Many hours later, Alix crept up the stairs and opened my door. I was still awake. She leaned close to me, vodka fumes rising from her half-open mouth.
“Are you feeling better?”
“Kind of,” I lied.
“We’re having so much fun. Come down and have a drink?”
“I can’t.” She stumbled a little and stood up, looking around at the dark nothing on all sides of the half-open door.
“It’s boring up here!” she tittered drunkenly and walked out, leaving the door open.
So the rest of January and all of February and March I wasn’t relaxed at the bars or laughing at the parties. I was waiting on the couch in the Jenny Jones waiting room at Big Five. The doctor said it would probably be three months of the strong medicine he gave me before the ulcer would be healed. After a while the daze of loneliness lifted a bit and I noticed there were a couple of others who spent a lot of time on the couch. It was in the middle of a movie that I noticed. A zombie movie.
“So tell me what I’ve missed,” Chip said, sitting back down on the couch and opening his sketch pad.
“Well, he accidentally left the door open when he went back up to his hiding place and now…” I gestured at the screen. The zombies were slowly eating him. They moved through his flesh like they were wading through water. Their stone eyes were just more zombie surface. Perfect. Their clothes were eaten out. The flesh that showed through was whiter than bone.
“Is he the last one left alive, then?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” Chip passed me his sketchbook. It was a poster design to advertise the party Big Five was throwing that weekend. In the center was a pair of dice. IMAGINE THE POSSIBILI-TITTIES was printed in large block letters at the top.
“Nice.” I said. We threw these parties periodically to raise money, trading on the house’s vague reputation for licentiousness to charge hundreds of freshmen five dollars each to stand on the crowded porch in the freezing cold holding an empty cup and asking where the beer was.
“What are you going to do while the party is going on?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t we go bowling?”
Chip was a master of mildly pleasant activities. Confidence-building measures. Card games, crossword puzzles, bowling. To me this was immensely attractive. The movie was over. I was sitting on the couch tearing a piece of paper into smaller and smaller pieces. The pieces got too small. I started flicking my cigarette lighter. I reached down to the floor, picked up a filthy cigarette butt, and began pulling it apart. Chip looked up.
“Why don’t we play a game of chess, Mike?”
I nodded gratefully. People like Chip founded civilization.
“Your move, Mike.”
“Why don’t we listen to a little Pixies?”
“Why don’t I just put on some tea?” No intense, bright flashes. Just a steady, accumulating process. After college, when he moved back to New York, he even attracted a sort of salon of interesting and artistic people, who flocked to the pleasant, open atmosphere that rose from his constant, mild, unobtrusive activity. In the old days, as I gather from novels I’ve read, a woman would have done this kind of thing. And if the figure of Woman has a human face in my memory, her face is not my mother’s. It’s Chip’s. The little knickknacks and curiosities he’d collect. Little witty turns of speech. Regular habits. He had OCD.
He also had the feminine power of bringing something new into the world. And the feminine power of making a place for it, where it would stay and grow. He made cradles for it, knitted sweaters for it. When I discovered a new kick, it might wipe out a day or a weekend. For Chip, it would become the new crossword puzzle. It would be there every day.
“Your move.” Is it worth describing people who just disappear? But they don’t, not really. They go into memory. Into the memory disease. Not quite people anymore. Today, for example, as I write this, it’s lovely June. The light reminds me of something…a cloud opening, and a blue memory snake coils out. There are faces moving in its sides. “Your move.” Eva walked in, kissed Chip on the forehead, and slumped down in the chair.
“Charlie’s driving me crazy! He made us rehearse the scene like six times in a row, all the way through. And he’d just be there, crouched down, staring at us!”
“Charlie is crazy,” Chip said cleanly, moving a rook.
“I should have been there,” I said. “I’m the co-director.” Eva laughed and turned to Chip.
