A BUMPER STICKER, affixed to the inside of a women’s room stall door, bearing the name and telephone number of a rape crisis center that has lost its funding and is no longer operating
THE PASSPORT PHOTOS on which your eyes are obscured by little white bars
THE TUBE OF UNGUENT tightly rolled at the empty end, which she is just about to realize has been leaking all over the contents of her purse for days
THE TEST RESULTS from the genetics lab that his hands are shaking too hard to open
SPIDERWEBS that connect her bicycle to the cellar wall, which are severed when, some months after her death, he fills the tires with air, straps on her helmet, which is too small for him, climbs onto the bicycle, and rides as fast as he can through the darkened streets of their town, screaming her name at the top of his lungs, until at last he is arrested for disturbing the peace and spends the night in jail, which he later realizes is exactly the place he wanted to be that night, which is perhaps the reason that he elected to ride, while screaming, the bicycle, which he leaves behind at the police station and never sees again
THE QUILTED GRAY METALLIC-NYLON VEST that the Korean exchange student lost outside the Christian Center, on the back of which is printed an incomprehensible English phrase
THE NEW MAP on which his hometown is not marked, as it no longer exists, because the state forced its residents to sell their homes so that the new reservoir could be created above them, which reservoir, with its waterfront casinos, has greatly increased the value of the surrounding properties, many of which are owned by the senator who lobbied to have the reservoir project approved
A BOTTLE OF PAIN RELIEVER brought on a business trip that proves, at the moment it is most needed, to be filled not with pain reliever but with buttons
THE HOUSEPLANT that will not die
FIFTY PAIRS OF OLD BLUE JEANS found at secondhand clothing stores and brought, at great expense, on a trip to eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics, where, rumor had it, old blue jeans could be sold for a lot of money, but where this was no longer true, as so many previous visitors had heard the same rumor and done the same thing, creating a glut of old blue jeans, which were not even all that stylish there anymore, and causing the entire trip to be ruined by the necessity of hauling around these huge suitcases full of other people’s jeans, which smelled kind of bad, as if those other people were currently wearing them
ACRID MIST that, not long after a crash is heard from the chemistry storeroom, begins to seep out from the under the closed door
WORK GLOVES, once owned by the farmer, routinely used for calving and for the slaughter of cattle, and hardened with blood and slime into the exact shape of his hands, that are many years after his death discovered hanging in the barn by the farmer’s son, who tries them on and finds that his own hands, though soft from his life of relative affluence and leisure and work behind a desk, fit perfectly
THE PHOTOGRAPH of the woman and her children and the children’s father that the father has been cut out of, which the woman uses to mark her place in Valley of the Dolls when she goes to the window to see what is the matter
THE DECK OF CARDS that his children have added extra aces and kings to, because it’s more fun that way, but which he is accused of cheating with and is beaten up for during his regular card game, a beating he will have to explain to his wife with some lie, as he has been insisting that he works late on Friday nights, not gambling, an activity she believes he was addicted to but has been weaned from with the help of Gamblers Anonymous, an organization he never joined, despite what he said
SNEAKERS hanging from the power line, with one half of a boy’s broken glasses stuffed into each toe
THE URINE SAMPLE produced for the canceled doctor’s appointment and forgotten in the back of the fridge
THE UNEVEN HEDGE
HAIL
SEVEN HATS, knitted by the Retired Ladies’ League of Piedmont for a set of septuplets; two of whom die shortly after birth; one of whom grows up to host a nightly TV news broadcast in a small Midwestern city, until she is attacked and her face permanently disfigured one night outside the studio by a knife-wielding stalker, and is not rehired for the next season, because, according to her employers, “of cutbacks across the board,” and who in the ensuing lawsuit becomes very rich and endows a journalism scholarship in her dead siblings’ names; two of whom grow up to design and market a line of toys, furniture, and multimedia entertainments for the parents of multiples, including a kit, complete with iron-ons, for creating tee shirts that bear the message BABY, with an arrow, many times over, and who claim that the dead siblings never existed; one of whom grows up with some sort of persecution complex and fantasizes elaborate mass slayings of his siblings, then becomes briefly famous for his memoir about growing up as one of the so-called “Piedmont Quints” in which he claims to have been brutally tortured by the others and confesses his fantasies that the two dead siblings had become guardian angels who watched over him through his darkest hours, though a fat lot of good they did him; and one who grows up to become a late-night radio call-in psychologist specializing in sexual problems and who discovers the hats in her parents’ attic when her mother dies, including the two that were worn, very briefly, by the dead siblings for a newspaper article she still has a clipping of, but realizes she will never know which two, and so smells them all and crushes each to her breast for good measure
MY EYEGLASSES, covered with a thickening layer of dust that I never seem to notice, that I simply adjust to, until at last I clean them out of habit, and discover a new world sharp and filled with detail, whose novelty and clarity I forget about completely within five minutes
YOUR SIGNATURE, rendered illegible by disease
Weber’s Head
John Weber, the first person to answer my ad, appeared pleasant enough, tall and round-faced with a receding cap of curls, sloped shoulders, and an easy, calm demeanor. He nodded constantly as I showed him around the place, as if willing to accept and agree with every single thing in the world for the rest of his life. At the time, these seemed like good portents. I didn’t like looking for roommates, and I didn’t like dealing with people, so I told him he was welcome to the room and accepted his check.
