Emporium

by Adam Johnson

  Let’s say that Pluto’s gone, that the little planet swings wide one day and never comes back. Your varsity swim coach is also your Advanced Placement Astronomy teacher, and in AP Astronomy, the boys never stop because yours are the only breasts that are a mystery to them. It’s a game they play, rapping on your titanium trauma plate when they pass in the hall, though you know the spirit of their fingers goes deeper, and you learn to put your arms up in anticipation. In class, the sun and earth are two white dots, while Pluto’s historical orbit, as Mr. Halverson calls it, races away with his running chalk line across four blackboards. Sometimes he lectures directly to the Kevlar outline of your chest. These boys have never seen Pluto, have never reached for it across a black sky, but they moan and wring their hands, as if they can feel its loss, just out of reach, as Mr. Halverson’s orbit line comes to a halt at the end of the black slate.

  There’s nothing out there but starlight and locomotion, Halverson tells you at night swim practice. You think about this for five thousand yards, back-stroking through the blue lanes, the steam rising off your arms to the batter-black sky.

  And this is what you come home wet to, the place where you grew up: a hole in the wall behind a Dumpster that opens into the dust-flashing cavern of a closed-down Kmart. Here is where you learn to drive at thirteen, racing rusty carts full tilt through Automotive. Among the smashed racks of Entertainment is where Hector always waits for you. You first kiss in the room above, with mirrors that are really windows, lookouts over a discount wasteland. Through the ductwork, you can hear the nonstop static of your old man’s stupid movies. You hear him joking through the vent, endlessly joking. Always take a bomb with you when you fly on an airplane, he says to a rare customer, it’s safer, because the odds of there being two bombs on board are astronomical.

  You’ve slept with seven boys in here, making love, they call it, for your sake, but you know better. Through the hole, into the dark Kmart, they come, and you are waiting for them. But none ever fingers your ribs, strokes your shoulders, handles that hollow under your heart because every time one starts to tug on those Velcro straps you are in terror. That is your event horizon, Mr. Halverson calls it at swim practice, the speed beyond which you can no longer safely swim without changing your form, the point at which you must let yourself be taken by your own current. Safety is your enemy, he likes to say, and you know he’s right. In your own Kmart you’re safe, vested, with thirty-six layers of Kevlar to help you take a boy’s weight on top of you. But in a Speedo, wet, leaning over the starting block, dripping on the springboard, it’s like being naked under floodlights, unshouldered and alone. That’s what made you break the school record in the 400 Individual Medly last month—the arm-throwing terror of being vestless before the shouts of those who want the most from you. You took your little trophy—a golden girl, hands up, chest out—and quit the team.

  Karen Coles, whose locker is above yours, is seeing Mr. Halverson. Everybody knows since she crashed his Volvo last week. But only you’ve seen the notes that have floated through the cracks into your locker, only you know that she veered on purpose, that she was testing what was between them when she crossed the centerline, that she was saying I love you even as the airbags blew in their faces.

  Your father is different since Mr. Ortiz fired those warning shots in the parking lot that night. He tries to be even more happy-go-lucky, but there is a nervous edge to it, and you know that he is the one on the lookout now. He has bought a gun, a little silver number, your mom calls it, and she stores it under her end of the counter. You remember the excuse he gave, leaning down to you at fourteen: it’s for that one bullet, that one wellintended bullet, and after that the odds say you’re good. This is the line that made you cinch your Velcro straps and wonder if you’d hear the bullet coming. But now you wonder if deep down, your old man isn’t disappointed Mr. Ortiz didn’t shoot for the heart. At home, you turn the oven on before climbing into bed.

  It is the last of the warm days, the end of the semester nearing, one more till you graduate, and Mr. Halverson has saved the best for last: black holes. For now, the black and the hole do not seem to concern him. It is a thing called the event horizon he describes, the line beyond which light is forever drawn in, and you know this is going to be his big metaphor for life, his contribution toward bettering your future, a lecture, you can tell, he has made before. He draws a big, easy circle on the board and asks everyone to reflect a moment on the point of no return. But you know it is a mistake to call it that because nothing ever returns, really. Orbits are only historical. You like the swim-team explanation better: call it a line beyond which you can expect only a change in form and high rates of speed, a point of sudden inevitability. You lean back in your desk, your foot looping big, easily drawing his attention, and with a rift in his breathing, he returns his lecture to an institutional mode, comparing the point of no return to drugs and dropouts, to the joys of college learning and beyond. And we all know what happens in the black hole, he concludes, but his heart is no longer in it. You know those airbags were his event horizon.

