Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories

by Lucia Perillo

  “It’s not just the wedding. Forget the wedding.” Tim took the glass that Ivan handed him, full up to the rim. “I should be drinking this to celebrate something momentous, an event worth remembering for the rest of my life. Not, you know—” He waved at the apartment, the TV:

  “This.”

  “Hey, what’s wrong with this?” Ivan blustered, sucking the sloppage from his hand. “Who’s to say that thirty years from now you’re not going to think back on this afternoon and say, Boy, one thing I will always remember is that afternoon when my old buddy Ivan and I sat around watching the Blackhawks whomp the living bejesus out of the Pittsburgh Penguins. And we drank this bottle of the greatest hooch I’ve ever tasted.”

  “Yeah, right,” Tim said with a rueful laugh. “The Pittsburgh fucking Penguins.”

  “And you know what?” Tim continued as his rue gathered steam, “I’ll never be able to go back and see the Blackhawks play in the old Chicago stadium. Because I’ve got no one in Chicago now. And because they tore it down to build a new stadium just so the yuppies would have someplace to get their cappuccino—”

  “Women like cappuccino,” Ivan interjected. “The new thing is, you’re supposed to bring a woman to the game—”

  “Where they don’t even serve the hot dogs with tomato wedges lined on top.”

  This led to a patch of silence, after which Ivan suggested absently, “You could always buy some tomatoes and cut them up and carry them around in a baggie in your pocket.” But he didn’t seem to be thinking about hot dogs anymore: he had taken the small box down from the bookshelf.

  “What’s a cremain?”

  “Sam. Sam’s a cremain.” The little men on TV were starting to make Tim dizzy with their spinning. “The old Chicago stadium is a cremain.”

  Ivan unscrewed the cap and stuck his ear by the hole. “I think I hear Sam’s soul crying out for freedom.”

  “The only thing Sam’s soul is crying out for is that whiskey,” Tim said. “Sam went to his grave wondering if his son was a homo or just a selfish little prick.”

  Ivan carried Sam’s ashes into the kitchenette, where he splashed some whiskey in the box and stirred the ashes to a paste. “I’ll show you momentous, buddy boy,” he said. “Right after we kill this bottle we’re taking your old man to the Giff.”

  AROUND THE TIME that Tim went back to school to get a teaching certificate in history, Ivan had angled with an opposite tack in regards to what he called “the straight world”: he’d moved to a cabin near White Pass where he would read the Tao Te Ching and live off the grid. But before the first snowfall, Ivan shot himself with his crossbow while trying to take down an elk, and the arrow so mangled the architecture of his leg that he would walk forever with a limp. Shit happens, happened, will happen: on the surface at least, Ivan let this conjugation roll off him with a shrug. Now he spent his days at the public library, where he wielded a light wand at the circulation desk, the computer going Blip! Blip! Blip! He said what he liked about this environment was its preponderance of women.

  “. . and they walk up to you holding their books like a shelf for their breasts. Presented to you on a tray like the heads of St. John the two-headed Baptist.”

  This Ivan was saying as they hummed along the I-5 in his pickup, Sam’s ashes on the seat between them, the sky souping up and the evergreens crowding in. Ivan had bought another bottle of whiskey to prove he wasn’t just a mooch, an inferior bottle that Tim wasn’t sure was worth reaching into another man’s crotch to dislodge. Ivan was talking about a girl he’d been helping at the library, a student at the community college who was trying to go premed.

  “And get this, I’m showing her how to search schizomycosis on the computer and in the middle of it she looks at her watch and says, ‘Oops, I’m late for work, I gotta fly,’ and when I ask where she works she tells me she’s a dancer. So I go, ‘You mean like Martha Graham?’ only she doesn’t know who Martha Graham is since she’s Vietnamese, see, so I stand on my toes and she laughs and shakes her head and then — get this — starts wiggling around pretending that she’s going to undo her shirt.”

  The truth was that Ivan had not dated anybody since his divorce some years back. Come to think of it, Tim had not dated anyone since Ivan’s divorce either, and this thought troubled him — that Ivan’s life might be exerting some kind of astral tug on his own.

  “So what’s she like?”

  “Who?”

