Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  5/15/08

  Oh what fresh hell. So, Henrik shows up last month. We’re sharing the studio but he won’t talk to me. Instead he lies around on the daybed, only getting up to go to the bathroom, where he doesn’t even turn the light on.

  Henrik, I say.

  Nothing.

  HENRIK, I say.

  I give him an apple. He takes one bite & spends the next half hour watching the air tan its flesh. No response when I offer him the bed, no preference for TV on or off. How typical of me to envy him for this purity of feeling, his legit hunger art.

  If he won’t talk, I will: bullshit naturally. File under C for Coprolalia. But to lie, you need a quantity of truth to mortgage, and my truth’s run low. How long do I keep up the reverse-Scheherazade charade? Maybe he’s curious enough to hear me out, or even believes me. Maybe he’s humoring me . . . god no, I can manage my own delusions, thanks. So either I’m deceiving-exploiting him or he’s deceiving-mollifying me. Our whole college relationship entanglement, D.C. al fine.

  What is the small nasty Lucifer in me that prefers labor-intensive irony to the unslant truth? Some belief that reality wants my autograph, or that the inclusion of falsehood forms a fuller picture than truth alone? Henrik once said I just liked saying no. Well, no: it’s more complicated than that. I’m adversarial, I believe in dialectics. Agreement fixes nothing. (Nor does confession—it’s like defusing a bomb by pointing at it and saying hey, check out my bomb.) When there’s nobody to disagree w/ I can always controvert life. At least lies can be fair.

  HENRIK’S EYES OPENED the way they did when you realized you didn’t know where you were. Linda stood across the room brushing her half-blond hair, swollen with static and dented in the middle where she’d tied it earlier. A light trail of scars ran from cheek to chin.

  A tremor plummeted down to the deep-chest spot where a swallow ended. The cut of sunlight from the drawn curtains had passed about a foot over his outstretched body since he’d fallen asleep. Linda’s pills weighed in his blood; he felt his brain encased in some hard amber sap.

  “Morning,” Linda said. Henrik startled to see her sundered teeth, though he’d been startled by the same sight hours earlier. A rattling item arced across the room and struck Henrik’s shoulder, a pill bottle the size of a soup can. “Will says take it,” Linda said.

  Next to him on the floor was a dish bearing a green apple and a slab of toast smeared with honey. He could tell it’d been sitting out for a while because the honey was foggy and granular and beads of air clung to the inside of the glass. Henrik wrenched open the pill bottle and drank down eight pills. His breath stank, so the water was sweet. Will was probably forcing Linda to play nice. Linda took the apple from him when he failed to remove its sticker.

  “A few months ago I got hit by a car,” Linda said, slicing the apple into ramps. “I suffered some kind of memory loss. Will says you and I were close, but I don’t recognize you at all. Whenever I try, it’s like trying to think of a color that doesn’t exist. I’m not pretending this isn’t implausible. Online they call it lacunar amnesia. You know how every memory is split up all over the brain, so you can retain emotional associations to things without remembering them? That explains why I feel like you’re about to kill me, but I don’t know why.”

  Henrik fixed his eyes on the water glass as if trilling a sonar wave into it.

  “I also read this study on memory loss in divorcées and widows. How it’s caused by their partners’ physical absence, since they use one another as memory cues, like when they finish each other’s sentences. So losing your partner is like losing part of your mind. It’s probably pop science bullshit.”

  Red symmetries were forming at Linda’s cheeks and neckline. Of course memories were stored in different places. His were all over, at Stanford, New Haven, Goshen, Reno, Twentynine Palms, and in a truck that might still be moving. And the one place he thought they might have been safe: Linda.

  “Bullshit,” Henrik said.

  “Well,” Linda said, placing the apple slices back on his plate. “It doesn’t matter if you believe me. Here’s my idea. I think it would help if you told me everything you know about me. I know you don’t owe me anything. But we have free time. We’re both here. The zipper is down. Let’s talk.”

  “Let’s not,” Henrik said.

  Linda copped a Viennese accent. “Subject responds to offer of open-ended discussion with sullen disregard. Presents signs of echolalia.”