  In bed, at night, you sweat. You dream in shades of pink and green of gin and burning hair. In the morning, you, your mom, your dad, all eat breakfast in boxer shorts and bulletproof vests. Dad has a VCR set up on the table and watches Clambake! while your mom stares at her cereal.

  You had been thinking about it this way: there’s a ring around the thing that draws you near—the palms of Hector’s hands, say, or your reflection in Halverson’s glasses—and to cross that line is to be taken, swept, changed. But today you see it different. Today, standing in the empty AP classroom, not wanting to believe the rumors that Halverson’s fired, packed up in his rental car and gone, you wonder where is your event horizon, where is the line beyond which something will forever be drawn to you. His handwriting is still on the blackboard. Binary star homework due Tuesday, is all it says, and he can’t be gone, he can’t be. Stupidly waiting under the Styrofoam–coat hanger model of the solar system you reach up and set it in motion. But the hand-colored planets swing too smoothly it seems to you, too safely Halverson would say, and plucking Pluto from the mix sets the model wildly spinning.

  So it’s not just anybody waiting for you in the Kmart after school, not just some boy grabbing you by the vest straps and pulling you to him, but Hector. It’s Hector’s drugstore heart thumping next to yours, Hector’s letterman chest against yours, Hector’s dive team hips gaining on yours and you want to believe, you want.

  Hector has his father’s gun, you your mother’s, and you will ask the boy you love to break the plate guarding your heart. Hector has a Monte Carlo and you’ve seen the movie Bullitt enough times in your dad’s shop that there’s a California road map in your head as clear as the grooves around Steve McQueen’s eyes, deep as the veins in Hector’s arms, but it is not enough. The line must be crossed. He’s ten feet from you, a parking space away. You hand him your mother’s silver little number. It will knock you down, you know, there will be that smell, but soon there will be no more vests, no more fears, only Hector’s fingers on the bruise he’s made, on your sternum, and the line will be crossed, the event set in motion, at the highest of speeds.

  CLIFF GODS OF ACAPULCO

  My father is dying in Zaire, though I don’t necessarily know that yet as I drive to Vegas with Jimbo. I do know my dad is a Rover driver for Mobil geologists and, instead of seismic surveys, he carries two ammo clips and a military discharge that’s semiautomatic. This is 1985, and I’m going to Vegas because I’m still in those hazy couple years after high school when I read a lot of racing magazines, drink with secretaries at Bennigan’s every night, and take things at face value. I’m failing mythology, my lone course at Riverside Community College, and Jimbo and I test diodes all day for Futron, an electronics firm that makes black-market cable boxes and will shortly be shut down by the FCC. Between us, we have 244 TV channels.

  My favorite viewing is always the live coverage on the Canadia
n Motorsports Network. Jimbo prefers the Playboy Channel, whose only movie I remember liking is The Black Box, a soft-core in which, following an emergency landing on a desert island, naughty stewardesses screw survivors on inflatable rafts, yellow escape slides, galley carts, and even a thirty-thousand-horse pulse-injector tail engine. What the crew doesn’t know is that the sex is being transmitted by the flight data recorders, which leads to hilarity when the Coast Guard comes to “rescue” them. Getting the Playboy Channel free for yourself is simple; just connect two parallax converters in tandem with a P-9 capacitor, then bridge the diode with an alligator clip.

  Jimbo’s from Vegas, and we make the hop every couple weeks, though our thing is usually to get a United flight that leaves us about eighteen hours of solid bingo-bingo before we sleep on a flight home to six hundred transistors waiting for the green light. On United, I fly free. For Jimbo, the best I can do is drink coupons. Today we drive instead of fly because of FAA rules: you can’t take poisonous animals (scorpions) on commercial airliners. Jimbo has a whole box of them, a ridiculously large cardboard box for the dozen red scorpions the label says are within. They’re a special gift for a friend who has a “death thing,” Jimbo says. The box doesn’t have airholes, and is so light I don’t believe there’s anything in there—there can’t be. Jimbo’s excited to see what’s inside, keeps talking about opening it, though he wants me to do it. But the trick to life, it seems to me so far, is learning to tolerate the not knowing. I can take that box or leave it.

