Cannibals in Love

by Mike Roberts

  “The Queen of England,” Mike said again with disgust. “Look at all these people on the street! You’re putting all these people in danger! You realize that, don’t you?” But the cop wasn’t listening.

  The crowd began to titter as the Queen’s cavalcade breached the hill. This opulent and imposing show of force; a motorcade running more than a dozen vehicles deep. Motorcycles and police cars and unmarked SUVs formed a pocket of protection around Her Royal Highness. Look at all of these resources on display, I thought. Imagine all of this Sturm und Drang for a doddering old woman. The Queen of England, no less!

  But Mike began to boo. Pushing up to the front and booing lustily at the passing cars. “Boooooooooo!” Mike bellowed through his dirty hands. “Boooooooooo!” He was a single voice cutting through the din of our collective bewilderment.

  I didn’t know what to make of this. The veins were bulging in his neck as he shook his arms and taunted. I was afraid I was going to have to pull him out of the street now. But, almost as suddenly, people started joining in; picking up Mike’s war cry as a chant. This big and brawling noise that started somewhere in their guts. A raucous and spontaneous protest that was suddenly irresistible. People were booing the Queen!

  I pushed up to the front, next to Mike, where I could see her limo rocketing past. “Boooooooooo!” I screamed, feeling giddy and alive. To know for a fact that the Queen of England was hearing my voice was a strange thrill. I was smiling like crazy as I heckled with the crowd. Ours was a deep and guttural complaint. It was a thing beyond reason or reproof. I had chills running up my spine.

  The whole thing was over before it started, though. The motorcade flashed in the sun and the roar died out. The crowd began to laugh. Where had all of this come from anyway? People felt the urge to look away, to disavow themselves from the noise that they had made. These were not the kinds of people who felt a frenzy in their anger. These were not the good folks who identified with a mob.

  I watched as the motorcycle cops who had barred our passage fell into line behind the Queen, and the show was over. People scattered and cars were set in motion. The sidewalks cleared, and it was almost as though it had never happened. And, for all the good it might’ve done, it hadn’t, of course. But what did that have to do with us?

  THE AMBULANCE RIDE

  I must’ve fallen asleep at the wheel, as near as I could tell. I was kneeling on a sidewalk in New York, puking my guts out. My hip and elbow were bloodied, and there were two cops standing over me, waiting. I watched one of them prop my bike up against the wrought-iron fence of a park. It didn’t look that bad, really, and I tried to remember crashing it. But it was no use. I was fucked up good.

  It was dark; it was almost morning; it was a weekday. That was about as much as I could figure out straight off. If it really was a weekday, I had a temp job that I was definitely going to be late for this morning. It hardly mattered. Everyone has nine lives at a temp agency.

  I was done vomiting and I decided standing up would make a better presentation for myself. The two cops were smirking, and I tried to play it the same, casual-like. I gave a terse thank-you that may have included some sort of bow, and then I took my bicycle back off the fence.

  “Well, anyway,” I said. “Thanks for everything.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hang on a sec, Mikey,” the big cop said. This familiarity was slightly unsettling until I realized that the other big cop had my driver’s license. Again I was struck by the sheer fact of how drunk I was. What day was this now? All these bad nights in New York City, blurring together meaninglessly.

  The big cop put his hand on my shoulder in an avuncular way. Apparently he was in charge here. I let go of the bike, missing the fence by a clear three feet. With a series of apologetic head nods we decided to leave it where it was on the ground. And then, with a shallow breath and a deep nod, I was smashed in the head by the powerful feeling of sleep. All these vague disorientations here: the cops in their uniforms; the red, painless bleeding. None of this seemed particularly serious to me, especially after the big cop handed back my license.

  “Where do you live?” one of the cops was asking. “Where do you live?” They both kept asking this.

  “I live here. This is my neighborhood. Right around the corner,” I said, pointing generally. “Thanks for everything.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the big cop said again. He tightened his grip on my shoulder, positioning himself between me and the bicycle. “No, no, listen. Where do you live?”

