Cannibals in Love

by Mike Roberts

  The charm of working for Roman Holliday had begun to wear off, though. It was getting harder and harder to shake the idea that I was consorting with a known criminal. Worse, he had taken to leaving me maundering voice messages where he would threaten to fire me for using too much punctuation. It was supposed to be written badly, he scolded me. That was the whole point.

  “Help Stop Spam Emails!”

  This was my new personal favorite. This was my cry for help. I was desperately trying to turn this thing into an art project now. “Click To Make Sure Your Protected!” Roman was a stickler for enforcing the deliberate misuse of your/you’re. “Get Registered In The Anti-Spam Database Today!”

  I tried my best not to take the whole thing too seriously. Maybe people really were looking for penis enlargers and local sluts and off-brand medications. And, in that case, maybe I was a hero all along. Or maybe I was just spreading viruses. Abundance is the mother of neurosis, I worried.

  Spam was just one of many diseases born of the Internet, I was sure of it. It was part of the general force-feeding going on in the culture now, and everyone was complicit. At its worst, the Internet was one giant snuff film. We were all adding content into the collective nervous breakdown.

  Did I hate myself for this work? Probably not sufficiently. No. It was just work to me. It kept me knee-deep in alcohol and fucking around. Plus, it helped pay back my student loans, which my parents were thrilled about. That was about all I wanted at the present moment. I knew I was a hack, of course. I knew that this was not art. But at least I wasn’t working in something truly ignoble, like advertising. The spam writer gladly acknowledges his own whiff of repulsion.

  * * *

  AIDS. That was the reason I was sitting in this waiting room. I had been battling the disease in secret since the seventh grade when they pounded it into our heads, in health class, that sex and death were the same thing. I was struck by a memory of Don telling me that the government had created AIDS in a laboratory. Germ warfare gone terribly wrong, he said. This was toward the end, after the OTB, after I’d stopped listening to Don. I didn’t want to hear that shit anymore and I’d started cutting him off. I told him I didn’t believe in that, and I didn’t want to hear any more about it. I remember Don shrugging. Nodding. I felt like an asshole now.

  I didn’t actually believe that I had AIDS, but being symptom-free, it seemed like the logical place to start. My real symptom was my guilt. Loneliness and confusion had turned me a little strange. I was better when I had someone, of course. Everyone is. On top of this, I knew I would be paying for this visit out-of-pocket. The euphemism for the uninsured, I had learned, was self-pay. Har-har-har.

  I didn’t even know what it was I was paying for. A fresh start? Peace of mind? My paranoia? It was money that I didn’t have for such nice things as these. I daydreamed about a time when I’d have so much money that I could be taken to a hospital or a jail without a second thought. Strange luxuries, indeed. I thought about where I’d be living one year from today, and I came up blank. For some reason it still appealed to me that I couldn’t know a thing like that.

  I did actually want to talk to a doctor about a number of things, in fact. The poison in the tap water; the Teflon in our food; arsenic in the soil; radiation from cell phones. I wanted to ask a doctor about headaches. About blurred vision. My liver; my kidneys; my heart. I had imaginary lumps in my neck and my groin and under my armpits. I had questions about all these things I couldn’t possibly see or feel. Potent, malignant cancers lying dormant in the body somewhere. What should I know, and how much should I worry? What did it mean when you woke up with sore throats or sore muscles? And what was the least amount of sleep a person could get away with anyway?

  If a doctor in a white coat could just tell me I was fine, I thought, I might actually begin to recover.

  But there was no time for any of that here. This was a clinic, and I was here, ostensibly, to take an AIDS test I didn’t need. Abundance is the mother of neurosis, someone said. I wondered if that could be a kind of prayer. I had not said a single prayer in almost fifteen years, and I wondered how God looked upon johnny-come-latelies and those who make their prayers in selfishness. Save me, Father, and screw everyone else. I’ve come back again. This time it’s serious. Is that what people say when they pray for second chances?

