by Sam Lipsyte
I found a side door, fled.
Nice Horizons
HOW COULD I KNOW that rapper was on his way to an awards ceremony where he would win the People’s Prize for Best New Entertainment Package?
“I’m just proud to be the people’s package,” he said in the paper the next day. “That’s why it means something.”
Home that night I took a series of showers, hot, warm, hot, finished up with an icy blast. Penance for that baste job on Gwendolyn’s face, I guess. The parade? My God, Gwendolyn was right, I must have been insane. Part of me, anyway. The part I should have kept cuffed to the bedroom radiator, begging for another moldy crust of pumpernickel.
Tea, the tender monster.
Better test those binds again.
I dried off, slipped into my vintage imitation silk smoking jacket. It was something I’d bought years ago to don in moments of extreme psychic agony. I’ll pretend I’m another kind of man, the sort to sit with a snifter of Armagnac, muse upon his luck in the latest stock market crash. I’ve always been lucky in the stock market, Catamounts. I’ve never lost a cent. You all get one guess why.
Later I sat at my desk, worked on my poem about the splintering of consciousness in our rootless age. The beginning goes like this:
Consciousness/splinter(ed)
This is the rootless age
I’d been having some trouble with the rest of it. The trouble maybe stemmed from its atrociousness. I booted up my laptop instead, cruised those lonely information fire roads for some leg warmer lovelies, but even my yarn harem offered no solace tonight.
There was a deadness in me now.
I needed something to take my mind off my mind. There was nothing to smoke or drink in the house, nothing sugary to shove in my mouth. I couldn’t bear to watch TV. What if they had those corpses again and they still didn’t make me feel better?
I thought maybe I’d feign sleep.
SOMETIME during the night a figure appeared in my bedroom, hunched on a chair near the door. I heard breathing, short and sharp, saw something enormous pumped in shadow on the wall.
“Kid?” I said.
The figure drew still. Moonlight through the window caught a piece of polished brass, a bracelet on a hairy wrist.
“You know me?”
“You’re the Kid,” I said. “You took Buttercup in Kansas City.”
The Kid didn’t answer for a while.
“Guess I done took them all,” he said at last.
“Why are you here?”
“Tired, I reckon. Reckon I’m tired.”
“How much whang can a man spank?” I said.
“Ask myself that question every day.”
“Why not just stop?”
“And do what?” said the Kid. “This is all I know. Since I was a youngster, an orphan, and Mr. Feegle brung me in, taught me the game. I can do it any way. Fast, slow. Forever, quick. Forty times in a row.”
“Forty?”
“In Fort Worth it was forty.”
“God. I thought eleven was good.”
“There’s no shame in eleven.”
“Still, forty.”
“Wish I could just wipe it all clean from my mind,” said the Kid. “Wish I could just start over. I’d never touch the damn thing again.”
“I may know somebody,” I said.
“Somebody who?”
“An angel. Guardian.”
“Never had much respect for celestial types. They get everything handed to them.”
“This guy’s good.”
“We’ll talk again,” said the Kid. “Sorry about the mess.”
“What mess?”
I reached for the light switch. Illuminated, I was alone. My smoking jacket was draped on the chair near the door, a pair of slippers underneath. Just another hallucination, Catamounts? I got down to my knees, felt around until I found it, a small sticky puddle on the hardwood. The Kid’s mess?
It tasted like me.
THE REST of the night I dreamed of Lenny and Gwendolyn. They took lazy walks across a lake of fire. They made love on a molten patio.
“I’m a schmuck!” Lenny shouted as he came.
There was a musical number. Azorean boys in top hats sang a song called, “Honor Your Dream.”
I never got to hear the end of that song. Somebody was banging on my door.
Gary stood on the threshold in a fishing hat.
“We’re going in,” he said. “Our objective is to infiltrate and neutralize the forces of my mental oppression. I’m calling it Operation Thunderstruck.”
“It’s like morning right now, man.”
