“But that was no good either,” she says. “The science was too dense, too confusing. I mean talk to me about sodium and chloride and I am like okay but what about us?”
I say the only word I have left. “Yeah.”
The sound of her voice is so different than the sound of a voice on TV, the Kiwis, their voices are for each other. Her voice is just for me right now. She’s still talking, about our changing brains, how the technology is morphing and how the sodium and the chloride are outdated modules. I’m not sure what she means, but she goes on.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah.”
She has so much to say to me, as if jogging and traveling unearthed all these things and she has to get them out of her system. She wanted to learn about computers because we are computers, that’s where the sodium and chloride are less relevant and our brains are more like these. She points to the phone strapped to her bicep.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah.”
She tells me about how exciting it is to study computers and obviously practical in terms of a career but majorly stressful. It’s why she takes Zoloft, which is how she became obsessed with psych meds. She wants to figure out an honest way to think about your brain and your computer and your essence and the possibility of there being a soul, of all these things becoming one, the overwhelming burden of a body. She took a poetry workshop and she says it changed her mind. It made her think we’re all machines. You put people together, the same people every week, you all become one, there’s a hum when seven people are in a small place, thinking about the same thing, together, you know, like sodium and chloride can break out of your mind and go into someone else’s, you know?
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah.”
I wish she knew about me. I wish I could tell her about my bad heart, transfer everything I know, everything I don’t know, every word of The Dunwich Horror letter into her mind. But I can’t tell her. I would sound crazy and the fog is clearing. Her bumper sticker breaks through the mist: KEEP PROVIDENCE WEIRD.
“Every single MFA program,” Florie says, laughing shrill, sad. I think she’s had a bad year too. “What do you even do with that? Rejected from every single poetry program I applied to. If I were Sylvia Plath, I would just jump in the oven, you know?”
“Don’t do that.”
She looks to the left and winces. “Speaking of poetic injustice, my oven is broken.” She looks at me suddenly. “Too dark?”
“No,” I say. “Impossible.”
She laughs a little, a less disturbing kind of giggle. She says she’s working at this law firm, pro bono suits against big pharma.
“They’re noble which means I can sleep,” she says. “Or maybe that’s just the Zoloft.”
A light rain falls. She keeps talking, I listen, and I feel better just being here, learning about her poems, her rationalizations. “Pain is art and art is pain,” she says, smacking her thigh. “No matter how many successful fuckwits swear otherwise, so this has to be leading up to something amazing. And maybe next year, maybe I’ll have better material, I’ll get in, I’ll be sweating over where to go, and we’ll laugh at this moment.”
She cracks her knuckles and I imagine her fingers in my mouth. “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah.”
She laughs and pulls back. “We made the sun come out.” And then something shifts. Her shoulders roll a bit, her voice drops. “Sorry for going off. I guess you can tell I don’t get out enough lately.”
“Me too,” I say, willing the saliva to stop filling my mouth. “Same.”
She smiles. “And now I have to go in because I can’t be late to work and I can’t show up in a sports bra.” She laughs. “Next time it’s your turn to say too much and be the stereotypical millennial narcissist, okay?”
“Okay,” I say. “It’s a deal.”
She turns and walks away and I watch her on the grass, she used to be so dainty and barefooted. Now she is in sneakers. She stomps. She’s stronger.
And then it hits me. That was a lot of talking. I was there. I was feeling things, wanting to act on those feelings. My heart was revving up but it didn’t hurt her at all. She’s alive. Her nose isn’t bleeding. She wasn’t wheezing, wasn’t saying What’s wrong with me? I didn’t make her dizzy.
I didn’t kill her.
Maybe this is different because Crane Comma Florie is different, medicated, with bright heavy sneakers. Maybe she’s like those coats that firemen wear, the coats that don’t catch fire. Maybe she’s just different.
Or maybe it’s more like she said, maybe this year was lonely and long. But maybe my body was busy recovering. Maybe I’m different.