  “The shickomytosis girl.”

  Ivan thought about it for a moment, driving along with his eyes closed. “Dang Kim Nhung is her name. She wants me to come see her dance.”

  “Don’t do it,” Tim said. “Remember what happened the last time.”

  “This is different — she invited me.”

  “Yeah, sure, they always invite you; they want to prove they’re not ashamed. But how could anyone not be ashamed about having to hump a pole?”

  Having said this, though, Tim wondered if he was underestimating women’s shame threshold. At the few strip clubs he’d been in, the women looked terrifyingly smug, like his stepmother, if she were young again and wearing nothing but a cowboy hat.

  To dispel the image, Tim tried wrestling the bottle away from where Ivan had it pinned against the wheel, causing the truck to zigzag down the road. Ivan would not let go until he took another swig and hollered out the window, “To the Giff!” Words that were swallowed by the whooshing, drooping, and not-quite-but-nearly night.

  SIX YEARS AGO, Sam had finally made it out to visit Tim in Washington, taking the Amtrak from Chicago. He got to town on a Monday and Tim had worked at school all week; his father passed the time by going for walks around the neighborhood. “Well, I don’t get it,” Sam concluded. “I thought there were supposed to be all these great big goddamn trees. If all’s I wanted to see was a bunch of candyass little bushes, I could of just as well stayed home.”

  When the weekend came, Tim had taken his father out to the forest, and Ivan came too, as a sort of color commentator while Tim called the play-by-play: That’s a silver fir, that’s an alder, bigleaf maple, western red cedar. But Sam remained unimpressed. The spring day that was fair in town had been, in the mountains, cold and wet. Sam drank coffee from a cardboard cup and glared out the windshield. “So there’s trees,” he conceded. “But I don’t see one big enough to drive through yet.”

  Tim planned to stop at a trailhead to show his father some of their old handiwork. He and Ivan had been on the trail crew, which besides clearing windfall mostly meant laying water bars: quarter rounds of cedar that channeled runoff from the trail. There was an art to wedging the logs so tightly that even a horse couldn’t kick them out, and Tim wanted to see if their bars from a dozen years ago were still in place. In this one spot he was thinking of, Sam would have to walk just a hundred yards from the parking lot. Ivan had worn a long black oilskin cloak under which his bad leg swung as he leaned on his cane — after his accident, he’d exchanged his mountain gear for the wardrobe of an Australian vampire.

  When they reached the trailhead, Tim could have broken out in tears: the bars had held, at least these bars looked old enough to be the ones that he and Ivan had set — he even talked himself into a déjà vu about their individual knots and nicks. A tricky spot, where the trail plunged downhill. Over the years the logs had risen from the ground, and soon they’d have to be replaced so hikers wouldn’t stumble. And then the woods would bear no trace of him at all.

  Sam contemplated the trail for a minute before his gaze swung back to Tim: “All those years, this is what you boys did?”

  When they nodded, Sam shook his head. “Seems like a shame, to leave a perfectly good piece of fence post rotting in the ground like that.”

  TIM MUST HAVE dozed off; when he woke the truck wasn’t moving and the sleeves of his jean jacket were being strafed by colored light. Ivan had pulled off at the Skookum Club, a blinking nest of wires thirty miles east, in the foothills. Its sign stood on a tall metal stalk: a neon f
ir tree with breasts.

  “Ivan, no,” Tim groaned. “Let’s not subject ourselves to this again.” They’d stopped here maybe a half dozen times before, once for each friend who got married, which in the course of things meant fewer visits as the years passed. Last time, as they were leaving, Ivan stopped to help one of the girls jump-start her car, and they’d driven off as she watched her engine box go up in flames.

  “We’ll just stay a minute, honest,” Ivan assured him. “Let Sam catch a little pooty before we set him free.”

  No time to say that Sam had caught enough pooty back in the days when he could better appreciate it, because already Ivan was out and staggering toward the door. In his haste he’d kicked the bottle out of the truck and sent it rolling toward the dumpster. But Ivan didn’t notice, focused as he was on the club’s front door, where the bouncer made him open the box.

  “Looks like mud, stinks like whiskey,” the bouncer was saying when Tim caught up. “Okay, I’m stumped.”

