The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

  He reached the counter and bought his mother twelve dollars’ worth of gelato in three flavors—hazelnut, chocolate and vanilla. Leaving the store, he passed a church with a white plaster Madonna in the front yard, her robe rippling and draped against her legs, as if it weren’t made of stone. She was a figure you had seen a thousand times through a spiked wrought-iron fence. Tilted head, downcast eyes, ritual pose.

  Across the avenue, the construction site where he had worked had grown into a tower thirty stories high with a crane parked next to it, reaching skyward in the darkness.

  He got on the T and left the city, riding south through the tangled black trees of Dorchester, the nightscape opening up and panning by as they roared above the water, the treetops dropping away, the shore spreading out, lit by distant industrial lights.

  At home, Corey told his mother, “We’ll have a party.” He set out the gelato and lit a candle like a single Italian light. She made a moan of surprise. He thought he understood her. “Thank you for getting me a present, Corey. This is fun.” She closed her eyes and leaned against him. “Thank you,” she was saying. It was just the two of them. Joan wasn’t there. Gloria might have been crying, he couldn’t tell.

  * * *

  —

  Joan did not show up the next night or the next. She called instead. Corey held the phone to his mother’s ear. He translated for her when she wanted to talk. He found himself in the middle of a conversation he didn’t understand.

  “I’ll try to be there tomorrow,” Joan said, “if I can make it.”

  “My mom says, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Just a minute.”

  He got the letter board.

  I forgive her.

  “Tell her that?”

  Gloria moaned.

  “She says she forgives you.”

  The phone went dead in his hand.

  “What just happened? Did she hang up on us?”

  His mother said, She isn’t coming back.

  Corey thought that was impossible.

  Gloria said, You’ll see.

  * * *

  —

  He called her in secret when his mother was asleep. He hid in the kitchen and talked to her, as far as possible from his mother’s hearing, his voice lowered, just as he had when she was here in person. On the phone, her speech was colorful as always, but she never said how she could leave like this. So he called her back at Christmas and asked her why she’d left—was it because of him? She intimated that it was.

  “Joan, this is my mom we’re talking about. I can control myself.”

  But she did not return. And he wasn’t brave enough to tell her, “You can give me any reasons in the world, but this is wrong. What about that woman dying in there? You call yourself her friend?”

  She’d fled to Dorchester, apparently—or so she’d said. She’d moved in with someone—man or woman, sex unknown—who lived on a Haitian block. She’d lasted a year with Gloria’s disease.

  By the end of fall semester, Athena had dropped Adrian for a girl, a female student who was as innocent as Athena was sophisticated. This new partner had floppy limbs and looked like someone you could unfold. Adrian saw them walking around campus arm in arm, whispering and laughing. He told a classmate he was used to using his rational mind to deal with rejection; he was back to being “a proud, lonely boy.”

  Over Christmas, he went to stay in Cincinnati with his father. Mr. Reinhardt was prepared to let his son stay over, but wasn’t prepared to feed him. The elder Reinhardt was sharing his home with “his new playmate,” as he described her—a petite young blonde named Sheila, who drove a black sports wagon, wore sunglasses, short skirts and played tennis in the summer. The only thing Adrian was allowed to touch in the kitchen was the stove. Frank and Sheila’s groceries were off-limits, so Adrian lived on black-eyed peas, which cost 89 cents a dry pound. He made pounds at a time, soaked them overnight in a ten-gallon pot, boiled them for hours, filling the tall-ceilinged kitchen with steam, and stored the giant pot in the refrigerator. When he was hungry, he ate the cold congealed peas directly out of the pot, without seasoning, up in his room.

  He ate and studied at the same time so he didn’t have to take his eyes off his physics. The peas gave him gas, and he lifted up one buttock and farted loudly. His father on a lower floor said, “Adrian, you’re disgusting.”

  “I know,” said Adrian. “That makes me so happy.”

  The big, dusty house had four or five floors, a winding central staircase, which switched directions like a snake at each landing—the kind of house that cost a million dollars, but there’d be rusted nails sticking in a closet door or broken glass shards in a window frame and old wires wrapped in gummy black electrical tape jutting from a light socket. The large windows in Adrian’s room didn’t have shades or screens.

  Sheila and his father were eating dinner in the kitchen. Adrian walked in to get his beans, and Sheila remarked she’d come across a photograph she thought he’d want to have: It was of Adrian in the woods carrying a deer across his shoulders.

  “No, my dad wants that. That was from our hunting trip together.”

  “No, I don’t. You can keep that,” Frank said. “Sheil’, you want to know the story behind that picture? Adrian’s fourteen. We bag a deer, and he wants a picture of it on his back. So, Mister Show-off, he picks it up. But it was a buck, and he didn’t know it. Its penis went in his ear. The weight compressed the bladder and it pissed in his ear!”

  “Oh, Adrian!” Sheila laughed. “Didn’t you see the horns?”

  A few weeks later, the vacation ended and he went back to MIT. He did well on his highly difficult exams.

