by KUBOA
Mean. Chip says, Your face goes mean.
*
Can I sacrifice my only begotten son to the mob? Can I do it for the sake of Story? Can I do it as expiation for my sins? Is a writer not like God?
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Excerebrose (eks-SER-ee-bros) adjective
Brainless.
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Brier says this: “Let me sit on you. I like it when you watch me. I like to be on top of you. Big man. My big man. Yes yes yes yes.”
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Zoophyte—an animal resembling a plant.
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The shooting has “gang overtones,” Sgt. Melendez said. Neighbors in the area said they were shocked that the shooting could happen in their quiet neighborhood near Grahamwood Elementary School. At the time there were at least four children near the house on Potemkin. One small girl was in the front yard. The bullets were flying over her head, Sgt. Melendez said. “Gang overtones,” he reiterated. “Gang overtones.” The neighborhood took up the phrase like a chant, a spell.
Chip was supposed to be playing with those children. Instead he was inside the house, a headache sidelining his weekend plans.
*
Chip says this to Hayley: “You’re more beautiful than Halle Berry.” Halle Berry, for whatever reason, has become Chip’s measure for earthly beauty.
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Man to wife after affair is discovered: I got excited, okay? I got excited. Me. The dead, desiccated husk of a formerly vibrant man, your husband, got excited.
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Hayley says this to Chip: “You are my shining star, my knight errant.”
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Brier says this: “You bastard. You’re a bastard. Of course your wife knows. I told you this would happen. I told you so many times. Shit, you know what, I don’t care. Listen. Listen, you bastard, I’m still here. Okay? I don’t care. We can still fuck whenever one or both of us feels like it. This is the way I live my life, Okay?”
*
Hayley stays with her husband.
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The knife is out. It is always out. Knives are.
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Chip becomes a young man of preternatural kindness and intuition.
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The boys are arrested but not by Sgt. Melendez. They are all sent to “homes.” The word “homes” as a euphemism began when? Potemkin Street went back to the peaceful oasis it had formerly been. A safe neighborhood. Whatever that means.
Chip spends most of his waking hours outside. We do not ask him what he does.
*
Hayley says this: “What were you thinking? What were you thinking? What were you thinking?”
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Wamble (WOM-buhl) verb intr.
1. To move unsteadily; to totter, waver, roll, etc.
2. To feel nausea.
3. (Of a stomach) To rumble or growl.
noun
1. An unsteady motion.
2. A feeling of nausea.
*
®Hayley is my new wife. She is beautiful the way new things are beautiful, cars, tools, affairs. When they made her they broke the mold (possible love interest in future for new teacher at the community college). Chip, as in “off the block,” is my son, my only son, a good boy, as far as it goes. Brier is a visual artist. She calls herself a “visual artist.” She will never marry. She will live in New York City for a while running a gallery her parents buy her (later self-destructive, or is that too radical a change?). (Suicide attempt? With knife? No.) Writer never sees lover again. (He does see her, [the monster-me?] every month or so, running into her at the Whole Foods Market, or the video store, and they fuck, quickly, furtively, like teenagers who only know they must, and never consider consequences. Who must get it over with quickly.) (Writer grows ill—venereal? Too out-of-date? Oobsolete? Gout?) (Writer never finishes book. Someone else usurps the urban gang theme and writes a bestseller?) (Writer visits New York, finds gallery—what happens?) (Hayley asks for a divorce years later, years later?) (Hayley declares love for English teacher, another writer?) (Chip—into drugs?) (The dog’s name?)
What next? What next? What next?
Mike and Doris
Hhad Everything
Mike and Doris had everything. The home the newlyweds had chosen was a steal, especially in the neighborhood where they found it. And it was stuffed with all the accouterment of modern living, including many entertainment devices currently available.
On one blithe Saturday morning Doris leaned back, hands behind her pretty head, and said aloud, “We have everything.” She smiled at her handsome husband, standing before her in serviceable bathrobe and slippers.
Mike grinned like a possum.
