The Universe in Miniature in Miniature

by Patrick Somerville

  “Maybe, yes.”

  “It seems like I should just know it’s the right thing to do.”

  “I take it you don’t.”

  “You’re dangerous,” she says. “What do I do with that? My husband is dangerous?”

  “I’m not dangerous,” I say.

  “I just keep thinking about what you were like when you were fourteen,” she says. “Can you even believe it? If you think about that? We used to be so young. We were babies when we first met.”

  “I know.” Surprisingly, it makes me sad, even though everyone used to be so young, and I usually don’t go in for thinking like this.

  “Go to class,” she says. “Just call tomorrow. Tell me if it helps.”

  “It’s not a class. It’s a group.”

  “It’s a class. You’re learning something.”

  “Can I come over tomorrow? After? I’ll apologize to Justin. I need to do that.”

  “My brother,” she says, “is too pissed. Maybe next week.”

  “Your brother is always too pissed.”

  “Just when you’re around,” she says. “Or when we’re playing board games.”

  “I told him I was sorry about the Monopoly incident.”

  “I don’t think it really got through. Maybe because you were screaming it at him.”

  By the time we’re done talking we’ve gotten back to something we do, some back and forth that doesn’t really have any content to it, just the baseline of two people who know each other well trading the bottom things in their minds. I find it to be very normal. It’s often warm. I am fucking blue and shivering by the time I go inside.

  I take a hot shower and get dressed.

  I find an envelope under the door.

  Inside the envelope there’s a note.

  The note says: “You drive a hard bargain, bro! Great news! Chuck gave thumbs up on 120K! I’ll stop by later! Aaron: You want to be on this side of the fence, okay? Trust me!”

  On the bottom, a postscript:

  “I had Norm pull out that landmine, FYI. Careful, kid!”

  The beginning of the meeting isn’t so bad. It’s pretty much like you’d expect. We’re not in a high school gym; we’re in a church. There’s coffee. There are nine people here. Our leader is a therapist named Dr. Billy. Dr. Billy is about 50. He’s got a big biker beard and he’s stuffed into a brown suit from 1973. He explains that he’s just come from a conference in Canada. He uses his hands to illustrate his abstract points and then, out of nowhere, ten minutes into the meeting, I look up and see that he’s eating a massive hot Italian beef sandwich.

  He’s got a smooth, ultra-controlled voice and he talks about how anger really isn’t an emotion like the others, it’s more like the body’s admonition of confusion. I have a nine-inch serrated blade concealed in a sheath on my right calf.

  After the break, a sleepy-looking woman named Jill a few seats to the right of me asks if she can say a few words about her week, and Dr. Billy gives her the floor.

  She says, “First, I’d like to welcome Aaron,” she nods at me. Everyone nods at me and I nod back. Mumbled hellos. “Aaron, I just want you to know that most of us have been coming here for awhile now. It might look like it’s not gonna do anything for you. But stick with it. You look so skeptical right now.” She smiles. “Try to let go of that.”

  “I’m not skeptical,” I say. “This is just my face.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But I wanted to say it anyway.”

  “All right,” I say. “Thanks, Jill.”

  She explains that this week, her boss brought her into the office and criticized her for three typos on an outgoing email to a client. Jill explains that a co-worker added a few lines to the email before it went out, and that the typos were all in the addition. She never got a chance to re-proof it. But her boss wouldn’t let her speak before he was finished accosting her. She saw it happening and stayed calm. She let him talk, then she told him, calmly, that she hadn’t made the mistake. He pretended that it didn’t matter and found a way to blame her anyway. Something about how she was the final editorial eye, so all mistakes were her mistakes.

  People nod. People in the group go, “Hmmm.”

  Jill says, then, that this is usually her trigger—when being reasonable isn’t enough to get in the way of somebody’s drive toward a different goal. Part of me awakens at this characterization. But she smiles then and says that because of group, she recognized it in the moment. She saw it for what it was and because of that, she didn’t do anything. She says she got a little mad, but did nothing.

