by Max Winter
“I’m a ghost,” I said, thinking about it. “And I’m a ghost.”
“You—you can’t be here. This is a mall.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means you’re trespassing,” he said, shaking his flashlight beam all around the room, at the table and the hot plate and the bedrolls, all the time feeling around his hip for something that wasn’t there. A gun? I’m not sure he had ever worn a gun. “Jesus,” he said. “How many of there are you?”
“Can’t you see?”
“I see you.”
“There’s more. There’s two of us.”
“I’m going to call this in,” he said, fumbling for his walkie-talkie. “There will be backup. Police.”
“You don’t need to do this,” I said.
“You are breaking the law just being here.”
“You are choosing to do this. This is a choice you are doing.”
“This is my job.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m calling it in.”
So I got up, put the mixing bowl down on the couch, and walked toward the door.
“You’re not going anywhere,” he said, trying to block me in.
But I kept walking toward him. When I got close enough, I hugged him and hugged him over to one side and said into his ear, which smelled like an ear, “You are not a job.” I said it twice, maybe three times, at which point he stopped struggling and I let him go. I walked through the door, moving neither quickly nor slowly down the hallway. My back felt giant, tight. He didn’t come after me. He did call it in, but by the time the cars pulled up, I was walking along the Woonasquatucket in the dark and keeping an eye out for wild animals, which are everywhere if you look for them, like marbles and buttons. I find buttons all the time. My pockets rattle.
Pete-Peter moved in with his girlfriend, who looks exactly like him, only smaller and prettier and a little sadder, maybe. Sleepy put Manchild back together and hit the road for gas money and performance-space meals and floors to sleep on. And at some point Pete-Peter had started hanging out with the new kids.
I figured I could crash at what was now just Alix’s for a while. She had room. So I biked over to Carpenter on my tandem, which I kept chained to the guardrail underneath some brush at the far end of Harris. I took the long way around to avoid hills. The bike listed from side to side while I pedaled, as heavy as a length of scaffold. I wobbled down streets and weaved around corners.
When I got to what had been their place, I knocked and knocked, but there was no answer. The blinds were all down. I knocked again. I knocked and I knocked and knocked some more.
I’m pretty good at breaking into houses on account of being a latchkey kid who lost his keys a lot. But I figured I’d just rest a bit and wait. I sat down on the stoop and leaned against the door until it opened up behind me and I fell into a big pile of mail: junk mostly—circulars and rental center coupons—but also some bills. Two, three weeks of mail, at least. It wasn’t like either of them to leave their door unlocked, so I got up and walked up the stairs and into the apartment, calling her name and Rob’s name, just to be sure, and eventually alternating between them, with a pause that got longer, then shorter. Then I realized what I was doing and stopped and just poked around. They didn’t own much, and Rob had left most of his birds and things back at Eagle Square. There was their shitty furniture. Rob’s books and what was left of his records. Some condiments in the kitchen. The refrigerator door was open, and the lights didn’t work. But something stank, literally. And not in the kitchen. I followed the smell.
What Alix had begun cultivating a couple years back wasn’t really a mushroom—it was a bacterial colony—but that’s what she called the gray, waxy-looking thing now living in a rag-covered dish beside the radiator. Thinking mostly about getting rid of the smell, I grabbed the mushroom and carried it out with me, making sure to lock the door.
The night was quiet and damp. Waves of streetlight-lit mist rose up out of the gutters and through grates. I lowered the mushroom dish into the milk box welded to the front of the tandem and swaddled it with my sweatshirt to secure it. Every time I hit a pothole, the milk box lid jumped, releasing sour fumes. As I turned onto Broadway, the lid yawned open long enough to make me cough vomit. I spat and headed southeast toward the bike path. With the tandem, I figured I’d be better off biking through the night.
