We Live in Water: Stories

by Jess Walter

  This was true. I do love celebrities.

  “Hey, look,” she’d say finally. “I’m having a five-star day. If I relax, the answers will all come to me.”

  It’s painful now to recall those sweet mornings, the two of us bantering over our page of the newspaper, with no hint that it was about to end. And this is the strange part, the mystical part, some might say: on those days Tanya read that she was to have a five-star day . . . she actually had five-star days. Now, I don’t believe in such mumbo-jumbo; it was likely just the power of suggestion. But I did begin to notice (in the journals in which I record such things) that Tanya was more open to my amorous advances when she got five stars. In fact, after our first month together, I began to notice that the only time Tanya seemed at all interested in being intimate, the only time she wanted to . . . you know, get busy . . . was when she got five stars on her horoscope.

  Then one day in early October, when we’d stopped having sex altogether, I did it. I goosed her horoscope. Virgo was supposed to have three stars, and I changed it to five.

  So sue me. It didn’t even work.

  OBVIOUSLY, THOUGH, that’s where the idea came from. And yet I might have simply moved on after our breakup, and not launched my horoscope warfare, had Tanya not fired the first shot at me by filing a no-contact order a mere two weeks after throwing me out. A no-contact order! Based on what, I wanted to know.

  “Well, you do drive over there every night after work and park outside her place,” my dad said as he nursed a tumbler of rum.

  “Yeah, but eight hundred feet? What kind of arbitrary number is that? Shall I carry a tape measure? How do you know if you’re eight hundred feet away from someone? There’s a tapas place around the corner from her condo. Am I just supposed to stop eating tapas?”

  “There’s a Taco Bell over on M.L. King.”

  “Tapas, Dad. Not tacos.”

  Dad poured us a drink, then turned on the TV. “Look, I don’t know what to tell you, Trent. You make people uncomfortable. When you were a kid I thought something was wrong with your eyelids, the way you never blinked. I used to ask your mom if maybe there wasn’t some surgery we could try.”

  This was my father. A woman breaks my heart and his answer is to sew my eyelids shut. But I suppose he tried. I suppose we all try.

  “Life just isn’t fair,” I said as the old widower hobbled away on his prosthetic leg to get another drink.

  “Yeah, well,” he replied, “I hope I’m not the asshole who told you it would be.”

  The very next day, November 17, Virgo got the first of thirteen straight one-star days. “Four stars: your creativity surges. Keep an eye on the big picture,” Virgo was supposed to read that day. I changed it to: “One star: watch your back.” It was glorious, imagining her reading that.

  HOROSCOPES ARE cryptic and open-ended: “You’ll encounter an obstacle but you are up to the task. A Capricorn may help.” In fact, I could argue that what clearly began as a way to spoil my girlfriend’s day became a campaign to make horoscopes more useful. And I won’t pretend that I didn’t like the voice, the power that changing horoscopes gave me. In the office, I kept my own counsel, going days without speaking sometimes, but with these horoscopes I could finally say the things I’d been holding inside all those years. For our new drama critic, Sharon Gleason, I wrote, “Libra. Three stars: those pants make you look fat.” For the arrogant sports columnist, Mike Dunne, “Taurus. Two stars: I hope your wife’s cheating on you.” For the icy young records clerk, Laura: “Cancer. Would it kill you to smile at your coworkers?”

  Of course, there were complaints about the late-November horoscopes. (Thankfully, they were all routed to the “Inside Living” page editor . . . me.) In my defense, some people actually preferred the new horoscopes. Not Virgos, of course, since they were treated to day after day of stunning disappointment—“One star: you should try to be less vindictive and disloyal . . . One star: hope your new boyfriend doesn’t mind your bad breath . . . One star: you’re not even good at sex.”

  I’m the first to admit that I went a little far on November 24, the day I read in the crossword puzzle that the clue to 9-Across was a Jamaican spice, saw that the answer was Jerk, and changed the clue to Mark Aikins, e.g. Yes, it was petty, but I was being forced to wage a war without getting within eight hundred feet of my enemy.

