“I’m not feeling well,” I said. “I think I have a fever.”
“Oh, man,” he said. “You sick?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I’m sick. I feel terrible.”
He got up and ran to the kitchen, came back chugging from a carton of orange juice. “I can’t get sick now,” he said. “You know this commercial is gonna be huge. After this, I’ll be famous. You want to hear my lines?”
“My head hurts too much,” I said. “Is that your new hairstyle?” He was always putting gel in his hair and he was always squinting, pursing his lips. “Is that gel?”
“No,” he said, lying. “My hair’s just like this.” He went to the mirror, sucked in his cheeks, pushed his hair around, flexed his pectorals. “This time when I go in,” he said, “I’m gonna be sort of James Dean, like I just don’t give a shit, but sad, you know?” I couldn’t stand it. I turned and faced the wall. Out the window the palms hovered and shimmied and cowered in the breeze. I didn’t want him to be happy. I closed my eyes and prayed for a disaster, a huge earthquake or a drive-by shooting or a heart attack. I picked up the crystal skull. It was greasy and light, so light I thought it might be made of plastic.
“Don’t touch that!” my boyfriend cried breathlessly, leaping over the bed and grabbing the skull out of my hands. “Great. Now I need to find a body of water to wash it in. I told you, don’t touch my stuff.”
“You never said I couldn’t touch it,” I said. “The pool’s right outside.”
He put the skull in a pocket of his cargo shorts and left.
• • •
The buzzer rang the next evening. I got on the intercom.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“It’s the Kowalskis,” the voice said. It was Moon’s voice. “We couldn’t wait. We’re here with cash and a moving truck. Buzz us in?”
My boyfriend hadn’t come home yet from his callback. He’d called to say that he was staying out late to watch the lunar eclipse and not to wait for him, and that he forgave me for touching his crystal skull and that he loved me so much and knew that when we were both dead we’d meet on a long river of light and there’d be slaves there to row us in a golden boat to outer space and feed us grapes and rub our feet. “Did my agent call yet?” he had asked.
“Not yet,” I’d told him.
I put on my robe and went downstairs, propped open the gate with a brick. Moon stood there with a manila envelope full of money. I took it and handed her the keys.
“Like I said, we couldn’t wait,” said Moon. Her husband was unloading their moving truck, lugging black garbage bags off the back and placing them in rows on the sidewalk. Those damned crows flew across the violet sky, perched on top of the truck, cawed quietly to one another.
“It’s late,” I said to Moon.
“This is the perfect time to move,” she said. “It’s the equinox. Perfect timing.” Her husband set down a moose head mounted on a shield-shaped piece of plywood. “He loves that moose,” said Moon. “You love that moose, huh?” she said to her husband. He nodded, wiped his forehead, and ducked back into the truck.
I went back upstairs and started packing, stuffed the money Moon had given me at the bottom of my suitcase, cleared out my drawer, my boyfriend’s makeup case, wrapped the shotgun in that terrible afghan, zipped it all up. Watching from the mezzanine as Moon carried in a large potted tree, her husband slumped behind her under a bag of golf clubs, I felt hopeful, as though it were me moving in, starting a new life. I felt energized. When I offered to help, Moon seemed to soften, flung her hair back and smiled, pointed to a woven basket full of silverware. I helped Moon’s husband carry the old mattress out to the curb. We set it up against a tree trunk and watched the tree veer back precariously toward the apartment complex. A cluster of crows sprang out from its leaves. “Gentle souls,” the man said and lit a cigarette.
When the truck was empty, Moon told me to sit down in the kitchen, rubbed the seat of a chair with a rag. I sat down.
“You must be tired,” she said. “Let me find my coffee pot.”
“I should get going,” I said.
“No, you shouldn’t,” said Moon. Her voice was strange, pushy. When she spoke it was like a drum beating. “Be our guest,” she said. “Want saltines?” That third eye seemed to wink at me when she smiled. She found a plate and laid out the crackers. “Thank you for your help,” she said.
