by Chris Vola
The actual conversation, as I remember it, was short. We were at this greasy Pan-Asian place we used to go to a lot and Lauren hadn’t touched anything on her plate. She kept twirling a spoon through her egg drop soup, twisting her hair with her other hand.
I stopped eating, looked up from my BlackBerry. The tension had been building for days. “So what’s the plan?” I asked.
“Plan?”
The rest of the meal isn’t perfectly clear. I do know that she snapped. Started screaming about the dirty secret burrowed in her uterus. My bastard baby, or something equally outrageous and melodramatic. People started to stare. The woman at the next table choked on a piece of General Tso's. I told her to calm down, that it was still too early in the trimester or whatever to call it a baby. Neither of us is ready for something like this. What would Mommy and Daddy say? Which went over about as well I’d imagined.
“I moved to Connecticut, Josh,” she said, the undertones venomous. “I think they know how I feel about you. They’d be happy.”
“That’s what Archer and Katherine thought,” I said.
“Is that what you think?” Lauren asked. “I’m on the same level as Katherine, is that it? Are you and your friends going to make up a name for me, too? Lauren Scrape?”
“It was Scraped, but that’s not –”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Katherine Skrate was Archer Hamilton’s girlfriend at Columbia, notorious for her familiarity with the abortionist’s vacuum. Even before they started dating, we used to call her Katherine Scraped. I’d had no idea that Lauren knew about the nickname. Archer knocked her up twice in the course of a semester. She’d been confusing her birth control pills with all the Adderall she’d been crushing. The second time, the doctor told her how messed up the walls of her womb had become, how she might want to go through with the pregnancy. A little less scrambling would do the body good. Archer and Katherine cabbed it to her parents’ place on Central Park West to explain the situation. The silver-spoon tragedy (yawn) unfolded from there. Dr. Skrate was less than a month away from being sworn in as the newest chairman of some board of something. A gala was being planned. The unfortunate fetus wasn’t included in those plans. Katherine was shipped off to Geneva for an extended spring break and Archer’s invitation was withdrawn. Blah, blah, blah.
“You know it’s not the same,” I said, slurping down a dumpling, scrolling around on my BlackBerry. “We’re too young and a baby is way too expensive.”
“Is that how you look at it?” she screamed. “A dollar figure? What would your parents say about that?”
“My parents?”
She lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right. You are, it’s…” I pressed my hand onto hers.
“It’ll be over before you know it.”
She pulled her hand back, disgusted. “Do you have any idea what happens?” My BlackBerry vibrated. I didn’t say anything. “This isn’t like South Park,” she snarled, “or ‘Hills Like White Elephants,’ it’s not ‘Oh haha that was fun, now let me get on with my life and forget all about this little appointment.’ I never said I one hundred percent wanted it either, after this, but you can’t –”
“I never said it was easy,” I said. “Wait. Hills like what?”
The rest of the evening isn’t worth repeating. Graphic descriptions of a dilated cervix, pumps, the possibility of a punctured uterus. A too-clear picture of the reality I was asking of her, albeit a bit, like I said, melodramatic. And then she said she’d changed her mind. She wanted it out. Mid-sentence! But she was fired up and wouldn’t be quenched. It was pointless.
“How does that sound?” she asked at the end of her diatribe. “Make you want to keep eating?”
By now, everyone in the restaurant was staring at us. The woman at the next table glared, the proverbial hands over her children’s ears. The stereotypically timid waitress had stopped trying to re-fill our water glasses.
It was obvious she’d done a lot of online research, of that I was certain. Maybe she’d talked to Katherine. I stared down at my plate, speechless. Finally, I tried another weak apology. “Lauren, I didn’t –”
“No,” she cut me off again, “no you didn’t do anything. You didn’t fuck up the birth control, you didn’t not get a morning-after pill, it was all my fault. And it’s fine, it really is. I’ll even pay. I wish that just once, just one time, you could stop thinking about…you.”
“This is about us.”