  “I used what I learned,” she says proudly.

  Everyone claps.

  Dr. Billy thanks her and then asks me if I want to say anything.

  I say, “My trigger is everything in the universe.”

  Everyone laughs.

  I stare back at them, one by one. I hate it when I make people laugh. It’s unintentional. I don’t joke. To clear this up, I stare at Dr. Billy for a long time. Yes, like a threat.

  “I know we sometimes feel that way,” says Dr. Billy, after absorbing my look with his fat face. “Of course. But part of the exercise is to hone it down and get more specific.”

  “No,” I say. “I’m being specific when I say that. Everything that exists, now, makes me angry. All. I don’t know any other way to say it. All.” I nod the last time I say “all”; I’m getting somewhere.

  “Hm,” says Dr. Billy. “In what way?”

  “Nobody, anywhere, has any real sense what is actually going on.” This doesn’t seem to get a very good reaction from the crowd—no doubt I’m scowling as I say it, but still. I continue: “I don’t either, but at least I know I don’t. I’m sorry but you people aren’t like me.” This is me trying to take the edge off. Being friendly. “You haven’t done the shit I’ve done.”

  “What do you mean by ‘going on’?” Billy asks. He does air quotes. “Could you elaborate on that point?”

  I have choices here. I could explain to him, for example, that most people, when they wake up in the morning, they don’t think about, say, laws and things like that, but they probably feel that those things are there somewhere, all these agreements people have made with one another, in the background of life. Furthermore they probably feel that they are solid, even though they’re invisible. And beyond laws, there are other standard powers we acknowledge as part of your human realm: Love, for example. Kinship. Good. Family. Truth. Meaning. I could explain to him that those things are like warm, bending taffy to me, and how actually, something would be wrong with me if they weren’t like warm, bending taffy. There is no underlying structure. We live in chaos. So maybe for other people, something happens and that’s their trigger. But for me, just walking around and being alive in chaos is mine.

  I say, “I find myself getting particularly agitated at movie theatres.”

  “Why, do you think?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Most endings are disappointing.”

  “I think there might be more there,” Billy says. “Maybe it’s stories themselves. The way they often try to present a definitive truth? Maybe it’s narrative you’re rejecting.”

  “Your goobledeegob mumbo-jumbo makes no sense, Dr. Billy,” I say.

  “I’ve heard that before, son,” Dr. Billy says, smiling kindly. “But is that me? Or is that both us?”

  After the meeting, I don’t go to see Lanie and Justin. I just walk straight west. I’m looking for a neighborhood that makes me uncomfortable so I can clear my head. Lawndale might be nice. I need to walk around in a place where I might possibly die a violent death.

  Things look safe for about a half-hour, but after another mile, I’m further west, on an empty street, and my skin comes alive. It’s an industrial area, and I’ve never been here. There is slush and snow everywhere. The streets are empty and there is a gloom wafting from the dilapidated buildings, windows sadly alight with residents who’ve most likely been put where they are by somebody els
e. I keep going, past an empty warehouse, past a lot, past a 7-11. Through the window I see the lone attendant behind a wall of bullet-proof glass, leaning on the counter within his small protective cube, smoking, watching television. I push on. The street again darkens. I come to more houses and an apartment complex. This is excellent ghetto, here. No clichés, but danger in the air. Another block and there’s a group of teenagers on the corner. I wouldn’t call them life-threatening, but they might do; I walk by them and stare with very buggy eyes.

