Flings: Stories

by Justin Taylor

  The whole sky was alive with pale phantoms, metamorphic clouds like wax bubbles in lava lamps. When I had my breath again I crawled to the top on my hands and knees and belly. It was a fairly easy grade, no worse than the embankment had been, but I had to go slowly, because my knees and fingers wanted to pay attention to every subtle contour in the tiles; my mind flooded with a trillion fragments of worthless glittering information, every stray kernel of grit lit up my skin.

  I reached the apex. It was the view that, as children, we’d always imagined having. I could see all the school’s outbuildings, its PE field and basketball courts, and big chunks of our neighborhood—the new overpass by the road to the mall. I thought I glimpsed the lake my house was on, but then realized that I wasn’t looking in the direction my house was in, so it must have been some other lake, or else only in my head.

  Isaac was on the basketball court shooting foul shots by himself, and I felt as if I’d known he was there since I got to the school, that perhaps it was even why I had come. What I mean is that this was one of those times when learning something felt like remembering it. He would stand at the line, dribble, shoot, sink it, chase the ball down, then make his way back to the line, doing dodges and head fakes and spin moves as though outmatching an invisible defender. The basketball was a comet and when he moved his body became one, too. If he looked up, I wondered, would he see me? The angle was against him, and I had the sun at my back.

  I watched him and ate the clementines. Peels piled up on the roof all around me, their white innards shining even brighter than their glowing skins. A wind rose and the peels rolled down the roof faces, falling away into the void below, an endless empty darkness that had followed me, yawning open where the ground had been. Shocked by the sight, I scrambled toward the relative safety of the middle of the roof and watched the color drain out of the trees. Everything was coming undone. Isaac had the basketball court and I had the library roof and we were shipwreck survivors on bobbing planks, stuck where we were until whatever had begun was finished and the process reversed itself. What had been unwritten would be rewritten, the shattered world made whole again. Wouldn’t it? I told myself it must be and wanted to tell Isaac—who, I realized, had no idea that any of this was happening—but he was too far away to hear me no matter how loudly I cried out to him, no matter what I might have meant to say.

  AFTER ELLEN

  Ellen is at her internship with the film festival and Scott is in their gravel driveway, loading his half of everything they own into the Jetta. The small stones crunching beneath his sneakers are the same color as the three o’clock sky. He’s composing the Dear John in his head while he packs the car, but he can’t seem to get it right—not that it can be got right, ditching her like this, but shouldn’t there be a way to make it less bad? He carries crates of records, a Camel Light between his lips, sweat streaking down his naked scalp. The Jetta is midnight blue and his own, though he and Ellen share it; usually he drops her off in the morning, then picks her up around four thirty, five. Today, she’s going to take the bus home, ostensibly so that Scott can drive out to the Costco by the airport.

  Why is he leaving? Tough to say. From the moment they decided to move to Portland together, he’d known that this evil seed was planted in his heart. He could have, maybe should have, said no when she asked him to come with her, but they’d graduated; there was no reason to stick around their college town in Ohio, and he certainly wasn’t going back to Long Island, so—the Great Northwest. Why not? Perhaps he had believed that the feeling would pass. The seed would fail to blossom or the fruit would wither on the vine. Last night they had this talk about adopting a dog—curled up on the couch, they weighed the relative merits of mutts versus purebreds—and suddenly he could see their life together, all mapped out: the proposal and the wedding and the grades the kids would be in when the dog died of old age. Now here he is, twelve hours later, gut-sick and elated, sweaty and sore-armed, all his clothes in duffels and Hefty bags.

  It’s not too late to call this off. He can unload the car, get a bottle of Côtes du Rhône uncorked and into the decanter. He can get everything back in its right place if he’s quick. He can come up with a reason that he never made it to Costco. He can put a knife through the front left tire of his car. He can kiss Ellen when she walks through the door.

