American Innovations: Stories

by Rivka Galchen

  J and Q looked for somewhere to have breakfast. At the first café, omelets were $13.95, which seemed a little bit much. Not a lot much, but it just seemed unpleasant and like it would set expectations that the omelet really would be quite good, which surely it wouldn’t be. It was already hot outside. At the next place, the omelet was $16.95. They went back to the first spot, where a window seat was available.

  “I feel skinny in this town,” Q said. “At least there’s that.”

  It was true: although the festival participants were relatively fit, the locals were relatively not fit. And a bit flush in the face. Like alcoholics. Obviously they also had less money. One felt guilty noticing. Apparently the locals were called Bubbas. Why did everyone, even J and Q, feel superior to the Bubbas? It was terrible.

  “And I think for a time, supposedly, this was a fashionable town,” J said. “Artists and gay people. Which are both groups that I think of as made up of mostly thin people. And maybe a few charismatically fat ones.”

  “It’s never charismatic to be fat,” Q said.

  “It can be, I think.”

  “No, never,” Q said. “And there are no children here, either,” Q observed. “That’s the other weird thing.”

  J of course had no children, not yet, anyhow. Neither did Q—no “natural” ones.

  “It’s very weird,” Q said, “to not have children. People who never have children are always still children, which, if you ask me, becomes disgusting. Even though children, of course, are sweet. I think the people who live here—I think they must have come here to run away from other things.”

  J had of late turned over in her mind the idea of having a baby that Q might move in to help raise; maybe Q needed a place to stay? “How’s your friend Morris doing these days?” J asked. “I heard he was in the ICU.”

  “I think he’s better,” Q said. “To be honest, I didn’t like visiting him in the hospital. I really thought he was dead. It was unpleasant.”

  “Who’s taking care of his place while he’s in the hospital?”

  “Maybe his children? Though they’re very selfish. Morris said over three hundred people visited him while he was in the hospital. That’s because of his activity with the Toastmasters Club. It’s really about being friendly and taking care of other people by cheering them up.”

  The omelet was not that good, though it wasn’t bad. There was a newspaper.

  “It says here that Gene Hackman was hit by a truck,” J said. “He lives here. He was on his bicycle, and he was hit. Not very far from here at all.”

  “Is he OK?”

  “It doesn’t say.”

  “Is he old?”

  “It says eighty-one.”

  “These days that’s young. I bet he’ll turn out to be fine.”

  Why would he be fine? J thought. It was a truck. He was eighty-one. The physics was not promising.

  * * *

  Twenty-four hours then passed in an extraordinarily slow blink. It was too hot to read or think or get hungry, and it wasn’t even that hot. One could walk around, but there wasn’t much territory to cover. The local graveyard was probably the prettiest thing in town. The graves were aboveground because the ground wasn’t really ground; it was hard coral that could not be dug up. The graveyard didn’t really look all that much like a graveyard; it was more like an ambitious papier-mâché project that schoolchildren had put together. Except that one saw no children. One saw lots of margarita bars. There was a party for a ninety-five-year-old art collector—maybe the blind man in white?—who owned many things in town, but J and Q slept through it. Finally it was the next afternoon, and J did an unusually bad job with her minimal obligations.

  “You should have just told some jokes or something. Everyone likes to laugh,” Q said. “We all need a little more laughter in our lives.”

  “I failed,” J said.

  “Sometimes failing is what’s needed. I think it can put people in a good mood, to see someone fail. Let people entertain themselves. I think that’s one of the reasons people are so lonely in this country. Because they always have to rush out and have someone else in the room entertain them. It’s terrible, the loneliness here. People live in coffins. Like Morris—if it weren’t for the Toastmasters, Morris would be in his coffin.”

