Cannibals in Love

by Mike Roberts

  “Did you go to school today?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You had my car.”

  “You could’ve taken the subway.”

  He didn’t answer. Sipping from his beer.

  “What did you do all day?”

  “I didn’t do anything. I watched TV.”

  “Did you eat?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why not?” I asked, feeling exasperated. “What do you do when you’re at school? Who cooks for you there?”

  “Nobody cooks for me. There’s a dining hall.”

  “You have a meal plan?”

  “Yeah. I mean, of course.”

  “Well, shit.” I beamed at him. “Why didn’t you say that two days ago? C’mon. Put your shoes on. Let’s go eat.”

  * * *

  We drove the twenty minutes out to College Park; my brother in the passenger seat, with his shoulders tight around his neck. He used his ID card to swipe us into the dining hall, and there we were: a meal out on Mom and Dad. They would be pleased to know that we were finally spending some real quality time together.

  The cafeteria itself was a veritable Valhalla of salts and sugars and fats. Decadent buffet tables lined with gleaming processed foods. These extraordinary foods that you would never actually pay for in a restaurant. Corn dogs and popcorn shrimp. Soft pretzels and shish kebabs. Mexican pizzas and English muffins. We ate potato skins and pigs in a blanket. There were chimichangas and Denver omelets. And we even ate some vegetables, too.

  We stayed for nearly three hours, eating this way, in fits and starts. Feeling sickened and exhilarated in turns. We sat in silence, feeling full, feeling soothed. I watched the girls as they crossed the room, back and forth. These lively, pretty state school girls. This dining hall was teeming with blond and buxom cheerleaders. Former field hockey captains and high school prom queens. It was almost enough to make me give up on the orange apartment and go back to my own school.

  “Where is your girlfriend?” my brother asked me out of nowhere. I looked up at him, baffled by the question. “The girl I met when—”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend,” I said.

  He stared at me blankly, before nodding. I looked away again.

  “What about your roommate?”

  “What?” Where were all these questions coming from? The kid barely says one word for three days, and now he won’t shut up.

  “Your roommate,” he said again. “I haven’t seen him once since I’ve been there, and I’ve been there the whole time.”

  “Okay?”

  “So why hasn’t he come home?”

  “I don’t know why. Sometimes he just doesn’t.” This was met with an anxious pause. “Why?” I smiled. “You think he’s been killed by the Sniper?”

  “I never said he was killed by the Sniper. I just asked—”

  “Why did they kick you out of school?” I interrupted.

  “They didn’t kick me out of school. I told you, they kicked me out of the dorms.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Yeah, sure, whatever you say.”

  I turned and tried to keep watching the girls, but my brother had ruined it. “Are you finished? Let’s go,” I said, picking up my tray and walking away from the table.

  * * *

  Overnight, it seemed, the city had suddenly become a patchwork of blue and green tarps. Hanging loosely off of awnings. Covering doorways and entrances. Gas stations draped them over their corridors to obscure the innocent pumpers below. This was not diversion. This was an effort made, in earnest, to restore the public safety.

  I could hear the cheap plastic rippling overhead as I filled Mike’s truck with gas. Staring at the rusted side panels, I tried to imagine the thing riddled with bullets. Mike liked to joke that the pickup never really rode the same after I drove it. There was a rumble, or a cough, somewhere deep down in the guts of the machine, he said. Buried a level below whatever I was hearing.

  I looked up and watched a white van go wheeling through the intersection. This was strange, actually. I realized it was the first one I’d seen all day. What had happened to the others? I wondered. Was it possible that white vans were being rounded up and taken off the streets now? Registered? Detained? Disassembled?

  I watched the people as they got out of their cars and circled the pumps. I watched their heads snap up as the tarps caught in the wind and shot out like sails. I watched the way they flinched when the nozzle clicked off in their hands. P-pop!

  I saw a woman in black tights go scurrying across the street in a zigzag pattern. No one could decide who had told people to do this, but you would see it happening everywhere. The Metro Police were adamant about dismissing their own liability. They called it wanton superstition, and asked that people try to remain calm. But no one cared. It made sense to behave erratically now. I mean, what could it hurt?

  Unfortunately, people were cracking up left and right. Something bad had happened that morning. One of our faithful disc jockeys had broken character and mentioned real life. I could hear it happening, too: this quaver in his voice as he started to speak. He was dedicating David Bowie’s “Heroes” to all the brave men and women of law enforcement.

  “Ugh,” I said, getting down off my ladder, dejected. This man had broken through the fourth wall now, and there was no going back. This was not his job, of course. It was like watching a flight attendant start to lose it at thirty thousand feet. This was the moment we were all supposed to panic.

  “Did that just really happen?” I asked.

  Mike smiled and kept on painting. “Don’t worry. I’m sure he’ll be taken off the air for a few days.”

  * * *

  My brother was already putting his shoes on when I walked through the door. With that fucking necktie hanging down in front of him, like a dog’s tongue. We didn’t even talk about it anymore. This was just our routine. We got into the Camry and drove out to College Park, where we ate our free meal together in silence.

