by Sam Lipsyte
“What?” said my father, waking. “What are you looking at?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry for?” said my father.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You know what the situation is, don’t you? You understand this, right?”
“Yes.”
“Did you check your people today? Check your people, kid. What happens is they swell up on you. Sort of thrilling at first, but don’t be fooled.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I was a fool,” said my father.
Days they drove away for his injections, Nathalie stayed here with me, lit joints, my father’s stash, spun the stereo dial.
“Crap,” she said. “Tripe.”
She wore T-shirts with the names of bands in spatters of blood, or maybe her night gown if duty called before noon. She was skinny, beginning to be rounded in the same places as the women on TV, the ones I called up like flip cards lying on my belly in the dark. The blonde widow on the Florida yacht. The space lady with the thimble in her ear.
“Do you like music?” Nathalie said.
I showed her my only record, a collection of gunslinger ballads sung by a man in cowhide who looked like my Uncle Sy.
“You’ll learn,” she said.
“Learn what?”
“How to dance and how to fuck. You want to dance?”
We danced, a tour of eras, tango, pogo, slide-and-dip.
“You’re terrible,” she said. “You’ll never make it.”
“Make what?” I said
“Good point,” she said, “but answer me this: What do you want to be when you have to be something?”
“An astronaut,” I said.
“Bullshit. Who taught you to say that?”
“President.”
“Crooks.”
“A rock star,” I said.
“That’s more like it.”
Now we heard the door, saw my mother shove my father through it. He was weeping. He was wiping vomit from his beard with a dirty mitten.
Then it was a miracle week, a miracle month, a month from God. My father said he was on the mend. He got what my mother called his color back. My father said he was on the uptick, fit for light duty, maybe.
“I’m either getting better or I’m already dead.”
The bucket went back to the shed with the diggers and spades. Breakfast, he did the disappearing-lip trick, the joke about the Pope, the Jew, the parachute.
He hung back near the coffee pot and palmed his patched head.
“What are you doing these days?” said my father.
“Fractions.”
“I’m half the man I used to be,” he said, or maybe sang.
I found him later at the dining room table, his glasses low on his nose, papers, pens, strewn.
“I’ve missed a lot of homework,” he said.
I stood near him with my mother when the firm called with the news.
“Perfectly understandable,” he said into the receiver. “No, the package is generous.”
Done talking, he put the phone down, gently. He sighed, kicked a hole in the wall. He limped off to the fall-away chair and sat there, alive, destroyed.
He smoked a cigarette.
“May they all get cancer,” he said.
I checked myself in bed each night. I kneaded my people. I turned on my belly, burrowed down and in. Somewhere between the mattress and me was Nathalie, the Drury girl.
Sometimes I would see myself walking up Venus Drive, the dream version, the houses steeper, the birch boughs soft with moth rot. I’d eye the berm for what they took from my father, skinned and glimmering in the leaves.
The Drury girl was drying her hair. She’d showered. I’d stood outside the door. She’d caught me, beckoned me in, let me watch her slide her jeans on underneath her bath towel. Now we sat on the sofa with our dilemmas, my fractions, her dangerous men.
“Fuck it,” she said. “I don’t care what my father says, I’m really into Keith Puruzzi.”
“What does your father say?”
“Fuck my father. Which I’m sure would be swell by him. Mr. Eyeball. What a prick. Oh fuck, I shouldn’t talk like this.”
“You always do,” I said.
“I know I do. How’s your dad? Not so good, right?”
“He’s on the uptick.”
“The what?
“The mend.”
“They took his thing off, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve seen it, right?”
“Not…no…” I said.
“Your old man,” she said, “he hid his pot on me.”
Then it was still winter. The miracles worked in slow reverse. Wine into water into walkway ice. They were pumping him with what he called the hard stuff. He wore a watchman’s cap and we gathered his hair from the sofa, the sink. My mother bought him a bigger bucket. It looked industrial.
“Don’t worry,” he told me, “I’ll be dead soon, but not before I’ve ascertained whether you’ve cleaned your room. So don’t think you can just wait it out.”
“Please, God, stop that,” said my mother.
“Stop what?” said my father. “Who are you talking to?”
I played with my Tonka dump truck. It was their gift to me for not wanting anything, for behaving, being quiet, remote. I was too old for it. I was remote anyway.
My father heaved. Sour sheets of air rushed out.
The Drury girl said we could make a surprise for my mother and father. They were due home in an hour. She dug around in her bag.
“Strip,” she said.
The Drury girl had a rubber stamp, an ink pad sunk in tin. She inked the stamp and took my arm, laid the cut rubber on it. “John A. Drury,” it read. “Notary Public.”
She said for me to shut my eyes.
“Why are we doing this?” I said.
“You want to be a rock star, right? This is it. The show of shows.”
“This is it?”
We rehearsed for a while.
“Wait,” she said. “One more thing.”
Now she reached down and took me in her fingers, twisted it a little, let it spring back of its own accord. She cupped her hand under, pinched, stretched, pressed the stamp in, let the flap pop back.
“Now you’re perfect,” she said. “Look.”
