Calf

by Andrea Kleine

  As they waited for their ice cream, Jeffrey thought of all the different ways he and Amber could fall in love. He could invite her over to his apartment. He could ask for her help with something, like picking out curtains or deciding where a lamp should go. He could ask her to teach him how to cook a certain recipe. They could wear silly aprons, make a mess in the kitchen, start a food fight, and wash each other off. She could shake his hand good-night and he could hold on to it just a little too long. She would put her other hand on top of his and gaze up at him with her perfect eyes. And when she had looked at him long enough, she would close her eyes and wait there, wait in the atmospheric space beneath his shoulders. She would wait for him to land on her lonely planet.

  Jeffrey thought these things as he stared across the white table that was damp from being freshly wiped clean. This is probably what Amber looked like at her age, he thought. This is what she was like when she was pure, before the Hollywood goons got to her. When she was just a kid, like this, carefully eating ice cream, methodically dissecting a candy snowman face. Everything in this ice cream place was cold and wet, everything except for Jeffrey and this girl.

  The girl didn’t like talking. Jeffrey was the same way.

  But Jeffrey had to be the big guy here.

  “So, what’s the deal with the book?” he asked as nonchalantly as possible.

  “It’s just a book,” she answered without looking up from her dish.

  “Why weren’t they letting you take it out?”

  “It’s a book for preteens, or for teens, but they say you need parental permission. It’s stupid.”

  “What’s the book about?”

  “It’s a Judy Blume book and sometimes people don’t like her books because they talk about real life.” The girl shrugged. “It’s just a book.”

  “Yeah,” Jeffrey said. “I get it.” Jeffrey didn’t know who Judy Blume was, but if she was someone who cut through all the crap, then this kid should be allowed to read whatever the lady writes.

  “You like to read?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Jeffrey wrapped his hand around his glass. He attempted to lift it off the table, but the condensation around the base glued it down like a suction cup. He slid the milkshake across the table and the seal was released when it reached the edge. The airborne glass felt shaky in his hand and he tried to steady it with his lips. He felt awkward about the whole operation and thought, this girl probably thinks I’m a freak. Jeffrey set the glass back down on the table and curled his arm around it as if to say, it’s the glass, not me, that’s shaking.

  The boy ate with a spoon too large for his face. He opened his mouth wide and clamped it down trying to get as much in one bite as possible. He hadn’t yet learned how to ration like his sister.

  “People who don’t let you read,” Jeffrey began slowly, not sure what he was going to say next, “don’t understand.” He felt himself forming a big idea in his head. It was so big, he wasn’t sure if he understood it, and he knew that if he went to say it too quickly, the words might dart away never to be heard from again. “People who don’t let you read are jealous. They just want to talk all the time, but they don’t want to hear what you have to say. They don’t want to let you read either, because then you’re not paying attention to whatever stupid shit they’re saying.”

  The girl looked at him, gently tapping her spoon against the side of her dish.

  “I shouldn’t have said ‘shit,’” Jeffrey apologized.

  The girl shrugged.

  Jeffrey saw a few nurses being seated across the room. They were fat and didn’t look good in white and didn’t need the ice cream.

  “The thing is,” Jeffrey continued, lowering his voice, “these people sense that you’re smarter than they are. And that pisses them off. They don’t want anyone to be smarter than them. But look at what they’ve done: they’ve gone and fucked up the world. Telling people they can’t read. That’s the worst. They just want to keep you down. Then they complain that you’re not pulling your own weight. They don’t know anything.”

  Jeffrey was talking too much. The girl wasn’t saying anything.

  “Do you like your mom and dad?” he asked her. It was an idiotic question but he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  The girl shrugged. “My parents are divorced,” she said.

  “Oh.” Divorce was not a part of Jeffrey’s world. His parents were hopelessly, helplessly married. The thought probably never occurred to them.

  “I live with my mom and my stepfather. He’s really my half brother,” she said with a gesture in the boy’s direction.

