Miles growl-shouted the chorus of the death metal song: “MELANCHOLY IS MY CROSS TO BEAR.”
“Ow.” Tim grabbed his own throat.
“You keep your larynx down and you don’t use your actual vocal chords. You use your fake vocal chords.”
“Fake vocal chords. Tell your mother about those.” On his way out, Tim looked back at the boneless Miles, who had no ideal self, who had no noticeable desire to join the living. “Whoever you talk to on the phone about all the video games, you should invite him over.”
“It’s a girl.”
“Prove it.”
# # #
Tim’s mother lived in a Dorchester triple-decker and left it only to walk a block down to Walgreens to buy her food and sundries. Her kitchen counter was loaded with canned goods.
“Who are all the Vienna sausages for?” Tim called out as he waited for her to fix herself up for lunch. “Are you buying the dogs Vienna sausages?” He shook a mutt off his leg. God, the place smelled.
“Do you change the pee pads, Ma?” He suspected the carpets were also now pee pads.
He picked up the dog that wouldn’t stop humping him and carried it to the bathroom, where he was going to close it in, but he was instead stopped short by the horror of the walls and floor: tiles chipped to bits, holes punched through backer board, like someone had tried to imprison Bolt Thrower.
“What the hell, Ma?” he said when she came into the hall.
She glanced into the quake zone. “It’s something that designer did on HGTV—the Texas woman I told you about.”
“It’s not your house!” Tim reminded her. (Fire Team Mission #3: Move His Mother into a Retirement Home.)
“When I die”—she clutched her shouldered purse strap—“you can reimburse them with the insurance money.” She always said that. She had taken out a dozen policies for accidental death because their premiums were minuscule and she still didn’t understand how they worked—that she would not only have to die, but die in an accident.
Tim drove them to the restaurant in his truck, which his mother always acted as though she had never seen before. “It’s amazing how small they make trucks now. I once had a male friend who had a truck I could hardly see out of.” She slid a hand along the dusty dash. When they reached the restaurant, she crossed the parking lot, spinning around in wonder like a newly released prisoner as Tim held open the front door.
They should have been welcomed like old friends at Olive Garden, but staff turnover was high. On the way to the table, his mother informed the hostess, “I have the calamari appetizer for my whole meal and two glasses of Chianti. And when I say two glasses, I mean two glasses at the same time.”
After later repeating her order to the correct authority, Tim’s mother filled him in on her Facebook friends, most of whom he didn’t know. “Marcy Butts is in Rio. Landed last night. She writes little notes to her granddaughter on the Facebook. Little love notes.”
“That’s nice.”
“Everyone seems to be traveling!”
“Well, those are the ones who have something to post about, maybe.”
“I’d like you to show me how to do a video. People are asking for one of the dogs.”
He tugged his pant legs down so they weren’t so tight in the thigh. “Why?”
“So I can do one of the dogs!”
“No, what do they want to see the dogs doing?”
“Oh, they get into all sorts of naughty things. Tessa sings with the fire engines. Her little mouth gets into the funniest shape, a little O, and she sings! Angie Cullen’s dog runs around the yard with a barrel over its head, around and around and around, till it runs right into something. I’ll show you when we go back.” There was always a twenty-minute review of Facebook videos when he took her home.
Tim’s mom smiled and waved at a little girl who’d just been put into a high chair by her father at the next table. Then she craned to look behind her for the approach of her wine. “I love the arched doorways, here, don’t you?” she said, to cover for all of this twisting about.
“Very Tuscan,” he agreed.
“I’m at forty-two thousand words,” she then announced, as she did each week.
“Isn’t that less than last week?”
“You pay attention! Yes it’s gone down. I had to dump a long chapter that was probably before its time, the woman-as-penetrator section. I have to be careful not to give the average reader a shock.”
When the wineglasses and the spicy calamari arrived, she visibly relaxed. Closed her eyes for the first sip.
Tim unrolled his napkin and said, “You know how we always joke about how you could never go into a retirement community because they don’t allow alcohol? Well, some do. Some serve wine with dinner. Did you know that?”
Her eyes narrowed, but the glass was slow to leave her lips. Then she dug a calamari ring around in the parmesan-peppercorn dressing for a while with a look of grave concern. “I’m not interested in communal living.”
“No?”
“Were you looking at my bills? Is that what this is? And they don’t take dogs, those places.”
“Lots of families who have loads of time to play with dogs would love to adopt yours.”
She looked away, shaking her head.
“And they’ll take your Social Security check and make it work. No more worries. No more bills for me to snoop into.”
She chewed brazenly, with her mouth open. Then swallowed hard. “I know you don’t want me to pay to have the book published.”
“I’d love it if it got published, Ma, but I don’t want you to pay one of those vanity publishers. Are you still thinking about that? It’s a scam, and you won’t have any buyers.”
“Thank you.”
“You know what I mean. Real publishers promote their books; the scam printers just send them all to you in a box. Or fifty boxes.”
“I would promote them on Facebook.”
“Okay. Are you really doing this, or are you toying with me, because you are behind on the cable bill, I noticed.”
