Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories

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Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories Page 14

by Lucia Perillo


  Finally, after I backed out the key a smidgen and pressed my thumb to it, the tumblers settled and the door flopped back. Straightaway the scent of mildew slapped its glove across my face. Inside, I found the living room sparsely filled with furniture that must have come with the cabin: a card table with two rickety chairs and a dusty plaid sofa. The shotgun lay on a shelf above the sofa, too high for me to reach.

  In the room’s kitchen portion I opened a cupboard and found a variety of tins: asparagus, baked beans, cocktail franks. It was not the kind of food I pictured people eating after making love. When I tried, I saw a man and a woman sitting up in bed, spearing beans out of the can, its ragged lid like a miniature sawmill blade sticking up.

  Onward, I said, but for a long time did not move.

  Out the window, I could see the rain falling. And what tells you it is rain? It’s only an aberration of the light. You try to get a fix on a single drop, but as soon as you think you’ve captured something, it dissolves into the collective glisten. This is a game you can spend a good while playing.

  The bedroom door was a vinyl accordion, calamine-colored, screaking reluctantly along its track. Once through, I saw that Daniel had painted the paneling white, the cracks filled so that at first glance the walls appeared to be smooth. Such a funny desire, I realized then, to want smooth walls. That the smoothness makes a difference.

  And still, if you studied them for any time at all you could tell that they were only paneling in disguise, the plaster lumpy in the cracks. I wondered if this depressed Daniel, the small ways that his cabin could not help being tinged by sadness, no matter how many gallons of paint he encrusted it in. But then I thought: if you dwelled on sadness you’d never get even one foot out the door. What was sadness, after all, but the fibrous stuff out of which a life was woven? And what was happiness but a chemical in the brain?

  Strange what makes you giddy, how similar the feelings of giddiness and fear. When I launched myself, the chair skittered backward through the doorframe of this room too small for anything but a bed. For a split second I was airborne, and when I touched down the mattress swallowed me deeper into it than I expected. The quilt was old and moldy and mossy and limp, made from the underpelts of who knows how many birds — a dozen? a hundred? a thousand? — that obliterated whatever musk could have been left behind by a mere two human bodies when I climbed under it and drew it like a napkin over my head.

  Light trickled in through the stitches, but still it took some time for my eyes to adjust. When I looked through the quilt, it seemed as though I were seeing a mass of gray birds in the sky, so thick there were no gaps between their wings. And I was sailing under them, so close their feathers brushed my skin, my arms and legs spread-eagled, my body supported by narrowest of strings. Filaments, I guess you’d call them. Looped around my ankles, neck, and wrists.

  I can see that it is Daniel who flies in the lead, but I also know the point bird must keep switching before exhaustion sets in. Soon Lou the driver will take his turn, then Daphne the neurologist and Julie the carpenter. And Julie’s lover and her Lucy, flying like Wonder Woman as her braces fall to earth. And even the president of France is with us as we migrate through the clouds, trailing his mistresses like a kite’s tail of rags. Even Aldo Leopold is here with us as we fly with the tiny ortolans and his long-necked sand hill cranes.

  So it wasn’t rain on the roof I heard but the sound of my gray flock, each bird rustling against the others, vying to claim a scrap of skyscape for her own. Despite our scrambling we all flew on, wing to wing, lifted by the collective draft and borne along by each other’s wake as we massed in such great numbers that our feathers dimmed the sun.

  SLASH (1976)

  The slash burners burn the slash to prepare the mountains for replanting. All week they pile the mess of sticks and stumps that last year’s logging crews left scattered in the clearings. They build long snaking piles that stand taller than the heads of the tallest men, though here the hillsides are so steep that when they stand on the uphill edge of the pile the top is at their feet. Then they clear a swath of bare ground beside it with their Pulaskis, a tool that has an ax head married to a mattock. At the end of each week someone has to run alongside the pile to torch it with the drip can, which holds a mix of gas and diesel. There’s a wick in the spout that lights the drip as each one falls. Then the slash burner runs along the whole pile’s length while flames are born around his feet. His feet, her feet, as the case may now be.

