Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  “A few more years was the plan. But there’s no plan anymore.”

  “Well, you know my thoughts on college. Dropping out was my best decision. I can’t believe it took me three years. You should move to the city.”

  “I couldn’t afford it.”

  “You could at my collective. Three hundred plus utilities. Huge backyard with a vegetable garden. And we just got chickens! I haven’t bought groceries in nine months. Oops, I got sauce on you.” She licked his hand and laughed. “Consider it.”

  When they parted, Lucretia kissed his shoulder and pressed her palms together.

  That night, Henrik considered it. He’d never really wanted to be a career student. A quick move could throw off his creditors. It seemed like a pretty good idea. Then after jerking off he realized it was a stupendously idiotic idea—if he couldn’t even hold down a cushy academic gig, how would he live in the most expensive city in the US, uninsured, with a girl he’d paid to not-really-fuck two months ago?

  Lucretia seemed completely optimistic, and every few hours she’d send along another text about how close her place was to the train, how cheap the utilities, any potential irony nullified by lack of punctuation. Mooooove heeeeerrre, read Lucretia’s nth text. He thought of the piles of dining hall dishes ridged with hummus, the fruit fly cocoons spiculed on his trash can lid, the week-old chicken remnant in his fridge flocked with white-green mold. Not even he wanted to live with him.

  “Maybe I might take you up,” Henrik said on the phone to Lucretia. “Are you sure you want us to live together?”

  “Well, don’t put it like that. I have lots of housemates. And, okay, if you’re weirded out by how we met, let’s just agree that that whole phase is over.”

  “That’s what I assumed.”

  “Then move here! I’m all about first-thought-best-thought. Say yes! Say yes!”

  “Okay, yes.”

  “Woo! You’re gonna love the city. Does tomorrow work?”

  The next morning Lucretia’s black Explorer skidded into his driveway in the afternoon, playing a cannonade of drum-and-bass. Wearing sweatclothes and an eyebrow-immobilizing ponytail, she hustled into his apartment. She ignored the plunger standing in the sink and headed for the bedroom, where she upended drawers and unplugged lamps. Henrik stopped her when she picked up a composition notebook from a box in his closet. All the white space on its cover had been filled with ballpoint pen. He stepped toward Lucretia, wondering if she would play keep-away if he grabbed for it.

  “Old diary, huh?”

  “You guessed it.”

  “I won’t look. Oops!” she said, pretend-opening the pages filled with dense massacres of handwriting. “Ha.”

  “I can finish packing myself,” Henrik said, taking the notebook. “You should see the cactus garden on campus.”

  While she was gone, he packed everything that wasn’t garbage into garbage bags. What little mattered in his life; his life’s matter. If life was matter, what form, phase, state? Was it a fabric, as the saying went, a differentially deforming continuum? Or was it the other saying, a river: fluid and turbulent? No, definitely a solid, considering its modes of failure. How it held together and fell apart. Fatigue. Fracture. Shock. Stress. Cracking. Crazing. Life was no gas. Life was definitely solid. Life was hard.

  He packed his laptop and its charger. His toothbrush and clothes. He left the front door key on the kitchen table.

  Lucretia returned in the evening, pausing in the driveway to smile at the warm midwinter sky. When he approached her car with his load of belongings, the car grunted to life, remotely ignited. Deafening EDM rippled his cheeks when he opened the door. It was like she listened to music by vibrating her brain directly. The bass frequencies sent a tingling charge into Henrik’s arm hairs, and his head hairs floated in an unfalling fray. “This is my roommate’s car,” Lucretia said. “I hate myself for driving, but it’s handy, not gonna lie. I was going to plant some trees last weekend to make up for it, but my sapling has a fungus, so.”

  Henrik went back in for a final check. He stared at the water trickle on the wall and the blistered latex paint around it. When he turned the light off, the mess disappeared.

  II. Distance Learning

  When you drove far and fast enough west, exiting Nevada on I-80 through motor-weary Reno into an onset of greenly watered life, fleeing the interior to all the traffic and habitation, lawns greened on potable water, the low church density and visible interdependence of the Bay Area, the west was qualified by a coast, and California, becoming the West Coast.

  States that contradicted their geography betrayed deeper conflicts, were governed by strange rules. Henrik was born in Sheridan, Wyoming—a proper western state, like you might see in a Western—but grew up in Florida, which was southerly but somehow not Southern; Ohio, mideastern but culturally Midwest; Indiana, no longer the land of Indians; then Reno, the Biggest Little City; and a final season in continental Rhode Island.

