by Dana Spiotta
“I guess, but Kris Kristofferson is like a Rhodes Scholar. And he has long hair. And a beard,” Caroline said.
“Okay, you’re right. I’m dumb, I know. But I felt lonely and I needed some attention.”
“Actually, I understand, I do.”
“You don’t, but anyway. I sat at the bar, and right away this group of guys starts talking about me to each other, whispering but not hiding it at all. Sort of pronounced whispering. This was happening quick. Everyone knows freak chicks will fuck anyone, right?”
“Or women who go into lumberjack bars by themselves, anyway.”
“But what I hadn’t expected was this whole group vibe, you know? And this whole hostility trip they were on, like, right away?”
Caroline nodded, frowning. She uncrossed one of Berry’s legs and undid the sandal. She pulled it off and undid the other.
“But you do know men find women like you threatening?” Caroline said.
“Why? Men want sex. What could be better than a sexually liberated woman, you know?” Berry said.
“They don’t really want free sex. They don’t feel comfortable with women. They want fraught sex. They want to go to the bar and be with other men and be far away from women. They are in the bar to not look for women. But once you are there, once a woman is in the room, they all have to try and screw you, and they’re mad, because they really want to drink a beer and not deal with women. If they wanted free love, they’d go to a hooker and pay for it.”
Berry sighed and chewed the last bite of bread. She no longer seemed so weepy and drunk.
“So what happened?” Caroline said.
“One guy did approach me and said something real clever about my forgetting my bra. And the other guys he was with laughed and stared. So gross. This guy was way too aggressive. Besides, I wanted to pick, I wanted to approach. That was the whole point. My feet are filthy.”
“They are. Do you want to take a bath?”
“No, not really. So I saw this cute guy in the back, by himself. Do you have any more of this bread?”
Caroline cut another piece and handed it to her on a napkin.
“Thank you. So this guy by himself was very young, maybe nineteen or twenty, and he was sipping a beer and smoking a cigarette as though they were still novelties to him. Like he wasn’t quite sure he was pulling it off.” Caroline sat on the floor next to Berry. She wore the loose embroidered cotton nightgown that Berry had given her. She started to rub Berry’s feet, pushing her knuckles into the soles, kneading slowly. She liked taking care of someone. It made her feel less wounded and more solid. Berry always wound up sitting on the floor, and Caroline again noted that this had a definite effect: it made you feel earth-tied and natural and safe. You can’t fall or get tipped over. Furniture towers around you, but you are self-contained and somehow liberated from the structure of chairs and couches. It sounded silly, but it was undeniable. If you were sitting on the floor, you would be one sort of person and not another. You couldn’t picture Spiro Agnew on the floor, say, or Henry Kissinger. It was a litmus test, one of many—can you picture them cross-legged on the floor?
“I walked over to him and asked if I could sit down. He said, ‘Of course,’ and then got up to hold my chair. I swear. I said, ‘Don’t, I can sit by myself. I can do lots of things by myself.’ Anyway, I asked him if, for instance, I could buy him a beer. He said he would buy me a beer. I said, ‘No way, I buy or I don’t stay.’ So he let me buy him a drink. He looked at the other guys, who naturally were all staring at him. I ordered a shot of tequila. Then another.”
“At least you were being cautious.”
Berry frowned.
“I’m sorry. But what were you thinking? You don’t even drink tequila, do you?”
“I don’t drink tequila with you, Caroline, but I do, in fact, drink tequila. I do when I want to get my nerve up. I really wanted to see this through. But I admit, it gave me the heebies having them stare at me. And I think I was off a little, I didn’t read it the way I should’ve. I didn’t take very long to ask him to leave with me, to go to my room was how I put it. I didn’t want to be coy or have repartee or use any bullshit euphemism. I just wanted to be real and straight about it. So he blushes. I’m not joking. He says, Sure, all casual-like, but he is totally red, even in the dark of the bar.”
