Tiny Americans

by Devin Murphy

  Across the street was the golf course cut from the jungle with a long fairway sloping to the ocean. From his patio, when it was light out, he could see the broken lines of cresting waves gathering at the curve in the beach.

  “I mean no family? No one knows you?”

  “Oh. No,” he said. Though he did have a family. His father doggedly wrote him once a week. One of the letters had a picture of his mother and father before any of the kids were born. They were leaning shoulder to shoulder against the side of a rusted red VW Bus and smiling. They were just kids. The whole world ahead of them. The big family to come. The upheavals. None of that yet hinted at on their bright faces.

  In another letter, his father sent a Polaroid of Lewis with Connor and Jamie as small kids. All of them were in motion, darting toward the corners of what the lens could capture. Too wild to sit still for even an instant. The photo had dark smudges in the bottom-right corner on the front and back where it was worn from holding. He imagined his father studying this picture, trying to trace the shifting energy of his children.

  Over the years in some port calls, dozens of those letters had stacked up. His nephew, Dennis, was born while Lewis was sailing in the South China Sea. His niece, Tina, when he was crossing the Indian Ocean. He called his siblings from a satellite phone on the bridge each time. There were still those distant connections. And he still felt the dull thump of love for them that persisted despite the time and distance and silence that existed between them. He could now see his dark patio window and watched for a flash of Nipples pacing the room. His room was a dump compared to the tourist hotels but he could afford to stay on this side of town for as long as he wanted. The room cost 160 US dollars a month. Rena had cost 30 dollars for the evening. Her words played in his head again. “No one knows you.”

  He brought Rena to the long hallway of other rooms, and she waited as he opened the door slowly so Nipples couldn’t flee. Once inside he looked closely at the urine-colored mattress on the bed. When he shut the door, Rena stepped farther into the room. She was obscenely large for her small frame, with tan, fat ankles slipping out of leather sandals with soles made of cut-up tire rubber.

  As soon as she saw Nipples, Rena’s red-rimmed eyes flashed to Lewis. Nipples went to the far corner of the room and curled up with her head resting on her tail.

  “You like dogs?” Rena asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Is your dog?” Rena was looking around the room and flashing looks at Lewis’s wrapped hand.

  “She’s my friend,” Lewis told her.

  “You like big ladies too?” she said and patted her splayed hands against her belly.

  “Yes,” he said. Nipples was looking at them from the kitchenette. Lewis stepped toward Rena. He expected her to say something to him, to ask him to be gentle with her, but she didn’t. She looked at him with a sexy, pouty look he was sure she had been trained to give to men her entire adult life. He wanted her to say something. He had wanted the girl with the duckling to say something too—some small hint of outrage.

  Because he didn’t know what else to do, he reached his hand toward her stomach but recoiled when a ghastly scream ripped in from the hall. Nipples jumped up and started barking. Lewis ran into the dark corridor that now felt tight as a grave. It was empty and he shut his eyes and listened, but all he heard was the sound of someone disappearing. He thought of Russell Bartuga punching his lover’s pillow-clad face—swinging wildly to make sure someone on earth knew him and would remember him once he left.

  Alone in the hallway he felt his heart furiously pumping in his hand and a dark part of him felt this was the kind of night he might actually welcome such a horror, such a visceral understanding of life—if only for an instant.

  Rena was leaning against the sliding glass door when Lewis walked back into his room. He knew if he slid the door open, both Nipples and Rena would run into the darkness and he’d be left in his lonely room with nothing to distract him from his need. So he crossed the horrible carpet, toward Rena, who turned away and made the sign of the cross—maybe asking for him not to damage her baby or for some kind of redemption, for her God or Jesus to turn a blind eye for the next hour, and he understood what made her do it, as he wanted redemption too, though it wasn’t anywhere at hand.

