Head bent, you watch from the corners of your eyes as the gang member uses his right glove to push the scrambled eggs between his teeth, grinning, lips smacking, eating with his mouth open.
You're just glad Gretchen isn't here to see your humiliation.
You make your way through the tall corridors of City University, past bulletin boards thumbtacked with sign-up petitions for political causes, and index cards advertising apartments and tutoring services, arriving at the double doors of Classroom 304.
The doors open onto a large arena, much more vast and echoing than any classroom in your high school in Pennsylvania, curved rows of seats descending down to a circular stage where a college professor stands in front of a podium, long hair and eyeglasses, hand over his left ear, talking to a few admirers.
You find a seat about halfway down the rows.
Glancing to your right, you do a double-take. A few empty seats over, Gretchen, from your apartment.
You silently observe her as she stares straight ahead with those bedroom eyes, as if she isn't in this classroom, but instead on the edge of a green cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
"Hi!"
She continues staring straight ahead.
"Hey!"
She tracks her eyes over towards your voice. Raises her eyebrows.
You lift yourself halfway off your chair. "Do you mind if I sit next to you?"
"Yeah."
You scoot over, smiling, blushing. "Good to see a familiar face."
She surprises you by not being at all aloof. Lowers her blue eyes, raises them, with a friendly camaraderie and a little girl's smile.
The professor calls for everyone to find their seats, be quiet.
He places both hands palms down on his podium, looking up over the tiered rows rising around him. "In Chapter One of Sense and Sensibility, we are told that…" The professor looks down at the podium. "'By a former marriage, Mr. Perry Dashwood had one son: by his present lady, three daughters.'" He looks back up. "And what does that matter? Jane Austen is providing details of Mr. Dashwood's financial obligations with respect to his second marriage, but since all these people are merely characters in a fictional work, why should we care what travails they face, or what ultimately happens to them?"
A student dutifully raises his hand.
"Yes!"
"It's important to the story?"
"Granted. But is it important to us? A 'story' is something that's not true. Why should we care about something that isn't true? We read how Elinor suppresses her own self-interests to help her family, but who cares? She doesn't exist! She's just a name on page after page of an archaic punctuation system of colons, semi-colons, and emdashes.
"If we accept that a study of Jane Austin, or any other author, is essentially a study of unimportant events, then why bother studying her? And the same applies to nonfictional works. Karl Marx is mostly known for Das Kapital, but I consider his earlier work, Wage-Labor and Capital, to be a far more significant contribution to the class struggle. Almost like something Ralph Nader would have written, if he lived in the nineteenth century."
Some knowing laughs around the curved tiers, followed by pretending-to-be-knowing laughs.
"But again, since all those people discussed in Wage-Labor and Capital are dead, why should we, the living, care?
"Why should I bother teaching you? What good are you? What good are any of us? We're all going to die, with nothing left, no trace of us. Earth is going to blow up. Either from an asteroid smacking us, or our sun entering a red giant phase, in about 5 billion years, at which point its outer layers will expand as the hydrogen fuel in the sun's core is consumed and the core contracts and heats up.
"We're temporary. We are not permanent. Nothing we do is worth shit. Do we save a child from starving? Protect a woman who's about to be raped? Say an encouraging word to a stranger crawling on his hands and knees? It means nothing. No matter what we do, it will all end in ashes, unrecorded."
A student raises his hand amid the rows of laptop tappings. "But what about our spiritual selves? Doesn't what we do here, on this plane, allow us to transcend the physical fate you're talking about?"
The professor looks astonished. "I don't believe it." Lots of laughter from the tiers. "In this day and age. Someone who still believes in God." He makes an exasperated face. "There is no God. God is the cunt that the cock of religion has been trying to fuck for eons. Without success. Without any hip-writhing on God's part. Because God is frigid. But it's different when Science fucks the world. Science shoves its cock into the world's cunt, which is located just below South America. And the world starts rolling its hips side to side at the incredibly pleasurable fuck Science is giving it. 'Finally, someone who wants to get to know me!' Science fucks the world with the world's continents wrapped around Science's ruler. And Science says, What's my name? What's my name? And the world says, Science! Science!"
