by Jesse Miller
Samantha quickly found her seat and crossed her arms. Her hands seemed to remain paralyzed, as if to follow orders, but her fingers, independent of her hands, awkwardly attempted to unite each open button on her white blouse. The fresh night air that entered the car rubbed against his face cool and fine, like the sponge of the corner man between rounds. It was cold, fresh, and all the blood in his body was wild; every drop of blood seemed on a pilgrimage back to his heart. He placed his hands clumsily at ten and one on the wheel.
–What’s going on tonight, folks?
–Not much, officer, just out watching the stars. You know, the nightlights.
The man’s long, pock-ridden face completely filled the open window frame.
–The moon’s full tonight.
–Yes, yes sir, it is.
Disembodied now, he was just a talking head.
–There’s nothing goin’ on here, is there?
He paused. Thom could hear his hands shift on the roof of the car.
–There’s no…rape. Nothing like that tonight?
The word shook the edges of Thom’s body, the periphery of angles about his elbows and knees and his face twitched involuntarily. The man’s eyes pushed beyond him and trained on Samantha. Thom turned to her. She looked slightly anemic pinned under the spotlight but composed.
–Jeez no. We were just talking about some things, officer.
Could he even ask us that? Surely, a code or some kind of policy…
–Miss, is everything going okay this evening?
–Yeah, oh yes. We were just hanging out. Talking.
–A full moon has been known to make people act pretty strange.
Two large cradles of sweat hung on Thom’s shirt waiting to break open and flood down his dimply gooseflesh.
–We’re probably not supposed to be here. We can totally go.
Thom’s hands left the wheel in a bid to further articulate his words, but not finding a real place to put them, they fell heavy, back into their original position.
–Folks, ah, have you been drinking this evening?
In the distance, a plane rose into the night. Thom watched as it crossed the windshield like a glowing fish sliding across the wet, winking aquarium of the sky, behind glass. His eyes stopped at the rearview mirror and the dirty beige golf cart that came into focus.
–No…
Thom began to laugh and then stopped.
–Well, not yet.
Samantha flashed a confused look at Thom.
–Very well then.
The man stepped back from the window. He had no holster. No gun. His blue uniform matched his Nikes.
–We lock the gates up at eleven sharp, so you know. Have a nice night, folks.
The crunch of feet on gravel sounded like bacon in a frying pan. Thom raised his window and turned up the heater.
The route home could be measured by how much of Thom returned to the earth from
* * *
Section II
Banana Splits and Other Divisions of Labor
1:00AM- On the velvet cusp of slumber, Thomas Evans learns of the tragedy that befell Samantha Freeman, while concomitantly, and privately, he surveys the jagged contours of his own memory. all the while, talk show host Jurry Wringer provides note after note of amaroidal accompaniment.
And it was over. The day could safely be tallied, totaled, and filed away. Or maybe misfiled, or lost, or…? Only to surface years later. Or never.
Outside, the moon poked through the dark flesh of the sky, a giant pendulous gland, swelling, throbbing, waiting to pop and fall like heavy wet snow over the sunhungry ground.
Thom didn’t know he was gone, but he was. Just about. He didn’t know that he didn’t know he was almost asleep because he was almost there, almost deeply, deeply asleep. He was almost there. With all of the bottled dreamfuel driving him along, each breath a step lower and lower. He was almost there. Never looking back. Or up or down or even straight ahead. Never looking at all. Only moving, breath by breath, away from that day and into the next. Into Saturday. Into mid-afternoon coffee cups, eggs with oversized ten commandment tablets of toast, a yolk so runny it could float an armada of potatoes, plank after plank of hash browns, on the golden sea, and shreds of cheese all googoo like strips of fluttering, falling confetti. Add three serpentine strips of bacon, almost crunchy, and ohhhhh, oooorange juice, a little sweetness here, tart with pulp that swims round beneath, between teeth like a pebble lost in the undertow, and sausage patties as big as pancakes, and pancakes, of course, pancakes with thin white borders like whitewall tires and…
–Thom, who was the first girl you screwed?
