Nicotine

by Nell Zink

  He hears drumming and struggles to his feet. He looks over the edge of the roof and sees an older man he hasn’t seen since Norm’s funeral, sitting on a rattan stool in the street, playing a conga. A teenage boy next to him keeps time with a shell-and-gourd rattle.

  Matt sits down. He leans back hard, drowning out the sound with his thoughts. Because of the nature of his thoughts, he soon switches to drowning them out with the sound. He notices a second drummer joining in, playing tabla. He hears ululation and a rhythmic clattering of wood on asphalt.

  He gets up to look down again. A troupe of women in sarongs with palmetto leaves in their hair, looking vaguely Polynesian except that they are white and African American, is performing a dance with broomsticks. Four crouch, raising and lowering parallel broomsticks in a cross shape, and four others dance among them. The attitude of the dancers’ hands unmistakably suggests a Scottish sword dance.

  “I did not order this,” Matt says aloud. He calls the landline downstairs to ask Kestrel what’s up.

  “It’s a community celebration,” Kestrel says.

  “I’ve met this community. It sicced its dog on me. Ask those people where they’re from.”

  She lays the receiver on the counter without putting Matt on hold. He can hear his staff clapping in time with the music. He hears voices and laughter, and she returns. “Followers of Norman Baker!” she says. “They came all the way from Cincinnati!”

  “Thanks,” Matt says.

  At around 1:00 P.M., he starts hearing complex polyrhythms. He looks down again. There are so many people dancing and drinking in the street that he can’t make out individuals.

  In particular, there are so many small, dark-haired women that he can identify no one relevant to his mood. He sees Jazz and Penny many times—mostly Penny—but it’s never the real Jazz or the real Penny. Interspersed among the many doppelgängers are poor locals, gangs of wild-looking little kids, a wide array of anarchist youth of many genders, and the guy whose dog he painted. He blanches. He rehearses his speech about creating community.

  PENNY APPROACHES A GROUP OF her father’s friends to exchange congratulations and condolences. They embrace her and tell her how lovely she is looking. They are thrilled about the Baker Center, and sad that Norm can’t be on hand.

  “I was surprised to hear it was Matt’s idea,” one woman says. Her husband looks at her critically. He takes Penny aside.

  He is old, but vigorous and animated. Young for his age, the way Norm was before he got sick. Penny’s known him all her life. Not well, but from the time she was a baby in Manaus. Like a relative. His name is Ed, and she trusts him. He says, “Penny. Let’s go sit down somewhere quiet and talk. I have something to tell you.”

  They walk to his old VW camper parked around the corner, climb inside, and sit at the dining table. It’s humid and stuffy. Penny picks her hair up off her neck and tries to tie it in a knot the way Anka does, but her hair is too flexible and slippery. He smiles when she gives up.

  “Hot day,” he says, offering her the joint he’s smoking.

  She takes it and inhales deeply. “Whoa,” she says.

  “Penny, I believe your father wanted you to know the truth about where you came from. He told me you’re his spiritual heir.”

  Modesty leaves her no option but to laugh. “You know he didn’t leave me anything nonspiritual, right? No money, no possessions. Not even facts. I know he wanted to tell me stuff, but he lost the ability to talk. He was going to dictate it and hide it in a time capsule for fifty years. I ended up with nothing but this spiritual—burden—I don’t know, it’s hard to describe. That’s what I got when he died. He flew away like a bird, and I got something so heavy I couldn’t carry it.”

  “That spiritual freight is also a gift,” Ed says. “I hope you found somebody to help take the weight.”

  “In fact I did,” she says. “My friend Rob! He’s the best. But this weed is knocking me on my ass. I don’t know anybody who smokes weed this strong.”

  “I don’t smoke dope for its own sake. It’s a road, not a destination. Sometimes I just need a little nudge to get me moving down the road. Now I want to tell you about Katie, because you need to know.”

  She is not surprised that the secret about Katie is her father’s legacy. People with secrets may consist of little else. “I know all about it. I asked Patrick.”