  Yet, despite my constant barrage of single-star Virgo days and crossword puzzle salvos, I got no response from either of them. Tanya knew this was my page. She had to know I was behind her run of bad horoscopes. But I heard nothing. Some days I thought she was taunting me by not responding; other days I imagined she was so deeply mired in one-star hassles (traffic snarls and Internet outages) that she was incapable of responding.

  Another possibility arose on the last day of November. I had just called in another phony customer complaint to Il Pattio (“The chicken breast was woefully undercooked; it had all the symptoms of salmonella.”) and driven back to the house I now shared with my dad. That’s when I found him on the kitchen floor, slumped in a corner, his artificial leg at an odd angle, fake foot still flat on the floor.

  He was in what doctors called a diabetic coma—an obvious result of his nonstop drinking. “You need to take better care of him,” the ER nurse said. But it wasn’t until I filled out the insurance paperwork that I understood exactly how I’d failed my dad. I copied his date of birth from his driver’s license: August 28, 1947. I knew his birthday, naturally, but it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment.

  My father was a Virgo.

  IN THEIR glee to portray me as a bad employee, the suits failed to mention that on the very day my dad was fighting for his life in a hospital bed, I still reported to work. Of course, it was also that day, November 30, that my section editor responded to a complaint from the features syndicate, investigated, and called me into her office.

  In the frenzy of meetings and recriminations that followed, I somehow got one last altered horoscope into the paper. Again, I don’t mean to portray myself as some kind of primitive, moon-worshipping kook, but the next day, Virgos across Portland read a heartfelt plea: “Five stars: you’ll get better. I’m sorry.”

  DAD PULLED out of his hypoglycemic coma and returned home to live dryly, me at his side. I have purged his little house of alcohol. Dad drinks a lot of tomato juice now. Since I’m not working, we play game after game of cribbage, so much that I have begun to dream of myself as one of those pegs, making my way up and down the little board. I recently shared this dream with my court-ordered therapist. She wondered aloud if the dream had to do with my father’s peg leg. So I told Dad about my dream and he said that he sometimes dreams his missing leg is living in a trailer in Livingston, Montana. I’m thinking of asking him to come to counseling with me.

  And Tanya? Even after the Oregonian ran its “Public Apology to Our Readers,” full of righteous puffery about how I “acted maliciously and recklessly,” how I “broke the sacred trust between a newspaper and its readers,” I hoped Tanya would at least glean the depth of my feelings for her. But I never heard a word. My probation officer and therapist have insisted, rightly I suppose, that I leave Tanya alone, but this afternoon I went to the store to get more tomato juice for Dad and I found myself down the block from her building again.

  This time, however, it was different. I know it sounds crazy, but I’d begun to worry that my little prank had somehow caused her to get sick. And I take it as a positive sign that I didn’t want that for her. I really didn’t. I sat in my car down the street and gazed up to our third-floor corner window, just hoping to get a glimpse of her. It’s winter now and the early night sky was bruised and dusky. Our old condo was dark. It crossed my mind that maybe she had moved, and I have to say, I was okay with that. I had just reached down to start my car when I saw them walking up the sidewalk, a block from the condo. Tanya looked not only healthy, but beautiful. Happy. The big, dumb, sensitive, cheating chef was holding her hand. And I was happy for her. I re
ally was. She laughed, and above them a streetlight winked at me and slowly came on.

  There was a line in the newspaper’s apology that stunned me, describing what I’d done as “a kind of public stalking.” I shook when I read that. I suppose it’s what Tanya thinks of me too. Maybe everyone. That I’m crazy. And maybe I am.

  But if you really want my side of the story, here it is: Who isn’t crazy sometimes? Who hasn’t driven around a block hoping a certain person will come out; who hasn’t haunted a certain coffee shop, or stared obsessively at an old picture; who hasn’t toiled over every word in a letter, taken four hours to write a two-sentence e-mail, watched the phone praying that it will ring; who doesn’t lay awake at night sick with the image of her sleeping with someone else?

  I mean, Christ, seriously, what love isn’t crazy?

  And maybe it was further delusion, but as I sat in the car down the block from our old building, I was no longer wishing she’d take me back. Honestly, all I hoped was that Tanya at least thought of me when she read our page.

