by Sam Lipsyte
“And … scene,” I said. We’d taken some drama classes together. The others clapped hard for our skit, or the oratory, really. Davis, wasted in the right ratios, was a natural. We both took a bow.
* * *
I had one of those phones that did everything, but I could never master the simplest apps. Every time I tried to add to my schedule, these words would flash on the calendar display: “This appointment occurs in the past.” I grew to rely on the feature. It granted me texture, a sense of rich history.
I was remarking on this to Davis in the midtown diner where we’d agreed to meet. I suppose you could call it a retro diner, but what diner isn’t? They’re all designed to make you think fried food won’t kill you because it’s the 1950s and nobody knows any better, and besides, there’s a chance you haven’t been born yet.
We dug into our bacon and cheddar chili burgers. I watched Davis chew.
He didn’t look sick at all. He was still ugly but a good deal less so. Some men get handsome later. It’s up to them to make it count. He’d replaced his granny glasses with modish steel frames. He looked scientific, artistic, somebody trained to talk to astronauts about their dreams. He eyed me over his drippy meat.
“That’s funny,” he said. “I could look at your phone, maybe fix it.”
“No,” I said. “I like it that way.”
We were silent for a moment.
“So,” I said. “The ragged rider.”
“Indeed.”
“You look fantastic. I thought you’d be much more winnowed.”
“It’s not that kind of disease.”
“What kind is it?”
“We’re still working on that. The doctors.”
“I’m sorry. Whatever it is.”
“It’s in the blood. They know that. I’m sorry, too. But at least it’s given me an excuse to gather my old friends.”
“We haven’t talked since—”
“Since graduation,” said Davis.
“No,” I said. “That other time.”
We’d run into each other in a cocktail lounge in San Francisco several years after college. Davis wore a suit of disco white and toasted the would-be silicon barons at his table. I, assistant manager of this spacey blue sleazepit for the young and almost rich, sloshed Dom in their flutes. Davis slipped me some cash and a wink, but he flailed in a world beyond his code capacity. His group appeared composed of algorithmic gangsters, expert wielders of their petty and twisty Jewish, Welsh, Cambodian, Nubian, and Mayan brains. They hadn’t spent their undergraduate years soused, brandishing pistols and theory. They’d been those morose, slightly chippy bots I’d noticed at the refectory whenever I rolled in for some transitional pancakes after a night of self-bludgeoning. They were churls with huge binders, and I’d always known they were my betters.
“Be honest,” said Davis at the bar. “Are you gunning for maître d’ or is this research for a screenplay?”
“I’m trying to pay my rent, sycophant.”
“We were like brothers.”
“Cain and the other one.”
“That’s true. So what’s your life plan?”
“Drinking,” I said. “One day at a time.”
“These people here think I’m Swiss,” said Davis. “They think I have Ph.D.s in cognitive science and computer engineering. There’s a serious tip involved if you help maintain my cover.”
“What’s the angle?”
“I need them to work for stock options. I’ve got a start-up. It’s called the Buddy System Network. You become friends with people online, share your opinions, your stories, put up pictures. Only connect, right? What do you think?”
“I think you’re a freaking crackpot. Your idea is ludicrous. People aren’t machines.”
“If you’d read more great literature, you’d know that machines are exactly what people are.”
Now, as we sat in the diner, Davis—the new, dying, steely, reframed Davis—dragged a waffle fry through his chili burger sauce.
“So what have you been doing?” I said, thoughtless as usual.
“Right now I seem to be dying. Before that I was looking to break into your line of work. Sponging off wealthy women. My tangelo flow isn’t what it used to be. The economy mugged the Davis dynasty. Come to my place tomorrow, will you? It would mean a lot to me.”
* * *
That night, back in my shimmering crypt, I called Martha in Michigan.
“This is crazy,” I said. “Let’s patch it up.”
“You turd, I’m married again.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “Scott. How well does he grill?”
