Home Land

by Sam Lipsyte

“Clean slate.”

  “But the money was the clean slate.”

  “Felix was right,” said Gary. “That money was a bad amulet. Whoever has it is weak.”

  “You want your folks to be weak?”

  “Who cares?” said Gary. “They probably did molest me.”

  He moved to the window, peeked past the curtain.

  “Maybe they’re hiring down at the mayonnaise factory,” he said.

  I took out my phone bills, the letter from the IRS.

  “What’s that stuff?” said Gary.

  “My portfolio,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing. Nothing now. I’ve got to get to work.”

  LEAVE IT to Captain Thorazine to throw his money away without asking if I wanted some. What do I care if it’s cursed? I’m weak anywise. I’m bedecked with bad amulets. My belly’s full of poison birds.

  I guess I was pretty pissed, because that night at the Moonbeam, washing dishes for Delbanco Realty’s annual gala, I kept thinking how I should have told Gary about Bob Price and Mira, if only to revel in his heartache. Later I started picturing Gary wandering half-dead in the desert after being raped and robbed by roving bandits. Blood seeped from his wounds into the sand. The sun cooked up squishy blisters on his back. Birds, carrion specialists, swooped overheard. Probably I wasn’t that pissed. It was really just a way to pass the time at work.

  Then we had a rush, all the folks from Delbanco Realty demanding coffee for the drunk drive home. It was just me on duty, and Rick, the cook, who waxes his mustache, fancies himself a folk artist. There’s a color print of one of his masterworks up near the punch clock. It looks like your typical angel poster, everything fluffy, radiant, until you notice all the unspooled intestines, the torn wings. It’s some sort of celestial killing floor, all of it framed as though broadcast on an antique television set, the kind with metallic mesh speakers, quaint buttons, knobs. Rick’s brilliant, ask me. It’s a shame he missed that outsider art craze I recently read about in one of my magazines.

  “I should have diddled kids,” he yelled through steam. “The critics would have loved my paintings then.”

  “Maybe it’s your subject matter,” I said.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” said Rick. “People go bananas for angels.”

  “Not when they’re impaled on giant meat hooks.”

  “But it’s on TV. My painting aren’t real, they’re on TV.”

  “I understand that,” I said. “But still.”

  Now Roni burst through the doors.

  “Rick, we need more flans! We’re running out of flans! How many flans did you make?”

  “I don’t know. Fifteen.”

  “There are over a hundred guests tonight!”

  “Nobody ever eats flan.”

  “These people want their flans!”

  “Flan,” said Rick.

  Roni’s eyes caught mine, or caught mine conducting perv recon on her person. There are some who say you shouldn’t compartmentalize the parts of a woman as it demeans her totality, but Roni’s totality was so damn luscious and immense I’m sure she understood I could only appreciate her in parts, the swell of her calves in those high suede boots, the soft crevasse her bunched breasts made in her blouse.

  “I need you in the stockroom, Lewis,” said Roni. “We’ve got to find more napkins.”

  The stockroom is not my favorite nook. It’s dark, reeks of decomposing animals, but it seemed a cozy mountain villa here with Roni. Enormous cans of tomato sauce and tubs of red powder filled the shelves around us. Hate to divulge a divine Moonbeam secret, but that red powder is actually barbecue sauce. Stick a hose in the tub, voilà, fresh batch.

  It took me a moment to get my bearings in the must, the clutter. Roni wheeled and we nearly collided, stood, huffed fraught breath. Light from a bare bulb fell down her hair, caught the glitter in the hollows of her neck.

  “Napkins,” I said.

  “Napkins,” said Roni.

  We kissed, our hands marauders, jerked each other to the floor.

  Roni’s skirt was peel-away. I yanked her giant ass to my face. I was like a man who refuses to lose the ass-eating contest.

  It was maybe an ancient kind of contest where the winner wins a kingdom, the loser loses his tongue.

