Desert Boys

by Chris McCormick

  I had fifteen minutes before Joshua Stilt was scheduled to speak, so I took a walk around the park. Lining the perimeter were tables manned by volunteers of various city organizations and businesses. Food and beverage booths, including a vegetarian soul food restaurant called Souley Vegan, sent into the world the thick smells of fried polenta, tempeh burgers, and Ethiopian coffee. Every plate, cup, and utensil used for the event was compostable, and marked green bins had been arranged in neat rows throughout the park for that purpose. I bought an ear of barbecued corn, still in its husk, and found an open seat on one of the park’s benches. The whole setup reminded me of a more sophisticated version of a vaguely political rally I’d attended in my hometown, years ago. This was why my article wasn’t going to work, I thought. My central question—how had Joshua transitioned so seamlessly and successfully to life outside the Antelope Valley?—interested neither Joshua nor my editor. I realized this was why I’d never been interested in politics: I wanted to understand the past while everyone else wanted to talk about the future. I felt tired. Nearby, children tossed bread crumbs to the geese at the edge of the lake, and, behind them, a white kid—a high schooler probably—pulled up, one by one, his baggy pant legs.

  I watched him wade into the lake, one long, splashless stride at a time. I had no idea what this boy was doing. I was confused and my headache was flaring up—otherwise, I might’ve shouted, Someone’s getting into the lake! When he was knee-deep in the water, he hunched over and covered his ears.

  Then the ground shook, and I dropped my corn.

  THE TRANSCRIPT, 3/3

  DK: What do you believe in?

  JS: I believe in Oakland’s next beginning. I spent a lot of time reading Zen philosophy in high school: D. T. Suzuki, mostly, despite his charmless nationalism. I still believe in some of that, the illusory nature of beginnings and endings. I believe in working to make beginnings breed off each other. I believe everyone can contribute their own beginnings to the city—whether it’s business or art or an idea for the classroom—if they have the time and energy and luck and support to find out what it is. I believe in celebrating differences instead of pretending we’re all the same. What else do I believe in? I believe in Beyoncé. [Laughter.]

  DK: Are you dating anyone?

  JS: You’re never going to ask about my plans as mayor, are you?

  DK: I just want to paint a more complete picture of your life than your career.

  JS: She’s a photographer and a sound artist I met in college, believe it or not.

  DK: A sound artist?

  JS: Yeah. She makes noises on her computer, and then syncs them up with symphonies in Japan. I don’t really get it, either, but it’s what she does, and she keeps winning prizes and everything, so I just trust, at this point, that she’s a genius.

  DK: Is she Japanese?

  JS: No, she’s a black girl from Oakland. She’ll be photographing me when we get back. Speaking of Oakland—

  DK: One last question about the Antelope Valley. I promise it’ll be the last.

  JS: [Sounds of the espresso machine.]

  DK: Did you ever find out who painted the mustache on the mascot?

  JS: No. I couldn’t imagine anyone at that school making a political statement like that. Nobody I knew thought the mascot was in bad taste, but the Hitler mustache seemed to suggest, albeit crudely, that someone did. Did you? I mean, did you find out who did it?

  DK: I’m trying to find out. I’m interviewing people. Unless you think I should let it go?

  JS: Hey, if we’re not going to talk about my plans for Oakland, we should get going. We’ve got to wade through the micro-city at Sixteenth and Mission to get back to the train.

  DK: I like that, “micro-city.”

  JS: It feels that way sometimes. Like we live in a Russian doll made up of one community on top of another.

  DK: I know we’ve been off the record for a while now, but can I use that for the article?

  JS: No, it’s dumb. It doesn’t make any sense. [Laughter.] Let me think of something better.