  Over intersession, the period of independent study and self-renewal between finals and the start of the spring semester, he lingered in the dining hall, eating copious amounts of ground meat and rice long after the kitchen closed. A classmate who sat with him one day learned that Adrian was teaching himself the crystalline structure of metals, a subject that interested them both. They fell into conversation. Adrian revealed that his vacation had been marred by an incident in consequence of which his father had told him that the only women he was ever going to get were “gas station women and nigger whores.”

  Adrian’s listener was shocked. He thought people only talked like that online.

  “Yes, it’s damaging to my self-esteem. But,” said Adrian, “I’ve accepted what I am.”

  Suddenly, he put on a whiny falsetto: “A-drian, I don’t like what you’ve become!”—and laughed. His mother’s cancer was getting worse—that is, she was claiming it was worse. She was simply angry, he explained, that he hadn’t spent the holiday with her.

  It was around this time, in early January, that other residents of the dorm noticed Adrian’s renewed affinity for the basement.

  * * *

  —

  Adrian said he was having certain ideas in his head, things he had to tell someone.

  Corey’s father said, “Come with me.” He picked up his radio and led the way downstairs into the basement. It was long past midnight.

  They came to a locked door at the far end of the basement. Adrian thought they’d have to turn around, but Leonard had the key and they passed into an old tunnel with two-tone painted brick walls: a fallout shelter from the Oppenheimer days, the subterranean rock so thick it blocked all frequencies and sounds. You couldn’t use your phone down here.

  “Now you’re in the catacombs,” Leonard said.

  “I love this!”

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “I dream about hanging up a live deer on a tree like a heavy bag.” Adrian began throwing pantomime punches from his hyper-muscled torso while staring far away. “I’d have my hand wraps on. I’d be wearing nothing but my kneepads and my cup, so it couldn’t kick me in the groin, and I’d start smashing it. I’d break its ribs.
I’d beat it until I popped its organs and it exploded. I’d put my fist right through it. Then I’d take it down and put a condom on and fuck it while I was punching it as hard as I could. My body would be completely covered in its blood.”

  “And?”

  He wished his penis were made of steel. He fantasized about ramming his hips into a woman until he had smashed her womb into a bloody pulp—into taco sauce.

  “And you feel like there’s something wrong with you?”

  “No. I feel like something’s right.”

  Leonard held silent.

  “It’s like a prison down here,” Adrian observed. “Sometimes I’ve thought jail would be perfect for me. I’d lift weights all day and wouldn’t have to worry about room and board.”

  “The end of all worries.”

  “One time, my mother didn’t want to pay for me to join a gym, so I found this cheap place to work out, the Y in Central Square. It’s like this halfway house. All these guys were ex-cons. I met this one dude who had gone to jail for statutory rape, and I asked him about it.”

  “Did his alleged crime bother you?”

  “Well, let’s look at this. Here’s some woman who’s been having sex since she was twelve, she’s fully developed, she lies about her age—if you ask me, the real crime is putting him in jail. He served like ten years. They ruined his life! And he had this great attitude: He was philosophical about it. If that happened to me, I’d be so angry. I’d be looking for revenge after I got out.”

  “What would you do?”

  “I’d find that girl.”

  “And what would you do to her?”

  “I’d file a sexual harassment lawsuit against her.”

  They laughed.

  “But then you’ll never know what it’s like to do certain things.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t actually want to go to jail.”

  “You don’t have to. FBI statistics say there’s about a hundred serial killers in the U.S. at any given time. That’s an estimate based on the number of unsolved homicides, the key word being unsolved. Nobody has to go to jail. There’re a lot of people who are gonna die anyway.”

  “But a lot of people go to jail for murder.”

  “Not everyone.” Leonard gazed at Adrian from behind his brown-lensed glasses, which protected him from cosmic rays. “Not everyone gets found. Decomposition can be catalyzed.”

  “Yeah, but the human body is like ninety percent water. You need a super-high temperature crematorium.”

  “You’ve heard of a pot roast, haven’t you? You cook that in a household oven.”

  “Oh. Like Jeffrey Dahmer?”

  “The biggest bone in the human body is the femur. You could have it in a bag of golf clubs in your closet. Then you got the skull, the spine and pelvis. You can do different things with each one. You could have a cop over to your house and serve him coffee in the skull of some unlucky individual and he’d never know it.”

  “I guess there is something kind of primitive and special about eating someone.”

  “It’s the ultimate in domination.”

  “Yeah, but isn’t it gross?”

  “No. I mean, yeah, it is, obviously; it’s sickening, but that’s illusory. Once you get past the societal prohibitions, you’re dealing with the meat. You’re handling it; it’s up to your standards of cleanliness.”

  “I don’t know. I tried eating this whore’s pussy over Christmas and it made me throw up.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “I wanted to get good at it. I wanted her to have a good time.”

  “You could catch something like that.”

  “I dipped my tongue in Clorox afterwards.”

  “Did she like it?”