  THE SLASH BURNERS have always been uniformly young men, though the time has come for them to add some women to their ranks. So this year three have joined the returning five of last year’s men, plus two new men who’ve come from back East. Women, men, it sounds strange to call them this, but what is the alternative? Most everyone is a college student, except for one ski bum and one surfer. It adds up to a crew of ten. The government likes a good round number.

  UNDERSTANDABLY, the women are nervous, wondering if they will measure up. They sleep in a trailer that’s been trucked into the clearing where the men’s bunkhouse has always stood, next to a power pole that is the endpoint of the wire scalloping across the mountains. What has crossed more than a few minds among them is what will happen this summer if any romance sparks. Will they subject their roommates to the creak and groaning of the bunk beds? Will they make the flimsy walls of the trailer sing? Or will they pitch their tents by the creek and let their noises mix with those of the forest, whose own limbs groan softly all night from beyond the edges of the clearing?

  THESE ARE by and large hypothetical questions, because among the women there is only one obvious erotic object. Throughout the day, blond strands detach from her braid, mix with sweat, and tangle with the hoops that she wears threaded through her ears. Another of the new women is short, her hair close-cropped to show the muscles in her neck. And then there’s Marie, who is knock-kneed and slight, the only slash burner to wear glasses. She’s also the one who jumps at the first snarl of the chain saw. Her brown hair she wears in a helmet like Joan of Arc’s, but unlike Joan she would not choose to go willingly into the flames. Yet she has chosen. Here she is.

  SLASH BURN. Field crew. Coastal mountains. Washington. Marie sent off the application for these words alone, never even inquiring how hard the work was, how much it would rain, how little it would pay. She had a vision of herself as someone in a depression-era photograph, instead of just another skinny cartoon kid from the suburbs. On the application they had posed many questions: could she lift fifty pounds, could she perform CPR. Of course, Marie had lied and answered all their questions yes.

  THOUGH THE SLASH BURNERS are newly arrived in camp, already the dampness has caused a strange fungus to grow between their toes. So far they’ve made and torched just one slash pile, the surfer, their crew boss, taking his turn first. He ran alongside the pile while the flames licked at his tall boots, into which he had tucked his green pants that were made from some unnatural substance that does not burn. Off the side of his one foot the hillside rose and disappeared into the still-standing trees. His other foot surfed on the edge of the slash, which was neither solid nor air but a mesh made of both. For him, the trick to running along a slash pile lay in staying fluid, never coming to rest anywhere with your full weight, not letting your knees lock while the drip can rains its baby flames.

  THE SLASH BURNERS all wear the same thing: hard hats, safety goggles, yellow Nomex shirts. But their bodies make these same things look different, the women’s hard hats perched awkwardly atop their heads. By the end of the day their faces are black. But their lips, like the rims of their eyes, are stark red, as if their first lips have burned away and these new ones have been made from the insides of their mouths. Their old scorched lips rolled outward, these new lips fixed in place with a hem stitch.

  SO A FEW WEEKS go by and they burn a few piles. All the guys from last year go first. Of course, everyone’s waiting to see one of the women take her turn, and the women fear that waiting until
last will prove that they’re afraid. So the week after the last of last year’s guys go, the short woman volunteers, not checking the look on anyone’s face. She is not fluid like the surfer when she charges straight ahead, a strategy in whose grips she should be doomed. But what saves her is speed: as soon as a leg touches down she lifts it again. She moves like a piston, her calves snapping down and retracting. When she gets to the end of the pile, the others move in to help her step down; then they realize that she doesn’t want their help. But they’ve lifted their arms toward her already, so they change the gesture into the upswing of a comradely slap, but suddenly they’re not sure how hard to hit her. They end up awkwardly tapping the back of her shirt. Good work. Tap. Nice job. Tap tap. They can feel the buckle on her bra, which leaves a small singe on the palms of their hands. A spot they need to cool by wagging in the air.