  Where from? The most honest answer would be America, broadly. Henrik was a ward of the interstate, spending his childhood in a black four-speed single-cab Chevy S-10, with decals from the previous owner that his dad didn’t bother scraping off (NOTRE DAME, JAP JUNK SUCKS, Calvin pissing on a USC logo). Henrik usually claimed he was from a military family, though he and his dad hardly added up to anything so coherent as a family.

  Not much distinguished his childhood from a kidnapping in progress. They never resided, only parked. They avoided cities in favor of the blight and sprawl towns that looked identical. Payless. Staples. Jenny Craig. For cash they went on courier sorties, hauling cross-country for three hundred bucks plus the cost of fuel. Off the roadside they shot prairie dogs and gophers for the culling bounty: two bucks a critter, payable on receipt of severed foreleg. The parking lots of churches and outlet malls made for camping grounds, and Dad would offer the lot managers free security in exchange for overnight parking. They covered the car with a blue tarp while they slept and woke in a stinking pouch of blood-heat blue.

  Each morning they retook the highways, past ecru acres of level dry terrain, the nation’s breadbasket truly resembling different types of cracker in parallax motion—the biscotti cliffs, the matzah veld, the crouton steppe. The Fenns were sunburned on opposite sides of the body, driver’s and passenger’s. Each smoked his own Pall Malls. Henrik dozed to the chirp of the police radar detector, tensely reassuring, like how an EKG sounds to the patient it’s attached to. Lingering tang of grape Bubble Yum that once melted under his seat. Dorito grit in the upholstery seams. The rhythms of mile markers and green rectangles passing overhead, cars floating in adjacent lanes, and the dizzy upstreaming of vision after staring for hours at a moving road.

  At rest stops they diced and salted potatoes and carrots and nestled them in a tinfoil papoose with a pound of pork tenderloin. They laid it in the iron braids of the manifold, slammed the hood, played Arkanoid in the rest stop, then ate under the wavy triangular shade of the propped hood, sitting on a searing fender in shorts, keeping the hot sagging foil balanced on their laps, popping beer caps in the car door’s strike plate. Gear oil imparted a distinct flavor, which you could grow to like, if that was what you called growth.

  DROWSY DRIVERS PULL OVER IF NECESSARY. They passed cars with flag mounts, flag decals, yellow ribbon decals. Salt flats. Corn shocks. Earthen sound baffles. Wawa. Hy-Vee. Big Y. H-E-B. The hundreds of abandoned cars alongside I-4 outside Orlando looking like a preview of the Rapture. Little towns employed by enormous prisons. Views of splendor through the windshield’s beveled quadrilateral: the whip of wipers biting against a single driven shade of annihilating white in Midwestern winters. Exploded moose. A swarm of pamphlet-size butterflies flapping away from a hulking black storm front. Skidding out on a teeming migration of Mormon crickets on I-80 outside Sparks. Food Lion. Piggly Wiggly. Giant Eagle.

  Everywhere was the country full of emptiness and strangers dealing infinities of abuse. Eugene Fenn, traveler of America and disrega
rder of its laws, labored to instill disdain for all forms of authority in his only son, Henrik, whether neighbors, taxes, or employers, never acknowledging the paradox this entailed in his own parental authority. Finding state after static state deficient in liberty, they moved through, evading the humble laws imposing order onto human affairs, especially those nine-tenths comprised by possession. Eugene kept a knee brace and an eyepatch in his map hutch to invalidate field sobriety tests. They flung garbage out the window onto sixty-six interstates and into the trash cans between gas pumps. All they owned was bought from flea markets or pawn shops or shoplifted.

  Eugene’s sedentary obesity afflicted all his negative spaces, approaching ideal cylindricality, with a bald head doming up like a third shoulder and a face that looked like it had baked in a tandoor, except where shielded by orange chrome sunglasses. Which was not to deny a resemblance—both Fenns were tall and land-colored, with unfixed teeth and jets of bunchgrass hair on the backs of their toes, ruddier stubble that covered more cheek than it didn’t. By fourteen Henrik was mingling his Norelco clippings with his dad’s in the bone-colored sinks of Citgo, Sinclair, QuikTrip, ARCO.

