by Anna Bruno
In my adolescence, my parents presented a certain reality to me: they were right and I was wrong. That reality is like old skin. It itches a little. It flakes. Yet it still offers a layer of protection from the world. Even with miles between us, I find that skin difficult to shed. Still, I cut the cord a long time ago, which is more than I can say for Lucas.
We argued about this, shortly after we married.
We were in bed by midnight—it was definitely no earlier than eleven thirty—and Lucas’s cell rang. The sound jolted me. I could tell who it was immediately by the way he shot up and turned his back to me. I could tell who it was even before he said, “Mom.”
My first thought was that something bad had happened, like maybe his dad suddenly fell ill. She had never called at this hour before. Lucas spoke calmly and didn’t ask about the old man. He grabbed paper and pen on the nightstand and started jotting something down as she spoke to him. I crawled over to his side of the bed to look over his shoulder. Either my eyes deceived me, or it was exactly what I feared it would be: a grocery list. They had this weird practice of ordering basic grocery items in bulk quantities. She was telling him to order lentils and couscous. He eventually told her he loved her and hung up the phone.
There is something in the water in this town. A mysterious chemical that keeps grown men attached, a castration of independence. Lucas’s childhood bedroom was perfectly preserved in his parents’ house. We slept there once when the kitchen renovation made our house temporarily unlivable. On the dresser, there was an old Wheaties box from the nineties, featuring the Yankees as the American League Champs. The cereal was still in it.
Really, though, who am I to say what is a healthy relationship and what is not? Most people tell themselves the healthy ones are those that last, but we all know that’s not true.
“Lucas,” I said. “Your mom cannot call here at this hour.”
“We weren’t asleep.”
“I’d like to be asleep.”
“I can’t tell her not to call. What if something happens?”
“Does her giving you a grocery list constitute something happening?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, Lucas. Well, yes, I know what you mean, but I completely disagree.”
“Fine. I’ll tell her not to call so late,” he said.
“Why are you ordering her bulk groceries anyway? Seems like she’s perfectly capable of using the telephone.”
“I’m helping out my mom, Emma. Would you like anything from the health food store?”
“What century are we living in? Can’t you just set up a recurring shipment on Amazon? Or would all that cardboard disrupt Joan’s vastu shastra?”
“Can we just go to bed?”
“You need to cut the cord. You’re a grown man. How does it go again? ‘A man shall leave his father and his mother and hold on to his wife.’ Something like that?”
He didn’t respond. He was on his stomach with his head turned away from me.
“You aren’t listening,” I said.
“I was listening. For the longest time,” he said, and he shoved his face down into the pillow.
Joan told me once that I should meditate. Every morning she sat cross-legged on the floor and stared at the wall for fifteen minutes. She called it mindfulness. I told her that every morning I hit snooze and stared at the ceiling for fifteen minutes. I called it lethargy.
“I can’t do dinner with your parents this weekend, Lucas.”
“Why?”
“I have to work on the book. Sorry,” I said.
He was still on his stomach but his head was turned toward me, half-sunk into the pillow. From this position, he could look at me with only his left eye. A cyclops dagger.
“You can take a break for dinner,” he said.
“It always takes, like, three hours. That’s too much time,” I said.
“We were at the bar last night for six.”
“That’s different.”
“Time is time,” Lucas said.
“Friday night: I needed a drink.”
“You can have a drink at my folks’ house.”
“Your mom judges me.”
“Dad drinks beer in the morning, Em. No one is judging you.”
“Sorry. Just tell her I’m not feeling well this week.”
“I’d prefer it if you just come with me,” he said.
I told him I didn’t want to eat gluten-free, non-GMO casseroles fortified with flax. I told him I could taste the flax and I didn’t like it. I told him I knew his mother made his lunch most days because I saw the Tupperware in the sink. I told him a man in his thirties should make his own lunch.
I told him, “I gave up everything to live in this town; the least you could do is give up your mother’s teat.”
* * *
JIMMY WEDGES HIS BODY next to me at the bar. He orders another stein of beer for himself and tells Amelia to put my next drink on his tab. He’s either apologizing for Yag’s behavior or paying a debt. Lucas was the same way when people bought him drinks. He never left the bar without returning the favor.
He looks tired now, less spirited. A day of hard drinking and cigarettes and greasy food is finally catching up with him. Amelia pours his beer and he’s gone, back at the pool table with Yag.
When Jimmy’s sister died, Lucas didn’t know what to say to him. For weeks, he fretted about this. He stopped calling. Jimmy had taken a break from the bar—he dabbled with AA for a bit—so they were virtually cut off. Out of the blue, Lucas received a text message from Jimmy that read, Nostalgia comes from the Greek: nostos, homecoming, and algos, pain. Most people wouldn’t know how to respond but Lucas understood what Jimmy was after immediately. What’s the best way to respond to a fact? More facts. Lucas knew the origin of the word nostalgia already. He’d read about it somewhere. He wrote, Defined as a “cerebral disease of demonic cause that originated from continuous vibrations of animal spirits.” They riffed off this for a while. And with that, they found their way back in.
