The Sabotage Cafe

by Joshua Furst

  The sun was gone and the temperature had started to drop again. It was probably a waste of time to get too close to this guy. There was that canker sore—and the whatever about his mother. But, she didn't want to spend another night hiding and worrying about what might happen to her if she slept. And she definitely didn't want to return to me. The mother she didn't know had to be better than the one she did. Or not. It could go either way.

  She had this idea that somewhere out there she was going to find a new vision of the world, like a kind of Burning Man illumination. She could already tell she wouldn't find it with Jarod. But he might have friends. One of them might be cool.

  He took forever. When he came back he had a bag of pot.

  “So, yeah,” she said, “I guess I'll check out your place.” She could always take off again if it really sucked.

  As they hiked away, he seemed oddly dejected. He refused to look at Cheryl when she talked to him and she decided he must be a virgin.

  THEY SPRAWLED for Cheryl had no idea how long on the floor in front of the couch, smoking pot and zoning out on the television. Jarod was all keyed up about the Discovery Channel, hour after hour dedicated to different regions of the world: the American West, Patagonia, the South African veldt. By the end of each program, an entire ecosystem would be explained, one exotic animal at a time. He wouldn't let Cheryl watch anything else.

  “It's educational,” he said. “You can see how animals are like people too.” He looked at his puppy. “Right, Dog? You're a person too. You're just a really stupid kind of person.” He picked something brown and unidentifiable out of the carpet and held it out for the dog to gobble down.

  Cheryl clamped her mouth to the end of the bong, then pulled the plug and watched the smoke whoosh in.

  I want to say this was the first time she'd tried drugs. I want to say she'd been innocent and sheltered right up until the day she stomped away, that innocence and shelter were part of what she was so bent on fleeing. I don't know if this is true, though. I might just be wishing. What I do know is that, as she and Jarod got stoned, she felt something unravel around her, like some kind of thin leaden wire she hadn't realized was constricting her movement was beginning to peel away. Her skin tingled. Her brain breathed. Muscles that she didn't know could be unclenched now relaxed and sank into a kind of restfulness. I see her in shades of purple and blue. She lies on the carpet, her head propped on an arm, and her heart radiates with wavy gold vibrations. Above her, sprinkled through the streaks of smoke, little puffs like popcorn burn themselves out. These are her fears and her sadnesses.

  On the television, a giant sea turtle slowly descended into the thick Pacific, its paddles spread like it was parachuting, its heavy lumbering form casting shadows in the streaks of white light streaming through the water.

  “Look at that,” Jarod said. “I could be a turtle.” He watched it hover for a long moment until the image broke abruptly into a commercial. “Not like that one, though. Just a little one.”

  Cheryl pictured him crawling along the side of a road, tucking himself up inside his shell, waiting for a car to come along and crack him.

  “I'd be a moth,” she said. Then she laughed. “I'd like fly into light-bulbs and pound my head against them and then get all frustrated and go chew up somebody's clothes or whatever.”

  The mother Jarod had warned Cheryl about didn't show up until three a.m. She limped in on a metal orthopedic cane and gazed for a second at the mess of the two of them, the beer cans and chip bags and the big purple bong. Her baggy pink sweatshirt was unzipped, exposing a shapeless yellow t-shirt with a peeling iron-on festooned across it—I'm Not Getting Older, I'm Getting Better spilling out of a tilted wine bottle. Cheryl felt like she should hide her eyes, like there was something shameful in letting herself look.

  Jarod had buckled into a defensive ball. He stayed that way, silent, waiting for his mother to shuffle off and shut herself into the dark room behind him. Then he repacked the bong and sucked more smoke into his lungs.

  A single heavy creak of a mattress. The sound of a television zapping on. The flick, flick, flick of a lighter. Jarod's mother slipped away for the night and not even the drugs could stop Cheryl's mind from wandering out to the northwestern suburbs and hovering there over me.

  “What's wrong with her?” she whispered, warding me off.

  Jarod just shrugged. He ticked his head like he was shaking off a fly.

  Later, she asked, “What about your father?”

  “What about him?”