  “Do you like your stepfather?”

  “I guess,” she said staring down into the soupy remains of her dessert. Jeffrey knew she didn’t mean it. She was too polite to tell the truth. She probably hated the guy. He was probably a real bastard who didn’t give a shit about her. Give her a few years and he’ll probably kick her out of the house and say, you’re on your own, kid. Go suck off guys for a living, I don’t care. If she’s lucky he’ll wait until her eighteenth birthday, or maybe the day after.

  “Have you ever thought about running away?” Jeffrey asked.

  “Where would I go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They said nothing for a moment.

  “You could take a bus somewhere,” Jeffrey said.

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.” Now it was Jeffrey’s turn to shrug.

  “I’d probably need somewhere to stay where I could go to school.”

  Jeffrey wished he had a safe house to offer her. A place out in the woods near a one-room schoolhouse. A place where the backwoods schoolteacher would take her in like the black kid in Sounder, take a special liking to her and give her books to read while she waits for her real father to be freed from jail.

  “Where would you go if you could go anywhere?” he asked.

  The girl looked at him then. Before, she had looked at him only to satisfy some conversational rule and then quickly glanced away. This time she looked at him and allowed him to look at her. Their eyes locked and something, an energy or an ESP feeling, poured back and forth between them and Jeffrey couldn’t tell who was really looking at whom. Her eyes had become his and he was looking at himself. The girl started to speak about a tree house, or a fort or something, someplace where she used to live where she could go back to her old school, but Jeffrey felt the whole time he was watching himself from outside his body. And with her eyes he was bathing himself in a blue watery glow. It was surrounding him and tugging at his throat. He felt strangely, peacefully, about to cry. Flood his face with tears like her little half brother. He felt like there was a hand clenching his throat, but he didn’t feel pain. He knew what the invisible hand was doing. It was shushing the sob that was welling up. It was creating a dam with the back of his tongue. It was reminding him that she was the kid here, and he was the grown-up. He was the one who should save her. Just like he was the one who should save Amber. That is what men do.

  “You should go there,” he said. “Maybe today, even. I could take you to the bus station.”

  “I have to watch him,” she said, gesturing to the boy.

  “Where are we going?” the boy asked.

  “Nowhere.”

  “Are we going to look at busses?”

  “No.”

  “Can we?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Shut up,” she said softly. “You have chocolate on your face.” She reached over and tried to wipe his mouth with a napkin.

  “Stop it!” he said, turning away from her.

  “You have to wipe it off.”

  “No I don’t!”

  He hid his face near the bench. The girl tugged on his shirt a couple times and then gave up.

  “We should go,” she said to Jeffrey.

  “Do you want me to take you to the station?”

  “No, I mean, we have to go home.”

/>   It wasn’t that Jeffrey was disappointed in her response, it was that he understood this was not the moment when she needed him. She might need him in the future. She might not ever need him at all. She might need only the essence of Jeffrey, only the memory of him to remind her that she is not alone out there. He’s out there too. And if she knows he is out there, she might begin to like his being there, she might begin to enjoy the presence of his existence, she might begin to love him. And all Jeffrey would have to do is telepath over to her, appear in her dreams, leave little bits of food outside her hideaway, light up the pebbles on her walk home from school as it’s getting dark out. Because the girl was, without lifting a pinky, showing Jeffrey what to do next.

  The girl scooted out from the table and uttered an awkwardly quiet good-bye as she passed Jeffrey on her way to the door. The boy slid off his seat until his feet touched the ground and followed her.

  JEFFREY TOOK A bus back to the National Hotel.

  He took a nap.

  When he woke up it was raining. The gray day outside matched the smoky interior of his hotel room. Everything was merging into one color.

  Jeffrey wondered if he had slept through the night and now it was morning. He didn’t know. It was probably early evening, but he decided it was morning because he wanted it to be.