I’ll never forget this exchange for two reasons. First, the idea of the portmanteau, homecoming and pain, is so precisely relevant to Jimmy. His return to our town, his homecoming, made him a witness to pain, and his continual presence here is the enactment of pain. And second, animal spirits is a term that has been co-opted by economists and investors to describe psychological factors that drive certain market outcomes, and the fact that it is conceptually connected to pain is, ultimately, what The Breakout Effect is about.
* * *
A SPARROW IS IN the bar, flying into walls: a bat in the belfry.
Amelia appears from the cellar door, wielding a broom. She points to Fancy Pete. “Hold ’er open!”
The sparrow drops to the floor and begins to hop. Amelia coaxes the bird toward the front door. I think it’s working.
As regulars, we believe our presence here is an inalienable right of higher order than the natural world. The bird has no claim to this place. She is an interloper, infringing on our interests, which are to drink, and occasionally to talk, and, in rare instances, to make peace with our lots.
I’ve decided the bird is female: a she. I’m not sure why; I know nothing about birds.
She panics, takes flight again. A few patrons duck down on the bar, like school children playing heads down, thumbs up.
A series of loud, sharp chirps rap, one after another, in quick, uneven intervals. The song has no rhythm; the lyrics are chaos. It isn’t the frenetic movement of the sparrow but this unyielding noise, a combination of strange vocalization and flapping wings, that makes her presence alarming. We are under siege.
Because we are still relatively sober—not sober, exactly, but still mindful—both individually and collectively, nothing escapes our notice, no friend or foe, pleasure or annoyance. Everything either adds to or detracts from a great, invisible basin of grievances to which each of us contributed, one by one, upon walking through the front door. Behind the bar, a few photo
s of bartenders and regulars are tacked up. Among them, there is a single tarot card depicting Lady Justice and her scales. I imagine our basin of grievances rests on one side of the scale, and as the night progresses, it is counterbalanced by inebriation on the other side. The sweet spot is when we are collectively drunk enough to balance the burden but not so drunk that we have tipped the scale in the other direction.
The bird flies directly into the mirror behind the bar: smack! She drops into a line of bottles. Glass shatters on the floor. I cross my arms over my face. She takes flight again, this time in the direction of the pool table.
Somehow this bird, large as sparrows go but small for a creature of the earth, has us all subdued. How many times have I seen a sparrow in a tree outside my window? A little brown friend, about the size of my hand. A welcome guest in my yard. When the bird leaves the tree and enters the bar, she is suddenly different: predatory. Outside she is light and gentle, in search of grain and seeds. Inside, she works herself into a frenzy. The bird hasn’t changed; the place has changed. To her, the bar must seem oppressively small, a cage, or alternatively, dangerously large, a labyrinth. Removed from her natural habitat, she is lost and alone, a threat to herself and others. Take away the habitat and the creature scarcely has a chance.
The Final Final is my natural habitat, but it wasn’t always. I’m like an animal inured to captivity. I can no longer survive in the wild.
“Call animal control,” someone says, but we all know that will take too long.
Cal takes the broom from Amelia, tells her that she’s scaring the bird and that she should hit the lights.
“Turn them off?”
“Yep. Do it.”
Amelia trusts Cal.
The front and back doors are propped open with bar stools. Amelia hits the lights, and the place turns into a tunnel, black in the middle, light at the ends. This is the first time I’ve been in The Final Final with all the lights out. I’m surprised by how little light makes its way in. The front window is tinted black, partially covered by a low-hanging awning and a couple of fluorescent beer signs, hung from the outside. There are no back windows and there are solid brick walls on either side of the bar. One side abuts the alley, and the other separates the bar from a late-night take-out spot, called China Star.
The bird’s instinct will take it toward the streetlight. This is our collective expectation, as if we are churchgoers awaiting a reckoning.
The darkness lends a special quality to the bar, a false expansiveness: a beautiful emptiness. No one speaks. No one moves. The TV audio is off. The jukebox does not have a queue. Stillness hijacks the room.
The bird is quiet now too. She is resting on the floor in the middle of the bar. Her tiny bird head turns to the back door and then to the front. She decides between the two ends of the tunnel. It occurs to me that the expression The light at the end of the tunnel carries with it a false idea of forward progress. In fact, there is light at both ends of the tunnel, which can be reached either by forward movement or by turning back to the place from whence one came.
Four TVs are mounted above, two directly over the bar, and two at either end. The faces of the patrons, men bellied up, are illuminated by their glow and the beer signs hanging behind the bar. Some combination of sunlight from outdoor work, cigarettes, and hard drinking has deepened the lines on their faces, which are exaggerated by the bluish light. To my left, Cal, Short Pete, and Fancy Pete sit, one, two, three.
I want to hold on to this moment a little bit longer.
