Kath would be gone, I thought, as I opened the apartment door. She stood in the middle of my living room wearing a padded black bra and her poufy skirt, picking lint from her sweater. A fresh spliff smoking in the ashtray and coffee brewing in the press.
“Want an omelet?” I asked.
“Just the avocado.”
She sat in the chair by the cracked-open window and smoked, chewed on a fingernail between drags, checked her phone. She had something on her mind and she wanted to leave.
“Tell me a new word, Stephen.”
“Loup garou.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s French for werewolf.”
“That’s so fucking sexy.”
I guzzled a Budweiser and sliced in half her avocado, cut the halves into strips, peeled off their almost reptilian skins, and arranged the exposed green fruit on a plate. Drizzled the skinless strips with juice from a plastic lime.
“Planning on something new for us?” Kath asked as she surveyed the items in the bag. “Every girl likes the cheap stuff.”
“It was an act of charity.”
“Really? What’s up with the surgical tape?”
I grabbed for her. She dodged me, ate with forefinger and thumb, asked for a toothpick. I handed her a small box.
“What are you doing today?” she asked.
“Lying on the couch and drinking beer.”
The avocado made her dance on her seat like a happy little girl.
“Soncha just texted me. There are like a hundred dirty protestors near the World Trade Center fighting with the cops and this guy Jupiter who’s like their spirit guru has them all punching back. And apparently some image of the Virgin Mary appeared in the windows of the Mercantile Exchange overnight and the Mexicans are saying it’s a miracle and the protestors are saying it’s a sign that the universe is on their side. It’s a total shit show. Let’s go shoot some pictures with my new camera.”
“Maybe,” I said, refraining from disclosing to Kath that an entrepreneurial masseuse had already informed me about Jupiter, independent of her and Soncha, as if that meant anything at all or anything at all anymore. The same way I no longer cared about bands or DJs or art the way I used to; my ear no longer to the ground; that portion of my spiritual spleen atrophied and shriveled.
She poured herself coffee.
“Maybe is weak, Stephen. I need stronger than maybe.”
Maybe I should have been interested but at that moment I wasn’t and I wasn’t about to pretend I was.
“Stop,” she said, breaking my grip, as I pulled her from the kitchen chair. I lit one of her all-white American Spirits. “You’ll wish you did.”
I sensed the impending arrival of zombie decisions. The capitulating revenant charged with manning the woman. I half-attempted to commit myself to trekking with her in the snow and wrapped myself in a blanket on the couch, struggling to disavow the post-sex half-drunk exhaustion that resulted from less than a half-night of sleep.
“OK,” she said. “Got to go. I’ll text you later.”
She kissed my forehead and the door slammed shut behind her. Spliff still smoldering in the ashtray as a shadow of smoke curled and rose in the square of sunlight reflected on the wooden floor. Kath’s breakfast avocado, pierced with toothpicks and suspended inside a rocks glass, perched atop the windowsill. I fell asleep on the couch, facedown in a puddle of her scent, like a pig hunting truffles, snowed under by another storm of the century.
11
THE IPHONE VIBRATED ON the coffee table. It was an ominous blocked number. I debated whether to answer. It was almost noon. The vibration ceased. If it was important they would leave a message. The blocked number called again.
“Stephen?” Celeste asked, frissoned with urgency. “Are you on the road? Have you gone to Pennsylvania? What did you find?”
I willed myself to sound awake. Told her I was leaving shortly and poured myself a cup of cold coffee.
“Why haven’t you left yet?”
“I was waiting for the roads to clear.”
“What did you take—a snow day? I need you on top of this, Stephen. Fleeger told me you were already on the road. Let me know what you find at the Pennsylvania courthouse ASAP. The higher-ups are very curious to learn what you discover. Teach them, Stephen. This could be very good for our position versus Thomas. They’re growing keener on you, Stephen. They see real potential. You’re the tip of the spear here so don’t let us down. We’re all counting on you.”
I surveyed the three empty beer bottles on the coffee table I drank since breakfast. I had no choice. I was on the move.
“I know I can always count on you guys.”
