Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

by Ron Currie Jr.

  When I got back to the island Charlotte hadn’t had a drink for four days. Her eyes were bright and clear, her hair tied in a neat, gleaming French braid. She smelled good in a hippy kind of way, like lavender and fresh sweat, and she seemed very calm. I was impressed with her lucidity; intimidated by it, in fact. She’d cleaned and organized the fridge, for God’s sake, and lined our footwear up neatly just inside the door.

  I don’t care why you stopped drinking, I told her. Just don’t start again. I’m going to set a bad example, but don’t follow it.

  I probably won’t. At least not at first, Charlotte said.

  I opened a Medalla. You were fine with being sober while I was gone. There’s no reason why it should be different with me here.

  You don’t really understand how alcoholics work, do you? Charlotte asked. Which is weird, considering.

  You’re not an alcoholic.

  Maybe not. But I know how they work. My father is a drunk.

  I’m sorry to hear that, I said, and meant it.

  Don’t be. He quit. I was just talking with him about it the other day. I called him after you left.

  I swigged from the Medalla. So how’d he manage it?

  Well he went to rehab a dozen times. Tune-ups, he called them. You wake up in a locked ward and aren’t really sure how you got there, leave after a couple of days. Other times he would just start going to AA meetings at the church. He’d be good for a couple of weeks, a month maybe, and then he’d start up again. This was pretty much the whole time I was a kid. He even went to a hypnotist. Nothing took.

  Here Charlotte paused. She seemed to be waiting for me to contribute in some way, so I said, It can be a tough thing to quit, for sure.

  Well, yeah. But the thing that ended up working for him was this not really deep realization he had one day. It was a normal morning, for him. His head hurt and he was confused and didn’t remember much from the night before. There was no reason to think that this day would be different from any other—he’d get up, spend some time in the shower pulling himself together, then go off to paint houses and stop at Calucci’s on the way for a sandwich and a twelve-pack of Bud Heavies, which was what he called regular Budweiser. You know, as a counterpart to Bud Light. Bud Heavy. Get it?

  I get it. Very clever.

  But anyway, on the day he quit drinking for real, instead of his usual routine he lay in bed for a while, and all he could think about was that he hadn’t been born drinking. That when he was a kid not only did he not need alcohol but had never even tasted it once, and was perfectly happy and didn’t feel like crap all the time. And somehow that was all it took, after years in and out of the hospital and dragging himself all hungover and embarrassed to AA meetings. After ruining his marriage with my mother and disappointing my brother and me God knows how many times. Just this one thought: that he’d been able at one point in his life to exist happily without booze. And he hasn’t touched it since. It’s been six years.

  Charlotte looked at me, not expectant, really, just radiating this new calmness of hers.

  So that’s why you stopped drinking? I asked. Because of the talk with your old man?

  No, Charlotte said. I’d already stopped, and I mentioned it to him, because he was asking why I’d dropped out of school and when I was coming home and all that. I told him it was kind of a confusing time but that I’d stopped drinking so much and things were getting clearer to me.

  They are?

  Sure.

  And so what about this clarity? I asked.

  Well for one thing, Charlotte said, I know now that I really am in love with you. That it’s not just, you know, boozy disorientation.

  Once, shortly before I left for the island, Emma and I were stretched out on the sofa in her new house, and I said to her, You are equal parts utter self-reliance and tremendous vulnerability.

  And she said, The inevitable consequence of having to basically raise myself.

  I said, There’s a lot of ‘Come closer, get away from me’ going on, here.

  And she offered a sad, wry smile and said, Yeah you’ve probably noticed some of that.

  The night Charlotte told me she really loved me I waited until she’d gone to bed, then broke out the bottle of Macallan twelve-year I’d stashed for special occasions. I drank half of it while considering how to respond to the text Emma had sent while I was in Pennsylvania. I wasn’t angry anymore—Ajax had relieved me of my anger, along with every other discernible emotion—but I was still dedicated to the truth, and so finally I wrote: ‘Don’t repackage your fear and try to sell it to me as indifference.’ And she went silent for two full weeks after that.

