Stephen Florida

by Habash, Gabe

  “You’re by yourself?”

  “Yeah, most everyone comes out here by themself. I had a roommate, he was here until about a week ago, his name was Hector, he would travel during his week off, go see his kid. I guess he couldn’t do it anymore, I don’t know.” That’s when I hear the thump, coming from his bedroom, but I pretend I don’t, pretend I’m relaxing and not paying attention. I can feel him looking at me, and I try to forget that he’s not wearing a shirt and it keeps getting colder.

  “Are you sure we’re alone?”

  “I already said it to you. It’s odd. I don’t know, sometimes you get to wondering.”

  “Wondering about what?”

  “About what happens to you when you get left alone for so long. As a person, you begin to change. Sometimes I’ve been so angry I thought I couldn’t go to work. I don’t feel like myself sometimes.”

  “You mean like thoughts?” There’s something behind the back of my chair with its jaw hanging open.

  “Yeah, I’ve had some thoughts, bad ones. I’ve had … once or twice …”

  There should be at least the sound of traffic or the wind, but there’s nothing, and suddenly it’s very dark and I sit still and don’t move, hoping what’s at the end of the sentence is not what I think it is.

  He is looking right at me.

  “Once or twice what?” I say quietly.

  His chest fills with air and he sighs. “Just a few times,” he says, breathing faster. “It gets … bad.”

  I don’t move my eyes or make any noise, but what seems to have bobbed up near the surface has gone back down again. I dance around it and take delicate steps.

  “I understand this is very hard.”

  “It is, very hard.”

  “I can see it.”

  He stands up and rubs his face. “I think we should go to bed, O.K.?”

  “O.K.,” I say. We both stand up. “In one of my classes we talked about how octopuses will do self-cannibalism.”

  He goes over into his room and slams the door.

  I walk outside, down to the end of the unfinished block. Either something’s moving around the settlement or it’s completely empty. I can’t tell. I can’t make anyone feel better. I can’t make myself better or any of them. I forget the name of the town I’m in. I forget where I am geographically in relation to anything I’ve encountered before. Then I remember.

  In the dark, straight past the gravel road and the huge plot of grass under snow, is a potato field, and standing in the middle of it is a giant.

  Then when it gets too cold, I walk back and lie down on the couch, and probably would’ve been too frightened to sleep if I wasn’t so tired or if I was afraid that kind of thing could ever really happen to me.