She hung up the phone before I could utter another word. I admonished myself for succumbing to her fabricated urgency, located the swish messenger bag with the seatbelt strap beneath the pile of yesterday’s clothes, walked to the parking garage, and rented a car from Hertz. On the corporate account. A midsized Detroit sedan with giant plastic nobs and a digital dashboard and soft wide seats. None of the pieces quite fitting together.
The temperature had dropped and I rubbed my hands together as the engine heated the car. I typed the address for the White Haven courthouse into the satellite system. Almost three hours each way, provided the sun didn’t zap the GPS. A day’s worth of billable hours clocked while driving from New York to upstate Pennsylvania and back. I sipped a cup of coffee purchased from the Korean bodega. Law Coffee™. Blue Mountain and organic and Folgers Crystals and La Colombe and even coffee brewed from beans egested by Indonesian palm civets—those brands I could grasp. As brands. But not Law Coffee. I exited Manhattan though the drop and dip of the soot-covered Holland Tunnel, vertigo under control but barely, the sedan’s bouncy suspension tugging the car to the right.
“And the Knicks drop another and so too do the Rangers. Must have something to do with all that solar radiation they say is still coming at us.” “No that would be if they both won, Chuck.” “Up next: traffic on the twos.” Debt relief. Credit repair. Joint relief. Pain repair. The car bounced across the Kill van Cull, too much play in the steering wheel as I summited the outer crossings, skyways spanning black water, past the abandoned coal-fired cathedrals, through a latticework of cast-iron drawbridges raised for the passage of cherry-red tugs and coal-black barges navigating narrow channels laden with combustible commodities.
Now past the port. Brackish and greasy and stacked with containers. I didn’t want Kath. I didn’t want Celeste. I didn’t want Kilgore or WorldScore or cocktails with the client. I wanted this. Bunkers and vessels and strategic commodities. For discharge at Byway. Linden. Bayonne. Where the New Jersey landscape absorbed the drippings from the standpipes and the manifolds. Feedstocks stored in giant gasometers for baking at various heights and temperatures until the molecules separated and reconnected into petrochemicals that smelled like tuna fish and maple syrup. A skyline of smokestacks cracking open raw Nigerian and Arabian petroleum stripped from the holds of the giant maroon-hulled tankers berthed in the black tributaries of the Hudson and Raritan Rivers. The smell of diesel and salt water, sometimes tar. Cargo tanks parceled for loading in New Jersey destined for Yokohama, Pusan, Antwerp. Styrene. Sulfuric acid. Benzene. Toluene. “Rare, exotic stuff,” my father would say when warning us to keep away from the chemicals stored in the basement. Crystal clear building blocks of plastic, insulation, fiberglass, PVC pipes, bacteria-resistant automobile and boat parts, food containers, and carpet backing. Yes, carpet backing. Clean in and out, free on board, cost insurance and freight. The physical reality of geopolitical infrastructure. In sync with the rhythms of the Anthropocene era, the manmade planet. With its alkaline seas and halogen cities and heavy-metal extractions and chaos. The city’s computer chips pining to be plugged into the motherboard. Ready for docking with something larger. Leaving the planet behind. Scrambling into the new. No more apiaries. No more tartar thistles. No more old man and the sea. Just the thrust and hum of the ti
me.
“National Transportation Safety Board issuing warnings today that any increases in solar radiation could result in flight delays.”
The lumbering rise of an airplane in flight as the pilot pulled back on the throttle, spewing contrails and data. Radar Cavalries. Triangle billboards: for Coke, Parx Casino, the NBA on TNT. Cars circling closer and closer, like pilgrims around the Kaaba, water down a drain.
“Traffic on the twos.”
Honk
Honk Honk
Honk Honk.
“Brought to you by the Dominican Republic. Golf, swimming, sun, and sand. Five star resorts and Michelin fine dining. You can have it all in the DR.”
The airplane engines have obliterated space and time. We exit the plane in Santo Domingo and enter a different world, of sweet-smelling disinfectants and burning trash. I queue to buy pesos and Kath enters the bathroom to strap into her bikini top and Robert retrieves the rental car from some guy he found online. “Cheaper than Budget and doesn’t give a fuck.” Kath now in bikini top and me clutching pesos as we bypass the gold shirts and black collars of the lounging Dominican taxi drivers.
“Maybe we should have just called an Uber,” she says. I refrain from advising her she’s an idiot.