  “Right here, man. I’m practically home.”

  “What street?”

  “Gates. Franklin and Gates.”

  Their foreheads dented with this. “Where’s that? Brooklyn?”

  “Yeah,” I said, with a little less spit.

  The two cops burst into hysterics. “You’re in Manhattan, Mikey.” They were looking at each other, truly tickled by this. And I laughed, too.

  “Har-har-har. Very funny. You’re wasting all your jokes, man. I’m not some tourist. I’m already half asleep in my bed. I’m on autopilot here. Don’t you guys know you’re not supposed to wake a sleepwalker?” This was my best crack at New York posturing, and the cops seemed to warm to it a little. They were having fun with me.

  * * *

  The truth was I’d barely been living in New York a couple months at this point. Filing photocopies in some featureless Midtown office building. This qualified as working in the abstract, in the extreme. It had something to do with investment banking, a thing they were very careful never to explain to me. I copied and shredded documents until my left eye began to tic. What did that mean? Stress? Guilt? Boredom? It was all a little scary in its formlessness. Time was a drum, beating in my blood, I thought. This was not a life.

  I was living in some filthy rattrap apartment with a family of mice and a couple of Pratt kids who smoked cigarettes all day. My bedroom looked out onto an air shaft, and I would lie there and wonder about fire codes. I tried to imagine how many people lived in a building like this. Who even kept track of such things? People lighting burners; ironing shirts; smoking cigarettes, all day long, distracted. Every day was like this. It was surprising how few fires there actually were, when you stopped to think about it. I would go through a kind of morbid checklist each night, wondering if I’d even know how to get out of here when the smoke alarms went off. I walked through it in my head as I lay there in bed: crawling for the front fire escape, or groping for the hallway stairs. Did we even have a smoke alarm? Did it work? What if I jumped down three flights into this air shaft and found out that the doors didn’t open? What then?

  I already knew I would end up going back to Washington before the end of the year anyway. This was disheartening because I’d been so ready to leave it. I was desperate for a real change of scenery, some actual sense of urgency. To my mind there was a strange logic in moving to New York City at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Some raw desire to live under the volcano. Stress. Congestion. Pollution. Terrorism. I was courting death. This was the modern condition and I was the modern man.

  Still, I couldn’t believe that the temp agency actually wanted me to work in Midtown Manhattan. This seemed sadistic to me. Wasn’t Midtown going to be next? Downtown, Midtown, Uptown: crashing over the island like a tidal wave or a virus. Was it possible to not think about the world this way now?

  The woman at the temp agency did not find these sorts of questions amusing. Me neither, I told her. Me neither.

  Of course, I took the job, and I tried to do it right. Just like everybody else. I rode the subways at rush hour, like a real goddamn New Yorker. Sweating. Claustrophobic. Rushed. This lasted all of one week before I resigned myself to riding my bike the ten miles each way, from Brooklyn to Midtown, through the warm poison clouds of truck exhaust. I locked up under the Chrysler Building and learned to stop looking up for the top. I grew numb, the way that all the people in the business suits acted above fear. Aloof and impersonal. So, so very busy.

 
If there were windows on the thirty-second floor, I never saw them. It didn’t take long for me to get a bit of a reputation in this office, either. Working inside of a storm cloud, I wanted to familiarize myself with the stairways. At first the floor security guard just laughed. When I assured him that I was serious, he creased his brow and told me that the stairs were on alarms.

  “I just want to make a test run, though. To time myself,” I said.

  We suffered each other like this, talking in a circle. Him shaking his head, not understanding me; both of us trying to keep smiling. It just did not compute that I would want to voluntarily walk the thirty-two flights of stairs, for any reason.

  “Everybody has to use the elevators, kid…” he said, almost apologetically.

  I nodded, feeling this a grim proscription. I went back to my desk and put my headphones on: working in isolation; talking to nobody; wandering the floor; hiding photocopies in boxes for money.

  * * *

  I was being detained now, and it was starting to make me restless. I didn’t understand why the cops were holding me here. All this small talk, yakkety-yak. Not answering my questions, not letting me go.