  The way a car engine consumed total silence allowed other silences to continue indefinitely. In a car you never faced each other, only forward. Dad’s lips would move sometimes, murmuring things like “Not too good, not too good” or “That’s right,” carrying on a conversation in his head that he didn’t want interrupted. In more talkative moods he would tell what he called his “stretchers”: Knew this guy in Eau Claire so addicted to slots that he fed dollars to Laundromat change machines just to hear the coins paying out. Knew this guy in Sparks who taught himself to walk on his hands till his ass grew a face. This chick in South Pattaya who could fire candy corn from her snatch into a shot glass across the bar.

  Henrik had managed to stitch a rough biography from these stretchers: Dropped out of high school in Utah to get a GED, left home at sixteen to work in a garage in Pittsburg, Kansas. Two years as a firefighter in Milwaukee, followed by the enlistment in the air force in ’65, leading to a bloody year of rescue-and-recovery in Vietnam that he enjoyed in spite of taking a slice of flak in his ribs, though Eugene’s own account of his wartime service boiled down to a single stretcher, wearyingly repeated, that for all the Bangkok poontang he’d gotten they awarded him the Purple Helmet. Though this was a stretcher rooted in the reality of the Purple Heart dangling from their rearview mirror, beside the cat-butt air freshener and a few feet from the loaded Ruger in the glove compartment.

  After Vietnam, Eugene went on the road, underwritten by VA disability. In ’79 he picked up Maggie Erinson, a veteran runaway with a crew cut and messed-up boundaries hustling for rides at a Sinclair station in Sioux Falls, and she became his passenger for three years before producing Henrik out of carelessness, actually birthing him in the backseat, as that stretcher went. When Henrik was four, she left to use a gas station bathroom in Milwaukee and never returned, a dubiously stretcherous detail that made Henrik occasionally wonder if his mother, too, had been kidnapped.

  Their longest period of fixed residence was a ten-month stretch in 1997 when they hit a light pole head-on in Goshen, Indiana, and they took up in a double-wide trailer. Goshen had been a penitentiary of niceness, where neighborly Mennonites openly worried at their balding tires, lent them Makita drills, noted the state on their license plate. While they raised cash to fix the truck, they enlisted in the Midwest’s war on boredom: football games, county and state fairs, electronic darts, bowling, motocross, ubiquitous TV, large-scale grilling. Legally ordained, Eugene prowled bars to marry drunks on the cheap. On game days, Henrik scalped Hoosiers tickets for a month’s wage, while Dad stood on unattended lawns near Memorial Stadium charging ten bucks for a park-’n’-piss.

  While Dad was out plying his grift, he’d drop Henrik off at the library to fill up on books. From there Henrik would walk to Goshen High and stand by fences, courts, corners, scouting the emerging hard cases, unsupervised baby-faced whiteboys who coveted their fathers’ guns and girlfriends, those pissed-off soap bubbles wearing the blackest T-shirts, unresponsive to all but their peers in disaffection. Henrik spotted them easily: flannels tied around their waists like half kilts, crop tops or draping bangs that both concealed and produced acne. You walked over and said Hey in your boredest voice. Offer a smoke, drop the question marks. Let’s hit the mall. They accepted Henrik, maybe seeing the advantage in befriending a silent, malleable six-foot-three kid with an age-of-purchase beard.

  He grew alongside convenience stores, shattering Old Crow bottles to radio-recorded mixtapes of Helmet, Dio, Primus, smoking ditch weed they agreed was good weed. They vandalized TVs at the landfill and played the glitched Street Fighter II machine at the Laundromat that let you throw fireballs in midjump. Henrik accepted that this was what normal felt like, tranquil eventlessness, and he enjoyed it until one afternoon he returned to the truck with blood on his lips and shirt. He’d said something wrong. Eugene examined Henrik’s face like it was a door he’d just dented, gave him a stack of White Castle napkins and a Dixie cup of gin. “Learn from it.” In two months they were moving again.

  So Henrik learned. Eugene taught Henrik to drive as soon as his legs were long enough, but he forbade Henrik any official ID, so Henrik took the wheel only when Eugene was drunk. Otherwise he was an autodidact. One way or another he’d learned to read (cloudy recollections of tracing DUCK and COW on green wide-ruled paper), and thereafter Eugene registered him as homeschooled, giving him the run of his own curriculum from distance learning catalogs. The correspondence lessons were forwarded through the same RV club service as Eugene’s VA checks. Boredom was the only incentive. It annoyed him to get wrong answers, so he did until he didn’t. His extracurricular reading consisted of stolen library books and flea-market books, with ocher-edged pages curled with heat and crinkled with water damage, a clothespin to riffle-proof them on the highway: Choose Your Own Adventure and Encyclopedia Brown, Madame Bovary with eighty pages missing, Emily Dickinson, Anne Rice, Lord of the Rings, the Dalai Lama’s autobiography, Jack London, novelizations from the Predator universe. He threw his finished books out the window.