  It was a new moist language I gibbered up into her, too. I flipped her over, concocted more delicate lingo for the other hole. Catamounts, perhaps it’s best not to get too graphic, to instead let the subtle play of metaphor carry the day, but I must confess I’d never seen a chick bust a load like that before. Her thick hips were sort of tremoring and her juice just fountained out of her, crystalline, stinky-sweet. Roni moaned, flibbered on the floor, a plump exquisite porpoise. Me, I was Poseidon, horndog of the deep, or maybe the Man from Atlantis.

  When we’d finished and I’d messed my Moonbeam-issue kitchen shirt, Roni shot up, started to dress. Done, near decent, she knocked a packet of napkins from the shelf, rocked it in her arms, a paper baby, while I scrambled with my pants.

  “Hurry up,” she said.

  “I’m hurrying,” I said. “And don’t worry about anything. I know the drill. I won’t tell anybody and I won’t expect special treatment. I won’t act like we’re ever going to do this again.”

  “What drill?” said Roni.

  “You mean we can do this again?”

  “We’ll see,” said Roni. “But the special treatment thing is true. No special treatment. Except for this kind.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  We walked out of the stockroom together.

  “Where were you guys?” said Rick.

  Dessert plates smeared with some foul custard were piled on every surface.

  “Lewis was eating my ass,” said Roni.

  “Sure he was,” said Rick.

  I went back to my station, my weed farm.

  “I better take these flans out,” said Roni, nearly knocked down Daddy Miner on her way to the dining hall.

  “There you are!” said my father. “And there you go!”

  “Bye, Roni,” I called.

  “Don’t get any ideas about Roni,” said my father.

  “Gravy boat,” I said. “Stay in the now!”

  My father smiled his my-son-the-moron smile. I’m sure many Catamounts have fathers with similar grins in their arsenals. Maybe they teach it at the Dad Academy.

  “That’s right, kid,” he said. “Gravy boat, and whatever else you said.”

  “Stay in the now,” said Rick. “He said stay in the now.”

  “Did I ask you anything, Rick?” said Daddy Miner. “FYI, you and I have a big-time flan-related confab ahead of us tonight, so don’t cut out.”

  Roni was gone by the time we shut down the kitchen. She hadn’t even left me a note. I guess she wasn’t ready for sex outside the workplace. Rick reported to Daddy Miner’s office for his bawl-out session and I went home, watched TV.

  They were pitching end-of-summer sales on the local station and I started thinking about Fontana in his bunker, wary of Hollis but also eager for his summerlong becoming, his transformation, the ever-sprouting pubes of his soul. He was nearing sixty, still talking about the grown-ups. I was half his age, no better. Everybody gets stuck somewhere, though, Catamounts. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad place to put down stakes. It’s not my fault, anyway, I thought, poured another whisky.

  “Consuma Cultcha!” I shouted. “You done infantalasized me!”

  There I was, all liquored up, giggling, making a fool of myself alone in my home, when suddenly Gwendolyn’s face filled the screen. Her hair fell in whitish waves and her lips looked extrapuffed, a pout shot straight from a needle gun. There was a wise shimmering ache in her eyes as she held aloft a tiny box.

  A pack of laxatives.

  “I’m on the go,” she said. “I don’t have time to sit around. Do you?”

  Fall of Berlin

  TODAY IS Hazel’s birthday. She would have bee
n, well, what? An older old lady?

  When she was mostly dead in the hospital I clutched her chapped hand, desperate for those involuntary spasms people take for secret squeezes, farewell twitches. The nurses know better, of course, even the ones who believe in heaven, wear dumb pins.

  I had lots to say after the memorial service.

  I said, “She was the only one who loved me unconditionally.”

  I said, “She believed in my potential.”

  I said, “I’m floating in darkness now.”

  It was all about me, of course. Teabag, aggrieved. Never mind the woman we’d just fed to flames.

  I was floating in darkness anyway. I’d been floating in darkness while she was nibbling on saltines.

  Did she love me unconditionally? Did I love her unconditionally? Who tests the conditions? Maybe Gary did. But look at Gary. He had to buy his mommy’s love back.

