Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  She woke under a sky the color of baby clothes. She was rapt with a soreness whose ambitions surpassed the body, springing up her back in a fountain of sparks and multiplying into her shoulders. A torus of stiffness constricted her ribs, and the forgotten locations of her obliques were illuminated in red flashes of ache. She pulled herself up and made uneven sandalprints through the mud and male-pattern grass toward the Muni tracks, where her piss both looked and felt like old-school Listerine.

  The weather was chill but bright enough to go jacketless. Paralyzed with dreaminess, Cory stood at the park’s north terrace and glanced across the bay. Pink clouds hulked over the alpenglow like raked sand. The park’s pastured districts were empty of their defining memberships: the Fruit Shelf, the Dogpatch, Hipster Hill and Fiesta Flats and the shelters of palms. A trail wound to the pavilion on the flank, abutting the bumpy sandlot and the filthy bathrooms. On warm days the breeze smellshifted as it changed direction: sunscreen, charcoal, weed, sod. A sandy playground rested low in the center, tennis and basketball courts up north.

  It was full morning by the time she donned her staff lanyard and went down the hill to measure out vendor lots with checkered speed-tape. She greeted the Barr None van her father had sent to help move the booth supplies from the office. John, Pascal, and Martina arrived at nine A.M., each given staff lanyards and dispatched to their Socialize Action Tables, outfitted with flyers, petitions, and suggested donation tills. While Cory inflated a hundred balloons, the first vendors arrived: the vintage tennis apparel shop Beforehand, the LGBTQIA-BBQ, and the Election Year Eatery (LOCAL NO. CAL. LO-CAL/NO-CAL CUISINE: STEM CELERYSEARCH - $2.99 / IRAQ OF RIBS [V] - $7.99 / ABORSCHTION - $4.99 / UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARROT CAKE - $3.99).

  Setting up was like installing thousands of tiny lightbulbs on a moving carousel. She’d grouped all the food carts in one plaza, but the vegan bakers complained about being near the walking-taco trailer—tough shit! Nothing unvegan about smelling meat! A jeweler asked if she could pay half and have others take over halfway—hell no! The programs were printed! The SF Mime Troupe, hired to replace Luis’s drag queens, had arrived to perform a commedia dell’arte, which, following their stipulations, Cory had not previewed.

  Claiming a rack of PBR as her pay, Linda limped in carrying a crate of soul LPs with an iPod balanced atop, the sleeves of her faded black sweatshirt pushed up, wearing white sunglasses and cowboy boots, teal leggings, door-knocker earrings. The scabs on her cheek had healed into a shiny pink archipelago. Cory pointed Linda to the DJ table where the PA was set up.

  Roland arrived at eleven A.M. dragging what looked like two body bags. These were the banners, and when he lashed them up, they hung twenty feet across, one between two poles over the eastern steps, the other in a break of the tree line by the tennis courts:

  “Yo, where’s our logo?” Cory said. “We spent three hundred bucks on logo design. Why is our text so tiny?”

  “Your part is smaller because you gave me more text,” Roland said. “And I emailed you for the hi-res logo two days ago.”

  “Okay, and why does it say Levi’s and Red Bull?”

  Roland pointed. In one lot, a blond woman in a red bikini and sneakers was unloading a large duffel from a van with a tremendous Red Bull can erupting from its roof, the other end of the duffel being carried out by an identically dressed woman who was also blond or may as well have been. Cory grasped Roland’s flannel. “Who’s they? I mean, who’re they?”

  “I thought we resolved this.”

  “We agreed on one slot for PBR.”

  “I assumed if other sponsors were interested, we’d offer the same deal.”

  “You assumed wrong!” She’d assumed wrong assuming he’d assume right. The banner stretched and sagged with gusts of late spring. “Sorry. I appreciate your work. It’s just not ideal.”

  “Shit never is. Everything’s still on.” Roland reached down to squeeze her shoulder. “That crowd. Focus on the customer.”