I looked around at the walls, which were mottled and scratched and dirty.
“You can paint the place, you know,” I told Moon. “My boyfriend was supposed to have painted already. Of course he didn’t.”
“The manager guy?” the husband called out from the brown velour sofa they’d set in the middle of the living room.
“How long have you two been a couple?” Moon asked. She laid her hands down flat on the kitchen table. They were like two brown lizards blinking in the sun.
“Not long,” I said. “I’m leaving him,” I added. “Tonight.”
“Let me ask you one thing,” Moon said. “Is he good to you?”
“He beats me,” I lied. “And he’s really dumb. I should have left him a long time ago.”
Moon got up, looked over at her husband.
“I’ve got something for you,” she said. She disappeared into the bedroom, where we’d piled all the garbage bags full of stuff. She came out with a black feather.
“Is that from the crows?” I asked.
“Sleep with this under your pillow,” she said, rubbing her third eye. “And as you drift off, think of everyone you know. Start off easy, like with your parents, your brothers and sisters, your best friends, and picture each person in your mind. Really try to picture them. Try to think of all your classmates, your neighbors, people you met on the street, on the bus, the girl from the coffee shop, your dentist, everybody from over the years. And then I want you to imagine your boyfriend. When you imagine him, imagine he’s on one side and everybody else is on the other side.”
“Then what?” I asked her.
“Then see which side you like better.”
“You need anything,” said her husband, “you know where to find us.”
I went home and put on the yellow sports jacket. It didn’t fit me any better than it fit my boyfriend. I put the feather under the pillow.
• • •
That night I had a dream there was a monkey in the tree outside my window. The monkey was so sad, all he could do was cover his face and weep. I tried handing him a banana but he just shook his head. I tried singing him a song. Nothing cheered him. “Hey,” I said softly, “come here, let me hold you.” But he turned his back to me. It broke my heart to see him crying. I would have done anything for him. Just to give that little monkey one happy moment, I would have died.
• • •
My boyfriend came home the next morning with a black eye.
“I can’t talk to you,” he said to me, rubbing the skull in his small, rough hands. I sat on the bed and watched him. His brow was furrowed like an old man’s. “I can’t even look at you,” he said. “They’re saying you’re a scourge. A bad scourge.”
“They?” I asked. “Do you know what a scourge is?”
He cocked his head. I watched his wheels grind. “Um,” he said.
“You love me, remember?” I said.
“‘Scourge’ means you’re going to ruin everything,” he answered after a long pause.
“What happened to your eye?” I asked him, reaching a hand out. He blocked my arm with a swift karate chop. It didn’t hurt. But I could see his heart beating through his shirt, sweat leaking down his arm.
“It’s not good for me to talk to you,” he said. He went into the bathroom. I heard the door slam, the shower run, and, after a moment, the nervous tapping of the razor against the tile. I sat on the bed for a while. The sun flickered harmlessly thro
ugh the swaying palms.
I got my suitcase and lugged it up the two flights to the roof. I’d been there only once before, one night soon after I’d moved in, when I couldn’t sleep. My boyfriend had come up and found me sitting on the ledge. We had talked for a while and kissed. “If you get torches and wave them up to the sky, it’s like a signal to the aliens,” he had said. He’d gotten up and twirled his arms around like propellers. “It’s the light that calls them.” He’d looked deep into my eyes. “I love you,” he’d said. “More than anyone else on Earth. More than my own mother. More than God.”
“Okay,” I’d told him. “Thanks.”
Up on the roof I unzipped my suitcase, pulled out the shotgun. It was easy enough to slide the round into the magazine tube, as they called it, pull the action back. That’s what the instructions said to do. But there were no birds around. I tried firing off a round, hoping it would startle the Egyptian crows, hoping something, anything, would leap up in front of me, but my hand shook. I got scared. I couldn’t do it. So I sat for a while and stared down at all the concrete, the palms flapping to and fro between the electric wires, then lugged the suitcase back down to our apartment.
