The Removed

by Brandon Hobson

  I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “I mean you’ll get used to feeling sad,” he said. “I used to sit in this torn booth at the Regal Café downtown and drink coffee and try to meet people, but nobody wanted to talk to me. One night I was there at three in the morning, and a man and woman sitting across from me kept looking over and whispering. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the napkin dispenser, and I looked goddamn pathetic. My eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep, I was unshaven, I looked like I was in pain. Everyone kept glancing in my direction. A construction worker sitting at the counter made eye contact with me and then looked away, shaking his head. It was terrible.”

  I didn’t respond. He sniffed hard, then took a deep breath.

  “It was like this before, though, sort of. From an early age I didn’t like my face. Remember my uncle, who raised me? He always made dumb remarks about it.”

  I didn’t remember, but I nodded anyway and took another drink.

  “He sat in his stupid wooden rocking chair every night, drinking and smoking cigarettes. He wore glasses and mumbled to himself. I remember nights in bed, how I imagined myself escaping while he slept beside me, snoring like a goddamn bear. Every so often he had seizures. I’m glad they found him murdered in his bed.”

  He apologized. It occurred to me how badly Jackson needed someone to talk to, even first thing in the morning. He changed the subject and began talking about his life with his ex-lover, their arguments about money and having other lovers. I listened to every strange story. I rarely spoke, nodding to confirm I understood what he was talking about. He stared past me as he reeled in sad memories. There were parties and drugs. He grew tired of people.

  “You still shoot hoops?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “Too out of shape. Plus I never liked it much. You were a great athlete for a while. You were the next Jim Thorpe. You even looked like him. Still do.”

  “I guess I lost interest.”

  “I was awful,” he said. “I came off the bench in the semifinals at the huge fucking Mabee Center and blew it. I shot an air ball from the baseline. I missed a layup. I head-faked left and airballed a hook shot.”

  We were both quiet.

  “Speaking of Jim Thorpe, I need to tell you about this software I’m working on,” he said “It’s game development. A sports game, really simple. Everyone loves sports games these days. In this game, you can play sports with Jim Thorpe. You challenge him and compete in basketball one-on-one, hitting at the plate in baseball, tackling and throwing passes in football. The game’s called Thorpe 3D.” He went on to talk in great length about a projector-like device that emitted a hologram of Jim Thorpe. The hologram could have whole conversations, apparently. Jackson said he could make new holograms from any image found on the web. The possibilities were endless.

  “Holograms,” I said.

  “Yeah, they’re basically lasers that produce high-frequency pulses,” he said. “They’re images that talk and listen to you. We’re working on the voice-activation software at the moment. I’ll show you it soon. It’s downstairs in the basement. The images are incredibly real-looking. You can shoot hoops with them, throw a football.”

  “But you can’t touch them?”

  “The lasers burn your skin, which is a problem. A friend of mine burned his face trying to strangle a hologram. He was a retired prison guard from the federal reformatory. Anyway, right now I’m working on making holograms of other Indians. I could use your help. When you play three versus three against Jim Thorpe, you need other avatars. I can study your features.”

  “You need other Indians,” I said. “This is what you want my help with? Because I’m Native?”

  “Pretty much,” he said. He laughed, coughing dust.

  THAT NIGHT I WAS UNABLE to fall asleep, too warm, unclear exactly where I was. I had my cell phone, but it wasn’t registering a location. I tried to meditate and concentrate on something peaceful: an open field at dusk, an ocean, a cloudless sky. I needed peace. I didn’t want to think about Rae or my family. I didn’t want to think about anything. I stepped into the hall bathroom and closed the door behind me, locking it. The mirror was smudged. When I turned on the faucet, rusty water splattered out, gurgling in the pipes. I knocked on the faucet a few times with the butt of my hand, but the pipe kept gurgling. The walls were light green and ticked. I felt certain I was being paranoid, but strange houses always made me uneasy at first.

