Look Down, This is Where It Must Have Happened

by Hal Niedzviecki

  I mean, I guess I was . . . in a different kind of . . .

  High school’s so cliquey. It’s all who’s cool, who’s not. It’s such bullshit. Laurie rolled her eyes.

  Yeah, Peter agreed.

  I was in the cool crowd, I guess, Laurie said. But looking back now I’m like, we were such a bunch of bitches. She pushed her bangs out of her face. Peter gulped wine. So Star and Deirdre, Laurie said. Weird, huh?

  Peter coughed abruptly, wine in his throat.

  Take it easy there. Laurie patted his back. You okay?

  I . . . uh . . .

  You didn’t know? The whole class knows. Laurie shrugged.

  Peter felt the wine swirling in his hot stomach.

  I can’t believe you didn’t know.

  Poor Petey. Laurie took the mug out of his hand. Don’t worry about it. She was leaning into him. You’re kinda . . . cute, you know? She kissed him. He sat stiffly, feeling her tongue in his mouth. The kiss ended. Laurie looked at him.

  Are you okay?

  I gotta . . . I should . . . Peter stood up. I gotta go.

  He walked in a daze back to the apartment he shared with Jeff and Mike. All his life, he’d been waiting for something to happen to him. Then he’d seen Star sitting in the back row dangling her slim legs. Peter was a gamer, loved the way one action led logically to another. Things happen for a reason. The same action should produce the same result. Things were going to change for him. He was going to be with Star. The way she acted around him, always smiling and touching. The thought of her. What Laurie had said — it made no sense. And weren’t there rules against that kind of thing? He walked fast through the empty streets. It was 4 am. He just wanted to go home and go to bed. He’d kissed Laurie. No. She’d kissed him.

  He was surprised to see Jeff and Mike still up. The remains of a pepperoni pizza and a twelve-pack of Pepsi surrounded them. Their eyes were puffy. They were languidly playing, methodically blowing up whatever jumped, crawled or raced into the screen.

  Hey, Peter said. Jeff and Mike were his best friends. He’d met them in first year. They used to hang out in Mike’s dorm room — he’d set up Xbox and a flat screen with surround sound. Lately, Peter hadn’t been hanging around with them that much. He took off his jacket and made to walk through the messy living room to get to his small bedroom. But Jeff and Mike had abandoned the game and were staring at him.

  What? Peter asked.

  You had a visitor, Jeff said. Some lady.

  She was looking for you, added Mike.

  A lady? Peter immediately assumed it must be Star. Why would they call her a lady?

  She was really weird, noted Jeff.

  She asked me if I had a smoke, said Mike.

  She was trying to be all buddy-buddy.

  It was really weird.

  What are you guys talking about?

  Mike and Jeff glanced at each other.

  This lady knocked on the door, Mike said, and asked if Petey was home. She was all friendly, acting really weird. She was asking all kinds of questions.

  She asked for Petey? He felt his stomach sinking to his knees.

  Yeah, this older lady.

  You know her? Jeff said.

  Peter shook his head.

  I think she was, like, a cop or something, Mike said.

  Yeah, right. Jeff rolled his eyes.

  They both looked at Peter.

  But what did she want? he said. His voice came out begging.

  She was like, You guys know where Petey is hanging out tonight? Is he out doing his thing?

  Yeah, Jeff jumped in. It was really weird. She kept talking about your thing. We were like, What thing? What are you talking about?

  She asked if I had a smoke. I was like, I don’t smoke. I don’t even know who you are.

  Peter dropped his jacket. He stared down at the filthy carpet. I gotta — he mumbled as he picked up the jacket and struggled into it. I gotta . . .

  He hurried out of the apartment. He felt his legs, weak and trembling, under him. He pictured the guy Star sprayed with glue and paint. The way he dropped to his knees, the sound of him spitting and gurgling. Peter walked aimlessly, moving through the dark of the city.

  In the morning Peter found himself waiting at the top of the steps of the old red bricked building that housed Deirdre’s class. He fingered the zipper of his jacket, felt revealed in the cold light. He shifted from foot to foot. His feet hurt. But he wasn’t tired. He didn’t think he was tired. Finally he saw Star energetically mounting the stairs.

