by Bill Peters
He smiles for a second. Even though I’m not making a joke, he begins to crack up.
“Applesauce,” he says, eyebrows hoisted. “I’ll give you that. I’m the boss, applesauce!”
Then he chokes the laughing back.
“I think you have to go,” he says.
So, forgive me, when I whip a trash bag from the trash bag roll at home, go to my room, and spend an entire day throwing out the pictures we took of the pizza delivery woman for no reason that one time me and Lip Cheese ordered Domino’s; the sheet of paper me and Necro found downtown that said: “freedom for len freedom for len Freedom for Len Freedom For Len FREEDOM FOR LEN FREEDOM FOR LEN FREEDOM FOR LEN.” I throw out the first picture of Man-Serum Bagelheart, on loose leaf paper, his beard a bunch of squiggles in pencil, and I throw out the last drawing, I think, me and Necro ever made, where Man-Serum Bagelheart’s limbs grow weak from ague (which Necro pronounced “agoo”), which Man-Serum had come down with from watching a seventy-hour broadcast that just showed a pair of testicles, and worrying, deeply, over whether they were his. Then I think: We were weird kids.
CRYSTAL-LYNN MAUER
Because we’re at Mindy Fale’s house and her parents are away, all we’ve done through the evening is feel each other up on the two-cushion couch in her living room. We’re in the dark, lit only by the computer that’s set up against the stairwell’s half-wall, and after a good hour of General Makeout Fest, well after Conan, I’m feeling sort of fluish, one shoe suddenly off, staring into the fruit-punch vortex on her monitor’s screensaver. Which makes General Makeout Fests way sadder and way more annoying than you would imagine.
“It’s just Necro,” I say. Her forehead is pressed into my cheek. “The Aurorist?”
She rolls over. “Bitter, Nate.”
Her living room is cramped as the inside of a music box, porcelain trinkets on heavy wooden shelves built into the walls.
My lips feel raw from kissing. She’s crushing my chest a little, so I squirm, and she props herself up on one elbow. “You need to get involved in something. Maybe church. It’d be good for you.”
“What does everybody always mean, good for me?”
I know I’m starting to depend on her more, because she has the kind of pity where it makes me want to shoot down her advice so I can get more pity. The screensaver changes to blue, to red, to yellow, and makes flickery shadows of the porcelain figurines on the shelves—a lumberjack, a swan, a newsboy, an archer. Each figurine stands next to a sign displaying a suit of a playing card.
“Something good has to come from your situation,” she goes.
“Well, it won’t,” I say.
She stands up and puts her hands on her hips.
“Whatever. You don’t care,” I say.
“If I didn’t care would I be—” she gestures broadly to the couch. “Never mind.”
Mindy Fale leads me up the stairs, which ascend more at the angle of a ladder than a staircase. Her bed is waist-high, bedspread woolly as cotton candy, dolls and teddy bears piled two or three deep on the bed and her dresser. She reaches forearm-deep into the pile of dolls, pulling out the smallest, most mangled one.
The doll has a green Girl Scouts-type dress, a picnic-tablecloth Raggedy Ann face, and loose hemming where its right arm meets her body.
“This is Patty,” she says. “I thought you should meet her.”
I lie down. She lies down. The sheets are clean and stiff, like they were broiled dry. Some cartilage pops in my chest when she lays on top of me. She turns off the reading light attached to the bed’s headboard.
“Could be worse,” she pauses, thinking, which is also annoying. “You could be in Ethiopia.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
She shakes her head. Her shoulders collapse and her brow crumples. “Well it seems like you’re trying to sad your way into bed with me,” she says, voice coming from some future where nothing is ever a joke. She’s taken her hand out of my hair, like how some girls can move themselves away from me without me noticing, in that way where they’re always smarter than me in all the ways that count.
So I say, with the last shreds of Happy Rolodex I can gather, Happy Rolodex’s Last Stand: “I don’t know. It’s different with every girl.”
“Different, like, with who, specifically?”
From her window, I see some light move. She knows I’m lying. “I—um, I, I—” Make something up. Give her a name she can’t track. “Crystal-Lynn Mauer.”
Who I hope doesn’t actually exist. Then I remember that Crystal-Lynn Mauer does, in fact, exist, because she worked at the Science Store in Eastview, where me and Necro asked if we could buy gravity.