  Afterward, walking back out to the car, I gave him the keys. I told him I wanted him to drive now. I pointed out a liquor store with a burning yellow sign, and I told him to stop. My brother pulled the Camry into the parking lot and left it idling, with the doors locked, as I went inside. A minute later, I was back in the car, with a bottle of whiskey in a brown paper bag.

  “Okay,” I told him. “Drive.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’re going to Michael’s,” I said.

  “Michael who? The guy you work with? I thought you said he has a kid. It’s like ten thirty at night.”

  “Don’t worry about his kid. Just drive the car.”

  My brother sighed and put the Camry into gear.

  “Turn up here,” I told him.

  “Where?”

  “Right here. Get onto the Beltway.”

  He looked at me like I was crazy.

  “Just do it.”

  My brother shook his head and accelerated up the on-ramp and into the sea of red taillights on the westbound lane. Nobody had actually been killed driving on the Capital Beltway, of course. The Sniper waited till you stopped, till you stood still, till you looked the other way. But it was in the man’s name now; it was part of the stigma. And I watched as my brother’s grip grew tighter on the wheel.

  I knew we weren’t far. There was a Home Depot in the suburbs where Mike and I would pick up paint. I could see it in my mind’s eye perfectly. Standing in the parking lot and staring across the buzzing traffic at this simple cursive sign.

  “Okay, here. This is our exit.”

  My brother sighed and turned off the Beltway. We were spit out onto an arterial road that funneled us down through an enclave of box stores and strip malls. The night sky was a wash of neon signs and corporate logos. We could’ve been anywhere in America right then. It was my brother who saw it first, though: the big glowing lights of a Michaels Craft Stor
e. This bloodless hobby chain; the infamous setting of a half-dozen shootings in the spree.

  “What the fuck?” my brother said.

  “Turn.”

  “No,” he answered as we passed the first entrance.

  “What are you doing? I told you to turn!” We were coming up on the second driveway and he was shaking his head. “Park the fucking car!”

  “No.”

  I reached out and grabbed the steering wheel recklessly.

  “Stop, stop! All right!” he yelled, and something snapped. As I let go of the wheel my brother made the turn into the craft store parking lot. He eased his foot off the pedal, letting the Camry coast.

  “Just stop,” I said, and he did then. Turning off the engine.

  We sat there in silence, staring out at nothing. I uncapped the whiskey and brought it to my mouth with a wince. “Drink this,” I said, pushing the bottle on him. But he wouldn’t take it. Leaning his elbow against the window, he looked angry enough to start crying.

  “Jesus Christ,” he finally whimpered. “Why would you do this to me?”

  “Will you relax? I told you to drink this.” And, after a minute, he did. Flinching with the first sip. My brother eased back against the headrest and stared out over the blank and empty lot. This was good, I thought. This was what I wanted.

  “What are we doing here?”

  “We’re being brothers.”

  We sat there in the dark, with no reason and no plan. And in this moment my brother finally stopped asking why. He stopped expecting to get an answer out of me that would make any sense, at all, out of everything that was happening. And in this way the quiet here became infinite.

  “Why did you get kicked out of the dorms?” I asked, for the one-thousandth time. But he didn’t answer. Taking a sip off the whiskey, he seemed to smile into the bottle.

  “Do you trust me?” I asked him.

  “What?”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Does this feel like your home?”

  “In what way?”

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “What?” he said, losing patience.

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  “Fuck you,” he scowled.

  “Have you ever even had sex?”

  There was a long pause here as he opened his mouth to answer me. But he looked away instead. What did that mean?

  “I’m going to keep this car, you know.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Are you listening to me? It’s mine now. No sense in being mad about it.”

  When he didn’t answer again, I took his necktie in my hand. Turning it over gently. “And take off this fucking tie!” I said, ripping down on it.

  My brother came uncoiled in an instant. Shoving my head against the window, hard. I laughed and smiled at him with wet lips as he seethed at me. We sat there, the two of us, trapped in this car. In this parking lot. In this suburb. In a war zone. This had been my idea all along, I supposed.

  “I love you,” I said, with a sickening smile. “Do you love me?”

  He clenched his jaw, not answering.

  “I’m your older brother,” I barked at him. “You’re supposed to worship me the way that Jeb worships George.”

  “Jeb hates George!”

  “Everybody fucking hates George, asshole! You’re my brother.”

  “Fuck you.”

  There was a long silence again before I took the bottle away from him.

  “Why did you get kicked out of the dorms?” I asked.

  “I didn’t,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I just left.” He stared out the windshield, toward the entrance of the Michaels Craft Store, and he started to smile.

  I didn’t even know what to say to this. I could feel my face begin to burn. I was furious at him for this stupid lie. I was ready to start screaming in his face.

  But before I could even get my head around, there was a rap against the glass. My brother and I jumped. This was followed, in short order, by the blinding beam of a flashlight, and a brawny command to roll down the window. My brother did this and we found ourselves squinting into the face of a young police officer. He banked his flashlight around the inside of the Camry, blinding us once again. We stared back at him, waiting. The young cop’s face was grim. Nervous. We seemed to catch him in a moment of indecision. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old.

