The One-Eyed Man

by Ron Currie

  “It’s a nice place, anyway,” I said, looking around the kitchen.

  “And dirt cheap,” Peggy said. “Anytime you’ve had enough of real estate prices back home, you should look into property here.”

  “We’re making a lot of money, with the show,” I said. “Speaking of which, you still haven’t mentioned why you asked me to come.”

  “Couple reasons,” Peggy said.

  “Maybe start with the primary one,” I suggested.

  “I’ll start with the fact that I wanted to meet the girl I saw you with on TV,” Peggy said. “Wanted to see who had replaced my daughter.”

  “No one has replaced Sarah,” I told her. “That’s not what’s happening.”

  “Either way, as you probably figured out by now, I approve.”

  My light-headedness upshifted into borderline vertigo; the room didn’t spin, exactly, but it had definitely begun to tilt back and forth in a way I didn’t enjoy. “And the other reason?” I asked, swallowing.

  Peggy eyeballed me as she took a long drink from her Rumford Martini, holding my gaze until the glass was drained.

  “I wanted to be on your show,” she said, putting the empty glass down on the tabletop, “to tell you to quit doing your show.”

  I sat forward in my chair and put my hands on my knees.

  “I think,” I told Peggy, “that I need to vomit.”

  She pointed to the back door. “Outside,” she said. “Don’t you dare do it in my sink.”

  I took the porch steps two at a time, bent at the waist once I reached the ground, and unleashed a torrent onto Peggy’s lawn. My throat and nostrils burned instantly with digestive fluids. I vomited again and felt a tingling in my face; the following morning I would awake with the freakishly rouged cheeks of a toy soldier. I gasped for breath, preparing to genuflect and silently beg whichever god would hear me to make it end. But then, just when I was about to fall to my knees, the sickness began to abate. A few more retches produced only caustic dollops of bile. By and by the world began to right itself. The ringing in my ears faded, and soon I could hear the cheerful din of bullfrogs and nocturnal insects in the bog adjacent to Peggy’s property. I stood up straight, spit once, wiped at my mouth with the back of my hand. A thin sheet of ground fog, limned with silver by the quarter moon, drifted out of the trees, and I stayed outside for a few minutes, taking in the moonlight and the chirrups while a breeze wicked sweat from my forehead.

  “You alright?” Peggy asked when I came back in. She was mixing herself another drink. A glass of ice water rested on my side of the table.

  “Better,” I said.

  “Gotta know your limits,” Peggy said.

  I sat down in my chair. “I think it was the cigarette that got me.”

  “Like I said.”

  “It’s nice out here at night,” I told her.

  Peggy took a seat with her fresh drink. “I like nights the most,” she said. “A lot of women—hell, a lot of men, these days—would probably get spooked out here in the sticks after dark. But I love it.”

  My stomach, empty and offended, groaned magnificently.

  “You want a bite to eat?” Peggy asked. “Some toast or something?”

  I shook my head and took a sip of ice water.

  “Gotta eat, if you’re gonna drink,” Peggy said. “The two of you didn’t have dinner.”

  “Neither did you,” I said.

  “I’ve been drinking my dinner ever since Roger died. Can’t be bothered to cook for just myself.”

  A sudden fatigue descended on me, oppressive and uncomfortable. I closed my eyes and let my head loll back. “If you’re going to explain why you think I should quit the show, you probably ought to do it soon,” I said.

  “Fine,” Peggy said. “Here, sit up.”

  I raised my head.

  “You shouldn’t do this show anymore,” Peggy said, “because you’re using it to try and hurt yourself.”

  “I keep hearing as much,” I said.

  “Then maybe you should start listening.”

  “That a large number of people believe something does not make that thing any more likely to be true,” I said. “In fact, often it’s the opposite.”

  “Sometimes,” Peggy said, “I could just smack you.”

  “Again,” I said, “you’re not the only one who suffers the urge. Though I don’t hold it against you.”

  “Well that’s just the problem,” Peggy said, tapping her index finger on the tabletop several times.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “That you don’t hold it against me,” she said. “That you don’t care if you get hurt.”

  “That’s not true,” I said to her. “I care. You see acceptance and misinterpret it as indifference.”

  “I’m going to put this as plainly as I can,” Peggy said. “You’re being taken advantage of, K. Whoever makes this show is using you. Using the fact that you don’t care to put you in danger.”

  “His name is Theodore,” I said. “And I have reason to believe he’s concerned about my well-being.”

  Peggy shrugged, a gesture somewhere between acquiescence and exasperation. “You want to kill yourself, fine,” she said. “Just be honest about it. Draw a warm bath and break out the straight razor. Take a bunch of pills. Have some dignity and do it in private. You’re embarrassing your family, not to mention the memory of your wife.”

  “I don’t have any family,” I told her.

  For the first time I’d ever seen in more than two decades of knowing her, Peggy looked wounded. “That is a hell of a thing,” she said, “for you to say to me.”