“Don’t get freaked out,” Mindy Fale says. “I just feel bad for you. You just seem like the unhappiest person I’ve ever met.”
Which: unhappiest person? Tell that to my pants, when she rolls on top of me, pressing me halfway deep into the mattress, and sticks her hand through my fly, and it feels like she’s rummaging for a stray tissue in her purse, but it’s good enough, and I get into pushup position over her, and I don’t even think to say to myself, with no friends left to even say it to: Well this is it! Flight Deck of the Enterprise!
After that, the whole thing feels pretty much like I imagined. The pillowcase is halfway off my pillow. A steam bubble cools in my head. Some enormous part of my personality feels as if it’s been pulled out of me, like a bunch of tied-together handkerchiefs from a magician’s mouth. The sheets feel less papery. The bedspread covers my left thigh. My underwear is rolled up into the fold where the bed sheets tuck under the mattress. My brain feels like the Snoopy nightlight in her bedroom, hovering in the dark, tracers batting across my eyes when I blink.
“Playing anything good on finger drums?” she says.
Because I’ve, on total autopilot, been tapping out a drumbeat on her waist. “Oh, it was nothing.”
She rolls over and digs her chin into my chest. “Tell Mindy.”
My stomach catches some shine from the nightlight when I inhale. “Well, it started out as Phil Collins’s ‘Take Me Home.’” She rolls away and laughs into the headboard. “But only for a second, I swear! And then it redeemed itself, sort of, by turning into ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number!’”
She bolts out of bed and claps her hands to her face, standing now, brow tense with important things. Her paunch line and vagina just out there.
“I was just thinking—just thinking—that was the song you were playing,” she says, serious like she’s dug up a lost Bible chapter. “Like I was half-thinking it, and then you said it. My dad used to sing that song to me in the car and change Rikki to Mindy. I was literally raised on that song.”
I sit up and pull the covers over my crotch. She points to her eyes with her index and middle finger and then points to mine. “I’m very passionate about connections. We are buying that album first thing when we get an apartment!”
Even I wonder about this. Even I try to raise some doubt in her. “But what am I going to do for money?” I say.
“Dude. I make $26,000 a year.”
I fall back down with my arms spread out. She throws herself on the bed and I bounce upward slightly. She is this awesome naked linebacker of a woman; her whole body is marshmallowy, made for breastfeeding, this girl, who can whoop my ass in bed, who I can get weird and desperate with. I had no idea we were together.
A THING TO INVEST
When I wake up one afternoon, Mom isn’t home yet. In our kitchen, a light blinks on the message machine. I shake off the sleep and press it:
“Nathan this is Todd Vick from Kodak Park your friend Andrea told us to give you a call for a possible job at our industrial park downtown, uh, please give me a call back if you’d like to set up an interview, uh, Andrea gave you a very positive recommendation, and we’d like to get to know you a bit more and uh, if you’d like to give me a call back you can do so. oooOkaybye.”
Just like this! Todd Vick, speaking with every str
etched-thin, flat-A vowel available in the Rochester accent. Necro doesn’t answer when I call him to see what any of this means. But, I figure, this means we’re still friends. I figure that means me and Necro will have forklift races on the job the way he always promised if he could find me one, or smoke cigarettes in the factory alleys on our midnight lunch break and listen to the city’s faint gunshots, or take naps in our own sleep corners. The Kodak Park Winjas—part wizard, part ninja—we’d call ourselves.
When I actually drive to Kodak Park for the interview, I park in the visitor’s lot, across from this wedge-shaped brick building with no windows that extends forever down Ridge Road. Inside, Todd Vick is wearing a white, nylon-pajama-looking suit, a hairnet, and plastic goggles. He and everybody else who works at Kodak Park has a mustache. He goes for the handshake:
“Nathan Gray! Todd Vick nice to meet you how are ya welcome to Kodak Park. Just gonna have you fill out some paperwork.”