She looks over her shoulder. “Wanna come in?”
I turn off the car and dig my hands into my pockets. I do. I have to know. Have to test it. Want-to and have-to were never as united as they are right now, as I walk toward her, toward her door, into her house. I look around the living room: the records on the coffee table, the playlist on low, the pillow with Jack Nicholson’s big smiling face, the poster of the periodic table of elements, right under a photo of Janet Jackson torn out of a magazine and stuck up there with gum. She’s dancing, dancing on the periodic table of elements, because there it is, the wonder of life, how we get from the periodic table to Janet Jackson.
I look at all her fish tanks, her fishbowls. “Wow,” I say. “How many fish do you have?”
“I’m not about numbers,” Florie tells me. “My babies inspire me. I’m surrounded by life. And, fish die. Constantly. So there’s death too. But that’s poetry, you know?”
She sits on Jack Nicholson’s face and pats the sofa next to her. Carefully, I sit down.
“And Muse Frontman keeps me company,” she says, then laughs. “But he’s a cat. I mean I’d much prefer to hear about you, Theo.”
She kicks off her sneakers and stretches out her legs and crosses them at the ankle. “Let’s start with your job. Do you like it?”
“Yeah,” I say, that word, my word. “I deliver the papers.”
She laughs. “I know,” she says. “And why do you deliver the papers?”
“I dunno,” I say, feeling boring, feeling bad. Here I am, I still can’t quite look at her, I’m worried that I’ll see blood coming out of her nose, that I would kill her. But I can’t resist it right now, the talking, the listening, telling her about the Telegraph, trying not to stare too hard at her nostrils, her pupils.
“Cool,” she says. She pulls her legs away from the table in one swift move. She crosses her legs and tickles my calf with her big toe. I feel it all over, under, in the small of my back.
“So how did you come up with the name Muse Frontman? Is that your favorite band?”
“No,” she says with a smile, like she loves this question, like she always wants boys to ask but they never do. “I got him at the shelter, well, it’s more like he got me. We made a deal. We decided to pick up People magazine, name him after the first two words we saw.”
I smile, thinking of Pedro. “You’re nice.”
She lowers her chin. “Theo, I think you should kiss me.”
Kiss.
I’ve never kissed a girl. Never.
She is in the room, Crane Comma Florie. She is in the room and she’s not fainting, not bleeding. She’s different. I’m different.
And then I do it. Kissing is so different than I expected, her mouth on mine, the air we share, our mouths closed, the cave, the inside of a girl. I’ve always known girls have tongues, lips. But I’ve never felt it, the wetness, this miniature whale swooshing from her mouth into mine, swimming, the wanting, the click-clack of our teeth. I keep thinking it. This is kissing. This is it.
And I’m fixed. FIXED. I kissed. KISSED. I know why you can’t do it to yourself, because you need the surprise of another person’s tongue. Crane Comma Florie. I kissed her and she’s alive. She’s not fainting, not bl
eeding. I kiss her a lot and her cheeks are flushed. She bites her lip. She talks so much and then after she finishes saying something good about us, about this, she says, You know what I mean? And then no matter what she is saying, I say, Yeah. Kissed. Fixed. She says she knows she comes on strong and her friends tell her she should try to back off and play it cool. “But look how long we waited,” she says. “You know, I liked you before I saw your face. You’re so tender. The guy before you, he didn’t close the bags on the papers. But then you come along and you tie every paper with a twisty thing. You use red and green ones at Christmas. You.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah.”
I watch her nostrils closely. I make sure there’s no blood coming. She says she likes how bold I am, how unafraid I am to look her in the eye. I look at one of her posters, like the bumper sticker: KEEP PROVIDENCE WEIRD. I’m normal now. KEEP PROVIDENCE NORMAL.
“There is such a story I could tell you about that sign,” she says. I didn’t realize she was watching me, didn’t realize I was staring. “But it’s more of a first-date story, it’s my big closing number at the end of the date, you know, the story I tell to make it clear that I unequivocally rock.”