  “I always say, ‘You can’t always know what you need, but if you try sometimes, you get what you want.’”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I said. Be careful what you wish for. You asked him what he knew, and he told you.”

  “Mom said the exact same thing.”

  “That was Norm, lying to protect them. That’s why I’m telling you now.”

  “Oh.”

  “What happened was this. He and Katie had been together twenty years, and it wasn’t always easy. He was seeing this”—he pauses—“backpacker, this biology student named Penelope.” Penny sucks hard on the joint, pondering her own given name (Penhana). “When Katie got wind of it, they broke it off, obviously. But he was a romantic. He went back to the dump in Cartagena where she’d taken him to see the wildlife, and instead he saw this little girl in need of help, and he put two and two together. He thought it was a sign. So that was your mother. Katie goes overnight from almost losing him to chasing after this uncontrollable wild child. She snapped. She took a machete—” He pauses.

  “She what?”

  “She cut up her legs and went in the Pacific. Like she thought a shark would come and get it over with. The current took her out and she swam all night, because who wants to die? And a fishing boat found her with hypothermia and bacteria from raw sewage just eating her up. They were not doctors. They put raw meat on her wounds to draw out the poison.”

  “Holy shit. God. But why? I mean, what a weird—that’s, like, mentally ill—”

  “She was a schizophrenic.”

  Penny tries to empty her brain to make room for this. She goes around inside it, sweeping with tendrils of the pot smoke, which forms a shadowy cloud in the bus, and finally responds, “Did she go off her meds?”

  “Meds don’t always work like they’re supposed to.”

  She nods.

  “The first thing Norm did when they found her was put me and the kids on a plane to Jersey City. So they never found out.”

  “But how come they still don’t know?”

  “The boys aren’t strong like you. They’re like Katie.”

  “They’re grown-ups. They have a right to know.”

  “Look me in the eye and say it again: ‘Matthew Baker, mature adult.’ You really want to hand him a precedent for an insanity defense? I think I like him better when he’s trying to measure up to Norm. And Patrick’s a sensitive guy. I wouldn’t want to know my mother died that way. It wasn’t a slow death or a hard death—not if you’re used to cancer—but still.”

  “Maybe Matt stayed sixteen forever because he was frozen by the shock. And I know Patrick wants to know. He told me not knowing is hell.”

  “Then why in hell doesn’t he ask me, pardon my French?”

  Penny can find no plausible answer.

  “That was something your dad used to say, about how it’s the stories we tell ourselves that cause all the problems. If you look reality straight in the eye, you end up a lot less confused. It’s a matter of signal-to-noise ratio. Any story you tell has to be all signal. Any distraction is noise. Anything extraneous is noise. Now try to define extraneous. In life, nothing’s extraneous. There’s no noise. It’s all signal. That’s Freud. The early Freud.”

  “He tried to teach me that, but I’m so bad at it. Like just now with Patrick. You’re right. I try to see past people’s narratives. Sometimes I do it right. Like with Rob, my boyfriend. Basically we ended up getting together because I didn’t believe a word he said.”

  “About what?”

  “The workings of his body. But I never told him anything either.
We were all reality, all the time. As in total lying phonies. We had to take our clothes off to even communicate.”

  Ed nods and says, “Been there, done that. Right above the level of the physical world, that’s where the signals are strongest. Like the colors of the rainbow or the pentatonic scale. You don’t need a narrative when you’re making love.”

  “But the second you stop, life gets complicated.”

  “So you take some time to agree on a beautiful narrative of why and how you met each other. Now, I never managed to make one of those stories work for me more than about six months, but maybe you’re more romantic. I’m not a big storyteller. I have to make a conscious decision every time to trust my gut. All my actions feel arbitrary, because I’m not persuasive even to myself. That’s how lousy a salesman I am. Makes it hard to live with your own decisions.”

  “I know,” Penny says. “What I usually do is live with them for a while and hope I notice if they suck.”

  He laughs. “So like I said, I’m not enough of a storyteller to convince myself Matt’s a normal guy with some interference and static. I have to assume everything he does is part of the signal. And the signal is on red alert. The Norman Baker Center, proprietor the garbage truck designer who thought Norman Baker was a fraud and a quack. What the heck is that?”