• • •
After that he’d disappear a lot, call me from some windy alleyway, talk fast, explaining his regret, ask me to marry him, then call back to tell me to go to hell, that I was trash, that I wasn’t worth his time on Earth. Eventually he’d knock on the door with huge scabs all over his arms and face, body thrumming with methamphetamine, head bent like a naughty child’s, asking to be forgiven. He always hid his shame and self-loathing under an expression of shame and self-loathing, swinging his fist back and forth, “Shucks,” always acting, even then. I don’t think he ever experienced any real joy or humor. Deep down he probably thought I was crazy not to love him. And maybe I was. Maybe he was the man of my dreams.
A DARK AND WINDING ROAD
My parents kept a small cabin in the mountains. It was a simple thing, just four walls, and very dark inside. A heavy felt curtain blotted out whatever light made it through the canopy of huge pines and down into the cabin’s only window. There was a queen-size bed in there, an armchair, and a wood-burning stove. It wasn’t an old cabin. I think my parents built it in the seventies from a kit. In a few spots the wood beams were branded with the word HOME-RITE. But the spirit of the place made me think of simpler times, olden days, yore, or whenever it was that people rarely spoke except to say there was a storm coming or the berries were poisonous or whatnot, the bare essentials. It was deadly quiet up there. You could hear your own heart beating if you listened. I loved it, or at least I thought I ought to love it—I’ve never been very clear on that distinction. I retreated to the cabin that weekend in early spring after a fight with my wife. She was pregnant at the time, and I suppose she felt entitled to treat me terribly. So I went up there to spite her, yes, and in hopes that she would come to appreciate me in my absence, but also to have one last weekend to myself before the baby was born and my life as I’d known it was forever ruined.
The drive to the cabin is easy to imagine. It was a drive like any drive to any cabin. It was up a dark and winding road. The last half mile or so was badly paved. With snow on the ground, I would have had to park in a clearing and walk the rest on foot. But the snow had melted by the time I got there. This was April. It was still cold, but everything had thawed. Everything was beautiful and dark and powerful the way nature is. I brought all my favorite things to eat and ate them almost immediately upon arrival: cornichons, smoked trout, rye crackers, sheep feta, cured olives, dried cherries, coconut-covered dates, Toblerone. I also brought up a nice bottle of Château Cheval Blanc, a wedding gift I’d hidden and saved for three years. But I found no corkscrew, so I resorted to the remnants of a bottle of cheap Scotch, which I was surprised and relieved to discover on a shelf in the closet next to a dried-out roll of fly tape. Later, after dozing in the armchair for quite a while, I went outside in search of firewood and kindling. Night had fallen by then and I had no flashlight, hadn’t even thought to bring one, so I sort of grappled around for sticks in the glare from my headlights. My efforts amounted to a very brief but effective little fire.
I’ve never been outdoorsy. My parents rarely brought us up to the cabin as children. There was barely room enough for a young couple, let alone bickering parents and two bickering sons. My brother was younger than me by just three years, but those three years seemed to stretch to a wide chasm of estrangement the older we got. Sometimes I wondered if my mother had strayed, we were that different. It wouldn’t be fair to call me a snob and my brother trash, but it wouldn’t be far from accurate. He called himself MJ, and I went by Charles. As a child I played clarinet, chess. Our parents bought MJ a drum set, but he wasn’t interested. He played video games, made messes. At recess I’d watch him throw fake punches at the smaller kids and wipe his snot on his sleeve. We didn’t sit together on the bus. In seventh grade I won a scholarship to an elite private high school, started wearing ties, played rugby, read newspapers, and spent all my time at home in my room with my books. I turned out successful, but nothing special. I became a real-estate lawyer, married my law-school girlfriend, bought a pricey condo in Murray Hill, nothing close to what I hoped I’d do.