Now working our way north on the road to the Samaná Peninsula, older gentlemen walk the shoulders in collared shirts and straw hats, with big arms and strong shoulders, beneath streetlights festooned with portraits of a young president assuming the prime of his power. Robert removes wayfarers from his pocket and presses them to his face as he navigates the elevated highways. I lean out the window and gulp the humid, sweaty air. Miles of rows of defoliated palms. The thin brown trunks of the slashed and burned bush. A black snake smashed into flakes by a procession of automobiles traveling the toll road north from the city to the playa.
“Do you think we need to worry about cholera?” Kath asks.
“Of course we need to worry about cholera,” Robert replies.
We descend from the plateau into a lush valley. Robert guns the gas to overtake a truckload of black soldiers holding rifles across their laps, sweating in uniform, expressionless beneath camouflage caps. Kath covers her bare, pink freckled chest with a thin yellow scarf. We climb steep mountains that shield the plains from the sea, switchbacks and ruts, and Robert watches me in the mirror as I bounce across the back seat. We pass terraced hills, painted shacks fashioned from rebar and cinderblocks.
“It’s all the same,” Fleeger says.
“What is?” Kath asked.
“Every time we go to an island on vacation it’s always the same.”
“Tell that to him,” Kath says, pointing at an old man draying sacks of cement on a wooden cart.
Up ahead there is a wall of fire. Kath ceases her search for phone service. We round a curve and come upon a car in flames. Consuming the cabin and devouring the upholstery and blistering the paint. A boy wearing jean shorts wants to smash the driver’s window with a stick but it is no use. The car is too hot and the smoke too toxic. His thin forearm shields his face. I feel the heat on my cheeks as we drive past the burning car. There is a man buckled into the driver’s seat, still gripping the steering wheel and wearing sunglasses as his face tightens into a smile.
“Oh God,” Kath says, and Fleeger parks. He and I run to the car but there is nothing we can do, just like this boy in jean shorts standing next to us. People step forward from their cinderblock homes and watch, standing on small verandas atop concrete staircases. An old woman crosses herself and Robert and I stand watching the burning car. It is sublime to watch fire destroy something. Growing before you as it feeds its destructive appetite. We retreat as bomberos descend the hill hanging from the sides of a small firetruck. They pull the man’s body from the car, carbonized in the driving position, and douse his corpse with white foam.
Robert drives slower now as we descend the mountain. We hypothesize about the fire and Kath tells Robert he shouldn’t have stopped because he could have been killed and he insists he was never in any danger and she says it was all very disturbing and we agree that it was all very disturbing. And then it disappears as the ocean presents itself before us, an expanse of blue so open and clear you could see the curve of the earth. As if we inhabited a blue quartz planet.
Kath implores Robert to drive slower because there are no guardrails here. We enter the beach town and merge with scooters and fishmongers and mango sellers and I realize that I feel no different than when I boarded the plane. Fleeger turns into the resort driveway and a fat man with a large gold-plated belt buckle stops us, flanked by skinny security guards gripping shotguns with both hands. I look inside the weapons’ chambers. The guns are unloaded.
“Are they supposed to make us feel safe?” Kath asks as the fat guard waves us through.
I drop my bags on my room’s tile floor and pop a lorazepam and walk to the beach and lay on a chair. A young man in blue-and-white striped livery takes my order. I grip the Cuba Libre as the sun warms my stomach. There are more Americans at the bar, husbands and wives, Delaware blondes. Strong jaws and missing chunks of skin and fake breasts and FitFlops. Louis Vuitton luggage and tennis rackets and golf clubs. It would be best if we all avoid one another. I order my third drink and fall asleep as hummingbirds vibrate in the tree above me.
Fleeger and Kath sit at a nearby table drinking with lipless Americans and light-skinned Dominicans wearing Carrera sunglasses. Kath looks bored. The waiters place sandwiches and cocktails on their wobbly table and the Dominicans smoke Marlboros and someone offers one to Robert. He declines and leans forward with his elbows on the table rubbing his palms together and Kath runs toward me with a giggle, now wearing a rhinestone bikini, her new black cat tattoo wrapped in a red bandanna to protect the ink from UV rays. She grabs my arm, giggles, “Come on, Stephen,” and pulls me from my chair and I follow her into the sea, across the sand, proud of my dive as she leans backward into the small waves. She swims deeper, slickening the sea with SPF 75, and Fleeger turns his back on us. A massive back in a gold golf shirt pointing a finger in conversation. Kath’s breasts and shoulders are sunburnt. She leans against me. She is wet and taut.
