Disasters in the First World

by Olivia Clare

  “Sure is interesting,” you said. That was your father’s inflection you were using. “Ve-ry interesting.”

  “Now you go, baby-baby. Your turn!” she said, coming down to the river. “Lie down. I said lie down!” and she picked up your feet and held you upside down while you stood on your hands, your shirt tumbled over your head. I tried not to stare at your upside-down body. I felt this trying-not-to shouting in my head like shouts from down inside a well.

  When she let your legs go, you laughed quietly, unlike a child, maybe almost like a man remembering himself a child. You said you’d try it one more time.

  It’s 2017, you should be twenty-nine. Why am I remembering you this way? Why am I thinking of that town? It would be too easy to say it’s because I’m depressed or regretful. When I’m waiting—in line at the drugstore, stopped in traffic in this city which I don’t have the means to leave and in which I hardly live—I sometimes think of you in a place that resembles no life or afterlife. A dead body gets put away, but a missing person simultaneously exists and is lost, excluded from ordinary reality, but still part of the equation, an imaginary number. A rabbit hole.

  Melanie had you by the legs, and you fell over. When you got up, you weren’t standing straight.

  “Do it again!” Melanie clapped her hands.

  “He’s tired,” I said.

  “You need practice!” she said. “I said so.”

  I said, Quit. She said you were learning. Quit, I said.

  “Mind your own damn business,” she said. You were staying on your feet, but barely. “Unless you want to try,” she said.

  I went down on the ground. I didn’t want her touching me, but better me than you.

  Then she had me by the ankles; up turned down. You stood on the ceiling-ground on one leg, rubbing your shin. That was when my own knee spasmed or slipped, and my foot hit her in the middle of her face, and her hands jumped to her nose. She was crying.

  “He didn’t mean to,” you said. “It wasn’t on purpose.”

  Blood came through the bottom of her cupped hands. I said, Sorry, Sorry. She had blood on her lips and teeth and all I could think was she looked like a boxer on TV.

  “You pecker,” she said.

  She ran away from us and kept running until she was completely gone. Later I’d see her at school with a bandage on her face. She lived in a trailer with her grandparents. I’d never seen them. My mother says she’s married now to the younger Cassidy, the homely one.

  You sat near me on the grass, and I’d almost forgotten the man with the dog. The man walked the Atchafalaya’s edge and pulled up his sleeves and laved his arms to his cracked elbows like a surgeon.

  “Count back from a hundred,” you said.

  “Okay.”

  “And close your eyes!”

  “O-kay!” I yelled.

  I counted, and I would have a hundred times. I would have recited numbers backward like a madman counting seconds, looking for you.

  It’s 2017, you must be twenty-nine, and I want to tell you, in no true order, the things I think you’ve missed: New planets with new names. Earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis. Puberty and sex. September 2001. E-mail. Unemployment. Cell phones. Or maybe one imagines all of that, and you exist someplace more real than this. The past becomes real only if I can remember it.

  I found you easily—behind the bowed, twisty tree, and you had put your arms over your head. I wasn’t unselfish enough to pretend I couldn’t find you, and I tapped you on the head—a little violently—and cackled in your ears. Found!

  “It’s not even dark,” I said as we stood there. “It’s not even dark and it feels dark.”

  “Now you count again,” you said. You were angry. All I could think was that Melanie had turned you against me.

  “It’s your turn to count.”

  “Yours,” you said.

  I didn’t argue. I counted back from fifty. “Come out, wherever you are!”

  This time you fooled me. I looked in every place, in the patches of thickest grasses, into the branches of the oak. I thought maybe you’d gone home.

  But then I heard you talking, saying, Quiet! Quiet!, and I found you behind the twisty tree as before.

  When we got back to home base, our patch of grass right by the river, the man had shed his coat and squinted, as if he saw rain, and the dog was up and as glad as dogs always are. You stuck out your palm to the sky.

  “Quit,” I said. “There’s no rain.”

  “Your turn to hide.” You shut your eyes.

  I walked backward.

  “. . . forty-seven . . . forty-six . . .”

