by Baird Harper
To Hartley, though, the ability to read the future was just a matter of understanding the past. Research plus intuition equals success. But there it was again, that look in her eyes, that sauced melancholic twinkle. She slid out of the nook and dipped to him to lay a wet kiss on his mouth. A sweet boozy mix of lip gloss, white wine, and a trace of something harder, not even on her lips so much as in them. When she pressed closer to him—a second, deeper kiss, her hand sliding down the side of his neck, dipping into his collar—he was reminded of the way she smelled in college, the honeyed bouquet of her flesh pickled by an all-night binge.
He reached for her, his hand running up the back of her shirt, their mouths opening on one another, the doom drifting away, his mind clearing, making space only for her.
//
He begins to wake, swimming to the surface of this dream, flavors of wine and lip gloss pooling in his mouth, until finally he emerges into the concrete bunk room that is still his home. A convicted rapist snores peacefully on the cot below. It is the middle of the night before the day on which he’s scheduled for release. There is no clock to tell him the time, no window to carry the dawn light into his cell. The new day, with each dream, with each waking, refuses to arrive. The future stalls. The breaths of the monster in the lower cot count the seconds in reverse. Time backpedals. The past sits on its haunches in the predawn black of his cell. He can hear its slow breathing, its dark mouth consuming the future. The day won’t arrive and he can’t envision it. He doesn’t know who will be there to pick him up. His mother will be there, but will his father? Will his wife? He closes his eyes and swims into a darker place. Into the mouth of the beast. Who will come and where will they take him? Where is home now? He squeezes his eyelids tighter, swims deeper into the past, to a time when his father had no place to live, evicted from home and marriage.
//
“What do you think of my new digs?” he asked Hartley as they pulled up alongside the shipping container that was his father’s new home. The long steel box was set off on its own away from the hundreds of other stacked containers in the shipping yard along the concrete shore of the canal.
“Riverfront property,” his father declared, pointing to the spot on the freight container below the words Lu Kang Intermodal where someone had spray-painted a picture of a naked woman with bottle caps over her eyes. “But of course your mother,” he added, “isn’t to know that I’m living in storage.”
They set out in search of what his father called “bach-pad essentials,” down a street full of pawnshops Hartley knew well. The main showroom of Mel’s Second Hand sold used housewares, greasy tools, stolen electronics, but if you had the courage to walk through the beaded curtain, the back rooms offered more.
They browsed, finding a hot plate with a corner where the white plastic had been toasted like a marshmallow, a space heater with screws missing, a power strip a dog had gotten at, and a bronze desk lamp with the green glass dome that his father insisted was the exact same kind they had in the University of Chicago library.
“These things are all damaged,” he announced, parking the space heater on Mel’s glass-top counter. “So I’ll expect a serious discount.”
Mel’s eyes rolled. He drew his good hand from one pocket and scratched the gnarled stub where his left hand once had been.
“Twenty bucks,” said Hartley’s father. “For everything. Twenty-five tops.”
Mel dragged glazed eyes across the things in Hartley’s arms. Cobwebs and dead bug parts clogged the empty socket of the green lamp. “Forty-five.”
Hartley’s father laughed. “Come on, Mel, I haven’t even perused the back rooms yet. You don’t want to drive away a customer before he’s even finished shopping. I’m thinking of buying my son a sword.”
Mel cast a hateful look at Hartley. “Fine,” he said. “Twenty-five.”
The first room down the back hallway had racks of cracked leather jackets and polyester suits people had died in. The second room peddled lethal exotics, cases full of Nazi bayonets and guns so small they looked like weapons for toddlers. There were throwing stars and tooth necklaces here, a wall of battle-axes. Then, at the end of the hall, a walk-in closet with floor-to-ceiling shelves full of skin magazines heavy with the oil off people’s hands.
