Cannibals in Love

by Mike Roberts

  “Hey,” Lauren said, putting up her hands. “All I’m saying is that you should have a plan for when this writing thing doesn’t work out. Is that so crazy? Are we not allowed to talk about that?” She was just barely smiling, but not. We were right on the verge of some eruption here.

  “You’re an elitist, you know that?” I said coolly.

  “You are.”

  I laughed with contempt, wanting not to be vulnerable anymore. But all at once I felt unbearably sad. Sad about us. Something had changed. We were fighting too much these days; everything was too raw. These fights used to be shorter. Cleaner. Funnier.

  “What’s going on now? Are you going to cry?” she asked, beaming at me. Lauren was the only girl who had ever made me cry. And despite the fact that I’d made her cry a half-dozen times at least, she held it over me, bringing it up on these occasions.

  “Maybe.” I sighed. “I don’t know.”

  Lauren’s face changed. “Come sit down next to me,” she said, pushing her magazines onto the floor. “You know I don’t mean it. It would kill me if you started crying right now.”

  I could almost believe her, too. But I was tired. I just stood there, refusing to sit, refusing to cry. “Will you just give me the five fucking dollars already so I can buy myself a beer? Please? You know I have a check coming on Monday.”

  “When I was a girl,” Lauren began cryptically, “I always imagined I would have a boyfriend who was a doctor or an architect. And he would bring me flowers, and take me out on dates to fancy restaurants.”

  “Yeah,” I said unkindly. “And I feel sad for you for everything you’ll have to do to earn your money, honey.”

  “Exactly. I need a man with a big cock that eats big, bloody steaks.”

  “I hope you choke on it.”

  Lauren laughed with her angry face crumbling. “Choke on what?”

  “All of it,” I said, and we were both laughing again, in spite of ourselves. But this was exhausting. This was not really fun.

  “Aw,” she said, looking sincere. “Why are you always doing this to yourself? Working yourself up like this. You wouldn’t be able to take care of me anyway. You can hardly take care of yourself.”

  “And who’s going to take care of you when you’re not so pretty, huh? When you have big matronly arms and dry, brittle hair. Who’s gonna love you then, huh?”

  “You will,” she said simply.

  “Goddamn right I will.”

  The only thing I wanted in the whole world was to believe in that, to agree with Lauren now. But I resented my own flailing desperation. I couldn’t be sure that I believed in any of this romantic pap any more than Lauren did. Maybe she was right about love. Maybe we really were all doomed.

  Just looking at each other was enough to bring on another sick smile, though.

  “Come down to the store with me,” I said. “I’ll let you pick everything out. I’ll let you make a big show of paying for it and emasculating me in front of the old guy who works there.”

  Lauren looked at me strangely, not saying anything, and I felt myself sigh. I didn’t even care about the beer anymore.

  “What if I let you slap me in the face for five dollars?”

  “What?” she said, slightly startled.

  “You heard me.”

  “Hard?”

  “Yeah, as hard as you want,” I said, suddenly impatient. “As hard as a girl can do it, anyway.” These were fighting words, and I could tell that she really wanted to slug me. “Yes or no? It’s a onetime offer.”

  With that, Lauren was up on her feet, ready to smack me.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Pay up,” I said, taking a step back.

  Lauren stopped and crossed the room, looking for her purse, as I followed behind her, taunting. Rushing her. I was making her angry all over again.

  “Jesus. Shut up,” she said in a small fluster. But when she was done digging out balled-up dollar bills she was one short. “Shit, shit!”

  And then I really laughed. This was as good as any outcome I could have wanted.

  “Look,” she said seriously. “I can write you a check for ten bucks, right now.”

  “Don’t insult me,” I said. “The price is five. Cash money. One time only.” I was gloating and claiming victory now. I was getting pedantic.

  “This one scenario is a microcosm of all your larger problems with money, Lauren.” I laughed, growing giddy. “You see some shiny thing that you just have to have, and then—”

  WHACK!