  THE TRUTH IS I’ve barely come up for air. I got my teeth fixed at the dentist. I sat through the lectures and took down some notes. It wasn’t anything. What is life but one prolonged, serious push? I read the papers. I read about the bizarre weather that’s coming, clouds and fronts meshing strangely above Alberta, and then I read about the Junette disaster that killed five of six on one of the rigs. It happened because they got ahead of themselves. I didn’t read the follow-up stories, I didn’t want to find out if Shane was one of them. When I was a dumb little child I didn’t think anything cost more than one hundred dollars. My mom bought me a thick, expensive winter coat and I couldn’t believe it. I remembered that a week ago, that feeling, so I bought a new coat in New Rockford, I went there just because I had time on my hands, I took the bus an hour and got off and bought the most expensive coat they had in the store, a black coat with a fur collar, and I feel like a million dollars when I wear it. I wore it into the regionals gym outside Minneapolis with the hood up, I didn’t listen to anyone, didn’t listen to what Hargraves or Linus talked about on the drive here while I sat in the backseat and hummed Dolly Parton until I ran out of gas. Rudy sent me a letter about the coat but I didn’t open it. The coat is the nicest thing I’ve ever had. Sometimes I put it onto my visage and just smell the fur. I’ve been thinking about my mom a lot lately. Then they call me up for my first regionals match. They run me out there for a second-rounder against a junior from Wheaton named Marv Garber, and I do away with him halfway through the second period. I’ve been practicing on him in my head for weeks. He’s won a lot of matches, but I do away with him like a scarecrow. I wish this emptied me out better. Or that it didn’t refill as quickly. There’s barely time to clap before I’m off the mat and they bring up the next two, and I’m sitting back where I was before, under the bleachers, where I’ve been all day. I eat half a banana and scream. Two making-out teenagers are scared away down at the other end. I reach up and grab a beam and hang and pull. I can see up the ladies’ skirts who choose to wear skirts in February. I do not touch their dumplings but am close enough to smell the verbena fragrance, then I drop back down and rub my front against the wall. Frottage. No one sees. When I hear them announce the Marion-Worthington match, I emerge like some kind of woods troll and stand off to the side. I watch Marion build up a 7–2 lead on Worthington through a period and a half, but Worthington blows forward for Marion’s leg and in the process Marion’s shin gets caught under and bends the wrong way to the side, the leg going from an I to a crooked L. It’s how it goes. I watch him try to cover it up, I watch them stop the match and give Worthington the win and haul Marion out of the gym crying. Then I return under the bleachers. I pass time by eating small nibbles and making myself sweat. I think of my dad, who could get angry very easily, who picked objects when there were no people around, and the one Sunday my mom and me came home and found the vacuum dismantled in the backyard and my dad, in a sweaty shirt, said, “Sorry.” Joseph Carver wins to go to the semis, Jan Gehring has already lost. On the bleachers I spot a sack of Cheerios and steal it from the child, and then I write my name out with them on the hardwood. All the art I made as a kid looked like a retard did it. I don’t mind, I got good at other things. I fired up a small sea monster in a kiln and painted it red and green and gave it to my mom, but how, when I gave it to her, could she not be disappointed that it was so poor? She put it on the window ledge above the kitchen sink and the paint faded in the sunshine, and as I got older I was embarrassed that it was so terrible, that it only had value to her as a representation of me, of me trying hard at something, I was embarrassed that I could only make art that was sloppy and ugly. I wish she was sitting in the bleachers, I would trade the whole crowd for an empty gym if it meant she and my dad could watch. Linus wins his semifinal, then they call me out again. I go where they tell me to, I sit through the movies they want me to watch, I learn the courses, I sleep in their hotels, and when they call me out I do my business. The strategy I go out with is what I stick to and it’s two parts. The first part is to go right at him, nine times out of ten what gets you beat is you hesitate on a shot, but I go right toward him and discard the flutters of the brain, I keep shooting at him and I get his leg and then his other and he’s not talking to me during, that’s how I know I’m pushing him, two, then three takedowns, and one time he’s too fast but so am I and I escape, but the important thing is to just keep pushing, I go high and left and right, more points, I go so fast and I look for such small signs like the transference of his weight and go after it without control, and at some point Hargraves is yelling instructions between the periods but I don’t hear, I get another two points and go through him, and when he begins leading with his hands I know he’s going to start trying to get back the points I’ve racked up by shooting, and this is when I switch to the second part of the strategy and sit back and wait for his shots, and if he gets me down I tell myself I will get out, he reaches for my leg and I don’t give it to him, he dances me around the mat, and they call it for the third period and he wants top, of course he does, because I’m up so much that he needs a home run, but forcing it from top is the worst thing you can do, it’s like driving under the influence, you lose sight of what you’re doing because you’re sc
