American Dead

by PW Cooper

Roberta smiled back, a bit guardedly. “Hello, Jessica.” She was the older of the two women, early-thirties, Nathan guessed. She had a thick Hispanic accent which had always struck him as somehow exotic.

  Taylor grinned, waving timidly.

  Jessica smiled back. “You still in school, honey?”

  Taylor nodded. “One more year.”

  “Grad School?”

  “That's right. Ancient Languages.”

  Roberta smiled. She reached down to take hold of her girlfriend's hand, running her thumb over the back of Taylor's wrist. “She's brilliant.”

  Taylor blushed, “Well, maybe I could be... if I ever finish.”

  “You'll finish, honey,” Jessica said, “Just wait. Two years from now it'll feel like a lifetime ago.”

  Nathan leaned back. He couldn't think of anything to say, any way in which he could participate in the conversation. He found it difficult, sometimes, understanding the rhythms of natural speech. He'd always felt that he was only repeating what he had learned, never really understanding how it fit together. He'd found that he couldn't trust himself to simply say what first came to mind. He had to work it all out in his head: what he would say, how they would respond. It was a tight skin, covering himself in the Nathan-thing he'd created, sewn up from borrowed bits of personality. He turned away from the conversation. The dark coffin seemed to be sucking all the light out of the room.

  “What about this?” Roberta lowered her voice to a whisper. “Can you believe it?”

  Jessica brushed back her short hair. “I know. I never thought anything like this – you know... Not here. I mean, I know it's happen before, but...”

  Taylor frowned. “What's that mean? What happened?”

  Jessie's voice turned dark with concern. “Suicide, honey. Been a lot of people before Michael. These gorges, they should just wall them off or fill them in or something.”

  “Suicide?” Taylor squeaked, turning pale. Her mousy brown hair seemed to be curling at the suggestion. “Do you really think he... he did that?”

  “What else?”

  “I... I don't know. I just never thought. I mean,” Taylor pushed her fingertips against her eyelids, “I knew Mike. He always seemed so happy... Not like a person who would kill themselves...”

  “What's the alternative?” Jessie said, arching an eyebrow.

  Roberta shook her head. “Don't even say it. It's too horrible. I can't think about that right now.” Nathan stared at the woman's fingernails. Deep red lacquer, a sort of bloody russet color.

  “Does anyone know what the police think?” Taylor asked nervously.

  “The Conners, maybe.” Jessica gave them one of her oh those poor people grimaces. “Where are they, anyway? I haven't seen Charles or Patty yet. Wasn't the service supposed to start twenty minutes ago?”

  Taylor cocked her head towards the door at the far end of the room. “They were out here earlier, when people first started showing up, but... uh, Patty needed a minute alone. I think Charles is going to say something when they come back.”

  It was, in fact, a full fifteen minutes before Charles and Patricia Conner finally appeared. Patricia clung to the wall, her flesh raw. Charles Conner's short brown hair was turning gray at the roots; his face sagged. There was no life in him, Nathan thought, not a drop. Patrica's face was streaked with tears, her eyes so red and puffy that she looked sick. They stood in the doorway, very close together but not touching each other. Everyone got very quiet when Charles began to speak.

  “Thank you all for coming. Any support is... Well, we appreciate it.” He stood there with his hands opening and closing uselessly at his sides. He stared at the people gathered before him, grasping for something more to say. Patricia just shook her head, not looking at anyone. Charles struggled on: “I guess you all know why we're here. A lot of you knew my son since he first... and... The police haven't told us much. Apparently he's been... apparently it happened a while ago, when he went missing, I guess a few of you knew that we were looking for him. And, God willing, we'll all be able to... move on, I... Sometimes people... children... just lose themselves. You try to teach them, to show them the right path. Sometimes people just don't listen. Sometimes they lose sight of God, they lose sight of what makes them...” He trailed off again, and shoved his hands into his pockets.

