Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  “Dude,” Marcus said, nodding. Anything the vaguest bit Zen-like appealed to him. “That’s cool.”

  “Wait,” Kyle said. “Alien tree? What the fuck is that?”

  Sometimes she felt like she’d lost her sun. First Danielle had abandoned her for college, then she’d gone off to backpack around Asia on her junior year abroad, and it was awful to be the one left behind, to have to take over the parental spotlight, a solo act, doing the whole song and dance yourself. All those tiresome how-was-your-day and have-you-done-your-homework and what-are-you-thinking-about-college questions, because the show must go on. If only she too could go to Asia. Danny would be happy to see her, she was sure of it. Every e-mail she’d sent—not that there had been so many—bubbled over with how fabulous it was. They have these great trance parties that go on all night to celebrate the full moon. It’s really cool, Mims. Everyone comes out of their bungalows and starts dancing and doing E and there are flying fish that jump out of the water and these cool magic lanterns and people showing up from all over the world and even though some of them are creeps you want to avoid if you can (I could tell you stories, but I don’t trust the um Great-And-Powerful-Ones not to get their hands on these emails somehow) and even though there are a lot of jellyfish around—and you have to watch out for those suckers, they’re really pretty but when they get a hold of you, yow!—there are good people too, people into healing and massage, who really want to purify and get rid of all these western hang-ups we don’t even realize we’re weighed down by all the time. There’s this really great energy all around, even though the electricity keeps going on and off like every five minutes. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. The people are really nice too. They all call us farenjis, which means white person I guess. I don’t think they mean it in a bad way though. Gabi says everyone needs a name for people who’re different. It’s human nature, Gabi says…

  Gabi was the new boyfriend, or maybe the old boyfriend, Mimi couldn’t keep track anymore. There did seem to be a lot of action in the boyfriend department over there in Asia. Asia. Just saying the word, just whispering it to herself, made her feel calmer somehow, more together, like it opened a door to this really cool, quiet place where people lived in paper houses and walked around in black slippers and invested everything, even their baths, their meals, their sex, with this fabulous refinement and care. Lately she had this fantasy of setting out in a boat, just floating off, crossing all those tiny pencil lines of longitude and latitude you only see on maps, and then washing up on the beach one day like a message in a bottle, where some nice, calm Asian couple would happen along and take her home to their clean paper house on the side of a mountain. Why not? Her parents were so self-involved, they’d never miss her. Besides, American couples were always shooting off to Asia to adopt little girls; it was only fair to turn things around once in a while and give the Asians one of ours.

  She looked over at Yuko, cooing quietly into her cell phone. Her boyfriend, Ivan, was in Guam, having graduated back in January and enlisted in the navy to protect them all from terrorism. It was a big responsibility and, according to Ivan, way less than fun. For one thing, he missed his little Yuko. He lamented loudly, loud enough for the news to travel nine thousand miles without the aid of phone wires, how much he missed her, and how often—like, say, every time he beat off, which from the sound of it was not exactly an infrequent pastime over there. Lisa, who’d gone out with Ivan before he’d started up with Yuko—Lisa had gone out with Marcus too, actually, before he’d started up with Yuko—couldn’t take it; she began to dance around the fire in these weird little hula steps, tossing her red hair and her humongous freckled boobs, singing a tune Mimi recognized to be one of her featured numbers from the play at a volume Mimi recognized to be irritatingly loud. Showbiz was Lisa’s default world, her own little Asia; it was the place she retreated to in times of stress.

  Mimi was feeling no little stress herself these days. A stress that had really intensified the night before, when she strolled into the bathroom to find her father at the mirror with an electric razor, buzzing off his hair.

  “So how do I look?” he’d asked, with a crooked grin that made him look truly awful, as a matter of fact.

  “I don’t know. Like a bald guy, I guess.”

  “I should have done this a long time ago,” he said. “It feels good.”

  “You’re going to clog up the drain.”

