spotlights.

  It’s green, a bright go green, the car’s being driven fast.

  Slow down, Dad asked, who’s driving?

  Her boyfriend.

  Boyfriend?

  Driving southwest, I said, away from the towns he’d grown up in, toward the towns she’d grown up in, poorer to rich, criminal to just criminally tame—quarter tank to Empty, burning last gas, he’s wasting time, he’s stalling.

  Dad asked, What’s his name?

  Blood’s pooling in the seams of the seats, blood’s puddling and the radio’s off but he turns it down anyway, that’s a good detail that he can’t stand all that noise, he’s turning the volume down, down, lower down, all this one paragraph he’s just lowering the volume.

  Why’s he doing that? Dad asked, I said, It’s a circular motion like how you’re supposed to stab someone then diddle the wrist, tweaking the knob of the liver, the spleen.

  That’s a good detail? Dad asked.

  Neon sizzles past, neon sizzes, zisses? The windshield, in reflection, becomes signage. His throat burns, the boyfriend’s, “his hands are readied tense.”

  It’s when I wrote that line—beginning the story fro
m the middle, I realized—that I knew I was stalled too (my hands were readied, tense): knew that I couldn’t say the Word, knew that I couldn’t bring myself to care enough about this Word to write a story with it in it (anyway the Word was not a word, was actually less than a word, was meaningless, had no untainted derivation, had no true legacy or beauty, it was even less than its least letter, it was nothing, it was ruination).

  So I described things, I made things up and described them to my Dad: light and signs and the throats of boyfriends, frisking my face in my sleep with a thumbnail that left wounds, smoking quit cigarettes and drinking nightly a half bottle gluglug of whiskey, waking up late so getting to work late where I’d spend Midwestern quantities of time on the internet pursuing this one particular commenter I thought common to a spate of local sports blogs but under twelve different, differently gendered aliases and product recall news especially when it concerned the domestic automotive industry and searching search engines for “whats wrong with my story?” coming back from work still worrying the story and hating the story and thinking that introducing this Word into the story would be like introducing Mom who really wants grandchildren to a girlfriend who’s really a man, it’d be like inviting friends over to my apartment for dinner then serving them individual portions of my feces garnished with poems about how much I hate friends and the poetry would rhyme.

  It’d be wrong to bring this Word into my story and so into my life, not interesting in the way that foreigners tend to enliven a host country with their cuisine and dress, religiosociocultural traditions and languages, but in fact evil and destructive, The boyfriend’s foreign? Dad asked, I’m trying to tell you the story by not telling you the story, I said, you should be aware that this is what writers regularly do, This is America? Dad asked—To recap, I said, he’s driving because her corpse is in the backseat and her corpse is in the backseat because he killed her.

  The boyfriend might be, I said, he originally was or should’ve been, I said, heading over to her house, in through the front door then up the stairs to search through her bedroom’s drawers for the ring he’d bought her, the ring she’d accepted and that the moment she’d accepted he’d wanted back, not the ring but the money it represented, the overtime it represented, What does he do for a living? Dad asked, But he can’t just butt into her house unannounced pushing past her family because she lives with her family now heading upstairs to go through her bedroom’s drawer, I said, construction, he works construction, What kind of construction? Dad asked, He killed her with his switchblade, I said, which he keeps in a jacket pocket.

  He stabs her with a switch just to get a ring back? Dad asked, But that’s where the quandary squats, I said: He’s been driving around for an hour, driving around for hours with the corpse in the back thinking to himself what to do what to say, should he ditch the body and where or bring it with him indoors while early evening remains, smashing into her house at what could conceivably still be dinnertime with the nice dishes out, the whole bird starched for the carving, the veggie sides to the side, no flowers but flower motif vase (narcissus), (snuffed zircon-encrusted) candlesticks without candles—to innocent and gentle with grace lay her body like a fine polish atop the diningroom table, to force her father to cover her body with a tablecloth “as if a bridal gown,” the detail, the cloth “lawned in dewsmoothed white,” the poetic description, or else he could, he thinks again another alternative, leave the body in the car, go inside the house alone and without explaining anything not to the victims neither to the reader slaughter everyone inside because her family—father, mother, four grandparents like a full set of heirloom silver—would be the only people who’d miss her if she went missing, What’s her name? Dad asked, what’s his? I said, And to die is to go missing profoundly, When and where’s this set? Dad asked, what kind of car’s he driving? Or maybe it’d be better to narrate this chronologically, I said, Dad asked, Chronology means you’re finally going to tell me what happened?

  Ray, I want to call him, or Ronald, I said—though other options are Mac, Dick, Donnie/Donny, Smith/Smyth(e), Luke, and John—but she I’m convinced is a Patty because there’s something in her face like an underdone hamburger patty, like its waxed plastic wrapping, or a mess of wet napkins smeared with makeup sampled from a mortuary for clowns, I thought you said she looked good? Dad asked, She has a hot body, I said, a hot little body, a hot tight little body but the clownface is unfortunate, kind of greasily melting and the car is a Ford, What model Ford? Dad asked, A white Ford, I said, a white Ford Escort, I said, I don’t know why I have such an easy time saying Ford but I do, it’s simple to say and so obvious to say the car was a Ford and it was, maybe a Ford Fiesta in red, in yellow, in a color like Autumn if Autumn’s a color—do Fords come in Autumn? is it redundant to speak of an Autumnal Ford? Dad (who might, as I write this, be performing his nightly check that the garage door is locked) asked, Why would you have trouble saying Ford?

  Mac, Dick, Mick, Ray Ronald, or let’s stay with Ronald Ray, I said, who’s driving this—no forget I said Ford, it just sounded reliable, authentic or verisimilar, a moment ago but now it sounds shitty.

