Famous Men Who Never Lived

by K. Chess

  “We had a disagreement about something.”

  “Yeah, I figured that. I just meant, what was it this time?”

  She twirled some linguine around her fork. “This time? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You have these . . . these things with people all the time. These fallings-out. Secret offense taken or insult given, cold shoulder, whatever. Your entry group, your old housemates, people from Reintegration—you don’t see them anymore.” Though her mood for days now had been an unusually sunny one, he knew how quickly dark clouds could blow in. But he was tired of being careful around her all the time. “Sometimes it seems like when you decide unilaterally that you’re disappointed in somebody—that he isn’t worth your time anymore, that he should get a cancer and die—you make the call and don’t even bother to tell him. So is it one of those types of situations, whatever it is that happened with Oliveira? Do you even know why?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Was it, then, unconscious? Vikram knew one thing for sure: he was waiting for the day when she would do it to him, too. “You push people away. You and I both know why. You haven’t dealt with losing your son.”

  She leaned over and kissed him, her mouth tasting sour with garlic and capers. “Don’t worry about it, OK? I don’t need Oliveira.”

  “Are you ignoring me? I’m talking about Jonas.” There. He’d said it.

  “You told me you’re working on my project,” she said, her face impassive. “You’re interviewing UDPs. If you reach out to Oliveira, do yourself a favor and don’t mention you know me. It won’t do you any good.”

  “Stop trying to derail me, Hel! I’m saying his name! Jonas!”

  “I kicked Oliveira into a swimming pool when he wasn’t expecting it.”

  “What?”

  Hel stood up, took her plate over to the counter, and dumped her uneaten food into the trash. She put her plate in the sink. She extracted a plastic storage container out of the cupboard and scraped all of the leftover pasta from the pot into the container. “You heard me. That’s exactly what I did. I wish he’d drowned, but I’m sure if he had, it would have been in the Times.”

  “Hel, please.”

  “I’m sick of you feeling sorry for me. I make my own decisions. I make terrible decisions!” She dug in the cupboard for the lid that matched the container. “Listen to this one.” She turned her face to him, devoid of all expression. “I lied to you about your book. It’s lost.”

  Vikram watched, trying not to understand, as she took two similar lids out from the cupboard. The first was too big for the container. The second snapped into place. “What book?” But he knew.

  The Pyronauts.

  “I lost it. I’m not joking. It’s gone. I’ve looked everywhere. I don’t know if I will find it. But, hey. Who cares, right? It’s just some memento to you. Or a paperweight, like your dissertation. Fucking two hundred thousand words, who knows how many hours that took you. You act like you don’t give a shit, you with your big flashlight and your uniform, but I know what it must mean. Somewhere inside you, you buried the bodies, right? Where are they? How did you shut it all off?”

  He didn’t speak.

  “Teach me your secret. Teach me your secret!”

  He sat in the hard chair, his hands flat on the table’s surface. He knew the chair as well as he knew anything he’d inherited in this new world. Its quirks were as familiar to him as Hel’s. One leg’s slightly shorter length set it off balance; if he didn’t hold his body completely still, he would rock a little in the uneven seat. That leg would thump against the floor, a knock knock knock for a tenant who’d long ago moved away.

  Throughout his childhood, Vikram had observed his parents’ quarrels. At a certain point in every one of their frequent disagreements, his mother would lock herself in the bathroom. Vikram would watch his father in the hallway, shouting through the keyhole. He would reason with his wife. He would attempt to see things her way. He would cry. But Vikram’s mother did not respond to any of it, and she wouldn’t come out until she was good and ready. She could sleep in there. She would curl up in the bathtub, piles of clean towels for her pillows and blankets.

  Thus Vikram didn’t believe in walking away from a fight. He’d seen what it did to the other person. Hours of ugliness and recriminations on both sides were, to him, preferable to the cowardice, the ignobility of withdrawal.

