by Atticus Lish
“Don’t we know you from school?”
“That’s fuckin’ right.”
“Why is that fuckin’ right? What do you want? Do you want something?”
“Maybe you’ll find out.”
“There are five of us.”
“I don’t care.”
“Great. What are you, like, Superman suddenly?”
There was no fight, just sneering, but someone tossed a cigarette. Behind him as Corey was leaving, he heard one of the boys telling the others, “This is the weirdest day.”
* * *
—
At school, Corey began to stop talking to people in the old friendly way. He practiced three things: 1. The Deadpan. 2. The Up and Over. 3. The Front-Off. The Deadpan consisted of an expressionless stare. He let you talk without any facial feedback from him. You could be telling him a storm blew down his house: He would give you no reaction—as if all the nerves in his face had been disconnected from his facial muscles. The Up and Over was, after boiling you in his dead stare for as long as you could stand, he allowed his eyes to unhitch from your face, as if you couldn’t hold his attention, and rise to a point in the air above your head. The Front-Off was, if you were finally offended by all this and dared to call him a jerk, he squared up with you and made an arm gesture with both hands as if he were throwing down a pile of papers on an invisible desk. The gesture came from the waist, so it looked as if the papers were stored in the groin: It looked sexual and baboonlike. The elbows were out. He was throwing down a gauntlet—or a red carpet that would unroll towards you—a walkway inviting you to your doom if you dared to come at him.
Practicing this new language took a lot of work. Corey had no time to think about anything else. Every day was showtime, moseying around, pretending to be a gangster and wondering when the world was going to call his bluff, and if it did, was he going to play his role to the point that it went from being a role to being real? He spent a lot of time telling people what he would do if other people crossed him. He spat on the ground. He pretended to get angry even when he wasn’t.
He drove off everyone who had ever liked him except for Molly. For weeks, she kept trying to get his attention. “Hey!” she said to him in the cafeteria, where the ceiling was hung with international flags and all the tables were little hexagons. Not wanting to break character, Corey didn’t smile. “Hey, shorty,” he said to her, and went and sat and dead-stared at his grilled cheese sandwich.
His greeting made her raise an eyebrow. She came towards him through the tables, wearing a Quincy High athletic jacket over a long knit sweater, which functioned as a short dress, cotton tights and old Nikes. Fresh from basketball practice, her still-wet hair was contained under a ski hat. The gym bag hanging from her shoulder was on a long strap and it was hitting her knees as she maneuvered between the tables to his side.
“You seem like something’s wrong lately. Are you okay?”
But Corey refused to drop his mask, wouldn’t joke with her, wouldn’t smile. She kept on pressing him, “What happened? You used to be so chill.”
“What, do you need a friend?”
Her other eyebrow went up. She stared at him for a minute. Then she said, “Hey, we’re playing Duxbury this weekend. You should come and watch us if you have time.”
“Thanks,” he whispered.
She didn’t give up on him.
He went to see the girls’ basketball team play their rivals in the gymnasium. The girls ran and dribbled and jumped and passed the ball, and sometimes they shoved each other, fouled each other and took long skidding falls on the polyurethaned floor, but the only thing he could think about was his mother’s car being taken and her falling face-first on a concrete sidewalk.
After the game, he waded down through the parents and friends to tell Molly he had supported her. He didn’t even know if she had won or lost. She was breathing hard, flushed and sweating, a towel around her neck, in a crew of tall teammates wearing high-top sneakers, headed for the locker rooms. She put her hand out sideways and touched his hand. Her hand was wet.
“Thanks. You’re awesome.”
* * *
—
He challenged people to fights without getting into them on the street. He sat next to a guy on the bus, and the guy pushed his knee into Corey’s knee, and Corey pushed back. The guy was hairy and French-looking, as if his roots went back to fur trappers in Montreal. He had a bearded face and a skinny body. His knee was hard and it ground against Corey’s knee bone, and Corey could feel tension loading up in the man’s body like a spring.
“How old are you?” he asked Corey. “I was in the Marines. I was in Force Recon, and I loved it. One thing I learned: If I get in a fight, I won’t get off the other guy until they pull me off him.”
But Corey didn’t stop resisting his leg, and the man, for whom life was overwhelming, got off at the next stop, having decided that he had to avoid the consequences of another conflict. He threw a look at Corey that said, “Kid, if you only knew what I know.”
And then Corey spread his legs out all the way and his heart stopped pounding: another fight avoided.
* * *
—
But finally he pulled the pin on the wrong grenade. An Irish kid—white skin, red hair, freckles, a Boston Celtics uniform—attacked him a block away from the Family Dollar. The kid wore a newsboy’s hat, a gold chain, and dollar-sign rings. On his fist, he had a tattoo of a bomb with the fuse burning down as in a Tom & Jerry cartoon. Afterwards, Corey couldn’t remember what he had done to set him off. There had been an exchange of words between them. He had lost vision of the street, of the parked cars, bystanders, everything—and then the kid himself had disappeared and a painless impact had exploded in Corey’s eye. A balloon popped inside his nose and something shot out of his nostril. Then he was hanging on to the Celtics uniform and fists were hitting his head, but he didn’t feel anything. They were wrestling. He had a flash image of his enemy, hatless, the chain whipping around his neck. Someone was shouting, “Let him go!” Then he saw a cop car, a black and white, that said Quincy Police on the body. Then Corey had his arm around the kid’s neck and was grinning, pulling him close. The kid was still angry.