  18

  SOLIPSISM IS A SHARED FATE

  In the weeks after Sarah’s diagnosis we had more sex than we’d had since college, more sex than we’d had during college, coming together as if in an effort to make up for, or else obliterate, the time we’d spent in near total indifference to one another’s bodies. Twice, three times a day, every room in the house, Sarah suddenly voracious and without qualm, caring nothing for doctors’ appointments, open window shades, or any lingering mores from her Catholic childhood. Where once there had been definitive if not strict limitations on what we would do to and with one another, now almost nothing earned objection.

  Except I could not, under any circumstances, touch her right breast.

  This was Sarah’s rule, not mine.

  “It’s diseased,” she said by way of explanation.

  “That doesn’t bother me,” I said.

  “But it bothers me.”

  “Okay,” I told her. “I get it.”

  And I did.

  Except I started, slowly, over the following weeks, to obsess. As the days passed and our old routines dissolved, each time we made love my attention focused a bit more myopically on the one thing I really wanted. When Sarah said Slap me I slapped her, and when she said Against the refrigerator I obliged, but I did these things, increasingly, by rote—all my conscious attention focused on her right breast, rising and falling with our rhythm in the cup of her bra, which never, ever came off.

  During my few hours of sleep each night I started to dream about reaching back and releasing the bra’s hook-and-eye clasp with one flick of my fingers—a skill much discussed in the hallways and locker rooms of my adolescence, but which in real life I did not possess.

  One afternoon I made the perhaps willful mistake of imagining that this new, sexually aggressive Sarah needed me to match her aggression. To be insistent.

  After all, time was short.

  She sat straddling my hips, and I leaned up, just as I had in dreams, and grabbed for the clasp of her bra.

  She froze and looked at me. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Taking your bra off,” I said.

  Sarah pushed my arm away. “We talked about this, K.,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “I guess I thought maybe.”

  She rolled off of me and pulled the covers up, resting her head against my
shoulder.

  “You thought maybe what?” she asked.

  “That in your heart of hearts, you wanted me to,” I said. “That you just needed me to be forceful.”

  Sarah breathed. “I’ve given you everything else,” she said.

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “It’s all for you, you know,” she said.

  I had not known this, having imagined, until that moment, that her passion over the past few weeks was genuine.

  “So what I need in return,” she said, running a hand up and down my forearm, “is for you to understand.”

  “I can try,” I said. “I want to try.”

  “This thing,” she said, “is diseased. It wants me dead. When you touch it, it feels good. And I don’t want it to feel good.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Can you understand that?” she asked.

  It was not, in my mind, a question of whether I could understand, but whether she could understand that I wanted to touch her breast not for pleasure, but by way of apology.

  There was no way I could think of to explain this to her.

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

  19

  YOU MAY ALL GO TO HELL, AND I WILL GO TO TEXAS

  To be fair, a reasonable person might have agreed with Peggy’s assessment of Theodore, considering that Claire and I went to Fort Worth’s Memorial Day parade at his urging. After all, he had to have known this fell on the scale of historically bad ideas somewhere between lawn darts and the Donner Party’s shortcut. A large number of the people I’d called overgrown babies with semiautomatic pacifiers lived in Fort Worth, and in the evermore-shrill debate over firearms, those people had recently taken to carrying their rifles in coffee shops and chain restaurants to prove some point or another. What was more, most of them who knew me on sight, had, in fact, discharged many high-velocity rounds through images of me distributed by their gun club, Cold Dead Fingers of Denton County, in the days after my Ted Show appearance.

  These were people, understand, for whom the NRA was not strident enough—they’d burned their lifetime membership cards when LaStrange and Co. suggested that bringing a loaded AK-47 to Chuck E. Cheese’s was perhaps not the pinnacle of either good sense or patriotism. So yes, undoubtedly, Theodore sending us to the Lone Star State for Memorial Day was at best unwise, though I continue to believe, especially given how things ended, that it was not malign. The worst that could be said about him is he was perhaps too confident in the abilities of ex-Spetsnaz to deal with any challenge, up to and including a mob of heavily armed Texans.

  Claire was quiet on the flight to Dallas/Fort Worth International. She’d taken Xanax as a hedge against turbulence, and this gave her a slouched, silent contemplativeness, an almost eerie contrast to her usual liquored exuberance. She drank water, and spoke to me only once, to ask to be let out of our row so she could go to the bathroom. When we touched down and deplaned she lagged two steps behind me on the walk up the Jetway. We stopped inside the terminal and searched for an indication of where we could find a cab.

  As we stood reading various signs, a gigantic man walking past did a double take, then stopped and stared. He weighed at least four hundred pounds, the sort of heft that makes one’s knees look like they’re buckling slowly in toward each other, like tectonic plates. He wore huge silver basketball shorts, a blue T-shirt big enough to serve as a two-man tent, and a camouflage boonie hat with the chin strap cinched tight against the fleshy bulge of his throat.

  The man took one lumbering step toward us. “Hey there,” he said.

  “God help me,” Claire said.

  “Hello,” I said to the man.

  “You’re that fella.”

  “It’s possible that I am,” I said.

  “What’re y’all doin’ in town?”

  “There’s an open-carry rally after the Memorial Day parade in Fort Worth,” I said. “We’re going to attend.”

  “Y’all recordin’ this raight now?” he asked. “To go on that show of yours?”

