Exes

by Max Winter

  *Why do we still want so badly to believe in witches? And to blame them when things don’t turn out the way we’d hoped? Eli used to argue that Plastic Ono Band was Lennon’s best work,* and I agree.

  *But he also used to pretend that the Beatles were the Monks whenever anyone else brought them up. And he would never let it go, would pretend not to understand their confusion and, eventually, their anger. “I love ‘I Hate You’ best,” he would say. “Stop it!” they would shout. “Yes!” he would say. “And how about that ‘Cuckoo’? Wow. Oh, wow!”*

  *I can’t believe I almost forgot about this! There’s something around every corner, under every rock. I get in my own way a lot, but I can’t stop looking.

  My father—who I called Ned: Ned Dubberford, Fox’s headmaster.

  My idiot brother’s expulsion: My Fox classmate, Teddy “Cree” Dubberford. Young Teddy had got himself kicked out of Fox* for jumping off a moving school bus on the way home from Fall Fun Fest. But little did Ned or anyone else know, Teddy made the leap only because his briefs had, mere seconds earlier, filled up with what felt like a quart of come. At the rear of the bus—one row in from the emergency exit—sophomore Gina McQueen, scandalously clad in a bikini top and what were supposed to be shorts, had been playing a playful game of catch with Teddy across the aisle until he caught the glimpse that broke the camel’s hump. Teddy then leaped from his seat—a jacket held fast to his lap—and emergency-exited the moving bus. While his classmates whistled and cheered, Teddy’s still-bent legs—remember, he had that hard-on to hide!—folded up under him like a card table’s and he hit the ground chin-first. Full of adrenaline, Teddy spat some teeth, picked himself up, and made straight for the woods, where he hid till dark.

  *On its own, such a stunt wouldn’t have been enough to earn the headmaster’s son anything more than a stern talking-to. Not in the late ’70s. Not at Fox, at any rate. But since Teddy had already been caught covering his English teacher’s Dodge first with pineapple rings, then papier-mâché pricks, and, last of all, a mock cherry felled during the spring musical (a toothless Pippin) while he was supposed to have been running lights, his father was left with no choice but to send his eldest packing for an alternative correctional institution in the foothills of the White Mountains.* His family all took turns shaking his hand and wishing him luck—except for Alix, who stayed home, listening to Blondie and reading Judy Blume or doing whatever it is nine-year-old girls did in 1980 when having none of it.

  *Zeno’s Zen Archery Academy, in craggy Aporia Falls. Cree has since returned to Providence and was recently arrested for hiding a camera in the unisex bathroom at the Wickenden Street café where he worked. Over the course of six years he filmed a healthy cross section of the city’s residents in various states of undress and relief. It all came to a head when a peeing Brown coed leaned down to retrieve a dropped cell phone and spied an electric eye duct-taped beneath the sink, staring unblinkingly at her bare lap. She ripped the whole setup out and dropped it on the counter by way of asking what the fuck. I mean, what the fuck? It didn’t take long to figure out who had set it up, given that Cree had—inadvertently—filmed himself doing exactly that at the tape’s start. His name and address were published in the next morning’s paper. Meanwhile, Cree hides in plain sight. His trial date looms, and those still close to him say he hardly seems himself.

  Secretary: That same Gina McQueen. She obviously made a pretty big impression on Pops, too. As for how Teddy took all this, I’d say not well. Not well at all.

  . . . Lovecraft’s grave: Practically spitting distance from my room at Butler—and I would know, as during my brief stay there I did a power of spitting. Granted, I’ve never been on a date; nevertheless, Eli’s tour strikes me as overdetermined—the sort led by a guy in period garb who discourages slowpokery but can’t read faces. Why, the only thing missing is a quick pit stop at the Industrial Trust building, which delusional locals insist on thinking of as the Daily Planet from the old Superman serial.

