Fireball

by Tyler Keevil

  ‘And we talked for a bit.’

  ‘I get you. Like pillow talk.’

  ‘Sure. Except there weren’t any pillows.’

  I don’t know exactly what they talked about, but I know she asked him what it had been like for him. You know – his first time and everything. But he couldn’t explain it. He couldn’t even really explain it to me.

  ‘Was it like jerking off with shampoo in the shower?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Better or worse?’

  ‘Better. Way better.’

  I glanced around, then lowered my voice a little. ‘Was it like sticking your dick in a cantaloupe?’

  I don’t know why I asked him that. It’s not like either of us had tried it.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was it like a wet dream?’

  ‘No, man.’

  ‘What was it like, then?’

  He stood up. The guy in the shop was signalling that our pizza was ready.

  ‘I don’t know. It wasn’t like anything.’

  ‘How can it be like nothing?’

  ‘It just was, okay? I put it in her and we fucked and then my whole body sort of exploded and for a second I wasn’t even me any more. I was nothing. I was gone.’

  ‘Oh.’

  That wasn’t really what I expected – but it still sounded awesome.

  33

  ‘Well, you caught me in the act. You might as well have one, too.’

  I went back to see my shrink about a week later. It was a Tuesday, I think. Or maybe a Wednesday. I can’t really remember. But basically, since she didn’t have a secretary or anything, I walked right in without knocking. And there she was, sitting at her desk, pouring rum into a highball glass. I was embarassed, for obvious reasons. We both were. But she played it pretty cool. She just got out another glass and offered some to me. Normally I don’t even like dark rum, but this tasted nice and smooth. It was Havana Club – a special reserve or something. She drank the good stuff, all right. My psychiatrist was pure class.

  ‘What happened to your face?’ she asked.

  I was still sporting a shiner and split lip from our brawl at the Avalon.

  ‘Chris and I got in a fight.’

  ‘With each other?’

  ‘With six guys.’

  I was glad she’d asked. Everybody asked. It felt good to say it, especially to her. I had these wounds on my face and this rum in my hand and now she knew how tough I was.

  ‘Did you win?’

  ‘It was sort of a draw.’

  ‘Your father must have been pleased about that.’

  I laughed. My dad was convinced I’d stepped on a rollercoaster ride to hell. First I’d broken a bottle on my head and now I’d gotten in a brawl. He blamed himself. He thought he was failing me as a father. There was no convincing him otherwise.

  ‘He’s decided you’re my last chance,’ I told her.

  She smiled. ‘We better get started then.’

  I sat in the same chair. She came around the desk, bringing her glass with her. I listened to the swish of her skirt and watched her feet moving across the carpet. When she sat still, her ankles were gorgeous. But when she walked they were almost mesmerising.

  As she passed the window she paused to gaze out.

  ‘When was the last time it rained?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  The summer seemed to have gone on forever: hot and dry and merciless.

  ‘God it’s like a wasteland out there.’

  She took another sip of rum. She had her back to me and all I could see was her silhouette against the window – which was so bright it didn’t even look like a window. It looked more like a square of white-hot metal somebody had hung on her wall. Just staring at it made me sweat.

  ‘There’s supposed to be a water shortage,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’ She raised her glass and swirled the liquor around. I was surprised to see it was almost empty. ‘Luckily there’s enough of this to get by on.’

  She went back to top herself up. I put my glass down on the desk and slid it towards her – nice and casual. She glanced at me, surprised, then sort of smirked.

  ‘All right,’ she said, pouring me another, ‘but let’s keep this between us, shall we?’

  As far as I could tell, she was the greatest psychiatrist in history. First it had been the cigarettes and now it was this rum. It didn’t kick me in the head like the cheap rum we usually drank. It made me all friendly and feisty and warm. The first thing I did was tell her about our scrap. I don’t remember everything I said but I remember talking loudly and making huge gestures with my hands. I even hopped up to show her my flying sidekick. I really got into it.