  I’ve got to talk to you, he hissed as soon as she reached the top.

  What’s up? Star said. She kept moving, smiling. Peter trailed after her into the foyer of the building.

  A woman came to my apartment, he said urgently, chasing after her. She asked my roommates if they knew where I was. She called me Petey.

  So? Star said, finally stopping. She didn’t whisper. Her girly voice echoed.

  You guys are the only ones who call me Petey.

  Star shrugged. That doesn’t mean anything.

  They’re looking for us!

  Who’s looking for us? Laurie joined the group.

  Petey’s getting all scaredy-cat.

  No I’m not!

  He thinks someone’s spying on him.

  On us.

  On us? Laurie asked.

  I told you this would happen!

  C’mon, Petey, it’s no big deal. Star softened her tone, licked her red lips. C’mon, Petey, she said again. She took his arm, leaned against him, smiled sympathetically.

  It is a big deal!

  What’s he talking about? Star?

  They came to my apartment, he said, turning away, looking at Laurie.

  The foyer was emptying out, students hurrying to their classes.

  I’m going to delete the pictures, Peter announced.

  Star marched to the front row and sat down in the middle. She stared intently at the podium. Peter looked at Laurie, who shrugged. They took their usual seats in the back.

  The next group was led by a pudgy girl with wheaty hair and an unfortunate overbite. Our group is CATIF, she announced in a shrill voice. The class stirred. Did their groups also need clever monikers? The girl continued, her pasty cheeks flushed. CATIF stands for Crush the Abomination That Is Fashion. The two other members of her group fidgeted. The girl wore a skirt-top ensemble that looked homespun out of some thick, coarse fabric. She talked about the patriarchy and class struggle and breaking the cycle of dependency. Peter tried to focus. He looked down at his notebook, picked a white spot between blurring blue lines. When the first girl was finally done, another member of the group stepped forward, a redhead in jeans and a sweatshirt. We’re going to focus on the clothing industry to start, the redhead said. We want to disrupt the means of production. My aunt works in the industry in the Fashion Building on Ninth Street. It’s got the offices of Laurion, Duppee and Hank’s Navy Outfitter in it, plus a ton of other designers and small companies. We’re going to start by calling in a bomb threat there.

  Call it in? Deirdre snapped. Why not just blow the building up?

  We’d like to give a warning first, the redhead explained. Like the IRA.

  Peter gripped the sides of his desk. He pushed his sneakers against the floor. He tried to center on the back of Star’s blond head. He felt dizzy. He was having trouble catching his breath. He thought he might faint.

  Terrorists are produced by the perverted alliance between the logic of industrial capitalism and the misanthropy of postmodern spectacle, Deirdre monotoned, perhaps approvingly. Peter couldn’t tell. Terrorists don’t revel in violence but in the possibility of violence — a possibility that is only actualized when it becomes the accepted truth, the new normal.

  So, said the redhead timidly, you don’t think we should call in a warning first?

  Peter broke out into a sweat. He was going to throw up. He stumbled out of his seat, past Laurie, and into the hallway.

  The Net
Effect Internet Café was mostly empty. Trying to look nondescript, Peter paid the bored sole employee for an hour and sat down. He went to YouTube. The slide show had been viewed 24,389 times. How did they trace it to him? Someone from the class? There’s no evidence, he told himself. It’s just pictures. Nobody knows anything for sure. He deleted the slide show, deleted the account. He went to the Gmail account he’d set up using a fake name and contact. There were several hundred e-mails. Most of them were spam, but a few were from real people talking SUV=Death. Two of them just said stuff about how cool it was. One guy wanted to hook up with them and help wreck shit. And there was an e-mail from a local news reporter saying he wanted a statement from the group for a story he was doing.

  Peter’s fingers shook. He selected all the e-mails and deleted them. Then he deleted the account.

  There. It was all gone now. Wasn’t it? He didn’t know if it was. Stuff lingered online, shimmered in the background, refused to die. He googled SUV=Death and came up with five pages of hits. Bloggers recommending it and that sort of thing. There was a piece in one of the newspapers. It mentioned the YouTube video and that the police were searching for the members of the group in relation to an increase in vandalism. All at once Peter felt like crying. Was he really that stupid? What had he expected? They’d arrest him and he’d go to jail. His life would be over.

