by Adam Wilson
“This guy’s fucking crazy,” Dan said, meaning it as a compliment. Got out of the car. I fell on the ground. Dan helped me up. Nikki’s makeup was messed. She looked in a hand mirror, as if she was going to fix it, didn’t bother.
“Your rich friends better not give me shit.”
“It’s not high school anymore,” Dan said. “We’re all the same now.”
“You’re wrong,” Nikki said. “We used to be the same. Now we’re different.”
“She’s right,” I said. “We don’t belong.”
“We haven’t even gone in yet,” Dan said. Went in.
Party was bumpin’. Dan said, “Shit is off the heezy.” Nikki said, “You know you’re white, right?”
Stood leaning against a wall trying to keep my balance.
“Holy shit,” John said. “It’s Schwartz.”
“I’m the Ghost of Christmas Past.”
“Good to see you’re raging.”
“What choice do I have?”
Two high school girls walked by wearing black halters, speaking into cell phones, strutting.
“I know them like I know myself.”
“You’ve been hanging out with high school girls?” John said.
“Niiiice,” Matt said.
“I get older, they stay…” Dan started to say, but Nikki nudged him, said, “Just shut up.”
Bobby Feld walked by trailing the girls, turned to us, said, “Whassuuup.”
“Schwartz,” John said, “why the fuck haven’t you visited us?”
“Visitation is for model prisoners only,” I said.
“You’ve been in jail?” Matt said.
“Not jail, Yale. He goes to Yale.”
“It’s true. I’m an econ major,” I said.
“You’re a major pain in my ass,” Dan said.
“Let’s get high,” John said.
“I’m already at Pluto,” I said. That’s what we used to say in high school when we were so stoned that getting more stoned would be a waste of pot.
“Pluto’s not a planet anymore,” Matt said. “I saw it on the news.”
“Then I’m already at Neptune.”
“Pluto’s still there,” John said. “It didn’t disappear. They just changed what it was called.”
“Shit changes,” I said.
Walked into the main room. “Here’s the celebrity,” someone said, with regard to me. On the plasma: home video from that morning’s football game. I lay on my back in my bathrobe.
“At least your dick looks big,” Dan whispered.
Two cops and two refs stood over me, deciding, chuckling, pretending to be serious. Jennifer Estes walked over, knelt, held my hand, felt for a pulse, stroked my hair, looked up at the cops. Not laughing. She said something, then they said something, then the cops helped her put me on a stretcher, carried me away. Crowd cheered.
Crowd at the party cheered too, chanted my name. QHS had won, and two former players said I should be the new mascot (Boner Man?), hoisted me on their shoulders. Raised my arms, gave the “V.” Then wobbled and the players put me down.
Stumbled into the kitchen. Saw Shelly Peters, my first vagina. She introduced her boyfriend. I mentioned the night of pure adolescent delight we’d shared, bodies ripe, unsullied, emanating delicate aromas like baby chimpanzees or scented liquid hand soap. Her boyfriend didn’t punch me until I asked if I could suck her nipple. Tossed me into the backyard. Passed out. John and Matt left me there while they tried and failed to convince girls they were different than they were in high school: mature now, practiced lovers, deserving of ear nibbles, power-thrusts from gym-toned calf muscles.
Some people came outside, drew on my face in magic marker: a penis on my cheek pointing toward my mouth. Cops came. Woke up when I heard the sirens. John dragged me to his Wrangler.
Rolled up the window, lit a small pipe of what was apparently red rock opium, the synthetic stuff we used to smoke in high school that might have just been incense. Mistook the fake opium for crack, smoked it anyway. Listened to classic rock radio, drove in circles. Matt said, “It’s always the same. You think you’re a different person until you come back and everyone’s the same and you’re the same too. The girls still treat you the same.”
