Disasters in the First World

by Olivia Clare

  “The more gerbil pellets this guy eats,” Blake was saying, “the more points he gets. Some are worth more than others, that’s how the mechanism of the game works. There’s an element of uncertainty. We can’t know what each is worth, or even if some will hurt us.”

  “Gerbil food hurts gerbils?” said Leslie.

  “We don’t know, that’s what makes us play the game.”

  “Oh-kaay.”

  “Oh-kaay,” Blake repeated.

  Just from her face, I knew Blake’s status at his junior high school, the same one I’d gone to years earlier. He was not disliked, nor was he thought interesting or intelligent, as I thought of him, but he was simply ignored, avoided. Leslie tapped on a glass terrarium next to the gerbil cage. A pale chameleon came out from behind a vine of pale, fake flowers.

  “That’s Benjamin,” said Blake. “That’s the chameleon’s name.”

  Leslie thumped her thumb on the glass. “I have to go find my friends,” she said, though she stayed right where she was.

  An elderly woman sitting behind the counter looked up from her computer. “Please don’t touch,” she said.

  “He likes it when you do that,” Blake said to Leslie. He tapped the glass quietly. “He likes girls. He really likes you. Benjamin says, ‘She’s pretty.’ Say that, Benjamin. Can you say that? She’s pretty.”

  “Thanks,” she said to Benjamin, “but you’re a lizard.”

  “Chameleons come from the family Chamaeleontidae.”

  “Oh-kaay,” she said.

  “Look out, Benjamin.” Blake picked up the tiny terrarium and turned it upside down. “Earthquake, Benjamin! What are you going to do now? What are you going to do?”

  He held the cage upside down, leaving Benjamin to scramble and eventually crouch on his new ceiling-turned-floor. His vine fell and landed on his triangular head. I should have stopped Blake sooner, but there’s always some coarse curiosity in me that waits to see what he’ll do next. Maybe he knows this.

  “Young man,” said the woman, coming out from behind the counter.

  “Blake, that’s enough,” I said, taking away the terrarium.

  “Young man. Young man.” The woman was stunned, repeating herself, looking like a parrot with deep red eye shadow and thin, tufty black hair.

  Leslie tittered. Blake smiled with his arms crossed, having won something from her, finally, a small prize he’d keep for himself.

  “Is he with you?” said the parrot-woman. “I’m sorry but he needs to leave. We don’t tolerate that.”

  I didn’t apologize. I bought Benjamin and his cage for thirty-five dollars.

  “I think he’s starving it on purpose,” Deedee said to Dullard as she set the table. “I know you think I’m crazy, but I do.”

  It was Saturday afternoon, and Blake had had the chameleon a week. He played with it, talked about teaching it tricks, but wouldn’t feed it.

  “Leave the poor kid alone,” said Dullard.

  “Poor kid? What poor kid?” said Deedee.

  She’d been dyeing her hair blonde for years, but down one side she left a line of gray she wore like a medal.

  “He’s thirteen,” Dullard said, as though explaining a wisdom tooth extraction. He had prominent ears that wiggled when he spoke. “He’s a guy, and he’s thirteen. Simple. That’s all there is to it.”

  “It is what it is,” I said, baiting him.

  “Exactly,” said Dullard. “It is what it is. Can we eat now?”

  “What did he name that lizard?” said Deedee. “He refused to tell me.”

  I wouldn’t tell her, either. Dullard’s actual name was Benjamin.

  Deedee liked to say the dinner table was an airplane, and all electronic devices must be turned off. Meals were for conversation. We were silent when Blake walked in.

  “I was sleeping,” he said. His face was round and swollen, his hair in his eyes, his scabbed bald spot exposed.

  “It is what it is,” I said.

  “We’re going to the doctor tomorrow,” said Deedee. “Both of us.”

  “What imbeciles,” said Blake, shaking his fist in the air. “I’m not hungry.”

  “Sit down. Right now. Then Miranda’s taking you somewhere.”

