Shuck

by Daniel Allen Cox

  He started by washing my chest, then my back, then behind my ears, doting over me like I was going to melt away. I noticed a certain softness to Derek that afternoon, even though I was sure, at the time, that he was just a pervert with a knack for psychology. His head was getting soaked in the shower stream, and the tips of his matted bangs tickled my neck and gave me goose bumps.

  “Outside,” he said. “Why did you ask me if I wanted anything?”

  “You clearly have no concept of how the world works. It doesn’t surprise me.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, don’t take this the wrong way, but ... it’s obvious that money’s kind of ruined it for you.”

  “You’re a rude little snot, aren’t you?” he said.

  I watched the blood dribble down my body and pool between my legs, circling around the drain like little red spider webs.

  “Did you call the police?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  “For what they did to you.”

  “As an independent businessperson, I’d rather bleed here than in jail.”

  “Your eye doesn’t look very good. I mean, it looks great but it probably hurts.”

  “Maybe you can do something with it.”

  He grazed the skin just below the cut, pressing ever so gently with the tip of the washcloth, opening the wound to the water.

  “Ow.”

  “It’s turning the most incredible color,” Derek said. “Like a ... like a pomegranate dropped from a window. Two days in the sun. Three.”

  Somehow I knew that he was fascinated by all kinds of gruesome stuff. I thought about showing him the toe funk I’d been farming through the winter.

  He turned off the water.

  “Dark towel, please, so ...”

  “I know,” Derek said.

  I was pissed at myself. I hadn’t shown him yet, but I had fallen for tenderness, a trap that has worked on stupid, trusting animals ever since they were first fucked into the world.

  “I’d like to paint now,” he said. “I’m thinking ... something the color of your eye.”

  Because you can buy beer at five a.m. from a pharmacy, because you can get Montreal bagels with cream cheese in ice cream flavors like pistachio and Cherry Garcia, because everyone is an actor and no one is a waiter, because everyone “does” something and it’s usually something other than what they actually do, because area codes determine your place in the food chain, because you are always in the food chain and you can never, ever take a break.

  Even without the telescope of time to back us up, we both knew it was the beginning. The beginning of a relationship that neither of us might ever understand, nor be able to criticize, nor be able to live with, nor be able to undo.

  Derek Brathwaite was arranging flowers in a vase on a painter’s table in the middle of the loft. His wet blond bangs kept nudging the bouquet out of whack, so he had to do it a few times. I liked watching him lose his mind like that. There were only two tulips and a swollen lilac head.

  I was drinking coffee by the big square windowpanes—typical of Chelsea’s converted factories, I’m told—letting the afternoon sun dry my naked body. I wasn’t used to the heat, and couldn’t keep his bathrobe on.

  I was both impressed and confused by the size of the loft—the distance between piles of clutter was hard to measure. Past a heap of canvases were towers of art magazines with names like S.P.A.C.E. and New Paradigm, teetering over an even scatter of paint tubes on the floor. There were stacks of photos everywhere, shots of boys in trouble piled waist-high, and there was a stripped-down jet engine near the door, maybe a replica, maybe a crash-site score.

  The kitchen was a corner of the loft where I learned the extent of Derek’s problem. Water ionizer, blender, food processor, KitchenAid tilt-head stand mixer, juicer, vacuum sealer, Wolfgang Puck Electric SwivelBaker (for waffles), Mikasa hand-cut lead crystal stemware, Wedgwood fine bone china by Vera Wang, Hamilton Beach BrewStation Deluxe, and casual place settings for eight, broken and reglued for style.

  It really bothered me that he was missing a toaster.

  On the floor, in the middle of it all, was a rectangular frame made of two-by-four wood planks, fencing in two turtles.

  “I thought you were going to paint something,” I said.

  Derek carefully lifted up one turtle at a time, sliding a sheet of canvas under them in the box. He kissed their shells.