Conscious enough to get out of the car. Stumbled beneath streetlamp, edged my way to the driveway, punched the garage code. Didn’t work. (I kind of remember this.) Walked up the steps. Didn’t want to wake Mom, so I didn’t knock. Picked up one of the rocks from the rock garden, heaved it through the kitchen window. Window broke but didn’t shatter. Hoisted myself up on the ledge, climbed on through, cutting my arms and face in the process. Dripping blood, lay on the floor. Alarm went off. Stood, turned toward the basement stairs to get some sleep. Something hit me from behind, knocked me over. Felt like a team of baby sharks was biting through the flesh of my leg.
twenty-six
Flatscreen:
• Some nights—high, eyes closed, music off, focused on functional hum: dryer, dishwasher, bathroom pipes—my skull expands, shape-shifts to a massive plasma-flat, wide as a football field, McMansion tall, super-high-def, high-res, wireless, static-free, angel-winged for when the weather’s right, planets aligned, time to rise, kite-like, above the clouds, into the atmosphere, into orbit, out of orbit, into space, sun-aimed, body still attached, legs trailing like a tagalong electrical cable, unplugged.
• On-screen: line after line of LED-lit brain code, nonverbal thoughts translated to conversational English, Courier fourteen-point font, each distinct thought lettered, numbered, Roman-numeraled; synapses visible, connections color-coded, sensibly arranged, mapped for maximum comprehension, all clear to anyone outside looking at my flatscreen head, but not to me, internally trapped, no view but wiring, only a tiny window to the outside.
• Floating through space, looking for a single mirror, a moon would do, anything to reflect skull-screen for my personal perusal.
• Then just when I’m about to find my moon-mirror, achieve some kind of clarity, I fall, without warning. Down to earth, back in bed, FS off, screen blank, head back to being a head.
• Remaining: weak glow coming from the nexus of my skull like a shitty single-watt headlamp, no help through the black, so I open my eyes.
twenty-seven
Kahn sat in front of me holding a smoking rifle.
“He comes like an apparition through my window, but it turns out he is made of flesh and blood like the rest of us.”
“You shot me.”
“An arrow not unlike Cupid’s.”
“Except there’s a bullet in me.”
“I guess I fucked up. I’m an old man and I fucked up.”
“It’s not your fault. You thought I was breaking in.”
“You were breaking in.”
“Right.”
Alarm still going off. Footsteps came from the hallway. Kahn lifted my leg, looked at it.
“I’m not a doctor. But I once played one on TV. Season two, episode four, Blacks and White Coats. A gritty urban medical drama. I was a special guest: widower brain surgeon with a heart of gold.”
“Not sure that helps our situation.”
“It was a crappy show but they paid union.”
Benjy and Erin ran in. Benjy in his boxers holding a baseball bat. Blood all over my old kitchen.
“Get a towel,” Kahn said, “and some rubbing alcohol”—he paused—“stat.” Then to me, “You’ll be all right, just a flesh wound.”
“Do you really know that, or are you just pretending to be a doctor?”
“I’m just trying to help.”
Benjy came back with the materials.
“What the hell happened?”
Benjy still held the baseball bat.
Kahn doused my leg with rubbing alcohol, wiped it with the towel. He had to lean from his wheelchair. Awkwardly bandaged me with his left hand alone, while he steadied the chair with his right. Gauze held in his teeth. Reminded me of Wood and Nail: Kahn’s labo
red craftsmanship, his intensity of concentration. Moles and burn scars spotted his outstretched arms. Bare feet atrophied, askance, hardened by white mold. Feet heavy with white warts, spiky black warts, like perma-cleats. Overgrown toenails curled stiffly upward.
“The garage code didn’t work. So I climbed in through the window. Forgot I don’t live here anymore.”
Benjy shook his head.
“Honest mistake,” Kahn said. “Once Robert Redford shot at me for the same reason, only I knew it wasn’t my own house.”
“Is that why…” Benjy started to say, looked at Kahn’s wheelchair, stopped himself.
“No. Bob could never have hit me. He’s a terrible shot. That’s why all Hollywood votes Republican: they don’t think we need gun control laws because none of them could hit a fat man from across a kitchen anyway. Unfortunately for old E., I am one of the rare thespians who also happens to be a formidable marksman.”
“I was unlucky before that.”
“No kidding, fat boy,” Natasha said. She’d come into the room. “You’re bleeding out your head, you’ve got two black eyes, and you got a dick on your face.”
“What?”
