by Mike Roberts
But the dog had died, and Shawn had been accepted into the University of Texas. This was the first thing she said to me when I ran back into her: Shawn was leaving town. We smiled at each other stupidly. This was fantastic news, of course; it relieved us of the pressure of starting over—this was just a fling.
There was something loose and uncomplicated about this girl, the second time around. Nothing against her poor dead dog, but Shawn had shed a lot of baggage. She was lighter; she was present. And, without realizing it, I began to fall for her in spite of myself. Shawn and I rode high on the madness and infatuation of new love, letting it carry us all the way to Texas. It was never even a conversation, really. Somewhere along the line she began including me in her plans. And I found myself telling people I was leaving. It was important not to overthink it—the whole thing had been pulled out of thin air anyway. Shawn and I were making a jailbreak.
* * *
The reality of Texas set in quickly, though. We were met by a brutal and otherworldly heat. Austin was in the midst of a historic drought and you could feel the weather in everything. It stayed hot in an unholy and interminable way. Even the grackles began to weep in the trees. These bony little deathbirds that would stack themselves on the power lines and scream for mercy. I couldn’t help but take the whole thing personally. The weather had a strange effect on my psychology that way. It was bad for morale.
And then, a month in, something else happened. Shawn came home with a brand-new dog. And the writing was on the wall for me.
* * *
Lane, for his part, though, had made himself right at home in Texas. He would put on George Bush’s twang, or John Wayne’s walk, at the drop of a hat. These three men who couldn’t help but play along, pretending they were born and bred.
“Shoot,” he said to me with a grin. “If I’d known that Peloton was getting back together, I never would’ve sold my drums to buy all these fucking diapers.”
Lane was in a good place, though. There was a change running through him that was hard to miss. I mean, the kid was somebody’s father now. He looked leaner in that posture. Older. His skin was tanned, almost wizened. The whole thing just hung together on Lane somehow. To see him there with Bruno was to lose all doubt.
Lane would drive us out to Barton Springs, to go swimming in the heat of the day. I would watch as he zipped Bruno up in a full wet suit, which was easier than trying to slather him in sunscreen. It was a thrill just to watch the way the baby took to the water. This beatific smile coming over him as Lane set him loose—trusting his son to kick and paddle.
“How did you teach him to swim like that?”
“You don’t have to teach him,” Lane said. “You just throw ’em in. Babies already know what to do.” I nodded dubiously, thinking of my sister’s son, who was petrified to even sit in the bathtub alone. Meanwhile, Lane was managing to keep both the baby and his iPhone above water, as he and Bruno shot a swimming video.
“You know what the best thing about all of this is?” Lane announced afterward, as we sat out in the grass. “I’ve become a father without becoming my father.”
“Who was your father?”
“Who knows,” Lane said bluntly.
“Right.”
I had been speaking with my own father a lot lately. He’d started calling me on his cell phone, in the middle of the day. On a Tuesday or a Wednesday, just out of the blue. I would see his number come up on the screen and it would freeze me. Oh, god, I’d think, something terrible has happened. He’s going to tell me he has cancer.
“Hello?” I’d ask, in a voice filled with foreboding.
“Hey,” he’d answer me elliptically.
I’d never even seen my father use his cell phone. No one had. He was famous for leaving it in the cupholder of his car, where it was impossible to reach him. The battery was dead half the time besides. The only time my father and I spoke on the telephone was when my mother handed the receiver to him directly. Oh, no. I winced again. He’s going to tell me that she’s dead.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“Okay.”
“I was just thinking. Did you know Dick Cheney never apologized for shooting that guy in the face?”
“What?”
“His hunting friend. Harry Whittington. I just read the whole Wikipedia page.”
“You did?” I asked, feeling my heart rate level off.
“Yeah. But lucky for him the Secret Service keeps an ambulance on call whenever Cheney leaves the grid. On account of his defective heart.”
“Jesus.”
“What a country, right?” And then he would laugh.
Every conversation was like this. My father was retired now and still learning how to fill his days. There was always something he had seen on TV, or read on the Internet, that made him think of me. He loved to hit me in the chest with these wild non sequiturs. Nobody was dead, after all. Not even poor Harry Whittington.
* * *
School started, and Shawn disappeared. She’d been accepted into a master’s program at the University of Texas to study Public Health. Public Health was the reason we were here. Public Health was the reason for all of it, actually. I had no ax to grind against Public Health, I swear. I just wanted to know what it was.
“Everything is Public Health,” Shawn assured me.
“Everything?” I asked her.
And it was true, I suppose. Public Health was the broad umbrella that allowed Shawn and her cohort to embrace the larger platform of saving the world.
“The world?” I would inevitably end up asking. “Like the whole world?” Because they all talked this way, it seemed, and I wanted to understand it. I was trying very hard just to listen. But I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
Public Health was nothing less than a worldview in this circle. It was a gift that these kids had been given at birth. It was a burden they’d been carrying for as long as they could remember. They recognized this mark in each other instantaneously. These were the children who grew up calling adults by their first names, and sending their allowance money to Greenpeace. They all wanted to make the world a better place, and who could quarrel with that?