Shaking her head no for a while, she finally said, “Maybe you shouldn’t come over anymore.” She popped a calamari into her mouth and gave him a bold look. After patiently chewing it down, she said, “I’m not your child, Timmy.”
“Okay, yeah.”
They concentrated on their meals. Tim was having the shrimp scampi again. All of his shirts had butter stripes from the slinging noodles. His mother took one of his breadsticks, leaned over toward the next table, and began to wave it at the baby girl, shaking it at her like a rattle. The child covered her face and kicked crazily at the high chair until her father turned around and held up his hand to halt all further communication.
Tim’s mother snapped away from them.
“Sorry,” the man said to Tim.
“It’s no problem,” Tim told him.
When she finally returned to poking at her food, his mother said, “I think you should try to find your brother. Have you looked on the Internet for a Richard Turner in Florida?”
“No, but you have.”
“There are two. One’s a psychologist in Winter Park. Isn’t that nice? One’s a sex offender.” She shrugged. “But I’m sure that’s not him.” Tim’s father had left them when Tim was three and had begun another family in Florida.
“Just because Dad had a family after ours doesn’t mean his other son and I have anything in common.”
“Of course you do! Your father!”
“Yeah, but it’s not like I can share anything about my life with Dad.”
“Don’t be jealous.” She slid one empty wineglass aside. “Poor Richard. He could be jealous of you! Maybe he would’ve loved not to have that father at all.”
“The end,” Tim said, swiping his fork through the air.
She rocked her head quickly side to side; so be it.
They continued to eat. Tim watched the father feed his child soup at the next table, blowing on each spoonful before del
ivering it. He started to say something to his mother, but the waiter returned to check on them. “Another glass of wine?”
She covered her current glass as though he intended to pour more into it. “Not today.”
When they were alone again, Tim’s expression grew pained. “You know, I figured out why I always wanted to be in a big orchestra; it’s because Dad loved going to the symphony. I guess I thought maybe he’d see me, see my name on the program, see that we shared something and that I had made it big in a way that he could admire. And then he’d be—”
“He wasn’t that into the symphony, Timmy.”
Tim set his fork down. “What? What do you mean?”
She brought the napkin halfway up to her lips and stopped. “He loved the Beatles. I remember that.”
“He wasn’t into the symphony? You used to go on and on about it after my lessons. The whole ride home! His favorite was Beethoven’s Ninth. He used to sing ‘Ode to Joy’ to you when you drove to Tanglewood with the windows down.”
She slumped back, sated. “Okay,” she said with a shrug. “Sure, now I remember. He did have a passion for symphonic music.”
“Now, no, the way you say that now, I don’t believe you!”
“I’m sure if I said it, it was true. I forget things.” She wearily waved her napkin.
“If you said it? Are you crazy! This was an endless thing you used to tell me.”
“I don’t think every minute about your father, I’m sorry,” she said, rolling her eyes.
Tim dried his flushed face with the napkin.
“When you read my book, I don’t want you thinking he inspired the kinds of revelations I’ve had. He might like to think so, but that wasn’t the case.”
“No? It was all of the other men you had sex with?”
Quick nods. “That’s right.”
“Okay, okay.” Tim threw his napkin onto the plate. His mother had had an affair with at least one of her cleaning clients. The man must have been home one day and then made it a point to be home on more days. He was a lawyer married to another lawyer. Tim often went out to dinner with his mom and this Ryan Beltzer, and Ryan was always nice to him. They’d go to a place that had a bar on one side and booths on the other. Tim’s mom would have whatever soup they were serving, while Tim and Ryan tucked into loaded burgers. She would wear things he hadn’t known she had: shawls and clanky bracelets, feather earrings. She thought Ryan was the funniest man in the world—not that she’d laugh at his stories, but after any joke, she’d turn and smile into his face and her hand would move up onto his thigh. Tim would study Ryan’s expression then, to see whether his mother was off track, as he often sensed she was. His mother claimed Ryan was going to marry her. And the answer to when was always “Very soon.” He knew Ryan gave her money, because sometimes the pressure would lift, great worries would blow out to sea, and the car would be running again or the gushing basement leak would go silent. So Ryan clearly was one of her practice partners.
Another likely bedmate would be the jazz drummer who called Tim Clyde and always set his leather cap on Tim’s head when he came in the door. And Tim could name another few if he had to: the man with the stutter, the guy who bought Tim a lizard, and one she called Mario but later learned was a fake name.
“Not the maestro, though, right?” Tim asked. The principal tuba of the Boston Symphony Orchestra had been his mother’s Saturday client. He’d begun teaching young Tim in order to stop him from making a racket around the house. “You didn’t have sex with the maestro.”
“Sex, sex, sex, is that all you’re interested in? You have to let go of your infantile ideas about it, Tim. I’m writing this book for women, to help them appreciate what they contribute to and what they can take away from the practice of mindful coupling.”
Tim scooted back from the table and pulled out his wallet, waved it at the server.
“As you know, all copyrights on my writings revert to you upon my death, so I wouldn’t let the book languish. You’ll need to continue the push.”
