Everything Matters!

by Ron Currie Jr.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sure you do. Because you’ve been lying to me about Eisa. And before you say anything in protest, listen: I am not who you think. I am not a nice guy. I want information that you have, and as a professional I am willing to do unpleasant things to you in order to get that information.”

  I have no fucking idea what he’s talking about, and I say so.

  “In college you were part of a student organization whose entire purpose was to support the formation of a Palestinian state,” not-Eric says. He leans against the countertop, folds his arms. “An organization that put to a vote a resolution of official support for suicide bombings in the West Bank and Gaza. Is this factual, so far?”

  “Yes,” I say. “And I voted against the resolution.”

  “Regardless,” not-Eric says. “During this time you were also romantically involved with the head of this organization, one Eisa Jabar. Mr. Jabar, after leaving Stanford University short of a master’s degree in poitical science, formally renounced his United States citizenship, thereby becoming a citizen of only Lebanon, where he had previously enjoyed a dual citizenship. He subsequently moved to Tripoli and, according to confirmed intelligence from multiple sources, became a Hezbollah soldier.”

  Oh good God. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  Not-Eric ignores this. “But here’s where it gets interesting,” he says. “Because here is where you seem to come back into the picture. The Hezbollah brass, realizing the talent they had in Eisa, hastily took him off the front lines and began grooming him for a leadership position. He rose quickly, working all over the Middle East in various capacities—recruiting, arms purchases, soliciting financial benefactors. He was on just such an assignment in Nicosia, Cyprus, in February of 2002.”

  “Oh. No. No, no, no.”

  “But yes,” not-Eric says. “Because we know that you, too, were in Nicosia at that time.”

  “On vacation,” I say. “I was with the Peace Corps in Botswana, Eric. Teaching kids how to put condoms on bananas, for Christ’s sake. I had no idea Eisa was in Cyprus.”

  “So you say. Except that less than a year later, Eisa was in Aswan, negotiating the purchase of a large amount of RDX explosives. November 2002. Do you remember where you were, Amy?”

  My recollection of the Peace Corps has always been a bit of a blur, and my mind races to unearth details. “In Egypt . . .”

  “On vacation?”

  “Well, yes. I went to Luxor, though. Not Aswan.”

  “You were in Aswan. You spent the majority of your time in Luxor. But you were in Aswan at the same time as Eisa.”

  “Half the point of doing the Peace Corps,” I tell him, “is traveling as much as you can in the region where you’re working.”

  “It starts to seem less and less like coincidence,” he says. “Moving along—because I have some questions I want to ask you—there were several other times, which I’m sure you also have no knowledge of, when you and Eisa were in close proximity to one another. The most recent being the last four years, during which time he’s been living in San Francisco again, off and on, under an assumed identity.”

  I put my throbbing head back, close my eyes, exhale.

  “And then,” not-Eric says, “fast forward to today. You get picked up for causing trouble on a transcontinental flight. Smoking, allegedly, though when our crew goes over that plane I’ve no doubt they’re going to find something more damning than a cigarette butt.”

  “I was smoking. That’s it. I swear.”

  “You understand, I hope, the roots of our suspicion.”

  “The only thing I understand,” I say, “is that evidently no matter what I say, you’re going to think I’m a terrorist.”

  Not-Eric takes a pair of latex gloves from the towel-thing and slides them on, flexing his fingers to make a snug fit. “Terrorist?” he says. “No. That’s not really how I think of you. Besides, the word’s been drained of all its meaning anyway. Six years of ‘terrorist this’ and ‘terrorist that.’ ”

  He cuffs me across the face a few times in quick succession, just hard enough to sting a little and make my head bob around. Like kneading dough, or tenderizing meat. I haven’t been touched this way since Mom, but the reaction is the same all these years later: fear evaporates instantly, leaving behind crystallized defiance.

  Then the questions start.

  Not-Eric is not getting the answers he wants. As a consequence, he hits me: with his fists and feet, a phone book, an electrical cord. At first he thinks that hitting me will produce the answers he wants. I just keep inviting him to go fuck himself. He can’t figure it out. He hits me some more and I get angrier with each blow, until I’m whipping my hair around and screaming at him and spraying my own blood all over the place.

  Finally he tells me to shut up and slams me in the temple, a dazzling hammer-fist shot. It works—I shut up. My vision narrows to the size of a toilet paper roll, and I can’t seem to hold my head up for more than a few seconds at a time before it drops back down to my chest. I catch glimpses, though, of not-Eric going back to the countertop and lifting one of the shiny metal implements. This one looks like a miniature set of pruning shears.

  My mother, mean and crazy as she is, never used anything like this on me.

  I struggle against the handcuffs as not-Eric approaches again. He asks me from what seems like very far away if I’m sure I don’t have anything I want to tell him. Anything at all. I try to respond but nothing comes out of my mouth except bloody drool. Not-Eric steps behind the chair. I feel him separate my pinkie from the rest of my fingers. Then I feel the cold pinch of the shears at the top knuckle.

  Anything at all?

  I can’t talk. And even if I could.

  The shears close. I hear it but don’t feel it.