  “Disposal is an issue,” he agreed. “It’s harder than it looks. Anyway believe it or not, Sweetpea, I’m doing this for you.”

  “Well, don’t.” Her face was like a mask, her mouth a hard shell. “We didn’t ask you to. It’s not fair.”

  “Do you want to talk about fairness? Do you want to hear my views on the subject of fairness?”

  “You don’t even know it’s cancer, Mom says. You’re probably way overreacting.”

  “The trouble with people who underreact to things is they always think other people are overreacting. Where is your mom, anyway?”

  “I think she went out for a bike ride or something. She had on her sports bra.”

  “Ah. Finished with your homework?”

  “Sort of.”

  “You have to be prepared, Mimi. Life throws things your way, and they’re not all pretty.” Briskly he rubbed his head with a towel and inspected his scalp in the mirror. “See what I mean?”

  “I just said I did my homework.”

  Actually what she was thinking was, he’s enjoying this. He’s been waiting for this.

  “Don’t be such a hard case, okay? You’re the kid here, I’m the adult. It’s not easy to find the right attitude. You think I’m not terrified? Of course I’m terrified. But I’m trying to keep my head straight, and to spare you the sight of your dear old dad falling apart.”

  “Good,” she said. “So close the door.”

  There was a 10 p.m. curfew at the lake, according to the signs in the parking lot, but fortunately the cops were never around to enforce it. So until the aliens showed up, Mimi and her friends had the whole place to themselves. Which was a good thing too. Because it probably wasn’t strictly legal to have that big fire going either, or to be smoking all that dope, or drinking all that beer Marcus had liberated from his dad’s garage, or scarfing up all that Ritalin Lisa was passing around, because aside from her voice and chest that was kind of her other acknowledged talent area, pharmaceuticals…and God knew what Jeremy was doing to Mimi with his tongue, after she’d wriggled her bikini bottoms down over her hips—oh my, that hummingbird routine of his, that silent dip and flutter, that filthy raid…that couldn’t have been legal. But maybe it was.

  She cried when he stopped. She had no idea why. It was a confusing night.

  “Tell me you love me,” Jeremy said in his soulful, petulant voice. “Tell me.”

  But she was too busy crying. She’d been crying on and off for about three weeks at that point; she was getting reasonably good at it. That more often than not she had no clue what she was crying about did nothing to stop her from crying so much. If anything it made her cry more.

  “Don’t I make you feel good, Mimi?” Jeremy’s long face looked washy in the moonlight, as if she were draining the life out of him. “Don’t I make you feel good?”

  The sand was digging into her butt at this point, leaving marks that would, she knew, lie engraved in her skin. Down the beach the fire was crackling, flinging sparks at the vacant places in the sky where stars should have been. The heads of their friends bobbed up and down.

  “I wish I wasn’t going in two weeks. Especially now, with your father and all.”

  “I know.”

  “The thing is, I don’t even know if you’ll miss me.”

  “I know.”

  “You know you’ll miss me, you mean? Or you know that you won’t?” He narrowed his eyes. “Are you fucking with my head here, Mimi? I don’t know, it feels like you’re fucking with my head.”

  “Shhh.” She stroked the soft hairs on his roun
ded upper arm, trying to shut him up. He was a great guy in a lot of ways, and she sort of loved him better than any other boyfriend she’d ever had—all two of them—but he was starting to bring her down with these morose and needy moods of his, the way he kept bearing down on her, trying to read meanings into whatever she said or didn’t say.

  Mimi, Mimi, don’t I feel good?