# # #
That evening, after taking his mother home and enduring another dinner with The Star, Tim shut his bedroom door and cracked the sniper book again.
In a firefight, the key is to keep shooting, even if you cannot place the enemy, because to stop returning fire gives them confidence. Even if you are wounded, especially if you are wounded, you must continue firing.
He could hear his son’s voice in the next room: “Wait, you don’t know the workaround for that? When you drop objects, they are consolidated into your overall settlement size.” The kid’s voice had really gone deep this year. It still seemed like some kind of party trick. “Every once in a while, I go and buy out all of a vendor’s junk, then drop it and scrap it in the settlement. It means I’m never short on odds and ends like crystals and gears and shit.”
Listening to this nonsense made Tim angry. What was this generation going to do for the world? He looked again at the Marine on the book cover, and the Marine looked back with a shared disgust.
When the enemy is well hidden, you look for muzzle flashes, you look for dust curls out there where water is too scarce to wet the ground beneath their guns. When they’re far away, you use the detonation flashes of your own shells to adjust your aim. Their bullets snap and crack around you, the pops sometimes coming so close to your ears, you know you have only seconds to interrupt someone else’s fine-tuning.
That night, he finished the book. When he finally closed it, his wife was asleep next to him and the house was silent. He dreamed he was up in the gun turret of the lead Humvee in a military caravan, with a relentless wind driving sand into his eyes, and he kept yelling down that he couldn’t see, that they had to stop. But the Humvee kept moving.
DAVIS
Because he had decided to send the committee printed tenure documents as well as electronic, Davis was lugging a five-ream package of printer paper up and down the aisles at Staples. No one wanted to read a book-length document on a computer screen, too wearying, perhaps doable for your average supporting docs—much slimmer than his—coming earlier in a career, but in Davis they got a candidate with twenty-seven publications, his field’s foundational research. It was not lost on him that Lindstrom had mentioned the present era of widespread extinction during the dinner. Some tried to insinuate that this horrific ongoing event made the practice of looking for cryptids trivial, but in fact it was a great justification for his line of work. Who better to determine whether any complete species wipeout had occurred? Jesus, toner cartridges were always such a pain point here at Staples! The ever-elusive printer model number—2280? 2820? 2840? Neither his wife nor Megan answered her phone. Hadn’t he just left them at home? Moving on toward checkout without his ink, he passed the binder area. God, the color choices were blinding! He could imagine some of his students having a field day here—a notebook to match any toenail polish. He had always told his students that binding never made up for bumbling and, therefore, to please not bother.
With five black binders stacked atop his paper, he entered the checkout corral, where he was tenth in line, snaking along beside shelves of chocolate, which he would buy for Megan if she would answer her phone. After Davis looked up to survey the cashier situation, he immediately slapped his phone down atop the binders, spun around, and hustled back up the printer aisle, dumping the paper and binders onto an endcap display and briskly leaving the store. It was Graeme Stoltz at the register. He’d seen Graeme there before. Why hadn’t he remembered? And the rageaholic had seen Davis, too, awaited him with nostrils flared. Seeing the poor guy there in action shamed Davis. Watching this fine visual artist slide suckers and paperclip holders across the scanner elicited the same deep shame Davis felt whenever he encountered that Patterson-Gimlin film of the walking Bigfoot (which he could not believe was still allowed to be shown on television). That film was a complete sham, a con, but Davis had been an ardent supporter of it and had helped to spread its lie. It had taken Davis to
o long to come into line with the majority of the scientific community, admitting that the creature had hairy breasts, unlike any other primate. And the animal’s hair, overall, didn’t appear to flow naturally, and the buttocks were not distinct enough from each other. But before Davis could see and accept all of this, he and many others had held the film up as a final proof of their religion. They had replayed the footage of the creature looking back at them over his shoulder until they were drunk on it.
Before Megan had branded him a child molester, Graeme—who now performed this part-time work of teenagers as his sole occupation—had been a respected art teacher. Back then, two summers ago, he was a man struggling only with troubles of his own making or of his own nature.
Davis liked to think he would have called out Megan’s lie—and he now believed it was a lie—if not for the birthmark. Jenny had come across a drawing in Megan’s room of a naked backside with a birthmark like Megan’s (a sideways heart–shaped mark) on the small of her back. Megan claimed the drawing came from Graeme’s hand. And, in fact, it had, he admitted, but it had been in his zippered portfolio case, he said, and it depicted a model in his live-drawing group. When the detail about the birthmark came out in the press, even Graeme’s wife fled the poor man (it wouldn’t have been a first affair, Davis guessed). He kept repeating that he hadn’t included that birthmark in the drawing, that he’d paid no special attention to Megan at all. The police finally became suspicious when Megan’s timelines of the molestations did not match up with Graeme’s proven locations, but Davis kept the pressure on. Who remembers times and dates when experiencing unfathomable trauma? Eventually, however, the case was dropped, and Megan moved on to pawing a neighbor man.
Davis watched from the car as Graeme shoved a wastebasket into a too-small plastic bag, his biceps enraged. Soon enough, he knew, Megan would lure a man into trying something that could be proved. She was practicing all the time.
The Futility Experts Page 4