Once I got to Jamestown, the sky was dishwatery, and I realized I had no way of contacting Rob because of course there was no phone. But there the house on the rock was, and there he was, maybe. I jumped up and down on the beach a little, yelling and trying to get his attention, but that didn’t work. It was close, the rock, but not close enough. I scoured the banks for something louder than my voice and, like a miracle, found a barnacled length of PVC pipe. I put my lips to one end and fucking laid into it. I blew like I was calling up ghosts. I blew and blew till my head went white and I had no breath left in any part of my body, not even my feet. At some point the beach turned white also, then shrank and took a swing at me, so I sat down on a rock until the color came back. Then I ditched the tandem in some bushes and grabbed the mushroom, sloshing and oozing and oddly hot inside its milk-glass pot, and carried it over to the dock, where I saw a guy who’d already been having a conversation with me for who knows how long. “And this man who lived in the room before me,” he said pointing over my shoulder in the direction of something, “was Buckminster Fuller!”
“Listen,” I said. “Can you give me a ride out to that house.”
“Where’s the safest place to be in a storm?”
“Where?” I asked.
“The open ocean!”
“No shit?”
“Climb in,” he said. He handed me a thermos. “Have some coffee.”
In the boat, over the outboard’s whine, I drank hot black coffee while he talked to me about putting schools on ocean liners to ride out storms and other natural disasters, and about putting ecosystems in floating domes. His teeth moved while he talked, but his eyes were as bright as the latest state quarters. “What do kids like?” he said. And before I could answer, he went, “Athletics! So the first thing I do is, I walk in and say, ‘Quick show of hands: Who here would like to swim five miles to school?’”
“I bet they would like that a lot,” I said, the house getting closer. I took one last swig of coffee, chewed on the grounds, spat them out.
“It’s the hundred-mile zoo,” he said.
“There would be animals?”
“Exotic animals! And in their natural habitats. Endangered ones. Kids would swim to school through the glassed-in canals and look at them.”
I told him that sounded pretty fucking incredible.
“This is good. You’re giving me ideas,” he said, easing the throttle and making a vaguely circular gesture with his free hand.
I told him the feeling was mutual, and before we knew it, we were there. He tied up the boat and he waited for me, even though I didn’t ask him to. I carefully carried the mushroom up the rocks, spilling half its dew on me. I set the pot down and tore off my shirt. Steam rose from my flesh. I balled the shirt and stuffed it in my back pocket. I picked the pot back up and headed toward the house, where I banged on the cellar door—the only way in, far as I could see. I waited. The dude in the boat squinted. He was talking to the sun. There was no answer. I banged again. I tried the knob, but it was locked. I shouted, “Rob! Rob! Rob!”
I looked up at the house’s second story and set the pot down, again. I grabbed hold of a stone column and scaled it onto the front porch. I looked for an open window, but found none. I wrapped my fist in the sweatshirt, smashed the cheapest-looking window, and climbed through it. I cupped my junk and carefully hooked my leg over the jagged glass stalagmites.
The house was like something that had slowly and naturally grown atop the rock: a coral reef or a mussel cluster. Many Robs could’ve lived in it. A colony. I called Rob
’s name, and it echoed throughout the house. I opened doors and looked in, but all the rooms were empty. I looked in each one and called Rob’s name. I looked out of every window. You could see out in every direction. You could see the sea or the bridge or the town, still asleep. On the top floor there was a big window over the bed, and the glass was missing—just gone. I blinked at the wind that rushed through. Down below, the guy in the boat was just sitting there, talking. The sun rose behind the clouds. “Hey,” I yelled down, “can you take me back?”
“We need to find my friend’s glasses,” he yelled. “We’ve got to check the dump!”
“Okay,” I yelled back. “I’ll help you find them.” I took one last look around, but there was nothing other than one room that looked out only onto the water and smelled like Rob when he wasn’t doing well. I looked for blood or burns, but didn’t see any. I stood in the middle of the house with my hands on my hips and looked around. I made a slow circle.
“My friend can’t see without them!” the guy yelled.
Coffee sloshed in my guts and up near my heart. Rob would be back, I told myself. I shut my eyes, saw his thumb hooked over the rim of a diner mug and into the hot, wet black. There was nothing more I could do, and I wanted to be there for whoever needed me. I gripped the sill, brought my leg over the broken window glass. The guy’s swears were getting louder. “Listen,” I shouted. “I’m here to help!”