  * * *

  That evening there was a double birthday celebration for two people named Norm. The Norms! Turning seventy-five and eighty-five. J and Q didn’t sleep through the party; they rode rented bicycles over to it. There were many loud-print shirts, and lots of alcohol. A woman with thick, long gray hair held back by a headband was wearing a high-waisted bright yellow skirt and platform sandals. Among the snacks were bright yellow peppers. The party was mostly outdoors, on a spacious deck between the main house and a guesthouse. Gentle lighting illuminated a small swimming pool. A little baobab tree grew through a hole in the deck. What might have been an anti-mosquito device had black light properties, or, at least, there was a pale blue Gatorade sort of drink that glowed in its aura, like new sneakers in a haunted house.

  J found herself in conversation with a woman whose mouth dragged left, perhaps from a stroke, or maybe it was just a thing. The woman was a host, it turned out. It was her house; one of the Norms was her husband—her husband who was younger than her. The other Norm was staying in host Norm’s guesthouse with his young lover, although apparently his young lover was, just for this week, staying elsewhere for half the time, because his even younger lover, “the chestnut,” a graduate student in French literature, was in town, visiting. Visiting all of them. J realized that the host was the woman who had written a book called Real Humans, which J had for years been pretending to have read; it was a seminal nine-hundred-plus page post-apocalyptic book that imagined another way to live decently, ethically. On an island that, it was speculated, was modeled on Tasmania; there were creatures like wallabies there. J commented on how nice the guesthouse looked.

  “Yes, we built that so our kids can stay there when they visit us. With their kids.”

  “That sounds smart,” J said.

  “Do you have kids?” the author of Real Humans asked.

  “I don’t,” J said.

  She looked J over. “Well, one day you will,” she said. “What you’ll find out then is that you don’t like to cook breakfast for them. People are weird with their breakfasts. They have very particular demands, and you’ll find that dealing with them can be very annoying.”

  “I can imagine,” J said.

  “You know what’s strange?” the woman asked.

  “OK. What’s strange?” J wondered where Q was.

  “You’re going to go on living,” she said. “And I’m not going to go on living. I might go on for a while. I’m eighty-seven. But you’re going to continue into a future that I’m never going to see and that I can’t even imagine. I mean, this cocktail party is just like one my parents might have thrown fifty years ago. But in other ways it’s a completely different world. I hear people on their cell phones saying, ‘Yes, I’m on the bus now. I’ll be there in ten minutes.’ Or, ‘I’m in the cereal aisle now.’ Well, that’s just so strange to me. It’s like people can’t be alone. I don’t find that normal. Do you find that normal? Do you do that tweeting? Do you understand those things? I know that I can’t follow. So I just don’t. But you’re just going forward into the future. You’ll go forward and forward, into it. And I won’t.”

  “I’m here with my mom,” J said. “I better go check in with my mom.” J couldn’t recall ever having used that phrase out loud. It sounded almost like science fiction.

  She couldn’t find her!

  Then she found her.

  Q was in conversation with M. And also with the lover of the other Norm, the guesthouse Norm. And also with a man who had lived for a long time on a boat. The man had lived on the boat when real estate in Key West was too expensive, he was explaining, but now he was back on the island again. Which had he liked more? Well, he liked both. Then the o
ther Norm’s lover was explaining that sure, Norm didn’t like to sleep alone when “the chestnut” was in town. Especially since his recent health scare. But one couldn’t be at the sugar teat all the time, the lover was of the opinion. The other Norm was in sight, looking pretty happy, talking to some people near a fountain. The other Norm was a painter and a language poet, known to have been living in relative health and joy, and with numerous lovers, while HIV+, for decades.

  J did feel a little spooked by the openness of it all.

  It had to be how it had to be, the lover was saying. And it helped keep things really hot—there was that, too. The conversation went back to boats.

  Someone startled J with a tap on the shoulder.

  “Did you find your mom?” It was the Real Humans woman.

  J blushed.

  “Look,” the woman said. “I can see you’re disgusted by us.”

  “What?” J said.

  “I know about young people. They’re very conservative and very judgmental.” She had now opened up her speech to the whole group, but she was still clearly addressing J. “You think we’re all decayed and dying, which we are, of course, but you’re dying every day, too. You’ll just keep dying and dying. I know from my own children.” She took a sip from her little blue drink. “I mean, look at you. Quiet as a superior little mouse.”