A small cloud spit in Doris’s eye. “Don’t we?” she demanded.
“Everything except a sugar bowl,” Mike said, still grinning.
“Is that an expression?” Doris asked, a small choke to her voice.
“No. Literally, we don’t have a sugar bowl.”
“Didn’t one of your cousins—the gay one in Michigan—”
“Creamer.”
“Oh,” Doris squeaked. Her brow tightened like a bow-string. She now thought she was going to have a good long cry, the like of which Mike had never seen.
“Jesus, hHoney,” Mike said. “I was being breezy. I’ll get dressed right now and go get us a sugar bowl.”
On his way out the door Doris called from somewhere in the house, “Make it a nice one.”
Mike drove to Pottery Barn, a few miles away in a tony strip mall.
As he parked the car a dark, lovely woman in a midriff blouse was getting out of an adjacent vehicle. Mike was a sucker for midriff blouses.
And she smiled.
“Your midsection is like mead by the warm breezes fanned,” Mike offered. “I cannot continue to breathe if I don’t place my cheek there.”
When Mike came home later that day Doris was out. Whit Whitaker, her old boyfriend from high school had called, and she couldn’t resist one more highly charged fuck, Whit Whitaker was just that attractive.
Shadow Work
“Taking it in its deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him. Carefully amputated, it becomes the healing serpent of the mysteries. Only monkeys parade with it.”
—Carl Jung
Some say it started in Europe, like existentialism and psychotherapy. The truth is, however, that it was probably, initially, an American innovation because its contours were American: its swank exclusivity, its decadent solipsism. In the major metropolitan areas, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, it spread so quickly that it was as if it had always existed. In a matter of months, they were seen everywhere, in bright daylight on urban sidewalks, a vaporous dayglow, or evenings cast against grayish backgrounds by gentle streetlight or moon. Moonshadows were especially pleasing.
For Valerie, the issue was not whether she would have her shadow dyed—that was, as the young say, a no-brainer—it was whether to tell her twin, Vicki, about her plans. She and Vicki were close, don’t get that wrong. And, being identical twins, the issue partly became whether their shadows should also be identical. They were not the sort of identical twins who dressed alike. If Valerie opted for the magenta with iridescent gold highlights, which is what she was leaning toward, should Vicki then do likewise? Or, and here Valerie really balked as if reprimanded, should she consult with her twin before even scheduling the session? What if Vicki wanted the anodized purple? Or, gad, the new tie-dye?
In Memphis, where trends arrived on the last coach, there were already three parlors specializing in dyed shadows, two of which were also tattoo parlors (where the option had become le dernier cri, quickly) and one was a freestanding business in what used to be a 7/11: P. Cocky’s. The tattoo parlors, Peter Pan’s and Midtown Colours (they insisted on the superfluous “u” because it sounded European), were having a price war. P. Cocky’s was a more elegant establishment and kept mum through the whole Shadow Color Wars.
They were the tony top dog. Their reputation, already, was so solid that they did not feel the need to compete.
So, it was to P. Cocky’s that Valerie went one day, the money in her purse hard -earned at her job as a mall security officer. She stood uncertainly in the doorway. The walls were papered with bright, blown-up photographs of happy people, trailed by shadows of every imaginable hue. The shadows, in the photos, seemed super-real, magnified, and overly bright. The shadows Valerie had seen in real life were slightly plainer, though grand in their way. Some people swore their dyed shadows had changed their lives, made them more confident, in their relationships, in their business dealings. Some said, it was as if they were trailing light itself, instead of its obverse. Shadow envy was, suddenly, a bona fide social phenomenon. Valerie, still fighting inwardly with her devotion to her sister, left the shop, after picking up one of their eye-catching brochures.