  A real change could do me good, I supposed. I had daydreams about serious employment, with health insurance and a 401(k). I could dress myself less shabbily and finally have an adult haircut. Standing around the water cooler, quoting lines from television shows with my coworker/friends. I could cut the grass and shovel the snow. I could check the oil and fix the flat. I could play golf, and tennis, and fantasy football. I could find myself a nice girl to go to the movies with again. I just needed to find one nice girl who liked to laugh and eat and fuck and have fun. Simple things.

  * * *

  The door buzzed again and a girl my age walked into the waiting room. Someone more like me, I thought. I watched her talk to the lady receptionist with a kind of self-assurance I was sure I’d never had. She was matter-of-fact and free from paranoia, and this made her very pretty, actually. I could almost place her face from somewhere, too, falling just short. I was intrigued, though. I wished stupidly that there were some way for me to kiss this girl today. I could never talk to her now, though. Not here, and not anywhere.

  Still, I couldn’t stop myself from stealing glances. I wanted to know what her story was. What was her dirty little secret and why had she come here to the Planned Parenthood on a Wednesday? Maybe she was simply picking up her birth control or having some kind of annual exam. Or maybe she was hiding ugly blisters and sores, or worse, something invisible. Like me.

  The girl looked out the window and down at the carpet and up at the posters, and she reached out for a pamphlet, which she read and quickly tired of. But she never once looked at me, waiting patiently to make eye contact. How could she not look over at me at all? And why was that a turn-on? I was either totally invisible or she was making this tremendous effort not to see me on purpose. I had no idea what this meant. Didn’t she see we were the same here? Out of place among the teenage Latinas and the pizza-faced boyfriend who was yawning wildly now. Maybe this room was the reason we were doomed to never meet. We had been marked by the waiting room of the Planned Parenthood. We couldn’t just ignore that fact. Eventually we would have to acknowledge what we were both doing here on this day. I thought that that could be a very funny moment, actually. Unless, that is, she really was hiding blisters.

  I realized I’d been doing this for weeks now, making up stories for strangers. I secretly wanted to be in love again, and I’d been projecting the vague idea onto girls all over the city. Daydreams and missed connections. I saw these happy girls walking around with their boyfriends and I wanted to take them away. All these girls I would never even speak to. But I could again, and that was the point.

  And just then, as I stopped waiting for the girl to look at me, a door opened. A nurse was calling her name, and I turned around, and back again. She stood up and I missed it. I missed the girl’s name and then she was gone, too. The door closed and I smiled. I leaned back in my chair for a second. And then I got up and left.

  A CATTLE, A CRACK-UP

  I was unlocking my bike downtown when this girl walked by. I caught her eye and she smiled at me, I thought. But she was walking away.

  “Hello,” I called out, surprising her a little.

  She turned back and waved her hand, unsure. “Hey,” she said. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “I do. But I don’t know how.”

  “In Washington,” she said. “We were neighbors.”

  “Oh, right. You lived in Columbia Heights. You’re Jamie.”

  “Danielle.”

  “Shit, right, Danielle. I remember you.” I smiled at her like a moron. “You live here now? Where are you headed?”

  Danielle hemmed a little, looking past me up the street.
“Nowhere. Just running some errands. I have the day off today. You?”

  “I don’t know.” I paused. “Maybe I’ll just come with you. I might have errands, too. Things I haven’t thought of yet.”

  “But I’m taking the bus,” she said, looking at my bike.

  “That’s okay. I can lock it up.” I snapped the U-lock back together and took the key. I looked at Danielle, forcing her to tell me no now. But she didn’t, and the bus was already coming up Burnside.

  “Okay,” she said, not quite smiling. “Why not, I guess.”

  I did remember her, too: this girl from the ancient past. It wasn’t that I thought I’d never see Danielle again; I’d forgotten there even was a girl called Danielle. But I liked the randomness of this. I liked sitting beside her on this city bus. I wanted the other riders to imagine us as a couple, the way I was trying to imagine it myself.

  Danielle looked at her watch. “I’m supposed to meet my boyfriend back in front of the Whole Foods at six o’clock,” she said, trying to sound casual. “Just so you know.”