  While she was facing away from him, he wrapped one sweaty and one bandaged hand about her stomach and pressed himself hard against her, and then led her away from the glass door. Neither of them talked. The fingertips of his good hand ran under the strap of Rena’s dress and pushed it over her shoulders until it hung on by her breast and stomach. As he led her to the bed she was mouthing something—a prayer. The bible would do nothing for them here. Maybe he could make up his own bible. A reading from the book of Tides: And ye shall be washed ashore, and pulled back to sea naked and renewed.

  He laid her back on the bed, kneeled between her legs, and brought his mouth between her thighs. Rena’s skin tasted like the exposed top of a battery washed in lavender soap. Nipples stood up next to him and started nervously sniffing the bed as if to test the timbre of the woman’s whimpers—searching out what was really in her heart or body. The image of himself made Lewis think that the world was full of people balancing on the fulcrum of tenderness and danger.

  When Rena’s voice started ululating higher and louder he stopped but her legs rose off the ground and her soft calves wrapped around the back of his neck. She arched her body backward when she came, and the bulbous bottom of her stomach pressed against Lewis’ forehead. He sat back and crawled onto the bed, scooping his arms under her so she could shimmy the rest of her body onto the mattress. Her naked body next to him sent a pang of loneliness through him. Then she reached for his waistline.

  “No,” he said, pushing her hand back toward the bed.

  “That all you want?” she asked.

  Lewis lay down next to her, clutched her belly, and rested his left ear against her popped navel as the room grew darker around him. After several minutes, something pressed briefly against his cheek, and he held her tighter until it pressed again. Rena’s hand came down and rubbed through his hair as he felt the fetal churning of her child, some bastard child of a Filipino sailor, a freighter messman off for leave in the dock towns, having long forgotten about her. He presumed if this child were a girl, she, too, would know plenty of lonely men off the ocean seeking some immediate fix.

  The baby kicked again. “It’s a duck,” he whispered, holding tighter to her stomach as if afraid to fall off the bed, fully aware now of some sadness that had been on the verge of release.

  Rena’s hand pulled back his bangs and each finger slowly worked its way over his scalp. As he lay with her, he imagined her unborn child growing up the destitute offspring of a whore, sucking on an overused nipple. He imagined the child picking among the trash for food, trying to give names to the things she would think were myth and magic, and as he was falling asleep, he imagined giving her a new path and carrying her away.

  Then something pulled him awake. He tried to fight it, but opening his eyes he saw the last wrappings of his mummified bandage being pulled off his hand by Nipples. Enough light was shining through the curtain that he knew it was six in the morning, and he felt like he’d just come alive again after a long sickness—a nightmare finally lifting. Rena was gone, and Nipples was licking the crust of dried blood away from his hand. He opened his palm to the animal’s warm tongue. The light traced its way from the far corner along the floor to the bed and up the ceiling. He felt the old longing for the steady work of ships and the sea—of having some job always waiting for him. The longing gave him some hope that he might still have a purpose and he started to feel a physical strength coming back to him. And stretching out each finger, he offered it all to the broken animal lapping at his hand.

  12

  Jamie Thurber, 2013

  The wires running from small white suction cups on my head to the computer make little green lines on the screen jump up and
down sporadically when Chow-Fung asks me if I know what the color mauve tastes like. When I tell him I don’t, the lift and drop of the electronic lines seem to level out. I keep looking between him and the green lines as he asks me complex math equations, reads elementary alphabet books, and asks me to blurt out the first word that pops into my head when he says sex. He seems quite pleased with the whole process, intently running a metallic-looking pen over his notepad. He asks several odd questions that make me think he’s privy to some faction of the world I have no idea about. I’m starting to wonder if this intense young man knows the feel of nothingness and the smell of sound.

  He lets me take the suction-cup helmet off my head to use the ladies’ room halfway through our three-hour session. In the stall, I wonder what my brain lines are casting as I hear a stream of pee hitting the water. The second half of our session requires me to be quiet after each question, letting my brain waves answer Chow-Fung.

