Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

by Ron Currie Jr.

  After that email, I drank and drank. I did away with the pretense of ice and mixers, and shortly thereafter with even the rocks glasses, eliminating all mediation between myself and the lip of the bottle. The local garbagemen, unreliable as any other service on the island, could not keep up with my Medalla consumption; trash bags full of empty cans piled up at the foot of the stairs outside, baking sour in the heat and attracting flies. I swept the rum shelf clean at the supermarket, literally swept it with one arm, as though my life were a movie, consequence-free, nothing but entertainment, and two or three pints detonated in my cart and coated the floor with distilled sugarcane. Gringos shot me frightened glances, then looked quickly away when I met their gazes, and even the locals stared.

  Charlotte tried to keep up, to her detriment. She was twenty-two but could have passed for thirty after just a couple of weeks. Reversible damage, but damage nonetheless, and when on most afternoons she retired to the bathroom to vomit, I sat on the tile with my back against the door frame and asked her, not unkindly, to consider what she was doing to herself.

  You should be at school, I told her. You should be finishing your degree, breaking boys’ hearts, vomiting only on the weekends.

  She tried to respond, but retched instead.

  This is advanced drinking, Charlotte, I said. It looks a lot like what you saw at college, but it’s different. You have to work your way up to it. It takes years. Drinking this way at your age is like plucking a toddler off her big wheel and giving her the keys to a bulldozer.

  Whatever she was trying to say before, she apparently thought better of it. She flushed the toilet, let her head hang for a minute while water and vomitus swirled in the bowl, then crawled across the bathroom floor and put her arms around my neck. I let her hold me, and rubbed my hand up and down her back, and thought about Emma, far north in her wool toggle coat, bent to the wind, an angled slash of green and auburn against a white-gray landscape.

  With my heart squashed again like a kitten in a crush video, and my head on the briny, I began to notice small strange inexplicable things around the casita. Usually in the mornings. I’d wake with a head like a toothache and emerge from the bedroom into unbearable sunlight and find something not just strange and inexplicable but also sinister in some exquisite way.

  First I discovered a dead cat on the porch just outside the back door. Its insides had liquefied and run out of both ends, forming gray-orange pools that had, in the cool of the overnight, grown skins like cups of pudding.

  The very next day I walked into the bathroom and found the sink painted with drips and drabs and fingered smears of blood. I had a terrible thought and went to check on Charlotte, found her unmarked and snoring softly in the bed, just as I’d left her.

  Later that week I noticed that the picture frame Emma gave me for Christmas had moved from the end table to the coffee table, and the picture of us on the Cliffs of Moher, which had come with the frame, was missing. I knew I hadn’t moved the frame, or removed the picture. I drink a lot but I’m not like your average drunk—my recall is pretty ironclad.

  I asked Charlotte if she’d done it. She said no, and I believed her. By now she’d read my book, really read it, and loved me because of how I loved Emma. This came as no surprise; it had always been this way, with each of the hundreds of women I’d fucked and been kind to. They loved me for the way in which I loved, despite the fact that my love was not directed at them. It made no sense. It made perfect sense. It simply was, sense or no.

  I love you, Charlotte said to me, her breath redolent of Bacardi and bile, and when I smiled kindly and nodded and did not respond she said, I know you don’t love me. I know you never will.

  And I was reminded of the many times I’d told Emma I loved her, and how she’d smile kindly and nod and not respond.

  I would have believed Charlotte about the picture even if she didn’t love me, because she was one of those people for whom liquor is like sodium pentothal. Get her drunk, and she’d make immediately clear why as a species we’re hardwired to avoid absolute, comprehensive truthfulness. She’d told me many things about herself, in the few weeks since abandoning her act of nonchalance, that I could have happily spent the rest of my life not knowing. I learned, for example, that often her menstrual blood issued as a sort of gritty sludge. I learned that when she was eleven and her brother ten, they had, on several occasions, in the provocative quiet that followed bedtime, ‘touched’ their genitals together, and that while this repeated act fell short of full coitus it nonetheless produced such a riot of Catholic shame within her that to this day she often flashed back to it when she had sex, felt herself transported to that time and place, and sometimes even saw her brother’s face in those of her lovers. I learned that she once slept for three straight days, waking only long enough to gobble handfuls of Halcion, after suffering the sudden and immutable realization that she had the desire to create art, but not the ability. I learned that riding the bus in junior high had been a daily ordeal, because she’d suffered from chronic and apparently incurable foot odor that would fill the bus’s interior and become the subject of loud speculation among the other students, while she sat there tense and silent, hoping no one would trace the smell back to her Topsiders.

  And so, knowing all this and more, I also knew that when Charlotte was twelve fingers into a bottle of Don Q and said she had no idea what had happened to the picture, she was telling the truth.

  I tried for two weeks to locate the photo—Emma and me arm in arm, smiling at the camera, our faces shadowed by the hoods on our rain slickers—and never did find it.