“Someone drew a penis on your face,” Benjy said.
“It looks like it’s pissing blood into your mouth,” Erin said.
“Great. Fantastic.”
Waited for the ambulance.
“White people are crazy,” Natasha said.
“I’ve neutralized the wound,” Kahn said.
“What does that mean?” Benjy said.
“I have no idea,” Kahn said.
Kitchen floor looked like a slaughterhouse (Fast Food Nation, RPC, 2006). Red and blue flashed in the window.
“Prop up the head,” Kahn said. Benjy got a pillow from the living room, put it under my head.
I am at home. I am at home and this is my fucked-up family.
Jennifer Estes entered in white.
“My guardian angel.”
Knelt, examined my wound.
“Twice in one day,” I said. “It really must be fate.”
She and some dude put me on a stretcher, carried me out to the ambulance. Benjy rode with us. Didn’t hold my hand, but I could see him when I tried to lift my head. Jennifer let me squeeze her forearm.
“I baked you a pie,” I said.
She leaned in close to my face.
“Stay with us,” she said, and I did.
Part III
one
Possible Ending #1 (Daytime Soap):
I’m written out, etched into sweet relief. Benjy knuckles dirt, discards tempered tears like wiper fluid. Someone speaks; they all speak. No one has anything to say. Never really knew me. Homeys pour forties. Otherwise, I go unmissed. Even if I’m missed, I don’t know it because I’m dead.
two
“Florida,” my mother said.
Pacing the room, scrutinizing machines like a government inspector—reading serial numbers, fingering an IV tube—even though she had no idea what the machines did, let alone if they were doing it successfully. One machine was a balloon attached to the underside of my calf that alternately inflated or deflated every couple minutes, elevating my leg half a foot in the air, like a yoga-robot posing me (Hatha3000, MouthEar Films, 2006).
Mom must have flown back, come straight to the hospital. Dressed all wrong, still in Thanksgiving stilettos, black tights, spaghetti strap dress that showed off her eight-minute biceps.
“Florida’s a nice place.”
Walked to the window, opened the curtains, looked out the window. Like a TV soap: Thanksgiving, fuckup son in hospital bed, Mom staring into sunlight, makeup smudged, reapplied in hand mirror while son sleeps. Heart monitor thumps electric blips. Hospitals are designed to feel like sets, what with well-lit bare rooms; generic, prop furniture, all grays, muted blues; machines that look archaic, two-tone, low-pixel screens providing retro eighties vibe. Or maybe it seemed that way because I’d been watching too many prime-time medical dramas, uneagerly anticipating my own encounters with the life machines, taking comfort in their theoretically altruistic attendants. TV in my actual hospital room, muted. Bosomy woman in a low-cut shirt hid a knife in a drawer, blew kisses at a bearded man. Averted my eyes, watched Mom, the way she pushed with her legs to open the window, the tightening of her veined, muscled thighs.
No idea how long she’d been in the room, if she’d stared at me while I’d slept; sipped coffee; thought of my body, the way my pale face blended with the white sheets; imagined the blood that covered the floor of the old house, seeped through the carpet, dripped through the cracks in the floorboard, thickened, blackened.
Sunshine highlighted her highlights; she pulled the strands into a low ponytail, the kind she wore for tennis.
“I could see myself there. I was there and I could see myself there. No winter, outdoor tennis year round. Maybe I could start playing golf, too. Lot of women play golf these days. Wear a bit of plaid; I think that would be cute. Not really my game, too slow. But I could get into it. Jeff’s a big golfer. Jeff Goldblum, not the actor. He spells it differently. He’s an insurance salesman. A nice man, Eli, and I think you’ll like him when you meet him.”