  A kid with a huge kicked Bulls hat sees me, watches me, and says, “The fuck you lookin’ at, faggot?” and I say nothing but feel adrenaline, joy, other things. I look away, don’t respond. I feel them peel away from their corner, begin to follow me. I smile to myself and don’t look back. Then I find myself laughing out loud, but accidentally. It’s a foreign, high-pitched giggle and it frightens me. I try to think of a dance I can do, but while walking. I try something with rolling my head back and forth and I continue laughing. I hear someone say, “You escape from the loony bin, dude?” and another say, “Motherfucker must be crazy.” They all laugh. Perhaps they’re reacting to my twitches and feints? I keep going. They are children, they are no older than sixteen. They’re just kids making fun of the strange person and I am here because I am bloodthirsty. The most subterranean of my imaginations is hypothesizing about good kill shots with the blade. A wild and horrendous part of me is straining against its bonds in anticipation of multiple liquidations. In the outside world, the same voice says something else and they all start to laugh harder. I missed it. I feel glad they have me to laugh at. Feeling glad makes me think, too, that I’m not Satan, I’m just all bound up inside. This makes me doubly glad.

  I go one block, turn right, walk a block, turn right again, and walk all the way back to my car.

  I drive home.

  I don’t see Wes’s Suburban on the street. I park a few blocks away and cut through the backyards and climb the side of the house and break in through my own bathroom window. At first I sleep in the closet, holding an assault rifle, but in the middle of the night, in the middle of the darkness, I wake up, still feeling a little glad, leave the rifle, go to the bedroom, get into my pajamas, and go to bed like a normal person.

  The morning is crisp, raw, and cloudless. There’s no sign of Wes. I decide not to clean. Instead I will go to see Lanie and ask her to come home and also tell her that if she doesn’t, I’ll be leaving again, only possibly forever, down into the pit of ambient metaphysical chaos. I take no weapons.

  I knew her in junior high. We didn’t go out then, but we were friendly. We used to live near one another, and sometimes I’d see her playing basketball with her brother. Sometimes I’d play. She met her first man, Justin’s dad, at college, but by the time she was back in town she was on her own again and she just had the kid with her. I saw her once or twice—I’d stayed in town for school—and then one day I went to war. When I came back, she was still there.

  One night we ran into one another at a bar, talked, and that was that. She said, “Your hair is so weird,” and I said, “Your hair is weird, too,” even though it was exactly the same as it had been. Mine was longer. I was doing everything I could to distance myself from where I’d just come from. But these things…there are pushes and pulls. ICS sent a mailer, I filled it out. ICS called, ICS offered, I joined.

  I don’t want to go to Europe, I know that, but truth be told, the skeleton thing is real. Sometimes it’s only lightly in the background, but some days I’ll be walking around in Home Depot and every single person will literally appear to be a white grinning skeleton to me. No flesh. Is this a hallucination? Can the absence of something be a hallucination? How is it that my mind, in real-time, renders the background reality where the flesh is supposed to be? I once had a ten-minute conversation about bathroom tiles with a skeleton wearing a bright orange vest. One might say that this is fairly clear evidence of malfunction. But that’s not true, either. I recognize metaphor. Hallucination can be thought of as metaphor. Dr. Billy knew. Some guy in some gym eating an Italian beef. He could see the truth. I mean they really actually all do look like fucking skeletons, but I see what my mind is doing to me.

  I decide it’s a good idea to show up at Lanie’s brother’s with flowers, and so I drive first to the flower shop on Sheffield. Inside, there’s a guy with little Charles Dickens spectacles reading the newspaper. He looks up and nods and I tell him that I need something beautiful.

  “Okay,” he says. “They are flowers. Let’s both relax.”

  “I don’t know if I know how to say this right,” I say, “but I want something that has no meaning.”

  “You’ll have to explain.”

  “I don’t want a bunch of flowers that have special meaning.”

  “Ah.”

  “They say a red rose is this, a white rose is that.”

  “White rose means happy love.”

  “Well fuck that.”

  “Really?”

  “No,” I say, “not really. Ignore me if I say things quickly.”

  “Because happy love is not something you can just—”

  “There must be flowers that are just flowers.”

  “Okay,” he says. “I see what you’re saying. I understand. Interesting.”

  “Good.” I’m relieved that he understands, exhausted by the attempt at communicating. “Good,” I say again.

  He comes out from behind the counter, animated by the challenge. Together we go to the cooler against the wall. “Last week I had a local pizza-delivery man in here asking for a flower representing the ability to teleport.”