  “Let me get you some water,” M said to the woman.

  “No, no,” she said. “I don’t need water. I’m just saying something about this young woman. She’s had her little bit of success. She’s thinking to herself, I’m not going to make the mistakes these people made. I’m going to keep my head down and work and not hurt anyone’s feelings too much and not get hurt myself. She thinks she’s solved it all with her preemptive gloominess and her inoffensiveness.”

  “You should enjoy your party,” the man who had lived on a boat said.

  “There’s a subspecies of these young people,” the woman was saying. “They’re very careful. The young women especially; they’re the worst—”

  “You’re so right,” Q said. She took hold of Real Humans’s arm. “They are the worst. This one’s probably innocent enough, though.”

  “She’s a wily mouse, you don’t know. Do you have children?” she now asked Q. “They’re very judgmental. If you have children, you know.”

  “This one’s kind of my daughter.”

  She gave Q the once-over. “Yes, they’re all kind of our daughters, aren’t they?”

  “I wouldn’t take any of this too seriously,” Norm’s lover said to J. “She’s been starting arguments at parties for thirty years. Haven’t you?”

  “For fifty years,” Real Humans said.

  “Did you hear about Gene Hackman?” Q asked.

  “He doesn’t really live here,” Real Humans said. “He lives one island over. I heard he’s doing just fine.”

  “I feel kind of elated,” J said.

  “Sure you do,” Real Humans said.

  It was as if Q’s secret wasn’t that she’d lost her home, or lost her money, or was secretly ill, but that she actually knew what she was doing. Or maybe she had lost her money, and her home, and maybe she was ill, but she was able to handle it. All these partygoers seemed able to handle their lives.

  “He was just scratched up a bit,” Norm’s lover said.

  “Who was scratched up?”

  “Gene Hackman. He wasn’t really hurt at all.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Q said. “I thought he would be fine.”

  Everyone admired Gene Hackman.

  “Hasn’t he had a sad life?” J asked. “I thought I’d been told that. That his mother had died in a fire started by her own cigarette?”

  No, no, his life had worked out. He had a great life. He joined the navy. He was a failure in acting school. When his old teacher saw him working as a doorman in New York, the teacher said that he’d always known he’d amount to nothing. He was retired from movies. He had three kids. He had paired up with an underwater archaeologist to write three adventure novels. Maybe four adventure novels. Or one was a Western, maybe. It was titled Justice for None.

  ONCE AN EMPIRE

  I’m a pretty normal woman, maybe even an extremely normal one. Especially now as I’m entering my mid-thirties, which are among the most normal of years. I live—I used to live, that is—in a small lofted studio apartment on the top floor of a six-story building on a tree-lined block, across the way from an abandoned police station. I bought that studio with an inheritance from, well, it doesn’t matter from whom. I bought it because it was time. My mother no longer tenderized meat with a hammer, I had failed to become the cabaret singer or CEO she once might have become; the termination of our roommatehood had become essential. This was many years ago. I love my apartment so much. Its window looks out onto the Jehovah’s Witness Watchtower building whose enormous lightbulb billboard broadcasts the temperature in Fahrenheit, the time, then the temperature in Celsius, then the time again, then the updated temperature in Fahrenheit, and so on, unto eternity. Having sight of that billboard: it used to make me feel like neither time nor temperature would ever change without first petitioning my approval.

  As a normal, stable adult with an ordinary life on a quiet street in a peaceful neighborhood, I never thought I’d be the victim of an especially unusual crime. Or of any crime, really. If it was a crime. A middle school counselor once told me that she didn’t know if as a child, she was, or wasn’t, beaten with a belt one or many times because, she said, we never really know what happened in the past. Only what we dread or long for in the future. And often not even that, she added. OK, sure.

  It was a Tuesday when what happened happened.

