Fortune Smiles: Stories

by Adam Johnson

  I can’t remember the last time she called me that.

  “Oh yeah,” I say, and unbutton my shirt, unzip my jeans. When I drop my underwear, I feel weirdly, I don’t know, naked. I swing a leg up, then kind of lie on her.

  A look of contentment crosses her face. “This is how it’s supposed to be,” she says. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to look into your eyes.”

  Her body is narrow but warm. I don’t know where to put my hands.

  “Do you want to pull down my panties?”

  I sit up and begin to work them off. I see the scar from the femoral stent. When I heft her legs, there are the bedsores we’ve been fighting.

  “Remember our trip to Mexico,” she asks, “when we made love on top of that pyramid? It was like we were in the past and the future at the same time. I kind of feel that now.”

  “You’re not high, are you?”

  “What? Like I’d have to be stoned to recall the first time we talked about having a baby?”

  When I have her panties off and her legs hooked, I pause. It takes all my focus to get an erection, and then I can’t believe I have one. Here is my wife, paralyzed, invalid, insensate, and though everything’s the opposite of erotic, I am poised above her, completely hard.

  “I’m wet, aren’t I?” Charlotte asks. “I’ve been thinking about this all day.”

  I do remember the pyramid. The stone was cold, the staircase steep. The past to me was a week of Charlotte in Mayan dresses, cooing at every baby she came across. Having sex under jungle stars, I tried to imagine the future: a faceless someone conceived on a sacrificial altar. I finished early and tried to shake it off. I focused only on all those steps we had to make it down in the dark.

  “I think I feel something,” she says. “You’re inside me, right? Because I’m pretty sure I can feel it.”

  Here I enter my wife and begin our lovemaking. I try to focus on the notion that if this works, Charlotte will be safe, that for nine months she’d let no harm come to her, and maybe she’s right, maybe the baby will stimulate something and recovery will begin.

  Charlotte smiles. It’s brittle, but it’s a smile. “How’s this for finding the silver lining—I won’t have to feel the pain of childbirth.”

  This makes me wonder if a paralyzed woman can push out a baby, or does she get the scalpel, and if so, is there anesthesia, and all at once my body is at the edge of not cooperating.

  “Hey, are you here?” she asks. “I’m trying to get you to smile.”

  “I just need to focus for a minute,” I tell her.

  “I can tell you’re not really into this,” she says. “I can tell you’re still hung up on the idea that I’m going to do something drastic to myself, right? Just because I talk about crazy stuff sometimes doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything.”

  “Then why’d you make me promise to help you do it?”

  The promise came early, in the beginning, just before the ventilator. She had a vomiting reflex that lasted for hours. Imagine endless dry heaves while you’re paralyzed. The doctors finally gave her narcotics. Drugged, dead-limbed and vomiting, that’s when it struck her that her body was no longer hers. I was holding her hair, keeping it out of the basin. She was panting between heaves.

  She said, “Promise me that when I tell you to make it stop, you’ll make it stop.”

  “Make what stop?” I asked.

  She retched, long and cord-rattling. I knew what she meant.

  “It won’t come to that,” I said.

  She tried to say something but retched again.

  “I promise,” I said.

  Now, in her mechanical bed, her negligee straps slipping off her shoulders, Charlotte says, “It’s hard for you to understand, I know. But the idea that there’s a way out, it’s what allows me to keep going. I’d never take it. You believe me, don’t you?”

  “I hate that promise, I hate that you made me make it.”

  “I’d never do it, and I’d never make you help.”

  “Then release me,” I tell her.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  I decide to just shut it all out and keep going. I’m losing my erection, and my mind wonders what will happen if I go soft—do I have it in me to fake it?—but I shut it out and keep going and going, pounding on Charlotte until I can barely feel anything. Her breasts loll alone under me. From the bedside table, the drone turns itself on and rises, hovering. It flashes my forehead with its green laser, as if what I’m feeling is that easy to determine, as if my emotion has a name. Is it spying on me, feeling sympathy or executing old code? I wonder if the drone’s OS reverted to a previous version or if Google reacquired it or if it’s in some kind of autonomous mode. Or it could be that someone hacked the Android glasses, or maybe…That’s when I look down and see Charlotte is crying.