  His hour up, Peter walked out of the café. It was a cold day. Faint flurries of snow blew in the breeze. Early November. The semester was already coming to a close. There were three weeks of class left.

  That night Peter took the commuter rail to his parents’ house. He surprised them, stumbling through the front door as they sat in the living room taking in the evening news. Peter mumbled something about a fight with his roommates and how he had to study. He climbed the stairs, went into his bedroom and locked the door. He laid down on his childhood bed and stared at the ceiling.

  In the morning he called Mike’s cell. He told Mike not to tell anybody anything. He said he was moving out after the Christmas holidays but he’d pay rent until they could find someone to take his room. Mike asked him where he was, and Peter quickly hung up.

  Peter spent the next few days wandering through the suburb. He walked until his legs ached and his empty stomach’s acidic heat dissipated. At night he locked himself in his room and wrote his essays. He did all his research online. He mailed the papers to his professors’ offices with short notes explaining that his mother had been in a major car accident and he had returned home.

  Every time the phone rang his stomach turned. His mother made giant dinners and urged him to eat. His father tried to talk to him man-to-man. To avoid his parents he started going out just before they got back from work and coming home after they’d gone to bed. He drifted through the quiet side streets. The few remaining leaves fell from the mostly naked trees and turned brown on lawns and sidewalks. Some nights there was frost.

  Gradually, Peter’s wandering took on direction, pattern. He found himself casually but methodically moving closer and closer to Star’s old neighborhood. The houses got bigger, the driveways circled back onto themselves. Peter strolled through, trying to look nonchalant while peering up at second-floor windows. There. That was the house. Classes were over. Star was probably home for the holidays. A flash of blond in the corner window. He stopped, frozen. The way she hugged him, the way she pressed her body against his while he breathed in her scent. He thought about the way she breathed his name. C’mon, Petey. Everything’s okay, Petey.

  Back at home in his room, Peter hoped he might start sleeping again. His papers were done. No one had come looking for him. Why hadn’t they come for him? His feet stuck out over the edge of his childhood bed. He lay on top of the comforter, staring at the model of the Millennium Falcon storing dust on his bookcase’s top shelf. He didn’t sleep.

  The weeks passed and the term ended. Christmas was approaching. His uncle and aunt and their two kids would be coming to stay. At night, to pass the long wakeful hours, he pulled on himself. He thought about Star and Laurie in their jeans and hoodies. Sometimes an image would flash into his head — the dude spitting glue, Deirdre’s tongue wetting her flat lips — and he’d go limp. Then his mind would race: Should he call Star and Laurie? Were the phones tapped? Would the police be tracking his e-mail? Over and over again, he thought to himself: I’m so stupid.

  On December 24th, in the afternoon, his uncle pulled into the driveway. Peter was standing outside at the time, just about to embark on another one of his walks. Peter’s uncle threw him the keys and said, Hiya Pete! Help the kids bring the bags in then park it on the street so I’m not blocking, will ya? Peter nodded dumbly. It was Christmastime. Presents and a game of Monopoly and a round of touch football and his mother’s roast turkey. The air was cold, shimmering. After helping his nephews drag the bags inside, Peter climbed into his uncle’s minivan. The interior smelled of warm apple juice and socks. The beige cloth seats were stained and dusty. Peter sat in the driver’s seat. He turned the key in the ignition. His hands shook. He broke into a sweat. His stomach turned. Abruptly, he jerked the van into reverse and parked it on the street.

  Look Down, This Is Where It Must Have Happened

  A guy named Bradley quits his job because it’s too much like a job. After that, there’s a futon couch and a quilt bundled up over him. Don’t worry about Bradley: he can take care of himself.

  Mickers finds himself at the opening long after it opens. He hopes for free wine, a few platters of greasy cheese at least. Instead, there are buckets of pink popcorn. A woman behind a table exchanges bottles of beer for three-dollar donations. He sticks his hand in a bucket, steadies himself. There’s something gaudy on the wall. But he doesn’t want to see it, can’t see it, anyway, shrouded by the gesticulating and hairdos of people who look familiar to him.

