by Karen Rivers
I wonder who is going to pay the monthly phone bill now that he’s gone, how long it will take his dad’s accountant to realize that The King couldn’t possibly be using it anymore. The water sluices off the screen, leaving the greasy path of my fingerprints behind.
The gulls on the Steins’ roof laugh cruelly. Someone on the street yells in hard-edged language and there’s the sound of something heavy and metallic falling, a silence, then a barking laugh. Then a honk and a squeal of tires. The roar of a bus going by. More laughter. (How dare you laugh, I think. How dare you. The King is dead. Are you stupid? Don’t you know?) That’s how I feel about all of it, like the whole world should stop laughing, even the seagulls. Don’t they get it? We are all on our way out.
Music with too much bass reverberates from the window across the gap. I read once somewhere that so much bass eventually does something to the muscles in your colon and people who listen that way will end up in adult diapers sooner or later. I make a mental note to stick some coupons for Depends on the guy’s front door. Jerk. He deserves it.
I turn the water off and pick up my phone and wipe it on my pant leg. I like the heft of it in my hand. That stupid phone makes me feel connected to everything and everyone, even to the people it can’t connect me to anymore.
It makes me feel safe.
There are footsteps in the hall, then Mom knocks. I shove the phone into my pocket, quick, like she can see through walls and doors, like she knows I’m texting a dead guy like someone who is too stupid to understand that dead is dead is a marble choking you to death.
I gag and spit in the sink. Pink mist.
“I need to talk to you about something important, JC,” she says. “I wish you’d come out of there. I have to go to work in an hour. One hour, do you hear me? One. I can’t miss this train. And I want to … I have to … Well, just come out, would you?”
Her voice wobbles a bit, which bugs me. It makes me mad. I’m still me. Why can’t she see that? I’m so angry with her for treating me like I’m broken, even if I am.
Ahem, ahem, Mom coughs. Ribbit ribbit.
“Sharky?” Mom leans on the door and I can tell the full weight of her is there, pressing. The door is wood. Brown. Wood makes me think of coffins. The idea of coffins makes me feel like I am breathing through a straw with holes, nothing is filling up my lungs. I inhale and inhale and inhale until I’m dizzy, dizzier, the dizziest. The King’s coffin isn’t even wood, it’s marble. There are stones inlaid across the top that look like actual jewels. I don’t know what they are. Diamonds? Crystals? His coffin is worth more than everything I’ve ever owned in my life.
“Sweetheart?”
I shove the window open farther and gulp in the garbagey, fishy, hot-pavement scent of the alley. My lungs drown in the humid stench, that damp stink that seems to have stuck around long after they cleaned up Hurricane Sandy, like everything went moldy and now can never really be cleaned.
My mom sighs so loud I can practically feel it. “JC…,” she starts again. She rattles the knob. “What are you doing in there? Do I need to do something?” She delivers a solid kick to the door, which rattles but doesn’t break. “Ouch,” she says. “Shit. I mean, sugar.”
I take my phone out of my pocket and type, Am OK. Sorry, and send it to her. The swoop swoop of those invisible birds carries it right through the door into her pocket and I hear her phone buzz and then I can hear her reading it. I know you shouldn’t be able to hear someone read, but somehow, now, I can. Sharks can read the electrical impulses in the water; I can read the electrical impulses in the air.
Everything vibrates.
The last thing I said to The King was, “Hey, Chief Not Scared of Heights, you’re going to fall.” I was sort of laughing, sort of not. I took a picture. #dontlookdown He was too far out for it to be funny, maybe five or six feet from safety. That’s not much when you’re two feet off the ground, but when you are on the forty-second floor, trust me: it’s a lot. He bounced a little on the balls of his feet, like he was going to start jogging. Then he wobbled, sat down. “HEY!” I yelled. “Seriously.”
He was looking at his phone. Typing.
“Don’t text and drive!” I said, which was a joke because of this campaign at school about texting and driving that we all made fun of because we were kids in New York: none of us could drive.