  I really do think I’m better.

  And so when I started the car to go home, and they crossed the street toward Tanya’s condo, I was as surprised as anyone to feel the ache come back, an ache as deep and raw as the one I felt that night in late October when I first saw the lamp go out.

  I told the other officer, the one at the scene, that I didn’t remember what happened next, though that’s not entirely true. I remember the throaty sound of the racing engine. I remember the feel of cutting across traffic, of grazing something—a car, they told me later—and I remember popping up on the sidewalk and scraping the light pole and I remember bearing down on the jutting corner of the building and I remember a slight hesitation as they started to turn. But what I remember most is a spreading sense of relief that it would all be over soon, that I would never again have to see the light come on in that cold apartment.

  Helpless Little Things

  I FUCKING HATE PORTLAND.

  It’s so earnest and smug. There was a Portland guy here in Shelton on a meth pop and even he had it—that too-sweet-to-believe thing. Like a lot of chalkers, the guy’s teeth were rotted, so he couldn’t say his Rs and I used to fuck with him about it.

  So you’re from Poland?

  Po’tland, the dude would say calmly.

  So you prefer being called Polish or Polack?

  No, I’m f’om Po’tland.

  Fuck off, Polack.

  Then one day on yard, someone racked the poor helpless guy for standing too close and knocked out two of those black, hollow uppers. It was weird—afterward he could say his Rs again, but he had a low humming whistle whenever he spoke. So we called him Kenny G. He actually believed this was an improvement.

  I suppose I’ve hated Portland since I took a pop there. It was a shame, too, because it was the perfect Portland scam. A guy in my building was a volunteer recruiter for Greenpeace, and one day when he left his car unlocked I stole his pamphlets and sign-up logs. I couldn’t use that shit in Seattle so I drove to Union Station in Portland, picked out two lost kids who looked like they could be college students, and put them out downtown. There was a girl, a little redhead named Julie, and a loaf named Kevin. I put gay Kevin on Burnside a block from Powell’s and sweet Julie on Broadway, on the corner in front of Nordstrom.

  Kevin was okay—friendly, made good eye contact—but Julie was the find: nineteen, short curly red hair, and what looked like a decent body under her hippy dress. She’d been kicked out of her house for accusing her stepdad of feeling her up, and though I’d heard that story a hundred times, it was harsh coming from her, because, like a lot of good-looking girls, she seemed convinced it was her fault.

  I figured the bookstore would be the better place, but it wasn’t even close to Julie’s haul at Nordstrom—no one more eager to help the environment than a guilty white liberal dropping sixty on a tie. But then I switched them and Julie kicked ass at the bookstore, too, so it was all her.

  It was almost too easy: the kids stopped shoppers, flashed a Greenpeace brochure, and asked them to join. Thankfully, most people don’t want to join, or claim they’re already members, but they’re more than happy to give a one-time donation, especially when the kids say they’re trying to raise four grand to go on the big Greenpeace ship that disrupts whaling. I’d printed up some tax-deduction receipts off the IRS website, and it was amazing how this convinced people we were legitimate. This was the cash side of the business: fives, tens, twenties, a few fifties. On the first day alone, Kevin got almost four hundred and Julie took in six-and-a-half. I chopped half, five-twenty-five for running the thing, and then sold Kevin some weed for the rest of his take. I tried to sell Julie some, too, but she shook her head. I need money more than I need weed, Danny.

  Of course, some shoppers got nervous or suspicious and didn’t want to give cash, or claimed they had none. This was fine. Like I told the kids: Make them want to give you the thing you’re taking. So the kids would reluctantly mention credit cards and checks, but say that Greenpeace discouraged it. And they said they’d need to see some ID. Nothing kills suspicion like suspicion.

  That was the real haul: credit card numbers and checks. I gave the kids twenty bucks for every card number but I got four hundred dollars each from a guy in Mexico; in two weeks I had given him seventeen. Give me your number and I can have four grand run on your card in Mexico before you’ve put your wallet away.

  Checks were even easier. In Seattle I had a dude did nothing but print up phony checks. He had an ID template that made temporary driver’s licenses and soon we were running phony checks all over the state.