  AT NIGHT, in the trailer, the other women come to Marie with their stories. Perhaps because she is the quiet one. Turns out the short-haired woman once halfheartedly tried to slash her wrists, and the erotic object, the tall one with field-hockey thighs, had an abortion just before flying here from the famous Catholic college, Our Lady of the Midwest. Ever since, blood has leaked from her in intermittent drips. She does not think it is enough blood to worry about, but it scares her nonetheless.

  THE NEXT WEEK one of the new guys has to volunteer to torch. He has to, because the smallest woman has gone, and so, by laws that are somehow understood by everyone, one of the new guys has to go. The volunteer is a big guy whose body Marie takes one look at and knows is wrong for torching slash. It is too solid, too firmly anchored to the world. Worse, he takes as his example the short woman’s unhuman performance and charges down the pile. But he’s too big to get away with this, and before he’s gone halfway his left leg punches through some brush that overflows the slash pile’s edge. Then his foot twists and hooks beneath a branch so that his leg cannot be pulled straight up. Like a finger in a Chinese trap, the harder he pulls, the more fixed is his boot. The others paw his leg for useless moments until the crew boss elbows his way through. He’s the one who knows to push down on the foot to make it pop from under the branch that pins it. And from his example the others glean the most important lesson. Which is that sometimes the way out is farther in.

  MARIE’S BODY’S STORY is simpler than a slashed wrist, and yet it involves the same idea of transformation. Meaning: as soon as she found out she had the job she started running in a silver suit. The suit was made out of plastic, and the catalogue she bought it from had sold it with the promise that as the sweat flowed from her she’d be able to see the muscles rising below the surface of her skin. On her feet she wore a pair of blue tennis shoes with soles as thin as carpet slippers. She could not run more than a dozen steps before one of her ankles would roll into the dusty pebbles lining the road. Back in her dorm room, removing the suit, she looked at her thigh and pressed her thumb into its creases. At least it looked like there were creases, but maybe this was an illusion, maybe her muscles were just caused by the sunlight’s passage through the trees.

  ON THEIR BELTS they wore pouches containing the fire shelters they were to use should the fire ever escape from the pile and they find themselves beset by flames. In this scenario the slash burners were to grub out patches of bare ground big enough to fit their bodies before hunkering down, using the shelter like a tent, pinning it with their arms and legs while the fire rolled over their backs. Never mind that it did not seem possible there would be enough time for digging: during training week, they practiced baring the ground and throwing themselves into it. The shelters themselves were no more than foil tarps. Glorified tinfoil. Shake-and-bake bags, the guys from last year said. During the training they’d also watched a film about a crew from the Navajo reservation, a group of men who’d been pinned in their bags for thirty-six hours straight. Finally, another crew had come along and told them to get up. The fire had been out for hours. But the men did not believe this until they stuck their arms out from under their shelters and touched the blackened ground.

  THE SLASH BURNERS take turns using the chain saw to cut the larger branches. Marie can’t help thinking the chain is always going to fly off the bar and catch her in the mouth. Luckily, the other new guy is eager to prove himself with the saw, and only a few other men — and the short muscular woman — will haggle. But one day when this new guy is bucking up a gnarled fir stump he catches the tip of the saw on a knot. And the bar flips up, spins, nicks him in the meat of his chest. Then everyone’s swearing about either sex or God as blood spits out and dirty bandannas are pressed to the wound. The boss throws him in the truck and speeds toward town, and for the rest of the day the other slash burners trudge through their chores like pallbearers. Around nightfall the truck gets back and they all crowd around as it pulls in. No new guy: he has to stay in town for minor surgery. But he’s okay, the crew boss says, and a collective sigh inflates the clearing.

  THAT FRIDAY, after the slash pile is built, they stand for a good while watching it, almost as if they expect it to start moving like a worm or snake or other legless creature. The women have made a tactical error: with the new guy out for this week at least, it’s only the two of them who have not taken their turns lighting the slash. So they are last after all, and silently they curse themselves for being weak, for being wimps. One of the men volunteers in their stead, but both women insist, rather shrilly, No. Marie can tell the blond woman is dying to go: she wants to prove that she is more than just her beauty. She does not wear earrings anymore, because she’s been told they might scorch her neck. From the way she holds one arm curled in front of her, Marie can tell that, though she’s eager, whatever is damaged inside her holds her back. So Marie says, aloud, Oh, God help me, I’ll go, which is supposed to be more joke than plea for any serious kind of rescue, though she would in fact like to be rescued. Abruptly the rest of the crew claps and hoots, except for the blond woman, who shuts her eyelids in relief.

