by John McManus
Ignore, pretend, thought Victor. In a sort of trance, he walked over. There in a window that rose to the level of his neck, backward on a couch, knelt a curly-haired teenager bloated to nearly three hundred pounds.
For a moment Victor feared there’d been yet another spirit trade, until the pale, obese boy said, “I need to discuss Albert.”
“You’re supposed to be in high school,” Victor said, hoping none of his friends would drive past and see.
“I’m in the equivalent of the twentieth grade. It’s Albert who’s unwell.”
“Come again?” said Victor, although he’d heard clearly.
“He wonders why you abandoned him.”
When Victor didn’t answer, Sievert carried on. “He sends you love letters that our mom burns. He carved your name in his bed frame and everyone saw.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’ve never asked for his address.”
“What’s his address?”
“If you don’t love Albert back, write it. I’ll send it.”
Through the window Sievert offered a sheet of paper, the sight of whose untidy torn chads made Victor yearn for a drink. “Why would you want his heart broken?” he asked.
“If he falls out of love, he won’t go to hell.”
“Okay,” said Victor, taking the paper along with a pen. Against the house siding he wrote, Dear Albert. About to tell a vague lie like I miss you, he wondered what kind of retard carved into a bed that he loved a boy.
He glanced behind him at his own house and imagined Sievert peering through a telescope, jacking off and eating hot dogs.
Fat Sievert was the one who loved him.
Now Victor knew exactly what to do. I have a whole new life, he wrote on the paper. We were immature kids. You called yourself a devil worshiper, which is stupid. I don’t miss you. I never loved you. —Victor (Micah)
“Here,” he said, handing it back.
“Thanks,” said Sievert. “Bye.”
Retreating across the Alfssons’ yard, Victor doubted his reasoning. If Sievert really liked him, he’d have kept him lingering longer by the window. “Wait!” he would be calling. And what if he mailed the letter? Walking faster, Victor grew light-headed the way he used to. The idea of a lovelorn Albert reading his hateful words might have sent him regressing into a panic if not for the acceptance packet he discovered in the mailbox from Tulane.
Disrobing in his bedroom before the open blinds, Victor recalled his idea that Sievert was a hot name. It wasn’t. Nor was it a fat name. Names, like most things, were far more complicated than that. He’d been correct to deem the world half beautiful and half ugly, but he’d been wrong to seek a clear dividing line. The correct line split past from future. His task as a curator of aesthetic pleasure was to locate ugliness in the future, and sequester it in the past. He’d done as much with Albert and Sievert, and now he would do it with Mississippi, too. To tidy the world in this way gratified him. Buzzing with expectancy, he knelt. As he touched himself in sight of the Alfssons’ family room, he allowed himself one last image of his old friend in his defaced cot at military school, weeping poignantly for Victor, unaware of falling into the past.
Victor’s cocaine habit began the night he arrived in New Orleans, when he asked an upperclassman in the dorm to point him toward the gay bars. A cab took him to Bourbon Street, where a spot called Oz swarmed with celebrants of something called Southern Decadence. Victor wound up on a balcony among men thrice his age. “Looks like trouble,” said one. “Truckload,” said another, bringing Victor’s rigid childhood mind clamping down on him. But before he could explore his panic’s source, someone bought him a whiskey. His need to demand that these drunks be annihilated along with their gaudy city vanished like any flash of déjà vu. Where had he been all their lives? Did he want to come into the bathroom? Yes, he replied, and yes to all that was asked on every sultry evening from there on out. The flirters would muss his hair, smiling at their sly prowess as if he might ever tell anyone no. He didn’t.
Years passed. He liked how New Orleans had so few unsightly buildings. The ones that did exist never had him gasping for breath. He considered structural design often enough that he wound up majoring in it, then entering the master’s program. He thought too about the design of his face. Men were asking if he’d considered modeling. No, he replied coyly each time, as if he had no idea of his effect on people. He’d been drinking enough to rarely eat. Was it conceited to believe the svelte angles of his jaw derived from his state of mind? With his clutter of tics, he’d been an ugly child. These days he barely had to slouch against a bar before someone touched him.