“Oh, they’re friends,” a cop said to his partner.
“Yeah,” the kid muttered, snatching up his newsboy hat.
All of them went their separate ways, including the police.
At home, Corey found the entire white of his eye was filled with blood. He found dried blood under his nose. His sinus had popped and blood had shot from his nose and hit his shirt. He had to go to the doctor—a forty-dollar co-pay. His knees had gotten skinned badly through his jeans, and he had to soak the wounds in the tub. His scabs hardened up and for several days after the fight he had to go around on crutches because he couldn’t bend his knees.
But then he went to school, his eye still swimming in blood, and began to swagger, imitating the walk of the kid who’d beaten him up, and for a little time thereafter wore a newsboy’s hat—until he had a change of heart.
* * *
—
He still saw Adrian, but their relationship had changed now that Corey spent most of his time outside school hanging out, going to Blecic’s job site but not working, playing hooky with Dunbar, acting out the role that no one could tell him what to do and, at home, bracing for another fight with Leonard—waiting for Leonard to do something to his mother. For weeks now, in front of Adrian, Corey had been talking about how Quincy boys were tough. When the honors student complained about his own mother, Corey would say, “Just overcome your problems, dude.” He stopped showing any interest in Adrian’s analyses or treating him with deference. Their meetings stopped being philosophical. He would put Adrian through a bro-shake and treat him with aloofness and amusement. He practiced his Deadpan on him. He took over the dialogue between them, rolling
through the streets, pointing out the corners where half-imaginary disputes had taken place, referencing a cast of characters Adrian had never heard of.
“That dude looks like Hawk.”
“Who’s Hawk?”
“Some dude I was beefin’ with.”
Corey delighted in treating his former mentor in this high-handed way. He told Adrian the world was divided between those who were real and those who weren’t—and let Adrian draw his own conclusions.
An irony occurred when Adrian invited him to spar. They looped back to Mount Auburn. New England was having a gray day and it was rainy. They were on the edge of March. The cocoa-colored house waited in the wet trees. Adrian opened his mother’s garage and invited Corey in. Corey, his clothes damp from the weather and hanging on his lean frame, entered without hesitation, his jeans bunched at the ankles over his big sneakers. All his clothes were oversized, bigger than he was.
The garage smelled wet and moldy. The boxing gloves lay on the floor. Adrian only had one set of gloves, so they would get one each. Corey took the right one: the power hand. At first he thought he had given himself an advantage, but then he wasn’t sure how to stand.
Adrian took his leather jacket off and exposed his arms. Unlike some people whose muscles bulge, Adrian’s arms didn’t expand when he flexed them. They looked like they were made of blocks. The internal parts seemed to slide inside one another. He put the left glove on.
“Are you ready?”
“No, wait. Which way do I stand?”
Adrian told him not to worry about it. All they were going to do was work on their feints.
They put their hands up. The garage had very little light in it. Adrian advanced and Corey backed up into the wall and his back hit the handles of rakes.
“Wait,” he said. “I can’t see shit.”
Adrian waited, bouncing on his tiny wrestling shoes. They started moving again. Corey jabbed at Adrian. He hit nothing but air. The garage filled with effortful scuffing and breathing. No one hit anyone.
I should get closer to him, Corey thought, and took a step towards Adrian.
A shadow ballooned in front of his eyes, covering everything he saw, like a car speeding into his face, blacking out everything.
The shadow was Adrian’s left hand hitting him in the face. Corey threw his arms out and fell flat on his back on the concrete floor, striking his head.
He came to sitting up against the garage wall. He saw Adrian standing several feet away.
“What time is it?”
“You’ve asked me that already.”
“What am I doing here?”
“We were sparring.”
“We were? What happened?”
“I threw a jab and you walked into it.”
* * *
—
Corey remained friends with Adrian despite the knockout. A week later, he was back in Cambridge, sitting on the floor of Adrian’s room, saying, “I don’t care that I got snuffed. I may be smaller than you, but I’m crazy. I don’t give a fuck.”
Rain was falling on the skylight. Corey was holding his newsboy hat, feeding it through his hands like a steering wheel. Adrian was enthroned at his desk, looking down at him.
“I can see that. You act like you don’t care what happens to you.”
“I’ve changed. I don’t care.”
“That’s very interesting. How did you change?”
“Had to. It was time to get some balls.”
“Hm…So you’re really not scared of street fights anymore?”
“No,” Corey lied. “It’s a mental shift.”
“It can be really satisfying to make a mental shift or connection,” Adrian said. “That’s something I really need to work on. If I could be as fearless as you, I’d be unstoppable. I’d be a killing machine.”
“It’s all in the mind.”
“I should show you a picture I drew for my art class. I bet you’d really appreciate it. It’s so violent.”