  NOW IT IS HAPPENING too quickly, though Marie can think of no way to slow it down: when she steps to the pile, the boss hands her the drip can as if he were a squire armoring his knight. All she can think of are the Navajos who’d lived at the center of the flame’s blue core, saying, We are alive, so we’ll just stay here for a while. As they told the story in the film of how the fire roared across their backs, the men broke into shivers. Or gagged on their words, sobbing in silence. Never before had Marie seen such big men in tears.

  MARIE CHECKS the bottom of her boots, killing time. She sets down the drip can so she can tie her bandanna over her mouth like an old-time thief. When she closes her eyes, she sees herself lying on her back as the fire passes over, her eyelids burning like a piece of film stuck in a projector. Her glasses exploding like windows in an abandoned burning shed. Then she opens her eyes, picks up the drip can again, and peers down into its pure dark. And that’s all the stalling she can do without embarrassing herself, so at last she touches her Zippo to the wick that sticks from the drip can’s spout. Rolls the flint wheel with her thumb. Snick. The wick doesn’t catch. Snick snick. And then it does.

  THRUSTING HER RIGHT ARM awkwardly backward at a diagonal to her body, she lets the drips fall and stands there for one split second while the branches start crackling like gunshots. No going back now, everything back of her is burning. And the pile in front of her looks like a tunnel whose way out is farther in. She can hear the flames rising, the green wood moaning, while the slash burners stare at her with doubt and hope scribbled in the twisting shapes of their red lips—

  AND AT LAST Marie is left with no choice but to run.

  LATE IN THE REALM

  On Wednesday afternoons, the Daughters of the British Empire hold their High Tea at Doctor Doodle’s Donut Den, whose regular business hours run from five a.m. till noon. They throw some chintz over the tables and stick a silk flower in a jelly jar on top of each, a transformation that somehow lets them feel okay about charging big bucks for sandwiches the
size of bottle caps. The proceeds they send back to England, where my mother is originally from, back to some charity for war orphans. I don’t know why it took so long to dawn on me which war we were talking about.

  “Just because they’re elderly doesn’t mean they don’t still need our help,” my mother huffs. She’s got the long skirts, the dust cap, she’s even got the rolling pin. So it’s pretty much a knee-jerk reflex when I put up my hands to fend her off: “Hey, just so they didn’t still have their hearts set on adoption is all,” I say.

  These Wednesdays always throw a segment of Doctor Doodle’s regular clientele for a loop, namely the rough trade who have a hard time keeping their a.m. and their p.m. straight. They come stumbling in from their caves hollowed out in the blackberry brambles by the bay; they come because Doctor Doodle’s is the only place in town that still offers bottomless cups of coffee. “I can’t turn my back on the people,” says Doctor Doodle, and I say, “That’s why you’ll never be a rich man, Doctor D”—this was before I knew about the high-quality weed that he had growing somewhere in the state forest.

  But don’t go blabbing about this, because the news would break the Daughters of the British Empire’s hearts. Or the Doobies, as I like to call them, though my mother has asked me to desist. Doctor D they call “a good boy” whenever they’re called on to speak charitably of him, and they have to speak charitably since he’s letting them use his shop for free.

  Because she lives with Mum, my sister Louisa gets drafted for High Tea duty, though Louisa doesn’t go in for any of that Upstairs, Downstairs dress-up crap. For Louisa, High Tea is strictly an occasion for navy blue skimmers and her Home Shopping Network earrings, a pair of which she’s got to match each one of her good dresses. I think she figures that being retarded is enough of a strain: she doesn’t want to have to add worrying about looking weird on top.

 

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