It was nearing dawn. The room started to fill with weak, gray Oregon morning light. It was unlovely, flat, toneless light; not at all golden, not tender. The damp sunsets were subtle and lovely; the sunrises diluted, murky, unremarkable.
“The others made comments as we left. Really nasty stuff, like ‘Watch it, these libbies have dicks’ and ‘Use a pool cue on the dyke.’ I was getting a little queasy at this point. It was not yet fun. I was thinking maybe this was a bad idea. But there we were on the street, away from the bar, and I reached for the guy, kissing him. He tasted like Budweiser and unfiltered cigarettes. He was instantly shoving his tongue in my mouth. And grabbing at my tits. Apparently not wearing a bra really gets them tit obsessed, even with the baggiest dress. I said, ‘Hey, hey, let’s take our time,’ like couldn’t he kiss my neck a little. He pressed himself against me and pushed his leg between my thighs. I was turned on but sort of grossed out too, you know? Both at once. I can’t really explain it, but I hesitated, and he pressed my hand against his cock and said something corny like ‘You know you want this.’ I had this vision, suddenly, of a porno film I saw once, you know, where the guy is just balling the chick and she’s practically bouncing around, and it is superaggressive and not, you know, at all Kris Kristofferson–like, and I thought, I am not into this. I didn’t want to get screwed by this guy, and no matter who I think is screwing who, that’s how he’ll look at it. For once I actually figured out that getting pummeled by some smelly John Bircher who thought he was really gonna show me was not going to make me feel too hot. So I lost my taste for it, just like that. I told him, sorry, I wasn’t into it, I had to split.”
“Now I get the picture.”
“So he grabbed me, and I said, ‘Get away.’ He saw the fear in my face, and he slugged me. He fucking punched me, one shot, knuckles to nose and mouth, bam. And he held his hand like it hurt him and I ran.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, especially how am I going to explain it? Mel will take one look at me and she’ll know. They will never understand, not like you. You know what I am about. You know that I am not a joke, I am a genuine person. That I think about things.”
“Of course. And you don’t just think about them. You act on them and put yourself right on the line.”
“She’ll say it’s destructive and self-loathing.”
“You take your own hits. It is none of her business.”
“Screw this town. I should get out of here. I have to get away, I do. Oh God, I am starting to really hurt now.” She felt her lip with her tongue. She pulled herself up and went to the bathroom mirror. “I can’t believe it. I’m screwed. That dumb-ass. He thought I was making fun of him, but I don’t think I was. This better not scar.”
Caroline called Mel the next morning.
“I think you’re right. I should leave town.”
“Probably a good idea. Before there is any real reason to. A woman I know can help you. She lives in a women’s commune near New Harmon, New York. Ten miles north. She doesn’t have a phone, but I will send her a message that you are coming to see her.”
“What’s her name?”
“She goes by Mother Goose.”
“Really?”
“It’s these rural acid lesbians—everyone has a ‘special’ name, like Alice or Mother Goose or Medea.”
“Gotcha.” Caroline took a deep breath. “Mel?”
“Yeah.”
“We never expected it to go down like that. We were being so careful, I swear.”
“You’ve got to be joking.”
Caroline pressed her head against the phone, crying.
“It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s done,�
�� Mel said.
“I know, I know.”
“And Caroline?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t call me or contact me again, okay? You have already made me an accessory after the fact, and I don’t want to be a part of your mess. I don’t want to hear from you again, ever.”
PART FOUR
Fall and Winter
1998
Jason’s Journal
I AM THE center of the culture. I am genesis, herald, harbinger. The absolute germinal zero point—that’s me. I am the sun around which all the American else orbits. In fact, I am America, I exist more than other Americans. America is the center of the world, and I am the center of America. I am fifteen, white, middle class and male. Middle-aged men and women scurry for my attention. What Internet sites I visit. What I buy. What my desires are. What movies I watch. What and who I want; when and how I want it. People get paid a lot of money to think of how to get to me and mine.