His eyes filled with wavy glow thrown from the TV in the bedroom. The light fanning outward from the TV was like a lifeboat, conveying all of the motion and people on the screen, all of the praying, shivering nervous to the sandy shores of his sleepy eyeballs. The sound, however, was off, garbled and out of synch and distant, like the diminishing screams of the passengers who didn’t make it into the lifeboats. It was all a colossal shipwreck.
–Today? Well today, I think it was you. Yes, I’m quite certain it was you.
She erupted into a boozy and metallic bronchitic chuckle, the kind that people fall in love with and learn years later it was the purest form of their hatred. Thom realized at that moment he was at his funniest, semiconscious.
–Seriously.
She slapped his shoulder a little too hard.
–Who was it?
He sat up. His eyes kept sliding shut, but he was suddenly nervous.
–Shouldn’t we have…we had this conversation before? We did, right? Like over mimosas or shit like that? In our bathrobes? I think there were pillow mints and Ray Bans, wayfarers…
She wheezed with laughter again.
–What was her name?
–Why do you want to know?
In pre-somnambulant logic, in post-bacchanal logic, straddling between two parallel but mutually repellant conditions of being, the gap was widening. He couldn’t tell if she was serious or not.
–I don’t know. I wanna know. What’s her name?
Her arms thrashed around. She seemed to be trying to pull herself through the air with an invisible rope. It occurred to him then that she was more intoxicated than he was. But only slightly.
He closed his eyes, concluding delay could make a larger mess. He could hear her, her chest falling and rising opposite his, their shared rolling around, opposing, together, like an old cloth towel dispenser in a public bathroom. She picked up the remote and began scrolling through the stations. Everything scrolling too quickly now. He opened his eyes. They didn’t feel as heavy at this moment.
–Is this so you can tell stories about me, to all of your little friends?
Samantha dropped the remote and picked it back up.
–No. Jesus, grow up, Thom.
–Then why do you want to know?
–It’s just something I want to know. To know more about you. Like if you’re allergic to penicillin. I don’t want a blow by blow report, just an idea of who…why that person, why…
–I’m not allergic to penicillin.
–I know. But that’s just it. I know what you’re allergic to. I know you, ah, hate black olives. I know you like black leather over brown, because brown looks kinda trashy and black leather is intergalactic cool. I just thought we could share something…important.
She paused to scratch her ear.
–But meaningless.
–You want to share old lovers?
–No, you’re being stupid. Forget it.
Samantha released the remote control and grabbed a fistfull of blanket, swinging the bunched cloth over her body. Thom drew a long breath, the biggest he could swallow. The air filled his lungs, filled his mouth, and schemed to burst out, but he held it down, hard inside. How long could this last? He could be a balloon and fly away inside himself. Nothing could happen if his cavities were full of air. He held it longer than he imagined he could. He’d hold
it longer than anyone. He’d heard of girls in kindergarten a million years ago holding their breath until they woke up in the nurse’s office, their stubbornness washing away any of the immediate confrontation or disappointment of their teachers. He kept holding. He thought of those girls in kindergarten and imagined all of them like little flowers, slowly rising up from the ground, sitting pretzel-legged, like little bulbs with big eyes and little teeth, rising like tulips.
Eventually, the room started to wave, slashing, like a cobra rubbernecking out of its basket. He kept holding it in. His eyes watered then wandered around noticing the hurly-burly shadows that hopped along the yellow ceiling. But something always breaks. The imprisoned air suddenly lurched from his mouth into the silent room, across his tongue, a slow rub along the lips, and out, forever, forever, forever, removed from his chest, leaving an odd tinge of sweet sterility and chlorine.
–I’ve done a perfect job avoiding the subject with you.
She watched the TV closely, like it would reveal something to her. The next commercial was for a brand of green cola.
–Well that’s just it. Why?
His body suddenly snapped around like a mousetrap firing.