“Mike came during the last rehearsal. All he did was tell everyone they had to make their voices sound stranger. He made us say our lines over and over again really quickly until the words stopped making sense. Then he’d tell us to stretch out the vowels crazily. Even to add extra sounds. Here’s what my first line sounded like.” She demonstrated. It was incomprehensible.
“It’s supposed to be a surreal play,” I said defensively. “And the writing isn’t really very good so we have to express the surreal through other means.”
“But it sounds like gobbledygook! No one will be able to understand a single word!”
“Well Charlie likes it,” I countered.
“Yeah, that’s the terrible thing, Chip. That was like the only idea of Mike’s that Charlie liked. I mean, it’s the worst idea ever, guaranteed to make the play totally unwatchable. And Charlie loves it! He’s all intense about it. He’ll walk up behind you, ‘Now break that word down. Break it down!’ It’s so creepy.”
We laughed. The play was going to be a complete disaster. We’d just gotten another two grand from the college for costumes. The production was like an octopus. It had nearly every one of our friends in its tentacles. Todd was doing electronic music. Dan was doing silkscreen posters. Liz and Scott were designing sets. Emily was helping with costumes. At least thirty others were involved at various levels. Gary and Lisa were even driving a van into Cleveland twice a week on play business. Charlie rushed back and forth without sleep, without shaving, like octopus blood. He kept the octopus going, until it collapsed on May 15 in the amphitheater, sagging and pumping blood under the glare of one hundred and twenty tiki torches, fifteen floodlights, and maybe a hundred drunken spectators.
Eva looked at me slyly.
“How are things with your girl?”
“Bad,” I said. “The ulcer makes it so I can’t drink.”
“So?”
“So I don’t know how to do it. I haven’t had sober sex since I was like,” I paused and thought, “eight. And that was with my uncle. So I didn’t have much to do.” Chip laughed.
Eva looked shocked. Fake shocked. Her mouth opened. Eva’s fake shocked look was the center of sexiness. It was a hole in sexiness and everything slid down toward it. It would be under me in two months, her open-mouth shocked look, red cheeks, heavy breaths. My life was sliding down toward it.
She started to laugh, and her sexy punctured look smoothed out with a ripple. Like a baby swallowing. Now it was blonde hair, warm blue eyes, fine Dutch cheekbones. Only a little tremble in the smile showed that her face unhinged and opened around thick jets of ecstasy. That her eyes shot disappearance beams. Not that I knew for sure. Not yet.
Chip looked up and saw me looking at her, and her looking at me. The line between us thickened, opened out, and grew solid. A place in the world. The living room of Big Five, March 1997. The day had been warm and it was foggy out. Eva went into the kitchen and returned with a beer. I felt a phantom twist and a pang of loneliness. But Chip didn’t drink and he was showing me how to do it. He had acid reflux. Plus I don’t think he even liked drinking.
“Your turn,” Chip watched the chessboard. Zombies moved slowly through the rain outside. I studied the board, lighting a cigarette. Chip flipped through a magazine.
“Class feeling is deeper than an ocean. Who said that, Mike?”
“Chairman Mao,” I said, studying the board. Eva flipped through the channels, found Gremlins, and sat watching it as she sipped her beer. Out of the corner of
my eye I saw Stripe spray-paint a white circle on the wall of the closet they’d trapped him in, and disappear into it. Eva laughed.
“Man, you’re taking forever,” Chip muttered.
“Just chill out.” I leaned in to move, then sat back. I was happy, I realized. Maybe happier than I’d ever been.
People get together to bring new things into the world. And after a couple triangular months, something new was starting to show. Just in time, too, because the triangle was starting to collapse, two points were starting to slide together. Eva standing behind Chip’s back, mouthing “I love you” to me and laughing. I was laughing. Chip was laughing. If she kept that up, space itself would start collapsing. There isn’t very much space between two people in love. “Two is the loneliest number.” Other things were starting to collapse. The octopus play. The fragile respect enforced by the doctor’s waiting-room furniture.