  Cory shook his hand and returned to field vendors and acts. She hadn’t kept track of time, and didn’t realize the event had started until people were dribbling in—passengers disembarked from the J-Church carrying sunbrellas and coolers. Stroller-pushers pondered the safest route into the park from the steep northwest. The portly ganja treats guy patrolled with his walking staff and knapsack. A stout Latino in plaid flannel pushed an ice cream cart. Obama campaigners went afield in their boxy blue T-shirts. At the park’s west, a bucket was being lowered from a second-floor window with a sign reading HOMEMADE COOKIES $3. Cory did not feel the heart-spreading warmth of achievement she was supposed to feel. She’d probably feel it after she’d slept.

  6/5/08

  Hey Linda. Maybe this is an invasion of privacy but I figure this is the simplest way to work things out. And frankly I don’t have anything else to write on. I know if we talk we’re gonna twist each other up into balloon animals just like before. So I’m handing you the home-field advantage. I haven’t had much luck with writing, hell my last journal got me committed. But this way there’s no shouting or interruptions. I’ll say my whole piece and then you can laugh at my bad writing, win-win.

  No point getting defensive I guess. “Procatalepsis is for pussies,” like you used to say. But to really quote you properly I’d need more quotation marks, “‘like this,’” since that’s how you talk, in scare quotes. That way you’re never wrong, just verbatim. Man, its obvious now! Scare quotes mean you’re scared.

  So first of all of course I don’t “‘believe’” you about your memory loss. I don’t even believe you’d believe I’d believe you. No, I know from a goddamn stretcher and I’ve read my DSM-IV. “‘Lacunar amnesia’”? More likely its pseudologia fantastica, pathological lying . . . file under M for Mythomania. Not fact or fiction but factition, the intentional fabrication of subjective complaints with no external incentive. By proxy. Its linked to high verbal skills and a rough childhood. Or if it is “‘lacunar amnesia,’” then its probably a symptom of Korsakoff’s, whose other symptoms include anhedonia, apathy, lack of insight, and making shit up. Caused by drug and alcohol abuse . . . stop me if this sounds familiar.

  I know its tempting to diagnose your unhappiness. To turn your life into a pathological seismograph. The real puzzler is why you’d lie to your own diary. A dry run before you lay it on me? Doctoring your future memories? This whole “‘reverse-Scheherazade charade’” is obviously a trap to get me to engage with you. But the trap itself is bait in a larger trap: to make the whole process as interesting as possible. That’s so completely your M.O. Writing a whole made-up story about me right in front of me, then planting it in the trash for me to fish out. You think “‘nobody will read it’”? Fucking yeah right. You knew I would and secretly you think everyone will and everything you do will be held up to criticism.

  At first I thought this was all some role-play puppet therapy where I’m the puppet. You shove your arm up me and put pretentious words in my mouth like “‘“quintessentially Lindaic”’” even though that phrase and strategy and pointing them out are all quintessentially Lindaic. (Even more quintessentially Lindaic is doing the exact thing that you say you’re not doing by saying you’re not doing it!) You and the Henrik-puppet bond over a rough history, you have mature little epiphanies about writing and trauma and loneliness, and boom-shakalaka, forgiveness.

  But now I’m starting to think you believe writing something makes it literally real. Its not “‘Lucifer’” in you, its Maxwell’s demon, converting ordinary chaos into unnatural order. The amnesia lie leads to another lie about me telling your life story. Rape, violence, tit-for-tat, and you’re the righteous victim who gets revenge . . . by lying.

  Jeez louise just describing it makes me sound crazy. I imagine that was the intention. Let me try and sort out the possibilities here.

  Case 1: You were never raped and you made everything up. Maybe you’d invent a story like this to pull my heartstrings. But it’s extremely unlikely, and to b
e extra clear I’m not in any way doubting you were raped. There’s no way I’m pulling the pin on that shit. One-in-six, I know. For the same reason I’ll wager you never lied to Gavin about being raped. But I think you would lie about having lied.

  Case 2: You were raped and everything you wrote about it is true. Unlikely, since you confessed to your “‘reverse-Scheherazade charade.’” But for argument’s sake let’s say its all true except when you say its not. Why pretend something’s true just to undermine it by presenting it falsely? And why launder it through a fictional version of me? If you wanted my sympathy you could’ve told me what happened. Its probably worse than anything you did to me, plus you could avoid any appearance of fabricating the rape, which I know you hate when women get accused of.