  Lauren spun around and slapped me good. Uninvited and off guard, and pretty fucking hard. It stunned me a little, and I turned away defensively.

  “Oww, Jesus. What the fuck, Lauren?” I said sourly.

  I stretched my jaw and touched my hand to my cheek where it stung. Lauren’s mouth was hanging open like a guilty little kid.

  “Oh. God. I’m sorry,” she said in a small fit of laughter. “I don’t know what came over me. That felt incredible. Let me see your face.”

  “No,” I said, turning away again, annoyed. “What a dirty cheap shot that was.”

  “Aw,” she said, finally feeling bad. “I didn’t mean it.”

  Lauren’s face turned genuinely sweet then, and I let her come a little closer. I dropped my hand and measured this. She touched my cheek softly and shook her head. “Look what you made me do.”

  “Shut up,” I said, not wanting to give her the satisfaction of a laugh.

  “You just make me so mad sometimes,” she said, growing fond of this voice. “I only hit you because I love you, baby. You know that.”

  “Shut up,” I said, grabbing her arms. We laughed with our faces coming closer, and I couldn’t stay mad because this was all too much like sex. And Lauren could feel it, too, as I pressed my hard-on into her hip and she cooed something soft in my ear. She was sweet and careful with me. She kissed my cheek and told me how sorry she was. And all the barriers fell away then. We kissed each other, slow and tender, before our mouths began to open. Lauren grabbed on to my belt and I pulled at her sweater. And when I picked her up to carry her into the bedroom, she squealed happily.

  This was how it always ended when we set off fighting to kill. We were tearing off our clothes and fucking loudly on the bed now. Lovers. Lauren would let the sound build out of her. Unh-unh-unh. This thing that she couldn’t stop, erupting into orgasm. Unh-unh-unh! Her body generating a kind of scorching radiant heat under mine. We came alive in this way that made me feel insane. We lost our bodies in the bed. There was no self, and there was no other. We fell into the space between, letting it close and disappear around us.

  Good sex was always very primal. This tingle across the back, climbing the base of the spine, as we started to sweat and stink. The smell of us mixing together violently. The richest, most pungent, skunky smells of sex. The squish of our bodies catching and slipping together. I could feel all the blood moving in me at once. My legs were taut like electric lines. My toes curled. Nerves fired and muscles flexed, everything on loan from the brain. You could shoot me in the head in this moment and I wouldn’t die. We had become one giant, physical beating heart. Overfilled with a dangerous, vibrating energy.

  Sex was galvanizing after a fight. It was indestructible. Incorruptible. In this moment it was impossible for us to destroy each other any more. I pressed my forehead into Lauren’s as I rocked between her legs, and I begged her to forgive me. I asked her to love me forever. She caught her breath and told me yes. I couldn’t help but make her say it again. Yes, yes, yes.

  “Don’t ever leave me,” I said as I buried my face into her body.

  “No,” she said. “Never, never, never.”

  THE WEDDING

  The streets were filled with teenagers and other sociopaths. I was staring out the window, astonished by this. The mall was boarded up. The movie theater was shut down. The bookstore and the record store were both gone, too. I had been back in Lockport for less than twenty-four hours, and I had begun to catalog the thi
ngs I was seeing. Everything was exactly the same, only completely different.

  “I used to have a girlfriend who pierced ears in that mall,” I said wistfully.

  “What?” my brother asked.

  “Where did everything go? What are you supposed to do if you live here?”

  “There was never anything to do to begin with.”

  “Yeah. But now it’s so much worse.”

  My brother, Peter, and I were driving down Transit, having just picked up our tuxedos for Kerry’s wedding. We were on our way to Cullen’s house, so that I could get a haircut. Kerry had warned me to deal with this before I got there, and she was less than pleased to see that I hadn’t. But the haircut was nothing. The thing she was furious about was the fact that I’d had the audacity to show up in Lockport without my date. Kerry all but accused me of trying to sabotage the wedding.