  Back in my bedroom, though, I heard barking outside and looked out the window. In the fog outside I saw hounds rummaging around, tearing into garbage. One of the hounds ran off with a small animal in its mouth. The others were fighting, growling and barking at each other, their eyes yellow in the night. I saw the red fowl strut right past them, its head cocked. How did it follow me here? The fowl walked slowly, pecking at the ground. The wind moaned through the cracks in the windowsill. I saw dark trees with drooping branches out there. I saw black vultures hanging in the moonlit sky.

  Sonja

  SEPTEMBER 2

  WHEN RAY-RAY WAS STILL ALIVE, in the summers we used to ride our bikes out to the river and swim. We splashed and wrestled in the water. I was only one grade ahead of him. We got along really well, and because he was my little brother, he was very protective of me. I remember once a group of boys from his school showed up when we were swimming in a shallow area. Some of the boys started teasing him about me, telling him I was pretty.

  “Hey, look at that hot ass,” they said. “Hey, Ray-Ray! Your sister easy?”

  “Shut up, fuckers,” he called to them. “You guys wish she would even talk to you.”

  “Faggot,” one of them said.

  I thought it was all harmless, at least at first, but then Ray-Ray ended up getting mad and fighting one of the boys. I watched the whole thing until the other boys broke it up.

  “I hate them,” Ray-Ray told me later, but he wouldn’t tell me why. I just assumed it was because they were harassing him. I wasn’t as social as he was. I was quiet, mostly an introvert in high school, and other kids knew I was unpopular. Maybe my being quiet and unpopular bothered him. I wish I knew. We were a private family. Papa gave me comfort by telling me to let people think what they want. Let bad people be bad people, he told me.

  The day after our encounter, Vin called, but I let it go to my voice mail. He left a message saying he had been thinking about me and wanted to know whether I would like to have coffee with him in downtown Quah at the Roasted Bean. It was noon. I waited an hour to return his call, partly to give the impression that I was busier than I actually was and partly to show that I was not checking my phone so often, waiting for him to call. When he answered, he asked if we could meet for coffee while Luka was in school, or was I too busy? So I agreed to meet him at the Roasted Bean in an hour.

  When I saw him there, I pretended to act happy, and the first thing he did was apologize for acting a little “out of it,” he said, or maybe he said “out of touch,” or maybe “out of town.” He said he was taking Benadryl due to all the rain stirring up his allergies. He bought me a chai tea and himself a mocha, ordering for both of us; I found it strange that he ordered for me.

  “My dad’s really sick,” he said.

  “Oh, really?” I said, and my attention sharpened. “Sick how?”

  “He’s on chemo. He has lung cancer, and they’re bringing in hospice to care for him at his house. It’s so sad to watch him have to go through this.”

  “You’re close to your dad?” I asked.

  “We’re closer now than ever. He’s kept to himself since he retired. He lives out in the woods north of town.”

  “He doesn’t come into town much, huh?”

  “No, why do you ask?”

  “I know more about your family than you think.” He gave me an uncertain look, so I laughed it off and told him I was joking.

  “Does chemo really even help?” I asked quietly into my cup. “Doesn’t it just kill people eventually?”r />
  “It depends.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m Cherokee, and we live forever, you know.”

  “I was thinking you were Hispanic. I mean, I knew you were part something, something, but I wasn’t sure.”

  “I’m something,” I said.

  He laughed, oddly, and I sensed a part of him I didn’t care for. Why he’d said it that way: something. We walked down the sidewalk, past the little shops selling university paraphernalia, past the tattoo shop and the flower shop and the Thai restaurant where Papa liked to eat. We crossed the street, and I took his arm, feeling his energy as we walked. We strolled over to the alley between Muskogee and Shawnee, passing a dumpster behind Morgan’s Bakery, and came to the back entrance of a local club where Vin played every so often. We stopped walking here, and he pushed me against the red brick of the building and kissed me hard. I embraced him, running my fingers through his hair. I let him touch me, run his hands over my body. We kissed for a while. I reached down to feel that he was hard and grabbed him, telling him I wanted him to take me right there. He said we could go to his house.

  “I want you here,” I told him, right there in the alley, and he pulled back somewhat aggressively, telling me it wasn’t safe, people walked down the alley all the time.

  I laughed at him.

  “What’s so funny?” he said. “We can’t do it here, people will see.”

