The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

  Another bus came and went while she talked about her art class. The cop watched them without watching them. He was a tan-skinned colossus in a sharp navy uniform and black boots who had mastered the Deadpan. Corey glanced at him and looked away.

  * * *

  —

  Corey never sold any drugs. He gave away one pill to a black kid named Brian and took one himself and gave the rest back to Anthony. They were opioids. They put a wall between Corey and the world.

  But they didn’t put a wall between him and Anthony. Through a third party, he heard that Anthony expected five hundred dollars for his two missing pills. Corey tried to get a job, but Dunkin’ Donuts wasn’t hiring. Someone called his mother’s cell phone and told Gloria that her son didn’t pay his debts. He went to Dunbar and asked him what to do. Dunbar was broke and couldn’t help him out but promised to speak to the hairdresser on his behalf. In the end, Corey borrowed two hundred fifty dollars from his mother and gave it to Dave to give to Anthony. But after that, he heard from others that he could have simply blown the drug dealer off, and he was left wondering if Dave had taken advantage of him. He heard rumors about himself.

  The story of the episode came back to him in exaggerated form, with him an even bigger fool, a mark, getting played for even more of his mother’s money. His friendship with Dave Dunbar ended.

  On the fifth of April, MIT held a welcome day for next year’s freshmen. Workers put up canvas tents on the lawn outside the student union. Administrators sat with upturned faces to speak to parents and their children. A sign asked “Want to Spend the Summer in Kazakhstan?” A caterer delivered brisket from Redbone’s in Davis Square. Initially, it was sunny. The sun passed overhead, making the tent glow like a lampshade. In the afternoon, however, the weather clouded over and the lampshade went dark. The brisket cooled. Mrs. Reinhardt pushed through the tent flap in her wig, followed by her hulking son, Adrian.

  She approached a long-necked woman with a pious face and medieval bowl cut who sat with her hands primly clasped and her fingers interlaced, waiting to be called on to help someone.

  “My son’s coming here next year!” Mrs. Reinhardt indicated Adrian—the figure in the black leather jacket. He was standing with his feet braced out like a man about to meet a charging herd of horses, holding open a heavy textbook, studying the contents with a look of dramatic fascination on his face. “That’s him.” And she laughed at the sight of her son. The administrator, either due to innate humorlessness or because there was something that troubled her in the sight of the figure in the mouth of the tent, didn’t laugh.

  While his mother talked to the administrator, Adrian drifted out on the lawn, repeating formulas, whispering to himself, working out a problem, touching his lip in thought, writing in the air on an invisible chalkboard, looking up at the clouds.

  His mother emerged and reclaimed him. She wanted to inspect the student union. It was a public space open twenty-four hours a day: slightly trashed, smelling like old pizza. Anyone could sit for as long as they wanted in the chairs, leaving the stink of their sweat in the fabric of the cushions. She toddled past the young engineers-in-training sprawled out doing homework. At the far end, there was a Dunkin’ Donuts–Baskin Robbins, giving off its characteristic confectionary smell—a sugary, creamy, coffee-flavored, vanilla-chocolate goopiness.

  “Oh, Adrian, I’m going to have an ice-cream cone!” she cried. Then she noticed she was alone. Adrian had let her go on without him.

  She bought an ice-cream cone and went back and got him and made him follow her around the campus for another ninety minutes.

  When she was satisfied, she took him to his dorm. It was a redbrick-limestone building with white colonial trim. There was a glass rotunda with a white roof and white vertical elements separating the windows. She took her son inside. There was a guard desk in the lobby but there was no one there.

  “Let’s go upstairs!” she said. “I want to see where you’ll be living!”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “Oh, come on, Adrian! Don’t you want to take me? ‘Where the boys all go, the girls go too!’ ” She sang to him in a show-tune falsetto.

  “No, that’s okay. I’m not interested.”

  “If you won’t come with me, I’ll have to get a college man to show me his room.”

  “Go ahead. I’m sure that will be very satisfying.”

  “Adrian…”

  “Yes?”

  “You better not wander off.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Adrian.”

  “What?”

  “You better be here when I come back.”

  “You can’t tell me what to do. You’re the one leaving.”

  “I’m only going for one minute.”

  “Okay, one minute.” He set his G-Shock watch. “That’s sixty seconds. You’re going to have to hurry, otherwise I have no obligation to wait for you.”

  “I know somebody who wants to go to physics camp this summer. Maybe you better think about that, unless you want to get that yanked.”

  “You’re just countering a reasonable condition with a threat. We went over this with my doctor. For an agreement to be valid, both parties have to have a stake in it. You’re acting in bad faith. To be in good faith, you would have to say how long you’re going to be upstairs and then you would have to make a faithful commitment to be back here by that time.”

  The elevator arrived.

  “If you’re not here when I get back, I’ll take away something you want,” Mrs. Reinhardt said.

  When she was gone, Adrian stood in the lobby, staring at his watch. “That’s thirty seconds,” he announced to the empty room.