  Henrik made that platter-lifting shrug with one hand. “Least it’s not amnesia.”

  The way he elongated that last word, as if he were teaching it to her, made Linda’s forehead itch. “If you want to believe I’m lying, go ahead. I can’t prove anything.”

  Henrik put an apple slice into his mouth and chewed. She knew he was allergic.

  CORY’S LABOR WAS acquiring a fateful poignance, as if she were assembling a large bomb she would later wear. If she was exhausted and missing her periods, if she ate only chickpea salad and drank only lemon seltzer, if sunglasses no longer fully concealed her raccoon eyes, if she had to rinse her hands in warm water every ten minutes, or hide her calf bruises under wool socks, or ice her inflamed toes and cheeks, or track the violet map lines on her calves, it only proved she was working as hard as she had to.

  Her ledger became smudgy with pencil lead as she added vendors, and expense receipts stuffed her file cabinet by the baleful. She picked at the cat’s cradle of logistics: to make room for vendors, she’d have to close traffic on Dolores, which pissed off the Mission Dolores Neighborhood Association. The ISCOTT panel said the earliest street closure was the last weekend of June, Pride Weekend, two weeks before Socialize’s debt deadline. DPW wouldn’t clean the park after the Dyke March on Saturday if Socialize was going to mess it up again on Sunday, so Cory agreed to handle cleanup. And hire 10B rent-a-cops for security and traffic, SFMTA PCOs, and paramedics, all in high demand. And make road signage.

  She caved and bought a cell phone. Balking at the glassy unaccountability of smartphones, she bought the dumbest one she could find, a small red clamshell. Lo: she was texting and emailing, collapsing her time into button presses and screen checks. She responded to vendor queries, discovering that being prompt with email was like diving into a vat of leeches:

  sry we dont provide tables or chairs. read the vendor guidelines :)

  u r responsible 4 cleaning ur space, plz bring own receptacle it’s in the guidelines :)

  LISTEN IM SRY IF U PAID 4 10x10 LOT U CANT SET UP 15x15 TENT. I DONT C WHAT IS HARD ABOUT THIS! BASIC PHYSICS :)

  She paused often to fight low blood sugar, and in lengthening blinks she dreamed of an afterlife in which the turfy fire blanket on her head was brushed out into a blade of satin and she had a big scary wardrobe and hit Pilates every day until she’d burned off the paradoxical melancholy of feeling worthless and underappreciated, of doing work that was frivolous and insurmountable.

  Since her weed hookup had moved out, she had no eight P.M. bowl to relax with. She took long sitting showers and slunk into bed with cold wet hair. She was finally starting to comprehend money, its gold fangs and green fur. How it signified importance and bought kindness. How it enabled the losers who considered poor people losers. Corporations argued money was free speech because it talked—actually it was expensive speech, and it screamed. Time was money and work was money; when Cory forced herself to brush her teeth while nodding off, that was money; when she drank coffee until she trembled and beer to calm down and threw up without even meaning to, that was money. Soon she’d have enough money to start making some money.

  But her revenue projections were diminishing with hidden shakedowns. She had to buy event insurance and a sound permit, rent porta-potties and generators, and hire a CPA to help with the 990. A Rec & Park bureaucrat told her commercial events on public space required “donations.” A letter from Handshake claimed that the Terms & Conditions of her registration obliged her to credit Handshake in the market
ing material of any new business endeavors. And food problems, always food problems: not all of the carts and trucks had the $10K permits they needed, and because Dolores Park adjoined Mission High School, she needed an exemption from the anti-obesity ordinance banning food trucks near schools. Food trucks required health and fire inspection, and had to cook their meat in enclosed spaces with refrigeration, ventilation, and three-compartment sinks; carts were regulated differently. Maybe she’d hire shared facilities—but only after she’d verified business licenses, liability insurance, and food handling certifications. The paperwork made her hungry.