Everything is geared to me. When you see those herky-jerky close-ups in action movies, where the camera jumps and chops its way in rather hyperly to the close-up of the hero, that is not for anyone but me. That is a movie being made to look like a video game or, rather, a computer game. That’s right—the superior technology aping the inferior technology, which was trying to be like a movie in the first place. The mannered, telltale visual grammar of the computer graphic becomes the cool thing itself. It identifies cool. The real question is, if you don’t get it, why are you watching it? It is for me and mine. It is legible to me and mine. It is our grammar, our visual slang and our rhythm—the speed and the super-percussive blowout sound effects. The most advanced technology making reference to and imitating inferior technology. Don’t worry if you don’t get it—that’s the point. You are excluded.
I should feel proud. By the mere fact of my youth, I am entitled to so much power. I feel the world spinning around me, the NASDAQ, the Dow, every index and indicator, the focus group, the cool hunters, the yearn forecasters—everything. So then why do I feel the way I do? Worse than ever I feel excluded. Worse than ever I feel singular, freakish, alone. I don’t care for computer gaming. Or computer gamers. I am not a fat, clammy kid who spends all my waking hours online and then either takes a machine gun to school in some perverse extension of the gaming life or ends up slumped among pizza boxes and tissues full of jizz as my fatty heart finally gives out, my game hand palsied and my parents full of guilt and halfhearted excuses about the distance of three-car garages, two-career marriages and six-thousand-square-foot houses.
That’s not me at all.
Yes, I spend time online, sure. Yes, I have the kind of pasty, fat body that will one day evolve into adult-onset diabetes if not total morbid obesity. Yes, I spend money on stuff. But there is nothing carefree about my life. Not anymore. Something has changed. I no longer have the privilege of total self-absorption. What I need right now more than anything is to figure out what her secret is. I have determined she is hiding something. I don’t think I am being overly imaginative, although all the crime books I read do affect my level of paranoia. They convey an ordered, systematic-but-rotten universe. And nothing is ever as it seems.
I followed her last night. I have started questioning everything about her. She teaches cooking twice a week—or so she claims. I waited until she left the house. She drove her Nissan even though it is only ten blocks to the community center. I got on my bike, which is a rare occurrence, and followed her. When I got to the community center, her car was parked there. I went down the halls, peeking slyly through the small windows in the classroom doors, the shatterproof glass panes with fine wire deeply embedded in them making everything a grid or like the crosshairs of a rifle. I heard my mother’s voice. I stopped and leaned against the wall. It was brick painted an industrial white. I stared at the speckled vinyl composite flooring. I couldn’t see in the classroom, and the people inside the room couldn’t see me.
(Incidentally, if you have never stalked someone close to you, I highly recommend it. Check out how it transforms them. How other they become, and how infinitely necessary and justified the stalking becomes when you realize how little you know about them, how mysterious every aspect of them seems with an at-a-distance-but-close examination.)
“It is important to rinse inside and outside the bird.”
Have you ever closed your eyes and listened to the sound of your own mother’s voice?
“You must pat the skin and the cavity of the bird dry with a paper towel. Otherwise the seasoning will not adhere as you wish it to.”
She exists, you know, wholly in the world apart from me. She spoke slowly and with deliberate emphasis. She sounded authoritative but not a bit shrill. No ugly breaths or underweighted sentence ends. Not girlish or apologetic. Not sexy either, but soft and serious.
“I like to put slivers of garlic and truffles under the skin of the breast. Also pats of butter. It makes the breast moist and the skin crisp and flavorful.”
But I wasn’t there to admire her voice or hear what she was saying. I’m not quite sure why I was doing this. But then I realized I was trying to place her accent. Does she truly have a California inflection, or is there a hint of the East Coast or Midwest to her speech? As I listened, leaning against the cold white brick, I couldn’t remember what any of these accents sound like.