  All she’d meant was that she knew he didn’t know if she’d miss him or not. But he didn’t understand. He was always after her to be more expressive. Apparently crying all the time didn’t count as expressive enough in his book. She was failing him again. Ever since they’d downloaded their SAT scores, he’d been finding fault with her capacities for expression. The distance between them had been there all along, but he hadn’t seen it, not until those numbers came back from Princeton, New Jersey. Now that he’d caught a glimpse of the hard facts, he knew he had a project on his hands. He knew that in a couple of years, thanks in no small part to those scores, he’d be off at Brown, or Penn, or Georgetown, where he’d really get going on his expressive life, and thanks to her own scores there was absolutely no chance at all that she’d be around to share it. In two weeks she’d be lifeguarding at the town pool, as she had the previous two summers, while Jeremy went off to New York to intern at his uncle’s law office. He had uncles and cousins in all the best cities. Maybe that was what made him feel so self-important, so entitled, so certain—the world was spread open for him like a silken web: he was already at home in it. The only exception, apparently, the only holdout in the opening-up-to-Jeremy department, was her.

  Me me, me me, don’t I feel good?

  His voice nagged in her mind as she dozed and dreamed. At one point she thought she heard, way out on the lake, a motor chugging, but then the sound went away. She decided it was just the engine of her own mind, laboring noisily as usual in the darkness, going nowhere fast.

  “Ahem, people,” Kyle said. “The Klingons are getting restless.”

  Mimi blinked open her eyes. The light was gray. Mist rose from the water. The sun peeked through the trees, bleaching out some things and darkening others. The shadows of the meters stretched over the parking lot. You had to pay, she thought, for every fucking thing.

  Down the beach, the alien visitors were dressed now, their rafts collapsed behind them, flattened and faded like old gum. They wore cargo pants and sweat suits, baseball caps with folded visors. They tied up their sneakers, then straightened the sleeves of their ridiculous outfits.

  “Someone should go talk to them,” Mimi said. “Let them know we’re friendly.”

  “A little close encounter,” Marcus agreed.

  “Hand my brain over to some alien in a jogging suit?” Kyle said. “No fucking way.”

  “Believe me,” Lisa said, “no one will know the difference.”

  “I’ll go,” Mimi said.

  “No you won’t,” Jeremy said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not letting you.” To soften it, he added, “Not alone, anyway.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Well, you’ll be even finer if I come too.”

  “No, Jeremy, I won’t.”

  “Ouch,” Lisa said, giggling. “Check it out. The mouse that roared.”

  Jeremy turned to Mimi with his big heavy lit-up eyes. “What is it with you, Mimi? Why are you always working so hard to pull away?”

  “I’m just—” But it seemed impossible to explain to him, or even to herself, what she was just doing, even though she could see that it was of tremendous significance to him that she do just that. His eyes went small, his lips pursed, and that cute, hardworking facial muscle of his, the one that connected his fuzzy cheek to his bony jaw, clamped up tight. She pictured him two weeks from now, down in New York, shaving those fine, soft cheek hairs in the bathroom sink and staring into the mirror, as if demanding it to tell him how nice he looked, how good he made it feel.

  Right now though he looked pretty tense. He kept digging divots in the sand with his feet. From the way he avoided her eyes, he seemed already afraid of what she might say. This was what Mimi didn’t like about having a boyfriend. The way every move you made was seen as either good or bad, either brought you toward him or took you away, when often as not you intended neither one. Maybe if she’d been smarter, more expressive, she’d have found a way to make Jeremy understand what she meant and would not have had to endure all this self-absorbed confusion of his, and the pain that seemed to be waiting for him, like a boat just offshore, when that confusion passed.

  Around then they heard the first sirens.

  “Uh-oh,” Marcus said. “The cavalry.”

  After that things unraveled very fast. Mimi sort of half-ran down to the lake, while the aliens scrambled to button their pants and gather up their stuff and get going already. No one saw her approach. The closer she came, the more she found herself agreeing with Yuko: underneath the baseball caps the aliens did look Chinese. In fact it began to seem possible, even probable, even, sad to say, incredibly freaking obvious, that they were Chinese.

  “Whoa,” she said, breathing hard. “You’re Chinese.”

  The Chinese guys seemed almost as taken aback by this news as she was. Had they been floating out on the lake so long they no longer remembered who they were or where they were from?

  “It’s stupid, I know, but for a minute there we thought you might be extraterrestrials. You know, space creatures? But I guess not.”