  I must pass out, because the next thing I know the front door flies open and a blond man with cheekbones that could not possibly exist outside of a dream steps into the kitchen with a pistol in each hand. Not-Eric makes a move for his gun on the countertop, but the man shoots him twice in the chest. When not-Eric falls the man steps calmly over to him and pumps another bullet into his head. Then he stands looking down at the body, and I’m able to read the T-shirt he’s got on beneath his sportscoat: I LOVE YOU LIKE A FAT KID LOVES CAKE.

  All this, fucked up and unlikely as it seems, might exist somewhere on the outer edge of plausible. Given how the rest of my day has gone, I might be able to believe that even the T-shirt is actually happening. But the next moment, Junior, eight years dead, walks through the door, and that’s when I know that the trauma of my day with not-Eric has scrambled my brain. Because this is definitely not happening. No way.

  The detail is amazing, though: Junior’s arm in a sling, his face a swollen mass of yellow and black. The warmth of his hand, the good one, on my face. The sound of his voice, unchanged by time and death, as he hollers at the man with the cheekbones to get the cuffs off my wrists and ankles. The relief, like floating in warm water, when Junior throws off his sling and lifts me with a grimace.

  I let him gather me in and I put my face in his chest.

  In the dream, I go to sleep.

  Love, Redux

  For obvious reasons the sex is far and away the most painful either of you has ever experienced. Of course your own sexual experience is limited, and what’s more you’ve never before had sex while recovering from a grade 3 concussion, eight separate fractures, and external and internal contusions too extensive to quantify. Amy, on the other hand, has had a lot of sex, with many partners, and as a woman is more accustomed to associating sex with pain, but even so she’s never moaned and writhed and cried like this.

  Aside from the injuries themselves, part of the reason you’re in so much pain is because your body, in its excitement, is hyperalert, magnifying and exaggerating every bit of stimulus. Your cerebellum is inflamed with neural chatter, signals of pain and pleasure swirling and melding until they are more or less indisti
nguishable. The difference between positive and negative sensations has become irrelevant; all that matters is that the sensations be copious and intense, and they are both. Every neuron, encoded with years of stifled longing, strains toward Amy—toward her hair fanned out on the pillow, toward the boyishly modest swell of her hips, lumpy with bruises though they are. In a very literal and unsentimental way your desire for her exists and functions on a molecular level. Love, in its purest form, is biology.

  Amy’s having a pretty good time, too, despite the pain. First, because it’s not as though her boyfriend Oscar was really getting it done, so to speak—they did not have sex often, and Oscar is not very deft with either his hands or his tongue. Consequently it’s been a long while since Amy’s had an orgasm that was not administered by the cold silicone of her Fun Factory Waterproof Deluxe Dolphin shower vibe.

  On one level this makes you no more or less than an extra-extra large, warm-blooded version of the Fun Factory Waterproof Deluxe Dolphin shower vibe—except you’re not really waterproof, and, sadly, you do not vibrate.

  Of course that’s not all you are to Amy. We’ll put it plainly so there is no confusion: She loves you, but not the way you love her. No molecular-level longing on her end. She doesn’t experience temporary retardation in your presence, as you do in hers. She hasn’t had recurring dreams of loss and pain featuring you for the past fourteen years. In fact, she goes for months at a time without thinking of you at all.

  Yet she does love you. The thrill she feels as you kiss the spot where her neck meets her jaw is not merely the rush of skin on skin. Her trembling is not just trauma and lust. The tears seeping from her swollen eyelids are spurred by several emotions, and her gratitude at being here with you after all this time is not least among them.

  There is love, and then there is love. Either way, as far as you’re concerned, whatever it is that Amy feels for you is more than enough to make and keep you happy. This inequity of feeling couldn’t matter less. There is still enough, you think, to build a life around. Of course you believe this because you need to, not necessarily because it’s so.

  The question, naturally, is whether or not Amy shares this conviction.

  At the moment it’s too early to say. Which, you know, try to be fair and reasonable: In the past seventy-two hours, the woman has left behind her home, her job, her dog, and her relationship of four years. She’s been arrested, kidnapped, punched, kicked, and whipped with electrical cord. She’s had half a finger snipped off. She’s had occasion to consider the likelihood of her own painful and premature death, strapped to a chair in some stinking abandoned farmhouse. And just as she was ready to resign herself to that fate she was rescued, in a violent and shocking manner, by her long-dead high school sweetheart and his personal government assassin.

  All that considered, yes, it would probably be good form to give her some time to think things over.

  But first things first: she wants to know about the end of the world.

  You’re lying very still postcoitus, pressed together down the full length of your battered bodies.

  “You’re not crazy,” she says.

  “I never was,” you tell her.

  “But how?” she asks. “That’s what I don’t understand.”

  “Like I explained to you before,” you say, wincing as you roll onto your side to face her. “It’s not as though I really understand it myself.”

  She thinks for a minute. “Is it God?” she asks, and her matter-of-fact tone seems odd, given the scope of the question.

  “I don’t know,” you say. “Possibly. Or maybe it’s just a form of ESP that has nothing to do with the divine.”