(. . . . . .)
A diner-shaped hole: These absent landmarks must vex out-of-towners hoping to follow a local’s directions. (“Take a left where Custy’s used to be,” we tell them. Or “It’s just past the old milk store, on the right.”) But it would be awfully small of them not to see how a memory might remain more real than whatever took its place.
. . . the new kids: Meaning the new Browns and RISDs: reinforcements for the Occupying Forces. They parade through Providence, taking whatever’s left from our gutted thrift shops and Salvation Armies before moving on to Brooklyn or San Francisco so they can begin their lives for real, while the whole time we locals watch, waiting, aging. But they stay young. They get younger every year.*
*I’ve watched this four-year cycle turn over six times now. Back when I went to college, they all wore mid-’60s Mod and Nouvelle Vague: skinny ties, anoraks, and raincoats for guys, and girls in toreador pants. By Eli’s senior year they’d moved on to ’70s bells and stripey hip-huggers and too-tight double knits with collars as wide as gull wings. And now they’ve reclaimed the mid-’80s mainstream: Members Onlys and the same high-waisted acid-wash jeans and top-of-the-food-chain iron-on sweatshirts—lions or wolves in their natural habitats—that bottom-of-the-sex-chain student security volunteers used to wear without irony in high school.* I figure it can’t be all that long before RISD kids start dressing in baggy jeans and triple-XL aqua tees. But sooner or later the past will catch up to all of us, and things will start going backward for real.
*It might interest you to know that up until now, I have only once managed to bully someone other than myself. The child in question was a pampered ten-year-old Venezuelan named Shimon Vainrub. I was eighteen at the time, working as a junior counselor at the same sleepaway camp in Athol, Massachusetts, where I, too, had spent a particularly unhappy prepubescent summer.* Young Shimon was assigned to my cabin, along with all the other homesick foreigners, bed wetters, and milksops. Shimon—then heir to a vast oil fortune recently wrested from his family by Chavez—had little interest in mess hall meals as he regularly received care packages of gummy colas, chocolate stars, and gas-station arepas. So I took to quizzing him:
Me: What did we have for lunch, Shimon?
Shimon: Ehh . . . meat.
Me: What kind of meat?
Shimon: Ehhhhh . . . cheese.
I would then take away his Condorito funny books and make him wear a box over his head and repeat “I am a rotten person” for the remainder of postcard hour. Mala-leche, Shimon used to hiss at me when he thought I was asleep. Mala-leche. Mala-leche. Mala-leche.
*I had arrived at Camp Miskatonic* only to discover that the rocketry and archery for which I had signed up in advance had both been canceled. During counselor-training week, the Welsh demolitions enthusiast hired to run both courses had been fired for putting alum into the CIT coordinator’s lube. I cried myself to sleep every night and woke up adhered to the plastic mattress. Having already seen more than my share of prison movies, I quickly sought the one camper even less well liked than myself, finding him in the quiet, linty person of Jeremiah Katz-Polk. While waiting behind him on chow line, I told Polk he stunk and was a jerk and a homo, whereupon he spun around and punched me twice in the heart. I then went seven days without showering or moving my bowels and, much to my bunkmates’ delight, got sent home humiliated and doubled over with searing gas pain.
*Recently reimagined as a role-playing day camp called Warriors & Wizards. Yet another example of my having come of age at the wrong time. And that goes double for Eli.*
*Just when I think I’m done losing him . . . I find myself wishing the years were people so I could punch them right in their exed-out faces.
Tandem: Could this be the same two-seater Eli won, on a dare, for batter-dipping, deep-frying, and then eating his own jockey shorts? (Managed only a bite or two, but that’s all it took.)
I took the long way around to avoid hills: Had Cliff been less distracted and/or in better shape, he’d’ve almost certainly biked west down Harris, hooking a left at Atwells, then somehow not seeing, to his immediate right, One Eagle Square, burned into a pit of bricks and ash earlier that week.*
*But we all steered clear, for one reason or another.