He moved in the next day with the help of a wan, stringy-haired woman wearing hiking shorts, though it was late October and forty degrees outside. The woman did not smile and hauled his boxes in the door with practiced efficiency while Weber began unpacking in his room. I asked her if she wanted any help.
“No,” she said.
“Are you sure?” I wasn’t doing anything, just waiting for noon to come along so that I could catch my bus.
She said nothing in response, but shook her head vigorously, her hair falling over her face. I returned to my coffee and magazine and left her alone.
When I came home from work that night, John Weber was standing alone in the kitchen with an apron around his waist. Various things were hissing and bubbling in pots and pans on the stove, and he beckoned me over with his spatula. The kitchen table was set with two placemats—they must have belonged to him, because I had never owned any in my life—and there were separate glasses for water and wine. I didn’t recognize the silverware, either. It was heavy and bright and lay upon folded cloth napkins.
“Expecting a guest?” I was thinking of the woman from that morning.
“Nope. Just a roommate!”
He was grinning, waiting for a reaction.
“You mean me?”
“You’re my only roommate!” he laughed. “Take a load off!”
His manner could be described as bustling. He pulled out my chair for me, took the briefcase from my hand and set it on the floor behind me. He said, “Red or white?”
I looked at the table, and back at him. “What?”
“Red or white?”
“Uh …”
He rolled, jocularly, his large, slightly bulging gray eyes, then gestured toward the counter, where two bottles of wine stoo
d, uncorked. One of them, the white, was tucked into a cylindrical stone bottle cooler, the kind you keep in the freezer. I had never seen one outside of a cooking supply catalog, and had never considered that somebody might actually own one.
“Uh … red,” I said.
“You sure not white?”
“Yes.”
“Because the white spoils faster once you open it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “White wine gives me a headache.”
He rolled his eyes again, not so jocularly this time, and snatched the white wine off the counter. Into the fridge it went with a clatter, and the cooler into the freezer. He poured my red wine with unnecessary haste, and some of it slopped over onto the tablecloth, which must also have belonged to him.
“How was your day?” he asked a minute later, his back to me, his arms working over the pots and pans.
“Fine.” I took a swig of wine. It was not the gamy plonk I usually drank. “How was yours?”
“Exciting! I’m glad to be here.”
“Is your room all put together?”
“Sure!” He turned off each burner and began transferring food to a pair of china plates. “I don’t have many possessions,” he went on. “I don’t believe in them.”
“Well, what about the napkins and placemats and tablecloth and all that?”
“Oh, someone gave them to me.”
With a flourish, he whipped off his apron and hung it on a wall hook that I was certain he had installed there himself for this express purpose. In response to this effort, the landlord would no doubt someday withhold twenty dollars of the security deposit. Then John Weber lifted the two plates high into the air and glided them onto the placemats. With a similar motion, he seated himself, then grinned at me again, awaiting my reaction.
Before me lay a lovely-looking lamb chop, overlaid with a coarse sauce of what appeared to be diced tomatoes, onions, and rosemary. There was a little pile of roasted new potatoes and some spears of asparagus. It was really very impressive, and I looked at it in dismay as the sounds of rending and smacking reached me from across the table. It was quite a sight, John Weber digging in; he yanked shreds of lamb from the chop with his incisors, folded entire spears of asparagus roughly into his mouth. His jaw clicked and popped. He wasn’t a slob—on the contrary, he dabbed constantly at the corners of his mouth with his napkin—but his ardent champing had its closest analogue in the desperate feast of a hyena hunched over a still-twitching zebra. It was unsettling. I tried not to make any sound.
“Hey,” he said, his pupils dilated, his shoulders faintly heaving. “What’s the matter?”
“John,” I said. “I’m sorry to tell you this. I already ate.”
The fork slowly descended to the plate.
“Why didn’t you say?” he wanted to know.
“You’d already cooked it.”
“You could have called home.”
“John,” I said, meeting his hurt and angry gaze. “I don’t know you. You moved in this morning. Why would I expect you to cook dinner for me?”
He waved his hand in front of his face, sweeping the question away. “We’re roommates,” he said. “We have to show one another a little bit of respect.”
I should have kicked him out right then and there. But I didn’t. How could I? You don’t kick a man out of his home for making you dinner. And I had already cashed the check.
“All right,” I said. “I’m sorry.” And I picked up my knife and fork and went to work.
