PLANET GRIM

by Alex Behr

  We slept together, but I wasn’t disloyal to Royann. I stayed clothed and stared at the votive candles lined against her windowsill until the flames died in limp wax. She didn’t sleep either. She sat with her back against two black pillows and petted a kitten all night, still high on acid, still afraid to pee or undress or walk. Our feet touched each other but couldn’t get warm. The orange kitten scratched her arms with its tiny razor claws and Jolene never noticed.

  “I don’t want to kill it,” she said, over and over. I wanted to take the animal away from her, but was afraid she’d hold it tighter.

  She knew her bones were dissolving in her body. I wanted to know that feeling, to put it into music.

  THIS IS NOT A LOVE STORY

  No eye contact. No eyes. Dragged across the floor. Dragged across the carpet. Kicking legs, trying to get free. To what end?

  Nancy Sinatra on the stereo with her leather boots—until the record skips. No more walking.

  Bubbling water from the aquarium.

  Bent over the bathtub, greasy water. Scar across your stomach. Scar up your arms.

  “You want coffee?”

  She doesn’t say she hates coffee.

  Body parts disappearing into others. Blue walls.

  Gloria thinks, Most problems you can solve with a cock in your mouth because guys are so stupid. Except that isn’t her thought. She doesn’t think in grammatical sentences. It’s what she feels. She stands in the living room, by the deck overlooking the street. It’s dark out. She pulls up her shirt and pulls off the electrical tape. She winces, turning toward the sliding door to make sure Ham isn’t watching. The tip of the cigarette. Where is it pointing? He spies on the neighbors, he spies on her, and she spies on her ex.

  Her ex: The obsession. She is trapped with him in a walk-in closet. He has nailed a fish to the wall. He is six feet tall. She is petite. She runs her fingers through his chest hair. She moves his arms out to be Jesus on the cross. He obliges her.

  Now her ex has moved out, leaving her with Ham.

  Ham works at an auto shop. They met because Gloria almost crashed on the Fremont Bridge. Her tube blew out and the inner workings of the tire ground together. She knows she looked wild when she got the car towed there. She had to give the driver a hand job because she didn’t have money to pay. Her hand smelled like him. So did her jeans.

  She is a right-handed hand jobber, with the left cupping the balls. Or she switches it up, looking out the window at faded ads for face cream or soda painted on brick buildings in Old Town, Portland.

  It is her hands doing it. Hands that wash dishes. Hands that type. She can lose one and live. She can lose both and get metal pinchers attached. Who cares if she jerks off some guy in exchange for a free ride to the garage?

  Ham doesn’t see her. He sees her as an obsession. But her gaze is elsewhere: her ex has a roommate, who must want to fuck him. If she wants to fuck him, then the whole world must want to fuck him, especially the people she knows, the people in stores he frequents, and the people he meets when she’s not around. She thinks, True. And this is the word in her mind.

  “I love you,” her ex says (in her mind, that’s really what he said). “You’re beautiful.” Days later, he says, “You’re glowing.”

  “I don’t talk to strangers,” she says, but he is no stranger.

  She doesn’t record what he says in writing and doesn’t tell her friends, but lets the words drift over her body. Nail clippings spike across the dish on the side table. He gets a postcard from his mom. A pig on the front. He said right away that he used to go to nudist camps with his mom. He lived in a cult. There were movies made. Nothing she does ever really surprises him.

  She wears a tiara. He likes it at first, then breaks it in half.

  SOME WEIRD SIN

  The first sin was assuming an intimacy with someone through a pager. Access to her fingers, pressing the buttons, watching the screen, choosing to be sitting in one place, close to a phone, until something happened. Waiting for the vibration, which immediately got him hot. It was a contagion. Joe had a pager. She had a pager. Therefore, they were connected. The pager was always listening to the radio frequency. Then that sin transferred through devices and decades to the cell phone Joe held now. Watching the spinning as he refreshed get mail get mail get mail get mail get mail get mail. He twisted a piece of his sideburn into a tight coil. The last ice cube melted in the scotch.