During hangovers a memory would surface of his writing I don’t miss you, I never loved you, and he would bury his face in his hands. Mostly, though, he was drunk and high.
In his second year of grad school he never got around to applying for internships, but it didn’t matter, a partner at a prestigious firm fell for him at a bar. Victor had been staring at this silver fox’s wing-tipped shoes when the man said, “Salvatore Ferragamo.”
At first that seemed to be Gary’s name. “I’m Victor,” he replied.
“You’re the sort of boy folks like to take advantage of.”
“What do you mean?” he said, sensing already the pheromones Gary was exuding as he fell in love. The capture was as easy as that. A string of endless hot days followed, during which Victor seemed to have stumbled into his own dream-life. Gary lived in a mansion full of mirrors and varnished wood, where old-guard fetishists whiled away their dissolute days in high abandon. Bolted to the bedroom wall was a barred-top pup cage Gary would padlock him inside of. I’ve arrived, thought Victor, soaking naked with the guys in a backyard pool, nursing hangovers with mint juleps. Reasoning that Gary would give him a job whenever he asked, he felt no urgency to start work. Soon a dozen coke dealers knew his name, which filled him with well-being akin to professional pride. He would emerge from blackouts inhaling powder off Gary’s house key. “Boys have committed suicide over me,” he told the barflies who had become his friends. “I was fourteen when I got one sent off to military school.”
“You must have been a hot fourteen-year-old.”
“Albert thought so,” he said with a curt laugh. “When I arrived to bust him out, he’d already slit his wrists.”
“Did you love him?”
“I lived to see another day.”
Chuckling again, Victor wondered if his letter might really have pushed Albert over the edge. Later, alone, he searched online for his old friend. None of the Albert Alfssons he found was the one he’d known. A quest for Sievert led him to a blog about the complexity of God, with no photograph or mention of family. If he phoned home to Mississippi, his mother would inquire about his work. He’d lie and tell her he had a job. Best not to call again until it became true.
One evening in January Gary kicked him out. In a near blackout Victor walked to the antique shop run by a man who winked at him in bars. His name was Ernest, and he moonlighted as a fashion photographer. “Of course I want you,” he said, so Victor spent the next days modeling for Ernest under vaulted ceilings replete with metal leaf. Ernest’s lurid stories of the merchant marine took place in every port from Manila to Marseilles. Victor listened carefully, planning to retell them as if they were his. For months, whenever he finished a bottle of scotch, Ernest would replace it. One humid day he overheard Ernest telling the phone, “Keep your hands off him if you know what’s good,” so it came as a surprise when he too banished Victor, kicking him out into the Marigny. But there were plenty of antique shops a boy like Victor could choose from.
Victor lived with James. He lived with Phillip. He lived with Ian and Timothy and Rufus. For short stints he worked as a waiter at high-end restaurants, intending to begin real work when he felt like it. He lived with Leroy, Bruce, Sebastian. Two bars banned him in one night. He developed prediabetes. He got his own apartment. The more fun he had, the more he blacked out. His cheeks g
rew gin blossoms. Hours after his aunt phoned to say his mother had died of ovarian cancer, he awoke without memory of that conversation. Sure, a foreboding anxiety gripped him, but that was typical of the hours prior to a first drink. He went to the Eagle and got wasted on hurricanes. In the darkroom he met a Cajun named Thierry and rode with him out to a fishing cabin on Bayou Dupont. That was where he smoked crystal for the first time. Time increased to lightning speed under phase after phase of the moon. At some point, convinced the pelicans floating on black water were spy cameras, he left for home, and crossed into the Sprint service area to discover the voicemails.
Soaking in a hot bath, Victor steeled himself to explain that he’d been away on an architectural commission in Central America. He was already so sober that he could hardly imagine speaking at all, let alone telling and then maintaining a complex lie. He’d missed the funeral anyway. Why bother, he thought as the water grew cold. He pulled up his aunt in his phone contacts and deleted the number. Then he collected the liquor bottles from every room and poured them out in the sink.