Hartley’s father liked to take his time going through the back—trying on the biker jackets, digging through the buckets full of belt buckles, testing the balance on all the throwing knives in all the glass cases—so Hartley made his way directly to the last room, locating again the one magazine called Sexpot, which he knew had a series of naked women riding horses through mountain meadows. Back when Hartley first discovered this issue, he imagined there might actually be a ranch somewhere out west where the models and their horses hung out all day, washing their hair and eating carrots, waiting for the most ideal summer weather to go out and do the next photo shoot. It was a place that had entered his dreams long ago, and he still entertained the naïve fantasy that someday he’d try to find it.
But the pages with the horseback women had been torn out, and all that was left, besides the phone sex ads, was a spread titled “Damsels in Distress!” A blonde on a hospital bed with blood running down her chin and chest; a blonde in a pleated skirt with a jump rope noosed around her neck; a blonde in a hard hat and denim cutoffs with a saw blade embedded in her torso. He leafed through them, each page tearing loose from the ruined binding, until he came to the last picture, of a woman trapped in an overturned car. She looked less fakely pornographic than the others, more plausibly distressed, with her dark hair and judicious green eyes, a sensible yellow blouse. The shirt had been torn open in a revealing way, but the overall effect—of her ribs stabbing out her torso and the sickening curve of her neck, of the broken auto glass studding one side of her face, the blood welling up across her cheek, the embedded blue diamonds turning into rose quartz, into dark wet rubies—
“Psst! Earth to Hartley.” A finger flicked his earlobe.
He glanced back at his father.
“Ooh, nice. What is she? A zombie or something? Excellent. Have you seen the new movie about the zombie apocalypse?”
Hartley gathered the loose pages of wrecked women and stowed them on a shelf of water-damaged Playboys. “Which movie?”
His father shrugged. “It’s our future, I guess. But I haven’t actually seen it.”
Hartley felt it then, perhaps for the first time, the silent advance of Fate taking a step closer. Something was about to happen, he thought. Good or bad. Something. He knew it.
As his father drove them away, down that derelict city street, Hartley looked out at the world, trying to see what was coming to him. Pawnshops and liquor stores, steel bars on every window. What, he thought, am I not seeing?
Back at the shipping container, his father set the library lamp on the minifridge beside his mattress and said, “Well, I guess I’m nesting.” He pulled the brass chain and the steel room filled with soft green light. When all of his new appliances had proven themselves to him he got two beers from the fridge and pulled a pair of tattered beach chairs to the open end of the container so they could watch the orange evening sky fade beyond the shipping canal.
“Just the men tonight. Who needs anybody else.”
Hartley nipped at his beer. The stale froth combined with a rotten whiff of the canal made his stomach shudder.
His father finished his first beer and opened a new one. “But what do you suppose she’s doing tonight, without us?”
Hartley thought of the girls on the erotic horse ranch. Another night eating carrots, a pillow fight, a kissing closet. But he was already graduating from this fantasy, as there were real girls in school with bodies he might soon get to touch. The old dreams were fading, real life showing through at the edges. The horse ranch wasn’t the future anymore. The future was a girl he’d meet on spring break of sophomore year, two singles hedging at the perimeter of a blaring Florida dance floor, stealing away to share a tallboy on a se
awall as sand crabs scuttled beneath their dangling feet, two midwesterners sharing stories of having suffered the same long winters, the same luckless summer baseball. The future was a marriage six years later, honeymooning in the islands, room service every night, love on the beach under a new moon. The future was a shift from protected sex, to careful sex, to hopefully procreative sex, to the anxious nightly coupling of people losing faith that any kind of sex could bring them what they really wanted. Will we, her eyes sometimes asked, ever have a child? The future was a big house in the suburbs, with Glennis trapped inside all day with wine, with gin, washing back the neighbor’s pain pills, asleep at the dinner table, wasted at the company picnic, naked in the boss’s koi pond, minor interventions, major interventions, drunk behind the wheel, Are you sure you’re okay to drive?