My friend’s glasses: Eli lost his all the time. They turned up everywhere: the bank, compost heaps, parking lots in Warwick, the lenses scuffed, the temples taped. He’d find them on the street and realize how long it had been since he’d read a book, and how much books had meant to him, once. Not that any of it could sink in anymore, but still. He used to be so sharp. I hate when I forget about him—even for a minute—or when I remember how I used to forget all about him, and for long stretches of time, too. Why, I’d go weeks without giving him a second thought. We all would, I bet, whoever we were. At some point after he had lost his last pair, they closed the library nearest his apartment for good.
CLASS HISTORY
Jacob Deinhardt
(Senior Class President, the Amos Fox School)
Providence Congregational Church, June 17, 1989
HELLO. HERE WE ARE! WE MADE IT.
Now, we’re meant to pat ourselves on the back, but if you don’t mind, I’d much prefer to talk about who isn’t here.
(And by that I don’t mean Eli and Alix, though I mean them, also. Of course I mean them. No, I just don’t mean Slepkow, who only ate some bad clams at his old man’s work picnic. Get well soon, buddy!)
Mostly I mean those we’re meant to forget on a day like this. So look to your left and to your right and notice who’s not there. See who didn’t make it, for one reason or another. Remember him? Or her? From fire drills and field trips or cheating off you in bio? This is what history feels like. It feels like missing article you swore was there until you had to read the thing in front of everyone.
Bartek Scovic was the first kid in our class to come and go, just like that.
[SNAP FINGERS INTO MIC]
Bartek pretended to be retarded and had a little sister who actually was retarded, or maybe just lead-poisoned, and a dad who didn’t live with them. He sat with Slepkow and me at lunch, but we didn’t like him. He had an outdoor voice both in and out of doors and probably crapped in the cloakroom and might have eaten it also, depending on who you talked to. Bartek could fit his whole fist in his mouth, and when he did, the kids who told him to would punch him till he bit down hard on his own wrist, the blood—when he drew blood—running up it.
In third grade his dad got stopped at the state line with women in his trunk. The morning
after the news broke, remember how our homeroom teachers told us how we would all have to be careful not to bring it up? Bartek was gone for good, but that didn’t mean we didn’t learn the lesson. We can’t help who our fathers are.
Betsy Buckley was the next to go. Fifth grade. But back in kindergarten—without warning, bargaining, or otherwise quid-pro-quoing—Betsy showed me hers. She did it quickly, from across the courtyard. I didn’t get a good look, but that night my mother and I argued about whether or not girls had penises until she dragged out the old man’s magazines from beneath their bed.
In fourth grade, on the bus back from a whale watch, Betsy put my name on a list of gross boys that was getting passed around. I crumpled the list and brought up the time in the courtyard. Betsy denied it from two rows away. I asked her why on earth I would make it up. “Because you’re weird,” she said more than asked. “And gross?” “At least I don’t have a penis,” I said. My ears were hot, like my old man’s get when he’s upset.
Oh, and he’s not here either. Tomorrow’s Father’s Day. It’s like a two-in-one.)
Then came Bob Sadwin, who chased me around the play structure until someone told. Bob had no idea what it was all about, and I wouldn’t admit a girl who liked him and not me because, like most girls, she only liked jerks.
And Steve Taglitelle, who left his left ball on a fire hydrant he BMX’ed into the same weekend I got the worst poison ivy. It looked like a suit of swollen skin, and scratching it felt like coming in slow motion. We both had to miss the freshman retreat to New Hampshire or wherever. From our couches we watched Family Affair to Brady Bunch and called each other twice a day. “Now how am I gonna impregnate all the best-looking girls?” he asked me. “Maybe you could impregnate the less-good-looking ones,” I told him, but he started crying, and I hung up—accidentally, I think; my cheek was bigger than normal. Steve wasn’t nearly as conceited as most of the boys I knew at Fox.