The reason Valerie wanted the somewhat- expensive procedure was the old story: she wanted to gain a young man’s attention. The young man in question was named Tommy “Dago” Swell. He had gone to the same high school as the twins and had been the school’s starting point guard on a team that went all the way to State. Coach Handbag said Dago was the best point guard he had coached since “Tiny” Barthelme. Dago was lean and muscular and wore his hair gassed straight back from his forehead. His tattoos were legendary, vistas previously unknown to the eyes of men. And Dago Swell was the first student at Ransom P. Stoddard High School to get his shadow done—it was a small scandal since shadow dyeing was an adults-only procedure at the time. But, because Dago looked eighteen18 when he was fifteen15 and twenty-five25 when he was seventeen,17 he passed easily. When he first came to school, highlighted, nonchalance belying a secret pride, his shadow was itself shadowed by a gaggle of underclassmen who had already worshiped Dago Swell as an athlete and now could revere him as a god. On the basketball court the varicolored shadow caused other problems. Occasionally flickering into view, a polychrome glint in peripheral vision, it was responsible for the team’s increased steals record. But opposing players were afraid to point a finger, such was Dago’s spiky reputation.
Valerie thought Dago just about the hottest male she had ever encountered. She thought he was the cats. She had been in love with him since ninth grade, and when he got a job as a security guard at the mall alongside her she was fit to be tied. It had been assumed that Dago would attend the University of Memphis on a basketball scholarship but his grades were poor and, when it was suggested he go to jJunior cCollege first, he gave up basketball, just like that. If his reputation suffered because of his change from baller to rent-a-cop, you couldn’t tell it by Valerie. She still thought he was as sexy as a winter pear, one she longed to take a bite out of.
Vicki knew of her sister’s moderate betrayal. Her twin ESP was more fully developed than Valerie’s, to the point that Vicki occasionally listened in on her sister’s private conversations simply by tilting her head toward the nNorth and shutting one eye halfway. She heard Valerie tell her friend, Elspeth, that she had saved enough for a dye and was contemplating not telling Vicki. Elspeth answered with her own terse eloquence: “Whatever.” Elspeth put herself above many of the world’s more mundane proceedings. She feigned that she had seen it all. Vicki’s own secret was that she was in love with Elspeth.
“Oh, you’ve had your shadow done,” Valerie said the first day Dago came to work.
Dago gave her the look he reserved for boiled codfish.
“Years ago,” he said, his fingers playing over his nightstick.
Valerie’s face burned with shame. What a stupid thing to say! Did he know her? Did he realize that she was at Ransom P. Stoddard with him and hence would know before now about his infamous shadow? She wanted to die.
“I’m Valerie,” she said.
Dago Swell looked into the middle distance. There he seemed to find a more interesting tête-à-tête and he slowly moved away, trailing behind him a candent bismuth-yellow- and -viridian eidolon. Valerie shrank. She became wee. She almost disappeared.
The next day Valerie returned to P. Cocky’s with a fresh resolve. She didn’t have to go to work until 8 p.m., and she was determined to show up with a brightly -hued shadow, one that would knock Dago Swell out of his high-tops. Her sister Vicki sat in their bedroom, the one they had shared since they were born, and tuned into her sister’s erratic aura. It was flickering like a wounded thing and it was all Vicki could do to regulate its message. When she did she realized the degree of Valerie’s disloyalty and she felt cheerless. She felt jilted and forsaken. She picked up the phone and dialed Elspeth’s number.
“It’s Vicki,” Vicki said. “Valerie’s sister.”
“I know.”
“What are you doing?” Vicki didn’t know how to woo. That was clear.
“Hmph.”
“Wanna—” and here Vicki drew a blank. What did she want to ask of Elspeth? To go get coffee? To catch a movie? She was suddenly up against it. Dating—it was a foreign concept.
“Where’s Valerie?” Elspeth asked in the lacuna between words.
“She’s—” Vicki burst into tears.
Elspeth waited a few moments and then, calmly, hung up.
Vicki dried her eyes. After letting the sobs dissipate she decided that she had done okay for a first foray. She felt that she was on the righteous road to romance.