  “What’s the deal here, guys? Am I under arrest or what?”

  This got the big cop smirking again. “Why? You do something tonight you wanna confess to?”

  “Yeah, get me a priest,” I said. Har-har-har.

  There was always this strange rapport with the cops. This joviality. They made it perfectly plain how unthreatened they were by me, and it was starting to piss me off. All these fucking cops: Yes, Officer. No, Officer. We were constantly explaining ourselves to the police, which was impossible. They talked to us like we were idiots.

  At this point I knew that they were right, too. There was no way I made it back to Brooklyn last night. But why was I still in Manhattan? I hated Manhattan. Not only that, but one of the big cops was loading my bike into the trunk of the cruiser. This was the exact moment when I understood I’d lost control of the situation. And then the big white bus was pulling in on top of me.

  There was something impressive about how close they brought the ambulance in on us. How big it really was, with its wheels up on the sidewalk, unnecessarily. They were even running the lights, for chrissake! It was a total overkill, all out of proportion with the way that I was feeling. I was on my third or fourth wind, no problem. I was perfectly ready to finish riding home now. Hungry. Sleepy. All those good things. There was no way I was getting into that truck.

  “Aw, c’mon, what the hell is this thing? You guys called for backup on me?”

  But the cops weren’t listening anymore. The jokes had stopped, too. They were talking to the EMTs about me: “Mikey … Drinking … Mikey … Been out drinking. Hey, Mikey, talk to this guy. Tell him how much you been drinking.”

  I looked up at them with my blankest face. “You’re the detective, figure it out.”

  This was the wrong thing to say, obviously. But I seemed to have a certain genius for saying the wrong things to authority figures. The big cop looked more stunned than angry. Frowning harshly as the other big cop saved me with a deep guffaw.

  “Detective! You? Har-har-har.” And they all shook their heads and turned away again. Taking pity on me. Forgiving me my stupidity.

  I sat there on the ground, waiting for a decision to be made. I was depressed. I knew that I was drunk; I knew that I was bleeding; I could smell the vomit on my shirt. Otherwise, I was perfectly fine. Tip-top. No complaints. It struck me then that these are strangely defining moments. Something truly terrible could’ve happened tonight. But something terrible can happen on every night.

  More than any one thing, I did not want to get into this ambulance. I did not want to go to the hospital. What I was thinking right then was that I did not need this. I had no insurance; I could not pay for it. And I told them all of this, too, but it was too late. The big cops turned unfriendly then, terse. Enough was enough, shut up or get arrested. And that was that. They drove away with my front tire sticking out of the trunk of the police car. I felt a tremendous sense of injustice watching them turn the corner and disappear. I had just lost my bike and I felt totally fucked.

  The EMT stood there, looking tired, holding the back door of the ambulance. I frowned and finally did what I was told then, feeling like an asshole.

  * * *

  The truth was I had written a novel. This was the real reason I’d moved to New York. It started at my parents’ house on Christmas Day and took over my entire senior year, all through the buildup to the Invasion of Iraq. It basically took over my life. I brought it back to school and kept going. It was important just to finish now, I thought.

  Being in college couldn’t possibly have felt any more irrelevant, so I just kept writing. I had no idea what I was doing, so I put every single thing I knew into this book. And yet I went to extraordinary lengths to detach myself from it completely. I wanted to make certain that no one could accuse me of writing about myself. I mean, the fucking novel was about cows! But it wasn’t really about cows. It was called A Cattle, a Crack-Up, and I flattered myself with the idea that it might actually be an allegory about war.

  Strictly speaking, it was a book about men, and weather, and the death of animals, and the idea that a tree could be an important character in a serious novel. It was about a dairy farmer named August Caffrey, whose cows were suddenly causing him to suffer a mysterious illness. This psychosomatic seizure that began with his body’s rejection of milk and ended up in a kind of nervous collapse. It was a book about loneliness. It was a book about fear. It was a book about disappointment and loss. It was a book about paranoia and obsession and death. It was a book about one man’s failure to carry his family name forward.