  “This is so strange, running into you out here,” I said, answering a different question. “All the D.C. kids I know moved to New York. And San Francisco.”

  “Right. Me, too. But I was offered a job, and I ended up liking it here, I guess.”

  I nodded. “Lane Tworek told me there’s a Target and a Best Buy on Fourteenth Street now. Right by the Metro. And all kinds of condos and shit.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “And that weird brothel near your old house, with the Fruitopia machine in the front yard … that’s a Brick Oven Pizzeria.”

  “Ha!” I laughed, and then I groaned. “Jesus. Yuck.”

  “Yep.” Danielle sat back, and I could feel her beginning to loosen up. “I’ve seen you out here, too, you know. Last summer. They were kicking you out of a bar for taking your shirt off inside.”

  “Huh,” I said, acting puzzled. “Maybe it was unusually hot or something.”

  “Right.” She nodded.

  “I’m afraid I can be a bit of an unpredictable drunk, Danielle.”

  “Yeah. I remember that, too,” she said with a smile. “You were having fun, though. People seemed sad to see you go.”

  “Good, then. That’s the only thing I really care about.”

  Danielle laughed and I was startled by what a nice laugh it was. Really lovely and in pitch, like a glass bell. My entire memory of the girl came whole in this one moment. She leaned in and pulled the cord above my head.

  “This is our stop,” she said, standing up.

  * * *

  The truth was, I’d grown bored with drinking and acting out. I was buying books and making soups and getting ten hours of sleep (which my sister told me was obscene). I’d stopped eating fast food and checking my email every day. I was flossing regularly and doing push-ups in the morning. I was reading the Metro section of the newspaper and making plans to watch NBA basketball on TV. I was going to the bank and the grocery store and the post office, and having long conversations with strangers about the weather.

  And I was living alone, for the first time in my life. I had a big bed and a nice desk and no furniture. I used to be able to share the smallest spaces with people: sleeping on a futon in a walk-in closet; storing everything I owned behind a stranger’s couch. I could lie down in a coffin with a girlfriend, or more likely just a twin mattress on the floor. There was something about that forfeit of space that I always liked: breathing each other’s air, and smelling each other’s skin.

  But more than anything I found I liked being alone now. I liked sleeping diagonally and having the whole bed to myself. I even liked the celibacy that it bred. I liked taking long showers and talking to myself out loud in paragraphs. I liked keeping the house too hot or too cold. I liked the spareness of my refrigerator and the piles of clean clothes on the dresser. I filled my days and got things done, and I convinced myself that this capacity to be alone might even make me well disposed to being a writer.

  But I didn’t share any of that with Danielle. It was too intimate for the city buses.

  * * *

  We walked a block, looking for an address, and Danielle asked about Lauren Pinkerton. Out of the blue. I looked at her and realized she wanted to take a shot.

  “That girl was always so mean to me, you know? For no reason at all, really.”

  “Maybe you looked at her funny,” I said, yielding nothing.

  “Yeah, right.” She smiled. “Whatever happened to her anyway?”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling a strange prick of melancholy. “I don’t know. The last I heard she’d gotten engaged to some guy with money. A doctor or an architect or something.”

  Danielle yawned, losing interest. “Uh-huh.” It didn’t mean anything to her and I was grateful for that. She mentioned her own boyfriend again, in a passing way, which was kind of cute. Something about his job.

  “Oh. Super,” I said flatly, just to make her smirk.

  * * *

  Back on the bus, we showed our transfers and found our seats, and I caught myself thinking about Danielle as an idea again. What would it be like to date a girl like this? She was too nice; too neat; too mature for me. Where would the tension come from? What would we fight about? There was probably not one single picture of Danielle on the Internet with her middle finger up, I thought.

  She was talking about her day off again, too, which was an attempt to fish out what it was that I was doing wandering out in front of Powell’s on a Thursday afternoon. And finally she just asked me.

  “What are you up to these days, anyway? Like for work.” I could tell that these kinds of questions were important to a person like Danielle. So I screwed up my face as serious as I could make it.