The apartment building in question stood, or rather lay, at the bottom of a mountain. It was a one-story strip of six units, with four arranged in a row and two more at an angle, to accommodate a rock outcropping in the back. Our apartment was one of the ones on the angle, and our back windows looked out at the outcropping. Even at the height of summer, we didn’t get a single ray of sunlight until midafternoon.
The mountain was called Mount Peak—a terrible name for a mountain. It didn’t even have a peak: it was rounded on top. It was part of the western foothills of the Rockies, and though this all sounds very bracing and natural, the fact is that Mount Peak was, in almost every sense, a thoroughly shitty mountain. The southern third had been completely chopped off to make way for a highway, its western face had been logged and stood bare and weedy. An abandoned housing project jutted out to the north like a tumor. In addition, about a hundred feet above our apartment, the local high school had spelled out the name of its mascot, BEAVERS, in white-painted stones, and a few of these would roll down each week and thump against our back wall. Sometimes one of them would ricochet off a tree stump and crash through a window.
Even the wildlife looked scraggly and sick. Mangy elk could often be found mornings, standing around in the parking lot looking confused. You would have to honk at them to leave, if you were lucky enough to own a car. We once found a dead bighorn sheep lying on our front stoop, and another time we had to cancel a dinner date because a scrawny, insane-looking moutain lion was standing outside our door, growling.
By “we” I don’t mean John Weber and me; I mean Ruperta and me. Ruperta was my girlfriend. She left me because we had sex problems—specifically, the not having of it. It was my fault. I didn’t want to do it anymore. All I wanted to do was read and reread from my library of books about trains. It was my interest in trains that caused me to rent this place, with Ruperta, five years before; if you hiked to the south end of the mountain you got a great view of the tracks down below. But a few months after we moved in, the only freight company that used the tracks went out of business, and they fell into disrepair.
Honestly, I don’t know what was wrong with me. I felt like I was slowing down. I had moved to this town to go to graduate school in environmental and land use law, and I suppose I lost enthusiasm. To be sure, the subject was not very interesting to me. I read a lot of thick, boring books, and went on field trips to see how various ranches diverted creek water. Then, one day, while inspecting a barbed-wire fence as part of a summer internship, I fell into a ravine and broke my arm. When I got out of the hospital, I had lost all desire to return to school, and I started begging off when Ruperta wanted to get it on. She put up with that for a very long time, and this reasonableness caused me to lose all respect for her, respect I regained the moment she left. I missed her terribly.
Since quitting school, I had worked for eight dollars an hour editing the newsletter of a hunting and conservation outfit. The work took about three hours each week, so I spent the rest of the time pretending to do it and posting on internet messageboards under a variety of names. I chatted all day long about knitting, veganism, soccer, scrapbooking, and dog grooming, none of which I knew anything about, nor cared to learn. I was thoroughly debased, and at thirty-two felt like I’d been an old man for a long time. I saw no way of escaping the life I’d made for myself, save for the mountain falling down and crushing me.
Weber was also probably around thirty, but his girlfriend, Sandy, looked closer to forty. Forty-two, if I had to make a precise guess. She came twice a week to spend the night in Weber’s room, where some kind of new age harp CD was cued up and left to repeat all night long. I asked Weber if he could turn the music off after midnight, and he laughed. “Of course not!” he said.
“Why not? It’s hard to sleep.”
“Well, Sandy can’t sleep without it.”
“But Sandy doesn’t live here. I live here.”
“Sandy is a guest.” He shook his head. “I’m disappointed in you. You don’t know how to treat a guest, do you. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
I actually got to spend a fair amount of time alone with Sandy, since Weber liked to sleep in on the mornings after her visits—he was actually still in school, studying I don’t know what—and she, like me, was an early riser. We sat across from one another at the table, me with the paper, she with nothing, drinking from gigantic mugs of coffee. She made cryptic little pronouncements in a withered, weary voice.
“John doesn’
t like coffee.”
“There’s a nuclear missile near here, I bet you didn’t know that.”
“John used to race bicycles competitively.”
“It’s possible to get certain diseases from fish, you know.”
One morning in late autumn she said, incredibly, “John is a genius, you know.”
I could not resist. “He is?”
Beneath her haylike skirt of hair, her chin seemed to nod very slightly.
“What’s he a genius of?”
“Art,” she replied.
“Art?”
“Sculpture. He’s a sculpturist.”
“I would never have guessed.”
It was hard to see what her eyes were up to under there, but I had the feeling they were glaring at me. We drank our coffees for several minutes.
“Don’t be an asshole,” Sandy said.
It was another week before I found out exactly what type of sculpturism Weber was getting up to in his room. He had invited me in there more than once, usually so that I could hear one or another horrible song that he was grooving on:
“Hey, come listen to this!”
“I can hear it from out here,” I would reply from the living room.
“No, you can’t. You need to get the full audio spectrum.”
“John, I can hear enough out here to know I don’t want to come in there and hear it better.”
See You in Paradise Page 14