  At some point, inhaling Eugene’s millionth beef or watching the odometer’s nines roll over into zeroes, hustling down a windy shoulder to fetch a toaster fallen from the truck bed or getting coldcocked by the roof after they vaulted off a dead elk, a thought came like an itch in Henrik’s brain—what if he was smarter than his dad? Could Dad score in the ninety-fifth percentile of five practice SAT IIs? Give the partial derivative of a vector function? Break down the phases of cell division? The more mutinous studying he did, the more he packed up his emotional belongings and moved upstairs into his head. (It wasn’t roomy but it was quiet, furnished with a library and wall-to-wall mirrors.) He scanned obsolete college guides for schools that waived application fees, tossing in Harvard, Princeton, and Yale as moonshots. He didn’t know that his application essays, which felt like mundane autobiography to him, were award-winning stretchers—knew this kid who was raised in a truck, with a Purple Heart and a cat-butt air freshener as his mobiles, who taught himself to the test.

  And Eugene slunk into his own cellar, slamming the blast hatch shut, with his eyes reading the road and a mutter playing mutely on his lips, emerging only in backfires of road rage to punctuate the radio. Da’ Dip. Electric Slide. Achy Breaky. Macarena—Henrik thought real life was like the Macarena.

  Early in 2000, when Henrik was nineteen and passing through Rhode Island, he opened an envelope. The forwarding service had been slow in keeping up with their movements, and the envelope had been concealed in a brick of rubber-banded mail that sat in the map hutch for two weeks. By the time he noticed his name on the envelope (trimmed in the shade of dark blue named for the university that accepted him), he had only two weeks to reply. The envelope was stuffed with folders, forms, and glossy welcomes; upon his sighting the phrase We are delighted to offer, bliss, nau
sea, and dread warred in his guts.

  When he could bear to read on, he saw he’d been granted a half-tuition scholarship, with additional Pell Grant funding and a fellowship for prospective STEM majors. It felt like the first thing that had ever happened to him, though really things had only ever happened to him. At last the vista of possibilities felt wider than the converging lanes at a horizon.

  Despite the deadline, he put off telling Eugene for a week. The acceptance packet wrinkled and softened as he reviewed its contents in bathroom stalls—financial aid forms, reply cards, a stark little pennant. Though he’d never said so, the feeling was that Eugene wanted him to run the family business of minding their own business. Reasons emerged, as usual, to justify desire. When Henrik finally told Eugene, Eugene paused long enough that Henrik thought he’d ignore it entirely. “College is a load of penguin shit.”

  “I think I should try it. I could make some money.”

  “Money what for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s a big picture,” Eugene said, bumping his knuckles on the steering wheel. “And that’s doing what you want.”

  “And what if I want to go to college?”

  “Only reason you’re saying that is because you ain’t gone yet.”

  “You didn’t either.”

  Eugene took this levelly. “I been everywhere. All over the bright blue fucking Earth and above it too. You think there’s any kind of asshole I don’t know? Talkin’ about freedom here. Work a job, you got a boss. Run a business, you got customers. That’s your life if you go to college, only worse, ’cause then you get a giant stick up your ass about being smart. Smart don’t make you less stupid, though. You’re never gonna get the money or respect you think you deserve. You get it by keeping your ass under your elbows and making your own way.”

  “I’m making my own way? We only do what you want.”

  They eased to the shoulder, crossing the corrugated rumble strip that made the car moan deepeningly as it slowed. A car at rest felt so low to the ground. The breakdown lane fizzed in the noon with bottle glass and high-reflectance asphalt. “Okay, scooter. Where you wanna go? Outer space? Pick somewhere.” Cars of different colors whipped past, too fast to have shapes. “I could’ve given you up easy, shit. Easy. I raised you up for your own good, not mine. Put my kid in some gagglefuck group home? Not me, man.” Eugene spat his cigarette out the window. “But hell if I’ll keep you from fucking yourself up. I’m not your boss. Suit your damn self.”