  He shoves a last duffel in on top of his vinyl, then struggles the trunk shut. What else does he even own? His turntables and headphones, his laptop, its power cord and the cord for his cell phone, a few pairs of shoes. That stuff can all go in the backseat. He’ll throw a winter coat over the DJ gear so that it won’t get stolen in some rest-stop parking lot. The plan is to drive to his sister Priscilla’s place in LA. The trip will take two days if he pushes himself, three if he goes easy. Priscilla, who is four years older, is married to an entertainment lawyer. They have a house in Silver Lake that seems to be made entirely of windows, with a sandy backyard and two spare rooms; one of these is empty and the other contains a blue foldout couch. Scott assumes that the empty room is earmarked for a child but thinks of the other as his, though he knows the house only from photographs posted online. He’ll probably call them from the road tonight or tomorrow morning. Or maybe he’ll just show up.

  Now he’s standing in his soon-to-be-former bedroom, pushing drawers back in, shutting the closet door, smoothing the top sheet. He doesn’t want Ellen to think there’s been a burglary or, worse, that he’s had another woman in the bed. He wishes that he could somehow be there to explain things to her when she comes home—an absurd thought, but it reminds him that he still hasn’t written the note.

  He tears a piece of paper off the yellow pad that they keep on the counter for their shopping lists. He writes, “I wasn’t ready and am so sorry but swear this will have been the right thing for us.” Signs his name way down at the bottom in swift cursive, like he does to endorse checks. Leaves himself space to go back and add “Love” as his closing, but isn’t sure whether he should. He knows that he’s giving up his right to use that word with regard to Ellen, but doesn’t know whether that means that he ought to use it this one last time or if the forfeiture has already taken place.

  If not “Love,” then what?

  But just because there’s room for a closing doesn’t mean there has to be a closing. He didn’t begin with a salutation, after all. “Dear Ellen”—how absurd would that be? The letter is held on the table by their little brown pepper mill. Whatever happens next is his fault but not his problem. He may never even know about it, whatever “it” will turn out to have been.

  Scott locks the front door. His bowels are twisted in hot knots but he doesn’t have to go to the bathroom. Indeed, he’s eaten nothing but cigarette smoke all day. He plugs his iPod into the dashboard. He knows that it’s stupid to soundtrack his own life by picking a song “for the moment,” but can’t help himself. Puts on Derek and the Dominos’ “Key to the Highway,” rolls all his windows down, shuts his cell phone off and tosses it in the glove box, lights a cigarette, puts the car into gear, and then, sobbing freely, inaugurates his long ride south.

  Scott drives out of Portland half expecting to crash on the highway. He won’t cause the accident but he will deserve to suffer it. He imagines how it will go: a flash or a swerve, a drop in his gut, like when an elevator hiccups, then jump cut—waking up alone in a sunny hospital room or a wailing ambulance or somehow back in Ellen’s arms in a body cast or even shipped home to a grave beside his grandparents at New Montefiore, in West Babylon. He believes that the universe will charge him with his crime against Ellen, will confirm to him the value of his actions by making him pay dearly for having taken them. This strikes him as a quintessentially Jewish sentiment. He pounds the steering wheel with the heel of his hand and cries out, “Fuck your ancient law!”

  Six hours later, the state line safely behind him, he stops for the night in Yreka—a depressing old mining town in the high beautiful woods near Klamath National Forest. The phone stays o
ff and in the glove box. At the Black Bear Diner he orders the Joe’s Hobo Omelette—ham, bacon, and sausage. Fuck your ancient law. The next morning, he gets up, checks out of the Econo Lodge, goes back to the Black Bear, sits in the same seat as the day before, orders the same omelette plus coffee, then gets back on I-5. He figures he’ll drive as far as Sacramento, but then the prospect of an evening in that city seems so grim that he takes the 505 to San Francisco, where he uses the family credit card to check into the Omni Hotel.

  The Omni has an air of beleaguered elegance: faded crimson carpets roll down scuffed marble stairs into a lobby full of wing chairs; waxed apples brown in a bronze bowl on a sideboard by the elevators. Scott drowns himself in HBO and room service. He showers with the bathroom door open, eats the five-dollar chocolate bar from the minifridge. Through the smoke coat on his tongue, the taste of the bittersweet confection is like glimpsing a hooded figure through swirling fog.