  No one else seems to be there alone.

  He eats six handfuls of pink popcorn without stopping to breathe. The popcorn is more chewy than crunchy. It tastes like old gum.

  Shauna calls Mickers on the phone. Wants to know: Did you hear about Bradley?

  I can’t believe it, Mickers says.

  He hangs up. He’s got weight on him. He feels miserable. He grabs at the handles of his stomach. He spins around the room, stumbles over a coffee cup filled with stained water. A long time ago, Mickers had a best friend he insisted on calling Brado. They lived on the same cul-de-sac in a suburb named after a tree. What happened to that friendship?

  There are one or two vague messages about getting together saved on his voice mail.

  Mickers feels drunk. He feels the muscles in his body rigid against the impossibility of what he doesn’t know. His legs go straight and he collapses. Something happens to the phone. Scraps of paper and Post-it notes orbit down. Decrescendo. The carpet smells like dog. I live here, and before I lived here, someone else lived here. Call waiting. Speed dial. Three-way conference. Notepad dialing. Disconnection. Directory Assistance. A sound like a busy signal and then nothing.

  Two hours later, someone’s mother calls and leaves a message. Mickers to the disembodied silence of his own rented appliance: Don’t go just yet. Take the time to leave me a message. Please. Leave me a message.

  I’m not sure how I became involved in this. I was elected. Sent to see if everything’s okay. Given the circumstances. Given the tragedy and whatnot. Once involved in something. A person is known to speculate. I wrote it down the way I found it lying in my head. Like a corpse.

  Look. All we think about is stuff like going to the mall or checking the mail or canceling our extra channels before their cost gets automatically deducted from our bank accounts without anyone even asking us. We never think about love or death or grabbing onto a pet with both hands and squeezing it until its wet nose starts to bleed. Nobody ever asks us.

  I’m fine, I told them at work. I just need a half day, a full day, a week. No need to fill my position. Just leave my position empty, the way it’s always been.
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  Shauna said: It’s just — so okay, you don’t really know him, but I’m afraid something awful has happened and after Brad, I — please, you’ll go, won’t you? You’ll do this for me? She accuses me of taking too little on, of doing next to nothing. Ambition plus desire equals hope. Didn’t I ask you to marry me, I say with my hands clenched in little balls. Didn’t I?

  The night before I get set to leave she has me lying down on the couch with my head in her lap. Her fingers trolling through my hair, touching the bumps and imperfections on my scalp.

  What happens next is personal. The hospital show comes on and I feel that instant disassociation that tells me something I don’t want to know about the way I can never care for people the way they do for me. I close my eyes. People pretending to be other people are rescued from their bodies. Shauna takes on friends the way crazy old women adopt stray cats. I guess you have to think about it this way: Okay, I shit my pants twice in all my twenty-eight years. Only twice.

  Mickers wakes up. It’s not the perplexing violence of it, the suggestion of some TV-style unexplained incident. It’s the principle. It’s the damage. It’s the fact that cash dollars will have to be utilized. Maybe he should just disappear, take a train to someplace where it’s warm enough to open the windows. That’s something Brad always used to tell him: that the kind of guy he is is the kind who should move to a, you know, like an open-air sort of climate.

  Lying there on the carpet, he assesses his options. He thinks of time as some kind of permanent record. Having made himself aware of all the possibilities, he snakes a hand down his pants and grabs for it.

  I do something that’s like kicking in the door, only it isn’t.

  Jesus, I say, clean yourself up. He’s soiled. I’ve been with Shauna for four years. Literally with her. Following her around, trying to get her not to go where she is planning on going without me. It’s like, yeah, okay, I know that this is impossible. So why do I feel so impossible? Don’t hold on to me, she says in the restaurant. But on the street she lets me take her hand in both of mine.

  I go over and give Mickers a prod in the ribs with my boot. Or it’s more like a kick, because I’m feeling all of a sudden very angry and frustrated. All of a sudden it’s that thing where I can’t get enough air. It stinks, but that isn’t it. He sits up, or props himself up, anyway.