“What did you just say?” his father barked.
Hartley looked out over the shipping canal. The clouds glowed above the distant skyscrapers like warm coals. He felt far away from himself. “Nothing.”
His father glared at him for a time, then opened another beer. “I was asking you,” he said, “what your mom’s doing tonight.”
Hartley turned around and looked into the dark cramped space of the shipping container.
Then the dream begins to fade. Consciousness creeps closer. The beast in the dark breathes to the cadence of a sleeping rapist. The corrugated steel of the freight unit wants to dissolve into the flat concrete of a cell wall. He shuts his eyes again, harder. Chasing after the reverie. Anything to pass these final hours of captivity.
“I think Mom went out for Indian food again,” Hartley explained.
“Indian food.” His father forced breaths through his nose. “I believe that. Who eats Indian food?”
“Yeah, she doesn’t even like it.”
The lights of half a dozen planes hovered in a perfect dotted line connecting down toward Midway. Hartley was sure they were both seeing this, but turning to his father he realized the man’s thoughts were somewhere else.
“If she doesn’t like it, then why would she eat it?”
Hartley closed one eye and reached out, touching each sparkling blip in the sky.
“If she doesn’t even like it,” his father repeated, “then what? Someone’s making her eat it?”
“Mr. Gupta,” said Hartley.
The beer can stopped short of his father’s face. “Who’s Mr. Gupta?”
Mr. Gupta was the man who taught the entrepreneurs’ course Hartley’s mother had begun taking on Wednesday nights.
“Entrepreneurs’ course?” His father stood up, patting his thighs like he was going to rush off in the car at that very moment. But this was the night the car wouldn’t start, the night his father would eventually fall into a deep drunk sleep in that lawn chair, the night Hartley would walk two miles to a gas station in the dark to call his mother for a ride home.
“Mis-ter Gup-ta.” His father shaped carefully the name of the man who would, in time, become Hartley’s stepfather. “Entrepreneurs’ course.”
Then came a shift in the wind and Hartley caught the full stench of the canal—the rust and mushy tires, the toxic fish skeletons, the reek of the cell toilet. The green belt of lamplight stretched out in front of them, unfurling all the dim promises of a future they could suddenly see quite well but do nothing about.
I see it now, Hartley thinks, remembering the soft green glow of university life, the charmed career, the big house, the love of this or any life. All of it suddenly dissolving in a rush of fluorescent light and the hollering of prison guards announcing a new day.
THE INTERVENTION SO FAR
A wicked brand of storm had been brewing since dusk, but then the drapes fell still and the stagnant tyranny of August returned without a drop of rain. Emmit Page could smell a sweet rankness he thought might’ve been the ripening cornfields coming through his living room window, then the phone rang. It was his son-in-law calling to explain that Glennis had taken off all her clothes at a dinner party. It didn’t seem like the kind of emergency to be calling about so late at night, but Hartley insisted that this was a nearly unforgivable thing for her to have done. The other guests at the party were important business colleagues, brokers and traders, people like Hartley working in downtown Chicago turning the dials of the midwestern economy.
Hartley, who worked in farm futures at the mercantile exchange, had once tried to explain his job to Emmit by stating that if he could simply predict September’s price of corn in August it would make him very rich. Hartley clung to the notion that he and his father-in-law weren’t so different, insisting occasionally that Emmit, living as he did in Wicklow, must’ve known things about the farm end of the business.
“She’s drunk, sir,” Hartley said. “So drunk this week I don’t know what to do.”
Emmit muted the volume on the baseball game. “It’s difficult to put clothing back on a drunk woman,” he said. “Can you get something big, like a sheet or a tarp maybe?”
“We’re already home,” Hartley explained. “She’s asleep in the foyer now. I’m calling to ask if you could come up here and help me confront her.” He paused, waiting for Emmit to agree. “I’m thinking,” he added, “of staging an intervention.”