Lauren didn’t verbally respond to my John Cusack line. Instead, she stabbed her spoon into her soup, got up, and ran into the bathroom, bawling, covering her face. A crusted-over old guy in a Patriots hat sitting by himself stared at me and shook his head.
A thin strand of egg white and some broth had spilled onto the tablecloth. The egg part was curled over itself, balled up, floating in the spilled liquid, two pieces of scallions attached to it, a pair of tiny yellow fingers giving the peace sign, or flipping me off. It seemed so typical I was almost bored.
We Googled a list of all the clinics in our part of the state and found one ten minutes away in Somerset – Choices Medical Options, Inc. Women’s clinics aren’t supposed to exist within a thousand feet of schools, but because of a shady business deal or a strategic ploy on the part of conscientious PTA mothers, Choices’ main facility is located directly across the street from Somerset High School, facing the running track and athletic fields. I made the appointment and drove Lauren there on a bright Friday morning, holding her hand tightly across the seat like the sad scene in an eighties teen movie that no one gets too bummed about because they know everything will work out at the end. In the parking lot we hugged for a long time. I watched her wispy body disappear through the sliding doors, walked across the street and sat on some bleachers next to the track.
It was a warm day for late autumn, dozens of people jogging, speed-walking, the fattest middle-aged women barely waddling. Going around, oval after oval, sweating in windbreakers, iPod headphones glimmering. A woman with a librarian haircut shrieking at her daughter in the clinic parking lot, dragging her by the arm, more ovals, grunting, sweating, lunch-hour traffic, and inside a duffel bag, someone’s cell phone ring-tone that, for some reason, I remember as Radiohead’s “Creep”: I don’t care if it hurts, I want to have control, I want a perfect body, I want a perfect soul…
WE SHOOT THROUGH a tollbooth in the EZ Pass lane. I unzip my backpack, finger through a few empty bottles until I find one that rattles. Tryptan. Davis has been fiddling with the terrestrial radio and has probably cycled through the entire FM spectrum three times. Now he’s doing the same with AM, waiting to hear something.
“Jesus,” Billy moans, “you’re killing me here, ADD Boy! Pick a station, is that so hard? Maybe Josh has some Ritalin or something.” I almost explain out of habit that last week I traded my entire stash of Ritalin and Adderall, along with a small salad of anti-anxiety meds, to Jackson Smith for a dozen high-grade OxyContins his sister got when she tore her ACL spring skiing in Saint Moritz.
Davis mutes the radio. “Don’t ever call me Boy, you fucking cripple,” he snarls. Billy lurches forward, speechless. Davis tries to maintain the same harsh expression, but his lips can’t stop from curling into a paper-lipped slither of a grin.
“Asshole,” Billy snorts. “You believe this guy?” he asks me as he tosses another Egg McMuffin wrapper out the window. “But seriously,” he asks Davis, “what’s with the radio?”
“Trying to find a traffic report,” he mumbles, scanning the stations again.
“We in a rush?” I ask as I watch the mostly empty lanes whiz by, realizing I left my BlackBerry charger in New York.
“No,” Davis says, “not really. But D.C. can get gruesome this time of day.” The Baltimore-Washington Expressway – federally bungholed spit-box, closed lanes and construction projects, rental cars, traffic-monitoring helicopters. What you see is more than what you’ve been taught. The full sting of the law.
We run into a major jam ten miles from the drawbridge that stretches over the Potomac and into Virginia. The District unveils itself in a lazy lunch-hour haze, overshadowed by Washington’s whitewashed robot phallus. Davis groans when he finally hears a traffic report – Motorists advised to avoid I-95…expect lengthy delays…northbound and southbound lanes – and rolls down the window. Helicopter blades whine, the reek of diesel. A billboard advertising the benefits of alternative fuel sources says You Have The Right Not To Remain Silent.
“Are we the-r-re yet?” Billy whimpers.
“Fuck off,” Davis snaps, suddenly not in a joking mood. “Give me a cigarette.”
“Lighten up, dickface,” Billy says.
“I hate D.C.,” Davis mutters.
“Who doesn’t?”