  He inspected a science exhibit in a Lucite case: a geode, an egg of stone that had cracked open, revealing fang-shaped crystals of purple and white, like frozen milk. The outer surface glittered with shiny dollops of chrome and nickel. Geodes, the exhibit said, form in bubbles of molten stone within the earth.

  The leather of his jacket creaked. His bicep compressed it when he flexed his arm to look at his G-Shock watch, strapped to the joint of his powerful hand.

  “A minute’s up.”

  He found a fire exit, which led to a stairwell, and went down into the basement.

  Thirty minutes passed, and the security guard who tended the lobby of the dorm returned to his post to find a woman talking excitedly on her cell phone. Her tone of voice suggested delight. But there was something paradoxical about her voice. It didn’t match what she was saying. She was saying, “There’s a maturity issue! He’s not ready to be away from home!” The guard realized she was seething.

  The woman got off the phone. “My son’s disappeared,” she told the guard. “You haven’t seen him, have you?”

  “What does he look like?”

  “You’d know him if you saw him,” she said.

  The guard offered to put out a call on the radio.

  “Don’t bother. I’m going home. I’ve got cancer, you know. He’s going to regret this. This is a very nice dorm. I was just upstairs. It’s a lovely dorm and I met some lovely people, but he’s never going to know them.”

  She left the building.

  The guard strolled through the hallways on the upper floors. Finding no one out of place, he entered the stairwell, tapping his trouser leg with the antenna of his radio, and after looking up and looking down, descended to the basement.

  There was a red exit light at the far end of the basement, which was otherwise dark, and it glowed on the overhead pipes—water, sewer, gas, electric—turning them red. The air was humming from a high-voltage generator running in the power room. The guard began to stroll into the throbbing darkness. As he moved, white lights keyed to motion detectors came on and went off, so that a square of white light traveled with him down the tunnel, illuminating the cinderblock walls.
The last bank of lights to blink on revealed a human figure standing like a robot absorbing the sound waves coming out of the generator.

  “Hello, Adrian.”

  Adrian turned around and looked at the guard. The guard was Corey’s father.

  “Mr. Goltz, is that you?”

  “Almost. Goltz is my baby mama’s name.”

  “Oh dear, I’ve committed a faux pas. What should I call you?”

  “You can call me Leonard.”

  “Leonard, what are you doing here?”

  “I work here. What brings you down here?”

  “I like feeling the energy radiating from the walls…I feel like no one knows I’m here…I feel violent and powerful…I feel like I’m in this big red humming pussy.”

  Adrian looked inside himself while he talked, following his ideas from one to the next, until he came to this conclusion. Once he said it, he looked up with the air of a sleeper coming awake and registered Leonard and a smile spread over his face at the hilarious strangeness of what he had said. He laughed.

  “Don’t worry,” Leonard said. “That’s perfectly normal.”

  And Adrian laughed even louder.

  “You’re getting away from it all. I get it. This is my favorite part of my rounds.”

  “Are you a policeman? Corey told me you were a policeman for MIT.”

  “I’m a guard. I was with the cops. But the hours are better for me as a guard.”

  “I don’t blame you. I think you’re so lucky. I’ve always wanted to be a night watchman! I’d have time to read and study…I wouldn’t want to be a cop either, telling people what to do. What kind of person needs to control other people like that? It’s like something’s missing in them, like they have some kind of penis envy, so they have to wear a gun.”

  “They’re small-minded. They’re blinded by status markers.”

  “Exactly! I hate that! They want to wear an MIT T-shirt and brag about having their kid go here.”

  “You see it with academics getting letters after their names. I call it alphabet soup: PhD, MS—multiple stupidity, more like; bachelor of science—BS, BS, BS. I’ve gotten letters after my name too. You think I introduce myself as Leonard Agoglia, PhD?”

  “You have a PhD?”

  “Yeah, you bet your ass. Got it in 1998. Wrote my dissertation. Did original work. Big fucking deal. Life goes on. I don’t need the status.”

  “Wow! Corey never told me that!”

  “That’s because I never told him. It doesn’t change who I am. It doesn’t change the universe.”

  “Gosh, that’s such a noble attitude!”

  “People look at the surface and think they know you. They have no idea what you’re thinking.”

  “That’s exactly how I feel!”

  “They look at me and see Joe Shit the Rag Man. I just laugh at them.”

  “I think of myself as a proud, lonely boy.”

  “We’re all heirs to the capitalist system.”

  “In what way?”

  “It’s the system of competition: the zero-sum game of I-win-you-lose instead of the understanding that knowledge is not property. You can’t buy and sell knowledge—even though that’s what places like this try and do. Knowledge lives outside the economic realm. And if you look at history, mistakes have happened when people have tried to bring these realms together.” He held his hands apart and moved them towards each other until they overlapped. “This is a problem. Things that are separate should stay separate. This is the problem right here—” and he gripped his hands together, clutching his own flesh.

  “Hmm, that’s very interesting. I have to think about what you said. I wouldn’t have thought of it as capitalism. I guess I was thinking more of it in terms of psychology, like somebody has this expensive house or car, and they want to fight over it, but deep down, the reason they’re fighting over it is because it’s this part of themselves that they see being taken away, like a penis.”