  His chair rocked. The leg knocked. Hel bent to slot the storage container full of pasta into the crowded bottom shelf of their cold box. Her face in profile. Her lips pressed tight, the familiar mole by the flange of her nose.

  She turned her body, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  The next thing he knew, he was out of the kitchen. Not just out of the room, not just out of the apartment, but down the hall, down the stairs, through the lobby. He was on the street outside, looking up at his own bright windows.

  How had that happened?

  But he was not alone. No one is ever alone in the most populous city in America.

  Leaves rustled at his feet and cars hushed past on pavement still wet from rain that had fallen and stopped. Two middle-aged women came out of the payday advance store and halted on the corner under the streetlight, talking softly and seriously. A small child across the way shrieked as her father lifted her up to carry her on his shoulders. The building super of a complex nearby hauled his bulging trash bags, tossing them into their bins. Ordinary people, like the ones he’d left behind. The hair on Vikram’s arms stood up.

  He imagined seeing Hel’s shadow passing from left to right, her elongated shape dark against the glowing yellow curtains, watching for him. But he didn’t look up to see it.

  When Sleight was a little older than Hel was today, he’d lived in the cottage in Brownsville across the street from the synagogue. She spoke aloud the titles of the books he’d written there like a recited prayer: What to Do with the Night. The Poorhouse. Chinese Whispers. The Pain Ray. The Pyronauts.

  He’d lived alone with his cat, Catamount, bereft of all human companionship aside from that of his fiancée of half a decade, Ada Green, who had by this time given up on Sleight ever marrying her, but who still came by occasionally, bringing gifts of food to supplement what scanty produce grew among the weeds in his wild garden. This was the ’50s and war with America Unida was on, again. Every night, city wardens announced on the airwaves blackouts still in effect across the five boroughs: the city darkened to foil the small Abeja and Avispa bombers piloted by El Mero Mero’s Mexican allies on their stinging missions up the coast. In addition to the opaque fabric curtains most people used, Sleight taped sheets of butcher paper over every single pane of glass in the house; no lamplight could get out during the nights and no sunlight could get in during the days. Day and night became interchangeable while he composed The Pyronauts on the old typewriter at the scarred kitchen table.

  Vikram was the one who’d relayed these facts to her. She found the picture they painted very satisfying.

  A month ago, she’d paced the floors of Sleight’s house, inspecting the haphazard piles of possessions that crowded the space where that historic table might once have stood. Young Dwayne Sealy didn’t offer to take her to the upstairs room where Sleight once slept under the eaves, and she did not insist on being shown. She preferred the picture in her head, a room as empty as a monk’s cell. An iron bedframe, paint flaking off. A narrow mattress piled high with quilts. A shelf for the old-fashioned pitcher and bowl he used to wash his face, the great tangled beard she remembered from the back cover of the book; if Hel could have grown such a beard in memoriam, she would have. A second shelf for a console radio with a lighted dial. And on the slanted papered walls, notes for his novel written in pencil, outlines and maps overlapping each other, plot points and lists of names.

  Aliens.

  Visitors from fathomless space.

  A wiser power who turned out, of course, not to be so wise
.

  The upstairs room of the cottage. Had Vikram seen it? Surely, he would have mentioned it to her when he talked about his work there. He talked about the otherworldly junk instead, talked about the present and all of the worthless possessions that got in the way. Or he talked about the people he worked alongside, their stories. Their reactions to his.

  She felt as if she had somehow donned the protective equipment John Gund wore, as if she were carrying his eighteen kilograms of gear—the compact dustproof tent, the nutritional paste and water ration he and Asyl needed to survive in the Neverlands, the heavy tank of chemicals that powered the flame pistol, the testing supplies. And she wanted to take off the pack and leave it behind. She was tired of squinting through the fogged faceplate of a protective suit. She wished to walk through the world naked, like Aitch.

  Vikram was the one who should be so attached, so entangled. Not her. She had taken his book, but he, he had taken her purpose.