  “It’s a café bookstore with a yoga studio.”

  “If he hasn’t turned gay on us, there’s something bogus going on. What happened to his arrogance? It’s almost masochistic.”

  It occurs to Penny that Ed doesn’t know about Jazz. She suspects Jazz of being silent partner to Matt’s machinations whether she knows it or not. But she can’t tell Ed—the narrative would violate her own privacy—so she reverts to the topic of the past. “Hey,” she says. “What do you know about Matt and Mom in Colombia?”

  “That, you’d have to ask them. Whatever it was, they were sneaky. I know it upset Katie, but she was easy to upset, and Norm was never sure.” After a pause, he adds, “I know he had to take your mother to a gynecologist a couple times, but there’s a million reasons for that. I don’t want to speculate.”

  Penny looks down at her hands and says, “You know what? Forget it.”

  He nods. “The past is gone.”

  “It’s never gone,” she says. “It’s as real as the present. It’s shadows on smoke. And we figure where there’s smoke there’s fire, and where there’s shadows there’s light, so there we are, all trying to get to the fire and the light, because of some story we saw in the shadows on the smoke. We’re all crazy.”

  He bows toward her, palms together, thumbs to his forehead, and says, “Bodhisattva.” In response to her skeptical look he offers her a cold bottled pilsner from the fridge. She turns it down, saying she’s buzzed enough already. He opens the twist-top with a church key (he has arthritis) and toasts her health as she opens the side door and steps cautiously down to the pavement.

  She hears drums, loud and fast, coming from under her feet. “I am so fucked-up right now,” she says.

  AT THREE MINUTES TO TWO, Matt goes downstairs for the grand opening. The odor of ganja intensifies with each downward step. Like a dollop of foam on the quadruple espresso of his anxiety now is the question of how a visit from the police might affect his personal safety and property rights.

  Dancing on the porch, where he couldn’t see him from the roof, is someone he did not expect to encounter again in this lifetime. Rob.

  Nope, no way. Not expecting to see the dickless wonder ever again. Especially not here. Not doing the pogo to Beninese voodoo like it’s Black Flag. Not standing foursquare and seeking eye contact like some kind of faggot, holding out a big, calloused, working-class hand to shake. “Hey!” Rob says with a friendly smile.

  Matt gives him a swift fake hug—left hand around shoulder, right fist punching car key into wound from previous fight—and says, “Get off my porch.”

  Listing to the left, in significant pain, Rob says, “I hear Jazz didn’t want your baby.”

  Matt says, “That’s it, cocksucker. Prepare to die.”

  Frowning, Kestrel taps Matt on the shoulder. She glances at the car key in his hand and looks up hurriedly. “Excuse me, Matt. Did you just say ‘Prepare to die’?”

  “It’s a figure of speech.”

  “That kind of language is not in accordance with principles of nonviolence, and I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “It’s my grand opening in two minutes. If anybody has to leave, it’s this shithead.”

  “The Baker Center is part of our movement for social justice and peace. Violence, whether physical or verbal, is always inappropriate. We can discuss this at the next collective gathering, but right now you have to take a time-out.”

  “You’re my employee, Kestrel.”

  “That doesn’t exempt you from observing nonviolence! Go upstairs and come back in an hour. If you don’t, I’ll tell everyone to go home. Violence has no place—”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Matt says. He pushes her against the door as he reenters the house. “Fucking fuck you,” he adds to Cassidy as he passes her. He climbs the stairs to his apartment, eager to wash Rob’s bodily fluids off his hand.

  Kestrel asks Rob, “What on earth did you do to him to get him so pissed off?”

  He raises his T-shirt, now sporting a pink stain of blood and lymph, to show her his left-hand waistline. “He put me in the hospital because he caught me in bed with Jazz. That’s why we left town.”

  “He must be so possessive.”

  It is two o’clock. Kestrel turns to face the crowd.