ared and it leads to easy escapes, and then after he knows it’s all over, he just keeps trying to clutch me and I let him and this is how the match ends, 13–7. What I say to Worthington is: “My body is not to be touched by you or anyone else.” I walk off the mat and stand at the edge of it while Joseph Carver wrestles the second-highest wrestler named Jim McBride and loses. I have no opinion about this. When Joseph Carver walks off past the mat, where I’ve stationed myself to be sure this exchange happens, he hardly looks up and doesn’t recognize me, and I content myself with the washed-up fate that keeps messing up its only job, and before I go back under the bleachers I watch the 125 final, where Linus goes right at Daryl or Darren Johnston, puts him wherever he wants to put him, as though he’s a piece of a tea set. He wins 14–2. When Linus finally loses, it will be to someone as aggressive as he is, who pushes directly forward, pushing aside Linus’s forcefulness with his own forcefulness. I sit and wait my turn while crunching the Cheerios to wet powder. McBride is too good a wrestler to set out a trap for, so I just stare into the void. Linus comes through the beams and sits down next to me and he says, “I know what’s going on. I’ve seen you around her place. I followed you. I think you should fess up.” My head sails away. How could he have known anything? I was so careful, I thought I found Anna Michaels’s apartment building without anyone noticing me, I told myself no one would catch me at Louise’s manless house, studying the different wallpapers in each room, looking at the child’s crib. I waited until night every time. Abruptly, Linus stands up and walks away and so it’s someone else who asks me, have you ever believed you were going crazy? and I respond: Craziness is not having anything to put your behavior into. Craziness is when your behavior drops off a ledge into a canyon. I’m putting mine toward a service. I’m winning. How can I be going crazy if I’m winning? My glory flaps in the gusts like an old windsock. A few people stand up and applaud the two of us for getting all the way to the regional 133 final, and I in turn start up a clap directed toward McBride until the referee gives me a warning. We start and I put my hand on his lips. This is the only time I’m allowed to show myself, display the limit of my capability. I get five more opportunities and then no more. How many times total did Bach or even Monert get to sit down at the piano to show what he could do? Two or three hundred? It doesn’t matter who you are, you only get a few chances to display yourself. I make the best of all the opportunities I’m given. McBride has a green singlet and I watch for his tries left. I know he got lucky but not against me. I strip his headgear strap down so it’s slung across his eye like an eyepatch. When he tries to shoot I fend it off, and when he gets high enough for me to do it I give him a head snap because I can see it annoys him. He calls me mayonnaise boy. The whole first period passes this way and I let it, because each time he returns to a stand, I give him a head snap and he opens up so that by the time the first is over I can see he’s agitated, and I smile. I start the second on bottom, and I wait to see which way he goes and when the whistle blows he tries to go under but I’m faster and I sit down on his hand and I hear him yelp because I bend a finger or two with my tush and I squirm out for one point, but none of this looks like how I’m explaining it, trust me, it’s little shivering steps fitted together like violence, which is so abstract as to be the departed past, an ambulance full of context-free furniture pieces. There’s a force working in me that’s stronger than I am. He’s shaking his hand and mad now and coming right back after me and he goes high because I’ve trained him to do so, but it’s like I’m thinking the same thing and can see what he’s going to do before he does it, so I go just a level below him for a high crotch and his legs are apart and I get to the gold mine and lift and throw and hold him there for the rest of the period because he’s not being cooperative, already down 3–0. Then they put us back together for the end, for the third, and I put my ear to his back, like I’ve done my whole life, and I wait for it to start and when it does, it’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before, it moves like the pages in a book, in one direction that I follow, I latch on to him as though a part of himself he dislikes, he first gets ambitious with an attempt at a switch and then grows less ambitious and tries a sit out, and I will give him credit because he does not get tired but I’ve done this before, I’m in control, I have his flank and when he tips over onto his face, I hook my hands together where the authorities can’t see and he screams about it but they don’t catch me. Deep down, I have the sense that I was once the strangest man in Europe. My life is full of exceeding strangeness but very little nuance, as if a child could grasp it. He’s good enough that he gets out eventually, but not before he’s cut his own legs out from under him, so that when he tries to shoot for the last fifteen seconds his heart’s gone, and when the whistle blows he perhaps doesn’t hear, because he keeps trying and I tell him that it’s over and he squeezes my ribs and his head drops to my shoulder, he collapses and sighs, and then the referee inserts his hands between us.

