I wonder if Carla watched herself the way I watched her, the way the fan at the hot dog stand watched. Maybe she thought, Now, I, Carla, spread mustard and relish on the hot dog. I am really Carla, picking out a cactus for the windowsill. I am really Carla, in my trailer on set, listening to country music from the forties, lying on the floor with my legs propped up on the chair, my book on my stomach. I, Carla, am reading a novel, a present from my father, who always knew I would be an artist. I, actually Carla, look up from the book to note the way that the light bulb casts a ring on the surface of the coffee when I tilt the paper cup.
I dated her for eighteen months, and I don’t know what she was like. I wasn’t—I’m realizing this for the first time as I say it—I wasn’t interested. I wasn’t paying attention to what she was like. What she was like was not the point for me.
OLLIE THE OWL
We should not have let the alumnus in the house. He was random. He said he lived out in the Berkshires, and he pulled up in this new Porsche at two miles per hour. His khakis had mustard stains on them, and he wore loafers even though there was snow on the ground. He was in Delta Zeta Chi when they played football in chain mail on horseback or something, so of course he loved our mascot, Ollie the Owl. The Ollie the Owl statue was the only thing about the house that was still the same from when he was in it.
Now he’s got this routine. He goes up to the “secret attic” and puts his hand on the thing’s head and says, “How’s it hangin’, Ollie?” like he’s figured out the cool way to say hello to a wooden bird. Then he eats lunch downstairs, a tuna sandwich he brings in a Ziploc bag, and asks us about our service to the community.
“Just keeping watch over the place,” he says. Then he reminds us what our motto is, even though it’s on a plaque three feet from his head: CHALLENGING EACH MAN TO A GREATER WORTH SERVING ALWAYS JUSTICE AND THE GREATER GOOD.
And nobody wants to say it, but it’s like, that was 150 years ago somebody made that up. Not to be negative. But I mean, we’re young guys. What are we supposed to do? Is this some movie where a cool frat saves the school from a guy named Dean Mordoch or whatever? What are we supposed to serve? Nobody really ever gives a shit, actually, but he’s like, “I heard one of you made a little bozo of himself during a protest march. Some kind of song and dance where you showed your downstairs.” He doesn’t say any names, but Swordfish starts acting extra-casual, crossing his arms and playing with the brim of his cap. Because during the Women’s Center Take Back the Night march he danced on the balcony with a black strap-on on his head, played Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” on our weatherproof iPhone station, and mooned people.
“Now, horsing around is horsing around, but how do you think showing your ass to a bunch of girls would’ve looked to the guys who started this whole thing? They would have had a conniption.”
Swordfish walks off to his room.
“You’re supposed to be brothers in honor,” the alumnus continues. “You are part of an organization that was created for selflessness and service, not stripteasing on a damn balcony.” He shakes his hand in the air as he says it. And then Swordfish comes out of his bedroom with the black strap-on he wore on his head during the Take Back the Night march and straps it onto Ollie the Owl, who is standing behind the alumnus.
Everyone gets quiet. The alumnus turns around and looks and doesn’t move for a while. Then he walks out, down the stairs. We hear the Porsche start in the driveway.
“What?” asks Swordfish, grinning, but nobody says anything. We just stare at the sex toy on the wooden owl. We’re all mad, don’t get me wrong. It’s a truly shitty thing to do. But we’re not going to boot Swordfish for it, and we all know it. He’s too good a guy.
When Ollie disappears during the night, we just figure somebody got pissed at Swordfish and put Ollie in his bed or something.