  “So what if we get caught? Someone may watch us and get off, or take a picture and post it online. Who cares?”

  I dug in my purse for a cigarette and looked at him.

  “Let’s just go to my house,” he said again.

  His car was parked down the street from the Roasted Bean. During the walk back, I didn’t take his arm. I wondered what had happened and why he was suddenly so stressed, or if it was something else entirely that had created such a strange shift. He drove us to his house and parked in the drive. From here I could see the iron-fenced backyard, his back porch with its lawn chairs and table. I had seen none of this from the library. Outside, somewhere nearby, I heard an owl in broad daylight. I asked Vin whether he heard it, too, but he said he didn’t. We stopped by the back porch and waited to listen, but the bird didn’t call again. Vin asked if I was sure it was an owl. Maybe it was a car horn far away, he suggested. Or maybe a different bird or a bobcat. But I told him I know when I hear an owl. It worried me because Papa taught me that owls can be messengers of bad news. Papa had told me old Cherokee stories of dead people turning into owls and bringing warnings to people. When I said this to Vin, he said he found superstitions fascinating. I could tell he didn’t take it seriously.

  “There’s a lot to be said about owls,” I told him as I waited for him to unlock the door, but he didn’t respond.

  We went through the back door into the kitchen, and I followed him into the living room, which was modestly decorated, with a TV and stereo in the corner of the room, pictures of abstract art on the walls and above the fireplace mantel. A red couch, a recliner, a coffee table. Old hardwood floors with Legos, action figures, and various toys. I sat on the sofa while Vin went into another room and returned with a baggie of weed. I watched him roll a joint on the coffee table carefully, sprinkling the weed into the paper and then sealing it. He lit it with his lighter and passed it to me, and we smoked it down. He had two shelves entirely filled with record albums, organized by genre and alphabetized by band name. He was interested in eighties music, bands I had no interest in: Split Enz, Bow Wow Wow, Bowie.

  “Why don’t you listen to real rock?” I said to him.

  “I do,” he said. “But I like New Wave bands, too. You like Morrissey?”

  “You’re kind of a pussy,” I said, and he seemed annoyed. I watched him go through his album sleeves and tell me about them. There was a different story attached to each album, to each song. He told me about his first dance with a girl in sixth grade, about a series of firsts: first kiss, first fuck. First drunk, first acid trip, first party in college. Each album held a special memory. His whole life was contained in the sleeves of those albums. I found his obsession amusing and a little endearing.

  Around seven in the evening we stepped out the back door onto the porch and sat on his patio. We drank wine as he talked about his own music. He didn’t ask many questions about me but seemed more interested in himself, his band, and letting me know he was serious about it. I yawned into my wineglass, stoned but invested enough in him that I wanted to take him upstairs to his bed. We fell silent, and I studied his face, long and stolid, unshaven. His nose was thin and his eyes were gleaming and dark. He stared back at me, and because I was stoned, the look felt long and important. Then, abruptly, he stopped looking at me and stared toward the kitchen.

  Luka was there, in the light of the house, watching us through the screen door. I’d assumed he was with his mom, especially since we’d been at Vin’s house for what felt like hours, and Vin had made no mention of him. I lit a cigarette and turned in my chair so I could see him better. He was holding a toy in his hand that he kept tapping against his leg as he watched me. For a moment that’s all we did: stare at each other, though it was hard to tell for how long because of the weed. His hair was unkempt, but in a way that looked boyish and cute. He lifted his toy to his face, and I realized it was actually a pair of binoculars. He held them there, staring.

  “I see you,” I said.

  He opened the door and stepped outside, approaching us slowly, cautious. His mouth was open as he held the binoculars to his eyes, and I could see his little white teeth, his small chin. His skin was olive-colored, his elbows dry and white. Then he lowered the binoculars and looked at me, and I saw something mysterious in his striking eyes, more than sadness, more than loneliness, probing for affection. In this fragile way he searched my own face, curious, looking as gentle and innocent as any boy I had ever seen. Vin introduced me as Colette, his new friend, and I asked Luka what his favorite thing to eat was, and he said ice cream, so I suggested we all go out for ice cream, my treat. With this, I won a smile from him.