  He didn’t have to get dressed because he had never gotten undressed. He didn’t look too shabby either. He could use an ironing, but that was about it. Somebody should invent a full-body iron, he thought, something you do without having to take your clothes off and set up an ironing board.

  Jeffrey checked the peephole before opening the door a crack with the gold chain still latched in place. No kids. The coast was clear.

  Jeffrey ducked through the rain to the little convenience store across the street. He bought a box of Frosted Flakes and a little package of Hostess powdered donuts. He bought a newspaper too because there was no TV Guide in his room.

  Back at the National, Jeffrey ate cereal directly out of the box. He licked the powdered sugar that stuck to his fingers from the white donuts. He flipped through the paper, his moistened fingertips turning gray from the ink. He usually didn’t read the newspaper. Maybe just the funnies or the movie reviews. Stuff like that. But today he read through the front page, Metro, Business, and Life. The Brits were shooting up the Falklands, people were still upset about the Chinese girl’s design for the Vietnam memorial, Brezhnev had been missing for a month and everyone thinks he’s dead, El Salvador, El Salvador, El Salvador, and someone made the Guinness Book of World Records for blowing the largest bubblegum bubble. Funny, Jeffrey thought. How do they measure the bubble before it bursts?

  The TV listings page was at the very end of the Life section. They obviously didn’t think it was that important. Right next to it was something called the District Diary, which listed special events: museum exhibitions, the cherry blossom festival, congressional goings-on, and where the president was going to be that day.

  That was the funny part. Reagan would be attending a Kennedy Center gala celebrating “The Artistic Life of America.” Amber was one of the celebrities doing a song-and-dance number. It would be broadcast live via satellite hookup. Amber was still in town.

  But it wasn’t funny. It was a cover-up. Was she here or not? It was either a big coincidence or a big scam. Or a big joke on him. Maybe that female desk clerk knew someone at the paper and called it in just to fuck with him.

  Jeffrey picked up the phone and dialed Amber’s hotel. His father always said, if you want to know something, pick up the phone and find out.

  A male voice answered the line.

  “Hi, could you please connect me to Miss Carrol in penthouse suite A?”

  “One moment please.”

  Surprisingly, Jeffrey made the fifty-fifty guess correctly. He felt kinda proud of himself.

  “Thank you for holding, could you please repeat the name of the guest you are trying to reach?”

  “Miss Carrol, Amber Carrol.” He said it in a low voice as if to say, don’t let this get around. She’s famous, you know.

  “I’m sorry, sir, Miss Carrol checked out a few days ago.”

  Jeffrey hung up. He didn’t need to go through the whole good-bye routine.

  He flipped to the TV listings page and saw the long rectangular box graying out eight p.m. to eleven p.m. Had he not bought the paper today, Amber would have slipped by him, her blonde buttery hair melting through his fingers, their chance at happiness forever blown into the wind. She was being inducted into a society of hate. A society of liars and users and phonies. They would do whatever it takes to get her on their side and keep her quiet. She was already being brainwashed. She was just a young girl out on her own trying to make it in Hollywood. All she ever wanted to do was be an actress and love people. They prey on girls like that, girls with big hearts and big dreams just off the bus from Smalltown, USA, where her dad smacked her around for letting a boy look at her tits and her mother was too nervous to do anything to stop him. She took the bus out to Hollywood to prove them wrong. She wasn’t a worthless slut. She had talent. The feds knew that. They knew everything, that’s why they picked her. Every one of those Hollywood girls has a secret: an abortion, an uncle who raped her, a cheerleading team who humiliated her. They get dirt on you as part of their insurance. They’ve got you trapped. You pay your debt to society by being a super-secret covert operative. When they’re done with you, your body washes up somewhere, mysterious circumstances, drank too much at a yacht party, fell overboard, your secret life of drugs, an abusive boyfriend. I knew she was depressed, your fake friends tell the magazines, but I never dreamed she would, you know, commit suicide. Jeffrey had to step in. He had to be the cult deprogrammer she would fall in love with. He had to get her out of there. Jeffrey the hero. Jeffrey the savior. Jeffrey would inherit the Earth. Who wouldn’t love him?