“What is the spirit of the bayonet?” said Gary. “To kill is the correct answer, but take your time.”
“Gary, when are we going to stop talking like this?”
“You mean like everything’s pretend? Like we can’t face the truth of our lives as we live them?”
“Yeah, that.”
“Today,” said Gary. “Today’s the day.”
NICE HORIZONS, in case you’ve never noticed it, Catamounts, is that place set back in the marsh grass behind Mays Lumber. I kept an eye out for Georgie Mays as we drove by the woodpiles. I’d heard he worked at the lumberyard, or at least spent his afternoons idling near the toolshed, waving a jigsaw at his many invisible foes. Some Catamounts may recall how Georgie once stalked a history professor from Rutgers for publishing letters which proved his ancestor Matheson’s Tory sympathies. These were long missives, the earliest known Catamount updates, if you will, many addressed to Benjamin Franklin’s monarchist son. Charges of treason didn’t bother Georgie so much as the professor’s insistence on the phrase “erotic overtones.” He’d mailed the academic some feces of indeterminate origin in Ziploc bags, picked up the man’s children at their Quaker preschool.
“Tell your daddy no Mays man ever had a taste for cock,” he told the little ones, ditched them in a cornfield near a high-voltage transformer.
They’d put a winking metal device on Georgie’s ankle after that little escapade.
There was no sight of Georgie today, just some flatbed trucks, a few men drinking liters of cola from a plastic cooler. I couldn’t make out the labels from here.
Some Catamounts may not be aware of this, but the cola wars continue to this day. Folks have just forgotten, moved on to more comprehensible conflicts. Believe this, though: The centrality of cola in our transnational life will be affirmed in future tracts. Citizens swilled caffeinated sugar water, experts will explain, while enjoying digitally enhanced entertainment. Their dim repetitive culture was the work of “artists,” who employed “imagination.” Regeneration would not come for many years, and only in the wake of utter annihilation—
“What are you jabbering about?” said Gary.
“Me? Nothing.”
Nice Horizons was about a quarter mile on, a complex of dark glass and wood built at steep, healing angles. We pulled up to the main office, sat parked for a few minutes.
“What’s the idea here?” I said.
“I’m not sure,” said Gary, tapped his thumb nub on the wheel.
“I figured you had a plan.”
“My plan was to be spontaneous.”
Gary dialed around on the radio, found some dance track on a techno station. “You can’t have it both ways,” a man intoned to a mournful beat.
“I hate this friggin’ shit,” said Gary.
“You don’t have to go in there,” I said.
Gary shrugged, fingered the bass lure hooked to the mesh crown of his hat.
“What’s with the angler duds?” I said.
“Does it look retarded?”
“Don’t use that word,” I said.
Catamounts, I’m not sure how many of you recall Fred Powler from our Eastern Valley days, but if you do, and knew him for the joy-bearing boy he remained even while being pelted with bombardment balls, you wouldn’t abide the way people toss the R-word around, either.
“Okay,” said Gary. �
�I’m sorry. Not retarded. How about lame?”
“Totally,” I said.
“Good,” said Gary. “I’m going for sympathy here.”
I FOLLOWED THE CAPTAIN into the lobby. Bright smears lined the walls. Finger paintings, mostly, and some that looked toed. A sign hung near the fire exit: “Mandatory Hug Zone.”
“I’m afraid not,” said Gary.
The woman at the reception desk fixed us with her friend-of-the-damaged smile. We watched it fall in stages from her face.
“Gary?” she said. “Lewis?”
It was Stacy Ryson’s sister, Tiffany! She’d been a few grades behind us, so some Valley Cats may have what they call in the photography world a degraded image of her. Picture a gangly girl with a lousy haircut who nobody realizes will be beautiful one day, though Gary and I, we always knew. We considered her high hilarity even then, hounded her in the library every chance we got, picked out dirty books about sluts in petticoats for her perusal, offered her our weed, which she always refused.
