by Miles Klee
LEV
We’re the real thing.
TOM
Are you, now. They said a mobile center wouldn’t hit this neighborhood for another couple months. Maybe I need a new calendar, hnn?
DH
What about your wife?
TOM
What about her?
LEV
Lie down already.
Tom gets on the table and shuts his eyes as DH pulls down a Hallaxor tank, attaching a tube to a mask.
TOM
I can drive home after?
LEV
More or less.
Tom laughs.
DH
What?
TOM
Forgot I sold the shit car to get the money to bet.
Lev rolls his eyes, fits the mask over Tom’s nose and mouth. DH twists the tank valve.
LEV
We aren’t responsible if you’re allergic, but we’ll dump you at a hospital if anything happens.
DH
You’ve got to breathe deep. You’re going to feel sleepy, but you will not be asleep.
LEV
Sure won’t.
They roll Tom onto his stomach, and DH draws an incision line with a marker. Lev pours half a bottle of water over his lucky scalpel and slices the back of Tom’s neck open as DH watches with growing unease, knowing he’s already cut too deep.
AIDAN /// IVYLAND, NEW JERSEY /// THIRTEEN YEARS AGO
Henri swings stubby legs under the bench, ratty catcher’s mask locked in the raised position so he can chew and spit sunflower seeds. He musters inhuman gobs of saliva’n’shell fragments that absorb dugout sand, clotting into putrid buttons you can feel through cleats. Henri playing catcher not because he’s the best at it; Stanley just figured that’s where the fat kid goes.
“Kilham! On deck!” Stanley yells from the other side of the dugout.
Coach Stanley. A next-level alcoholic. Guy who clarified what it meant to be one right as his species went extinct. Never without this shiny film on his face, as I only saw him in Jersey’s swampy late spring and early summer, and the sort of gnarled gray hair and creased cheeks a Jack London fur trapper would sport in his twilight years, squinting beneath the brim of a crappy mesh hat. Yes, Stanley, pride of our suburban little league circuit, was the inevitable byproduct of volunteerism. Henri’d finally put his foot down on the hide-his-flask trick we always played, saying the man’s life is already too sad, an excuse that annoys more than a flat refusal.
“Sean’s using it.”
Stanley does like he’s having an idiocy-related aneurysm.
“Well take it away fromm’im!”
“But he’s batting now …” The protest disintegrates.
“Use mine,” Henri wheezes through a repellent mouth, seeds sliming out. Sean hits the kind of pop fly that’s an easy out for anyone but little leaguers. It’s caught, though, and a lone Hawaiian-shirted weirdo in the bleachers claps twice. I take a few cuts with Henri’s monster bat.
“Ou godda behd yr deez,” Henri garbles, mouth even fuller than before.
“Bend my knees. Don’t act like you made that advice up, butt nugget,” I tell him. Henri guffaws, seeds chuckling forward. I laugh, too. “You have like an infinite number of seeds in your mouth! Your head is just a sack of sunflower seeds! Look at you!” Now we’re in hysterics, headed toward full-body laughter I won’t be able to shake by the time I reach the plate.
*
“There’s one.”
Game’s over. I struck out looking, team lost again, Stanley urinated on the pitcher’s mound and thereby salvaged a kernel of pride. We’re trolling the neighborhood on bike after ditching equipment in my mom’s minivan. The house I have in mind is a sad shade of mustard and sits atop a hill cluttered with trees and overgrown bushes. Henri pushes sweat-laden bangs away from his eyes, panting softly as I jump off my bike and prop it against a telephone pole.
“I don’t want to.” I find and throw a pebble, which can’t help hitting him somewhere in the chest. “I told you to stop. They’re home, anyway.”
“O my God, Henri. Like anyone cares.”
“Easy for you to say. Not all as skinny and agile as you. Someone did come out, you’d be a block away in no time. Whereas I’d have to bend over and rest after running like ten feet.” He swings a leg over his bike’s crossbar and puts down the kickstand with his hand, a dumb method in my opinion.
“I’d stay with you.”
“BS.”