  But it was all making me very strange, too. I had to stop telling people the things that I was doing. I carried around books from the library about the genuses of American elm trees. I kept scrupulous notes and wrote Latin names in the margins, knowing I would never return these books. I took the Metro out to the end of the Orange Line, and rode my bike twenty-five miles into Virginia, just to look at different cows and farms. I spent hours on the Internet learning the smallest differences between Holsteins and Jerseys. I was googling local dairies and cold-calling them, inquiring about nonexistent internships. I knew nothing, and I was totally obsessed.

  I finished the novel in the spring, in a manic burst, only to discover that I’d tanked my GPA and would have to hustle just to graduate. I started bringing the full manuscript along to office hours, where stunned professors begged off the threat that I might actually ask them to read it. We worked out all kinds of creative solutions to make up the work that way.

  I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t come to New York under the illusion that I might meet somebody important. I wanted to believe that I was a writer. I was going to bowl them all over, of course. Sadly, I didn’t even know how to get a single person to read the thing, let alone publish it. I spent two months working on a pathetically earnest query letter that ended up in the trash cans of prominent secretaries all over Manhattan. What connections did I have?

  * * *

  Sitting alone in the back of the ambulance was unnerving. The padded benches; the strange lights; the quiet equipment: all these important metals and plastics. The EMTs had not checked me out, or run tests, or done anything at all, really. They helped me into the back and closed the doors, and that was that. I was left there watching the city go by in a buzzy blur. They told me they were taking me to Bellevue. It was literally ten blocks: five minutes maybe, at this time of the morning. Still, I knew exactly how expensive it was going to be. They should have just called me a goddamn taxi.

  And, all at once, I was struck by the feeling that I’d played it wrong. I should’ve let the cops arrest me. I should’ve called their bluff and gone with my bike. Jail, the drunk tank, whatever. I could’ve sobered up; dealt with the paperwork; paid the fine; and left on my bicycle. It made me nauseous to think about i
t this way now.

  I lowered my head between my knees, and saw the note for the first time. Tucked into the front pocket of my shirt and folded in a square: Mikey. You are in Manhattan. Your bike is at the 13th Precinct. Take the 4, 6 train to 23 & Lex. We’ll hold onto it there.

  Well, Je-sus Christ, I just about cracked myself up. Relieved is one way to put it, but really I was touched. This unexpected kindness from my friends in law enforcement was too much. And after I had been such an asshole and everything. I almost wanted to cry. The big cop had written a great note. And funny, too.

  When I looked up again, the ambulance was stopped. The back door opened and the EMT helped me down, taking me under the arm as we walked into the ER. The Bellevue emergency room at 5:00 a.m. is a sight to see if you ever find yourself living in New York City. Wall-to-wall hard-luck misfits, myself included. Junkies and old men and a Puerto Rican kid with a bone sticking out of his shin.

  “Why isn’t anyone helping that kid?” I said in a loud voice to no one as we passed him. I was staring back at his leg and it was making me dizzy.

  I looked up to find that the EMT had left me at the desk with a stern lady nurse, who was already holding my driver’s license and writing everything down. It cannot be stressed enough that this woman was not amused with me. Not at all. She handed the license back, barely willing to look at me. I smiled and played my only ace, producing the note from the big cop. I explained that I was expected urgently at the Number Thirteen Precinct, where there were pressing matters involving the retrieval of my bicycle. I told her thank you very much, but I would have to be going.

  “No.” The lady nurse scowled, pushing the note back unread. “You smell horrible like vomit, and I need you to sit down and stop talking until the doctor can see you. Do you understand me?”

  Needless to say, her authority was absolute. I nodded meekly, feeling embarrassed for myself. The lady nurse left me in a chair looking out over the big open room: the swirling chaos of it all. As I folded my driver’s license back inside the note, it hit me again: the cops; the ambulance; the doctors. I didn’t have any insurance! How many times did I have to explain this tonight? I couldn’t just sit here and wait for a doctor to come. What was a doctor going to do for me anyway?