  The bouncer was about to dip his fingers into the box for a taste when his flashlight struck the label, which caused his hand to snap back as if it had been burnt.

  “What kind of kink is this?” he asked.

  It was Ivan who looked down at his rubber sneaker tips before he answered:

  “Grief.”

  INSIDE, THE BASS NOTES throbbed at a frequency that interfered with the swallowing mechanism in Tim’s throat. First thing, he looked at the flimsy stage to see if the woman dancing was indeed wearing a cowboy hat. No, he saw with some relief, but she was wearing cowboy boots, white cowboy boots that she seemed afraid of stamping down too hard lest the entire stage collapse. Everyone looked as if they were packed in heavy syrup: a few girls traipsed around in their underwear, their trays bearing cups of coffee and glasses of soda pop. When Ivan finally recognized the girl from the library, planted like a lily in a forest of stumps, he shot up his hand and hailed her: “Dang Kim Nhung!” But her only response was to curl her lip and turn her back.

  Tim saw that her buttocks were flat like a boy’s, separated into their precincts by a purple satin ribbon. When he realized that she was dancing for two lummoxes who had been in his class a few years back, he tried to press himself flat against the darkness like a shadow. Still one of them cried out: “Yo Mister Fitz!”

  The walls echoed: Mister Fitz Yo Mister Fitz Yo Mister Fitz. . Or could have been a dozen of his students.

  What she did was barely a ripple, waves traveling up her arms and then back down. Meanwhile, methodically, she touched various parts of her body, but not the parts he expected: instead her hip, her shoulder, an elbow, her knee. As far as Tim could tell, her legs were necessary only to hold up her torso within viewing range.

  When the song was over, she approached them testily, grinding her gum between her teeth. “Library Man,” she said, adding in a voice that would have been underneath her breath except that she was shouting to be heard above the din, “You have to call me Tiffany. What are you doing?”

  “We were in the neighborhood,” Ivan shouted back. “I was telling my friend about you.”

  She gave a shrug in Tim’s direction before setting one hand on her hip. “Can’t talk now; I’m working. But I could get you guys a soda. You still have to pay five dollars for them, though. Each.” So they ordered two Sprites and watched the stage, where the girl in the boots took two steps in each direction, then agitated her hips. Stomp stomp hips. Stomp stomp hips.

  “We came to see you naked,” Ivan blurted cheerfully, when Dang Kim Nhung Tiffany returned with their drinks. By mashing her small breasts up toward her throat, her purple bra was able to manufacture the facsimile of a cleavage. To keep from staring at it, Tim watched the stage where the girl was wrapping up. Stomp stomp hips one last time, and then she curtsied.

  Dang Kim Tiffany shook her head. “They don’t want to put too much Asian onstage: I just do tables. And sorry, Library Man, but I think dancing for you would do a number on my head.”

  There were no stairs for the girl onstage to get down, so she had to inch off the edge while wriggling her white boots in the air. They had fringe that reminded Tim of the undercarriage of a carpet sweeper. Meanwhile, Ivan yodeled happily, But that’s the beauty!

  “You wouldn’t be dancing for us, it’d be for his dad.”

  She glanced around the room then, as if expecting to find him abandoned in a corner with a portable oxygen tank, until Ivan shook the box to make the clod thump.

  “He’s just ashes, see? Nothing you have to worry about.”

  Dang Kim Tiffany did not believe it until he opened the box and let her look, and even then she would not dance until Ivan offered her the contents of his wallet: twenty-six dollars. Plus his change. The bills she stuffed into her bra with the coins wrapped inside them. “Okay, Library Man,” she said. “Just to show you I’m not sentimental about the dead.”

  She took the box and set it on a chair, and when the next song rose up, her wavery-arm dancing began, and again she touched strange places on her body. Tim could see, in profile, the restless movement of her lips, could hear her reciting the names of the bones: tibia, fibula, femur. “Cat Scratch Fever” was the name of the song the random universe had delivered up, and Tim watched the box shimmy along with the rumble of the bass, as if there were something live inside it.

  When the song ended, she turned and handed the box to Tim. “Anatomy test tomorrow,” she explained.