  Case 3: You were raped but lied about how it happened. Probably. But how? Maybe you were raped by the middle school boys but not Gavin. Or vice versa. Or Scotty did, and you made up the Gavin story to justify using him to retaliate. Maybe you were assaulted in some other way entirely and you’re working through it with a more digestible shadow account. Or by fictionalizing what happened, you can insulate yourself from your frustration about not being believed? I can only speculate.

  Now I bet you’re nodding and saying: yeah, pal, this is what writers do, transform reality into art. But “‘confession fixes nothing,’” right? Plus who cares if its art? Actually you want to get caught lying and then have everyone play along anyway. Lie out in the open. Have every motive point to you. Having, wanting, or losing you, its all the same. Even getting hit by a car ups the ante. Even this lecture goes straight into the bank, you love a postmortem. Putting concepts before people, assaying every experience for usable material and all material for its breaking point, its almost scientific. Except scientists have ethical standards for human experiments.

  Its all so warped and narcissistic. But what do I know? Maybe this is what every “‘relationship’” is like. Yeah-yeah, I hate that word too. Too broad to define, too easy to disqualify. I bet you crossed it out because its cheesy, but also for the same reason you call sex “‘fucking’” or “‘boning’” or “‘porking’” like teenage boys do. You’d commit suicide before you “made love.” It makes sense: we actually never made love and never were in love, we were just porking. And now we’ve got beef.

  Not wanting sex to be sex, writing about not writing, getting engaged without following through . . . actions without consequence. Now you’re denying reality wholesale, and denying you’re denying it.

  You always used to shut me down by saying “‘it’s more complicated than that.’” Sure. But you’re the one complicating it. There’s such a thing as a simple proposition, True/False. Yes/No. For example. Was there an abortion or not? It doesn’t matter now. Go ahead and lie, but you better sell it to me. I want it in writing.

  —Henrik

  THE GRASSY HILLS at Dolores Park were not congenial to Vanya’s wheelchair, so she’d gone downtown to cover the Pride Parade, dispatching Will to cover Cory’s event by himself. He was drunk and every cab was taken, so he waited for the 48-inbound Muni bus amid costumed Pridegoers and a flock of children on a weekend field trip. The bus came late, a zero-emission model tethered to an overhead cable, with an electric motor warbling like harmonized theremins. Will waited for it to kneel and allow the elderly to board, and he slapped the fare box that retched his limp dollar back at him. More bodies crushed in and the seated passengers drew in their legs and moved shopping bags to laps. The bus kicked forward and everyone heeled into each other.

  Will stood at eye level with chins and armpits, his wrists tingling from straphanging. The collar of his gray oxford crinkled in the heat. Through the window whitened with scuffs, he saw people strolling in pink T-shirts, VOTE FOR LOVE / UNITED BY PRIDE. The bus slewed left and the children screamed in delight; a skinny elbow shanked him in the side. Will busied his eyes with the shipping labels stuck to the windows, tagged with territorial ideograms and dingy with pick-and-peel—nothing was uglier than a half-removed sticker, with its furry white scar.

  After three stops the children herded off and Will slipped into a seat, immediately feeling his nuisance antenna twitch at a conversation directly behind him. He faked staring out the window to catch the speaker’s reflection—an Australian teenager with a green bandanna, addressing the teenage Asian girl sitting next to him. “Your sort are more laid back about it all,” he said. “More feminine too. You lived in the States long? Are you from here originally? Come on, give us an answer.”

  “No,” the girl said.

  “Where you from, then?”

  “Seattle.”

  “And where’s your family from?”

  “Seattle.”

  “Right. Going to the park? I’ve got whiskey. It’s Pride Weekend, everybody’s drinking. I bet you blush when you drink. Hey. Smile for me.”

  Fighting to control the temperature of his ears, Will turned in his seat with words already splattering out. “Hey kid, can you pipe down?”

  The kid glared. “Fuck off.”

  Will pivoted as much as his spine would allow. “Listen, dick. She’s not interested. Do you think she’s some little shivering lotus petal who’s just too turned on to respond? And yeah it is my business, because I have to sit here, listening to you being an annoying fuck.”