Late on that first sober day the liquid in him began trickling into his fingers to evaporate into the stale air. That was why his hands quivered the way they did. Soon his head throbbed, too, because his brain was bouncing around in the newly desiccated space. By sunset he was hallucinating that his couch was an exam table. On a nearby table lay his cancerous mother, awaiting news of who would live and who would not. He clenched his fists and kicked and turned, the ringing phone pitching him into further visions where Mary hung shackled to that wall he’d dreamt. Her presence there rendered the place horrific, a torture chamber, which he supposed it had always been. Desperate to be helped, he gripped the phone, but everyone fell into three untenable categories: alcoholics, relatives, and ex-boyfriends. He powered it off and watched a spy movie. After that one, another. During a commercial for beds, his shakes gave way to something worse.
“Tchoupitoulas Mattress Madness at Chuck’s Tchoupitoulas Mattress at 5300 Tchoupitoulas,” shouted the TV.
Hearing that garishly unparallel name repeated, Victor thought he might be suffering a heart attack. His breath tightened. It was as if he hadn’t outgrown his attacks at all. Then, as the man bellowed it all again, the ghastly, elegant truth struck Victor. Although he’d lived half his life near Tchoupitoulas Street, he’d always been drunk.
Half in nightmare already, he barely noticed his brain shutting off. He passed out cold. The next morning he awoke into a period he would think back on as a new, outsized childhood. Looking around at the squalor of his basement apartment he saw cobwebs in the corners, piles of garments, cluttered trash. He couldn’t take it; he shut his eyes again until he was too parched to lie still. He stood up to find water. Landing on his right foot, he stopped, sat down, rose again on the other side.
“Just a test,” he said aloud, as if his mother now spectated in heaven. He made a point of arriving on his right foot at the sink.
He gulped water and promised himself to clean the apartment, but as he scanned the room he saw there would be no way to scrub out its sheer lopsidedness. There were low ceilings, half-windows up to the street. If he was to remain sober, he would just have to suffer through it until he found a salaried job. How to do that, though, when everywhere he turned there was only ugliness: the phlegmy French names of the avenues and neighborhoods, his unclassically proportioned apartment, the Uptown bars where whole years had dwindled away, the men who lived in them, the names of liquors—Dewar’s—the name Gary, Gary’s white beard, Ernest’s gray one, the name Ernest, all of it so suddenly, viscerally nasty that he dreamt of a lobotomy just to soothe himself into a breath?
The prospect of AA meetings, where drunks would speak their names aloud and he would say, “I’m Victor,” gave Victor such apoplexy that he cut an index card to wallet size and listed
Blackouts
Drunk nose
Prediabetic
Fat
Unemployed
Barebacking
Reflux
Credit cards
Drunk driving
Shat pants
along with three more columns of dire reminders. Whenever he felt like drinking he took the card out and read it. After a week its edges were worn and he’d spoken only to store clerks. He wondered if he could have befriended anyone, ever, without liquor’s aid. Within minutes of his first drink, he’d made a first friend, and all other friends had derived from that one. There’d been a domino effect, he was thinking when a FedEx man arrived with an envelope from a Yazoo City probate court.
Of course, thought Victor as he tore into it: he was his mother’s next of kin. He skimmed through reams of papers. He would inherit the house, sell it, live off the income. Everything happens for a reason, he was telling himself when he read the executor’s name.
Now he fell into a vision. On the body of a strapping teenage Albert Alfsson, Victor saw a rheumy-eyed and hoary head. Floating near it was a disembodied hand, slapping him. He let the papers fall, and sat down. It wasn’t a pleasant vision. The quality of his sight was deteriorating, along with the fantasy itself. The old parts aged, the youthful ones regressed. Soon he beheld the aged infant Albert in the air before him. He didn’t faint, though. He sat still until his legs went to sleep. Finally he collected himself enough to stand up. He collected the papers, too, threw them into the trash, carried the trash out, came in again, locked the door, lowered the blinds, and lay down.