“We’re vegans now.”
“No dairy?”
“Kills the sex drive.”
“So that’s what it was.”
“No, honey, it was other things with us.”
“How’s your mom?”
“Let’s not revisit that incident.”
“Incident? Try era.”
“I’ve got to go.”
Down in the hotel bar, I thought of how much Davis and I still had to discuss. Our friendship, for example, and how quickly we’d passed through each other, from fascinated strangers to loyal chums to relics of each other’s worlds. We’d been pawns of proximity, choiceless as brothers. I’d always sort of hated him, really, his arrogance, his masks, his whispery fake ways with my mind. I’d been nothing to him, just his handsome stooge, a barker for his depraved tent.
Now, I could tell you my family history and you could do some amateur noodle prods, conclude I needed one such as Davis to salve my certain hurts. Was it the time my mother beat my hands with a serving spoon while I stood enchanted by the ripples in her gray rayon blouse? Or the occasion my father recited a limerick that began “There once was a dumb fucking boy / who was never his daddy’s joy”? Yes, we could solve for why, but we could also eat another slice of coconut cake. Why won’t save you, anyway. Why makes it worse. And Davis, I realized, he wasn’t sick.
He was sick.
* * *
I took the train and then the bus to his place in Red Hook. He lived in a refurbished ink factory. I pushed through the iron doors and climbed the stairs until I saw a metal plate with Davis’s name on it. This building, he’d told me at the diner, was owned by rich artists who rented cheap, unsafe spaces to poor artists. Davis had a good deal with these slumlord aesthetes.
His apartment, empty and unlocked, was a great cement room with high windows. Greasy carpets covered the floor. A pair of half-shredded cane chairs and a stained divan connoted a parlor. I recognized all the furniture from the old days. He’d added nothing. Even the stereo had survived.
Davis appeared in his doorway. “Everyone’s up on the roof, kid. Follow me.”
He led me up a narrow ladder to a nearly nautical hatch. I popped through after him, my chin at tar level, surveyed the roof scene—so many pasty, dulled versions of the people I’d known, our old audience, and strangers, too. Caldwell the goblin had gone waxen and squinty. The Texan, dipless, had a tidy potbelly. He sported a polo shirt and unsevere trousers, golf philanthropical. The girl who once stood by the stereo was now a woman who hovered near a hooded grill. It resembled a Greek design I’d coveted from catalogs back in Ypsilanti. I could smell the seared tuna smoke, the zuke-juice vapors. Davis pulled me from the hatch, led me to the sawhorse bar. We had vistas of city and sea.
“My friend will have the rum punch,” said Davis to the teen boy with the ladle.
“Okay, Dad.”
Davis pounced on my surprise.
“You bet your life I have a magnificent son. This is Owney. Eugene Onegin Davis.”
“A pleasure.”
“You’re doing the math, but I’ll save you the trouble. Especially you. She drifted away from both of us that fateful night. But we crossed paths in Marfa years later.”
“She?”
“She,” said a voice. A dark, glitter-dusted hand brushed my shoulder: Brianna.
“So, you two a
re…”
“God, no,” said Brianna. She still had the heart-threshing looks, the wicked corneal glint of a serious reader. “We still care for each other, and we both love Eugene, but our affections have relocated.”
“Well phrased,” said Davis.
“So,” I said. “How are you dealing with the illness?”
Brianna looked baffled.
“Great news,” said Davis. “I’m not terminal. That’s you, I’m afraid. I’m going live forever. I’ve gotten my hands on some black market Super Resveratrol. I’ll tell you, some of these scientists become dope slingers just to keep their three houses going. But no, I’m fine. How was I going to get you out here? For my shot?”
“Your what?”
“Please, you’ve already figured it out, I’m sure. Down deep”—he poked my chest bone—“you must have understood exactly what was going on.”
“I don’t have much of a deep down.”
“But remember, this can’t work unless you know what you will be missing.”