  I stop.

  “No, don’t,” she says. “Keep going.”

  She’s not crying hard, but they are fat, lamenting tears.

  “We can try again tomorrow,” I tell her.

  “No, I’m okay,” she says. “Just keep going and do something for me, would you?”

  “All right.”

  “Put the headphones on me.”

  “You mean, while we’re doing it?”

  “Music on,” she says. From the headphones on her bedside table, Nirvana starts to hum.

  “I know I’m doing it all wrong,” I say. “It’s been a long time, and…”

  “It’s not you,” she says. “I just need my music. Just put them on me.”

  “Why do you need Nirvana? What is it to you?”

  She closes her eyes and shakes her head.

  “What is it with this Kurt Cobain?” I say. “What’s your deal with him?”

  I grab her wrists and pin them down, but she can’t feel it.

  “Why do you have to have this music? What’s wrong with you?” I demand. “Just tell me what it is that’s wrong with you.”

  —

  The drone follows me to the garage, where it wanders the walls, looking for a way out. I turn on a computer and download one of these Nirvana albums. I play the whole thing, just sitting there in the dark. The guy, this Kurt Cobain, sings about being stupid and dumb and unwanted. In one song, he says that Jesus doesn’t want him for a sunbeam. In another song, he says he wants milk and laxatives along with cherry-flavored antacids. He has a song called “All Apologies,” but he never actually apologizes. He doesn’t even say what he did wrong.

  The drone, having found no escape, comes to me and hovers silently. I must look pretty pathetic, because the drone takes my temperature.

  I lift the remote for the garage door opener. “Is this what you want?” I ask. “If I let you go, are you going to come back?”

  The drone silently hums, impassive atop its column of warm air.

  I press the button. The drone waits until the garage door is all the way up. Then it snaps a photograph of me and zooms off into the Palo Alto night.

  I stand and breathe the air, which is cool and smells of flowers. There’s enough moonlight to cast leaf patterns on the driveway. Down the street, I spot the glowing eyes of our cat. I call his name, but he doesn’t come. I gave him to a friend a couple blocks away, and for a few weeks the cat returned at night to visit me. Not anymore. This feeling of being in proximity to something that’s lost to you, it seems like my whole life right now. It’s a feeling Charlotte would understand if she’d just talk to the president. But he’s not the one she needs to speak to, I suddenly understand. I return to my computer bench and fire up a bank of screens. I stare into their blue glow and get to work. It takes me hours, most of the night, before I’m done.

  It’s almost dawn when I go to Charlotte. The room is dark, and I can only see her outline. “Bed incline,” I say, and she starts to rise. She wakes and stares at me but says nothing. Her face has that lack of expression that comes only after it’s been through every emotion.

  I set the iProjector in her l
ap. She hates the thing but says nothing. She only tilts her head a little, like she’s sad for me. Then I turn it on.

  Kurt Cobain appears before her, clad in a bathrobe and composed of soft blue light.

  Charlotte inhales. “Oh my God,” she murmurs.

  She looks at me. “Is it him?”

  I nod.

  She marvels at him. “What do I say?” she asks. “Can he talk?”

  I don’t answer.

  Kurt Cobain’s hair is in his face. Shifting her gaze, Charlotte tries to look into his eyes. While the president couldn’t quite find your eyes, Kurt is purposefully avoiding them.

  “I can’t believe how young you are,” Charlotte tells him. “You’re just a boy.”

  Kurt mumbles, “I’m old.”

  “Are you really here?” she asks.

  “Here we are now,” he sings. “Entertain us.”

  His voice is rough and hard-lived. It’s some kind of proof of life to Charlotte.

  Charlotte looks at me, filled with wonder. “I thought he was gone,” she says. “I can’t believe he’s really here.”

  Kurt shrugs. “I only appreciate things when they’re gone,” he says.

  Charlotte looks stricken. “I recognize that line,” she says to me. “That’s a line from his suicide note. How does he know that? Has he already written it, does he know what he’s going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. This isn’t my conversation to have. I back away toward the door, and just as I’m leaving, I hear her start to talk to him.