  ‘Would you mind doing that again?’

  ‘The kick?’

  ‘Please.’

  I ran across the room and, leaping into the air, snapped out my foot. She jotted something in her notebook. She was unravelling the mysteries of my flying sidekick.

  ‘Do you like fighting?’ she asked.

  I sunk back into my chair, a little breathless. I had to think about that. I remembered the whirlwind of violence and the hitting and being hit and the sharp fear in my gut, like shrapnel.

  ‘No. But it felt good afterwards, knowing I’d done it.’

  ‘Knowing you weren’t scared?’

  ‘I was scared. I did it anyway.’

  She found that interesting. I could tell because she wrote a couple more notes down. She had one leg crossed over the other, and her shoe had come half off. It had fallen away from the heel and just sort of dangled from her toe. Super sexy. I wanted to get down on my knees and kiss it. Not the shoe. The foot. And the ankle, of course. The ankle was the best.

  ‘Does Chris like fighting?’

  ‘I don’t think he cares. He just does it.’

  ‘To impress Karen?’

  ‘No. He doesn’t care about that, either.’

  She put aside her notebook and sighed. You know – totally exasperated.

  ‘Is there anything Chris does care about?’

  It was a good question. We both sat there in the dark safety of her office, trying to think of an answer. Meanwhile, outside, the sun hammered the city into submission. I imagined it as an apocalypse. Car tyres melted and trees burst into flame and people boiled in their skins. It felt as if we were the only ones left. When we finished our drinks she stood up and reached for the bottle. This time she filled mine right to the top, just like hers. We’d drunk half the twixer without chasing and I was feeling pretty loose.

  ‘Listen,’ she said.

  Under the hum of her air conditioner I heard this soft rattling noise.

  ‘Do you hear it?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘My air conditioner’s breaking down.’

  It was the most depressing sound I’d ever heard. It was only a matter of time before all that heat found its way in here. Then we’d be finished, and we both knew it.

  ‘How about some music?’ she asked.

  She had a Discman and some portable speakers in her desk. All her CDs were in the wrong cases. She had to open every single one before she found what she was looking for.

  ‘You like John Lennon?’

  ‘Yeah. My dad plays all that old hippy stuff.’

  ‘Lennon was more than a hippy. He was a martyr – the only Christ we deserve.’

  I had no idea what she meant by that. I just nodded and drank as she fiddled with her Discman. The speakers were the kind that make CDs sound tinny and faint, like music on an old transistor radio. She turned them up all the way, which wasn’t very loud. It was Lennon, all right. He was singing: They hurt you at home and they hit you at school… She sang along with him. She knew all the words and everything.

  ‘God I love this tune.’

  They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool... She slipped off her shoes and leaned back in her chair, still humming the tune. Till you’re so fucking crazy you can’t
follow their rules…

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Sing with me. You’re making me self-conscious.’

  I laughed and tried to join in, but I didn’t know any of the lyrics and ended up sounding like a bit of a treat. After a while I tapered off, and instead just sat there sipping rum and sneaking glances at her ankles and feet. She wasn’t wearing any nail polish. She didn’t have to. Her feet were hot enough as it was – even hotter than Karen’s elbows.

  When the song ended, she said, ‘You know, my daughter once asked me how I wanted to die. She was six. What kind of question is that for a six-year-old to ask?’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘That I didn’t know. I wasn’t lying. I honestly don’t know. Do you?’

  ‘No.’

  We sat there, trying to think of the best way.

  I said, ‘Chris wants fireworks when he dies. You know – like a big bang.’

  She gave me a funny look. ‘Do you wish you were more like Chris?’

  I shrugged. ‘Well, it would be cool to be that tough.’

  ‘And he has Karen.’ She picked a bit of fluff off her skirt. ‘You like her, don’t you?’

  ‘Sure. I mean, she’s pretty unique.’

  ‘You dream about her. Do you fantasise about her, too?’

