by Sam Lipsyte
“Big man, get me a bag of D, will you? I can’t leave my post.”
Maybe it’s the way he says post that sways me. Now I’m part of an operation, a cause.
They call it Cups because you walk down a hallway of tile shards and wait for paper Dixies to come down on box twine. There’s a kid I know from somewhere waiting ahead of me, but neither of us speaks. What is there to say?
I put money in the cup marked “D” and watch it shimmy up into the dark. It comes back down with one bag in it. Lookout’s out of luck, I guess.
He’s waiting out on the stoop for me.
“Well?” he says.
“Talk to your man,” I say. “He screwed me. I paid for two and he only gave me one.”
“Give them to me,” he says.
“What them?” I say.
“Them is two bags. I gave you twenty bucks.”
“Ten,” I say.
Cups, it appears, also maintains a radical management style. The lookout puts a pistol to my neck and walks me back up through the door.
“Now,” he says, “Why don’t you say that again?”
“Oh, forget it,” I say, “just kill me.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Just kill you?” says the lookout. “You make it sound like nothing. What, you coming back? You got roundtrip? Frequent flyer?”
He hits me with the pistol, takes my wallet, leaves me the bag.
“It’s good tonight,” he says.
Justice has always been swift, and just, at Cups.
When I get to Gary’s the girl from the gargoyle building opens the door.
“What are you doing here?” I say.
The girl lets me in, brings gauze for the dent in my head.
“I’m staying here for a few days,” she says. “Gary’s out of town, his aunt, his somebody, died.”
“What happened to your place?”
“Couldn’t make rent.”
The girl and I sit in Gary’s kitchen. She’s got spoons, water, powders, works. It’s like your only cozy memory falling out of the sky for you. I tie her off and hit her clean, the way I always could. She has veins like little tadpoles darting under her skin but I still know which way they’re going. Me, I’ve got this hole in my arm like a great, dark lake. I just have to squirt the stuff in. The girl starts jerking in her chair. I clinch her down around the knees.
“Listen,” I say. “I talked to this guy tonight. He was a lion tamer. Stuck his head in lion mouths.”
“I could never do that,” she says. “I could never tempt fate that way.”
The girl twitches hard, almost out of her seat.
“Yeah, no reason to tempt fate,” I say. “Like tonight, I asked a guy to kill me tonight.”
“I can understand that,” she says. “You can’t do everything yourself.”
When her spell breaks we shoot more of everything and sip something grape. We talk about old times, those nights in her bed behind the stone homunculi.
“What’s wrong with your hair?” she says.
“I’m going bald,” I say.
“That’s not it. It’s something else.”
“What you’re noting,” I say, “is a dearth of pattern.”
I kiss her, slip my hand under her ass and lift. She’s about as heavy as a phone book. I lower her down on the futon and slide up to her hair.
“No,” she says. “I don’t feel like it.”
“How do you know what you feel?” I say.
Now she peels down my fly, starts doing frantic things with her hands, annoyed, severe, like someone who forgot to defrost the meat. I can’t feel anything but the view is exciting. I stick my fingers in her mouth and pry it open.
“Don’t bite,” I say, straddle her head.
“God save the circus,” she says.
When the girl passes into what passes for dreams for people like us, I go down into the din of the avenue. I walk through the lights to the darker places. There’s no moon in the sky to violate, no mothership, no hover of coming dominion. There’s just the city, jerking in its concrete seat. Maybe I’m sorry to leave the girl up there, but if I stay she’ll probably leave me. Then I’ll surely be a Larry. I’ll pace a room with the phone in my hand, eager to please some invisible slave. Good, I will say, excellent, excellent, excellent. I will never say poor. I will never say I don’t know.
Every Larry who wants to live is a liar.
The Wrong Arm
There were marks in it, divots in it, a feathering of weals and burns. These were all the scars from all the times something tried to kill her in that arm. The stove tried to kill her. The cleaver tried to kill her. The brillo nearly did it, too.