  Emma was thirty-four and childless and rolling downhill without brakes toward a divorce, and when she couldn’t sleep sometimes she’d concentrate on the gentle mechanisms in her belly and wonder when they would call closing time.

  Wet as she got when I touched her, I imagined she’d be fertile as Kansas’s inclined plains for years to come. But I didn’t say that to her, of course. And besides, I’m no doctor.

  As I mentioned before, I did toss around the idea in my mind, back before the island, that maybe with Emma I would want to have a child myself. Maybe I could give her what she wanted. Maybe I could want it. Maybe I’d even be good at it, and make her and this theoretical child wildly happy. Maybe I could understand, finally, what everyone else seemed to ken instinctively without having to think about it at all.

  But now, with her silent in the snow and me sweating and feckless a world away, bestowing kind indifference upon Charlotte, it didn’t seem at all likely I’d have the chance to find out. And one morning at the beach, while I watched birds playing on the cliffs, it came to me that if Emma ever did have a child it would be with another man, and soon, as we were both, in our thirties, feeling the actuality of growing older. Aging was no longer the abstraction it had been a decade before. It was now a fact made concrete by every gray hair discovered in the mirror, every randomly sore knee and forgotten factoid and irregular, spotty period, every unbidden thought of where our parents were at our age and, moreover, how old they had seemed to us then. Advances in fertility science notwithstanding, Emma was approaching forty and wanted kids and if she were to have them it would not be with me. She did not believe in the future I believed in. I knew this as surely as I knew my own name.

  After that revelation, I spent a week staring at my navel and waiting in vain for it to blink. Charlotte traced wide barefooted parabolas around me in the casita, and drove the Jeep to the colmado to replenish my rum stores, though she didn’t touch a drop of it herself. Kept the ice trays filled, a good and loyal partner. She read book after book, I remember that. Sometimes two a day. When she finished the small library I’d brought with me—The Corrections, along with a couple of slender, wry little volumes by Sergei Dovlatov, a pop psych book on the parallels between Vietnam veterans and Achilles, and last but by no means least, The Sot-Weed Factor—she extended her daily forays for rum to include a stop at the bookstore in Isabel, where she bought used English-language paperbacks for a quarter apiece.

  Her getting smarter, me getting dumber, concurrently, exponentially.

  On the fourth day of the contretemps between me and my navel, I spied, from the hammock on the porch, a skinny, shirtless local beating up his horse.

  I remember this less like an actual event, and more like a vivid dream. The horse was mostly white, with yellowish splotches, and well-muscled. The man was so thin I could see the knobs of his vertebrae, and he wore only a pair of denim shorts, slung halfway down his ass in the style of no-account hoods everywhere. While I watched, he very casually smacked the shit out of the horse. The horse wouldn’t let him throw a saddle blanket over its back. Every time the man raised the blanket, the horse angled its hind end away, shoes clattering staccato on the pa
vement, and every time the horse shied, it got hit. First the man punched it on the snout; sharp, snappy blows I could hear from a hundred feet away. Then he grabbed the braided rope that served as reins and whipped the horse across the eyes. I sat up in the hammock, my blood rising, and watched. With each blow the horse bowed its head, capitulated utterly, struggled against the bit to move out of range. I kept hoping the horse would realize it was much bigger and more powerful than its tormentor, hoping it would turn and give him both hind hooves square in the chest. But thousands of years of domestication won out, and the horse cowered and did not fight back.

  Then the man merely raised his fist without hitting, and the horse flinched, and suddenly I’d had enough. I could tolerate him beating the horse with purpose, but I could not accept him bullying it for sport.