  The bus slowed and the electric engine went mute. The kid sat in amused ease, rubbing a frizzy muttonchop. His arm veins cast shadows. “Mate, you fuckin’ mind—”

  “What do they even call rednecks in Australia?”

  “—before you get your head smacked, right—”

  “Settle down,” the driver called over the loudspeaker.

  “—you dumbshit.” The caffeinated cinders in Will’s stomach made it difficult to steady his volume. He made a petitioning scan of the other passengers, who glowered at their phones or out the windows. The moment hung like a spun coin that would not collapse on its final wobbles.

  “You’re embarrassing yourself, right,” the kid said. “Shouting like a fucking monkey.”

  “Oh, there it is, you racist little shit.”

  “What the fuck you mean, racist? You wanna go me, you cunt?”

  Will addressed the Asian girl. “He’s bothering you, right?”

  She gazed down the aisle, gripping her bag to her hip. She had a plain face, high-foreheaded and maybe fifteen, dressed for some kind of sport, though she wasn’t carrying equipment. Maybe she was a runner. “Don’t get intimidated,” Will said, “just speak up.”

  “I don’t know,” the girl said, oppressed.

  “You’re kidding.” Brambly heat from Will’s ears pumped out to his scalp. He was weightless with rage. “So you’re okay with random Asian fetishists harassing you?”

  “He’s an Asian fetishist just because he’s hitting on me?” the girl replied, and now that Will was seeing her face-front, it was possible she was hapa. Though that counted.

  “Yeah,” Will said. “It may not be obvious to you because you’re young, but yeah.”

  “Leave me alone,” the girl said, absurdly. “I didn’t ask you to rescue me. You’re both creeps.”

  “Right, there’s your answer,” said the kid to Will. “Fuck off now.”

  Will queried his thesaurus for Australian slurs—dingo, boomerang, vegemite. Great Barrier Reef. “Shut up. She’s just feeling awkward.”

  “Oh, you daft midget. Go play with your little Chinese cock.”

  “You racis—”

  The instant Will grasped the kid’s shirt collar he felt his head snapped back, his glasses whipped off, many arresting strengths pushing him down in the aisle. Will thrashed his legs and, instead of the expected beatdown, he heard the kid give a short surprised laugh and with shocking agility he yanked and freed Will’s belt, jeans, and boxer shorts down to his ankles. The driver was shouting and another teenager went Ohhhh! Will shook off the arms and pulled his jeans back on, walked to the stairs in front of the rear door, realizing his s
top was five stops ago. The bell-cord Klaxon sounded a doubled middle A. He remembered his lapel camera and held down the dump button. His glasses had fallen off, but he wasn’t going to frisk around for them.

  He waited in the witless staircase, feeling the bus’s camera blaring its security at him. At the stop he yelled, Back door, and the bus released him with a pneumatic hiss. Will stepped into the blurry afternoon, where he was not known.

  BY TWO P.M. Cory’s aluminum water bottle was empty and her bladder was full. The insides of her cheeks were taking on the grainy texture of mackerel. She’d been shooing off the street vendors she caught laying out blankets at the periphery of the park to sell battered DVDs and belts; likewise the bonneted woman selling pastries, whose enormous breasts hung bare from unbuttoned hatches in her dress. A homeless man was harassing the Good Vibrations vendors. On their performance stage, the mime troupe had gone entirely nude and were hamming up the negotiation of their arrest with the 10B officers.

  Cory tried to accept that opportunists signaled success. With more limbs, she might have managed it, more Cories, though the last thing she wanted more of was herself.

  The time felt right for an announcement. She stood on the hill by the marketplace with her megaphone, signaling Linda to cut the music. “How’s everybody doing?” Cory called out. A few people whistled or hooted. “My name’s Cory! Thank you guys so much for coming out and supporting local artists and merchants! Our profits go to Katrina reconstruction, AIDS research, and . . . all that good stuff! If this is a success, we can make it a regular—” Cory lowered the megaphone with a crackle, swallowed to resharpen her voice, then raised it too quickly, smashing the receiver on her teeth. “Ow! A regular thing. Uh, I was gonna say something . . . oh! Make sure you see the booths up by the J-Church stop, okay? Lots of cool stuff there, don’t miss it. T-shirts . . .”