  She has to yell a bit before the drummers quiet down. At last she is able to bid hello and welcome to everyone.

  In response, the Norman Baker fans chant, “We want Penny! We want Penny!”

  “Penny?” Kestrel says, looking around. “Does she want to say something to open the Center? Somebody definitely should. Is she here?”

  Penny is in the street, swaying ecstatically at the center of a mob. Her admirers interrupt her and direct her toward the front steps of the house.

  She mounts them unsteadily, like a child dizzy from spinning around. At the top she turns this way and that to get her bearings. Kestrel arrests her rotation so that she faces front.

  Seeing the crowd in front of her, she begins to speak.

  “Welcome to the Norman Baker Center,” she says, as loudly as she can. She’s not sure how loud that is, but she gets the impression she’s audible. “My friends. I love you all. I’m so happy!”

  Briefly drowned out by applause, she considers stopping right there. Hands folded in front of her mouth, she adds in a near-whisper, “I need to talk to my dad.” Her tone is pleading and trusting, like that of a three-year-old saying it needs its sippy cup.

  “Speak up,” Kestrel says.

  “He taught me so much, but I was too young to get what he was getting at, most of the time.” Speaking seems more difficult than usual. A potential rest stop appears before her like a flashing highway sign, and she raises her voice to call out, “Hey, Mom! Why don’t you get up here and tell them about Dad!”

  “No!” Amalia shouts. “I’m not Norm’s woman!”

  Penny says, “Say what?”

  She searches the audience, shading her eyes. Amalia is swallowed up by the mass of people around her. She is too short for anyone on the porch to see where she might be standing. Tony waves his ball cap helpfully. She can see that they are quite far away. Young people in the crowd begin to relay Amalia’s statement to the front with the human microphone, à la Occupy, but the effort peters out due to the Norman Baker fans’ unfamiliarity with Occupy procedure and their unwillingness to shout that they aren’t Norm’s woman.

  Penny’s phone rings—Amalia. She takes the call.

  “I can’t be Norm’s voice,” Amalia says. “You are still your father’s child, but I’m with Tony now.”

  “Wow,” Penny says, impressed and dismayed. “You forgot about him already?” As
a response she can almost see—in fact she does see, due to all the THC—Amalia rolling her eyes. “What should I say?”

  “His ideas.”

  “Which ones?”

  “The river?” Amalia prompts her. “The cosmic snake?”

  Kestrel taps Penny’s arm. “You’re in the middle of a speech,” she advises her.

  Penny puts her arm around Kestrel’s waist and drops the phone on the floor. While Kestrel stoops to pick it up, she raises her eyes to the restless crowd and calls out, “Life is alive! All is one!”

  This time the human microphone works. The Norman Baker people, having gotten the idea, adopt it as their own. “Life is alive!” the crowd echoes. “All is one!” Applause, in the form of brief outbursts of dancing and drumming, spreads down the street with the two phrases.

  “Life is a river made of life!” Penny shouts.

  She pauses to let the microphone do its work, her claim resounding four or five times as it makes its way through the crowd.

  “Life flows downhill, but it rises again like the water cycle! Or a snake? I am way too stoned to be doing this.”

  The human microphone develops some technical difficulties. She has to admit that her pronouncements lack the note of celestial wisdom she is aiming for. Feeling thirsty, she releases Kestrel and says, “Sorry about that. I’m usually a better public speaker.”

  Kestrel leads a final round of cheering and applause and announces that Baker Books is now formally open. In response, several people come inside to drink tap water and use the bathroom.

  ROB FINDS PENNY AT THE side of the house, examining a bed of lavender. She appears to be deep in thought. He whispers her name so as not to startle her.

  “Rob!” she says. “Boy, am I glad to see you. We need to talk. I found out some really crazy stuff.”

  “I need to head out,” he says. “I played a scene from Hamlet. I should get home before Matt remembers what happened to Hamlet.”

  “First promise me you’ll always be nice to him.”

  He strokes her hair and says, “Baby, have you lost your mind?”

  “Swear!” she insists. “Swear you’ll always go easy on Matt.”