Her sister Stacy got all the glory—class president, Merit Scholar, Rotary Club student prize—but Tiffany was, by my lights, the superior Ryson. She’d written a sonnet about her yeast infection, liked to lug around a cello she couldn’t play.
Once, a bitter winter afternoon, she followed us out to the maintenance shed, watched while Gary and I sucked on his one-hitter. We stood in biting wind, passed the shiny bullet pipe between us.
“It’s so cold out here,” said Tiffany. “Is it worth it? Smoking the pot?”
“To me,” said Gary. “Yes.”
“I like the way it makes you guys smell,” she said.
“You can smell it?” I said.
“Everybody can. My sister says you guys are the true fools of society because you don’t even know what fools you are.”
“We know,” said Gary.
“Do you have hallucinations? Do you see whirling colors or skeletons rising out of the ground? Or, like, on the football field, is there a giant nipple?”
“This is just pot,” said Gary. “Shake, at that.”
“You should try some,” I said.
“No, thanks,” said Tiffany. “I like feeling things the way I feel them.”
“That’s insane,” said Gary.
“I’m cold,” said Tiffany. “I’m going in before they catch us.”
“You’re always welcome here,” I said.
“I know I am,” said Tiffany.
She never followed us out again but we all stayed library friends. We were like a secret gang, but only during frees. She’d draw pictures of us in her sketchbook, interview us in whispers for her tellall book about Stacy, Perfect Sister.
Gary and I graduated that year and I guess we forgot all about Tiffany. Now here she sat at the Nice Horizons reception desk. She looked about the same, too, except for the pukey streaks of color in her hair, the thick crucifix knotted to her neck.
“Is it really you guys?”
“It’s us,” I said.
“I always think of you together and here you are together.”
“We’re like an ancient prophecy,” said Gary.
“I don’t know about that,” she said.
Her hand darted to the wood at her throat.
“What’s that?” I said.
“What does it look like?”
“I know, but, like, actually?”
“Did you get all Goddy on us, Tiff?” said Gary.
“Not on you. On me. In me.”
“I thought it was some Goth deal.”
“It’s the real deal,” said Tiffany. “Just like my savior.”
I felt that nervous smile on my face, the one I tend to get around people who believe in things.
“I’m here to see Doctor Felix,” said Gary.
“He doesn’t see people. He works with the groups. Do you have an appointment?”
“I’ve got to see him,” said Gary.
“It’s his day off. He’s in his room. I’ll call him. He knows you?”
Gary looked both annoyed and relieved that Tiffany seemed to have no grasp of his history with Doc Felix.
“He knows me.”
“We’re always welcome here,” I said.
Tiffany must have missed my reference to that day by the maintenance shed. The universal sign for bone-toking, thumb and forefinger pinched up to my lips, didn’t help much, either. There’s a chance I looked to be choking on my hand.
“Are you okay?” said Tiffany.
“He’s fine,” said Gary. “He’s just an awkward guy.”
“No,” I said. “I was just remembering when we … oh, forget it.”
“I’ve forgotten most of it,” said Tiffany. “I recall just enough to thank Jesus every day for saving me.”
I’ve got nothing against religion, Catamounts. It’s idiotic, but so’s most television, and I’ve watched about twenty-five thousand hours of that, the idiotic kind. Educational, maybe nineteen hours, tops. Daddy Miner and Hazel never took me to synagogue, but I did go to Catholic Mass once with Dean Longo when we were nine or ten. I didn’t mean to go, I was bouncing a ball in his yard when the whole family came out in their nice clothes, piled into the car. I just squeezed in after them. They were a big family with a big family wagon and Mr. Longo didn’t notice me.
I loved all the pretty glass, the priest with his wine and snacks. When I later discovered I’d eaten the body of Christ I got scared, told Daddy Miner the whole story.
“Don’t worry,” said my father, “that wasn’t the body of Christ.”
“It wasn’t?” I said.
“He was much taller.”
A few years later all the other Jewish kids in town were gearing up for that momentous day when they’d get cash from strange uncles and synth ballads would be played in honor of their ability to sound the Torah out phonetically.