  I ran far, farther out than we’d gone before, to a monstrous tractor tire I’d seen and remembered for a hiding place. You wouldn’t find me easily. I sat inside and held on and watched what light sky was left turn off. My head squeezed against the tire until my neck, so little then, fell asleep. It wasn’t raining. Then it was. I watched the moon and got hungry, you didn’t come, and by the time I came out of the tire to walk down the road home I was imagining our whole town eating or sleeping, shut inside, nested.

  I imagine the man as a huntsman, carrying you over his shoulder. You had a mole above your right eye, and if you are not now alive, that eye is a nothing-eye, and what I can remember of you is just this sliver, a remainder divided until what’s left is not enough to break.

  Creatinine

  This is about Tristan and not me. Tristan the grasshopper.

  For dinner, he’s laying out raw amberjack with clumps of wasabi and rice. Finger bowls of soy sauce, ginger, and, for himself, flakes of seaweed.

  His movements are as precise as a casino card dealer’s: he’s thinking, some small admission, now to himself, soon to be spoken. Pouring our drinks—wine for him, Japanese beer for me—he talks about the monotony of buying groceries, brushing his teeth, of the ways he writes and reads; he should be traveling; not that he’s bored, but he has too much to give, just stored away in him, and so he should be somewhere, or helping someone, helping himself.

  “Maybe that sounds awful,” he tells me. “Or spoiled? I think it’s a privilege to casually question privilege. But I’m not spoiled.”

  He published a book of poems with a small press, and he started a second manuscript, even a third before the second one was finished. I told him to slow down. The first book is dedicated to his father, who hasn’t contacted him in years.

  “But that’s complicated,” I say. “You’ve never had to sit at a desk all day.”

  “Okay, but I’m here, and nothing really happens. I should do something, go on walks, walk in ‘nature.’ But in Los Angeles?” He pours tea and arranges sugar cubes in a pyramid on a plate, quick hands, like when he reads at night, turning pages with a reading writer’s confident anxiety. “I could drive to nature, in traffic. But when do we ever do that, Pixie?”

  We have what we need without spending too much, living off the money I made those years I was a paralegal. When he can, Tristan teaches. We don’t have “normal jobs.” Among his family, this crime is perceived to be his alone.

  There’s a last piece of fish on my plate. Our queen stray cat chatters in the yard; later I’ll feed her in the tiny gap between our building and the next. We have two floors, a balcony—we own some large Pre-Raphaelite prints, one on almost every wall. Or maybe they’re his. After six years it’s hard to know. I don’t like the look of sofas; we have chairs and good lamps, a table. Wood floors and almost no furniture.

  He looks up from his food, and he’s about to say something I’ve heard before. We’ve stopped having enough new things to say at dinner. “Gretchen says that when she had kids, she stopped having time for meals. She just eats things out of a box, she says.” Gretchen is his half sister, forty-four, fifteen years older than Tristan and I. We used to see her more, before she had children. “She says whe
n she eats, she eats—”

  “Standing up,” I finish. “I know.”

  “I tell her, ‘May we all have the nerve to sit down!’ ” He raises his glass. “Let the word burn out on the slope of being where we are stranded.” This year he’s reading Yves Bonnefoy.

  “It won’t burn out,” I say. “To wet ink!”

  “To wet ink in 2055!” Tristan jabs his fork at me. “I obscenity in the milk of thy ink, Pixie!”

  “I obscenity in thy mother’s ink!” It’s one of our jokes, a curse from Hemingway, though I couldn’t tell you from where.

  Tristan holds his glass over his head. “I obscenity in the cheapness of objects.” He looks at our table. “And Swedish furniture stores!”

  We move to the balcony. The freeway makes enough noise that we don’t need steady talk. Dusk turns the brick fronts of jigsaw houses to drab bronze. Neighbors, having a party outside, dance in awkward pairs. Our drinks are full. A palm frond taps my chair in a small wind.

  He’s reading Bonnefoy’s On the Motion and the Immobility of Douve. He reads to me—the poem of Douve’s dark hands, and another of her dress stained “by the venom of lamps.”