  THE CALL

  After the park was evacuated, we worshipped our phones. We knew when and where, so we searched the internet for information regarding the other three Ws: What, Why, and Who. I was on the corner of Grand and Perkins, aiming my phone’s video recorder at the emergency crews. I thought we’d had an earthquake, but then I checked Twitter. According to @Markus_2987, two homemade pipe bombs had been set off at the stage. According to @EllaElla11, however, only one bomb went off, from a compost bin at the center of the park. The low-pitched swell of the blast was still vibrating in my stomach, and I felt queasy. I couldn’t find Joshua or Jenna. I knew I may have seen a suspect in the lake, but I couldn’t remember anything about him other than his race. The name Elijah Retivat—Shelly’s son—entered my mind, but what were the chances that he and the bomber were the same person? I checked my notes, but nothing was there. So I sat, legs out, on the sidewalk, and called Lloyd.

  We knew my mom wouldn’t survive through the fall. I kept pushing off introducing her to Lloyd until it was too late. He hadn’t forgiven me, and I was beginning to think he never would.

  “Babe,” I said, still shaking, and as soon as he said a word—his first to me in two weeks—I started to cry.

  THE BEGINNING

  In the beginning, a gay sixteen-year-old boy, desperate to convince himself of the falseness of that first adjective, tried to get a sixteen-year-old girl to show him her braces.

  When Kate Schaffer used to laugh, she flashed her wild teeth like the triangles of a sliced orange. Now with her braces she giggled like an aristocrat, lips closed behind a chubby white hand. Obviously I used the word “love” without meaning it just yet, but I wanted to grow into that word with her, and the only way I figured I could was to make her laugh again the way she used to laugh. This—a straight boy might’ve concocted a more sexually explicit plan—should have been my first clue that the whole experiment was a waste of time.

  However. On the day of the pep rally, Kate Schaffer and I ditched our history class to—to do what? I don’t remember. She was everyone’s crush in middle school, but now she’d put on some weight and had been relegated to kissing a boy she must have known was gay. She kissed shyly; my bottom lip, for the most part, rested gently between hers. I remember liking the fact that she was bigger than me, and remember uttering the phrase, “Kiss me, Kate”: if there had been any doubt to my sexuality, these should have been strikes two and three.

  The gym’s back door opened from the inside, and we stopped kissing to duck behind an air-conditioning unit. I peeked over to see a janitor prop open the door with a large trash bin and walk off some fifty feet for a smoke. He kept his back to the open door, and I grabbed Kate’s hand and ran into the equipment room.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m going to kiss you in every room on campus,” I said, and kissed her on the mouth. I could feel the metal behind her lips. “This was a tough one, but, equipment room: check.”

  “Let’s go to the next one before we get locked in here,” Kate said, happy to play along.

  Plopped in the corner near the basketballs and volleyball nets was the cloth head of Rebby the Blue, his blank, meshed eyes staring blandly ahead. Above him, a dry-erase board, its black tray stocked with four fat markers of blue, black, green, and red.

  “One minute,” I said. I grabbed the black marker, uncapped it, and aimed it at the mascot’s face.

  At the rally, when the mascot came out onto the gym’s floor, and everyone around us jumped from the bleachers and hollered and laughed, I watched Kate Schaffer laughing wildly, and saw those braces. God, I was proud—I thought, stupidly, that being able to fix the way Kate Schaffer laughed meant I’d be able to fix myself.

  “Was that the last girl you ever kissed?” Lloyd asked me once, years later. We were in bed in the Noe Valley apartment we shared with two other couples, alone for the first time in a long time on a
lazy weekend afternoon. The sun through the windows turned the sheets on our stomachs an impossible white.

  “The one and only,” I said.

  “I know it’s ridiculous, but I hate to think of you kissing someone else, even if it’s a girl. Even if it’s ten years ago.”

  Our faces were so close, it didn’t take much work for me to kiss him.

  “There,” I said. “Now you’re the last person I’ve kissed, no question about it.”

  “Take me home,” he said. “Let me meet your mom and dad.”

  “I will,” I said. “I promise I will.”