  “Don’t do what you’re thinking about doing,” she pleads with him. “You don’t know how special you are, you don’t know how much you matter to me,” she says, carefully, like she’s talking to a child. “Please don’t take yourself from me. You can’t do that to me.”

  She leans toward Kurt Cobain like she wants to throw her arms around him and hold him, like she’s forgotten that her arms don’t work and there’s no him to embrace.

  Nonc pulls up outside Chuck E. Cheese’s and hits the hazards on his UPS van. The last working cell tower in Lake Charles, Louisiana, is not far away, so he stops here a couple times a day to check his messages. He turns to his son, who’s strapped into a bouncy chair rigged from cargo hooks, and attempts to snag his cell from the boy, a two-and-a-half-year-old named Geronimo.

  “Eyeball,” Geronimo says into the phone. “Eyeball.”

  It’s one of the boy’s few words, and Nonc has no idea what it means.

  “Trade?” Nonc asks as he raises a sippy cup of chocolate milk. “For some gla-gla?”

  Geronimo has puffy little-boy eyes, white nubby teeth and an unfortunate sunburn.

  “Eyeball” is all the boy will say.

  Nonc next waves his DIAD, the electronic pad customers use to sign for their packages. It’s got GPS, Wi-Fi, cellular and Bluetooth capabilities, though most of that is worthless since the hurricane. The kid goes for it, and Nonc steps down into the parking lot, which is a checkerboard of green and blue tents.

  The boarded-up Outback Steakhouse next door is swamped with FEMA campers, and a darkened AMC 16 is a Lollapalooza of urban camping. It’s crazy, but weeks after losing everything, people seem to have more stuff than ever—and it’s all the shit you’d want to get rid of: Teflon pans, old towels, coffee cans of silverware. How do you tell your thin bedsheets from your neighbor’s? Can you separate your yellowed, mismatched Tupperware from the world’s? And there are mountains of all-new crap. Outside the campers are bright purple laundry bins, molded plastic porch chairs and the deep black of Weber grills, which is what happens when Wal-Mart is your first responder.

  Inside the pizza parlor, the place is packed, everyone looking sunburned and glassy-eyed in donated T-shirts and baggy-ass sweats. Nonc heads for the restroom, but when he opens the door, a loafy steam rolls out that makes it clear a hundred people have just taken a dump, and even Nonc—a guy who has lately improvised toilet paper from first-aid compresses, a miniature New Testament and the crust of Chuck E.’s own pizza—even he backs out.

  Nonc steals all the plastic spoons and napkins, then checks his voicemail, trying not to focus on the people around him—they’re so clueless and pathetic, sitting around Chuck E. Cheese’s all day, a place that’s open only because it’s a Christian outfit. Sure, Nonc shouldn’t point fingers—he’s had some mosquito problems lately, and his wraparound sunglasses have given him a raccoon tan line. But nobody gave him free clothes and prepaid calling cards after he was evicted last year and all his possessions were auctioned by the sheriff.

  First there’s a text message from his girlfriend, Relle: “411+XXX.”

  Then there’s a voicemail from his boss about a utility crew. Delivering to the utility crews is the biggest pain in the ass—they’re in a different place every day, lost themselves half the time. They’re all from Nebraska and Arkansas, and since they signed up to go save New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, they’re none too happy about getting stuck in Lake Charles after Hurricane Rita.

  Finally, there’s a message from a doctor in Los Angeles about his father. Nonc’s old man is a garden-variety scoundrel, and on the scale of bad dads, he probably only rates a medium, but because of his ability to write vicious and unrelenting Post-it notes, he was one of the most avoided characters in Lake Charles right up to the day he stole Nonc’s car and left town. Nonc’s father can’t speak, so once or twice a year Nonc gets a call from somebody who’s been suckered into the task of reading a stream of Post-its.

  The doctor’s text message is this: “Your father is very ill and not expected.”

  Nonc’s dad has had cancer before, so the diagnosis isn’t exactly news. There’s something right about it, though. A man spends his life “not expected”—isn’t that how it should end?