  On the shelf was a glass stained red, ant bodies stuck in the crust. From his son’s strawberry milkshake, which he’d made himself. As if cooking made him a better dad. His son had watched him scoop the vanilla into the blender. He said it looked like an iceberg floating in a bloody sea. His son usually ignored him. His son with his spattering of freckles. The shadow of dark hairs above his lip. Not quite a teen.

  As a kid, when Joe sat with grownups, they talked fast and white spittle formed at the edge of their lips like the crud of polluted streams. He walked to streams to feel inspired. Like nature would tell him something, but he found a condom wrapper. He found deer droppings and a pale salamander that didn’t have the strength to pull itself out of the water. The water flowed over a sideways deer corpse, its eye brown and cloudy.

  Then Joe changed, fell in love with a young drummer, and had a device that tied him to her. Not his wife. Even his wife couldn’t say her name, because it would give her a magical presence. Joe wanted his wife to say her name. He prayed she would.

  Deer die off of strange diseases now.

  His fantasy involved playing guitar in a British band; the slur of a British accent was unpretty, hard on consonants, dragging vowels down, as if grit meant honesty. Seeing the outline of a cock in Robert Plant’s pants: he could do that. Instead, he heard the rub of a cat paw on the sliding glass door, so innocent, as if the cat hadn’t killed something outside. As if it could deny the bird feather in its whiskers. Musicians weren’t unemployed. They were in-between shows or tours or recording or practicing. But he did spend a lot of time letting the cat in and out. His wife never thanked him for that.

  Before he got kicked out of his band, he tried to get them on a tour with…he won’t admit who the band was now. They’re assholes, anyway. He reached out, clawing on the chick drummer, not peeing submissively, but emailing her links to small-town crime pages. The desire was one-way. He was like a concave-chested teen with samples on his iPhone that he recorded into a four-track, then played out into a basement tricked out with baffles made of old foam from under the futon. He forgave the drummer for liking Faith No More, Pearl Jam, and the Dandy Warhols.

  He wanted to play her a perfect guitar line. He thought every nipple would taste the same. Not true.

  A band’s emergence into an entity happens through layers of wet strips drying, with B.O. replacing the odor of papier-mâché goo. All those hours in a van together. Stale fart air, potato chips, cigarettes, hair spray. The essence of a bar and a nursery school birthday party. Blood on the cymbals. He bragged to his band that they would go on a European tour through his connections with that drummer. They fired him through a text.

  The walls of his home were sticky, coated with translucent patterns, from air freshener, suntan lotion, and his son’s successful attempts to kill ants. There were remnants of hairspray and cooking oil. Trailings from silverfish and ants’ microscopic licks.

  Joe couldn’t parent through benign neglect anymore. With divorce looming, he created the bad time. The hurt that was attached to his son’s head. The ruined birthday. The inability to extricate child from house to hang with him. The back talk.

  Joe heard his son talking to his wife. “Get me pizza. Pizza. Make it triangles. It’s OK if they’re not, but I want triangles.”

  “I’ll try to get up but my butt’s so heavy it might not make it through the door.” She sang a song about her butt. He used to like her songs. Now they grated on him.

  Moss crusted the roof and gutter. Another failed home improvement project.

  The first br
eakup conversation with his wife needed subtitles. Everyone has had these conversations; even a monk might have one with another monk, scrubbing potatoes or polishing Jesus’s wooden bones. The heat of the crotch against the mouth. Monks would know this.

  There were gestures. There was snot and heaving. There was drawing squares and rectangles and triangles with crayons. And certain words. There were flashes of panic in the amygdala. Yes, memories would be made. Neural pockets died off, obliterated. The heat of someone on his shoulder. The arm. The hand. The averted face. The limbs were a substitute for that intimacy he’d found so quickly with his wife long ago. Then the limbs would be gone. He would see them only when his kid would be dropped off. A limb resting out the ledge of a car window.