  When he turns his phone back on, he learns that Ellen called him sixteen times in the first two days he was gone. Her initial messages are desperate and imploring—“Baby, whatever I did wrong . . .”; “Baby, I don’t understand”; “Baby, TALK TO ME”—but that tone is soon supplanted by frustration, then rage. “You pussy!” she screams in one of them. He has never heard her speak this word before, and it pops in his ear like a cold wet finger, sending gooseflesh up his arms and a shiver through his loins. Scott has been at the hotel for a week.

  There are also livid messages from his parents, who say that if they don’t hear from him within twenty-four hours they will cancel the credit card and hire a private detective. (Empty threats since he hasn’t lost the room.) Danny, a college friend who also lives in Portland, sent this text: “You fucking moron, how is she supposed to do anything without a fucking car?”

  Scott feels bad about the car. He had thought about it only in terms of ownership, and in doing so failed to consider the question of use. The house that he and Ellen sublet is in a suburb a half hour’s drive from her office, from all the good bars, from anywhere she might actually want to be in Portland. He writes back to Danny, “Shit im sorry do u think i should send her $ for a rental?” Danny’s reply comes faster than Scott would have guessed it was possible to type on a touch-screen keypad: “FUCK YOU DON’T EVER EVEN THINK HER NAME EVER AGAIN YOU FUCK.”

  On the phone, he prevails upon Priscilla to sort things out with their folks. She’s his ambassador to the family and seems to enjoy the role. She tells him that she and their mother, appalled, have been in touch with Ellen. Their father has been heard to question Scott’s honor. “Remind them that Ellen wasn’t Jewish,” he says to her, wishing he could evict the hint of whine from his voice. He’s sitting on the room’s windowsill, cigarette on his lip, staring blankly at the office building across the street, itself essentially a blank.

  “Believe me, little brother,” Priscilla says, “Mom and Dad have never needed to be reminded of that.”

  Scott takes a daily walk through Chinatown. It gets him out of his room for an hour, ensures that he sees the sun—when there is sun to be seen in San Francisco—and keeps him from ordering the same ham-and-Swiss from room service three times a day. In Portsmouth Square Plaza, old men play Chinese chess on stone benches while the wind whips crazily and vagrants pull deposit bottles out of the trash. In the open-faced souvenir shops that line the steep streets there are countless jade or wood statuettes of Hotei Buddha, fat and laughing, and sweaters, sweatshirts, hoodies, and hats in every color of the rayon rainbow, all emblazoned with a Golden Gate Bridge. Scott remembers once having been told that the bridge never stops being painted. They start at one end, and it takes the whole year to get to the other, by which time the old work has absorbed so much dirt and damage that it needs to be redone, and so they begin again.

  Sometimes he has lunch at this Japanese place where there is a moat built into the sushi bar. Little blue boats putter along in three inches of water, each tied to the next with shoelace rigging, like parading elephants twined trunk to tail. There was a place like this in Portland, but instead of boats it was an electric train set.

  Scott orders iced watermelon juice and starts grabbing at the plastic plates that rest on the boats, on which pieces of sushi are grouped in twos and threes. A laminated placemat explains that the pattern of the plate indicates its price. When he’s finished eating, a waiter will tally up the plates and give him a bill. He has to be careful when reaching for the plates so that he doesn’t bump a boat and send water sloshing up onto it, or else knock the food overboard. The placemat concludes with this terse warning: SINK SAME AS EAT YOU PAY.