  People often dismiss the idea of the Singularity as science fiction, of course. A wild fantasy that could never make the leap from drugstore paperbacks to their everyday lives. They smile indulgently at talk of reverse engineering the human brain, shake their heads in a pitying way. People believe that what makes them uncomfortable about the concept of the Singularity is that we will lose something essential and ineffable that makes us human. But they’re wrong. What makes them uncomfortable, whether they recognize it or not, is that we will lose our gods irretrievably, and that we will do so by becoming them ourselves.

  In the beginning, the child’s play stuff: neurological implants will circumvent all manner of damage and malfunction, and like Jesus before them, doctors will tell the crippled to rise, the blind to see, the mad to be still.

  Eventually they will move beyond this, and tell the dead to come forth. If my mother chooses and can afford it, they will be able to remake my father out of the same dirt from whence he came originally.

  Soon after that, there will be no more dead, for the rest of time. No one will die, and no one will grieve, ever again, until the universe collapses upon itself.

  Sometimes I wonder if I could have saved my relationship with Emma if I’d been able to shit when she was around.

  Don’t laugh. I am serious, here.

  Because I am shy about it. And with reason. I stink. I make a lot of noise. I am able, on my worst days, to clear out entire public restrooms, make them as uninhabitable as Chernobyl.

  Not that I often use public restrooms. Only as a matter of absolute last resort, when the one thing standing between me and soiled underwear is the industrial neutrality of a public bathroom stall. And even then I’ll fight it, as long as the fight seems winnable. A lot of people don’t realize one can battle most any bowel movement into stasis. As with many things, it’s a mental game. There’s almost never any real danger of shitting yourself; there is only the question of how much discomfort you can tolerate. And I can tolerate a lot.

  If I found myself searching for Emma even as we sat side by side at a bar, if I found myself missing her, somehow, even in the midst of coitus, then part of that was her fault, certainly, part of that was her peculiar way of hiding in plain sight, the way her face set itself in neu
tral, an impenetrable expression of absolute containment, a vault of self.

  But might that distance also be my fault, in part? Did I lie by omission to avoid her displeasure? Did I censor and groom myself out of desperation to have her, and did she intuit that the me I presented was an ill-fitting flesh suit, a character from one of my books who defied the laws of both his own nature and nature at large, a character who, for example, seemed never to need to take a dump?

  Before the island we spent weeks together, rarely leaving each other’s sight; thus few or no opportunities for me to use the bathroom. Add to this the fact that eating, and eating well, was among her favorite ways to pass time and satisfy a multitude of appetites: for sustenance, for ambience, for companionship, for aesthetics. We ate pâtés and terrines and galantines, great steaming bowls of mussels, duck confit dripping salty globules of fat, rare hanger steaks plump with warm blood, spit-roasted pork loins. Preceded by whiskies and bourbons, accompanied by wines red and white, followed with cordials. And the desserts: chocolate peanut butter tortes, champagne-infused sorbets, stomach-rupturing blocks of bread pudding.

  All this, and me too shy to use the toilet.

  I agonized. I cramped and bloated and hobbled about with a body so full of intestinal gas—gas that I could rarely vent, even on the sly, because the irony of course was that the longer I held a shit, and the more it built up after every expensive fat-laden meal, the worse it smelled—that I worried, a couple of times, that I might actually burst somewhere inside myself. I lay awake at night, staring at the ceiling while she slept beside me, and suppressed groans while violent cramps rippled through my gut.

  So really when I stop to think about it, I realize that my not taking a shit when I needed to, when you unpack that and extrapolate it, is really a kind of betrayal of self. Do you follow? No less than, say, pretending to like a movie because you think it will please a person you want desperately to please. Or else sitting calmly and smiling at a dinner party when someone’s acted in a way that makes you want to flip tables and throw glassware. To smile through a movie you loathe, or to refrain from breaking things, is a betrayal of self.

  And when you try to live there, to live in a place where you’re betraying yourself over and over, not only do you grow to resent the hell out of it, and resent the hell out of whomever you’re betraying and censoring yourself for, but the very idea of your self begins slowly and inexorably to erode. Until you realize one day out of the clear blue that you have no idea who your self is, anymore.

  This was what I was doing every time I had to take a shit around Emma and chose not to. Chipping away at myself, assuming a persona that looked like me but was not. I know it sounds ridiculous. I know. But it’s the truth. And every time she went to work or yoga and I would steal upstairs, secure in the knowledge that she’d be gone long enough both for me to shit and for the stink to dissipate before she returned, there was a shame in my relief. At first I thought it was just some weird infantile Freudian thing, like the shame we all supposedly learn to feel very early in life about our shit itself, over the very fact of it. But I came gradually to understand that that was not the nature of my particular shame. No. The shame I felt was deeper and broader and more complex and, frankly, more grown-up. It was the shame of one who has betrayed himself repeatedly, and knows he has, even if he won’t admit it to himself. But how could he admit it to himself, with no self to confess to?

  And so because I did not recognize the source and nature of my shame, I couldn’t talk about it, and certainly not with Emma. But neither could she talk to me about what she no doubt realized, at least subconsciously, and was affected by: a strong if ineffable sense that the me she dealt with on a daily basis, went to sleep with at night, wrapped her arms around and allowed to penetrate her, was not the authentic me.