  “Where?” he said.

  “It’s a surprise,” I said.

  He sat down and pretended to yawn. He quickly finger-combed and patted his hair over his bald spot. That summer I’d never seen him up before two p.m.

  “I have a thought experiment for you,” he said.

  “Please, no,” said Deedee, bringing to the table long plates of sushi rolls we’d had delivered. “Can we just eat?”

  “This is important,” he said. He cracked his knuckles. “You’re at war.”

  “At war with what?” I said.

  “A fictional place, okay?” said Blake. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Except we are at war,” said Dullard, unwrapping chopsticks. “That’s what people like to forget.”

  “Right,” said Blake. “So pretend you’re at war. You have two buttons in front of you. Two. The first saves a thousand people but all of Shakespeare gets deleted. Or Bach, or Camus, choose whoever would mean the most to you. The second button does the opposite.”

  “What’s the opposite?” I said.

  Blake placed large petals of ginger on his tongue.

  “Tell us the opposite,” I said.

  “The second button,” he said, “saves Shakespeare, but kills the people. Get it? Two buttons. The question is, how many people dying would make you choose the first button? See? It’s like, how many deaths are worth deleting Shakespeare? How many people would you sacrifice?”

  “Who are these people?” Dullard said.

  “Not the point. It’s a fictional place,” said Blake.

  Deedee put a whole eel roll in her mouth and chewed. “A hundred people,” she said finally. “I’d only push the second button to save Shakespeare if it killed fewer than a hundred.”

  “Really, a hundred?” said Blake. “What do you think?” he asked me.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You read about this somewhere?” Dullard said. “You saw it on TV?”

  “What’s the point?” said Deedee.

  “Just think about it,” Blake said.

  “Go get dressed,” she said.

  I drove us to a museum in a neighboring city, quite out of the way. The permanent collection had been donated by a mining magnate. I’d taken my adult art classes there on field trips and had gone several times on my own.

  “Do you think you’re a good person?” asked Blake, rolling down his window. “It’s damn hot.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It isn’t so black-and-white as that. Why are you asking?”

  “I don’t know.” He played with a black lighter, flicking the flame, the little flick sounding like kick to me. Kick. Kick. “I guess I was just testing you.”

  “Where’d you get that? Are you smoking?”

  “You ask a lot of questions,” he said. “And no.” Kick. Kick.

  Visiting the museum was one of the only things I did to show I was still interested in painting, though I often claimed, to Deedee, to do much more. I’d tell her I was working when she called, but I wasn’t: I’d be reading magazines or watching bad television or sleeping. I wanted her to believe something about me, that something was better now, that I was a person who did things.

  There was an exhibit by a contemporary Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, that I hadn’t seen yet. It began with a photographic triptych: three gelatin silver prints of Ai nonchalantly looking at the camera, dropping a Han dynasty urn. On the floor in front of the triptych was an arrangement of ancient Han urns, similar to the one Ai dropped in the photographs, but these urns were painted in gaudy colors. Colored Vases, 2007–2010
.

  “Han dynasty,” I said. “I don’t know—”

  “Roughly 206 BCE to 220 CE,” said Blake. “I should grab one of those things and drop it!”

  “Don’t say that,” I said. “It’s like saying ‘bomb’ on an airplane.”

  “But he’s already doing it.” Blake pointed at the photos of Ai.

  “That’s not the point.”

  We passed a tour group circled around a glass case that displayed Ai’s Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo. They were taking pictures with their phones; we couldn’t see around them.

  “Let’s go,” said Blake. “I feel implicated.”

  “Implicated? You mean complicated?”

  He didn’t say.

  “Have you heard about Ai Weiwei before?” I said. “Some people think he’s a political hero.”

  “Big deal,” he said. “He destroys an ancient urn to say he’s against destroying an ancient urn.”

  “Maybe it’s fake,” I said.

  “Very original,” he said.