  Eli took a job at the Borders in Cranston: Where he edited the store’s newsletter. In his first and last issue, Eli introduced his short-lived alter ego, Cleats McNeil, a crazy-legged and leather-helmeted varsity end who crashed weekly his rumble-seated sawbuck-green roadster. My brother then went on to offer kudos to the café on the pine-flavored coffee, and to pine for a lady friend of his very own—someone who wouldn’t get all sore at him if he broke the horns off her unicorns or the wings from her Pegasuses or peg legs off her pirates or show him the door for drinking from the finger bowl. I didn’t think to hold on to my copy, which Eli had, uncharacteristically, slipped through my mail slot. He was proud, I guess. It seems I’ve held on to all the wrong things over the years.

  “Tell your friend we would like to fuck him”: Eli told me that the closest he’d ever come was a two-dude three-way. We both made faces. “Like sharing an armrest,” he told me. “And you both need the ashtray.” But that was just him trying to make me jealous. He was always finding new ways. Words could split me in two, and he knew it. Names have always hurt me.

  Louder Than Good

  Cliff Hinson

  Rob and I found the secret room after seeing a movie with explosions and ghosts in it. It was the first time either of us had ever set foot in the mall. We weren’t going out of our way to avoid the place, even though it was built by the exact same dicks who bought Eagle Square out from under us. It’s just, it’s the mall.

  We caught the midnight show, so by the time it let out, the stores were closed and the lights were all half off. People on the down escalator stared straight ahead, already in their cars in their minds. Rob and I took the stairs. Flight after flight, we kept going down, looking at each other, thinking, this can’t be right, can it? How many stories is this place? Five at least. Felt like eight. You could smell the river: copper, feces, geese. Something was humming. The hum got louder. The handrails were vibrating, and we hadn’t seen an exit sign in at least three flights.

  The door to the subbasement crash-barred open onto a long corridor, lit only by red alarm lights. Our footsteps hardly echoed. At the corridor’s end an extra-large Dunkin’ Donuts travel mug propped open a door with no handle. I pulled the door all the way open, and Rob felt around for the lights. They flickered onto a raw concrete room, roughly twenty by twenty, with ten-foot ceilings. The far right corner was wet, but opposite it was a couch scattered all around with lunch-break detritus: coffee cups, cigarette butts, beer cans, stroke books. Judging from all the dust and the dates on the sports sections, no one had been in the room since spring of ’97, which is when the mall was finished. This couldn’t have been a coincidence. Our footprints were the only ones in the dust. We looked around and then at each other’s idea-lightbulbs and laughed.

  Later, from a pay phone down the street, we called Pete-Peter, who said right-on and he’d tell Andyman, because you never know with Andyman. It was a couple months after the eviction, and we were crashing here and there, holding out for someplace big and cheap where we could fuck up the floors and make all the noise we wanted.

  The pay phone looked out on what was going to be a luxury condo but for now was just a diner-shaped hole. Rob had worked at that diner for a minute in the early ’90s. In fact, it’s where we first met, when he served me a cup of coffee with his thumb in it. I asked him if it hurt, and he grinned at me like we were in this together. His teeth were crooked like mine. I miss their corned beef hash, which didn’t taste homemade but was.

  We moved into the secret room piecemeal, stuffing what little we needed into duffel bags and making trips a couple-two-three times a day under cover of the busiest business hours. We brought some pots and pans, a hot plate, milk crates, clothes, a stereo. There was also what was left of our old space. The building’s new owners figured it was garbage, so they hadn’t thrown it out. It took a whole lot of trips to get the caftan maze down there, and the wall’s worth of action figure torsos. My hips started to hurt from all the up and d
own, but that’s because we’re meant to live in trees.

  Between Fire & Ice and the Melting Pot, the Dumpster provided us with more than enough root ends and peels and ugly bits for the stockpot, which, because of the free electricity, was pretty much always simmering. In it we cooked beans and grains and other cheap, dry items. We would come and go when we pleased, and when the weather was nice, didn’t spend that much time down there.

  We got invited over friends’ places for showers and sleepovers. Before long, Andyman took off for a family cabin in Maine or Vermont or wherever. I saw less and less of Pete-Peter, who’d met a girl and got a job fixing bikes. Me, I hung out more and more and drew on the walls. I drew friends mostly, doing different things. Viv with a tricorne and a musket. Andyman sticking Sanderson and Sons’ heads on pikes. Rob in a diaper. Rob in a pelt, brandishing a club. I drew the rooster I had given him years back that thought dawn came every hour until Rob made soup out of him. I drew an outline of Rhode Island with a thirteen in it. I crossed out the thirteen with a calumet. “WHAT CHEER!” I wrote. “WITNESS THE WORLD’S CRAZIEST PILGRIM!” I drew a sun smoking.