Emmit moved to the window where the last etchings of daylight were being pinched between a dark bank of clouds on the horizon and the night sky above. He saw his son-in-law infrequently these days, on holidays mostly, fancy dinners at their house in Tower Hill. Less frequently did they come to Wicklow. But the very first time Emmit met his son-in-law had been when they came to announce their plans to marry, or, as Hartley had put it, to ask permission to do so. Emmit couldn’t recall much suspense in it—Glennis already had a rather conspicuous engagement ring on her finger—but he ended up liking Hartley for the gesture anyway. And later on, when the two men stepped outside to smoke the cigars Hartley had brought, his future son-in-law promised to give Glennis a big house in the suburbs. Emmit wasn’t worried about that, but he didn’t know how to tell this young man that he was entering a life in which Emmit himself had once been trapped.
“We had plans for dinner tomorrow night,” Hartley went on. “But I’ve canceled that and arranged this instead. The intervention, I mean. And if you could make it, sir, it would mean a lot to me. To Glennis.”
When Emmit finally agreed, his son-in-law’s voice became suddenly more upbeat, like a salesman rushing the call to a conclusion before minds could change. “Okay then,” Hartley said. “Tomorrow it is.” And the line went dead.
Out the window, the distant bank of weather had merged with the darkness and he could no longer tell where the calm gave way to the trouble. Emmit turned back to the TV, where a catcher chased a ball to the backstop while runners stole bases. He dialed his friend.
“You watching this crap?” Rick said. “Fucking Cubs. All this money on the field and still the product sucks.”
“My son-in-law just called,” said Emmit. “Sounds like Glennis is on a bender. I gotta go see them tomorrow. Mind if I drop by your place tonight?”
Rick’s TV announced more chaos while Emmit’s muted set showed a ball drifting into the outfield bleachers, visitors jogging home. “Same shit over and over,” Rick mumbled.
//
Rick’s house sat on a hill overlooking the south end of Wicklow. A sprawling piece of land with a view, in daylight, of the burned-out trailer park that Rick had turned into a postapocalyptic paintball battlefield. And beyond that, on a clear day, one could see the cemetery where Janice was buried.
“An intervention, huh?” Rick dropped himself into a bank of stuffed leather chairs set up in front of a home theater screen.
“I don’t see much point in it,” Emmit said. “But Hartley asked, and I haven’t got any plans for the weekend. How about you? You wanna come along for this?”
Rick stared at the TV as the pitching coach strode to the mound.
“Glennis always liked you,” Emmit said. “I think she used to h
ave sort of a crush on you. On the uniform, anyway. Did you know she wanted to join the Navy back in high school?”
“They’re down nine runs in the eighth,” said Rick. “And now they’re giving the pitcher some advice?”
“Honestly, though,” Emmit continued. “The message might sound more convincing coming from a sailor.”
Rick leaned forward, his face gathering the forlorn blue light off the television, and Emmit recalled the many times the two of them had tried to help save Janice from herself.
“I’m not sure the messenger matters,” Rick said, “when it’s an ambush.”
//
As he was driving alone back through town, the Lumina’s power steering finally gave out. Emmit muscled the car to the side of the road and left it. The walk home took him through Oak Hill Cemetery, squeezing through the fence where he knew there was a loose bar. There wasn’t much trash at Janice’s grave this time—just a crumpled can of High Life and an empty pack of Marlboros—but someone had spray-painted a reaper’s scythe on the back of the headstone, so Emmit took off his blazer and hung it there. A good fit, he thought as he gathered the trash and then stood a moment longer, thinking what to say, listening to the bugs hum in the trees.
After dark, the cemetery always smelled vaguely toxic, but not in such a terrible way. It reminded him of drinking beer in the quarry in high school, he and Janice and Rick, with the waft of the heavy metals oxidizing in the water at the bottom of the basin. A premonition of the rust that would eventually spread over the whole town, but a trigger for nostalgia just the same.