  Nonc steps up on one of the kiddie rides, a paddy wagon driven by a singing rat. From this height, he can see the evacuees are all wearing orange FEMA bracelets and the same cheap-ass white sneakers. Eating pizza all day, watching TV. It’s true these folks had it bad—got hit by Katrina, then evacuated to Lake Charles, only to get hit by Rita three weeks later. But Rita has passed, and it’s high time to get their shit tight. Someone needs to tell them that they’re better off without their coffee tables and photo albums. Some person will have to break it to them that their apartments weren’t so great, that losing track of half their relatives is probably for the best. Some shit, though, you got to figure for yourself.

  Nonc lifts a hand. “Does anybody know Marnie Broussard?” he asks them yet again. “She’s a white girl, from Tremé in New Orleans. She’s the mother of my boy.”

  —

  Soon Nonc’s UPS van is grinding toward the top of the Lake Charles Bridge. The bridge cuts the city in two, and it has this weird way of making you forget. Nonc goes over it like ten times a day—parts for the petrochemical plants, drops at the riverboat casinos, a million foam coolers of crawfish to the airport—though he never really thought about the power of the bridge till the hurricanes came. This morning, Nonc delivered sausage casings to the hog lots in Lacassine and Taser batteries to the Calcasieu jail, but once he starts climbing the bridge—suddenly there’s no more pig squeal in his ears, and his clothes don’t stink of louse powder and prison okra. There’s just the clean smell of rice barges, oyster shale in the sun, and that sandwich spread of ocean, twenty miles south.

  For the bridge to work, there’s only one thing you got to not think about, and that’s how this lady from New Orleans tossed her kids off last week. She lined those tots up for the old heave-ho, and when the deed was done and it was her turn to splash, she chickened. The bridge is no stranger to jumpers, and Nonc has driven past exhaust-blackened wreaths and we miss you so-and-so messages spray-painted down the guardrail. What gets Nonc is that, in his experience, parents abandon you slowly, bit by bit, across your entire youth. Even after you get over being ditched, they keep calling to remind you. So the thought of casting off your children in one stroke is u
nnerving and new, and Nonc knows exactly how it will play out: they’ll blame the hurricane and put that lady in a halfway house for a year—then she’ll move to Vegas or something and live on dollar-ninety-nine prime rib.

  Nonc coasts down the backside of the bridge before turning onto Lake Street, where the fat homes are, with their long docks and boathouses. Because the rich folks are still poshing it up wherever rich folks evacuate to, this is the last section of town to get service restored. Sections from downed oak trees have been rolled like old tires in the ditch, and Nonc’s van lumbers over sprays of brick from fallen chimneys, making Geronimo’s yellow boom box skip.

  “Grow-grow,” the boy shouts.

  “Easy there, hot rod,” Nonc says, forwarding through the CD tracks—there’s Ernie and Bert singing “Elbow Room,” and then there’s “Batty-Bat,” which the Dracula puppet does. He turns it up when Grover starts rapping the ABCs.

  It took him a week to figure out the boy was trying to say Grover.

  Nonc’s had “custody” of him since the day after Katrina. New Orleans was being evacuated, buses coming in by the caravan, and the city was already overrun with tuffdicks from the offshore rigs. Nonc was making a FEMA delivery—which meant wading into a casino parking lot filled with thousands of people, looking for anyone wearing a tie. He emerged to find Geronimo in his van with a yellow boom box and a bag of clothes.

  Marnie didn’t even leave a note. Do you brush a toddler’s teeth? What do you do when a boy stays awake all night, staring at the roof of the van? Nonc would give anything for a vocabulary sheet. What does bway mean? And the initials M-O? So far, Nonc’s figured out a couple dozen words—back, bed, mess, broke—things like that. Gla-gla is chocolate milk. When Geronimo needs help, he says up, up. And then there’s eyeball, which he says clear as a bell—why, what the hell for?

  Relle taught the boy hug and kiss. You can say, “Baby kiss van,” and though you can tell he doesn’t want to, he’ll go like a robot and put his lips on the dusty fender. Relle is always saying, “Baby hug chair” and it kills her, it’s so cute. Geronimo goes into this seek-and-destroy mode, and the next thing you know, he’s gotten to third base with the nearest barstool. And it was Relle’s idea that the boy should call him Nonc, rather than Randall, his real name.