Law & Order proved most useful: twenty seasons, five hundred hours. It had mostly neutral names, disyllabic, Scots-Irish or English. Aside from his walks to the corner for DVDs and cigarettes, he stayed home ordering delivery. He watched the spin-offs, gaining weight. He watched The West Wing, Deadwood, 24. When characters spoke words he didn’t like, or called each other by ugly names, his breath caught, but that was better than not watching. During Lost he struggled to button his jeans. By Six Feet Under he’d stopped wearing them except on cigarette runs. On the day his Visa card quit working, he was cinching his pant waist up with his left hand.
“Got another card?” the clerk asked Victor, but his wallet was in his left pocket. His right hand held the pen, ready to sign a receipt.
“Maybe,” he said, leaning against the counter. Using the pressure as a sort of belt to free up his hands, he retrieved the Discover card. It felt like a divine gift for that one to go through. He looped the grocery bag around the pants hand and headed home, smoking with his right hand until he saw a ruddy-faced blond man by his apartment stairs. The adrenaline of recognizing Albert Alfsson felt like a hit of pure cocaine.
“You’re home,” Albert said. He seemed younger than he should be.
Clutching his waist, Victor approached. “Who are you?” he said, falsely.
“You seem kind of peaked.”
“I’ve got food poisoning,” said Victor, going for the stairs.
Albert followed him in as he hurried to the couch. “It’s been hard to find you.”
“I’ve been designing a museum.”
“Let’s get down to brass tacks. Your mom didn’t have many folks caring for her. I was there a lot. I read her rites.”
Victor sat on the couch. He put his head in his hands. Albert’s words were fading in and out, and it was hard to follow his drift, at least until he held up a paper.
I have a whole new life, it read in Victor’s loopy scrawl. We were immature kids. I don’t miss you. I never loved you.
“This is a copy. My lawyer has the original.”
“I thought Sievert was lying,” said Victor, his skin clammy.
“Sievert’s a Christian.”
“If you kept it—”
“Your mom kept it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I needed Mary to explain why you’d said those things.”
“Take the house,” said Victor at once, as if that would cancel out a decade of his behavior. “It’s yours.” His fingers were tingling again. He wished Albert wo
uld hit him, slap him silly. Those fucked-up fantasies, the hook-nosed villain: his mind had known it should be punished for what he’d do. It had sought preemptive redemption, Victor thought, as his body hummed with a nearly electric vibration and silvery specks blotted out Albert’s handsome face.
He awoke to Albert pressing a compress to his forehead. He’d been laid out on the couch. All these years later, blond fuzz still dotted Albert’s sinewy arms.
“Are you awake?”
“Please go away,” Victor said.
“Do you want to hear her answer?”
Shaking his head, he could see movement in the far left of his vision. He had left the TV on mute. It was showing a close-up of the stricken face of Ruth Fisher, the brittle mother in Six Feet Under. Albert would leave, he thought with a thrill, and he could rewind the DVD and watch what was happening to Ruth.
“She said, ‘A pediatric psychiatrist warned us he’d be this way.’”
Now he sat upright. “The house is yours,” he said again. Albert could raise boys of his own in it, teach them the Bible, slap them. Anything to shut him up.
“She knew it’s not your fault. She pitied you. She used to drive down here and watch you from across the bar.”
“Albert, stop talking.”
“I want to sell it on your behalf, set up a trust. Do you know what that means? A trust like Sievert’s?”
That was when a wild idea grew in Victor.
“You don’t even have a twin,” he said. “You and Sievert are the same.” Sievert had liked Victor because Sievert was Albert. Sievert had posted that letter to himself, locked himself indoors, gained weight and lost it.
“Oh, come on. Don’t be stupid, Micah. You watched us play ball. We saw you every day, sticking those pliers up your nose.”