* * *
The next afternoon, Swordfish and I are like, let’s go to the Hu Ke Lau on Comedy Buffet Night, just to go to it. And we’re there with our chicken lo mein and our mai tais, and this comedian guy with a microphone says, “Dating is like mowing the lawn, isn’t it, ladies?” And Swordfish does the thing where he coughs “Suck m’dick” into his hand, and this old Chinese lady is like, “Quiet please,” and we’re like, “Sorry, sorry, but oh excuse me, could I…” and then superloud, “… please possibly bother you for some tea.” Because we are all about the tea at the Hu Ke Lau. And then we come back to the house and it’s, hey, feeling good, we just had some good Hu Ke Lau, and now, oh my God. Because Wolf is rolling around on his side making burbling noises.
“Brendan, what happened?” I ask. It’s the first time I’ve called Wolf by his real name since his parents visited when he was a freshman and asked me to make sure he didn’t lose his orthopedic sneakers.
“I don’t know what hit me,” he says. “I only saw it from up close but I think it flew.”
We assume he is completely fucking with us, but he’s staring straight ahead with his hoodie rolled up like a carpet so you can see his belly, and there’s a stain on his jeans where he shat himself. Swordfish taps me on the shoulder.
“Look,” says Swordfish, and points with his chin. The rafters are covered with little cuts, like somebody chucked a lawn mower at the ceiling a few times.
We call security and everything, and they say they’ll get the guy. They don’t sound that confident, though. I’m not confident and I hate more than anything else feeling not confident. Swordfish and I are on the rugby team, and before a game Coach will talk about showing the other side we have more class, and we’ll all put our hands in the center of a circle and say “My strength is the strength of ten because my heart is pure” three times, like we’re supposed to be thinking about being the English soldiers fighting Napoleon in a historical movie. I think when we say that, we’re not actually trying to have pure hearts. We’re trying to get rid of the feeling of being not confident, and that’s why we play the game, to get rid of that feeling. But obviously I don’t say that.
* * *
The next morning, as house manager, I call a meeting. Swordfish calls up the stairs, “Borat and Dracula, you too. This shit’s for real.”
Borat and Dracula are two physics majors from some country I keep forgetting. We call them that because they talk like that. We rent them two rooms in the annex of the house even though they’re not Delta Zeta Chi, just to help with rent. They walk down the stairs in that I’m-not-hurrying foreigner way, with their hands in their pockets and their backs straight.
“What’s the problem?” asks Dracula.
“You partied hard yesterday evening,” says Borat.
“Please sit down, guys,” I say. “We’re here to talk about the Wolfman. He may not be a fallen brother to you, but you do live in a house with us and we share some things that happen to us.”
They foreigner it over to the white couch.
“The Wolf is convalescing okay,” I say. “He’s at the trauma unit at Cooley Dickinson. He’s got some cuts and bruises, and it was a real rough day for him, but he’s going to be fine. The issue is, was anybody else possibly there when it happened and is now being shy for some reason? Because the time has now come for you to speak up.”
Borat raises his hand. He takes off his glasses and scratches at something on one of the lenses. “I heard wings,” he says, “and the howl of a dog through the neck of a bird.”
Dracula makes the “perfect” sign and points to Borat. “Hey, this guy is precise,” he says. “Howl of dog through neck of bird.”
“And you just sat there upstairs, like, who cares,” says Swordfish.
“Yes.” Dracula shrugs. “Why leave my studies, when I think that it might only be you and your girlfriend of one weekend on a sled to hell?”
“Listen, fellas,” Swordfish says to Borat and Dracula. “Just communicate as best you can what your ears were trying to tell you. The rest of us are here to listen.” Swordfish wants to do international law, not finance like me and W
olf and Laser. He has a diplomacy complex. He leans forward and puts his hands together.
I lean forward and put my hands together as well, so that we are all almost touching foreheads. “This is probably not the way it is in every culture,” I say. “But here, if somebody is hurt, and other people might get hurt, that’s considered significant, and you have to tell the truth.”
Borat sighs and makes a brushing-aside motion with his hand. “You have a monster,” he says. “You did something to make him come.”