  Hazel was the universe for a while, then she was the old woman who knew about that mole on my scrotum, who didn’t approve of my friends, who took me, probably correctly, as a less cunning corollary of my old man.

  Right before she died was the universe again.

  Then she was my dead mother.

  There are perks to the pain. You have permission to appear saintly, or at least tuned to some extradimensional frequencies.

  “It may sound silly,” you tell people, “but sometimes I know she’s there in the room with me. Life, death, it’s such a mystery.”

  People nod, their eyes water. They want to be part of the mystery. Maybe they wish their mothers were dead so they could be part of the mystery.

  They must hate themselves for wishing that, cringe from themselves in their heads. Maybe they go home, call their mothers up, lunge at these women with their baby love. The mothers want to watch a movie, have a light snack, not listen to their progeny slobber. Why can’t these kids understand what’s understood?

  “I love you, too, honey.”

  Devotion’s twitch, its unvolunteered spasm.

  Hazel’s calves.

  Today is the birthday of Hazel’s calves, Hazel’s nose.

  I’ve got a candy bar in the freezer in honor of this day.

  FONTANA CALLED while I was peeling the wrapper. He sounded frenzied, demanded we meet for lunch. I wound the candy bar up in its foil, stuck it back in the freezer.

  “The Garland?” I said.

  “Good tuna melts, but full of spies.”

  We met at the Corner Luncheonette, that Flying Dutchman diner near the Moonbeam. Fontana was antic in the shadow of his sweatshirt hood, as though in his solitude he’d been storing up new frowns and sneers, experimental grins. He stabbed at the fruit in his fruit cup, stole looks out the window to his ride.

  “The car will be fine,” I said.

  “Anything happens to me, it’s yours. I’m serious. Ginny and Jen, my daughters, well, there are only so many listless embraces I can take from those bitches. The hooker thing, it didn’t have to be end of the world. They acted like I’d done it to hurt them. What, a father’s supposed to cut it off? A father can’t fuck? They don’t get the car.”

  “Don’t be silly. Nothing’s going to happen.”

  “Nothing never happens,” said Fontana. “Psycho followed me to the pharmacy last week. I was getting my Saint–John’s–wort. Some magazines. Do you read MindStyle? They had this article—”

  “Hollis?”

  “Of course, Hollis.”

  “He’s just trying to intimidate you.”

  “Thanks for the expert profiling. Doesn’t matter now, anyway. Or it won’t for long. As soon as they catch him I’m safe.”

  “Catch him?”

  “There’s a warrant out. He sold drugs to some kid who died. Kid’s parents had connections. This is how society works. People leaning on people. People pressuring people.”

  “There’s a warrant?”

  “That’s what Loretta says.”

  “Have you seen her?”

  “Loretta? She was over the other night. I’m sure Hollis was out in the bushes, too. Like you used to be.”

  “Just that one time.”

  “You haven’t missed much. We’re not planting this year. The fields lie fallow. We’ve been reading haiku to each other, though. We cooked Swedish meatballs the other night. Miner, let me tell you something. I realize now I can exist. She makes me want to exist. Even the Hollis part is amazing in its way. I mean, how many romances go south because of boredom, distraction? You know, I read in the paper that people lose interest in each other after a few years if they don’t breed. It’s biological.”

  “Junk science.”

  “Just what they said about Copernicus. But that’s not my point. My point is how many love affairs have the benefit of an outside threat to invigorate them? Well, around the world, sure, tons, you’ve got your coups, your pandemics, your floods, but here in Jersey? We don’t get to screw to the boom of the ack-ack guns around here. Not yet, anyway. Probably soon. Where’s my car?”

  “What’s an ack-ack gun?”

  “Never mind that. I’ve lost view of my vehicle.”

  “It’s right there where it was the last time you looked.”

  “So it is.”

  Fontana took a French fry from my plate, dipped it in the wet dregs of his fruit cup.

  “How can you eat that?” I said.

  “I eat the world, Miner. It’s all tasty. I want to exist, to live, and that makes the world extremely fucking tasty. Also, I haven’t really eaten for days. Or slept, for that matter. I’m too excited about existing.”