  “I lost the impulse. The problem was that we cleaned your eye too quickly. The lighting in the bathroom was bad.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He wandered over to a pile of Polaroids, rooted through them, then emerged with an armful and handed them to me.

  “Take a look at these.”

  Grainy shots of crying boys with knee scrapes full of gravel. Dubious medical procedures, strange tools. Faces squinched in pain. Teen hoodlums slammed against cars, wrists cuffed tight, shocked faces reflected in the hood shine. Gloomy and insolent. Bloody noses that puberty had already made too conspicuous. The world ending before they turned sixteen.

  I was almost expecting to find a picture of myself.

  “Who are they,” I said.

  “Concentrated inspiration. Useless boys.”

  Derek strapped Magic Markers on the turtles’ backs with rubber bands, the thick blue ones you find holding broccoli spears together at the supermarket.

  “I haven’t been able to paint for two dry, damn years. The pictures don’t do it for me anymore because I can’t trick myself into believing that those bruises are fresh. Pretty boys heal quickly. You know.”

  The walls of the loft were lined with canvases, warm jumbles of squiggly lines and Day-Glo colors that had little to do with Derek.

  He snapped the rubber bands and the scaly turtle legs revved into gear. They set off on separate adventures, to different corners of the two-by-four box, tracing their jerky paths behind them in fluorescent purple and orange.

  “There are three rules,” Derek said gravely, taking the photos out of my hands. “Rent is three hundred dollars a month.”

  “Shouldn’t you be paying me?”

  “What for?”

  I stared at the king-sized mattress in the middle of the loft, the only bed in sight.

  “To be determined.”

  “I think I had something else in mind.”

  “This place has to be a few grand. Why don’t you charge me thirteen hundred, I’ll charge you a thousand, and you’ll get your three hundred dollars.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “If we’re not going to have receipts and invoices, then we at least need pretend ones, to know where we stand.”

  “You’ve done this before,” he said.

  “Yeah, but at least the guy had a toaster. Or I’ll charge you back thirteen hundred and I’ll get you a pair of Fioruccis.”

  “Huh?”

  I pointed to his Pumas.

  “Your insteps.”

  “I have an idea, weirdo,” he said, showing me the demonic gleam I’d come to know. “Since you want to play house, I’ll raise the rent to two thousand and pretend to love you.”

  “That wasn’t nice,” I said. “Do you even need my money?”

  “Listen, you’re the one who wants to be official about this.”

  “About what?”

  “God, you’re complicated. Rule number two. If you end up leaving, don’t steal anything from me.”

  “I reserve the right to take back the fucking shoes.”

  “And three, you must never, ever take care of a wound yourself unless you’re farther than a cab ride from home.”

  This looked like it was going to work out just fine.

  Some days, there’s nothing to do but smoke. Those are usually the days it’s too cold to hold anything in your fingers.

  I notice things. The entire city of New York smells like garbage and flowers. You can buy daisies in winter, dyed Kool-Aid colors and frostproofed with shellac.
Rats arrange bouquets out of the junk people throw out:

  Broken high heels, alligator-skin pumps dyed the wrong robin’s egg blue, clogs that stink of champagne, wingtip bucks missing Swarovski crystals, vinyl vamps peeling off, open-toe stilettos covered in mascara, silver sandals covered in mud, slip-ons with the tassels snipped off.

  Some of the stuff I notice is so fascinating, I do a little collecting, too.

  Wink and Nod, having eaten a fortune in greenhouse produce (a.k.a. turtle fuel), started to mill restlessly around their box. Nod liked her shell to be tapped so I drummed out a remix of “Tainted Love.” Derek was busy in the kitchen making us fusilli pasta and artichoke hearts with a goat cheese Alfredo sauce.

  “Jaeven, can you strap on the Magic Markers? Let’s get a masterpiece going before they shit out too much creative energy.”

  “What colors?”