  Then, street promo. Mission turnout looked likely, so she canvassed Van Ness, Divisadero, Embarcadero, Sunset, and Haight in the finger-stiffening spring mist. Cory was reminded that her rap had never been very effective—she’d never cleared the daily quota by much when she’d canvassed for Equality CA after college. (Their top earner had been a shameless tall hot boredom-proof Scandinavian with a fathomless bladder who positioned her messenger bag strap strategically between her boobs.) She felt guilty, as usual, for competing with the homeless for the scarce goodwill of pedestrians—no one would ever stop more than once.

  “Recreate ’08! Local DIY fair! June 29! Design, crafts, food, performances! Support your neighbors!” she chanted across miles of sidewalk, everywhere tasting the same exhaust and surrounding ocean in the air.

  Interlude: 2004

  It is a long season of affectations; of self-definition by process of elimination. He teaches her the Tao of the freebie—music off Soulseek, movies off BitTorrent, booze from house parties, furniture from Craigslist, craggy lemons from the bushes on West Campus. He knows she’s out to transgress, but she also has a puritanical streak that makes her wary of fun qua fun; everything must be a step toward metamorphosis. So he scores her a fake ID from a guy in Sunnyvale so they can get into bars in Mountain View, where he stealth recharges her whiskey glasses from his flask. On weekends they take the Caltrain up to the city and he buffers her against butt-friskers at Popscene and Frisco Disco, elbows her to the front of the crowd when the headliners come on at the Rickshaw Stop, his ears packed with toilet paper.

  Two months of this and it’s understood that they’re in something. Are they happy? It doesn’t feel that way; or maybe happiness withers under that sort of doubtful probing. It’s more of a monotonous amnesia of chillness, with no events or progressions, and at any rate it is very chaste, only partly because she’s underage. Not even a kiss until date seven, just to see how he’ll respond to getting pushed into deep criminal territory.

  He’s no longer Force-choked with anxiety when he keeps her company while she’s working, or when she visits him in his room. They can’t stop talking, hours of recirculating bullshit. Why the left-hand horse on the Marlboro logo wears a crown, and whether whales menstruate. Fuck Bush, marry Rumsfeld, kill Cheney, become Rove. Occasionally midconversation she’ll do some weird shit like slap him or sit on his lap and start pissing, both of them discreetly aware that his appeal will be measured in the shit he lets her get away with.

  He’s glad to indulge; it’s incredible for the world to want something from him. He reckons that relationships are about maxing out intimacy ASAP, eliminating secrets. No, he doesn’t tell her about the bipolar or the suicide attempt / transfer, but he’s medicated now, and anyway, he’d rather get to know her. He googles her name, chows down her book recommendations, listens to her music. Charts her PMS to the day. He knows she prefers Cabernet, Pantene, Aleve, Trident, Xiu Xiu, and that whenever she can’t find her hair clip it’s always attached to her purse strap. He develops a ratlike intuition about her frequent puking—when, how much, whether migraine- or alcohol-induced, that look of concern on her face when it’s coming.

  Though, being institutionalized in solitude, he can’t shake the conviction that all commitment is temporary and kindness has an agenda. For him the grapes will always be sour.

  For her part, she enjoys that he’s nakedly unsocialized and a little rednecky and so doesn’t constantly nod and say uh-huh when you talk to him. He keeps doing things that make her snicker. One nice thing about books, he says, is you can’t bore them. Balloons make him wince (“You just never know about them”), and whenever he lights his Zippo on the first try, striking the flint-wheel off his knee, he goes, “First try.” His favorite band? Oasis! Even his most annoying tendencies—broad rationalization, narrow sciencizing—indulge her favorite pastime, disagreement.

  Not enough to settle into anything, obviously. She’s just coasting on inertia when he invites her to an annoying costume party at his house on Mayfield Avenue. She gulps down the free booze, feeling way overcute in her fringe dress and pin curls while a guy in a Pikachu costume hits on her by explaining chore divisions in co-op housing. Before dinner is even served, she tells Henrik to take her to his room. It’s unclear whether she’s flirting or steadying herself when she takes his arm to climb the stairs.

  When they switch on his room lights, there’s an Asian guy in headphones laughing at a photo of a bloody corpse on his computer. Linda clocks the bare walls, the bare hangers, the duffel bag in the wardrobe prolapsing with undershirts and sweatpants, decommissioned sneakers behind the door, a desk set with a field-stripped Zippo and no lamp, situated beneath a double-lofted bed that signals his low expectations.