  I’m going to go sit down inside my coat for a while.

  I walk off the mat, look up at the bleachers. Jan Gehring and Joseph Carver are sitting next to each other like friends.

  MARY BETH SENDS ME A PHOTO OF HERSELF. She’s in a room with her hair up and a bunch of dolls behind her. She’s wearing her mackinaw and is not smiling, and for at least five minutes I sit down and look at the picture. There’s a note with it that says:

  I looked up the qualifiers and saw your name, S. FLORIDA, it was like that, and so congratulations. It feels good to get what you always wanted. I got another job offer, manager. I’m not going to bore you with the details. I’m too sensitive to boredom. Pictured is me at the Nun Doll Museum. I couldn’t think of anything else so here’s this picture and congratulations.

  A week of warm weather comes through, and when the snow melts, three months of trash and dog poop are exposed. The warmth fools everyone, including the bugs. I walk around at night, thinking about the bracket. Joseph Carver lost the third-place match to a senior named Pat Fisher, and they announced that Fisher, McBride, and me were named to the championship, but they don’t announce the matchups until four days before. I think about how they put me on top of the red pedestal at regionals and the little metal wrestling trophy they gave me, shaped like a man.

  At first the world was inauthentic, but then I became the inauthentic one, I think. Something is going to happen when the season is over, but I don’t know what it is.

  I run into Perry in the hallway, outside the bathroom. He has a coffee can with the lid on in his hands. “What’s in there?” I say, and he says he has the flu and breathed into it, canned his flu, and he’s going to dump it on his ex-girlfriend.

  On Wednesday, they suspend all classes in Opal Hall because of a gas leak. You can smell it standing outside, moving in a playful way through the air around the building.

  Another fatal accident happens involving students leaving the Honky Tonky.

  Tired of trying to figure Silas’s secret out, I skip a Jazz class and walk around school while the rain keeps stopping and starting. I pass by Petrusse and look through the glass doors. Inside, lying down on one of the benches with his legs spread and his fly flamboyantly open, is Pervis.

  The man in the trophy is the size that I can close my mouth around almost all of him. He’s in a stagger stance with his hands raised.

  On Thursday, a tornado comes through and rips apart the retirement home and the houses south of school, lifts rocks from the quarry and tosses them all over the area. The power takes a week to come back. Gardner, the southernmost dorm, gets a chunk taken out of it and they announce a lottery to temporarily reassign the students who lived there for the rest of the semester. There are two days between when the lottery is devised and when the new assignments are released, and the whole time I go back and forth about whether I want a roommate, whether I’d want someone to be forced to live with me for the next few months. But then they announce it and I don’t get selected, but Linus does. Tornadoes don’t get name
s like hurricanes. They’re too insignificant.

  Two rapes happen in the chaos immediately following the tornado.

  During the blackout, someone breaks into Mooney. He steals a stereo and two watches. The next night he breaks into Leon. In the second room he enters, a student is home so he runs away.

  They find out who did it by seeing that the same fingerprints were on seven straight doors on the east side of the hall. He had tried doors until he found one that would let him in. It was a white man in his fifties named Cider or Cyper.

  The cold comes back. The snow does, too. It drops forty degrees in five hours.

  Sometimes I listen through the door to Linus and his new roommate talk. His name is Zachary and they stay up late talking.

  Silas tells us the midterm is coming up. It’s half fill-in-the-blank, half listening. “If any of you need to listen to the music again to study, just come ask me and I’ll let you borrow any of the records. If you don’t have a player, there’s one in the music studios down the hall.” After class, I go up to his desk and ask for Duke Ellington’s “Concerto for Cootie.” He turns his back to check his bag for the record. On his desk, under some papers, I spot his keys. There are two and they’re attached to a little plastic trumpet key chain. I snatch them and shove them in my pocket just before he turns and says, “You’re in luck, thought I’d left it at home.”

  A few times, I go out to Silas’s house and lie down on the hill watching it. After I get over the sad rush of lying in the same spot where I was with Mary Beth, I think about going inside. If I can just get in his bathroom, I can tell her the answer. The key’s in my pocket. One time, when he comes home, I happen to sneeze right as he’s in his driveway and he turns and suddenly begins walking fast, coming right toward me through his field. I get up. “I see you!” he yells. “I see you!”