  Could I feel the loss of my inherent body, Joe wondered? His wife felt the loss of the body she knew well (before adolescence) by the addition (of fat), yet Joe had lost his inherent body (muscle). He had dropped fifteen pounds in the time he’d fallen in love. His loss was magnified by the body weight of the anorexic drummer he loved. Anorexics denied the desire to transform sugar and fat and protein into fat cells. Her desire: ultimately unknown. Perhaps not Joe. Perhaps never Joe. His desire: for her skinny ass.

  Joe invited his son’s best friend over when his wife was out of town. He set up the mini pool table from Fred Meyer’s on the linoleum floor.

  “All you’re doing is winning.”

  “I’m playing the real rules. I know they’re real.”

  “You can’t make up fake rules.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “Why do you even want an advantage? You always take advantage.”

  “You bad, son. You bad, son.”

  “The one thing that annoys me is that you always take advantage.”

  “Three stripes in the hole. You try to win. It ain’t going to happen. LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL.”

  The play date was a disaster. His son punched his friend in the gut. His friend hit him across the face with a Styrofoam sword.

  Joe fought the urge to pick up his guitar and play, to ignore them, to pretend they didn’t exist.

  He didn’t notice the plug came dislodged from the aquarium heater and oxygen bubbler when he finally extricated his son from the house.

  When they got back, his son cried. The fish were belly up. Their energy dissipated into the water. The water forgot. It didn’t have feelings. Even though his back hurt, Joe picked up the tank and emptied it. The water flooded the garden, and Joe assured his son that it would be good compost for the tomatoes they so loved to eat. He forgot he would not be there next year to eat the tomatoes.

  “You asshole,” his son said.

  THE TENANT

  “Your move-in date is in February,” the landlady said. “Like whenever. But this is today.” She pointed to a pink highlighted square on the calendar. She had white streaks in her hair, pulled back in a retro butterfly clip. She wore a fleece sweatshirt and an owl pendant and jeans tucked into her boots.

  The tenant nodded, without committing. This woman’s accent, the tenant decided, was Dutch, which probably meant habitual awkward cheek kissing, as when they first greeted. But it was desperate Craigslist times in Portland.

  “I can have movers come into my house,” the landlady said. “That’s all that I’m asking. But I need to prepare—get you a key.” She emphasized the last word as if doing the tenant a favor.

  The tenant sucked the cola and put the end of her straw against a piece of ice. Not sure if she should drink alcohol. Thought about how wet her underwear was. How it was nasty, but human. All women get wet sometimes. She won’t mention her girlfriend. She hadn’t even mentioned her girlfriend to her ex-husband. What’s the point?

  “If you want my help let me know. I can’t be available twenty-four hours a day. I will make sure there is space for you to move in.”

  Behind the landlord’s head, a TV. The hockey player was talking, the stick in front of his face.

  She watched a man coming out from the bathroom. There were certain things old men did that her ex hadn’t adopted yet, like stick his forefinger in his ear to clear out wax or pick the front of his trousers, or walk with arms separated from the sides, not swinging, like he was holding up imaginary baguettes.

  The landlady tapped on her plate to get her attention. “Do you feel pressure? I feel pressure. I want to confirm this. You’ve been distant on the phone. Can we use this dinner to pick a move-in date?”

  Her ex thought he could control his life. He spent hours studying the postal exam book so he could deliver mail. He timed himself with a metronome to mark progress.

  The landlady moved into focus. She had a hair on her chin. “If you were going to lock your door, I’d need a key.”

  The tenant nodded, wondering if she could go into the bathroom here to swab out her underwear. But she didn’t want to seem like someone who peed a lot.

  “You need to tell me weeks in advance when you’re going to move out. I will never go into your room to borrow your shoes or borrow a pair of scissors. If I was stupid enough to go into your room to steal your shoes.” The landlady was finished with her second Chardonnay. Hadn’t touched her burger.

  The tenant looked at the men in the bar. They put their hands in front pockets. They kept their hats on, even indoors. They licked their lips. And now she was trying out this other thing. Women. Why not? Her parents were dead.