  I hollered at him in Spanish. He looked over, grinned evil, invited me to come down for a taste of what the horse was getting. I got to my feet, muttering as I strode across the porch, but Charlotte intercepted me on the landing.

  No way, she said. You’re not fighting anymore. That’s all over.

  Nothing is over! I yelled in her face. Nothing! You just don’t turn it off!

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but of course I was quoting Stallone’s final monologue from First Blood, complete with the nonsensical transposition of ‘just’ and ‘don’t’.

  I pushed past Charlotte, went down the stairs and into the street, crossing toward the man without words, without any hesitation. As I drew closer, it registered distantly that he was in fact a boy, maybe sixteen or so. He took in my expression, realized he’d made a mistake, and fled, holding the waistband of his shorts to keep them from falling.

  When he was gone I looked at the horse. Its eyes were wild, showing white at the edges as it watched me warily. I put a hand out; the horse flattened its ears but let me stroke its muzzle. I worked my fingers carefully around the raised red slashes from the rope. Then a strange and powerful grief welled in me, and I put my arms around the horse’s neck. I laced my fingers together through its mane, and clung there.

  I’m not sure how long we stood together. Not long, I don’t think. Soon the horse tired of our embrace, and it bit my ear, then clattered off in search of its master.

  After the horse some time passed quietly, until on the sixth night I started yammering about sentient, evil appliances. Or so Charlotte told me later; I had and have no recollection. Apparently I was flailing through some sort of waking nightmare in which I imagined the oven was trying to set the casita on fire, and the refrigerator was spoiling food deliberately in an effort to poison us. At some point, while Charlotte watched, I shoved the vacuum cleaner down the stairs and threw the toaster off the porch and into the street. She recovered the vacuum, but the toaster disappeared pretty much the moment it hit the pavement, salvaged, no doubt, by one of the neighborhood kids.

  When I snapped out of it on the morning of the seventh day, I told Charlotte she was a regular angel, or else a saint, for abiding this madness.

  It’s not what most people would imagine, she said. Dating a writer.

  You ever read Kerouac? I asked. Or Fitzgerald? Or Poe? Or Bukowski? Or Dorothy Parker, for that matter?

  Some, she said. Still, it’s different when you see it in person, rather than reading about it.

  Fair point. But if it bothers you, maybe you shouldn’t be, you know, running out to buy more booze for me every day. Not that I don’t appreciate it, I added.

  Who said it was bothering me? she asked. Maybe the thing is that I want you dead. Maybe I want to see you drink until your heart gives out. Did that occur to you? That maybe I want to be here to watch you choke on your own vomit? And maybe that’s why I go to the store? Because every time I go I’ve got my fingers crossed, that I’m hoping today will be the day?

  She looked me in the eye, paused a beat. Then she smiled. Just kidding, she said.

  That afternoon, when I’d managed to eat some oatmeal and, later, a banana, Charlotte admitted that she hadn’t been kidding entirely.

  I don’t want you dead at all, she said. Don’t get me wrong. I am angry at you, though, sometimes, because you can’t see me. All you see is that other woman.

  What other woman? I asked.

  You know who I’m talking about.

  Yes. But you don’t.

  What do the details matter to me? Charlotte asked. Blonde, brunette, redhead. Big tits, no tits. Tall or short. It doesn’t matter what she looks like, or when she was born, or what her name is. She’s all you can see. That’s what matters. Still, I keep hanging around here because I hope that might change, though I feel like I know better. I feel like all I’ll get out of this is a good chunk of time spent reading. But I can’t bring myself to leave.

  So you go to the store for me because you’re angry? You want to punish me with booze?

  No, she said. That’s got nothing to do with how angry I am at you. I go to the store because I love you.

  Before I left for the island, every once in a while, after all the punching and scratching and growling, after she had a particularly strong orgasm, Emma would start to cry, and she would clutch my shoulders with frightening strength and plead, Please don’t leave me.