  THE END

  The police arrested two nineteen-year-old boys (neither named Retivat) whose four homemade bombs—of which only two were set off—proved less effective than they’d planned. Now those boys were adults, forced to reconcile the perfection of what they’d imagined with the defectiveness of what they’d actually done. No one was killed, thankfully, though among the seventeen injured were Joshua Stilt and Jenna King. Both had checked out of the hospital with various degrees of burns and lacerations. I met with them at their apartment that night, just before heading back to BART.

  “Well,” Jenna said. Her right arm was bandaged from the elbow to the wrist, and her nose ring had been—by choice or not, I didn’t ask—removed. To my surprise, she hugged me with her good arm. “At least this’ll give your article some pizazz. You might even win an award.”

  The flowers Joshua had brought home from the man at the Mission Street BART station stood in a colorful Tiffany-style vase on the radiator. The day-old newspaper they’d come wrapped in had been thrown out, apparently, and now there was no way to tell the flowers apart from those purchased at an expensive boutique.

  “I’m not sure I’m going to write the article after all,” I told them. Instead, my plan was to stop thinking so much about the past, to bring Lloyd home with me to the Antelope Valley. I wanted him to meet my father. I wanted to start our future. But that was another story.

  If Joshua was disappointed by the news, he didn’t let on. He was sitting in the chair he’d been photographed in earlier that day, holding a plastic blue ice pack against his knee. He said, “What are you going to do with all your notes?”

  “They’re yours,” I said, presenting my notebook. “If you want them.”

  Joshua Stilt narrowed his eyes. He was in pain. “If I read them,” he asked, “will I find what I think I’ll find?”

  I nodded.

  Then he smiled—that smile—and told me exactly what I could do with these notes.

  YOU’RE ALWAYS A CHILD WHEN PEOPLE TALK ABOUT YOUR FUTURE

  We didn’t love the circumstances, but for the first time in years, my sister and I were home at the same time. Dad took a nap on the brown leather couch in front of the TV, and Jean and I tiptoed past him on our way to the kitchen like kids. We weren’t kids. In a month, Jean would be twenty-nine. She was an attorney but worked, in addition, for free. Pro bono. My dad, if awake, would have made his favorite joke on the subject: He’d always been, himself, pro-Cher.

  At twenty-five, I wasn’t a kid either, but compared to the Mother Teresa persona Jean had wrapped around herself, I didn’t feel much like a contributing adult. A day earlier I’d called her that—Mother Teresa—when she’d told me about a community center she was planning for low-income survivors of domestic abuse. I said, “Damn. Mother Teresa over here.” She told me never to call her by that charlatan’s name again, and recommended the book by Hitchens.

  My mom was in the kitchen, making coffee the Armenian way. When I’d left home for college, I discovered most people knew it as “Turkish” coffee, but in my house we knew the truth. The Turks had taken enough from us already. We drew the line at espresso.

  Jean and I took seats at the kitchen table, an oak-top rectangle with white, ornate legs like a piano’s. Jean saw me noticing the legs of the table and mentioned how Victorian they were. I corrected her. “Victorians would have sawed these off,” I said. “Too lurid. Too ribald.”

  My mom rubbed her head and made a joke about herself being too bald. The treatment had taken her hair and weight, but not her jokes.

  That’s when we asked her to tell us a story.

  Jean and I both knew Mom was getting impatient with us about starting families of our own. She was particularly frustrated with Jean, who had just ended her engagement to a physicist at Cornell. Mom hadn’t heard of Cornell before meeting Patrick, but after the breakup, she couldn’t help bringing up the school every time she heard something intelligent. As for me, I had time. An Armenian man—even a halfie like me—could claim his mother as his girl for as long as he wanted.

  “Tell us a story,” my sister and I said, afraid silence would lead into another eulogy of Patrick.

  “First, put on socks,” said my mom, turning from the countertop with two miniature cups of coffee. “On this cold floor? Go put on socks.”

  When we got back to the kitchen, my mom had our coffee cups on the table. She said she didn’t have any stories to tell. “Ask Daley,” she said, gesturing to me. “He’s the writer.”

  “I’m a blogger,” I said. Then, to improve my self-esteem: “And a freelance journalist.”