She spun me to the mirror. I was measled in her father’s ink.
We heard the Plymouth in the street.
“Hide,” said the Drury girl. “Don’t do it until I call your name.”
I hid behind the fall-away chair. I listened for noises I knew, galoshes, boots, the slash and saw of winter nylon. Here came the voice of him, the old voice, from before the stitches, the bucket, the braid. It carried over the frozen world. My mother’s voice stabbed at his pauses. These old rhythms of them, the tilt of happy talk.
They stood at the threshold, flushed, bundled things.
“Good news!” my mother said.
“Hold your horses,” said my father. “They’re not positive. They have to run more tests. But things are looking up.”
“More than up,” said my mother. “More than up.”
“We’ll see,” said my father, and laughed. “But, yeah, sure, maybe. Why not? Now where’s the little beast? Where is he? I want to see my boy. I’m going to take him somewhere. You hear that? We’re going to do something fun. Soon. You hear me? Where is he?”
I kept my crouch.
“Wait,” said the Drury girl, “I know where he is.”
The room filled with violins, static, saxophones, more static, more violins. There was a burst now, a hissing, gouts of feedback, guitar.
I eeled out from behind the chair, hips rolling, arms up, all of me thrown forward with whatever idea I had now of dancing. It was the Drury girl’s steps and more, some lewd concourse of the blowzy slides my mother favored and the neatened twirls of bandstand teens. I shook my ass at them, shook my
inked ass at my mother, my father, and then, with some kind of stricken pivot, I flippered my tiny dick. It was dreamlike only in that I felt seized with secret logic. Time moved in the real, my body bucked in it, all these parts of me pocked with the public seal of our good neighbor. The Drury girl receded, as though stunned by consequence, easing toward flight. My mother wore her school-play face. I could sense annihilation underneath. My finale was confected from the Tonka toy. Thrusting upward, I held the truck out, glided my balls over the painted bed.
“Look!” I said to my father. “These are my people! Are you looking? Are you looking?”
“Stop!” my father shouted, almost the cry of a bullied child. He bolted from the room.
I felled myself, with theater, head down, arms out, the vaudevillian’s good-night wings.
The room got quiet. The Drury girl was gone.
My mother’s galoshes, rimed, wet, leaked on the carpet.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay, now.”
We could hear my father moving with steady violence in the kitchen.
“We know that wasn’t you,” said my mother. “Was that you?”
“Who?” I said.
My father lived and I lived. We live still. Later, years later, my mother died. I have her galoshes, with my bucket, in a box somewhere.
The Drury girl, we heard, got work at the town plaza. Sometimes I’d watch her run our strip of yard to the street, to a car revving there, to a boy at rest in his Naugahyde bounty, that great godly twitch of electric guitar when she opened his door, her roaring off from all that was lived here or near us.
Probe to the Negative
Lucky for me I get a Larry tonight. Maybe he’s a wandering daddy Larry, all alone in the middle of lonely places somewhere. I run the screens, tug him through his ache. Probe to the negative, that’s what the training guide says. Poll, poll, poll, until you get a no. You’re golden when they don’t say no. You’ve gone to demo heaven. A Larry, though, is someone who is maybe lying. You can feel him through the wire. He wants to qualify. He wants to flee with you, wherever, away.
This Larry, he says, “Yes.”
Says, “Yes, yes, yes.” To work, to daddyhood. It’s a survey about the schools and we need family men, solid citizens, taxpayers, debt-payers, payers in kind. Lucky for me the Larry checks out. Now we can voyage together across the vast spectrum of human experience: Excellent, Fair, Good, Poor, I Don’t Know.
Choose, please.
“Good,” says the Larry, “good, excellent, fair, good.”
He never says, “Poor.”
He never says, “I don’t know.”
“How many kids did you say you have?” I say.
“Kids?” says the Larry.
“This only counts if you have kids.”
“The old lady has them. That’s why I’m out here. It’s me and the trees. My children are the trees, the sky. From where I stand, I can assfuck the moon.”
“Thank you for your time, sir,” I say.
“Thank me for my time! Thank me for my time! You think I don’t know what you’re trying to do to me? You goddamn mothership Jew!”
“You’ve been a real gentleman, sir.”
Here comes Frank the Fink, my monitor, all mission control with his clipboard, his headpiece. Maybe Frank was a decent guy once, but he’s management now. He sits with the other monitors at the edge of the room, eavesdrops, takes notes on our etiquette. Sometimes one of them will come over to your port with a personality tip.
“Start with hello,” they’ll say.
Frank lays off, though. I guess he thinks I would take it the wrong way, but I figure with a job like this, the higher you move up, the more of a tragedy you are.
“Hey,” says Frank. “Forget that nut. You’ll get a complete tonight, I can feel it.”
“Thanks, Frank,” I say.
Fuck off, Fink, I think, which is my thought of the day. I like to have one, it’s almost Buddhist. Yesterday’s thought was how did I get here, thirty-one, thirty-two, just this huge knot of unknowing and losing my hair. Big deal, you say. Male pattern baldness. But that’s the thing. There’s no pattern to it.