  “The weird music starts in the hands, in the knees . . .” Douve wasn’t always a woman, he says; sometimes she seems supernatural, or not supernatural, but made of Bonnefoy’s wanting more than mere Earth. Is Earth mere? There is another passage about Douve in which I understand her to be waking the dead.

  “Did I tell you what Gretchen told me?” he says.

  “Which thing?” I say.

  “That I should imagine myself as a woman. ‘Fair enough,’ I said, ‘that’s ridiculous, I wouldn’t be I.’ But I told her I understood,” he says. “Male privilege. I know.”

  “She tells me to imagine our life with kids. All the time.”

  “I’m clearing out our shelves later,” he says, “just what we certainly won’t read.”

  Like Keats, who wore a suit to write, Tristan wears a sport coat. No pants, an inch of boxers extending past his coat. He’s told me that if the lines do not come in one piece, they do not come. I accused him of superstition once. He admitted something to me: he doesn’t like the act of writing, and he works many hours, until it exhausts him, but he likes to have written, the act complete, the words outside his head.

  It’s December, late morning. I open the curtains in the dining room, where he keeps his laptop. Rain leaks through the uncaulked windows. He sits forward, typing suddenly, the sound of solitary work, his eruptive beginnings. Speaking to himself, a sparse language. He was raised in a house in a forest, without TV. Rain like this is a stimulant—echoes from childhood, patterns in the forest, three- and four-petaled flowers, and Byzantine pathways of weeds.

  We eat a long lunch. Three kinds of bread and ham and cornichons. He says nothing but is in midspeech, midverse with himself, his face like a traveler’s, expecting. He told me once he thought about his quantum lives, branching from one another, and in others he wasn’t a writer, though he was content and pleased, but he’d wanted this one, “Because contentment’s not enough.”

  Our conversation consists of tasting the same food—this is my slice of pumpernickel bread, and that is yours, and both are ours. My taste in food is more conservative. If he dips his pumpernickel in his tea, he insists I try it.

  After lunch, he noisily sweeps a whole shelf of books to the floor. “My exercise for today.”

  “Take off your jacket,” I say.

  He unbuttons his cuffs. “We should keep only things we truly want. We have to go through all these systematically.” Sweat on his collar, he picks up his books, examining spines quickly, like a salesman or cataloger of antiques.

  I don’t remember where I went; when I return he’s at the table, shirt and jacket off, his undershirt yellowed. His laptop’s open. Books, all of them, are on the floor, a heap of bent or obsolete toys, some lying open. One in the middle of the pile is torn.

  “I have sixty-five-year-old kidneys,” he says.

  “That doesn’t sound like something you’d write.”

  He smiles and looks pained. “No. They called from the clinic. From last week.” He was healthy. He had had some tests for new insurance.

  “So?”

  “My creatinine levels are very high. It means there’s something wrong with my kidneys, very wrong.”

  “Too high?” I say.

  “He told me on the phone. I have to take more tests, to find out what we’re dealing with.” He seems tired, with the remote look of when he’s written nothing, or only fragments, all day.

  “Call David.” His cousin, a surgeon, in Maine.

  “I did already, and he was very straight with me. He said kidneys filter the creatinine. If there’s too much in the blood, something’s wrong. I’m far above the limit, David says.”

  Levels like this could mean kidney failure, soon. Dialysis.

  “That’s not true,” I say. “This isn’t what happens.”

  “I wouldn’t exaggerate,” he says. “I talked to David for an hour.”

  I turn on all the lamps in the room.

  “We should go to bed. Let’s hide under the sheets and be snug-snug.”

  Sometimes we try to be children together—easier to repeat our made-up little chants or rhymes than to talk. He’s terrified of aging, even as I watch him age. He holds up a hand to tell me to wait. His sport coat is on the floor, his cheeks are red. He says he should call his mother. That’s who he can talk to. When I first met her, she kept saying she’d seen my face before. She complained of the heat and the tingling in her hands. Tristan’s cheekbones, she said, he got from her brother, who, if he still lived, lived in a motel in Elyria. She quoted from Jeremiah, from Uriel in Enoch, until Tristan told her that that was enough.