Then my phone buzzed. I pulled it out of my pocket while I was yelling, “Come on. You’re going to get blown off, dude.”
I angled my phone to cut the glare on the screen and read it. It said srry. It was from The King. “What?” I said. “Dude. WHAT?”
The distance between me and The King stretched like melting plastic and then there was that forever second, my WHAT? hanging in the air between us, becoming as thin as a thread, breaking in the sky, long strings of it dangling down toward the ground like a jungle of plastic vines.
The King didn’t hear me because of the wind and because he was already tipping backward, scuba diver–style. His face like the weather, all jumbled up: storm clouds, rain, lightning, and the sun.
I saw him raise his eyebrows and
It was really gusty by then, the wind was
Anyway he was already
Some things are too hard to
Screw this. I mean, seriously.
“Please,” Mom says, from the other side of the door. “Please, Sharky.”
OK ok ok, I type. I hesitate. I stare myself down in the mirror. Suck it up, Buttercup, I think. My cold dead eyes glare back at my cold dead eyes. My lips curl in a sneer. My face has forgotten how to arrange itself properly. I allow it to fall back into flat nothingness, expression free. When did I get so skinny? I can see the bones in my face, the skeleton of me pushing to get through.
I touch Send.
I peel my now-blue sock off and slop it, dripping blueness all over the clean tile, into the garbage can. Underneath, the skin of my foot is blue, too, and puckered. My ankle is starting to swell.
The phone vibrates.
Daff: I need 2 talk 2 you.
I type: Je suis indisponible.
I hear Mom move away from the door, her footsteps slapping the floor toward the kitchen. When I put weight on my ankle, it hurts like something separate from me, with a life of its own. I take a picture of it. #bluefootedbooby It’s almost a funny thing to type right now. LOL LOL LOL.
My phone buzzes again. Need 2 talk 2 you srsly <3 Daff. I have something from him. U have to c it. Its 4u.
I almost send her the blue-foot pic. But then I don’t. I hit Delete. I reply to her with my standard, Non merci. No thank you. No mercy. Whichever you prefer, m’lady. I love her so hard it hurts, like all my organs are curling over inside me. But I can’t. Not now. Not ever.
I put my hand on the door and open it, dizzy, dizzy, dizzy. At any moment, I might just faint dead away, like one of those too-skinny girls in my class, folding up against the hall wall like a piece of beautiful paper. The light grays and thins. I pinch the skin of my wrist hard. The feeling passes.
It always passes.
I’m okay.
I’m fine.
I go into the kitchen and sit down.
4
“He probably fainted in the air,” the fat cop had said. “I learned that back on September 11, you know, 2001. I was there, like … I was there. All those people, jumping, remember? Falling. Well, you’re too young to remember. But all those people. It was unbelievable. Holding hands. That one woman holding down her skirt. Anyway, they said they all fainted, passed right out, didn’t know what it was like to … Oh, I shouldn’t be saying this, I guess. Shit. I’m sorry. Kid, I’m sorry.”
He looked surprised, like I had made him say those things, like my friend dying had forced these words out of him against his will. I scowled. I wanted him to stop but I couldn’t find the words. I couldn’t find any words. Words were a school of fish flashing in the sun and then vanishing all at once, a hundred thousand bodies departing in one smooth motion.
He leaned so close to me I could smell that he ate a meatball sub for lunch, washed it down with a coffee and a piece of too-weak gum. He had a gold filling in the side of his front tooth with a hunk of dark food stuck beside it. I wanted to punch him hard, so hard his nose would burst, a cartoon balloon.
“It’s something like two hundred miles an hour when you fall like that,” the skinny cop interrupted, his face all creased up like rotten fruit. He sounded excited. “What McRory there means is that he didn’t feel anything, ya know.”
