Simple Machines

by Morris, Ian;

  He held the cards endwise up and wiggled the fingers of his right hand over them, saying, “Rise … rise,” as though he was hypnotizing them. A single card pushed upward from the deck.

  “Go ahead,” he said. I pulled it from the others and turned it over. “That your card?”

  It was the ten of spades. “How’d you do that?”

  “When we have a few years, I’ll show you. What’s going on tonight?”

  “Tonight,” I said. “Why?”

  “Figure it’s our last night down here. We should do something.”

  “I got somewhere I got to be.”

  “Yeah, where?”

  “Just this thing. It’s connected to school.”

  Dennis walked in, saw us sitting on the floor, and started to leave again.

  “Come on back,” Grey told him. Ship stepped delicately into the room, as though he thought the floor might be mined. Grey got up and locked Ship’s head in his elbow. “I was just asking what Tom here was doing tonight and he said he had ‘this thing’ to do for school, and I said, ‘It’s okay. I’ll stay here with my friend Dennis.’” Ship looked terrified and trapped, like a tagged caribou.

  There was no music as I climbed the stairs to the second floor. I stopped at the door and listened. Hearing no sound from inside I thought maybe I’d got mixed up but remembered clearly that Majors had said, “Come back tomorrow,” so I knocked. Crowder opened the door just a crack and peered around the corner, as though he wasn’t dressed. “Yes?”

  “Mike told me to come by.”

  “He’s not here,” he said.

  “He’s not?” I said. “Well, he just said to come by. Maybe he didn’t mean come by to see him.”

  “So you’re here,” he said. He was still not opening the door, until Sing yelled out, “Who’s there?” and Crowder stepped back and let me in. “One of those guys from last night. He’s here for Majors.”

  “Did you tell him he’s not here?”

  “Yeah, he did,” I said, stepping inside, determined not to play the fool.

  Roy and Harold were the only ones around. Less of the room was lit than the night before. It was quiet enough to hear the wind piping through the cracks in the factory windows. I stood a minute, trying to think of what to say and if I should just leave, before Dru emerged out of the dark from the direction of the refrigerator, carrying a half-empty wine jug.

  “I’m not sure how this will taste,” she said. “Someone didn’t screw the cap on very tight.” She sat in the same easy chair she’d occupied the night before. “Sit down,” she said. “Roy and Harold knew as well as I did that you were coming.”

  “Why’d Majors ask me?”

  “Because I asked him to,” Dru said. “I would have myself, but I wasn’t sure how that would look.”

  “Dru worries about her reputation,” Crowder said.

  “We thought you might like us,” Dru said. “It’s not easy for us to mix with other”—she paused—“people our age. They just don’t seem to like us too much.”

  “They don’t like us,” Sing said, “because they don’t get us.”

  “We’re an acquired taste,” Crowder said. “Your friend didn’t like us.”

  “Grey? Actually, he did,” I said, watching Dru fill a tall glass with wine and hand it to me.

  “Really,” she said. She sounded genuinely surprised.

  I tasted the wine. It was sour, but I didn’t really mind, not being a wine expert or caring about wine in any way except that if I emptied the glass I would feel less nervous than I had when I arrived.

  “How do you know Dooley?”

  “We had him for a class,” Crowder said. “That was how we all met, except for Mike. He was a friend of Bea’s from home, I think. We were impressionable and he made a great impression on us. Then, as you might have heard Dewey say, we got into a little trouble and he helped us out.”

  “That was nice of him,” I said

  “So he says,” Sing said. “He’s something of a tired queen.”

  “A queen?” I said, “like he’s arrogant?”

  “A queen like he’s gay.”

  “He’s gay?”

  “You didn’t know?” Crowder said.

  “No,” I said.

  “You sound disapproving,” Crowder said.

  “I do?”

  “Yeah you do,” said Sing, “You’re not a homophobe, are you?”

  “No,” I said and meant it, smug in my ignorance of what a homophobe was.

  I thought Dru would step in, but she sat in her chair, staring through narrowed eyes as she had the night before, as Crowder and Sing hovered. Finally, she got up, walked to a metal stairway just within reach of the light and ascended into the darkness of the second floor.

  Sing sat cross-legged in the easy chair opposite mine. Crowder fell backward on the couch, landing with such force that the wood splintered beneath him. He didn’t seem to have noticed the crash and lay facing the ceiling, his snow-puckered boots hanging off the armrests. He put his fingers to his eyelids as if holding them shut.

  “You must have taken a wrong turn somewhere?” Sing said, nearly a whisper, with the edge of a threat.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t?” he said. He looked around the room as if for proof of his point and said, “Then what do you think?”

  “Think of what?”

  “Us,” he said, gesturing to include the entire building and everything in it.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll tell you what you think. You think we’re full of crap.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You just said you don’t know what to think.”

  “So?”

  He moved forward in his chair and looked me in the eye. “Would you say so if you did?”

  “Probably not.”

  “How come?”

  “I wouldn’t think I knew enough to say one way or the other.”

  He smiled and leaned back in his chair again. “Which proves my point.”

  “Which was?”