The balloon was meant to help circulation. Could feel the blood moving. Thought again of the blood that poured from my body when I was shot. Even that puddle, not enough to stop the flow of oxygen to my brain. I, who always felt so fragile, melodramatically straddling the borderline between here and the eternal, I had been shot, lived to tell the tale. Wounded. Soldiers get wounded. Mom was a soldier too, wounded by Dad’s unshaven face, and now she was in love, it seemed, from the way she looked out the window as if she were staring at an ocean, index finger tracing rings around the inside of her palm. In love with a man who wouldn’t hurt her, a man she’d chosen for that exact reason. Imagined a child’s face on an adult body; a child wearing an unstylish but respectable suit, his hairless cheek rubbing against my mother’s. An insurance salesman, practically his job to be reliable. Goldblum-Spelled-Differently was reliable; I wasn’t. Things had started to go well for her, and I was like a baby crying on a monitor, demanding attention just as a gentle man has poured the wine, begun to rub her shoulders, slipped the straps down, whistled half a bar of some familiar melody, one she hasn’t heard in years. Not sure if it was her or me, or both, but somewhere there was the sense that one of us had to quit on the other, drift out of cell phone range. Or we’d be pulled back like heavy magnets, ceaselessly weakened by the force it takes to pry ourselves apart.
“I think you’ll like Jeff. Jeff Goldblum. It’s a ridiculous name, I know. But he spells it differently, and he has a nice face. Blue eyes even though he’s Jewish. Obviously Jewish with a name like Goldblum, living in Boca. About as Jewish as you can get.”
Didn’t want to hear about her new boyfriend, but maybe that’s all she could talk about. Easier than discussing the trauma that had occurred while she’d abandoned me. Because even though Thanksgiving was my dad’s holiday—we went to Mom’s for Passover and night one of Chanukah, Dad’s for secular holidays: Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, etc.—her absence was still a reminder that our family had become a slump-shouldered Diaspora, that regardless of actual physical proximity, we lived in separate, isolated communities. Not that I blamed her for my being shot, but didn’t she, at least a little bit, blame herself?
“Jeff’s not rich like your father, though. He has a good job, but he’s not rich. Drives a Honda. Not that your father was rich when we first met, either, but you could tell he was hungry for it. He didn’t like to wear a shirt and tie, but he was hungry. So was I, really. You are when you’re poor. When you’re poor and pregnant like I was. Sleeping on a cheap mattress. You’ve never slept on a cheap mattress. Maybe at summer camp, but not every night for years, or with a pregnant stomach. My parents were never rich. They did okay, but money was different then. People weren’t rich like they are now. Jews, I mean. Your father grew up with nothing. We wanted you boys to
have it good, nice toys, good schools. Guess it didn’t matter in the end, did it?”
Thought she might jump out the window, let her body fall to the pavement. What then? They’d drag her back in here. In the bed next to mine, hooked to more complicated machines, ones that would help her breathe, pump her heart. Maybe Spelled-Differently would visit, maybe he wouldn’t. Wanted to tell her it wasn’t the end, we were still alive, my leg would heal, we would all heal, salt in your wounds hurts but also cleanses. Didn’t she watch television? Didn’t she know that in America everyone gets a second chance?
Instead shut my eyes, imagined her stare on my body like a tractor beam, lifting me out of bed, into the air. Abducting me.
“Your father, your father, your father,” she said.
Because she still thought about Dad, took each Goldblum-Spelled-Differently limb, measured it against the memory of Dad’s; bushified Jeff’s eyebrows; pictured new children, prettier versions of Benjy and I, happier; admired his small, unsunken pectoral muscles, visible because he hardly had any chest hair. Or maybe he had chest hair, had Dad’s square jaw, winter-red nose, unemotive eyes. The same, or opposites. Either way, a reaction. Whoever this Goldblum-Spelled-Differently was—tender or brute lover, workaholic or Euro-fied American who lived for scented, aged items: wine, cheese, my mother—he was that way because of my father, because Dad needed a replacement, and Florida is where you replace one life with another.
“I’m tired,” she said.
Not just me who’d made her tired—it was Dad, Benjy, the weather, time which sank her cheeks and breasts, made lines on her forehead—but right now it was me, my broken body, the sight of which made her want to lie flat on the floor, feel the tiles form sharp triangles with the bones of her upper back, watch the ceiling light until she saw blue dots, nothing but blue dots covering the world, covering me, her injured son, her never-prodigal son because I’d never left. Instead forced her to become a prodigal mother, returning not to feasts and joy-tears, but to blinking machines that said, “Our beating hearts are only gears, our bones will never truly heal.”