A word burned on the end of my tongue. I opened my mouth. Nothing happened. I tried again. “Screw you,” I croaked, real quiet. And then, just like that my voice was drained out of me, like blood pooling on the ground. I could feel it go, heavy like syrup. I expected to look down and see under my chair a puddle of words I’d never say.
The fat cop squinted at me. Then, his eyes on my eyes, he reached over and touched my face. His fingertip was soft and terrible. I froze, every part of me clenched up, wanting to fight or to flee. My throat snapped tight shut in a way that made me think of gulls, swallowing. I started to gag. He pulled his hand back, looked at it like it wasn’t anything to do with him, operating without permission. He shook his head again, hard. Like an Etch A Sketch he was trying to erase.
That one woman holding down her skirt. Holding hands. Fainted in the air.
Mom took me home from the station in a cab that cost forty-two dollars.
The forty-twos were everywhere. I couldn’t get away from them.
I Googled the thing about fainting first thing when I got into my room and I found out that it’s just an urban legend. You don’t pass out when you fall from high up. People want to think that because it makes the trip down to the ground seem more palatable to the witnesses. And cops are liars, like everyone else.
I guess The King was awake right until he wasn’t.
File that under: Things I Don’t Want to Know.
It’s right there in my brain, next to my other ever-growing file: Things I Can’t Stop Seeing.
His shirt billowing against the backdrop of the sky.
The crowd on the sidewalk when I finally got there.
Pink mist.
My own face in the mirror, staring back at me.
5
Mom’s eyes are tired but that doesn’t mean they aren’t perfectly lined and shadowed, each eyelid like a tiny art canvas, a black mole that looks like cancer perfectly drawn on her powdered, death-white cheek. The table is bright yellow. She painted it last year when she wasn’t tired yet, when she was still reinventing the apartment as often as she reinvented herself.
I am why she is so tired.
The bright yellow paint is bubbling. I stick my fingernail under the edge and start to peel it, which I know drives her crazy, but that yellow is offensively cheerful. Underneath the yellow is a flat gray-brown that seems a lot more like real life. She turns off the music and the silence is sudden, like jumping into the sea and having your ears fill up.
Last summer, I took diving classes at the Y. We learned to breathe through regulators. We swam around the swimming pool, looking at each other’s legs, picking up coins from the faded blue tiles. On the one day when we actually dove in Long Island Sound, a storm came up and we had to come in. We only got fifteen minutes down there. It was the worst, best fifteen minutes of my life. The seaweed was covered with slime that looked like sewage. The one fish I saw was dead, trapped in a roll of wire someone had dumped off the side of their boat. The water was the kind of filthy that made me think I’d see corpses: suited men with ties flapping, feet encased in concrete.
Or bull sharks, hungry for a meal.
Saltwater crocs, rising from the murk.
Everything was gray-brown. Like life. Like the table. Like everything we are pretending not to be.
It scared me: the way the ocean was struggling to be alive but failing, the way a rusty oil can lay under litter and old tires. I hated it mostly for not being what I expected, for not looking like a National Geographic special, or like footage from the Shark Week episodes that I watched over and over again.
I wasn’t expecting coral reefs, I’m not a total idiot. But I was expecting something else.
Something beautiful.
Something other.
At least something more colorful.
I couldn’t explain it after, to Mom, so I said it was great. The best. Everything I wanted. Luckily, scuba diving is something I can’t really afford to do and we live in Brooklyn. It’s not exactly the Great Barrier Reef.
One day, when I have enough saved up, I’ll fly somewhere where the diving is amazing. I’ll go to Australia. I’ll sign up for a dive. I’ll step into that water and swim as far away from the reef as I can. I’ll look down into the deep and see the answer to some question that I haven’t thought up yet. I’ll see the heft of the shadows gliding through the water below me and I’ll know exactly what they are. And what they are doing.
I’ll understand them.
And they’ll understand me.
That’s when it will make sense.
Mom takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, like someone in pain. In, out. In, out. A third time. Giving birth to a sentence. I kind of know how she feels, but it’s also annoying. Pant, pant, pant.