  More and more, Rob would show up just to crash and be either gone or asleep by the time I’d wake up. Nights, I’d wait up for him and leave a light on and the door propped open before I went to bed. I’d sing “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning” to keep myself company. I’d hear things—crackles, bumps, concrete scraping. At night my spine would prickle. Spooked, I sat with my back against the wall until the cold and the damp seeping through it gave me chicken skin. I knitted myself a cape from maze scraps and left it on while I drew, read, ate soup.

  One morning Rob showed up looking at least as bad as he felt. It took me a minute to recognize him. It had been a bunch of weeks at this point. I turned on the lights, and he covered his eyes.

  “I’m going to kick,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. “I can help.”

  “No you can’t.”

  “I’m right here.”

  “It gets loud in my head,” Rob told me, pointing crookedly at his temple.

  “We’ll make something,” I said.

  “I’m in no kind of shape.”

  “After, then. We’ve got time.”

  “Yeah,” he said, hugging himself.

  “Promise,” I said, covering him.

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  “Promise, you son of a bitch.”

  “Once I feel better,” he said, uncovering himself.

  “Life is not how you feel, asshole.” I was going to add that life is not what you want, either, but I took a good, long look at him, shivering hot like that, feeling the two months’ worth of pain he had created and put off, then redoubled and decided against it. He pulled the blanket back up and kicked it off again and vomited into the first thing he grabbed—a hat Alix never wore and left behind that Rob had kept.

  “You good for an hour?” I asked.

  “Fuck you. This is my idea,” he said, pulling the blanket back up.

  “Okay,” I said, and left, leaving the door propped.

  I showed up an hour later with a couple bags of groceries and a stack of paperbacks about the future.

  For the next three days I drew marks on the wall to represent those days. “You remember jail, right?” I said.

  “You mean prison,” he said. “And fuck you.”

  I cleaned up his vomit. I threw out his shitted sheets. I called him asshole and fucking prick to encourage him. One time I kneeled on his chest. Later I put alcohol on the spots where his nails broke my skin.

  By the time Rob had sweated his way through it, I finally gave in to the flu that I had been staving off. My flu looked and smelled almost exactly like his cold turkey, right down to the sick boners, which don’t make any fucking sense at all.

  Once I could keep my liquids down, we spent another week or so in fake lockdown, a week during which we were well enough to read, but not to think or make anything, so we tore through the books. We liked them okay. Me more than him. But he’d already reread all his own books too many times—Philip K. Dick, mostly, but also Nietzsche and someone Russian or something—so passing the time was enough.

  When we were both more or less back to normal, I went upstairs to grab refreshments at the CVS that had replaced the toy store. But first I asked for some money, and, like a dick, Rob made me turn around while he extracted a locked metal box from its hiding spot. But I only heard change. “You miser,” I said. “No wonder you started using again. You gotta work less.”

  “Fuck you, hippy,” he said, handing me three bucks’ worth of coins—buffalo nickels mostly, but also oddball dimes and one of those Bicentennials—and a two-dollar bill for the paper and some Cup-a-Soups and whatever else.

  “You’re like a crazy old lady, all holed up with rare denominations. What else you got hidden?”

  Rob’s middle finger was long and straight, and he never bothered with knuckle balls, which somehow made it even worse.

  We didn’t make the Cup-a-Soups, but in the Lifebeat! section of the paper I saw a notice for a traveling exhibition of Chernobyl photographs at the Ukrainian Social Club in Pawtucket. We hadn’t even known there was a Ukrainian Club in Pawtucket, but it was the last day, so we went.