“You’re the BS.” I toe a crack in the sidewalk and attempt to pry the concrete slabs apart with my foot. Henri has his hands in his pockets. “Are you coming or not?”
“It’s weird.”
“What is?” No answer. “Nothing else to do.”
“Get some bottles and play Submarine.”
“I’m bored of Submarine. “Come on, wienie-puff.” I absently karate-kick at the waist-high grass along the curb, pausing every few seconds to tear crumbly caps off of the blades and flick the powder at Henri.
“Would you stop!” he pleads, unable to suppress a giggle.
“Weenie-puff, weenie-puff,” I chant, like he’s stepping up to the plate. He really can hit.
“You can’t make me. So far, too.” He’s not exaggerating: probably about seventy-five steps to the top, and steep ones. “This is so stupid.”
“That’s why we do it. Stupid kids. Weenie-puff.”
“Pish-posh.”
“Pish-posh? Are you, like, the Queen of England now?”
“‘Pish-posh’ is a perfectly acceptable term.”
“You saying ‘pish-posh,’ that’s the pish-posh.”
“I’ll go up if you stop saying ‘pish-posh.’ “
“Deal. After you.” I jab my index finger into his spine to get us going. The steps have wooden frames but are filled in with gravel. I occasionally grab a handful and toss a gentle spray at Henri.
“What is it with you and throwing things?”
The lawn is drier and pale as the hill stretches upward. When I start to listen to him, Henri is saying something about how human waste that ends up in septic tanks is sold as fertilizer once the solid waste and pathogens and stuff are filtered out.
“That why you’re always shitting on your lawn?”
“Said you have to filter it.”
“Could you walk any slower?”
“Told you this hill would suck.”
“Fine, stay here.”
I shove Henri aside and bound up the remaining steps, leaving him next to a fat pine near the top. When I arrive at a crumbling brick stoop, I notice all the creepy paraphernalia of a person who tried to fit in but failed spectacularly: a battalion of lawn ornaments dot the crest of the hill, many with parts designed to spin in the breeze. They’re motionless, rusted in place. Wooden wind chimes, maybe a dozen sets, bonily chatter from freestanding steel rods. The first floor windows are caked with dust on the inside.
“Henri?” I turn to hiss. There’s only a rustling. Out of a desire to get it over with, I tiptoe up to the door and find the mailbox off to one side, turn the old-fashioned red flag thing up to the ‘got mail’ position. Pointless, really. I start back down two steps at a time.
Behind me, from the house, comes a definite thump. I veer off the path, twist my ankle on tilted ground and go down in a cloud of limbs. Scrambling with hands and feet, I get behind the pine Henri had been waiting near and peek around it at the front stoop. There’s a screech as the screen door swings out savagely, then a snort as the man who opened it steps outside.
Wet, yellowish skin: looks like he sweats potato-chip grease, but every third day it’s gasoline instead. He rocks side to side on filthy feet while surveying the property from his stoop, dressed only in a stained tank top and boxer-briefs the color of old paper, with a pistol jammed in the elastic waistband.
The raised red lever on his mailbox registers at last; he flings the tin thing open and slams it shut in one motion. He stares at the closed mailbox li
ke he’s trying to meld minds with a higher life force. Then he punches it, leaving a crater. The sound coaxes a woman’s voice from inside the house—can’t be made out, but the inflection is of casual worry.
“Supposed to get a check today,” he yells in. “Dickhead mailman is playing games.” He wrenches the red flag off and hurls it down the hill, then brandishes the gun, asserting its realness, and disappears inside to answer a follow-up question from the female voice. I crawl under the low-hanging pine branches and find Henri a few feet away. He’s sitting between two pricker bushes and pulling up grass by its roots.
“What happened?”
“Shut up and go. Not the stairs.”
“Fine.”
“And shut up,” I remind him.
Henri shrugs, gets up and starts threading his way through the overgrown vegetation with the expediency of a dying turtle. I can’t leave him. I kick him hard in the ass instead, and he wheels around with an expression of silent indignation.