  Jean said, “Emphasis on ‘free.’”

  “Story,” my mom muttered to herself, fetching her own cup of coffee. “Story.” Then she took a seat at the table and started talking.

  * * *

  When my mom was a girl in Armenia, she’d eat apples until she grew sick. She and her older brother Gaspar practically lived in the apple tree outside their farmhouse in Kirovakan. The other brothers and sisters would leave them up there all day, until Raffy, the eldest, went out after sunset to talk them down. My mom blamed all her current dental trouble on those early days eating apple after apple after apple in the twilight.

  She moved to New York at twenty-three, the first of her immediate family to emigrate. Nights she took English courses in Brooklyn. She feared the people in the subway, clutching the railings like weapons, until one day she didn’t. Nothing happened to signify the change—only time. Time replaced her fear with an immense loneliness. She missed her family and her country. In the Big Apple she missed her apple tree, and on the subway she cried and cried.

  Eventually the rest of her family came to America, and she moved with them to Glendale, California. She worked in retail at the local mall. The mall security guard, a Midwestern transplant hoping to break into the movies, asked her to meet him for coffee. Jean and I knew this part of the story well. Our dad—the security guard with a head shot folded up in his back pocket.

  While my mom and dad started dating, there was another man involved. An Armenian, a friend of Uncle Gaspar’s, named Armen. This was the first time Jean and I had heard about this other man. My mom said Armen definitely sold and probably used inordinate amounts of drugs. “Which drugs?” we asked. “Just drugs,” she said. “The bad kind.”

  In any case, Armen—even though he’d never spoken to her, had seen her on only a handful of occasions—kept telling my uncle Gaspar how badly he wanted to marry my mom, how it was destined, how he’d do anything, anything, anything for her. My uncle, being of a certain generation of Armenian men, obliged. He told my mom to stop dating the white security guard so he could introduce her to his friend. It’s destined, he said, and it’s better that he’s one of us.

  A few years earlier, my mom would have buckled. But remember: she’d lived in New York for two years by herself. She was not the same person she’d been before she left home. She wasn’t the girl her brother remembered, lounging in the limbs of an apple tree.

  No, she said. I love Ed—my dad’s name—and I don’t want to meet anyone else.

  My uncle must have hated her for making him return to his friend, tail between his legs, with a no. What kind of man lets his younger sister tell him what’s what? But they were in America now. The rules were different. What could he do?

  On that topic, Armen—dealer of unspecified
drugs—had an idea. Late one night, he drove to the apartment my mom shared with her parents. He brought a shotgun. Probably it rode in the empty passenger seat like a child. He was so high, it was a wonder he’d driven the whole way, but when he arrived, he removed the gun from the car and walked along the gravel parking lot to my mom’s first-floor apartment window.

  My sister and I had a hard time swallowing the next part of the story. According to my mom, two angels appeared in her dream and told her to leave her bedroom—which faced the parking lot—and head into her parents’ bedroom, where she’d be safe. So she did. Less than a minute later, the blasts from the shotgun shattered her bedroom window, glass and buckshot splattering the walls like water from a shook, wet hand.

  The next day, my uncle made an anonymous phone call to the LAPD, and his friend Armen was arrested for possession with intent to sell. He was deported to the Soviet Union, and even after that log of a country broke into its splintered parts, my mom never heard from him again.

  * * *

  We drank the last of our coffee. My mom kept saying, “Are you sure I haven’t told you this before? I’m sure I’ve told you this before.”

  “We’re sure,” Jean said, and I agreed. “We’d remember the time you were visited by angels and almost murdered.”

  “Oh, well,” my mom said. “That’s it, really. Not a story. Not really. More like an anecdote. Nothing changed because of it. I would have married your dad even if this crazy man never existed.”

  We all fell quiet. We had nothing to say about her story. I was amazed at learning something new about her, amazed at the fact of a person’s unknowability, but this was a feeling more than a statement to proclaim. Eventually the silence was broken when Jean asked Mom to read our fortunes in our coffee grounds.