  The photos were exactly as amazing and awful as you’d expect. Red walls looked green, and the green desks were rusted red. Paint peeled from buildings like burnt skin. What, from across the room, appeared to be a gray mound of stomachs turned out to be abandoned gas masks. The lenses were covered in ash. Trees grew through cars, buildings, other trees. Basically extinct horses ate grass. Mushrooms looked like cartoon mushrooms: swollen, red-capped, deadly. Cranes and wolves and boars frolicked and hunted like humans had never existed, their insides burning with radiation. I took off my sweatshirt, put it back on, took it off again, wiped my face with it. I couldn’t swallow. An electric sizzle traveled from my jaw to my eye. My eye started twitching.

  Rob put his sunglasses back on. We nodded at each other and were about to walk out when we saw this beautiful white cake sitting on a table, beside which stood two old ladies in calf-length skirt suits. The cake had three layers at least and was completely, perfectly white. So white it looked almost black. Like a big blank wedding cake. You could see anything you wanted to in it. There were two pieces missing, or maybe just one big slice, and we hadn’t eaten anything in a long time. Rob took off his sunglasses. “That’s a beautiful cake,” he said, smiling. For Rob, charm was something you do, not something you have, and it worked.

  “That’s His Excellency’s cake,” the older of the two ladies said, getting taller.

  “His Excellency?” Rob said, cocking his head to the left a bit.

  “The Ukrainian ambassador. He was here this morning.”

  “Did he like the cake?”

  “He declared it . . . exquisite,” she said, taking her time with the word, which, with her accent, sounded like actual sex on her lips.

  “Exquisite,” Rob repeated.

  “Yes, exquisite,” she said one more time, disappearing into her own mind for a moment. “Would you like a slice?” she asked, remembering herself. She picked up the cake server, which was also a knife. We said yes, thank you, of course we would, and ate the cake on the steps of the club, squinting into the sun. It tasted even whiter than it looked. It was dense and sweet, and you noticed what you didn’t taste. It tasted like metal, almost. We hadn’t eaten in weeks.

  We offered to rinse our plates, after, but of course they wouldn’t hear of it.

  By early fall, Rob was crashing with Alix again. “We’re giving it another shot,” he said, kicking a chunk of concrete into a pot-hole.

  We were standing in the parking lot of a Cambodian restaurant. Rob’s face was still red from all the pickled peppers I’d dared him to eat. Either way, lunch was on him.

  He was mostly pointed away from me, and he kept shifting his weight like he had somewhere
to be. His pupils were small, but it was sunny out. I didn’t even really know what to look for.

  “Alix is the best,” I said.

  Rob made that fucking teenage cowboy face I fucking hate.

  “Asshole,” I said. “I’m rooting for both of you here.”

  “We’re not a team,” he said.

  “We’re all in this together,” I said.

  I gave Rob and Alix a month, two tops. But who cares. I only knew I would be there for him when it fell through, because what else are you gonna do?

  And now, a year after we found it, the secret room was just where I lived. People stopped by to visit, to smoke weed, to see it for themselves. “You live in the mall!” they’d say. I’d say, did you know the guys who built the parking garage won’t park in it? A place doesn’t have to be old to be history.

  They mostly told me more and worse things about Rob. That he and Alix were through. He wouldn’t go out without sunglasses on. He no longer slept or ate. He’d taken a caretaker’s job to avoid people entirely. The Lyme he caught living on that yurt on Despair Island had finally gotten to his brain. He started using again. Probably. I mean, what else could he be doing out there, they said. His teeth had fallen out and his hands were like oven mitts. All of them—a few of whom Rob didn’t know and an even fewer of whom Rob even liked—were really worried. Someone else said he was in the pokey. They even used that word, pokey, which threw me for a minute. “Jail,” they said, misreading my confusion.

  “Prison, you mean,” I said.

  Meanwhile, the night watchman’s shoes made small, hooflike noises in the stairs and halls. He made his rounds above me, looking for places to hide from the cameras. The secret room would hold a certain appeal for a man like that. But it felt like I had imagined him into existence. I stayed put and he kept descending deeper and deeper into the mall. Before long, I lost track of the days. And sure enough, late one night, the door creaked open and a flashlight hit me on the couch, eating hominy from a mixing bowl with a wooden spoon. “What?” he said. “Who are you? How did you get in here?”