  As we all went back inside, the living room was flooded with light, though I was still a little stoned. Vin put on his sunglasses and drove us to the ice cream parlor downtown, observing the speed limit. We pulled up to the drive-thru window, and he ordered our ice cream cones from a boy in black-framed glasses, his hair gelled in a very fifties way. His glasses magnified his eyes as he leaned forward out of the window to take our order. On the drive back Vin kept talking about how the boy held an uncanny resemblance to Buddy Holly, but I was turned around in my seat, watching Luka eat his ice cream with a spoon. “I’ve never seen anyone eat an ice cream cone like that,” I told him, and he responded without looking at me: “I like it this way.”

  Vin’s weed was really good, better than anything I had smoked in a long time, and it took me a while to come down from my high. After Luka went upstairs to his room, we listened to music in the living room, and Vin began to ramble on again about the bands he had played in. I found much of this boring and asked him to be quiet so I could listen to the music. “Goddamn, that’s sexy,” I said. “Who is this?”

  “Sam Cooke.”

  He kissed my neck a little, and I closed my eyes, listening to Sam Cooke sing about bringing it on home to me and feeling Vin’s warm breath, his hands. Soon we were kissing.

  He said he wanted me to keep hanging out with him. He would make spaghetti for dinner and open another bottle of wine. “So you’ll stay with me,” he said.

  “Oh really?” I said.

  We went into the kitchen, and he backed me against the counter and kissed me, running his hands over my body. He asked me whether I wanted him, and I said I did. “After Luka’s in bed we’ll go upstairs,” he said. He was handsome, but not a great conversationalist. As he made dinner, he talked about how he wasn’t registered to vote because politics wasn’t his thing. I wondered whether he even knew how he felt on certain issues or if he was a person who simply didn’t care. “I don�
��t watch the news or pay much attention to what’s going on in the world,” he said. “I get bored so easily with anything political. It’s all shit. Watching the news is all about fear and violence anyway.” He preferred music and movies. He preferred not thinking about the world too much, things like mass shootings, poverty.

  “People are dying all around us,” I said. Or maybe I said, “People are falling in love all around us.” But I knew he wasn’t interested.

  He said Luka was on the autism spectrum. Luka’s mother, Vin’s ex-girlfriend, was in jail, he told me, for distribution of meth, adding that he didn’t want to talk about it anymore because he became too angry whenever he thought about her. About the only thing I told him was that I knew what it was like to be around kids without a mom, since my mother had been a social worker. While I talked, I watched him set two spots at the table. He called Luka to get his food. A moment later Luka came down and took his plate upstairs to eat in his room.

  “What an adorable son you have,” I told him.

  Later, after Luka had gone to bed and we’d finished the bottle of wine, I followed Vin upstairs to his bedroom. It was surprisingly messy compared to the rest of the house. He clearly hadn’t planned on me seeing his bedroom, or maybe he didn’t care. There were clothes on the floor and on a dresser, a few of Luka’s toy cars in the corner, and the bed was a tumble of covers. In a way I found it humorous. His walls were a faded turquoise, with a few framed pictures of people I assumed were family members on them. A mahogany-framed oval mirror that looked like an antique hung over his dresser. It was charming compared to the rest of the decor.

  He came over to me and kissed me a long time, running his hands along my sides, over my breasts. I preferred it this way, to be slowly caressed. I wanted to indulge in him. I put my hand against him and told him I could be loud sometimes, and was that a problem, since Luka was down the hall? “So what,” he said, and I pushed him onto the bed, planning to get on top of him, but he took my arms and wrestled me to my back. I watched him unbutton his shirt and pull it off. He clearly wanted to take charge, so I let him, though somewhat reluctantly. In the past I’d found that guys who wanted control were careless and quick. It appeared he wanted to take his time, though. I sat up and raised my arms so that he could pull my shirt off. He was still standing, wanting me to watch him unbutton his jeans and take them off. He did this slowly. He did not take off his boxer shorts but instead leaned forward onto the bed and kissed me without restraint. I could feel the tension in the muscles of his arms and legs. What I can say about that first time with him was that he was not trying too hard, like so many other lovers I had been with.