Everyone but You

by Sandra Novack

  My husband taps on the bowl. You’re stalling, he says. This is a life-or-death scenario.

  In life-or-death scenarios there are never really good options, I comment. Someone always ends up dead. Someone is bound to be lost in the flames. Boop, probably. As you say, there are sacrifices.

  He says, You’re tough. He leans over, kisses me gently. You know, he says, Boop has nothing on you, really.

  Then, when his face changes, when he looks pensive, I add, Well, obviously, you’d be the first person I’d save.

  THE NEXT DAY, Mr. Gun-Metal stops by. Eventually there are always complications to the basic scenario. For example: I’m starting to notice he only comes over when my husband is at work. Also, when I open the door, a smoky haze hangs in the distance and there is a distinct odor of burning wood. I can almost hear the cracking noise the oaks make before their trunks split and fall, but I know that, at this distance, I am only imagining the sounds things make when they are falling.

  He hands me a bottle of wine.

  Are you flirting with me? I ask.

  Believe it or not, he says, I don’t even think you’re pretty.

  Oh, I say, disappointed.

  Frankly, he adds, you have a very ugly nose.

  I like my nose, I say. It’s a character-building nose.

  If you say so, he tells me.

  In the kitchen, we sit in silence because neither Gun-Metal nor I is terribly good at small talk. He pours me two glasses, as if he’s lazy and knows I drink quickly. Then he stares hard and rakes his hand through his almost nonexistent hair. He tenses his jaw.

  And so? I ask.

  Wasn’t only a cow I killed, he says.

  Oh? I say. Did you sacrifice a goat, too?

  Killed a man once, he tells me, and suddenly everything about the room, about our interaction, changes.

  I clear my throat, stare at my hands. You’re a combat soldier, I remind him, as if he needs reminding. Lots of soldiers have killed in the line of duty.

  He looks at me intently. Wasn’t like that, he tells me. And it was after the war.

  This is how it goes with Gun-Metal, then: Suddenly he is talking about a night many years ago, and suddenly I am implicated; I have to make a choice about whether I will sit here or not and listen. I have to make a choice about whether or not I think he’s crazy. But here’s the thing: Here’s what makes me me, that I would always listen to strangers when they disclose their secrets, because I can’t not listen—it’s practically my job to gather up stories, like a spy gathers intelligence, except without all the snooping around.

  He’s looking at me now, with those flat metallic eyes.

  Is this a confession? I try to joke.

  On the street one night, he says. I was out on the West Coast, Seattle. It was a dark night, no moon. I hate those kinds of nights. There was a man walking. Some gangbanger, probably. He called me a motherfucker—just like that, called me a motherfucker!—and he shuffled around in his pocket. Probably had a gun. I still think that. And, anyway, I wasn’t going to wait around to see. Pop, he says, pointing his index finger. End of that story.

  I lean back in my chair. I know we’re going to be here awhile. I think, somewhat absently, that I’ll need a lot of wine, more than I have on hand, to hear this.

  Sometimes, he tells me, I think I didn’t care to wait and see, either. Just one less asshole to worry about. The thing is, he says, once you step across that line you can’t go back, it’s not about war anymore; it’s about your soul.

  Were you cleared of wrongdoing? I ask dumbly.

  Would it matter? he asks. When there’s two men standing there with guns, or even one man with a gun and one without, it’s the one who’s left that gets to tell the story.

  You could have just told the truth, I say, though I’m unsure exactly what the truth is. You could have told them it was dark, you were confused, there was a fight, et cetera.

  I might have, he says.

  Did you? I ask. Did you tell?

  I’m telling you, he says. Bet you want to know why, don’t you? Bet that’s the question floating around in that brain of yours. He grins then, crosses his arms. Because I could do it and I could walk away then, is why. Because shit just happens.

  You’re lying, I say.

  He grins wider then, Gun-Metal does, which unsettles me even more. It’s all a house of cards, he tells me. Truth and lies, combat and civilian life. Civilian life, he says again, as if he finds the entire notion amusing.

  I CALL MY FATHER after my neighbor leaves. Hello, I say.

  What’s wrong? he asks.