  I moved the whiskey bottle against the door, knowing full well that the cop had already seen it. But he didn’t say a word. We stared straight ahead as he walked around the back of the car, peering through the windows. He studied my brother’s boxes in the backseat. I was sure it must’ve looked like we were living in this vehicle.

  “You shouldn’t be out here,” he said, flicking off the flashlight. “This is a dangerous place.”

  We nodded dumbly. We could hear the tension in his voice now. The frayed edges of a man who’s been drinking coffee to stay awake.

  “You don’t wanna end up in the newspapers. Believe me,” he said. “You don’t wanna make yourselves a part of this thing.”

  He raised his head to look behind him, into the street. Watching an eighteen-wheeler blow by in a flash. The Sniper had yet to pick off a police officer, we knew, but it was hardly out of the question. He turned back to us with a big moony face.

  “Where are you boys from?”

  “We’re from here.”

  “Not me,” my brother spoke up stupidly.

  “Uh-huh,” the young cop said. “That’s how come the New York plates?”

  “Right, yes. This is my brother. He drove this car down from Buffalo. He’s leaving it for me. It’s mine.”

  My brother didn’t say a word.

  “Uh-huh,” the young cop said again. He didn’t seem to know what he was doing out here, I thought. Alone and in the dark. He didn’t even ask for our IDs. He just anchored himself there. Holding on to the side of the Camry, as though the whole thing might float away.

  “This is some shit,” he said absently.

  My brother and I nodded, letting him talk. But he stopped again. We waited for him to bust us now, to end all of this, but he didn’t. Was this really the guy meant to find and kill the world-famous Sniper? Or, worse, to apprehend him peaceably? How the hell was that going to work? You could practically read the question on his face.

  In a blink, the darkness was punctured by a flash at the far end of the lot. The young cop jerked up and pulled away from the Camry. We saw a pair of headlights dip and bob, as they bounced over a speed bump a hundred feet away. The driver slowed down suddenly as he picked out the police cruiser in the shadows.

  The young cop reared up, with a hand on his gun belt, as the vehicle began to veer off in a slow, sweeping turn. And, all at once, it was there: a white van!

  “Stop!” the young cop shouted, following this vehicle into the distance. “Stop!” he yelled again, as he ventured out into no-man’s-land. My brother didn’t hesitate. He turned the key in the ignition, and the Camry fired back up.

  “What are you doing?” I asked in a panic.

  The cop turned, too, holding out his pistol in a disoriented way. He took his eyes off the van as we pulled away in a rush. The young officer was going to have to shoot out our tires if he wanted to stop us now. I gripped the armrest as my brother floored it through a yellow light and back up the on-ramp. I turned and looked over my shoulder and saw the young cop running into the darkness again. Still chasing the white van.

  * * *

  In the morning, my brother was gone. He had taken the Camry with him, of course. I knew this even before I went outside to look. He was on his way back to my parents’ house. This had been his plan all along.

  I shouldered my bicycle back down the stairs to the street. Exhaling before I swung my leg over the top bar. I could already feel the heat coming up off the blacktop. Mid-October, and the humidi
ty still hadn’t broken. I was miserable; I was hungover; I was aggrieved. I didn’t want to do this anymore.

  Mike just nodded and climbed up his ladder when I told him I was quitting. I couldn’t care less, honestly. Let him be pissed off all he wanted. Let my brother be pissed off, too, for all I cared. That motherfucker stole my car.

  It was time for me to go back to school now anyway, to get on with it. This was supposed to be my senior year in college, for fuck’s sake. Mike and I both knew that he was perfectly capable of finishing the orange apartment by himself.

  At lunchtime, we got into the truck and drove down Georgia Avenue in silence. We were headed downtown to a hardware store where Mike kept a standing account. We made our turn, and cut across the avenues, where we found ourselves suddenly, and unaccountably, stopped. Traffic had come to a dead halt at Fourteenth Street.

  “Holy shit,” Mike said softly, and I felt my stomach drop.

  I knew immediately that I did not want to see this. But when Mike opened his door, I followed him. Everyone was leaving their vehicles now, as the sidewalks filled with people. I walked behind them, feeling anxious. Feeling vulnerable.

  There were two motorcycle cops holding traffic in the street as people lined up on the sidewalks, standing shoulder-to-shoulder. Mike and I moved through the crowd, stepping down off the curb, where we were confronted, inexplicably, by nothing. We looked across to the other side, where people craned their necks the same way. Looking dumbfounded; looking disappointed. There had been no shooting after all. No white van. No bodies lying bloodied in the street. There wasn’t even a car crash to gawk at.

  “What’s going on?” Mike asked one of the motorcycle cops.

  “Queen of England is coming through,” the cop said flatly.

  “The Queen of England?” Mike asked indignantly. The words didn’t seem to fit in his mouth. Mike turned away and looked at the gathered crowd.

  “We have to get through here. You’re blocking us in.”

  “Everybody has to wait,” the cop answered.