Winter, she hid the wrong arm in her home sweater. Summer was bees and bad nails in the porch door. We were worried about summer, until it was summer and we forgot to be worried anymore. We packed all the food we needed in the plaid bag, sandwiches and sandwich stuff and twist-off cups of lemon pop, packed it up and drove away. She sat up front, packed in her proper place, beside our father, wrong arm pressed against the window glass.
We were going to see the boats. The boats of the world were sailing up some river.
I wondered what the wrong arm looked like to the drivers driving by. I wondered if they saw its wrongness spread there on the window, the burnt part, the brillo’d part, the cleaver’d.
All we knew about the wrong arm was that it was wrong to touch it, to pinch it, to rub it. Any other part of her was there for us to hold. The wrong arm was not for us to take her by and lead her. The wrong arm was not for us to tap it for her to turn.
The wrong arm would never heal right. That’s why everything knew to try and kill her there. If harmed, our father told us, the wrong arm could be the end of her. He said end of her as though he meant no harm.
Our father told us about that man who died from how his mother dipped him in a river.
He had a wrong heel.
I figured I’d take the heel over the arm any day. This was given my pick. This was given if they let me pick, not just given being given what you got. Our father said sometimes you had to deal with the cards life dealt you, but I knew games where you got new ones. Lantern men granted wishes, too. I wanted to be the kind of boy who would wish the wrong arm wasn’t wrong anymore. I was worried I was the kind of boy who wouldn’t waste a wish.
My brother, my sister, we did not behave on the way to the boats. Some of us had to piss. The car needed gas. The pipe in the gas-place bathroom almost killed her. Maybe it was filled with boiling piss. We got back on the road to the boats.
There would be bees out where the boats of the world were sailing, but our father said you couldn’t be scared of everything, or you might as well be dead.
“It’s nothing to worry about,” she said to us. “I’ve had worse than bees.” She lifted the wrong arm a little where it stuck to the window.
What could be worse than bees?
Maybe wasps were worse. Maybe porch-door nails that could stick you with sickness even if your arm was right. Maybe porch-screen teeth where it was ripped and curled and our father never fixed it. Why didn’t he fix it? Wasn’t he summer worried, at least in winter? The bees were asleep then. There had been time. Who was I to say it, though? Me, who wouldn’t waste a wish.
My brother, my sister, they had their parts of the seat, to eat sandwiches on, to sing. Each of them was nothing to me. Everything that was everything was in front of me. My father was in front of me on the other side of the car. She was in front of me with just the seat between us. The wrong arm pressed through the secret slot between the seat and the door. It was our slot. I could see the blister from the hot-piss pipe. The arm would flutter whenever the road went hard.
We stopped to sit at a picnic bench, to take a picture of us, with trees.
The bench was bad with splinters.
I walked the clear and hunted for hornets. I hunted for ticks. I counted all the things that could k
ill her here. A piece of bottle, a broken comb. A thorn, even. No lantern man would ever let you wish it all away at once. You could only do it one at a time, and you’d never get it all. You’d just waste your wishes that way.
“What about here?” she said to my father.
“Not yet, not here,” my father said.
Now we were on the river road. We spotted mast tips over the river hills. The plaid bag was on the floor. I was the keeper of it now. I put my hand in to feel the sandwich wax. I heard my father talking to her under the brother-and-sister songs.
He said, “One fucking opinion.”
He said, “Don’t think that way.”
He said, “A specialist in New Paltz.”
He said, “Don’t think you’re getting away from me yet.”
He said, “We have to tell them. That’s the whole point. Who cares about the boats?”
I was beginning to care about the boats.
I was beginning to be someone who wanted to see what kind of boats the world had sent to sail here. I wanted that to be the point.
I started to ask a lot of questions about the boats. I didn’t think it was wrong to ask.