  Nothing, I tell him, even though I am shaking. Nothing at all, I repeat, as if I am in court and have been asked what exactly it was, as a witness, I saw happen.

  Liar, he says. No offense, honey, but you couldn’t tell a lie to save yourself, which is odd considering your line of “work.”

  I deflect. Anyway, I say. I’ve decided against working at the Walmart, because it smells funny, like plastic and popcorn, and that gives me the willies. Plus, I’m not sure I could greet people in a way that actually feels welcoming. So, I add, what’s up with you?

  I realized something about hell, my father says.

  What about hell, I ask, thinking of Gun-Metal, whom I suddenly see burning up in flames, everything in him consumed by anger and hatred and fear. On the news there are burning forests, the fleeing animals running down hills. I think they are repeating the same coverage from before.

  Hell, my father tells me, is repetition.

  I agree.

  I’m dying, he says.

  I know you are, I tell him.

  Now we’re finally talking. You don’t have to worry about me, he adds. I’m not afraid to die, you know. Try living for seventy years. That’s the hard part.

  WE PRAY.

  We pray because of Boop and her husband, because they are over at our house and it’s dinnertime and they both pray in public and in private, because they pray loudly and ask for the Lord’s blessings. They are serious prayers. They proclaim their devotion to God, if not to each other, shouting it from the rooftops and flaming mountains and valleys. Since we last spoke, Mr. Narcolepsy has been asked to give an inspirational speech to his church congregation, on the subject of slumber and God. He zonked out halfway through it, and everyone was very impressed.

  I’m not religious, Boop, if you want to know the truth, I say. I really hate holding everyone’s hands at the table, I add, because I end up thinking about germs afterward.

  It’s Harry who gives me that look, the kind that says, We should be nice to guests, the kind of look that says, Fuck you, Chickie babe.

  I mean, I continue, it’s not that I don’t appreciate your hardcore religious ideology. You Baptists really have that down. I wish there were some cult I could belong to, too, of true believerism, like the Temple of the Anxious or something like that, a place where people don’t pray but sit around talking about how nervous everything makes them—public spaces, plastic cups, old-school paper versus electronics, that sort of thing. Then, at this temple, when one of us would get too old and die, we wouldn’t go to heaven but would just come into another form, like a cow or something sacred and good.

  Boop ignores this and folds her hands tightly, for once keeping them to herself. She prays for the sinners of this great big world. She prays for deliverance from the fires.

  The brush fires? I ask, interrupting.

  Hell, she tells me and scowls.

  But hell is a very distant, abstract thing, and the brush fire is currently only one county away from us. The winds are blowing east, though, so we are supposed to be in the clear. Still, I think of all those poor people who have been displaced from their homes, and all the lost furniture and pictures and sentimental things. I tell Boop, Someone should wake Mr. Narcolepsy, because he misses everything, because he’s fallen asleep with a fondue skewer in his hand. I’m worried he’ll impale himself, I say.

  Oh, she says, as if she hasn’
t noticed him there, slouched over so that his balding, shining head greets us in a sad, sort of empty way. He looks so innocent when he sleeps. I regard him, thinking that sleep like that must be a blissful thing, all in all.

  You know, Boop says, I just can’t believe you haven’t found your home in God yet. The idea of a cult? she asks, indignantly.

  My home in God. I think about this. I don’t know if I ever felt at home, anywhere, really. Once, I thought my home was with Harry. Well, I say, feeling angrier than I usually do. I don’t know about God, I tell her. I pick up two clean skewers and hand one to Boop and one to my husband. But I think I found the two screwers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Boop glares at my husband.

  He frowns and shrugs at Boop apologetically. Maybe, my husband says, we should call it an early night.

  1. Everything built must eventually collapse.

  2. All houses are built.

  3. All houses must eventually collapse.

  I didn’t want things to break apart. I wanted everything in my life to hold together—my marriage, my various houses. I wanted, in a way, happiness, a life free from disasters. But after Boop and her husband leave, and while Harry and I ready ourselves for bed, I realize something and say it. It’s over, I say. You know that, don’t you?

  He stops brushing his teeth for a moment and regards me. Us? he says, in a flat, resigned way. I know.