  I nodded and didn’t say anything.

  ‘About both of them?’

  I looked away, out the window.

  My dad’s a bit of a bloodhound about booze. Come to think of it, he actually looks like a bloodhound. He’s got those drawn eyes and saggy cheeks and a pair of middle-aged jowls. And whenever he picks me up from parties, he sort of sniffs the air. Totally suspicious. Then he’ll say something super sarcastic, something like, ‘God you smell like a brewery.’ He doesn’t get furious, either. He just goes all quiet and looks disappointed, as if I’ve let him down in the worst possible way. It drives me absolutely insane, so for obvious reasons I was pretty nervous when he picked me up from my shrink’s office. He was driving his Civic – the silver one he got a year or two ago. I rolled down the window, straight away, and made sure to breathe out the side of my mouth. Also, I got him talking. That’s the best way to avoid his wrath. Just get him talking and act extremely interested in whatever he says.

  ‘Hey pops – why was Lennon so awesome?’

  ‘Lenin the communist or Lennon the Beatle?’

  ‘The Beatle.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, and sort of shifted around in his seat. I could tell he was getting ready to do some serious talking. ‘He was one of those people who became more than a person, for whatever reason. The hippies wanted an icon and Lennon fit the mould. So we put him up on a pedestal. And for a while he actually seemed to stand for something.’

  I burped – this hideous rum burp – and blew it straight out the window.

  Then I asked, ‘Like what?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Peace and love. Freedom. All that counter-culture crap. Whether or not he really embodied those values didn’t matter – people needed to believe in something.’

  He kept talking and I nodded along, trying to look attentive. The only problem was that I felt harsh sick. My dad’s a pretty aggressive driver and zigzagging through traffic was making me queasy. Robson Street is packed with tons of fancy restaurants, and with the window open I could smell the fish and seafood rotting in the dumpsters. The stench practically strangled me. All that rum simmered away in my belly, threatening to boil over. I clutched at the armrest, terrified that I was going to hurl.

  ‘I remember the day he got shot,’ my dad was saying. ‘Your mother and I were down near Puerto Limón in Costa Rica, camping in our Volks.’

  ‘Um, dad?’

  ‘It came on the radio and your mother just burst into tears.’

  ‘I think you better…’

  ‘It was like all those things he’d stood for had died with him.’

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘What?’

  But I didn’t have time to ask him to pull over. I just stuck my head out the window and started puking. It was weird puke – super explosive. It rushed out in a single spurt, like a short burst from a firehose. It splashed onto the road and rolled away behind us. I hardly even got any on the car door. Then I sat back and wiped at my mouth, trembling all over.

  ‘Jesus,’ my dad said. ‘Where did that come from?’

  ‘Uh… my shrink gave me some leftover sushi. It tasted a bit funny.’

  It was the only thing I could come up with. I thought I was busted for sure, but all he said was, ‘Oh. Did you have tuna?’

  ‘A couple pieces of sashimi.’

  ‘Maybe it had gone off.’

  And that was it. He must have suspected something, but I guess the notion of me getting plastered with my psychiatrist was just too far-fetched for him to believe.

  ‘How’d it go today, aside from the sushi?’

  ‘Pretty good, I guess,’ I said.

  He slugged me, playfully, in the shoulder.

  ‘Think you can stay out of trouble for a while?’

  I nodded. I could tell he didn’t believe me, though. That’s another thing my dad’s got a sixth sense about. Trouble, I mean. It was only two days later that we started the riot.

  And it was all downhill from there.

  34

  It was just like my dream.

  The water shifted and shimmered, shimmered and shifted, as if a huge strip of sequinned fabric had been stretched all the way across the Cove. And Karen was sitting right beside me, dangling her feet off the edge of the dock. Waves slurped at the pilings and sunlight lashed me in the face and a warm breeze tickled the back of my neck. Chris and Jules weren’t there. They hadn’t gone to go get ice cream, though. That part was different from the dream. I think they were trying to find us some weed, actually. Or maybe some nachos. I can’t really remember. But basically, I had Karen all to myself for a change.