But they had a way of carrying on. And at first I was sure that this was just the way that they unwound. God knows that the school expected them to work for it. But no one seemed to take a breath long enough to stop talking about Public-goddamn-Health. It was incredible. I was surrounded by kids who were obsessed with water safety and infectious disease. They could ramble on for hours about Universal Preschool or the Midnight Basketball Program. I had watched two young men pound the table and raise their voices over gerrymandering in the exurban ghettos.
“Right,” I would say patiently. “But is all of that really Public Health?”
“Everything is Public Health,” they would answer me in earnest.
I eventually made a point of sitting in the middle of these tables and embargoing the conversations as they passed, sending them back as something new. Something I could be reasonably certain was not Public Health. Football, for instance.
But Shawn didn’t like this. She told me I was being rude. She accused me of picking fights. Shawn was convinced that I was making fun of her friends, but I wasn’t. I just wanted them to acknowledge certain hard-line truths. Like the fact that the game was rigged against us. We must consider this first and foremost, right? It was incumbent upon us to speak truth to power by calling out the fraud that is power. And then, by all means, yes, let us begin to talk about Public Health. Rah-rah. Let’s lock arms and save the world.
But these philosophical differences had a way of opening larger cracks in my relationship with Shawn. I felt like I knew her less than ever now. The intensity of her graduate program had activated this entirely other part of her personality. And the truth was I kind of liked this other Shawn. She was smart; she was outspoken; she was engaged. These kids all listened when she spoke. And I was proud of t
hat. I just had a threshold for talking about infectious disease.
* * *
Honestly, I was sure I was just jealous. I wanted to make this work for Shawn. I wanted to be supportive of the thing she had found here. That’s why it was so important for me to find my own thing. I needed to uphold my end of the bargain in this couple. Because, strangely, that’s what we were now. In the eyes of everyone around us, we were a set unit. We were partners. We were a team.
This was how I ended up working as a substitute teacher in the Austin public school system. It was nothing if not steady and adult work for me. I even wore a necktie. But I had no business being a schoolteacher. I was brooding. I was quiet. I was disinterested. I’d never felt qualified to teach anything to anyone, and especially not children. Not that they were asking me to do anything like that, obviously. My job was to take attendance.
The real teacher would leave me a note with a short list of uncomplicated instructions. I might be charged with the distribution and collection of some mindless little ditto, say. Or the proctoring of a pop quiz. Nine times out of ten my job was just to put the DVD into the machine and press play. Teaching was a desk job for me. I was stuck there, staring up at the clock, with the other kids. Tracking the second hand as it ran its laps around the dog track, all day long.
My real job was to hurry home after work and take the dog out before he shat the living room. With Shawn at school, the majority of this dog care had fallen onto me. Walking him through the neighborhood, through the endless swell of heat. People wanted to stop and talk. They wanted to fawn over my pet dog, while I stood there sweating. Waving as we passed their houses; watching as I stooped down to pick up his mess. Everyone just assumed the dog was mine.
These were the same people who were convinced that Shawn was my one true love. Strangely, it was this fact of being accepted so fully as a couple that left me most bewildered. I wasn’t even aware of having referred to Shawn as my girlfriend, back in Portland. But now we were a couple, and everyone was certain it was meant to be. I mean, look how happy our dog was.
Even Lane and Maritza seemed to meet us on these terms. I had an image of the four of us sitting around the table with a bottle, telling stories, while the baby slept in the other room. Like characters in a Raymond Carver book. Not that we ever did that, of course. But there was always this element of smoke and mirrors. It was flattering how easily the whole thing could be put over on people. There was a power in simply playing along. Because Shawn and I did want to be a couple. It was the reason we had moved two thousand miles across the country. But we had skipped a step; we had rushed the whole thing. And I couldn’t help but feel like we were living someone else’s life.
* * *
Lane helped me find a second job writing script coverage for a local production company. As work goes, it was really only marginally better. But at least I was being paid to write again. And, best of all, I could do it while I sat there at my teacher’s desk.
Everyone, it seemed, was hell-bent on writing the Great American Screenplay now. All I had to do was read the thing; write a summary; and offer up my professional opinion. Buy. Consider. Pass. These were the options at my discretion. Almost everything was a straight pass, of course. I was warned up front to never propose a buy. That was miles above my pay grade, and a fireable offense besides. Therefore the gold standard was a firm and serious “consider.” And so I gave out a few of those, too, because, why not? I already had two jobs.
It was Danielle, of all people, who seemed the most intrigued by my entrée into the movie business. Somewhere along the line we had started texting again. This didn’t come out of nowhere, but it was true that we had stopped speaking. I’d tried to kiss her over the summer, in the back of a taxicab, in Portland. And she kissed me right back, too. But Danielle was never going to leave her boyfriend for me. And that was that.