  We entered a different room, a different period, Warhol and Klee. I instructed Blake, the same as with my students at the art center. Approach carefully, stand facing head-on, and, at first, do not think.

  “That’s impossible, you know,” he said.

  I sat on a bench between two little-known Klees and started to sketch one of them as Blake approached the Warhol.

  “Take a step back.” A docent in a red jacket came out from his corner, making a motion with both hands. “Take a step back, son. You’re too close to the painting.”

  “I’m not your son,” said Blake.

  “Just step back,” I said.

  He semi-stomped into the next room; I could hear him in there, walking from one side to the other, then back again, flicking his lighter. Kick, kick. I heard someone ask, “Are you all right?”

  “Have a nice day,” I heard him say. Kick, kick.

  Once Deedee asked if I loved Blake, and I told her of course, thinking it an unanswerable question, in the way most of Blake’s questions were. I could not think I could not love him, and yet, between us, there existed no abstraction that could be called love. He’d have laughed at me if I’d suggested it. There were things about him I couldn’t see, things he wouldn’t give up.

  Kick, kick. He came back into the Klee and Warhol room.

  “Come here,” I said. “Blake. Sit right here.”

  I used to rub his back when he sat next to me. He was too old for that now.

  “To me,” I said, looking at the Warhol, “these colors pulse, if you stare at it long enough.”

  He grunted and fixed his glasses on his nose.

  “That’s it?” I said. “You could give me more of a response.”

  “Well. There’s just something wahoo-y about a Warhol on a white wall.”

  He stood and walked up to the painting as if, I thought, approaching an enemy. He was so close to it, I whimsically imagined he was seeing into it. The docent, who had three rooms to look after, was in the adjacent space, hands clasped behind his back, head bowed, as though he were standing in the back of a church. And Blake looked at the Warhol, as I’d told him to, but too close, peering strangely, for a long time.

  I had heard there was an installation, a cube of light by Ai Weiwei on the second floor. I asked Blake to come with me, but he wouldn’t move. We were there on the last day of the exhibit, my only chance to see it, so I walked upstairs. The installation was large, the size of a tiny room, a metal jungle-gym-like cubic grid, with hundreds of crystals inside, lit by bulbs arranged within it. Somehow it emotionally drained me. I walked around the cube. A couple walked around it, too, with arms around each other, and I imagined this as some kind of performance. It was a three-dimensional chandelier, a meteor of meanings, a small sun. Or else it wasn’t meaningful, mere metal and lightbulbs, probably built by Ai’s assistants. Children peered inside the cube with their parents. A girl reached to touch it, and her father said her name sternly, three times, until she put her hand back in her pocket.

  “Will you take a picture of me with it?” A college-aged boy stood next to me with his phone.

  “Sure.”

  “This is going to be cheesy,” he said, “but it’s this thing I do in front of monuments. I send the picture to my friends.” He stood in front of the cube, I counted to three, and he jumped up and spread his arms out in a V. “Thanks. Do you want one of you?” he said.

  I didn’t, I told him. It’s just metal and bulbs.

  When I heard the museum alarm go off, I felt I already knew what had happened. A few other people in the cube room proceeded calmly to the exit, which is what an automated voice instructed us to do. I exited with them, but ran down the stairs, through the door to the first floor, then through to the room of Ai’s ancient urns, to find Blake in the center of a small crowd, including two docents and a museum guard, their heads down, all staring at what I could not reverse or unsee—the shards of a shattered, painted Han urn. Blake looked at the shards as nonchalantly as Ai, dropping an urn, looked at us in one of the photographs.

  I remember stepping over the dark pink shards and grabbing Blake’s wrist. The tour group from before was taking pictures of him and the shards. I wanted to take him home, to put him in bed with soup and decide he had the flu, but four more guards arrived, and they escorted us both to the third floor. A larger crowd of people had gathered.

  The museum guards took us to a small room, where two policemen were waiting with the docents and a teary museum director. The room was an office, maybe an intern’s, full of art books and prints. A policeman asked Blake if he had anything in his pockets, and he surrendered his lighter and three quarters and continued sitting where they’d told him.