More laughter.
Gretchen leans her warm shoulder against you. Those eyes swing up to yours. Wink. In a conspiratorial voice she whispers, "Atheism is so twentieth century."
You and she agree to meet after class at The Green Throat, a vegetarian restaurant one block away from the college, for coffee.
You sit across from her at one of the small square tables by the front windows.
"Are you a vegetarian?"
She shakes her head. "Not by choice. I can't afford meat. So I wind up eating a lot of tofu. Plus it helps me keep my girlish figure." She makes a sexy face for him, eyes hooded, wide mouth parted, and she's doing it ironically, as a joke, but still, it actually is sexy, as she probably knows.
"I noticed there are a lot of packages of Ramen noodles in the kitchen cabinet."
Holding her coffee cup with both hands, head dipped, she gives a pretty shrug. "Those are Rudo's. They're incredibly cheap, like twenty-nine cents. He sells them in the apartment for two bucks."
"What's your major?"
"Veterinary medicine." She nods to herself. "They have some really good instructors here. A degree in veterinary medicine from City University means a lot. I should be able to work at one of the top vet hospitals in Manhattan once I get my degree. How was your first night in the apartment?"
"I slept okay, but in the morning, the book I was reading was infested with faces."
"That's New York. I've gotten used to living here, even though I get a lot of weird dreams. I had a weird dream last night."
"So now I ask what your dream was, right?" God, you're trying so hard to impress her with your cleverness.
"In my dream, I was shown all these birds I fed over the years. I was always in charge of the bird feeders in our backyard, ever since I was a little girl, but I mean I never kept count of how many birds I fed. How do you distinguish one cardinal from another? But in my dream, all those birds showed up, in gratitude. I had no idea there were so many!" Her blue eyes were moist, but she was pretending they weren't. Looked away, looked back at him. "Thousands, tens of thousands. Beautiful colors. Even though there were so many, I could suddenly, during the dream, see each bird for who she or he was. Could see their personalities, their histories, their hopes, their fears. It was just…extraordinarily moving."
You sit back in your chair. "Wow."
"But then, as my dream progressed, I was shown all the insects I killed in my life." She raises her eyes to you.
You don't know what to say.
She gets playful. "So why is Patrick Morgan going to City University?"
"I had an older sister. Betty."
She blows on her new cup of tea, refreshed by the server. "Okay. 'Had'?"
"She died."
"I'm so sorry."
"Yeah. She was the Great White Hope for my family. Really brilliant. But…"
"She had a drug problem."
"Yeah! How did you…"
"Hey. I know young women. So what happened?"
"She basically went bad. I remember growing up with her as my older sister. She was beaut
iful. She was the star. I was basically her younger brother. The not-star." He wiped his eyes, laughing. "I mean, it was ridiculous. Fucking ridiculous. She excelled at everything. There was nothing left for me to be good at. But then, in high school, she 'got in with the wrong crowd', or whatever, and all these demons I never knew were in her, and our parents never knew were in her, in her clean-cut American face, perfect blue eyes, wide-spaced, above a perfect nose, came out. She ended up a drug addict. And, eventually, she died. We saw her body at the police morgue, and she was just extraordinarily skinny. You could count her ribs, like she was something washed up on a beach. Tendons stretched out on her neck, elbows and knees. Part of me, I feel so much shame about this, and I never told anybody else, but part of me, I thought, okay, now it's my turn to shine. To come out from under her shadow."
"Wow. Fuck."
"But I loved her. I really, truly, unconditionally loved her. She was my sister!"
"I get it."