  Upstairs in the house, under the sharp-angled roof, the rain and its audible echo. Each of the Novembers Sleight lived there, it would have come down on him, but she thought specifically about the year that he wrote The Pyronauts, a year of attacks from above. It came down on Sleight while he lay still and listened and worked out the plot. That’s where fear came from: the sky. Just as she had lain in her son’s tiny bed that night in Park Slope after the attack, knowing then what it was like to grab a knife by the blade. She heard the rain scream at her on the fire escape outside, and she was certain for the first time that she could not protect him. She’d never be able to protect him again, no matter what she did.

  She’d been right about that.

  She didn’t want this connection. Maybe, if she got the book back for Vikram, they could switch.

  INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT: STORMIE URDANETA, AGE 31, STATEN ISLAND

  The first time was with one of the receptionists at the optometrist’s office where I’m a tech. Trinh, her name is. She beckoned me over to her desk to ask me under her breath if I had a tampon. I told her no, sorry, and she looked offended like I’d broken some cardinal rule of sorority, so I explained that where I’m from, most women have a reusable menses catcher instead, like a soft silicon cup.

  Where I’m from being, you know, the least awkward way to refer to my status.

  And it’s true, about the catcher. Though they’re not exactly mainstream here, they do exist, a design similar enough to what I was used to, and I didn’t see anything weird about it. Not until that conversation, when I noticed Trinh’s reaction. This look of mild disgust crossed her face. But she didn’t come right out and express her discomfort. Instead, she said something fake like oh, how wonderful that is. How ecological.

  “It is,” I said to Trinh. “It’s very ecological. And healthy. Because where I’m from, what women do is we drink the captured menstrual blood out of the catcher. We find it fortifying.”

  That knocked her out of her pretend open-mindedness.

  “Your own?” she asked, her voice quavering.

  “Or our mothers’ or sisters’,” I told Trinh. “You know how women synch up? We think that’s why.”

  After the first lie, I knew I would do it again. That night, I made a list of all the things I couldn’t remember how to say in my polite and rusty childhood Spanish. Stuff about bodily functions. Suicide. Sexual mores. Bereavement rituals. If I’d lost the vocabulary—or never had it in the first place—that indicated a topic that wasn’t discussed in public. I would lie about all of them.

  Who would know? Who would I shame, now?

  My parents fled El Mero Mero in the ’80s. I was born here and I’m as American as anyone else, but the kids in elementary school who called me comrade didn’t know that, or care. My father told me I was always going to stick out. From an early age, he trained me to believe it was essential that I behave unimpeachably. Under no circumstances was I to draw negative attention to myself, because by so doing, I’d be drawing negative attention to my entire community. If an ignorant person made rude assumptions, I was supposed to remember my dignity as a Venezuelan anti-communist as well as the dignity of every mestizo and pardo around the world when I responded.

  “But Papa,” I told him, “I just want to be like everybody else.”

  “Too bad,” he said. “You’re not.”

  While my landlord repaired my dripping sink, I told him that in my world, people only have sex standing up and preferably in the shower because the man’s ability to defecate just after the woman attains orgasm is prized as erotic. I told my roommates that we encourage young children to smoke cigarettes when they have the common cold to loosen the throat. I told my server at a Lebanese restaurant in Bay Terrace that, where I’m from, people with bipolar disorder are permitted to carry their pet cats with them everywhere because cats are believed to absorb bad mental-health energy and, furthermore, I planned to return the following week with my own cat. I told the flamboyant guy who works at the bodega down the block that at UDP funerals, all attendees line up to gently slap the cheeks of the corpse in its coffin, one by one, to assure themselves that their loved one is really dead.

  In deference to my father’s memory, I made certain to mention that this tradition wasn’t a Venezuelan thing. I told him that, in my world, Swedes and Finns from the upper Midwest had been especially zealous about the ritual slapping.

  At first, it felt really good to say all this. Maybe I’ve always wanted to tell lies and I just didn’t know how to do it. I’ve always been a good girl. An obedient daughter.