  No doubt it sounds silly. But these things have consequences. And I think, sometimes, that one could draw a straight causal line between my reluctance to shit when Emma was around and the fact that today she is married, once more, to a man other than me.

  Eventually the caballeros grew weary of fighting me. Not because I was any good at it, really—I lost more fights than I won, though no one walked away unbloodied—but because I was dogged, and probably, in their view, a little crazy. I bit and scratched and wasn’t above a nut-punch or two, and the caballeros eventually wanted no more of it. So they proposed one last fight with their biggest guy, a hulking, home-tatted cabron who, because he was gigantic, and because I never found out his name, and because our fight had all the elements of a champions’ duel straight out of Homer, I came to think of as Ajax.

  Which, I suppose, made me Hector by default.

  The challenge came one hot morning when the local drunk (a genuine distinction on an island full of drinkers) pounded on the door of my casita. I left Charlotte in bed and went down the stairs, found the drunk grinning at me through the aluminum bars of the security gate. He was a whip-thin, anemic man with the features of a Latino weasel and a pint of Palo Viejo always jutting out of his back pocket. I thought I recognized his scheming eyes and crooked smile, the teeth like rusted, broken knife blades. Then I placed him in a specific memory, beyond his ambient, rambling presence on the malecón: I’d once seen him tumble off the pier fully clothed, so drunk at nine in the morning that he couldn’t swim the twenty-five yards to shore and had to be fished out by a gringo bartender setting up for lunch at Duffy’s.

  Bueno día, the drunk said, grinning, grinning. He hooked his fingers around the bars. Give me rum, and I give you a message.

  I don’t have any rum, I lied.

  I smell it on you.

  It’s not the rotgut you like. Muy caro, my friend.

  This is not a problem, he said, pulling the empty pint from his pocket and tossing it in the dirt. I didn’t always drink this gasolina. I had money when I was young. Mi padre the car dealer. Mucho dinero. All the Bacardi I wanted.

  He grinned wider, revealing black gaps in his mouth where molars had gone missing.

  I eyed him a moment longer, then went back up the stairs and returned with a near-empty bottle of Don Q. That’s all I have, I lied again, handing it through the bars.

  He twisted the cap off and downed the two fingers or so. I waited.

  They say you like to fight, he said finally, his grin disappearing and reappearing in intervals as he licked rum from the corners of his mouth.

  There was a pause. So? I said.

  So maybe you like to fight tonight. At la gallera.

  La gallera? I asked. You must be mistaking me for a rooster.

  No no, he said. A special fight. Man-fight. Just two of you. No funny business.

  I laughed. ‘Funny business?’ Where did you learn English?

  They say to tell you, the man continued, that you fight tonight, and there be no more after that. They leave you alone, no matter who win.

  I thought for a minute. It was intriguing, I had to admit. Not because I wanted the fighting to stop—I was indifferent to that. No, I was intrigued because they obviously wanted the fighting to stop, and they imagined this proposal an acceptably macho way to end it and save face at the same time.

  The gallera was a large corrugated aluminum building set beside the main drag in Isabel, like the world’s biggest garden shed. The ring in the center, a ten-foot-diameter scrap of Astroturf hemmed by a short concrete wall, was surrounded by concentric circles of theatre-style seats rising up to the rafters. Big Medalla banner on the wall. A small window through which beer and roasted chicken pinchos were sold. Cumulus zeppelins of cigar smoke and chlorinated fluorescent light and crowds of men who never bothered to use the seats provided. This was where I found myself that evening, nine sharp, the hour when the actual cockfights always started.

  Ajax stood across from me, stripped to the waist, three hundred pounds if a pound and streaming sweat just standi
ng there. He sneered at the comparatively insignificant amount of air I displaced, and here was my chance, if I had any: hubris always makes one vulnerable, no matter how strong.

  His arrogance was the only stroke in my favor, though. Everything else worked against me: the crowd; my poor physical shape after so much heroic drinking; the tiny ring, designed to house the clash of angry fowl, not a no-holds-barred match between grown men. I was giving up over a hundred pounds and had nowhere to run, let alone hide.

  But things were even worse than they appeared at first blush. Because I realized quickly, after the buzzer screeched to begin the bout, that not only was Ajax massive and fierce, but he also knew how to fight. He had training. He slipped my berserker rush out of the corner, intended to surprise and intimidate, with a deft, practiced side step, and as I passed he cuffed me with a left jab, then landed a blinding right cross to the nerve center just below my ear.

  I staggered, tripped over my own feet, nearly went down. The crowd, as smug as Ajax himself, and as certain of his victory, murmured approval. Ajax waited for me to clear my head and made a show of looking bored, letting his hands drop a bit.

  Of course he knew how to fight. Half the island’s men had spent more net time in the boxing gym than in school. While I’d been busy playing JV basketball and getting into the occasional undisciplined scrape in the neighborhood, conflicts that usually looked more like an awkward slow dance between two dudes than an actual fight, Ajax had passed his days cutting class and working the speed bag and sparring without a head guard.