  Nathan looked back over his shoulder. Everyone was frozen in place, eyes locked on the bereaved couple, flowered paper cups of bright red punch clutched in their hands. They could have been posing for a painting, their finer features melted away in blurred impressionist oils, leaving only the raw grief, stark in their faces.

  * * *

  After the service, Jessica was angry.

  “It was bullshit, Nathan!” She yanked off her shirt and tossed it blindly at the laundry basket. She turned away from him, fishing in the dresser for another. He sat on the bed and watched the way her tattoos rippled when she flexed her shoulders. There were wine-red words spelled out above the narrow black strap of her bra, tracing across her back in an flowery script.

  “What was?” he asked.

  She turned on him, incredulous. “Jesus Christ, Nathan you were there, weren't you?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The Conners! I just can't believe them! They didn't even know him, Nathan! Michael meant more to us, we loved him better. Those fucking holier-than-thou assholes just adopted him to make themselves feel better! They didn't want the responsibility, they didn't give a shit about Mike! Never!” Her voice was stretched, on the verge of breaking.

  Nathan caught himself chewing his fingernail, and looked at the ragged cuticle with surprise. He hadn't bitten his nails since he was a child.

  Jessica came to him and sat on the edge of the bed. She brushed his thin hair back from his forehead. “We did love him, didn't we? We really loved Mike?”

  Nathan nodded.

  She wrapped her arms around his head and drew it down to her chest, laying her cheek against his thinning crown. “He was a good kid,” she murmured, her voice back under control. “Unhook me.”

  Nathan undid his wife's bra strap. His hand brushed along her side, caressing the bare warmth of her skin. She smiled at him, caught his hand to kiss at his knuckles. “Gena needs a ride, do you mind?”

  “Where's she going?”

  “Visiting a friend in Ithaca. Trevor Allocco, you remember him.” Jessica got back up off the bed, the tip of one breast brushing against his cheek as she rose. Nathan felt himself stirring.

  “Yeah, okay. I'll take her. About time she got out of here.” He crossed his legs uncomfortably over his erection.

  She patted him absently, sliding her watch onto her wrist. “Talk to her, would you? About Michael, I mean. They were friends, right? Or... schoolmates, I guess... maybe she needs to talk about it?”

  “I'll see what I can do.”

  Twenty minutes later, he was drumming his fingertips on the steering wheel and trying to think of something to say to his daughter.

  The trees to both side of the road were draped in heavy green vines, all Spring's foliated clothing drawn modestly over naked tree trunks. The atmosphere was thick with fog, dense as marsh air. The road curved upwards, out of the mist and into a cruel sunlight.

  Gena had her feet up on the dashboard. She had long smooth legs. Loose strands of black hair whipped about her face, those few wisps that had escaped from under her hairband. Nathan found it hard not to look at his daughter's legs. His wife hadn't shaved since she was seventeen, years before he had known her. He'd gotten used to that. Gena's smooth legs, though, skin waxy in the summer sun, seemed artificial and almost pornographic. He wanted to cover them, tear at them, caress them. He hated himself.

  He pulled his eyes away and looked into the dense tangles of foliage wrapping about the pine trees.

  When they turned onto route 81, he asked her, “Is there anything you need to talk about, honey?”

  She gave him a blank look. “Is there something we're supposed to talk about?�
� Then a suspicious knitting of the eyebrows, “Is this why Mom wanted you to drive me?”

  “I don't know how well you knew Michael...” he started, “but if you need to talk about it, we're-”

  “I didn't.” Her voice was flat and brittle. “I didn't know him.”

  Nathan shrugged. “Okay.” She was lying, but he didn't push. The truth was, he didn't really want to know. What would be the benefit? She could deal with the grief in her own way. No point in him digging into anything raw. The last thing he needed was a hysterical teenager around the house. He wouldn't get a single word written.