  “That you’re in the wrong place.”

  I laughed.

  “What’s funny?” he asked.

  “I know someone back home who says the same thing.”

  “Well, then he’s right,” Sing said. “In this instance.”

  “Are you saying I should leave?” I asked.

  “In one version you do,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means now that you are in a place where one wouldn’t ordinarily expect to find you, what you do next is largely up in the air. Look at it this way: let’s assume the universe is infinite, which by definition it has to be, right?”

  “If you say so.”

  “Not because I say so. The universe has to be infinite because nothing can exist beyond the infinite.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Of course it does, and if you accept that the universe is infinite, which you must because I’ve proven it, then you have to recognize that all possible outcomes of all events must not only occur somewhere but must also occur simultaneously. Which means in practical terms, in your case, that there is one outcome in which you are offended by what I say and leave and in other combinations, you remain.”

  “Do I know about this reality when I’m in these other worlds?”

  “Sometimes. In some of them you are having this same conversation.”

  “Let’s say I stay.”

  “Let’s say you do.”

  “What happens then?”

  “The stairs,” he said, glancing toward the far wall.

  I looked that way. “What about them?”

  “There are a million outcomes in which you don’t climb them and a million or so in which you do—aren’t you hoping this is one in which you do?” He stared for a moment as though he were expecting me to answer.

  I got up and climbed the metal stairway and stepped slowly so that my sneakers fell silently on the ste
el grating of the catwalk, as the concrete floor passed far below my feet, like the ground beneath a swing. All of the rooms I passed had been offices, with high windows and sturdy desks, most of them stacked with dusty office equipment. I reached an office whose window was covered with a blanket from the inside. The door was ajar, a blade of orange light sliced the catwalk in half. I looked inside. There was no furniture except for an office chair in the corner piled with clothes, a lit kerosene lamp on a wooden crate turned on its end that served as a sort of night table, and a mattress on the floor in the corner, on which someone slept under a pile of wool blankets. The room smelled of burning fuel and the stale oatmeal odor of an old furnace. I stood in the doorway until I heard Dru’s voice from beneath the covers say, “What are you doing?”

  “I just came to say I was leaving.”

  Dru pushed the covers away from her head and spoke to the ceiling. “You came up here to tell me?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She sat up and pushed her hair from her eyes and squinted through the poor light between us. “Where are you going?”

  “I guess I’ll go back to my place, see if Grey’s there.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy from last night.”

  “The bald one.” She yawned and clasped her hands across her knees, and said something I didn’t catch.

  “Huh?”

  “Stay here,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “In the bed.”

  “Where would you sleep?”

  She laughed. “I’m starting to change my mind,” she said, pulling back the covers, flashing a glimpse of a pair of black sweatpants.

  Inside the room, the smell of the furnace was stronger, and comforting. Without bending over I pushed off my sneakers and slid under the covers, my feet feeling cold and wet against the flannel sheets, which smelled of moth balls and the lamp and something I couldn’t identify that was all her. “You’re sexy,” I said and I wished I hadn’t.

  “At this point,” she said, back-flopping onto the pillows, kicking up a screen of dust and lint that turned the light from the lamp into a solid amber field around us, “you should probably say as little as possible.”

  As I bent to kiss her she leaned toward me, smacking me square in the mouth with her forehead. There was a streak of white light like a photo-flash, a springing sound in my ear, and then the familiar tang of an old penny taste spread across my tongue. Dru rolled back on the bed holding her head and laughing.

  “I’m bleeding,” I said.

  “Yeah, you are,” she said, checking the palm of her hand to make sure she wasn’t as well. She leaned over me, opened the drawer of her nightstand and came back with a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a roll of gauze. “Turn this way,” she said.

  The fact she kept field dressing in her drawer turned me on. I said, “Is this going to hurt?”

  “Of course.”

  She saturated the cotton with the alcohol. The sting made my lip twitch. “Brave boy,” she said, dabbing again at the cut. “You’re such a big brave boy.”

  She kissed the unhurt edges of my mouth. I looked for her tongue with my tongue. She wrapped the fingers of one hand around my ear and pulled me on top of her. We fell into the deep scent of the mattress. She scissored my neck in an elbow lock and clenched her muscled calves to the back of my thighs. I had to push with all the strength of my legs, drawing leverage from my legs just to pull away so that she could pull me into her again. When I came, her biceps, hard against my cheek, trembled with the strain of her grip.

  She broke free and rolled toward the wall. More than a minute went by before anybody said anything. Finally, I said, “I’ll come to your show when you have it.”

  “You can if you want,” she said. “I don’t care.”

  I fell asleep trying to figure out what I might’ve done to make her mad.

  I woke up to white light from the frosted window filling the room. My eye settled on a dark spot on the pillowcase. Lifting my head, I saw that it was a bloodstain, the shape of a small hourglass, left by the cut on my lip as I slept. Dru was still sleeping. Her cheek lay on the back of her hand. As I watched her eyelashes fluttering, it suddenly became important to me that she not be awake when I left. Feeling the cold of the floor in the bones of my feet, I snatched up my clothes and stepped out the door to dress on the even colder steel grating. I was relieved to see that Sing and Crowder weren’t sprawled on the furniture. I grabbed my coat and ran like a thief for the door.