  I’m not following you, Dad asked, what’s so shitty about Ford?

  Me, I said, past tense:

  Ronald Ray left the house he and Patty shared, the house they used to share until last week’s fight over when and where to hold the wedding—Patty was always fighting for later and splurgier—caused him to hurl a boot at her: him awhirl in a single sock, kicking her out of the house—with an eye that would bruise orificially black, a parturient bust lip—her calling her parents from a payphone two corners down to come collect her but not letting them call the police. The house was a rancher, the rancher didn’t have a driveway, Ronald Ray kept the car out front, he walked to the car, there was a busstop out front and the car kept getting nicked by the bus, the bank owned the car, the bank owned the house, he leased both from the bank, the bank owned the block, This isn’t the city? Dad asked, He didn’t have any work that day, I said, he had the day off because there weren’t any construction jobs because no one was building anything because no one had any money and the banks weren’t giving loans, Even though the tense you’re using is past, Dad asked, are we still talking about the present? He got into the car and drove into town from their suburb, I said, and while nondescript is itself a description that’s how it’ll be described initially, just by the way it’s written it should be obvious that there is no town, that this town is rather all suburb, that there’s no middle, no coagulant center and that the more Ronald Ray drove he never got any farther from the house just more involved in the grid, more involuted and lost and it seemed like hours though it was only minutes, it seemed like an entire afternoon though it was at most half an hour until he pulled up in front of a diner, A diner? Dad asked, Ronald Ray idled there, I said, watching through the plateglass printed with greedy full palms of fondle his girlfriend or fiancée or, screw it, wife enough Patty finishing her shift and just when the news blared he turned the radio off, looked up from the dial and there was the climax of the story.

  The climax? Dad asked, I said, It all has to be in the mood or tone if there’s anything distinguishing mood from tone or in the way that waitressing Patty leaned like a wiperag hanging from the window’s backpocket—leaned across the counter to swipe herself out for the day and her manager, that’s how he’s characterized, “her manager,” rushed over and pinched her but she straightened out and smacked his hand from pinching again and went to walk out the door to stand at the busstop and this, this harassment, was daily, Whose harassment? Dad asked, did her murderer pick her up usually? He pulled around the block to pull up alongside her at the leafpiled curb and that shocked her, I said, she didn’t know what to do or say but acted like he hadn’t just witnessed what happened, maybe he’d missed it or would forget that he hadn’t with the sunglasses over twelve stitches smile she gave as she opened the door and got in, but as soon as she was seated and had shut the do
or she knew that he’d seen it because he leaned over the stickshift to kiss her, which is something he never did, that not being the kind of thing this character would do, Why not? Dad asked, what’s he scared of? But this kiss—“this pinch of lips” “this stitch of kiss”—was only a diversion, I said, because with one hand on the wheel he stabbed her, stabbed her with his switch and she screeched and overtop the casualty of her screech the tires smoked as he shifted to streak away, straightened the car and pulled his knife out of her then her body toward him to toss over the median stick into the backseat where she rolled and thumped, the knife he dropped to the floor unwashed white, washed in red with the knife kept inside her body thumping and rolling around the backseat slicing the wound open wider to pour its packet of ketchup—“that condiment the color of love,” And he did this why? Dad asked, I can’t understand his motivation, I said, If I wanted to have a body thumping in the backseat of a car, the car had to be in motion and the body had to be dead, and if I wanted the body to be dead, Patty had to be killed, So you began this whole thing just to have a body bumping around? Dad asked, Like the secondhand of a clock, I said, the sweeperhand if you want to get poetic about it, like the Atlantic lapping against a jetty or your testicles slapping up against a woman’s own backseat as you rut at her sexually from behind, Do you always just write from or toward one idea? Dad asked, and is that one idea always so fucking moronic? But the idea was for the body’s bump to symbolize time, I said, and while the sound is time ticking the image isn’t so much the dead body as it is the car driving around with the dead body inside, rolling and thumping and thumping and rolling, So you have all that to what end? Dad asked, I said, That’s probably when the monologue comes in, when Ronald Ray whose name makes him sound like a multiple killer already and who certainly looks like a killer with his bleared face but whetsharp nose tries to figure out what to do in first person, not just what to do with the body like should I chop it up somewhere abandoned and into what amounts but also what to do in the aftermath, how to feel, crank the tears, check under the hood for a heart or soul, consternation Ronald Ray—this is the junction in the story where I/he make(s) plans and alibis, complots turned conspiracies for the authorities and surviving fam, Like what? Dad asked, Like I was going to pick her up at the diner and she saw me and was running to me across the street waving when she was hit by a car, a van or truck that said across the side of its haul Someone’s Grocery, like I just showed up to pick her up and was waiting for her running to me waving when a man came around the corner he was Afric I think to sink like this knife into her incalculable times until she expired there in my arms dragging her into my car, which is why I didn’t call an ambulance, But does she have to die? Dad asked, does she have to die so terribly? But death on the page is just a typo, I said: You can’t say for example, She is dead—“she” no longer is. You can’t say for example, She was dead—death itself, a condition coterminous with eternity, renders the past tense inaccurate. But what does it mean that death is just some sort of mistake? Dad asked, some only known to writers language error? But there is no Dad, there never was any Dad, my own father would never ask such questions, my own father would never have had the patience to listen to me talk about literature let alone about my own literature or murder and sex in some ineptly imagined Midwestern state though I think that unlike the afterdinner drunk sextalk about rear entry testicular thwacking, which would’ve offended him, the violence would’ve only made him uncomfortable (Are you sure his car’s a manual transmission? is something he might ask, however, Why not just make it an automatic and not have to deal with the shifting, the shifts?), just as certain other things unsettle me, certain things and times and places, the here and now and certain Words.