  The car hummed on the road. He reflected on that great advantage which came from being married to a mechanic: the car was always in excellent condition. It was good to be with someone who could fix things. He'd never been handy with machines himself, though his father had been something of a tinkerer. There had been this old silver VW Bug that he'd spend his evenings and weekends refurbishing. He never seemed interested in driving the car, only in fixing the thing, as though the point of the machine had been to generate work rather than to serve any vehicular function. Nathan, of course, had not been welcome when Dad was working on the car. He might get in the way, his mother told him. After what happened with Katrina and William, Nathan hadn't felt welcome anywhere. Neither of his parents seemed able to stand the sight of him. They moved to a tiny little house out in the country and didn't talk about anything that had happened before.

  Well, he thought to himself, that was just something kids had to deal with. What boy in America wasn't afraid of his father? Fathers and sons could only interact on a purely superficial level, that was just a fact of life. As for fathers and daughters... well, that was a more delicate matter. It seemed so much simpler just to avoid one's children. His writing wasn't too far removed from his father's Volkswagen in that way. It was just a distraction, a shield between him and that grinding female psyche assembling itself down the hall. What he was doing wasn't so different from what his father had done. No matter what promises they made themselves, all sons eventually turned into their fathers.

  The rest of the drive passed in silence. Silently beyond the mall, between the craggy rocks through which the highway had been blasted, down along the high ridge over Cayuga Lake, onward past the high school and into downtown Ithaca. And there he left her.

  * * *

  He did not return to Verden for some time. It was nearly dusk when he finally did.

  Jessica was curled up on the couch with a battered paperback. She didn't ask him what had taken him so long, didn't ask where he'd been, didn't even look up when he walked in. Never mind that, he had things to do anyway.

  Nathan fetched his computer and retreated with it to the darkest corner of the trailer.

  He still hadn't decided on a title. For now, he was saving the bits and pieces in a folder titled Murder: An American Story. He liked that more every time he saw it, and was beginning to think that he might just keep it. He cracked his knuckles once, and he wrote about what had happened in Ithaca after he'd dropped off Gena:

  I left my car and walked out onto a bridge. The iron span arched out across the deep gorge. This was a broken city. I stood at the railing and looked down into the abyss. Thick growth filled the crumbling canyon, gnarled trees clawing at the soil. Down at the very lowest point the silver-black river twisted in the rock, like a vein of precious metal through the stone.

  People die in these gorges. They kill themselves here. At least once every year, usually more often. Every once in a while there's a big to-do about it. The New York Times comes down to interview students about their depressed classmates. The College faculty makes speeches. Everyone gets very nervous for a few weeks, then they all go home and everybody forgets until next year when it happens again.

  Some say that the gorges hold a certain power over the doomed. I think I did feel an urge, standing there looking down into that swirling darkness, felt a desire to lean out and let go. There was something beautiful about the idea of suicide. The eery silence of that tumbling nothingness.

  I remember how scared I was when Jessica first got pregnant. We'd only been married a few months and we barely had two pennies to rub together, as they say. I kept asking myself, how can I possibly be a father?

  I finished The Wreckage three months before Jessica was due and the first publisher I sent it to bought it. All the right people praised it when it came out and, for about twenty-four months, I was rich and famous – felt like I was, anyway – and I had a new baby to show for it.

  I'd think to myself, having children is just something that people do. And of course I could do it too. I was, and am, the worst sort of fool.

  Nathan stopped writing, and he read back what he had just written. A feeling of grotesque unease crept up on him, more with each word. By the time he came to the end his head was throbbing and his hands trembling. All the words meant nothing, there was nothing there. No matter how much he wrote, it did nothing to stem the drifting of his life's meaningless slide into obscurity. Nothing he made had any value. He was a fraud and a fool.

  He'd meant to write about September 11th, about the destruction of the Towers and all that had happened. Everybody was writing about it now, the venerable artists and the eager hopeful; they all had a spin to put on it. It was the new literary vogue, a fresh new holocaust upon which they could build all their stories and have them granted an immediate potency.

  But Nathan couldn't quite manage it. No matter how he tried to force it, he shied away at the last minute as if by instinct. Maybe he'd be better off leaving it alone.

  But no. No, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. This was his chance, he could make use of it, twist it into something that people would look at and respect. They would look at it and they would see only him, only Nathan Riley, rising from the rubble.