  “This is like how your brain works when sleeping,” he tells me, pointing to the screen where the lines are still gyrating. “It’s pretty busy up there all the time.”

  Chow-Fung is a doctoral student in educational psychology here at Buffalo State. I answered his mass email requesting volunteers for his study out of a combination of curiosity and a desire to meet people, a person, someone—anyone really. Everything about his demeanor is serious and he makes no mention of his work, grants, or life. The three-hour session in his laboratory is solely for gathering data. Resting my hands on my lap, I feel frumpy, like the sex questions are nothing he would associate with me. My clothes start to feel too tight, and it seems like the temperature in the room is rising. At the end of the hour, sitting quietly, letting my brain talk to his computer, I’m ready to shake my limbs loose and yell at him. Nothing particular comes to mind, just frustrated gibberish. See what that does to his screen.

  The laboratory has a small office where he comes out to see me after we’ve finished the tests. The cinder-block walls are painted a sort of dull aqua green left over from the seventies, lending the room, despite being impeccably clean, a sense of staleness.

  “Thank you very much for coming, Professor Thurber,” Chow-Fung says to me as he walks into the room. “Now, I can offer you the ten dollars or a T-shirt for your time.”

  “Oh, I’ll just take the T-shirt, please,” I say, making him turn to dig around in a file cabinet against the wall. His pants have creases in the butt from sitting so long. He pulls out a white shirt folded like it would be at the Gap. Shaking it loose he holds it up in front of me, pressing the top seam against both my shoulders.

  “There, that should fit you well,” he says.

  My hands graze his as I grab the shirt, but his face shows no recognition of having been touched. Spinning the shirt toward me, I read the black bold letters: I’ve seen how my brain works.

  “Slowly?” my daughter, Tina, says to me when she reads my T-shirt as I walk into our apartment.

  “Very funny, smart aleck,” I tell her.

  She mumbles something toward the television and doesn’t look at me when I sit on the couch next to her. I find it hard reconciling that this person is my daughter. She’s just turned thirteen and recently cut her fruit punch–colored hair short in the back like a boy’s, leaving two long strands of bangs parted from the center of her forehead, wrapping her face like quotation marks. She has the same rounded features and healthy coloring she did as a newborn when I would stare at her for hours in a state of near worship. She’s still pretty, but now comes across as tough and a bit scary. She smells like cigarettes, but I can’t get her to admit to smoking, and I’ve never found anything in her room. She’s wearing a metal-studded black leather bracelet, but it’s her socks that worry me. She alternately wears either small girls’ socks with frills on the elastic or multicolored knee-highs like a slutty school girl. The socks on her seem overly suggestive, and it scares me that despite her aggressive and dark clothing, she’s begun working sex appeal into her life. She learned it from me, I have no doubt, though I don’t show it off as much as I used to, or what’s left of it at least.

  “I had a brain procedure done today,” I tell her, hoping exaggeration will spark some recognition that I’m alive. “I was held for hours while they ran tests.”

  “Shut up, Mom,” Tina says, still watching some sort of anime cartoon.

  “I did,” I tell her, lowering my voice. “Look at the suction marks on my temple,” I say, pointing to my head.

  When she shifts toward me the small orange cotton tassels hanging off her socks sway from her feet on the coffee table. Her eyes are almost black and when she was young I’d watch myself in them. “It may be serious,” I say, wanting her to keep looking at me.

  Later, I hear her talking on the phone with one of her friends. “My mom might have brain cancer,” she tells whoever is on the other line. I think of whatever life she imagined herself having changing as she speaks the words. She won’t ever tell me about those imagined lives, but I know she gets the compulsion to play out her future from me. I recognize it on her like it has climbed out of my mirror and draped itself over her, like Chow-Fung draped the T-shirt over me. Part of me wants to see how she acts toward me now before telling her my brain is fine—though it doesn’t know the taste of mauve and the green waves spiked at the word sex.