Our father said the boats would be big and from every sea-going land. He said sea-going as though he meant some harm. He said the boats were one thing, and there was also another thing we would all have to talk about when we got to the boats.
I said I had some things I wanted to talk about, too. I said I wanted to know why they boiled piss at the gas station, what purpose did it serve. I said I wanted to know why he didn’t just fix the porch screen while the bees were sleeping. I said I wanted to know if there was an Old Paltz, too.
“You shouldn’t eavesdrop,” she said. “We’ll tell you everything.”
I asked why the wrong arm was so wrong, whether what we were going to talk about was an even wronger wrongness.
“Look,” she said, “the boats.”
My father pulled the car onto a high plain, a meadow. The plaid bag slid when we braked.
We got out of the car and stood in the grass. We stood in our places from the car. People sat on blankets and bed sheets, pointed at the boats.
“Look,” said my father, and we were looking.
“Does this answer any of your questions?” he said to me.
“Some,” I said.
The wrong arm was backways in front of me like it was still in our secret slot. There were scars, blisters, sun peels, stains. There were birthmarks and marks from after being born. It could be anybody’s arm, I thought. We were making it wrong by saying it was wrong. We should be holding it and rubbing it and taking her by it to lead her somewhere. To lead her by it to the boats. We didn’t need a lantern man’s one fucking opinion in New Paltz to make my mother’s wrong arm right again. We didn’t need all the bees to go to sleep to keep the wrongness in my mother from getting wronger. We just needed to waste all our wishes.
“Let’s go closer,” I said.
And then I did the wrong thing.
My Life, for Promotional Use Only
The building where I work used to be a bank. Now it’s lots of little start-ups, private suites, outlaw architects, renegade CPA’s, club kids with three-picture deals. It’s very artsy in the elevators. Everybody’s shaved and pierced in dainty places. They are lords of tiny telephones, keepers of dogs on battery-operated ropes.
I work here for my ex-girlfriend, some sort of handy-man, or some kind of clerk. I can’t run an accounting program, or collate, or even reload a stapler right, but there’s usually something for me to do, even if it’s only to loiter, to stand around in a way that reminds Rosalie she’s my boss.
This is not hard.
Rosalie is some kind of rock star now. She’s the founder of a web site for serotonin-depleted teenage girls. They log on and rant about their home life to other oppressed teens as far away as Laos, or at least Larchmont. Rosalie’s paper-rich since a big tech outfit bought the company. There’s a line of clothing, a perfume, maybe a sitcom in the works.
Rosalie and I are still chummy. Maybe she feels sorry for me. Maybe she also resents the way I ditched her back when I was a rock star in actual minor fact. She pays me piss wages and sometimes buys me lunch.
“Let’s recap,” she’ll say, the two of us out for Indian. The condition is I tell her all about my latest girlfriend.
“Her name is Glenda,” I say. “She’s a painter.”
“Painting’s very in right now,” says Rosalie. “Or it was a few months ago. I don’t have time to keep up.”
After me, Rosalie fell in love with a boy billionaire who saw her picture in a fashion spread, one of those bulimia gazettes dedicated to time and the body’s dwindle. They had what amounted to an amorous montage, young industrialist and glamorous new media mogulette—Zürich, Paris, Crete. Then one night the kid had a coke seizure, drove his Jeep off a bridge into a lake. For me, there are only two words that count in this story: Electric windows. My father always warned me about them.
“You’re in the drink,” he said, “and the power shorts out. A dumb way to go.”
Maybe they make them differently now. I don’t drive much. Maybe the kid hit his head.
These days Rosalie wrestles her Saint Bernard through doors, calls her lawyer from the curb. Whenever she pinches a napkin in half for the big dog’s leavings, bends over for a civic-minded scoop, her jeans make this lovely spout of denim at the back. You can see a piece of the prayer wheel she has tattooed on her tailbone. Look hard and maybe you can see me there, too, shackled to the spokes, spinning, dying.