A gunshot punctures the air above us. I shove Henri to the ground next to the shrubbery lining the stairway and topple onto him in the process. We roll apart and tense up. A drop of sweat bleeds into my eye. Henri’s heartbeat mingled with mine. Mine faster. We keep our eyes on the one stair visible through the brush. Two bare feet drop onto it and shift around anxiously.
“Still here, aren’t you,” the guy shouts. “Good. Long as you’re trespassing I can still kill you.” We wait a long minute and hear him spit. “Fuck it,” he says quietly, and the feet withdraw.
“I think that’s old man Clafter,” Henri whispers.
“Listen to you with the old man shit.”
“You know, Leo’s dad.”
“You didn’t even see him.”
I raise my head and spot the man up near our pine, parting its branches with his gun to look for a climber. We get to our feet and move as silently as boys could ever hope to, slinking through the last clusters of bushes toward the street.
“You know why he went crazy, right?”
“How would I?”
“Cause their other son got all messed up from VV when he was little. You know, the gas? He was allergic—stopped his brain from developing.”
“Such a liar.”
“Yeah-huh, Leo never got VV, the gas is too risky if there’s a family history. And his older brother—”
“Leo doesn’t have a brother.”
“Then why’d he beat up Jack for saying it? Anyway they bought him twenty years guaranteed at Harvey House and that’s why Leo’s too poor for school lunch.”
I glance back up the hill in time to notice that Mr. Clafter or whoever is crouched like a spider on the front stoop and calmly training his gun on us. A shot goes wide, burying itself in the lawn with a queasy thunng. I gasp as though it passed clean through me.
We drop into a gravity-assisted sprint. Every breath stabs at shredded lungs. Joints are pumped fluid. Another shot. Henri, a few feet in front of me, is running like he’s forgotten his body, running so fast that he can’t compensate for the last bush in our way and catches the side of it with his shoulder, knocking a whitish football-shaped bees’ nest out of its niche within.
Buzzing dots unfunnel from the papery ball as it tumbles downhill with us. Tearfully I barrel through the swarm, taking dozens of stings in my forearms, the only shields I have. The sound gooey terror, a living chainsaw. Henri tramples the nest as it rolls into his path. Pop and hiss of two more bullets. One for each of us. Bone grinds. Vision is a stain. This is what it’s like to regret something, I have the weird coolness to reflect. We should have played Submarine.
We make it to the street, but it’s not good enough: I look back to see Clafter struggling to reload atop the stairs. Red welts flame out like mutant chicken pox. Henri’s giving his kickstand a rapid-fire series of kicks to get it to swing upward, too panicked to realize that he’s kicking from the wrong side.
“I knew he was crazy!” he shrieks. “I knew it!” He gives up and starts riding with the kickstand still down. My hands grip rubber, igniting bolts of pain from stung palms. We ride, Henri’s bike limping is how you might describe it, kickstand periodically catching the road and grating along asphalt till he regains his balance. I pedal furiously, not slowing even as I pull needle after tiny needle out of my skin.
When we reach my house, I coast straight into the backyard. Instead of slowing down, I simply let myself fall sideways onto dry, sun-beaten grass, the bike toppling onto me. The chain grease is cold on my leg. Henri stops, pushes his bike aside and crumples.
“I hurt everywhere.”
“Same.” Could count, but it’s easier to call myself one giant sting.
My mom’s semi-concerned alto floats out of a window, across a sky silver and veined like a dragonfly wing.
“What are you boys doing?”
“Nothing,” is the answer, in unison.
We lay there, reptile-still, replaying action and reaction with awe. Some spoken, some drifting through brains. Through mine, anyway. Leaves overhead ripple at a calm boil. The waves of surreal memory crash without direction. To and fro. In and out. Points of debate are exhausted. Certain blanks fail to be filled. One or two tortured what-ifs haphazardly examined. Apologies come, awkward and quiet. Our stings quietly throb, but the breezes are balms. Blankness creeps up on us.
At last, Henri, attempting a conclusion, offers:
“We should’ve played Submarine.”