  Scott never makes it to LA. He takes some money out of his trust to cover first, last, and security on an apartment in the Mission, plus furniture and whatever else he needs: towels, rugs, a bed. He goes on a few dates with a cute barista named Olivia. She has this staggering Afro that she keeps kerchiefed down while she’s at work. Scott tells his sister all about her, keeping only two facts from his account: first, that they are not a serious couple; second, that while Olivia is half black she is also half Jewish. On her mother’s side, no less. Olivia wasn’t bat mitzvahed, but she spits fire if she sees a FREE PALESTINE patch on a backpack. She wants to take one of those birthright trips to Israel to explore her roots. She encourages Scott to take one, too, but stops short of suggesting that they go together. Scott makes his sister understand that Olivia is the first significant girl after Ellen, and so Priscilla tells their mother, and now it’s a family scandal. These poor narrow-minded, well-meaning Long Island racists! All this tribal madness about bloodlines, purity—obsessions that have never worked out especially well for Jews. Unless you count the six thousand years of survival (that’s what Olivia would say), but then what about, for example, Tay-Sachs? Anyway, he calls home more often. The perplexed suffering in his mother’s voice is not unwelcome. He’s pretty sure “schvartzeh” is the only Yiddish word his father knows.

  On a walk through his new neighborhood, Scott sees a homemade flyer stapled to a utility pole: I FOUND YOUR DOG. There’s a photograph of a blond mutt relaxing, stretched out on the floor with its muzzle on its front paws. It looks to be part retriever. Scott takes the flyer down and puts it in his pocket. He calls the number and receives an address, which he plugs into the maps app on his phone. Ten minutes south on the 101 and he’s in a part of the city that he’s never seen before, a miserable-looking neighborhood below McLaren Park that his phone says is called Sunnydale. The directions lead him to a gravel lot where there are two boxcars.

  The boxcars’ open doors face each other, and a sun-bleached tarp is secured over the space between them, as an awning; white plastic chairs and a card table suggest a porch. A man with a white beard halfway down his gut and white hair all the way down his back emerges from one car, leaning on a hand-carved walking stick. “You must be who called,” the overgrown gnome says.

  The boxcars are wired for electricity. The man has three computers going at once. Two of them mine bitcoins, he says, while the third donates its processing power to SETI. “Also grow,” he says, gesturing with his stave in the direction of the other boxcar. “Real good shit, if you’re interested. Medical grade.” The blond dog wanders out from a shadow and comes up to Scott for a sniff. Scott gets down on his knees and opens his arms wide, wondering what the dog will do. It licks his face, so he hugs it. “Found her wandering loose on Dolores,” the man says, supplying the story Scott hadn’t thought to ask for. “While I was on an, ahem, errand. Hope I didn’t cause you too much trouble taking her back here, but I couldn’t see leaving her.” Scott produces a bank-crisp hundred-dollar bill from his shirt pocket. The man shakes his head at the money but then takes it anyway. He pounds the ground with his walking stick. “I got a real big heart,” he says. “Big enough to burst.”

  Scott names the dog Yreka. Whenever he walks her, he’s on his guard. What if he runs into her original owners? What if they call out to her and she bolts? The dog was found without
a collar, and she’s put on a healthy amount of weight since Scott brought her home, so the odds are that she was abandoned or neglected. Nonetheless, he can’t shake the feeling that he has kidnapped Yreka rather than adopted her, and that somewhere in San Francisco is a person or a couple or a family who miss their dog. They probably live in his neighborhood. Almost every day, he walks by the utility pole where he saw the flyer, and he imagines her owners as a couple, approximately his own age, married a year and a half but childless—like his sister and her husband, they’re taking things slow. Before losing her, perhaps they joked that the dog was their trial-run baby. They probably don’t make that joke anymore.

  Scott names the couple Nate and Jennifer. She’s Korean American, born here to immigrant parents, grew up in Foster City. Nate’s from Ohio, near Schmall, the town that shares its name with the private college where Scott and Ellen met. Surely Nate didn’t attend Schmall, but he probably went to the parties. Maybe he and Scott waited in line for a keg together, made eyes at the same wobbling girl. Maybe Nate even hooked up with Ellen. All the college girls went through a townie phase. Sometimes, when Nate is making his regular love to Jennifer, with her smooth skin and soft belly and perfectly black hair, his mind wanders back to the old days, when a random Thursday night might have delivered him a freckled brunette in a scoop-necked shirt to make love to—where? In somebody’s upstairs bathroom or on a back deck, his own childhood bed or Ellen’s dorm bed, the woods behind a tumbledown barn.