  I decide I can pick myself up, pick up the pieces and start over again. My father is right. Everything is repetition.

  IT’S THE MIDDLE of the night when the house alarm sounds. The winds have changed direction; the fire is at our front door. Right, I know, like you couldn’t have seen this coming, the flames, the smoke, the burning structure. But once it’s here, I’m surprised by how quickly it consumes things, how it makes the wooden floors creak and crackle and buckle. The fire swoops up the steps, consumes the railings and furniture and spare bed on the second floor. It ignites my paperwork. It burns all my books, my Tolstoy and Dickens and Alexie and Russo, my Pynchon and DeLillo and Roth, my Updike. The photo albums burn to nothing, the newspapers and magazines. And then there’s the noise fire makes when it mixes with wind, the howling of it as it tears through the rooms.

  Our bedroom is on the third floor, and there is only one exit that’s feasible: the balcony. Dressed in his pajamas, my husband motions me outside, where the smoke and flames billow up, around us. We climb up on the balcony. Across the street, Gun-Metal’s house is already in flames—an inferno that reminds me not of hell but words. Sirens sound in the distance, the fire trucks traveling here, right now. There is no choice but to jump—jump or die, believe that the landing won’t be entirely too hard, that there is such a thing as being saved. The heat pounds my back, singes the hairs on my arms. Beneath me, floorboards buckle. My feet burn. I look down into the smoke and flames and calculate my odds.

  MORTY, EL MORTO

  Morty Langly awoke to find the December chill edging against his blanket. In the dawning light a heavy snow fell, the first snow of the season. He peered out the window to the cars parked along the eerily quiet street. The snowdrifts bunched up against the tires, a sight that surely meant reprieves were to come: Sister Deuteronomy’s religion test postponed and Sister Agatha’s obnoxious crooning of The Canterbury Tales ceased for a time, thank Jesus. For the past three days, the old nun had waddled to the front of the class, cleared her throat, and in a voice that belied her heft, begun, “Wan that Aprill with his shoures soote”; she then proceeded, as Aggie Tuft remarked, to massacre Middle English until the dismissal bell sounded. Aggie was what the boys in the eighth-grade class referred to as a brainiac, and so Morty supposed she was right about Sister Agatha’s pronunciation, though each day he didn’t think about the nun’s language so much as what Sister Agatha must look like naked—her blubbery skin, her torpedo breasts.

  Ice pinged against the glass. Morty writhed down, under the covers. He envisioned the Wife of Bath, her depiction brought to life in his textbook—her dress hiked up along her gartered thighs, her bosom thrust forward. Even the mole on her cheek was enough to give half the boys at Our Lady of Perpetual Help (aka Our Lady of Perpetual Misery) an erection, particularly those without access to Playboys or those with parental locks on Internet porn. In gym, even Eric Brumble had recently confessed to working up quite a sweat over the lusty babe, though the boys also suspected that Sister Agatha had no intention of ever reading the Wife’s tale, because at the end of each class she would inform them all that they would begin again tomorrow, and everyone soon discovered this only meant starting over at the prologue, with Wan that Aprill …, the Wife’s tale forever out of the boys’ collective grasp.

  The snow swirled and whipped around, and Morty’s thoughts flitted about. He wanted to jiggle off. The act (THE act) seemed to necessitate blankets. It was difficult to be chaste at 6:37 in the morning, he realized, though he also reminded himself that if his mother could see him now, she’d surely be disappointed. Thinking this, he turned his attention to the image of the Virgin Mary taped up on his wall. She appeared in miniature, her face serene, her arms outstretched, as if to hold him. He might have said a prayer—there was a time he loved to pray; there was a time he loved to wonder about God and heaven—but instead he imagined the silk falling from the Virgin’s shoulders, her fair skin and perfect, holy nipples. His hands fidgeted then and instead of folding them in supplication, Morty spit into his right palm and cupped his hand over his flesh. He hoped, in a vain, desperate way, that God was a late riser on snowy days, such as this, though he secretly feared it was possible that God and all the saints and mothers in heaven saw every small and large sin committed on earth. Jiggling off to the Virgin, he reasoned, was surely blasphemy of the highest order. And yet.