  He supposed he needed a ticket to get in. A ticket and a tuxedo. Even if he couldn’t get in, Amber would certainly notice him outside. It’s like when you see someplace you know on the news. Hey isn’t that . . . and the little black kids from the hall would be jumping up and down behind the reporter making funny faces, purposefully walking back and forth behind him several times and then giving him bunny ears with their fingers. She’d see him and she’d feel safe. She might get worried at first about how it would all go down, but when he needed her, she’d step in. She was on his side even if she didn’t know it yet.

  Jeffrey stared at the wallpaper peeling away from the corner at the foot of his bed. For a fugitive, solitary moment, he experienced a state of being without thought, without the burden of words. He was perfectly still, like the model he drew in art class. He didn’t blink. He didn’t sing songs in his head. His entire existence blended into the stillness.

  A pigeon cooed outside his window, bringing him back to life.

  Jeffrey looked around his room. Are we doing this or aren’t we? What do you think? I don’t know. What time is it? It’s not far. What do you think’ll happen? Maybe Amber will come over to the screaming fans and sign autographs. Then he’d be able to rescue her. The CIA was probably trying to get her to insert messages into the dialogue. She shouldn’t do it. They’d ruin her in the end, even if she agreed to do it. That’s how it works with them. You do what they want and they fuck you over anyway. Probably that soda fucker working on her crew was one of them. That whole soda conversation could’ve been some kind of code. Jeffrey could’ve received the messages and not even have known they were messages. The kids in the hall with the umbrella could have marked him, inserted some microscopic device into his arm to track his movements or to release some sort of poison at just the right time. They would force him to deliver the message he didn’t know he was carrying and then he would die.

  Fuck it, I should just kill myself, Jeffrey thought. Over and done. Beat them at their own game.

  Jeffrey stared at his bed, at the grayness that enveloped the historic National Hotel. It was
reminiscent of a vision he often had right before falling asleep. The hotel was out of focus. It was blurring away like an eraser rubbing out pencil marks, or a pen with erasable ink. Just enough markings are left behind so you know that something was erased. Something used to be there, but you can’t make out exactly what it was, and something’s fucking with your head so you can’t remember either.

  I can’t die here, Jeffrey thought. Not alone, bleeding to death in this gray room. If I shot myself here, even my blood would run gray.

  Better to go down in a blaze of glory. Better to let the world know I was here. Better to let Amber know I really loved her. Better to let everyone know that I was here and I existed and I had feelings. I had ideas. I had thoughts. I wanted things. And nobody listened to me and nobody cared. They just erased the parts of me they didn’t like and didn’t want to see. But they could only erase the parts they saw. I still saw the rest of me, the parts they didn’t give a shit about. They hate me because even after the erasing, all the putrid parts grow back. My skin is rubbed raw from all the erasing and it stings every time it grows back, and then before it has time to heal, I get rubbed out again. Everyone wants me to be some normal all-American businessman, play ball, make a buck, chow down on a Big Mac, fuck some Playboy pinup girl, buy a house in the suburbs, and take out the garbage. All I want is Amber. All I want is for me and Amber to be together the way we should be, the way we’re supposed to be. We would spend a year in bed like John and Yoko. We would be king and queen because we understand things, we would change things, we would make things right. Everything now is a mistake. The whole world is a mistake. It was all a mistake that I am where I am. I wasn’t meant to wind up in a shithole like this. I should walk over to the White House right now and shoot myself on the pearly white steps, stain them up good with my blood. Or catch a bus up to New York, do it right where John fell. I’m just never given a chance. Nobody cares. My parents haven’t even tried to find me. Good riddance to bad rubbish, they’re probably thinking. Jesus is the one who saves. We don’t have to worry.