  Jimbo’s big into thrills, and our hotfoot to Nevada is all him describing this new indoor skydiving attraction we’re going to try when we get there. I don’t tell him my mythology teacher says thrill rides are a mix of sky worship and disaster simulation, both primitive kinds of foreplay. I can’t explain it the way my teacher does, so outside the state line, I just tell Jimbo, “Let’s piss already.”

  Detouring over Hoover Dam, Jimbo leans hard into the canyon curves, chuting the two-lane fast enough that the scorpion box slides back and forth in the hatch, cornering tight enough that we flirt with guardrails and great heights. Such driving does not appeal to me. The thrills I go for are more predictable—a pistol kick, a sudden loss of cabin pressure, the way a secretary or nurse at Houlihan’s will try to lay you by chewing ice from her drink and saying things like, “Grrr.” Thrilling driving takes place on oval tracks, especially thousand-lap endurance races that stretch late into night—tight, boxy circuits—spinning long after you turn off the TV and go to bed, races in which the victor is a mystery until the last lap, when you’re crashed already and dreaming.

  Entering the shadows of great saguaros and graffiti-covered rock faces, we pull over to take a leak in the bluffs above Lake Mead. The outcrops are like lava, and we walk through the shoulder’s gravel and ground glass to stand among barrel-chested Joshua trees. “My old man used to take me up here when I was a kid, to see the bomb tests,” Jimbo says, unzipping. Jimbo keeps his dope in his Jockeys, so he holds the Baggie in his teeth as he points. I look up through outstretched cactus limbs to the bluffs, which are low and could not offer much of a view, then scan the distant scrub plains and tawny hills below.

  “You’d need some L-5 optics for that,” I say, using a testing term from Futron.

  “We’re talking about nukes,” Jimbo says, “which tend to be large events, and our binoculars were Bushnells, the best.” Speaking through the plastic bag, he goes on to describe how the military would build a little dummy city for every explosion, complete with town halls and fire stations. “My old man would flip. Some of the houses were two stories, with yards and barns. He’d look through those Bushnells and ask, ‘Is that a Cadillac in that driveway? Tell me that’s not a Caddy they’re gonna cook.’ But the white flash always shut him up.”

  Talk of the white flash, which I imagine too clearly, shuts me up as well. We do not go on to discuss either bombs or fathers here among the Joshua trees; we just piss into their hairy arms and leave.

  What would I have to say anyway?

  Actually, I will never know if my father is pulled from his Rover and shot in a sorghum field in West Africa. My only confirmation comes from a man who arrives out of nowhere one day and claims to be my father’s best friend, who begins seeing my mother, and finally convinces her to move from Michigan to Acapulco with him. His name is Ted, and all I know about the whole deal is the sketchy portrait he paints of guarding Mobil interests from tribal warlords, and the general fact that Acapulco is a place where, in long streaks of flashing skin, people throw themselves from cliff tops into the frothy abyss.

  Before Ted takes my mom to Mexico, the only time we see her is in LAX on Sunday mornings. Ted and I both find ourselves at the SkyLounge cocktail rail, eating prepopped popcorn and watching people go by until my mother’s red-eye comes through, a point at which we have thirty-five minutes with her before she stows tray tables and passes out pillows all the way back to her base in Detroit. The first time we meet, Ted tells me he and my father really took some heat from the local screws in Africa. “Things are different on the continent,” he says, and I watch his teeth. Ted has knuckles for teeth. “Those screws were coming at us from all sides. There was no dealing with them.”

  I have yet to watch enough cable movies to know “screw” is prison talk.

  Ted is going to become a saga, but that’s not a concern right now. It has no bearing as Jimbo and I drive to Vegas. This story is about amputation.