  Maybe he should write a story about a firefighter...

  He buried his face in his arms, bent low before the sickly glare of the screen. He was nearly asleep when he felt Jessica's hands on his shoulders. Her fingers worked deep in his muscle, soothing to the bone.

  “How's the job hunt going?” she asked as she massaged his neck.

  “Fantastic,” Nathan mumbled into his sweeter sleeve, “everyone's just desperate to hire me. They've all been sitting around waiting for just this sort of washed up wreck.”

  “Oh good. I'll go ahead and buy that yacht then.”

  Nathan sighed. He was tired. He shouldn't be this tired; it wasn't even fully dark out. “I can't believe I'm turning forty next week.”

  “It's not so bad. Trust me, I speak from experience.” She bent down and kissed the back of his neck. She was smiling, he could feel it.

  “What have I got to show for it though? Everything I thought I would have accomplished by now... I wanted to make people think, Jessie, you know? Wanted to make them feel.” I wanted to make them love me. He left that unspoken. He looked up at his wife. “Did you know that I've always wanted to change the world?”

  “Don't we all?”

  “I mean it.”

  “I know you do. Everybody means it.” She kissed his forehead. “Come to bed, Nathan. Just sleep.”

  * * *

  Forty.

  He was going to be forty years old. There were only a few days left now. He felt like he was trapped in his adolescent nightmares: getting older and older and older and accomplishing nothing along the way.

  He'd seen this future, hoped that if he could ignore it than it might simply disappear. He got married, he had a child, he wrote a book, and when he couldn't write another he got a freelance job writing fluff for the local paper. It wasn't everything he'd dreamed of, but he thought that he'd escaped. And somehow his life had become everything he'd feared; he hadn't even noticed it happening.

  Where was he going to end up? There was nothing before him now, only the great emptiness of irrelevance and old age.

  The night was dead, the hot air so humid that his clothes clung to his bo
dy. He was parked on the wooded shoulder of a lonesome road. It was the road out of town, and he'd gone further than he had ever gone before on this particular stretch of highway, deep into the unfamiliar. His headlights poured out on the alien pavement, on the dirt of the shallow embankment, on the shaggy rust-red pine boughs hanging in the muggy darkness.

  Nathan ran his hands along the wheel.

  He'd dreamed about places like this. Empty roads, wind animating the surreptitious movement of rustling trees. There was something about the wildness of the night which both frightened and excited him, the idea that anything could be out there in the shadowed places. The forest seemed to gleam with the dripping claws and teeth of those unnameable creatures which surely stirred there.

  Jessica didn't like sex. That was an oversimplification, maybe. It may have been more accurate to say that she didn't like sex with him. That had been the understanding from the very beginning, and it had always suited Nathan just fine. To be perfectly honest, he'd never really enjoyed fucking. He liked sex well enough – the sounds and smells and feel of it, and especially the idea of it – but when he was inside a woman and she was looking up at him and he was sliding himself around down in her warm wet parts... it made him nervous on a profound level. He preferred to watch. It had always been that way between Jessica and he, and it had always been enough for him.

  Until they met Michael, at least. That had changed everything.

  Nathan lay against the reclined seat-back. The night was turning cold at last, and his breath fogged before his eyes. With a twist of the keys, he shut off the car. Everything went dark. For a moment, as his eyes adjusted, there was nothing but the faint green glow of the digital clock on the dashboard. He stared down the stretching emptiness of the highway, and he waited.

  It was almost twenty minutes before a car finally crested the hill. First came the sound of the engine, groaning like a great animal. Then the lights, spilling violently on the road in harsh white streams. The wheels thrummed smoothly on the road, carrying the vehicle swiftly towards him. He could feel the vibration of the passing car shuddering minutely through the entire frame of his vehicle.

  He was going to be forty years old soon. He couldn't leave Verden, no matter how he tried he simply could not leave. All his accomplishments turned to nothing in his hands, all his hope had withered in him. And Michael was dead.