  “I don’t know if she could enjoy it. She told me when she was a kid, her stepdad used to come home drunk and make her sit with her legs spread open on the kitchen floor, and kick her right between the legs with his boot. But I could sort of tell when I was doing it right.”

  “I’m surprised you fool around like that given your experience with gonorrhea.”

  “It was a great experience for me. I went out there every night. She was blown away by my physique. I was the best sex she’s had—and she sees tons of men all the time, so she has her pick of the litter. We basically started going out. It was just like being boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  “How much did she charge you?”

  “I didn’t pay a thing. I took my stepmother’s credit card and used it at the whorehouse. When the first charge of five hundred bucks came up, my stepmother was like, ‘What’s Starlight Entertainment’? I was like, ‘I have no idea.’ So she called the card company and stopped payment and they cancelled the card, but the whorehouse didn’t figure it out until the charges got declined. By then, I’d had like all these times with Tricia. When she found out, she was pissed. She said I owed her two thousand dollars and she was gonna send these corn-fed guys out to my dad’s house to do a job on me. They had the address off the credit card.”

  “They show up?”

  “Yeah. They threw a brick at the house. I called the cops.”

  “Look, kid, if you want to have a good time without paying, all you gotta do is slip the girl a Mickey. You give her a date-rape drug, and it’s your word against hers.”

  27

  Night World

  Winter. The social worker visited in her red turtleneck one day while his mother was sitting in her chair, to talk about end-of-life planning. Gloria was having her morning juice. Did she want radical measures taken to keep her alive? Would she want to be kept alive on a ventilator? Did she want a tracheotomy? Did she want a feeding tube, a PEG? If she couldn’t make decisions, did she want to create a medical power of attorney?

  Gloria said yes, to this last question. She wanted Corey to make decisions for her if she couldn’t make them for herself.

  What about the breathing tube and the feeding tube?

  No, she said. Not yet.

  What about later?

  She writhed in her chair and made a sound of aggrieved protest.

  “My mom doesn’t want to talk about this now, I don’t think,” said Corey.

  “Doesn’t she have anyone but you?” Dawn Gillespie asked as he was showing her out.

  * * *

  —

  When Corey was a child, when he and Gloria were living in her car, they’d traveled out to Springfield to stay with her parents, he recalled. His memories were vague. He believed they’d spent a night with them, but it might have been a week. It hadn’t ended well; he had an impression of his mother, her thin cheek flushed, suppressing tears as they were leaving—and then the stress as she had stopped at gas stations and argued with a clerk for change and made calls on a pay phone to try to find them somewhere else to stay.

  “Why don’t we go back?” he’d asked. She’d said, “They don’t really want us.”

  A clapboard house, a yard inside a wire fence, dull and quiet—these were his snapshot memories of his grandparents’ home. A blue dining room where he ate a bowl of Rice Krispies. His grandfather putting a spoonful of sugar in the milk. His grandmother making meatloaf in the oven. A ketchupy aroma. The Revolutionary War–themed plates that she collected. Helmeted men on horseback, brandishing sabers: Hessian horsemen. A country landscape, plumes of smoke from flintlock pistols and muskets, the horsemen leaping stone walls.

  There’d been two sides in the Revolutionary War. The Hessians were Germans. He hadn’t known which side they’d fought for, American or British. He hadn’t known if he was allowed to like his grandparents.

  It had all been new to him; he hadn’t minded it; he’d thought of Springfield as the country. Years later—last year—when he’d returned to Ludlow to fight, he’d realized it wasn’t the country, but a small economically depressed city in the f
oothills of the mountains.

  His grandfather had fabricated mechanical parts. The parts went in machines, which went in factories, which produced more machines, possibly cars, possibly something else like lawnmowers. In a shed outside his plant, there’d been a row of drums. The workmen spent their day grinding and polishing parts, then came outside in machinist’s aprons and dunked them in the drums and shook the liquid off. They’d worn rubber gauntlets. The chemicals were toxic, his mother claimed. Corey remembered his mother telling her father not to touch her son unless he washed his hands first, and both his grandparents—especially grandma—getting angry.

  His grandmother had worked in the plant office, as a secretary. Both she and granddad had worked there over thirty years.

  Corey’s grandfather had died of heart disease during Corey’s childhood, but he’d been expected to die of cancer. It was possible that the chemicals he had put his hands in had affected his DNA, causing him to pass something on to Gloria that had made her prone to ALS.

  Gloria hadn’t gone to her own father’s funeral. When she’d come down with her disease, Corey recalled her saying that her disease was her comeuppance.

  Corey wished they had family to help them now, but, either because Gloria didn’t invite her or because she held a grudge against her daughter, Mrs. Goltz did not appear.

  * * *

  —

  During the day, he fed her and gave her oxygen, and at night, after her feeding, he took her to brush her teeth. They had invested in an electric toothbrush. Gloria stood balanced at the sink in her white pajamas and sneakers, seeming to float, due to the involuntary tension of her legs and the fact that she was losing weight. Corey held one arm around her, ready to catch her if she fell, and prepared the toothbrush.