  Ashamed, he closed his eyes and moved his hand, faster, faster, faster, until the friction heightened and guilt and pleasure tangled in complicated ways. His breath quickened. On the day of Judgment he’d be cast down to hell for all this, he just knew it, and there he’d suffer through fires, and there in hell would be countless nude virgins lying supine, legs spread, and every time Morty would look in any direction, some demon would thrust a poker into his side. Or worse! He moved faster and faster, aware of his breaths, aware of the cold and icy snow and the otherwise consuming silence. Faster and faster and …

  He opened his eyes and waited for God to level His wrath, but ten minutes passed and Morty yawned, waiting. The alarm sounded, and he decided that, on that note, it was time to get out of bed.

  “THE GIG IS CANCELED,” Morty’s father announced when, with cereal in hand, Morty sat down at the kitchen table. Morty Sr. was a big, hulking man, a man who because of his height tended toward a lumbering, awkward appearance even on those rare occasions when he wore a suit. Today he was dressed in jeans and a long-worn and faded flannel, which were his more typical attire. At the table, he brooded over his coffee cup as if it demanded considerable contemplation. He glanced up briefly. “I’m glad the gig is off,” he said. “Aren’t you? They’re saying we’re in for a blizzard.”

  “Heck, yes, I’m glad,” Morty said. “Test today. Never a better time for the gig to be called off.”

  Morty Sr. nodded and sipped his coffee. The gig was a leftover phrase from when his father drove eighteen-wheelers across country, in those days when his father wore a perpetual smug grin for being the driver with the most miles under his belt. That was before Morty and his mother were in the car accident last winter, before his mother was killed, and before Morty stopped speaking for a month. After all that occurred, Morty Sr. quit his job so that he could work closer to home. “In case you need me,” he had told Morty. Increasingly, neither spoke of Morty’s mother and often the boy had difficulty remembering the simplest things: his mother’s face when she told a story, or the sound of her voice at night when she’d crack open the door and ask Morty if he’d said his prayers. Memories reduced to fragments; even Morty sensed it. And it was the things you took for
granted that often became the things you missed most.

  These days both Morty and his father were under the auspices and good graces of the nuns at Our Lady of Perpetual Misery and of Father Bastian, especially, who had seen fit to give Morty’s father a job at school and also waive Morty’s tuition for a time. Both developments left Morty embarrassed beyond words, a humiliation that only intensified when his father was actually seen in the halls, sweeping or emptying trash, or when—on the two occasions his father was persuaded to receive penance, even though he had refused since the funeral to step foot in church—Father Bastian walked over to school and crammed himself into the janitorial closet, both men sitting on overturned buckets, Morty Sr.’s crying heard from behind the closed door.

  Now he and his father sat in silence while Morty ate his cereal. It was the boy who finally spoke again.

  “Yep,” he said, and he drummed his fingers on the table. “A test.”

  Morty Sr. took another swig of coffee. “So what test didn’t you study for, anyway?”

  Morty shrugged. “Just religion.”

  “How do you test that?”

  “The usual. You know, like the choirs of angels—seraphim and cherubim and thrones and stuff like that. If it’s in the Bible, it’s fair game. That’s what Sister Deuteronomy says, ‘Fact, not fiction, my little chickens.’ ”

  His father rolled his eyes. “Great,” he said. “A flipping fundamentalist.” He looked at Morty for a moment too long, and Morty wondered what his father was thinking about. Still, Morty sensed that the conversation, such as it was, was over, even though generally speaking, the lucid hours of morning were the best time to talk to his father at all. Lately, trying to have any conversation with his father proved as difficult as trying to talk to heaven: full of impossible silences. He missed the days when his father would crack jokes about priests and rabbis and monks screwing in lightbulbs and his mother would slap him playfully and tell him to stop, or days when his mother would cook a large breakfast and they’d eat so much that she’d hold her belly. “Well,” she’d say when she finally got up from the table. “I guess I’ll try and stand for Jesus.” And Morty’s father would joke that she’d stand or fall, for sure. “All depends on what you believe,” he’d say.