  Lauren was supposed to come with me, of course. This was never not the plan. I had wanted her to come; she was excited to be here. She bought a dress and a necklace and a plane ticket. And then, all at once, everything went to shit again. I don’t really know how this happens. I told her not to come, or she was refusing to go. It didn’t really matter. The story ends the same both ways.

  Peter was dateless, too, of course, which wasn’t helping anyone. The seating arrangements were wrecked. The symmetry was gone. Two dateless brothers meant that everything was fucked. There was no arguing with Kerry on this point. There was no sense in explaining how two dateless brothers had its own kind of symmetry. Peter and I had agreed to be in the wedding months ago, though we were never really given a choice. Our new brother-in-law, Greg, didn’t have much say in the matter, either. This was about what Kerry wanted. This was about the pictures and the cake. This weekend was her weekend, and everyone knew better than to cross her.

  * * *

  “Where is Lauren?”

  People had been asking me this question for days. The truth was I didn’t really know. Lauren and I had a fight. It was several fights, really. She got angry and left the apartment. It was only after that that she told me she wasn’t coming. Or maybe I had already told her I didn’t want her there. Who could remember if it happened one way and not the other? It was just one more fight.

  “Where is Lauren?”

  They all kept asking this. It was not a thing I cared to discuss with them, frankly. I had thought I was making myself reasonably clear on this, but they all kept asking anyway. So I started telling them things, making it up. Dissembling on Lauren’s behalf. I was amused to find myself presenting her to the world as some kind of do-gooder.

  “She’s building relief housing,” I offered soberly.

  “Relief housing for what?” they’d ask.

  “The hurricane,” I’d say blankly.

  “Oh, wow. In New Orleans. Wow.”

  But I exploited other tragedies, as well. I was just as happy to mention the tsunami. Or the earthquake. Or the typhoon. I spoke vaguely of famines and droughts and civil wars. There was always something terrible happening somewhere. A whole wide world of generalized misery. People were left stranded, and abandoned, and in need of intervention, all across the globe. In my version it was Lauren who was there to help them. She was the one who comforted and protected all these good people. She was the person who was easing their pain. She was the only one.

  This was hilarious to me, of course. But how could anyone here possibly get my joke? It didn’t matter anyway. I was sure that most of them weren’t even listening. Lauren’s was just another name—like Greg’s—that they’d memorized in preparation for this happy event. I could count on two hands the number of people, in any given room, who had actually met Lauren Pinkerton or had any idea what she looked like.

  “Where is Lauren?” they all asked eagerly.

  “She’s around here somewhere,” I told them with a smile.

  “Oh, good. I feel like I’m the last one to meet her.”

  * * *

  I was sitting bare-chested, in a wooden kitchen chair at Cullen’s house, as he stood over me with his clippers. “Thanks for doing this,” I said.

  “Of course,” he answered, as he tilted my head to the side. There was a lit cigarette dangling off his lip. “I barely even use these things anymore.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I mostly basically use them for one thing.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “To get rid of excess hair.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, not flinching.

  “To clean things up downstairs.”

  I nodded.

  “To shave my balls,” Cullen said, grinning flatly.

  “Yeah, I know. I get it. Thanks, Cullen.”

  “You’re very welcome.”

  Cullen flicked the switch and the clippers went blurry in his hand. My head tingled as he touched the razor to my scalp and started carving out swaths. The hair came off in peels, fluttering down over my shoulders and onto the floor.

  My brother was sitting silently in the corner, petting a fuzzy orange calico. This was Cullen’s cat. We were in Cullen’s kitchen. Cullen owned this whole house, actually. A three-bedroom foursquare, down by Outwater Park. “Sixty-eight grand,” he told me proudly, as we took the tour of the stark and empty domicile. Cullen had been working for the last three years as a certified public accountant, making a decent amount of money, clearly. Dullsville, USA, Louis called it.