  This was all a nice diversion from my real business, running bud down from BC. My territory was Washington and Oregon, from Bellingham all the way down I-5. I had seven stops: Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Portland, Eugene, Salem, and Ashland. Two trips a week, up and back, meant two nights a week in the midpoint, Portland. People have a certain picture in their mind of a bud smuggler—white-boy dreds, Marley T-shirt—but I’d be a moron to dress like that for fifteen hundred miles a week with six kilos in the trunk. So I wore a suit and kept my hair short, hard-parted on the side, like a fifties superhero. But the key was my car: I had to be the youngest man in America in a loaded gray 2006 Buick Lucerne. Cop could pull me over blazing a spliff, coke spoon up my nose, syringe hanging from my tied-off arm, dead hooker in the passenger seat and still just tell me to ease off the gas and have a nice day.

  No game works forever, of course, and I knew the Greenpeace thing could bust a hundred ways: kids steal from me, marks get suspicious, credit card companies get a whiff, real Greenpeacies get pissed. I put the half-life at three months. This was early November, so I figured I’d run the game at least through Christmas—when the banks and credit card companies are too busy to notice the extra draws—make a little side money and move on. In the meantime, I was careful. On my return run through Portland I always collected the Greenpeace material so the kids couldn’t freelance. I moved Julie and Kevin around and worked hard to stay away from real fundraisers.

  And once each, I had the kids strip in front of me, to make sure they weren’t holding any money back. This is drastic shit, but you do it right, it only has to happen once. It makes a real impact, kid standing in front of you freezing his ass off while you go through his clothes. You make him stand a long time too, while you ignore him. Then, at the end—so he knows how far you’ll go—you have him spread his ass cheeks, like a jail search. This is always necessary with drug dealers, but even if it weren’t I’d do it anyway, to remind these kids that they’re nothing. Meat.

  I’ll be the first to admit I was looking forward to this with little Julie. It wasn’t like she had a stripper’s body; she was small. I wasn’t into the waif thing. But there was something about the way she moved, like poured syrup, and I couldn’t help being curious about what lay underneath all those clothes.

  Like my car, I chose my hotel rooms carefully. No sketchy mote
ls for me. In Portland, I took a room at the Heathman downtown. I liked the porters in their Beefeater costumes, and I liked sitting on the mezzanine by the fire, drinking Chivas, and making eyes with the businesswomen. That’s what did it for me, women in suits, not little homeless girls. My first night at the Heathman I hit a blonde prescription drug rep—impeccable makeup, Pilates-hard ass. I’m in the same business, I said. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had to re-drywall my room after we were done banging around in it.

  I was a month into the Portland gig when I called Julie up to my room. I sat on the big fluffy bed and told her to disrobe. Right away these big tears rolled over her cheeks.

  No, it’s not that, I said. I just need to make sure you’re not stealing. I’d strip-searched Kevin a week earlier and he’d thrown a fit. Danny, how could you think I’d ever steal from you? But Julie just nodded, turned away from me, looked out the window, and started unbuttoning. I couldn’t believe how many layers she was wearing—wool scarves and flannel and army surplus. And then there was just . . . her. Pale little body. Freckled shoulders. She was shaking. She turned away. I could see every little bump in her spine. It was her back that got to me, in fact, tapering down to this tiny waist, which I could’ve put my two hands completely around.

  Then she started crying, in these jerking little hiccups.

  I don’t think I’ve ever felt worse in my life. She was so small. Not a tattoo or a ring anywhere. I turned away as I went through her clothes. They were warm. I’ve never felt so horny and so shitty at the same time.

  Hell, I knew she wasn’t stealing from me; she was outdrawing Kevin two-to-one.

  It’s okay, honey, I said. You can get dressed now.

  I didn’t touch her, and still the strip search changed things between Julie and me. She stopped meeting my eyes. Even her take started to go down. I’d watch from coffee shops and it was like she was shrinking. Where before she stepped up to shoppers, now she huddled against the wall, waiting for them to make eye contact. Soon Kevin was outdrawing her. This happens to dealers, too: they lose nerve and start shrinking, until, finally, they’re done.