  “Sorry about the air-conditioning.” Nathan’s chopping radishes on a cutting board. He met Tristan ten years ago at Stanford, and they’ve been friends since—with the exception of the year after college when they didn’t speak because Nathan “couldn’t handle Tristan’s oppressive energy,” as Nathan tells it. A large potful of curry and vegetables steams on the stove. English and Spanish yells and the rushing sound of a bus come through the window in Nathan and Rebecca’s kitchen.

  “You’re repeating yourself,” says Rebecca to Nathan. “Sorry,” she says to us. She’s trying to be hospitable, even faintly obsequious. She’s taller than I am, skinnier, and pretty in that Southern California way, some rosacea visible beneath her blonde bangs. She holds up her hair with one hand and wipes sweat from her upper lip with the other.

  The kitchen’s tiny, dense with scent. Their apartment is dirty and old, with stained carpet, but there are nice appliances, nicer than ours, and a few pieces of good furniture that they received as wedding gifts.

  “I hope you brought onion.” Nathan stops chopping, as if realizing a mistake. He nervously pushes his thin glasses up on his nose and turns to Tristan. “Wait, can you eat radish?”

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” Tristan says. “I’m not dying. And if I was, I’d still eat your radish.”

  A palm in the rain shakes in the window, the fronds like furred shoulders, epaulets. Feral green parrots live in these trees; you hear the parrots approach before you see them fly and settle in the palms in small flocks. Tristan skims his tongue over his teeth with his mouth closed: the sound of it, one of the many sounds of his idleness.

  We eat a scavenger’s meal of roots and leaves. I brought a twelve-dollar wine I hope is not too sour. The long, low dining table’s in the living room, with their electric piano and patio chairs.

  “You’re lucky they’re catching it early,” says Nathan. “And that you have insurance. There are many things that are preventable, more and more things now. It used to be that you could die from an abscessed tooth.”

  “I have insur
ance,” says Tristan. “But just the minimum.”

  Nathan and Rebecca write and work at day jobs, on salary. Conversations always arrive at this, especially drunken ones, which usually end with Nathan and Rebecca cursing their student loans, wishing they could live on less, and with Tristan and me in an endless loop of incredible guilt for not working a forty-hour week, for not having loans. I eat a turnip’s tip and put the rest at the center of Tristan’s plate. He is not eating, hasn’t been since the news.

  “Still, there’s your father,” says Nathan, “if you need him, and your sister. I just have loans. Get married. You could be on Jillian’s health insurance.”

  “I can’t put him on my insurance, even if we’re married,” I say.

  “Nathan, stop,” Rebecca says. She looks at me as though to tell me she’s an ally, and she is, in a way, and also continuously kind and a little anxious.

  “Hey!” Nathan, his eyes immense behind his glasses, thrusts his fork at Tristan. “I obscenity in the milk of thy kidneys, thy entropy!”

  “Sold!” Tristan says, bringing down his fist too hard, bouncing the table.

  Rebecca steadies her wineglass. “Jesus,” she says.

  “Sorry,” Tristan says. “Sorry about that.”

  In the kitchen, I help her with coffee.

  “What’s he like at home?”

  “Not saying anything,” I say. “He gets up very early. He doesn’t know how to be sick.”

  “He thinks he hides it.” She balances cups on the corner of a card table crammed with potted dill and rosemary. She’s concerned, genuinely. Although she’s barely older, she has something like maternal kindness, that I both value and envy.

  “Should we use this?” I point to their cappuccino maker.

  “Not that I know how. We have so many useless things.”

  I don’t want children, and she wants two, not soon—first, she’s told me several times, she wants to write something significant, or at least that she likes, which she has not started. But there’s time, she’ll say, she’s only thirty-three. As Tristan and I leave, she stands barefoot on the sofa, holding her ankle-length skirt above her knees, closing and latching the windows, in what must be her ritual before bed.