  Any question would be the wrong one.

  “I mean, like, what happened to him?”

  Jarod shrugged again.

  “Or, don't you know?”

  “What the fuck, hey?” His voice constricted. “You think you're my fucking shrink or something?”

  For a moment she was afraid he'd hit her, or tell her to leave. But then he collapsed back in on himself and she knew she was going to be okay.

  “Sorry,” she whispered.

  Watching walruses slip to their deaths at the bottom of a hundred-foot cliff, he didn't show any sign of having heard her. It seemed like the thing that was supposed to happen next was for her to crawl up and wrap her arms around his waist, nestle her cheek against the back of his neck, hold him and give him the little warmth she contained. He was closed off now, though, he'd disappeared, and since he wasn't willing to tease it from her, she decided she was allowed to keep her heat for herself.

  They passed out on the living room floor that night, and the next night and the night after that. Jarod had a bedroom upstairs, but getting there would have meant a conversation, a recognition of what might happen inside. Cheryl wasn't sure she was up for that.

  She was happier just to be stoned all the time, to lie with her back to him when she got groggy and let him hug the dog if he wanted something to hold. She liked the way time warped and twisted, how it hung upside down with the bats on TV, or stretched so thin that, if she twirled her hand just the right way, she could slip right through it, curl up and hide in a place far away from it. When she came out, she'd be a different person with a different name and a different face. If only she could stop her thoughts like she could time. No matter which direction they ran, they always butted up against my yearning face. She battled with me. She couldn't thrust me away and she couldn't make sense of what had happened between us. Days slipped by like this, she didn't know how many. With the lights so dim and the blinds always down, it was hard to tell what was going on with the sun. Anyway, she didn't want to know. Counting the days meant acknowledging she'd left something important behind. She needed to get away from thinking like that.

  When they absolutely had to, they went out for necessities: more beer, more cigarettes, more Cool Ranch Doritos, more marijuana— her hundred bucks was depleting quickly. And when they remembered, when it simpered and pawed the carpet frantically enough, they walked the dog a few yards down the street for a dump. Sometimes, after Jarod kicked the shit into the gutter, the three of them would hang out on the curb, tossing stones and smoking cigarettes, blinking in the light. Then they'd head back to the house for more Discovery Channel or, if Cheryl complained, one of the two videos Jarod owned, Blade Runner and Pitch Black.

  Jarod's mother hid behind the thin door to her room all day, sleeping late, chain-smoking and watching talk shows on the TV propped on the overcluttered ironing board in the corner, emerging only to use the bathroom. Some time later, she'd hobble out to her rusty station wagon and drive off to wherever it was she worked.

  Even to her face, Jarod called her ho-bag. He'd shout, “Hey, ho-bag, you gonna get up sometime today?” or “Turn the TV down! I can't even think! Ho-bag, you hear me? Turn the fucking TV down!” She responded to these taunts in the same way as she had to the cloud of smoke clogging the living room—by not responding at all.

  There was one day in there when the ho-bag wouldn't stop howling, deep bellowing sounds, moans like shifts in the earth. Jarod cocked his he
ad, taking in the noise, then he told Cheryl to ignore it. “She's just trying to get my attention,” he said.

  A while later, she gave up and went quiet.

  “See?”

  But then she started calling out, “Jarod? Jarod, honey? Jarod?”

  He glared at her door, willing her to shut up.

  “Listen, will you … Can you call the factory and tell them I'm sick?”

  Jumping up suddenly, he ran into her room. He barked at her. “Stop it. Get up now.” His voice was stern, vicious.

  “I'm sick,” she said.

  “You're not sick. What do you have?”

  “My leg hurts.”

  “That's not sick. Your leg always hurts.”

  Cheryl tried to focus on the sponges and starfish floating around on the television, but the tranquil life of these sea creatures only made her feel more embarrassed. The whole house seemed to be drowning.

  “It especially hurts. I need to rest it.”

  “Get up.” Jarod's shadow sprawled out behind him into the open doorway. As his voice rose, the shadow seemed to grow.

  “Really, Jarod, I need to rest. You have to … Can't you call in for me?”