  “But a voice?” Amy says. “That doesn’t sound like ESP to me, Junior. ESP is like visions. Dreams and visions. Not a voice in your head.”

  “How can we know that?” you say.

  She smirks at you. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That you’re still only interested in what can be known. One hundred percent, unequivocally known,” she says. “You’re not willing to entertain even the fairly reasonable speculation that a voice in your head is more likely God, or someone anyway, rather than ESP.”

  “That’s not really it,” you say. “I just wonder if we have the language to describe what I hear. Maybe it’s not God or ESP. Maybe it’s both of those things—what’s the word for that?”

  “There is none.”

  “Right,” you say. “Believe me, I’ve given this plenty of thought over the past thirty-plus years. We’re not going to sort it out in an evening.”

  “Stands to reason.”

  “Besides, it’s what I know, not how I know, that matters.”

  Several minutes pass during which neither of you speaks, and silence, since your father’s death, has been a bad and dangerous thing. Any time you have more than a few moments to think you are haunted by memories of him. Now another one rises: You are three or four years old, and it is winter. You are tottering around the public ice rink that the city used to put up by the river every December, back when the winters were consistently cold enough to keep the rink frozen through March. You’re wearing skates that once belonged to Rodney. He outgrew them, but they’re still a couple sizes too large for you. You are not skating so much as taking a series of tiny, ankle-buckling steps. Older boys buzz past at impossible speeds on either side of you, sometimes close enough to brush against the nylon shell of your jacket. You’re terrified of the speed and proximity of the older boys, the way they appear suddenly from behind and then hurtle ahead, only to come all the way around again in the time it takes you to move seven or eight halting steps. You try to get off the ice, but every time you move toward the edge of the rink you are cut off. You look over your shoulder and see a large boy with premature whiskers on his top lip scream around the turn behind you with frightening speed. You are certain you’ll be run down and killed, and you look away from your fate, bracing yourself, but the blow doesn’t come. You feel the boy’s hand on your shoulder as he sidesteps and spins at the last instant, cursing as he passes, now skating backward. You’ve moved one lane closer to the salvation of the outer wall but your nerve is gone, so instead of trying to escape you keep tottering forward, praying, in your manner, for deliverance.

  Then deliverance comes, in the form of strong familiar hands grasping you from behind, whisking you up from the surface of the ice and setting you to rest on wide shoulders. You are flying now, and it is the older boys who make way suddenly, scattering as you rush past at twice, three times their speed, so fast that as you veer into the turn you have to lean at a fairly steep angle to compensate for the intense centrifugal force, and now you have outpaced everyone and there’s nothing in front of you except open ice, and you are shrieking with glee and fear, gleeful fear, and the fear is hollow anyway, because the wide shoulders you’re sitting on and the strong hands that hold you firmly in place belong to your father, and even though you know little about the man, what you do know is that he is always, always in control, and so nothing can possibly go wrong.

  With this memory, as with the others that have haunted you the past few days, you wonder if they’re real or just imagined, and we can tell you that this one, at least, happened exactly as you remember it.

  “What am I going to do about my family?” Amy asks.

  Her voice brings you back to the present. “Arrangements can be made for all of them. If that’s what you want.”

  “Of course it is,” she says emphatically. And then, more softly, to herself almost: “Of course it is.”

  “Of course.” You turn and nestle and kiss the top of her head.

  “No one knows where my father is, though.”

  “He can be found,” you say, pressing gently at your eyes with the heels of your hands. “Quite easily, in fact.”

  “But see when you say ‘arrangements,’ I’m not even sure what you mean.”

  “We haven’t talk
ed about that, have we?”

  “Nope.”

  “Long version, or short?”

  “Neither of us has to be anywhere, right?”

  “You mind if I grab another beer first?”

  She shakes her head even though part of her really does mind, because she knows booze and what it does to people like you in places like this, where winter lasts half the year and nine dollars an hour is considered a good wage. She is determined not to caretake anymore, not even for you, so be warned: she won’t stop you, but neither will she tolerate it beyond a certain point. You make your way painfully across the hotel room to the cube fridge, remove a Bud Light bottle, and return to the bed.

  Amy listens intently as you tell her everything: Bulgaria. Sawyer and the Program. Warp drives and biospheres and spacecraft the size of Cleveland being constructed piecemeal by a dozen different contractors all over the country, so that those doing the constructing have no real idea what they’re working on. Massive hangars hollowed out beneath the red clay of the Southwest, where, in several years, those fortunate enough to be selected in the lottery will gather. The planet Gliese 689 d, future home of these lottery winners.

  “And of course,” you say, “I have the influence to secure anyone you want a one-way trip. Within reason. Your mom and dad. Your brother. A few friends.”

  “What about Oscar?”

  “Sure,” you say. “If you wanted.”

  “I think that I would,” she says.

  “Done.” You worry faintly that this means she’s not done with him entirely, but believe us when we tell you that she is.

  Amy takes the beer from you, sips, thinks for a minute. “So in two years San Francisco is gone,” she says. “Mount Sinai. Paris. Victoria Falls. Have you ever been to Victoria Falls? I went swimming there once, while I was with the Peace Corps. Amazing.”