Then finally she blurts, “I know the timing is rotten but the show is filming on location for the summer to try to boost ratings by, you know, spicing it up with ‘world travel’ … I—I’m going. I just, well, I have to tell you. I’m going to go. I have to go. It’s a thing I have to do.” It comes out as one long word that sounds like a different language. I nod. Yes, Mom. I understand. She exhales so long that I can smell the toothpaste on her breath, laced with green tea and something stale.
Mom does makeup for a reality TV show about love that has nothing to do with reality. Or love. She paints contour marks on the main guy’s abs. I forget his name this season, but it doesn’t much matter. They are all the same, these guys. Gleefully smacking their lips at the sight of the women they get to pick from. This one guy licked his lips so often that he chapped the skin all the way up to his nose. Mom said it was gross to cover it up and he kept licking off the makeup. Literally licking his lips. Mankind is just so obvious, you know?
She makes shadows on the hopeful girls’ cleavage. Like, what are they hoping for? A chance to be with this jerk? I don’t get it, but it’s basically the most popular show in the world, so what do I know? She hides their faces with the same thick mask of makeup. No one is real.
The saddest part is that those girls? They remind me of the new Daff. Painted on. Fake. Pretending.
It’s the worst. I don’t even watch it anymore. I used to watch it with Daff and we’d laugh our butts off about how gross it was, and how pathetic those people were. Now she’s practically one of them. It’s just a matter of time. Probably she’ll be on it one day, fake crying about true love to the camera.
Mom pauses. Clears her throat, ribbit ribbit.
“I have to tell you that you are going to go stay with your dad, which will probably be good for you actually, to get away from here after, you know, everything that’s happened and besides it might be … an experience. Different, at least, from anything you ever … you can just take some time … and … well. You know. And … and you and your dad need to reconnect and the show says I can’t bring you with me and I’m sorry, Sharky, but your dad is your dad no matter what and he loves you and maybe this trip is going to be the best thing to happen to you after all.”
It’s like she thinks that if she stops to take any more breaths, I’ll be able to stop her from saying what she’s saying. I’ll somehow be able to change her mind.
I’m super aware of my own breathing now. In, out. In, out. In, out. Pant, pant, pant. It just keeps going, a person’s inhalations and exhalations, while all around them their life might be completely changing. In and out, like you can’t stop yourself. Something metallic is in my mouth that tastes like blood o
r hate. I work up some saliva and swallow it down. I go over to the sink and spit. I fill a glass with water. The pipes belch.
“I’ve sublet the apartment to that girl Blaire who answers the phones at the studio,” she adds. “She has cats. She’s too young to have that many cats. But I know her, so I thought it would be better than—well. I hope they don’t scratch all the furniture but I guess it doesn’t … we can just lock your room and I’ll pile some other stuff in there and … I rented it, anyway, as a one bed. I couldn’t tell you, I didn’t know how to tell you, I know you’re upset, you should be upset, I am upset. This has all been very upsetting…” Her voice trails off. Her eyes are on the wall behind me, which is bare except for the one painting she did when she decided to go to art school when I was five, a painting of a kid in bright red boots standing ankle deep in the waves at the beach, staring out to sea. The sea has highlights of purple and green and red, it’s hardly blue at all. Mom can never see things as they are. The kid is me, I guess, but I never had red boots.
“It’s just that,” she says, “I’m not sure how to do this, JC. I’m not sure how to be a parent to you right now. I don’t know what you need or how to do it. I’ve run out of—I just don’t … I don’t know, Sharky. I love you, but I don’t know how to do this. You need someone. Something. Someone else.”
I am shaking my head slowly side to side. No way. My heart is thumping out something that I can’t explain, which is Daff, Daff, Daff, Daff.
No.
“Sharky,” she says. “Sharkboy. JC, sweetie. Come on. Don’t make it harder. I’m only—it’s that I can’t lose this job, and you know, I think…”