  “Get the fuck up!” The shadow began to twitch. It clenched and unclenched its fists. Cheryl imagined Jarod turning into a werewolf, the frayed edges of the shadow taking on bulk, sprouting fur.

  His mother was crying now.

  “You want them to fire you?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then don't be a fucking ho-bag.”

  Cheryl knew what I'd do if she spoke to me this way. I'd cry and beg her to join me in analyzing why she thought I deserved this flood of rage. Then I'd construct hypotheses in my head involving dark forces beyond human control and convince myself it was them, not her, carrying out these attacks on me. She could only imagine where it would all lead.

  Stomping back to the living room, Jarod looked bigger, meaner. He dropped to the couch as though he'd been shot.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “She'll go.” He craned his neck to peer at the doorway. “You going?”

  The moan from the bedroom was noncommittal, and Jarod repeated, “She'll go.”

  And she did, eventually. She limped out of the house, carrying herself with spiteful self-possession.

  Jarod fell into something close to catatonia, his eyes half shut, his head lolling forward, his gaze fixed abstractly, dumbly, on the puppy. He'd ignored it all day, and misunderstanding this niblet of attention, it sat up, tense and proper, flicked its tail like a strobe light, dragged itself with tentative, shuffling steps across the carpet. Jarod just kept staring, a blunt indifference in his eyes. The puppy was confused. It scooted. It stopped. It grinned and panted. Thumping its tail incessantly, it pulled another few inches forward and waited, hungry for some sort of response from him. It cocked its head toward Cheryl, back to Jarod. Another scoot, just a foot away now. And then, suddenly, Jarod lunged and growled. Flinching, the puppy seemed to know not to come closer, but it wanted to play and it wasn't quite sure if, maybe, it wasn't already playing. This might be a fun new game. Or it might not be. The puppy let out a nervous yip, and Jarod slapped it upside the head.

  “Fucking bitch,” he said.

  Then he was over it, the bong clasped around his mouth like an oxygen tube.

  More disturbing than Jarod's insolence—she found that inspiring, wished she were so daring—was his contrasting devotion to the ho-bag. He made her SpaghettiOs and tuna sandwiches, popped frozen dinners in the oven for her. Cheryl even saw him sometimes run the dishwasher.

  One day, they snuck into her room while she was sleeping, naked from the waist down. Her knotted pubic hair called out to Cheryl like a haunted house. Jarod strode by as if he didn't see it and the tenderness in this act was, to Cheryl, nearly unbearable. They'd come to peel money from the meager stack she kept tucked in a broken music box on her dresser, money that wouldn't go toward drugs and beer—they'd been using Cheryl's hundred bucks for that—but toward groceries. For her.

  “The ho-bag needs her kibbles and bits,” he said.

  It was too much for Cheryl, all this complicated emotional bondage, exactly the sort of thing she was fleeing. When they returned from the store, she sat on the lip of the couch, her head propped glumly on the balls of her hands, and took inventory of her belongings, trying to decide if she should get out of here or just get stoned again. It would take two minutes to pack up her shit.

  She pulled her cell phone from the corner where it was charging and a harsh lucid thought went shooting through her brain: What if Robert and I had sent the police out to find her?

  I cried when I heard her voice and she hung up on me. Then five minutes later, she called back.

  “Hi.” The hardness in her voice was brutal, as though all the love had been vacuumed out of her. “You're not looking for me, are you?”

  I sputtered some inane thing, I don't know what. I was scared and my fear made me angry and confused.

  “Don't look for me.”

  “Cheryl—”

  “Just don't look for me.”

  “Maybe if you tell me where you are and whether you're eating and those sorts of things—”

  “Just don't.”

  “Cheryl—”

  “And don't call the cops. Or put me on milk cartons or little signs at Cub Foods, either.”

  “Cheryl, stop.”

  “I'm not lost, okay? I'm not missing.”

  “Please stop.”

  “You can't make me do anything.”

  “Enough! Cheryl! Enough! Shut up now!” I was screaming. “Listen to me now! You. Are. Not. Going to make me crazy. There're lots of things I'll allow you to do, but I'm still your mother, and when I say—”

  “So?”