  “I’m a dogcatcher,” I said.

  “Mm.” She smiled painfully. “The world always needs good dogcatchers.”

  “Amen,” I said, nodding.

  I could go on like this all day, making jokes, talking about nothing. But suddenly I didn’t want to do that with Danielle. I didn’t want to be defensive and sarcastic. I didn’t want to bore and annoy her. I just wanted to keep hanging out, running errands with this girl who felt like a stranger to me, and not, all at once.

  “Actually, I just finished writing a short story this morning,” I said.

  “Really?” she said, brighter. “What is it called?”

  “‘A Cattle, a Crack-Up.’”

  This was true. I had rewritten my four-hundred-page novel as a thirteen-page short story. It was an act of total and utter fucking madness, which I was still riding high off of.

  “I could read you some of it, if you want.”

  “Right now?” she asked, looking stricken. “You mean you have it with you?”

  “I’m supposed to mail it out to somebody, maybe.” It was Bettina Kleins, but Danielle never asked this, so I didn’t tell her.

  “Well,” she said, a little coy, “I’m sort of a tough grader.”

  “Ha!” I said, appreciating this last attempt to discourage me. “Good, give it to me, then. I like a hard F,” I said with all sorts of disgusting innuendo.

  Danielle shook her head. “Oh, man. Just read it. Go ahead.”

  I pulled the story out of my bag, laughing. And then, of course, I froze. “Should I set it up, or just start reading?”

  “I dunno. What’s it called again?” she asked, looking at the title. “‘A Cattle, a Crack-Up’? What does that mean?”

  I smiled back, not sure what to say. “I’m just gonna read it…” I said, flipping to the first page.

  “August Caffrey banged the latch off the pen and led his forty black ’n’ white Holsteins grazing out into the field in a slow, somnambulant stream. He hustled the last of the milking herd out and made his way back up to the farmhouse.

  “Overhead the clouds were raked out across the sky. At the western border of the pasture was a stand of rock elms where the scavengers waited for the herd. Pieces of trees could be seen breaking o
ff in the wind and flying away as State Birds. The wooden fence that ran rectangular around the field seemed unfit to keep anything, but it was good enough for cows. The grass grew a fast vibrating green in the early summer that the cows beat back with hoof and mouth. And everywhere you stood you saw the kingly American Elm that lorded over the open pasture. The American Elm was the skyline here.

  “Gail had August’s lunch waiting for him on the table, and she stopped with the dishes to sit down beside him…” I stopped reading.

  “Maybe I should explain it to you.”

  “No, it’s good. Keep going.”

  I nodded reluctantly and picked it back up, feeling strange.

  “August never said much. If his appetite was good he ate quickly, as a rule. He picked up his ice water and swallowed it in gulps. Setting the glass down, he turned to his wife. ‘Where’s the milk, Gail?’

  “‘Well,’ she began, as though she were expecting this. ‘I just figured maybe you were still havin’ problems with your stomach.’

  “‘Problems with my stomach? Since when did I say I was havin’ problems with my stomach? All’s I ever said was that the milk tasted off to me. Haven’t I lived here my whole life? Don’t I know how cow’s milk is supposed to taste?’

  “‘Of course, August. I’m not sayin’ that.’

  “‘Don’t look for fights with me, Gail. I work too hard…’

  “Gail stood up and brought back a cold bottle of milk, which she poured out into a glass.

  “‘You take away the boy’s milk now, too?’

  “‘Course not, August, you know Kurt loves milk. We all do. I was only thinkin’…’ but her voice trailed away as she turned back toward the fridge.

  “August Caffrey put his head back down and brooded over his plate. It had been two long weeks since his stomach started rejecting the milk. It was the smell or the color or something else. He tried not to taste anything at all, but the milk coated the inside of his mouth and throat, as milk does. August pulled at it slowly and then threw back half the glass. He returned it to the table and put his hands down on his thighs, sitting stock-still, as his body worked at something unseen. August grimaced then and belched quietly into a closed fist.