Still, I was lonely in Austin, and Danielle had a way of making me feel like myself. Plus, it was fun just to flirt. I felt a connection with her that I did not feel with anyone in Texas. There was a rush in commanding her attention.
Danielle encouraged me to write a screenplay of my own. Something about the medium made her believe that I could do it. But I didn’t know the first thing about trying to write a movie, and I could never seem to take the whole thing seriously, besides. I made a game of pitching Danielle a laundry list of unproducible film concepts. A screenplay about consciousness, for instance.
“Hmm,” she texted back. “Have you ever thought about writing one about a jewel heist instead?”
“I just think people want to see their own metaphysical reality projected a hundred feet high on a movie screen.”
“But who’s going to play the bad guy?” she asked.
“Capitalism,” I answered.
“Right, well. Maybe you could try one about a prison break, too.”
The joke itself was entertaining, and, more to the point, a reason to keep talking to Danielle. But I had no interest in writing the Great American Screenplay. The truth was I had already begun to double down on my book. In the midst of all this hand-wringing down in Texas, I had discovered the first good reason in years to carry on with A Cattle, a Crack-Up. I was determined to turn this book into a one-thousand-page novel. This was a number that could not be ignored. Credibility had always been an issue, and what was more incredible than a thousand fucking pages!
Danielle, to her credit, was against it. She had read a myriad of drafts over the last nine months, and she was convinced that it still worked best as a short story. She said that I should publish that, and cut bait for a while. It was time for me to start something new. But I was certain she was wrong. I had come too far with this book to abandon it in a dozen loose-leaf pages. No one reads short stories, besides. And while it’s true that the readership for one-thousand-page novels might be even smaller, at least that audience was elite. And if no one was going to read the thing, then why not go for broke? I wanted to give people a book that they could defend themselves with in a fight. I wanted to write a novel that you could crack somebody’s skull with.
* * *
But this ugly and ferocious desire for more did not manifest itself out of nothing. I was embarrassed to admit that I was almost twenty-three years old before anyone bothered to tell me that Joyce Carol Oates was a native of Lockport. Joyce Carol Oates, who had published more than forty novels and won the National Book Award. Joyce Carol Oates, who had taught writing at Princeton University for over four decades. Joyce Carol Oates, who had once graced the cover of Newsweek magazine as a writer of fiction!
Joyce Carol Oates was from the same nowhere town as me. The lapse in this detail was astounding. I felt angry and exhilarated to find it out only in adulthood. It was as if they had conspired to keep it away from me, for my own good. Not that it would’ve changed anything, obviously. But it’s the fact of not being told something so seminal about the place where you are from that feels so galling. It was like trying to imagine a world in which no one bothered to tell you that Timothy McVeigh was from Lockport. Which, of course, he was.
Lane, for his part, claimed to have no idea who Joyce Carol Oates was, or why it possibly mattered. Lane was interested in Timothy McVeigh. He was fascinated by the fact that the Oklahoma City Bomber could be from my hometown. He’d begun badgering me to make a video with him about this. Lane had the idea that we could visit this monster in his super-max cell, in rural Indiana. He wanted me to interview McVeigh on camera about his memories of Lockport. Just Lockport and nothing else. Every little thing that this man might remember about the place we had in common. The smaller the detail the better, Lane told me.
“Dude,” I said. “Timothy McVeigh is dead.”
“Dead?”
“Yeah. They executed his ass.”
“When?”
“I don’t know when. A long time ago.”
I watched Lane take this in. “Huh. Well, good fucking riddance, then.”
“Yeah.”
* * *
I was amazed to find that Lane wasn’t simply bugging out on his iPhone. He knew exactly what he was trying to do. He was watching scenes develop in the world. Encounters, really. Everything seemed to revolve around a moment of conflict for Lane. Couples fighting; babies crying; a group of teenagers swearing loudly in a parking lot. But these pieces could get altogether scarier, too. He had videos of dogs barking, and buildings burning, and paramedics loading dead bodies into ambulances.
Lane, I was amused to find, was turning into something of a big deal as a video artist. He’d been showing me segments from an unfinished piece on PTSD, which he had sold to Vice magazine on commission. There was one particular image of a young soldier in a grocery store that I could not shake. This plainclothes GI who was berating a middleaged man in the frozen foods aisle. The civilian, it seemed, was guilty of touching the soldier lightly on the back, in order to squeeze behind him into the refrigerated cooler. I could still see the GI pulling up like a scared cat, as he snapped around on the other man, asking point-blank why he had touched him.
And in this moment it seemed clear to me that the two men knew each other. I thought for certain that they were playing out this scenario as a joke. The gray-haired man froze for a beat, before smiling in recognition. But this was no joke.
“Is something funny to you?” the soldier asked.
“Excuse me?” the befuddled man asked, waffles well in hand now.
“You put your hands on me, without permission, and now you’re laughing at me.”
“Hey. Take it easy, buddy.”
“Who the fuck do you think you are? You touch me without my knowledge, without my permission?”