  “Capitalism is based on false value—the value of a bar of gold. You can’t eat gold. In material terms, it doesn’t do anything for human survival. What good is it?”

  “You’re right! People love to talk about how beautiful gold is: It’s shiny; they practically masturbate over it; they fetishize it; they make statues out of it. But it’s just a bunch of atoms. You could melt it down to nothing in a kiln. If we can worship gold, why not silver? Or why not shit? I’d like to grind up a gold statue into powder and make a gorilla eat it; then I’d collect the gorilla’s shit and make a new statue, and worship that. People would say, why are you worshipping a shit statue instead of a gold one? And I’d say it does have gold in it! Here—smell!”

  Leonard laughed ha-ha. “Unfortunately, most people worship gold.”

  “Yeah. I guess that’s why I’m doomed to my lonely quest. Nobody wants to smell my shit.”

  “You never know. Stay hopeful.”

  “I thought Corey would be a great person to share ideas with.”

  “I think he’s very taken with you. He looks up to your academic success.”

  “I looked up to him too. He was so hyped-up about ideas in the beginning. I’d never met somebody who was so into the same things as me before. It was incredible. It was like looking in a mirror! But he’s changed.”

  “Yes, he has.”

  “You’ve noticed it too! It’s like he’s lost his intellectual side, and he’s doing this tough-guy thing, like what matters is being this big man instead of being a friend.”

  “Yes, it’s ridiculous.”

  “What’s been causing it?”

  “His mother.”

  “I thought it had something to do with her! Hasn’t she got some health problems?”

  “Yeah, she’s sick. But everyone’s got health problems.”

  “You must be really bummed.”

  “I’m not surprised. His mother’s destroyed everything she’s ever touched.”

  “Gloria—that’s his mother?”

  “Yeah. The thing is, he tells her everything, so if you talk to him, she’ll hear everything I’m telling you.”

  “I won’t tell Corey anything we talk about.”

  “I thought I had you pegged as a solid guy.”

  “That’s a sacred trust to me. I wouldn’t expect anyone else to understand what we’re talking about.”

  “They probably wouldn’t. They probably wouldn’t get the whole thing about the big red pussy, would they?”

  Adrian laughed. “No!”

  “It might be a good idea not to tell anyone we know each other.”

  “I have no problem with secrecy. It’s how I’ve survived knowing my mother.”

  “I think I met your mother upstairs. Is she short?”

  “She’s pushy.”

  “I was going to say loud, but that fits.”

  “She’s loud. Her voice is so whiny…She’s awful.”

  “I know the type: has to get what she wants when she wants it. She wants to know where you are.”

  “She’s stalking me. That’s why I’m down here. I’m going to stay until she leaves. I know she’s got to get to bed at a set time, so all I have to do is stay out till ten thirty and I can still get eight hours’ sleep and be up by, like, seven. I can study the way I want, I can work out, I can lift, I can get stronger; everything’s still improving; I’m learning everything for my courses; she isn’t defeating me.”

  “A difficult woman. Is she Italian?”

  “Does it show?”

  “It shows. Italian women are hysterical.” Leonard made devil horns and pointed them at the earth. “See this? This is what my father did when he saw my mother, to ward off the evil eye. You ought to try it.”

  “I’m not going to be able to keep her away with that.”

  “Is she in good h
ealth?”

  “She’s got brain cancer.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s okay. I hope she dies!” They laughed.

  “When did you figure out your mother was difficult? How many days, how many minutes, after being born did it take?”

  “It was early. I was like four or five.”

  “Did she do something?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Something you don’t want to talk about?”

  “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  “My mother was a freak of nature also. I can barely talk about her. She fed me worms.”

  “That’s awful. That makes me feel really violent.”

  “I have to get back to the lobby,” Leonard said. “Keep the faith.”

  Still oppressed by the Dunbar affair, Corey cut school and took the Red Line up to Cambridge, planning to surprise Adrian at Rindge, a campus of green lawns and gray stone buildings that harkened back to churches. Class was in session; the grounds were quiet. Corey could see a teacher lecturing behind a distant window. Then the doors opened and kids with backpacks came out of all the buildings. He looked for a leather jacket. Coming down a path beneath a high stone archway, Adrian appeared, carrying a book under his arm. Corey put himself in his way.

  “What are you doing here!” Adrian exclaimed, looking with wonderment at Corey, who stood before him, draped in baggy clothes and hood.

  “I cut school!”

  “Your rebelliousness gives me such a sense of power.”

  “Come on! Let’s go to Harvard Square! Let’s go meet some ladies!”

  Adrian thought that was a great idea! He checked his watch and said he’d be free to do that in four hours and seventeen minutes.

  “What do you mean, four hours? Let’s go now. Come on!”

  But Adrian refused—he had to maintain his grades.

  “What am I supposed to do, stand here and wait for you all day?”

  “I told you my terms. I can see you in—four hours and thirteen minutes, now. All you have to do is occupy yourself for that length of time. Anybody should be able to do that if they have basic inner resources and aren’t hyper-needy.”