MJ was a different type of man. He had zero ambition. His friends lived in actual trailer parks. He dropped out of the public high school his junior year, shot dope, got a job in the warehouse of an outlet store, I think, unpacking boxes all day. I’m not quite sure how or if he makes a living now. He used to show up at Christmases unshowered in a ratty hooded sweatshirt, would pass out on the couch, wake up and eat like a wild boar, burping and laughing, then disappear at night. He was talented physically, could easily lift me up and spin me around, which he did often just to taunt me when we were teenagers. He had terrible cystic acne in high school—big red boils of pus that he squished mindlessly in front of the television. He didn’t care how he looked. He was a real guy’s guy. And I was always more my mother’s type. We shared a certain refinement, which I’m sure was annoying to my brother: he called me a faggot every chance he got. In any case, I hadn’t seen him in several years, since my wedding, and I hadn’t been up to the cabin since my wife and I first started dating. We’d spent an awkward night up there together one spring, a lifetime ago, but that’s not a very interesting story.
I rolled a joint in my car with the lights on and smoked it sitting in the armchair, in the dark. There was no cell-phone service up there, which made me nervous. I don’t know why I continued to smoke marijuana as long as I did. It almost always sent me into an existential panic. When I smoked with my wife, I had to feign complete exhaustion just to excuse myself from going out for a walk, which she liked to do. I was so paranoid, so deeply anxious. When I got high, I felt as though a dark curtain had been pulled across the world and I was left there alone to waver in its cold, dark shadows. I never dared to smoke by myself at home, lest I throw myself from our twelfth-story window. But when I smoked that night at the cabin, I felt fine. I whistled some songs, tapped my feet. I whistled one difficult tune in particular, a Stevie Wonder song, which is melodically complicated, and after a few rounds I could really whistle it beautifully. I remembered what it was like to practice and get good at something. I thought of how great a dad I would be. “Practice makes perfect,” I’d tell my child, a truism maybe, but it now seemed suddenly endowed with great depth and wisdom. And so I felt wonderful about myself, forgetting the strange world outside. I even thought that after my child was born, I’d still come up to the cabin once or twice a month, just to keep the secret of how great I was. I whistled some more.
Around nine o’clock, I pulled my sleeping bag out and unrolled it on the bed, which was covered in old blankets and dust and mouse poop, and slept with no trouble at all. In the morning I guzzled a liter of mineral water and drove on the dark and winding road back to Route 11, where there was a Burger King. I ate br
eakfast there. In addition to my breakfast sandwich and coffee, I purchased several Whoppers that I figured I could heat on the wood-burning stove for lunch and dinner, should I decide to stay another night. I also bought a six-pack of beer, a family-size bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, and a pound of Twizzlers from the gas station. And I bought the local newspapers and a magazine called Fly Tyer to stare at while I chewed. On my cell phone I found one missed call from my wife. I happily ignored it.
Back at the cabin I shook the dust off the blankets covering the bed because I wanted to lie down in the light from the window and read Fly Tyer and eat Twizzlers. Something flesh colored caught my eye amid the blankets. At first I thought what I’d seen was my wife’s old diaphragm—a Band-Aid–colored thing that I’d always hated looking at. Then I thought it might be an old prosthetic arm, or a doll. But when I pulled another blanket back, I saw it was a dildo. A large, curved, Band-Aid–colored rubber dildo. My first instinct, of course, was to pick it up and smell it, which I did. It only smelled faintly of rubber, anonymous. I set it on the sill of the window and went outside to collect more firewood. I was determined to start a real fire. Was I perturbed to find the dildo? It only peeved me the way one is peeved when one hears his neighbors banging pots through the walls. And it seemed at the time more like vandalism than evidence of any kind of sexual activity. It seemed like a prank. Outside I was happily surprised to find a large store of dry logs in the crawl space under the cabin.
Homesick for Another World Page 6