  “Blue and green. They look kind of surfish and oceanic today.”

  “You’re the genius.”

  I uncapped the markers and strapped them on the turtles. I’m firmly convinced that each of us has a rubber band around us that can snap at anytime. We either have to be ready for it, or cut ourselves loose before it happens.

  He wasn’t kidding about being oceanic. Today, the turtles were drawing a great big rollicking sea smacking of salt and adventure. They were marching around, bumping tock-tock-tock into the two-byfours of their rectangular world, their microcosm, what Derek had dubbed TraceBox™.

  Sometimes they will draw at night. We’ll be lying in bed and I’ll listen to their headlong plods, the persistent knocks into deterrents that don’t work, wondering if they’re as incapable of feeling (or as capable of unfeeling) as people can be. On their bad days they act like us, turning in circles around and around, leaving pathetic scratchings in corners of the canvas, markings accumulated monotonously on top of each other.

  The lines can be bold and straight, like the ones explorers etch into the earth. Other times they’re nervous and uncertain. There are even trails that begin, disappear, and resume elsewhere, as if Wink and Nod fly to whatever parts of the canvas they deem worthy of their art-making.

  “Who buys these?” I asked him. “Fans of Teenage Mutant—”

  I shut up because he stopped dismantling the artichoke in his hands and gave me a searing look.

  “Collectors who want to throw the most postmodern parties. Postcolonialists who find it funny when artists employ animals to do their intellectual dirty work for them.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “I don’t give a crap who buys them,” Derek continued, “just as long as they pay. But I’m tired of being recognized for my pets. I used to be better than them, you know.”

  “Are you talking about the paintings in the storage closet?”

  “How did you get in there? Listen, I don’t want you poking around through my life failures like that.”

  “Sorry, but I was curious why you have all these paint supplies lying around if you don’t paint anymore.”

  “Good question,” he said angrily.

  “Derek, I didn’t mean it that way,” I said.

  The dinner was tinged that night. It was bitter and over-cooked, some flavors a little frustrated. We swallowed too loudly.

  That night, we crawled into our princess-and-the-pea bed in the middle of the loft and listened to the sound of shells knocking on wood.

  When that stopped, we listened to each other’s breathing, and to the silence between us.

  I have a place to live, a great guy to cook and care for me, and an address where I can receive mail from publishers.

  Derek has a muse who hasn’t inspired him yet.

  Life could always be more, well, fair.

  I don’t write poetry, but if I did, this is what it might look like:

  Flowers withering in the dark, cutting your leg with a razor blade when you feel sad, private performances nobody attends, snakes molting, deer shedding antlers in the woods, seahorses hooking tails.

  When Derek handed the envelope to me, I had to read my name a few times before I could believe that the US Postal Service considered me a person. It was from Circle magazine, a literary journal I had sent a short story to.

  The story.

  A kid was reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in English Lit, mouthing the words silently to himself in class, wondering if he was reading in Russian or in English. He couldn’t tell, but it didn’t matter. (I had this writing book called Avoiding the Draft. Good writers, page eighty-four says, foreshadow story elements like retreating soldiers plant landmines.)

  The teacher asked him to read a passage out loud. The kid started off reading as it was written, word for word, but then five pages into it, veered off the page and into text nobody else could see. There was laughter. Confusion. Fury. (Good writers, page ninety-nine says, take readers through an emotional battlefield.)

  The kid was channeling drafts that Dostoevsky had trashed when he was slogging through the manuscript more than a century ago in Russia. The kid was rescuing the crumpled sheets from Fyodor’s wooden wastepaper basket, or papier-mâché bin, or whatever they used for receptacles back then.

  Someone screamed genius. Someone else screamed ADD. The kid calmly informed them that it was neither, that it was a gift from above, and that they had better shut up so he wouldn’t lose any of the text.