  When Deedee arrived, she smiled bizarrely at everyone and said, “I’ve never been so embarrassed in all my life.” I believed her.

  Blake, Deedee, and I were questioned. The director didn’t, perhaps couldn’t, speak, except for once, to state her name for the police report, and then she put her elbows on her knees and her hands over her eyes.

  It was criminal, said everyone in the room. Criminal to the police, the museum director, and Deedee for the same reasons. But if Ai-as-artist could destroy an ancient urn, how were we certain Blake-as-criminal couldn’t?

  I’d sometimes be convinced he held on to some precocious wisdom, but I’d also begun to think there might be no interior, no sketch beneath the painting, that would reveal what he was or intended to be. As easily as I could imagine his full inner life, I could imagine a cavity, hollowed out by us and all the things we’d told him he was.

  “This affects your whole life,” Deedee said. “This goes on your record for life.”

  They kept asking Blake why he’d done it, even though he appeared, as they said, “in his right mind.”

  “I just saved a hundred people,” he said. “It is what it is.”

  I wanted to tell everyone sitting in that circle: we should all be blamed, it was our great burden and fault, that we were at least half the problem, but this felt glib and wrong-even-if-right—and there sat the other half, holding, in his lap, a small painted shard no one had thought to take away from him.

  Olivia

  Because I was happy, I looked for what might ruin me. I asked questions—wanting vision, prophecy—of something not there. I called it Baby. Baby, tell me what it is, I’d say. What takes this away? I meant not just happiness, but my life.

  For months I was consumed by a blackish-brown ­screwhead-sized mole on my jaw. I delayed the appointment. I didn’t want the news. The mole, I was told, was nothing. I worried about gangrene, spent hours with Internet images of dying intestine and toes. I worried for the circulation in my right leg. Down its back is a visible vein. That leg bruises easily.

  I’d go into our guest room, my Asking place. Shut the door. L
ie down in the impartial smell of pine and wicker. I’d say, Baby, let me be happy. Then I’d say, let her be happy. I prayed on behalf of myself.

  My husband, Shannon—I want to say this—is a kind person. No other way to describe him but calm and kind; I couldn’t understand. During sex I’d say to myself, Baby, let her be happy. While Shannon went down on me, I’d say it.

  One April the son of high school friends of my husband’s came to stay with us. Cullen was twenty-two and looking for a job in San Francisco. His father was a teacher. The mother, a biochemist for the military. Her name, that of a saint or rose, I can’t remember.

  We gave Cullen the guest room, my Asking place. My only Asking place; there was no other. Shannon said he’d be with us awhile but pretend he wasn’t there, let him be, live a day as I would. His luggage wasn’t a wheeled, rolling bag such as everyone has, but a dark, oversized suitcase, molding to green on the sides like a sea wall. I sat Cullen in front of a plate of chicken. His fingernails were smooth on top, naturally pale. I didn’t know any twenty-two-year-olds; we had no children. He was blond, glowing blond like a canary, with a snub nose and a thin band of stubble beneath. Ardent and brusque and thin. He was interested mainly in some business something, to make good, good money, that was the main thing, to have his own business card, a place to wear paisley ties, he said on a third glass of scotch, and money to buy them.

  “He seems quick on his feet,” Shannon said later, undressing in our room. He valued wit and banter, though not in himself. And pride. We were happy together, had been for a while, but I knew about happiness and how it ends.

  “Do you remember that age? Cullen’s age?” I said. “Because I can’t,” but Shannon didn’t hear me or didn’t answer.

  I woke early to make pancakes, ugly pancakes, put out syrup in my late mother’s decanter and jars of grape and berry jams on doilies. Cullen came down the stairs in a suit, his canary hair scrunched and tangled.

  “Do you need to borrow a comb?” said Shannon.

  “I suppose I look like I do,” Cullen said. I’d never heard someone his age use the word suppose.