  There are thousands of us UDPs and no one really knows us—not intimately. When I told people these things, they almost always nodded, outwardly accepting. They didn’t question me. They told me our traditions were interesting.

  Last week, I was feeling under the weather. I was in the kitchen, pouring myself a glass of tomato juice, and my roommate Amina came in. She had a pack of Parliament Lights with the cellophane still on and a book of matches, and she pushed them across the counter to me.

  “Here, Stormie,” she said. “Maybe this might help?”

  Even though I’ve never smoked—I’ve never even tried sniff—I know how much those things cost in this New York City, what with the taxes. I felt moved by her gesture, just a little. But I quashed that impulse down. It was pathetic. I said to her: “I mean, thanks for the thought. But I told you, that’s for children.”

  It was depressing, is what it was. Knowing she was so gullible. Knowing that she and all the others were willing—eager, even—to believe any outrageous nonsense I could make up about me and my people.

  My people. I can’t believe I just said that.

  Look at me, fitting in, now that it’s too late.

  I’m going to have to think of some worse lies to tell.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Vikram stood in the gloom at the foot of the stairs, picking at a long tear in the wood of the banister. He tried to imagine how the damage might have been done. Some previous tenant moving furniture up the narrow steps, the half landing, the tight turn. Scuffs marred the pale wallpaper and one rip exposed an older pattern just below the surface. Wear and tear. A palimpsest of lives, moving things in, moving things out.

  Stand still enough, for long enough, and he might see them. A parade of previous residents, shadows on top of each other, moving through one another unperturbed and going about their various businesses, cast onto the walls of this house, of every old house, like the pictures projected from a magic lantern. Vikram waited to watch them dance.

  “Incoming!” Dwayne tossed a full garbage bag into the front hall, barely missing Vikram’s head. “Shit, man. Look alive down there. Stop moping. I’ve got a better idea for you, anyway.”

  Ever since Vikram mentioned his failure to reach Oliveira, Dwayne had made valiant efforts to cheer him up. But Dwayne didn’t know it was impossible; he didn’t know about the book. “Give it a rest, OK?” Vikram said.

  “No, listen. Are you ready for this? My high school friend
works for the city now, investigating police misconduct claims. People make complaints about the police, he looks into them. And guess who’s got an open case?”

  “You might want to not throw those around.” Vikram stooped to examine a split in the trash bag that had just fallen from on high. “You bought the cheap kind, didn’t you? The plastic can’t take that kind of punishment.” He poked the contents—children’s clothing, still with tags on—back in through the hole in the bag, and tossed the whole thing into the corner of the now decluttered living room reserved for items to be donated to charity.

  “Guess who?” Dwayne insisted.

  “No one we’ve heard of, probably.” Wes’s voice filtered out, muffled, from one of the upstairs bedrooms.

  “Wrong! Joslan Micallef. She made a complaint about discriminatory anti-UDP language being used against her after her arrest.”

  “Her arrest for murdering an eighty-year-old?” Vikram said. They were talking about giving up on the most respected UDP and settling instead for the most reviled. “Are you kidding me?”

  “No, I am not. She made a complaint, and an investigator interviewed her. It’s perfect. Incoming!”

  Vikram ducked as another bag of clothes sailed down the stairs. He kicked it over to a clear spot next to the first, careful not to let it snag on the loose nail protruding from the threshold. “I’m not interested.” The Pyronauts. All he had of it now was a memory as transparent as his feeble imaginings.

  “Here’s what I’m picturing,” Dwayne continued, ignoring him. “Joslan’s in Rikers now, right? In the women’s facility. Max security. No one’s getting in to talk to her again. But the interview she already did—it’s all recorded. What if my friend could get you a copy? Put that in your museum.”

  Wes came around the corner to the landing, a big box in his arms. “I see a couple of problems here. Why would Vikram want an interview with Joslan Micallef?” He sidled past Dwayne. “The whole point of this is sympathy, right? To get people to see us as people too.”