  Will N———————— says hey. Instead of waving, Linda just straightens her fingers with her thumb still hooked around her purse strap. “Linda,” she says, forgetting that she’s been going by E. “Pretty snug in here. You guys share a bed?”

  “No,” Henrik says.

  “I was kidding.”

  “Oh. Me too.”

  “Wait, you really do sleep together?”

  “Only when we’re fucking,” Will says.

  Will receives Henrik’s psychic telegram and leaves the room with his laptop.

  “Do you want anything?” Henrik says. “Tea?”

  Without replying, she scales the teetering bedframe, re-adjusting to sit sidesaddle on the mattress; he climbs after her, with vague concerns about bearing capacity, and sits uneasily beside her. She’s still hunched in her jacket, heavy-eyed. She wriggles her toes and arches to loosen her heels and waits for sex to occur. And occur it does not. This makes her feel undesirable, then annoyed at her reflexive self-blaming, then indignant because what the fuck, this was supposed to be easy.

  When he gets up, sensing that he’s unwanted in his own bed, she yanks him back down by his shirt. He has no idea what to do, except the usual: make things explicit. “Do you want me to kiss you?”

  “Oh god, are you seriously asking permission? You’re killing me.”

  But then when he leans to kiss her, she shoulder-blocks him. The quintessentially Lindaic gambit of exploiting his inexperience to misdirect him from her own.

  “I’m stumped,” Henrik says.

  “How many relationships have you been in?” she asks.

  “None.”

  “How many girls have you slept with?”

  “One.”

  “How many times? Protected?”

  “Three. Condom.”

  “Let’s see a picture,” she says.

  Incredibly, this strikes him as reasonable, and he doesn’t question why she wants or needs to know. He fetches his laptop and pulls up an online photo of the redheaded Yalie pretending to drink from a keg tap. Linda laughs through a raspberry. “Tight, dude. You dated Princess Keg Stand?”

  “‘Date’ isn’t the word.”

  “Kind of questioning your standards here.”

  He knows she’s joking, but also that she won’t let up until he throws the redhead under the bus. “She’s much cuter in person when I’m drunk.” This makes her laugh, so he continues. “You’re better-looking.”

  “Aww, that’s so vague of you.”

  “I like your mouth.”

  “What? That’s weird. You can have a nice smile or dimples or lips or teeth. But mouth? Ew.”

>   “Should I compliment your eyes instead, or is that cliché?”

  “Any dumb cunt can wear eyeliner. So did you just give up on my mouth or what?”

  “Come on. I like the whole package.”

  “By which you mean my looks.”

  “I mean, you’re so good-looking it’s hard to appreciate only your mind.”

  “. . .”

  “That was totally a compliment.”

  “!!!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  However clumsy, his artlessness ends up convincing her that he’s incapable of deceit. She kisses him. He assumes that her stiff, poking tongue and the way she’s gripping his head must be deliberate, she must be trying to correct something he’s doing wrong. The sex is very much what his retractile, uncomfortable personality led her to expect: his hands are unimaginative tourists, bumbling around her most obvious landmarks before wandering in circles around her back and thighs. She works his pants down halfway and seizes the fourth dick of her life—come on, she thinks, admire me, be into me, don’t make me regret hooking up with someone lame, it’s your goddamn move. She gets his shirt off and microjudges his coronas of nipple hair, his dunes of flesh, the pit hair frosted with deodorant. Straddling him, she begins the chore of erecting him, grinding fast against the sway of the bed. She manages to roll the condom on, but then getting it in is like trying to swab an ear with an uninflated balloon. The way she’s worrying the corner of her lip makes her look like she’s jumping her first car battery. She still hasn’t removed her jacket.

  The drama is abrupted when the lofted bed collapses at one end with a thrilling snap of timber and they go skidding off the mattress. She won’t stop laughing as he helps her up with his pants down and the condom still on. She pats him on the shoulder. “Next time, brosef.”