  Louis had his own job working as a straight-up repo man. Collections, he insisted on calling it. I was tickled by the idea of Louis driving around the city, knocking on doors, repossessing property. Gas grills and Sub-Zero refrigerators and flat-screen TVs. Anything could be put up for collateral if both parties agreed on its value. Once a debtor went into default, it was Louis’s job to get their attention. After a period of civility, there was a period of threat. And then there’s just a knock at the door. By that time, your brand-new boat has been hitched to the back of a truck. True repossession comes without warning, in the end.

  The whole thing fascinated me and I pressed Louis for details. I wanted him to tell me stories. I was looking for something I could write about, something I could steal. This was the stuff of fiction, I was sure of it. But Louis failed to see the beauty in how he spent his days. It was just a job to him. If you couldn’t pay for your shit, it had to be taken away. Besides, Cullen was the one who told me that Louis spent most days sitting at a desk, talking on a telephone. He wasn’t wrong about the absence of drama.

  No one in Lockport, it seemed to me, had anything at all to say about the thing they did for a living. It was just work. It never really changed, because, how could it? I mean, can you actually imagine if Cullen went through the blow-by-blow of being a certified public accountant for you? Hour-by-tedious-hour. Day-by-drudging-day. Who could even tell the weeks apart after the first one? And why would you ever need to?

  * * *

  Peter and I went straight from Cullen’s house to the rehearsal dinner at the Lockport Town & Country Club. Someone handed me a drink and I found myself walking a gauntlet of aunts, and great-aunts, and second cousins. These plump and smiling women, with their tinted hair, and lipstick on their teeth. They beamed at me as they stood there and stirred their martinis with polished fingers.

  “What about law school?” my aunt asked me, apropos of nothing.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Have you ever thought about going to law school?”

  “Oh. Sure,” I lied.

  “Good,” she said, seeming relieved.

  “You’re next, then, right?” another one chimed in.

  “Next what?”

  “To marry!” she cried.

  “I’m only twenty-five years old,” I said, stricken by the thought. They all laughed at this, as though I’d just told a joke.

  I caught my reflection in the window, looking down over the eighteenth green. I was surprised to find myself looking like a stranger. I ran my hands over my shaved head, feeling it prickle. Why had I done this
to myself? I wondered. It felt like it was supposed to matter, but it didn’t. Hardly anyone seemed to notice, as they repeated the mantra of the weekend.

  “Where is Lauren?”

  “She’s around here somewhere,” I kept on saying now.

  “Oh, good,” they all said. “We can’t wait to meet her.”

  But as the previous day’s stories of Lauren Pinkerton’s relief work—in New Orleans and around the globe—began to circulate, I found people grabbing on to my elbow to repeat them back to me in earnest. This little game of telephone had taken on a life of its own. They were suddenly asking me to account for Lauren’s work in places I’d never heard of. Disasters I hadn’t thought to invent.

  “She must be helping children, then, right?”

  “Sometimes, yes,” I said, as I took a carrot off a silver tray. “She mostly deals with lepers, though. That’s her specialty.”

  I was not trying to be an asshole, I swear. This was an act of self-preservation for me. What other choice did I have? I didn’t know the answer to the question they were asking me. Where is Lauren Pinkerton? It simply was not possible for me to open up this vein on this weekend. What was to stop me from bleeding out all over the floor? I wouldn’t know how to stop talking if I let myself start now.

  Not that anyone wanted to have that conversation with me anyway. This was a party, and we were here to celebrate. All they needed was a story. So I propped Lauren up for them. I made her go down easy with a spoonful of sugar. And then I changed the subject. No one was listening anyway, I thought. We were all just making conversation.

  “Where is Lauren?” they asked again.

  “She didn’t want to come,” I said finally.

  “Oh,” they said, letting it hang there.

  “Yeah.”

  * * *

  The mall and the movie theater were closed. The bookstore was boarded up. The record store was shut down. But the bowling alley was alive and well. Peter and I slipped out early to go meet Louis and Cullen there.