“What about my bar mitzvah?” I said.
“It’s bullcrap,” said my father.
“Gary’s getting one.”
“Mazel tov.”
“If L. wants to, let him,” said Hazel. “Maybe he needs something to rebel against later.”
“I didn’t have one,” said my father.
“That’s what I’m talking about. So now you rebel against me.”
“Please, Hazel.”
“Well?” I said.
“Well, what?” said my father. “Are you telling me that every day after school you want to go to another school and learn a language that sounds like people with bronchitis?”
“Marty!” said Hazel. “We’re talking about thousands of years of tradition. Patriarchal tradition, but still, even I respect it on some level.”
“Don’t confuse the issue,” said my father.
“What’s the issue?”
“Lewis,” said my father. “You know how when we go to grandpa’s house he has that cow tongue cut up on a plate?”
“Tongue?” I said. “That’s a real tongue?”
“What did you think it was?”
“I thought they just called it that. That’s disgusting.”
“So we agree,” said my father.
“We do?” I said.
“We’re going to take this assimilation thing the whole nine. No half-assing.”
“Marty, he doesn’t understand you. He doesn’t know when you’re kidding.”
“He knows I’m not,” said my father. “I’m a fucking secular American. I nearly shed my fucking blood for the right to be one, too. I scrambled for Cuba. Don’t ever forget that. My unit scrambled for Cuba. I was on the fucking tarmac. I was ready for Castro’s bullet. And I liked Castro. But more than Castro I liked the fact that I didn’t have to eat tongue if I didn’t want to. I didn’t have to pray to any god, either. Except DiMaggio.”
“Marty, this doesn’t make any sense.”
“I sup from the melting pot.”
“There’s herring in the melting pot,” said Hazel. “Gefilte fish.”
“Can’t taste it,
” said my father, smacked his lips. “It’s all ham hocks to me!”
Hazel laughed for the first time in a while, that laugh like flash lightning she had. I could see them both lit up in it, figures frozen in an old love pose, the way they’d maybe been, before the head scarves and the bad investments, the groped hostesses, the agitprop, baby Lewis, too. A random millisecond of illumination to remind you of the daily dark.
“Fine, forget it,” I said, went back to the basement, maybe to evacuate Saigon.
Which is really just to explain to you, my fellow alums, why I never got bar mitzvahed, which I’m sure most of you (minus the Jews) never wondered about anyway, but which may also, perhaps, provide some context for my mixed feelings apropos Tiffany’s new dead boyfriend. Part of me was happy she’d found peace, grace. Another part wished she’d stuck with her weirdo grandeur. But at least her hair was still shitty.
She puffed a lock of it off her forehead now, spoke low into the phone.
“Karl,” she said. “Doctor Felix. There are two men here to see you … . Well, yes, I do know who they are, in fact … just by coincidence … okay, hold on a minute. He wants to know what it’s about.”
“It’s about the mystery of the mind,” I said.
“It’s about all the money he used to have in the bank,” said Gary.
Tiffany conveyed both interpretations.
“Follow the hallway to end,” she said. “Knock on the last door.”
THE LAST DOOR, it sounded so ominous, Catamounts, reminded me of the days before we discovered parking lots, when Gary and I used to play those dragon games after school. Our dungeon master, Todd, Gary’s older brother, had no passion for the fabulous, the strange, for hidden rivers, ruby-walled caves. He believed our games should mirror the humiliation and despair of everyday life. We never slew giants, won treasures, wove spells. We’d just tool around in the forest, get jumped by trolls and such, each roll of Todd’s queer dice another pike tip tearing through our cotton armor.
“You’re both dead,” Todd would hiss from behind his laminated screen. “Killed by drunken orcs, no less. Pathetic, but that’s life. Nasty, fucked-up, short. Get used to it. I’m going to roll now to see what kind of vermin converge on your corpses. Why don’t you guys get me a nice glass of ginger ale.”