  The school called his parents who called the doctors who medicated him. Pumped him full of Ritalin. As his final literature project that year, he turned in a newly revised 1865 draft of Crime and Punishment, casting himself as the tortured Raskolnikov, whom the world was out to get.

  Judging from the amount of work I put into the story, the number of times I rewrote it, and my constant trips into Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, I thought it was pretty good. The story was circular, and I thought that a magazine called Circle would, at the very least, be able to pick up on that.

  Here’s the response I got:Dear Mr Marshall,

  Thank you for sending us your short story, “An Improbable Gift.” We have chosen not to send an impersonal rejection slip, because we feel the need to point out how particularly inappropriate this submission is for our magazine.

  It is amazing how many writers fail to read the submission guidelines.

  We do not publish first drafts.

  We do not publish teenage revenge fantasies.

  We do not publish stories that contain more than one instance of the word “overwrought.” This is specifically mentioned in the submission guidelines.

  We do not publish stories that are not fully thought out. What is your character’s connection to nineteenth-century Russia? In other words, why Dostoevsky? And if his gift is supposed to be from God (because we can’t perceive any other source), don’t you think that God would direct the character to a less atheistic writer?

  Thank you for submitting to Circle, and please read an issue before the next time you do so.

  The Publishers

  I followed their advice today and stole all the copies of Circle I could find in Manhattan. I went to uptown magazine stores, to the Gem Spa newsstand in the East Village, and scoured Chelsea clean.

  Good writers are determined writers, page twelve says, and determined writers don’t take bullets lying down.

  So I went to Chelsea Piers on the Hudson River, laid the magazines in a perfect circle, screamed the word “overwrought” to a passing barge, and lit a fucking match.

  Because AIDS and HIV aren’t ignored as much, because people read books, because everybody’s from Canada or Puerto Rico, because nothing west of the Hudson River matters or even exists, because you can throw away a magazine and magically buy the same one ten minutes later from a recycling technician.

  Because a young man is doomed to live in a Fiorucci store if he doesn’t want to whore himself out in some degrading office job.

  Because writers can make it here no matter what.

  Today, a jerk-wad stuffed a hundred between m
y cheeks, poking it in that extra half-inch with his pinky, so it would be tainted with the stink of my ass. That Franklin is forever connected, as long as its circulation life will last, with the ass that earned it this afternoon.

  But he didn’t end it there. He donkey-punched me in the ribs and left me gasping behind the garbage container. I followed Derek’s orders and limped, screaming and bent over sideways, into a taxi. The driver said he didn’t change hundreds so I cursed him in a rather racist way and found one who’d take it.

  Derek spent the better part of an hour tending to my ribs, watching the bruises shift floridly through the color spectrum. I was splayed on his lap, arched over his knees staring at the ceiling, the skin stretched tight over my ribs. He was watching me breathe, scribbling notes.

  Ninety-two dollars and thirteen cents, after cab fare. That means I’ll have to go through this hell at least two more times before rent is due, maybe three.

  Now that I think about it, I might not give Derek those shoes after all.

  It’s best to hurt yourself before anyone else can do it for you. At least you know how deep the cut or how purple the bruise will be.

  Fuck-you notes in champagne bottles cast to sea, private blackness left to ache to itself, a lifetime of secrets and a headful of inside jokes, breakup emails snagged by the spam filter.

  Derek was busy blowing his head open with color experiments.

  I learned to recognize the pattern: a crazy look in his eye, shades of an impossible hue splashing itself on the inside of his head, and then days of pouring and mixing, tinting and distilling, all in a mad quest to replicate it in reality so his world could be sane. Anyone in his position would do the same. The rainbows you see have to match the ones in your head. They just have to.

  Say it’s a shade of Ajax blue that haunts him, some shadowy mix of peacock and ultramarine, with a touch of afternoon sky. There’s a certain Sunlight dish-soap yellow that’s elusive and hard to describe, even though there’s no mistaking it. Or it will be the ice-mint green in his tube of Aquafresh.