  19

  AGAMEMNON

  The morning was bright and still. Days upon nights of freezing temperatures and cloudless days had turned the snow hollow and brittle and it crunched like Styrofoam beneath my feet. The wind blew through the loose folds of my coat as though it was hollow too, and me inside it a dried pea in a dead husk. The sun was a bloodless white, large and bright, but incapable of generating heat.

  When I thought about home, it was always winter, in the three months when the ferry didn’t come, and anything that we didn’t have already had to come by plane with the mail. While the rest of the world carried on as always, we lived in a cryogenic suspension, subsisting on what we had put aside before the harbor closed. In the afternoons we played hockey on the frozen lagoon, measuring the days until spring by the dwindling supply of pucks lost in the dead underbrush along the shore or slid into holes newly left by ice fishermen. We knew if we lost the last one, there’d be no more until spring because cargo space on the plane was rationed and expensive.

  Every year at this time, Ben Friendly got out the whiskey decanter that looked like a talking snowman, propped it up beyond the Beer Nuts display, and threw a Christmas party where the kids could come—his way of thanking the captive clientele. Being fat, he’d put on the Santa suit, while Greta wore stuffed antelope horns and played the Autoharp next to the artificial tree they put up at the at the end of the bar, with empty beer crates wrapped up to look like presents.

  Even Pop liked those parties. When we went home, he’d let me watch the Christmas shows on television. That was our Christmas, and it was fine with me.

  If I ever thought of my mother at the holidays, it was only to wonder what she was doing. I don’t remember wondering if she was thinking of me. I wondered where she lived and did she have a new family with a husband and children and maybe a girl, which I think she would have liked. Once, two summers after she left, she’d sent a postcard from Houston. The picture on it had been of an oil well, but instead of oil, it gushed pictures of what must have been the local attractions. On the back she’d written,

  Tomas,

  Your father will have told you by now that I left because I don’t love you. He knows in his heart that this is not true. He is a shit. I am safe.

  —Mama

  After that I had imagined her in Houston, which was easy, because it sounded like a nice place—cowboys and animals—and I wanted her to be happy. In grade school we watched a filmstrip, called “Christmas Around the World,” which had showed an Indian boy in New Mexico (which wasn’t Texas, but I figured was close enough) holding the reins of a donkey and hanging an ornament on a cactus. And that’s what I thought her life must be like: Christmas warm and out of doors, hanging tinsel on the desert vegetation.

  Campus was desolate. A freezing rain had cratered the snow, giving the ground a look of a planetary landscape—a dead planet formerly populated by a benign race of school builders. At the curb outside of Rosewalter station wagons and vans idled waiting for kids to come shuffling, sleep-addled and hung-over, out of the same gate they disappeared behind four months earlier. Hugs were exchanged, tinged with guilt from students, who sized up their parents for the right moment to confess their failed courses and their debts.

  Howie was on the elevator, coming up from the basement with a load of laundry.

  “Hiya, Howie,” I said. All the guys on the floor addressed Howie thusly because we knew he hated it.

  “How’d your exams go?” he asked
. Acting like he cared came with the job.

  “Well,” I said. “You know.”

  “Tell me about it.” He shifted the weight of the basket to his hip and held out his hand for me to shake. “Happy holidays, Zim.”

  “Yeah, you, too, Howie,” I said.

  From several doors away, I heard Mr. Shipman’s voice echoing from our room. Shit, I thought, as Mrs. Shipman backed out of the door, directing Ship and his dad who followed behind with Ship’s trunk. “Honey, slow down, you’ll throw your father’s back out.”

  The Mrs. saw me first and recognized me. She was wearing a pink snowsuit with pink fake fur around the collar that she had to blow out of her mouth to speak. “Darling,” she said, “your roommate is here.”

  Ship looked up in time to miss the trunk getting dropped on his foot. He hopped on the good one with the grimace of a wounded ape. Free of his burden, Mr. Shipman swung his arm around in a bowler’s arc to shake my hand. “Looks like so good, so far, eh,” he said. “Ready for a little R and R?”

  “Sir?”

  “That’s army talk,” Mrs. Shipman said.

  “I didn’t know you were in the Army, Mr. Shipman.”

  “He wasn’t,” said his wife.

  Mr. Shipman pulled on a pair of heavy leather work gloves and clapped his hands together. “When we’re through with Dennis’s things maybe we can give you a hand with your stuff.”

  “He doesn’t have any stuff,” Ship said.

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Shipman said. “You’re a light traveler,” looking critically at her son’s trunk.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “This one’d pack for his own funeral,” she said, a joke that was meant for me only. I wondered how many digs like that they expected Ship to take before he turned on them. Maybe he would pack for his own funeral, and maybe he’d take some people with him.

  “Well,” I said, “safe trip,” and pushed past them into the room.

  Ship’s eyes had kept shifting toward his desk so I looked that way and saw what looked like a glossy folder with the picture of an East Indian girl with a pencil behind her ear and a notebook in her hand.