Traffic is worse across the drawbridge, past the huge blue sign that says Welcome to Virginia! Davis asks for Billy’s pack, chain smokes until they’re gone. I close my eyes, tune in and out of an NPR host reading from today’s top headlines: …that G. Harold Blunderthal, director of the European counter-terrorism…still missing two days before his scheduled meeting with members of the U.N. Security Council in New York…compelling evidence of well-organized cells operating in this country and…linked to the militant group Yushua…whose leaders have recently claimed responsibility for the deaths of sixteen Coalition soldiers serving in Iraq and…The 53-year-old Blunderthal was last seen exiting the lobby of Manhattan’s Gramercy Park Hotel. NYPD and the FBI are pursuing possible leads but have been unsuccessful…
I rub my eyes. “Cops are lying,” I mumble.
“Lying?” Davis asks.
“The guy on the radio, Harold whateverhisnameis.”
“Blunderthal,” Billy says.
“Yeah,” I yawn. “High-profile disappearance. No leads. In New York.”
“So it’s a conspiracy,” Davis says. “Certain Americans didn’t want him to go in front of the committee with the report.”
“What report? All I’m saying is they’re lying, lying, ly-ing!” I’m half amusing myself, half acting like the petulant brat in the back seat who’s just ambivalent enough about everything to start irking the shit out of everyone else. “Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, who cares? Maybe he’ll pop up on a YouTube al Qaeda video or something. Why am I still talking about this?”
“I saw a guy disappear once,” Billy says. “The hills outside Fallujah, first time I was there.”
Enter total vehicular silence. In the almost two years since he’s been discharged, Billy’s never said much as far as war stories go, except for a few offhanded comments about his injuries, his gear, a couple ill-advised nights with circumcised Kurdish girls, minor eruptions like last night at dinner. But nothing too specific. I’ve seen the internalization, know how deep it can be. Why let it out now?
“It was two-thirty in the morning,” he says, running fingers through his buzz cut. “We’d gotten some intelligence about IEDs buried along the main road to Ramadi.” He scratches at some scar tissue on his left elbow. “There were twelve of us and three bomb-sniffing dogs out on recon. Even with the night-vision goggles you couldn’t see anything, miles of sand, one big line of nothing, dark on dark. An hour later we hadn’t found jack. All of a sudden, fuck, the sergeant gets this alert. Insurgents coming down from the hills, our position’s been compromised. The sky lights up. Fire from the west, three guys gone in five seconds. We hit the ground, start crawling back towards the base single-file, hoping the fucking air strike would come.
“There was this skinny cowshit ex-knucklehead from Oklahoma or somewhere, Private Reardon, only been with us a couple weeks or so. No, Oregon. That’s right, he was from Oregon. We called him Ducky. Well Ducky freaked out, pissed himself, begged me not to leave him. I told him to stop acting like a little bitch, to follow me close as he could. We crawled for almost two miles. Sometimes Reardon’s hand brushed into me. I could hear his breath. About a half-mile from the base, the touches stopped. At first I figured he’d calmed down but when I looked back he was gone. Disappeared. I shit you not. The next day they sent us out in Jeeps. Five hours of searching and we never found as much as a scrap of uniform or a piss stain. It was like the desert had swallowed him.”
Traffic’s picked up and we’re passing through Fredericksburg, enormous signs for strip malls and Waffle Houses beckoning. The Chevy pickup in front of us has a bumper sticker – the letter 88 colored in a Confederate flag pattern. The trappings of Dixie, or an interloper’s vague idea of it. At this point, the distinction’s probably negligible.
“Are you really surprised by yourself?” Davis asks.
“By what?” Billy asks. “The kid fucking disappeared. Nothing like that’s supposed – ”
“A culture of lies,” Davis cuts him off, “where lying publicly is not only acceptable, it’s become standard practice. Two-hundred-fifty pound first basemen, the Tour de France. Lying is understood, inherent, just don’t confront me with the evidence! Give me the fantasy, the acting surprised for the sake of it. You’re totally right.”