  When she is off the phone I go to talk to her. Tina is sitting down at a kitchen nook table doing homework. One of the light bulbs is out and the room is half in shadow leaving the lone light spotlighting her soft hair. I stop and stare at her. The room with her in it now looks like a piece of art, and I’m flooded with love for her. It seems there is no way to be anything but in love with her. The feeling makes me think of my parents loving me this way. Of course they did. Of course they did. Everything I thought they burdened me with suddenly seems to switch from their lack to something different. Something I couldn’t see until now. A wash of forgiveness comes. There would be no knowing this feeling without looking at my girl in the half-light. I want to send all this love back in time to my parents when they needed it most. I want to send it forward to my girl when she will judge me. Backward and forward through time, I want to send all my love, which seems like an important enough revelation to change how I live the rest of my life. I don’t disturb her and go to my room to get ready for teaching.

  “What are you doin’?” Tina asks from the doorframe of my room, next to a faceless painting of a woman in white clothes levitating over a gravestone that I made when I was a young woman. She won’t come inside, thinking that this demonstrates to me how one shows respect by staying out of other people’s rooms—though we both know that when either of us is home alone the whole house is ours, every drawer rifled through and put back as best as possible.

  “I’m getting my lesson plans ready for class tomorrow,” I tell her. I have an Introduction to Philosophy class. I’m supposed to teach St. Augustine’s vision of the mind to eighteen-year-olds who spend the class time text-messaging each other and don’t even pretend to look at me when I’m talking.

  “So when do you find out what the deal is?” Tina asks, leaning into the doorframe.

  “I guess it will take a few weeks. But I wouldn’t worry about anything for now. There’s no sense worrying until we know something for sure.”

  “Well, I’m still going to go to Dad’s this week if you don’t need anything,” she says, turning away from me, shyly now, like her gothic cloak can’t cover everything she’s not sharing.

  My classroom is one of those big lecture halls with stadium seating. “St. Augustine believed the mind was the producer of infinite images,” I tell the class to start my lecture. None of my students look like they care. The few ROTC soldiers in the classroom are sitting straight up, but their eyes are glazed over. “A person can imagine a mountain, a snow-capped mountain, a mountain with a goat on it, a mountain inside of another mountain. The possibilities of what the mind can produce are infinite. The mind therefore is the best
model for God that we can find. God can also produce infinite things; though what God produces is tangible, Augustine believed, the mind nonetheless holds the same generative potential.” I like the idea but it apparently has no effect on my class. I think about telling them that the mind casts squiggly green lines of all their thoughts, that the mind can become sick and generate tumorous growths, that I myself was in peril of those green lines casting some growth in my own skull, and that for homework we could all sit tight and wait on the results of my brain-study tests.

  On nights when Tina stays with her father, John, I cook a quick dinner and spend the evening doing research in the campus library. Tonight, I’m chopping onions, green bell peppers, and celery to mix in with marinara sauce from a jar. I’ll make enough to last until Tina comes back at the end of the weekend. It’s easy for me this way, but I miss her. I miss her even though she’s like a pensive cat, keeping one flank to a wall or an exit every time I’m around her. I halve the celery stalks and get lost in my thoughts with the rhythm of my knife crunching through the veiny green walls. Each slice sends out a little mist that I feel on my fingers and I’m not sure I hear the knock on the door until it comes again.

  “Tina told me,” John says when I open the door. “She came home and started crying.”

  But this is Tina’s home, I think, still surprised my daughter has another life without me, surprised to find evidence of it here, now, on my doorstep.

  “Jesus, why didn’t you tell me?” he asks, limping forward and hugging me toward his chest. When he puts his arms over my shoulders they feel like heavy links of an anchor chain, pulling me down, lifting me up, and holding me suspended in his grasp. He hasn’t hugged me since leaving me three years ago. We hardly even see each other anymore. Tina bikes across town or has him pick her up after school. He smells the same though. It’s the smell I slept with and woke to before I finally washed all my sheets and clothes of him.