  Every Tuesday night I go and see whatever is playing at the movie theater nearby. I’m not choosy. I’m happy to see whatever everyone else is going to see. That way I stay in touch without having to talk to people, which is great, because even though I very much like people in general, I find most people, in specific, kind of difficult. I prefer the taciturn company of my things. I love my things. I have a great capacity for love, I think.

  Like the movie theater. I love the popcorn there, which makes me feel ever so slightly asthmatic. And I love the heavily patterned carpet that recalls the slot machine section of a gas station out West. And that fateful Tuesday evening I saw a movie that was about love. If also about Japan, and kind of about dinnerware, too. The movie ran late, past midnight, which is when—this is what they said in the movie anyhow—the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest.

  Its being the witching hour didn’t spook me, I want to be clear about that. One time the Watchtower displayed a static LL:LL, and that spooked me, but little else has ever spooked me. Which is to say, I wasn’t out of sorts that Wednesday morning. (Because now that I think about it, that fateful Tuesday night was actually a Wednesday—as kids we used to call Wednesday hump day—morning.) After that movie I was walking my regular walk home, past the now nineteen months’ static construction site that sits at the corner of my very own block, right next to the abandoned police station.

  I turned the corner, past the plywood barrier, on around to the front of the abandoned police station. From there I saw the six stories of my own building. I saw my window. My lights weren’t on. Which was wrong. I always leave the lights on in my apartment, day or night. I’ve never shaken that childhood fear that in the dark things cease to exist. Maybe that is what really happens, if briefly; science these days keeps confirming the strangest things.

  My window dark: probably just the coordinated demise of several bulbs, I told myself. Or something. Something pretty normal.

  I looked down at my feet, as if to remind myself of them. A breeze blew, carrying an ever so slight scent of burning leaves and an industrial shoreline kind of mildew. I felt myself growing dim through inexposure. Maybe a fuse had blown. A very important fuse.

  Some sort of sound. I looked back up, toward my unlit window. Some … thing was e
merging from the darkness there. At first, it looked like a nothingness that had acquired an outline on the cheap. But as it descended—it was descending—it became more fully ontologically realized. It was my ironing board.

  I’d forgotten that I even had an ironing board. It was an old family thing, all wooden. It used to collapse unannounced, and often. I and a series of dogs had been afraid of it when I was a kid. I’d forgotten it to a closet. I would never have said I cared for it. But when I saw it there on the fire escape, out of its context, a great tenderness unearthed itself, flowing from me to it.

  The ironing board’s gangly back legs hooked over the fire escape’s final edge; its front legs made gentle, almost elastic contact with the sidewalk below. Having landed confident as a cat burglar, the board then continued east. Its progress wasn’t awkward or zombielike. It moved supplely, playfully. Kind of like a manatee.

  Next, with surprising nimbleness, my brown velveteen recliner climbed down, then passed by me in a stump-legged gallop. My wood-armed Dutch sofa shuffled graceful as a geisha. My desk chair seemed to think it had wheels, which it doesn’t. A green-globed desk lamp went by. An ordinary plastic dustpan. A heavy skillet, scorched. My things. They were all heading east. With an enviable sense of purpose. An old set of Russian nesting dolls from my father, the ladder I used to reach my storage loft, a forgotten feather duster (blue), a pine cabinet with round hinges, two high kitchen stools I had painted, one of which had a yellow splatter from another project, which splatter I liked to run my finger across. My dresser whose drawers squeaked just so, a faux-colonial laundry basket, a blur of white dishes; a checkered ceramic vase, downy throw pillows, three folding chairs, a harem of kitchen utensils; a video projector, a yarny bath mat, a striped shower curtain, perky Tupperware labels, a corkboard with its map pins, chewed-on chopsticks, a crystal-like vase that makes a finger look cut in half if held in just the right way. “Stuff” is such a childish word. Sheets passed as if floral ghosts. My books rustled by like a military of ducks. My mother had never liked my books. She’d said they kept me from real life, by which I think she meant men, or money, or both. Always accusing things of precisely the crimes they haven’t committed.