  “Just straight-up beautiful,” I say. “But also simple.”

  “I heard you,” he says, swatting the air in my direction. He’s getting irritated now, which is bad, because I get irritated when I’m with someone who’s irritated, and I don’t want to be irritated. “Don’t keep saying the same thing. It makes you seem like a nutjob.” Still looking into his coolers, he places a finger on his lips and deliberates. “We’re going to start wild,” he says, “and go from there.”

  I step aside and let him do his thing. A new calm comes over me as I watch him experiment with arrangements, maybe something to do with his matter-of-factness, something to do with believing, as I watch, that there truly is a skill to flower-arrangement, and that this man has a palpable and demonstrable talent that is not related to harm. He chats with me. How nice. As he is gathering the ingredients I stare at the metal handle of one of the coolers and take deep breaths, groping at the possibilities implied by such an idea. I turn and start to watch people passing on the sidewalk outside. A man goes by and I am convinced he’s wearing a green helmet. A woman with a little girl, and they are rushing. Old man and dog. Other person. People. They are all like me. I try to think of what they do at home at night, or what skills they utilize at work. I see, I’m pretty sure, Wes’s Suburban go by, and about a minute later, just as the flower-man is asking if I like what he’s assembled, if I like the bubbly purple nubs, and I, eyes glazed, am staring dumbly into the multitude of pleasing colors, the chime rings, and Wes’s pal Norman, the IIS guy with the wool socks, comes into the store and starts looking at ferns.

  “It’s good,” I say, taking the bouquet. I hold onto the bouquet very carefully as we go to the cash register. As he rings me up, I look back at the ferns. Norman is there for a moment, but as I watch him, he presses something on his watch, shimmers, becomes translucent, melts into the foliage, and I can’t see him anymore.

  “Twenty-five dollars.”

  I pay. To get to the door, I press my back against the wall opposite the ferns. Once outside, I run to my car. When I start the engine, I look up at the mirror and see that Norman is sitting in the back seat. He has a can of lemon soda.

  “You’ll have to stay with us,” he says. “I know you don’t believe me, friend, but everyone goes through this. You’re one of the better ones. So we got an expense account.”

  “
Please,” I say, very calmly, “exit my vehicle, sir.”

  “I don’t understand why you need the flowers,” Norman says. “We brought you flowers.”

  “I needed more flowers,” I say.

  Norman opens the door. “What’s incredible is that we probably don’t have to convince you,” he says. “Right?”

  “Please, sir,” I say. “Exit my vehicle.”

  I actually studied things. I went to college and read Plato and Aristotle. I wrote a long, decent paper on Anaximander. I’m not saying that that necessarily makes me a Whiner automatically, this liberal arts education of mine, or that it makes me special, but I am saying that once in a while, skeletons and all, weapons attached to discreet parts of my body or not, the taste of blood on my lips or not on my lips, I realize it’s wise to remember who you used to be. Or, like Lanie says, recall being fourteen years old. People come from somewhere. Wes, I don’t doubt, had a mother who treated him very well, and as I drive, flowers in my free hand like a chalice, feeling wise but also afraid, yes, I imagine him. I imagine that he was on a soccer team once. The vision comes alive. Wes, a boy, dribbles. Wes, a boy, scores a goal and throws both arms into the air.

  There’s no sign of the Suburban as I turn onto Lanie’s brother’s block. I am clear and lucid. Fuck them. Wes, Norman, Chuck. The other ten-thousand, too. I am going to take my flowers and repair the damage and make it clear that getting turned around is something that happens over the course of time. Even the act of being turned around implies that it can be reversed. Nothing is stuck. I have to believe that. You are never trapped. Say it to yourself, Aaron, over and over again. Say it as you drive with flowers. Say it and also say Lanie, my baby, come back to me, I love you.

  “Lanie’s not here,” her brother tells me, deep concern on his face, “if that’s what you’re trying to say, Aaron.” He clears his throat. “I don’t even look like Lanie.”

  I’m apparently standing at Lanie’s brother’s door.