  Out in the larger world, in the daylight, when she would treat me like a bare acquaintance or else disappear altogether, I wondered if these moments had really happened. In the face of her apathy I doubted myself, though I knew damn well that this same woman who now appeared indifferent to my existence had recently begged me to never go away.

  The term ‘singularity’ comes from physics. It means a spot in space and time where gravity becomes infinite and nothing can escape its pull.

  I will repeat that: nothing—not even light—can escape the pull of a gravitational singularity.

  Just before leaving on spring break with the specimenz and Rick, Charlotte told me, she’d made a pornographic film at a Theta Chi kegger, a film that could now be found on porn websites all over the Internet.

  We lay in bed after midnight, watching the ceiling fan funnel up smoke from our cigarettes. This was after the long week of suicide drinking, and I’d recovered well enough to be able to listen with my customary attentiveness. It was hot. The sheets were lumped in a damp mass at the foot of the bed, and with the windows open we could hear dogs bawling at a gibbous moon.

  So maybe that’s why I haven’t gone back, she said. Maybe it’s got nothing to do with you at all. Or very little to do with you.

  You’re too embarrassed to go back, you’re saying?

  That’s not it. I’m not embarrassed in the least. Notorious, probably. But not embarrassed.

  Good for you. Don’t let the bastards get you down.

  Do you want to watch it? Charlotte asked. I could find it online in about three seconds.

  I guess I don’t, I said. And I really didn’t. Maybe describe it to me, I told her.

  She shrugged. Pretty stupid, she said. I was at this party, and a group of guys were asking every girl in the place to go upstairs with them. We’re making a movie, they said. Making a movie. They said it over and over again. They were afraid to be more specific and say We’re making a porn, or We’re shooting a stag film, though it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that that’s what they meant.

  Charlotte took a long drag on her cigarette. The first time they came to me I told them no, she said. The second time I asked what the details were. Just head, they told me. Maybe some titty-fucking. This was their term. But no actual intercourse, they said. ‘Intercourse’ is my term. The way they put it was: No real fucking or anything. I told them, Not all five of you. And they said, No, just Brian. They pointed to this one tall kid who was staring at the floor. The rest of us are going to watch, they said.

  So I said, Sure. And they just stood ther
e for a minute, staring at me. They couldn’t believe it. I think part of the reason they were shocked was because they realized suddenly that they had to actually do this. It wasn’t just a crazy idea they’d come up with, anymore. It was real. They had a taker.

  They didn’t realize that it wasn’t about the thousand dollars. I sure as hell took the money, but money wasn’t why I did it. Not to sound too much like exactly the sort of fantasy they were trying to create, but I just decided I wanted Brian’s cock in my mouth. It had been a while since I’d given head. I like it. I liked the idea of taping it, and I liked the idea of them watching while I did it.

  Charlotte must have thought she saw something in my expression then. Everyone wants to be bad sometimes, you know, she said. Not just you boys. And Brian was cute enough. He looked like he had a nice cock. Sometimes you can tell.

  She paused again, looking at me. I made what I hoped was a noncommittal face: not shocked, not judging.

  Anyway there I am, kneeling in somebody’s bedroom, a towel on the floor underneath me—one of the guys had put it down so my knees wouldn’t get sore. Almost a sweet gesture. Shirt off, bra off. Brian’s standing in front of me, his cock bobbing up and down in my face, and now that it was actually happening I knew for sure that it was me using him. That their little plan had turned all the way around, started eating its own tail. And he knew it, too. You know what it was? As soon as he realized that I actually wanted to be there, and that I was not compliant, that I knew just how to stroke and suck him and would not take instructions, that if I put the lube they offered on my tits it would be in my own time and of my own volition, he got scared. Because this was not the way it was supposed to be. I wasn’t scared, and that scared the shit out of him. I could see it when I first took his cock in my hand and looked up. He was petrified. I felt calm, and when I saw his fear I also felt very, very powerful.