  ‘God it’s so hot, today,’ I said.

  ‘Mm-hmm. For sure.’

  I always turned into a bit of a gearbox when we were alone. Don’t ask me why. I was just too aware of her to act normal. I mean, let’s face it: a bikini doesn’t cover much. There was plenty to look at. I could have studied any part of her for hours. I loved noticing all the little differences, all the little changes. That day she had a sunburn on her nose and a hickey on her neck and a new bracelet around her wrist. It was one of those candy bracelets that you can eat, and she nibbled at the sugary circles as she flipped through her magazine. Meanwhile I just sat there, trying my hardest to look relaxed.

  ‘How hot do you think it is?’ I asked.

  As soon as I said it, I wished I’d said something else. Anything else. I mean, Karen didn’t want to talk about how hot it was, for Christ’s sake. That’s like standing in the middle of a swimming pool and talking about how wet the water is.

  She shrugged. ‘Oh, about thirty I guess.’

  I felt so shitty that I decided to stop talking entirely. I’d give her the silent treatment. It worked for Chris so maybe it would work for me, too. I flopped back onto the dock, crossed my arms, and shut my mouth. Also, I closed my eyes. That way I couldn’t see her and get all distracted. I lay like that for a few minutes, trying to forget she even existed.

  Eventually she asked, ‘What are we doing tonight?’

  I didn’t answer. I just grunted.

  ‘Are we hitting the Avalon or what?’

  I grunted again.

  ‘But we’re partying, right?’

  The third time I didn’t even bother to grunt. I just lay there with one arm draped over my eyes. Totally indifferent. It was pretty hilarious, actually. After a while, Karen started moving around and rustling the pages of her magazine. When that didn’t work, she sighed in this super obvious way – like a spoiled little kid trying to show me how bored she was.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked, acting all innocent.

  ‘I need help with this quiz. You’re a guy. You should know.’

  ‘
Okay.’

  ‘When will a man ejaculate the most: when he’s been drinking, when it’s been a while since his last orgasm, when he gets a lot of foreplay, or all of the above?’

  I tried to look as if I talked about that kind of stuff all the time.

  ‘Um,’ I said, ‘if you haven’t come for a while you’re carrying around a bigger load.’

  ‘What about the other two?’

  I had to think about it. ‘When you’re drunk it’s bigger, yeah.’

  ‘So all of the above?’

  I couldn’t comment on the foreplay. I hadn’t gotten that far with anybody yet.

  ‘Sure – I guess.’

  She leaned over and pecked me on the cheek. ‘Thanks, babe.’

  Karen hardly ever flirted with me like that. I knew it was only because Chris and Julian weren’t around, but it still felt pretty awesome. I sat there in a giddy little daze while she finished her quiz. Then she rolled up the magazine and popped it in her beach bag.

  ‘Want to go swimming?’

  When she said that, I harsh tripped out. It was like déjà vu, except way crazier because I’d heard those exact words in about a hundred dreams. I almost said, ‘We don’t have our bathing suits.’ But this wasn’t the dream, and we did, so I just said, ‘Okay.’

  Karen adjusted her bikini straps, pulled off her bracelet, and slipped into the water. I followed, shoving off with my arms and letting myself sink straight down. Five feet below the surface the temperature dropped suddenly, and I shot back up.

  ‘Careful,’ Karen said. ‘There’s a red jellyfish over there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Right there.’

  Then I saw. It was only a few yards away.

  ‘I hate those goddamned things. I got one on my face, once.’

  Karen started giggling. ‘On your face?’

  ‘Yeah. Right on my face. Like this.’

  I demonstrated with my hand, palming my face like a basketball. Karen giggled even harder. She swam over to the jellyfish, which was floating on the surface, pulsating.

  ‘It’s so beautiful,’ she said, ‘like a flower.’