"She used to scuba dive. Yet another thing I never did. I tried to, but I panicked, switching the bubbling breathing apparatus back and forth with my 'diving buddy' fourteen feet underwater in the scuba diving pool. I got 'bug eyes'. And never dived again. But she kept diving, even after she was hooked on drugs. I used to wonder, all the joy I knew she experienced diving as a kid, before she ever tasted drugs, if after she became an addict and continued diving, if that was her way of getting back to a time when she was innocent."
"How'd she die?"
"They found her in an apartment in Harlem. Needle dangling from her arm. White foam puffing out of her nostrils. My parents were devastated. But that's when my dad started pushing me to take over the family legacy, to be the new Great White Hope."
Mid-day. You're alone in the apartment, not feeling well. You've been losing some weight. Not much, but enough to pull your belt to the next notch. Food is expensive, in the city. Especially when you have to pay for it yourself.
With no one here but you, the apartment is quiet, even with the traffic and pedestrian noises drifting up. Outside, on one of the concrete window ledges, a blue and gray pigeon is strutting back and forth, percolating its head, french fry like a nest-building twig clamped in its beak.
You heat up some water on the stove. Squeeze down into the bubbling water the contents of several ketchup packets you lifted from the condiment bar at the McDonald's down the block. Stir. A trick Gretchen taught you. Free tomato soup. Hot liquid is the easiest way for your stomach to feel full, at least for a little while.
As you sit down at the kitchen table with your soup and a spoon, the front door of the apartment bangs open.
You stand up.
A gang member walks through, looking into the different doorways he passes to see who's inside.
Which is just you.
You feel your pulse thumping in both wrists. "What do you want?"
He's dark-haired, dark-eyed. Black curl of hair hanging down over his forehead that must have taken time to get right in a mirror.
His right hand pulls out, from his front pants pocket, a knife. He wipes its long blade left side, right side, on his blue jeans, as if sharpening it. Keeps advancing towards you. "What do I want? What do you think I want?"
"I don't have any money."
His snub-nosed face looks insulted. "You think I need money? Do I look that way to you?" Both fists pound his expensive white dress shirt, like an ape up on his hind feet. "Are you insulting me?"
"I don't have any money."
Even though he's shorter than you, and alone, he's completely relaxed. His dark eyes look you up and down. "Are you wearing underwear?"
"What?"
"I want your underwear."
You say nothing.
He's within reach of you now. Twists his face to one side, anger filling it like you've never seen anger fill a face before, red and purple skin rising around his nose and eyes. "Give me your fucking underwear, or I cut you up and pull out your intestines into a big pile here on the floor like they're a fire hose."
Despising your cowardice, you strip off your clothes, standing next to your untouched bowl of steaming tomato soup. Hand him your underpants.
He sniffs your underpants. "Where is the girl with the blond hair?"
You realize he's talking about Gretchen. "She's not here."
Standing right in front of you, he pokes the tip of his steel knife against your pale bare abdomen, just below your rib cage, the soft, vulnerable section of your body not protected by bones. His dark eyes look up into yours. "So where is the bitch cunt?"
Your elbows are shaking. Your ears are muffled with fear. But still, instead of answering him, you say, "Why do you want to know?"
He doesn't push the knife in. His eyes twitch, blinking uncontrollably. There's something wrong with him. From him standing this close to you, you see, looking down at the roots of his black hair, lice. "Why do I want to know? Really? You ask me this? Because I am going to rape her. In every orifice of hers."
You grab the knife out of his hand, and by the time he gets an astonished look on his face, you stab the stiff blade deep inside him, red spreading across his white dress shirt as he stumbles back, falls.
He's lying on his back on the kitchen floor, legs kicking out, mouth gurgling.
You put your clothes back on, run past him, trot to the still open front door of the apartment, down the stairs.
Once you reach the street, you slow down. Pass your shaking hands through your hair.
Where are you going?
You walk like a puppet down the Manhattan street, passing hundreds of people, trying to look normal.
Stop in at the McDonald's. Stuff a couple of dozen ketchup packets in your pants pockets. Go to the counter. Order a fish filet sandwich.