  For these couple of years I am unshakable, so the back roads through Vegas speak nothing to me. I do not think about the people who wander the edges of sidewalkless causeways, the cars that shift and float as if unused to daylight, or the particular strains of Vegas trash that string wire-lined gullies. The power lines simply sink and rise above us, the sky is only October blue, and it seems perfectly natural that people hitchhike in the dips, where freshly blacked streets wash over with sugar sand.

  The plan is to get stoned and ride a new attraction called Fly Away, which basically consists of indoor skydiving in a room shaped like a padded tube. There’s a wire net at the bottom that keeps you from falling into the DC-3 engine below. Actually, it’s Jimbo’s plan. I don’t smoke dope, and I’m a big guy. I don’t believe I will fly.

  Key to the plan is going to see Jimbo’s old friend Marty. He’s the one the scorpions are for. The whole ride out is Marty this and Marty that, an old-school parade of Marty memories, but what’s important is this: Marty’s girlfriend, Tasha, is the preflight girl at Fly Away, the one who suits you up, so we’re headed to Marty’s to get some good dope and the VIP from his girlfriend.

  “Wait’ll you get a load of Tasha,” Jimbo says as we crest the foothills outside Vegas. He’s pretty stoned, and from his description of Tasha, I know she’s the kind of thank-God-it’s-Friday secretary I’d work at Bennigan’s.

  “Tasha’s seen the other side,” he says.

  “The other side of what?”

  Jimbo just raises his eyebrows, and we drive for a while.

  “Maybe I’ll show her the white flash,” I tell him.

  Jimbo doesn’t quite know what I mean by this, but he likes the sound of it. He smiles and steps on the gas, sending us full tilt through the newly paved scrub desert leading to the suburbs. “White flash,” he repeats.

  Closing my eyes, I let the road’s G-force take me. I feel this Tasha woman cinch me into a billowy nylon flight suit, her hands folding Velcro, running zippers, jerking my straps tight. I hear her knock my helmet twice, meaning A-okay, thumbs up, as I follow her into Fly Away’s engine room. It is a more modern version of this engine, the DC-9, that kills my mother’s best friend, Tammy, climbing out of Dulles International. You’ve seen the footage, the one that goes into the icy river. I say this because Tammy is a fox, too, a woman I stare at endlessly as she and my mother sit by our condo’s swimming pool in white bikinis.

  Marty’s house is on a pie-shaped lot at the end of a cul-de-sac in west Vegas. It’s long and low, hard
-lined and brown, the kind of house John Wayne would’ve lived in, if he’d never been famous. Beyond the sprawling roof rise two jagged outcrops of stone, one with a five-story radio tower that flashes red strobes bright enough to make us wince a bit, even at noon. The light’s glow pattern is two fast and one slow, which warns overhead airplanes that this particular hazard’s in the approach lane.

  On the front steps, we stare into twin, rough-hewn doors and Jimbo rings the bell again. “Like I said, Marty’s a soap-opera case,” he whispers. “Don’t say anything about his face. He’s sensitive about his face.”

  I’ll tell you this. Jimbo’s not a good friend. He’s shallow and deceptive, and there’s a hole in him that will make him say anything. I’m not a good friend either. I am asleep in an essential way, and I will not begin to wake up for several years, not until I learn the meaning of the word loss, until I am in Acapulco and Ted hands me his favorite pistol, a chrome Super-25.

  A woman finally answers the door in a UNLV Runnin’ Rebels T-shirt she’s adorned with glitter and spangles. She is clearly not happy to see us. I’m six foot four. Jimbo has no neck, and he’s holding a box labeled LIVE ANIMALS POISONOUS.

  It takes her three full seconds to place Jimbo, then she turns and walks away.

  We let ourselves into a room carpeted in cream wall-towall, with a black pumice fireplace and a ranch-style bar made from dark wood and warbled green glass. There is an elaborate seventies intercom system, with talk stations on every wall. Jimbo heads straight for a Wurlitzer and works its silent keys. “We used to play Ozzy on this,” he says. The walls are covered with photos of Marty, blond-haired, blue-eyed: Marty in a football uniform, Marty in a powder-blue prom cravat, Marty midair in front of a white ‘66 Mustang, which it turns out is the crash vehicle in question.