  “We are recording, yes,” I said.

  The man looked around at people rushing this way and that through the terminal. “If you’re recordin’,” he said, “then where’s your crew?”

  “You’re looking at it,” Claire said.

  “I don’t see no cameras,” the man said.

  “Moore’s law indicates that the number of transistors in a CPU doubles every two years,” I said. “There’s an inevitable miniaturization of electronics attendant to this phenomenon.”

  “You want to try that again in English, buddy?” the man asked.

  “He means the cameras are very small and very hidden, Private Pyle,” Claire said.

  “Okay, whatever you say,” the man said. “I just want to make sure you’re tapin’ this.”

  “Are you going to do a magic trick?” Claire asked.

  “Nope,” the man said. He lifted his right hand, cocked his thumb and forefinger into the universal pantomime of a handgun, and pressed the tip of his finger against my forehead.

  “Pow,” he said, dropping his thumb down like the hammer on a pistol.

  “Is this the part where the Stasi guys come and choke him out?” Claire asked.

  “I think,” I said, “that he would need to have a real gun for that to happen.”

  “You stick around here too long, big guy,” the man said, “somebody gonna do that for true. Word to the wise.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” I said.

  “Sure.” The man dropped his hand to his side again.

  “This will probably seem like a non sequitur.”

  “Whatever the hell that means,” he said.

  “Why are fat men so fond of athletic shorts?” I asked.

  The man looked down at his legs, then back up at me. “Who you calling fat, buddy?”

  “The hayseed who just threatened to shoot him,” Claire said. “That’s who.”

  “For years,” I said, “I’ve noticed that obese men often wear athletic shorts, even in winter, and I started to wonder why that was. I mean, you’re clearly not setting out on a long run or getting ready to play full-court basketball.”

  “Now you listen up—”

  “Is it because they’re more comfortable?” I asked. “Is it the accommodating elastic waistband? Or the porousness of mesh? I understand that fat men tend to sweat more than the median.”

  The man stared, gape mouthed.

  “I mean absolutely no disrespect,” I said. “Though I realize it probably doesn’t seem that way.”

  After a moment the man lumbered away, pointing at me over his shoulder and muttering. “You gonna get yours,” he said. “Mark my words, buddy. You gonna get it, big-time.”

  We watched him go.

  “That was fun,” Claire said.

  “Did you think so?”

  “Sarcasm, K.” Claire released the handle of her roller bag and rubbed at her eyes.

  “Those sorts of threats,” I said, “are almost always idle.”

  “In Delaware, maybe,” Claire said. “This is Texas.”

  Idle threat or not, before leaving the airport for our hotel we encountered several other people who took no pains to obscure their dislike of me. When we asked where to find a taxi, the man behind the Terminal A information desk glowered for a moment, then used both hands to point in opposite directions. A woman at McDonald’s with a tattoo of six-shooters on her wrist refused to sell me a soda, crossing her arms and staring at me in silence until I walked away. When we finally located the cab stand, the attendant looked at me, leaned through the passenger window, and told the driver to charge us double.

  The driver, though, a man from Iraq named Samer, seemed to like me just fine, and charged according to the rates on the slip from the cab stand.

  Given my overall unpopularity, we decided not to venture from the hotel, and ate at the restaurant on the eleventh floor. I had the thirty-ounce “Lone Star Size” porterhouse with a glass of bee
r, while Claire opted for the Cobb salad and, quite conspicuously, nothing but water to drink.

  When she was finished, Claire pushed her plate away and put her forearms on the bar, examining the teakwood grain in silence.

  “You’re not drinking,” I said finally.

  “No, I am not,” she said.

  “That was my way,” I said, “of asking if something’s wrong.”

  “I’m not drinking,” she said, “because I want to have a serious conversation. I don’t think we should do this tomorrow, K.”

  “I would ask why,” I said, “but I think I already know what you’ll say.”

  “You always think you know,” she said, running the tip of one finger around the rim of her water glass. “You think you know everything.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “There is hardly anything I’m certain of.”

  Claire turned on her stool and gazed around the dining room. “There are exactly five other people in this restaurant right now, not counting the bartender and the waitress,” she said. “Four of those people are women, and none of them looks even vaguely Russian.”

  “What does a Russian look like?” I asked.

  “Heavy brow, predatory nose, eyes set a millimeter apart,” she said. “You know, Slavic.”

  “I’m not sure that look is exclusive to Slavs,” I said.

  “The point is I think Theodore was full of crap about this security team.”

  “It was his idea,” I said. “Besides, I thought you didn’t like it in the first place.”

  “That was before you went on national television and called every tobacco-chomping half-wit in the country a big fat baby.”

  “It’s possible,” I said, “that you see this as more serious than it actually is.”

  “Have you not been paying attention today?” Claire said. “It’s very, very serious. And do you know why? Because you were right. They are mama’s boys, and what’s more they know it, deep down in their stupid little hearts. You’ve challenged their most sacred delusion: the image of themselves as tough, self-reliant inheritors of the spirit of Davy Crockett, or who the fuck ever. And they’ll hurt you to preserve that delusion, K. They will.”