–Why? Because it’s worthless talk. It’s trash talk, Sam. The talk of trashy people in iron-lung bars and frat boy…body-shot slobber. Ohhh...I popped that bitch like a balloon. Slide on, slide off people. Catch the next bus. No one needs to know an old fuck.
–You don’t want to open up with anybody do you? Oh my God, to think you could be just a tad vulnerable and share. Jesus, Thom, you’re acting like such a little brat.
He couldn’t see her eyes but he knew they were squinting.
–Fuck off.
She rolled over and brought the blanket over her ears and then inched it over her head.
–I got nothing to share with your little…
–With? With who…m?
–With all your little… friends.
–God. No shit. I know it. They know it. I’ve seen you do it, too. So have they. Sitting there in your corner of the room avoiding conversation like it’ll infect you with AIDS. Rolling your eyes like you’re gonna black out every ten seconds. You think you’re so much better than everyone else there because your job is so fucking important. ’Cause you put in overtime. You type fucking condom memos up. You’re a fucking… scumbag scribe!
–Shut your mouth. You’re still pissed about the wine, aren’t you?
Samantha shrieked. Thom closed his eyes again. Sleep had left the building. Under the waning glow of the last candle, the room flickered in a tenuous, diminishing light. There was a long and hopeless pause.
–Look… I’m sorry. Why don’t we talk about this tomorrow.
He touched his palm to her bare shoulder only to have it grabbed and pushed back at him. His hand fell on the remote, which he picked up and fired at the TV like a pistol.
*
With the television on mute he listened to her breathe, pulling in the air she borrowed from the world, returning it with a small, stabbing release. He listened and knew. There was more. Every breath she took from the air, she was pumping into the night, resuscitating the darkness, bringing it back to life. Thom couldn’t stop thinking that she was on the other side of something. He closed his eyes again, but sleep would never come now. There was no cool autumn air; it was a cataclysmic heat wave. The moon was the sun, pecking at his eyes to rise. Sleep was ridiculous. For the birds. From behind the lids of his eyes, the room was pale and blue, and light hung around in the shape of a noose. Her breathing slowed. His lips parted.
–Tell me, Sam, what was your first time like?
She responded quickly, without single bodily movement, except her lips.
–It hurt.
–That’s it? It hurt?
–It was sort of like a trip to the dentist at warp speed. I had a cavity filled that took about 10 seconds.
The image of a naked man popped into Thom’s head with a long twirling drill where his cock should have been.
–I always thought there was more.
–What kind of more?
His voice tapped plaintively. He spoke almost fully into her pillow.
–More like more. I thought there was a…consequence.
He softened and elongated the word, dissolving it into the air like sugar in a cup of coffee.
–There was.
–Was his name, Jonah?
–Jonas, actually.
–Ah…
–Was it expensive?
–It was totally free.
–Well that’s one good thing.
–Yeah, I guess.
–Did he pay? I would think that would be the thing to do. Like the last vestige of chivalry, a kind of appendix, you know?
–After a while, when I was sure, when I told Jonas…he just took off for a while. I had no idea what to do. I went to his mom’s apartment, but he wasn’t there. His mom made me a sandwich, and some of her ashes fell on the bread. We split a joint, actually.
She reeled in a slow, quavering breath and sighed quickly.
–The next day he met me after school, near the woods. These dumb woods. We walked in. He turned. He grabbed. He…he punched in my stomach so hard that I blacked out.
–What?
–When I woke up in a hospital bed, he was holding my hand.
–Jesus.
–I lost it on the can.
–Sam…
–It looked like the tip of a banana. Is that the kind of trash talk you had in mind?
–Jesus Christ. Are you serious?
–I flushed the thing, but it didn’t take, so I had to get a plunger…
–I don’t want any more of this.
She slid a cigarette from the pack and touched a flame to the end, setting it aglow in the unlit room.
He cast off the heavy blankets and passed through the bedroom door.