Swordfish and I are sitting in this talk-show healing way, so we can’t laugh, but everybody else does—Laser, Nighttrain, Buckhunter, and Ironman. Borat and Dracula sit back on the white couch and cross their arms across their chests.
“Let’s think of that as the worst-case scenario but not necessarily likely,” I say.
“Okay,” says Swordfish. “Next order of business, then. How many people here think it was some crazy fucker like Christina Richman?”
Christina Richman is this student-newspaper girl who’s always writing editorials saying frats should be shut down. She devoted considerable space to Swordfish’s behavior during the Take Back the Night march, and he’s been fixated on her ever since. For my part, I simply think she’s not living up to her potential as far as hotness is concerned.
“She is neither crazy nor fucker,” says Borat, straightening his back. We all get quiet for a moment, registering that Borat likes Christina Richman.
“Stop with the Christina Richman already,” says Ironman finally.
“Fuck her, man,” says Swordfish, staring into space. “She’s like, ‘Frats are discriminatory,’ but if she would just get contact lenses and put on a little makeup, then she’d be hot, and we’d let her into our parties.”
Borat whispers something to himself in his grunty language.
“Does anybody else have any other ideas?” I ask. Nobody does, and I’m still not confident.
So Swordfish and I go cross-country skiing. We started to do that together when we ran into each other once on the Robert Frost Trail, both using sets our moms gave us. We just follow the trails for a couple hours and then go home and usually have some cocoa with marshmallows and play foosball.
We’re out by this brook and we ski past a flock of brown birds. It’s more like we ski through them; they’re coming right toward us, or just blowing around us, the most motivated flock of birds I’ve ever seen. They’re making this little high, panicked sound, and then they’re past us already. Then, from way off, we hear the wings of something bigger.
We’ve both stopped skiing. The sound is a little closer now, near the old yellow brick smokestacks that pop up over the trees on the edge of the trail.
“You know what’s funny?” asks Swordfish. “I’m kind of obsessing over what Borat and Dracula said.”
And then I hear it: the howl of a dog through the neck of a bird. I turn around and see the thing for the first time.
It comes down on Swordfish. I realize I’ve thrown myself to the ground and I’m lying on my side. I start to unbuckle my skis. Swordfish is making this sound like he’s puking, and the thing on top of him is concentrating and quiet.
It’s wooden, and dwarf-size. It has claws at the bottom and a face that’s a perfect circle, only all made out of wooden feathers, with big wooden circle eyes. The lids are like upside-down teacups, and they click up and down. The eyes beneath them are splintery holes. Its wings are short, and when it hunches—it’s hunched over Swordfish—its head pumps in and out of its neck. It’s weird to watch wood move like an animal, the way an animal kind of pulses around.
I stand up in my ski boots and grab the ski behind me. I swing it way back and bring it down on the thing’s head. The owl—because now I can see that’s what it is—makes its dog-bird sound. I tackle it, and it shakes like a laundry machine does when it has a broken belt.
Then I feel something where I shouldn’t feel anything, moving up and down. Swordfish is pale. There’s puke on his face. “Look,” he says. He points at what’s moving, and I recognize it immediately. I pull away and stumble backward through the snow, staring at Ollie the Owl, who has come alive because of the strap-on.
It makes the noise at me again and curls over Swordfish. I realize what it’s doing, now that I know what I’m looking at.
“Swordfish,” I say. “Take your skis off, so you can stand up. Let it try to do what it wants to do to you, just for a second.”
Swordfish fumbles with his skis and it humps at him the way a dog humps at your leg. I grab a rock and bang it off its head. Then Swordfish gets to his feet and I go at it with my ski again, only this time I hit it down there. It makes the sound, beats its wings, and glides away over the trees toward the yellow smokestacks. We run.
* * *
“Slyepoi Mongol, the Blind Mongol,” says Dracula. “That is with what you have fallen sick.”