  “You must have taken one of those time-management courses.”

  “You be surprised how much work I get done here. And practical experience: the other girls always want me to palpate their breasts.” This all she shouted through the megaphone of her hands: “That means I feel them up! Everybody here is always freaking out that they got lumps! They bought themselves boobs, and now those bought-boobs are leaking! The bigger the boob, the more poison oozing out!”

  A WATER BAR was an insignificant thing, Tim realized, but its worth was easily measured: you kicked it and right away you knew whether or not it would hold. Water bars may have been at the low end of technology’s food chain, sure, but still they were responsible for nothing less than the shape of the landscape, for the sides of mountains staying up, for one’s way becoming or not becoming impassable with mud.

  He’d wanted his father to understand this, but Sam hadn’t, or Tim hadn’t tried hard enough to explain. He was hoping that explanations somehow wouldn’t have been necessary, that Sam would look down at the water bar and suddenly understand: how Archimedes was wrong about the size of the lever you’d need to hold up the world, how even a two-foot length of cedar could, with the proper placement, perform this feat. And then Sam would have looked up and seen the mountains rumpling and rerumpling for mile after mile, and he would have understood why his son had left Chicago.

  But instead, to get out of the rain they’d gone to a diner in Packwood, where all Tim could think about was how his young mean father was now old and mean and weak, and it was Ivan who’d finally perked up with an idea over dessert.

  “I know! I know!” he said as he tucked into his second slice of pie. “We’ll take your father to see the Patriarch.” The Patriarch was a tree that could be found on old maps, named by the forest’s first explorers, an ancient douglas fir located on an unmarked deer path that took off from behind the trailers where they’d lived. When their work for the day was done, they used to sit between the roots of the tree with their backs propped against its trunk, drinking beer while the raindrops rustled in the branches. Silently, they would pay homage to their muscles flecked with dander from the woods. They would press the cold cans against their bruises.

  This was where they were headed now, with Dang Kim Tiffany wedged between them in the truck. Hers was a snap decision, she said, brought about by the catalyst of Sam: once she’d danced for him, she felt compelled to see the ceremony’s end. And she’d never been to the mountains, despite having lived in the Northwest since she was six, her own father being afrai
d of them because he said they were the home of ghosts. The storms were ghosts wagging their beards at the children who’d forgotten them too soon. And the gullies were where they reached over the mountains and scratched with their long fingernails. Her voice reminded Tim of a little bell being rung by an impatient woman.

  “Every weekend he made us dig for butter clams. That’s the story of my life: clams and more clams.” She and her mother built driftwood fires and cooked lunch right on the beach. Dang Kim Tiffany was wearing Ivan’s cloak because the boss had taken her pack, which contained her clothes, hostage. “No leaving with customers,” he barked from behind the bar where he dispensed the soda pop. “Plus you got three more hours until you’re off.”

  He’d seized one shoulder strap of the pack while she pulled on the other, and — after they’d stood for a while at a standoff — she let go and sent him crashing into the glasses stacked in plastic racks.

  “Who needs it?” she said as she crossed the parking lot in her purple underwear, in her silver high-heeled sandals that were now heaped on the floor of the truck like a pile of chicken bones.

  Ivan asked, “So do we still have to call you Tiffany?”

  Her earrings jingled when she shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, Library Man. When I finish med school everyone will have to call me Dr. Dang.”

  They made the rest of the trip in silence, passing the reservoirs that stretched so ominously black between the foothills and the Pacific Crest. Dang Kim Tiffany fell asleep and snored quietly while drooling onto Tim’s jean jacket, which he was surprised to find had more of an erotic effect on him than her dancing; it had been a long time since he’d found himself on the receiving end of a female slump. She breathed through her mouth, which smelled like hay, her nostrils small, her hair perfumed by smoke. When they finally stopped, he could hardly bring himself to wake her. Groggily, she sat up and said, “This is not what I expected of the wilderness.”

  They’d pulled off at a roadside clearing littered with paper diapers balled up in the brush. Their trailer was gone, and the concrete pad that it had sat on was now cracked and spiked with thistles. The tall firs that ringed the camp had been logged off, their stumps overrun with blackberry vines.