*
As the last drops fell from his empty mouth into the pool frothing below, a returning wave of nausea blossomed in his guts. He slid down the bathroom wall, reluctant to recast himself on all fours as a trembling conduit between stomach and the ever-filling white basin, but nothing more emerged from his mouth to the other fat white static mouth, all-day wide there. Instead, it seemed that all of the clearing had now made room for something else, the arrhythmic coggy rolling of everything out, everything was out. Or was it also the uneasy turgid moon above? The moon was a kind of trawling ship with spears of light that had run something up to the surface.
Burning more and more inside, Thom turned whiter and whiter in front of the mirror, as if swallowing his own pallor down. It was as though a vestigial memory bucket, long resting and unremarkable, collecting all the runoff, had been kicked over. He waited for the drowsy retrospection to settle and pool in the fresh open space he’d made. After all, a wound is really nothing more than fresh space…
One night when Thom was still in grade school he heard the roaring engine snap and snarl into the drive. The car didn’t move, but the engine was still on the fray. Then the front door quietly slid open, tolerating a cool autumn draft to stretch into the foyer. Sitting on his perch at the top of the stairway, he could feel goosepimples hump along his arms, up and down like lines of brail along his skin. From behind the door, Thom could see his father’s florid head look left then right, like a cartoon cat burglar, before sliding through the doorway and into the unlit house. He tapped the room with his fingers, bumping into things, dropping things. And then the room got bright as his father stood upright, arms extended, caught in a net of light, squinting, startled, older than Thom ever imagined. His father’s shirt was partially unbuttoned, and he took on the slake solemnity of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein as Thom’s mother entered the room and began to scream for hours.
&
In the bedroom, Samantha considered another cigarette but thought she’d best not. She unmuted the TV.
–I still love him, but…
The audience was silent
ly poised, awaiting the arrival of another guest. The woman on the screen uncrossed and crossed her glossy, angular legs, piloting them under the black belt of a miniskirt synched to her waist. Her extravagant breasts bobbed behind her ribbed, black, belly shirt. Her stomach appeared disciplined; her lips were moist. Her name and affliction ran across the foot of the screen.
–I just like to f**k, Jurry, and if I can get paid, hey…
She tipped her hands in the air as a deluge of yells and applause poured in from the audience.
Watch as a home run scrambles off the bat of a legendary slugger to win game seven of the World Series. Watch as a Hail Mary is launched and nimbly caught on the end-zone carpet in the final second of the Super Bowl. Watch as people sit on grenades.
&
Most night’s though, Thom’s father, Raymond Evans, would return home after his radio show and pour a long drink. Probably was a terrible evening with a new way to cue up an album and that’s nothing about the good music suddenly becoming older and older, and to say nothing of the mawkish requests and unoriginal dedications that make your heart age and sag like a mummified tit. They all worry about baby. My baby. The baby. Night baby. Sleeping baby. It’s all babytalk. Baby, everyone’s worried about baby.
Raymond always returned to the kitchen after his first to pour a longer drink. It was easier. Soon after that he returns for another. Just think of how it was ten years ago. It was easier. They say it gets better and it’s alleviating, morphine patches and succor, more sheep-eyed gazing and less frightening ways to live. But the past is a pernicious grudge sharpening its axe, the abandoned backburner coiling like a snake, and it sneaks up on the present; the now that will haunt your then, will hack you into a pulpy pool of fractals spinning and spiraling into nauseating infinitudes… He returns to the kitchen and pours an even longer pour of brown and spins back into the living room. The only thing worse than waiting for a song to play is waiting for it to end.
&
Watch people swallow glass. Everyone watching, overtly or secretly, wanted her to spread her legs. It needed it to happen. Scripted or not, there needed to be proof. Facts to hold up the story. Evidence to confirm she’s truly indecent and filthy and morally unrestrained. Adrift. Because she’s teetered, played with it, toyed with licentiousness like a gush of water rubbing and overturning a pebble, holding it above the earth, in the air momentarily, in a tight fluid net before throwing it back down and then resurrecting it with another wave. WE NEED PROOF!