“How about this?” Christian dropped a bucket full of bricks through the Jenny Jones coffee table. As soon as everyone saw it everyone knew it was just what we needed: a nice hole to put garbage in. Spring was sliding in. Spring was sliding thousands of needles into whatever was solid, fast, or frozen. Ice, the color gray, sleep: All died the death of a thousand needles. Voices didn’t carry the way they carried across the smooth frozen spaces of winter. They sank into the mud. Or the husks melted off and released thousands of whispers: “OK just for a second or two but I hear Chip coming…”
The beach was under the sidewalk. Peace and heat rose through the holes appearing everywhere. The spring revolution. Eva had given me a light green military-style jacket and I wore it everywhere. There was a photo in a book I had. It showed a man with a peasant hat and a jacket kind of like the one I had walking along a sidewalk. He had a folder under his arm and a man and a woman on either side of him. They were obviously all good friends. The caption read: “Josef Stalin walking to a meeting of the Central Committee, May 1922.”
That was the time! When he could still just walk down the street, unafraid, unparanoid, to a meeting of the Central Committee. It became a little mantra for me: “I’m walking to a meeting of the Central Committee.” The casualness, the soft green light of revolutionary power. I was smoking a lot of pot. Wherever I was, I was also somewhere else. The picture of Stalin gave me a sort of symbol for this magic feeling: There he was, just a man walking down the street, but he was also something else! I didn’t know what else I was. That’s what made smoking pot a soft revolution. A spring revolution.
If it was a surprise to see Stalin just walking down the street, it was also a surprise to see me. A surprise to me. The spring, the end of ulcer pain, future love, love of the future, and pot conspired to blur me out. Moving through the weeks like a Slinky, spread out over April May and June like a pack of cards spread out on a table. Talking with Charlie at the rehearsal, eating lunch with Emily on the grass, sitting in Professor Morris’s Islamic Mystical Poetry class: Put a knife through any one and it would go through all three. I was never completely in one place. Except when I was with Chip and Eva. Then the Slinky folded up, the cards returned to the pack, my body didn’t cast a shadow.
A couple other people, using enough force, could still nail me to a single instant.
“Hey, Mike.” It was Charlie. He was wearing a sky-blue suit that must have been made in the seventies. Perfectly pressed, perfectly preserved. “Hey, Mike.”
“What’s up, man?”
“Do you remember the people who lived behind my dorm sophomore year?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you think of them?”
“They remind me of garbage,” I said. I laughed.
Something in Charlie’s face stopped me.
“Be serious, Mike. This is very serious. In fact,” his face lost all elasticity, “this is really very serious.” As a child, you learn very early to identify a wide range of facial expressions. These are so various, and express so many degrees of feeling, that they appear to exhaust all the possible movements of the human face. But they do not, and I know they don’t, because I was looking at Charlie, and he wasn’t wearing one of those expressions. He wasn’t wearing one of those expressions I’d ever seen before.
“Do you,” he half-whispered, “do you remember those fucking people?” I shook my head.
“What people, Charlie?” I was sitting in a lawn chair smoking on Big Five’s spacious lawn. Charlie was about three feet away, crouched on his haunches facing me. He lobstered slowly up, still crouching, one thigh at a time, until he was a foot away from me. This didn’t look easy. He was a big guy, six foot two, maybe 230 pounds. In addition to his many other creative talents, he was a modern dancer. It had given him thighs of steel.
“I really don’t know,” I said. I paused. I was about to say, “I really don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” but I thought better of it. “I really don’t know who exactly you mean, Charlie. I’m trying to remember.”
He sighed, still looking straight at me, as if deeply disappointed.
“They live in the old white house right behind Harkness.” Harkness was the name of the dorm he’d lived in sophomore year. “Now do you remember?” I shook my head. “Mr. and Mrs. Anderson. Maybe you never met them. Lucky. You’re real lucky, Mike. Just like you’re real lucky to have such good friends. Chip for example. And Eva. She’s such a nice friend,” he sneered.