My last good thought was weeks ago and it wasn’t even a thought. It was a building I passed on the way to Cups. Limestone, or maybe soapstone, with gargoyle guys on the sills. Homunculi, maybe, if that’s the kind with the smirk. This was a building I knew from when I vaguely lived with a woman in it. She was fresh off the malls upstate, hungry to hurt herself. She wanted to write a history of art. She taught me all about Courbet and in return I went to Cups for both of us. Then she found some sculpture dealer’s dealer, high-end guy, come to your house with a leather bag, a book in German. Now the girl and I, we had nothing in common anymore.
It’s a bittersweet story, I guess. I wish I could remember more of it. She used to shoot too much cocaine and jerk around in her chair. It sounds bad, but if you’d been there it just might have charmed you somehow.
It charmed me. I even made some art of my own when I was with her. I took all the beat bags I’d copped—corn starch, baby powder—and glued them to some Belgian linen. “The Decline of Quality Control,” I called it. The dealer’s dealer dismissed it outright. He said it was an “insufficient interrogation of authenticity.” I said I wasn’t about to waste the real stuff. The point is, I shouldn’t have bothered with that idiot. I had ideas in those days. I had hair.
It was Carla who started calling them that, Lonely Larrys, the ones who stay on the line. We used to share smokes on break. She’s not around much these days. Maybe she’s on a different shift. Maybe something better came along. That would be a shame.
The guy that hired me, he gave me this look when he gave me the job.
“You’re hired,” he said, “but it seems like a waste of a fine college education.”
These days there’s a conspiracy against the overqualified. I told him I was a painter, in the manner of Courbet, Corvette. He seemed appeased.
Tonight, everyone is telling me to go to hell. One guy I call wants my name, my real name.
“Saltine,” I say. “Leonard Saltine.”
He’s going to report me to the bureau of something or other, make a phone call to vent about a phone call. I guess these are the vengeful types. They don’t believe in market research. They are enemies of progress. They want to go back to that dark time when America didn’t care what kind of donut you liked.
“Saltine?” he says. “Bullshit.”
“My name is nobody,” I tell him.
“Yeah, I read that book, too,” he says. “Well, I’ve got two eyes, pal.”
“What book?” I say.
Later, I’m a few screens in with a lady from Duluth. Cough drops. Mentholated. Do they soothe? Do they soothe you to the poor, to the fair, to the good?
“These are dumb questions,” the lady says.
“I didn’t write them, Ma’am. I’m just doing my job.”
I savor the saying of Ma’am. We never got to say it growing up in my town. People would take you for crazy, a peeper, or trying to burn them on school chocolate. Now when I say Ma’am I belong to a great tapestry of Ma’am-sayers stretched across the republic. We’re just doing our job.
I get another guy, Wyoming, I think, one question to go. A country number comes over the line, a song about a jet pilot chasing Jesus through the sky, his heart on target lock. I ask Wyoming to rate the service at his local self-serve salad bar.
“Fair-to-good,” he says.
“I need you to pick one, sir.”
“How’s about good, then? Good’s better for you, right?”
“It’s all the same to me.”
“You pick,” the man says.
“Okay,” I say, “how about good?”
“Good’s good.”
Frank’s up over me, doing his fink looks at my screen.
“Lose him,” says Frank.
“It’s complete,” I say.
“It’s compromised. You fed him a
response.”
“Don’t do this to me,” I say.
“Take a break,” says Frank.
“Fuck you, Fink,” I say.
I guess Frank has been briefed in the latest management techniques, because instead of hauling off on me, he smiles, rubs my neck.
“Okay, fuck me,” he says softly. “Fuck me, and take a break.”
The smoke room, it’s just a stock room with no stock. It’s concrete with a window in it. You can see the high floors of a brokerage house across the way. The brokers work late in their cubes, ties down, cuffs rolled, lips quickening against their headset mikes. We are all cold-callers now.
It’s kind of dark in here but I can see her, Carla, her knees up on the heater. She’s got these wide pretty shins gone to stubble. There’s something about that. There’s something about everything. Take her hair, tucked inside her sweater. We could be home somewhere, her legs, her shins, up in my lap. Those stiff little shoots.
We wouldn’t have to tell each other about our days. It would be the same day.
“Hey,” I say. “Got a cigarette?”
“No,” says Carla. “Got any completes?”
“You?”
“No. But I got this one Larry, I couldn’t tell if he was putting me on. Said he used to be a lion tamer. Used to stick his head in lion mouths. He said they always doped the cats, but still, you never knew when, well…”
“I never get a Larry that good,” I say, lay my hand on her shin. I stroke down with the grain.
“This is a very troubling development,” says Carla.
“I love your shins, you know,” I say.
“No, I didn’t know that. I wish I didn’t know that. Now I have to wear pants to work. Don’t ever follow me in here again.”
I clock out early, turn my headset in, flip Frank a secret double bird on the way out the door. I call my friend Gary from the street. He’s got a futon for me nights I need it, nights I sleep.
“This is Gary,” says Gary’s answering machine.
“Gary,” I say, “this is me.”
Down at Cups, the lookout hooks my arm.