  “Is that why you wanted to meet? To tell me that?”

  “No,” said Fontana. “I had to get out of the basement. Listen, it would mean a lot to me if you’d come to the Togetherihg. I need moral support.”

  “I’m working the Moonbeam that night.”

  “Can’t you switch?”

  “I begged for the shift. Anyway, are you sure you should be out and about so much?”

  “No way Hollis will risk showing up in public.”

  “He’s got friends.”

  “Nobody likes Hollis enough to hurt me for him. And I’m not worried about the Togethering. Dark parking lots are that man’s domain. Maybe he’s already split town. Anyway, you’ve got to come. What’s wrong with you? What are you scared of?”

  “Everything.”

  “You think you’re the only loser this town has produced? We should be jubilant in our disappointment. We should join hands, form a ring. A broken promise ring. Everybody’s weeping themselves to sleep, Miner.”

  “Not Mikey Saladin.”

  “Are you kidding? He hit 232 last year.”

  “I didn’t know you followed baseball.”

  “I don’t. It’s a load of pseudopoetic crap, boring as hell. It was invented so frustrated intellectuals could pine for their daddies without appearing too unmanly.”

  “I like baseball,” I said.

  “I’m just kidding, buddy. Of course I like baseball. But I like French fries dipped in melon juice and giving it to Loretta from behind more.”

  “I should get going,” I said.

  “Live, Miner. There’s nothing to it. It’s not original. Just necessary.”

  I’d had enough of Fontana, Catamounts. Sometimes the idea of a man is sufficient. Fontana was a fine enough notion for a man, but to see him here, sick eyes afire in hood shadow, to listen to his lectures on the art of living, it was more than I could stand.

  I stood.

  “Where are you going?”

  “There’s something I’ve got to do,” I said. “Be careful.”

  Fontana gazed out in reverie upon his car.

  “Maybe I don’t like baseball,” he said. “I can’t decide.”

  I WANDERED out to the avenue, Catamounts, to the bus shelter catercorner from the Corner Luncheonette. The ride to the Department of Motor Vehicles took long enough for me to realize what I was doing. Symbolic implications. Rewards in real time.<
br />
  It turned out I didn’t need to take any kind of test again. The clerk slid my license across the counter.

  “Why do we even have this?” he said.

  “I couldn’t deal.”

  “And now?”

  “I’ve been walking in circles. I want to drive in them.”

  “Glad I asked,” said the clerk.

  THAT NIGHT I stopped off at In Your Cups to celebrate my reinduction into wheelsmanship. Victor spotted me a shooter of that syrupy stuff frat boys drink to nerve them for rape. The TV over the bar showed the view from a news chopper, a forest in flames.

  “Half the country’s burning up,” said Victor. “It was a dry summer. Driest on record.”

  “It rained here,” I said.

  “Nonetheless,” said Victor, appeared proud he’d used the word, unsure how to follow up. “Nonetheless, we have statistics to prove this was the driest summer on record. It’s no surprise. What with the economy. And the terrorist networks.”

  “Not to mention the television networks,” I said. “And that guy in the White House, what’s his name?”

  “The president!” somebody called from the end of the bar.

  Chip Gallagher had the makings of a one-man orgy down there with his boilermaker and his jeans unzipped from his last trip to the john.

  “The president,” said Victor. “Exactly.”

  “The president is a fucking monkey,” said Chip. “They should put him in a monkey house and feed him peanuts and cashews and shit.”

  “That’s elephants,” said Victor.

  “Ah, the free flow of ideas,” I said. “Democracy in action.”

  “Don’t come in here with your snide comments,” said Chip. “This is a safe place for inane chatter and random hooting.”

  “Sorry,” I said, “next one’s on me.”

  “That’s more like it.”

  I slid down the bar toward Chip.

  “Are you going to the Togethering?” I said.

  “The what?”

  “That reunion thing?”

  “Oh, shit, man. Yeah, I heard about that. Open bar?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then I guess I’ll be there. Is Jasmine Herman going?”