“Mr. and Mrs. Anderson,” he continued. “They’re, I don’t know, maybe fifty. Mid-fifties, something like that. He’s a big, strong man. Like a big bear. Big shaggy eyebrows. Business man. Mr. Business. And he talks…like…this.” Charlie demonstrated, his elastic actor’s face and arms imitating a solid, no-nonsense middle-aged man.
“And she’s a proper housewife. Garden. Church. Everyone loves her. ‘Oh! How are you Charlie? Come on in!’” He did a grotesque imitation of a middle-aged woman’s high voice. It might have been funny. But while he was doing it, Charlie’s mouth maintained its horrible grimace, showing through like a hole poked through a mask so the wearer can breathe.
“‘Come on in Charlie! Oh don’t sit there; you’ll get it dirty! Let’s go on down to the basement where we can sit down and talk a bit.’ They’re evil people Mike. ‘Come on in Charlie! Come on innnn!’”
“What—” I began.
“They molested me,” he said. It was warm. The heated air was intimate.
“Do you remember,” he continued, “that year in Harkness, I had John and Dirty Ray staying in my room for like two months?” I did remember. John was a teenage drug dealer whose brother had killed a gas station attendant with a screwdriver the year before. Charlie had done a large painting of a screwdriver and given it to John as a present. John loved it. Two years later, after I graduated, I’d hear from James that John had held up the same gas station, shot someone (not fatally), got caught on tape, and was doing ten to fifteen. Ray was a huge blond hippie.
“Mike, do you remember we used to get in fights all the time? ‘Play’ fights?” I remember sitting on Charlie’s bed. Charlie was painting in the corner. Ray was breaking down a quarter-pound of weed. John leapt in and grabbed the scale. “Give it back John.” “Fuck you Ray.” Ray grabbed John, they stumbled over Charlie, Charlie, grinning, got up and began beating Ray with a broom.
“And you remember that broom?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Well do you remember the time John held me while Dirty Ray pulled down my pants and stuck the broom handle up my ass while James filmed it?”
Strangely enough, I did kind of remember that. It didn’t seem very unusual at the time. I was in and out in those days. Even then Charlie was not an everyday guy. I don’t think I actually saw the broom-handle incident, but I remember people talking about it.
“Well, when you put it like that, Charlie.”
“Put it like what?” he whispered. “It was rape.”
“Rape’s kind of an intense word, Charlie. You’d wrecked Ray’s bike or something, and he was mad, and
afterward you stole a bunch of acid he had or something. I don’t know, I couldn’t have hung out there all the time. But you guys were all friends. Crazy stuff like that was always happening in that room.”
“I know,” Charlie said darkly.
“But now,” I said, trying to be sensitive, “thinking about it, it does seem kind of awful.”
“I know,” Charlie muttered. “It was especially awful for me,” he continued. “Because the Andersons constantly molested me.
“They’d take me downstairs. She would hold both of my hands. Soft at first, but then tight.” He demonstrated, grabbing my wrists.
“She’d have hot chocolate. Mountain Dew. But not too much because I’d have to go to the bathroom.” I had a bad thought. “Mr. Anderson would wave to me if he saw me on the street. ‘Hey how are ya, Charlie!’ “
Granted, the Dirty Ray incident, taken out of the haze and smoke of Charlie’s dorm room two years ago and placed in the strong spring sunlight, didn’t look too good. But it would be insane to believe that big, strong Charlie had been molested two years ago by a middle-aged couple living behind his dorm.
“Only two sips of Mountain Dew. But I’d have to go to the bathroom anyway.”
Could he be talking about something that had really happened to him? Maybe in his childhood? Maybe in another old white house? Had the white of another white house gotten stuck to the house behind Harkness? Or could it be possible that a couple who had molested Charlie when he was a child was now living here in Ohio?
“They said if I ever told anyone they’d kill me. Well you know what, Mike? You know what?” I shook my head. I was very aware of everything that was happening. “Maybe I should kill them. I’ve got everything I need. I’ve been watching their house. I know when they go to sleep.”
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