I headed out to the parking lot. I sat behind some trees with a view of her Nissan Maxima. It is a metallic, high-saturation blue-green. I waited. What for, I don’t know. Did I think she would meet someone after class? Is it merely a liaison I suspect her of? I waited. I noticed several other cars in the lot were the same blue-green, no-name color. Or else a deep red flecked with gold underlights. Or shiny black. It occurred to me—have you noticed that there are no longer any beige or brown cars? I know they existed once—I have seen them on old TV shows like Hawaii Five-O or The Streets of San Francisco. Brown, chocolate brown, or that taupe beige color, like a raincoat. It is strange how color schemes of various times are different. People used to like browns, military greens, creams and mustards.
You know, she doesn’t have one baby picture of herself? I think that is odd. She’s estranged from her parents, but I presume they exist somewhere. For some reason she just left all that behind.
Someone apparently decided that nobody wants brown cars anymore. Some fifteen-year-old, no doubt, in some information-gathering test situation declared brown old looking, uncool, or it made him not want to drive. And that was that.
Contraindicated
THE PILLS CAME in a small opaque plastic bottle. He pressed down hard on the cap as he turned it to open. Fastened to the bottle was a folded piece of paper with chemical chain diagrams, case studies and long lists of side effects. Charts with percentages of groups that experienced some of (but not limited to) the following: peripheral neuropathy; facial and testicular edema; impotence; stroke; hallucinations; myocardial infarction; sudden, unexplained death.
The pills were ovule, innocent shapes. Peaceful shapes. It was called Blythin. The improved supplement to his Nepenthex regimen. He swallowed two. Because. This was a new one, taken to augment the others he already took. You don’t ever stop taking any of them, you just add new ones or alter dosages. But things had gotten so bad lately.
Henry couldn’t sleep, and he decided to take a bath. He put on the lights everywhere in his house. If he were to look out his windows (he never did, particularly at night), he would see faces looking back (or probably he would), so he pulled all of his curtains closed. He didn’t even like to think about the covered windows because he could imagine so easily what he feared seeing. He also, for similar reasons, avoided mirrors. It hadn’t been quite this bad before. Things were getting worse. He couldn’t take showers anymore because he couldn’t hear well enough through the rush of water (hear what exactly?). But he could take a bath, in the middle of the night, with the door to the bathroom open, and most times make it to the morning undisturbed. Then he could take an exhausted
drop into bed. He lay there and listened. His breathing.
Henry is in a plane again. This is a B-52. It is predawn darkness. He is in the tub, but he knows that he is flying over Quang Binh Province. He hears the loud-to-faint sound of bombs being dropped. He looks beneath him through the open hatch. The sky is lit up by showers of white phosphorus, arching in floral, organic, symmetrical shapes; the lines they describe are graceful. They are otherworldly, these electric trails and their already fading illumination. Light reflects off the water, glitter sparkles in the smoke. Then the bombs make contact, and beneath them and behind them he can see explosions.
Henry no longer feels the water on his limbs; he no longer sees the bathroom. He is on the ground, beneath the plane, not suddenly but as if he had followed the bomb down, he sees the ground come closer and closer in silent jump cuts. Henry hits the ground running, and he sees an explosion and then feels the breath sucked right out of his lungs, out of everything around him. The heavens are ignited, and the air has collapsed. Then he feels the burning on his skin. Something sticky on his skin, eating it. He runs and it burns worse, burrowing into the flesh. It has a gasoline stench. He knows what it is. It is jelling to his back and arms. He rubs at it, and it doesn’t come off, it just burns his hands. He jumps into a swampy tide pool, covers himself in water. But it still sticks, and he can really smell it now, gasoline, burning plastic, and burning flesh. NP2, or Super Napalm. He doesn’t feel anything but numb, but he watches the stuff burn through the layers of skin to the bone. He yelps and clamps his hand on it. It seems to stop, somewhat, but as soon as he lifts his hand it resumes burning down into him.
Henry lurched in his bath and then leaned over the side of the tub and vomited. There was some white, chalky goo, which may have been the Blythin. He can’t quite breathe. I am being followed by fire and brimstone, but fire that burns with no flame, just a chemical constancy. He still smelled a sharp whiff of gasoline. They frightened him, these smells from nowhere, their conjured passage from imagination into experience. How can you know things you don’t know?