We tour rooms with whiteboards that have numbers and diagrams. All Todd Vick asks me is: Can you lift fifty pounds? Can you follow specific directions? Work independently and with a team environment? All of which, as it finally hits me, I need to say yes to. He hands me a clean-suit, a nylon onesie packaged in shrink-wrapped plastic, and I tear open the packaging, unzip the suit, and step into it. He leads me deeper into the plant, through long, white, well-sanitized hallways into longer, darker hallways with only the dimmest striplighting on the floors. Todd Vick yells, “Yope!” and, from someone at the far opposite end of the hallway, I hear a whistle echo like an ocean bottom. Then he turns, suddenly, through a few sets of doors and we’re back into the light, in a large, concrete room with maybe six vats, doors that look like garage doors, and metal carts holding jugs of chemicals.
There’s some sort of cherry-rubber smell in the room. “This is the Building 38 Cart Loader,” he says. Then he shows me Chemical Recycling, a room with a broad, gray floor, with a straight conveyor belt that runs along one wall, and, in the center of the room, a Humvee-sized metal box with a short, horseshoe-shaped conveyor belt curving into and out of it. On a desk near the wall, there’s a booklet titled “Let’s Build a Film,” open to a page describing a step called Knurling. Then, with no specific reaction or another, I walk out with a job.
Which, honestly, feels better than Holy Grail Points, better than even the Pope’s Scratch-Off Magic: It feels really pretty good. Because: Kodak: it’s been here forever. Some guy—maybe sportscaster Rich Funke but without the mustache—narrates one of the workplace intro videos during my orientation the next day. It’s cameras; I’ve used cameras.
So, dinner then.
When I call Necro so I can take him out for a Plate, a low pasty female voice answers the phone: Necro’s in the woods behind his house.
In the woods, apparently, kicking at a sogged mat of dead leaves. The trees are knuckly and veiny, and Necro’s hands are in his jacket pockets.
“I wanted to tell you thanks,” I say, “for whatever recommendation you put in for me for Kodak.”
He doesn’t look up.
“Celebrations tonight? Get a Plate?”
“Come this way,” he says.
I follow him, ducking under pine branches and stepping over rotted tree trunks, down a hill that’s just steep enough to make my shoes skid.
At the bottom of the hill there’s a crater, the size maybe of a cul-de-sac. There are beer cans, some rusted barrels, and what appears to be an airplane propeller, easily taller than me, mounted to a metal disc. Half of it is buried in the ground.
“Hawker Tempest prototype. Propeller, drive shaft, radiator—all intact,” Necro says.
“Jesus, Necro.”
“Give me a hand.”
When we pull, the propeller-thing heaves up, vomiting chunks of dirt, dangling with roots. The propeller blades wobble when Necro drops it to the ground. “Before World War II, the government used to test planes over this area,” he says. “One of them crashed, but it never made the papers. Then, an Italian immigrant and deer hunter, Cosimus Belvende, found some of the precious engine metals, in this very location, from this very plane’s Napier Sabre. He discovered that when he took and welded down those metals to liquid form, he could make tantalum oxide, which he would use to make the first camera lens. The public name everyone knew this man by? George Eastman. This is the last part from that test plane. So, hold on to it. Let that thing accumulate some value-add. It’s worth some stuff when you get it to the right collector or museum. Rochester and the Eastman House would probably pay, I don’t know, $40,000? Italy maybe more? Give you a chance to take and implement some arbitrage. Give you a thing to invest in.”
Which for the record: $40,000, converted, is 45 billion Holy Grail Points. “Then why don’t you take it?” I say.
He starts to laugh, and not in his sniffly I’m-with-Nate way. “Didn’t have room,” he says. “Just didn’t have room to pack it before I left tonight.”
“Left? As in, what?”
“As in, town.”
A balloon of nerve-syrup pops in my chest. I feel some aerosol behind my eyes, which makes it hard to stare straight ahead.
“My uncle. He took and found me a cashier job at the Swords and Candy store off I-90, in Pennsylvania,” he says. “That, and I took and bought some stock in Howard Stern. Allow me to get away from that.” He jabs his thumb behind him, toward his house and the whole city maybe.
“Now you have it all, victor and the spoils,” he says. “You got my job. You got this patch of dirt in the woods. You got my propeller. You’re me.”
“Wait wait wait wait wait, Necro,” I go. “What do you mean ‘get away from that?’”
“I wouldn’t wish that job on my most hated enemy.”
“But—why?”
He laugh-coughs into his fist. Only the Great Walls of China dividing me and the division of labor in there. I don’t even know where those canisters go after I send them down the conveyor. Every day we just take and shuffle chemical scrambled eggs from one room to another.”