Meanwhile, Valerie was in the backroom of P. Cocky’s, prone in their elegant leather chair, which looked like something between a barber’s and a masseuse’s. The dyer was a middle-aged man with a pony tail and only one tattoo, but that one tattoo was in the middle of his forehead and was an eye. “My pineal,” he said. The dyer’s name was Rip.
“Relax,” Rip said. “It only hurts for a second. You wanna smoke to calm you down?”
“Grass?” Valerie asked, squinching her face.
“Uh, no, that would be illegal,” Rip said, but he didn’t offer an alternative.
“No thanks,” Valerie said. She couldn’t stop her feet from dancing.
“Okay,” Rip said. “Away we go.”
When she got home that afternoon, Valerie felt a little nauseous. She sat in her car, in her parent’s’ driveway, willing her stomach to go easy on her. After a few minutes she felt a little better. When she stepped from the car she saw it for the first time. Rip had said that the process takes anywhere from a half- hour to an hour to take effect. So, emerging from her Toyota into the full blast of afternoon daylight, Valerie was able to behold the enormous change in her incorporeal self for the first time. She stepped away from the car. The shadow sprung out in front of her like a red carpet. Except it wasn’t red. It was cobalt violet. With gold highlights! She had asked for magenta but Rip had talked her out of it. “Magenta—it’s for tourists, tourists and receptionists. Not a serious color for shadows. I recommend the much subtler cobalt violet.”
“Okay,” Valerie said. “Can I still have gold highlights?”
Now, Valerie looked at her gold highlights. She loved her gold highlights! She twirled in the driveway like a child with a new dress. The air was ripe with sSpring and Valerie was a kaleidoscope. Valerie was a dappled fairy castle! She spun until she was dizzy.
Vicki stood in the carport doorway behind the screen door. She watched her sister’s self-centered dance. Vicki felt the tears coming again. But, she did not cry. Gradually, like the slow glow of an ember, Vicki began to feel extraordinarily happy. Her sister was beautiful. Valerie was like a glittery butterfly just emerged from her dun cocoon. A smile grew on Vicki’s face, a smile that made the plain girl suddenly quite lovely.
Valerie stopped her caper and leaned against the Toyota for support. Then she saw Vicki behind the screen door and her heart stopped. Guilt flooded her. And Vicki, behind that metal scrim, looked as if she was installed in a black- and- white movie. Her silhouette was positively colorless, graey like a shallow sea. Valerie felt heartsick. And she knew she had to face her sister
and tell her loving things and cuddle her and convince her that she too needed the dye job. She would tell Vicki that the only reason she did this was to be a guinea pig for the two of them. She wanted to show her sister that this was a selfless act, an act of bravery designed to brighten their lives. That was her tack. That was what she knew she must do.
But when she entered their home Vicki threw her arms around her sister and wept onto her shoulder.
“I’m so sorry,” Valerie said.
“No,” Vicki said, still snuffling into her neck. “You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Oh, Vicki!” Valerie said. “Oh, my sister!”
“And Dago Swell is gonna eat you like cake,” Vicki said.
That stopped the love fest for a moment. How did Vicki know the secret of her twin’s heart of hearts, the one secret Valerie held dearest? It was twin ESP, of course, Valerie realized; it was not the first time it had occurred between them. Vicki was fine-tuned. She was powerful.
The rest of the afternoon, the twins stayed in their room, casting Valerie’s new shadow against each and every surface with the dazzling light from a gooseneck lamp. When their mother called them to the dinner table the twins emerged, their arms locked, exchanging small kisses, petting each other as if they were new lovers. Their mother paused as she passed around the hamburger hash. Something was new. Something about her beloved daughters was brand new—and, somehow, as exciting as a spiritual awakening!
Valerie insisted Vicki go to the mall with her that evening. She didn’t want to part from her twin now, now that their bond was re-established. Really, it was such a slight thing, their rift, so easily repaired.
“You can go to The Gap while we’re there. I’ll buy you something,” Valerie said.
Vicki could only smile at her generous sister. Such love. On the way to the mall Valerie asked Vicki if she had thought about dyeing her shadow.