“The future?” I said, and broke from his grip.
“What can’t work?” said Brianna.
“Nothing, sweetie.”
“Brilliant Brianna,” I said. “Did you know I was married? The union didn’t last. I couldn’t forget you. I sexed it with the mother, though. That was tender.”
“See, that song won’t pass the audition,” said Davis. “I have to know I’m ventilating a contented man. Otherwise it’s a mercy job. So you’ve drifted a bit. Lived with uncertainty. You’re a student of life. You’re the eternal student. You should have lived centuries ago in Germany. Besides, you’re a stud, my man. Women want to make love to your sunglasses. It’s always been that way. You’ve pursued and overtaken happiness. Maybe you’ll suddenly decide to make a ton of money, find a beauty to bear your children. This life, it’s all so exalted, so tremendous and full of wonder, and also relaxing. Are you with me?”
“I’ve just been running from anything that resembled revelation. For twenty years I’ve been running.”
“Nonsense,” said Davis. “You have friends. You have health.”
“I did quit the cowboy killers,” I said. “And you and me, we had a ball, just hanging out, talking.”
“I didn’t like you,” said Davis. “Go another way.”
I stepped forward and stroked his lapels. He shucked me off.
“You condescended,” said Davis. “Acted like you were killing time until a better life came along.”
“You never cared for my ideas,” I said, and snatched his hand, kissed his knuckles.
“What ideas?”
“Not ideas. Something. I’ve blocked most of it. Our whole friendship is a blur.”
“I remember every microsecond,” said Davis.
“It’s really good to see you,” I said.
“Fetch the party favor, Owney.”
The boy reached under the bar for the mahogany box. Davis lifted out the Beretta.
“We’ll just need one of these.”
The new guests, who had gathered in for our sloppy matinee, gasped. The old hands, the repeat attendees, stood back.
“Not this homoerotic gunplay again,” said the goblin.
“Homosocial,” said Brianna. “Or, no, you’re right.”
“Shitesnickers,” said the Texan, whom I’d overheard talking about his Irish roots.
“Just blanks,” said the goblin. “They’re old farts now. Wouldn’t dare.”
“It’s a prank,” a man with a gray-blond beard said to his date. “They all went to college together and it’s like a sketch they do.”
“Juvenile, entitled,” said the date.
“It’s like that Chekhov play,” said another woman. “The one with the gun that must go off if you dare introduce it.”
“No,” the woman by the grill cried, wrapped herself around my waist. “Didn’t you know it was me! Me all along!”
“Me who?” I said.
“Debbie!”
Brianna giggled, blew me a French kiss. It mattered that she’d never loved me, or ever saw me as anything but a pleasant face to mount. I’d always known this, but never understood how germane it was to what I’d begun calling, suddenly, inanely, my life narrative, which I assumed would culminate in our bright joining.
But here was Debbie instead.
“Debbie!” said Davis to me. “Yes! Of course. Your reason to live, pal! Debbie! The tragic element of your demise.”
Davis pointed his oiled Lombardic hole puncher and took aim, as he had years before, when I had the soul of a laboratory coke mouse, craved only life’s jolt, couldn’t know wise joy.
“Debbie, honey,” I whispered. “Move away. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
I raised my arms and tilted my head in the manner of the carpentered carpenter.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen, to complete a procedure begun many, many years ago, when I, Standish James Davis, having been fired upon by this knave during the latter days of Bush the Elder, take, as my duelist’s right, the second and, fate willing, final shot of this contest. Furthermore—”
“Cap his monkey ass!” shouted Brianna.
Davis obliged.
* * *
Summertime, the neighbors come around to the backyard of the sweet rickety house Ondine sold us, watch me wheel up to the grills and baste the meats and flip them into Styrofoam boxes and thermal bags. We do only takeout, pork or beef, with biscuits and pop, and only on the weekend. We don’t even have an official name, but I hear some people call our operation the Capo’s, because a rumor floated that I was once some edge player in the North Jersey mob, got marked for a whack. Hence the wound, the wheelchair.