Because they’ve known since the meeting our house has a demon, they’ve moved temporarily into Cross-Cultural House. We’re sitting in the really clean kitchen drinking tea. Borat pokes his head upstairs to make sure nobody else is home.
“Isn’t that word kind of racist?” asks Swordfish.
“Slyepsi Uregh,” says Borat. He picks up a plastic-covered dictionary and flips through it until he finds something. “This means, in English, the Blind Thruster, the Blind Piercer. From the Old Church Slavonic language. In later Slav stories, it becomes a Mongol. A very old demon, but in a later time they do not call a demon a demon.”
Dracula nods and puts a sugar cube between his teeth. He sips his tea and the cube turns red.
“The demon has a sex never vanquished,” Borat continues. “Because it is blind, it thrusts but its member never finds a home.” He unwraps a Snickers he was carrying in his pocket and dunks it.
Swordfish puts his head in his hands. “How do you know it’s not just some weird bird?” he asks. He rubs his eyes. “How about this. You come out to the woods with us and tell us whether you still think it’s the blind thing. I’ll make it worth your while.”
“There is nothing worth it,” says Borat.
“All it actually does is try to fuck you,” says Swordfish. He leans in. “Look, these names that we use for you and Dracula can sometimes sound negative, or like we’re making fun of you, but we use them on you because you’re our really good friends. You live under the same roof with us, and we think of you as honorary brothers. Just go on a walk in the woods with us and tell us what’s going on.”
Borat’s eyebrows shoot up. “You have Christina Richman come to the house while I’m in the kitchen, you have a bargain.”
Swordfish’s mouth falls open a little bit. He takes off his cap and rubs it.
“You have a crush on her?” I ask Borat.
Dracula nods.
* * *
We tell Christina Richman we’ll give her an exclusive on our attitudes about gender. She comes over, and I’m like, “Let’s maybe talk in the kitchen, so you can see we’re exploring our feminine sides,” which is a good one, and Borat’s waiting there, as we walk in. Soon, she and Borat are standing next to each other by the cutting board looking through some Afghanistan photo book someone had to check out from the library for class. They’re pointing at things in it, and Christina is saying something about the infant mortality rates with her hands pushed way down in the pockets of her overalls, and Borat has his arms folded really tightly across this zip-up sweater he went out and bought. Dracula goes into his room and comes back with more photo books, which he puts on the table and backs away from.
Then there’s a high fluty sound, outside, maybe down by the soccer fields. The next moment the owl bangs against the window, like birds do. Christina makes a hyperventilating noise. Borat says something to himself in his language that you can tell is probably a swear. It bangs against the side of the house, and plates fall down and break on the Afghanistan book. I run to the front door and lock it, knocking over a chair on the way, which knocks over a la
mp, which knocks our mounted Frank Sinatra mug-shot poster off the wall. I put my shoulder to the door just in time, because the owl bangs into the door hard enough that my shoulder feels like it’s going to crack. There are tears in my eyes and I want to run away.
I look back inside the room to see who could take my place. Borat’s like seven feet tall but built like a centipede. Dracula’s more of a soft pod. Christina is chewing on a strand of her hair. I turn to Swordfish. Compared to the others, he and I are built like a different species. We’re rugby players. I mean, it hurts us to get hit, but when you look at our bodies you can tell we were meant to do this. This is like childbirth for us, our painful but natural role in the universe.
“Swordfish,” I say, and he stumbles over. We both know what we’re going to do. There’s not really a choice.
“Fuck you, blindman assfucker,” I shout, and when I shout it I can feel how old the words are, from the way they scratch the bottom of my throat. I open the door and Swordfish runs outside. I follow him, and it claws at our chests. As it scratches me, I try to screw off its head.
But Swordfish has a different idea. He has both hands on the strap-on, and he’s reaching around to the back. I see his hand fumble with the clasp. I try to help him with it but the owl screams in my ear so loud I lose my grip and fall back. I look down at my body and there’s blood dripping down my shirt.
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