“With Glenda, is it as good as it was with us?” Rosalie says at one of our tandoori lunches. Her mouth is a cavern of cumin.
“It’s different,” I say.
“Good answer. We just did an issue on why the best ex-boyfriends lie.”
“I know,” I say, “I was there when you thought it up.”
There really is a Glenda the Painter, but she must be in her nineties by now, if she’s not dead. She was old when my mother took me to her studio on Saturdays to learn how to draw. I could never get past foreshortening feet, which I took, correctly, I think, to be symptomatic of a deep character flaw. I was some side-on maestro, though. I’d have been hot shit in ancient Egypt.
The first time someone at the office asked me about my skill-set, I thought it was some kind of mail-order frying pan. Everyone seems to have one but me. The people I work with are human résumés. They are fluent in every computer language, boast degrees in marketing and medieval song. They snowboard on everything but snow. They study esoteric forms of South American combat and go on all-deer diets. Sometimes I’m not even sure what they are up to, but I know I will read about it in one of our city’s vibrant lifestyle journals. It’s easy to detest these people, but they have such energy, such will.
I used to think I had integrity but I came to realize it was just sloth. For a few years I was the lead singer in a band of punk manqués. I couldn’t sing, but who could? Talent was not the point. The hard dick of knowingness was pushing the least of us into the light. I referred to myself as the frontman. I liked the word. I was never at the front of anything before.
Our music was in dire need of notes but we had the charm of the improperly medicated. Between songs I used to stab out cigarettes on my tongue, weep, proclaim my love for my father in all its sordid, socially-determined complexity. Everyone said they couldn’t make out the words once the music started, but I preferred it that way. God knows what people will think if they ever really hear you.
I met Rosalie when she came to our show at a converted storefront grocery at the edge of the city. Everything was a converted something down there. Every club was the Bakery, the Barber Shop, Shoe Repair. My band was already up on stage, coaxing screeches from defective Peaveys, giving in to the joy of a random cymbal splash. This was our much-theorized intro. My entrance wasn’t due for a while, not until all possible frequencies of aural inanity had cancelled themselves out.
Soon enough I would crawl into the lights with a microphone in my ass, bleat what I took to be holy.
Now I stepped out to the street in my fur stole and crash helmet, drank off my malt forty. That’s when I saw her, Rosalie, standing there in radiant slut-majesty beneath a urine-stained awning. She was talking to a tiny lady who might, in a period of categorical leniency, have passed for dwarf. This lady was selling syringes from a paper bag. I was waiting for her to recognize me, an occasional customer. Rosalie crouched in her pumps, as though smalling herself for some kind of progressive-minded field work with the dwarf. Or maybe she had finally found somebody who, as she tended to put it, really, really made sense. I smashed my bottle on a nearby sculpture, this hideous tinwork someone had dragged to the curb, maybe the second-to-last act of its agonized maker.
“The show’s started, bitch,” I said.
Rosalie wheeled.
I figured she was looking for someone to talk to her that way.
It was a good guess.
We bought an old Merc with turquoise-tipped window handles, drove past green fields and shimmering phallocracies of silo to see her bi-polar brother in Pittsburgh, PA. Going over a river I had a shudder, a sense of the terrible that would not be mine. We checked into a Super 8 motel with a bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon and a running conversation about trust. I said for her to say a secret. She confessed she had never undertaken a proper bowel movement, that only on the rarest of days, fecal baubles, marble-sized things, pressed and shiny, worried themselves through her.
This is something between us now, and I can’t say it doesn’t affect me on the job. I suffer from lackey bitterness. Treachery is an easy sideways step.
“You should see the woman try to take a dump,” I’ll tell the design team, looking to comfort them after some venomous memo from Rosalie detailing their failure to achieve a “totalizing space for commerce and dialog.”
And here’s the other thing: I can’t remember the secret I told Rosalie. I must have told her something.