These are good people, but they watch too much television. Debbie, who works the register and is my wife, insists we do without one. We pass long evenings in our house drinking tea and talking about books and art and politics, or watching old movies on the computer, or having gentle, atrocious sex.
Sometimes Ondine comes over for poker or we all go out for chimichangas. Last time, after a few drinks, I asked Ondine about her daughter.
“Martha? She’ll never be happy with anybody but herself.”
“Lucky girl.”
“You lucked out, too,” said Ondine.
“I know,” I said. “But life gets really murky sometimes.”
“It’s true, honey. Like a fish tank nobody cleans. Just fish shit and dead fish. But that’s how you know it’s life.”
Debbie is a big deal over at the university, where she got a professorship as soon as I was healed enough to marry. We didn’t plan on Ypsilanti, but Michigan happened to want her. Sometimes I read her presentations for typos, but I don’t understand them. Turned out she was the brilliant one of our bunch.
I never charged Davis, and they ruled the shooting an accident. If I’d charged him, I could have taken him to civil court and gutted him, but he wasn’t lying about the disappearance of his family fortune. Last I heard, he ran some kind of permanent luau up on that Red Hook roof, and also a break-dancing camp for private school kids. Brianna, somebody told me, makes films of women giving birth alone in public spaces. I never even knew she liked that sort of thing.
I’m not sure why Debbie stays with me. Her devotion must have fixed itself to the memory of my brief, illusory splendor, or else she has some plan of revenge for the years I missed her charms. I would deserve that, if only because I know in my heart that if she were the ruined one, I would not stay.
It turns out you can live, even prosper, with that kind of truth. Until, I presume, you cannot.
I still wonder why our reenactment of that Pushkin story meant so much to Davis. My real confession is that I never even read the thing. Davis just told it to me. And the way he did so, now that I recall his manner, makes me suspect he hadn’t read it, either.
Typical, I guess. We were poseurs, but why do you think poseurs pose? Because they want to be invited to the dominion of the real, an almost magical
zone of unselfed sensation, and they know their very desire for it disqualifies them. Consider that, the next time you cluck your tongue at some awful, grandiose fake.
Dude just wants to feel.
I did almost achieve that sensation, or a cheater’s version of it, but it had not much to do with Davis, or the rest.
It happened the night before I went to Red Hook, while I sat at the bar in the Hudson Lux. A woman took the next stool. She wore a silk dress with pearls, ordered one of those something-tinis. We introduced ourselves, but she had a thick accent and I couldn’t make out her name.
“You a hairy motherfucker,” she said, caressed my forearm where I’d rolled my sleeve.
“You want to see all of it?” I said.
Her room was just like my room, with more moon in the window.
We were on the bed when she asked the big New York, or at least Hudson Lux, question.
“What do you do?”
“I’m a barista by training,” I said. “Though I enjoy grilling. I’ve also been a schoolteacher and worked construction and run the night shift at a homeless shelter and interned at a men’s magazine.”
“You here on business?”
“Are you here on business?” I said.
“You mean right now?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “What do you want?”
“Well, part of me just wants to die, but the other part wants to live, to really live.”
“Okay,” she said.
I slipped my belt off slowly, slung it from a hook in the door, looped.
It all followed rather quickly after that, a surge of bliss, a great groinal shudder, a shell burst of froth and light. Then I got cold, fogged. I floated in a bitter-tasting cloud, but in that moment I also glimpsed everything that was good and sweet and fresh, and also incredibly refreshing and relaxing, and I saw how I could reach that place and remain there for a very long time. After that, I think, somebody clutched my legs, my knees, shoved me upward, and a bald man with an earpiece and a combat knife cut me down from the door.
PEASLEY
The man who killed the idea of tanks in England—his afterlife.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up