  Men let dates dip their fries into BBQ sauce. Men brought their laptops to bars.

  She’d met the girl, the girlfriend, the night her favorite band came to town from Chicago. She’d leaned against the stage, her head back, slapping the tape-covered wood with her bare hands, giving it the best hand job she could, the vicious kind. And the band members looked down at her: the guitarist stepping on his foot pedals, the singer spraying spit from the microphone, changing rhythms and singing in a half-spoken, half-melodic yelp to get his political messages out, never mind they couldn’t hear a thing onstage, all deaf from blown-out cilia.

  Some kids from college waved hi, and she slowly took off her clothes in the club, copying the action of this older chick, who by the end of the set was kissing her. Her name was Margo. Her tongue easing around her mouth like a happy clown setting up a joke. They made out everywhere and the tenant rarely ever had to use her hands, since the girl preferred to hold them behind her back. Or twist her nipples. Somehow she got her clothes back on. Or someone’s. Most of her own.

  Margo hooked her arm through the tenant’s and spun her around, slammed her into the punk boys kicking up their legs like a herky-jerky roulette wheel. They were pretty boys, especially the black and Asian punks with bandannas tied around their legs, flannel shirts around their waists, one dude with a lightning bolt shaved into his scalp.

  The tenant went into the bathroom with Margo. It seeped water in the corners and dripped water from the pipes. Wads of toilet paper stuck to the ceiling as if the tenant were back in middle school, hankering for a place to smoke.

  They spent the night together. Margo seemed bipolar or a little crazy or a little out there. She was the purple to the tenant’s pink. She was dark purple like a Siouxsie Sioux album, eyebrows drawn in black and angular and purple eyeliner mixed with yellow, like a perpetual bruise. She had a slash of red over her thin lips and wore tank tops loose on her, the armholes too big, showing her stash of armpit hair, her Chia pets. She had pierced nipples, but didn’t brag about them.

  The waitress asked, “Do you want another soda?”

  The tenant looked up.

  “No, she’s had enough,” the landlady said. “All that sugar.” Shook her head. “You need to clean the backyard so it doesn’t stink of dog poop. Then there’s the kitchen, dining room, garbage, back yard, BBQ pit, and bathroom. Don’t let the canister get too full. Don’t leave the empty plastic bags full of cookie crumbs out with one cookie left. Don’t leave the scrubbing sponges in the shower.” One night had turned into five. The tenant couldn’t wait to see Margo again
. She loved the name. It tasted right. She had to get through this meal.

  The landlady said, “About the kitchen: we each have one shelf. Do not add dishes. Clean the floor in front of fridge,” she coughed, covering her mouth. “Oh, and cleaning the sink: if you make potatoes and bacon: I’m still going to clean it if it’s my turn. I expect you to do the same.”

  The tenant’s glasses were falling toward the end of her nose. She had stained teeth. Didn’t care. But the damp underwear. Not good.

  The tenant had spent days arranging plastic baggies of stamped crack bags into piles for a future art project. Then she found out someone else had done it first. So now what? She pointed to a date on the calendar, late in February, smiled and said, “See you then.” She thought of the most banal actions of caged men. Yet how honorable they seemed compared to caged women.

  OBSERVATIONS OF PUNK BEHAVIOR

  I.

  Dear Systematic Records: Please send me your catalog. Currently I’m here at a school to stop me from listening to Punk: But they won’t stop me or break me!

  II.

  Rowan was one of the first punks with a mohawk in Austin. One guy worshipped him and fed him bong hits. At a party, he swung Rowan too hard on a hammock, and Rowan flew out and hurt his back. The guy rushed over and extinguished a cigarette on his own tongue.

  III.

  In San Diego, Marc had a friend who hung out by the railroad tracks with other hardcore guys. One day he said, “You want to see something really punk?” He ran out in front of the tracks and was instantly splattered. Later, his friends went back to his death site and found pieces of his flesh, which they kept in glass jars.