I watch her nostrils. “Do you feel okay?”
She smiles. “I feel so okay,” she says. “I love how considerate you are. I love that I don’t feel this compulsion to spin you some yarn about how I never do this. There’s this innocence about you and it brings out the wild in me and I love that we got here this fast and that you don’t even know my first-date stories. Can we even call this a date?”
“Yeah,” I say. “We can call it whatever you want.”
Crane Comma Florie puts her hand on my arm. “We can do anything in the world right now,” she says. “We can eat or not eat we can sit here or go out we can talk or not talk, we can mess around or not mess around. I have some pot. I have some old beers and some new vodka. I have time. I love this hour, you know? We can decide what this is, if it’s morning or night, when else can you say that, you know?” She falls back against the sofa. She’s a nice person, maybe the nicest person I ever met. There’s something crazy about her in the fun way, like when Roger, when he was our sub, told us that if Van Gogh were walking around, everyone would run away because he had no ear, but if he was holding his paintings they would be nice to him. She’s holding her paintings and she’s good at it.
And now she’s thirsty. “What about you?” she says. “Are you thirsty?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Sure.”
She returns with plastic cups of water, biting her lip. “That took forever because I stepped in gum,” she says, giggling. “In my house. How great is it that I can tell you that and I know you aren’t going to judge me?”
I feel bad for Crane Comma Florie. I’m glad she has Muse Frontman. I bet there’s some guy out there who’d wanna sit on the couch with her and take pictures of the cat. I bet there is someone for everyone. I’m drinking her water and it tastes like soap. I wonder what she’s going to do when she realizes I’m going to leave her. I wish I could tell her it’s not because of her nonstop talking and the gum on the floor and the hair on her toes, which I’m noticing now.
“Tomorrow we should go out in the world,” she says. “Like do something totally random. Do you want to go to Seekonk and just be in Seekonk? We can even take Muse if he ever comes home. I have a leash.”
“Yeah,” I say. “We could go to Seekonk.”
But in my mind I’m already gassing up my car, already gone, already on my way to Chloe.
EGGS
Right after we put Chuckie in the place they said is safest and best for him, we had to go right back to work. We didn’t have any more time off because we’d used it all up dealing with him in our home, the place that was unsafe and worst. It was good for Lo, the distraction of other kids, many of whom would walk her to the car, want to know more.
But it was no good for me. I was ferocious in those days. Scowling at anyone who said hello, slamming the coffeepot in the kitchen at the station. One day we had bagels brought in and they gave us plastic knives. I lost my temper and sliced my thumb open.
I still have a scar, a tiny mark. You’d only know it was from a knife if I told you. Lo knows, she kisses it sometimes, says I wouldn’t have a scar if I’d put Vitamin E on it, but then she also says my thin skin is part of my charm, such a Pisces. She doesn’t know that I wanted a scab, not a scar per se, I didn’t think it through, but I wanted a little project, a place to put my energy. I picked that scab and watched it bleed. I fought my body as it tried to close that wound, lunging at it with my sharp fingernail. It made me so aware of our bodies, how they’re on our side, your skin working so hard to hold it all together 24/7.
And there I was, picking at it, fighting it, me.
It’s been a minute and I can’t figure it out, how the hell the Beard healed up so fast. And it’s a load to carry because anyone would say I’m spinning my wheels, say that the haughty Lovecraft gal was just one of those people who can’t say I’m wrong. But in my gut it was the Beard. In her gut too. You can smell conviction.
And that just brings me back to where I am right now, middle of the night, every night, up in bed wondering how. How do you heal that fast? I know how you stop yourself from healing. But how do you expedite it? Did he immerse himself in a tub of Vitamin E? Is that a thing you can do?
I’m awake when the call comes at five A.M. It’s a woman on the East Side. Dead. Dead at twenty-four. Twenty-four.
Lo rolls over. “I’d make you something but I’m so wiped out.”