  “What did you say?”

  “So maybe you plopped me out, so what?” She knew she'd gone too far. “Mom?”

  “What.”

  “Just promise me you won't come looking for me?”

  I sighed. “I can't promise you anything, Cheryl.”

  “I need you to promise me. I'm sure Dad probably hasn't even figured out I'm gone, but—”

  “Don't make too many assumptions about him, Cheryl. He might surprise you.”

  “Yeah, right. You should have seen him while you—” She seized up. The instinct to protect me was still powerful in her. “Look, I've got to go, Mom. Don't look for me, okay?”

  I was in the kitchen. The flecks in the faux-marble countertop were vibrating. A sudden energy surged through me and I knew I'd do anything, anything she wanted, if she'd just stay on the phone a little longer.

  “I'll make a deal with you,” I said. “You keep me up-to-date on what you're doing, and I'll try to keep your father off your back.”

  “And what if I don't tell you what I'm doing—'cause it's really, like, none of your business, right?”

  “That's the deal, Cheryl. Take it or leave it.”

  “Fine.”

  “Is that a whatever-leave-me-alone fine, or an okay-Mom-that-sounds-great fine?”

  “What if I said I could take care of myself? Better than you can, anyway.”

  I didn't know what to say. I didn't know how to defend myself against this.

  “It's not your fault, Mom. You've got to be able to take care of yourself before you can take care of another person.” She said this like she'd read it in some self-help book and been saving it up for the right time to throw at me.

  While I cried, she gave me the barest of facts about where she was and what she was doing: some kid named Jarod—no I didn't know him, no she wasn't lying. He had a cute little mutt named Dog and a freaky mother who could, like, barely walk, and maybe she was still in the Twin Cities, or maybe not, those details were classified. Finally, she said, “No, Mom, I'm not happy, happy doesn't exist. That's a kind of completely stupid question. This interview's over. I'm hanging up now. Say goodbye, Mom, I'm hanging up.”

  “It'
s not fair,” I said. “Everything was supposed to get better. Why wouldn't you just let everything get better?”

  “Nothing ever gets better, Mom.”

  This she said with absolute conviction.

  THE BEER CANS SPREAD like a ruined wall around them, multiplying by sixes and twelves. The water in the bong thickened and darkened—gunky things hung there like pears in a jello mold. Jarod sometimes tried to stare down Cheryl's shirt while she was smoking. He found unending excuses—reaching for the crackhead cheese, maybe, scratching the dog behind the ears, extended, unnecessary searches for the bottle opener—to reposition himself until he was close enough to graze her arm hair. Then he'd freeze there, charged and pulsing. If she wanted to stretch her legs or scratch her neck, she felt guilty, like she was rejecting him. He'd sulk away and the cycle would start all over again. When he handed her something later, a beer, a slice of pizza, he'd take great care not to let their fingers touch, and if they did anyway, his hand would spasm as though he'd been shocked.

  She discovered him once, or she thought she did, peeking through the crack in the bathroom door, trying to catch a glimpse of her while she peed. The wood had bloated in the humidity; there was no way to get it completely closed. She saw a darkness flit past, then return and linger, and she knew it was him because what else could it be. His longing at that moment seemed like a parasite on his body, a wart that he couldn't freeze off. While she sat there, she wondered what would happen if she called his name, invited him in and gave him a better view. His gaze felt almost pleasant as it touched her skin, teasing and caressing and reassuring. As she wiped herself and pulled up her shorts, he fled, taking the sensation with him, but the possibility it had sparked stayed with her.

  He was a watery version of the skater guys she'd hung around with before she left. “They're not worth knowing, Mom,” she told me once. “We just do nothing. It's boring. We play Tony Hawk's Underground on their Nintendos and then I have to watch them try out new tricks.” She called them the “alt-consumers,” the “burnout bimbos.” They didn't know who the vice president was or why she might think it was patriotic to refuse to stand for the national anthem. “If they were worth mentioning, Mom,” she said, “you'd know.” This hadn't stopped her from sleeping with one of them.