  They continued to observe her inattentively at best, showing only the most minimal interest in this one-sided conversation. Clearly they did not speak her dense, stupid language. And to be fair, they probably had a lot of last-minute details on their minds. It must be a pretty complex operation, she imagined, sneaking into a new country. She remembered her immigration unit back in sixth grade, all the tired, poor, huddled masses, like her great-grandfather, who’d also snuck his way in, come to think of it, on a boat, with no money or family or possessions, trying to get out of some shithole village in Central Europe the name of which she could never remember, and would in any case never find, given that between one fascist dictator and another it had probably been obliterated three or four times by now. The old guy had died way before she was born. She knew him only from his picture at the top of the staircase, a fierce-looking graybeard in a collarless smock who glared down at her, tracking her comings and goings. What did he think of his progeny now, she wondered, with her crying jags, her drug consumption and bitchy friends, her lousy SATs? Was it worth the trip?

  “Hey, listen,” she said, wanting to ease their passage somehow, “I just wanted to say, on behalf of me and my friends up there, welcome to the land of the free, et cetera.”

  No response. She watched her little welcome speech do a 747 over their heads.

  “Of course it’s kind of a shitty, boring place to live,” she acknowledged, by way of full disclosure, “and the weather sucks. But most of us are friendly. And you’ve got the lake here and all, which is good for swimming and partying and stuff. Though I realize you probably aren’t too interested in partying at the moment.”

  The aliens watched her like a television going in the background, flickering away harmlessly, making noise. Fair enough. She watched herself too—grinning and babbling and flapping her arms like a puppet on a string. That seemed to be the thing to do at this moment to put the aliens at ease: show them how silly she was, how ungainly. Because silly and ungainly people, as everyone knew, were incapable of harm. And the aliens looked a bit nervous and defensive all of a sudden, as if even her presence here talking to them was evidence somehow of a plan gone wrong. It happened sometimes, people getting busted and deported, hauled off in chains, and all because some plan or other had gone wrong. Because once you set off from home, crossed that border between the claustrophobic familiar and the infinite imagined, nothing ever seemed to go the way it should.

  Anyway they did plenty of harm, silly and ungainly people. As a reminder of this
you had only to listen: the sirens were getting closer.

  “Hey look,” she said, grabbing the nearest Chinese guy by the arm. “You better get out of here, I’m serious. Someone’s coming.”

  He examined her hand on his arm with considerable hostility, until she removed it. “I not deaf,” he said.

  “Oh good, you speak English, I mean, what a break. It’ll come in handy. ’Cause they’re going to be looking for you, you know, and it’ll make it easier to get away if you can actually speak the, I mean…”

  She should have brought Jeremy with her; she was no good in these situations. Her father was good at them, her mother was good at them, Danielle was good at them, but something had gone wrong, some genetic mishap or botched inoculation, and now she’d never get into college, never travel, never get married, never be the one whom people listened to in an emergency. The Chinese guy must have sensed this, which was why he continued to look so hostile, she thought, as he tugged on his baseball cap and patted it down on top.

  “My friends and I want to help. We saw you guys float in. You probably saw us too.”

  “We saw. You play in sand. But we very busy now.”

  He wore a wedding ring, she noticed, a silver band around the fourth finger. His eyes were red, his black hair matted and peppered with sand. She was tempted to ask him what his wife was doing at this moment, but it was none of her business.

  “Hey, you guys hungry? We’ve got some Doritos and stuff back there…might help tide you over.”

  “No food!” he said. “No time!”

  He was right about that: the sirens were everywhere now, as if the whole cosmos were on red alert. Boats were roaring across the lake, their headlights tunneling paths through the murk and mist, their hulls crashing up and down, not so much skimming the water as beating the hell out of it, churning up foam. Mimi stood tall, watching them approach with a kind of matadorial disdain. She understood now why she was there. She was not the helpless orphan on the beach; she was the mother who happened by. The protector.