Adrian opened his closet door. Tacked to the inside wall was a sheet of drafting paper. On it, he had drawn a larger-than-life rendition of his own face.
The looming Adrian-face held the viewer with its steady, hypnotic gaze. The picture was astonishing in its detail: Each of the whiskers on Adrian’s jaws, each of the hairs of his eyebrows, each one of his eyelashes, each of the hairs of his head, each follicle had received its own pencil line. It could have been a photograph. There was nothing stereotyped about it. It was completely the opposite of the drawing of the vulva that Adrian had made on the board at MIT. It wasn’t a token of a thing; it was the thing itself.
There was more: Exploding out of the side of Adrian’s head, there was a second figure, a kinetic figure—another Adrian—muscles flexed, swinging a sledgehammer, bursting out of his own skull, like a mushrooming bullet.
The portraits—both the bigger-than-life-size face with its heavy open-eyed gaze and the kinetic mini-man leaping out of the brain—were highly accurate likenesses of the artist. Corey was awestruck. Adrian said that the work had taken him eight weeks of meticulous effort. He’d spent an average of two hours each night in front of the mirror, studying himself, using a ruler the way his art teacher had taught him, to get the dimensions right. He’d sharpened his pencil every ten minutes to make sure all his lines were the same. He’d posed night after night with his sledgehammer to capture all the muscles of his torso. He leaned back and indicated his abdomen and rib cage where the latissimus ties into the ribs, the serratus, not quite touching his own anatomy, but indicating it with his fingertips.
“You can see my narcissistic identification. How I think I’m beautiful.”
“You should be proud.”
Adrian said he was.
Then why was the picture in his closet?
Adrian said his mother wouldn’t let him put it on his wall.
“I don’t understand. What’s wrong with it? Didn’t your teacher like it?”
Adrian said his teacher had given him an A. But his mother had reported the teacher to the principal. She’d threatened to pull Adrian out of school. She’d called his psychiatrist and made sure Adrian saw him twice a week. She’d demanded that Adrian put the sledgehammer back in the garage, otherwise she couldn’t sleep in the same house with him.
“But that’s crazy!” Corey said. “What is she, afraid you’re going to kill her?”
“Yes.”
“I really think that’s wrong! You do something artistic, she ought to be proud of you! She ought to encourage you! This shouldn’t be in your closet! Look, you’ve complained about her a lot to me and I always thought you were overblowing it. This is the first time I finally get what you’re talking about! She’s not right, man! You’ve got to stand strong against her, if that’s the way she is! You gotta be you all the way!”
Adrian said nothing.
“You don’t seem happy.”
“I’m not unhappy. But I know there are things about me that are bad.”
“You’re not bad!” insisted Corey. What did the picture mean? He saw a man escaping, flying free.
No, said Adrian. Not quite. It meant: His head contained an angry weapon. There was an explosive projection from his psyche, a force that could destroy.
* * *
—
They closed the closet door on Adrian’s self-portrait and went downstairs. Gray light was flowing in the windows and filling up the house like a beaker, bringing with it the dismal cast of the rainy blacktop road and the dripping trees outside through a gap in the white, see-through curtain. The house was full of shadow. Mounting to the platform kitchen, Adrian took a jug of milk out of the refrigerator and began to drink.
“That’d make me sick.”
“I can overcome it.” Adrian belched. Swallowing the entire gallon took some time. It was
zero percent fat; just water and protein. He crushed the empty jug and put it in the flip-top trash can.
Corey looked in the refrigerator. “You got anything to eat?”
“Everything in there belongs to my mother.”
“You can’t eat your mother’s food? How ’bout this? What’s this? Meatloaf?”
“That’s hers.”
“Can I have it?”
“I can’t give you something that belongs to someone else.”
“There’s barely anything here. She’s not even going to notice it’s gone.”
“Oh, she’ll notice.”
“How ’bout if I just take it?”
“It’s up to you, if you want to do that. That’s between you and her. I’m staying out of it.”
“I don’t understand what she’s going to do. What’s the big deal? It’s leftovers. It doesn’t look like you guys are starving.”
“I’ve made my position clear.”
“Fine. Relax. I’m not gonna touch her food. Where is she anyway? Is she at the hospital getting treatment?”
“Maybe. There’s a schedule around here somewhere.”
“Is this it?” Corey pointed at a sheet of paper clipped to the refrigerator door: a laser-printed table of the days of the week. In one cell of the table, the words “Adrian garbage don’t forget” caught his eye.
“Yes, that’s it. Let’s see: On Thursday she goes to the cancer center. On Wednesday she sees her friends. On Tuesday she has her real estate meeting. On Monday she goes to some other committee thing. She has the whole week planned out for both of us. Mondays, I do the dishes. Tuesday, I do dishes and trash. Wednesday, I—no, Thursday, I see my psychiatrist. Friday, I have nothing to do. Saturday, I get to go out. Sunday, I have to see her. She’s got every day of the whole week on her computer. Yeah, here we go: Saturday, she goes to the hospital. She should be back any minute. We should get out of here.”