“Should’ve played Submarine.”
PROFESSOR FLEER /// IVYLAND COLLEGE /// ONE YEAR AGO
The students give me hope when they do not open their mouths too wide. But this little season has seen slack-jawed awe in the main, and the shrouded inner walls of throats refract things miserably. A quality—let’s say coherence—escapes in muted gasps, slipping serpentine toward sunnier rocks. It’s humbling to remember humility.
To doubt the primacy of our species, I mean.
He’s leaning over my desk, asking for my wife, when I notice. (Truth be told, I have no answer, confirming healthy levels of marital trust.) I can barely snatch a word between the oaf’s intimidations. His tie is oddly textured, fish-scaled. Full Windsor knot wrenched as though in pain; it reminds me of a sculptress who worked metal into corkscrewed shapes to strangle and drown her adulterous father in history’s clouded stream. One can’t recall, sculptress, whether your art ever pitied mom instead.
“There’s a caterpillar on your shoulder,” I interrupt, pointing. The detective sneers and crushes it with thumb and forefinger.
They are simply everywhere—the word is biblical. Too many warm winters, buttressed by this muggy spring, have yielded a bumper crop of the yellow-speckled creepers. Our campus is their extra-leafy Eden; a formal armistice alone prevents them from wresting control from the deans. Yet I let them feast at Azura’s honeyed insistence, will never maliciously kill one lest she catch me in the boyish act. My vermiculate office spider plant is holey testimony of that appeasement, swarming with the busy plague.
“Are you hearing me right now?” the detective blusters, apparently vexed. “You’re to help me find certain responsible parties.”
I tell him I’ll draw up a list of moral relativists in the department.
“Funny. I’ll ask again before we go downtown: Professor Azura Carcassone.”
My wife … crime of passion … exits rising to enable. Sixth floor. She pushes the elevator button with sweet impatience. Inuit cinema to teach. Sylvia, a fiery if cipherlike student of mine, is already descending. Sixty feet below: safety, the ghastly gift shop of Ivyland College Museum. But no. Doors whine open. Four too-similar eyes are locked. Sylvia, my wife shrewdly concludes (and is it any wonder with this quicksilver Sherlock? I blame her sense of noir), has just enjoyed my favorite exhibit, “Gauguin in Tahiti,” which fills the seventh, uppermost floor. Glorious flattening of space, Gothic complex of rilled drapery boiled away to one dimension. Would that I lived within such mazes.
Azura can’t help
but see her chance. Perhaps a Sylvian tic is prologue. Formalities dispensed, a ruby-encrusted butterfly knife—Christmas gift—enters her at every angle and erogenous zone. Azura alights on the second floor and ecstatically cartwheels en route to fire escape. Ding: doom spills into the lobby. Hot blood folds over the precipice between elevator and gleaming wood floor. Some clerk, lobotomized townie, ratchets up a scream. Sylvia’s slender fist uncurls from the knuckle-crack that announced her fate.
Is what I’m guessing happened.
And tenure was so close this time.
I start shoveling Žižeks, Kirkegaards and Lacans into my briefcase, bare essentials for a portable library. I sprinkle some William James on the pile for good measure. Call my temperament pragmatic. A dusty edition of René Thom’s squirts out of my hands, falls open to the butterfly catastrophe. V = x6 + ax4 + bx3 + cx2 + dx. I kick it back at the bookcase in a mounting fit, wishing I owned Dalí’s merciful last painting instead.
“Uh,” says the chuckling detective, whom I’d quite forgotten. “Going somewhere?” The dreariest impasse.
“Coxswain duty. There’s a meet against Rutgers today, and I’d hate to disappoint the girls. They’ve rowed so expertly this season.”
“Do a lot of reading on the boat?”
He gestures sardonically at my open Samsonite, overflowing with dense critical thought.
“The proper passage never fails to galvanize an athlete,” I smile, casually holding up a copy of—O, dear—Discipline and Punish. I drop it like a catty footnote.
“Did I mention that I’m a cop? And that your wife is wanted for questioning as regards senseless criminal acts?”