“But I thought we were going to do Kodak Park Winjas,” I say. “They’re giving me my own ESL account. I mean, it’s cameras.”
Necro lets his eyes get lazy at me. “There’s no cameras, Nate. They’re a repurposer of equipment. I heard Kodak wants to research fuel cells in Tel Aviv.”
I have no idea what that means. “So, you think you’ll have enough money to cover expenses in PA? What if you get fired?”
He adjusts the shoulders on his jacket and steps toward me, chest first. He says, like he’s been waiting sage prophecies of time to say this: “Goddamn Nate Rochefoucauld. Goddamn Nate Rochefoucauld, with his good night’s sleep. You can’t even take and support the people you like. The more altruistic people are to you, the more malice you apply to them and then, in turn, the more altruistic they’ll be to you because they’re thinking: ‘Did I do something wrong? Did I offend him?’ Until they epiphanize that you’re like this-niceness-to-meanness-currency exchange, and people give you altruism dollars and you take and shit out drachmas at them. And this is how you go through people.”
A leaf falls, sticks in my hair, hangs over my face for a second, and tumbles down my shirt. “So do you, just, not like me anymore?” I say.
I sit on a rock. The woods smell like really old fire. Necro shakes his head.
“If you don’t want to talk to me ever again, I understand,” I say. “But know that I’m sorry.”
“The scope here is bigger than you,” he says. “Over the last few months, I’ve been dedicating myself to the absorption of various, you know, tomes, about the relationship between linguistics and general man-to-man harsh treatment. As I try to take and synthesize these various texts—Lecercle, Pinker, et al—I’ve begun to suggest, in my thinking, that violence occurs within a cultural subset as that subset’s phraseology gets too stale. Like: Colonel Hellstache, Colonel Hellstache—that’s all we ever say. No new modes of expression. When the existing modes of expressi
on are made stale or co-opted into oblivion by government agencies, man becomes incarcerated by his own linguistic detritus, and the result, eventually, is always violence. They say the government should be overthrown every sixty years. And I would argue that, you know, that maybe language should be overthrown every sixty years. Change the name of things. Change the mindset.”
“But we do change the mindset, Necro!” I say. “It’s not just Colonel Hellstache. Sometimes it’s Colonel Maritime Jason Hellstache. What about Condor Wrap with Diamond Sauce?”
Necro shakes his head. “But even Condor Wrap with Diamond Sauce, Nate. If you recall, I fed you the premise to Condor Wrap with Diamond Sauce. And Condor Wrap with Diamond Sauce was just a re-amalgamation of that Chilled Leopard Jaw with Braised Keith joke you made two years ago.”
And now I know for certain that I can’t convince him, at the last second, to let me Maverick Jetpants out of here with him off to Pennsylvania and overthrow language together. It’s a thought that hits me in this practical way, like an accountant passing along paperwork.
The next thought hits me slightly harder: At some point in our friendship, I started making Necro dumber. When I said Condor Wrap with Diamond Sauce, I was actually restricting both of our Joke Rolodexes, giving him less to say, pushing him to a life of Weapons of Mankind.
Necro smoothes out his jacket and exhales. “Welp. That said, I could use some sustenance. Get a Plate somewhere? Beans?” Necro gets his Plates with beans. I never understood people who get their Plates with beans.
“I’m going to stay here, actually,” I say. “Think for a while.”
Necro walks back up the crater’s incline, European shoes crunching in the leaves, quieter and quieter, until he walks away forever.
I stand and let things get dark. My heart feels dumb. I think, for a while, that I am actually not thinking any thoughts. I am not even thinking about how people can live without one real friend; how all I have left are all my problems. I thumb at the propeller. It’s wooden. Splinters dig into my hand when I pull one of the blades. I stretch my sweatshirt sleeve around my fingers and pull the propeller harder. The propeller moves, leaves catching on the radiator disk. It’s maybe only as heavy as a canoe, but my hand muscles almost immediately cramp, and my shoes dig into the fudge layer of dirt under the leaves. I walk backward, pulling the propeller through the smooth rises and dips of the woods, the blade leaving a long trail through the leaves. The air freezes my front teeth when I inhale. My nostril hairs stiffen. Eventually, I find a nice stretch of woods that have nothing the propeller can catch on, and I start to build momentum.