Find an empty table. Eat it slower than anyone has ever eaten a fish filet sandwich. It takes you over two hours before you finish it. By then, the final bites are cold, but they still taste pretty good.
By the time you get back to the building, it's four o'clock.
Everyone will be coming home soon, from classes.
The hallway door to the apartment is still open.
You sneak inside, listening, hands reaching out, touching walls.
The body is no longer on the floor in the kitchen.
Your bowl of tomato soup has separated. Red ketchup congealed at the bottom of the bowl, cooled water above.
Where the body was on the kitchen floor, there's a small smear of blood.
Was he only wounded? Limped off, to come back later tonight with his gang, to kill you? Found dead on the floor by his gang, who carried his corpse out to set it on fire on top of a car, unknown to them who killed him?
You get down on the floor on your knees, scrubbing at the stain like a maid. Behind you, voices.
You look over your shoulder.
Your roommates, returning from class, arguing.
You hold up the white rag you had been using, big pink smear in its center. "I had a nose bleed. Here's our blood tribute to the old man to put outside our front door tonight. My treat."
All of you are sitting around the kitchen table, eating a chicken and andouille sausage gumbo Rudo has prepared, its darkness poured over steamed white rice in the bottom of each bowl, for five dollars per person. It's absolutely delicious. Who would have known Rudo was such a great cook?
You're still trying to make friends with him. "So what are you doing over the Thanksgiving vacation?"
Head dipped, spooning the gumbo into his mouth, he looks up, eyes wild above his black beard. "Really? Chris, ask Patrick if he really cares. Is he going to kneel by his bed each night during Thanksgiving break and say a prayer for me?"
"I'm just asking."
Chris, sitting naked next to Rudo, scratches his blond goatee. "What are you doing?"
"Gretchen and I are going to stay with my family in Pennsylvania."
Rudo hurriedly gulps down his latest lifting of the gumbo. Wipes his mouth. His dark eyebrows arch
. He lets out a chuckle of pure delight. "Chris! Tell him, you poor sap! Are you really serious?"
Gretchen, sitting next to you, concentrates on eating.
"Yeah."
"Convey to him, Oh, you poor boy!" He chortles. Swings his head around to the others around the table. "Heavens to Betsy! Does he really not know anything about our girl Gretchen?"
"What do you mean?"
Rudo's voice rises. "Oh, my goodness, how do we break it to him?"
A few smirks from the others.
"Chris, by any chance do you have Gretchen's latest 'performance' bookmarked on your laptop?"
Gretchen, next to you, sits straight up. "Why can't you be respectful?"
"Ah!" Rudo accepts the opened laptop from Chris. "Here it is, in living color." He sets the monitor in front of you. "I guess all I have to do now Chris is click on the arrow. Oh! I just did it! The horror! What is it we're watching, along with millions of other people on the Internet?"
You look at the monitor.
A muscled dark-haired guy with a messy moustache is lying on his back, holding down the top of a woman's light-haired head.
Cut to a different camera angle. It's Gretchen's profile, riding her opened mouth up and down on the guy's tall cock.
Rudo, seated at the kitchen table, raises his right knee. "Oh, this is too rich, Chris! He's going to take this sausage-swallower home to meet the folks, and here she is, our little princess, bobbing the banana! She looks like an expert, Chris. Please convey that to Patrick. A real pro. Tell the doofus to make sure he doesn't show this to daddums while daddums is eating the turkey leg. She looks to me like she's ready to start fucking guys with beer bellies."
Gretchen sits on your bed.
You sit next to her, wishing you had finished your gumbo. "A gang member came by here a few days ago, the day I stayed home because I wasn't feeling well? He said he was going to rape you."
"Was it Eduardo?"
You're surprised she knows their names. "He didn't introduce himself. I think he probably felt that would make him seem less menacing, if he said, Hi, I'm Eduardo, before he tried to intimidate me."
You Can Never Spit It All Out Page 17