“What the shit, bro?” Billy groans. “I’m talking about Iraq.”
“I was responding to Josh’s question as to why he felt the need to point out that the reality of this Blunderthal investigation is probably a far cry from what the gentleman on NPR has been telling us.”
“Uh,” Billy says.
Is this some kind of reverse psychology? Interrupt your friend’s suppressed war stories by following up on some drivel that wasn’t supposed to be serious or even thought-provoking. That’ll make him feel better! Billy grumbles something, starts fiddling with an air vent. Furrowed tension-lines crease the back of his head.
“It’s obvious,” Davis continues, “Our currency is toilet paper, it’s the United Lobbyists of Amurdera, fighting a war that everyone supposedly hates, and what happens?”
This is getting old fast. Against common sense and sympathy for Billy, I ask, “I don’t know, what?”
“People,” Davis says, swerving into the left lane without signaling, “like that obese redneck fuck in the Dodge to our right, recline in central-air pumping boxes, escaping into virtual reality, jacking off to Japanese girls getting their throats skewered, watching high-definition re-runs of celebrities’ asses falling out of their skirts, avoiding any real issue that comes in contact with the comfort blanket they’ve…”
“Whoa, dude,” I murmur.
“I’m not saying anything that isn’t obvious.” he says. He looks at himself in the mirror.
“You weren’t there,” Billy says.
“What?”
“You-weren’t-there,” he repeats. “In the hills.”
Davis moans. “You’re right, I wasn’t in-the-hills,” he says. “And neither was Josh. But you know what they, what you had out there, what we have here, is this –” He jabs the volume button up to 10, lets the car shake with a couple random catastrophic snare drum blasts, then mutes the stereo. An unnecessary pause for effect. What effect? “ – music. Dumbass.”
Duh. How could we have been so stupid, Davis? Of course you were talking about music this whole time! But it isn’t “dumbass” in the plural. For whatever reason, he’s concentrating the gibberish attack on Billy, who’s taking it with an uncharacteristic pout, a weird kind of sadness that goes beyond grumpy. Triggered by the Ducky story?
“…talk about an industry that caters to escapists,” Davis is saying when I zone back in. “Remember what I was saying about escapists. This is the crux of capitalism. And you think I’m just taking you to meet potential assets about building a record company? Ha! Think of all the audiences one song can reach, audiences that blur the lines between races, social demographics…”
While Davis is blathering, I watch Billy in the side-view rummaging through his backpack, emotionless, until he quietly extracts a camouflage sheath. He pulls out his 12-inch, military issued Bowie knife, a souvenir that usually stays on his boat. Lifting the blade like a motherly spoon, he gingerly gu
ides it, palm up, in a direct line to Davis’s unsuspecting neck. When the point presses against his cheek at the exact spot where a dimple should be, Davis flinches a little, shuts up, but stays focused on the road. He swallows.
“So again,” Billy asks, slowly, “what’s your fucking point?”
Davis recovers, deflates a little. Now self-conscious and bitter, he swats away the blade like it’s an out-of-ammo Nerf toy. “You know what?” he sighs, “I don’t know if there is one.”
Billy smiles to himself, tucks the knife into his backpack without sliding it back into the sheath.
So this entire exchange is just another half-assed sales pitch, I guess. My head is melting; the Klonopin's wearing off. I reach into my backpack. Davis pushes a button on the steering wheel, turns up Bloc Party’s “Hunting for Witches,” drowns most of the tension vibes he’s bizarrely decided to create. These unprovoked snake-oil assaults are rare. He must be uptight about this meeting tonight, if that’s what he’s still calling it.
The highway shimmers in the scalding afternoon. Thick strands of trees box in the road on both sides, blocking complete glimpses of fields and dirt lots being prepared for commercial real estate development. What these here woods need is a Lady Foot Locker! Another hour and an off-ramp onto 64 West a few miles north of Richmond. The new road looks exactly the same as the last one, different town names, numbing pastoral mosaics.
“I have to take a piss!” Billy shouts over the music.
“Me too,” I say.