“Why is he so boring?” Kath asks.
She slips her hands into my shorts and tickles me and I watch the men playing cards and someone lights Fleeger’s cigar. Nothing feels wrong about this at all as she rubs me inside my shorts, like she is washing clothes in a lake, and when she and I are done she swims ashore and lies on a towel on her stomach and lights a white cigarette. I surf a small wave into the sand. Enter my hotel room, shower, pull on jeans, feel the tan against the denim, and sit on the concrete veranda, watching Fleeger throw money on the table and Kath standing at the bar on one leg, sipping from a straw.
Something small and aviary darts past me. A hummingbird, metallic and green and red. It bangs into the bungalow window and falls to the ground. It flaps a wing and rolls on its side and flips and rolls again, discomfited by the cement. I watch its constant repositioning, moving in circles to hide beneath a solar-powered garden light. I return to my chair and light a cigarette. The bird shutters like a cicada, its beak jammed in a crack as it pants beneath my shadow.
I pick up a large stone and drop it on the bird. It is smashed but still pants. I drop the stone three more times. Now it is destroyed. Two open gashes to its tiny ribcage reveal strange, gray contents. The bird no longer metallic and green but gray. I dig a small hole in the mulch and place the bird in a shallow grave, entomb it beneath a rock to protect its corpse from scavengers.
12
I CROSSED THE ANCIENT cement canyon of the Delaware Water Gap and entered Pennsylvania. Floodlights hoisted above the interstate where the traffic narrowed through a harrowing construction zone. Exits to Perkins Family Restaurant, Cracker Barrel, Ramada Inn, Lackawanna College.
Atop the still Susquehanna River, a square-bowed tug pressed a flotilla of barges laden with gravel, sand, and road salt as a freight train rounded the
anthracite buckles of the Appalachian ridge hauling tanker cars plugged with Bakken Crude east to the refineries. Somehow evocative of World War II. A landscape disclosed by winter: bridges fashioned from stone, a disturbing number of fallen trees, a pipeline sluiced a track of dirt the length of a low cleared mountain, where it crested and continued north.
The traffic slowed and dispersed as I exited the interstate. Long truck beds laden with more steel pipes, little pink flags spinnakering at their mouths, forged in China, barged up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers from New Orleans, for fracking Pennsylvania gas country. Adverts along the roadway for endocrine surgery, discounted laparoscopic procedures, Cancer Centers of America, drug and alcohol rehab. The afternoon sky darkened above a snow-piled Walmart, half-boarded-up strip mall, and a facility that specialized in genetic testing and screening for cancer and paternity. Are you my daddy? A small quarry, a cement depot, the steep triangle roof steeple of a Methodist church with a roadside marquee exhorting passersby to keep Christ in Christmas. A wood-paneled minivan braked in front of me, Confederate flag and Hillary for Prison bumper stickers, someone’s joy machine, words across the tinted rear window fashioned from white shoe polish that read:
MY FRIEND DIED FROM DRINKING
I’M DYING FROM SMOKING
DON’T QUIT … JOIN US.
I drove into open space and descended collapsing hills covered with late-winter snow and wisps of winter wheat, verges pinkened by road salt, and remembered why I was here, the work purpose of this drive. Destination on the left in one-quarter mile. The modern courthouse constructed on open land, surrounded by ample parking, empty on all sides, a limp American flag at half-mast. I turned the steering wheel and parked.
No security at the courthouse. No hot pastrami on rye. No hustle. A telephone rang unanswered. The clerk’s counter empty as well. I pressed a soft, illuminated doorbell for service, spurring movement behind the shelves of folders where a short woman in a floral blouse hoisted herself from her chair and approached the counter. She was built like a lantern battery, with a gold cross imbedded above her red cabbage breasts and a haircut not too different from Fleeger’s, but with perhaps a bit more gel.
All the Beautiful People We Once Knew Page 12