“Of course,” I say, meaning it, fearing it, the end of love. A year ago she’d be up in her robe, yawning, cracking eggs, overcooking ’em. “Of course.”
I take a cupcake out of the freezer. I heat up water and I steep my tea. Fifteen minutes. One woman. Twenty-four.
* * *
—
It happened here on Wickenden by the gas station, a sprawl of an intersection, the highway above looming like the highway in a Bruce Springsteen song, the road outta here.
Her name is Jillian Farber and she dropped dead by an out-of-service pump. She was here on foot. No car. The guy in the gas station nods, he’d seen her around, now and then. This means she’s a user, a regular. He was probably talking shit about her yesterday, but now that she’s gone, he’s possessive. The loss is his.
“She ever with anyone?” I ask.
“Sometimes,” he says. “I guess?”
There are other people here. Cops. EMTs. I lean in. “You ever see her with anyone with a beard, say about six-two? Anyone like that here when she passed?”
The guy shrugs. “Maybe,” he says. “She’s just one of those people, you know, she’s around.”
Maybe isn’t no and I head outside. Stacey is here, back after leave with baby number six. Richie. Healthy Richie. The joke around the station is that Richie is gonna be a quarterback because he looks like Tom Brady. I will never be captain because I will never agree that a baby resembles Tom Brady.
“Eggs.” She doesn’t even look at me. Says my name like I’m a dog, leaving me with no choice but to walk to her. Woof woof.
“Stacey,” I say, faking it. “Good to have you here.”
She wants to know what I was doing in there.
I stammer and sweat. “I was just asking the guy for his POV.”
She glares. “I said what were you doing?”
I am steady. “I got his statement, nothing more to it.”
She nods. “But we already got a statement.” She looks at me in that pitying way. “They found track marks on her toes,” she says. “Eggie, you look like hell. And there’s no work for you to do here, you know better, you saw her backpack full of all the tagged jewelry, junkie thief, plain as day. Get some sleep.”
She watches my face fall. I never got good at covering my disa
ppointment. Another reason I don’t visit my son: They say he can’t process emotion, but what if they’re wrong? What if I walked in there and looked at him and he saw the sadness on my face? What if he felt it? What if I went in there and ruined his day?
“Druggies die of drugs,” Stacey says. “And I mean it. Get some sleep.”
She pats my back in a way that reminds me that she’s a mother. My eyes land on the backpack I didn’t open. I did miss that backpack. The sun is up and the van is here and the Beard is not here, never was.
I think of all the nights up, all the boxes, all the wondering. Who is the Beard? How did he heal his wounds? How did he fix his nose? How does he kill all these people? How does he slip away? Those sound like the questions of a crazy person, a ghost hunter, a conspiracy theorist, an absentee father who won’t even visit his own son, who doesn’t even properly fuck his wife on a regular basis anymore, a secretive man, a man who keeps files on dead people, people who died because people die, not because some Beard killed them.
In the gas station I pick up two jelly doughnuts. Stacey accepts my apology, she eats the doughnut and licks her fingers. “How’s Lo?” she asks.
“Great,” I say. Because I’m a liar and liars lie. “Better than ever.”
JON
The miracle of the Internet is that I am in my car, knowing exactly where to go, what time to be there. Chloe has an opening at the Flare Gallery in Chelsea. I like the idea of there being an audience for our reunion. This is why people have big weddings, because sometimes you want everyone to see that things worked out for you. I love the idea that I will be the guy marching into the gallery to get the girl. And she’ll come running to me, to get me.
Kissed. Fixed.
That’s my plan, just walk up to her and kiss her. Say nothing. Do what I should have done a long time ago. I’m making good time and it’s mostly a straight shot on 95. I drive faster than I should, but then again I am kissed, fixed. I don’t know how it happened and I don’t need to know. It happened. Kissed, fixed. I don’t think anything could hurt me right now and I’m checking my phone to see how long it’s gonna take when the guy in back of me beeps. I was veering into his lane. I wave. Sorry.
Providence Page 15