I think about all those black birds, dead on the shoulder of the 101 near San Francisco. Maybe The Final Final is about to have an earthquake. Or maybe I’ve just had too many whiskeys already and I need to go home and go to bed.
The bird hops, rotating toward the front door. She flaps her wings a couple of times. She pushes off. Halfway to the door her feet tuck in, like landing gear retracting into the belly of the plane. Then she is gone.
8PM
A GROUP OF COLLEGE girls rolls in. Wet high heels stomping on the doormat, umbrellas jettisoned, they shake off excess water like dogs. They never wear rain slickers or rain boots or anything else that would protect them, regardless of season. They are impervious to weather. It is a superpower of youth.
Huddled together, they shuffle over to the shot wheel, and the queen bee sends it spinning. They’ll stay for one drink and then head downtown to join the sea of crop tops and four-inch heels. Amelia half pays attention to them, waiting for them to decide what they want. No, not that one. That sounds gross. They spin again and it lands on redheaded slut. That’s offensive. One of the girls looks up at the line of men watching from their seats at the bar, seats they’ve been in all night. This is such a gross townie bar. Amelia doesn’t do or say anything to the girls. She serves other customers. She asks me if I’m doin’ okay.
Martin Yagla and I can’t share this space. This much is clear. It’s him or me. And though I’m sure he needs The Final Final as much as I do, I decide to step over him when he falls, as if he is nobody, subhuman, a danger to himself and others.
Everyone in the bar knows Yag is hard up for money. He’s on thin ice because he brought in trouble, which makes him vulnerable.
Cal is carrying that huge wad of cash in his wallet, money he’s accumulated from a week or more of odd jobs, money he’ll use to cover his bills, which probably include whatever amount he fronted for parts. I picture the fat wallet in the pocket of his rain jacket slung over the empty chair across from Summer.
She sits in front by the darkened windows, playing with a vintage, plastic Breyer horse on a high-top table, squirming left and right and back again on a low-back swivel chair. There’s a small enclave there, a nook to the right of the entrance. Lucas and his friends used to commandeer this space, back when they had a big crew, before people started moving away and having kids. I take my fresh whiskey over and position myself in the chair reserved with Cal’s jacket.
I ask Summer if her horse has a name.
“Pony,” she says. She makes it gallop toward me on the table. “Want to draw with me?” Summer hands me a piece of orange construction paper and a blue crayon. She keeps a yellow piece and the rest of the crayon box for herself. She asks me what she should draw. I suggest her pony.
She begins. Her ability to focus is impressive. She chews on her tongue as she draws.
Reaching back, I slip my hand into the pocket of Cal’s jacket and wrap my fingers around the fat leather wallet. Quickly, I shuffle the wallet from his pocket into my rear waistband, where it fits tightly between my underwear and jeans, just above the crack of my ass. I make sure my tank top is pulled down over the bulge, which is probably still visible but shouldn’t draw attention from a bunch of unsuspecting drunks.
I start doodling logical fallacies with my blue crayon:
Cal is a good dad ^ Good dads spend time with their kids
∴ Cal brings his kid to the bar
Everyone likes Lucas ^ Lucas likes me
∴ Everyone likes me
The second one nags at me. It’s a man’s prerogative to be liked. Women are sometimes respected, sometimes admired, sometimes adored, but they aren’t liked, not really. I know this because I am a teacher. My course evals don’t benefit from the affable-white-guy bump.
My own mother preferred Lucas to me. Once, she steadied herself by pawing his bicep and resting her head on his shoulder. “So firm,” she slurred. Lucas was like a funnel. He took all the love in—from his vast network of friends, from people in the town, people he’d known for thirty years, patrons of this bar, Amelia and Jimmy and Yag. But without Lucas, the funnel was gone, and these people, though I’d spent years in their company, were strangers again.
“Whatcha writing?” Summer asks.
“Logical fallacies,” I say without further explanation. She doesn’t seem to mind. She’s accustomed to adults talking. “Whatcha drawing?”
Next to her pony there is a green leafy plant. I ask her i
f that is what the pony eats. She shakes her head. “The pony eats hay. This is a marijuana plant.” She says marijuana with perfect diction, and the leaves on the plant really look like marijuana. The pony is sort of watching over the plant.
“This is my plant,” Summer says. “It’s not as big as Daddy’s plant even though I put all the Miracle-Gro on it.”
“So this plant is in your yard?” I ask.
“It was. It’s not anymore,” she says. “Me and Daddy had a competition—”
“Daddy and I—”
“Huh?”
“You say Daddy and I, not me and Daddy,” I say. “Trust me.”
“Daddy and I had a competition,” she says, pleased with herself. “Who could grow the biggest plant. His was always bigger no matter how much Miracle-Gro I put on mine. He said if mine grew bigger than his, he’d buy me a pony. A real pony. It never did, so I just got this one.” She knocks the plastic horse away with the back of her hand like she is disgusted with it now.
“What happened to it?”
“What?”
“Your plant.”
“One day I was out in the field playing, and up in the sky I saw a helicopter. It found us.”
